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Random commentary and senseless acts of blogging.
The first Republican president once said, "While the people retain their virtue and their vigilance, no administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can seriously injure the government in the short space of four years." If Mr. Lincoln could see what's happened in these last three-and-a-half years, he might hedge a little on that statement. Blog critics Gryffindor House Slytherin House Ravenclaw House House Elves Beth Jacob Prisoners of Azkaban Muggles
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Monday, June 17, 2002
More on Enemy Combatants Demosthenes and Jeff Cooper have both spoken kindly about my earlier post discussing ways of dealing with terrorist suspects. Mr Cooper, incidentally, is a law professor. I'm certainly flattered and pleased to find my thoughts on a legal topic being complimented by a real expert. Regrettably, however, Mr Cooper doesn't drive quite as many hits as certain other law professors/bloggers who still have not deigned to notice the Nuisance.
One of Demosthenes' commenters, Brian, (who has his own blog, but who doesn't) was less positive:
I think what's missing from this idea is the status of the defendant as an enemy combatant. Civilian rights should not accrue to enemy combatants, whether or not they happen to be US citizens.
The dual track suggested here, either a civilian court or a military tribunal depending on the sensitivity of the evidence, ignores the fact that we wouldn't want a wartime enemy tried in a civilian court even if all evidence against him were already public.
I do agree that oversight of the executive branch will be necessary in the long term.
Brian and I might not be that far apart. I agree that when a person is clearly an enemy combatant, that person can be held outside the regular justice system. To allow this for US citizens is a step on the slippery slope, scary, but probably acceptable under the circumstances. They can be treated as Prisoners of War and have the rights accorded under the Geneva Conventions - in this case, relatively few rights because they are illegal combatants and not true POWs.
I would tend to agree that if you can demonstrate the intent to act as a combatant for al Qaeda or similar groups, it is less important to demonstrate specific overt acts. Maybe it isn't even necessary at all, but it does seem if you're saying somebody is a part of al Qaeda, you ought to be able to show some sort of specific act in furtherance of some kind of terrorist intent.
The key question is how you determine who fits into this category. The Bush administration answer seems to be: anyone we say. That's clearly unacceptable, and Brian, by agreeing to the importance of oversight, appears to agree.
I think at least US citizens accused of being such combatants are entitled to some sort of legal proceeding to determine if the label is justified. Which gets us back to some kind of adversarial process that might resemble the one I described.
Atrios cites a recent column by Lawrence Tribe, who also is possibly better informed on the technical legal issues than myself, and there is some related discussion by that other professor.
It does seem to me that all of us are agreed here on the broad points, as odd as that may be for a bunch of bloggers. That is, we all agree that enemy combatants are not necessarily entitled to the full Constitutional rights of a normal US criminal proceeding. And we all agree it is unacceptable for agencies under the executive branch to have unchallenged or absolute authority on who is considered an enemy combatant.
Journey to the East Blogs of War mentions a UPI story on Americans training at radical madrassas in Pakistan. Westerners were attracted to Afghanistan soon after the Soviet invasion in 1979 and many joined the Afghan Mujahedin fighting the Russian army. Their numbers dwindled after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, "but both Americans and other Western volunteers continued to come after the Soviet withdrawal as well," says Mufti Muhammad Iltimas, a radical Islamic cleric who runs a Muslim seminary -- Madrasah Arabia Hassani -- near the Afghan border.
"These new converts are more eager to participate in the jihad than their Pakistani and Arab comrades and are not reluctant to join dangerous operations," said the cleric in a recent interview to a group of Pakistani journalists.
John Walker Lindh, the American charged with fighting alongside the Taliban, studied at Iltimas's seminary. He joined the school on Nov. 27, 2000 as a student of Koran and Islamic studies and stayed there till May 15, 2001 "but the harsh Pakistani summer forced him to leave the school for Afghanistan's cooler climate," Iltimas said.
The cleric said converts were "the best students" who had "an unquenchable desire for knowledge" and often studied "late into the night."
So there you have it, straight from Mufti Muhannad Iltimas, lunatic and professional brainwasher: the Westerners at his 'school' are his star pupils.
We have seen the Westerners who go to Pakistan to study what passes for Islam there: Lindh, Reid, Padilla. Small time incompetent thugs mixed with pathetic drifters. The sweepings off our streets.
And Iltimas admits they're smarter, braver, more dedicated than his regular students.
I've got just one thing to say to Mr Iltimas: if you think our worst are major league ass kickers, just wait until you see our best.
Saturday, June 15, 2002
A Moment of Gloating The very first post on this blog critiqued a post by Max Power asserting that Earth First activists Judi Barr and Darrell Cherney planted the bomb that injured them in 1990 and mocking one of their witnesses in the trial in which they accused the FBI and Oakland police of violating their rights in trying to convict them of the bombing instead of searching for the real criminals. I pointed out that the evidence against Barr and Cherney was very weak and there were many reasons to suspect the FBI's handling of the case.
That trial is now over, and the jury verdict is a complete vindication of Barr and Cherney, who have been awarded $4.4 million in actual and punitive damages. The FBI, the Oakland PD, and 6 current or former agents/police officers have been convicted of violating Barr and Cherney's rights under the First and Fourth Amendments.
This case is of considerable importance in the current climate. As a matter of self-defense, there is probably no alternative to giving expanded powers in some areas for counter-terrorist security to law enforcement in general and the FBI in particular. This instance of the FBI responding to a terrorist act not by vigorously searching for the criminal but instead harassing the victims illustrates the importance of balancing that power by accountability. In particular, the FBI and other executive branch agencies working on counter-terrorism must remain accountable to judicial review. Fact Checking Moran's Ass Kesher blog has noted a recent attack by MSNBC blogger Michael Moran against the web site honetreporting.com, for organizing a petition urging lournalists to label terrorists as terrorists. Moran insists:
MSNBC.com does use the word “terrorist” to describe someone who has been convicted of a terrorist act, or someone who has admitted the act or been caught in the act.
Before that, the person is an “alleged terrorist.” ...
Further, we use the word “terrorism” rather liberally to describe suicide bombings and other acts of random violence against civilians. What we don’t do (and this is what irks “Honestreporting”) is throw the word around at every Palestinian who opposes the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Does MSNBC's own reporting back up Moran's claim? Here is the lead from their description of the notorious Netanya massacre: "Just hours after a peace plan was brought before the Arab League summit, and on the night of one of the most important holidays on the Jewish calendar, a Palestinian Hamas militant exploded a bomb at a hotel hosting a religious meal, killing 20 people and injuring more than 100." The word 'terrorism' appears only once in the story, in a context which suggests it was used by the State Department, not MSNBC.
By Moran's standards of course, the bomber wasn't a terrorist. Being dead, he had never been convicted. And it certainly seems reasonable to insist on a full trial in these cases. Otherwise, how can you be certain it wasn't a Hamas member who just happened to spontaneously combust while strolling innocently into a Jewish gathering with a bag of nails strapped to his chest? A good reporter can't jump to conclusions.
MSNBC doesn't use this caution only in Israel. In the site's story on the latest terror incident in Pakistan, a Pakistani official but never the reporter stated what the attack was:
U.S. and Pakistani investigators on Saturday searched the site of a deadly car bombing outside the American Consulate in Karachi, trying to piece together clues about the attackers. A previously unknown group claimed responsibility for the massive blast Friday that killed 10 people and injured 45 others....
Initial reports indicated a suicide attacker was responsible, but police said they also were looking at the possibility that the bomb was hidden in a car carrying the head of a driving school and three female students, then set off by remote control as it passed the consulate.
Karachi Mayor Naimat Ullah offered sympathy for U.S. officials and vowed to arrest those behind the attack.
The foot of the article is a recap of recent terrorist crimes in Pakistan that goes to almost comical lengths to avoid ever using the T word:
Violence against foreigners has increased since Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, threw his support behind the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.
Militant groups were further angered when Musharraf launched a crackdown on them in January. That followed a bloody attack on the Indian parliament, blamed by New Delhi on Pakistan-based militants, which took the two countries to the brink of war.
“Of course it’s a backlash,” Hamid Haroon, publisher of Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper, told India’s Star News Television.
Friday’s blast occurred less than a mile from the site where 11 French engineers and three others were killed in a suicide bombing May 8. Police suspect Islamic extremists, possibly al-Qaida members, were responsible.
