21ST CENTURY SUBURBAN PARADISE: I’m blogging on the laptop from the deck via wireless, while sipping a Redhook IPA and grilling steaks. Is this a great country, or what?

BACK ON MAY 29TH, I HAD A POST ABOUT A MISSING 727. A lot of readers thought it was probably a repossession. But apparently intelligence services are worried:

The media has figured out that the US government launched an intensive intelligence campaign to find a Boeing 727-200 passenger jet that mysteriously disappeared from Angola’s Luanda airport three weeks ago. Since then, the plane’s status has discussed every morning in meetings at various intelligence agencies and congressional intelligence committees. While the mainstream press describes the US efforts to locate the missing airliner as “secret’, the mystery was first mentioned in the Angolan press on May 28th. . . .

While American investigators think that the plane is probably being used for criminal purposes and not part of a terrorist plot, leaving such things to chance in a post 9-11 world is asking for trouble. So an alphabet soup of intelligence agencies have been using satellites to try to locate the plane, the CIA is working its human sources in Africa and embassies in Africa have been informed of the disappearance and asked to provide any information they may come across. The US has also asked South Africa (via Interpol) to help trace the aircraft.

While the South Africans said it hadn’t entered their airspace, perhaps most troubling was that their police and aviation officials thought that the 727 appeared to have been converted into a fuel tanker. While the Americans believe the plane doesn’t have enough range to reach the US, that doesn’t rule out an attack on a US embassy or facility overseas in Africa.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Here’s a photo. The 727-200 model has a range of 2,175 nm according to the linked source. On the other hand, a reader sent this link to a source stating that “The 727-200 is capable of a maximum range of 3738 miles with full fuel tanks; with maximum payload, it has a range of 3335 miles.” I’m not sure what explains the difference. Terrorists, presumably, wouldn’t want to arrive at their target with empty fuel tanks, regardless.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Daniel Aronstein observes:

1 – if the stolen 727 has a nuke on it the fuel tanks can be empty on arrival.

2 – if I remember correctly, the metaphorical language of what was purportedly OBL’s last audiotape prefigured his “martydom” in an “eagle” or another form of transportation; hence maybe OBL will be on board.

3 – the most likely target is Israel, as the neighboring countries do not have great air defenses or a diathesis to warn Israel.

Hmm. I wonder if you could land and camouflage a 727 in the Sahara, then reach Israel from there. I think so. Several readers noted that if the plane is configured as a tanker it could have a much longer range. You’d have to modify it to draw fuel from those tanks I think, and it would probably pose non-trivial challenges, but I’m sure it could be done. As for the range discrepancy, reader Michael Jennings emails:

The Boeing 727-200 was originally developed as a derivative of the shorter 727-100. The original version did not have additional fuel capacity, so the range was shorter than the earlier 727-100

Airlines wanted a version with greater range, so Boeing produced the “727-200 Advanced” in 1972 with more fuel capacity. Later versions were techically still called the 727-200 Advanced, but they had even greater range. (Increasing the fuel capacity of an aircraft can be non-trivial. More fuel means a larger maximum take off weight, which means more powerful engines and sometimes a larger wing can be required. Even without dramatic changes in design, the range of newer aircraft tends to be more than that of older aircraft (even if they are technically the same model), because new technology means that lighter versions of components are being invented, engines are becoming slightly more efficient and similar, and the aircraft manufacturers and airlines are always looking at ways to improve the aircraft.

Therefore, different instances of theoretically the same aircraft can have markedly different ranges. That said, getting a 727 of any description across the Atlantic ocean is not likely to be possible.

Let’s hope.

STILL MORE: Jonathan Gewirtz emails:

In the 1970s a 727 flown by an incompetent Arab airline crew got lost and flew over the (then-Israel-occupied) Sinai in the direction of Israel. The Israelis intercepted the plane, tried unsuccessfully to communicate with the pilots, then — fearing a 9/11-type attack — shot the plane down. (The event was written up in Aviation Week.) I doubt that a similar plane would be able to penetrate Israeli defenses now. Assuming the plane is in the hands of terrorists, a European target seems most likely.

