Iran Seizes Ship in Straits

Iran seems bent on ratcheting up the tensions in the Straits of Hormuz, where most of the world's oil goes on its way out of the Gulf.  Asa Fitch in today's Wall Street Journal [Iran: Ship Seized Over Debt ] desccribes the seizure of the Maersk Tigris by an Iranian gunboat in international waters.  CNN says the gunboat was operated by Iran's Revolutionary Guard rather than its Navy.  The crew is being held on the ship near the harbor at Bandar Abbas.  An Iranian spokesperson said the ship was taken to settle a 14-year old debt, as unlikely as that might be.  This is a barely rational explanation in light of all the other things going on in that area.  

Last week the Iranians had surrounded a U. S. registered freighter, the Maersk Kensington, but backed off before making any attempt to board it.  The U.S. has sent an aircraft carrier to the region and has the firepower to make it difficult for small boats.  The little tit for tat has gotten the attention of most of the countries in the Middle East and they are starting to take sides.  That, and the escalation of hostile actions by both sides, will not make things better.    

Russians and Chinese read Obama's Email

I guess it should come as no surprise, but in an article in today's New York Times [Michael Schmidt and David Sanger, Russian Hackers Read Obama's Unclassified Emails, Officials Say ] declares that the Russians were involved in the latest email skimming at the White House and the President was included.  As least some of his correspondence, and those of some staff, was being read by the Russians who were also reading the State Department email, including no doubt, the "private" email of Hillary Clinton.  This same article also mentions the old news that the Chinese have been doing the same thing since Obama ran for office the first time.  

The White House needs to know that we have the technology to make secure email.  It will not be very easy to use, but it is secure.  It will be encrypted at rest and on the fly.  It won't be able to use Hillary's email server in the basement of her house, but it will be safe from anyone trying to hack into it.  It can be stored encrypted and made reasonably secure against phishing attacks.  It won't work with GMail or Outlook, but it will communicate just fine with every staff member chosen to use it.  Government communications can be secure or not, as we choose.  Most of the seniors, with the possible exception of George W. Bush, choose not to use secure communications for anything but classified information.  All they have tdo do is think about this for a minute or two.  Do we really want people in foreign governments reading the email that our most important government officials send to one another?  Are we willing to do something about it?  The answer seems to be No.  

Two Chinese nabbed Stealing Sensors

The Justice Deparment announced yesterday that a Federal judge had sentenced two Chinese students, one a PhD candidate, attempting to steal a sensor and take it, presumably to their employer, Nanjing Shuntai Technology Co. in Jiangsu Province, China, which supplied the money for the purchase of the sensors.    

A story by Olivier Uyttebrouck, Chinese National Pleads Guilty to Weapons Smuggling, Albuquerque Journal, 23 July 2014, says the stolen item was an ARS-14 sensor.  The vendor says these sensors are "Used for everything from crash and ejection testing, to precision platform stabilization and line-of-sight imaging, our sensors are available in both commercial and space-qualified versions. "  

Why do the research and build your own sensor, when you can steal one in the U.S. and have it brought to your facility in China?  Then, it can be reverse engineered and put into many of the very products sold to the world's arms dealers.  

  Bo Cai, 29, of Nanjing, China, was sentenced to 24 months in prison and his cousin Wentong Cai, 30, of Chifeng, China, was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison.  Both will be deported after completing their prison sentences.... The Arms Export Control Act and the ITAR prohibit the export of defense-related materials from the United States without obtaining a license or written approval from the U.S. Department of State.

This is a lovely way to spend Summer break and they can look forward to future employment in China when they finish their jail time.  

China warns about North Korea

How curious that China would choose to warn the world about a major uptick in the number of nuclear weapons held by their neighbor and only friend in the world.  China supplies the majority of oil and trade with North Korea and probably has more influence over that country than any other.  The CIA World Factbook says that China accounted for 67.2% of North Korea's exports and 61.6% of imports in 2011. Since then, they probably account for more.  Why would they need to warn the world about what North Korea is doing?  

