Category: Terrorism

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How Dare You Not Stop Everything When I Tell You Too

When construction crews at the site of the World Trade Centre found some human remains in an abandoned manhole last week, some of the families of the victims were “outraged”. They demanded a stop to all construction. They demanded that the world stop turning and the winds stop blowing, until their grief has been adequately recognized by a monument 1150 miles high, made of pure titanium, and costing more than a billion, trillion, zillion dollars.

And all of the other suffering people in the world– your suffering is not important or significant or worthy of memorials or cash awards because, you are not me.

Nobody will publicly take on the families of victims of 9/11 because their shrieking outrage will be deafening and the media is terrified of displeasing them in any way, so they get to make demands like this with impunity, without blowback, without anybody calling them out.

And one thing the media would not dare to do is raise the question of why other victims of government malfeasance or neglect, like black families living in poor neighborhoods because of red-lining,  polluted by lead factories or dumps of asphalt shingles or leaky refineries, suffering outrageously increased rates of cancer and lung disease, — why do these families never receive even a penny of compensation for their suffering?

Yes, we do know.  And it is an outrage.

 

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“Al Qaeda a bigger Threat to the World Than Hitler Ever Was” – Manchester Union Leader

The Manchester Union Leader is a newspaper. This is a newspaper that might like to regard it self as sober and rational and intelligent. This newspaper insists that the “war” on terror is “the most difficult and challenging war we have ever faced”.

Okay. The other wars include World War I, World War II, Korea, Viet Nam, and the Cold War. Small potatoes compared to a 2-bit Arab millionaire hiding in the hills of Tora Bora.

The editorial went on to question whether the nation could afford to have a president (McCain) who isn’t willing to torture people. We want a torturer. Can you torture? I will vote for you. Because I want a torturer.

[Note: now that the so-called compromise Senate bill has been revealed, it turns out to be more of a cover-your-ass bill than a genuine concession to the Geneva Accords. No real protections, legal or otherwise, are extended to the prisoners being held in Guantanamo Bay or anywhere the U.S. may have renditioned any person any 2-bit bureaucrat might have decided is a terror suspect.]

This is ridiculous. The U.S. has faced more than a few military opponents over the years, nearly all of which have actually carried out a war against the U.S. All of them were genuine threats in one form or another.

Well, now that I think about it, Viet Nam obviously was never the threat it was sold to us as– it did collapse and the world continued to spin as it did before. No dominos.

Panama.  Oh.  No dice.

In the five years since the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, there has not been a single terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Not one. Not a single one. Not one. None. Zero. If you believe the government– and you know how conservatives just automatically trust the government– they have nipped several conspiracies in the bud. I happen to believe that not a single one of those conspiracies was anywhere near the stage of realization.

Yet the Manchester Union Leader believes that the U.S. is more threatened now by Al Qaeda than it was by Germany or Japan or even the Communist Block at the height of the cold war, with their thousands of missiles pointed right at us.

Remember the communists? Remember the thousands of nuclear missiles pointed at us, and ours at them? Remember the Cuban missile crisis? Not as scary as the “Lackawanna 5”, I guess.

It is a dire threat indeed that does not manifest itself in five years. The Bush administration gingerly tested the idea, recently, that the reason for this is because of Bush’s brilliant successes at rooting out terror. Right. Just as, if the police doing their job well, a large city could expect to have no murders or thefts or break-ins. Seriously.

The real agenda is the oil and the tax cuts and deregulation and running up a deficit so the progressives won’t be able to afford any new programs when they finally do take office.

But since most people eventually become dimly aware of how bad Bush’s other policies are, the only way to sell them on this government is to convince them that there is this horrible war going on out there and if you don’t vote for Bush, they’ll be coming to get you, right there, in Duluth and Peoria and Gary and Orange County and Iowa City.

What they are doing seems contrary to all reason and common sense. It is contrary to all reason and common sense. And it doesn’t seem to matter. We want our government torturers. We believe they are out to get us. We have lost our minds.

When does Bush cross over into “big lie” theory? At a meeting with conservative columnists last week (why mess things up with someone who might ask hard questions), Bush insisted he had absolutely no doubts about the rightness of his decision to invade Iraq. Surely no matter how conservative you are or how loyal to Dick Cheney, you would have a doubt or two when your actions now result in the deaths of 3,000 people a month, and torture, and mayhem, in a nation you thought you could rebuild into a Western-style democracy in a “cake walk”. No regrets?