Karachi was also where Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was abducted and slain in January while working on a story about Islamic militants. Four Islamic militants are on trial in that case.
On March 17, a man ran down the aisle of a church in Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave, throwing grenades. He was killed along with four others, including two Americans — a U.S. Embassy employee and her teenage daughter. The man has not been identified.
"We use the word 'terrorism' rather liberally to describe suicide bombings and other acts of random violence against civilians." Sure you do.
Incidentally, Moran's most recent entry proposes having the FBI consult with suspense novelists about possible terror attacks. That's not a bad idea. It's a pity no blogger ever thought of it. Friday, June 14, 2002
The Ideology That Dare not Speak Its Name A number of liberal bloggers have been pretty hard on Ralph Nader, now that he has openly accepted what has been obvious for quite a while: in reality, he is now a Republican activist. MWO has been even rougher - no permalinks as usual, but they do quote pro-Nader statements from Phyllis Schafly. Those of us who have never been forced to hide our true feelings shouldn't be too hard on Ralphie, now that he has courageously come out of the closet. We can never understand how hard it must have been for him to keep his shameful secret all these years, all the little and big lies he has had to tell: sitting in late night dorm chat sessions praising Che and Sartre when all the time he was secretly dreaming about Von Hayek. Buying Bob Dylan tapes just so he could carefully paste the labels over his Donny and Marie collection. Laughing at Archie Bunker with all of his friends, even though he secretly knew Archie was right and Rob Reiner really was a meathead. Insisting that he only read Commentary 'to understand the other side'. Claiming that he only watched Ronald Reagan movies for the camp. Wearing neckties in public every day when his beloved bow ties could only be worn at home behind locked doors. Closing his eyes every time he shook hands with Jesse Jackson and fantasizing he was with Clarence Thomas. Trying to figure out whether he loved Andrew Sullivan in public but hated him in private, or vice versa. Inventing countless excuses about why he missed the last episode of The West Wing so he wouldn't have to admit that he was really watching O'Reilly. Pretending that there was no difference between Bush and Gore.
So Ralph, now that you have finally found the courage to declare your true identity, the Nuisance salutes you. Be strong, be bold. Say it out loud: "I'm a dittohead and I'm proud!" Serve on a corporate Board of Directors, or serve on a bunch - the pay's good, the work's light, and they owe you big time. Grover can set it up. Don't let up now - you still have a Senate Majority to deliver for Bush to go along with the White House you already gave him.
According to new historical evidence, it appears that Julius Caesar has been widely misquoted. What he really said was: Veni. Vidi. Blogi. On the Serious Side To describe this as disturbing would be an understatement: The United States will not bring American terrorist suspect Jose Padilla before a military tribunal, the Justice Department told lawmakers Thursday, according to congressional and Bush administration officials.
The Justice Department, making its case in a closed meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the United States can hold Padilla until President Bush decides the war against terrorism is over.
"They say it's not punitive, it's just purely prevention to stop him from attacking us," said one congressional official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "He's going to stay in the can until we're through with al-Qaida."
Government officials had said there were no plans to put Padilla before a tribunal, but officials told the Judiciary Committee that the decision is now final.
It appears to now be the position of the US government that an American citizen can be held indefinitely, presumably for life, without being formally charged with a crime.
The claim that it is not punitive is especially strange, bordering on Orwellian. If being locked up potentially for life isn't punishment, exactly what is?
We will win the current war. There is really not the slightest doubt of that. The home team has a record of 3 - 0 in these World War situations, and our previous opponents were all, in most ways, tougher than the batch of medieval fanatics we're up against today.
The only thing that even makes this war complicated is that some small percentage of the Muslims in the US, both among immigrants and among US citizens, are fifth columnists working for the enemy to kill us.
How we handle that situation will determine whether we end this war as we began it, a free people.
There is a real need to conduct intelligence, both human and technological, among Muslim extremists, and we should do so in the US and overseas. When this intelligence does identify terrorists or would-be terrorists, it will at times be necessary to incarcerate them without allowing them to see evidence which could endanger human sources or electronic methods.
It seems that to deal with this problem something along the following lines is needed(IANAL):
I'll be interested to see in the next few weeks how this plays out among the pro-Bush folks in the blogosphere, many of them self-labelled libertarians. My guess is that most of them will see the problems in the government's handling of the Padilla case. Eugene Volokh - who, unlike me, actually is a lawyer and law professor and knows what he is talking about - has addressed some of the issues here and in other posts.
It occurred to me not long after 9/11 that this was an ideal opportunity for somebody who had been in the Towers to just walk away and play dead. Now one case of that has actually been confirmed. It isn't clear from the story that this person ever really was in the WTC - it seems he probably wasn't. But he pretended to be so that an ongoing criminal investigation of him would be dropped. That at least I can understand. The disturbing part is that I found it looking to see if I could confirm this genuinely warped story I found at jekyl.com. (Jekyl has no permalinks.) I just have no comment on this one. The Lighter Side of Terrorist Atrocities The Onion, desperately trying to regain its status as the most trusted news source in China, has scooped the world media on the recent discovery near the city of Potzrebie of the body of Mad Magazine reporter Phil Fonebone, believed to have been murdered by Blecchistani terrorists. Though many of the specifics regarding Fonebone's murder remain unclear, some details are known. The body was badly decomposed, but coroners identified it by its oversized, folded-over feet. As for the identity of the perpetrators, reports suggest the involvement of one or more mysterious, trench-coated espionage agents dressed in either all-white or all-black clothing, and described as "angular, birdlike males with wide-brimmed, pointy hats."
A recently leaked memo from the State Department also confirms the interception of a Morse-coded message suggesting that the plot may have been masterminded by a shadowy figure known only as "Prohias." This same figure may have been responsible for an elaborate swivel-turret backwards-firing cannon found at the scene of the dirigible attack.
At the time of his capture, Fonebone was tracking down members of the al-Jaffi terrorist network, a group widely believed responsible for the devastating Snappy Answers To Stupid Questions Atrocities, a string of May suicide bombings intended to undermine efforts to establish democracy in Blecchistan. Asked if they knew anything about rumored al-Jaffi involvement in the Fonebone murder, suspects detained in connection with the bombings replied only with a series of three sarcastic variations on "No," leaving a fourth response blank for State Department officials to fill in themselves.
It is suspected that the murder may have been caused by Mad's refusal to print several recent pamphlets from the Blecchistan League of Evil America Haters (BLEAH), including the titles 'Israelity Bites', 'Jew Lies', and 'I Know What You Yid Last Summer'. The controversial pamphlets can be found here.
When asked for the White House response to the murder, spokesman Alfred E. Fleischer said, "What - me worry?" New Linkage I've added numerous new links in the blog roll in the last few days. Silt and Sideshow are both part of the growing liberal echo chamber of the blogosphere, and I've been meaning to put them in for a while. Silt has been a bit inactive lately, but Sideshow has some particularly good posts in the last few days that I'll be commenting on further, time permitting. Armed Liberal is a somewhat offputting name for me. I tend to agree with Rabi: "When I hear the word 'gun', I reach for my culture." Guns and motorcycles really aren't my thing, but smart commentary is. This blog is just too good to ignore.
Max Sawicky has a new page design that I like much better than his old one, including a more accessible blog roll that very tastefully includes the Nuisance. And he writes in a language that is, for an economist, almost indistinguishable from English.
I don't really want to link to the same name blogs that everyone else does. That's why I don't link LGF , Pejman, Clueless, or several other big name, mostly conservative, blogs, even though I like them and read them with great frequency. If you're reading this blog, you almost certainly already know about them. I do link Instapundit, but it's the law, what can I do?
I would rather link to newer and smaller blogs. There actually are some blogs out there that are even newer and arguably more obscure than the Nuisance. I've added several to my roll: Terminus, Indepundit, Silflay Hraka, and Chilicheeze.
You don't have to be liberal to get on the Nuisance blog roll, although it does help. Happy Fun Pundit is way to the right, but makes the cut anyway by being very funny.
