"Some People are alive ONLY because it's illegal to kill them."

Big Brother Internet.

Do you remember the Safe-Cyber instructions they taught you in the mandatory Computer Ed class (operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology)? First you fire up your Secured Computing Device (SCD) and its hardware token authenticator.
Then you enter the six-digit algorithmically generated password displayed (a new one flashes every 60 seconds) and are asked to supply your biometric identifier. You place your thumb on the built-in fingerprint pad, click, and wait for the Internet connection to begin. But it doesn’t.
Instead, the screen goes black for a second before the dreaded words appear: “Malware has been detected on this SCD. As mandated by federal law, it has been placed in quarantine.” Then the machine shuts down.
This is not just conjecture, but an imminent scenario. Policies, such as the White House proposed “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace,” which will transform the character, culture and freedom of the Internet, are already in place. The 20 cybersecurity-related bills introduced in the Senate in 2011, and the dozen introduced in the House of Representatives, have wound their way through committees and, according to Senator Harry Reid, are scheduled to be voted on in the first quarter of 2012. Almost all of them, with the blessing of the White House, would make the Department of Homeland Security the overseer of private-sector networks.

Considering the apocalyptic rhetoric coming from Washington and the ranks of cybersecurity experts – echoed by media reports that portray every picayune data breach as Armageddon – it would appear that the vulnerability of the Internet has been underplayed for many years.

In the Internet’s start-up decades, both industry and government were committed to establishing an atmosphere of trust that would draw the public into conducting more and more digital business. Though data breaches, theft of trade secrets, identity theft and bank robbery have been a fact of Internet life since its beginnings, there were few laws requiring disclosure. Banks and credit card firms ate their losses as a cost of doing business, and the giant corporations kept mum rather than roil the public. Recently, the pendulum has swung in the other direction and a raucous alarm has been sounded regarding the great danger posed by the Internet.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

The Nation is at a crossroads. The globally-interconnected digital information and communications infrastructure known as “cyberspace” underpins almost every facet of modern society and provides critical support for the U.S. economy, civil infrastructure, public safety, and national security. This technology has transformed the global economy and connected people in ways never imagined. Yet, cybersecurity risks pose some of the most serious economic and national security challenges of the 21st century. The digital infrastructure’s architecture was driven more by considerations of interoperability and efficiency than of security. Consequently, a growing array of state and non-state actors are compromising, stealing, changing, or destroying information and could cause critical disruptions to U.S. systems. (White House Cyberspace Policy Review, 2011)
While there may be other factors behind the current wave of cybersecurity alarmism, we have identified three major forces: The Government, the Cybersecurity-Industrial complex, and the so-called “Hacktivists.”

The Hacktivists LulzSec and Anonymous, the most-publicized of the hacktivists, along with a growing community of ad hoc cyberactors, have had a multi-faceted impact on the cybersecurity environment that goes far beyond the number of hackers at work or the amount of actual damage their exploits have inflicted.
They have skillfully publicized their outsized, headline-ready cyberintrusions. Their attacks, which are something other than the garden variety cybercrime, have compromised the web assets of Sony, the CIA, Fox News, the Church of Scientology, Bank of America and many more. Beyond the financial damage and security breaches, they’ve created a public relations nightmare forcing these major institutions to go public with what they would otherwise go to great lengths to conceal.
As a result, attention has been focused on the inadequacies of Internet security. If organizations as large, powerful and security-conscious as these are vulnerable, who then is safe? Not only have the targets been breached and embarrassed, consumer trust in the Internet has also been shaken.

