Ever since North Korea conducted its second nuclear test and fired off volleys of missiles and red-hot rhetoric, there has been some degree of hyperventilation in international media coverage of the latest crisis in Northeast Asia. One example are reports that the United States and South Korea put their troops on high-alert after what appeared to be Pyongyang's renunciation of the 1953 truce accord.

    But former senior U.S. intelligence officer John McCreary, who produces NightWatch, a sterling daily analysis of international events that he compiles from open sources, notes that there are "two systems of graduated alerts" for U.S. and South Korean forces. One is for combat readiness - or Def Con - and the other is for intelligence collection, or Watch Con. And, he explains, it's U.S. and South Korean intelligence collection assets that have been placed on higher alert, not their combat forces.

    In his latest NightWatch, McCreary points out that the South Korean Defense Ministry announced on Thursday the implementation of "Watch Con II" and that "surveillance over the North will be stepped up, with more aircraft and personnel mobilized."

    "Watch Con II is the condition in which intelligence collection assets are surged," McCreary writes. "In addition, the analytical corps devoted to an intelligence problem is supposed to be surged and operating 24x7. More sensors are devoted to a problem and more people stand watch."

    "The South Koreans have increased their intelligence watchfulness to the second highest level. Watch Con I signifies a wartime level of intelligence effort," McCreary explains.

    The other alert metric is the Defense Condition system, which determines the level of combat readiness, like the cancelling of leaves, the calling up of reserve forces and the boosting logistics preparations. In South Korea, that system remains at Def Con IV, the lowest level, McCreary writes, quoting the Yonhap news agency.

    McCreary knows of what he speaks. As a member of the U.S. National Warning Staff and a senior intelligence officer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he participated as an adviser and observer in the formulation of the Watch Condition system.

   And by the way, McCreary's overall analysis of the current Korea crisis is second to none.

Hello readers: Over Memorial Day weekend, a friend pointed me toward a new blog that tracks the death of every soldier, airman, sailor and Marine who has served in Afghanistan and Iraq, from every coalition country no less, and places a marker on the map in that person’s hometown.

When you click on the figure, a box comes up with all the public information available about that person – like where that person was killed, his/her age and links to pages about that serviceperson.

It’s a breathtaking site. Each little figure – so often counted as statistic – comes to life as soon as you click and read that person’s story, however brief. The numbers from the United States are staggering but it is helpful to spin the globe, as only Google Earth can let you, and see the impact on other nations.

According to the site, the map began as a personal project for San Francisco resident Sean Askay while he was in graduate school. Four years later, the now web designer posted it just before Memorial Day.
He acknowledges that even this phenomenal amount of information sorting doesn’t capture the full scope of the losses endured by these wars. Here is in part what Sean’s posts about his effort: “I recognize that this map is just a slice of the story in these conflicts. The Iraqi and Afghan people have incurred substantial civilian losses through these wars; there are also U.S. and Coalition civilians, contractors, and reporters who have died as well. For this project, I've chosen to focus on the U.S. and Coalition military casualties, but I recognize that the losses extend beyond what is mapped in this project.”

As someone who spent years watching the war unfold in Iraq and now as a Pentagon reporter who travels to both Iraq and Afghanistan, the site was moving to me, an acknowledgment that every loss counts and that no community in the United States is spared, however distant the wars may feel.

So if you so inclined, check out the map. To download it, look to the top right hand corner of the web page. You will need Google Earth 5.0 to see it.

    One terabyte of data is roughly the equivalent of millions of books, and that is the amount of Clinton administration records - including sensitive national security information - contained on a hard drive that has gone missing from the National Archives, according to a Republican lawmaker.

Rep. Darrel Issa, R-Calif., says he is asking the National Archives and Records Administration Acting Director Adrienne Thomas to appear on Thursday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to answer questions about the missing hard drive.

    Issa, the committee's ranking Republican, issued a news release in which he said that the NARA Inspector General's Office briefed committee staff today on an ongoing investigation into the loss of the device from NARA's storage facility in College Park, Md., sometime between October 2008 and March 2009.

    "The IG is investigating the situation as a crime," assisted by the Secret Service and Department of Justice, the news release said.

    The one terabyte of data on the hard drive, it said, includes the Social Security numbers of more than 100,000 people, including the daughter of former Vice President Al Gore, contact information for various former Clinton administration officials, Secret Service and White House operating procedures, event logs, the logs of social gatherings, political records and other sensitive information.

   "This egregious breach raises signficant questions regarding the effectiveness of the security protocols that are in place at the National Archives and Records Administration," Issa was quoted as saying.

    The hard drive, it seems, was removed from a "security" area and taken to a workspace accessible by  at least 100 "badge-holders," the news release said, quoting the NARA IG staff.

Dear readers: Today's blog is by our Justice reporter, Marisa Taylor:

The former Bush administration lawyers who helped come up with the justification for enhanced interrogation techniques could lose their law licenses if two anti-war groups have their way.

The groups filed complaints with the D.C. Bar and with four other states, accusing former Justice Department lawyers John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury of colluding “to facilitate the abuse and torture of prisoners”, resulting in deaths at overseas U.S. military facilities.

The complaints also allege former Attorneys General Alberto Gonzales, John Ashcroft and Michael Mukasey should be held responsible for supporting the legal reasoning that justified the interrogation techniques.