China uses North Korea as a stalking horse for international crises which it can then observe, without being the cause of the trouble.  North Korea has threatened to launch a nuclear weapon on a long range missle capable of hitting the U.S., but we often forget that members of the Chinese military have twice done the same thing.  It didn't get much of a reaction out of us either time.  But coverage in the Wall Street Journal today [ Jeremy Page and Jay Solomon, China Warns North Korean Threat Rising, ]

indicates the U.S. believes North Korea gave nuclear technology to Syria, and could give more to other countries.  Republicans, and no doubt others, are looking at the deal with Iran saying the deal looks a lot like the one put together by the Clinton administration in 1994 to slow down the development of weapons by North Korea.  What it really did was give them cover to continue their weapons programs.  

The problem is the same in North Korea as it is in Iran - verification.  North Korea is a black hole when it comes to verifying much of anything and Iran is not far behind.  We know Iran will not follow an agreement to stop weapons development but would be glad to accept a lessening of sanctions in exchange for inspection of some of the known sites building their weapons.  They will never show them all to anyone.  

What that doesn't say, however, is why is China telling us about North Korea's nuclear arssenal and it's plans for futher weapons?  Maybe they are trying to tell us that the deal with Iran will not work any better than the one with North Korea.  They know they can control North Korea but will never have the same leverage over Iran.  Killing the ageement will not stop the Iranians from continuing development, but it might give us reasons to start thinking about other ways to do it.  Maybe I am giving the Chinese too much credit, but somehow, I don't think so.  

Who is Margrethe Vestager?

Perhaps I lead a sheltered life, but I had never heard of Ms Vestager until last week when the EU Competition Commissioner, decided to bring antitrust charges against Google.  Lately she has been spending a lot time with the press and public forums where she can explain the actions which were several years in the making.  [ see Natasha Singer and James Kanter, Google's Steely Adversary, New York Times, 19 April 2015 ].  She tries hard to justify bringing these kind of charges against Google, but not many others doing exactly what Google does as a part of their commercial business.  A more interesting slant on the whole thing comes from The Financial Times [Richard Waters, Christian Oliver and Alex Barker, How Google ended up 'on the wrong side of history']  

This article says it took a long time to bring charges because Ms Vestager's predecessor, Joaquin Almunia, slow-rolled the whole thing because he "... grew convinced the anti-Google campaign was largely  driven by arch-rival Microsoft, leading him to discount some compalints.  Collegues recall him grumbling:  if Steve Balmer of Mircrosoft has a problem, why is he sending proxies to see me?"  He also had his staff expressing doubts about the strength of the case, on the basis that the arguments were too novel.  

The FT article leads us to believe that Edward Snowden's disclosures has a lot to do with Germany turning on the heat with Google and it partly came from a belief in Europe that the U.S. was managing too much of the Internet.  This latter being something that comes up from time to time, especially when the Russians engage on the issue.  Putin expressed his opinion when he said the Internet was a "CIA project" without any explanation of what he meant.  

As to what she really is, the NY Times has more understanding of the real person.  She sharply cut Denmark's social benefits, especially unemployment.  A group of unemployed builders gave her a life-sized sculpture of a hand with the middle finger raised, and she keeps it in her office.  That must surprise a lot of visitors.  I don't know many government employees who could get away with something like that.  A reporter who covers her said she "is seen as a very tough, cold-hearted politician."  The kind who would bring charges against Google for doing what every search engine does, especially one managed by a business.  I don't find many Google products mentioned in Bing,  Microsoft's own.  Yahoo doesn't give equal prominance to Google products.  Why would they?  When the U.S. decided not to pursue anti-trust charges against Google, they were right.  While the Europeans might find it the equivalent of a crime to put their own products first, we certainly don't.  If they want to play this game, we should do the same to them.  

China Building an Empire

Several news channels from the Daily Mail to the Wall Street Journal have picked up a story on the Chinese building a runway on one of the Spratly Islands.  You can find them on Google Maps at
[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Spratly+Islands/@8.1250832,118.8474945,4z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x33d4a307e1349371:0x7d2a6c70ee3295a1 ] They are a long way from China, roughly 1000 miles.  Nobody claims territory this far from home, without some historical reason.

The Chinese say, very vaguely, that they have "historical claims to these islands" and they apparently told Hillary Clinton that when she was Secretary of State.  Mohan Malik in Historical Fiction: China’s South China Sea Claims World Affairs May/June,  2013 says these claims are largely a fiction and only go back as far as 1947 when the maps were drawn with the Spratly Islands in Chinese territory.  

