Bits & Pieces

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.

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.

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.

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.

Newsweek summarizes the decade. Nicely done.

By the way, they are also offering tech predictions about 2010. You might be interested in their number 1 prediction. (Hint: It involves Apple.)

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 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.

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.

Hold the trial of alleged 9/11 plotters in civil court, using American standards for criminal justice, and in New York, a scene of the attack, is an opportunity to show the world that our criminal justice system can handle the hardest cases, and at the same time provide defendants with fairness and openness. The complexity will be high, but the return to respect for the rule of law makes the effort worthwhile.

From an editorial in today’s New York Times:

Republican lawmakers and the self-promoting independent senator from Connecticut, Joseph Lieberman, pounced on the chance to appear on television. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they said military tribunals are a more secure and appropriate venue for trying terrorism suspects. Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a former judge who should have more regard for the law, offered the absurd claim that Mr. Obama was treating the 9/11 conspirators as “common criminals.”

There is nothing common about them — or Mr. Holder’s decision. Putting the five defendants on public trial a few blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center is entirely fitting. Experience shows that federal courts are capable of handling high-profile terrorism trials without comprising legitimate secrets, national security or the rule of law. Mr. Bush’s tribunals failed to hold a single trial.

The economy is in very bad shape in Michigan. That is not news. One small town north of Detroit has been discussing one way to keep jobs in town.  In Standish, the State of Michigan had built a maximum security prison recently that is scheduled to be closed due to budget shortfalls. Now, the state is offering to use the facility to house relocated Gitmo prisoners. The people of Standish appear undecided on this approach, but to me, maximum security prisons house far more dangerous people than the average Gitmo prisoner. People like Timothy McVeigh and the Unibomber have been successfully held. It would be good to have the jobs in Michigan and also the additional protection of officers from the Department of Defense and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Here is coverage of the story from yesterday’s NewsHour on PBS. A transcript is available here.

The Obama White House fires back at Dick Cheney over anti-terroism effectiveness:

Responding to criticism from former Vice President Cheney that President Obama is making the nation more vulnerable to terrorism, the president’s National Security Adviser, Gen. Jim Jones (Ret.), told ABC News in an exclusive interview that actually the reverse is true: President Obama’s greater success with international relations has meant more terrorists put out of commission.

Given his past lies (Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, etc.), I am puzzled as to why anyone listens to anything that Dick Cheney has to say.

In his new book, Tom Ridge claims that as secretary of Homeland Security he was pressured days before George Bush’s relection in 2004 to raise the national threat level. If this is true, it is inexcusable.

After Osama bin Laden released a threatening videotape four days before the election, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushed Mr. Ridge to elevate the public threat posture but he refused, according to the book. Mr. Ridge calls it a “dramatic and inconceivable” event that “proved most troublesome” and reinforced his decision to resign.

More (much more) on this from Glenn Greenwald at Salon.

It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics.

–Leon Panetta on Dick Cheney’s warnings that Obama is making the country less safe.

First, the troops do not Mirandize anyone. Second, as reported in the Washington Post, during the Bush administration, in order to collect evidence that would be admitted in United States courts, the FBI sent interrogators overseas to do fresh interviews with detainees already interviewed without Miranda rights. These new, “clean” agents did give Miranda-like warnings to the detainees. There has been no change in policy.

The Anonymous Liberal has chapter and verse.