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The cover stories are flying thick and fast as British investigators try to put some kind of cap on the London attacks.

It turns out, if you believe the Brooklyn Bridge is for sale, that actual IDs of bombers were found in separate piles of rubble at the sites of the blasts.

These IDs must have been engraved deeply in three-foot-thick steel.

Remember the 9/11 hijacker passport that floated out of the crashing jetliner on 9/11 and landed intact on a New York street?

Here is a Sky News report out of London. There are too many points to make up front, so I've inserted comments in caps and brackets as you go:

BOMBER DIED IN TUBE BLAST

It is "highly likely" one of the Tube bombers died in the attacks on the Underground network, police say.

[LATER IN THIS PIECE WE'LL LEARN THAT IT'S LIKELY ALL THE BOMBERS ARE DEAD.]

The suspected bombers travelled down from the West Yorkshire and met at Kings Cross station shortly before the attacks were launched on Thursday morning, police said at a press conference.

Their images were captured by CCTV cameras.

Personal documents have been found at all four bomb scenes and although the four attackers are thought to have died [OH THEY'RE ALL CONVENIENTLY DEAD BUT THE BOMBS THEMSELVES WERE ON TIMERS, WHICH WOULD HAVE GIVEN THE KILLERS TIME TO WALK AWAY FROM THE BOMBS---I SEE---IT WASN'T SUICIDE BOMBINGS, IT WAS JUST FOUR COINCIDENTAL SCREW-UPS BY THE TERRORISTS THAT RESULTED IN THEIR DEATHS] police were careful not to say whether Britain had suffered its first suicide bomb strike.

Anti-terror police said they had traced the bombers and six arrest warrants have been issued for addresses in West Yorkshire.

Police said there was forensic evidence that meant it was "very likely" the bomber responsible for the train explosion at Aldgate died there.

[WHAT EVIDENCE? WILL WE EVER SEE IT?]

One of the four men had been reported missing by his family on the day of the attacks and his property was found at the bus blast scene. The second man's property was found at the scene of the Aldgate blast and the third man's property at both the Aldgate and Edgware Road blasts.

[PROPERTY? PLANTED BY OPS AGENTS? DESKS, CHAIRS, JEWELRY? ENCASED IN STEEL VAULTS?]

One man has just been arrested in west Yorkshire in connection with the attacks. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, head of Scotland's Yard anti-terrorist branch, said: "The investigation quite early led us to have concerns about the movement and activities of four men, three of whom came from the West Yorkshire area. "We are trying to establish their movements in the run-up to last week's attack and specifically to establish whether they all died in the explosions. [THEY'RE ALL LIKELY DEAD. NO MAYBE NOT. LOOKS LIKE YES. WE CAN'T TELL. BUT WE HAVE THEIR 'PROPERTY' RIGHT THERE AT THE BLAST SCENES. MAYBE IT WAS PLANTED SO THEY COULD ESCAPE. TYPICAL AL QAEDA. PRETEND TO BE A SUICIDE BOMBER AND THEN ESCAPE. FORGET THE OTHER COVER STORY ABOUT THE AL QAEDA MO BEING SUICIDE AND GOING TO PARADISE. THIS IS DIFFERENT. BUT IT'S THE SAME. IT'S AL QAEDA.] We executed six warrants under the Terrorism Act at premises in the West Yorkshire area."

These included the home addresses of three of the four men. A detailed forensic examination will now follow and this is likely to take time to complete."

[THE PUBLIC HAS NO RIGHT TO LEARN THE DETAILS OF THAT EXAMINATION. NOT NOW. NOT EVER. WE'LL ONLY RELEASE THE CONCLUSIONS.]

He continued: "We know that all four of these arrived in London by train on the morning. We have identified CCTV footage showing the four men at King's Cross Station shortly before 8.30am on that morning, July 7.

[THEY POSED FOR A JOINT PICTURE FOR THE CAMERAS? BUT THEY WERE BRIGHT ENOUGH TO LEAVE 'PROPERTY' AT THE BLAST SCENES AS EVIDENCE OF DEATH, AFTER WHICH, WITH THEIR MUGS ON CAMERA, THEY ESCAPED. SURE, THAT MAKES SENSE.]

"One of them who had set out from West Yorkshire was reported missing by his family to the casualty bureau on July 7. We have been able to establish that he was joined on his journey to London by three other men. We have since found personal documents bearing the names of three of those four men close to the seats of three of the explosions." [IN PRISTINE CONDITION, NO DOUBT, WITH LARGE RED ARROWS POINTING TO THE NAMES, RIGHT THERE AT THE VERY CENTERS OF THE BLAST SCENES. IMMORTAL IDs.] As regards to the man who is missing, some of his property was found on the route 30 bus in Tavistock Square. Property of a second man was found at the scene of the Aldgate bomb and in relation to a third man property with his name was found at the Aldgate and Edgware Road bombs." [BUNDLES OF CLOTHING WITH HIS NAME SEWN ON LABELS? CLOTHING MADE OF ASBESTOS?] We have strong forensic evidence that it is very likely that one of the men from West Yorkshire died at the explosion at Aldgate."

