Waqas is back to keep us up to date on the Imran Khan file. The entire Pakistan establishment is united in trying to keep Imran Khan from returning to power in an election through court cases, violent repression, and electoral delay; but the people’s protests don’t seem to stop. Pakistan and Imran Khan at an … Continue reading "AER 122: Attempts to arrest Imran Khan and the Lahore High Court rallies"

In January 2015, as Islamic State militants were waging an offensive across Iraq and Syria, an Iranian intelligence officer known among his colleagues by the code name Boroujerdi sat down for a meeting with an important official: then-Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

The meeting, held at Abadi’s office in Iraq’s presidential palace in Baghdad, took place “without the presence of a secretary or a third person,” according to a report about the discussion contained in a leaked archive of cables from Iran’s shadowy Ministry of Intelligence and Security.

Abadi was a member of Iraq’s exiled political class, mostly Shia, who had returned to take power following the U.S. invasion. The two men discussed a range of topics, including the threat of ISIS to the Iraqi state, the role of foreign powers like Turkey and Saudi Arabia in the region, and, finally, the position of the West. On at least one point, they agreed: Despite the threat of ISIS and other regional powers, the political conditions wrought by the U.S. invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam Hussein had created an opportunity for the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allied Iraqi elites to “take advantage of this situation,” according to the Ministry of Intelligence and Security report.

Twenty years after U.S. troops first invaded Iraq, the classified Iranian intelligence documents, which were leaked to The Intercept and first reported in a series of stories that were published beginning in 2019, shed light on the important question of who actually won the war. One victor emerges clearly from the hundreds of pages of classified documents: Iran.

Today, Iran enjoys privileged access to Iraq’s political system and economy, while the United States has been reduced to a minor player. Iraqis themselves remain fractiously divided; many of their own political elites are close allies of Iran. The Ministry of Intelligence and Security cables, which were written between 2013 and 2015, the peak of the international campaign against ISIS, provide no shortage of examples of the expansion of Iran’s influence in Iraq. While helping train and organize Iraqi security forces who are ideologically tied to the Islamic Republic, activities documented at length in the cables, Iranian officials had also been routinely involved in promoting favored Iraqi politicians to important roles in the Iraqi government to protect Iran’s economic and political interests. One classified 2014 report contained in the trove of Iranian cables described then-future Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi as having a “special relationship” with Iran and named a laundry list of other Iraqi cabinet members who were close with the Islamic Republic — often people who had spent years exiled in Iran. The cables discuss how these close relationships have benefitted Iran, including by having sympathetic Iraqi officials give Iran access to Iraqi airspace and vital transportation connections with their allies in Syria.

The privileged conversation between Boroujerdi and Abadi was being replicated at that time at many levels of Iraqi government and society. In the cables, Iranian officials documented their work to solidify business and security interests in Iraq while obtaining oil and development contracts in the northern Kurdish regions and water purification projects in the south, the latter won with the help of a $16 million bribe paid to an Iraqi member of Parliament, according to one of the documents. The cables also show how former Iraqi military officials, including individuals trained or supported by the U.S. during the occupation, had been pressed into the service of Iranian intelligence, with one typical operative described as being forced to “collaborate to save himself.”

The war’s benefits to Iran were not solely political or security based either. Iraq is home to many sacred sites of Shia Islam, which, as the cables note, have opened up to Iranian tourism and influence. The documents in the Ministry of Intelligence and Security archive mostly provide individual reports of conversations and intelligence activities carried out by Iranian operatives inside Iraq. Yet overall, they depict Iran’s far-reaching political, security, and even cultural influence over Iraqi society in the vacuum left by the U.S. invasion.

This picture of Iranian ascendance is not only reflected in that country’s own intelligence documents. A massive two-volume study published in 2019 by the U.S. Army War College came to a similar conclusion, stating that “an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor” of the conflict. The study is the most comprehensive look yet at the costs and consequences of the war from a U.S. military perspective. Some of those costs are obvious and well known: Thousands of Americans were killed in combat after an ill-defined mission to find weapons of mass destruction devolved into a counterinsurgency campaign and civil war. But although most of the burden of the war was borne by the relatively small number of Americans who directly took part, the war had broader impacts on American society that continue to be felt today.

“In the conflict’s immediate aftermath, the pendulum of American politics swung to the opposite pole with deep skepticism about foreign interventions.”

“The Iraq War has the potential to be one of the most consequential conflicts in American history. It shattered a long-standing political tradition against pre-emptive wars,” the War College authors wrote. “In the conflict’s immediate aftermath, the pendulum of American politics swung to the opposite pole with deep skepticism about foreign interventions.”

Iraqis themselves have suffered greatly from the war; millions have been killed, wounded, or displaced as a result of the invasion and the subsequent civil conflict. The emergence of the Sunni Islamist extremist group ISIS, which Iran’s intelligence documents discuss at length, was itself the product of the chaos of post-invasion Iraq, including abuses by rogue Iranian-backed militias. In the same 2015 conversation between Boroujerdi and former Prime Minister Abadi, the Iranian intelligence officer opined that “today, the Sunnis find themselves in the worst possible circumstances and have lost their self-confidence,” adding that they “are vagrants, their cities are destroyed, and an unclear future awaits them.”

The miserable condition of Iraqi Sunnis had worried others within Iran’s intelligence establishment, who warned that many Sunnis, reeling from massacres by Iraqi government security forces and militias, had been driven not merely to welcome ISIS, but also other Iranian enemies as well.

“The policies of Iran inside Iraq have given legitimacy for the Americans to return to Iraq,” one Iranian intelligence officer lamented. “People and parties who were fighting against America from the Sunni side now are wishing that not only America, but even Israel could come and rescue them from Iran.”

In the end, ISIS was destroyed as the result of a tacit coalition between the Iraqi government, the United States, Iran, and the Kurdish Peshmerga, which combined to fight the group and regain control of its territories. Today, Iran remains the most powerful outside player inside Iraq. Although it has achieved a goal longed for since the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s — to wield power in Iraq and incorporate its Shia-majority areas into Iran’s sphere of influence — Iran’s victory has proven, in many ways, an unhappy one.

During protests against government corruption in Iraq in 2019, Iraqis often blamed Iran and its allies, along with the United States, for the parlous state of the country. In 2020, Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a major architect of Iran’s policy in Iraq whose role is documented at length in the Ministry of Intelligence and Security archive, was assassinated in a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad’s airport, following tit-for-tat attacks between Iranian-backed militias and U.S. troops in the country.

Despite relative peace following the defeat of ISIS, Iraq today remains a powder keg with widespread unemployment, environmental degradation, and poverty that its ruling elites, widely denounced by Iraqis as kleptocrats and puppets of foreign countries, have been unable or unwilling to address. Two decades after the first U.S. troops invaded Iraq, Iran is facing its own challenges with internal instability and the economic impact of a U.S.-led international sanctions campaign that has destroyed its economy.

Yet when it comes to the shadow war between Iran and the United States in Iraq, Iranian elites likely view themselves as having prevailed — at a steep price to themselves, Americans, and Iraqis alike.

The post How Iran Won the U.S. War in Iraq appeared first on The Intercept.

Andy Zaltzman is joined by Zoe Lyons, Angela Barnes, Hugo Rifkind and Nish Kumar. On the agenda this week is Nicola Sturgeon's surprise resignation, Jeremy Corbyn being barred as a Labour candidate and the case of 200,000 stolen Cadbury Creme Eggs.

Hosted and written by Andy Zaltzman with additional material from Alice Fraser, Catherine Brinkworth, Eleanor Morton, Peter Tellouche and Cameron Loxdale.