These high profile, anarchic Internet exploits – compounded by the role of social media in evading and undermining government control of the political and media arena (Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, etc.) – have intensified government efforts to clamp down on the Internet … while providing the media with scary cyber-stories to further that agenda.
The Government The US government agenda to control the Internet is at least a decade old. Just three months after the Bush White House created the Department of Homeland Security, it issued “The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace.” The document begins:
My Fellow Americans:
The way business is transacted, government operates, and national defense is conducted have changed. These activities now rely on an interdependent network of information technology infrastructures called cyberspace. The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace provides a framework for protecting this infrastructure that is essential to our economy, security, and way of life.
In the past few years, threats in cyberspace have risen dramatically. The policy of the United States is to protect against the debilitating disruption of the operation of information systems for critical infrastructures and, thereby, help to protect the people, economy, and national security of the United States.
Nearly a decade later, the basic message from the White House sounds much the same, if louder and more urgent. But there is a big difference. President Obama, and the rest of the Beltway insiders, have now formally defined cyberspace as a “strategic national asset.”
On the face of it, this appears to be a reasonable approach for a world that has become, in a relatively short time, totally dependent on digital resources. Unfortunately, it is an approach that provides a straight path to the militarization of the Internet and the loss of liberty that will follow. It is an approach that will elevate the most common forms of cybercrime (bank robbery, credit card theft) to the high-alert status of a cyberwar attack.
This government mindset will lead to the same abrogation of individual rights in cyberspace as the National Defense Appropriations Act of 2012 has codified in “Battlefield America.”
Given the integrated nature of cyberspace, computer-induced failures of power grids, transportation networks, or financial systems could cause massive physical damage and economic disruption. DoD operations – both at home and abroad – are dependent on this critical infrastructure. As military strength ultimately depends on economic vitality, sustained intellectual property losses erode both U.S. military effectiveness and national competitiveness in the global economy. Cyber hygiene must be practiced by everyone at all times; it is just as important for individuals to be focused on protecting themselves as it is to keep security software and operating systems up to date. (Department of Defense Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace, July 2011)
Many Internet experts and cybersecurity professionals have deemed 2011 “The Year of the Hack,” in recognition of the unending stream of headlines related to data breaches and thefts. We believe that – aside from any real uptick in cybercrime or cyberwarfare skirmishes – this perception is the result of the government’s determination to soften up the public to meekly accept an upcoming barrage of Internet regulation. It is a digital-age version of the tried and true fear mongering that is always employed to further empower the president and further enrich the military/industrial and Homeland Security complex. The government says it’s not fear mongering, just education.
The national dialogue on cybersecurity must begin today. The government, working with industry, should explain this challenge and discuss what the Nation can do to solve problems in a way that the American people can appreciate the need for action. People cannot value security without first understanding how much is at risk. Therefore, the Federal government should initiate a national public awareness and education campaign informed by previous successful campaigns. (White House Cyberspace Policy Review, 2011)
The Prominence of the Non-military Aspects of Warfare. Non-military means of warfare, such as cyber, economic, resource, psychological, and information-based forms of conflict will become more prevalent in conflicts over the next two decades. In the future, states and non-state adversaries will engage in “media warfare” to dominate the 24-hour news cycle and manipulate public opinion to advance their own agenda and gain popular support for their cause. (“Global Trends 2025,” National Intelligence Council, 2008)
The Money Card A key point being used to “educate” the public is the putative astronomical monetary loss caused by cybercrime in all its forms. There is, of course, no way to ascertain the validity of these numbers or even to figure out just what kind of losses are included in the estimates, which are generally arrived at by the large cybersecurity corporations. Some loss-figures appear to include the fall in a company’s stock price that usually follows revelation of a major hack (but doesn’t adjust that figure when the stock price climbs back up), as well as adding in an arbitrary sum attributable to time lost in recovery.
The largest global estimate of money lost to cybercrime currently floating around – as totted up by McAfee, the world’s largest cybersecurity company and endorsed by the White House – is $1 trillion a year. Symantec Corp., another cybersecurity giant, calculates the annual toll of global cybercrime to be about $388 billion. For dramatic impact, Symantec notes that figure is greater than the black market in marijuana, cocaine and heroin combined. Either of those (wildly divergent) sums is impressive, but do they mean anything? Or are they just part of a government “education campaign modeled on previous successful campaigns,” such as selling the public on the certainty of WMDs in Hussein’s Iraq?
Far from being broadly based estimates of losses across the population, the cyber-crime estimates that we have appear to be largely the answers of a handful of people extrapolated to the whole population. A single individual who claims $50,000 losses, in an N = 1000 person survey, is all it takes to generate a $10 billion loss over the population. One unverified claim of $7,500 in phishing losses translates into $1.5 billion.
