Reason Magazine - Topics > Terrorism

Also, No One Likes the Popup Ads

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:10:00 EDT

One Bin Laden tape in four months has a tremendous impact, a dozen Zawahiri tapes in two months has considerably less. In Zawahiri's Q+A, he repeatedly answered questions with an irritated "I already answered that in last month's speech" or "bin Laden already answered that in his speech." That suggests that too many messages dilutes the impact. It also reduces the likelihood of massive media coverage, since the messages become routine. The same applies for the Iraqi insurgency videos: the first exploding hummer might be thrilling, but the 76th not so much.

That's the always-interesting Marc Lynch writing about the limits of the jihadists' online efforts. They bear a striking resemblance to the limits of everyone else's online efforts. Here's some more:

I come across quite a bit of posturing and bravado in these forums, hating on 'enemies' and back-patting of 'allies'. The recent initiation of an 'al-Jazeera watch' feature on one of the forums tracking perceived slights and misrepresentation by the now maligned station reminds me of nothing so much as the partisan media criticism found on so many political blogs. There's a lot of posting of articles or news reports clipped from the media, with long comment threads of cheering or jeering. I remember seeing a bitter post on one of the main forums a few weeks ago (al-Boraq? I forget) complaining that the "internet jihad" had failed since the forum had degenerated into personal attacks and what we would call flame-wars.

Whole thing here.

Iron Man Confidential

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:11:00 EDT

Early word on the latest Marvel Comic turned big-screen spectaculah, Iron Man? It's been updated from Vietnam to the War on Terror and is techno-riffic. From the Daily News:

Downey is Tony Stark, a millionaire arms inventor who, while giving a weapons demonstration to troops in Afghanistan, is attacked and kidnapped. Shoved in a cave by terrorists who give him a week to build a rocket from spare parts, Stark - who now has a magnetized sphere in his chest that keeps shrapnel in his body from entering his aorta - instead constructs a tank-suit that looks like the Michelin Man and boasts more goodies than a Swiss Army knife.
Back home at his L.A. mountaintop bachelor pad (which of course has a workshop General Motors would kill for), Stark experiences a true change of heart, deciding to stop making war machines. So he builds a suit of armor that flies like a jet, shoots energy blasts and helps keep his ticker going as he fights injustice.
The fact that Iron Man is a B-lister in the Marvel Comics stable doesn't stop director Jon Favreau and his writers from aiming high and generally hitting the target. Meanwhile, Stark's inner circle - including Gwyneth Paltrow (sexy and bookish) as his trusty assistant, Terrence Howard (tough and loyal) as his military connection, and Jeff Bridges (bald and menacing) as a mentor-turned-villain - lend a touch of class.
But cruising above it all is Downey. Since Iron Man's helmet has no nose and a little rectangular mouth, the smartest thing Favreau did was cast a lead who's constantly alive. The few times the red-and-yellow battle gear is front and center in "Transformers"-ish action moments, Favreau often shows his star's face inside the shell-head. As Downey pumps life into every scene, it's clear the actor, long regarded as one of the best of his generation, has not let the rust set in after his battle with drugs a decade ago.

Sexy and bookish? Bald and menacing? Tough and loyal? It sounds like they're really blazing new trails!

More here.

I salute Iron Man because he, along with the board game Monopoly, Dallas, Bruce Jenner, Jimmy Carter's cardigans, and Bobby Fischer helped us beat the Russkies when it mattered (until his death earlier this year, the insaniac former chess champ Fischer was helping us defeat Islamism by identifying as anti-Western[*]). And because Iron Man points the way to the coming age of the cyborg (or cyborg-like humans), which we're already in. Everytime you see someone with a cochlear implant (look carefully) or a pacemaker or wearing a wrist-guard for carpal tunnel syndrome, there beats the adamantium heart of Iron Man. If you can't be a full-blown mutant (thanks for nothing Mom and Dad) and are a couple standard deviations down the Bell Curve from homo superior, you might as well have microprocessors and exoskeleton-like devices up the ying-yang.

But enough with the drug-story backstory on RDJ (and Iron Man, who battled the sauce longer than he did The Mandarin, one of the last great gasps of full-blown Orientalist fantasy is post-war pop cult)! Spencer Tracy had problems—including a penchant for locking himself in hotel room bathtubs for an entire weekend while drinking and pissing himself into stupor—but you don't have to know that to enjoy Bad Day at Black Rock, do you?

All you need to know about Tony Stark--a cool exec with a heart of steel and two fistfuls of "repulsor rays"--in 22 seconds:

Bonus video: Black Sabbath asks the musical question "Can he walk and talk?,' etc. in this great home-brewed video.

[*]: Corrected spelling and life status of Fischer thanks to reader UCrawford.

"Please Put Laptops and Fuel Cells in a Separate Bin"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:48:00 EDT

On Tuesday, my laptop battery died mid-sentence, mid-flight and I was screwed. I'm looking forward to the day when I will be able to just pop in a new methanol canister and keep going. I was thrilled to read today that (when the fuel cell technology becomes available sometime in 2009) the TSA won't stop me from doing just that.

The ruling helps clear the way for the industry and consumer acceptance. Fuel cells extract electrons from a reaction between methanol, ambient oxygen, and a catalytic membrane. Fuel cell makers hope to replace lithium-ion batteries as a power source in portable electronics. One advantage: no recharging time. Refueling a fuel cell only requires popping in a new fuel canister. A universal charger made from a fuel cell can charge notebooks, phones, MP3 players, and other devices, cutting down the number of chargers travelers have to carry.

So I should be good to go. As long as I don't try to carry one through a metal detector inside my shoes, that is.

Mostly, the TSA appears in our pages when it does something dumb, so let's have one cheer for something done right.

Al Qaeda vs. the Truthers

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:59:00 EDT

My brain hurts:

Al-Qaeda's deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has blamed Iran for spreading the theory that Israel was behind the 11 September 2001 attacks.

In an audio tape posted on the internet, Zawahiri insisted al-Qaeda had carried out the attacks on the US.

He accused Iran, and its Hezbollah allies, of trying to discredit Osama Bin Laden's network.

Via Thoreau, who notes that this is another case of satire as prophecy.

Now Playing in Memphis: Martial Law Lite!

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:13:00 EDT

Last week, federal, state, and local police in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas conducted a massive sweep dubbed "Operation Sudden Impact."

The operation included raids of businesses, homes, and boats; traffic roadblocks; and personal searches. They say they were looking for "terrorists." If they found any, they haven't announced it yet. They did arrest 332 people, 142 of whom they describe as "fugitives." They also issued about 1,300 traffic tickets, and according to one media account, seized "hundreds" of dollars.