Producer: Georgia Keating Executive Producer: Pete Strauss Production Co-ordinator: Becky Carewe-Jeffries Sound Editor: Marc Willcox

A BBC Studios Production

In this episode we discuss Jon Stewart giving push back to Mark Cuban's takes on SVB bailout in a recent interview, an independent test in East Palestine, Ohio detected deadly carcinogens in the water, a Roger Waters concert was cancelled due to his past statements on Israel, Lieutenant Governor McNally is caught with embarrassing social media posts flirting with a young man, Snapchat rolls out out a new AI to their app that goes haywire, and Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) from The Intercept joins to talk about Governor Gavin Newsom's personal financial connections to the SVB bailout.

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Commonwealth, Restoration, Glorious Revolution: we complete England’s cycle of political instability and, with a little help from our old friends the Dutch, birth a new order into the world.

Interactive atlas, bibliography and credits for the series can be found at: hellonearth.chapotraphouse.com

This is the end of the narrative portion of our series, thank you all so much for listening. But fear not: There’s more Hell to come. We have seven (7) bonus episodes coming up featuring interviews with guest experts on specific thematic topics we wanted to dive into more. Release schedule will remain weekly on Wednesdays through mid-April, with Will’s Movie Mindset series debuting right after.

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Sr. Foreign Correspondent Derek Davison stops by to take us around the world: China brokers mid-east diplomatic deal, Australia gets nuclear subs, porno mercenary recruitment, Russia drops drone, Ukraine exports grain…everything you could need in your Chapo Daily Brief.

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Uma and Ciarán talk about Nickelback's Funk Song, Zadar's Snake Museum, Anti-migrant demos in Ireland but most importantly, we try to understand Cyprus.

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Economist Michael Hudson analyzes the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Silvergate, and Signature Bank, explaining the similarities to the 2008 financial crash. He also addresses the US government bailout (which it isn't calling a bailout), the role of the Federal Reserve and Treasury, the factor of cryptocurrency, and the danger of derivatives. TRANSCRIPT: https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/03/14/us-banks-collapsed-economist-michael-hudson VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=uvm9qrXhqf8 Check out the playlist for the show that Michael Hudson co-hosts here, Geopolitical Economy Hour: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDAi0NdlN8hMl9DkPLikDDGccibhYHnDP Michael's column "Why the US banking system is breaking up": https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/03/12/michael-hudson-why-the-us-banking-system-is-breaking-up Michael's other article "Why the US bank crisis is not over": https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/03/13/michael-hudson-us-bank-crisis

Democracy Now! 2023-03-16 Thursday

• Headlines for March 16, 2023
• Blinken Visits Niger, Home to U.S. Drone Base, as Biden Moves to Counter China & Russia in Africa
• Will Peace Hold in Tigray? Blinken Visits Ethiopia Four Months After Truce Reached to End War
• Death, Destruction & Resilience: Nadje Al-Ali on the 20th Anniversary of U.S. Invasion of Iraq

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Another mystery man, nicknamed Red, comes to town. He’s Mickey’s so-called “outlaw biker buddy.” Red takes activist Bryce Shelby for a drive to scope out the home of Colorado’s attorney general as part of a budding assassination plot. But Red lets something slip that makes Bryce suspicious.

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Two decades ago, phonics fever swept the land as George W. Bush made “scientifically-based reading instruction” a centerpiece of his education agenda. But despite its scale and huge price tag, Bush’s Reading First initiative has largely been forgotten. Have You Heard revisits the Bush-led effort to transform reading instruction, learning a familiar lesson along the way: history can’t teach us anything if no one remembers it. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HaveYouHeardPodcast or donate on PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/haveyouheardpodcast

Grayzone Radio with Max Blumenthal excerpts investigative reports from The Grayzone podcast.

Ryan and Emily discuss a Russian jet shooting down an American drone, Desantis gives statements on Ukraine similar to Trump but receives more backlash, Tucker ridicules what Trump got done during his term and calls him "autistic", Is SVB the sign of another 2008 like collapse?, Biden approves a controversial fossil fuel drilling, ChatGPT 4.0 is unveiled, Emily looks at Women in the workforce, and Ryan looks into the origins of Ebola and how that outbreak's response may have effected our response to the possible Covid lab leak.

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African leaders, collective west is not the only game in town

Democracy Now! 2023-03-15 Wednesday

• Headlines for March 15, 2023
• Jeremy Scahill on Growing Proxy War Between U.S. and Russia & Downing of U.S. Drone in Black Sea
• The Nord Stream Bombing: Jeremy Scahill on Why U.S. Remains Most Likely Culprit in Pipeline Sabotage
• "Catastrophic": Trump-Appointed Judge in Texas May Restrict Abortion Pill Mifepristone Nationwide
• Mexico's Missing: 100,000+ Cases Unsolved as Leaked Military Docs Shed New Light on Ayotzinapa 43

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Democracy Now! 2023-03-14 Tuesday

• Headlines for March 14, 2023
• How Silicon Valley Bank & Signature Bank Lobbied to Weaken Regulations That Could Have Prevented Collapse
• Autopsy Suggests "Cop City" Protester Sitting Cross-Legged, Hands Up, When Shot 14 Times by Police

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We’ve got the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, saber rattling over a war against Mexican cartels, plus we meet a delightful new character out of the great state of Tennessee, wish a bittersweet farewell to an old friend, and FINALLY take those damn smoke detectors down a peg or two. All that and a side of meat salad in today’s ep. Get bonus content on Patreon

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Krystal and Saagar discuss the massive SVB bailout propping up the banking sector, Romney and Mark Cuban demand bailouts, Crypto Bank Signature collapses amid tech fallout, SVB Executives sold millions in stock and took bonuses before collapse, Matthew Zeitlin (@MattZeitlin) from the GridNews joins us to talk about how all banks are being considered "Too Big to Fail", JD Vance rips Republicans opposing Norfolk Southern Regulation, Pence blasts Trump and Tucker for January 6th, and Desantis blames Wokeness for Bank collapse, and Fauci is flustered when asked about calls for his prosecution.

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For everyone who’s fought and bled for years to get Medicare for All in the United States, I’ve got some great news: The government just created it on Sunday!

Yes, this is Medicare for All Bank Deposits, rather than Medicare for All People. But if we think this through, we’ll see that both these things are great ideas and make sense for the same reasons — and there’s no reason that if we have one, we can’t have the other.

First of all, it’s important to understand what happened yesterday. Banks are intrinsically vulnerable to runs. They accept deposits from regular people and businesses, which is good, so we don’t have to keep sacks full of cash in our closet and pay armed men to guard them.

The problem is that we want to be able to come get our money out of the bank at any time. However, banks don’t keep sacks of all our cash in their vaults waiting for us. They loan deposits out and make other investments with them, leaving just a fraction of their deposits available to be withdrawn at any time. In the past, in the U.S., this meant that if rumors got going that a bank was insolvent, it didn’t actually matter whether or not the bank was healthy or not. Everyone would show up and try to get their money out first, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: The very fact that people were scared a bank was insolvent could make it insolvent. (In fact, Silicon Valley Bank, whose failure led to Sunday’s swift government action, may have been accidentally destroyed by its own clients telling each other scary stories in a group chat.)

As a company called American Deposit Management cheerily informs us on its website, “The history of bank failures in the U.S. begins just over 40 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed.” From then until the Great Depression, America saw constant, catastrophic bank panics that destroyed individual fortunes and the economy overall.

