Quotulatiousness

July 5, 2011

Miss Taliban beauty contest called off after all contestants turn out to be men

Filed under: Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:01

Okay, the real story:

AFGHAN police have arrested seven armed insurgents who disguised themselves as women by wearing burqas, officials said.

Interior ministry spokesman Siddiq Siddiqi said that the men, who carried light weapons with at least one in a suicide vest, were captured in Jalalabad, the capital of the eastern province of Nangarhar.

He said the men wore the all-enveloping veil as part of their disguise and were planning attacks on government targets, but gave no further details.

H/T to Roger Henry, who notes:

Have a look at these delectable Afghan stunners, Afghanistan’s best!
I do so like the look of coy modesty, what possibly could have given them away?
They could do with a little grooming.

Would-be terrorists advised to pretend to be gay

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

A link from Jon, my former virtual landlord, discussing a document that fell into the hands of the Sunday Mirror:

al-Qaeda fanatics in Britain are being taught to avoid detection — by pretending to be gay.

A new terror training manual tells Islamic extremists to lie about their sexuality if a woman approaches them in case she is a “honeytrap” spy sent by security services.

The handbook, which was uncovered by a Sunday Mirror ­investigation, says: “Many hotels — especially in busy UK cities — have women hanging around the lobby areas in order to attract men.

“A young beautiful woman may come and talk to you. The first thing you do to protect yourself from such a ­situation is to make dua (prayers) to Allah for ­steadfastness.

“The second thing is to find an excuse to get away from her that is realistic and sensible, such as you having a girlfriend for the past few years and you are loyal to her or you are ­homosexual.”

The suggestion is one of many tips in the manual, called Class Notes From The Security and ­Intelligence Course.

Of course, if they were drawing their recruits from Pashtun tribesmen, they might not have to pretend much.

June 11, 2011

QotD: OPEC’s 50-year fishing trip

Filed under: Economics, Government, Middle East, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:56

The petroleum-exporting countries have kept America as a gigantic fish on a steel line for nearly 50 years, reeling it in slowly, and letting it out (relaxing oil prices), when the United States made purposeful noises about raising domestic production, cutting consumption, and going to alternate sources. As soon as OPEC fine-tuned the fishing reel, the great fish went with the docility of the addicted consumer back to its default position mainlining on foreign oil at steadily increasing prices and in ever larger quantities. Every president starting with Richard Nixon warned of the danger in this addiction, but none has done anything useful about it. There must be an emphasis on cheap and plentiful natural gas, more nuclear (with maximum safety standards), more off-shore drilling (with maximum environmental-protection arrangements), and higher gasoline taxes to raise revenues and restrain use. All of this will bring down the international price and reduce the amount of money available for the Iranians, Saudis, Venezuelans, and others to finance terrorism around the world, and will ultimately reduce U.S. defense costs. None of this has been done, though the need for it has been obvious for decades.

Conrad Black, “Why America is suffering”, National Post, 2011-06-11

May 22, 2011

The Tory “omnibus crime legislation” overview

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:06

Kathryn Blaze Carlson looks at the likely form of the new federal government’s “tough on crime” omnibus bill:

The Conservative government’s omnibus crime legislation, due ‘‘within 100 days,’’ will mark a watershed moment in Canadian legal history, imposing many controversial changes to how police and the courts operate, experts say.

The bill is sweeping in scale and scope: It is expected to usher new mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes — growing five marijuana plants to sell the drug would automatically bring six months in jail — and for certain sexual offences against children. It will expand police powers online without court orders, reintroduce controversial aspects of the Anti-Terrorism Act that expired in 2007, end house arrest for serious crimes, and impact young offenders and their privacy.

“This bundle of crime legislation represents the most comprehensive agenda for crime reform since the Criminal Code was introduced,” said Steven Skurka, a Toronto-based criminal defence lawyer.

As always, when the government bundles together a lot of bills, there are some good and some bad ideas all headed down the chute at the same time. An especially bad bit is the preventative arrest provision that expired with the original Anti-Terrorism Act, and another one is the one allowing the police to demand internet records from ISPs without a court order (or, one assumes, notice to the people whose internet records are of interest to the police).

