2013/4/26

AmeCon - The People Who Wanted to Torture Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

One more (hopefully final) thought on the cowards who want to torture a 19-year old boy. I was reading William Pffaf’s latest column, and he mentioned that

Moving to our own times, the United States has been spending itself in Southeast Asian wars, and then Middle Eastern and South Asian wars, because of two spurious theories. The first was the domino theory of Asian Communism’s potential for launching worldwide revolution, which American officials and advisors believed had to be thwarted whatever the cost. The current political fantasy behind American policy is the notion launched by Samuel Huntington of a “clash of civilizations” about to break out between Islamic civilization and the West.

There’s a kind of fundamental lack of faith in the American system behind the neoconservative Cold Warriors and Anti-Jihadis. They are deeply afraid that government of the people, by the people, for the people, will perish from the earth. Once a country goes Communist, it can only be contained or perhaps rolled back, but it will never seek out its own freedom. Should the resolve of the crusaders waver, Saladin will take Jerusalem, and Rome will pay the jizya.

Of course, as we’ve now seen, really existing socialism is self-destructive. It cannot keep up economically, and people eventually demand change. The socialists collectively cooperated to form the factories to provision the rope to hang themselves with from each according to his ability and to each according to his need. So why was it so imperative to create our own secret police and assassins to defeat theirs?

Jihadism is an even more pathetic “threat.” No state looked to Afghanistan or Somali as an example, and the revolution in Iran is desperate to maintain its depleting moral capital. During the Cold War, one could at least plausibly argue that there was a Fifth Column of Communist sympathizers hiding within the branches of the US government. Such a suggestion about Islamic sympathizers is beyond laughable.

Why go abroad in search of monsters to destroy? There are monsters enough at home. Daodejing 80:

鄰國相望，雞犬之聲相聞，民至老死，不相往來。

Though the neighboring kingdoms are in sight of one another
And can hear the cries of each others dogs and roosters,
The people reach old age and die
Without having traveled there and back again.

2013/4/23

The important security issue isn’t convicting Dzhokhar but finding out what he knows that might prevent a future attack or break up a terror network. This is where naming him an enemy combatant would be useful. Such a designation allows for extensive, long-term interrogation without a lawyer. Especially because President Obama has barred enhanced-interrogation techniques, such long-term psychological pressure can be crucial to learning if the brothers worked with anyone else, if they received terrorist training, and more.

—

Wall Street Journal - Enemy Combatants in Boston

I have difficulty expressing how much disgust and loathing I feel towards the views expressed in this article. A major America newspaper and several sitting Senators are calling for the torture of a 19-year old boy because they are too scared of terrorists, but these same spineless cowards tell us that requiring gun licenses (which is plainly consistent with the “well ordered militia” clause of the Second Amendment) would be an impermissible infringement of liberty. Sickening. If anyone listens to these snakes, democracy is as good as dead. (Via AmeCon)

2013/2/21

The New Yorker - Can a President Use Drones Against Journalists? Yes, it has come to this. Doesn’t a journalist working abroad who is about to release classified information about a war crime—thus committing a crime—that will provoke retribution or a break with allies—endangering Americans—fit this definition of a target? The answer is that the President can kill anyone if we let him, and no one if we don’t.

The New Yorker - Can a President Use Drones Against Journalists?

Yes, it has come to this.

Doesn’t a journalist working abroad who is about to release classified information about a war crime—thus committing a crime—that will provoke retribution or a break with allies—endangering Americans—fit this definition of a target?

The answer is that the President can kill anyone if we let him, and no one if we don’t.

2013/2/05

Gawker - We the Targets: Obama’s Combat Lawyers and a Fairy Tale of Law Obama and crew are all making that kind of technocrat wunderkinder mistake that if the person who writes the rules is just smart and thoughtful enough, the rules will become ironclad and binding upon all. And the great ugly irony is that they employ this process to pervert and circumvent a Constitution held up reverently in the American consciousness as the most perspicacious binding document ever crafted by—a room full of technocrats. They think they can come up with a fairly calibrated set of rules, then pass them on to the next administration and be sure that whomever occupies the Oval Office will play by them with more faith than they paid to the Bill of Rights. This isn’t just an Obama problem: it’s a bipartisan problem, and a problem that threatens to become permanent now that Democrats have pardoned this policy to support “their” guy. It’s a problem that merits a serious discussion on both sides of the aisle, from leftists worried about overreach in war and the same sort of conservative elements who even now see national assault weapons registries as an existential threat to both liberty and life.