Until the beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, Wall Street had been able to fend off most democratic oversight. Partly, they did this by overtly arguing that the government would stifle crucial financial innovations and partly by covertly engaging in every form of corruption imaginable. But by 1933, there was enough popular anger at a recent cascade of bank runs and failures to overwhelm the industry’s power. The government was forced to do something about it, and part of the something was the creation of Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

One of the main things the FDIC has done ever since is insure deposits, mostly savings and checking accounts, up to a certain limit. Originally, the limit was the equivalent of about $50,000 today. The idea was that this would cover most Americans, and people with more money were big boys and girls able to take care of themselves. It was last raised in 2008 to $250,000. Crucially, the funding for the insurance comes from an assessment on the banks themselves.

But the insurance created a new problem: With deposits insured by the government, depositors would naturally be tempted to place their money with banks making risky investments that promised high returns, knowing that if the bank lost their money, the government would step in and make them whole. Roosevelt was concerned about this at the time, telling reporters off the record, “We do not wish to make the United States Government liable for the mistakes and errors of individual banks, and put a premium on unsound banking in the future.” The only solution was what banks hated most: regulation, government oversight of what they were doing with their depositors’ money.

This was the basic background to what happened last week, when Silicon Valley Bank, or SVB, previously the 16th-largest bank in America and the favorite bank of the valley’s venture capitalists, experienced a bank run. This was alarming to many of its largest depositors, given that they apparently have the financial sophistication of a chicken. For instance, Roku revealed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it was holding “approximately $487 million” at SVB. This suggests that $486,750,000 of Roku’s money was uninsured — and as the filing said, “the Company does not know to what extent the Company will be able to recover its cash on deposit at SVB.”

It is not, in fact, impossible for corporations to manage their money safely. Indeed, some do it every day. But apparently, it can be a challenge for chickens, which have brains the size of two shelled peanuts.

The mass financial incompetence by SVB’s depositors set off shrieking and caterwauling from the valley’s venture capitalists and angel investors that could be heard on Neptune:

YOU SHOULD BE ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED RIGHT NOW — THAT IS THE PROPER REACTION TO A BANK RUN & CONTAGION @POTUS & @SecYellen MUST GET ON TV TOMORROW AND GUARANTEE ALL DEPOSITS UP TO $10M OR THIS WILL SPIRAL INTO CHAOS

— @jason (@Jason) March 12, 2023

On the one hand, this is hilarious. Silicon Valley’s libertarianism is apparently based on one clear, firm principle: It’s illegal for them and their friends to lose money.

But on the other hand, the financial system is so complex that literally no one on Earth can say for sure how it will behave under stress. Again, remember that banks can experience runs not because they’re insolvent, but because people come to believe they are or just that other people will believe that they are, perhaps because someone prominent is SCREAMING AT THEM IN ALL CAPS TO PANIC.

And society at large has a genuine interest in preventing bank runs. So the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC jointly announced on Sunday that the government would guarantee all deposits at SVB (and another big bank called Signature), no matter the size. In other words, it turns out Roku will be getting back all of its $487 million.

This might be the right call overall. But then again, it’s gratingly unfair. SVB’s big depositors are suddenly getting financial backing from the government — i.e., everyone else in America.

Most importantly, the entire financial system now understands that, if push comes to shove, the government will guarantee all deposits of any amount. The $250,000 limit turns out to be no limit at all.

The Treasury Department doesn’t want to admit this, of course, but they also can’t deny it. So when Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein asked about it yesterday, a Treasury official responded, “Well, you see, mmfrrffm rmmm blrf.”

I asked Treasury this question on a call with reporters this evening. This was their response pic.twitter.com/LeM9clLzmT

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) March 12, 2023

But whatever cloud of words is emitted by the government, depositors will be incentivized to put their money in banks taking wild swings, knowing that if there’s an upside, they’ll pocket some of it, while if things go wrong, the government will step in.

Now that this Rubicon has been crossed, there’s only one rational path forward: If the government is going to guarantee all bank deposits, then much of the banking industry is parasitical and should be euthanized.

The logic here is largely the same as with health care, where logic likewise inexorably points to universal insurance funded and supervised by the government.

Individuals have a strong interest in both their health costs and their basic banking deposits being covered by insurance. The conservative perspective is that everyone should buy private insurance based on a constant, never-ending series of Monte Carlo simulations about what your individual future holds.

But this is impossible for human beings. The future is unknowable. You may live your entire life with few health care costs, or you might suddenly face $1 million in costs next year. Your bank might putter along indefinitely, or it might explode tomorrow.

Likewise, society has a powerful interest in everyone being covered by these kinds of insurance. In the case of SVB, we don’t want the depositors to go without insurance but then be able to blackmail everyone else into bailing them out because we’re scared their miscalculations will infect the rest of the system. Analogously, we don’t want people, especially powerful ones, to avoid health insurance and then demand we pay for their treatment if they get a dangerous infectious disease.

In both cases, universal insurance is also necessary for more subtle reasons. Everyone knows that both the U.S. health insurance system and the banking system are unbearably unjust. If they’re not dealt with in an equitable way, the anger Americans rightfully feel about both will continue to be harvested by reactionary politicians.

The clear answer for health care is Medicare for All. With banking, it may plausibly be something like Banking for All — i.e., the Federal Reserve giving every person and corporation an account that no bank run could ever take away. In both cases, the solution is simple and obvious, with the only obstacle being the extraordinary power of wealthy corporations that serve no purpose whatsoever.

The post Hooray, We Now Have Medicare for All (Bank Deposits)! appeared first on The Intercept.

What the about-to-be-announced AUKUS plan will mean for us strategically, and how it will play domestically. Plus, the final wrap on the Robodebt hearings, which have raised big questions about the public service.  Guest: Laura Tingle, Chief political correspondent, 7.30, ABC

After needing to do a deep dive on the venv module (which I will explain later in this blog post as to why), I thought I would explain how virtual environments work to help demystify them.

Why do virtual environments exist?

Back in my the day, there was no concept of environments in Python: all you had was your Python installation and the current directory. That meant when you installed something you either installed it globally into your Python interpreter or you just dumped it into the current directory. Both of these approaches had their drawbacks.

Installing globally meant you didn&apost have any isolation between your projects. This led to issues like version conflicts between what one of your projects might need compared to another one. It also meant you had no idea what requirements your project actually had since you had no way of actually testing your assumptions of what you needed. This was an issue if you needed to share you code with someone else as you didn&apost have a way to test that you weren&apost accidentally wrong about what your dependencies were.

Installing into your local directory didn&apost isolate your installs based on Python version or interpreter version (or even interpreter build type, back when you had to compile your extension modules differently for debug and release builds of Python). So while you could install everything into the same directory as your own code (which you did, and thus didn&apost use src directory layouts for simplicity), there wasn&apost a way to install different wheels for each Python interpreter you had on your machine so you could have multiple environments per project (I&aposm glossing over the fact that back in my the day you also didn&apost have wheels or editable installs).

Enter virtual environments. Suddenly you had a way to install projects as a group that was tied to a specific Python interpreter. That got us the isolation/separation of only installing things you depend on (and being able to verify that through your testing), as well has having as many environments as you want to go with your projects (e.g. an environment for each version of Python that you support). So all sorts of wins! It&aposs an important feature to have while doing development (which is why it can be rather frustrating for users when Python distributors leave venv out).

How do virtual environments work?

Their structure

There are two parts to virtual environments: their directories and their configuration file. As a running example, I&aposm going to assume you ran the command py -m venv --without-pip .venv in some directory on a Unix-based OS (you can substitute py with whatever Python interpreter you want, including the Python Launcher for Unix).