May 15, 2011

US had prepared to fight Pakistan over Bin Laden raid

Filed under: Asia, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

Strategy Page reports that the US military had made contingency plans to cover Pakistani military intervention in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden:

On May 2nd, the United States was prepared to go to war with Pakistan. The American raid on that day, which killed Osama bin Laden and seized a huge mass of al Qaeda data from his Pakistani hideout, was carried out without informing Pakistan beforehand. Although Pakistan had years earlier agreed that the U.S. could enter Pakistani territory in hot pursuit of terrorists fleeing Afghanistan, or to grab high ranking al Qaeda leaders, it was always assumed that the U.S. would let the Pakistani military know what was coming. But because the Pakistani government was full of bin Laden fans, the U.S. did not inform Pakistan about the raid until it was underway. Apparently, that message included a reminder that if the U.S. troops in the bin Laden compound were attacked by Pakistani forces, there would be instant, and far-reaching, consequences.

The extent of those consequences have since been pieced together, from unclassified information. By May 2nd, the U.S. had assembled a huge naval and air force in the region, that was pointed at Pakistan. This force would attack any Pakistani troops or warplanes that went after the U.S. forces in the bin Laden compound, or who might be able to do so. The U.S. had assembled three aircraft carriers, hundreds of air force aircraft in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, and dozens of helicopters, and thousands of troops, in Afghanistan. Most of these troops didn’t know what they were alerted for. Such alerts happen all the time, often for no reason (as far as the troops are concerned.) But this time, as word of the bin Laden raid got out, it became obvious (at least to those who know how these things work) that the alerts throughout the region were to prepare for the possible need to quickly get the American raiders out, and destroy any Pakistani forces that sought to interfere.

May 2, 2011

Radley Balko: “He won”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:58

A distressing round-up of the lifetime achievements of the late Osama Bin Laden:

We have also fundamentally altered who we are. A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of how we’ve changed since September 11 . . .

  • We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured.
  • We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured.
  • In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.
  • We’ve abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them.
  • The government launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign implying that people who smoke marijuana are complicit in the murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens.
  • The government illegally spied and eavesdropped on thousands of American citizens.
  • Presidents from both of the two major political parties have claimed the power to detain suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial, based solely on the president’s designation of them as an “enemy combatant,” essentially making the president prosecutor, judge, and jury. (I’d also argue that the treatment of someone like Bradley Manning wouldn’t have been tolerated before September 11.)

The list, unfortunately goes on.

Yes, bin Laden the man is dead. But he achieved all he set out to achieve, and a hell of a lot more. He forever changed who we are as a country, and for the worse. Mostly because we let him. That isn’t something a special ops team can fix.

Location of Bin Laden’s hideaway difficult for Pakistan to explain away

Filed under: Asia, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

From the BBC News website:

More details are emerging of how al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was found and killed at a fortified compound on the outskirts of Abbottabad in north-west Pakistan.

The compound is a few hundred metres from the the Pakistan Military Academy, an elite military training centre, which is Pakistan’s equivalent to Britain’s Sandhurst, according to the BBC’s M Ilyas Khan who visited the area.

Earlier reports put the distance at about 200 yards (182 metres). Pakistan’s military says the compound is 4km (2.4 miles) away from the academy.

But it lies well within Abbottabad’s military cantonment — it is likely the area would have had a constant and significant military presence and checkpoints.

Pakistan’s army chief is a regular visitor to the academy for graduation parades.

Someone very well placed in Pakistan’s army or intelligence organizations had to have been aware of, and actively protecting Bin Laden’s hideout. There’s no way he could have lived that close to high security military establishments without active collusion with high-ranking officers or intelligence chiefs.