Interesting. I don’t remember that story, but it was rather a long time ago. Most likely, of course, the plane isn’t in the hands of actual terrorists, but the possibility is troubling.

AN INEXPENSIVE WAR:

WASHINGTON — A short conflict that used fewer missiles, sparked fewer oil field fires and created fewer refugees than anticipated produced a lower-than-expected financial cost for the major combat in Iraq.

Well, that’s good.

UPDATE: Just flipped over to James Taranto’s Best of the Web, where the take on this is much more amusing than mine:

As this March CNN/Money report notes, opponents of Iraq’s liberation had much higher estimates of the cost of war. House Democrats said $93 billion, and William Nordhaus, a Yale professor, said the price could be as high as $1.92 trillion (he inflated his figure by including “rebuilding costs and impact of oil, economy”).

This wasn’t the only thing war opponents told us during the prewar debate that turned out not to be true. They said the U.S. would suffer thousands of casualties. They said ordinary Iraqis would resent American “invaders” rather than welcome them as liberators. They said the “Arab street” would rise up in outrage. They said Iraq’s liberation would set off a new wave of terrorism. They said the war would be a “quagmire”–a line today’s London Guardian is peddling, though even the New York Times carries an article–albeit on the op-ed page–noting that “things really aren’t that bad” in Iraq.

Some war foes even said–get this!–that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and would use them on American troops. Well pardon us for asking, but if Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, where are they?

It’s possible that this was all just a massive failure of intelligence, but we can’t help suspecting that war opponents knew better and deliberately misled the public in an effort to establish a pretext for keeping a mass-murdering dictator in power. In either case, they now face a yawning credibility gap. The American people deserve nothing less than a full congressional investigation into the false claims of antiwar politicians, scholars, journalists and activists. If they lied to us about Iraq, how can we ever trust them to talk us out of future wars?

Don’t be so hard on them, James. After all, lots of people were were worried about WMD before the war.

UPDATE: Reader Mike Megargee emails:

There are several interesting aspects of the war costs. First, it’s amazing that the scholars who produced the trillion-dollar estimates did not allow for “something good” happening as part of the rainbow of options. Nordhaus’ low end estimate was in the $90 billion range. So a Yale economics professor allowed himself a 1.8 trillion dollar range and still missed the eventual outcome.

Similarly humorous was a Stanford paper(link) that said that the war had already cost the economy $1.1 trillion by mid-March, due to the drop in the S&P 500. Checking the Stanford website, I don’t see any credit for having recouped that drop twofold since the paper was published.

Seems to me that news of a trillion dollar benefit from the war might have made some newspaper– unless attributing a $1.1 trillion drop in US stock value directly to the war preparations was specious to begin with.

Finally, I note that the USA Today shows a figure of $30B for deploying and returning the troops. A good portion of those troops were required simply to force Saddam to agree to the inspections that the anti-war voices were advocating.

Indeed.

BOBOS IN BEARDEN: I hope David Brooks reads this piece. And yes, this describes my West Knoxville world pretty well.

WALTER DURANTY’S PULITZER is now under scrutiny given the well-established fact that he knew of — and deliberately covered up — Stalin’s genocides. Arnold Beichman surveys the issue and reports this quote from Duranty:

What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated.

Perhaps the Times should simply return the Pulitzer. And maybe apologize.

MORE GOOD NEWS FROM IRAN:

Several hundred students and onlookers gathered at a Tehran University dormitory in the early hours of Friday chanting “freedom, freedom” and “death to Khamenei” in a reference to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The protesters have also vented their anger at moderate President Mohammad Khatami, whom they accuse of failing to deliver promised reforms after six years in government.

Washington, which accuses Iran of building nuclear arms and sponsoring terrorism, has hailed the protests which have drawn crowds of up to 3,000 people in the last three days.

“It’s our hope that the voice of the Iranian people and their call for democracy and the rule of law will be heard and transform Iran into a force for stability in the region,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said on Thursday.