The theory of the big lie is that if you pretend to have not the slightest doubt that what you are saying is true, a large number of people will assume that it must be true, because it would be inconceivable that someone would lie on such a grand scale. How could they get away with it?

And from the ‘what is, “is” ‘ department, this gem also from the Union Leader:

Let us be clear that we do not advocate torture. We advocate that the law be written to protect CIA officers from criminal prosecution if they use certain techniques that could be interpreted as forbidden under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

“Certain techniques”. “Play rough”?

Just how many more euphemisms do we need before Americans can advocate torture with a clear conscience?  This is a shitty little dodge by the Union Leader to avoid using the more accurate word: torture.

More detail: The Bush administration has authorized six “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” to be used by the CIA on only a dozen al-Qaida members. The techniques include grabbing a prisoner’s shirt and shaking him, slapping, slapping the stomach (punches are not allowed), extended standing (which might include sleep deprivation), containment in a cold cell, and water-boarding.

Water-boarding? By golly, sounds like surfing! Slapping– no punching– someone might get hurt there, boys. “Extended standing”? That’s easy. You just tell him to stand there. And stand. And if he stops standing, you make him surf, or slap his face, or grab his shirt. Oh, the horror!

Manchester Union Leader Advocates Torture

On September 17, the same newspaper said this: If playing rough with a captured terrorist can save lives — and there is strong evidence that it can* and has — Congress must not forbid it, no matter what the Supreme Court has said.

How nice. Another euphemism for “torture”. They are not torturing anybody– they’re just “playing” rough. Like little boys, wrestling around in the den.

If these editorialists had any guts and any integrity and any morality, they would use the word they do, without any doubt, mean. They want to allow the CIA and the military to torture people. Torture, torture, torture. They want our men to be brutal and violent and absolutely diabolical, because they think that will help us win war on terror.

The editorial writer should publish his name so we all know who is willing to torture.

Aside from the enormous, insurmountable question of morality, history seems to suggest that the long term damage to the west’s credibility and respect will far exceed the benefits of obtaining information that won’t be trustworthy anyway.

An Oddity

I’m not advocating this– torture is wrong under any circumstance, at any time, and any place, and no matter what you call it. But it is curious that the Bush administration wants the cover of law. Why not do as has always been done: leave the law alone, but know that your men in the field will occasionally take liberties– as they did at Abu Ghraib prison? As they did when they trained torturers for Pinochet in Chile? Those men will understand that if exposed, the government will not protect them. They are on their own. In the meantime, they understand– too well, so it appears– what their superiors really want.

The fact that the Bush administration won’t go this route is compelling evidence that our leadership now consists of true vampires.

In fact, the best evidence is to the contrary.  Firstly, people will say anything to make the torture stop, so you cannot know if what they are telling you is accurate or not.  Secondly, some prisoners become more stubborn and more determined to not cooperate if treated badly.  Thirdly, the pertinent issue is that you will inevitably torture by mistake someone who is innocent and who really doesn’t know anything.  Fourthly, you will have innocent victims because when you torture other people they will volunteer any name they can think of if they think it will stop the torture.  Fifthly, you have no legal defense against any nation that decides to torture American prisoners of war.  Sixthly, your boys will deny that they gave any information away at all under torture.

Well, number 2 and number 6 cannot both be true.

 

 

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Torturing the Pharisees and Scribes

Church Groups Getting Ready for the Election:

Evangelical Christians in the United States, by an overwhelming margin, support George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in this election which means they support their policies which include torture.  They can’t hide from this: evangelical Christians support the use of torture to deal with terrorism.

I think every conservative, evangelical, Hillary-bashing congregation should dedicate at least one Sunday this fall to an in depth discussion of how Jesus would torture the Pharisees if he really, really needed some information from them. Suppose they were holding Mary and Peter hostage somewhere.  Or or the Holy Grail.