From the Memphis Commercial Appeal:

While the operation was billed as a regional "anti-terrorism initiative," the scope was also broad -- everything from the serving of fugitive warrants to spot checks of boats on the Mississippi River to ensuring drivers in Tipton County had their children properly fastened into child safety seats.
"Not all of this initiative is to arrest people," said Deputy Chief Donna Turner of the Tipton County Sheriff's Department.
Many agencies put an emphasis on traffic stops. A little after 8 p.m. Saturday in Hickory Hill, Sgt. Chris Harris of the Shelby County Sheriff's Office street crimes unit stopped a white SUV that was booming with music. The driver was driving on a suspended license -- he received a citation -- and there was marijuana residue in the car, but "not enough to weigh out," Harris said.
Still, every traffic stop holds the potential of netting much more than expected.

Nashville's News Channel 5 reports agents seizing equipment from local businesses:

The FBI along with hundreds of officers said they are looking for anything out of the ordinary. Agents take computers and paperwork from businesses.
One store owner said he was told the agents were looking for stolen electronics. While some business owners feel they are being targeted, law-enforcement officers said they are just trying to track down possible terrorists before something big happens.
"What we have found traditionally is that terrorists are involved in a number of lesser known type crimes," said Mark Luttrell, Shelby County sheriff.

What's really unfortunate is the complete lack of inquisitiveness in the local media. How many of these raids were backed by search warrants? What justification did police give for the traffic roadblocks and traffic stops? Random stops and roadblocks are only legal under limited circumstances. Fishing expeditions aren't one of them, though fishing expeditions disguised as DWI checkpoints usually are.

Soft on Terrorism? No Way!

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:53:00 EDT

reason contributor John Mueller, the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies and professor of political science at Ohio State University, writes in The National Interest:

Terrorism and the attendant "war" thereon have become fully embedded in the public consciousness, with the effect that politicians and bureaucrats have become as wary of appearing soft on terrorism as they are about appearing soft on drugs, or as they once were about appearing soft on Communism.
Key to this dynamic is that the public apparently continues to remain unimpressed by several inconvenient facts. One such fact is that there have been no al-Qaeda attacks whatsoever in the United States since 2001. A second is that no true al-Qaeda cell (or scarcely anybody who might even be deemed to have a "connection" to the diabolical group) has been unearthed in this country. A third is that the homegrown "plotters" who have been apprehended, while perhaps potentially somewhat dangerous at least in a few cases, have mostly been either flaky or almost absurdly incompetent.

Read the whole article here.

Hat tips: Alan Vanneman, Arts & Letters Daily.

Updates: Here's Jacob Sullum on "The Forever War," from the October 2002 issue. And me on "The New Cold War," from the December 2001 issue.

Al Qaeda No. 2 Slags U.S., Iran, Sunnis, Starbucks Coffee

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:35:00 EDT

From the AP, via the Cincy Enquirer:

Al-Qaida's No. 2 said in an audiotape released Friday that the United States will lose whether it stays in Iraq or withdraws, and he sneered that President Bush just wants to pass the problem on to his successor....
"The truth is that if Bush keeps all his forces in Iraq until doomsday and until they enter hell, they will only see crisis and defeat by the will of God," said al-Zawahri, the deputy of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden.
"If the American forces leave, they will lose everything. And if they stay, they will bleed to death," he said....
He said Tehran "has clear goals, which are the annexation of southern Iraq and the east of the Arabian Peninsula" as well as strengthening ties to its followers in southern Lebanon.
He said that if Iran achieves its goals, "this will add oil to the fire which is already ablaze. This will explode the situation in an already exploding region."

The tape, which is titled "Five Years of the Invasion of Iraq and Decades of Injustice by Tyrants," couldn't be verified but the AP noted it "the logo of al-Qaida's media wing," for what that's worth. Al-Zawahiri also trashed Iraqi Sunnis who created "Awakening Councils" and joined up with American forces.

More here.

What say you, Hit & Runners? Is A-Z right that U.S. options are all bad? That God is on al Qaeda's side? That Iran is on the march regionally? That the title of this audiotape sounds like a track from Love's Forever Changes? And shouldn't he be asking whether al Qaeda is bleeding to death in Iraq and elsewhere?

I Don't Want Yoo to Show Them the Way

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 07:00:00 EDT

According to John Yoo, the president's powers under the Constitution are so broad that the Constitution itself cannot restrain them. In a recently declassified 2003 memo, the former Justice Department official asserted that Congress, despite its Article I powers to "make rules concerning captures on land and water" and "for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces," has no business regulating the treatment of military prisoners. Yoo also cited a 2001 memo in which he had concluded that "the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations."

Compared to Yoo, all three of the remaining major-party candidates for president sound moderate when they talk about executive power. But Barack Obama is the one who seems to care most about restoring the rule of law and the separation of powers after eight years of an administration that has sorely abused both.

Even the Justice Department has backed away from Yoo's maximalist position, although exactly how far isn't clear. In Senate testimony last week, Attorney General Michael Mukasey repeatedly dodged the question of whether he thinks the Pentagon is free to conduct unreasonable searches and seizures.

Such immunity from the Fourth Amendment would allow not just warrantless surveillance of international communications involving people in the U.S. but monitoring of purely domestic phone calls and email as well. Indeed, it would allow warrantless domestic searches and seizures of any kind, provided they are carried out by a branch of the Defense Department that asserts a connection to terrorism or some other national security threat.

Yet the strongest reassurance Mukasey could offer was to say that "the Fourth Amendment applies across the board, regardless of whether we're in wartime or in peacetime." Asked specifically whether that means it applies to "domestic military operations," he said, "I'm unaware of any domestic military operations being carried out today."

Mukasey's evasiveness is especially troubling in light of his refusal during his confirmation hearings to acknowledge that Congress has the constitutional authority to restrict National Security Agency wiretaps. Unlike Yoo, he did at least concede that the president is bound to obey a congressional ban on torture.

That is the area where John McCain has most clearly distinguished himself from the Bush administration. Last December, in response to a Boston Globe candidate survey focusing on executive power, the Arizona senator also said the president is not free to violate statutory restrictions on wiretaps, and he rejected the use of signing statements as a way of reserving the right to flout laws. But he took a broader view than the other candidates of the president's authority to detain "enemy combatants," and he declined to identify areas where the Bush administration has overstepped its constitutional authority.

Obama, by contrast, gave half a dozen detailed examples. In general, the Illinois senator's answers to the Globe's questions were direct, thoughtful, and complete, apparently reflecting a sincere determination to limit his own power if elected.