A virtual environment has 3 directories and potentially a symlink in the virtual environment directory (i.e. within .venv):

1. bin ( Scripts on Windows)
2. include ( Include on Windows)
3. lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages where X.Y is the Python version (Lib/site-packages on Windows)
4. lib64 symlinked to lib if you&aposre using a 64-bit build of Python that&aposs on a POSIX-based OS that&aposs not macOS

The Python executable for the virtual environment ends up in bin as various symlinks back to the original interpreter (e.g. .venv/bin/python is a symlink; Windows has a different story). The site-packages directory is where projects get installed into the virtual environment (including pip if you choose to have it installed into the virtual environment). The include directory is for any header files that might get installed for some reason from a project. The lib64 symlink is for consistency on those Unix OSs where they have such directories.

The configuration file is pyvenv.cfg and it lives at the top of your virtual environment directory (e.v. .venv/pyvenv.cfg). As of Python 3.11, it contains a few entries:

1. home (the directory where the executable used to create the virtual environment lives; os.path.dirname(sys._base_executable))
2. include-system-packages (should the global site-packages be included, effectively turning off isolation?)
3. version (the Python version down to the micro version, but not with the release level, e.g. 3.12.0, but not 3.12.0a6)
4. executable (the executable used to create the virtual environment; os.path.realpath(sys._base_executable))
5. command (the CLI command that could have recreated the virtual environment)

On my machine, the pyvenv.cfg contents are:

home = /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/opt/python@3.11/bin
include-system-site-packages = false
version = 3.11.2
executable = /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/Cellar/python@3.11/3.11.2_1/bin/python3.11
command = /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/opt/python@3.11/bin/python3.11 -m venv --without-pip /tmp/.venv

Example pyvenv.cfg

One interesting thing to note is pyvenv.cfg is not a valid INI file according to the configparser module due to lacking any sections. To read fields in the file you are expected to use line.partition("=") and to strip the resulting key and value.

And that&aposs all there is to a virtual environment! When you don&apost install pip they are extremely fast to create: 3 files, a symlink, and a single file. And they are simple enough you can probably create one manually.

One point I would like to make is how virtual environments are designed to be disposable and not relocatable. Because of their simplicity, virtual environments are viewed as something you can throw away and recreate quickly (if it takes your OS a long time to create 3 directories, a symlink, and a file consisting of 292 bytes like on my machine, you have bigger problems to worry about than virtual environment relocation 😉). Unfortunately, people tend to conflate environment creation with package installation, when they are in fact two separate things. What projects you choose to install with which installer is actually separate from environment creation and probably influences your "getting started" time the most.

How Python uses a virtual environment

During start-up, Python automatically calls the site.main() function (unless you specify the -S flag). That function calls site.venv() which handles setting up your Python executable to use the virtual environment appropriately. Specifically, the site module:

1. Looks for pyvenv.cfg in either the same or parent directory as the running executable (which is not resolved, so the location of the symlink is used)
2. Looks for include-system-site-packages in pyvenv.cfg to decide whether the system site-packages ends up on sys.path
3. Sets sys._home if home is found in pyvenv.cfg (sys._home is used by sysconfig)

That&aposs it! It&aposs a surprisingly simple mechanism for what it accomplishes.

One thing to notice here about how all of this works is virtual environment activation is optional. Because the site module works off of the symlink to the executable in the virtual environment to resolve everything, activation is just a convenience. Honestly, all the activation scripts do are:

1. Puts the bin/ (or Scripts/) directory at the front of your PATH environment variable
2. Sets VIRTUAL_ENV to the directory containing your virtual environment
3. Tweaks your shell prompt to let you know your PATH has been changed
4. Registers a deactivate shell function which undoes the other steps

In the end, whether you type python after activation or .venv/bin/python makes no difference to Python. Some tooling like the Python extension for VS Code or the Python Launcher for Unix may check for VIRTUAL_ENV to pick up on your intent to use a virtual environment, but it doesn&apost influence Python itself.

Introducing microvenv

In the Python extension for VS Code, we have an issue where Python beginners end up on Debian or a Debian-based distro like Ubuntu and want to create a virtual environment. Due to Debian removing venv from the default Python install and beginners not realizing there was more to install than python3, they often end up failing at creating a virtual environment  (at least initially as you can install python3-venv separately; in the next version of Debian there will be a python3-full package you can install which will include venv and pip, but it will probably take a while for all the instructions online to be updated to suggest that over python3). We believe the lack of venv is a problem as beginners should be using environments, but asking them to install yet more software can be a barrier to getting started (I&aposm also ignoring the fact pip isn&apost installed by default on Debian either which also complicates the getting started experience for beginners).

But venv is not shipped as a separate part of Python&aposs stdlib, so we can&apost simply install it from PyPI somehow or easily ship it as part of the Python extension to work around this. Since venv is in the stdlib, it&aposs developed along with the version of Python it ships with, so there&aposs no single copy which is fully compatible with all maintained versions of Python (e.g. Python 3.11 added support to use sysconfig to get the directories to create for a virtual environment, various fields in pyvenv.cfg have been added over time, use new language features may be used, etc.). While we could ship a copy of venv for every maintained version of Python, we potentially would have to ship for every micro release to guarantee we always had a working copy, and that&aposs a lot of upstream tracking to do. And even if we only shipped copies from minor release of Python, we would still have to track every micro release in case a bug in venv was fixed.

Hence I have created microvenv. It is a project which provides a single .py file which you use to create a minimal virtual environment. You can either execute it as a script or call its create() function that is analogous to venv.create(). It&aposs also compatible with all maintained versions of Python. As I (hopefully) showed above, creating a virtual environment is actually straight-forward, so I was able to replicate the necessary bits in less than 100 lines of Python code (specifically 87 lines in the 2023.1.1 release). That actually makes it small enough to pass in via python -c, which means it could be embedded in a binary as a string constant and passed as an argument when executing a Python executable as a subprocess if you wanted to (directly executing microvenv.py works). Hopefully that means a tool could guarantee it can always construct a virtual environment somehow.

To keep microvenv simple, small, and maintainable, it does not contain any activation scripts. I personally don&apost want to be a shell script expert for multiple shells, nor do I want to track the upstream activation scripts (and they do change in case you were thinking "it shouldn&apost be that hard to track"). Also, in VS Code we are actually working towards implicitly activating virtual environments by updating your environment variables directly instead of executing any activation shell scripts, so the shell scripts aren&apost needed for our use case (we are actively moving away from using any activation scripts where we can as we have run into race condition problems with them when sending the command to the shell; thank goodness of conda run, but we also know people still want an activated terminal).

I&aposm also skipping Windows support because we have found the lack of venv to be a unique problem for Linux in general, and Debian-based distros specifically.

I honestly don&apost expect anyone except tool providers to use microvenv, but since it could be useful to others beyond VS Code, I decided it was worth releasing on its own. I also expect anyone using the project to only use it as a fallback when venv is not available (which you can deduce by running py -c "from importlib.util import find_spec; print(find_spec(&aposvenv&apos) is not None)"). And before anyone asks why we don&apost just use virtualenv, its wheel is 8.7MB compared to microvenv at 3.9KB; 0.05% the size, or 2175x smaller. Granted, a good chunk of what makes up virtualenv&aposs wheel is probably from shipping pip and setuptools in the wheel for fast installation of those projects after virtual environment creation, but we also acknowledge our need for a small, portable, single-file virtual environment creator is rather niche and something virtualenv currently doesn&apost support (for good reason).