April 20, 2011

Logic, consistency not strong points for this would-be terror gang

Filed under: Britain, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:30

A group of would-be terrorists were discovered before they could put their plans into action partly because of their disdain for “infidel” technology:

Recently, a British Moslem (Rajib Karim) was sentenced to 30 years for attempting to use his job at British Airways to help plan, coordinate and carry out terrorist attacks. One reason Karim was caught was the refusal of his terrorist cohorts in Yemen and Bangladesh to use modern cryptography for their communications. The reason was that the modern stuff was all invented by infidels (non-Moslems). Instead the group was forced to use ancient (over 2,000 year old) single letter substitution codes. The group’s implementation of this was accomplished using a spreadsheet. Unlike modern ciphers, like PGP and AES, the ancient substitution methods are easy to crack with modern decryption techniques.

A major shortcoming of Islamic radicalism is its disdain for modern, particularly non-Moslem (Western) technology. This often causes problems, like the one Karim (a computer specialist with British Airways) had with his less educated fellow terrorists in Yemen and Bangladesh. But what Karim encountered was another major problem for Islamic radicals, the fact that these groups tend to attract a disproportionate number of poorly educated recruits. The Islamic world, in general, is less educated and literate than the West, thus giving Islamic radical groups a poorly educated pool of potential recruits to begin with.

The disdain is highly selective, unless spreadsheets were also part of the Arabic cultural heritage.

March 8, 2011

Helicopter footage of 9/11 just released

Filed under: History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:21

The Guardian explains:

Previously unseen footage of the 9/11 attacks, filmed from a police helicopter hovering above the burning World Trade Centre, has emerged almost a decade after the terrorist atrocity.

The New York Police Department air and sea rescue helicopter was dispatched to the scene of the attack to see whether any survivors could be rescued from the rooftops.

[. . .]

The video is part of a cache of information about the attack handed over by city agencies to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal agency that investigated the collapse.

It was released by NIST on 3 March under a Freedom of Information Act request, but it remains unclear who published the footage online.

February 7, 2011

Blameshifting, subcontinental style

Filed under: Asia, India, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

Strategy Page talks about the common belief in Pakistan that suicide attacks are not really the fault of other Muslims:

While the Islamic terrorist attacks in Pakistan have created a lot of hatred against Islamic militants, many Pakistani government officials, and media executives, blame non-Moslem foreigners for all the Islamic violence. To Westerners, this is bizarre, but to more than half the population of Pakistan, blaming India and Israel (and the West in general), for Islamic suicide bombers killing Pakistanis, has some traction. The basic theme is that India, with the assistance of those clever and diabolical Israelis, are deceiving Moslems to become suicide bombers. In some cases, where there are no bodies left behind, the Indians or Israelis can be blamed for doing the deed themselves. This sort of thing is regularly reported in Pakistan.

Since India and Pakistan (literally, “the land of the pure.”) were created out of British India in 1947, Pakistan has seen India as preparing to invade and conquer them. There followed four wars with India, all of which [were] started by Pakistan. While many Pakistanis have figured out that India has never had any interest in taking over Pakistan, especially as Pakistan slid into a malaise of corruption and economic decline. But those who ran the Pakistani government (a very small group, be they politicians or generals) found it convenient to blame someone else, and India was always a convenient scapegoat. Israel was added when because Israel has long been considered the archenemy of Moslems, and especially since Israel became a close ally of India. The West is blamed because their economic success must have, somehow, come at the expense of the morally superior Islamic world.

On the national level, as at the personal level, having a shadowy “nemesis” to blame for your misfortune allows you to avoid looking for the actual root causes of your situation.

Update: A writer at The Economist reports on revisiting Pakistan after five years away:

Much of the news we read from Pakistan is a grisly catalogue of suicide-bombs, sectarian slaughter, political assassination, grinding insurgency and collateral damage from the war in Afghanistan.

So, on a first visit to Islamabad and Lahore in nearly five years, my initial response was to think how the relentless tide of such reporting obscures another truth about the country: how pleasant it can be; how helpful and hospitable the people; how many well-informed, articulate and enlightened cosmopolitans there are to talk to. In the past I have always argued that Pakistan has a tolerant, flexible core that is far more resilient than it is often given credit for. Surely, that remains true.

A second response, however, was to acknowledge how much worse things had got in those five years. Three sorts of decline stand out—the linked problems of worsening security and the spread of Islamist extremism, and the economy.

[. . .]