After the election, of course, such promises may not be worth much. But on that score I worry more about Hillary Clinton. The New York senator's answers to the Globe survey, though less detailed than Obama's, were similar in substance. I just find it hard to believe them.

Clinton agreed, for example, that the president has to seek congressional authorization before attacking another country, except in response to an "imminent threat." Yet she has bragged about urging her husband to bomb Serbia as part of an unauthorized war that had nothing to do with national defense.

Although Clinton now claims to have a modest view of presidential power, she was singing a different tune a few years ago. "I'm a strong believer in executive authority," she told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News in 2003. "I wish that, when my husband was president, people in Congress had been more willing to recognize presidential authority." With the War on Terror as a rationale, her wish could be her command.

Same As It Ever Was

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

On March 28, the United Nations Human Rights Council elected, by unanimous vote, a special rapporteur on the "situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967." The nominee, Richard Falk, a veteran political activist and emeritus professor of law at Princeton University, was opposed by Israel for, among other statements, equating the situation in the Palestinian territories with the Nazi Holocaust. According to a spokesman for Israeli's foreign ministry, Falk will not be allowed through passport control in Tel Aviv.

"This is a very outrageous statement to us and a personal insult to every Israeli," said spokesman Arye Mekel. "How could he then come up with an objective conclusion about what Israel does or doesn't do in Gaza?"

To the Israelis, Falk's appointment is but another indication that the Human Rights Council (UN-HRC), which replaced the corrupt United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) in 2006, amounts to little more than a new acronym obscuring old anti-Israel bias. When the UNCHR was disbanded, The New York Times called the organization a "disgrace," conceding that, on this one point, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton was undeniably "right." In assembling the replacement body, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the new council would provide the "United Nations the chance—a much-needed chance—to make a new beginning in its work for human rights around the world." The UN-HRC, he claimed, "will breathe new life into all our work for human rights."

So has the UN-HRC purged itself of its political biases? Has it, at long last, expelled human rights violators from its ranks? Writing in the International Herald Tribune, Human Rights Watch's Peggy Hicks surveyed the recent record of the revamped council with dismay: "In its first year, the council shied away from taking action on most human rights crises, dropped its scrutiny of Iran and Uzbekistan, and managed to condemn Israel's human rights record without addressing violations by Hezbollah and Palestinian armed groups."

The nomination of Richard Falk is further evidence of UN backsliding in its commitment to fairly scrutinizing human rights. Not only has Falk served in a similar role in the past—he was on a 2001 special panel investigating Israeli human rights violations, suggesting that UN-HRC is recruiting from the old UNCHR pool—but his record is considerably worse than the recent news reports would suggest.

For instance, in 1979, not long after the inauguration of Iran's totalitarian and theocratic "revolution," Falk, then chairman of something called U.S. Citizens Concerned about Freedom in Iran, was granted space on The New York Times opinion page to shill for the incoming government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A month prior, Falk had flown to Paris with his comrade Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general and inveterate friend of dictators, to discuss "social justice" (Clark's phrase) with the then-exiled religious leader. Upon returning, Clark told The Washington Post that he was "deeply impressed by the nature and depth and purpose of the movement in Iran that has established the opportunity for a new freedom."

By the time Falk published his impressions of the Paris pilgrimage, the Ayatollah's gang of fundamentalist squadristi—officially known as "secret revolutionary tribunals"—was already meting out executions with little concern for due process. Nevertheless, in his Times opinion piece, Falk upbraided President Jimmy Carter for "associating [Khomeini] with religious fanaticism," and declared that "the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude religious prejudices seems certainly and happily false." Indeed, "his entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals."

This was too much for the Times' preeminent liberal columnist, Anthony Lewis, who ripped Falk's column as "outstandingly silly." It was clear to those not blinded by ideology, Lewis wrote, that the "Ayatollah has set out, without equivocation or disguise, to turn the clock back and give Iran a theocratic regime." With hindsight, it is perhaps tempting to see Lewis's column as prescient, and Falk as merely a naïve, anti-Shah activist duped by the regime's unsophisticated propaganda apparatus. But as contemporaneous news accounts make clear, the theocratic and dictatorial character of the Khomeini clique was widely acknowledged by Middle East observers well before the hostage crisis.

Falk's conception of human rights—remember, this is what he is tasked to monitor for the UN—is also colored by his warm feelings toward Tehran. Ann Elizabeth Mayer, an associate professor of legal studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics, noted in 2000 that "The international law scholar Richard Falk, who sympathizes with the Islamic Republic and who opines that ‘Islam' is entitled to have its own 'civilizational approach' to human rights, embodies the tendency to imagine that Iranians need more Islamic culture, not the human rights protections valued by people in the West."

But this is small beer compared to Falk's latest intellectual pursuit. In 2004, Falk wrote the introduction to The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin, a book arguing that the American government was behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. Of the vast trove of 9/11 "truth" material available in print and online, it was Griffin, Falk wrote in his foreword, who "has had the patience, the fortitude, the courage, and the intelligence to put the pieces together in a single coherent account." For Griffin's latest book, Debunking the 9/11 Debunkers, Falk provided a dust jacket endorsement: "David Ray Griffin has established himself—alongside Seymour Hersh—as America's number one bearer of unpleasant, yet necessary, public truths."

As media coverage of Falk's nomination has metastasized, it has unfortunately obscured news of UN-HRC's nomination of the Swiss socialist Jean Ziegler to the UN Human Rights Council Advisory Committee. A brief recapitulation of Ziegler's qualifications: In 1996, he defended Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy not only on free speech grounds—an admirable position, after all—but further celebrated his supposed scholarship. "All your work as a writer and philosopher," Ziegler wrote, "attests to the rigor of your analysis and the unwavering honesty of your intentions. It makes you one of the leading thinkers of our time." He lauded the Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe, a leader who "has history and morality with him." He offered his "total support for the Cuban revolution." He recently told a Lebanese newspaper the he "refuse[d] to describe Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. It is a national movement of resistance."

Then there's Ziegler's friendship with Libyan dictator Moammar Kaddafi. In 1989, according to a report in Neue Zurcher Zeitung (one that confirms research done by UN Watch), Ziegler helped establish the Kaddafi Prize for Human Rights. In 2002, Ziegler himself received the prize, which he shared with, among others, Roger Garaudy. Previous recipients include Fidel Castro, Louis Farrakhan, and Hugo Chavez.

Outside Turtle Bay, it is obvious that those who believe the 9/11 attacks were a government sponsored "false flag" operation and who believe in the moral probity of Kaddafi bequeathing cash prizes to serial human rights abusers have no business adjudicating human rights violations at the United Nations. In 2006, the current administration was widely criticized for opposing the establishment of the UN-HRC; the United States was the only industrialized country, besides Israel, to oppose its creation. In light of the appointment of Richard Falk and Jean Ziegler, it is similarly obvious that this was the correct decision.

