The Wall Street Journal is after Hugo Chavez. Last week, at a speech before the U.N. General Assembly, President Chavez repeatedly referred to President Bush as "the devil." He was congratulated on his speech by such credible figures as Robert Mugabe and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Problem is, I agree with this WSJ op-ed from Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a scholar at the Independent Institute, a right-wing think tank. This is not because I have a vendetta against Chavez for criticizing Bush. This is because Vargas Llosa's criticisms of Chavez are right on-target.

Vargas Llosa parallels Dante's Inferno -- which is about Dante's trip through the nine circles of hell -- with Chavez's own "Inferno." It is true that Chavez has no credibility to assume a higher moral standing than President Bush. While Chavez isn't guilty of starting a war in Iraq (which makes him pretty popular in some circles), neither is he guilty of supporting freedom of speech and the press. Chavez is known, as Vargas Llosa tells us, for pressuring national media companies to write nice things about him. People who protest against him -- or even write unflattering op-eds for national newspapers -- find themselves suddenly imprisoned. Chavez is not only bosom buddies with Fidel Castro, but also Cuba's secret police and spy networks.

As I've written before, this sort of crackdown on what we would call First Amendment rights is astonishing coming from a country that wants to be seen as a democracy. While Western democracies like France, England, and Spain (which are still among the dominant diplomatic powers in the world) certainly disagree with the United States on a number of things -- and have an equal disdain for Bush -- they will not high-five Chavez for his remarks. They are undoubtedly as perplexed by Chavez as some observers in the United States are, and I hope that they take a dim view of Chavez's human rights abuses and resist giving him any credibility in the world until he makes his country truly a democracy.

Posted by Mark at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Not everyone is an administrator

If you find yourself entering the workplace as someone who's not in the IT department, then you'll sooner or later come to the realization that you aren't an administrator on the computer you've been given. You can't install software. You can't change your settings. And it's all for the better. It also means less opportunity for you to mess something up.

But software manufacturers don't seem to understand that. They write software that requires you to be an administrator -- not only to install it in the first place, but also to run it at all. Software developers for the Mac platform have discovered that Mac has true multi-user support. For years, we had to deal with Windows, which had "users," but all those users were administrators by default. And Mac OS 9 had no such distinction. But now that we actually have software restrictions -- non-administrators just don't have write access to certain folders -- we need to invent software that doesn't rely on the outdated notion that the user is always an administrator.

Posted by Mark at 8:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela in 2000, not many people outside the Latin-American Studies circle noticed. In 2002, there was a coup, and the democratically-elected president was replaced. Within hours -- hours -- the Bush administration, which champions freedom and democracy, recognized the un-elected government. The coup lasted for only a few days, and Chavez was rightfully restored to power. The Bush administration suffered an embarrassment; it showed its hand too early, clearly demonstrating that it didn't much care for the Socialist president. It looked like we were heading back to the 1980s, when the U.S. government supported right-leaning dictators in Latin America (like, say, General Augusto Pinochet) instead of left-leaning, democratically-elected presidents (like, oh, President Salvador Allende).

Thankfully, the U.S. government didn't actually returned to its policy of providing weapons and cash to right-leaning paramilitary forces, allowing them to overthrow the elected leaders. (Well, except for Colombia, but that's been going on for a while now.)

This was my first introduction to Hugo Chavez. And we didn't see much of him for a while.

Then, he became bosom buddies with Cuban president Fidel Castro. Castro, of course, is not a "president" in the sense that he was ever elected. He sort of proclaimed himself head of state after the 1959 revolution that overthrew U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. Do two wrongs make a right? Some people seem to think so.

It looked as though Chavez was setting himself up to be the next power broker in the region. Castro has been old for some time, and he will need a successor. Certainly his brother, Raul Castro, will be his successor as head of state, but Raul lacks the charm and tenacity of Ol' Beardy. Thankfully, Chavez is more than up to the task of filling Castro's charm shoes.

But even though Chavez presided over attempts at equalizing the lower and upper classes in Venezuela, he did things that should bother liberal-thinking people. Reportedly, Chavez has no qualms about intimidating or even imprisoning his critics. No matter what your goals are as a leader, or how left-leaning you are, or how much you profess to love the poor, it is never okay to use government power to silence speech.