Analysts say the protests, while small, reflect widespread frustration among Iran’s disproportionately youthful population and are likely to continue in the run-up to the July 9 anniversary of violent student protests in 1999.

The mullahs are nervous. That’s not as good as them being, say, dead . . . but it’s a start.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis has lots more on doings in Iran.

MORE GOOD NEWS FROM IRAQ, as the Marsh Arabs are reclaiming their land after Saddam’s depredations:

What the Americans will find isn’t so much a challenging engineering project as a colossal crime scene, a wasteland monument to human cruelty and survival.

“The destruction of Iraq’s marshes involved a genocide,” said Emma Nicholson, a British parliamentarian whose group, Assisting Marsh Arabs and Refugees, has been trumpeting the plight of the region for years. “The best way I could describe it is an open-air Auschwitz.”

The Iraqi regime’s assault on the Mesopotamian Marshes is a well-documented tragedy, and it began with the Shiite rebellion against Hussein that erupted on the heels of the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

Paying a terrible price

The Marsh Arabs, a 5,000-year-old tribe of fishermen-hunters who lived on reed islands and paddled swamp waterways in elegant canoes, joined the revolt wholeheartedly, and when it failed they paid a terrible price.

Bombed, shot, imprisoned and poisoned by the regime–Iraqi helicopters reportedly dropped pesticides into marshland lakes to kill fish, a tribal staple–the Marsh Arabs’ population in Iraq has dwindled from 250,000 to 40,000, human-rights groups say. Tens of thousands of the nomads now languish in Iranian refugee camps.

Their vast wetlands, crawling with deserters and rebels, fared no better.

According to the UN Environment Program, 7,000 square miles, or a staggering 93 percent, of the Mesopotamian Marshes were bled dry by Hussein’s engineers between 1991 and 2000. Gone are the 1 billion migratory birds–flamingoes, storks, cranes–that used to stop over on flights between Asia and Africa.

Gone are the 500-pound fish that tribesmen used to haul to market in trucks. Vanished, too, probably, are endangered species such as the smooth-coated otter.

So thorough was the destruction, ranked by the UN as “one of the world’s greatest environmental disasters,” that coalition troops hardly knew they were driving across a former swamp larger than the Everglades when they invaded Iraq from Kuwait in March.

Marsh Arab villages still cling to some of those roads. They look like Arab villages anywhere, including the middle of the Sahara. The only clues to their aquatic origins lie in stately council houses, with cathedral-like spires, constructed entirely of bleached, rotting reeds.

“We broke the dams when the Iraqi army left,” said Qasim Shalgan Lafta, 58, a former fisherman whose village sits marooned, along with a few cracked canoes, in a landscape that looks like the Utah Badlands. “We want to teach our children how to fish, how to move on the water again.” . . .

“Thanks be to Allah for giving our water back!” declared grinning old Mutashir, one of thousands of nomads displaced by Hussein’s cataclysmic reclamation projects. His dingy robes flapping about him, he hugged himself with his scrawny arms and added, “Thanks be to George Bush!”

Good.

BE AFRAID: Al Giordano has started a blog.

VIA OXBLOG, some modest good news from Saudi Arabia. Oxblog also rounds up mostly good news from Iraq (which seems pretty consistent with this report from G in Baghdad), but says the Bush Administration is dropping the ball in Afghanistan.

UPDATE: Here’s more on Iraq:

Two months after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Iraq is widely depicted as a nation in chaos, with armed gangs dominating Baghdad’s streets amid a widespread breakdown of public services. Having returned from Iraq two weeks ago, I believe this picture is distorted. In fact, we may soon look back at the postwar looting as only a bump in a long road.

And I love this:

As soon as the oil industry begins turning a profit on exports, we should give every Iraqi family a monthly payment. This would instantly dispel the popular myth that the coalition’s intent was to seize Iraq’s oil assets. It would eliminate widespread dependence on government food rations and could jump-start the consumer economy.

Yep. The idea seems to be catching on.

