Another Bush (Cheney) Fiasco
Illegal surveillance is one thing. An agenda to destroy generations of American Freedoms is something else.
Did anybody notice how hard Bush and Company tried to get federal troops into our states to cover any eventuality from an avian flu epidemic right after Hurricane Katrina and the rape of New Orleans?
Before that, a push to billet federal troops in all of our states in direct opposition to The Constitution was undertaken under the cloak of ‘disaster preparedness’ or some such transparent double-speak. Does anybody remember this?
These attempts to circumvent The Constitution of The United States of America were as egregious as the current push by the Bush Cheney cabal to use illegal surveillance on Americans. The difference is that nobody got very upset about it.
My point is that all of these things: the rape of America, the treachery of New Orleans, the succor extended to the wealthy (God bless ‘em) at the expense of the poor, the double cross of the American right to privacy as granted by The Constitution (written by men with ethics), the unfaltering betrayal of the ideals governing our country and our society, the un-called-for war in Iraq brought to us by misrepresentation of facts and the war-mongering-for-personal-profit crowd of criminals, the questionable Presidential election, all of these things are starting to add up to one very large and nasty American problem.
We need to get these people under control NOW. We need to re-capture our country by any means necessary and fear for oneself economically, politically—fear for any reason other than fear that our country is deep in the process of being taken from us by the combined efforts of sociopathic individuals with a Machiavellian blueprint—needs to be removed from any personal consideration.
Fear is the enemy in these times: if you are prominent, then chances are these BushNazis already have the goods on you through personal knowledge and coercion, as accomplices, or through illegal surveillance.
That might explain the flip-flop behavior of a so-called American patriot like John McCain who so often recognizes the evil with which the Bush leadership force feeds Congress and then turns around and votes to perpetuate, extend and render more concrete the very machinations that he points out to the rest of us.
This is called ‘compromise’?
Who doesn’t have fear of exposure? Look. You have to put that behind you if that’s what Bush/Cheney have on you and with which they are controlling you. A moratorium on punishment for indiscretions might be the answer to removing these criminals from office. As simplistic as it sounds, sometimes these ‘seed ideas’ grow into viability—a blanket plea-bargain in order to snag the perpetrators, the ring leaders, of this betrayal of America.
These people are traitors from the lowest member of this cabal to the highest and most powerful.
Get a clue.
___________________________________________________________________
The Register
Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/20/holiday_spy_cheer/
Santa running short on surveillance gear this year
By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View
Published Tuesday 20th December 2005 08:28 GMT
Every year at about this time, we try to bring our beloved readers a story or two to boost the holiday cheer. And this year is no different.
Our first heart-warming tale centers on an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. The unnamed student requested a copy of Mao's Little Red Book from the school's interlibrary loan program in the hopes of writing a cracking paper for his fascism and totalitarianism class.
Instead of receiving the book, the student found two Department of Homeland Security agents waiting at his parents' house. It seems the book along with the student's extensive travels set alarm bells ringing at Homeland Security central. The agents did bring the book to the house but didn't leave the material with the student.
You can find out more on the student here (http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/12-05/12-17-05/a09lo650.htm).
Our second story of holiday cheer takes place in Washington D.C. where the ever vigilant staff at Dulles Airport stopped a 9-month-old boy from boarding a flight with his mom.
Offensive diaper? Ugly baby syndrome?
No. The toddler in question couldn't board the plane because his name is on the "no-fly" list of suspected terrorists.
"We pointed down to the stroller, and he sat there and gurgled," mom Sarah Zapolsky told Reuters. "The desk agent started laughing. ... She couldn't print us out a boarding pass because he's on the no-fly list."
Of course, babies aren't the only ones to end up on the no-fly list. Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy of Mass, Republican Representative Don Young of Alaska and Democratic Representative John Lewis of Georgia are part of the not so exclusive club too.
(Perhaps there is a stinky diaper theme after all.)
And so are possibly hundreds of Peter Johnsons who share a flagged and all too common name.
The TSA has dedicated a whopping seven full-time staffers to dealing with the thousands upon thousands of mistaken "no-fly" incidents.
If you're lucky, you'll see Santa fly through the night sky as you're waiting at the airport for the guard to finish up the cavity check. Mistletoe never felt so good.