So, how would Jesus torture?  Cattle prods? Water-boarding? Sleep-deprivation and beatings? What would Jesus do? The results could be collected into a position paper and presented to George Bush at one of those frequent prayer breakfasts or other meetings

Conservatives love emergencies. That’s when they get to take control. If you let them. They thrive on fear– because they assume that others are prepared to do to us what they are prepared to do to others.

The question Al Qaeda has to ask itself is, “where is America’s oil”.

The answer: right below your feet.

 

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The Psychotic Judicial Torturer Theologian of the United States

Richard Posner is a judge on the United States Court of Appeal, 7th Circuit. Take note: this man is a standing judge in the United States. If you were arrested and tortured by the police, this man might end up hearing your appeal.

Richard Posner had just published a book called “Not a Suicide Pact: the Constitution in a Time of National Emergency”.

Okay, let’s start with the “National Emergency”. Personally, I think that two terrorist attacks in 10 years doesn’t quite constitute a “National Emergency”. Posner thinks this emergency is so dire that the government could and probably should suspend most civil rights, spy on everybody, torture prisoners, and, if Congress would kindly agree to it, allow the President to do whatever he thinks will attend to the emergency.

Now a reasonable person might ask what the definition of “National Emergency” is. This is a very important thing– since Posner seems willing to embrace the most repulsive human behaviour imaginable– torture– because we have one. A “national emergency”.

One would think it would mean that the survival of the nation was at stake. Too melodramatic for you? All right. One would think there would be sustained and continuous attacks on American citizens. One might think there were bombs going off in our streets, roving squads of masked, armed men, kidnapping and torturing people. One might think the economy was imploding under the pressure, that regional governments struggled to function, that hospitals were over-crowded, that bomb-shelters were filled to capacity, that people in the streets of Chicago, Seattle, Pittsburgh, felt fearful of their personal safety because you never knew when another terror attack would take place, that air traffic was snarled because of all the bombs, that politicians were being assassinated….

Obviously, the nation actually appears to be prosperous, peaceful, and orderly.

If our current state fits Posner’s definition of “National Emergency”, it is easy to see that any government could at any time, by his standards, declare a “National Emergency” and invoke all those delicious powers to detain, spy, torture, and arrest journalists.

I’m quoting from the review in the New York Times: “coercive interrogation up to and including torture might survive constitutional challenge as long as the fruits of such interrogation were not used in a criminal prosecution.”

It’s an odd rationale. If the “fruits” (one calls to mind Billie Holiday’s extraordinary “Strange Fruit”, written by Abel Meeropol, who adopted the children of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and that’s another long, long story…) … where was I? Oh yes. If the “fruits” of an interrogation using torture should not be used in a criminal prosecution (of the person being tortured), as Judge Posner recommends– think about this carefully if you think you are or should be a responsible citizen– then he is actually advocating the use of torture against people who will never be adjudicated to be anything but innocent by any official, legally constituted authority. Geez, it’s hard to keep this simple. Again, since these persons would never be legally convicted of any crime, according this actual U.S. judge, what we have is a government that uses force, that imprisons and tortures, whenever it feels the need to.

This government is unlimited and unaccountable.

The government, then, is committing crimes.

Posner is saying that he, as a judge, would excuse this government.

I am saying that this government cannot have any legal or moral legitimacy. It may be overthrown. It should be overthrown and we should start over again with something called a “democracy” and a “constitution”.

What if a group of concerned citizens agreed with Mr. Posner, but decided that it was necessary, for the survival of civil liberties, and constitutional government, and human decency, to seize this judge, hold him in a cell, and waterboard him day and night until he agrees to rescind his expressed opinion? Why shouldn’t they? Mr. Posner has already provided the rationale. The safety of our freedoms and liberties is at stake. There is no need for due process, or even for a constitution, in this circumstance.

Mr. Bush is seeking legislation to cover his stinking tail on the issue. He knows, better than anyone, that, until and unless this legislation is passed, he has no legal cover. He only has friends like Richard Posner.

The only thing that makes feel better when I go to sleep at night is the unfounded confidence that some day in the future–maybe even the near future– President Bush will be remembered sneeringly as the President who tortured.

Will a Democratic candidate for president in two years stand boldly in front of the electorate and declare loudly, clearly, and proudly, that his administration will never use torture?

