Tag Archives: terror

Torture quote of the day

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Mistreatment of enemy prisoners endangers our own troops, who might someday be held captive. While some enemies, and al-Qaeda surely, will never be bound by the principle of reciprocity, we should have concern for those Americans captured by more conventional enemies, if not in this war then in the next.

Though it took a decade to find bin Laden, there is one consolation for his long evasion of justice: He lived long enough to witness what some are calling the Arab Spring, the complete repudiation of his violent ideology.

As we debate how the United States can best influence the course of the Arab Spring, can’t we all agree that the most obvious thing we can do is stand as an example of a nation that holds an individual’s human rights as superior to the will of the majority or the wishes of government? Individuals might forfeit their life as punishment for breaking laws, but even then, as recognized in our Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, they are still entitled to respect for their basic human dignity, even if they have denied that respect to others.

All of these arguments have the force of right, but they are beside the most important point. Ultimately, this is more than a utilitarian debate. This is a moral debate. It is about who we are.

– Senator John McCain, in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post yesterday.

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For the kids (updated)

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(via BoingBoing)

Update: A couple of comments suggested that if anyone wants to avoid the police state, they need simply choose not to fly. Aside from whether that is in any sense practical, I have different thoughts on the point that I posted as a comment to this thread. I restate it below:

And if you don’t want your car tracked via GPS, don’t drive. And if you don’t want your location tracked, don’t use a cellphone. And if you don’t want your purchases tracked, don’t use a credit card. And if you don’t use a credit card, what are you hiding? And if you move money in the banking system, why of course it should be reported to the government. And if you travel with cash, of course you should be subject to a physical search without question. And if you take cash in your car, it should, of course, be subject to seizure. If you don’t want your email turned over to the government or stolen by the government, don’t use the Internet. Simply become an inert object, unmoving, inactive, unresponsive, and drop off the grid. Then you are not subject arbitrary government interference. Why does a citizen need the government’s permission to travel in the US? What does being a citizen mean? That police can stop, search, or detain you if you want to move or move property?

All of these government actions happen every day. Such surveillance is consistent with the actions of a police state, not a country that purports to value freedom and limited government. All this talk about how wonderful it is that we are being protected is naive. We don’t need that kind of “protection” and governments that offer it, history teaches, often result in abusing their citizens. We take enormous long-term risks with such “protection.”

And, sadly, this kind of police state intervention in the private lives of citizens is the ultimate victory for the terrorists. Think about it. Is America more free now than in the 90s? Has our liberty been protected? Or have we caved, like a total bunch if wimps, to an attack by less than 20 murderous terrorists, given our actions following an attack that killed 3,000 of us with civilian aircraft. How much damage do we have to do to ourselves on top of the attack itself? Do we have to whimper like children and beg for protection including a destruction of our traditionald rights an liberties? Are we that scared? Are we so timid? Are we in fact children?

As Franklin said, “Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security.”

From despair.com:

Old: TSA=Thousands Standing Around. New: TSA=Thousands Squeezing Asses. #homelandinsecurity
November 10, 2010 4:58 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@michellemalkin
Michelle Malkin

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America falls for a trap

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You have to read this op-ed by Ted Koppel in Washington Post. I think it nails it on every point. Excerpt below, but the full piece is worth your time.

The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams.

***

… the insidious thing about terrorism is that there is no such thing as absolute security. Each incident provokes the contemplation of something worse to come. The Bush administration convinced itself that the minds that conspired to turn passenger jets into ballistic missiles might discover the means to arm such “missiles” with chemical, biological or nuclear payloads. This became the existential nightmare that led, in short order, to a progression of unsubstantiated assumptions: that Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons; that there was a connection between the Iraqi leader and al-Qaeda.

***
Perhaps bin Laden foresaw some of these outcomes when he launched his 9/11 operation from Taliban-secured bases in Afghanistan. Since nations targeted by terrorist groups routinely abandon some of their cherished principles, he may also have foreseen something along the lines of Abu Ghraib, “black sites,” extraordinary rendition and even the prison at Guantanamo Bay. But in these and many other developments, bin Laden needed our unwitting collaboration, and we have provided it — more than $1 trillion spent on two wars, more than 5,000 of our troops killed, tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead. Our military is so overstretched that defense contracting — for everything from interrogation to security to the gathering of intelligence — is one of our few growth industries.