Last week, Chavez met with other leaders in a summit of the Non-Aligned Nations. These nations were formerly called "third world" nations because they were neither the first (capitalist) world nor the second (communist world). The summit was hosted in Cuba by Raul Castro, currently in charge of Cuba.

Guess who else hangs out at the summit of Non-Aligned Nations? President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for one. You'll remember that he's called the Holocaust a "myth" and suggested that Israel should be eradicated. These are both stupid things to say, and Ahmadinejad is stupid for saying them. But why would Chavez want to hang out with Ahmadinejad? It's definitely not good for P.R. Then again, why would Chavez want to hang out with Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe (who, a few years ago, seized white farmers' land in the name of revenge)? Or the Secretary of State of North Korea? Clearly, Chavez doesn't care about angering the United States with whom he associates. But, if he wants credibility from other countries in Latin America and the rest of the world, he needs to stop hanging out with crazies.

Because, clearly, the crazies are starting to affect him. Today, Chavez spoke to the United Nations General Assembly. Taking a page out of the Ayatollah Kohmeini playbook, Chavez called President Bush a "devil" several times, remarking of Bush's visit to the UN yesterday, "It still smells of sulphur today."

Even on NPR, that most liberal of forums (unless you talk to liberals, who don't think it's liberal enough), the resident U.N. expert had difficulty believing that Chavez actually called Bush a "devil." It's just not something that's done there.

Does Chavez expect the world to take him seriously? He also took the time to call the U.N. "worthless," echoing the sentiments of what is apparently his new friend, President Ahmadinejad, who called the U.N. "neither [...] legitimate nor effective."

President Ahmadinejad is clearly not someone the West would enjoy being diplomatic with. Ever since the Shah was overthrown in 1979, Iran has been ruled as an oppressive Islamic theocracy. (I mean, the Shah was no treat, but at least his was a secular oppression.)

Is this indeed Chavez's new buddy? Will he indeed team up with Ahmadinejad, Mugabe, and Kim Jong-Il -- the latter three comprising the Coalition of the Oppressive and Deranged? Chavez will never be taken seriously by anyone if he insists on associating with dictators, and he will most likely lose the respect of other legitimate democracies in South America. Even though he's challenging U.S. power, which is not in itself bad, he's going about it entirely the wrong way.

Posted by Mark at 6:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

WASHINGTON -- President Bush is lobbying Congress to make "clarifications" to its interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, alleging that "alternative tactics" are sometimes necessary in order to extract information from terrorist suspects. One reason for this "clarification" is that the Geneva Conventions are vague on its definition of torture -- and let's be clear about this. "Torture" is what Bush and Cheney want to do. Given all of the puzzle pieces -- (1) the Abu Ghraib scandal; (2) the existence of secret prisons out of the reach of U.S. law; (3) the president's signing statement attached to the Detainee Treatment Act, where he said that his authority as the president gives him the ability to ignore certain non-torture provisions -- it is quite clear that the Bush administration wants to be able to torture detainees. Whether it's shrouded in euphemisms like "alternative," "tough," or "enhanced," the idea remains the same: President Bush wants the legal authority to torture suspects.

John Negroponte, Director of National Security, argues in a USA Today op-ed that the Geneva Conventions need "clarification" so as to protect interrogators: "Thus, the president has asked that Congress clarify our treaty obligations just as it has done on so many other occasions. Absent such clarification, our intelligence professionals would be subject to unpredictable legal interpretations, including those of foreign courts." A wonderful sentiment, but this is exactly why the United States is not a party to the International Criminal Court (ICC). The U.S. refuses to join the ICC because it is afraid of the authority the ICC would have over its military operations. If the U.S. were a party to the ICC, American servicemen could be prosecuted under international law for war crimes or violations of international war treaties. Negroponte's argument fails to convince because it addresses a situation that doesn't exist.

But we already know why torture is bad from an ethical standpoint: torture is wrong. Period. But does torture actually work as a method of gathering intelligence? Perhaps the show Twenty-Four -- probably one of the most pro-government shows on TV -- is the most guilty of inspiring the notion that torture is necessary for instances in which there's a bomb somewhere right now and only this guy knows where it is so we need to beat that information out of him!. These instances -- like aborting a fetus or embryo to save the life of the mother -- are rare and apocryphal. In his Sept. 11 speech last week, Bush insisted that torture of detainees held in secret CIA prisons has stopped terror plots from being executed, but how are we to know that he's telling the truth?