And when is some politician going to summon the guts to demand the impeachment of Richard Posner: how can you leave someone on the bench who cannot imagine why it might be wrong to torture people?

Even if most Americans don’t mind torturing people– as long as they don’t have to conduct the messy, violent, repulsive acts themselves, personally, with a cattle prod or whip– it’s quite another thing to stand proudly in front of your neighbors and say, I voted for the guy who tortures.

He’s Not Totally Crazy

Posner’s Position on Marijuana:  Well, let me put it this way. I don’t really see the case for picking out marijuana among a huge variety of mind-altering substances ranging from, you know, caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, but above all, you know the prescription drugs. You know, for all of the illegal drugs, there’s some kind of prescription alternative. You know, it could be Valium, it could be Paxil. So given that, you know, mind-altering substances are a part of our culture, it seems to me the people who want to continue the prohibition of the sale of marijuana should explain. Well, what is special about marijuana that, you know, it deserves what’s now heavy criminal penalties for sale of substantial quantities. Maybe–maybe there is a case. I’m not an expert on it, but I haven’t heard the argument.  (From a University of Chicago website)

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Defending the Invested Policy

Without the slightest doubt, the U.S. invasion of Iraq is a failure. Even if you give the most generous room for interpretation and the most optimistic spin on the future, nobody who advocated this strategy believed that 3,000 people a month would by dying by now in sectarian violence.

The lamest argument in defense of Bush’s Iraq strategy is that, if even more people die and more things are blown up, eventually, there might be a moderately stable democracy. Might. Moderately stable. Like who? Like what? How deeply will the families of dead Iraqi’s appreciate the blessings of their new democracy? Will they ask themselves, what is the point?

So, it is difficult to defend the strategy, if you want to confine the discussion to actual facts and issues. The solution is to describe the brutal sacrifices’ made by individual U.S. soldiers and then argue that it would not be honorable to not sacrifice more in order to ensure that George W. Bush never has to go on TV and say, “our policy on Iraq was foolish and it failed and we have made a bad situation much worse. We are now faced with making very difficult decisions. I am responsible for the wasted deaths of thousands of U.S. servicemen. Life sucks. I suck. I resign.”

Eventually, it Won’t be a Mistake

How the debate has shifted. It should tell you something very important about Iraq policy when the argument for staying is that, if we leave now, it will be an even bigger disaster.

The miracle is that George Bush gets to make this argument while casually skipping over the intermediate step, the one in between “piece of cake” and “cut and run”, and that step is, “we failed”.

The deck here is stacked against prudence. If the strategy of invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein was stupid, the only way to not have to admit it is to argue that if we keep making the same mistake over and over again, eventually it won’t be a mistake.

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On an Unimaginable Scale

Paul Stephenson, deputy chief of the Metropolitan Police in London, said the goal of the people suspected of plotting the attack was “mass murder on an unimaginable scale.”  New York Times, August 28, 2006

I guess now we know why the scale was “unimaginable”. It was unimaginable because only the police involved in this case could look at the evidence they had gathered and come to the conclusion that a major terrorist plot was actually in the making.

As always, over and over and over again, the headlines screamed TERROR! UNIMAGINABLE SCALE! BOMB FACTORY! HIJACKINGS! 10 or more planes!!! and so forth and so forth. It’s almost as if the police were desperately trying to convince you that all of the infringements of your civil liberties, all the excessive new police powers, all of that sold-out, smug, superciliousness on Tony Blair’s face– all of it was justified. Here they are– Al Qaeda plotting again!

Well, it could be Al Qaeda. They admitted right away that there was no real evidence of a link. Oddly, they admitted that there was no evidence at all, of a link to Al Qaeda, but they understood the media: every article I saw on the story included the phrase “Al Qaeda” mostly to acknowledge that no link to AL QAEDA!!! was found.

The paranoid reader immediately understands: of course it was Al Qaeda. They just haven’t found the proof yet.

As it turns out, there is not much evidence of anything else either, other than the usual story of young, devout and foolish Islamic fundamentalist boys plotting and bragging and conducting rather laughable experiments to see if they might actually be able to blow up a disposable camera. The “bomb factory” turns out to be an apartment where they stripped batteries and emptied sport-juice containers. One of them had a copy of a schedule of flights on his memory stick. There was no date. They had not even discussed possible dates.

