My new best friend Glenn Greenwald has been liveblogging the Senate debate today regarding the extension of the Protect America Act (PAA), a piece of legislation passed last year that made temporary alterations to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The temporary alterations expire Feb. 2. As Greenwald has pointed out, the president has been playing fast and loose with his alleged desire for national security ever since the bill came up for debate. Bush insists that immunity for telecom companies that complied with the administration's request for wiretapping is essential to our national security. In fact, the president cares about national security so much that he's willing to play games with it in order to get what he wants.

Wait, what?

Last August, when the original PAA was passed, Bush spun it as necessary for us to maintain our security; without it, we would be powerless to access terrorists' emails here in the 21st century. Telecom immunity is icing on the cake. Now, if the Senate doesn't vote in favor of making the PAA permanent and enacting telecom immunity, Bush will spin Democrats as the party that wants the terrorists to win. But it's not the Democrats who are using fear to their advantage. Bush has said that he will veto any bill that contains telecom immunity. If Democrats refuse to allow such a provision, and they allow the PAA to expire, Bush will be able to say that they're playing with national security for political reasons. If Democrats pass a 30-day extension to the PAA, though, Bush has said he will veto that, as well:

The administration explicitly admits that the President won't allow an extension because he wants to repeat the success of last August -- when Congressional Democrats capitulated to every Bush demand because they were told they had to act within a matter of days, i.e., before their recess, lest they cause us all to be killed by The Terrorists. "They need the heat of the current law lapsing to get this done," said a senior administration official, courteously granted anonymity by The Politico's Allen to issue these threats.

This veto threat is one of the President's most brazen acts ever, so nakedly exposing the fun and games he routinely plays with National Security Threats. After sending Mike McConnell out last August to warn that we will all die without the PAA, Bush now says that he would rather let it expire than give Congress another 30 days. He just comes right out and announces, then, that he will leave us all vulnerable to a Terrorist Attack unless he not only gets everything he wants from Congress -- all his new warrantless eavesdropping powers made permanent plus full immunity for his lawbreaking telecom partners -- but also gets it exactly when he wants it (i.e., now -- not 30 days from now).

How strange that the PAA is necessary right now so that we can go after terrorists, unless the bill includes a provision that the president doesn't like, in which case, the terrorists will apparently ... what? Wait thirty days before communicating with each other about their dastardly plans? Every American should be outraged at what's going on, here.

What is going on? Your president, while mouthing platitudes about needing the PAA for national security, is more than willing to let the allegedly necessary provisions of PAA expire so that he doesn't have to make a compromise at all. This leads us to two conclusions: one, the president doesn't care about national security; or two, the PAA's provisions aren't actually necessary for national security. If the former is true, then the president arrives at the border of pure evil, as he is willing to place American lives in danger for political expediency. If the latter is true, then PAA's provisions are for something other than national security, and what this other thing is, we don't know. In this latter case, the president is not pure evil, but is instead a schemer, claiming that he needs PAA's provisions, when in fact he doesn't. There's also the issue of telecom immunity. Telecom immunity doesn't immediately protect us from terrorists. What it does do is protect the promises Bush and friends may have made to AT&T, Verizon, et al. in exchange for their cooperation in engaging in warrantless electronic surveillance.

So far, it looks like the Senate has -- narrowly -- defeated a cloture vote. A cloture vote is a vote to cut off debate about a particular piece of legislation. Republicans wanted to invoke cloture and force a vote on the PAA extension; Democrats would have none of it, preferring to either stave the vote off until they got rid of the amendments they didn't like or keep filibustering until Feb. 2, when the PAA expires.

Hopefully they will be able to stave any vote off until Feb. 2, at which time PAA will expire, forcing the president to comply with FISA as he should have always done.

Posted by Mark at 3:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Imagine that you're a political campaign with at least three times the notoriety of Ron Paul but one-sixth the number of party delegates. Imagine that you've been running on a platform of national security, but not much else, and not even a good platform of national security, at that.

Your name is Rudy Giuliani, and things aren't going well for you. After contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, South Carolina, and Wyoming, you've picked up only one delegate. Ron Paul, crazy Texas libertarian and Internet darling, has six delegates. How could this happen? You were supposed to be the Republican golden boy. You were "America's Mayor." You were Time magazine's Person of the Year in 2001. Where did you go wrong?