Our assessment of the quality of cyber-crime surveys is harsh: they are so compromised and biased that no faith whatever can be placed in their findings.
There has long been a shortage of hard data about information security failures, as many of the available statistics are not only poor but are collected by parties such as security vendors or law enforcement agencies that have a vested interest in under- or over-reporting. (“Sex, Lies and Cyber-crime Surveys,” Microsoft Research)
The Cybersecurity-Industrial Complex The fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) surrounding cyberspace has helped turn cybersecurity into an enormously profitable business, worth between $60 and $100 billion a year, depending on who’s providing the statistics. The sector is expected to grow 10 percent annually for at least the next five years. You don’t have to attribute any ethical lapses in the cybersecurity industry to recognize that it, like the government, has a great interest in “educating” the public in cybersecurity awareness.
Security experts say that it is virtually impossible for any company or government agency to build a security network that hackers will be unable to penetrate. (Reuters, 27 May 2011)
“I am convinced that every company in every conceivable industry with significant size and valuable intellectual property and trade secrets has been compromised (or will be shortly), with the great majority of the victims rarely discovering the intrusion or its impact …. In fact, I divide the entire set of Fortune Global 2,000 firms into two categories: those that know they’ve been compromised and those that don’t yet know.” – Dmitri Alperovitch, Vice President of Threat Research for McAfee
The military-industrial complex of the Cold War era has morphed into the cybersecurity-military/industrial-Homeland Security complex of the Cyber War era … to which there is no end in sight. With the cybersecurity industry creating the technology required to stem the very cyberattacks they are in charge of discovering and monitoring, we face an endless cyberarms race that will undoubtedly be fed on exaggerations of the virtual menace and our vulnerability to it.
On the heels of the fear and hysteria will come the firm push for strict control and regulation of the Internet. It will be championed by government and industry as the necessary response to cyberwar, cyberterrorism, and cybercrime which, since cyberspace is considered a “strategic national asset,” are essentially all the same.
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) for instance, which is scheduled for a vote in 2012, will take a page from the National Defense Appropriation Act of 2012. In order to protect the rights of copyright holders to profit from their intellectual property, SOPA would permit the dissolution of due process and open the door wide to censorship and the denial of the right to free speech. The bill, supporters suggest, is not just about recovering the billions lost to bootlegged movies and music, rather, it’s about protecting the military strength that ultimately depends on economic vitality.
We agree with The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has called SOPA the most extreme, anti-Internet, anti-privacy, anti-free speech copyright proposal in US legislative history. It is, however, only one of many legislative proposals likely to be steamrollered through Congress in the coming year.
Computer security expert Eugene Kaspersky, co-founder of Kaspersky Labs, envisions the “passportization” of the Internet. In his opinion, to access critical online services, such as banking or electronic voting, “it should be made mandatory to log-on only with the use of a unique personal identifier [for example, a token – a sort of cyber-passport] and establish a secure authoring connection.”
Microsoft has proposed what it calls a “public health model” for the Internet. Cybercitizens would be required to have a “clean bill of health,” make their computers open to inspection, and, if contaminated by a virus or other malware, be prepared for quarantine.
President Obama’s National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace is pushing for development and public adoption of Internet user authentication systems that will function as a driver’s license for the cyberhighway.
Government control of the flow of information will strike a blow against Internet anonymity and the free speech it has made possible. Driver’s license, bill of health, passport, whatever you call it – it’s all about the ability to track and control the individual. Today, traffic in copyrighted digital material is the criminal behavior supposedly under attack; tomorrow, it will be the ability to speak out against corrupt government.
Hello, Big Brother.
Trendpost: The demand for ever-more effective cybersecurity tools to counter the ever-more inventive depredations of cybercriminals and cyberwarriors will be with us far into the foreseeable future. Clearly, this situation will create many jobs, both for the formally educated and the creative hacker. In addition, The National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education – established to provide cyber-awareness training to students in Kindergarten through post-graduate programs – will need many specialized teachers.
Somewhat farther along on the timeline, there is a high likelihood that the manufacture of cyber-components will be repatriated to the US. The 2011 Department of Defense’s “Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace” notes: “The majority of information technology products used in the United States are manufactured and assembled overseas. The reliance of DoD on foreign manufacturing and development creates challenges in managing risk at points of design, manufacture, service, distribution, and disposal.”
A high probability exists that 2012 will bring revelations about contamination in the global IT hardware and software supply chain and proof that computer components are providing our “enemies” with entry to critical networks or transmitting sensitive information to them. This will turn the DoD’s security concern into a hot imperative.