Muslimpundit has been commented out because to make the roll, you actually have to do some blogging. Nothing would make me happier than to have Adil end his silence, inshallah, so I could slay the fatted calf and welcome him back to my list. Kausfiles is also gone until he gets a linking address at Slate that actually works. Thursday, June 13, 2002
According to Silflay Hraka, we have a ways to go before the war on terrorism can be considered officially won. (Link borrowed from Edward Boyd.) Wednesday, June 12, 2002
Lies, Damn Lies, and Conservative Statistics Instapundit today posts an item quoting from an article in Reason attacking Rachel Carson for misuse of statistics in her Famous book, "Silent Spring".
Although it sounds alarming, Carson’s statistic is essentially meaningless unless it’s given some context, which she failed to supply. It turns out that the percentage of children dying of cancer was rising because other causes of death, such as infectious diseases, were drastically declining.
In fact, cancer rates in children have not increased, as they would have if Carson had been right that children were especially susceptible to the alleged health effects of modern chemicals. Just one rough comparison illustrates this point: In 1938 cancer killed 939 children under 14 years old out of a U.S. population of 130 million. In 1998, according to the National Cancer Institute, about 1,700 children died of cancer, out of a population of more than 280 million. In 1999 the NCI noted that "over the past 20 years, there has been relatively little change in the incidence of children diagnosed with all forms of cancer; from 13 cases per 100,000 children in 1974 to 13.2 per 100,000 children in 1995."
Of course, these aren't those squishy, soft-headed, statistics that relativistic, Luddite, anti-Enlightenment liberal environmentalists love to terrify the innocent with. A good conservative/libertarian writer would never resort to such tricks, especially after just attacking an environmentalist for them. These are firm, trustworthy, conservative statistics with rock-hard pecs and abs, ready to stand up to the toughest challenge.
Aren't they?
The 81% increase in child fatalities looks unimpressive compared to the 115% increase in population. But the first problem is exactly that the comparison is to total population. We know that the percentage of the population in older brackets has increased dramatically in this period. Logic dictates that the percentage of younger groups in the population, including children, would have gone down. In the 1940 census, 36.3% of the population was under 21; in 2000 28.6% was under 20. So by comparing rates in children against total population instead of comparing against population of children, Baily is distorting the numbers by about 20%.
But this isn't the real trick. The real problem is that Bailey is comparing cancer fatalities and ignoring the dramatic improvements in treatments over the comparison period. From 1960 to the late 1980s, chances for 5 year survival of a child diagnosed with cancer went up dramatically , from 28% to 70%. For the period from 1938 to 1998, the difference would be even higher. So if cancer fatalities have stayed fairly constant for that period, it follows that cancer incidence must have risen dramatically.
According to this NCI report, from 1975 to 1995 mortality rates for children dropped 40% while incidence rates were rising at 0.8% per year. Incidentally, this report defines 'children' as birth - 19. If Bailey's report does the same, that's one more problem in comparing it to a report on children aged birth - 13. Bailey has just thrown out some numbers to make it look impressive - as long as you don't look too closely.
The bottom line is that you just can't make any meaningful statements about environmental risks for cancer by comparing mortality rates over generations. Any environmental factor more subtle than smoking 4 packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day while working in an asbestos mine will be drowned out by the treatment improvements.
Sunday, June 09, 2002
Thanks to blogger N. Z. Bear, who mentioned this site with some kind words on Thursday. And now that I've installed a new counter, I can confirm my belief that it was the Bear who put visits to this site at an all time high on Thursday and Friday. The Bear incidentally mentioned a post which I put up concern Media Whores Online and the watch blog that criticises it. You can find below a post which responds to a critique responding to my post which attacks Instapundit's mention of the watchblog which attacks the blog which attacks the mainstream media which attacks everyone except itself.
Dude, my meta can whup your meta's ass.
Saturday, June 08, 2002
Tapped is being uncharacteristically silly in this item on Salon's MWO article: Salon deserves praise for running a piece critical of MWO, even if the article itself left something to be desired. Wingnuts: Remember this the next time you accuse Salon of being a Democratic mouthpiece.
What exactly is so praiseworthy about running an article that you concede isn't especially good? After all, back when it was worth checking out every day, Salon ran some brutal articles criticising Clinton with real reporting. The New York Times savaged Clinton and Gore time after time for 8 years while being a lapdog for Bush. I didn't notice the wingnuts noticing.
Why is it, incidentally, that the few liberal outlets have to please (and print) conservatives to be respectable? Salon for years was a regular outlet for Vincent, Horowitz and Paglia. With the exception of Paglia, who is utterly trite and worthless on politics but often insightful on culture, it certainly wasn't because they either wrote well or had anything original to say.
And it isn't only Salon. Sullivan, before he made his living complaining about conservatives being frozen out of the media, made his reputation in the US as editor of the New Republic. Slate has many conservatives in its Breakfast Club feature, not to mention Kaus, who really isn't fooling anybody when he claims he's still a Democrat. Even the Nation has Hitchens, who really isn't a conservative pundit, but is so addicted to nasty personal attacks against Democrats that he might as well be. TAP is about the only major liberal publication that doesn't have an obvious house conservative, and good for them. It's not as if conservatives lack TV, radio, and print outlets where they can whine about the liberal media.
The total number of house liberals I know of in National Review, Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page combined is 0. (I have looked, but if any reader can point out one I missed I'll correct this.) The Endangered Texas RINO A group of Texas GOPers is pushing to prevent anyone from running as a Republican whom they consider to be insufficiently sincere in backing the state party's platform. The Texas platform calls for, among other things, teaching creation science and re-occupying the Panama Canal, but it seems that those positions may not be 'core principles' and are therefore optional for Party candidates. At first I was amused by this, since a party really doesn't determine its own candidates. But they do have a plan for kicking out candidates who don't match their standards, and some ambiguous precedents that suggest it might possibly be legal. So if a candidate fails to match some Central Committee's standards of ideological purity, other factors - for instance winning a primary election - just might become irrelevant. As a descendant of one-time members of the Communist Party, I can certainly respect their goals. If it hadn't maintained its firm opposition to all forms of revisionism through repeated expulsions, the CPUSA wouldn't be the major political and intellectual force it is today.
And as a Democrat, I wish Robert Johnson and his allies the best of luck. Friday, June 07, 2002
Rant and Counter Rant Jay Caruso, one of the bloggers at Media Whores Online Watch, which I blasted on Wednesday, has put up a response to my criticisms at Daily Rant, his other blog. Who's got time to write 2 blogs, by the way? Especially since Jay also says he has a young child. I would barely have time for one, except for my convenient lack of a life. Anyway, to get to Jay's criticisms:
I wrote: MWO Watch copies the loud, in your face attitude of MWO, but it doesn't copy their interest in actual facts. It prefers insults and sneers to troubling exercises like research.
Jay answered:First of all, I'd like to know what 'actual facts' Alex is referring to on MWO. Here is a quote from a commentary they had regarding a new story coming out in Esquire about President Bush:
I would definitely agree that MWO is an opinion-rich environment, with more than an occasional cheap shot. But if you look around, there are plenty of facts there.
For instance, one current article, "BUSH, CHENEY, AND THE HALLIBURTON SCANDAL", has numerous facts, apparently mostly cribbed from an article in the Boston Globe, that I have seen reported sparsely or not at all elsewhere:
Another story describes Tucker Carlson on 'Crossfire' repeating the bogus claims that FBI agents set the Waco fire and Dee Dee Myers meekly going along with him, with extensive quotes from transcripts.
So there is some significant meat on the site, along with the invective.
MWO Watch:
I don't know what MWO said about this. They either keep no archives at all or hide them someplace very hard to find, which is atrocious.
About this story in general, what amazed me, and also demonstrated how badly the media elite is in need of an aggressive watchdog, is that the Post was universally credited with 'breaking' a story that had appeared in a major newspaper the previous year.
I noted that in two consecutive posts, MWO Watch had mocked MWO for an ad hominem shot at Rush Limbaugh, then engaged in some pretty crude insults of its own to readers sending critical e-mails. Jay replied:
There has been a common misconception that MWO Watch is a site that is written with one voice, and the critics refer to posts by two separate people as though Henry and I have some kind of rules to abide by. This is not the case. I post when I feel like it and Henry posts when he feels like it. We'll email each other tipping each other off to certain things, but what we post is done on our own. Henry decided to make a comment about MWO and their use of the term 'fathead' with respect to Rush Limbaugh. My comments responding to other comments are irrelevant in that regard.