SKBUBBA CALLS IT TERRORISM. I think it’s more like child abuse. Your call.

SO WHO’S LYING? HANS BLIX, OR THE GUARDIAN? I link. You decide.

ANDREW SULLIVAN will no doubt be bemused by charges that I’m flaunting my heterosexuality!

This is flaunting? I guess to people who are uncomfortable with the idea. . . .

BRIBERY AT AIRBUS: The Economist investigates.

IT’S A QUAGMIRE!

One week after the first French troops arrived the first rapid reaction intervention by the EU alone is in danger of being a toothless failure, observers say. If it is not allowed to leave Bunia it will hardly see the slaughter in the province, much less stop it. If unable to intervene in fighting it will not prevent the civilian massacres that invariably follow. . . .

During their brief visit to Bunia yesterday the security council’s 15 ambassadors must have regretted this. They were preceded by three Mirage-2000 fighters screaming low overhead, but the Hema gunmen were unbowed.

Their continued presence was felt at the UN compound, where 12 refugees fainted with fright, and in the town’s market, the scene of a stampede by several hundred terrified shoppers.

As a UN convoy passed along the main street under heavy French guard a mob of militiamen and civilians ran behind, waving submachine guns in the air and shouting: “The white men will run, we have the city”.

That’s a polite mistranslation. He was actually saying “the French will run.”

MORE OF THIS, PLEASE!

Hundreds of demonstrators taking part in a third night of anti-government protests in Tehran called today for the execution of Iran’s conservative supreme leader – an audacious move under the country’s clerical regime, which has threatened a crackdown.

The pre-dawn protests constitute the biggest show of opposition to Iran’s clerics in months.

“Khamenei, the traitor, must be hanged,” the protesters chanted, referring Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The demonstrations took place around Tehran University and near the Intercontinental Hotel, in what constitutes the biggest show of opposition to Iran’s clerics in months.

Criticism of the ayatollah is punished by imprisonment, and public calls for his death were unheard of until this week.

Stay tuned.

IF YOU’RE A BLONDE HARVARD LAW SCHOOL ALUMNA, read this.

NICK DENTON IS UNIMPRESSED:

If Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, represents the flower of the liberal intelligentsia, god help us. She was in a debate yesterday at the NYSEC hall on the Upper West Side, with Bill Emmott, editor of The Economist. The topic: America’s role in the world, protector or predator? . . .

It would help, once in a while to go beyond the standard applause lines of the American left. Vanden Heuvel, in the course of 90 minutes, said literally nothing surprising, apart from appropriating the language of Pat Buchanan to rail against the cabal — could she possibly be implying they were Jewish? — of radical neocons who had captured American foreign policy. Now novelty isn’t a requirement of public speaking, or political analysis; but a token effort to veer from the party line, just once or twice, would at least demonstrate the capacity for independent thought. For Vanden Heuvel, and far too many others on the American Left, American power is always bad, all power is bad, the most recent Republic administration is always the most evil in history, globalization always works to the benefit of multinational corporations, international institutions are a power for good. These truths are held to be self-evident. No mere facts can alter her views. . . .

Oh, one last thing. Vanden Heuvel said the sanctions policy on Iraq was a mistake; what the US should have done was to encourage the kind of change from within that we saw in central Europe. What freaking planet is she living on? In countries such as Poland and Hungary, the communist regimes had lost the will to slaughter thousands; there, a few fax machines for dissidents could make a difference. To encourage the Iraqis to mount their own velvet revolution: that makes about as much sense as Jews mounting a sit-down protest at Auschwitz. When faced by a man with a gun and no conscience, Vanden Heuvel’s Left is incapable of coherence.

Read the rest.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING COLUMN on how the United Nations is, and has been, screwing up in the Congo:

International civil servants and diplomats from developing countries, appointed by their parent countries on a rotational basis, frequently lacked the qualifications demanded by the UN’s job description. More often than not they were successful in obtaining lucrative New York appointments as a direct result of their personal ties with their nation’s leader. On arrival at the UN, their self-interest motivated them to perpetuate the system that rewarded those within their inner circle. Within two weeks of Mr. Thornberg’s enlightened report landing on the Secretary General’s desk it was shredded — having been declared much too controversial! I have one of the few surviving copies.