Our plan for the Python extension for VS Code is to use microvenv as a fallback mechanism for our Python: Create Environment command (FYI we also plan to bootstrap pip via its pip.pyz file from bootstrap.pypa.io by downloading it on-demand, which is luckily less than 2MB). That way we can start suggesting to users in various UX flows to create and use an environment when one isn&apost already being used (as appropriate, of course). We want beginners to learn about environments if they don&apost already know about them and also remind experienced users when they may have accidentally forgotten to create an environment for their workspace. That way people get the benefit of (virtual) environments with as little friction as possible.

Co-hosts Gary Brecher & Mark Ames

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In the month since veteran journalist Seymour Hersh published his bombshell report alleging that President Joe Biden personally authorized a covert action to bomb the Nord Stream pipelines, we’ve seen a frenzy of speculation, detailed dissection of Hersh’s specific assertions, and the emergence of competing narratives both supporting and denouncing the report.

The question of whether Hersh’s story is accurate — either in whole or in part — is of monumental significance, and there are some issues related to this story that have not received as much attention as they deserve. Among these are questions surrounding the legal and constitutional framework the Biden administration would have used if, as Hersh’s source alleges, Biden directly ordered the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines. There is also an emerging counternarrative to Hersh’s reporting from U.S. intelligence that warrants scrutiny, both on its merits and for how it might relate to Hersh’s story.

“A Pro-Ukrainian Group”

On March 7, the New York Times and the German newspaper Die Zeit both published stories that thicken the plot. The Times story was based on a narrative clearly being pushed by U.S. intelligence sources that “a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack.” The Times asserted that a “review of newly collected intelligence suggests they were opponents of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, but does not specify the members of the group, or who directed or paid for the operation.” The report was spartan in its specifics, used no named sources, and seemed reminiscent of other efforts by anonymous U.S. intelligence sources to launder a narrative under the guise of a news scoop. “U.S. officials declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains,” the report said. “They have said that there are no firm conclusions about it, leaving open the possibility that the operation might have been conducted off the books by a proxy force with connections to the Ukrainian government or its security services.”

The Times report was almost immediately contested by reporting in CNN and the Washington Post, downplaying the certainty of U.S. officials that the intelligence was accurate. An unnamed senior administration official told the Washington Post, “My understanding is that we don’t find this conclusive.” The Ukrainian government has denied any connection to the operation, saying it “absolutely did not participate in the attack on Nord Stream 2.”

Die Zeit’s investigation, conducted with public broadcasters ARD and SWR, was based on a German criminal probe led by the federal police. Die Zeit reports that its journalists identified the boat that was allegedly used in the operation. “It is said to be a yacht rented from a company based in Poland, apparently owned by two Ukrainians. According to the investigation, the secret operation at sea was carried out by a team of six people. It is said to have been five men and one woman,” according to the report. “The group consisted of a captain, two divers, two diving assistants and a doctor, who are said to have transported the explosives to the crime scenes and placed them there. The nationality of the perpetrators is apparently unclear.” They allegedly “used professionally forged passports, which are said to have been used, among other things, to rent the boat.”

In response to the story, Germany’s defense minister Boris Pistorius said, “We need to clearly differentiate whether it was a Ukrainian group that acted on the orders of Ukraine or … without the government’s knowledge.”

These new reports offer no concrete evidence or credible explanation for how this alleged group may have conducted the sabotage operation.

Die Zeit’s story appears to challenge Hersh’s central narrative, which offered a mass of detailed information about how exactly the U.S. allegedly carried out its attack on the pipeline, including details about the specific forces and ships involved in the operation and a technical description of how they planted and detonated the explosives. But these new reports do not actually contradict Hersh’s story, because they offer no concrete evidence or credible explanation for how this alleged group may have conducted the sabotage operation.

The German report, written by Holger Stark, made no allegation of any nation-state involvement in the attack but noted that “it is not excluded that this is also a false flag operation,” which “means that traces could also have been deliberately laid that point to Ukraine as the culprit. However, the investigators have apparently found no evidence that confirms such a scenario.” In an interview with a German radio station, Pistorius said he cannot rule out a “false flag” operation “to blame pro-Ukrainian groups and make it look that way.” That probability, he asserted, was “equally high.”

Researchers specializing in open-source intelligence, or OSINT, have loudly concluded that Hersh’s reporting does not add up and is easily debunked by tracking publicly available data on the movements of ships, aircraft, and other vessels at the time of the alleged operation. Hersh has summarily dismissed these critics, asserting that U.S. intelligence understands quite well the need to circumvent such OSINT vulnerabilities and had taken measures — including, perhaps, the disabling of location transponders — to ensure the integrity of the operation. “If you’re in the intelligence community, you’ve been running covert ops for years,” Hersh said, “certainly, the first thing you look at is how to take care of open-source people, make them think what happened isn’t happening.”

Some of the doubts and criticism aimed at Hersh’s piece, especially the fact that it appears to rely on a single source, are valid, but Hersh has a long track record of breaking major stories about covert operations and U.S. war crimes. And he has frequently proved his critics wrong. Hersh’s narrative also has the benefit of abundant public circumstantial evidence in the form of statements by the president and his advisers appearing to threaten to take out the pipeline and then gloating once it was destroyed. The U.S. had the motive and the means to carry out the operation.

When Hersh contacted the Biden administration for comment on his story, a White House spokesperson said, “This is false and complete fiction,” while the CIA told him, “This claim is completely and utterly false.”

The New York Times has not published serious reporting — or any reporting — on the substance of Hersh’s allegations or the denials from the White House and other government agencies. But in its piece on the “pro-Ukrainian group” the Times mentions Hersh’s report in the 23rd graph of the story. “Last month, the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article on the newsletter platform Substack concluding that the United States carried out the operation at the direction of Mr. Biden. In making his case, Mr. Hersh cited the president’s preinvasion threat to ‘bring an end’ to Nord Stream 2, and similar statements by other senior U.S. officials,” the report said. “U.S. officials say Mr. Biden and his top aides did not authorize a mission to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines, and they say there was no U.S. involvement.”

In an interview on “The Daily,” a New York Times podcast, one of the reporters on the story, Julian Barnes, was asked if he knows who did the bombing. “Yeah, we think we do know,” he replied. But later in the nearly 30-minute discussion, he said, “I should be very clear that we know really very little, right? This group remains mysterious and it remains mysterious, not just to us, but also to the U.S. government officials that we have spoken to. They know that the people involved were either Ukrainian or Russian or a mix. They know that they are not affiliated with the Ukrainian government, but they know they’re also anti-Putin and pro-Ukraine.”

Barnes described the evolution of the pro-Ukraine story as beginning with the Times reporters speaking to U.S. intelligence officials. He said that initially the Times had been focusing its probe into the bombing on the Russian and Ukrainian governments, but that it was “just hitting dead end after dead end,” so the reporters “started asking a different question: ‘Could this have been done by nonstate actors? Could this have been done by a group of individuals who were not working for a government?’” Barnes added, “The more we talked to officials who had access to intelligence, the more we saw this theory gaining traction.” Barnes did not mention Hersh’s story on the podcast.

