A few weeks ago, I pointed out that the only complaint Marc Thiessen is capable of offering about Bush-Era detention and interrogation policy is that they should have done exactly what they did, only with more awesome.
It’s an infuriating self-criticism for two reasons. First, it’s simply not plausible that — given the tremendous strains and pressures of the months and years immediately following 9/11 — that they didn’t make some serious error in judgment that they subsequently realize was mistaken. Second, it’s the kind of self-criticism whose only function is self-compliment; their only mistake, Theissen argues, was fail to realize how incredibly — how awesomely! – right they were from the beginning.
Theissen, however, is not alone in this attitude. Having suffered set-back after set-back, defeat after defeat, and rejection after rejection, President Obama unveiled a new health care reform bill earlier today. By all accounts, it differs from both the Senate and the House bills in one important, essential way: it’s more awesome.
NB: Aparently, Marc Thiessen has written a best-selling, insightful, and reasonably-priced book on the subject that answers all conceivable questions in thorough detail and clear prose. How interesting! Whatashamehedoesn’tpromoteitmoreoften.
London, Feb 6 (IANS) Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan isn’t intimidated by the full body-scan machines that have been recently installed at London’s airports – in fact, he’s been signing off printouts of his X-rays.
Khan, appearing on ‘Friday Night With Jonathan Ross’ – one of British television’s most popular weekend shows – revealed he’s been turning the controversial security machines into a public relations opportunity at London’s Heathrow airport.
‘I’m always stopped by the security, because of the name. And I think its okay: the western world is a little bit worried, paranoid and touchy, I guess – and feely when they’re frisking you,’ Khan told his celebrity chat show host moments after explaining how his new film is about a Muslim named Khan on a mission to tell the US president he is not a terrorist.
‘I was in London recently going through the airport and these new machines have come up, the body scans. You’ve got to see them. It makes you embarrassed – if you’re not well endowed.
‘You walk into the machine and everything – the whole outline of your body – comes out.’
Khan said he did not know that the body-scans – installed in the wake of last year’s abortive Christmas Day bombing of a transatlantic flight over Detroit – showed up every little detail of one’s body.
‘I was a little scared. Something happens [inside the scans], and I came out.
‘Then I saw these girls – they had these printouts. I looked at them. I thought they were some forms you had to fill. I said ‘give them to me’ – and you could see everything inside. So I autographed them for them.’
In a few months, grocery aisle magazines will feature hi-resolution renderings of Jennifer Anniston’s naked body as she returns from a romantic romp in the Firth of Forth with Gerrard Butler (while secretly pining for Brad Pitt). Not too long after that, we’ll learn about Angelina Jolie’s next pregnancy from airport scans. All while feeling so much safer.
Isn’t Frank Lautenberg’s huffing and puffing in this piece over the top, even for a senator? In the last three weeks the federal government has been shown to be, more or less, incompetent at airport security. Rather than blaming the government – I guess Bush is no longer around, so the government is presumed competent again – Lautenberg wants to inflate the criminal charges against this guy who posed and poses no threat.
Moreover, isn’t Lautenberg just incorrect that this incident was harmful “because it sent out an alert that people can get away with something like this”? Any sentient person who walks through an airport knows that it’s easy to breach airport security. Instead, objectively, what happened at Newark will make air travel safer, as each harmless security breach provides a harmless lesson for security agencies on what they’re doing wrong. We don’t know how many times the guards at Newark abandoned their post in the month before this incident, but I’m really certain that I know how many times they’ll do it in the months that follow: zero.
Or perhaps I’m wrong, and slipping through a security checkpoint to kiss your girlfriend goodbye should be a capital offense. I’m just glad Lautenberg’s in the senate, where he’s relatively harmless, and not working in a DA’s office where he could do some real harm.
Surely there are some things here that are disturbing to those of us of a libertarian bent. But the fact that this didn’t get noticed in America – the event happened in September, and Reason is just now taking notice; personally, I’d forgotten it happened – should tell us something.
We’re now on our third generation of school children (I was part of the second) going through the public education system and being taught that the First Amendment exists primarily to protect hardcore pornography and slanderous journalists. I took a constitutional law course while an undergrad, and am now in my third year of law school, and I can’t recall more than a small handful of discussions about the First Amendment applying to actual political protest.
