SHOW ME YOUR PAPERS!

That phrase, show me your papers, has been immortalized by inclusion in any number of WWII movies over the years. You know the ones: our heroes are undercover in Nazi held territory, the come up to a checkpoint and the nasty Nazi in the gatehouse comes out and asks our heroes for their papers, ie, their proof that they are, in fact, loyal followers of the Third Reich.

It's that connection to one of the worst regimes in modern history which is why, I think, many people were not happy with the Arizona immigration law that raised such a stink last year. The image of a native born citizen of this great country, be he or she Hispanic or not, being asked to prove his or her citizenship when asked by a cop during a traffic stop or on a street corner waiting for a ride, smacked a little too much of Show Me Your Papers.

But that, and the entire illegal immigrant problem got me to thinking. Now, before my more conservative readers blow a gasket and stop reading, let me state that I am in full support of the much used phrase, "What part of illegal don't they get?" Where I differ with my friends on the Right is that I'm enough of a pragmatic realist to know that 12 million status law breakers are pretty hard to find, let alone deport. Clearly, it just can't be done without doing great harm to our rule of law... Show me your papers!

Why, just in the last couple of weeks a rather large ring of document forgers was caught and implicated in what could be the sale of thousands of phony documents. And, as a former employer of hundreds of employees I can tell you that knowing whether the ID that new hire showed me was legit or not fell well outside my abilities. Particularly when the drivers license, for example, was from a different state.

In 2005 congress passed the Real Id Act which requires the states to standardize the design and safety features of drivers licenses. The deadline for this has been extended from May of this year to January 15, 2013. There is still much controversy concerning the Act since it sorta/kinda creates that much dreaded National Id Card. Show me your papers!

But hold on a minute. Considering ID theft, the illegal immigrant problem, the thought of terrorists entering the country on forged documents (see 9/11) and the need for each of us to prove who we are, both in person and online, is a national ID card really that bad? It would, of course, have to be very hard to forge. It probably would need a biometric identity component. And it would have to be universally accepted within the U.S.A.

Don't get me wrong. The idea of having any of my personal data socked away in a government computer system scares the heck out of me. And it doesn't matter which team is in charge, since I don't trust any of them as far as I could toss Air Force One. But the need is still there and growing. Wouldn't you like to just swipe your card in a card reader attached to your smart phone or iPad and be certified by a web site on the other end as, well, you. No more passwords with "letters and numbers and at least one capital letter" BS when trying to use your online banking account. For every potential horror there is a compelling benefit from such a national identity document. If technology can just come up with a truly impossible to forge card, that is.

So, each time my bank makes me come up with yet another password, which I have to write down in order to remember, which means it isn't really safe, I wonder if a national ID wouldn't be a better answer. Except, of course, for Show Me Your Papers!

YOU BETCHA'

In the background of the current disaster filled news and opinions there is still ranting on the part of certain voices on the conservative side about the War on Terror. Actually, the opinion pieces I've seen are not about the W.O.T., they're about how much of a failure President Obama is. They run the usual list of presidential failures, including his apologizing for America's past actions, bowing to foreign leaders, not treating attempted terror attacks as acts of war and so on. It's that last one that bothers me.

The drum beat to treat every act of terrorism, or attempted terrorism, as an act of war carries with it certain baggage which the right wing pundits just seem to ignore. Like, what constitutes a terrorist act? Or more precisely, is it an act of terror if it's done, or attempted, by a non-Muslim actor? You know, like shooting an abortion doctor in his church. Or, is it an act of war, rather than a criminal act, if done by an American citizen? The Times Square car bomb attempt fits this category. See how this might get sticky?

The right wing seems to just assume that any action, taken by a Muslim, against American interests, is a terrorist act of war. Simple and straight forward. But here in the world of reality it's not so simple.

There are all those Miranda Warning problems. We can't stop interrogating some Muslim guy even if he is a citizen, so let's strip him of his citizenship! That is, in fact, what Senator Lieberman suggested. We just strip suspected terrorists citizens of their U.S. citizenship and we can then ignore all the rules.