General Baril’s recent appointment by Secretary General Kofi Annan to try and organize a national army in the Congo is a vivid reminder that the UN’s “old boys’ club” is alive and well — and doesn’t just recruit from developing countries.

Tragically, General Baril and Kofi Annan were at the very centre of the UN’s two most disastrous failures in its history — the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and the embarrassing and futile attempt to resolve the refugee crisis in Eastern Zaire (now the DRC) in 1997. . . .

An advisory job to the Secretary General at UN headquarters in New York during the Rwanda crisis, and a short visit to Zaire during a botched UN mission, do not uniquely qualify someone for a challenging and critical job in the current DRC crisis.

One is more inclined to conclude that the “old boys’ club” of the Rwandan genocide and the “bungle in the jungle” a few years later in Zaire refuses to acknowledge its disastrous role in those two monumental failures. On the contrary, the failures are offered up as qualifications for taking on key roles in the current crisis in the same area. Seems to me there are plenty of experts on that area of Africa who would be eminently qualified to take on General Baril’s challenging task.

Is it just me or is the UN proving completely incapable of arresting its downhill slide into irrelevance on issues of international peace and security?

It’s not just you.

DIDN’T DR. MCCOY HAVE ONE OF THESE?

The device, which looks a little like the metal detectors used in airports, works because different types of body tissue resonated in different ways when exposed to a fluctuating frequency of microwaves given off by the device.

This resonance can be detected because it interferes with the signal.

Tumour tissue resonates at different frequencies to healthy tissue – so the presence of a cancer can be identified quickly.

But do you get a gold-lame mesh quilt at the hospital?

A MAJOR STEP FOR GUN RIGHTS IN ALASKA:

JUNEAU — Alaskans will no longer need a permit to carry a concealed weapon under a bill signed into law Wednesday.

In signing the bill, Gov. Frank Murkowski lauded the work of the Legislature and the National Rifle Association in protecting the Second Amendment rights of Alaskans.

The bill would adopt the so-called “Vermont Carry” law that allows residents to carry a concealed weapon without a special permit. Vermont has no laws against carrying concealed weapons, the governor’s office said.

Actually I know some gun-rights folks who don’t like “Vermont carry.” Their theory is that a bunch of people with carry permits are conscious of gun rights, and likely to act to protect their ability to carry, while if everyone is allowed to carry there’s no such constituency.

MATT WELCH SEES A HOPEFUL SIDE TO THE FRENCH RIOTS, though he notes, “In French politics, one clings to whatever optimism one can find.”

BEWARE THE TWELVE-DIVISION STRATEGY FOR A TEN DIVISION ARMY — Phil Carter sounds a cautionary note.

MAUREEN DOWD IS STILL FOLLOWING THE IMMUTABLE RULES. And scroll up and down for many more cool posts at OxBlog.

THIS OJR ARTICLE ON LOCAL BLOGS isn’t bad. But I think its focus on big cities like New York and L.A. is probably a bit misplaced. I suspect that blogs will have a useful role as alt-media in small cities, too, where there are typically fewer alternative channels and where one or two people could actually cover most of what’s happening.

AS PROMISED, I’M BACK: A nice drive from Nashville, then a nice dinner at home (I made pasta). I felt sorry for the poor students in the Bar Review course — I well remember that studying for the bar combined stress and excruciating boredom in a fashion that nothing else has equalled.

I didn’t even try to surf from the Sheraton last night — and not really today. I opened the laptop up in the lobby and started picking up a wireless network named “Sheraton,” but the signal was very weak and intermittent. The hotel staff had no idea what I was talking about when I asked — they kept pointing me to the “business center,” where there was no wireless coverage at all. I finally found a place on the mezzanine level where the signal was strong enough, but I never did figure out where the coverage was supposed to be centered. Weird.