How Not to Get It

This would make me think they'd been taking lessons from the Bush administration, if it weren't so characteristic of them, already. Indeed, so much so that the Iraq War looks like it models itself on an Israeli policy. Anyway, looks like the Gaza rockets have finally crossed a line. Or something.

Israeli cabinet ministers on Wednesday voted unanimously to declare the Gaza Strip an “enemy entity” in order to shut off fuel and power to the 1.4m Palestinians in the impoverished enclave if rocket attacks continue.

Since June the territory where 40 per cent of Palestinians live has been ruled exclusively by Hamas and its borders have been open only for humanitarian aid.

So we thought it would be a good idea to make sure the humanitarian workers had more to do, which is sure to stop those rockets, since we're seeing that choking harder has slowed them down so much. Oh, wait,

Timed with the arrival in Israel of Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, the move by Ehud Olmert’s administration shows exasperation with continued Palestinian militant rocket fire against the Negev.

Yep, clamping down is clearly working for Israel in the Occupied Territories, just like it always has. Not.

Three dozen young soldiers were wounded last week when rockets struck their base, sparking a public outcry for retaliatory action.

Oh, no! Not soldiers! Only terrorists would fire at soldiers!

Gradual sanctions, imposed by Israel in stages if the rockets do not stop, would allow in only enough fuel to power electrical generators at Gaza hospitals. The borders would be opened only for essential food and medical supplies. Water supplies would continue flowing at present levels, however.

Lawyers also advised the cabinet that any disruption in electricity should be restricted, to avoid violating international law by inflicting collective punishment on the civilian population. More than half the Gazan population is under 15 years old.

Ahhhh, I knew I saw the hand of Alberto Gonzales; at least he's found new work! If less than half the Gazan population were under 15, it would be acceptable to starve them. As it is, it is only possible legally to make them really, really hungry. Even if they did vote for terrorists.

Despite Israeli air strikes and Israeli Defence Forces forays to root out the rocket launchers, which have killed a dozen people in seven years and terrified thousands of citizens in Sderot, in northern Israel, homemade rockets rain down almost daily on Israeli soil.

Almost daily attacks that kill an average of two people a year? Hasn't anyone in Hamas figured out that those are pretty inefficient numbers? Maybe the strategy is to keep the pressure on without, in fact, killing lots of people, but I don't know that you can target those rockets accurately enough to reliably aim not to kill or hurt people.

Tzahi Hanegbi, defence committee chairman, told Israel’s Army Radio there was no need to “pamper” Gazans with fuel and electricity, and that a new incursion into the strip was inevitable.

Yes, fuel and electricity are examples of those modern American luxuries, like private jets. I mean, it's not like they won't have water.

What? You got a problem?

tags technorati : Israel, Palestine, Terrorism, Hamas, Gaza, Politics

Greening Guantanamo, the Sheryl Crow Way

I guess someone was listening. This is an excellent example of how a really great idea from a rockstar that gets pooh-poohed in the mainstream media can nevertheless find new life:

For guards on the front line of the U.S. war on terrorism at Guantanamo, that often involves tedious chores such as counting out toilet paper rations.

"Noncompliant" prisoners who violate camp rules are allotted 30 squares a day because bigger wads of tissue can be moistened and dried to make crude papier-mache-type shanks for use as weapons to attack guards, said Army Staff Sgt. Jerry Rushing.

Ah, the tedium of prison guard life. They should just shut the prison down. Except that would probably embolden the enemy. Much better to have prison guards shanked by dried toilet paper. Now that's American ingenuity . . . from people who hate our freedom . . . to, I don't know, be ingenious or something.

The Ministry of Truthiness

Wikipedia, that is. And who is the Minister of Truthiness? Why, you are.

It is a sort of dictum of the postmodern left that power is everywhere and everywhere contested. It is tempting at times to emphasize the latter and play down the former. But the recent news about—or, more importantly, from—WikiScanner reminds us that when everyone is anonymous, so are corporate and government agents. At its best (which is to say, when contributors edit entries both honestly and knowledgeably), Wikipedia is an interesting and even important experiment in open source content.

Unfortunately, the reality is much more problematic, in two ways. First, there is the opportunity for governments and corporations (and, frankly, any other organization with a vested interest in an entry, including non-profits organizations and institutions, other political entities, etc. etc.) to manipulate ostensibly "grassroots" information source in a very astroturf-y kind of way.

So, that's the Orwellian part.

But then there's the Tocquevillian part, the part where the truth is what most people believe the truth is. Stephen Colbert, whom we know and love, hits both of these elements in a recent segment: video, transcript.

I don't contribute code to, say, the Linux or BSD codebases. Better programmers than I do that, and I let them do it. Because it makes better code.

*Hint*

tags technorati : wikipedia wikiscanner truthiness politics

Fear is Freedom

So much to blog, so little time. An op-ed in today's NYT describes the growing structural, economic entrenchment of the War on Terror state of emergency.

Back [in the 1980s, on the Montana-Alberta border], if we had seen a man on horseback riding along the border, standing in his stirrups to look around, we would have assumed that he was a rancher looking for straying livestock. Today, we’d have to consider the possibility that he was an operative for Operation Noble Mustang, in which wild horses from Bureau of Land Management holdings in the West are trained by prison inmates for use by border patrolmen on the lookout for smugglers and terrorists trying to enter the United States from Canada. [ . . . ]

It’s a new, strange story. In a part of the country that was built on the most extravagant homesteaders’ and oil-drillers’ hopes for the future, economic health in this new century rides largely on the continued threat of threat itself.