Of course, once we have these bad guys, we sure don't want to house them in the good old U.S.A. No sir, just because we've got more than 300 convicted terrorist prisoners in our prisons now, we sure can't keep these new bad actors here. Now, does it ever bother these folks (the right wing pundits, not the terrorists) that they appear scared stiff of guys who can't even make a bomb go boom.

But the big issue to be is the whole war versus crime comparison. The right, and in particular the so called Neocon right is, and has been, utterly wedded to the War on Terror way of looking at this. They backed (and pushed) the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so they're sort of stuck with that solution. Even though, as had been much reported after the Christmas crotch bomber's failed attempt, the Bush administration had used the Federal Courts to prosecute guys like the shoe bomber. The Neocons just ignore that. Their position is that it's always an act of war because, well, we're at war.

Now, can we stop for a minute and explode that thought. Writers far smarter than I have explained, slowly and carefully, in words of only one or two syllables, that the "War on Terror" is an empty concept involving as it does the declaration of war against a tactic. May I be blunt? It's stupid! It's stupid because it assumes (wrongly) that the U.S.A. has a right to enter any country, at any time, to kill or capture anyone who we deem to be a threat to us. It's stupid because it ignores the basic human values of protecting family and tribe if the ones doing the protecting are not of our particular tribe. It's stupid because it completely ignores the fact that for every civilian death in Iraq or Afghanistan we create more people who hate us and want harm to come to us. And it's stupid because the current crop of attempts were made by a guy from Pakistan and a guy from Yemin and we aren't at war with either of them (yet).

So, if I may paraphrase that great American thinker, Sarah Palin, when it comes to protecting the homeland from the threat of terror my dear Neocons, how's that War on Terror thing workin' out for ya?  

WELCOME PASSENGERS AND GUESTS

Given the current security concerns at our airports I think that the FAA and TSA should post the following sign at the entrance to all of this countries airports.

WELCOME PASSENGERS AND GUESTS

PLEASE BE ADVISED THAT BY ENTERING THIS FACILITY YOU AGREE TO WAIVE ANY AND ALL RIGHTS GUARANTEED BY THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION.

HAVE A NICE DAY

THE TYLENOL EFFECT

I just caught the last part of an interview this morning on CNN on the topic of terrorist attacks. Since this fellow seemed knowledgeable, and made sense, I knew he wasn't an American politician so I perked up and started to listen. He was explaining that al Qaeda, bin Laden's outfit, likes to plan attacks bigger and bloodier than their last attack. For them, 9/11 is a hard act to follow. But the bunch that sent the Crotch Bomber tm from Yemen, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) seems to be focusing on smaller operations like the Crotch Bomber tm. That's when the alarm bells started to go off in my head.

I've never really understood why we have placed so much anti-terror emphasis on preventing the big strike. Yes, the idea of another 9/11 type attack is horrible but, as we saw then, huge tragedies can bring us together as a nation. And such an attack can also stiffen our, and our allies, resolve. We can never know what might have happened after 9/11 if someone else had been in the White House, but clearly, for a time we, and the rest of the world were of one voice in our loathing of the terrorist group who brought this down upon us. So maybe big flashy attacks against the American homeland aren't such a good idea, if you're a terrorist. Maybe small, repeated attacks in multiple locations, like AQAP seem to be planning, are better at terrorizing a population.

And that brings us to the Tylenol Effect. In the Fall of 1982, in the Chicago suburbs, 7 people died from Tylenol capsules tainted with cyanide. This was no factory mix-up or contamination, this was premeditated murder. Bottles of capsules had been shoplifted, taken somewhere, tampered with and then placed back on store shelves. No one was ever caught and punished, but a few things did change.

For those of you younger than I (and that's a big bunch of folks, getting bigger every day) I offer a story which, at first, you might not believe. Once upon a time, when you twisted the top off of a jar of peanut butter, you saw....peanut butter. Not a paper seal, actual peanut butter. The same was true for grape jelly. And for bottles of aspirin and, yes, Tylenol. The poke and tear dance that we all do to get into products which we put in our mouths began with the Tylenol poisoning case. Prior to 1982 product tampering was nowhere on the radar. After Tylenol it was everywhere.