10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free

By Jonathan Turley, Published: January/13/2012.

Barack Obama

Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.
Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves? While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.

These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens — precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.
The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company.

Assassination of U.S. citizens
President Obama has claimed, as President George W. Bush did before him, the right to order the killing of any citizen considered a terrorist or an abettor of terrorism. Last year, he approved the killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaqi and another citizen under this claimed inherent authority. Last month, administration officials affirmed that power, stating that the president can order the assassination of any citizen whom he considers allied with terrorists. (Nations such as Nigeria, Iran and Syria have been routinely criticized for extrajudicial killings of enemies of the state.)

Indefinite detention
Under the law signed last month, terrorism suspects are to be held by the military; the president also has the authority to indefinitely detain citizens accused of terrorism. While the administration claims that this provision only codified existing law, experts widely contest this view, and the administration has opposed efforts to challenge such authority in federal courts. The government continues to claim the right to strip citizens of legal protections based on its sole discretion. (China recently codified a more limited detention law for its citizens, while countries such as Cambodia have been singled out by the United States for “prolonged detention.”)

U.S. President Barack Obama supports the killers in Iraq.

THANK YOU AMERICA!

There have been a lot of people over the last twenty years of my life who have told me that I should say those words, others only hoped I would and more still believed that I never would.
But here I am with them writ large as the title, you see, they are just words and it will only become clear as you read through this  exactly how I mean them.
Let me just say for clarification,( because I've had a few people recently tell me that I tar all Americans with the same brush, which I don't) that when I say America, I do not mean every man woman and child that lives on the continent of America, I mean the Administration (and whomever happens to be the picture in front, presently it's Obama) with special mention to it's foreign policy.
As the last troops pull out of Iraq to KUWAIT (so far away) but leave behind the biggest US Embassy in the world in Baghdad, you can't  help but see that it's all just  words. Recently when the Iraqis made comment about the 3,000 staff and 21,000 security that the American Administration were leaving in the Embassy in Baghdad they were told that if they didn't like the US Army as security for the Embassy they (the US) could replace them with civilian staff (mercenaries). Somehow, somewhere, someone misinterpreted the whole idea of "leaving". Leaving is everybody leaving, not 24,000 staying.  But then, I have said it before, America never goes somewhere and leaves, look at Germany and Japan for instance it's 66 years since the end of the Second world war yet they still have a presence in those countries.
Sometimes I really do just sit and wonder, this isn't news, so why do we not care? Why is it okay for America to get on it's high horse about Human rights in other countries when compared to Europe for instance it doesn't really have any and the great irony is that America never signs into Human rights legislation.  Why have we let America become the police of the world? Historically America has never attacked a country that it knew could really fight back, Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, it's military capabilities and population were severely weakened after 13 years of sanctions, Iraq was a soft target, but I am proud to say not as soft as the American's first thought. So after 8 years in Iraq they are "leaving" they have "installed a democracy" that's a misnomer in itself and after all their drum beating about Iran have left them in charge of Iraq! If you don't believe me, just the other week when Noori al-Maliki visited the graves of US soldiers, something I might add that he has never done for the soldiers of Iraq, instead of flying straight back to Baghdad he flew to Tehran to discuss what he did in the States and get the "Okay".
So Thank You America for getting rid of Saddam Hussein and replacing him with an Iranian government, and 300 members of Parliament who all want to be Saddam and act accordingly.
Thank You America for finding, training and supporting Saddam Hussein in Egypt in 1958 just so you could oust the socialist President of Iraq.
Thank You America, for being in Iraq for 8 years, leaving 24,000 soldiers and staff behind at your embassy and moving next door to Kuwait.
Thank You America for not rebuilding Iraq, leaving it to the new assholes in charge who haven't built a wall, let alone an infrastructure, Iraqis are very happy that they don't have water, electricity or proper sewerage.
Thank You America, because of the invasion of iraq in 2003 there are nearly 1.5 million Iraqi deaths, Saddam didn't manage that in 35 years. We have 5 million refugees around the world of which only a few thousand are actually in America because America only takes the Iraqis who worked for them in Iraq as refugees, Europe has taken the brunt. We have over 1 million widows and orphans, another 3 million refugees inside Iraq's borders because of the civil war that no-one acknowledges because it would "look bad" on America.
Thank You America, for bringing democracy in the shape of men who sat in the UK , US, Canada, Sweden, France, Germany, Ireland and other countries, lived on social welfare, swore allegiance to that country and upon their return to Iraq bought votes with blankets, generators and white goods.
Thank You America, for finding the weapons of mass destruction that were such a threat to your homeland that you needed to travel halfway around the world to defend yourself.
Thank you America for showing me the true meaning of "Human rights" when the CIA had me imprisoned and tortured for ten and a half months in Vienna because I wouldn't co-operate.
Thank you America for making sure that I have remained stateless since my flight from Iraq in 1991. Just like you promised, you're certainly true to your word in this case.
Thank You America for letting Al-Qaeda into Iraq, we never had them before.
Thank You America for supporting and training Osama Bin Laden, he did a great job against those Russians in Afghanistan, it makes you wonder why he turned against you?
Thank you America for making Terrorism the disease of this century, you will have plenty of "terrorists" to fight as you have created laws that make people who speak out against "America" terrorists, what happened to the "freedom of  speech and Democracy"  that you go around liberating other countries in the name of?
Thank You America for getting the media so "on-side" that we only really see and hear what you want us to, the only Free speech is the speech you decide is Free.
Thank You America for dragging the rest of the world into economic chaos, you try to arrest the 99% and leave the 1% free to do as they please that's definitely democratic. More liberties are lost through the ballot boxes than they are by tanks!
Thank You America for creating all the Dictators of the last century and today, we know you've been having great fun going around liberating us.
Thank You America, you've really outdone yourself this time!