We have always lived in interesting times, which is partly an old Chinese curse, but these are more interesting because two major powers have decided to expand in different ways while nobody challenges them.  China stakes out a territorial claim, takes years to plan its development, and moves slowly but steadily to its goal.  They make few enemies by moving slowly.  Russia goes slashing through the places it wants to take over, manufacturing allies who call for their help.  They too claim territory once owned by their country.  They will be wanting Alaska back shortly, moving armies into the north to firm up the claims.  

The areas both of them are claiming are pretty large.  New Russia extends from Odessa in the west, to Donbass in the east, mostly territories they do not hold now.  China is claiming an area that makes that look tiny.  

So, is the rest of the world suddenly taking a nap, or does it just not care?   Books at Amazon

Google Blasted by EU

Today's Wall Street Journal indicates Google is about to have a dust up against the EU over a 5-year investigation that rivals say favors Google's own services in travel, shopping and maps, rather than other on-line services from competitors.  ( see Valantina Pop and Tom Fairless, Europe to Pull Trigger on Google Antitrust Charges, 15 April 2015 ).  

This is not just a legal issue, though Google has enough lawyers around to defend themselves against almost anything.  To me, it is an emotional one.  We could put aside the law and think about this in the context of all the Internet services that people get for free.  As a business principle, if I get something for free, I generally don't quibble about whether it favors its own maps or not.  I even expect that it will, and in Google's case, I prefer that it does, since it has better maps than the upgrades I bought for my old car.  It is hard to see that as anti-trust.  

We remember anti-trust with the oil companies who drove competitors out of business---by force, if necessary.  It became the standard for anti-trust, but nobody stopped buying oil from Standard Oil.  We still buy oil from something called OPEC, which is not called a cartel for nothing.  How about bringing charges for that one?  

Free services, that get their revenue from advertising are everyhwere in the world.  Amazon Kindle has a version that has ads in it.  Google has ads in theirs, some of which I pay for to sell my books.  There isn't a website that I visit regularly that doesn's have ads in it and they get money from those.  I ignore most of them, and stay away from the advertised sites.  Commercial sites all have ads favoring their own products.  The network giants favor their own phones, even have them built for their own networks so they can't be used by competitors.  How about bringing charges for that?  

It smacks of Europe First.  It smacks of hypocrisy.  It took them 5 years to get this investigation done, and I wonder what took that long to figure out that Google gets paid to advertise services of others on their networks.  We expect them favor their customers because they are a business, not a monopoly.  

Maybe the European's should have their own Google, built by the governments of the EU.  It would be free and have no customers except their own countries.  I can just see a browser made by many governments.  The maps would take you somewhere, but it probably wouldn't be to your destination.  You could store documents on it too.  I get tired of the rest of the world telling us to be free and open in how we do business, but not doing the same themselves.  It may not be law as the EU sees it, but as my students used to say, "Denny said it was OK."  Leave Google alone.  

Russia Ready to Sell Anti Aircraft Weapons to Iran

Putin did not let any grass grow under his feet when the dust finally settled on the "framework" of a nuclear deal with Iran.  He was first in line to begin trade, presumably after sanctions have been lifted, and his first choice is a weapon that makes it difficult to overfly Iran for any purpose, including verification of the Iran nuclear deal.  

The weapon is the S300 which you can get a more detailed description of at [ http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-22652131 ].  It's range is 93 miles and an altitude of 17-19 miles.  It sets up in what is probably longer than the 5 minutes it is advertised.  The BBC says it is the equivalent of the Patriot missile.  The Russian RT news network says it is no longer being made and will be replaced by the S400.  The Russians have sold quite a few of them to various countries in the Middle East and, under pressure, backed out of deal to sell them to Syria in 2010.  

The Pope Engages with Turkey

Almost every news agency carried the Pope's remarks from over the weekend when he said the Ottoman Empire used 'genocide' to eradicate the Armenians.  Turkey took offense to the extent that they withdrew their ambassador to the Holy Sea.  You would almost think the genocide took place last month, but it was longer ago than that.