There had not been a single successful explosion of anything. They had no weapons. They had no passports.

In one of their homes, they found a copy of a book– they have noted this, for the judge to consider as something material to the question of whether these people should be locked up indefinitely– they found a book called “Defense of the Muslim Lands.” Oh the horror!

They also found “jihadist” literature. Suppose that we Christians were suddenly under suspicion of plotting to attack Muslims around the world. Suppose they searched your house. Would they find any “Christian militant” literature? Would they find a link to James Dobson’s website which advocates defiance of the courts? Ah ha!

The security commissioner of the European Union, pleasantly named Franco Frattini, said the British decided to proceed with arrests because they had intercepted a message from Pakistan saying “go now”. A “senior British official” admitted that the message was not quite that clear.

British Home Secretary John Reid, at the time, told the media that attacks were “highly likely” and would be on an “unprecedented scale”.

If you can find some indication anywhere that this idiot was not making statements of unimaginable stupidity and unprecedented hysteria, please show me. Reid himself had to back down quickly once he realized, apparently, that he was about to destroy the tourism industry.

Are the Islamic boys guilty of something? I don’t know. If I was in a mood to be really, really generously broad-minded about what they were actually up to I suppose you could charge them with…. well, get serious. With what? Talking about conspiring to plot? Hating America?

The truth is– check the news stories– buried on page 5 or so– if you don’t believe me— the truth is this: they had no weapons, no bombs, no tickets, no actual date, no specific plan to commit any terrorist act. They just talked about how they hated America and Britain because of their decadence, and because of their foreign policies. That’s about it.

I understand– you don’t believe me. It’s too silly to be true. I won’t be offended if you go and check some newspapers first. Even the paranoid ones do generally repeat the official facts. So back to my point– I don’t think I would convict them of anything.

It doesn’t matter. The headlines did their work. More than ever more and more people are convinced that there are thousands of Muslim youths out there planning right now to blow up airplanes and drop anthrax on you and build nuclear bombs and kill you all. We must kill them first.

And more and more people think I’m crazy for actually insisting that even terror suspects are entitled to due process and a fair trial under the laws that have existed for years and years before there ever was a 9/11.

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Yes, You Can be Too Careful

The Washington Post reports that United Flight 923 from London to Washington D.C. was diverted to Boston’s Logan airport because a female passenger became claustrophobic.  (The NY Times Account).

Well, she might have been a terrorist. How many times in the last week have you heard this phrase: you can’t be too careful. The answer, of course, is a resounding: YES YOU CAN. You can absolutely be “too careful”. It’s not even hard to think of an example: any time you enter a highway in a car, you take a notable risk of being killed or maimed in an accident. You could decide to never travel again. If you did, some reasonable people might reasonably conclude that you were being “too careful”.

Flight 923 landed at Logan where “State Police and federal agencies took control of the plane after it landed.” You can’t be too careful. But let’s not overlook the fact that Flight 923 was escorted to Logan by a pair of fighter jets. I wonder how old the pilots of those jets were? I wonder if either of those pilots could ever make a mistake.

What exactly did the fucking idiot– I use that word judiciously– who sent the fighter planes think they were going to do?  Shoot down the airliner?

You may recall — no, you probably don’t–that immediately after 9/11, there was some discussion about when a fighter plane would shoot down a civilian aircraft that was hijacked to prevent it from crashing into a building. There was some discussion of who makes that call. Lucky for us, it was Dick Cheney. Ha ha! Don’t be too sure I’m wrong about that.

Actually, the truth is that the air force was ordered to shoot down any plane that strayed into the air space above the White House without asking questions. After an actual airplane did stray into the air space over the White House and an actual jet fighter refused to actually shoot it down because, he could kind of tell that the guy was just lost and was waving at him– take note, Al Qaeda!– the policy was quietly rescinded.

Anyway, back to Flight 923. Two fighters escorted it to Logan where “State Police and Federal Agencies took control of the plane” (Washington Post). Well, well. Isn’t that reassuring. A woman complains of claustrophobia. OH MY GOD WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE SHE’S A TERRORIST GOD HELP US SHE HAS A BOMB SHE’S CARRYING LIQUID SOMETHING IS THAT A SCREWDRIVER IN HER HAND, HELP!! HELP!!