Despite the claim that this story emerged from a speculative hunch on the part of the Times reporters, it certainly appears to be an effort by some forces within U.S. intelligence to rework and spin the previous narrative that sought to imply that Russia itself had blown up the pipeline. Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and other nations have spent months investigating the explosion. The Times story could be an indication that after doing forensic and other investigations, Washington’s allies do not believe that Russia was behind the attack. Several European media outlets, including the Times of London, reported that European investigators zeroed in on the alleged pro-Ukrainian group very soon after the explosion, despite the fact that it only hit the news media in the past week. It may turn out that this is precisely what happened, and that the U.S. had nothing to do with the operation. But it would be unwise — and would require a complete disregard of U.S. history — to assume without evidence that the inferences of anonymous U.S. officials are genuine.

“I don’t know what happened here but it would be naive and irresponsible for journalists to take U.S. intel agencies’ claims at face value,” said Jameel Jaffer, a former lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who spent years battling the Bush and Obama administrations over issues of secrecy and national security.

Floating Narratives

If the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines was, as Hersh alleges, directed by the U.S., then the leaked suggestion that the culprits were a “pro-Ukrainian group” could indicate a nascent effort at floating a cover story. There is also the possibility that some elements within the U.S. government ran a covert operation using deniable assets, such as Ukrainian “partisans” operating with fake passports. Further, “pro-Ukrainian group” is so vague that it could apply to an infinite number of actors, including former U.S. military or intelligence personnel or those of an allied nation. Die Zeit reported that the alleged perpetrators rented a yacht from a Polish company owned by two Ukrainians. According to the report, the group failed to clean the yacht they allegedly used in the operation, leading investigators to discover residue from explosives on a table in the cabin. This is either unbelievably sloppy tradecraft, evidence of total amateurism, or an intentional “clue” left with the intent to deceive. The U.S. or another nation could have used such a team as a patsy operation to mislead investigators and cover the tracks of the actual perpetrators.

There are recent precedents for foreign actors taking credit for U.S. operations to conceal Washington’s involvement.

No one has claimed responsibility for this attack, but there are recent precedents for foreign actors taking credit for U.S. operations to conceal Washington’s involvement. This was the case when President Barack Obama authorized a cruise missile attack in Yemen in December 2009, which killed more than three dozen people, most of them women and children. The Yemeni government announced it had conducted the strikes, a claim later proven false when a journalist photographed the remnants of U.S. cluster munitions. In fact, this practice of cloaking the U.S. role in drone and other airstrikes in Yemen was common during the Obama administration.

European news outlets have been aggressively pursuing the story of the private boat that U.S. and German intelligence have suggested was used by the “pro-Ukrainian group.” Some of the open-source researchers who criticized Hersh’s version of events have also identified inconsistencies and problems with the initial reporting on this new theory. Among these are questions of how such a small vessel could have transported the quantity of explosives allegedly used in the attack on the Nord Stream, the extreme difficulty such a small team on a yacht would face in pulling off the operation, and the perplexing narrative about the alleged land route they used to deliver the explosives to the ship. Some analysts have also raised doubt that a small team of divers would have the technical capacity to have pulled off such a complicated and deep dive or why they would choose a difficult access point to place the explosives.

I am not saying I believe any specific theory about the Nord Stream explosion at present, including Hersh’s. But I am not about to denounce Hersh’s reporting. He has repeatedly been accused of being wrong, only later to be proven right. That was true of My Lai, it was true of the CIA’s domestic spying in the 1970s, and it was true of the secret plans to manufacture a “weapons of mass destruction” threat in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, and countless other stories throughout his career. I am confident that if Hersh publishes a story, he believes that it is true and that he has a source or sources he has deemed reliable who are providing information. That does not mean that he or his sources are always right about every detail. In that sense, the ultimate question of credibility for Hersh’s story rests exclusively on his source’s level of direct access to the planning and their personal firsthand knowledge about the execution of the operation.

Like many reasonable observers who understand the history of U.S. covert actions, I am following the developments closely, with an open mind. It is possible for a journalist to get many details correct while also being fed some unreliable information by sources who are passing off speculation as fact. This is one of the major risks of single-sourced reporting, no matter how reliable the source is. Very few people in government are privy to every single detail of a covert operation, and I know from experience that sometimes sources know a lot about some aspects of a program or operation but are trying to fill in the blanks about the aspects they do not know directly. This is not done out of malice or with an intent to deceive, but because that’s how many people operate. Sometimes it is difficult to parse fact from speculation with sensitive sources who are reluctant to talk, especially if the source does not make clear what they know to be true and what they suspect to be true.

It is also possible that sources themselves have been fed bad or incomplete information and pass it along sincerely believing it to be true. There are many instances too where assertions confirmed by more than one source and published by major publications with substantial resources turn out to be false. Despite getting some details wrong, it is still possible for a reporter to get the overarching conclusion right.

It remains conceivable that Hersh correctly identified the sponsor of the Nord Stream attack, even if some of the details provided by his source were speculative, inaccurate, or based on outdated operational plans.

Oversight and Authority

There is another important set of questions to consider: If the U.S. did carry out the strike on the Nord Stream with Biden’s direct authorization, under what authority would the operation have been conducted? Under what legal basis would Biden and his administration have to keep even senior congressional leadership out of the loop and then blatantly lie about it to the public?

It’s worth noting that as a young senator, Biden played a role in creating the permanent congressional intelligence committees and in crafting laws regulating the oversight of the CIA and covert actions in the aftermath of the Nixon-era lawlessness.

First, let’s review what Hersh reported about the authorities at play in the alleged operation. “The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. ‘This is not kiddie stuff,’ the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, ‘It’s an act of war.’”

According to Hersh, things changed after remarks Biden made on February 7, 2022, as he stood next to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the East Room at the White House. “If Russia invades … there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it,” said Biden. “We will — I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.” Hersh’s source said the framework for the operation shifted to a military umbrella because senior CIA officers determined that destroying the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.” Hersh writes, “The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, ‘There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it — but it still had to be secret.’”

“There is supposed to be at least some congressional notification of any covert action.”

I consulted several constitutional law scholars and experts on U.S. covert actions to explore the legal framework within which the Biden administration would have needed to operate to carry out such an operation. All of the sources I spoke with said it would be a serious violation of law if such a covert action were not briefed to at least some senior U.S. lawmakers. At a minimum, the operation would need to be reported to the so-called Gang of Eight — the House speaker and minority leader, the Senate majority and minority leaders, the chair and ranking members of both intelligence committees — either beforehand or, if necessary for the integrity of the operation, shortly thereafter. In that case, the president would be required to provide an explanation as to why Congress was not briefed ahead of time. In rare cases, presidents have chosen to brief only four members of Congress, though the practice has no basis in U.S. statute. “There is supposed to be at least some congressional notification of any covert action,” said Steven Aftergood, who served as director of the Government Secrecy Project at the Federation of American Scientists from 1991-2021. “If notification is not provided in advance, it must still be given in ‘a timely fashion.’ Failure to do so would be a violation of law.”

Within the U.S. laws governing military and intelligence operations, there are gray areas. Title 50 of the U.S. code sets out the rules and structures for intelligence operations, while Title 10 covers military actions. The code under which a particular operation is performed has serious implications for oversight and accountability. A covert action requires the drafting of a presidential “finding,” or memorandum of notification, and the White House must brief the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on its contents. This briefing must occur before the covert action unless there are “extraordinary circumstances.” The requirements for congressional involvement were established to prevent scandals such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and other dubious CIA operations.

Military doctrine defines another class of activities, “clandestine operations,” in which the point of secrecy is to protect the integrity of the mission, not to conceal its sponsor, the U.S. government. The military may conduct operations that are both covert and clandestine, but these are rare. Unlike covert actions, clandestine operations do not require a presidential finding if “future hostilities” are “anticipated” in the country where they are taking place. Nor is the administration required to report the operation to Congress. Such operations are defined as “traditional military activities,” or TMAs, and offer the intelligence committees no real-time oversight rights. Under U.S. law, the military is not required to disclose the specific actions of an operation, but the U.S. role in the “overall operation” should be “apparent” or eventually “acknowledged.”