Our last story has Human Rights Watch accusing the US government of torturing prisoners in Afghanistan by playing Eminem and Dr. Dre for 20 days.
Torture?
That's like a bad ass, free festival. The fun, however, is sure to end now that the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has caught wind of the music abuse. Read all the details here (http://www.kcra.com/news/5577000/detail.html).
Well, friends, it seems clear that we all have a lot to be thankful for this holiday season. Please be sure to wish the government agents wire-tapping your phone a Merry Christmas or whatever when sending your best to loved ones. We're all in this together. Now we just have to figure out what this is. ®
Related stories
My dead, much mourned friend: Jimmy Wales (17 December 2005)http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/17/jimmy_wales_wikipedia/ NSA uses ECHELON against US citizens (16 December 2005)http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/16/echelon_in_your_backyard/ Patriot Act 'compromise' makes matters worse (17 November 2005)http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/17/pat_act_getting_worse/ Google Earth: the black helicopters have landed (14 October 2005)http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/14/google_earth_competition_results/
© Copyright 2005
__________________________________________________________________
Revolt of the Professionals
By David Ignatius
Wednesday, December 21, 2005; A31
The national security structure that the Bush administration created after Sept. 11, 2001, began to crumble this month because of a bipartisan revolt on Capitol Hill. Newly emboldened legislators forced the administration to accept new rules for the interrogation of prisoners, delayed renewal of the Patriot Act and demanded an investigation of warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency.
President Bush has bristled at these challenges to his authority over what has amounted to an undeclared national state of emergency. But the intelligence professionals who have daily responsibility for waging the war against terrorism don't seem particularly surprised or unhappy to see the emergency structure in trouble. They want clear rules and public support that will allow them to do their jobs effectively over the long haul, without getting second-guessed or jerked around by politicians. Basically, they don't want to be left holding the bag -- which this nation has too often done with its professional military and intelligence officers.
I met this week with a senior intelligence official who has spent much of his career pursuing terrorist targets. I asked him what he thought, watching the emergency structure come down around him. "We all knew it would," he said. The interim structure was inherently unsustainable. But he noted that the very fact that the nation is debating rules for interrogation and surveillance of suspected terrorists demonstrates the success the intelligence agencies have had since Sept. 11 in disrupting attacks.
The civil liberties debate is indeed a welcome sign that we are returning to normality. We wouldn't be anguishing over these issues if terrorists were continuing to fly airplanes into our skyscrapers. As we learned after Sept. 11, a frightened nation loses its sense of balance. Now that the nation feels more secure, we insist anew on the rule of law. Presidents may claim extraordinary powers in times of crisis (and Bush is hardly the first), but the checks and balances inherent in our system push us back toward the center line drawn by the Founders.
One little-noted factor in this re-balancing is what I would call "the officers' revolt" -- and by that I mean both military generals in uniform and intelligence officers at the CIA, the NSA and other agencies. There has been growing uneasiness among these national security professionals at some of what they have been asked to do, and at the seeming unconcern among civilian leaders at the Pentagon and the CIA for the consequences of administration decisions.
The quiet revolt of the generals at the Pentagon is a big reason U.S. policy in Iraq has been changing, far more than Bush's stay-the-course speeches might suggest. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is deeply unpopular with senior military officers. They complain privately about a management style that has stretched the military to the breaking point in Iraq. For months they have been working out details of troop reductions next year in Iraq -- not just because such action will keep the Army and Marine Corps from cracking but because they think a smaller footprint will be more effective in stabilizing the country.
A similar revolt is evident at the CIA. Professional intelligence officers are furious at the politicized leadership brought to the agency by ex-congressman Porter Goss and his retinue of former congressional staffers. Their mismanagement has peeled away a generation of senior management in the CIA's Directorate of Operations who have resigned, transferred or signaled their intention to quit when their current tours are up. Many of those who remain are trying to keep their heads down until the current wave of political jockeying and reorganization is over -- which is the last thing you would want at an effective intelligence agency.
The CIA, like the military, wants clear and sustainable rules of engagement. Agency employees don't want their careers ruined by future congressional or legal investigations of actions they thought were authorized. Unhappiness within the CIA about fuzzy rules on interrogation, and the risk of getting clobbered after the fact for doing your job, was a secret driver for Sen. John McCain's push for a new law banning cruel interrogation techniques.