Now I know this doesn't sound like such a big thing, but stop and think a minute. Every single processed food or over the counter medicine you buy is in a sealed container. It's Federal Law. The huge sums expended to protect us from this threat are incalculable, but must be in the billions. Entire industries were created to satisfy the need for seals and guards and the adhesives to attach them. New factory machines and production steps needed to be created. This was a really big deal!

So what, then, is the Tylenol Effect? It is the very American response to bad things in the world. We go way overboard. We do everything in our power to see to it that any harm that happens, if caused by bad actors, can never happen again. Why do I add the part about "if caused by bad actors?" Because when it comes to natural disasters we aren't so motivated it seems. Witness the continuing poor response to Hurricane Katrina. Now compare that to our response to 9/11. We will spend just about any sum to try and stop the bad guys. Or bad guy. We will fight to open our sealed products forever because we think that will make us safer.

So what do we think would be this countries response to, say, ten terrorists, each with just three rocket propelled grenades, who each fired those RPGs  at so called soft targets on ten consecutive days? Ten days of shopping mall explosions? Or random vehicles exploding on the Interstates? Or power sub-stations blowing up putting thousands into blackouts? What would we do? We'd go absolutely nuts, that's what.

By the eleventh day there would be no one in the malls or on the Interstates. Commerce would lock up at every level. No one would risk their own life and certainly not the lives of their children. Employers wouldn't dare put their workers at risk (lawsuits you know) nor shop keepers their customers (more lawsuits). It would not be pretty. And that's just the commercial effects. What the government would do to try and keep us all safe would make today's airport security seem like a wave from the greeter at Walmart. Can you say martial law?

So I fervently hope that the bad guys continue to equate the USA with Israel. After more that 60 years of terrorist attacks, they still continue to continue. For all of it's failings in it's past and current dealings with the Palestinians, Israel is still a democratic nation that supports human rights and the rule of law. They have not been broken by terrorism. So, perhaps, the bad guys will think that we, too, would overcome the death by a thousands cuts of many small attacks, like the Israelis. Because if they ever figure out that instead we would probably respond with the Tylenol Effect, we could be in a world of hurt.


Just  thinking about this has given me a headache. I wonder if I can get into that new bottle of Tylenol?

YUMPIN' YEMENI

The Christmas day attempted bombing of an airliner by a Nigerian man, supposedly trained and supplied in Yemen, has turned up the volume on the left/right debate on what we should do about terrorists. 

In the left corner we have the law enforcement folks. Those who think that the actions of the Crotch Bomber tm, attempting to blow a hole in an airplane as it descended into Detroit, should be dealt with as violations of Federal Laws.

In the right corner we have the War on Terror contingent, most recently represented by former Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge. On yesterdays Larry King Show on CNN he said this:

“I take a look at this individual who has been charged criminally, does that mean he gets his Miranda warnings? The only information we get is if he volunteers it? He’s not a citizen of this country. He’s a terrorist, and I don’t think he deserves the full range of protections of our criminal justice system embodied in the Constitution of the United States”

In other words, damn the Constitution, full speed ahead into another front in the endless War on Terror. I have a few questions for Mr. Ridge, though.

Just what is it about this fellow, or his actions, which strips him of the Constitutional rights which we freely offer to other legal aliens within our borders? It can't be because he's black, can it? It can't be because he's Nigerian? Is it because he tried to blow up a plane? Well, the Shoe Bomber, Richard Reid, tried to blow up a plane and he was tried and convicted, by the Bush administration, in criminal court just fine. Was it because he had connections with al Qaeda in Yemen? Why should this guy be treated as an Enemy Combatant?

Because that fits within the right's position that all such acts are terrorism and the only way to fight terrorism is as a war. "No ifs, ands or buts about it, we are at war with terrorism and we've got to...."
And that's where the War on Terror bunch starts to change the subject. Even (some) of these chowder heads begin to realize that we can't keep invading every country with any connection to al Qaeda. At least I hope they do.