While it is gratifying that the commission that long provided political cover for vile and undemocratic regimes such as Cuba, Zimbabwe, and Libya was publicly disgraced and dismantled, it is a disheartening, though utterly predictable, that its replacement is following in its footsteps.

Michael C. Moynihan is a reason associate editor.

Links! We Got Links!

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 08:00:00 EDT

Stuff I've been meaning to blog:

* a leftist critique of the New Deal,

* an online chat with Al Qaeda,

* a psychiatric strange loop,

* and from 1986, the first important piece of Reagan revisionism.

Bonus politics-free, prog-free music link: Candi Staton sings Merle Haggard.

The All-Powerful Commander in Chief

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:43:00 EDT

In a recently declassified March 2003 memo to the Pentagon's top lawyer, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo lays out "the legal standards governing military interrogations of alien unlawful combatants held outside the United States." Yoo reiterates his notoriously demanding definition of torture, which requires suffering "equivalent to the pain that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result." But this generous understanding of how far the Pentagon can go without violating the statutory prohibition of torture is not really necessary, since Yoo asserts that Congress has no authority under the Constitution to ban the torture of military prisoners in the first place:

In wartime, it is for the President alone to decide what methods to use to best prevail against the enemy....One of the core functions of the Commander in Chief is that of capturing, detaining, and interrogating members of the enemy....The President enjoys complete discretion in the exercise of his Commander-in-Chief authority in conducting operations against hostile forces....Congress cannot interfere with the President's exercise of his authority as Commander in Chief to control the conduct of operations during a war....Any construction of criminal laws that regulated the President's authority as Commander in Chief to determine the interrogation and treatment of enemy combatants would raise serious constitutional questions whether Congress had intruded on the President's constitutional authority....Congress may no more regulate the President's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield.

According to Yoo, then, no statutory restriction on the Pentagon's treatment of its prisoners, presumably including "enemy combatants" unilaterally identified by the president and arrested on U.S. soil, could be legally binding, because it would unconstitutionally impinge on the president's powers as commander in chief. Never mind that the Constitution gives Congress the authority not only to declare war but "to make rules concerning captures on land and water," "to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces," and to suspend the habeas corpus privilege "in cases of rebellion or invasion," all of which seem to imply that the legislative branch has some say regarding the handling of military prisoners.

In Yoo's view, the president's constitutional powers are so broad that the Constitution itself cannot restrain them. As the ACLU notes, a footnote on page 8 of the memo refers to a still-classified October 2001 document in which the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel "concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations." That position provides a legal rationale not just for the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance of international communications involving people in the U.S. but for monitoring of purely domestic phone calls and email as well. Indeed, it justifies warrantless domestic searches and seizures of any kind, provided they are carried out by a branch of the Defense Department that asserts a connection to terrorism or some other national security threat.

The Justice Department has repudiated both Yoo's March 2003 memo and his August 2002 memo addressing torture. But it's not clear to what extent it still concurs with Yoo's sweeping view of executive power. During his confirmation hearings, Attorney General Michael Mukasey conceded that the president is bound to obey statutes regulating the treatment of military prisoners. But he dodged the question of whether Congress has the authority to regulate domestic surveillance conducted in the name of national security. No one thought to ask him whether the president is bound to obey the Fourth Amendment, presumably because no one imagined that even this administration would claim otherwise. Now we know better.

The full text of the March 2003 memo is available from the ACLU here.

Guantanamo: The DVD

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 10:53:00 EDT

John Yoo's newly declassified torture memo -- download it here -- surely paved the path for the abuses at Guantanamo. But it wasn't alone. Vanity Fair reports:

Ideas arose from other sources. The first year of Fox TV's dramatic series 24 came to a conclusion in spring 2002, and the second year of the series began that fall. An inescapable message of the program is that torture works. "We saw it on cable," [Lt. Col. Diane] Beaver recalled. "People had already seen the first series. It was hugely popular." Jack Bauer had many friends at Guantánamo, Beaver added. "He gave people lots of ideas."

The rest of the Vanity Fair feature isn't so funny. Read it here.

They Can Have My Ring When They Pry It From My Cold, Dead Chest

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:54:00 EDT

Warning that "incidents of female terrorists hiding explosives in sensitive areas are on the rise all over the world," the Transportation Security Administration says "this scenario must be addressed at our nation's airports." By "sensitive areas," the TSA does not mean airplane cockpits or cargo holds; it means breasts and vaginas. Still, that does not explain why TSA agents at the airport in Lubbock, Texas, forced Mandi Hamlin to remove her nipple rings, saying she could not board her flight to Dallas until she did so. The removal was a painful and embarrassing process that required the use of pliers and elicited the snickers of TSA screeners.

On its website, the TSA says passengers with body piercings may have to undergo "additional screening for a pat-down inspection" if their intimate jewelry sets off the walk-through metal detector. But in Hamlin's case it didn't, and she says it never has. Instead she was selected for secondary examination at random (or by whatever mysterious criteria the TSA uses), and her nipple rings made the screener's wand beep. Hamlin explained the situation and offered to show a female screener her breasts in private to verify that the nipple rings were not explosives or weapons. She was not permitted to do so. Nor was she offered the choice the TSA advertises on its website:

You may be additionally screened because of hidden items such as body piercings, which alarmed the metal detector. If you are selected for additional screening, you may ask to remove your body piercing in private as an alternative to a pat-down search.

Hamlin wanted the pat-down, but she was never given the option. "In response to her complaint," CNN reports, "TSA's customer service manager in Lubbock concluded the screening was handled properly." It's bad enough when the TSA adopts inconvenient, invasive, yet ineffective procedures that seem designed mainly to create the illusion of security. It's worse when passengers can't even count on it to follow its own stupid policies.

More on TSA follies here, here, and here.

[via The Freedom Files]

They Want to Buy Our Crappy Assets. Run For Your Lives!!!

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 09:12:00 EDT

Sovereign wealth funds, this year's Dubai Ports World-style ooga-booga man of international finance, are the subject of an interesting Washington Post feature today.