President Bush needs to do what he so often talks about, which is to provide strong leadership. In place of the post-Sept. 11 emergency structure, the country needs clear rules that Congress can debate and finally endorse. It may be, for example, that the NSA does need more agile and more flexible techniques for wiretapping suspected terrorists, like those the president secretly imposed in 2001. If so, it's time to amend our laws. Framing clear rules that meet traditional American legal standards is a sign of the nation's recovery from Sept. 11 -- and it's a process that will serve, above all, the professionals fighting terrorism on the front lines.
davidignatius@washpost.com
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
___________________________________________________________________
Hollow Rhetoric on 'Rule of Law'
By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, December 21, 2005; A31
Like democracy or freedom, "the rule of law" has become one of those things U.S. diplomats advocate so repetitively you'd think they could do it in their sleep. When the secretary of state speaks to the American Bar Association, she explicitly links "the advance of freedom and the success of democracy" to the rule of law. When a bad legal decision is made in a place such as Kuwait or Kyrgyzstan, the State Department issues a statement that starts: "U.S. Deeply Concerned About Rule of Law in . . ." Indeed, President Bush himself has spoken about how "successful societies protect freedom with the consistent and impartial rule of law."
Yet unlike democracy, which can be parliamentary or presidential or even constitutionally monarchical, the rule of law is not an ideal that is open to various interpretations. The rule of law pretty much means the same, rather prosaic thing in any context. It means that once legislation has been passed by legitimate, democratic institutions, everyone has to obey it, regardless of political party, ethnic group or ability to pay bribes. The rule of law is an ongoing process, not a goal.
But in its way, the rule of law is more fundamental to our national success than democracy or freedom, since without it, neither could exist. You can't have democracy if the president, once elected, can change the rules. You can't have freedom if some people are allowed to break the law while others are not. Nevertheless, the idea that everyone has to follow the same rules isn't especially awe-inspiring or transcendent: We sing about the land of the free and the home of the brave, after all, not the land of the politically impartial judiciary.
In times of perceived emergency, the rule of law's failure to inspire higher feelings becomes a problem. If you are fighting a life-or-death war on terrorism, it no doubt seems redundant to get a court order before tapping a potential hijacker's telephone. If you believe you are about to uncover a ticking bomb, it probably feels inconvenient to ask for a warrant to bug the potential bomber's house, just as it surely feels ridiculous to stop and ask yourself whether you have the legal right to torture the person who might know where the bomb is. But if you don't ask, and you don't stop, and you don't do the petty things the law requires, then over time -- as the war on terrorism grinds on, as the trail goes cold, as mistakes are made, as the wrong house is put under surveillance and the wrong person arrested -- well, I'm not going to repeat what everyone else has said already.
What also worries me now is that the rule-of-law bores, the people who keep banging on about how all these rules and regulations about torture or tapping matter, may soon come to be seen as the enemies of national security. Let me be absolutely clear: I am delighted to hear that someone has managed to identify so many potential terrorists and extremely pleased that someone thinks something could be learned from tapping their telephones. But we do in fact have a special foreign intelligence court, set up under a special law, that has secret, expedited procedures, carefully designed to allow the FBI to do that tapping legally. What's so bad about using it? Instead of holding informal discussions with a few members of Congress, the president could have asked Congress to create more streamlined procedures if he needed them. Why didn't he?
More to the point, I'd argue that the rule-of-law bores, be they Republican libertarians or liberal progressives, actually have a better understanding of what it's going to take to win the war on terrorism in the long run than do those who think tapping and torture without court permission are warranted by extreme circumstances. Like the Cold War, the war on terrorism is not merely a military conflict but a battle of ideas. And just as the Cold War was won when Eastern Europeans abandoned communism and joined the West, the war on terrorism will be over when moderate Muslims have transformed the Arab world -- abandoning the radicals to their tents and their caves -- and joined the global mainstream.
Before they get there, they'll probably be subjected to a lot of State Department speeches about why it's important to abandon such practices as arbitrary arrest, torture and secret electronic surveillance. They'll probably be told over and over again why it's important for political leaders to subject themselves to the same laws as their citizens. They'll probably hear lectures about due process, and other rights available to people in civilized societies. But as things are going now -- why on earth should they listen?
applebaumanne@yahoo.com
Did anybody notice how hard Bush and Company tried to get federal troops into our states to cover any eventuality from an avian flu epidemic right after Hurricane Katrina and the rape of New Orleans?