One of the commonplaces of analysis in Pakistan is that the roots of extremism lie not just in the war in Afghanistan and the “Islamisation” of public life introduced by General Zia ul-Haq a generation ago, but in economic hardship and lack of opportunity. The economy is lurching along on IMF-provided crutches, just a few months from the next crisis. Most people also agree about some of the basic reforms needed—in particular a broadening of the tax base. But the political parties want to make sure that it is the other parties whose voters’ pockets will suffer from the broadening. So reform is deadlocked.

Pakistan is indeed still not as bad as you might think from the newspaper headlines. And when Mr Hoodbhoy, for example, talks of an impending bloodbath it is still possible to think he exaggerates. But Pakistan is bloody enough already, and it is for now a depressing and frightening place. It is not just that the decline seems unimpeded by the end of Pervez Musharraf’s inept, corrupt military dictatorship and the advent of Asif Ali Zardari’s inept, corrupt and army-reliant civilian administration. It is that the arguments of those who claim the trend is remorseless and heading for disaster seem more persuasive than those I have deployed over the years to refute them.

December 10, 2010

The Economist: “America … should learn from its mistakes in the past decade and stick to its own rules”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:23

A very good column in The Economist seems to cover the issues quite well:

BIG crimes deserve tough responses. In any country the theft and publication of 250,000 secret government documents would deserve punishment. If the leak costs lives, let alone the careers and trust that have already perished amid the WikiLeaks disclosures, the case for action is even stronger.

[. . .]

For the American government, prosecution, not persecution, offers the best chance of limiting the damage and deterring future thefts. The blustering calls for the assassination of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder now in custody in London awaiting extradition to Sweden on faintly mysterious charges of sexual assault, look both weak and repellent. If Mr Assange has broken American law, it is there that he should stand trial, just like Bradley Manning, the alleged source of the stolen documents. If not, it may be some consolation that the cables so far reveal a largely flattering picture of America’s diplomats: conscientious, cool-headed, well-informed, perceptive and on occasion eloquent.

[. . .]

If America sticks to those standards now it will display a strength and sanity that contrasts with the shrill absolutism and cyber-vandalism of the WikiLeaks partisans. Calling Mr Assange a terrorist, for example, is deeply counterproductive. His cyber-troops do not fly planes into buildings, throw acid at schoolgirls or murder apostates. Indeed, the few genuine similarities between WikiLeaks and the Taliban — its elusiveness and its wide base of support — argue against ill-judged attacks that merely broaden that support. After a week of clumsy American-inspired attempts to shut WikiLeaks down, it is now hosted on more than 700 servers around the world.

The big danger is that America is provoked into bending or breaking its own rules, straining alliances, eroding credibility and — because it will not be able to muzzle WikiLeaks — ultimately seeming impotent. In recent years America has promoted the internet as a menace to foreign censorship. That sounds tinny now. So did its joy of hosting next year’s World Press Freedom Day this week. Chinese and Russian glee at American discomfort are a sure sign of such missteps.

H/T to John Perry Barlow for the link.

Update: This certainly matches what I expected Julian Assange’s personality to be like:

Defectors include Daniel Domscheit-Berg, otherwise known as Daniel Schmitt, who made a high-profile exit from WikiLeaks in September, and Herbert Snorrason, an Icelandic student. Both resigned in September. Snorrason is quoted as telling Assange, in an online chat log acquired by WiReD:

And you’re not even fulfilling your role as a leader right now. A leader communicates and cultivates trust in himself. You are doing the exact opposite. You behave like some kind of emperor or slave trader.

Snorrason’s departure was fomented by this declaration from Assange:

I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier and all the rest. If you have a problem with me, piss off.

And he did.

December 6, 2010

A qualified list of terror targets in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

Norman Spector goes where US federal government employees are forbidden to go:

In February of last year, U.S. diplomatic posts were given one month by Washington to compile and forward an inventory of critical infrastructure and key resources in their respective reporting areas “whose loss could critically impact the public health, economic security, and/or national and homeland security of the United States.” The U.S. embassy in Ottawa — and the string of American consulates across Canada — were included in this “action request.”