Gawker - We the Targets: Obama’s Combat Lawyers and a Fairy Tale of Law

Obama and crew are all making that kind of technocrat wunderkinder mistake that if the person who writes the rules is just smart and thoughtful enough, the rules will become ironclad and binding upon all. And the great ugly irony is that they employ this process to pervert and circumvent a Constitution held up reverently in the American consciousness as the most perspicacious binding document ever crafted by—a room full of technocrats.

They think they can come up with a fairly calibrated set of rules, then pass them on to the next administration and be sure that whomever occupies the Oval Office will play by them with more faith than they paid to the Bill of Rights. This isn’t just an Obama problem: it’s a bipartisan problem, and a problem that threatens to become permanent now that Democrats have pardoned this policy to support “their” guy. It’s a problem that merits a serious discussion on both sides of the aisle, from leftists worried about overreach in war and the same sort of conservative elements who even now see national assault weapons registries as an existential threat to both liberty and life.

Ta-Nehisi Coates - What Would Orwell Make of Obama's Drone Policy?

I highly advise you to read the memo. The powers it claims are broad and, as Isikoff pointed out on Rachel Maddow’s show, actually contradict some of the administration’s public statements and enter into Orwell’s world of false language rendered to conceal an arguments “too brutal for most people to take.”

Consider the notion of “imminence.” Last year Eric Holder claimed that a lethal strike against an American citizen can only be made if to protect against “an imminent threat of violent attack.” But the white paper states that imminence “does not require that the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons or interests will take place in the significant future.” Effectively, the word “imminence” has no meaning beyond “we think you’re a bad guy.”

The white paper further claims that it can carry out operations “with the consent of the host nation’s government,” and then moves on to declare that such operations would still be lawful “after a determination that the host nation is unwilling or unable to suppress the threat posed by the individual targeted.” In other words, we will ask your consent, but we don’t really need it.

This kind of language — imminence that isn’t, consent at gun-point — runs throughout the white paper. It authorizes, for instance, not just the killing of Al Qaeda leaders, but of any “an associated force.” Who determines what constitutes “an associated force?” The same people ordering the killing.

2012/5/31

The method we have built, over a couple of hundred years, for sorting out questions of guilt and innocence and probable cause, is due process. And that may be the most degraded phrase of all.

The Obama Administration has sought and killed American citizens, notably Anwar al-Awlaki. As the Times noted, “The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.” In other words, it’s due process if the President thinks about it. One wonders how low the standard for “internal deliberations” are—if it might be enough if Obama mulled it over while walking his dog. And if an American whom the President decides is a threat can be assassinated in Yemen, where Awlaki was hit, why not in London, or Toronto, or Los Angeles? (Awlaki’s teen-age son, an American citizen who had not been accused of anything, died in a separate strike.)

— The New Yorker - The President’s Kill List (The CIA has always been the President’s personal army. Praetorian guards signal the coming end of liberty.)

2012/5/03

They tortured men at military bases and detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo, and in U.S. Navy bases on American soil; they tortured men in secret CIA prisons set up across the globe specifically to terrorize and torture prisoners; they sent many more to countries with notoriously abusive regimes and asked them to do the torturing. At least twice, after the torturers themselves concluded there was no point to further abuse, Washington ordered that the prisoners be tortured some more.

They tortured innocent people. They tortured people who may have been guilty of terrorism-related crimes, but they ruined any chance of prosecuting them because of the torture. They tortured people when the torture had nothing to do with imminent threats: They tortured based on bad information they had extracted from others through torture; they tortured to hide their mistakes and to get confessions; they tortured sometimes just to break people, pure and simple.

And they conspired to cover up their crimes. They did this from the start, by creating secret facilities and secrecy regimes to keep what they were doing from the American people and the world. They did it by suppressing and then destroying evidence, including videotapes of the torture. They did it by denying detainees legal process because, as the CIA’s Inspector General put it in a 2004 report [pdf], when you torture someone you create an “Endgame” problem: You end up with detainees who, “if not kept in isolation, would likely divulge information about the circumstances of their detention.”

They managed all this, for a time, through secrecy—a secrecy that depended on the aggressive suppression of two groups of voices.

Over and over again, in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo, in secret CIA black sites and at CIA headquarters, in the Pentagon, and in Washington, men and women recognized the torture for what it was and refused to remain silent. They objected, protested, and fought to prevent, and then to end, these illegal and immoral interrogations. While the president and his top advisers approved and encouraged the torture of prisoners, there was dissent in every agency, at every level.