Before that, a push to billet federal troops in all of our states in direct opposition to The Constitution was undertaken under the cloak of ‘disaster preparedness’ or some such transparent double-speak. Does anybody remember this?
These attempts to circumvent The Constitution of The United States of America were as egregious as the current push by the Bush Cheney cabal to use illegal surveillance on Americans. The difference is that nobody got very upset about it.
My point is that all of these things: the rape of America, the treachery of New Orleans, the succor extended to the wealthy (God bless ‘em) at the expense of the poor, the double cross of the American right to privacy as granted by The Constitution (written by men with ethics), the unfaltering betrayal of the ideals governing our country and our society, the un-called-for war in Iraq brought to us by misrepresentation of facts and the war-mongering-for-personal-profit crowd of criminals, the questionable Presidential election, all of these things are starting to add up to one very large and nasty American problem.
We need to get these people under control NOW. We need to re-capture our country by any means necessary and fear for oneself economically, politically—fear for any reason other than fear that our country is deep in the process of being taken from us by the combined efforts of sociopathic individuals with a Machiavellian blueprint—needs to be removed from any personal consideration.
Fear is the enemy in these times: if you are prominent, then chances are these BushNazis already have the goods on you through personal knowledge and coercion, as accomplices, or through illegal surveillance.
That might explain the flip-flop behavior of a so-called American patriot like John McCain who so often recognizes the evil with which the Bush leadership force feeds Congress and then turns around and votes to perpetuate, extend and render more concrete the very machinations that he points out to the rest of us.
This is called ‘compromise’?
Who doesn’t have fear of exposure? Look. You have to put that behind you if that’s what Bush/Cheney have on you and with which they are controlling you. A moratorium on punishment for indiscretions might be the answer to removing these criminals from office. As simplistic as it sounds, sometimes these ‘seed ideas’ grow into viability—a blanket plea-bargain in order to snag the perpetrators, the ring leaders, of this betrayal of America.
These people are traitors from the lowest member of this cabal to the highest and most powerful.
Get a clue.
___________________________________________________________________
The Register
Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/20/holiday_spy_cheer/
Santa running short on surveillance gear this year
By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View
Published Tuesday 20th December 2005 08:28 GMT
Every year at about this time, we try to bring our beloved readers a story or two to boost the holiday cheer. And this year is no different.
Our first heart-warming tale centers on an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. The unnamed student requested a copy of Mao's Little Red Book from the school's interlibrary loan program in the hopes of writing a cracking paper for his fascism and totalitarianism class.
Instead of receiving the book, the student found two Department of Homeland Security agents waiting at his parents' house. It seems the book along with the student's extensive travels set alarm bells ringing at Homeland Security central. The agents did bring the book to the house but didn't leave the material with the student.
You can find out more on the student here (http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/12-05/12-17-05/a09lo650.htm).
Our second story of holiday cheer takes place in Washington D.C. where the ever vigilant staff at Dulles Airport stopped a 9-month-old boy from boarding a flight with his mom.
Offensive diaper? Ugly baby syndrome?
No. The toddler in question couldn't board the plane because his name is on the "no-fly" list of suspected terrorists.
"We pointed down to the stroller, and he sat there and gurgled," mom Sarah Zapolsky told Reuters. "The desk agent started laughing. ... She couldn't print us out a boarding pass because he's on the no-fly list."
Of course, babies aren't the only ones to end up on the no-fly list. Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy of Mass, Republican Representative Don Young of Alaska and Democratic Representative John Lewis of Georgia are part of the not so exclusive club too.
(Perhaps there is a stinky diaper theme after all.)
And so are possibly hundreds of Peter Johnsons who share a flagged and all too common name.
The TSA has dedicated a whopping seven full-time staffers to dealing with the thousands upon thousands of mistaken "no-fly" incidents.
If you're lucky, you'll see Santa fly through the night sky as you're waiting at the airport for the guard to finish up the cavity check. Mistletoe never felt so good.
Our last story has Human Rights Watch accusing the US government of torturing prisoners in Afghanistan by playing Eminem and Dr. Dre for 20 days.
Torture?