[. . .]

Not surprisingly given that we share a continent, the U.S. compilation of critical infrastructure and key resources in foreign countries includes many sites and undertakings in Canada, from Nova Scotia to British Columbia. Dams; undersea cables; oil and gas pipelines; border crossings, including bridges; nuclear power plants; defence production factories; mines; and, last but not least, pharmaceutical and vaccine production plants.

While, there has been considerable sympathy to date for WikiLeaks and for Mr. Assange, I suspect that some of this might erode once Canadians get a look at this latest cable, which is now widely available, and which sets out the juiciest targets in Canada for those looking to do harm to the United States. Moreover, once Canadians have had a chance to examine the list of sites it includes, I doubt that many of our compatriots will conclude that its compilation by U.S. diplomats serving in this country amounts to anything remotely connected to what we understand to constitute espionage:

Canada: Hibernia Atlantic undersea cable landing Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
James Bay Power Project, Quebec: monumental hydroelectric power development
Mica Dam, British Columbia: Failure would impact the Columbia River Basin.
Hydro Quebec, Quebec: Critical irreplaceable source of power to portions of Northeast
U. S. Robert Moses/Robert H. Saunders Power, Ontario: Part of the St. Lawrence Power Project, between Barnhart Island, New York, and Cornwall, Ontario
Seven Mile Dam, British Columbia: Concrete gravity dam between two other hydropower dams along the Pend d’Oreille River
Pickering Nuclear Power Plant, Ontario, Canada
Chalk River Nuclear Facility, Ontario: Largest supplier of medical radioisotopes in the world
Hydrofluoric Acid Production Facility, Allied Signal, Amherstburg, Ontario
Enbridge Pipeline Alliance Pipeline: Natural gas transmission from Canada
Maritime and Northeast Pipeline: Natural gas transmission from Canada
Transcanada Gas: Natural gas transmission from Canada
Alexandria Bay POE, Ontario: Northern border crossing
Ambassador Bridge POE, Ontario: Northern border crossing
Blaine POE, British Columbia: Northern border crossing
Blaine Washington Rail Crossing, British Columbia
Blue Water Bridge POE, Ontario: Northern border crossing
Champlain POE, Quebec: Northern border crossing
CPR Tunnel Rail Crossing, Ontario (Michigan Central Rail Crossing)
International Bridge Rail Crossing, Ontario International Railway Bridge Rail Crossing
Lewiston-Queenstown POE, Ontario: Northern border crossing
Peace Bridge POE, Ontario: Northern border crossing
Pembina POE, Manitoba: Northern border crossing
North Portal Rail Crossing, Saskatchewan
St. Claire Tunnel Rail Crossing, Ontario
Waneta Dam, British Columbia: Earthfill/concrete hydropower dam
Darlington Nuclear Power Plant, Ontario, Canada.
E-ONE Moli Energy, Maple Ridge, Canada: Critical to production of various military application electronics
General Dynamics Land Systems – Canada, London Ontario, Canada: Critical to the production of the Stryker/USMC LAV Vehicle Integration
Raytheon Systems Canada Ltd. ELCAN Optical Technologies Division, Midland, Ontario, Canada: Critical to the production of the AGM-130 Missile
Thales Optronique Canada, Inc., Montreal, Quebec: Critical optical systems for ground combat vehicles
Germanium Mine Graphite Mine Iron Ore Mine Nickel Mine Niobec Mine, Quebec, Canada
Niobium Cangene, Winnipeg, Manitoba: Plasma
Sanofi Pasteur Ltd., Toronto, Canada: Polio virus vaccine
GlaxoSmithKile Biologicals, North America, Quebec, Canada: Pre-pandemic influenza vaccines.

As Colby Cosh notes on Twitter, “That scary list of Cdn targets in the Wikileaks cable on security installations? You could have written it after a morning in the library.”

November 19, 2010

Shut up and get in the scanner, redux

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:27

Some whackjob so-called “libertarian” thinks that the TSA is out of control. No, really, he actually thinks that the TSA is out of control:

Americans can be murdered by terrorists, but shared values cannot be destroyed by guns and bombs and planes. Yet our adversaries in the “War on Terror” can most certainly win. They can win by frightening us into infidelity to our values, into betraying our best selves. Some would argue that they are already winning by that measure.