Sky News terror expert Steve Park said the documents may have been deliberately planted to "send police the wrong way".

[STEVE PARK HAS JUST RECEIVED A NEW ASSIGNMENT REPORTING ON BIRDS IN ALASKA. ANYWAY, WHO WOULD HAVE DONE THE PLANTING OF EVIDENCE? TERRORISTS? AFTER THEY POSED FOR A JOINT PICTURE IN FRONT OF A TV CAMERA ON THEIR WAY TO LONDON? SAY IT, STEVE. OPS AGENTS OR COPS MUST HAVE PLANTED THE EVIDENCE.]

The news comes as armed police search a house in Leeds after the Army used a controlled explosion to get in.

[I THOUGHT THEY HAD PEOPLE OVER THERE WHO COULD PICK LOCKS. AND IF THEY REMOTELY SUSPECTED EXPLOSIVE MATERIALS MIGHT BE IN THE HOUSE, WAS THE CONTROLLED EXPLOSION DONE TO GAIN ENTRANCE OR TO DESTROY REAL EVIDENCE?]

It was the discovery that the bus bomber was likely to have died in the blasts that triggered the raids. [AREN'T AMERICAN NEWS OUTLETS CLAIMING THE REAL CLUE WAS PROVIDED BY A PHONE CALL ON THE 7TH FROM A FAMILY IN THAT NEIGHBORHOOD? CAN'T THEY KEEP THEIR COVER STORIES STRAIGHT?] Hundreds of people were evacuated from the area around Hyde Park Road, Burley.

No one was in the house at the time but armed officers had been used as a precaution. Five other homes in Leeds had earlier been raided by police hunting the terrorists behind last week's attacks.

Neighbours at one of the addresses said a 22-year-old man who lived there with his family had gone missing. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair said the raids were "directly connected" to Thursday's atrocity.

Hours later, police evacuated Luton railway station and car park to recover a vehicle suspected of being linked with the terrorist attacks. The car was blown up in two controlled explosions.

[BLOWN UP WHEN? BEFORE OR AFTER EVIDENCE WAS OBTAINED FROM THE CAR. SEEMS LIKE THE AUTHORITIES ARE BUSY BLOWING UP KEY EVIDENCE. WAIT A FEW MINUTES. THEY'LL BLOW UP AREAS OF THE SUBWAY SYSTEM WHERE THE BLASTS WENT OFF.]

end Sky News article

This has to be one of the most transparent and amateur efforts at stitching together cover stories I've ever run across. Right up there with 9/11 and the OKC bombing.

Ten Step Method To Staging a Terrorist Attack

1) Hire a Crisis Management firm to set up an exercise that parallels the terrorist attack you are going to carry out. Have them run the exercise at the precise locations and at the very same time as the attack. If at any stage of the attack your Arabs get caught, tell the police it was part of an exercise.

2) Hire four Arabs and tell them they're taking part in an important exercise to help defend London from terrorist attacks. Strap them with rucksacks filled with deadly explosives. Tell the Arabs the rucksacks are dummy explosives and wouldn't harm a fly.

3) Tell four Arabs to meet up at London Underground and disperse, each getting on a different train. Make sure Arabs meet in a location where you can get a good mug shot of them all on CCTV which you can later endlessly repeat to drooling masses on television.

4) While four Arabs are in London, plant explosives in their houses in Leeds. Plant some explosives in one of their cars in Luton for the police to later discover. Remember that Qu'ran and flight manual in the hijackers' car? Ha ha, they fell for that one hook, line and sinker. No need to change tactics on this one.

5) Before the bombings take place, make sure you warn any of your buddies who are scheduled to be anywhere near where the bombs go off. If this gets leaked to the press, just deny it.

6) 4th Arab goes out partying in London night before and ends up getting out of bed late. No worries, the 9/11 'hijackers' did the same thing but that didn't cause us a big problem. 4th Arab catches bus to see if other Arabs are waiting for him. 4th Arab starts hearing about explosions in the London Underground. 4th Arab comes to the realization that this he is being set up and freaks out. 4th Arab starts fiddling in his rucksack. 4th Arab sets bomb off and is blown up.

If you hired any additional Arabs and they also got wind of the set up, make sure tere are GPS locators in the rucksacks so you can have police snipers ready to kill them before they can blow the whistle.

7) After the bombs go off, put out a story for over an hour that the explosions are a simple electrical fault. This gives you cover time to make sure the lazy bus Arab is dead and any other hired Arabs who reneged are also dead. Make sure any CCTV footage that doesn't support your official story is either seized or destroyed.