A special thanks to Mr. Obama the President of America, during his speech in the White House with Noori al-Maliki who was visiting, he said the following:

 The Devils Double 

Book will be re-released at the end of this month.

THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE, Book.

Dear friends, be aware that the Devils Double book will be re-released at the end of this month, please DO NOT try and buy this book through Amazon or another book site, the publisher will not be supplying any other website with the book it will be available exclusively through Arcanum Media Group. This is also where you will be able to find my other books.
Please share this link with all your friends so that they too know not to buy or pre-order the book on any other site except Arcanum Media Group as they will not receive it and may not get a refund either.
Best regards,

here is the link

www.arcanummediagroup.com

4 - 7 Working days IRL/UK : 10 - 14 working days Rest of World.
 Released on 20/November/2011

• ISBN-10: 0955419131
• ISBN-13: 978-0955419133

Iraq War Lessons Learned? Keep Rumsfeld Away From All Things Defense.

by: Dina Rasor, Truthout | Solutions

Last week, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld strolled into town to advise the Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee on how to prevent more cuts in the Department of Defense (DoD). The members of the committee lapped it up because they, according to the National Journal, "are on a crusade to protect the military's accounts from further budget cuts." There have been numerous other writers who have gone into great detail about the damage Rumsfeld did to our country in selling the Iraq war and in allowing torture and other outrages in the war, but many don't know how badly he messed up the invasion of Iraq and the logistics of the war. He had a grossly unworkable plan for the Iraq war which overrode much of the planned logistics. And personnel gave us the debacle of KBR's $45 billion and still growing logistics contract and a new war service industry whose excesses will plague the military and suck the US Treasury dry every time we have troops overseas in the future. 

I saw much of the damage done by Rumsfeld's theories and plans when I was researching my book, "Betraying Our Troops," on how the private contractors were used in the Iraq war in a way and number that was never done before. Profiles of troops and contractor employees showed how the troops suffered and the military mission was compromised. Many of these contractors, especially KBR, which was, at the time, a division of Halliburton, did not have the same urgency to keep the troops supplied on the edge of the battlefield and later in fighting the insurgency, while running up costs and charging for work not done. This resulted in troops away from the safe bases without the basics of food and water and vital parts to keep their equipment going.

