… keeping any and all “weapons,” from hobby knives to hair gel, out of the hands and luggage of 2 million travelers every day of the year. I’ll remind you that tough-as-nails prison guards cannot keep drugs and knives out of maximum security cell blocks, never mind the folly of TSA guards trying to root out liquid-filled baby rattles at overcrowded airports.
WooHOooo more from the eminently sensible pilot and air travel journalist par excellence, Patrick Smith, at Salon
From Glenn Greenwald at Salon:
While virtually all of the Bush agenda over the last eight years ended up being deeply unpopular and profoundly discredited, it was his foreign policy and intelligence programs (torture, rendition, illegal surveillance, war) which caused the most intense opposition, at least among Democratic voters. That is a large part of why Democrats just won their second straight national election promising to oppose Bush’s policies and to implement “change.” It was the policies implemented and overseen by Bush’s Pentagon, CIA and “homeland security” apparatus that caused the most disgrace. “Continuity” in those areas would be nothing less than a patent betrayal of everything Democrats, over the last two years, told the citizenry they intended to do.
And yet, having watched Obama already announce that he is retaining Bush’s Defense Secretary, here we have the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee also urging that Obama keep, for “at least” six months, Bush’s handpicked Director of National Intelligence (whom Democrats excoriated during the FISA debates for manipulating and, as even Reyes himself noted, outright lying to them) and Bush’s handpicked CIA Director (who was, as Obama himself said, the “architect and chief defender” of Bush’s illegal NSA spying programs). Even worse, Reyes is publicly urging that Obama maintain, rather than overhaul, “some parts of the CIA’s controversial alternative interrogation program” — or else we’ll all be slaughtered by the Terrorists.
Read the whole thing here
American border paranoia:
Jason Haist’s arrival in the U.S. was a complete accident. After nearly drowning in rapids on the Niagara River, he washed ashore on American soil, where he was promptly informed he faced charges for entering the country illegally and could be detained for up to three weeks while officials try to determine his intentions.
Read the whole ridiculous story here
From Newsweek:
The most influential legal thinker in the development of modern American interrogation policy is not a behavioral psychologist, international lawyer or counterinsurgency expert. Reading both Jane Mayer’s stunning “The Dark Side,” and Philippe Sands‘s “Torture Team,” it quickly becomes plain that the prime mover of American interrogation doctrine is none other than the star of Fox television’s “24,” Jack Bauer.
This fictional counterterrorism agent—a man never at a loss for something to do with an electrode—has his fingerprints all over U.S. interrogation policy. As Sands and Mayer tell it, the lawyers designing interrogation techniques cited Bauer more frequently than the Constitution.
According to British lawyer and writer Sands, Jack Bauer—played by Kiefer Sutherland—was an inspiration at early “brainstorming meetings” of military officials at Guantánamo in September 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial interrogation techniques including waterboarding, sexual humiliation and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer “gave people lots of ideas.” Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security chief, gushed in a panel discussion on “24” organized by the Heritage Foundation that the show”reflects real life.”
John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who produced the so-called torture memos—simultaneously redefining both the laws of torture and of logic—cites Bauer in his book “War by Other Means.” “What if, as the Fox television program ’24’ recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon?” Even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, speaking in Canada last summer, shows a gift for this casual toggling between television and the Constitution. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Scalia said. “Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?”
There are many reasons that matriculation from the Jack Bauer School of Law would have encouraged even cautious legal thinkers to bend and eventually break our longstanding rules against torture. U.S. interrogators rarely if ever encounter a “ticking time bomb,” someone with detailed information about an imminent terror plot. But according to the advocacy group the Parents Television Council (which has declared war on “24”), Bauer encounters a ticking time bomb an average of 12 times every season. Given that each season represents a 24-hour period, Bauer encounters someone who needs torturing 12 times per day. Experienced interrogators know that information extracted through torture is rarely reliable. But Jack Bauer’s torture not only elicits the truth, it does so before the commercial. He is a human polygraph who has a way with flesh-eating chemicals.