8) A few hours after the bombings, have one of your boys post an 'Al-Qaeda statement' claiming responsibility. Don't worry about the whole 'misreferencing the Qu'ran' thing, these idiots don't have the attention spans to figure it out.

9) After you have made sure that all the Arabs are dead and you are managing the story accordingly, wait for four days until the police piece together the story and find the explosives you planted in Leeds and in the car in Luton. Remember that Qu'ran and flight manual in the hijackers' car? Ha ha, they fell for that one hook, line and sinker. No need to change tactics this time either. The time delay will convince the gullible public that a real investigation is taking place. Create a background of the hired Arabs being militant Muslims. The drooling masses, as was the case with the '9/11 hijackers,' will ignore stories of neighbours saying they were the quiet, educated types who liked children and playing sports.

BBC excerpt: One local resident described him as "a nice lad".

"He liked to play football, he liked to play cricket. I'm shocked."

Another resident said he was just a "normal kid" who played basketball and kicked a ball around.

10) Sit back and enjoy as Blair and his minions grandstand in front of television cameras about staying the course in the war on terror. The pay raise, extra agency funding, and power to strip more freedoms and liberties made the ten easy steps to staging a terrorist attack a worthwhile venture. The dozens of dead people were necessary collateral damage. This is a dirty war, we need to be less moral than the terrorists to defeat them.

And that's how the government staged the bombings in ten easy steps.

Granted, you can interchange different pieces of the puzzle. The bombers could be real terrorists that knew exactly what they were doing. All you would need to do is control the 'mastermind' behind the attack and make sure his boys carried out the job in the way you wanted. Voila.

Give me a break. Four young men, maybe five though one chap remains a secret at present, simply decided to blow themselves up in support of a cause none of them had ever previously mentioned to their families, friends or anyone who knew them. Does that sound right?

In fact, UK intelligence agencies had never heard of these guys. They, the alleged London bombers, had everything to live for and no motive in becoming suicide bombers. Do you believe that?

With all that we see happening with the London bombings, I think it is wise for us to take a brief look at some historical information. History could be repeating itself. British and American targets have been bombed many times in the past and the evidence seemed to point to specific perpetrators. But as was discovered numerous times, the evidence was faked.

Numerous writers, scientists, investigators and even political figures have pointed out Israel’s involvement with 911. There is a huge pile of evidence that is being ignored, shoveled under the carpet and being labeled as “urban legend” regarding Israel’s involvement in 911. We should know that Jews have a consistent history of fraudulent actions resulting in the loss of lives of millions of human beings to accomplish their purpose.

False flag operations are not new for Jews. As I will show in the list below, false flag operations, the act of committing terrorist actions and having others blamed for it, is a technique that they have employed in numerous situations for hundreds even thousands of years. Not only have they done false flag operations to blame Muslims, they have done these actions to have others blamed like, the Czarist government in Russia, other Jews, Germany, enemy organizations and states, etc. I also find it interesting that they have been caught red handed in numerous false flag operations. Not once but several times they have been caught. As regards today’s terrorists actions, it is interesting to note that Israelis have been caught in false flag operations attempting to have Muslims blamed, but yet there is not one false flag operation where Muslims were caught attempting to blame Jews. We should really think about this and ask the reasonable question of, “I wonder why that is?”

Here is a brief look at some past Jewish actions showing their treachery, deception and fraud in having innocents take the blame for their horrible actions. I have summarized this and provided links... [...]

NEW YORK - Police in New York will board city buses and subway trains and teach passengers how to recognize suicide bombers, officials said on Thursday in the wake of the deadly blasts blamed on such bombers in London.

New York, hardest hit by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has been spared suicide bomb attacks such as those that plague daily life in Iraq and have frequently shaken Israel.

The bombings of three subways and a bus in London last week, which killed at least 53 people, were Britain's first suicide attacks.

Alerting the public to identify suicide bombers is part of a broader plan to step up warnings on New York's public transportation system of possible terror-related activity, officials said.

The idea of alerting people face-to-face comes after the New York Police Department got a positive public response when a city police officer who was searching a bus the day of the London bombings spoke to commuters about being aware of suspicious activity, said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

"It is kind of unique to be on a bus to be able to do that," Kelly said at a news conference. "In reality, we can't do it on every bus, but I think we are going to use that where we can, where it is reasonable to do it."

New York's 37,000-member police force is already on high alert, working overtime with bomb-sniffing dogs to patrol subways, buses, ferries and prominent buildings, and the warnings about suicide bombers will be added to those efforts, officials said.

"People could be told to look out for bulky clothing in warmer weather, or people repeatedly returning to a package," said Police Department spokesman Paul Browne. [...]

"Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long".
~ William Shakespeare ( Thanks to Brian Cloughley )

"ICH" - - "Does anyone doubt that 10,000 bin Ladens have been created by the events of the past two and a half years? If they do, they have their head in the sand." MP George Galloway; British Parliament, 7-7-05

"The destructiveness of the occupation affects the vast majority of Iraqis in a negative way and thus they are fed up with the presence of occupiers on our land. The resistance is not short on recruits to join them. Quite simply there are hundred of thousands of people in Iraq who are ready to sacrifice their lives for their country." Dr. Mohammad al-Obaidi, speaking for the Iraqi National Resistance; Counterpunch, 7-12-05

America has never been involved a war more clearly immoral than Iraq. From the phony pretext of weapons of mass destruction to the sadistic treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the conflict has been a nauseating chronicle of butchery and deception. Now, the victims of that massive crime are striking back in London and Madrid while the Bush press-corps regurgitates the same stale theories about radicals and Islam.

What baloney. Baghdad has morphed into an assembly-line for extremists churning out enough fanatics for 1,000 London-type bombings. This is Bush's work; and Blair's. The people who were killed in the London subway died for the crimes of their government, not because some young Muslim studied under a fiery cleric in South Leeds. The carnage is as much Bush and Blair's responsibility as if they had carried the bombs on the subway and detonated them themselves.

Those who've watch the developments in Iraq carefully know that the situation has steadily deteriorated. Rumsfeld's storm troopers (The Wolf Brigade) now roam the country freely, killing and maiming as they see fit; spreading terror to every corner of the Sunni heartland. (Just today, another 10 young Sunnis were dumped at the Baghdad morgue with gunshot wounds to the back of their heads) At the same time, the US military is moving from city to city; applying the "Falluja-solution" of wanton destruction to every town they invade. Falluja, Sammarra, Ramadi, Karbala, Heet, Qaim; everywhere the story is the same; the cities are pounded mercilessly while the people are denied water, food, electricity and vital medical supplies. The crusade to crush the resistance is reducing more and more Sunni cities to rubble.

This is Rumsfeld's remedy for resistance. This is Bush's "Liberation". Take a good look.

The people in London are the lucky ones. If they'd been in Iraq (after the explosions) the passers-by would have been cut-down by snipers on top of surrounding buildings. Their ambulances would have fired on as they tried to remove the dead and wounded. Their hospitals would have been bombed and occupied by a foreign army. They would have been deprived of even basic medical supplies to keep them alive. How can anyone compare the bombings in London to the all-encompassing campaign of terror in Iraq?

The victims of the London bombings disserve our sympathy, just as surely as the cut-throats in Washington and 10 Downing Street disserve our contempt. MP George Galloway summarized the feelings of many of us when he said, "Members of Parliament find it easy to feel empathy with people killed in explosions by razor-sharp red-hot steel and splintering flying glass when they are in London, but they can blank out of their mind entirely the fact that a person killed in exactly the same way in Falluja died exactly the same death."

There's a straight line between Falluja and the London subway; just as there is a straight line between the gulags at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and the terror attacks that Americans can expect to face in the near future.

For America, the prospect of London-type bombings is a mathematical certainty.

American newspapers are all breathlessly circulating their theory of "suicide bombers" in headlines across the nation.

Why not? It fits nicely with the racist ideology the underscores Bush's war on terror. Washington knows that their support would disappear in a flash if they failed to conjure up the requisite racial stereotypes that feed the public rage. And, no one is better at demonizing and fear-mongering than the Bush administration.

Look at Bush's comments following the London attack:

"And the contrast couldn't be clearer between the intentions of those who care deeply about human rights, and those who kill, those who've got such evil in their hearts that they will take the lives of innocent folks." What rubbish; Bush fouling the air with his lies when he's already killed more than 100,000 Iraqis.

And, Bush's "war-poodle" Blair reads from the same script:

"It is important, however, that those engaged in terrorism realize that our determination to defend our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world."

"Our way of life"? Is that what we are defending, or the blatant misuse of military force to subjugate an entire nation and steal its resources?

No one is fooled by Bush-Blair's facile rhetoric. Bin Laden doesn't care a whit about "our freedoms"; his message has been consistent throughout; "Get out of our countries, stop training our brutal secret police, stop propping up our corrupt regimes, and stop stealing our resources." When the imperialism stops, so, too, will the terrorism.

We know the root of terrorism now; the secret has been divulged. Robert Pape has done an exhaustive study that provides scientifically-researched answers to all the critical questions surrounding suicide bombers. His findings are more important to antiwar activists than the contents of the Downing Street memo.

Why? Because his research proves beyond a doubt that suicide bombing is the predictable upshot of occupation. As social scientist Scott Atran said, "Most jihadists have no history of religious education prior to becoming 'born again' radical Islamists, and many are well-educated, middle class and married. Most would-be suicide bombers say they act to restore dignity to their communities -- real or virtual -- marginalized by globalization and humiliated by military occupation."