I’d like to think that’s because we take the right to political protest for granted. That’s normally been the case in America. However, the First Amendment, like every protected right, can only do so much. The less it protects, the better it protects it; the broader its protections are spread, the thinner they become. Libertarians frequently argue that we should protect even the most extreme speech as a sort of outward barrier, as though this will protect all speech that is less extreme. But the fact is that a large number of people simply aren’t that gung ho about protecting the rights of their countrymen to post rape porn videos on the internet. If all speech is equal, rather than protecting rape porn with the vigor with which they protect mundane political speech, a part of the population will instead protect mundane political speech with all the vigor with which they defend rape porn. Which is to say, not much.
Though Balko misses the mark when he says that the G20 summit was when we needed the First Amendment the most. A bunch of foreign leaders gathered in an American city attracting a motley crew of protesters from all around the world grousing about insubstantial abstractions is not, I reckon, what the Founders had in mind. The leaders weren’t there to get a gauge of popular opinion, the issues were so large that no matter how many protesters showed up it would not have given an accurate gauge of the opinion of those effected by G20 policies, and the protesters themselves were a group with a history of violence and disorder. I don’t think much of what Balko complains of should have happened, but my sleep won’t be troubled much.
We’ve seen with the Tea Party movement that American political protest is alive and well when it really “matters the most” – spontaneous and representative demonstrations of discontent with elected officials’ actions on specific matters, performed in a time and place so as to actually convey that message to the elected officials. If libertarians want more than that core of political speech protected by the First Amendment, they need to pick their fights a little better. It may not be as simple as choosing between Hustler and G20 protesters (and what kind of choice is that?), but it might well be. In a libertarian paradise the First Amendment might well protect every fart as free speech and every orgy as a peaceable assembly, but here in our fallen world, one amendment can only do so much.
It appears that Abdulmullatab tried to get on the plane without a passport (H/T). Unfortunately, government screw ups—which this most assuredly was—are less likely to result in sensible policy changes than in more punishments for citizens. Megan McArdle’s predictions about the future of air travel are probably too optimistic.
It seems that TSA’s Standard Operating Procedures manual (or, at least a version of the SOP dated May 2008) got released online. Some years ago when I was a member of the national security apparatus (either as a James Bond-like secret agent whose job was to win poker games and bang models in Monaco, or as a schlub in northern Virginia who wrote training manuals for airport baggage screeners; my memory’s hazy on some of the details) I had access to that document and probably read most of it. I’m anxiously waiting to find out which contractor posted it – it may well be someone I know. How exciting!
Anyhow, reading the now-released details that are supposedly the most revealing, I have the exact same reaction that I had back when I worked on such matters: 1. It’s hard to think of a concrete way how someone could use specific details of screening techniques to defeat the screening process; but 2. the most important information in the book is how un thorough the screening actually is.
One of our great advantages in battling terrorists is that terrorists aren’t very bright and don’t seem capable of solid analytical reasoning. Anyone who flies a half dozen times a year knows exactly how spotty the screening can be. Immediately after I quit my job working on airport security issues, the wife and I went to France for a month. When we got to Paris I got to looking for something in the backpack I’d used as a carryon, and I found but a box cutter we’d used while packing. Ask anyone who flies regularly, and they’ll have a half dozen of those stories. I was disappointed that I’d made it onto an international flight with a box cutter, but I wasn’t surprised (well, I was surprised that it was in my backpack, but I wasn’t surprised I made it through security).
I’m not saying the screening process is a completely wasted effort. Nor am I saying that we need a significantly more complete screening process – a nation of frequent fliers like America would not tolerate El Al levels of scrutiny on every Des Moines to Chicago flight. But I am saying that a big part of why we’ve spent eight years without an act of air terrorism is because the baddies aren’t very good at calculating their odds of success. To the degree that releasing the SOP allows them to precisely calculate those odds, we’re less safe today than we were last week. However, I just don’t think many terrorists are smart enough to figure that out. Three cheers for ignorance and irrationality in the Muslim world!
Isn’t it awful how liberals treat the Constitution like dirt? As if it’s a living, breathing document that means whatever they want it to mean?