That's like a bad ass, free festival. The fun, however, is sure to end now that the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has caught wind of the music abuse. Read all the details here (http://www.kcra.com/news/5577000/detail.html).
Well, friends, it seems clear that we all have a lot to be thankful for this holiday season. Please be sure to wish the government agents wire-tapping your phone a Merry Christmas or whatever when sending your best to loved ones. We're all in this together. Now we just have to figure out what this is. ®
Related stories
My dead, much mourned friend: Jimmy Wales (17 December 2005)http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/17/jimmy_wales_wikipedia/ NSA uses ECHELON against US citizens (16 December 2005)http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/16/echelon_in_your_backyard/ Patriot Act 'compromise' makes matters worse (17 November 2005)http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/17/pat_act_getting_worse/ Google Earth: the black helicopters have landed (14 October 2005)http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/14/google_earth_competition_results/
© Copyright 2005
__________________________________________________________________
Revolt of the Professionals
By David Ignatius
Wednesday, December 21, 2005; A31
The national security structure that the Bush administration created after Sept. 11, 2001, began to crumble this month because of a bipartisan revolt on Capitol Hill. Newly emboldened legislators forced the administration to accept new rules for the interrogation of prisoners, delayed renewal of the Patriot Act and demanded an investigation of warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency.
President Bush has bristled at these challenges to his authority over what has amounted to an undeclared national state of emergency. But the intelligence professionals who have daily responsibility for waging the war against terrorism don't seem particularly surprised or unhappy to see the emergency structure in trouble. They want clear rules and public support that will allow them to do their jobs effectively over the long haul, without getting second-guessed or jerked around by politicians. Basically, they don't want to be left holding the bag -- which this nation has too often done with its professional military and intelligence officers.
I met this week with a senior intelligence official who has spent much of his career pursuing terrorist targets. I asked him what he thought, watching the emergency structure come down around him. "We all knew it would," he said. The interim structure was inherently unsustainable. But he noted that the very fact that the nation is debating rules for interrogation and surveillance of suspected terrorists demonstrates the success the intelligence agencies have had since Sept. 11 in disrupting attacks.
The civil liberties debate is indeed a welcome sign that we are returning to normality. We wouldn't be anguishing over these issues if terrorists were continuing to fly airplanes into our skyscrapers. As we learned after Sept. 11, a frightened nation loses its sense of balance. Now that the nation feels more secure, we insist anew on the rule of law. Presidents may claim extraordinary powers in times of crisis (and Bush is hardly the first), but the checks and balances inherent in our system push us back toward the center line drawn by the Founders.
One little-noted factor in this re-balancing is what I would call "the officers' revolt" -- and by that I mean both military generals in uniform and intelligence officers at the CIA, the NSA and other agencies. There has been growing uneasiness among these national security professionals at some of what they have been asked to do, and at the seeming unconcern among civilian leaders at the Pentagon and the CIA for the consequences of administration decisions.
The quiet revolt of the generals at the Pentagon is a big reason U.S. policy in Iraq has been changing, far more than Bush's stay-the-course speeches might suggest. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is deeply unpopular with senior military officers. They complain privately about a management style that has stretched the military to the breaking point in Iraq. For months they have been working out details of troop reductions next year in Iraq -- not just because such action will keep the Army and Marine Corps from cracking but because they think a smaller footprint will be more effective in stabilizing the country.
A similar revolt is evident at the CIA. Professional intelligence officers are furious at the politicized leadership brought to the agency by ex-congressman Porter Goss and his retinue of former congressional staffers. Their mismanagement has peeled away a generation of senior management in the CIA's Directorate of Operations who have resigned, transferred or signaled their intention to quit when their current tours are up. Many of those who remain are trying to keep their heads down until the current wave of political jockeying and reorganization is over -- which is the last thing you would want at an effective intelligence agency.
The CIA, like the military, wants clear and sustainable rules of engagement. Agency employees don't want their careers ruined by future congressional or legal investigations of actions they thought were authorized. Unhappiness within the CIA about fuzzy rules on interrogation, and the risk of getting clobbered after the fact for doing your job, was a secret driver for Sen. John McCain's push for a new law banning cruel interrogation techniques.