This not only obliterates Bush's specious yammering about "hating our freedoms", but also counters the propaganda from the mainstream media. Every editorial columnist from Tom Friedman (who calls the bombers a "jihadist death-cult") to Christopher Hitchens (who coined the phrase "Islamo-fascism") has added to the media-smokescreen by feeding the idea that terrorism emerges from an irrational hatred of the West or from religious zealotry. Neither is true. These theories have only confused the public and perpetuated a conflict that serves the exclusive interests of elites.

Pape's 7-9-05 column in the New York Times ("Al Qaida'a Smart Bombs" or "The Logic of Suicide Terrorism" informationclearinghouse.info) dispels the commonly held illusions about terrorism and exposes the underlying reason for the current violence; Occupation. The driving force behind terror attacks, Pape says, is "to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries". Period.

Pape's findings have armed us with the most priceless of weapons: the Truth. He has uncovered the vile fraud that fuels Bush's orgy of carnage and pointed the way out of the war on terror. With a clear-eyed approach to terrorism we can cut-through the demagoguery and propaganda and block the Bush strategy for perennial war.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com

Need proof that the U.S. is on the down-slope of the empire bell curve? Take a look at our turkey of a space shuttle and the skyrocketing cost of medical care.

Ever wonder why empires don't last forever? After all, by definition an empire holds all the cards. They dominate trade, education, science, literature, quality of life and so on. So, why do they all inevitably whither? Because, nothing fails quite like success.

Here are two examples from the world's current Imperial office holder -- the U.S. of A.

It's a bird. It's a plane. No, it's a turkey.

And there it was yesterday, all dressed and no place to go. America's only manned space vehicle, the space shuttle, steaming off liquid oxygen like a giant upright turd in the Florida sun.

The space shuttle is the actualization of the old joke, "An elephant is a mouse designed by a committee."

The reason I choose the space shuttle as proof the US is on the down-slope of the empire bell curve is because, of all the ways we could have explored space, we chose to invest all our marbles in bolting an 18-wheeler to rockets.

Sending a Mack truck into orbit required some very complicated and expensive engineering contortions. Satellites sent up on the shuttle cost $25 million a ton. Compare that with the cost of sending the same payload up on simpler Russian or Chinese rockets, $3-6 million a ton.

It costs upwards of $10,000 per pound to launch anything, including the crew, into orbit on the shuttle, a cost that is more than triple that charged by the workhorse expendable launch vehicles of NASA's heyday, the Apollo era.

What happened to NASA's own "right stuff"?

"Once we won the Space Race in 1969, NASA morphed from a can-do, risk-taking, think out-of-the-box organization, to Just Another Tax-Fed Federal Bureaucracy, that, instead of playing to "win", was instead playing "not to lose." (Thomas Andrew Olson, Libertarian Institute)

The space shuttle is a mind-bogglingly expensive example of this process. It's too damn big, too damn expensive, too damn dangerous and too damn unreliable. It was designed 40 years ago. If it were a car it would be spending its days being lovingly polished in the garage by some old geezer trying to recapture his youth. Instead, the folks now running NASA decided to put a garage in orbit, call it a space station, and send the shuttle there to polish their own image.

There are a lot of cheaper ways to put people in space. The Russians, who can barely run their own country, do it regularly. Thanks to the Russians' simple and reliable Soyuz capsules we didn't end up with three skeletons floating around the space station after the shuttle crash two years ago.

With any luck a bolt of lightening will reduce the next shuttle to a pile of tile on its way to the launch pad. That would leave just two shuttles. We could put one in the Smithsonian and sell the other to Disney World.

Then turn NASA over to Bert Rutan and Richard Branson. They seem to be the current possessors of the right stuff. Imagine what they could do with just a fraction of NASA's $16 billion annual budget. We'd be orbiting Earth sipping diet cola and munching peanuts in cramped coach seating within five years. (But please remember to return your seat backs to the full upright position for re-entry. Items in overhead compartments may have shifted in weightless conditions.)

Bad Medicine

What good is an empire if it can't provide affordable medical care for its own citizens? Good question, and one that confronts Americans now.

President Bush and Big Medicine would have you believe that the skyrocketing cost of medical care is the fault of lawyers who sue. But a study released yesterday disputes that, noting that malpractice suits have a miniscule impact on medical costs.

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Americans pay more for health care per person than citizens anywhere else in the world, doling out half again as much in medical expenses each year as the second-highest-cost country, according to a new study.

According to Dr. Gerard Anderson, lead author of a report just issued by John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, "We pay for drugs and hospital stays and doctor visits 2 to 2.5 times as much as other countries pay."

And why, you ask? Malpractice suits? Nope. According to the study, lawsuits add less than 1% to health care overhead. Another 8% in increases come from so-called "defensive" medicine -- doing lots of unnecessary tests to avoid being sued.