This was not a short-term problem. One unit that was parked at the border between Iraq and Iran was so isolated because KBR would not go out and supply them that they didn't even know that President George W. Bush had landed on an aircraft carrier and declared, "mission accomplished" until three months after the event. They were living on scarce food and water, and part of their daily routine was to try to keep their trucks working so they could go out and scrounge food from the local villages while many of their general officers were being treated by KBR to desserts made by expensive pastry chiefs at the major bases, including former palaces of Saddam Hussein.

The roots of how the military ended up with this expensive but broken logistics disaster can be placed directly on Rumsfeld and his build up before the war. For my book, I interviewed the two generals, Gen. Paul Kern and Gen. Wade McManus, who were responsible for the logistics during the build up of the Iraq war. Logistics is not as exciting as strategy, planes and tanks in war, but can be the most decisive and important to our troops for their mission and their lives. Rumsfeld's actions during the build up of the invasion guaranteed that there would not be enough logistical supplies and would set a politically connected company loose in the battlefield to run up costs and drain the money for the war effort, no matter how much money the Congress threw at the war.

Rumsfeld did two things that laid the groundwork for this debacle. First, he decided to limit the number of troops that could be used in the invasion to a level that was 200,000 troops fewer than the military asked for and relieved the commander who said that we needed more. This didn't just mean that we had to have fewer troops who were actually fighting, but also meant that there were not enough troops to do the heavy laden logistics of our modern Army. When Gen. Paul Kern was presented with the fact that he did not have enough troops for the logistics in the war, he, in desperation, pulled out a small contract the Army had with KBR to supply bases around the world and exploded it. KBR's contract, called LOGCAP, was around $60 million a year to take care of the logistical needs of 25,000-50,000 troops in a non-combat setting around the world. General Kern was forced to explode the contract to cover over 200,000 troops in dangerous warfront areas in just a few months before the invasion. The Army also didn't have the personnel to do oversight on this new contingency contract with open-ended funding, and KBR moved in and took advantage of the situation to run up costs as fast as they could while not delivering the necessary logistic to the troops in dangerous areas.

They did that because they didn't have to produce. In past wars, when the Army controlled its own logistics with its own people, troops would be put in jail if they refused to run supplies to the troops near the front line. Because KBR was a civilian company with civilian workers, they could refuse to do the work if they thought it was dangerous, and their workers could quit anytime and go home. The commanders, who never had to deal with so many contractors in a danger zone didn't know what to do because they had little power over this contractor other than filing breach of contract in an administrative action back in the US. KBR was in the driver's seat and they took full advantage of it.

When the insurgents began to blow up large KBR truck convoys and kidnapped an American truck driver who was seen captured on television, many of the KBR civilian truck drivers just quit and went home. The supplies piled up on the Kuwaiti border to such an extent that even the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that was set up by the US to try to govern chaotic Iraq were forced to ration their food in Baghdad, while the Army desperately tried to find troops who had driven trucks in civilian life to replace the missing KBR drivers. That was just one example of how using a contractor this close to a war area was one of Rumsfeld's big failures in the war. My book outlines many more.

The second mess that Rumsfeld directly caused in the initial run up to the war was to throw out the carefully laid logistics plans of the Army to put in a better "business" model. The Army, knowing that logistics during a war can be very chaotic, had a logistics plan that would requisition supplies and parts and have redundant supply backups in what was known as "just in case" type planning. Rumsfeld thought this was wasteful and changed the system just months before the invasion. He decided to do the "just in time" style of logistics that many companies used in the US where they did not have warehouses full of products, but used Federal Express and other delivery services to get their products or parts just in time. In what seems an obvious hitch to this idea was that wars are chaotic and it is very unrealistic to believe that you could use a civilian delivery system to deliver the supplies far away from the battlefield and expect that KBR, with their civilian truck drivers, could get this vital equipment to the troops.

By changing the logistics system right before the war, Rumsfeld guaranteed more chaos because, in the rush to war, some of the commanders were not aware of how the new system worked. They were assured that everything was in control and supplies would be pushed to the troops "just in time." It quickly became apparent that this business model that works in peacetime was a logistical nightmare during the war.