There are far better ways to get information than by torture. Scotland Yard and MI-5 foiled the British liquid explosives attacks through old-fashioned policework: they went through the arduous process of obtaining wiretapping warrants (amazing, isn't it? A terror plot foiled even though they got warrants!), listened on the phone, got names and addresses, and then arrested people. A simple interrogation of those people -- without torture -- yielded more names and more information. Perhaps the U.S. is just lazy; we have fewer undercover operatives around the world than we ever have. (Of course, it's hard to spy on the enemy when conservative columnists publish the names of covert operatives and the Army fires homosexual Arabic translators because it's more important to enforce Jerry Falwell's morality than it is to have competent people who speak al-Qaeda's language.)

(Incidentally, the British terrorist plot wasn't nearly as ready as the news made it out to be. The terrorists didn't even have passports yet, so it wasn't something that was going to happen even in the next month.)

Experts in the field of torture have come to realize the same thing: torture is ineffective as a means of obtaining information. Israel, the world's expert when it comes to anti-terrorism, takes a dim view of torture for precisely this reason. The assumption made about torture is that the person being tortured is telling the truth; but the torturee's goal is not to tell the truth, but rather to stop the torture. For this reason, he is all the more inclined to tell the torturer what he wants to hear in the hope that the torture will stop. This is why a slew of military officers -- including Sen. John McCain, who was himself tortured in Vietnam -- has spoken out against torture, citing not only its inefficacy, but also its dehumanizing nature.

But interestingly, notes Naomi Klein in The Nation, getting information may be only ancillary to torture's true goal:

This is torture's true purpose: to terrorize--not only the people in Guantánamo's cages and Syria's isolation cells but also, and more important, the broader community that hears about these abuses. Torture is a machine designed to break the will to resist--the individual prisoner's will and the collective will.

This is not a controversial claim. In 2001 the US NGO Physicians for Human Rights published a manual on treating torture survivors that noted: "perpetrators often attempt to justify their acts of torture and ill treatment by the need to gather information. Such conceptualizations obscure the purpose of torture....The aim of torture is to dehumanize the victim, break his/her will, and at the same time, set horrific examples for those who come in contact with the victim. In this way, torture can break or damage the will and coherence of entire communities."

Torture thus sends a message to potential terrorists: if we capture you, you'll get the same treatment, so don't even think about becoming a terrorist. Torture comes from the same machismo that inspired Bush to tell terrorists, "Bring it on." In economics, this is called the Jackie Chain fallacy: what is good for Jackie Chan is not necessarily good for everyone.

And, at its heart, is torture not also about that most ubiquitous of human emotions -- revenge? The desire to see the enemy injured in the same way -- indeed, in a worse way -- than one's dead compatriots must surely be a part of it. The Geneva Conventions are our attempt to take war and make it more civilized. As humanity has become civilized, our baser instincts have not, and even though we've tried to create rules to control them, they come out, anyway. And now we have an administration that attempts to use rational justifications to legalize an irrational and barbarous practice.

Posted by Mark at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Did you even notice the subtle shift in language that Republicans have begun using when referring to the Democratic Party? You see, for Republicans, the noun and the adjective are the same: "Republican." But for Democrats, the noun and the adjective are different.

The problem is, if you're a Republican, talking about the "Democratic" party makes it sound as though that party founded the idea of democracy. It makes it sound as though they are more about democracy than you are. What's a Republican to do?

Manipulate language, of course! In recent speeches, President Bush has taken to calling the party of Democrats the "Democrat party" instead of the gramatically-correct "Democratic" party -- ostensibly because he doesn't want anyone to perceive that the Democrats are more democratic than the Republicans.

The connotation, though, is that the democrats are not the party of Democracy. Republicans have begun using the term pejoratively to describe Democrats -- as though they (the Democrats) didn't believe in democracy.

The evidence comes from Media Matters, a left-leaning nonprofit organization that analyzes and criticizes the U.S. media. Their analysis:

The ungrammatical conversion of the noun "Democrat" to an adjective was the brainchild of Republican partisans, presumably an attempt to deny the opposing party the claim to being "democratic" -- or in the words of New Yorker magazine senior editor Hendrik Hertzberg, "to deny the enemy the positive connotations of its chosen appellation." In the early 1990s, apparently due largely to the urging of then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the use of the word "Democrat" as an adjective became near-universal among Republicans.