As for me, anybody who has read this site, knows that I am respectful to dissenting views, and do not engage in ad hominem here, and I appreciate that my liberal readers have not done so either. I like the dissent, and there are times when faithful readers like Midderpidge offer some rebuttal to what I write, which makes me think more about the issue. However, I am not about to offer a shred of respect for some left wing nut who is going to call me a fucking Nazi!
Jay, there's an old Jewish saying: When you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. The Rant (which is ultimately just as partisan as MWO Watch) posts intelligent, respectful commentary and gets respectful critiques of your positions. MWO Watch posts red meat invective and gets responses comparing you to notorious murderers or calling you a Nazi. Maybe there's a lesson in that.
Now we enter, with grave trepidation, the swamps of Florida. MWO routinely refers to the 2000 election as stolen, a position with which, for the record, I agree. MWO Watch posted an article under the headline "MWO's BIGGEST WHOPPER - SO FAR" on the recount.
MWO:"As everyone knows from subsequent reports making clear that overvotes would have been included in the recount - and making clear that Al Gore won under all six scenarios counting overvotes and undervotes - the US Supreme Court did cast the deciding vote installing Usurper."
MWO Watch:That is a total lie. Overvotes would not have been included in the recounts. Florida law at the time said as much.[Emphasis in original.]
The overvotes in question were ballots where a vote was entered for one candidate and the same candidate's name was entered on the write-in line. There were overvotes that included votes for multiple candidates, but these ballots could not have been counted. The countable overvotes are known to have tilted significantly to Gore.
The order by the Florida Supreme Court called for only the counting of undervotes. However, Slate showed that the Judge who was supervising the recount, Terry Lewis, was considering adding overvotes to the count. If he had, and the recount had been completed, Gore would have very probably won.
Contrary to the flat statement of MWO Watch, we simply don't know whether the overvotes would have been included. But it seems likely they would have:
By the way, this is all focusing on minutia while ignoring the basic question. MWO Watch doesn't seem to dispute that Gore would have won if all the legal votes had been counted. They're pretty much just saying that, even if the recount had gone forward, due to mistakes by the Gore attorneys and the Florida Supremes, enough valid Gore votes would have been missed for Bush still to win. Once you concede that Gore, along with the national popular vote, seems to have won the plurality of legal Florida votes - and also there's little dispute that Gore had a sizable majority in votes that had to be thrown out because of confusing ballot design - you're pretty much admitting that Bush's legitimacy rests, at best, on a legal technicality.
Jay also disagrees with my characterizing Instapundit's item as 'endorsing' MWO Watch. It doesn't explicitly say that the blog is good, and MWO Watch isn't on Glenn's lengthy blog roll. (Neither are Daily Rant or Public Nuisance.) I still think that's a reasonable interpretation of Glenn's line, "Advantage: Blogosphere!". Feel free to decide for yourself.
Thursday, June 06, 2002
How Can I Fraudulently Inflate My Stock's Price and then Sell? See Page 143. A fascinating article recently about financial shenanigans at Digital Lightwave and the connection to the Church of Scientology. The article actually seems to pull some punches. Previous reports I've seen on Digital Lightwave documented massive insider selling by Scientologists in key company positions shortly before the January 1998 admission that an incredible 80% of sales in 3rd qtr 1997 were phony.
Presumably this detail, and some others we may never know, were left out at the suggestion of lawyers. What's left is still quite good.
Jihad vs McCrusade Da Professor today comments on the oddity of objecting to the word 'Crusades' while criticizing anyone who objects to the word 'jihad'. As my regular readers (both of you) know, the Nuisance discussed this point at length a week ago.
Advantage: Nuisance! This Isn't Getting Any Prettier The Catholic sex scandal is hitting what seems to be a new low today, with police effectively investigating defrocked priest Stephen Kiessle for murder. Kiessle's vacation home in Truckee, near Reno, is being searched for evidence in the disappearance of Amber Swartz. Swartz was 7 years old when she disappeared from her home in Pinole June 3, 1988. She has never been seen since.
Kiessle at the time already had a criminal record for molesting boys, which led to his removal from the priesthood. He wasn't investigated in 1988, although he was living on the same block as Swartz, because his record had been expunged.
In May, Kiessle was arrested after 3 women came forward to charge him with allegedly molesting them while he was a priest in the 1970s. The women reportedly were close to Amber in age and appearance when they charge that Kiessle molested them. There is no solid evidence as yet connecting him to the Swartz case.
Wednesday, June 05, 2002
You Can Lead a Horticulture... Glenn Reynolds today praises a new blog dedicated to attacking Media Whores Online, suggesting that it raises serious doubts about the factual reliability of MWO.
I'll put in a link to MWO Watch because this is a blog and that's what blogs do, but I'll put it in with a warning: I've read at least 60 blogs and likely more, dozens with an aggressive right-wing tilt that I completely disagree with. I've blogrolled and/or linked to quite a number of them. But I can't recall ever seeing one less worth your time than this.
MWO Watch copies the loud, in your face attitude of MWO, but it doesn't copy their interest in actual facts. It prefers insults and sneers to troubling exercises like research.
Of the articles presently on the site, the top one attacks an article in Salon written by Jean-Charles Brisard apparently suggesting links (I don't have a Salon subscription, so I can't see the full article) between pipeline negotiations with the Taliban, the 9/11 attacks, and the attack on Afghanistan. To refute this claim, they cite a Nation article by David Corn which does have a few paragraphs challenging Brisard's accuracy, but is primarily concerned with debunking the entirely different 9/11 conspiracy theory that the US government ignored specific, detailed prior knowledge of the attacks. MWO Watch also mentions the crackpot theory that there was no Pentagon crash, just to associate the people they're criticizing with an obviously nutty claim that they have never endorsed. The link of all this to MWO is that "the Horse will go nuts over this later today, I'm sure."
The next item criticizes MWO for using the term 'fathead' for Rush Limbaugh, saying, "MHO desperately hangs onto their ad hominem attack... Or, you know, you could criticize people based on the merits of their arguments."
The third shows the MWO Watch watchdogs following their own advice with their critics: "Hey guys, when you stop sniffing your fingers after having them up your rear end, try and actually thing[sic] of something original to say "
To support Glenn's claim that they've challenged the accuracy of MWO, they put up a link to what they themselves cite as their best proof that MWO is unreliable. It's an article on the Florida 2000 mess that brings nothing new to the table
I could convert this blog to only arguments about the Florida election/recount and have enough items to go on blogging for months. But it's a dead issue, and I wouldn't convince a single person who disagrees with my take on it; pretty fast I wouldn't be read by one. So I won't go there. I'll just say that the MWO Watch article on the topic will convince you if you already believe that Bush's 'election' was clean, it won't if you don't. And if you followed the controversy closely from either side, it will tell you nothing you don't already know.
It doesn't prove that MWO is unreliable about facts, only that there is a vast chasm between the interpretation of the Florida recount as seen by highly partisan Republicans and highly partisan Democrats. And at least some Republicans assume that anyone who doesn't see things their way is deliberately lying. None of this is news.
I feel pretty confident that I could turn in work far better than the junk on MWO Watch to Professor Reynolds and in return, get a shining new 'F' along with a firmly-worded recommendation that if I'm really determined to follow a career related to law, I should look into current openings in the highly competitive courthouse janitor job market. Obviously the standards for a blog and a law school paper aren't the same, but good writing and good argument are reasonably constant factors whatever the medium. Since the Instapundit endorsement is probably the most influential in the blogosphere, it should be reserved for more worthwhile material than this. Josh Marshall, in his indispensable Talking Points, has a nominee for Slate's Whopper of the Week feature, but does he really have the goods? Marshall nominates Weldon Kennedy, who said of the Moussaoui search warrant imbroglio, "The computer was searched and guess what? There was nothing significant on there pertaining to 9/11. "
Marshall says this is false, citing an article from Newsweek:
People close to Rowley and her Minnesota colleagues say they were devastated after the attacks, convinced that they could have done more to stop the plot if only Washington had listened. (Moussaoui’s computer, searched after September 11, revealed information about crop-dusting and large jets, and his belongings included the phone number of lead hijacker Mohamed Atta’s roommate.) (Emphasis added.)