No, the basic problem here is that those on the right have no faith in the American justice system. Since even before the Miranda decision conservatives stopped trusting that the courts could "get it right" when it came to crime in this country. For that reason conservatives, when they have been in power, lead the charge that has pushed this country to it's position as the prison capital of the world. Justice has become secondary to punishment. So we are expected to see Mr. Ridge's calling this guy a Terrorist as the reason for bypassing the Constitution. Never mind presumption of innocence. Calling him a terrorist puts him into the War on Terror, which is a military and not a criminal justice issue. And anyone, like the President, who disagrees is, well, just use your imagination. I'm sure within the next weeks and months that they'll have lots of names for the President.

But where does it end Mr. Ridge? If all we need do is call someone a Terrorist and puff, all his or her Constitutional rights are forfeit are any of us safe? And would the same apply to Terrorist Sympathizer, or Terrorist Enabler, or Terrorist Leaner? Thought crimes can't be far behind. Of course, they won't be crimes, they'll be acts of war. In the war that can never end.


Here are a couple of links that explore the current situation a little more.

MORE THOUGHTS ON CHINA

The first thing that I think we need to do in order to share the 21st century with China is take a step back from the issue of human rights. Every time we try to overlay trade and economic foreign policy with morality we run smack into the same problem; our understanding of other cultures diminishes in direct proportion to how many layers of ethnocentric moral clap trap we bring to the table. We so want the Chinese to think and act just like us that we act as if they already do. They don't!

As I mentioned in the first China post, they are a culture that takes the long view. Their history and pre-history go back over 5,000 years. China contains almost 20% of Earths people at 1.33 billion (and counting). They've earned the long view of culture. We, on the other hand, lose interest after 15 minutes. We're like a bunch of puppies in a field of butterflys. It is that inherent difference between our cultures that may end up benefiting them and, maybe, harming us.

Take energy. In this moment in time, as we worry about global warming and climategate, we hear that it really doesn't matter what the U.S. does since China is just going to out carbon everybody going forward. They are putting into service one coal fired power plant every week to 10 days. But they are also the world leader in so called clean coal technology. They are building more nuclear power plants than the entire world combined (our contribution being zero). They have doubled the amount of energy gotten from wind power in each of the past four years and will soon be the world leader in wind technology equipment purchases. That's taking the long view.

The Chinese know that they cannot sustain their current carbon excesses, so they plan for a future world where the mighty U.S.A. has to buy wind turbines, along with TVs, from them. We can't decide where or how to address nuclear waste and are scared out of our jammies that a nuclear power plant will melt down and kill us all. So we don't build nuke plants. We carp about the need for clean coal fired plants but don't want to pay the price, or claim in campaign ads that "There's no such thing as clean coal!", so we don't try to build them either.

Here in the Mountain State of West Virginia we have the coal is king group taking the tops off of mountains while the environmentalists would rather preserve all of nature by just keeping all the people away. No one is seeing that we need coal for some time to come, but we also need to push ahead with non-coal produced energy (oops, there goes my local reader(s)) like wind and geothermal. Hey, lets put wind turbines on those topless mountains. Flat terrain and good road beds already in place!

And in the end I think that's the answer to the question of China as the next super power. If we continue to make every discussion an argument between vested interests, we can only make progress in the short term. If that happens the Chinese will surpass us in the long term and the long term is not that far away. If we continue to be reactive to environmental crisis instead of being proactive in the face of sound scientific predictions, the Chinese will surpass us in the long term. If we continue to think that some future technology, not yet thought of, will get us out of environmental trouble, the Chinese will surpass us. I wish it were not so, but we are a stubborn bunch. I think I better learn Mandarin!  

IT REALLY IS A HOLY WAR

The neocon reaction to the recent tragedy of the Fort Hood killings and to the administrations decision to bring Gitmo detainees to NYC for trial opens a window to the thinking (if any) of the pundits on that side of the debate. The view is not pretty.

On the trials we are greeted with the litany of:

1. They were captured in a war so they must be tried by military commission.
2. This will only invite more attacks.
3. What if they get off?
4. This is war, not crime.
   
5. Repeat (endlessly it seems).

Of course, the "This is war, not crime" trope has been wrapped tightly around the heads of the neocon right since George W. Bush both created the War on Terror concept and used it to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. They can't now take a terrorist act as crime tact since that would blow the entire justification for the two wars we are now involved in.