The star of the piece is Bader al-Saad, a former Chase Manhattan and First National Bank of Chicago man who came to the Kuwait Investment Authority in 2003 and started remodeling the state-owned, oil-fed investment fund on the endowments of Harvard and Yale, which meant getting out of the Persian Gulf and looking for diversified opportunities abroad. And it turns out, with the U.S. dollar and American asset prices deflating, those opportunities began presenting themselves in these United States. Excerpt:

It was not Bader al-Saad's idea to buy huge chunks of Citigroup and Merrill Lynch.
It was early January and Saad ... was in his office as usual, reviewing potential deals in Kuwait and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf region, when the banks asked him to invest, he recalled.
"They called us.... We receive calls on most transactions," said Saad, whose fund bought stakes of $3 billion in Citigroup and $2 billion in Merrill Lynch. [...]
He said the next big purchases of assets in the United States may be in the real estate sector, which he expects will peak as an investment target -- in other words, hit rock bottom -- in the next few months. Saad said he also thinks U.S. telecommunications companies and more financial firms would make good investments.
"There are certain opportunities which do not come every day," he said. "We consider the recent crisis as creating some opportunities in certain sectors. I look at history, such as the savings-and-loan problem. It created golden opportunities."

But fear not -- legislators are busy looking for ways to discourage global liquidity from washing in to cash-starved Washington. The EU and U.S.-backed International Monetary Fund are drawing up targeted regulations and extracting you-will-only-come-seeking-profit pledges from the scary foreigners. Future president Barack Obama vows to stop "transferring wealth to these countries." The Council of Foreign Relations has issued a jeremiad against the "New Financial Superpower" [PDF] who will bring us to our knees by, uh, selling the U.S. assets they have already bought? It's all very confusing.

Some thoughts from Marginal Revolutionary Tyler Cowen here. Science Correspondent Ron Bailey explained how foreign ownership is not a threat, but stupid legislation is back in March 2006. And Kenton E. Kelly explained how a bogus security panic is alienating an ally and endangering our country in February 2006.

Bin Laden Denounces "Pope of the Vatican," Has No Comment on Pope of Greenwich Village

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:10:00 EDT

There's a new tape out (or maybe it's old) from Osama bin Laden (or maybe it's someone else). Transcript here. The big news, if there is any news, is that bin Laden believes those Muhammad cartoons -- remember them? they were a big deal in 2005 -- "came in the framework of a new Crusade in which the Pope of the Vatican has played a large, lengthy role." This is presumably a reference to Benedict XVI's controversial remarks about Islam, which were a big deal in 2006. CIA experts say this new evidence will help them determine when exactly bin Laden's tape recorder ran out of batteries.

Iraq at Five Years

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:17:00 EDT

Editor's Note: With the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq upon us, reason staffers look at where they were when the shooting began in 2003—and where they are now. In 2006, reason published an "Iraq Progress Report," in which "advocates for liberty weigh in after three years" and the June 2006 cover story featured three views on "'Mission Accomplished,' Three Years Later." For an archive of reason's Iraq coverage, go here.

Radley Balko, Senior Editor:

In the lead-up to the war, I was suspicious of the Bush administration's assessment of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, dubious that the federal government is capable of building a liberal society in Iraq from scratch, and in general opposed to the idea of attacking a country that had no discernible ties to the September 11 attacks. Like most people, my positions were based on the assumption that there were actually weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That we now know there weren't only makes the decision to go to war more regrettable. My position hasn't changed at all.
As for what we should do now, I really can't see any option other than a plan to withdraw troops as soon as possible. Yes, it will be disastrous. But it seems to me this is a pill we're either going to have to swallow now or later, the difference being that swallowing it later will only mean more U.S. casualties in the meantime. We can't pay the Sunnis not to attack us forever (or maybe we can, but we shouldn't). The New York Times mentioned a striking figure in an editorial the other day. For all the talk about pork barrel spending, the total amount of federal spending in all congressional earmarks combined would fund the war in Iraq for about two months. This has been a colossal waste of blood, treasure, and global goodwill.
It's worth noting that it was the crazy, wild-eyed libertarian foreign policy experts who predicted what would happen in Iraq almost to the letter. Yet for reasons that escape me, the neoconservatives who got everything so massively wrong are still taken seriously, and get huge platforms from which to denigrate opponents of the war as "unserious."

Nick Gillespie, Editor, reason.tv and reason online:

After almost 4,000 U.S. deaths, and tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and trillions of dollars poured into the desert sands, Americans have gone from "shock and awe" to something approaching "Aw, shucks." According to data from the American Enterprise Institute, the think tank often credited with providing intellectual grounding for the Iraq War, 59 percent of Americans say the war was a mistake and 60 percent want a timetable for pulling troops out. Given a similar percentage favored invading Iraq in the spring of 2003, that just might be too little, too late.
I was never in favor of invading Iraq, which I thought was a bait and switch from the 9/11 attacks engineered by a Bush administration whose "War on Terror" had run out of steam given its inability to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice. When U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein (a man who makes me want to believe in hell, just so he can get what he deserves for all eternity), the Americans hubristically pulled a page from the playbook of Shelley's overreaching Ozymandias, and replaced one "colossal wreck" of a regime with another. It's incredibly dispiriting how arrogant and stupid the U.S. forces were when it came to losing the peace, but really, more of us should have seen it coming.
The question I worry about is what American foreign policy will look like five years hence. I'm not a pacifist, and I don't think that military intervention is always a bad thing (ideally, it should be used like Astroglide: sparingly and after a lot of foreplay). But I don't think we've learned very much as a country from the Iraq mess, other than not to rely too much on retreads from the Ford administration to call the shots. I certainly don't think John McCain, Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton, much less their advisors, have learned much from recent mistakes. Some of them are more ready to bow down to popular opinion but really, that's no way to conduct foreign policy. As a country, we're still a long way away from even starting a conversation that will yield a post-Cold War consensus on how the U.S. should act as a military power. That's not just a bad thing, it really dishonors those who have sacrificed life and limb over the past five years.

Kerry Howley, Senior Editor:

I don't remember where I was when the war started, or when the war turned one, or two, or three, or four. I was in college for the flashy beginning, in Burma for much of the following two years, where the war presented itself as a daily collage of gruesome black and white pictures in the junta's state press. The quality of the print was so bad that many of the pictures just looked smudged. You had to look for the black spaces, and imagine blood.
When I came back, the war was as it is now-hard to imagine and easy to ignore. Every liberty lost here is an abstraction. I have only the vaguest idea of what Nisour Square looks like; my image of Fallujah consists of charred bodies hanging from a single bridge. I can't fathom what it means for a collective to have lost 100,000 people prematurely, or for a state to waste $2 trillion it does not have. Few people I know have ventured out of the Green Zone, and no one I know has been hurt. What do I think about the Iraq War as it enters its sixth year? I think it seems tragic and brutal and criminal, and very far away.