Hersh’s source said the “covert action” was officially changed to a U.S. military operation after Biden’s public threat and that it used regular U.S. Navy divers instead of those from U.S. Special Operations Command “whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance,” thus eliminating the reporting requirement to the intelligence committees. “What qualifies as TMA has long been a subject of push and pull between Congress and the executive,” said University of Houston constitutional law scholar Emily Berman. “So the bottom line is that what rules apply would depend on which authority the President relied on to carry out the mission, which will often not be evident.”

“To the extent that ‘traditional military activities’ can look a lot like covert actions, congressional notification is only required under Title 50 (covert action) operations, not Title 10 (military) ones,” explained Melinda Haas, an assistant professor of international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, in an email. “It isn’t possible to know up front, however, whether a certain behavior is considered a ‘covert action.’”

The military, while not subject to the select committees on intelligence, does have its own reporting requirements to the Senate and House Armed Services committees. While there is a debate about what sort of congressional oversight would be required if the action was done under a military umbrella, it would be brazen for Biden’s administration and the Pentagon leadership to refuse to do so. Even the notoriously secretive and anti-oversight George W. Bush administration briefed four members of Congress, including Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., in January 2003 about the existence of CIA torture videos. It is also true that the CIA subsequently spied illegally on Senate torture investigators.

Robert Litt, the former general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under President Barack Obama, told me that he thought it was unlikely that the U.S. carried out the operation, but that if it did so, regardless of which U.S. forces performed such an operation, it would still “fall within a well-established statutory framework for covert action.” Litt said, “If a ‘highly classified intelligence operation’ is intended to affect conditions abroad and not to be acknowledged, it is a covert action under the law, and has to be treated as such. I don’t think this would be considered to fall within the traditional military activity exemption even though that may be what [Hersh’s] source is imprecisely referring to.”

If, as Hersh’s source alleges, no members of Congress were read into this operation, it would mean that Biden essentially adopted an Iran-Contra-style strategy of boxing out legislative oversight entirely, potentially setting himself up for a public scandal of epic proportions. There is, however, precedent for this. A 1986 memo prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel during the Reagan administration argued that the president was “within his authority in maintaining the secrecy” of a covert operation “from Congress until such time as he believed that disclosure to Congress would not interfere with the success of the operation.”

While this is not unfathomable in light of U.S. history, that likelihood seems low when you look at the vast number of agencies and people within the U.S. government — including an interagency working group with people from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury departments — who were allegedly working on the plans. Not to mention a foreign government and a cover story of a highly publicized NATO training exercise. This would mean mid-level U.S. government bureaucrats and foreign officials were read into the operation, but not senior members of Congress with statutory oversight authorities and sworn secrecy oaths.

“I believe that if this activity had been done by the U.S., it is almost certain that at least the Gang of Eight was informed, and by now probably the full committees as well,” said Litt. “Given the requirement of congressional briefing, the likelihood of leaks, and the political situation in Washington, I would doubt that the president would take the risk of actually lying had this been a U.S. operation.” Litt added: “My bottom line is that I think it is highly unlikely that if the U.S. did this Congress was not briefed.”

Beyond the issue of whether Congress was informed of the alleged operation, it’s hard to imagine a scenario, if Hersh’s source is accurate, in which no one involved eventually confirms at least parts of Hersh’s reporting, or intentionally or unwittingly leaks details and backs up the claims. According to Hersh’s source, there were dissenters within the CIA and State Department who said, “Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.”

Hersh has been confronted with this exact question before, including after his 2015 story challenging the official narrative of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound was published. “How many people do you think in the American government in the years 2001, 2002, 2003 leading up to the late March attack on Iraq knew that the government was misrepresenting the intelligence on the WMD?” Hersh asked in an interview with NPR’s On the Media, adding that potentially thousands of government employees and contractors also knew that the National Security Agency was engaged in warrantless collection of the communications of American citizens prior to Edward Snowden’s revelations, but kept silent. “We’ve demonstrated that you can cow the bureaucracy, you can cow people to an extraordinary length in this society to the length where nobody’s going to go public on it,” Hersh added.

If the U.S. did blow up the pipeline, it could be that the administration did in fact inform some congressional leaders and they are assisting in concealing the operation. “I don’t know of any rule that would prevent the President from denying involvement in an operation that was designed to remain unacknowledged, as covert actions are,” said Berman.

“As for lying to the public, I’m not aware of any law that would prevent the President from doing that (there is certainly plenty of recent precedent for presidential prevarication), although more typically the approach is when asked about a covert action is not to comment,” Litt wrote in an email. He added that “the military’s position is that they will not affirmatively lie about military action.”

Regardless of the U.S. military’s official position on lying about its activities, it is undeniable that military officials have lied or misled the public at various points throughout U.S. history, including the recent case of an August 2021 drone strike in Afghanistan that killed 10 members of an Afghan family, including seven children. Whether it is lying or misdirecting the public in the Nord Stream case obviously depends on the veracity of the information provided by Hersh’s source. When the intent is to deceive an “enemy” nation or hostile force, rather than the U.S. public or Congress, the military has extensive guidelines for doing so.

Aftergood points out that there is no U.S. law or rule prohibiting the government from promoting a false alternative explanation to conceal an operation. “This is an established practice in military operations and intelligence activities where it is often known as ‘cover and deception,’” he said. “Sometimes, in order to maintain the operational security of X, you have to declare that it is actually Y.”

The post Conflicting Reports Thicken Nord Stream Bombing Plot appeared first on The Intercept.

The computer world has a tendency of reinventing the wheel once in a while. I am not a fan of that process, but sometimes I just have to bite the bullet and adapt to change. This post explains how I adapted to one particular change: the netstat to sockstat transition.

I used to do this to show which processes where listening on which port on a server:

netstat -anpe

It was a handy mnemonic as, in France, ANPE was the agency responsible for the unemployed (basically). That would list all sockets (-a), not resolve hostnames (-n, because it's slow), show processes attached to the socket (-p) with extra info like the user (-e). This still works, but sometimes fail to find the actual process hooked to the port. Plus, it lists a whole bunch of UNIX sockets and non-listening sockets, which are generally irrelevant for such an audit.

What I really wanted to use was really something like:

netstat -pleunt | sort

... which has the "pleut" mnemonic ("rains", but plural, which makes no sense and would be badly spelled anyway). That also only lists listening (-l) and network sockets, specifically UDP (-u) and TCP (-t).

But enough with the legacy, let's try the brave new world of sockstat which has the unfortunate acronym ss.

The equivalent sockstat command to the above is:

ss -pleuntO

It's similar to the above, except we need the -O flag otherwise ss does that confusing thing where it splits the output on multiple lines. But I actually use:

ss -plunt0

... i.e. without the -e as the information it gives (cgroup, fd number, etc) is not much more useful than what's already provided with -p (service and UID).

All of the above also show sockets that are not actually a concern because they only listen on localhost. Those one should be filtered out. So now we embark into that wild filtering ride.