— Slate - How America Came To Torture Its Prisoners via Eve Tushnet

2012/4/19

The Onion - Four American Troops Tragically Killed Along With 23 Afghanis

This is the most true thing I’ve seen in months. Watch it to the end, the final gag is great and soul crushing.

I want a tattoo that says, It does not make sense.

2012/4/06

In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.

— n+1 - Raise the Crime Rate (Ugh, America, when will you stop making me want to quote Langston Hughes poems at you?)

2012/4/03

Robert Wright - Syria: America Steps onto the Slippery Slope

Today’s award for the most euphemistic lead paragraph goes to the New York Times. Paraphrasing Hillary Clinton, the Times says the U.S. has agreed to “send communications equipment to help rebels organize and evade Syria’s military.”

It might be nice if there were communications equipment whose use is inherently confined to evasive maneuvers. But I’m not aware of any. Inevitably, the equipment we’re giving the rebels will help them organize as they attack Syria’s military, not just as they retreat. It may even help them attack Syrian civilians who share the Alawite ethnicity of Syrian president Bashar al Assad. (Rebel attacks on Alawite civilians took place during the siege of Homs.) What’s more, according to the Syrian National Council, this “communications equipment” is going to include night-vision goggles—and I doubt it’s just nighttime evasions that the rebels have in mind.

As I’ve said before, the Syrian situation is such a mess that I don’t claim to have a solution. And I guess that limits how indignant I can get about solutions that other people are pushing, including those that my government is pursuing. But could we at least be honest about we’re doing? The U.S., by giving the rebels this communications equipment, is now officially helping Syrians kill other Syrians. That’s a big step.

Analects 13.3:

子路曰：「衛君待子而為政，子將奚先？」子曰：「必也正名乎！」

Zilu said, “If the lord of Wei depended on you and gave you governance, what would be your first command?”

Confucius said, “Surely, ‘make right the names’!”

2012/2/21

Via the New Yorker: The Caging of America; Why do we lock up so many people? The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country. Definitely must-frown reading.

Via the New Yorker:

The Caging of America; Why do we lock up so many people?

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

Definitely must-frown reading.

2012/1/25

Quick: How many countries was America at war with last year?

If you accept the old fashioned notion that to drop a bomb on a country is to be at war with it, the answer is, oh, half a dozen or so. As Peter W. Singer points out in a New York Times opinion piece, since the beginning of last year we’ve conducted drone strikes in six countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia… and… and… well, Singer doesn’t list them, so I’m not sure what the sixth one is.

— Robert Writght - America’s New Strategy: Endless War(s) (P.S. Libya.)

2012/1/18

Washington Post - 10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free

Sort of a cheesy headline, but I suppose it fits the mood of the day.

Here’s the list minus commentary:

  1. Assassination of U.S. citizens
  2. Indefinite detention
  3. Arbitrary justice
  4. Warrantless searches
  5. Secret evidence
  6. War crimes
  7. Secret court
  8. Immunity from judicial review
  9. Continual monitoring of citizens
  10. Extraordinary renditions

2012/1/12

Cato Unbound - License to Kill

The United States is increasing its commitment to drone warfare without regard for the risks these weapons pose to our security and moral standing in the world. Drone technology is spreading rapidly, with dozens of countries and even nonstate actors such as Hezbollah now developing or purchasing these systems. Military planners are developing autonomous drones that could make their own decisions on when to unleash lethal force. If other nations follow our example as they often do, we will soon face the prospect of a world in which terror can rain down from the sky at any moment without warning. There is no long-term benefit to the United States in the unchecked proliferation of drone weapons or in the absence of agreed standards for limiting their use.

I’ve said before for the United States government to invite Moore’s Law into the world of warfare is sheer, unblinking idiocy. We have more money than our enemies, so we’ve decided to make weapons cheaper so we’ll have someone to fight so we can keep spending money on making weapons cheaper.

The United States should work through the United Nations to convene an international conference for developing legal standards on the use of unmanned weapons. The goal should be to ensure that any military use of these systems complies fully with the laws of war, including international humanitarian law and human rights law. This would enhance our moral standing and strengthen U.S. and international security.

Didn’t we make a million movies in the ’80s about the US military funding robotic programs that then go berserk and take over the world? C’mon people, it’s not hard to see that these things are a nuisance. Let’s at least make SkyNet a rogue mission and not standard operating procedure.

2011/10/31

It is difficult to articulate exactly why, but there is something very significant about a nation that so continuously finds purpose and joy in the corpses its government produces, while finding it in so little else.

— Glen Greenwald - A remaining realm of American excellence