Katherine Mangu-Ward, Associate Editor:

In March 2003, I was just a few months out of college and I had already helped start a war.
My first journalism gig was as the pet libertarian at The Weekly Standard, the neocon home base generally credited with nudging the Bush administration into Iraq.
It's quite exciting to inaugurate a war, and we at the Standard were far from alone in feeling the thrill. Like much of the pro-war commentariat, I thought, "Whatever happens, it can't get worse." After all, what's worse than a genocidal dictator filling mass graves and stockpiling nukes in the volatile Middle East? (Belief in WMDs was robustly bipartisan at the time.) There even seemed to be a decent chance things would get a whole lot better-an oasis of freedom in a desert of tyranny and all that. My colleagues at the Standard and I supported the war with the best intentions, something that opponents of the war often lose sight of. We dreamed of a free, friendly Iraq. Better for us, better for Iraqis.
As a libertarian, I could have and should have known better than to think government actors would get things right, since my political philosophy is grounded in the idea that government is uniquely bad at getting anything done cheaply or efficiently. War is too often a classic example of government action creating waste and confusion on a spectacular scale, good intentions or not.
As it turns out, things could get worse—and they did.

Michael C. Moynihan, Associate Editor:

Anniversaries of catastrophic wars are typically moments of ritual self-flagellation. So what, then, was I wrong about, what have I changed my mind about, five years later? Where does one begin. In those years proceeding the 9/11 attacks, one was forced, often by the social obligation of dinner discussions, to wade into the swamp of Middle Eastern politics; to be pro-war or anti-war, regardless of your level of political engagement or knowledge.
Groping at the unfamiliar—which ones are the Sunnis? what is a Kurd, exactly?—the post-9/11 cult of the amateur (myself included) rebelled against the supposedly lazy and corrupt "MSM," and instead offered endless lunkheaded comparisons between 2003 Iraq and 1945 Japan. The insurgency that flowered, many bloggers blithely suggested, had its historical antecedents in the Werewolf Organization, a band of former Nazis that harassed Allied occupiers and quickly melted away. The Iraqis, brutalized by war and dictatorship, were ready to have a go at democracy. Of course, none of this would happen.
The best mirror of my bewilderment and disappointment is George Packer's brilliant book The Assassins Gate, a clear-eyed account of the stupidity and venality of those sent by the Bush administration to mismanage the occupation. As one CPA advisor told me in 2006, Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR) was known inside the green zone as "Kick Back and Relax." And as Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran's noted with wonderment, James K. Haveman Jr., the official put in charge of Iraq's health care system, landed in Baghdad and launched an anti-smoking campaign. I suppose this is something I always knew, just something that I hoped wouldn't be true in this one case, but boy was I wrong in thinking that the U.S. government could ever achieve a level of honesty and competence needed to even try to promote democracy in an undemocratic region.

Jacob Sullum, Senior Editor:

I was against the war before I was even more against it. I never had any doubts that Saddam Hussein was a murderous thug, but I believed he was a deterrable murderous thug. So even when I assumed he had at least some "weapons of mass destruction," I did not think the threat was big and imminent enough to justify the invasion. Now that we know he had none, I'm embarrassed that I gave as much weight as I did to Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations. I'm only slightly less embarrassed about my warning that Iraq surely would use its dreaded (but nonexistent) chemical weapons once the U.S. invaded. Here is the truth starting to dawn on me, right after the fall of Baghdad: "Could it be that Iraq never had a significant WMD capability?" I added that it might not matter, since "even before jubilant Iraqis started pouring into the streets, waving improvised flags and tearing down Saddam's statues, ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom' had metamorphosed from a pre-emptive act of self-defense into a humanitarian mission to rescue people from a brutal dictator."
People who supported the war assure me the Bush administration made the argument about fighting terrorism by turning Iraq into a liberal democracy and thereby transforming the Middle East even before the WMDs went missing. My impression during the lead-up to the invasion was that it was all about neutralizing the WMD threat, since Saddam could decide any day to use those weapons against us, either directly or by passing them on to terrorists. If I had believed the aim was to make the world safe through democracy, which I now hear was the idea all along, I would have been even more skeptical, and I think most Americans would have been as well. I doubt that many who supported the war imagined the U.S. would still have such a large presence in Iraq five years later, let alone that it would have to stay indefinitely simply to prevent the chaos unleashed by the invasion from getting even worse.

Jesse Walker, Managing Editor:

In 2003 I thought there was no compelling reason to invade Iraq, even if the country held weapons of mass destruction; that the U.S. would easily topple Saddam Hussein's regime but would run into serious troubles when the occupation began; and that the war would do much more harm than good.
Five years later, I am less likely to concede the possibility that Saddam was concealing weapons of mass destruction.

David Weigel, Associate Editor:

Do you remember the pro-war protestors? I was one of them. Five years ago a pack of conservatives at my college planned a "crash" of the final anti-war rally before the start of the war. When the forces of non-intervention set up on the library steps and started speaking, we walked right in front of them, blasting the Saddam Hussein love ballad from South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut on a ROTC student's boom box.

I have excuses for all of this. I was 21. My expertise in American interventionism came from watching Gulf War, Bosnia, and Kosovo reports on CNN. I had friends in the Army. I wanted to "free the Iraqi people." The takeaway is that, like millions of people, I was naive and uninformed about the doings in Mesopotamia and I did my little part to enable a catastrophe.

Matt Welch, Editor in Chief, reason magazine:

I was neither for nor against the war when it was launched, though most of the stuff I was worried about ended up coming true (especially "we will create a damned-if-we-do scenario unless we start looking for creative ways to devolve power and responsibility to the rest of the world").
But the mere fact of that ambivalence points to what's changed most about my thinking since then. Until five years ago, the prior three major U.S. interventions -- the Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo—each went quite a bit better than the skeptics predicted. In the same way that almost all past U.S. presidents end up looking good in retrospect (to somebody, anyway), while history marches toward a better future, my hunch was that the pattern would hold true to our post-Vietnam wars as well. No more.
Because of the magnetic logic of perpetual interventionism (on both sides of the political aisle); the strategic problem of anti-Americanism, the temptation of inapt historical analogies and the way that power wants to be corrupt, I have gone from a guy who begged for U.S. leadership in a feckless world to stop the slaughter in Sarajevo, to someone whose primary voting motivation is to provide a check on America's expansion of responsibility for the world's affairs.