We have raced to Afghanistan and Iraq, and more recently to Yemen and Somalia; we have created a swollen national security apparatus; and we are so absorbed in our own fury and so oblivious to our enemy’s intentions that we inflate the building of an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan into a national debate and watch, helpless, while a minister in Florida outrages even our friends in the Islamic world by threatening to burn copies of the Koran.

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Secret America

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The Washington Post recently published a fascinating three part series describing the mind-blowing scale of secret intelligence and counter-terrorism operations in the United States in the aftermath of the 9/11 attach.  Did you know that 850,000 Americans have top secret clearance now? The series is fascinating reading. Even looking at a map identifying the number of locations where such activity occurs is stunning.  And the series shows a scandalous level of wasteful spending and secrecy that we should not tolerate by the government in the US.  If the tea-partiers want a target of government action circumscribing liberty, here it is.

A good summary, for those so inclined, is provided in the latest issue of The New Yorker.

  • Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
  • An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
  • In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings—about 17 million square feet of space.
  • Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
  • Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year—a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
* * *

The story the Post tells is not about criminal conspiracies or rogue elements or corruption in the usual sense. No one’s dedication to the cause of protecting America is questioned. The tale has no villains—unless you count the pathologies of secrecy and bureaucracy and the panicky bravado that led the White House, Congress, and the public to frame the response to Al Qaeda as an essentially unlimited War on Terror. It is an exposé about a secret world, but it exposes no secrets. Interviewees who asked for anonymity did so not in order to “leak”—to reveal classified information—but to express judgments that their bosses and colleagues might hold against them. Virtually all the data that the paper collected in the two years it took to prepare the series was already in the public record.

And this fall, even more on the story will be coming on Frontline on PBS. Here is the preview.

Torture quote of the day

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They [George Bush and Dick Cheney] should have been indicted. They absolutely should have been indicted for torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrants. I’d like to say they should be indicted for lying but believe it or not, unless you’re under oath, lying is not a crime. At least not an indictable crime. It’s a moral crime.

– Fox News host Judge Andrew Napolitano.

Obama = Bush Light, part 3

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Jon Stewart sets out chapter and verse on the failure of President Obama to follow through on his campaign promises to restore the rule of law in the “war” on terror.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
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More on this from Glenn Greenwald at Salon.

Political quote of the day

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I think you’re going too far here… When the founders sat down and wrote the Constitution, they didn’t consider flying.

Senator Lindsey Graham, R-SC and de facto son of John McCain, speaking in opposition to a bill that would ban people on the F.B.I. terrorist watch list from buying guns and explosives despite the fact that such individuals are blocked from air travel.  As Gail Collins notes:

Yes, if you are tton the terrorist watch list, the authorities can keep you from getting on a plane but not from purchasing an AK-47.

When is a terrorist not a terrorist?

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Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon, points out that if a government asserts that someone is a “terrorist” that does not mean that the accused in fact is a terrorist. The idea that if a claim of “terrorist” is made means anything can be done to the accused (torture, indefinite imprisonment, deportation, etc.) is what helps support the use of torture among a large number of Americans. This despite the fact that torture is both illegal and immoral. It is particularly galling that many on the right (but including a growing number on the left), who claim to be against government interference in the private sector because of alleged governmental incompetance, seem to be quite willing to believe that no claim of “terrorist” can ever be wrong.

The whole point of the Bush-era controversies was that — away from an actual battlefield and where the Constitution applies (on U.S. soil and/or towards American citizens wherever they are) — the Government should have to demonstrate someone’s guilt before it’s assumed (e.g., they should have to show probable cause to a court and obtain warrants before eavesdropping; they should have to offer evidence that a person engaged in Terrorism before locking them in a cage, etc.).  But to someone who equates unproven government accusations with proof, those processes are entirely unnecessary.  Even in the absence of those processes, they already know that these persons are Terrorists.  How do they know that?  Because the Government said so.  Even when it comes to their fellow citizens, that’s all the “proof” that is needed.