Was the phone number on the computer or elsewhere in his property? If it wasn't on the computer, Kennedy wasn't lying. He maybe wasn't even really spinning, since the computer seems to be the only item agents were trying to search prior to 9/11. I have seen stories that seemed to say the number was actually on the computer. This article implies that it was in a separate notebook, and the Newsweek story doesn't contradict that. Andrew Sullivan, who still hasn't figured out how to do that permalink trick, has found another and more shocking way to surprise: he actually has something nice to say today about Bill Clinton. Hey, don't look at me like that. It's really true! As soon as I finish posting, I'm headed down to Hell for the snowball fight.
Sullivan quotes and links to this Post article with figures showing the 90's boom did lift poorer Americans as well as the rich. He uses this to make the point that "These numbers should undermine the notion that free markets and free people cannot generate wealth without immiserating the poorest. Wealth really does trickle down and up - even when a country is absorbing unprecedented numbers of poor immigrants."
Sullivan is arguing against a straw man here: nobody that I know of argues that generating wealth automatically hurts the poor. Really, such a claim would be prima facie absurd. The question is whether it automatically helps them - even with a government like the current one that actively tries to redistibute wealth upwards and mostly ignores whether any is actually being created.
What the Clinton boom really proved is that policies that conservatives have long argued, and still argue, are always destructive are in fact quite consistent with nearly ideal economic conditions. Clinton raised marginal income tax rates, which Republicans loudly predicted that would cause a recession. Instead it caused a budget surplus and soaring employment. He tightened environmental enforcement and improved worker safety. The catastrophe that conservatives confidently predicted never arrived.
Well, actually, it did. But only after Clinton left office and all his 'class warfare' policies were replaced by 'pro-growth' policies.
In addition to permalinks, Andy has trouble with just plain links. Here is the Times story he tries unsuccessfully to link to. (Registration required.)
Andy's complaint that the Times story works extra hard to make the numbers sound bad is pretty valid. The headline is Gains of 90's Did Not Lift All, Census Shows, and the lead paragraph says:
Despite the surging economy of the 1990's that brought affluence to many Americans, the poor remained entrenched, the Census Bureau reported today. The bureau's statistics for the 50 states and the District of Columbia show that 9.2 percent of families were deemed poor in 2000, a slight improvement from 10 percent in 1989.
Other numbers further down in the story do show the substantial improvements that took place in the decade.
Since Sullivan is always and exclusively looking for and finding liberal spin, he never mentions the most obvious oddity about the stories: both the Times and Post managed to publish fairly lengthy stories analyzing the 90s boom with the same thing missing - neither story ever mentions Bill Clinton. Clinton's role in the boom is so plain that even Andrew Sullivan no longer entirely denies it, but the 'liberal' media still manages not to mention it. Sunday, June 02, 2002
So you think you know how to deconstruct gangsta rap lyrics? The Poor Man is ready to test your skills. He is also ready to challenge your understanding of Led Zeppelin, but I thought the use of Zeppelin lyrics by Captain Scott was even cleverer. Friday, May 31, 2002
Eric Alterman and Charles Kuffner, both of whom seem to know baseball better than I do, have been discussing the lack of respect given to Barry Bonds, and agree that it is at least in part due to his unpopularity with professional sports journalists. That brings to mind a story I read years ago about another player who was famous for surliness to reporters. I believe the man in question was Alex Johnson , a quality player from 1964 - 1976, but well short of Cooperstown numbers.
A reporter asked, "Alex, last year you had 12 homers at the All Star break; this year you only have two. What's the difference?"
Johnson stared at the reporter, thought for a moment, and replied, "Ten, asshole." More Speech Issues Google is allegedly censoring ads by noted businesswoman and now blogger Anita Roddick. Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop chain, took exception to the recent statement by John Malkovich that he would like to shoot Robert Fisk. Specifically, she said, "His threat to shoot Robert Fisk for his honest reportage on Israel is but further evidence that Malkovich is a vomitous worm."
Now on my personal search engine, the name Fisk is much more likely to come up under 'vomitous worm' than 'honest reportage'. But that's no reason why Ms Roddick shouldn't be able to express her contrary view.
After Roddick made the Malkovich statement, google decided that her site violated their policy against "sites that advocate against groups or individuals." That's a pretty broad category. If taken at face meaning, it would ban every political blog I know of that is worth reading, along with quite a few that aren't. (Deciding which category the Nuisance fits into is an exercise left for the reader.)
On Jihad at Harvard Harvard commencement speaker Zayed Yasin has now announced that he is removing the word 'jihad' from the title of his speech, although he is not changing the text, which very few people have seen. If you need to be brought up to speed on this controversy, the place to go is blogger Matthew Yglesias. Yasin seems to feel that negative reaction to the word 'jihad' is over-sensitive: “It’s a speech about the privileged opportunities and responsibilities we have as graduates...and about how these are enunciated in both the Islamic concept of jihad and in American ideals,” Yasin said.
“The idea is that we live in difficult and trying times and we will have to struggle both within ourselves to do the right thing and with very difficult problems that affect our communities,” he said.
Yasin said he is not surprised by the outcry that followed the announcement of his speech title.
“That is part of why I wrote this speech,” Yasin said. “Jihad is not something that should make someone feel uncomfortable. It’s a matter of other people deciding what they think jihad is and attributing to the word the product of their own imagination.”
While not surprised by the reaction, Yasin did say that he was surprised at the vehemence of the response.
“More disturbing is ad hominim attacks upon the work that I’ve done and on my personal life,” he said. “They’re very disappointing. I expected more from the Harvard community. I’m referring to people who have called me anti-Semite, to people who have said I support terrorism...All of these are untrue.”
Now, some of us may remember that last year, shortly after 9/11, George Bush referred to a 'crusade' against terrorism. This was widely condemned and resulted in a mini-controversy that stayed mini mostly because Bush himself immediately withdrew the statement and apologized for using the word.
In the course of this controversy, it was generally allowed that Muslims had the right to be offended by the use of the word crusade. I didn't particularly hear people saying, "Look, those wars ended around 800 years ago. And besides, news flash: your side won. Get over it, for pity's sake."
Nor did people say: "OK, Christians got together and launched a war of aggression against Moslems. So what? The main thing that was unusual about the Crusades is that they were a counter-offensive in a period when Moslems were generally stronger and launched wars of aggression against Christian states in the West, and other non-Moslem states in the East, routinely."
Historically, the Crusades weren't even all that anti-Moslem. The First Crusade took time out on its jouney East to burn and pillage Jewish communities in numerous European cities. Perhaps the most successful Crusade, certainly the one which won the richest booty, was the Fourth, which in 1205 sacked the Greek and Christian city of Constantinople. Crusades were subsequently preached against Cathars and other heretical movements well after any serious attempt at recovering Jerusalem or other strongholds in Moslem lands (other than the remaining Moslem areas of Spain) were forgotten.
In fact, persons of Jewish or Eastern Orthodox faith have easily as much cause to jump at the word 'Crusade' as Moslems. They have, however, managed to live with events of almost a millenium ago.
While it seems to be entirely acceptable that Moslems leap into indignation at a mere mention of medieval atrocities, it is judged in some circles to be less acceptable that Americans are offended by the word 'jihad'. This in spite of the fact that less than one year ago, 3,000 of us were murdered in the name of jihad. In spite of the fact that millions of us personally knew one or more people who were murdered on 9/11 or in the terrorist acts of the present intifada. In spite of the fact that we know without doubt that others as I write are nurturing plots that they hope will result in equal or greater slaughter, in the name of jihad.
Having said this, I am not opposed to Mr Yasin giving his speech. To block the speech based on its subject would be unacceptable and contrary to our values.
However, I do note that the audience at the commencement has their own free speech rights, just as much as the speaker. I do not suggest any attempt to shout down or interrupt his speech, which would be consorship just as bad as barring it.
Speech can, however, take various forms.
Mr Yasin asserts that his concept of jihad is based on the idea "that we live in difficult and trying times and we will have to struggle both within ourselves to do the right thing and with very difficult problems that affect our communities ." These problems are universal, so we should see true jihad as being an opportunity for each of us, not linked to only one culture or religion.
In this broad interpretation of jihad, there are many jihads occurring at any time. A conspicuous current jihad is the struggle of the peoples of the United States and of Israel to maintain our nations against an evil and cowardly enemy that, being unable to strike at us directly, seeks to fight by killing unarmed people, in 'martyrdom' attacks that have no other purpose than to kill and maim the largest possible number of civilians, many of them infants, children, or elderly.