I thought that the “if x, then the terrorists have won” meme was dead before the end of the Bush administration.

Of course, if you recruit on pizza boxes, you’re not going to wind up with Elliot Ness. You’re going to get people who use the body scanners to make fun of people’s genitals, pretend to find cocaine in passengers’ luggage as a prank, steal from carry-ons, and generally act like badged choads. Oh, and sex offenders. Don’t forget the sex offenders. A security checkpoint is Walt Disney World for them.

See what I mean? This “libertarian” is objecting to the peaceful re-integration of former sex offenders into steady well-paying government jobs. One of the best success stories of the criminal justice system, and he’s criticizing it just because a few whiners don’t want to be molested as part of their travel routine?

Now, however, the TSA might possibly have found a way to startle the herd into genuine anger and defiance. The TSA has rolled out its program requiring you to submit to either a body-revealing scan or a gropefest patdown. Between revealing full-body scanners and the alternative “enhanced pat-downs,” Americans are as close as they have been since 9/11 to calling bullshit on the ever-increasing Security Theater. Is the TSA managing that anger well? Of course not. Some of them smirk that we like it. Still others are clearly furious that the cows are no longer, well, cowed. There are increasing reports that the enhanced pat downs are being threatened, and used, in an angry and retaliatory fashion by government employees who are upset that we don’t want our practically naked bodies displayed on scanners.

Look, the scanners are a labour-saving device. That’s all. Forcing them to caress your buttocks, squeeze your breasts, and manipulate your genitals is extra work for them. You should be grateful for the extra individual attention they’re providing to you!

Well, okay, the scanners are also a really handy source of humour, but that’s just a fringe benefit. How can you complainers be so unsympathetic to the working TSA folks who just want an occasional laugh while they check out your physical assets (or, more often, lack of).

Of course TSA agents are angry when you don’t herd obligingly through the scanner. They feel entitled to it, as a matter of right, based on what the modern Security State envisions that Americans should be. When the TSA expressed angst that “unquestioning compliance has diminished”, it was tipping its hand.

Yes, but you have no right to complain. When you buy an airline ticket, you implicitly give up all of your rights. Flying is a privilege, and you’d better show how grateful you are to be given that privilege or it will be taken away from you. Don’t be disrespectful: avert your eyes and don’t challenge the screeners. Obey orders at all times, and report those who grumble to the proper authorities. Don’t step out of line, or you will face the consequences.

The purpose of Security Theater is to convince us that the government can do something and is doing something, and most importantly to make us accept “unquestioning compliance” with government as an American value. The purpose of Security Theater is to normalize submission.

And you have to admit that it’s done a pretty good job. And, even better, it has had bipartisan support in congress.

In a nation in which we owe fidelity to shared values, accepting unquestioning compliance with government is like sneaking out on the wife and kids and nailing the smeared-lipstick cosmo-addled skank at the sleazy bar in the next town. And don’t come crying back to your wife Liberty and your kids Personal Responsibility and dear little Individuality when you pick up a nasty case of authoritarianism oozing from your — ok, I’m going to have to pull this literary device over and walk.

He references a blog post by “Mom” which I linked to from this post last week.

Now, I’m not saying that Mom is herself a perverted thug, like the people she’s saying we should just obey. I’m saying that she’s a sneering, entitled apologist for perverted thugs — and for the canine, un-American value of slobbery submission to the state. Even though she concedes that the groping is retaliatory bullshit, and even though she has no basis to assert that Security Theater actually increases real security, she’s deeply resentful that people are not putting up with it. Her righteous anger — like the anger of of the TSA thugs groping just a little bit harder to punish you for saying no to the body scanner — is the result we should expect from the small-time thugs whose identity is tied up in their petty authority.