This despite repeated proof to the contrary.

Another nuanced take on terrorism

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Paul Campos joins the ranks of those who view our current response to threats of terrorism realistically and not emotionally. He notes the remote risk than any particular US citizen will be a victim of terrorism, and yet we persist in imposing upon ourselves a huge costs in loss in freedom and efficiency in our impossible quest to make any terrorist incident “unacceptable.” Politicians also try to increase irrational fear for their own political gain. All of this makes clear that under our current approach the terrorists in fact are winning.

Far worse events than terrorists attacks occur in great numbers every day in the United States without being declared “unacceptable.”

Consider that on this very day about 6,700 Americans will die. When confronted with this statistic almost everyone reverts to the mindset of the title character’s acquaintances in Tolstoy’s great novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” and indulges in the complacent thought that “it is he who is dead and not I.”

Consider then that around 1,900 of the Americans who die today will be less than 65, and that indeed about 140 will be children. Approximately 50 Americans will be murdered today, including several women killed by their husbands or boyfriends, and several children who will die from abuse and neglect. Around 85 of us will commit suicide, and another 120 will die in traffic accidents.

No amount of statistical evidence, however, will make any difference to those who give themselves over to almost completely irrational fears. Such people, and there are apparently a lot of them in America right now, are in fact real victims of terrorism. They also make possible the current ascendancy of the politics of cowardice—the cynical exploitation of fear for political gain.

It is well beyond time that we, as a country, focus on the reality of terrorism and understand that no terrorist can bring down our country. But we collectively can do the damage ourselves if we play the terrorist’s game.

It’s a remarkable fact that a nation founded, fought for, built by, and transformed through the extraordinary courage of figures such as George Washington, Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr. now often seems reduced to a pitiful whimpering giant by a handful of mostly incompetent criminals, whose main weapons consist of scary-sounding Web sites and shoe- and underwear-concealed bombs that fail to detonate.

The reality of terrorism

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I am generally no fan of David Brooks. But his essay today in the New York Times is pitch-perfect. Essentially, he argues that Americans cannot rationally expect that all terrorist attempts can be stopped. Such perfection doesn’t exist in the real world. Living is dangerous; risks are everywhere. Ranting and complaining that the risk of terrorism (low that it is) has not been eliminated is childish and irrational. In addition, all the actions taken in an effort to achieve such a result cost the country dearly, both in dollars and in the loss of individual liberty.

Much of the criticism has been contemptuous and hysterical. Various experts have gathered bits of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s biography. Since they can string the facts together to accurately predict the past, they thunder, the intelligence services should have been able to connect the dots to predict the future.

Dick Cheney argues that the error was caused by some ideological choice. Arlen Specter screams for more technology — full-body examining devices. “We thought that had been remedied,” said Senator Kit Bond, as if omniscience could be accomplished with legislation.

Many people seem to be in the middle of a religious crisis of faith. All the gods they believe in — technology, technocracy, centralized government control — have failed them in this instance.

In a mature nation, President Obama could go on TV and say, “Listen, we’re doing the best we can, but some terrorists are bound to get through.” But this is apparently a country that must be spoken to in childish ways.

Bruce Schneier, an aviation security expert, has an essay up on CNN that is even more frank.  It is also well worth a full reading. Here is a small excerpt:

It’s not security theater we need, it’s direct appeals to our feelings. The best way to help people feel secure is by acting secure around them. Instead of reacting to terrorism with fear, we — and our leaders — need to react with indomitability, the kind of strength shown by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II.

By not overreacting, by not responding to movie-plot threats, and by not becoming defensive, we demonstrate the resilience of our society, in our laws, our culture, our freedoms. There is a difference between indomitability and arrogant “bring ‘em on” rhetoric. There’s a difference between accepting the inherent risk that comes with a free and open society, and hyping the threats.