I went to History.com http://www.history.com/topics/armenian-genocide, to see what happened to cause this to be such an issue today.  Since the early 4th century, Armenia was one of the first countries to declare its official religion to be Christian.  Even though they were surrounded by Muslim countries, they did pretty well and as a part of a larger takeover in the region, became part of the Ottoman Empire, also Muslim, and a caliphate.  You recognize that term from current history because ISIS claims that same title and kills Christians when it is convenient for them.  The Pope has said he doesn't like Muslims (or anybody else for that matter) killing Christians because they are Christians.  The Christians and Muslims got along pretty well until the success of the Armenians and the fact that they were Christians made Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II, fearful that they might be more loyal to Russia than to Turkey if war came to the region again.  He decided to "box them on the ear" to get their attention and started a campaign to wipe out whole villages.  He was ultimately overthrown by another group of Turks and everyone thought it might be better after that.  

During WW I, the Turks sided with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire declaring jihad against all Christians who were not on their side.  If that sounds familiar, it should.  Jihad is a word that many Muslims use as a description of a religious war against people they describe as their enemies.  It can even be against other Muslims, if need be.  They set up killing squads and threw people off cliffs, burned them alive, and shot some.  This sounds like genocide to quite a few people.  

So, the Pope tells what the History Channel sees as "the truth" of this matter, and Turkey brings home their ambassador.  ISIS sits not all that far away from this action, right across the Syrian border with Turkey.  Turkey does not allow anyone in their own country to say what Turkey did to the Armenians was genocide.  It is hard to imagine how to characterize the death of a million and a half people unless you just say they were casualities of war, but they have laws prohibiting thier people from describing it that way.  They are not content to leave it there.

What the Turks have succeeded in doing is getting most of the other countries of the world to also not use the term genocide.  They did pretty well with that since 1914, but find it harder to do when people have access to things like the History Channel.  I don't like other countries telling me how I should think about events in the world.  I am sure the Armenians would have a different view of things that we don't have.  Nobody tells the truth anymore, so somewhere between what Turkey wants us to believe and what the Armenians believe, lies something the Pope is allowed to say.  Killing people because they are of a particular religion is not something we want others to do.  

Ukraine Releases Russian Secret

At the end of an article in today's Wall Street Journal, Nick Shchetko and Laura Mills [ Ukraine Bans Soviet-Era Symbols ]  they casually added a paragraph about a new law passed by the Ukraine parliament, " A separate law passed by the Ukrainian parliament Thursday will permit public access to documents classified as secret by Soviet authorities."  I wondered what this could be about.

Several newspapers ran a story, repeated from Novaya Gazeta one of the last surviving investigative journalism concerns in Russia [six of its journalists have been murdered since Putin took over in Russia], about a plan briefed to Putin on a strategy to divide Ukraine and neutralize or subjugate certain parts of it.  This document was received prior to the removal of President Victor Yanukovych to the safety of Russia.  [ read Anna Nemtsova, Putin's Secret Ukraine Plan 'Leaked' in the Daily Beast,  25 February 2015 ] It describes the main concern of the Russians was Gazprom's oil and gas lines and ethic changes in Ukraine and the east that did not suit Russian foreign policy very well.  There was no discussion of the Russian Nationalists that are so prominently listed as the cause that got Russia involved.  Nemtsova's article contains several other details worth reading.  

A story by Czech researchers and published by Radio Praha [http://www.radio.cz/en/section/czech-history/czech-researchers-probe-secret-soviet-era-archives-in-ukraine ]  mentions that the new head of the SBU, the Intelligence Service of Ukraine, has opened archives to further study, allowing the Czechs to research backgrounds of some people held captive by the Soviets before World War II.  The jews who were sent there ended up fighting the Germans after Russia was attacked.  The fact that they were in gulags prior to that was not lost on very many of the Czechs, but there are real secrets to be had in these documents.  

A lot more will be disclosed if the researchers can reach the documents in time.  Many of them were carted off to Russia already.  Those that remain will open new windows on the SBU and FSB relationships that went deep, and how the Russians really went about taking Crimea will be first on that list.  

Why Russians Hacked the White House

We have to wonder why the press is speculating about why the Russians hacked the White House.  It isn't a secret and should not be a surprise to anyone.  The anwser is simple:  The Russians are keeping up with the Chinese who started hacking the administration while it was still running for office.  Why the White House didn't mention that the Russians are not the only ones hacking them, is not a big surprise to anyone.  