Michael Young, Contributing Editor, reason; Opinion Page Editor, Lebanon Daily Star:

The assumption that our thoughts should have changed on Iraq is presumptuous. Certainly, the Bush administration's abysmal postwar strategy until the surge last year invites a critical reassessment of what could have been done for the better. But what does not, and should not, is the bottom line of the war: the fact that the United States managed to remove one of the world's worst mass murderers from power, so that today 55 percent of Iraqis believe that their lives are good, according to a recent poll—including 62 percent of Shiites and 73 percent of Kurds.
The thing with conflicts is that they can be like that old joke about the man who swims halfway across the ocean, only to swim back to where he left from because he's tired. Is the U.S. halfway across the ocean of the Iraq war? Would swimming back to the departure point be a pointless waste of expended energy, so that persisting in Iraq would bring more dividends? It's difficult to say. The gross blunder of the administration was to leave such questions without answers. But it is difficult to justify retreat from Iraq a year into tangible signs of progress thanks to the surge.
Those who back an American withdrawal on the grounds that Iraq is already in a state of chaos don't know what they're talking about. The Moloch of uninhibited chaos and carnage would be infinitely worse, as I remember from my own experiences growing up during Lebanon's civil war. For numerous reasons—the fate of the Iraqis after a pullout, Iran's continuing rise as regional superpower, the future of the Kurds, the threat to regional stability—the U.S. has no choice but to stick it out in Iraq. And as the doubts creep in, Americans might want to think back to what Iraq was under Saddam Hussein, who in two decades was directly or indirectly responsible for the death of nearly 1 million people.
So, sorry, but invading Iraq was the right thing to do, even if it could have been done a million times better by a more competent group of people. When I think of Iraq, somehow I have no profound problem slamming George W. Bush's faults while welcoming what he did to the Baath regime—the barbaric, genocidal, thankfully bygone Baath regime.

"It's not worth it. You'll just get screwed."

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:11:00 EDT

The drawbacks of whistleblowing.

Diary of an Israel Junketeer, Part Two

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

(Editor's Note: reason Associate Editor Michael C. Moynihan is traveling though Israel on a program sponsored by the American Israel Education Fund, a travel program for journalists sponsored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He'll be filing observations throughout the week.)

Tel Aviv—"It's amazing," the owner of Jerusalem restaurant says, flicking his cigarette. "The police fined us for smoking out here. I mean, it's technically part of the building, but it's open air." The country banned smoking in bars and restaurants last year.

"Right over there, behind the security fence," he gestures wildly, "is the West Bank. And they are fucking with me for smoking. This restaurant used to be in the Old City and it was attacked four times. Guns, bombs, and hand grenades." But please refrain from lighting up.

In Tel Aviv, not a single bar or nightclub seems to obey the rules; all are thick with smoke. It is, roughly, a mix of 20 percent hash and 80 percent tobacco. According to a prominent investigative journalist here, it isn't just Israelis who indulge in drugging. The reporter, who works for a major Tel Aviv daily, is a fluent Arabic speaker who spends the majority of his time pounding the pavement in the Palestinian Territories.

He relates a bizarre story: Last year, while interviewing a house full of Hamas members, he entered into a rather ordinary conversation on the banalities of soldiering (the journalist, like most Israelis, is an Israel Defense Forces veteran). "So how do you pull these long shifts?" he wondered. "Well, we take pills smuggled in from Tel Aviv," said the Hamas apparatchik. "What pills?" He didn't know, but graciously placed a call to a Hamas comrade, who, apparently, doubles as his pharmacist. "He says they are called the EK-STAZY." The raver-jihadists explained that these mystery pills induce a mild euphoria, and allow them to shoot at members of the Israel Defense Forces for long, happy stretches.

The Hamas-embedded journalist relates another woe-is-me-story of life as a terrorist. "I'm the Oprah of the Palestinians. They are always telling me things about their private lives." One leader of Islamic Jihad recently confessed that his manifold sexual problems were driving him to depression. It is tough, he moaned, to find a good woman, a woman willing to spend time with you, when you marked for death by Israeli intelligence. Amongst the extremists, they even manage to blame not getting laid on Zionism.

According to a report in this morning's Jerusalem Post, Israelis are overwhelmingly opposed to further privatization of health services. It's initially surprising that such poll questions are even being asked, that such issues are deemed important, when Kassam rockets are being lobbed at Sderot everyday, when the very real possibility of a third intifada is discussed and debated with a mixture of exhaustion and terror. But life trudges forward. Visitors (and visiting journalists, especially) are the ones that steer conversation towards the maudlin. I have consistently asked Israelis, both politicians and ordinary citizens, their opinions on a variety of economic issues. There is, from this admittedly small sample, no real enthusiasm for such debates.

When I asked Likud parliamentarian Mickey Eitan to explain the difference in the economic policies of Kadima and his party, he was, as appears to be his nature, blunt. "None. We are both [classical] liberals. Our differences were almost only over the disengagement of Gaza."

Coming next: Hamas, Hezbollah, and the peace process that isn't...

Diary of an Israel Junketeer, Part One

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

(Editor's Note: reason Associate Editor Michael C. Moynihan is traveling though Israel on a program sponsored by the American Israel Education Fund, a travel program for journalists sponsored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He'll be filing observations throughout the week.)

Jerusalem—Walking toward Jerusalem's Old City, a journalist colleague in my tour group relates, apropos of nothing, that Tucker Carlson's MSNBC show is being cancelled. A brief argument follows over who is the best cable talk show host on American television—I nominate the peerless Robin Byrd—only to be interrupted by two elderly and ornery American tourists: "We came here to get away from politics." The Yanks seem unaware that, in Israel—and we're within spitting distance of the Dome of the Rock—there is no escaping politics.

The constant political discussions in this city quickly annex most of your brain. It's a shopworn observation, but the simple act of entering a coffee shop requires a quick bit of profiling and a wave of the metal detector wand. No one, from what I can make out, seems irritated by this.

Politics and the icons of war are all around. Reading an essay in Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, trying to beat suffocating jetlag, I repeatedly misread a doped-up character named "Sharon" as Sha-rone.

Within the walls of Jerusalem's Old City, plus-sized American tourists are everywhere, waddling through the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with their panama hats and chunky white sneakers, oohing and ahhing at various reconstructed tombs and crucifixion crosses. Deeply holy, with a whiff of Six Flags.

Like everything else in the region, the church is subdivided into four quarters. The Eastern Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Roman Catholic, and Greek Orthodox have their own little Bantustans for which they are responsible. Take away these invisible boundaries and, I suppose, fistfights would break out.

Just outside the church, in the narrow alleyways of the Arab quarter, it is possible to buy all manner of junk: rugs, cheap knives, and, depending on your degree of bravery, either an IDF or Yasser Arafat t-shirt.

Over breakfast, an Israeli political analyst inspires little confidence that a peaceful resolution to this baffling, maddening, intractable conflict is at hand. The three pillars of Israeli politics, she says—the right, left, and center—have all collapsed, all producing similar results.