For one, in several debates, Giuliani demonstrated that he knows next to nothing about formulating policy. In the very first Republican debate last year, Paul schooled Giuliani on "blowback" and why our Middle East policies may have created an environment for people like Osama Bin Laden to gain supporters. Giuliani would have none of it, insisting that Paul was blaming the United States for the September 11 attacks. At the end of the day, though, Giuliani's protestations about the evil terrorists revealed only that he has the same lack of understanding about the world that George W. Bush does.

And speaking of September 11, Giuliani speaks of September 11 a lot. His invocation of September 11 has entered the realm of the farcical, and prompted former presidential candidate Joe Biden to remark of Giuliani, "There's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, and a verb and 9/11." He has no clear policy positions, and his only credentials -- getting New York out of September 11 -- are based on doing exactly what anyone else in his place would have done. Doing the obvious does not make Giuliani an expert on national security. And continuing to invoke September 11, even in situations where it doesn't seem appropriate or necessary, only serves to strengthen the notion that he stands on the pedestal of September 11 because he has no other credentials.

Giuliani also managed to alienate the religious core of the Republican party with his stances on abortion and gay marriage. He used to be just peachy with abortion and gay marriage, but Giuliani has definitively come out against them now that it's politically expedient to do so. Christian conservatives wouldn't have anything to do with a candidate who isn't explicitly in line with their beliefs. While Giuliani may have changed his mind, it won't help him secure the nomination.

And most dastardly, Giuliani bypassed South Carolina altogether. Conventional wisdom tells us that no Republican has secured the party nomination without carrying South Carolina. Giuliani, rather than get into that brawl, opted instead to put all of his eggs into Florida, where he's been campaigning heavily. It is surely this misguided notion that will end Giuliani's chances at getting the nomination. Florida's delegates have been cut in half by the Republican National Committee as punishment for having their primary earlier than the RNC allowed. Florida has 57 delegates to pass out among the Republican candidates, and even if Giuliani wins most of them, it's not enough to surpass Mitt Romney, the current Republican leader. Perhaps Giuliani hopes that a win in Florida will give him a morale boost -- both for himself, his supporters, and the media -- but he should realize that he's dropped off the national radar. His decision to focus on Florida to the exclusion of all else has meant that he has pulled the plug on his own campaign, and even if he does win Florida, that can't help him win the nomination. He's lost too much already.

Posted by Mark at 6:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Raw Story reports that the Senate will proceed with an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that includes retroactive immunity for telecom companies that complied with the Bush administration's request for wiretapping. Federal law prohibits telecommunications companies from disclosing subscriber information to anyone without a court order. President Bush and Vice President Cheney maintain that telecom immunity is essential to the War on Terr'; otherwise, telecom companies won't want to help out the government for fear of lawsuits.

That's all well and good, but FISA already contains provisions for lawsuit immunity. Under current law, if the administration goes through the process of obtaining a FISA warrant, then anyone who helps the administration in executing the warrant is immune from prosecution.

This all begs the question: what is the executive branch doing that is so secretive and so pressing that not even FISA is sufficient to control it? Bush and Cheney wish to engage in wiretapping with no oversight at all, which is exactly what FISA was enacted to prevent in the first place!

Thankfully, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) has promised to filibuster any legislation that comes to the floor with an immunity provision. And well he should, for not all telecoms blindly agreed to the Bush requests. Those that refused questioned the legality of the request and were worried that they might be open to prosecution. The rest acquiesced, for reasons that are unclear (and that we're not allowed to know). Opening up telecom companies to prosecution lets them know that they broke the law and that when the president comes to them with a questionable request, they should think hard about it, as they may be open to prosecution from unhappy citizens whose conversations were recorded in a way that is against the law.

Posted by Mark at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

First, a lesson in how statistics work. This is addressed chiefly to CNN.

You see, if a candidate is two points ahead of another candidate, but the margin of error for that poll is more than two points, then there is no definitive statement that can be made about that poll. Yet, time and again, news outlets report that one candidate is inching out another by mere millimeters even though the margin between the candidates is well within the margin of error for the poll. Example: if a poll says that 34% of people support Hillary, but 32% support Barack Obama, and the margin of error is +/- 3 percentage points, then who wins the poll? The CNN answer -- and subsequent headline -- is, "Hillary ekes out two-point lead over Obama." The real answer is that the actual poll results could conceivably be that Obama has 35% and Hillary has 31%!

Okay. On to the show.