We should treat terrorists like common criminals and give them all the benefits of true and open justice — not merely because it demonstrates our indomitability, but because it makes us all safer.

Once a society starts circumventing its own laws, the risks to its future stability are much greater than terrorism.

Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country’s way of life; it’s only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we’re doing the terrorists’ job for them.

Airborne terror (updated)

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It seems to me that the complaints about the failure to stop the most recent terrorist attempt on Christmas are valid. Valid in the sense that a sufficient warning had been provided to the US government to trigger at least a careful search of the terrorist prior to allowing him to board a plane.

On the other hand, I think that there is no way to stop all would-be terrorist, aside from requiring passengers to travel nude following full-body cat scans.  Anytime you bring people together in a closed space there is a risk of criminal behavior. Nate Silver has provided a calculation of the true risk of being a victim of airborne terror:

Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.

These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.

Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.

Am I wrong to ask how many more billions of dollars we are willing to spend to reduce this extremely small risk? Are we getting our money’s worth from the huge amounts spent on the TSA? Certainly there are a great number of risks that are far larger than this that could use the funding for risk mitigation.

Update: And today, Holman Jenkins, Jr., writes an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal noting that airport security is actually very good.

Silly are the outrage and accusations simply because Mr. Abdulmutallab was on a list (along with 550,000 others about whom suspicions have been raised) without keeping him off a flight. Critics really seem to be saying that, politically, security personnel can’t maintain any lists that are bigger or different from the no-fly list—which is ridiculous.

Let’s be realistic—efficient counterterrorism requires the setting of priorities. There has to be more than one list. Yet the reaction to Farouk Abdulmutallab may soon mean there will be one list and eventually everybody will be on it and nobody will be able to fly.

Conservative of the year: Dick Cheney (updated)

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Did anyone at Human Events notice what year it is? Salon thinks not.

For most people, the year ending now is 2009. That’s apparently not true at the right-wing magazine Human Events; reading it Monday, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Bush administration is still in office.

Update: And Wonkette adds its own take.

Andrew Sullivan on a fearless President

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Andrew Sullivan makes an eloquent argument in favor of civil trials of terrorists. Read the whole thing, but here is an excerpt:

When you listen to the Fox News right speak about this, they reveal amazing levels of fear. They have been truly spooked by these men with long beards and chilling eyes. They are so scared of them they are willing to drop any and all legal principles that the West has historically used with respect to mass murderers. Their fear brought them to institute torture, and to engage in mass brutality against prisoners of war in every theater of combat in a manner that will tragically taint the honor of the US military for a very long time. It led them to establish Gitmo, to create for the world a reverse symbol of the Statue of Liberty, and imprint it on the minds and in the consciences of an entire generation of human beings, whose view of America will never be the same.

It made speedy prosecution of any of those who allegedly plotted and planned 9/11 impossible – and will make actual prosecution of any of them extremely hard. It turns out, then, that the primary (if not the only) thing we had to fear – was fear itself. It was our fear that gave al Qaeda so many propaganda victories.

And it is the refusal to be afraid that reflects the decision to bring this fanatic mass murderer back to the scene of the crime, to remind the world, all these years later, of why he is on trial, to restore a patriotic pride in the system we have, a system which it is al Qaeda’s goal to destroy.

I believe this is the best symbolic answer to 9/11: a trial, with due process, after tempers have calmed somewhat, that exposes this evil for all it truly was. And also reveals the tragedy of an American government that lost its nerve and has now, under a new president, regained it.

Look who is in favor of Gitmo detainees in the US

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And they are also in favor of civil court trial of terrorists.

Who could they be? How about Grover Norquist (President, Americans for Tax Reform), Bob Barr (former Republican Congressman) and David Keene (Chairman of the American Conservative Union).  Oh my!

And they say there are tired of Republican “scaremongering” on these issues.

Why do they favor this approach? Simply to restore Constitutional government.

More on their website here. A full list of the signatories is available here.

Needless to say, I believe that this is a terrific approach and I appreciate the notables who have signed on to the cause.