War Games

By this time next year, the closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics will be over, and the country will have been emptied of international athletes and sports fans.

Most likely, Tibet still won't be free, and China may continue its controversial support of the president of Sudan.

The skies over Beijing, which the government promises will be clear and blue in time for the games, will likely be returning to their original cloudy state.

The choice of China to host the international games is a controversial one, and the country and its Communist party are doing as much as they can to spiff up its image in time for 08.08.08. China is hoping to use the Olympics for its coming out party as a major economic power.

But for each step forward, it seems, there's a bigger one backward. And today's force comes from the Financial Times, which reports that China's military, in all likelihood, hacked into the Pentagon's computer system earlier this summer.

While both the Chinese and U.S. governments regularly scan each other's networks, "U.S. officials said the penetration in June raised concerns to a new level because of fears that China had shown it could disrupt systems at critical times," the F.T. reports. Essentially, the People's Liberation Army may have figured out how to cripple the Pentagon's network.

The Pentagon confirmed it shut down a part of its computer system, but it would not say who was behind the attack. But unnamed administration officials confirmed the China connection, saying that they have a "very high level of confidence ... trending towards total certainty" that the P.L.A. was behind the attack.

The U.S. continues to investigate exactly what data the hackers stole, but it believes most of it was unclassified information.

Still, this should make for an uncomfortable moment between President Bush and China's President Hu Jintao at the Asian Pacific Economic Conference in Australia later this week.

And that giant welcome mat that China plans to lay out at its borders ahead of the Olympics? It may still need a few more cleanings before August.

by Megan Barnett