… Yoo wanted to change American torture law to accommodate him, and Justice Scalia wants to immunize him from prosecution. The problem is not just that they all saw themselves in Jack Bauer. The problem was their failure to see what Bauer really represents within the legal universe of “24.”
For one thing, Bauer operates outside the law, and he knows it. Nobody in the fictional world of “24” changes the rules to permit him to torture. For the most part, he does so fully aware that he is breaking the law. Bush administration officials turned that formula on its head. In an almost Nixonian twist, the new interrogation doctrine became: “If Jack Bauer does it, it can’t be illegal.”
The Scylla in this case is a belief that this guys are profoundly evil. The Charybdis is that they are profoundly mundane and superficial. If it’s possible to be profoundly superficial.
Funny thing is, I noted the similarity between Bush-think and Bauer-think quite awhile ago, here. As did matttbastard [I can’t find the link to mattt’s original post – drop it in comments if you find it]. And, of course, Philippe Sands at Vanity Fair. But I hadn’t read either of them at the time.
My idea was that tv shows like “24”, much as I confessed to being addicted to it, softened us up to the idea that an American working on behalf of America would use immoral and illegal means without much thought but with easy justification – “it works and I gotta do it to save the world”. I guess Scalia and Yoo noticed that as well.
Newsweek article via digby
UPDATE: mattt kindly dropped some links in comments and I’m moving them up –
see this, this, and this and you get your LL.B. from The Jack Bauer School of Law. Show evidence of having read Jane Mayer and Philippe Sand and you get your doctorate.
Ok, now I understand why Western countries are loathe to critisize China on human rights issues. Thanks to Naomi Klein:
Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range – a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)
The security cameras are just one part of a much broader high-tech surveillance and censorship program known in China as “Golden Shield.” The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking technology – thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric – to create an airtight consumer cocoon: a place where Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cellphones, McDonald’s Happy Meals, Tsingtao beer and UPS delivery (to name just a few of the official sponsors of the Beijing Olympics) can be enjoyed under the unblinking eye of the state, without the threat of democracy breaking out. With political unrest on the rise across China, the government hopes to use the surveillance shield to identify and counteract dissent before it explodes into a mass movement like the one that grabbed the world’s attention at Tiananmen Square.
Remember how we’ve always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American “homeland security” technologies, pumped up with “war on terror” rhetoric. And the global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.
More at Rolling Stone
Adam Doster writes about the Iraqi refugee/humanitarian crisis and the US’ ineffective response:
Rising violence and growing attention to the emergency forced President Bush’s hand in early 2007. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice created a high-level State Department task force on the refugee issue and promised to resettle 25,000 Iraqis. But over the course of the year, that target dropped to 7,000, and later to 2,000. By year’s end, only 1,608 Iraqis had been admitted.
The number of refugees processed each month would have to triple for the administration to meet its new 2008 goal of resettling 12,000 refugees. And on March 11, the State Department’s Senior Coordinator of Iraqi Refugee Issues James B. Foley told the House subcommittee on Middle East and South Asia that reaching that number is “not guaranteed.”
By contrast, Sweden, a nation of 9 million people, has resettled more than 90,000 Iraqis, in spite of its opposition to the invasion. The Center for American Progress’ Katulis and his colleagues have advocated that the United States should take in at least 100,000 refugees annually, based on UNHCR estimates of Iraqi citizens facing extreme vulnerability.
Why does America keep missing its targets? The State Department points to bureaucratic snafus, ranging from the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) stringent security review of each applicant, to jurisdictional confusion between the State Department and DHS, to a lack of interviewers in the field. Kurtzer says the fault lies with the White House, where officials refuse to take the problem seriously.
“There’s been a lack of political will from the senior levels of the administration to respond to this crisis in a way that we know the government is capable of responding,” he says. “When the White House is interested in putting resources and finding solutions to a problem, they are clearly capable of doing it.” alternet.org
mirabile dictu 