Governments want to influence thought leaders who influence the President.  Most of them are in the White House or nearby and communicate regularly with him.  Almost everyone knows who some of them are - but few know all of them.  Watching who communicates with him and who he responds to is a good place to start.  

I was pretty surprised that the President's schedule was not classified, so it was on an unclassified network.  Some of the White House "expaliners" would be quick to say that everyone knows where the President is going to be on a given day, so there is no point in making it classified.  That would only be a half truth, something we are used to from anyone in that kind of position.  "Our version of the truth" is the essense of public comments being made.  This is what Press Secretaries are supposed to do and it is expected of them.  

The President's schedule is a combination of things including meetings, some with foreign dignitaries, some with members of Congress, and some with civic groups on the White House lawn.  The fact that the President is meeting with them tells anyone with access to the information who is influencing the President and how often they have that access.  Because it relates to foreign relations, that kind of thing is usually classified until the meeting is made public.  Nobody cares, except the Secret Service, that he is meeting with technologists from Silicon Valley today.  

Since the President is not likely to know why he is meeting with technologists from Silicon Valley and would like to make sure the meeting is important and not just a publicity photo, he needs talking points.  Most of the press stories on this hack mention those talking points being on the network that was hacked.  So, not only do the possessors of this information know who he is meeting with, they know what he will be saying to them.  The Russians and Chinese have both hacked several foreign governments so they can match up what he will say, with what the visitor will say.  

Our government doesn't seem to remember why we have secrets and why we protect them from other governments.  This particular administration needs what we used to call "calibration" on the subject of protecting information that needs protecting.  They are especially good at it if someone tells something to the press about how a particular debate was structured.  Those people are found and removed, but they are not so good at protecting really big secrets, like where the President is going to be, who is meeting with, what they are going to be talking about, and what his position will be.  Time to adjust to the fact that we can't protect our own computer networks even in places like the White House.  

Turkey and Social Media

Today's Wall Street Journal has an article by Emre Peker and Sam Schechner, Turkey Briefly Blocks YouTube, Twitter Access  that describes an action by a court in Instanbul to remove information about a terrorist hostage situation from sites operated by U.S. and Turkish companies, including ISPs, Facebook, and others.  We have a hard time understanding the significance of an event like this because a few people still believe the Internet is totally free from censorship.  They should know better.  

Turkey is not alone in censoring the Internet both in their country and outisde of it.  Russia, China, Iran and a handful of others actively try to influence the content of their Internet by filtering on keywords, controlling their press, hacking press sources in other countries, influencing thought leaders, and political officials.  What Turkey did here is considerably short of that.  

The world leaders have yet decide how much of the Internet needs to be managed and how much should be "free".  This isn't a simple thing with the kinds of crime going on the Internet.  Child porn has seen a huge upswing, drug distributors now use web sites, and money laundering tries to use electronic substitutes for currency.  Every time we turn around, somebody is stealing privacy information used to steal money from our economy.  Countries can barely keep up with crime, and have some difficulty with managing information coming into and out of their own countries.  Yet, what Turkey did here is only the beginning of a public acknowledgement that the Internet is not free everywhere in the world.  The term used to describe what is happening is "balkanization", meaning the Internet is no longer a single thing that reaches into the core of any country in the world.  It is being subdivided into regions and countries that don't necessarily agree with the West on how the Internet should be used.  

Don't confuse managing information with control of the medium of use.  Countries control television, radio and can monitor telephones and computers, but they cannot control them.  They make it painful for people who disagree, like Ilya Ponomarev who was described in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece today as the living example of why you don't want to vote against Putin in the Duma.  He is arrested, characterized as a criminal, charged with a number of crimes he probably didn't commit, and had his immunity stripped from him so he could be prosecuted.  The rest won't go well for him.  The Russians did the same to Ukrainian leaders who backed actions against them.  What the Russians are doing is manufacturing information which is then picked up by Interpol, newspapers, and their own press corps, and becomes news of their own making.  They are not controlling the Internet, but they are influencing the content it disseminates.  Truth does not matter to them.  