And that’s just the pilot.

It’s a good thing I was not on that flight. You see the state and federal authorities decided that YOU CAN’T BE TOO CAREFUL so the passengers we’re all put on a bus, their luggage was scattered on the tarmac, and explosive sniffing dogs were brought out. Not “explosive dogs” but “explosive-sniffing” dogs, you see.

I would have objected.

What I want to know is, what if I was on that flight and I didn’t want to get on a bus… What do you think? Do you think a wise, mature, reasonable “state or federal official” would have said, well sir, you haven’t committed any crimes and are not reasonably suspected of having committed any crimes, so it’s entirely up to you what you do because we don’t live in a fascist police state governed by paranoid boot-licking cretins. So long…”

I rather think not. I think I probably would have been hand-cuffed and led away to be interrogated by “state and federal officials” and then probably charged with some catch-all offense like mischief or contributing material support to satire or something, just to show that you are not allowed, in Amerika, to not be paranoid.

Dick Cheney realizing that the laxative didn’t work.

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Sock Puppet Security

Britain claims it caught 20 terrorist plotting to blow up lots and lots of airplanes, therefore the invasion of Iraq was a great idea.

You may have noticed Robert S. Mueller III, of the FBI, carefully linking the plotters to Al Qaeda, though he admits no proof of their association with Al Qaeda has been advanced by anyone. Responsibility, anyone? It doesn’t matter. It works. The letter writers to the New York Times insisted that this was obviously an Al Qaeda plot.

And once again we have sensational charges, gloating security czars, and that bizarre Republican insistence that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and Al Qaeda.

How easily the frightened are led.

As with almost all of the previous sensational thwartings of nefarious terrorist plots, there is no specific description of any particular actions by any individuals which actually took place. Yet. We might get such details. We might not. We might, in a few weeks or months or years, discover that we have another group of foolish Islamic would-be radicals shooting their mouths off in internet chat rooms, or getting informed on by dubious individuals with a vested interest in scoring with the cops.

The New York Times received numerous letters from pro-Bush people sneering at their editorialists and insisting that this proves that Bush is right to spy on Americans without warrants or congressional over-sight. These letters disturb me. They assume that the sensational charges are probably true. They seem to assume that confrontation and war-like militaristic gestures make us more secure. They definitely assume that we need to live in a police state because America is under siege by powerful enemies who stalk us at every turn, and that this was never the case before recently, and that the Soviets– are you ready for this?– were really a very mild threat compared to Al Qaeda.

They also buy into the absurd logic that no measure is too extreme if it there is even the most wildly improbable possibility that it might save one life. This is the ultimate in selective logic: it plays into the politics of the authorities, because they choose which absurdly improbable action they address, even if it saves only one life.

It makes me think we should have a “malaria alert”. Whenever there is a possibility of some child dying of malaria in Africa, we immediately embark on a host of bizarrely expensive and inconvenient measures. We spent tens of millions of dollars on pesticides and new hospital beds and vaccine development, and treatments. Don’t agree? Do you want to be the one responsible for a child dying of malaria when you could have prevented it? I suppose you believe there are no mosquitoes…

Women in Africa should form a committee and demand that their governments spend $1 billion erecting a giant, 3,000 foot tall mosquito, to commemorate all the children who died from malaria last year. You think that’s a strange idea? So you are in favor of children dying of malaria? It’s obvious that your child didn’t die of malaria, because you don’t understand. This is the right memorial. We must honor the memories of these children. This is a sacred bug. To question the need for this memorial is to buy into that defeatist attitude that somehow mosquitoes will just go away if we are only nice to them.

I suspect that we will find out that the plot was not quite as fully developed as we have been led to believe, especially since both Britain and the United States have more or less avowed that they will arrest, charge, and incarcerate people for even thinking about doing anything nasty. After all, do we wait for murderers and drug dealers to do their nasty deeds before we arrest them? Well, actually, we do.

It is striking also how many people seem to believe that, if there really were numerous people out there plotting to bomb and poison and disrupt our oil supplies, the government could be 100% successful at stopping these attacks. A reasonably astute statistician could prove to you with charts and graphs and mathematics that this just can’t be so. If there were 50 plots out there, and the police stopped 40 of them, they would be doing astoundingly well. But there would still be the ten.