The remaining 91% of increases are price, not cost increases. Americans are being financially disemboweled by the pharmaceutical/health care industries. The average American paid $5,267 on health care in 2002, compared with an average $1,821 in other industrialized nations. [...]

Stephen Pizzo is the author of numerous books, including "Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans," which was nominated for a Pulitzer.

As a security technologist, I regularly encounter people who say the United States should adopt a national ID card. How could such a program not make us more secure, they ask?

The suggestion, when it's made by a thoughtful civic-minded person like Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times, often takes on a tone that is regretful and ambivalent: Yes, indeed, the card would be a minor invasion of our privacy, and undoubtedly it would add to the growing list of interruptions and delays we encounter every day; but we live in dangerous times, we live in a new world....

It all sounds so reasonable, but there's a lot to disagree with in such an attitude.

The potential privacy encroachments of an ID card system are far from minor. And the interruptions and delays caused by incessant ID checks could easily proliferate into a persistent traffic jam in office lobbies and airports and hospital waiting rooms and shopping malls.

But my primary objection isn't the totalitarian potential of national IDs, nor the likelihood that they'll create a whole immense new class of social and economic dislocations. Nor is it the opportunities they will create for colossal boondoggles by government contractors. My objection to the national ID card, at least for the purposes of this essay, is much simpler.

It won't work. It won't make us more secure.

In fact, everything I've learned about security over the last 20 years tells me that once it is put in place, a national ID card program will actually make us less secure.

My argument may not be obvious, but it's not hard to follow, either. It centers around the notion that security must be evaluated not based on how it works, but on how it fails.

It doesn't really matter how well an ID card works when used by the hundreds of millions of honest people that would carry it. What matters is how the system might fail when used by someone intent on subverting that system: how it fails naturally, how it can be made to fail, and how failures might be exploited.

The first problem is the card itself. No matter how unforgeable we make it, it will be forged. And even worse, people will get legitimate cards in fraudulent names.

Two of the 9/11 terrorists had valid Virginia driver's licenses in fake names. And even if we could guarantee that everyone who issued national ID cards couldn't be bribed, initial cardholder identity would be determined by other identity documents... all of which would be easier to forge.

Not that there would ever be such thing as a single ID card. Currently about 20 percent of all identity documents are lost per year. An entirely separate security system would have to be developed for people who lost their card, a system that itself is capable of abuse.

Additionally, any ID system involves people... people who regularly make mistakes. We all have stories of bartenders falling for obviously fake IDs, or sloppy ID checks at airports and government buildings. It's not simply a matter of training; checking IDs is a mind-numbingly boring task, one that is guaranteed to have failures. Biometrics such as thumbprints show some promise here, but bring with them their own set of exploitable failure modes.

But the main problem with any ID system is that it requires the existence of a database. In this case it would have to be an immense database of private and sensitive information on every American -- one widely and instantaneously accessible from airline check-in stations, police cars, schools, and so on.

The security risks are enormous. Such a database would be a kludge of existing databases; databases that are incompatible, full of erroneous data, and unreliable. As computer scientists, we do not know how to keep a database of this magnitude secure, whether from outside hackers or the thousands of insiders authorized to access it.

And when the inevitable worms, viruses, or random failures happen and the database goes down, what then? Is America supposed to shut down until it's restored?

Proponents of national ID cards want us to assume all these problems, and the tens of billions of dollars such a system would cost -- for what? For the promise of being able to identify someone?

What good would it have been to know the names of Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, or the DC snipers before they were arrested? Palestinian suicide bombers generally have no history of terrorism. The goal is here is to know someone's intentions, and their identity has very little to do with that.

And there are security benefits in having a variety of different ID documents. A single national ID is an exceedingly valuable document, and accordingly there's greater incentive to forge it. There is more security in alert guards paying attention to subtle social cues than bored minimum-wage guards blindly checking IDs.

That's why, when someone asks me to rate the security of a national ID card on a scale of one to 10, I can't give an answer. It doesn't even belong on a scale.

This essay originally appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

My earlier essay on National ID cards:
<http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0112.html#1>

My essay on identification and security:
<http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0402.html#6>

AUSTRALIA - Attorney-General Philip Ruddock has been forced to admit that the government is considering introducing national identity cards, three days after flatly ruling out the suggestion.

Prime Minister John Howard put the idea on the agenda, saying circumstances had changed since he opposed the Hawke Labor government plan in 1987.

"We haven't made a decision to have an ID card in this country, but it should be properly on the table," Mr Howard told reporters in Sydney before flying out on a 12-day overseas visit.

The change of heart comes in the wake of both the London bombings and a damning report into how immigration officials mistook two Australians for illegal immigrants - detaining one and deporting the other.

Mr Ruddock says the government has had to reconsider security issues after suicide bombers attacked three trains and a bus in London last week, killing at least 54 people, including Australian man Sam Ly.