Part of this struggle, in fact much more challenging than mere military victory which is easily attainable for both Israel and the US, is the struggle to remain democratic societies which protect the rights of their Moslem citizens even when some of those citizens seek to undermine their societies, and which respect the rules of law and the laws of warfare while fighting against an enemy that has no respect for either and openly proclaims that their greatest strength is their 'love of death'.
By bringing American and Israeli flags to the event, and displaying them prominently when Mr Yasin is introduced and throughout his speech, Harvard students can demonstrate that they understand that the struggle for a better world is important for all of us, showing that they take Mr Yasin at his word in making their own commitments to jihad as 'struggle for personal growth and for wider peace and justice'. Res Ipse Loquitur "I get good advice, if you will, from their people based upon how we're doing business and how we're operating—over and above just the sort of normal by-the-books auditing arrangement." - Dick Cheney, in a promotional video for Arthur Andersen, explaining how Andersen helped him to cook his company's books while he was CEO of Halliburton. Stolen from a typically excellent piece by Michael Kinsley. Wednesday, May 29, 2002
SF State University Blogburst The following column by John Podhoretz appeared originally in the New York Post. May 14, 2002 -- The San Francisco Bay area is the new France - and that's not a compliment.
There's been a great deal of attention paid in recent weeks to the horrifying outbreak of anti-Semitism in France. Far less attention has been paid to an outbreak of anti-Semitism in Northern California that seems to be spreading like the awful spiritual disease it is.
Since the start of the year, there have been 50 documented cases of anti-Semitic acts in and around the Bay Area. That is more than three times as many as in all of 2001, according to Jonathan Bernstein of the Anti-Defamation League. He also reports that his office is the only one of the ADL's 30 regional bureaus to note an increase in anti-Jewish incidents.
There have been serious arson attempts on two synagogues. One temple, in Berkeley, would have been destroyed had a neighbor not spotted the fire on the roof. Another, in San Francisco, was pelted with Molotov cocktails.
It's worse at the universities. A man wearing a Jewish ritual skullcap was severely beaten on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. Students and faculty attending religious services at the Berkeley Hillel, the Jewish meeting house, were pelted with rotten eggs.
The Hillel house itself has been defaced with graffiti.
The comparison with France, where leading politicians have made public statements that stop just short of anti-Semitism and private statments that don't stop, feels to me, as a lifelong Bay Area resident, like a cheap shot.
It doesn't reflect what life through most of the area is like, and it doesn't seem to be based on close study of the facts - the arson incident that Podhoretz places in Berkeley actually took place in Oakland, and press reports I have seen don't mention Molotov cocktails in acounts of either incident.
In fact, the level of tension seems to me and nearly all the Jews I know to be lower than Podhoretz suggests. Even in the notorious People's Republic of Berkeley, the newly-elected president of the ASUC, the highest position in student government, is Jesse Gabriel, a Jew and an active Zionist.
I do not wish to trivialize the incidents that have occured, or imply that there is some 'acceptable' level of anti-Semitic violence that hasn't yet been exceeded. I just mean that the article, which almost sounds as if Jews in the Bay Area can no longer walk down the street without looking over their shoulders, is somewhat overheated.
The worst incident happened last week at San Francisco State University, where there is clearly no division between anti-Israel political sentiment and naked anti-Semitism. Demonstrations against Israel have been a daily occurrence there for months, and the rhetoric on campus has taken a literally medieval anti-Semitic turn.
Laurie Zoloth, a professor at San Francisco State University, put it bluntly and powerfully in a widely circulated e-mail: "I cannot fully express what it feels like to have to walk across campus daily, past posters of cans of soup with labels on them of drops of blood and dead babies, labeled 'canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites.' "
That's the explicit return of the "blood libel," the foul accusation leveled against the Jews of England in the 12th century that they were killing Gentile babies and using their blood in religious rituals.
The poster in question can be found here. It is assuredly true that such blatant racism directed at another ethnic minority (and financed in part through University funds) would never be tolerated.
It is worth noting that none of the groups which issued this repulsive poster have since apologized, with the exception of a pseudo-apology from the Muslim Students Association which essentially states:"We previously announced that Jews are inhuman monsters who murder Arab babies and drink their blood as a religious rite. We have since discovered that they do this for strictly secular reasons. We regret any error, however trivial."
When such expressions of infamy are not challenged, fought and defeated, those who voice them will only get more virulent. And that's what happened on May 8.
In an account confirmed by other witnesses, Laurie Zoloth described the disgusting denouement following a "Peace in the Middle East" rally sponsored by the SFSU Hillel.
A group of students, numbering around 50, had remained to chant afternoon prayers. At that moment, "Counter demonstrators poured into the plaza, screaming at the Jews to 'Get out or we will kill you' and 'Hitler did not finish the job.' I turned to the police and to every administrator I could find and asked them to remove the counter demonstrators from the plaza, to maintain the separation of 100 feet that we had been promised. The police told me that they had been told not to arrest anyone . . .
"The police could do nothing more than surround the Jewish students and community members who were now trapped in a corner of the plaza, grouped under the flags of Israel, while an angry, out of control mob, literally chanting for our deaths, surrounded us. . . . There was no safe way out of the Plaza. We had to be marched back to the Hillel House under armed S.F. police guard, and we had to have a police guard remain outside Hillel."
I can't really comment directly on the demonstration, which I wasn't at. Along with Podhoretz's version of Laurie Zoloth's account, at least one other first person account is included in the blogburst.
It seeks clear from the accounts both of the demonstration and the aftermatn that the SFSU administration has tried to maintain a scrupulously even approach throughout. The moral vacuity of attempting to be 'even-handed' when faced with a conflict between a peaceful demonstration supporting legitimately controversial positions and a counter-demonstration/riot screaming for genocide has been superbly dissected by the Armed Liberal.
Yesterday, following almost a week of silence, SFSU President Robert Corrigan issued a statement about the incident. "A small but terribly destructive number of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, many of whom were not SFSU students, abandoned themselves to intimidating behavior and statements too hate-filled to repeat," Corrigan wrote. "That encounter puts at risk all that we value and represent as a university community."
That's true, but it's insufficient. Had Corrigan more directly addressed the rise of anti-Semitism on his campus in the months preceding the riot, it might have been forestalled altogether. "Despite the claims of some," wrote Corrigan in an obvious effort to criticize Laurie Zoloth, "this is not an anti-Semitic campus."
Jews and especially Zionists facing a degree of hostility on left-leaning campuses is hardly new. There has been much discussion recently of a course taught at UC Berkeley which openly discouraged any students who were insufficiently committed to the cause from enrolling. The same thing happened almost 25 years ago when I was a student at Santa Cruz. A course in beginning Arabic was advertised in flyers with the statement "Anti-Arab racists need not apply." The obvious reference was to the UN resolution that "Zionism is a form of racism."
For some time now, such attacks at SF State have been considerably harsher.
In fairness to University President Robert Corrigan, who has not been looked on favorably in the blogosphere, it should be noted that the major local Jewish publication recently published an editorial asserting that he has been unfairly blamed for the situation. But I found myself unconvinced by the editorial; it mainly persuaded me
That's cold comfort to those Jewish students who have to endure being told on a daily basis that Hitler didn't finish the job. "The students are so brave," Laurie Zoloth told me, sighing. "But they shouldn't have to be brave."
This blog can only comment on one or two facets of the travesty at SFSU. Other dimensions of this incident and the alarming trends it represents are detailed in the full SFSU Blog Burst Index at Winds of Change.
The HappyFunPundit has a clever piece mocking the MPAA for blaming internet file trading for the 'mediocre' (only $100 mil a week) box office returns for Episode II: I submit that about 99% of the downloads of that movie were by dedicated fans who simply couldn't wait for the movie to open. Do you think such people would then avoid going to see it in the theater? Of course not. The people who downloaded that movie on the internet were the same ones standing in line at theaters for three days and being mocked by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
In short, the downloaders of that movie are your best customers, Rich. You didn't lose a penny to them. You won't even lose the DVD sales. Those people will buy the DVD, the T-shirts, the toys, the 'Special Edition' DVD, the 'Collector's Edition' DVD, the 'Ultimate' DVD, the "Director's Cut" DVD, the "Foley Artist Commentary" DVD, and a DVD showing the grips working on the droid costumes if you want to sell it to them. They'll buy any Star Wars tie-in product you can come up with. Except, of course, for Star Wars condoms. That idea should die in the planning room for obvious reasons.