Hertzberg argued against the use of the word "Democrat" as an adjective because it was ungrammatical. What would Republican stalwart William F. Buckley, Jr. say? While Buckley is the founder of National Review, he is -- like many old-school Republicans (notably James J. Kilpatrick) -- crazy about proper grammar. Will their love of correct English trump their hatred of Democrats? It appears that, among new-school neo-cons, hatred wins the day.

The word 'fascist' takes on new meaninglessness

In "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell argued that the word fascist -- which once had a specific meaning, referring to a dictatorial, hyper-patriotic, militaristic, hyper-capitalist form of government -- no longer had any meaning, as it was bandied about as an insult toward anyone the speaker didn't like. So, too, did "communist" cease to be a description of a centralized economic system, becoming instead an insult hurled at any left-leaning person.

Well, "fascist" is back, thanks to President Bush, Donald "Duck" Rumsfeld, and Vice President Cheney. CNN reports:

President Bush in recent days has recast the global war on terror into a "war against Islamic fascism." Fascism, in fact, seems to be the new buzz word for Republicans in an election season dominated by an unpopular war in Iraq.

Bush used the term earlier this month in talking about the arrest of suspected terrorists in Britain, and spoke of "Islamic fascists" in a later speech in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Spokesman Tony Snow has used variations on the phrase at White House press briefings.

[...]

White House aides and outside Republican strategists said the new description is an attempt to more clearly identify the ideology that motivates many organized terrorist groups, representing a shift in emphasis from the general to the specific.

"I think it's an appropriate definition of the war that we're in," said GOP pollster Ed Goeas. "I think it's effective in that it definitively defines the enemy in a way that we can't because they're not in uniforms."

But, again, the word "fascist" is being used incorrectly. Fascism, the governmental system, is defined by Mirriam-Webster as "a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition." For Ed Goeas to say that a group is "fascist" because it is "not in uniforms" is stupid: fascism is a type of government. Muslim terrorist groups are not governments.

And guess what, NASCAR fans: not all Muslim terrorist groups are the same!

Al-Qaeda, formed in the 1990s, devoted itself to three objectives: (1) getting U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia; (2) destroying Israel; and (3) creating a pan-Islamic movement to destroy the West, if at all possible. Hezbollah, Hamas, and the PLO exist only to destroy Israel, and they are not pan-Islamic movements.

So why lump all Muslim terrorist groups into a poorly-named container called "fascism"? Because it's good P.R. The gum-chewing public knows that "fascism" is bad; it has been ingrained in our culture. So, without any further explanation, the Bush administration can say "terrorists = fascists" and its audience gets the message without any further explanation.

Posted by Mark at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Whoa, it's been a long time since I posted last!

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) has authored a bill that he hopes will be a compromise between some semblance of Congressional oversight and the Cheney administration's hopes of unbridled executive power. Specter and Cheney brokered a deal in smoke-filled rooms in which they agreed to hold hearings about the administration's illegal, poorly-justified, warrantless wiretapping program in the Judiciary Committee instead of the Intelligence Commitee in exchange for Specter's guarantee that then-Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito would make it through the Judiciary Committee to the Senate floor.

At first, I thought, "Well, I suppose we have the lesser of two evils, here." I thought Specter was concerned about transparency, as hearings of the Intelligence Committee are often closed to everyone without a security clearance. Turns out it's about power: Specter wanted some leverage in Congress' increasingly one-sided relationship with the administration, which, through a variety of techniques, refuses to allow Congress to question it on any matters, including legislation that Congress passes in order to exercise its constitutional checks on the executive.

Nope. Turns out that Specter just wants Congress' power back, even if he has to screw the American people to get it. S. 2453, an as-yet unnamed bill, would retroactively legalize the president's warrantless wiretapping program, allowing the president to sidestep the provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which requires the president to obtain a warrant from a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before he engages in any wiretapping that involves a caller located in the United States.

But the administration's argument that it needs warrantless wiretaps is bogus.

The administration's major argument in favor of warrantless wiretaps is that the FISA court doesn't move quickly enough for us to keep up with the terrorists, and that the process of obtaining a warrant apparently takes so long that by the time the warrant is issued we may no longer be able to surveil the terrorists. "We use FISA still -- you're referring to the FISA court in your question -- of course, we use FISAs. But FISA is for long-term monitoring. What is needed in order to protect the American people is the ability to move quickly to detect," said President Bush in a Dec. 19, 2005 press conference.