"We've made it very clear that at a time like this you put everything on the agenda and you ask yourself the question again, is this something we need to reconsider?" Mr Ruddock told Sydney radio 2SM.

But speaking at a security conference on Tuesday, Mr Ruddock ruled out the idea, saying: "We've made it very clear that we're not about establishing a national identity card."

Labor is sceptical about Mr Ruddock's about-face, speculating that it is aimed at diverting attention from former federal police chief Mick Palmer's scathing report on immigration bungles.

"Labor waits with interest to see what ID card proposal - if any - the government comes up with," opposition homeland security spokesman Arch Bevis said. [...]

WASHINGTON - Despite two failed attempts, the White House on Wednesday said it wanted the Senate to vote again to try to win confirmation of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

But Republican and Democratic senators said the stalemate continued on Bolton's nomination over demands from Democrats that the White House provide information they said would shed more light on his suitability for the job.

The nomination of the blunt-spoken conservative has been held up by accusations he tried to manipulate intelligence and intimidated intelligence analysts to support his hawkish views in his post as the top U.S. diplomat for arms control.

"We continue to believe that John Bolton should have an up or down vote on the floor of the Senate. That remains our position," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. [...]

Looks like Karl Rove did break the law, the same federal law that got Martha Stewart sentenced to six months in prison.

It now appears that Rove, President Bush’s chief of staff, may have lied to the FBI in October 2003—a federal crime—when he was questioned by federal agents investigating who was responsible for leaking information about a covert CIA operative to the media.

During questioning by the FBI about his role in the Plame affair, Rove told federal agents that he only started sharing information about Plame with reporters and White House officials for the first time after conservative columnist Robert Novak identified her covert CIA status in his column on July 14, 2003, according to a report in the American Prospect about Rove’s testimony in March 2004, a copy of which can be found here.

But Rove wasn’t truthful with the FBI what with the recent disclosure of Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper’s emails, which reveal Rove as the source for Cooper’s own July 2003 story identifying Plame as a CIA operative, and show that Rove spoke to Cooper nearly a week before Novak’s column was published and, according to previously published news reports, spoke to a half-dozen other reporters about Plame as early as June 2003.

“Iit was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized (Wilson’s) trip," Cooper’s July 11, 2003, email to his editor, obtained by Newsweek, says. “Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring u ranium fro[m] Niger .. "

Moreover, evidence suggests that President Bush was aware as early as October 2003 that Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, were the sources who leaked Plame’s undercover CIA status to reporters and after the president was briefed about the issue the president said publicly that the source of the leak will never be found.

Furthermore, a few aides to Condoleeza Rice, then head of the National Security Council, may have played a role as well by being the first officials to learn about Plame’s role as a CIA operative and gave that information to Rove, Libby and other senior administration officials.

The disclosure of Plame’s name and CIA status was an attempt by the White House to discredit Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an outspoken critic of the Iraq war who had alleged that President Bush misspoke when he said in his January 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq acquired yellow-cake uranium from Niger.

Wilson was recommended by Plame, his wife, to travel to Niger to investigate the yellow-cake claims but he said publicly that he Cheney’s office sent him there. Cheney did in fact contact the CIA at first to arrange the mission but Plame ultimately recommended Wilson. Still, in February 2002, he went to Niger and reported back to the CIA that there was no truth to those claims.

Here’s the fullest account yet of how the events leading up to the disclosure that Wilson’s wife was a CIA operative unfolded, and how it all leads back to Rove. But first let’s get to the real story behind the leak, the catalyst behind this issue.

Did White House political adviser Karl Rove deliberately reveal the identity of an undercover CIA operative? Only two people can answer that question, and neither one is talking: Rove himself and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who is investigating the question.

Sooner or later, we probably will get an answer. Fitzgerald has been so aggressive in this investigation -- to the point of jailing a New York Times reporter who refused to reveal her confidential sources -- that indictments are reasonably likely.

In the meantime, it's important to look beyond the immediate political spectacle in Washington -- White House spokesman Scott McClellan finally confronted by reporters who feel abused and lied to -- to the reason Rove was talking to a reporter about ex-diplomat Joseph Wilson at all.

The real issue, more serious and less glitzy than whether Bush will stand by his political adviser, is the extraordinary efforts the Bush administration made to protect a case for war in Iraq from all contradictory evidence -- in effect, as the British spymaster Sir Richard Dearlove put it, to "fix" the facts and intelligence so they would support a decision already made.

Enter Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative specializing in weapons of mass destruction. As Wilson tells it, a question arose at the CIA early in 2002, prompted by an inquiry from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, about reports that Iraq had purchased uranium for nuclear weapons from the African country of Niger, where Wilson previously had served. When someone was needed to travel to Niger, Plame apparently told her superiors that her husband had good contacts there. CIA officials talked with Wilson and decided he should be the one to make the trip.