Throughout my career — both as a prosecutor and as a defense attorney — I’ve observed a consistent inverse relationship: the more petty a government officer’s authority, the more that officer will feel a need to swagger and demand that you RESPECT HIS AUTHORITAH. Your average FBI agent might search your house based on a crappy perjured warrant, invade your attorney-client emails, and flush your life down the toilet by lying on the stand at your mail fraud trial. But he doesn’t feel a need to vogue and posture to prove anything in the process. He’s the FBI. But God above help you when you run into the guy with a badge from some obscure and puny government agency with a narrow fiefdom. He and his Napoleon syndrome have got something to prove. And he’s terrified that you’ll not take him very, very seriously. When I call FBI agents on behalf of my clients, they’re cool but professional and nonchalant. When I call a small agency — say, state Fish & Game, or one of the minor agency Inspector Generals — they’re hostile, belligerent, and so comically suspicious that you’d think I was asking for their permission to let my client smuggle heroin into the country in the anuses of handicapped Christian missionary orphans. They are infuriated, OUTRAGED, when a client asserts rights, when a client fails to genuflect and display unquestioning obedience. They are, in short, the TSA.

See? See? Just wait until this guy tries to fly somewhere . . . they’ll subject him to the most degrading procedures they can imagine. No, not to get back at him for all this disrespect . . . they’ll just treat him like the rest of the cattle. Mooo.

November 16, 2010

It was such an urgent threat that only a week later, the authorities reacted

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:29

A good round-up of the “Twitter bomber” case:

It all started with a moment of grumpy sarcasm on Twitter. Frustrated that his planned trip to Northern Ireland was put in jeopardy by heavy snow at Robin Hood Airport in Doncaster, Mr Chambers whipped out his iPhone and posted the following message on the social networking site: ‘C***! Robin Hood Airport closed. You have got a week to get your s*** together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!’

A week later, he was in a police ­station being quizzed as a potential terrorist. He was eventually prosecuted under a law aimed at nuisance calls rather than under legislation for bomb hoaxes, which requires stronger evidence of intent.

After all, it was plain as a pikestaff that Mr Chambers didn’t have any intent to bomb anything at all. Even so, he was hauled before magistrates, found guilty of sending a menacing electronic communication and fined £385. A few days ago, Mr Chambers lost his appeal against his conviction and sentence.

He will now have to pay £2,600 legal costs as well. Judge Jacqueline ­Davies, who was sitting with two magistrates, ruled the tweet was ‘menacing in its content and obviously so’, claiming ‘any ordinary person’ would ‘be alarmed’ by it.

September 11, 2010

Nine years on

Filed under: History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

Video by James Lileks.

But every so often — every week, really — I remember the event in some odd echo of the emotions I felt on September 11. It might be the closing credit music of a BBC comedy, or an old movie about New York, or driving past a building designed by the architect of the WTC, or just standing in the spot where I stood when I saw the towers fall. Or more: for God’s sake, the Gallery of Regrettable Food’s publication date was 9/11; half the time I look at the book on the shelf I recall being in the shower, thinking of the interviews I had lined up, turning off the water and hearing Peter Jennings on the radio, wondering why they were replaying tape of the 91 attack on the towers. I remember what Natalie was doing — a happy toddler, she was digging through her box of toys and handing me a phone with a smile as bright as the best tomorrow you could imagine. I remember Jasper on his back, whining, unsure. I remember these things because I picked up my camera and filmed them, because this was a day unlike any other. Today I answered the phone in the same spot where I stood when I called my Washington bureau, told them I’d be rewriting the column — obviously — and wished them well. They were four blocks from the White House. Impossible not to imagine the Fail-Safe squeal on the other end of the line.

On the Hewitt show tonight I started talking about 9/11, and my mouth overran my head, because somewhere down there is a core of anger that hasn’t diminished a joule. This doesn’t mean anything, by itself — anger is an emotion that believes its justification is self-evident by its very existence. Passion is not an argument; rage is not a plan. But as the years go by I find myself as furious now as I was furious then — and no less unmanned by the sight of the planes and the plumes. Once a year I watch the thing I cobbled together from the footage I Tivo’d, and the day is bright and real and true again.

Update: How Twitter can be almost poetry. Disturbing, yet moving.

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