The fact is, there hasn’t been a single attack on American soil since 9/11.

I’m not saying there couldn’t be an attack. In fact, I am a little surprised myself that there hasn’t. I am saying that we haven’t yet built a world in which terrorist attacks don’t take place: they always have and the probably always will. I simply take issue with this bizarre idea– and it really, absolutely is bizarre– that we suddenly live in a hugely dangerous world filled with grave threats to public safety. That this is different from the world we lived in in the 1960’s or 70’s.

Most people seem to believe it. That’s is why inland cities in the United States received homeland security grants for scuba gear.

(It is odd that anyone should undertake to “end terrorism” today at all. I don’t think anybody serious in the 1970’s would have proposed to “end” terrorism. I think that would have been perceived as a preposterous idea. It wouldn’t have been possible.)

That’s why pop machines in U.S. airports were sealed off. These idiots thought, what if they put nitroglycerin in a Coke can, smuggle it into a Coke machine in an airport, manage to remove the right can just before getting onto an airplane…..

This is sock-puppet security. The biggest piece of bullshit in the world right now is the Republican claim that they are doing a good job of security, if the only thing they do well, because Democrats are “soft” on terrorism. It becomes more and more clear by the day that these people are not merely incompetent. They are dangerously unbalanced. They are prepared to shoot down civilian aircraft on a degree of suspicion, but don’t for one moment suspect that a world better than this one could come about through intelligent, prudent leadership.

In Case You Believe the Authorities That we Have Never Been as Threatened as we are Now:

  • Munich
  • The IRA
  • The Red Brigade
  • The PLO
  • Libya (Khadafy– now our “friend”)
  • The Black Panthers
  • The Mafia
  • Lockerbie
  • Oklahoma City

Or That the World was at Peace Back Then:

  • El Salvador
  • Nicaragua
  • Guatemala
  • Ethiopia
  • Iran
  • Algeria
  • The Congo
  • South Africa
  • Zimbabwe
  • Rwanda
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Where are Your Marchers? Your civil libertarians? Your Freedom Fighters?

The Bush Administration asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit against AT&T for complying with a government “request” to turn over– without the inconvenient assistance of an actual warrant or subpoena– information about millions of private phone calls made by Americans.

The government argued that the judge needed to protect national security by turning a blind eye to this rather blatant invasion of personal privacy. The judge declined to do so.

What’s wrong with you people out there? Can’t you read? Why are there no marchers in the streets to celebrate this victory of liberty against government over-reach, this violation of civil rights?

Where are the raging editorials? Where are the outraged investigative pieces on the news?

I’m not mad. I’m just curious. I read your Constitution and your Bill of Rights and I’ve heard you sing your anthems, and I’ve seen your tattoos and your bumper stickers. So where are you now?

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How Dare They

“They are smart, they are creative, they are committed,” Admiral Harris said. “They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” NY Times, June 16, 2006, after it was reported that three detainees at the Guantanamo camp had committed suicide. They had hanged themselves.

You should know that the safety and security of your nation is in the hands of at least a few individuals who think like this Admiral Harris. The prisoners in Guantanamo are held without regard for any law governing the treatment of either prisoners of war or suspects of a criminal investigation. President Bush claims he has the right to hold them for as long as he feels like holding them. Can you tell that he is on the side of freedom and democracy?

Those clever detainees! Committing suicide just to make it look like they are being mistreated!

And it is apparent just how much a victory Bush gives Islamic extremism when he pays it the highest honor imaginable: fear wildly in excess of any reasonable probability of harm.

But I doubt American citizens deserve any better any more. They appear to have acquiesced on the issue of human rights. Just keep us safe from suicide bombers in South Holland and Grand Rapids and Iowa City and all those other places that we just know they would attack if it were not for things like Guantanamo Bay prison.

For comparison’s sake, rent a copy of “Dr. Strangelove” and look for the pep talk General Ripper gives to his men just before he seals the base. He warns them that the Communist has no regard for human life, including his own, and that Communist invaders may look or sound like Americans.

Don’t worry. This film will be really funny again in about 10 years.