And now the House has gone and legislated Bush's freedom to eavesdrop on any foreign communication routed through the US, no warrant required. You're welcome, Ameria: kiss your fucking Fourth Amendment goodbye. No need to thank us.

When people see the US as the biggest threat to democracy in the world, they can prove their case by pointing to the contracting rights of US citizens. We do the "terrorists'" work for them. Well done, George. Well done, Democrat representatives. Well done, modern-day yellow dog Dems, and nu skool "we hate big government jackboots" Republicans. Well done, Americans who are too busy being afraid of or hating al-Qa'ida to pay any attention to what their own government is doing to them.

tags technorati : Freedom, Constitution, Politics, Surveillance, War on Terror

 

Give Me Back My Star Chamber

Thank God for the new security bill passed by the Democrat-controlled Senate. This legislation, approved by a razor-thin margin of 60-28, "would expand the government's authority to intercept without a court order the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who are communicating with people overseas."

"Every day we don't have [this wiretap authority], we don't know what's going on outside the country," a senior White House official said.

Excuses, excuses.

I'm writing an article on the Yankees. Every day I don't get to read all the major papers for free, I don't know what's going on with the Yankees. Of course I should have the New York papers, but is it too much to ask that I pay to read a bunch of irrelevant material?

On the other hand, the attitude also resembles that of our lazy-ass airport security, which can't be bothered to identify suspicious travel patterns, and so just makes everyone's lives miserable in a shotgun approach to security: if you take away everyone's everything, you're bound to take away the right guy's everything, too. This exemplifies the precision approach to fighting terrorism adopted by the Bush Administration.

Our senior friend at the White House continues:

"All you need is one communication from, say, Pakistan to Afghanistan that's routed through Seattle that tells you 'I'm about to do a truck bomb in New York City' or 'about to do a truck bomb in Iraq,' and it's too late."

Ahhhh, we need warrantless wiretap authority for the war in Iraq. I didn't even think of that one! I was thinking we could probably bust all those Islamist phone phreakers on pr0n charges, cause if they're rerouting calls all over God's green earth, you know they're anonymizing they're pr0n downloads, too. And Islamofascists love the child pr0n.

Anyway, all I'm saying is, it's a really good thing the Scientologists got penet.fi shut down. Otherwise, our lawyers would need warrantless wiretap authority so they could spend their precious time going after poor Julf.

Adding to the urgency for the administration is a secret ruling by a FISA judge earlier this year that declared surveillance of purely foreign communications that pass through a U.S. communications node illegal without a court-approved warrant -- a requirement that intelligence officials have described as unacceptably burdensome.

Right. So judges free of political pressure refuse to play along with Bush's bullshit "if you hate warrantless wiretapping, you hate America" approach to surveillance, so he gets into a political fight with Dems on the hill. This is a sick irony, that in the modern land of democratic freedoms it takes someone operating in secret to stand up for the Constitutional rights of Americans, rights the Declaration of Independence considers to be granted to us by our Creator (a creator Bush claims to believe in).

I don't believe in the creator, but I believe in the rights, and it runs right straight against my understanding of accountability that elected officials would be the ones to hand over those rights. It's the reverse of the Star Chamber. When the NSA comes to get me, I might actually request a secret trial.

tags technorati : Terrorism, Surveillance, National Security, Politics

Dictators without Borders

Well, poor old neoliberal dictator Alberto Fujimori lost his bid for parliament in Japan, but he remains under house arrest in Chile (ahem). He has to stay there in order to be safe from extradition for human rights violations committed as president of Peru. Ironic, it seems to me, not only that he is hiding out in Chile, of all places, but that the last "terrorists" to give him any real trouble in Peru were not the famous lunatics, Shining Path, but the pseudo-indigenous (Inca) Tupac Amaru (when they took over the, um, Japanese embassy in 1996).

On a side note, the Economist mounts an interesting defense of international courts, noting:

It is easy to pooh-pooh international courts. After the creation of the world's first international war-crimes tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo at the end of the second world war, it took nearly half a century before another one was established—the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), set up by the UN in The Hague in 1993. But since then, progress has been impressive. Of the 161 people the ICTY has indicted, only four are still on the run; 59 have been convicted.

tags technorati : Alberto Fujimori Peru Japan

Godwin's Law May Apply

In which case, we could just send all copies of the book straight to /dev/null.

The illustrious Jonah Goldberg is "boldly" publishing an expose on the fascist left. It turns out, in a politically risky and "startling new perspective," that the real Nazis are not US conservatives, but US liberals, including FDR, who, ironically, was trying to get the US into a war with Hitler long before it was politically possible. Perhaps that was just because there can, as it were, be only one. Surely this is a dangerous position for Goldberg to espouse publicly, which is why we should all admire his courage, and his, er, ingenuity.

The publisher's page on the book boasts:

Impeccably researched and persuasively argued, LIBERAL FASCISM will elicit howls of indignation from the liberal establishment–and rousing cheers from the Right.

Yes, that's exactly what American political discourse needs more of: cheers and jeers. Thanks to the editors of the National Review for their contribution to rational conversation, which these days takes the form of mutual name-calling. Apparently, an early working title for the book was, Nunh-Uh! You are!

Great, we're all Nazis. Can we move on, now?

tags technorati : Liberal Fascism Fascism Jonah Goldberg Nazis