Unfortunately for the president, FISA does not require the president to obtain a warrant before initiating surveillance. 50 U.S.C. 1802 says that "the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order under this subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year" as long as the Attorney General follows several reporting requirements, one of which is that "there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party." In other words, such spying must be between two people who are neither U.S. citizens nor U.S. nationals. This certification must be transmitted, under seal, to the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and both the House and Senate Select Intelligence Committees. As far as we know, neither of these conditions has been met. President Bush claims that he's kept some members of Congress in the know about the wiretapping, but many members say that they never heard anything about it.

Also, FISA allows the president to begin to engage in warrantless wiretapping for a period of 72 hours before submitting a warrant application to the FISA court, whereupon the initial surveillance could be retroactively permitted.

Nevertheless, no application for a warrant has ever been submitted to the FISA court. President Bush has ignored the express intent of Congress -- as noted in FISA -- and in doing so has violated the law, which requires that he eventually obtain a warrant from the FISA court. Average citizens are not permitted to ignore the law whenever they feel it convenient; our president should be held to no less a standard. The president -- or his agents -- should be arrested for violating federal law and the justification that he has some sort of expanded powers in times of war should be evaluated by federal judges and put to sleep once and for all.

Additionally, the FISA court isn't very strict at all. Since 1978, when the court was created, it has outright rejected only four foreign intelligence surveillance applications out of thousands submitted between 1978 and 2005. Many applications are not rejected, but are instead amended by the FISA court judges, asking the submitters to modify parts of the application before it will be approved.

The FISA court is pretty much a done deal. Why, then, would the Bush administration want to bypass even such a rubber-stamp authority? Possibly Cheney felt that the activities of the program were so illegal that even the FISA court wouldn't approve them, and he couldn't risk details of the program's illegality being leaked to the public.

Now, Arlen Specter seeks to submit to his handlers and legalize warrantless wiretapping. The preamble to the legislation makes a big talk that keeping our nation safe is the responsibility of all three branches of government -- and then proceeds to exempt the executive from checks upon him by the judicial branch. It's as though the legislature and the executive are in cahoots to shut the judiciary (which is, coincidentally, the most independent branch of government) out of any decision-making, as the judiciary might actually challenge the executive's authority. And, hey, it's an election year: we can't have it appear as though the legislators are siding with the judiciary!

Here are some changes made to FISA by Specter's bill:

• Targets no longer have to be named "where it is not technically feasible to name every person or address every location to be subjected to electronic tracking." This is called a dragnet, and it comes from the way that fisherman used to drag giant nets under their boats to catch any fish they could. In law enforcement, a dragnet is an open invitation to surveil anyone who might be involved without naming names. In this way, the president no longer has to say that "X" is the subject of surveillance; he can surveil everyone and claim that "it is not technically feasible" to surveil everyone, and thus he is not subject to a warrant requirement. All the president has to do is create the situation governed by this section, and he will not need a warrant.
• If anyone objects to foreign intelligence surveillance, and demands review, then the case can be sent to the FISA court -- which is top-secret -- if the information under review would "harm the national security of the United States." This means that if the EFF wanted judicial review, the review would be completely blocked from public view if the president wanted it to be (and of course he would want it to be).
• Whereas FISA required that a "United States person" (a U.S. citizen or national) not be involved in the wiretapping, under Specter's amendments, a "United States person" is now subject to wiretapping if the Attorney General believes him to be "a person reasonably believed to have communication or be associated with a foreign power that is engaged in international terrorism activities."
• Language that only allowed the president to engage in international surveillance only as set forth in FISA has now been modified to give him the ability to engage in such surveillance under the guise of any law or his "Constitutional authority," which, as we have seen, has been interpreted very liberally by Cheney.
• Releases from criminal prosecution anyone who furnishes foreign intelligence information to the U.S. government, like, oh ... AT&T. (This same provision, though, exists in FISA now, but I guess they felt the need to reiterate it.)

While this bill doesn't remove the warrant requirement, it significantly degrades the standard of evidence for obtaining a warrant, and, more importantly, allows U.S. citizens and nationals to be the subject of electronic surveillance, something that was previously forbidden by FISA.

Posted by Mark at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)