Here we are, ten years into a twenty-year long political campaign, and what do we have to show for it? Examine the situation: President Bush is a lame duck president facing off against a Congress controlled by the opposing party. A minority of the country supports him, and he has led the country into an expensive war that will be in its fifth year this March. This president has decimated civil liberties, destroyed science, and alienated every moderate person in the world with his cavalier, shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later "Don't mess with [the popular caricature of] Texas" style of governance. You'd think that all a candidate would have to do is be breathing in order to gain support. Terri Schiavo for president!

But it's not so. No candidate has emerged that is truly the winner. The Democrats have three plausible contenders: Obama, Clinton, and John Edwards. Any one of these people has a shot at the nomination. Seriously. But they poll very close to each other. It's almost as though they're -- dare I say it -- indistinguishable from one another.

The Republicans are faring worse. There has been no Republican savior, no heir to the Reagan mantle. Fred Thompson was touted as the true scion, but after his three months on the road, he's closer to winning the Grampa Munster Lookalike Contest than the presidency. Rudy Giuliani has enthralled his supporters but scared the bejeezus out of the rest of us. John McCain is that Little Engine That Wants To, but his staunch support of the Iraq war and even torture (!) in some cases makes us suspicious. And at the end of the day, no matter how hard Bush beats him, he comes back, insisting, "It was my fault. Bush really is a good person. It's just that sometimes he wants to win so much that he spreads rumors about me in South Carolina." Mike Huckabee is just as frightening as Giuliani, but he hates gays more. Mitt Romney is an android.

Sadly, in the Republican camp, no one is coming out on top. Again, Terri Schiavo should be able to do it. Sure, Mike Huckabee won Iowa in a surprise victory, but McCain won New Hampshire. At the end of the day, there is no one candidate who appeals to all people. Where is the Super Candidate? The Republicans have spent eight years in the White House because they're good at keeping the team together: stay on message, or Karl Rove will eat your skull.

Instead of a spicy burrito of a campaign with many different, exotic ingredients, this election -- like most others -- has turned instead into a gray, indiscernible goulash that doesn't taste much like anything but smells a lot like money. It's appalling that we're in the state that we're in right now: the White House is ripe for the picking, but no one can figure out how to build a ladder to pick it.

Posted by Mark at 9:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Why is it that flying always makes me think about security? Especially in light of this article and this article from over the weekend.

The first article was written by a pilot for The New York Times' flying blog, "Jet Lagged." The pilot, Patrick Smith, maintains that not only are security procedures, like shoe removal, explosive swabbing, and liquid prohibition, poor customer service, but they don't work, either. The British terrorists who wanted to blow stuff up by using liquids were not anywhere near carrying out their plan; they hadn't even bought tickets! Their plot was not foiled by a sharp TSA screener who saw the terror their liquids could cause: it was good, old-fashioned, non-warrantless police work.

Smith presents an interesting case. Prior to the September 11 attacks, he says, the mindset of plane hijacking was fundamentally different. Up to that point, planes had been used to hold hostages and receive demands. Flight crews were instructed to carry out the terrorists' demands, the assumption being that (1) it was better to protect the lives of the passengers and crew, and (2) they would catch the terrorists later, anyway. It's the same mentality law enforcement uses with kidnapping: pay the kidnapper now, get the kid, and then locate and arrest the kidnapper. It's a strategy that works; most kidnappers get caught.

But, on September 11, the hijackers of those four planes had a different idea in mind: they never planned to hold anyone hostage. The flight crew (aided by their belief that the hijackers were wearing bombs, which apparently turned out to be fake and designed to provoke acquiescence) did as the terrorists commanded, which is what they were trained to do. No more, says Smith: "Any hijacker would face a planeload of angry and frightened people ready to fight back." A set of unique loopholes was exploited by the terrorists, and our current security screening procedures wouldn't have caught them today any more than it would have caught them then. The box-cutters? "A deadly sharp can be fashioned from virtually anything found on a plane, be it a broken wine bottle or a snapped-off length of plastic," says Smith. Our prohibitions on liquids are also silly, as "the threat of liquid explosives does exist, but it cannot be readily brewed from the kinds of liquids we have devoted most of our resources to keeping away from planes." We already prohibit combustible or unstable chemicals and aerosol containers of any kind in either checked or carry-on luggage. (Perhaps the TSA would consider that the terrorists have cooked up a time-release liquid bomb that lives in their carry-on luggage? They would, and probably have, but that would mean a level of inconvenience that is apparently more frightening than the prospect of a plane blowing up. The indication that this is possible tells us one of two things: either they are incompetent, or actual security isn't the real reason for their security measures.)