Former Bush administration officials have argued they should not and cannot be held liable legally for policy decisions made in good faith.

Holding former administration officials accountable by pursuing ethics violations has gained traction among some groups in part because the Obama administration has expressed little interest in launching a criminal investigation into their conduct.

The complaints were filed Monday by VotersforPeace.US and Velvet Revolution and can be found here.

There are limits to engagement, apparently. President Barack Obama this week extended sanctions on Syria that were passed by Congress and signed into law by then-President Bush in 2004. Obama's action comes the same week in which he sent two senior officials to Damascus to try to explore better relations with the government of President Bashar Assad.

That may seem a bit oxymoronic, and perhaps it is. But it also reflects Obama's--and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's--caution in reaching out to U.S. adversaries, Obama has gone full-bore in some cases, as with Iran, where the administration at times seems to be tripping over itself in its urgency to start a dialogue with Tehran. And there's no equivocation in Obama's general outreach to the Muslim world.

But with Syria and another country--Cuba--Obama and his team appear to be saying, in essence, the ball's in your court. They have made gestures to both countries, and are waiting to see if Syria and Cuba respond in kind.

 In a statement Friday, Obama said he extended the sanctions for 1 year because "the actions of the government of Syria in supporting terrorism, pursuing weapons of mass destruction and missile programs, and undermining U.S. and international efforts with respect to the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq pose a continuing and unusual extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States."

That may well be true. But for the Assad regime, which just received the two presidential envoys, it's got to be a bit confusing--like a bad case of diplomatic whiplash.

The sanctions prohibit Syrian airlines from operating in the United States;  block Syrian with suspected terrorist links from accessing the U.S. financial system; and prohibit arms sales.

You can imagine the overwhelming joy that comes over reporters when budget time rolls around. Actually, that is not true at all. The budget is literally binders thick with numbers, numbers, numbers. And the potential for mistakes is daunting. But budgets are important in Washington because they really are mission statements for the departments they represent. The Defense Department’s $663.8 budget, for example, moves more money toward irregular warfare because Secretary of Defense Robert Gates believes that is where the wars of the future (indeed the current conflicts) are headed.

There were two numbers that stood out to me. First, the FY 10 budget is the first to allot more money for the war in Afghanistan than Iraq, $65 billion and $61 billon, even though the military estimates that more troops will be based in Iraq. That brings me to the second interesting number. The budget assumes there will be 100,000 troops in Iraq and 68,000 in Afghanistan, even as the United States draws down in Iraq and ramps up in Afghanistan. So while more troops will be in Iraq, more resources are going to Afghanistan. What the budget tells me is that FY 10 will mark the official transition from one war zone to the next.

You can read more about the budget here.

The following video caused quite a stir around the Pentagon today after al Jazeera reporter asked Adm. Michael Mullen about it at a press conference. It shows soldiers at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan collecting Bibles translated in Pashtun and Dari to distribute to the local population.

Here is the chairman’s response:
QUESTION: Al Jazeera has broadcast footage of U.S. servicemen at Bagram with Bibles printed in Pashtu and Dari, and those servicemen talking about distributing those Bibles to Afghans. We don't know if any of them were distributed.
 
What's your reaction? And what is the military going to do about this?
 
MULLEN: My reaction is two-fold.
 
One is that I'm not aware of the details of this, and certainly want to know more about it. Secondly, it certainly is, from the United States military perspective, not our position to ever push any specific kind of religion. Period.

Buried in Thursday's annual State Department report on terrorism trends, which we blogged about yesterday, is an interesting little nugget about Iran's relationship with Hezbollah, the Lebanese Sh'ite Muslim group on the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations.

In a section of the report here, the State Department says that Iran provided $200 million in funding for Hezbollah in 2008, and trained 3,000 of its fighters in camps in Iran. We did a little calling around, and officials say this appears to be the most specific the U.S. government has been publicly about the size of the assistance that Iran provides Hezbollah, which is basically its proxy in Lebanon.

N&S spent some time searching, and could not find similar language and statistics in the 2007 version of the same report. 

Hezbollah, which fought a bloody 2006 war with Israel, is of course more than an armed faction or a terrorist outfit. It also has an extensive social welfare organization, and is a political party that controls Cabinet posts in Beirut. And it's expected to do well in Lebanon's elections next month.

Iran has also helped Hezbollah rearm, in violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution adopted at the end of the 2006 war, the report charges.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee Thursday and told lawmakers that the department has begun discussing where to put Guantanamo Bay detainees if they cannot be released, tried or sent to other nations. That is, what should happen to detainees that have no where else to go but the United States?

As many as 100 detainees at Guantanamo fall under that category, Gates said. And in one of his first acts as president, Barack Obama vowed to close the controversial facility. But one of the conundrums has always been where to put them if the facility is closed. Indeed, as the United States has debated this very issue, many of the 241 being held there now have lived in legal limbo.

But on Thursday, members of the Appropriations Committee came back when an answer – not in my state. They pleaded, ranted, argued and tried to cajole Gates to not put the detainees in their state. 

They are worried that the facility would endanger the community (if one escapes anyway), bring down property values and the reputation of communities.

Gates decided to save that argument for later. "I fully expect to have 535 pieces of legislation before this is over saying: 'Not in my district. Not in my state.' And we'll just have to deal with that when the time comes," he told them.