Hopefully, there will be more important news than Obama's birth certificate and the Royal Wedding today.

On the Royal Wedding and security, I wonder if MI5 and the Metropolitan Police will be using GigaPan. Check out this gigapan photo of Obama's inauguration. No more getting lost in a crowd. You can see the face of each individual in the crowd on 2 million in focus.

Double click on any area in the picture to bring the person closer. Or, just click the mouse and use the mouse wheel to bring them closer. Or scoot it around to closeups of the people around them, like you would on a map. The picture was taken with a robotic 1474 megapixel camera (295 times the standard 5 megapixel camera.) If something goes wrong during the event, every one attending can be scanned afterwards. (Hat tip to criminal defense attorney Steve Salter of Birmingham, AL.)

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

President Obama has released his birth certificate. You can view it here.

The President believed the distraction over his birth certificate wasn't good for the country. It may have been good politics and good TV, but it was bad for the American people and distracting from the many challenges we face as a country. Therefore, the President directed his counsel to review the legal authority for seeking access to the long form certificate and to request on that basis that the Hawaii State Department of Health make an exception to release a copy of his long form birth certificate. They granted that exception in part because of the tremendous volume of requests they had been getting.

Will the absurd accusations stop? Unlikely. Of all the non-issues raised by the right to Obama, this is one of the most ridiculous.

President Obama will announce tomorrow that Robert Gates will be replaced as Secretary of Defense by Leon Panetta, and David Petraeus will become head of the CIA.

The changes, which will not take effect until this summer, essentially preserve the status quo on the national security team as the administration heads into a crucial period of turmoil in the Middle East and South Asia, U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq and a make-or-break year in Afghanistan.

Unless you've been living under a rock the past few weeks, you know that Friday is the day for the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

Time/Yahoo reports on the security precautions for the event. From nut jobs to al Qaida, there are contingency plans for everything.

[S]nipers from London's Metropolitan Police will have taken their positions on rooftops throughout the city. If a bomb explodes along the parade route, police will siphon crowds into areas that have been blocked to traffic, and ambulances will follow predetermined routes to get victims to various hospitals. Should terrorists launch a Mumbai-style gun attack on the streets, armed commandos, waiting in undisclosed locations, will storm the area within minutes to take out the assailants.

Cost of security: $33 million. Number of police officers: 5,000. [More...]

Another busy day for me. Light to no posting from me. Not sure about J.

Open Thread.

Attorney General Eric Holder addressed Justice Department employees yesterday on planned priorities. The full text is here.

Going forward, the department's priorities will be: terrorism, violent crime (which includes enforcement against so-called drug organizations) and financial fraud. He emphasized the increased use of "intelligence", particularly in sharing information between federal, state and local agencies. My translation: We can expect more surveillance. And more of the current trend of labeling garden-variety drug conspiracies as major "drug trafficking organizations" with links to some gang or cartel.

On terrorism: [More...]

There's a lot of news to catch up on today. Here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

McClatchy's Carol Rosenberg and Tom Lasseter have an analysis of the new Guantanamo documents released by Wikileaks to various news organizations. Shorter version: Bush and Rumsfeld's detention and interrogation policies were a flub.

a collection of secret intelligence documents from George W. Bush's administration, not meant to surface for 20 years, shows that the military's efforts at Guantánamo often were much less effective than the government has acknowledged. Viewed as a whole, the secret intelligence summaries help explain why in May 2009 President Barack Obama, after ordering his own review of wartime intelligence, called America's experiment at Guantánamo "quite simply a mess."

The information from detainee-informants was unreliable. [More...]

Paul Krugman:

When I listen to current discussions of the federal budget, the message I hear sounds like this: We’re in crisis! We must take drastic action immediately! And we must keep taxes low, if not actually cut them further! You have to wonder: If things are that serious, shouldn’t we be raising taxes, not cutting them?

It's amazing how no one was worried about the budget deficit in December 2010, including President Obama, when The Deal was struck. Krugman writes:

The Taliban spent the past 5 months building a 1,060 foot underground tunnel that led directly into Sarposa Prison in Khandahar and broke out 575 inmates, including about 100 Taliban commanders.

Their tunnel operation was not discovered. They were able to bypass checkpoints and main roads. When asked how the Taliban were able to build the tunnel and effect the breakout, Gov. Tooryalai Wesa said only, "It's under investigation."

This is one of the prisons at which the U.S. has been providing training and funding to strengthen the Afghan secuirty guards.

The facility has undergone security upgrades and tightened procedures following a brazen 2008 Taliban attack that freed 900 prisoners. Afghan government officials and their NATO backers have regularly said that the prison has vastly improved security since that attack.

All the prisoners had left through the tunnel, taking 4.5 hours to do so, before anyone knew they were gone.

Guess they are still not ready for prime-time. How much more will it cost us to stay longer and re-train them?

The New York Times and other media outlets have major reports tonight on leaked classfied documents regarding Guantanamo detainees. You can view several of the leaked documents, courtesy of Wikileaks, here. the Times reports some of the leaked files pertain to detainee suicides.

[A] collection of secret detainee assessment files obtained by The New York Times reveal that the threat of suicide has created a chronic tension at the prison — a tactic frequently discussed by the captives and a constant fear for their captors.

[More...]

The DEA will be continuing its Most Excellent African Adventures plan in 2011 and beyond.

Next up: It will open an office in Nairobi, Kenya. Why? Because, like with Liberia and Ghana, it wants to stop drugs from going from South America to Africa and then Europe. From the State Departments 2011 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report:

The principal U.S. counternarcotics objective in Kenya is to interdict the flow of narcotics to the United States. A related objective is to limit the corrosive effects of narcotics-related corruption in law enforcement, the judiciary, and political institutions. ....In support of this effort, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is in the process of opening a country office in Nairobi. Personnel from the DEA Pretoria Country Office offered support to the Government of Kenya in counter-narcotics over the course of FY 2010.

For information about all our drug enforcement efforts around the world, the full report is here. How much is this costing us? The State Department's 2011 international drug control budget runs 221 pages and is available here. Total: $2,136 million. [More...]