The latest: Kadima, the centrist party formed by Ariel Sharon in 2005 that took power the next year, presided over Hezbollah's 12,000-missile buildup and an inconclusive war. Sharon's total disengagement from Gaza has, almost everyone reminds you, resulted in a Hamas government and, as we have seen in recent weeks, a huge spike in the number of Qassam rockets fired at civilian population centers in Israeli border towns. As could be expected, recent opinion polling shows that the Likud party, which currently has just 12 seats in the 120-member Knesset (to Kadima's 29), would more than double that number if elections were held today.

Over lunch, an Israeli academic praises the innumerable benefits of the Israeli parliamentary system—no candidates, only party lists—and bemoans "the boring" American election. I wonder, though don't ask, if the parliamentary system in Italy, with its 50 governments in as many years, is an appropriate counter-example to the supposed brilliance of coalition governments and proportional representation. Israel, says the professor, was once a welfare state in the Scandinavian mold and, so I hear, was equally bungling and bureaucratic. But in recent years, he points out, the country "has privatized faster than Russia." It is difficult to determine if this is said with contempt or pride.

In the evening we drive into Arab East Jerusalem for a meeting with a senior Palestinian Authority official close to Mahmoud Abbas (all Israelis call him Abu Mazen). The consensus among our small group of journalists, regardless of their own political hang-ups, is that this guy, like many P.A. officials, eloquently delivers an hour of sophistry and evasion.

It's a pitiful performance. One questioner asks why, if the Palestinian Authority renounces terror, it recently celebrated the life and achievements of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist George Habash. The official becomes agitated and recommends that such issues must be left "in the past." Calling people "terrorists" or calling them "freedom fighters," he grumbles, is an impediment to peace.

For the remaining hour, it is clear that the Palestinian Authority wants to bury the past-except when it doesn't. The rest of the conversation is an argument about the past, with periodic nods to "the peace process." When I ask the official about the massive and well-documented thievery of Yasser Arafat, his eyes narrow. "Arafat never stole money," he hisses. "The people around him did, but not Arafat."

Besides, any corruption in the P.A. was "done with the full knowledge of Israel." If this guy pulls a muscle playing racquetball, he probably blames Israel. While the moderate Likud member of parliament Mickey Eitan told me that his former party boss Ariel Sharon "was the most corrupt man in the history of Israel," and that Sharon's extended family was like "something you would find in South America," the P.A. dare not speak ill of its former leader.

Coming Next: Raver-jihadists, privatizing health care, and the Oprah of the Palestinians.

Feds To Probe World of Warcraft in Search of Terrorists

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 12:10:00 EDT

No, really.

Thanks to Andrea Hofer for the tip.

Dick Cheney Wins World Fantasy Award

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:55:00 EDT

Not a surprise, but still worth noting:

An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.

The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam's regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.

Elsewhere in Reason: I considered the alleged Osama-Saddam entente back in 2003.

The FBI's Experiments in Self-Supervision

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 11:03:00 EST

Yesterday FBI Director Robert Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee the bureau's agents continued to improperly use the administrative subpoenas known as national security letters to demand personal information about Americans from financial institutions, credit bureaus, Internet service providers, and phone companies through 2006. A March 2007 report by the Justice Department's inspector general, covering 2003 through 2005, revealed that agents were unlilaterally issuing NSLs in nonemergency situations without getting the required clearance from their superiors. Mueller was offering a preview of an upcoming inspector general's report with similar findings about 2006. But all of that "predates the reforms we now have in place," Mueller said. Evidently the FBI now has a rule that says agents have to follow the rules.

A PDF of the 2007 I.G. report is available here.

Why Smoking Is Worse Than Terrorism

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:27:00 EST

This ad was produced for the New Zealand chapter of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) by Doyle Dane Bernbach. As Copyranter notes, the idea is not even original: An anti-smoking ad published in a Dubai newspaper on the 2007 anniversary of 9/11 used the same tasteless concept. The copy in the ASH ad reads:

Terrorism-related deaths since 2001: 11,337 • Tobacco-related deaths since 2001: 30,000,000

This juxtaposition should not be dismissed as mere provocation. For "public health" true believers, the fact that smokers who get lung cancer or emphysema are not murdered but instead die as a result of voluntarily assumed risks does not mean the government has less of a duty to prevent their deaths. As public health theorist Dan Beauchamp puts it, "The historic dream of public health that preventable death and disability ought to be minimized is a dream of social justice," and realizing it means rejecting "the ultimately arbitrary distinction between voluntary and involuntary hazards" as well as "the radical individualism inherent in the market model."

Properly speaking, the collectivist calculus of public health should take into account years of life lost, and the people who died in the the 9/11 attacks were, on average, younger than people who die from smoking-related diseases. But since the latter group is so much larger, it accounts for many more total years of life lost. By this logic, smoking is a much bigger outrage than terrorism, and governments should spend much more money and effort to prevent it than they do to prevent terrorism. Although I am sympathetic to the argument that our government devotes too many resources to stopping low-probability terrorist attacks, I tend to think any amount of taxpayer money spent on saving people from themselves is too much. But that's because I am still subject to what Beauchamp disapprovingly describes as "the powerful sway market-justice holds over our imagination, granting fundamental freedom to all individuals to be left alone."

[via Wonkette]

AT&T Works In More Places....

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:39:00 EST

For some real-world commentary on the recent telecommunications company/FISA brouhaha, see the work of the Billboard Liberation Front on a San Francisco AT & T billboard yesterday.

For more sober and detailed commentary on this matter see, to begin with, Julian Sanchez's "Time for Democrats to Lead on FISA" from December.

Heirs of a Terror War, That's What We've Become...

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:50:00 EST

Bush is once again trying to cut its budget to a mere $900 million (and will likely fail, like he did last year, when asking for that sum got him $1.3 billion appropriated by Congress), and while continuing its (sadly eternal) dying gasps, Amtrak makes the experience of riding the rails even more annoying:

Amtrak will start randomly screening passengers' carry-on bags this week in a new security push that includes officers with automatic weapons and bomb-sniffing dogs patrolling platforms and trains.
The initiative, to be announced by the railroad on Tuesday, is a significant shift for Amtrak. Unlike the airlines, it has had relatively little visible increase in security since the 2001 terrorist attacks, a distinction that has enabled it to attract passengers eager to avoid airport hassles.
Amtrak officials insist their new procedures won't hold up the flow of passengers.
"On-time performance is a key element of Amtrak service. We are fully mindful of that. This is not about train delays," Bill Rooney, the railroad's vice president for security strategy and special operations, told The Associated Press.

Peter Bagge cartoons wickedly on the Amtrak experience, from our Dec. 2005 issue.