In late February of 2002 Wilson made the trip, talked with numerous people in Niger, including the U.S. ambassador, and concluded there was nothing to reports of an Iraq-Niger connection. He briefed officials at both the CIA and State Department on his conclusions.

In January 2003, however, President Bush asserted an Iraq-Africa uranium connection in his State of the Union message. Subsequently, it turned out that Bush was indeed referring to Niger. The Niger-Iraq connection became one of the pillars in Bush's case for war with Iraq.

After the start of the war, Wilson wrote a lengthy op-ed piece for the New York Times laying out the facts of his trip and saying he had "little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

Five days later, Rove told Time reporter Matt Cooper he should "not get too far out on Wilson." His trip to Niger, Rove said, wasn't approved by Cheney or CIA Director George Tenet. Cooper wrote to his boss, "It was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd issues who authorized the trip."

Three days later, columnist Robert Novak identified Plame as a CIA operative and said two "senior administration officials" told him Plame suggested sending her husband. About the same time, a confidential source also told a Washington Post reporter that the trip was a "boondoggle" arranged by Plame.

This is a classic Rove technique: undercut a critic by planting the notion that he was off to Africa on a lark arranged by his wife. Rove's history as a rough political player is well-documented. But this wasn't about a political campaign; this was about a serious question of national security and the justification for a difficult war.

It also wasn't true. On July 22, Newsday reported that a "senior intelligence officer confirmed that Plame was a directorate of operations undercover officer who worked 'alongside' the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger. But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment." This senior intelligence officer also told Newsday that it was incorrect to suggest " 'she was the one who was cooking this up.' " Besides, he said, " 'We paid his airfare. But to go to Niger is not exactly a benefit. Most people you'd have to pay big bucks to go there.' " The CIA always said Plame did not recommend her husband.

It is instructive to remember that the investigation into who revealed Plame's identity was initiated by Tenet, not by administration critics. Remember also that Wilson was correct; ultimately the White House had to retract Bush's State of the Union statement on the Niger connection.

In addition to discrediting critics of the Niger connection, the Bush administration, through the actions of John Bolton -- now nominee to be U.N. ambassador -- sought to intimidate intelligence analysts who objected to conclusions about Iraq's WMD, and to get a U.N. chemical weapons official fired so he wouldn't be able to send inspectors back to Iraq, where they might disprove more of the case for war.

In the scheme of things, whether Rove revealed Plame's identity, deliberately or not, matters less than actions by Rove, Bolton, Cheney and others to phony up a case for war that has gone badly, has cost thousands of lives plus hundreds of billions of dollars, and has, a majority of Americans now believe, left the United States less safe from terrorism rather than more.

That's the indictment which should matter most.

A gay prostitute, a phony media organization that managed to sneak its "reporter" into White House press briefings, and the lies that were fed to the media and the American people in the run-up to war with Iraq ­ what possible connection could these items have to one another?

The answer: a man called "Jeff Gannon."

Amid the media frenzy over Gannon's journalistic bona fides, or lack of them ­ and the lurid speculation going on in the left lane of the blogosphere about how a purported male hooker got admitted to White House press briefings before his "Talon News Agency" (a front group created by "GOPUSA") was even created ­ one has to ask: who cares?

Answer: Patrick J. Fitzgerald, for one, the chief prosecutor in an investigation that could rope in several high-ranking administration officials and even lead to the White House itself. And those of us who have been awaiting the come-uppance of this White House, for two, and are ready to get out the popcorn and the chips-and-dip and settle down for a nice long juicy scandal.

Let's go back to my column for Jan. 12, 2004, in which I pointed to an interview with Iraq war critic Joe Wilson conducted by Gannon. Wilson, a former ambassador to Gabon, was sent to Niger by the CIA to find out whether Saddam had been trying to procure uranium in that African nation as part of his weapons development program ­ you know, the one that turned out not to exist. When Wilson returned, he reported that no such attempt had been made, and he was therefore astonished when the president, in his 2003 State of the Union address, made reference to Saddam Hussein, who supposedly "sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Wilson went public with his mission and its results, which is when the neocon smear machine went after him hammer and tongs. Robert Novak wrote a column in which administration officials were cited as saying that Wilson was a partisan out to get the president and had only gotten the job because his wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent.

At that point, Ms. Plame's career as a covert agent ­ apparently assigned to nuclear nonproliferation issues ­ came to an abrupt end. A crime had been committed ­ a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which makes it a felony to "out" a CIA agent on a covert mission ­ and an investigation was launched. When then-Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself and appointed a special counsel to look into the matter, the political implications of the case became clear.

Whoever was guilty of engineering the "outing" of Plame was also part of a more general effort to discredit Wilson ­ and head off any further investigation into how so much phony "intelligence" came to be touted by the president and his White House as "fact." The president's infamous "16 words" alluding to the Niger uranium caper supposedly launc