What Turkey did was far from what the Russians and Chinese are doing to control the information that their populations get to see.  I don't think I mind that they do that, until of course, they decide they want to manage our information too.  Hacking our newspapers, our government, and major businesses is allowing them to have access to the thoughts of business and government leaders who have to make decisions about how they are going to handle relations with the White House and our largest industries.  Today, the White House admited again that it was hacked and they still haven't gotten it under conbtrol.  They can't seem to learn that the Internet, however careful people like Hillary Clinton may think they are being, is not a safe place and you can't treat it like one.  

Comedian OLIVER Interviews Snowden

Maybe he did it intentionally for reasons we don't know, butd it does seem odd that Edward Snowden picked a comic, John Oliver, to do an interview with him in Moscow.  [ see http://money.cnn.com/video/pf/2015/03/30/ahead-retire-your-way-barber-shop-quarter.cnnmoney/index.html]  

True, Oliver is well known, maybe even in Moscow, but a comic puts a certain spin on things that might not come from a regular news reporter like CNN's Anderson Cooper.  Oliver went out on the streets of New York and asked people if they knew who Edward Snowden was, or what he did to be "famous" and much to Snowden's surprise, few did.  Maybe they were mostly tourists or New Yorkers who don't read newspapers, but these kind of informal surveys scare me sometimes.  If you ask someone what they thought of the President's speech last night, they are apt to tell you, even if the President gave his last speech a month ago.  

Perhaps Snowden thought he had immortality because he chose to betray his country, in the same vein as Benedict Arnold.  Perhaps he thought history books would record the day he gave up Top Secret documents to the Chinese and Russians.  Perhaps he thought people were still interested in his story, since he still had the Guardian newspaper chunking out new documents every few weeks.  That was supposed to keep him relevant for a long time, with new sensational stories putting him on the front page like they did when he was in his first 15 minutes of fame.  

Justice is slow to come to Edward Snowden, but when a spy finds out that nobody remembers him and nobody even knows why he defected to another country, he gets lonely.  Nobody in Russia trusts a spy.  I understand that feeling having been near a defector once, and feeling the disgust come over me, and not entirely understanding how I could feel like that when the poor guy was doing everything he could to help us.  Putin doesn't even like him, and treats him with distain befitting the leader of the Intelligence Services.  Snowden knows by now, the adminstration would not think he was a humanitarian for giving up secrets that harm his country as much as these did.  He will never be able to come home, however hard his lawyers negotiate for his return.  He can sit for years more years until everyone forgets who he is and the interviewers will no longer be willing to travel to Moscow for a visit with him.  That day comes to all spies.    

I had a thought the other day that the only way he is getting out of this one is if the President grants him immunity from his crimes.  If anyone thiinks that is a good idea, hold up your hand.  

Dennis F. Poindexter books at Amazon

Chinese Try to Control Internet

A recent article by Sebastian Anthony,  GitHub battles “largest DDoS” in site’s history, targeted at anti-censorship tools, 30 March ArsTechnica,  [ http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/03/github-battles-largest-ddos-in-sites-history-targeted-at-anti-censorship-tools/]   is yet another indicator that some of the countries who can, try hard to influence content of the Internet that doesn't suit their political views.  It is one thing for China (in this case) to dictate content in their own country, but quite another to try to influence what other countries put on the Internet.  They did this previously by hacking the New York Times, Bloomburg, the Washington Post and however many others that are unwilling to talk or didn't know they were attacked. They specifically looked for sources in those cases and dried up some of the types of sources that might help newspapers publish critical articles.  

In this instance they were after the New York Times again, which was distributed by GitHub in Chinese.  The ArsTechnica article, nor GitHub actually say the Chinese are at fault here, though they do mention that it was a subversion of Baidu, which is not exactly free to be critical of the central government for what it may see as interference with the content of someone else's websites.  "The ongoing attack appears to originate from China, with the DDoS specifically targeting two GitHub projects that are designed to combat censorship in China: GreatFire, and cn-nytimes, a Chinese language version of the New York Times."  

Our concern should be that Russia, China, Iran, and a few others are not content to manage their own portions of the Internet, but insist on trying to manage ours too.  We can talk all we want about Freedom of the Press or Net Neutrality, but the Chinese and their students are not wasting time by debating.  They are moving to control what they can, influence what they can't, by whatever means they can find, including denial of service, hacking, and intimidation where necessary, manage content of the Internet.   In this war, they are clearly winning.    Dennis F. Poindexter books at Amazon