This is going to list all open sockets and show the port number and service:

ss -pluntO --no-header | sed 's/^\([a-z]*\) *[A-Z]* *[0-9]* [0-9]* *[0-9]* */\1/' | sed 's/^[^:]*:\(:\]:\)\?//;s/\([0-9]*\) *[^ ]*/\1\t/;s/,fd=[0-9]*//' | sort -gu

For example on my desktop, it looks like:

anarcat@angela:~$ sudo ss -pluntO --no-header | sed 's/^\([a-z]*\) *[A-Z]* *[0-9]* [0-9]* *[0-9]* */\1/' | sed 's/^[^:]*:\(:\]:\)\?//;s/\([0-9]*\) *[^ ]*/\1\t/;s/,fd=[0-9]*//' | sort -gu
          [::]:* users:(("unbound",pid=1864))        
22  users:(("sshd",pid=1830))           
25  users:(("master",pid=3150))        
53  users:(("unbound",pid=1864))        
323 users:(("chronyd",pid=1876))        
500 users:(("charon",pid=2817))        
631 users:(("cups-browsed",pid=2744))   
2628    users:(("dictd",pid=2825))          
4001    users:(("emacs",pid=3578))          
4500    users:(("charon",pid=2817))        
5353    users:(("avahi-daemon",pid=1423))  
6600    users:(("systemd",pid=3461))       
8384    users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
9050    users:(("tor",pid=2857))            
21027   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
22000   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
33231   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
34953   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
35770   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
44944   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
47337   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
48903   users:(("mosh-client",pid=234126))  
52774   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
52938   users:(("avahi-daemon",pid=1423))  
54029   users:(("avahi-daemon",pid=1423))  
anarcat@angela:~$

But that doesn't filter out the localhost stuff, lots of false positive (like emacs, above). And this is where it gets... not fun, as you need to match "localhost" but we don't resolve names, so you need to do some fancy pattern matching:

ss -pluntO --no-header | \
    sed 's/^\([a-z]*\) *[A-Z]* *[0-9]* [0-9]* *[0-9]* */\1/;s/^tcp//;s/^udp//' | \
    grep -v -e '^\[fe80::' -e '^127.0.0.1' -e '^\[::1\]' -e '^192\.' -e '^172\.' | \
    sed 's/^[^:]*:\(:\]:\)\?//;s/\([0-9]*\) *[^ ]*/\1\t/;s/,fd=[0-9]*//' |\
    sort -gu

This is kind of horrible, but it works, those are the actually open ports on my machine:

anarcat@angela:~$ sudo ss -pluntO --no-header |         sed 's/^\([a-
z]*\) *[A-Z]* *[0-9]* [0-9]* *[0-9]* */\1/;s/^tcp//;s/^udp//' |      
   grep -v -e '^\[fe80::' -e '^127.0.0.1' -e '^\[::1\]' -e '^192\.' -
e '^172\.' |         sed 's/^[^:]*:\(:\]:\)\?//;s/\([0-9]*\) *[^ ]*/\
1\t/;s/,fd=[0-9]*//' |        sort -gu
22  users:(("sshd",pid=1830))           
500 users:(("charon",pid=2817))        
631 users:(("cups-browsed",pid=2744))   
4500    users:(("charon",pid=2817))        
5353    users:(("avahi-daemon",pid=1423))  
6600    users:(("systemd",pid=3461))       
21027   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
22000   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
34953   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
35770   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
48903   users:(("mosh-client",pid=234126))  
52938   users:(("avahi-daemon",pid=1423))  
54029   users:(("avahi-daemon",pid=1423))

Surely there must be a better way. It turns out that lsof can do some of this, and it's relatively straightforward. This lists all listening TCP sockets:

lsof -iTCP -sTCP:LISTEN +c 15 | grep -v localhost | sort

A shorter version from Adam Shand is:

lsof -i @localhost

... which basically replaces the grep -v localhost line.

In theory, this would do the equivalent on UDP

lsof -iUDP -sUDP:^Idle

... but in reality, it looks like lsof on Linux can't figure out the state of a UDP socket:

lsof: no UDP state names available: UDP:^Idle

... which, honestly, I'm baffled by. It's strange because ss can figure out the state of those sockets, heck it's how -l vs -a works after all. So we need something else to show listening UDP sockets.

The following actually looks pretty good after all:

ss -pluO

That will list localhost sockets of course, so we can explicitly ask ss to resolve those and filter them out with something like:

ss -plurO | grep -v localhost

oh, and look here! ss supports pattern matching, so we can actually tell it to ignore localhost directly, which removes that horrible sed line we used earlier:

ss -pluntO '! ( src = localhost )'

That actually gives a pretty readable output. One annoyance is we can't really modify the columns here, so we still need some god-awful sed hacking on top of that to get a cleaner output:

ss -nplutO '! ( src = localhost )'  | \
    sed 's/\(udp\|tcp\).*:\([0-9][0-9]*\)/\2\t\1\t/;s/\([0-9][0-9]*\t[udtcp]*\t\)[^u]*users:(("/\1/;s/".*//;s/.*Address:Port.*/Netid\tPort\tProcess/' | \
    sort -nu

That looks horrible and is basically impossible to memorize. But it sure looks nice:

anarcat@angela:~$ sudo ss -nplutO '! ( src = localhost )'  | sed 's/\(udp\|tcp\).*:\([0-9][0-9]*\)/\2\t\1\t/;s/\([0-9][0-9]*\t[udtcp]*\t\)[^u]*users:(("/\1/;s/".*//;s/.*Address:Port.*/Port\tNetid\tProcess/' | sort -nu

Port    Netid   Process
22  tcp sshd
500 udp charon
546 udp NetworkManager
631 udp cups-browsed
4500    udp charon
5353    udp avahi-daemon
6600    tcp systemd
21027   udp syncthing
22000   udp syncthing
34953   udp syncthing
35770   udp syncthing
48903   udp mosh-client
52938   udp avahi-daemon
54029   udp avahi-daemon

Better ideas welcome.

Andy Zaltzman is joined by Mark Steel, Ria Lina, Catherine Bohart and Camilla Long. This week the panel discuss President Zelensky's surprise visit to the UK, Rishi Sunak's cabinet reshuffle and Liz Truss' political comeback.

Hosted and written by Andy Zaltzman with additional material from Alice Fraser, Zoë Tomalin, Rebecca Bain and Cameron Loxdale.

Producer: Georgia Keating Executive Producer: Richard Morris Production Co-ordinator: Becky Carewe-Jeffries Sound Editor: Marc Willcox

A BBC Studios Production

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the pioneering Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546 – 1601) whose charts offered an unprecedented level of accuracy.

In 1572 Brahe's observations of a new star challenged the idea, inherited from Aristotle, that the heavens were unchanging. He went on to create his own observatory complex on the Danish island of Hven, and there, working before the invention of the telescope, he developed innovative instruments and gathered a team of assistants, taking a highly systematic approach to observation. A second, smaller source of renown was his metal prosthetic nose, which he needed after a serious injury sustained in a duel.

The image above shows Brahe aged 40, from the Atlas Major by Johann Blaeu.

With

Ole Grell Emeritus Professor in Early Modern History at the Open University

Adam Mosley Associate Professor of History at Swansea University

and

Emma Perkins Affiliate Scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.

While the Thirty Years War rages on, in England, a similar set of crises leads to Civil War.

Interactive atlas, bibliography and credits for the series can be found at: hellonearth.chapotraphouse.com

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First we announce Civ Books, where you can buy some of the best Civilizations Podcast transcripts in hard copy. Then, we reveal two of the most long-standing geopolitical disagreements that Dave and Justin have hitherto unresolved: one on the rights and wrongs of the Yugoslav war of 1999, and the other on the status of … Continue reading "World War Civ 13: The Bosnian Crisis 1908"