What made this a longer-term problem was that Iraq did not "welcome us as liberators" and the insurgency made most of the country unsafe to deliver supplies. So, between a new and dysfunctional logistics system and using civilian contractors to drive the trucks through fluid and dangerous areas, the situation was dire for much of the first part of the war. Rumsfeld's "business acumen" and mantra that private contractors could do anything better than the military helped fuel the years of quagmire in Iraq. Rumsfeld, as early as 2003, wrote a memorandum to Paul Wolfowitz, Gen. Peter Pace and Doug Feith, his fellow travelers who promised a quick and efficient war, that it "is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long hard slog." We are still in that slog, eight and ten years later because of his policies and his theories on how wars should be fought, while the troops were let down by the Pentagon and had to drink polluted water and even face electrocution because he set KBR loose with little oversight.

Besides the danger to the troops, this long slog has caused this KBR contract to explode to over $40 billion to date with unscrubbed and bloated costs promising to be the new baseline of what it takes to support our troops in the future. And the soaking of the taxpayers is not over for this KBR contract. As we transition troops out of Iraq as required by treaty with the Iraqi government at the end of this year (we hope!), KBR's LOGCAP contract will be turned over to the State Department to supply the new Vatican-size embassy and the 5,000 private military contractors that the State Department plans to have as the troops leave. With these bloated costs becoming the base for all logistics in the future, KBR promises to continue to soak us under the State's umbrella for years to come.

The long term consequences of these policy disasters will be seen in the future, because having as many or more contractors as troops has caused a new war service industry to get entrenched with political power. The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) is happy to make weapons and let them rust because they know that we will continue to build weapons whether we have a war or not. In fact, the MIC is not particularly fond of these messy, low-technology wars because the logistics and increase in troops takes away from the weapons procurement budget.

However, this new war service industry, because they don't manufacture anything but instead service the troops in war, need a hot war or occupation to continue to rake in the money. So, now we have a new and powerful military industry, which hires many officers and troops when they retire and has billions of dollars of contracts to help fund the lobbyists to keep them in contracts. This is an industry with an incentive to keep us in war or long-term occupation for their growth and even existence and is a scary new paradigm on our foreign policy.

The solution? It is not an easy one, but we can start by making sure that every time that Rumsfeld comes into town to advise anyone connected to the military, that the press and advocacy groups remind the public that he didn't just fail at the foreign policy and torture aspects of the war, but that he massively failed at running the basics of the war. He has been away for a decent interval, but is trying to come back, hoping that people forget that he didn't know what he was doing and cost us lives and money.

As for the long-term aspects of the war service industry, as we wind down in Iraq and hopefully in Afghanistan, we need to dismantle the contractors' model of doing logistics in war zones and draw a line in the sand where contractors cannot be used. We also need to go back to the KBR and other contractor bills for these two wars and scrub the numbers so that their running up costs to justify bloated new contracts will not work and that we don't get beholden to them in the future. This war service industry will try hard to keep their place with the US military and encourage us to police the world to keep their money flow, but they aren't as entrenched as the MIC, so we still have a chance to do something about it.

A Poet of On-Screen Violence

By EBEN SHAPIRO

Lee Tamahori insists that his scripts are already dripping with violence when he gets them.

It wasn't his choice to torture James Bond for 14 months in a North Korean prison, having him water-boarded, beaten while dangling from handcuffs and bitten by scorpions—all within the opening credits—in "Die Another Day," the Bond movie he directed in 2002. It was already in the script, he says.

The episode of 'The Sopranos" that he directed begins with Richie Aprile, one of the show's most gleefully twisted characters, getting out of prison and immediately smashing a glass coffee pot (filled with hot coffee) over the head of a pizzeria owner whom he feels has not paid him proper respect. In the last scene, the gangster runs down the same hapless victim, repeatedly backing over his prone body. Blame it on David Chase, the show's creator.

His latest movie, 'The Devil's Double," is no ode to pacifism, either. The film tells the story of Latif Yahia, an Iraqi military officer who is forced to become the body double of Saddam Hussein's depraved son, Uday. (Actor Dominic Cooper deftly takes both roles.) Mr. Tamahori says he actually toned down the script to make it more palatable to viewers.