Yes, it is, and it’s even worse when conservatives do it:
I’m not quite certain if Napolitano is entirely correct, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that the decision to not declare war after 9/11 (as well as before the Iraq War) was a tremendous mistake and the progenitor of all the legal/detainee problems we’ve been dealing with so badly these past eight years. Certainly, the circumstances presented a extra few difficulties — one would have to word the declaration carefully — but it would be quite doable.
But to return where this post started, did O’Reily seriously just say “I don’t care about the Constitution”? Yes. Indeed, he did.
I’ve spilled my share of pixels criticizing the Bush Administration’s detention policy, but this strikes me as completely insane:
WASHINGTON — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and four other men accused in the plot will be prosecuted in federal court in New York City, a federal law enforcement official said early on Friday.
But Obama the administration will prosecute Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — the detainee accused of planning the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen — and several other detainees before a military commission, the official said.
The decisions to give civilian prosecutors detainees accused of the 2001 terrorist attacks and keep the case of the Cole attack within the military system are expected to be announced at the Department of Justice later on Friday by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because that news conference has not yet taken place.
Why does everyone fly to such ridiculous extremes on this subject? America gets attacked. So we capture and detain a bunch of the ringleaders prisoners indefinitely at The Only Secure Location In The World and torture them (but only just a little). Then, we have this whole rigmarole a few years back that ends with the passage of some fairly sensible legislation to try them through the military so we can be done with them and (hopefully) see them hang. Then, we completely drop the ball for the next three years and elect a new president who wavers between being a cynical bastard and being a completely reckless pie-in-the-sky lefty nutcase, as we’re seeing today!
Hi, customer service? Yes, I’d like to return this world; it’s defective.
Mr. Martin said he could not comment on her case because it was under review. But Ms. Paton said the Office of the Surveillance Commissioners, which monitors use of the law, found that the Poole council had acted properly. “They said my privacy wasn’t intruded on because the surveillance was covert,” she said.
Well I’d say. I mean, what’s privacy compared to the concern that this woman could have been enrolling her daughter in the incorrect school district? THE INCORRECT SCHOOL DISTRICT!!!1!
Megan echoes my exact thoughts on the latest Democrat/Obama bit of chicago style thuggery:
Threatening to strip their anti-trust exemption as a quid-pro-quo is the kind of thing that sounds cute until someone thinks up a way to do it to people on your side. Would it be okay for a Republican administration to threaten Democratic groups that say unpleasing things by promising to pass laws–however sound–that would decimate the fortunes of George Soros and other big backers? Or openly declare that if unions didn’t stop issuing reports in favor of a higher minimum wage, the administration would have to revisit Taft-Hartley?
I was often criticized by members of the right for my opposition to Bush policies like the USA PATRIOT Act and warrantless wire-tapping. The argument always boiled down to “Well I trust Bush to keep us safe.” Such feelings and arguments are easy to understand, until one points out that 50 years from now a president we don’t like could use those same policies against mere political enemies (see: this).
The man arrested last month for allegedly plotting to blow up targets in New York contacted one of Osama bin Laden’s right-hand men, U.S. intelligence officials say.
Officials say Denver shuttle bus driver Najibullah Zazi used an intermediary to contact Mustafa al-Yazid, the head of al-Qaida’s operations in Afghanistan. Yazid is perhaps best known for saying earlier this year that he would use nuclear weapons against the U.S. if only he could get his hands on them. The Zazi connection to Yazid was first reported by The Associated Press.
While officials would not characterize the nature of their contact, the fact that Zazi could actually reach out and get hold of a top al-Qaida operative in Afghanistan is significant. This is the third time in the past few years that al-Qaida’s top leadership appears to have given recruits with U.S. ties some sort of special consideration or attention.
The question I have, is how did we get this information from him? I mean, we don’t torture any more, and torture is the only known way to extract timely information from recalcitrant terror suspects. Right? I mean, I can’t even begin to imagine how else one might entice a criminal — let alone a terrorist! — to give up information that would aid our efforts at the expense of his organization’s.
Williams and witnesses say officers tasered the wheelchair-bound man twice, then left him handcuffed with his pants down on the sidewalk in broad daylight. Williams spent six days in jail before prosecutors said they lacked evidence to charge him.
I have to ask, what kind of pussy ass cops are we training that need to taser a paraplegic man in order to get control of a situation?
Jamie posted this at 10:58 AM EDT on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 as Liberty and/or Security