Now, Dan is certainly right here on the central issue. But what's wrong with Collector's Edition Star Wars Episode II condoms, made in Yoda, Anakin, and Mace sizes? We all know that authentic fans never open the original packaging on their collectables. This is a perfect match!
Tuesday, May 28, 2002
The already-famous memo by FBI agent Coleen Rowley is now available on the web and makes grim and fascinating reading. The memo certainly strengthens the case that an independent investigation of the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11 is vital. Nothing here implicates Bush or senior administration officials, except in the very broad sense that as the man in charge Bush is finally responsible for the successes and failures of his watch. And although Mueller certainly doesn't shine in Rowley's picture, it should be remembered that he had been in office only for a few days on 9/11. What Rowley does implicate is the overly centralized and bureaucratic culture of the FBI, which comes across in her account as almost comically unwilling to take any risks. In describing the FBI bureaucrats as risk-averse, I am of course referring to their unwillingness to risk their career prospects, not the lives of Americans which they seemed quite willing to take chances with.
The problems in the FBI are clearly deeply rooted, going back probably to J. Edgar Hoover, the consummate bureaucrat and ultimate control freak. To obtain a simple search warrant for the belongings of a man already in custody, Rowley and her colleagues had to go through several layers of bureaucracy. Incredibly, they still faced bureaucratic roadblocks after 9/11. They had no knowledge of or access to the memo by Phoenix agent WIlliams, who the Post says "marked his memo 'routine,' knowing that it typically takes 60 days for such documents to go through the chain of command at FBI headquarters."
To meet its obligations in the current situation, the Bureau needs major reforms. It has to move into the 21st century, and allow agents who have similar concerns in Phoenix and Minnesota to communicate directly, instead of sending memos to Washington and praying that somebody there will take notice in a month or two. It has to empower its agents to act, instead of waiting for multiple levels of bureaucracy in Washington to review their plans.
A related point has been well made by Charles Dodgson: before we empower the FBI to take extensive new bites out of the Fourth Amendment in order to gather every piece of information it might possibly want, let's first try having it analyze and act on the information it already has.
Are there similar problems with the CIA? Very likely there are. Certainly the CIA, like the FBI, has a history of operating with little external review or accountability. Much more than the FBI, which is fairly continuously tested by the judiciary, it has had the power to mark its failures as 'top secret' and avoid responsibility for them. And before 9/11, it had problems forecasting other minor events, like the complete collapse of the entire Warsaw Pact.
An independent inquiry is the best means to start fixing the problems so that our security agencies can actually make us more secure.
Saturday, May 25, 2002
It's hard to say something original about the Star Wars franchise. It's hard for me; but not just me. Matt Honan has assembled the largest collection of links to blogger reviews and discussions of Episode II in the known galaxy (the Nuisance's review is linked to the Roman Numeral II in the second para), and if you look at several at random, you won't see a lot of startling insights. If you're Bruce Sterling, however, it's no problem at all. Thursday, May 23, 2002
From the Trenches of the Drug War - The Straight Facts "Staff members directed me to physically batter and verbally assault other clients. They gave me this directions when I was a client and when I was a Staff Trainee. I carried them out. So did hundreds if not tens of thousands of other kids. . . As hard as it has been to live with the reality of being clinically abused for nearly two years, it cannot compare with the complete nightmare of living with the fact that I abused other people repeatedly in the name of a thought control cult. It cannot compare with the nightmare of knowing that some of the people I abused have ended up in jail, or dead, and that I contributed to the destruction of their lives." James, Straight-Atlanta "Several children attempted suicide while staying with host families, but the attempts were not reported and the children were not treated. . . Some teen-age clients were forced to reveal their sexual fantasies during group sessions. Others were subjected to "spit therapy," where children would spit on each other to reduce their egos."
"So we were very concerned about a program which we looked at as being something of a private jail, utilizing techniques of torture and punishment which even a convicted criminal wouldn't be subject to. . . and I use their terminology--restraint techniques, it would be our terminology that it was child abuse and torture--was directed by Miller Newton."
Samantha Monroe was 12 years old in 1981 when her parents enrolled her in the Sarasota, Fla., branch of Straight Inc., an aggressive drub rehab center for teens.
Barely a teen, Samantha also had no history of drug abuse. But she spent the next two years of her life surviving Straight.
She was beaten, starved and denied toilet privileges for days on end. She describes her "humble pants," a punishment that forced her to wear the same pants for six weeks at a time. Because she was allowed just one shower a week, the pants often filled with feces, urine and menstrual blood. Often she was confined to her closet for days. She gnawed through her jaw during those "timeout" sessions, hoping she'd bleed to death.
She says that after she was raped by a male counselor, "the wonderful state of Florida paid for and forced me to have an abortion."
"Straight represents one of the worst excesses created by the drug war environment, where 'anything goes' kind of intolerance toward drug users prevails. It is a cult. plain and simple, of people who seize on parent's frustrations with their youngsters and then subject the kids to torture and brainwashing to make them obedient and drug-free."
"According to sworn testimony, Straight often left restrained group members sitting in their own urine, feces or vomit until suitable concessions were extracted."
"Straight is not a health care organization. It is a business posing as a health care organization and as a result hundreds of kids have been hurt. All of the business operations consist of fraud, double and triple billing of health insurance companies at the same time and they bill government grants while telling parents they are not the recipients of any kinds of government money."
The above quotes refer to Straight, an abusive drug treatment program primarily for teens. Most come from this web page.
What happens to the person who creates a program like this that, under the guise of therapy, abuses adolescents and destroys their lives? Some of the actions taken against the founders of Straight are listed here:
The author of the above article has posted several responses to it on his blog. Thanks to Eve Tushnet for the original reference. Andrew Sullivan has an interesting post under the title of "THE ABUSE OF MINORS - GIRLS" in today's crop. Of course, applying to Andrew the same standards he applies to the new Alterman blog, it doesn't actually matter that this posting tells a story, important in itself, that also makes legitimate points about the smearing of gay men in the Catholic church's current sex abuse scandal. What really matters is that in three paragraphs actually written by Andrew, two of them quite brief, there are 9 uses of I, me, my, we and our. And furthermore, in the second one, he uses a '(' without a matching ')'. Clearly, this proves that his argument shouldn't be taken seriously and his opinions are simply wrong. The Nuisance, incidentally, can find only two uses of first person pronouns in his own voice in the last several days' postings, leaving him far behind Messrs. Sullivan and Alterman both. Proving once again that professional pundits are more full of themselves, and often more full of other effluvia, than amateurs. Unqualified Offerings carries the following report from the International Herald Tribune: Sometime in the summer of 2001 GID headquarters in Amman, Jordan, made a communications intercept deemed so important that King Abdullah's men relayed its contents to Washington, probably through the CIA station at the U.S. Embassy in Amman....
The text stated clearly that a major attack was planned inside the continental United States. It said aircraft would be used. But neither hijacking, nor, apparently, precise timing nor targets were named. The code name of the operation was mentioned: in Arabic, Al Ourush al Kabir, "The Big Wedding."
Now that code name, "The Big Wedding" is highly significant. For Islamic radicals, it would indicate a suicide operation, since they believe that terrorists are married to 72 virgins in heaven. The invaluable Memri site discusses this in this report:
The death announcements of martyrs in the Palestinian press often take the form of wedding, not funeral, announcements. "Blessings will be accepted immediately after the burial and until 10 p.m. …at the home of the martyr's uncle," read one suicide bomber's death notice.[12] "With great pride, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad marries the member of its military wing… the martyr and hero Yasser Al-Adhami, to 'the black-eyed,'" read another.
Al Risala, the Hamas mouthpiece, published the will of Sa'id Al-Hutari, who carried out the June 1, 2001 suicide bombing outside the disco near the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv that killed 23, mostly teenage girls. "I will turn my body into bombs that will hunt the sons of Zion, blast them, and burn their remains," Al-Hutari wrote. "Call out in joy, oh my mother; distribute sweets, oh my father and brothers; a wedding with 'the black-eyed' awaits your son in Paradise."