The 61-year old New Zealand director first made a name for himself in 1994 with "Once Were Warriors," a grim depiction of Maori poverty and domestic violence. The indie film attracted widespread critical acclaim and brought offers from Hollywood. Since then, Mr. Tamahori has worked on a checkered assortment of films, ranging from the Nicolas Cage bomb, "Next," to a taut thriller, "The Edge," starring Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin, with a screenplay by David Mamet.

The Wall Street Journal: What attracted you to "The Devil's Double"?

Mr. Tamahori: I've always been perversely fascinated by the rotten sons of dictators. Now you have Gadhafi and his ragtag brood in Libya. They always seem to breed these contemptuous children. They have unlimited funds and they can literally get away with murder.

You've said you used gangster movies as a model for "The Devil's Double."

It kind of screamed out for the gangster genre. It was kind of a mafia family. There was nothing that can take this guy down. The Hussein family almost mirrored the Corleones and that's how I framed it in the film. You've got Saddam as Don Corleone. You've got an out-of-control Sonny who is never going to get the power (in Uday) and Qusay, the younger son, is the Michael of the piece.

It's a pretty dark, violent movie.

We modified some aspects of it. It was a pretty relentless script. This guy was 50 times worse than anything we've done in the film. We couldn't do end-to-end horror stories.

One of the most disturbing scenes is when, as a warning to stay in line, Latif is shown very realistic homemade torture tapes from Uday's private collection. They weren't actual found tapes; they were created for the movie, right?

I wanted that scene to be horrific. I wanted it to come out of nowhere, while Latif was lying around in the lap of luxury, having his feet massaged. Uday used to film everything. I decided that the best person to shoot all the torture video stuff was me because I'm a bad cameraman. We didn't even light it. It was just me and the actors. I had a Handycam as if I was a voyeuristic camera operator. For a lot of people, that scene is the worst in the movie. There is a cut-down version of those torture scenes, (to get an R-rated version for the U.S.)

What did you cut from the scene?

A rape at the beginning, a woman getting gang raped. A man being blow-torched. And a guy having his head drilled. I'm not saying that more is better. It was almost too much for some people.

How did violence become such a big part of your movies?

I grew up in New Zealand and became a great fan of the hard-edged American film directors of the '60s, Bob Aldrich ["The Dirty Dozen"], Sam Peckinpah ["The Wild Bunch"]. When you hadn't seen stuff like that before, it was quite shocking. I started to see that there was a different way of approaching violence in pictures. I'd seen barroom brawls. I've seen quite a bit of it. It was always around me. Fights and brawls between men are usually very vicious and over very fast. The fake American fight scenes, where they would slug it out and people would go through windows, I never really believed it.

What about the violence in "Once Were Warriors"?

In fight scenes, the more that you cut, the more edits you use, the more the audience becomes aware that there is trickery going on. In "Once Were Warriors," we used very few cuts. One shot. I had an ex-bouncer from Glasgow as the stunt coordinator. Glasgow breeds the toughest streetfighters in all of Scotland. The brawling in pubs is almost legendary. I told him I wanted that style of fighting. In a barroom brawl, you hit him before he hits you and you hit him with everything you've got and when he's down, you make sure he's unconscious. That's the simple basic rule of all street fighting. When the movie was released, people would come up to me, boxers, wrestlers, people who had training in hand-to-hand combat, and say, "that is the most realistic film I've ever seen."

How did you get involved in "The Sopranos"?

I watched the first episodes and said, "this is the best television I've ever seen. This is brilliant. I want to do one of these." They got me a meeting with David Chase, who was in town casting season two, and I said "David, just let me do one.''

What was it like to work on the show?

I was a very happy cog in the machine. It came from David and his writing crew. They imposed themselves brilliantly on the show, as they should. It was so tight. Even if I'd tried to change one word in the script, all the writers would go into a huddle and they'd say, "Yeah that's OK," or "Just leave it as it is." It was wonderful to have that level of concentration on the script.

What did you bring to your Bond film?

It was my idea to do all these little homages to Bond history. It's chock full of little tiny set pieces, with echoes of things that have been seen before. Only hard-core Bond fans will notice them. Nobody has picked up all of them.

The Devil's Double Official Trailer 2011