Article the Second! The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that the TSA isn't just watching your shoes, your belt, your watch, the contents of your pockets, the inside of your carry-on, the inside of your checked luggage, and the connector ports of all your electronics. They're also watching your facial expressions:

Travelers at Sea-Tac and dozens of other major airports across America are being scrutinized by teams of TSA behavior-detection officers specially trained to discern the subtlest suspicious behaviors.

TSA officials will not reveal specific behaviors identified by the program -- called SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Technique) -- that are considered indicators of possible terrorist intent.

[...]

"In the SPOT program, we have a conversation with (passengers) and we ask them about their trip," said Maccario from his office in Boston. "When someone lies or tries to be deceptive, ... there are behavior cues that show it. ... A brief flash of fear."

A commenter at Boing Boing, the source of this article, posted the definition of "facecrime" from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is relevant here. But airports in Israel do the same thing -- not to scrutinize your facial expressions, but to check your answers. If you don't have ready answers for their questions, then they believe something's up. The same goes for crossing the border. On my way back from Canada, I was asked some simple questions like "Where did you stay?" and "What did you do?" As Maccario indicates, the officers weren't interested in my answers -- only in the fact that I had ready answers. They didn't look at my face, though. The belief that the face can somehow point out things about a person comes to us from physiognomy, an outdated "scientific" method in which a person's outer features are indicators of his or her personality. Recall that President Bush, years ago, looked into President Vladimir Putin's eyes and saw nothing but puppies and ponies. Non-science is not science!

Happy flying!

Posted by Mark at 4:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier this week, the United Kingdom announced that they would stop using the monicker "war on terrorism." Describing the bombs of last summer, Sir Ken Macdonald said, "The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers. They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way." Also, the phrase "Islamic terrorist" will no longer be used by the government.

It has been hard these past six years to wage war on a concept. "War on terrorism" is in the same vein as "war on drugs" or "war on pornography": whom are you fighting, really? We cannot have unilateral wars on ideas. Wars happen between people and should be referred to as such. Nevertheless, the word "terrorism" should not be thrown out of discourse, for it is useful to describe the actions of civilians who attempt to terrorize other civilians. Again, I refer all readers to Mark Jurgensmeyer's Terror in the Mind of God, which is an excellent primer for understanding how terrorism works.

Words are important. Dr. Robert Thurston of the Miami University history faculty makes a distinction between "terror" and "terrorism": the former is perpetrated by a government upon its own people (cf. France's "Reign of Terror," 1792-3), while the latter is perpetrated by civilians -- whether foreign or domestic -- upon other civilians for the purpose of instilling fear as a tactic of part of a larger plan for something. Furthermore, to use the word "terrorists" homogeneously as President Bush so often does is to create the belief that all terrorists engage in terrorism for the same reasons. Al-Qaeda uses terrorism to further its stated goals of: (1) U.S. withdrawal from Saudi Arabia; (2) elimination of Israel; and (3) a theocratic pan-Islamic alliance. Hezbollah is a religious terrorist group, while Hamas is not religious. The IRA never wanted to take over the world and spread its message of "evil"; it wanted Irish independence. End of story. The PLO wanted independence for Palestine, not to take over the world. The notion that all terrorist organizations have the same aspirations as Adolf Hitler is a faulty one at best, and intentionally deceptive at worst. We were led to believe, for example, that Saddam Hussein wanted to take over the Middle East. In fact, Saddam was content to rule his country with his own personality cult. His aspirations did not extend outside his borders, except when it came to Kuwait, which he thought was his to take, anyway.

The Bush administration has done a thorough job of dismantling complex discourse and replacing it with bumper-sticker slogans. There's no need to understand the intricate historical, linguistic, and religious relationships among all the Middle Eastern countries. All you need to know is that every Middle Eastern country -- except Saudi Arabia! -- wants to destroy Israel, and the United States is here to bring light to darkness. The fact that the ideal solution for Iraq would be to separate it into three states is of no concern: just understand that it's bad. This anti-intellectual and anti-curoisity attitude (don't investigate for yourself; just trust that I'm right!) is endemic of politics for the last six years. Witness it in the domestic sphere as President Bush insists that no one needs to worry about his warrantless wiretapping program because "constitutional safeguards are in place," as he said in Buffalo in 2005.

How's this for a New Years Resolution: don't be complacent with information. When an authority figure tells you something, do as the Great Reagan once suggested: "Trust, but verify."

Posted by Mark at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)