The same view is also evident in news reports in the Palestinian press. Thus, for example, the reporter Nufuz Al-Bakri reported the death of Wail 'Awad as follows: "The mother of Wail 'Awad, from Deir El-Balah, did not plan on holding a second wedding for her eldest son, after his marriage on August 10, 2001 to his fiancée in a simple ceremony attended only by the family. But yesterday was Wail's real wedding day, and the angels of the Merciful married him, together with the [other] martyrs, to 'the black-eyed,' as all around [them] rose the cries of joy that his mother dreamed of on the day of his wedding [to his fiancée]."
The phrase "The Big Wedding" would seem to indicate that a large operation with multiple suicide terrorists was planned.
The Tribune indicates that a Moroccan agent inside al Qaeda provided even more specific information, although they include a caveat that this report could not be fully confirmed:
The reports said that a Moroccan secret agent named Hassan Dabou succeeded in infiltrating Al Qaeda. Several weeks before Sept. 11, the story ran, he informed his chiefs in King Mohammed VI's royal intelligence service that Osama bin Laden's men were preparing "large-scale operations in New York in the summer or autumn of 2001." The warning was said to have been passed on to Washington.
Dabou was said to have told his bosses in Rabat that bin Laden was "very disappointed" by the failure of the first bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993 to topple the towers.
It was also known in 2001 that Algerian terrorists had already been foiled in a plot to fly a hijacked plane into the Eiffel Tower, and terrorists associated with al Qaeda had planned to crash a plane into CIA headquarters.
A suspicious pattern had been observed of Arabs with suspected terror connections taking flight training. A recommendation that other flight schools be checked for similar individuals had been made, but already rejected.
One person with terrorist sympathies who had sought out training in piloting 747s had been arrested. It would seem that his arrest was due much less to FBI competence than an alert flight instructor who had to prod a reluctant FBI to act:
Privy to a briefing by the flight school, [Congressman James] Oberstar said Zacarias insisted on learning to fly a 747 -- even though he couldn't even fly a single-engine Cessna.
An alert instructor called the FBI but Oberstar said he faced a bureaucratic runaround. "At that point, the instructor said, 'do you realize that a 747 loaded with fuel can be a bomb?' It got the FBI agents' attention."
The instructor reportedly told the FBI on Aug. 15 Zacarias Moussaoui might be plotting a hijacking. The next day, he was arrested.
Now, certainly it is easier to piece these bits of data together now than it was in July of 2001. But consider the above facts and the recent statement of Condi Rice:
I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile. All of this reporting about hijacking was about traditional hijacking. You take a plane. People were worried they might blow one up, but they were mostly worried that they might try to take a plane and use it for release of the Blind Sheikh or some of their own people.
Clearly, nobody at senior levels in the government was thinking about the use of hijacked planes as missiles. But with the intelligence that was available, the failure to at least consider the risk suggests incompetence. The Jordanian report all alone contained the key element, multiple suicides using airplanes. The information from the Philippines shows that al Qaeda had considered this method. And the alleged Moroccan report gives the location and even the exact target.
If the facts weren't being connected, it seems likely that it was because nobody in the new administration was paying much attention. TAP showed evidence, long before the current controversy began, that counter-terrorism was a higher priority for Clinton than for Bush, and probably would have been a higher priority for Gore.
More recently, it has been shown that terrorism was a particularly low priority for Justice under Ashcroft:
In the late 90s the threat of a terrorist attack on US soil became a near obsession in the Clinton administration, particularly in the justice department under Janet Reno. But her successor had other ideas.
On September 10 last year, the last day of what is now seen as a bygone age of innocence, Mr Ashcroft sent a request for budget increases to the White House. It covered 68 programmes, none of them related to counter-terrorism.
He also sent a memorandum to his heads of departments, stating his seven priorities. Counter-terrorism was not on the list. He turned down an FBI request for hundreds more agents to be assigned to tracking terrorist threats.
Given the statement that "A Phoenix FBI agent’s request for a canvass of U.S. flight schools for al Qaeda terrorists was formally rejected within several weeks of his July 10 memo, after mid-level officials at FBI headquarters determined they did not have the manpower to carry out the task", the refusal to hire more agents for counter-terrorism looks particularly damning.
Even assuming that Ashcroft was unaware at the time of much of the above evidence, he certainly knew that Bin Laden had carried out past deadly strikes against US targets abroad and would obviously love to strike at the US itself. He took the threats to commercial airliners so seriously that he stopped using them. So by what logic did he decide that hiring agents for counter-terrorism investigations was a bad idea? What were those seven priorities that all took precedence over terrorism?
One more piece of the puzzle: John O'Neill, who led the FBI's anti-Bin Laden efforts, resigned in August 2001. It should be noted that O'Neill had felt frustrated under Clinton as well as Bush, especially by lack of co-operation in tracking leads in Saudi Arabia. And personal factors, including debts and his ability to gain a large pay increase in the private sector, also probably affected his decision. In spite of those factors, it speaks loudly that the one man in the US government who knew how important stopping Bin Laden was, and had the inside position to know what was being done, was so unimpressed by the Bush administration's pre 9/11 commitment that he just gave up and walked away.
Tuesday, May 21, 2002
As the Kashmir conflict heats up yet again (or maybe it's cooling off today) this article gives an interesting insider account on how President Clinton worked to defuse an earlier crisis. The Kolkata Libertarian blog, which discussed the same article, has a pretty grim take on the prospect of the current crisis leading to nuclear war. Monday, May 20, 2002
An anti-terror suggestion by N. Z. Bear has been jumped on by Instapundit and others. Bear noted in response to e-mail that the idea has already been tried in fiction, in the Niven/Pournelle alien invasion saga "Footfall". But there is a far more apropos precedent: it has also been tried against suicide attackers in real life. (Bear mentions this story, and knows that a group of writers including Heinlein worked for the Navy in WW II, but seems to have no knowledge of what the group was up to.) From Miller's outstanding biography of L. Ron Hubbard, "Bare-Faced Messiah", pp 109 - 110: While he was at Princeton, Ron [Hubbard] was invited to join a group of science-fiction writers who met every weekend at Robert Heinlein's apartment in Philadelphia to discuss possible ways of countering the kamikaze menace in the Pacific. They were semi-official, brainstorming sessions that Heinlein had been asked to organize by the Navy, in the faint hope of coming up with a defence against young Japanese pilots on suicide missions. 'I had been ordered to round up science fiction writers for this crash project,' Heinlein recalled, 'the wildest brains I could find.'...
Heinlein's group never came up with any ideas about how to prevent US Navy losses from Kamikaze pilots.
Pain. Death. Apocalyse. Much of it fun. The latest installment of Star Wars has impressive effects and fits snugly into the developing story arc of the franchise. The good news is that there is very little Jar Jar. Unfortunately, there is far too much Hayden Christensen, who as Anakin is generally far less lifelike and expressive than Yoda. But blaming Christensen is not really fair. No actor can fail to look and presumably feel embarassed when delivering lines like (quoted from memory and probably inaccurately):
"I cannot forget the kiss you should not have given me."
"I am not afraid to die. I have died a little bit every day since you came back into my life."
And those really aren't low points, most of the lines and all the romantic parts are like that. All you need is a few misspellings and this dialogue could fit right into The Eye of Argon. Both of the love scenes are downright embarassing. If Lucas can't write dialogue, and he pretty plainly can't, he should take a few thou out of his hundred million budget and hire someone who can. Or hire actors with the wit to improvise, as Harrison Ford did - Ford reportedly changed the pedestrian and boring "I love you too" after Leia admitted she loved him to the rakish, more fitting, and unexpected "I know".
Natalie Portman survives the dreadful lines better than Christensen, although I'm not sure if my favoritism for her is due to actual acting chops, her amazing looks, or her epistolary talents.
As quite a few bloggers have pointed out before me, Yoda is the strongest character in the film, and his light saber duel - far too brief - is the highlight.
Overall, this installment is certainly better than Phantom Menace, reasonably enjoyable but short of memorable. Spiderman was considerably better. Sunday, May 19, 2002
While nobody was looking, the Bush boys handed out several billion more in tax breaks - and not (surprise) breaks that the average taxpayer will ever see. It was done without going through Congress at all, using obscure regulatory rulings to reduce mostly corporate tax bills. |