President Bush needs to do what he so often talks about, which is to provide strong leadership. In place of the post-Sept. 11 emergency structure, the country needs clear rules that Congress can debate and finally endorse. It may be, for example, that the NSA does need more agile and more flexible techniques for wiretapping suspected terrorists, like those the president secretly imposed in 2001. If so, it's time to amend our laws. Framing clear rules that meet traditional American legal standards is a sign of the nation's recovery from Sept. 11 -- and it's a process that will serve, above all, the professionals fighting terrorism on the front lines.
davidignatius@washpost.com
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
___________________________________________________________________
Hollow Rhetoric on 'Rule of Law'
By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, December 21, 2005; A31
Like democracy or freedom, "the rule of law" has become one of those things U.S. diplomats advocate so repetitively you'd think they could do it in their sleep. When the secretary of state speaks to the American Bar Association, she explicitly links "the advance of freedom and the success of democracy" to the rule of law. When a bad legal decision is made in a place such as Kuwait or Kyrgyzstan, the State Department issues a statement that starts: "U.S. Deeply Concerned About Rule of Law in . . ." Indeed, President Bush himself has spoken about how "successful societies protect freedom with the consistent and impartial rule of law."
Yet unlike democracy, which can be parliamentary or presidential or even constitutionally monarchical, the rule of law is not an ideal that is open to various interpretations. The rule of law pretty much means the same, rather prosaic thing in any context. It means that once legislation has been passed by legitimate, democratic institutions, everyone has to obey it, regardless of political party, ethnic group or ability to pay bribes. The rule of law is an ongoing process, not a goal.
But in its way, the rule of law is more fundamental to our national success than democracy or freedom, since without it, neither could exist. You can't have democracy if the president, once elected, can change the rules. You can't have freedom if some people are allowed to break the law while others are not. Nevertheless, the idea that everyone has to follow the same rules isn't especially awe-inspiring or transcendent: We sing about the land of the free and the home of the brave, after all, not the land of the politically impartial judiciary.
In times of perceived emergency, the rule of law's failure to inspire higher feelings becomes a problem. If you are fighting a life-or-death war on terrorism, it no doubt seems redundant to get a court order before tapping a potential hijacker's telephone. If you believe you are about to uncover a ticking bomb, it probably feels inconvenient to ask for a warrant to bug the potential bomber's house, just as it surely feels ridiculous to stop and ask yourself whether you have the legal right to torture the person who might know where the bomb is. But if you don't ask, and you don't stop, and you don't do the petty things the law requires, then over time -- as the war on terrorism grinds on, as the trail goes cold, as mistakes are made, as the wrong house is put under surveillance and the wrong person arrested -- well, I'm not going to repeat what everyone else has said already.
What also worries me now is that the rule-of-law bores, the people who keep banging on about how all these rules and regulations about torture or tapping matter, may soon come to be seen as the enemies of national security. Let me be absolutely clear: I am delighted to hear that someone has managed to identify so many potential terrorists and extremely pleased that someone thinks something could be learned from tapping their telephones. But we do in fact have a special foreign intelligence court, set up under a special law, that has secret, expedited procedures, carefully designed to allow the FBI to do that tapping legally. What's so bad about using it? Instead of holding informal discussions with a few members of Congress, the president could have asked Congress to create more streamlined procedures if he needed them. Why didn't he?
More to the point, I'd argue that the rule-of-law bores, be they Republican libertarians or liberal progressives, actually have a better understanding of what it's going to take to win the war on terrorism in the long run than do those who think tapping and torture without court permission are warranted by extreme circumstances. Like the Cold War, the war on terrorism is not merely a military conflict but a battle of ideas. And just as the Cold War was won when Eastern Europeans abandoned communism and joined the West, the war on terrorism will be over when moderate Muslims have transformed the Arab world -- abandoning the radicals to their tents and their caves -- and joined the global mainstream.
Before they get there, they'll probably be subjected to a lot of State Department speeches about why it's important to abandon such practices as arbitrary arrest, torture and secret electronic surveillance. They'll probably be told over and over again why it's important for political leaders to subject themselves to the same laws as their citizens. They'll probably hear lectures about due process, and other rights available to people in civilized societies. But as things are going now -- why on earth should they listen?
applebaumanne@yahoo.com
posted by FancyRage at 12:38 PM
1 Comments:
Turns out the story on the student and the mao book was a big fat hoax. Read all about it here, in the same paper that originally ran the story: http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/12-05/12-24-05/a01lo719.htm
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