As you might imagine, I take a different position. I'm old school on this. I think a war should be declared, by congress, against another sovereign state. No declaration, no war. No sovereign state, same result. As has been said before, the War on Terror is a war against a tactic. Let's have a War on Land Mines. How about a War on Flanking Maneuvers. Ya, it sounds pretty silly doesn't it. If, on the other hand, we take the criminal approach we can clearly see that action can be taken against those who committed, planned or supported criminal acts. This approach can be applied to large acts, like 9/11, as well as small acts, like the "shoe bomber". This neither diminishes the horror of 9/11 nor elevates Richard Reids attempt to light his shoes at 30,000 feet. A crime is a crime and should be prosecuted as such.

Which brings us to Nidal Hasen and Fort Hood. The neocon right is screaming that Hasen's actions are terrorism, and he must be treated as a terrorist and, I suppose, be shipped off to Gitmo and a water-boarding session or two (or 183, you never know).

But wait a minute! If Hasen is a terrorist and our response to terrorist attacks is based upon the War on Terror model, who, pray tell, should we now invade? With whom should we start war number 3? Hasen wasn't, as far as we know, a part of any al-Qaeda sleeper cell. He didn't train at an Afghanistan "monkey bars" training camp. He wasn't bin Laden's driver, or go-fer, or anything. He is a Palestinian by birth so maybe we should invade Palestine. Oh wait, there's no such country as Palestine. OK, maybe we should invade the West Bank. Or Gaza. See the problem in dealing with Hasen as a terrorist actor in the War on Terror.

To my mind this blows up (sorry) the whole idea of the War on Terror as anything other than a holy war against Islam. That 800 pound gorilla is the only connection between Hasen and al-Qaeda. In fact, Islam is the only real connection between the many far flung Islamic terrorist groups around the globe from Asia to Africa to Europe. If Hasen must be treated as a terrorist it must be because he is a Muslim. There is no other logical reason.

Nidal Hasen is a murderer for whatever reason he himself used as motivation. Likewise, those who planned and executed 9/11 are murderers. We know full well in this country how to deal with murderers. By labeling him, and them, anything else leads to endless war in countries with little or no connection to the acts committed. I, for one, have more and better faith in our justice system then those on the right it seems. What ever happened to American Exceptionalism?  

WHY ALL THE ANGER?

I've been scratching my head over the very vocal anger being expressed by some at town hall meetings, in interviews and in blogs. While it's easy to see that people fed a steady diet of Rush or Glenn Beck distortions and false claims (see my last post), intended to arouse anger, would result in anger, I think that there may be an underlying cause.

Note that most of what is said (shouted) is anger at GOVERNMENT. "I don't want the Government to get between me and my doctor" or "The Government can't run anything right. What makes them think that they can run GM, health care or whatever." While the Obama = Hitler trope is there too, the overall sense is that these folks really hate THE GOVERNMENT. Since Obama has only been in office 7 months this, to me, seems a bit excessive. What is going on here?

Could it be our old friend cognitive dissonance? Our country has been through hell over the past 8 years. A terrible attack on the Homeland. A war to catch the people who planned and ordered the attack and the failure of that war to catch them. Another war started on grounds that proved to be pretty much completely false. A storm ravaged American city and the incompetent Government response. The revelations of mistreatment and torture of prisoners. The past 8 years have shown those average citizens out there in Sarah Palin's "Real America" that, by gosh, the Government IS incompetent and can't seem to do anything right.

But wait. These are the same folks who believed that Saddam had WMD. They believed that if we fight them over there they won't come here. They believed that we don't torture our prisoners. Classic cognitive dissonance. "The uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously" is exactly what we are now seeing. And, since they believe that they should both respect our leaders and their policies and that the Government run by those leaders has resulted in poorly planned and run wars, programs and agencies (can you say FEMA?) their brains are faced with the pain of cognitive dissonance.

What we are seeing now is the expression of that pain against the new guy and his Government. "He's Black you know. Not like us. He has a funny name. I heard he wasn't even born here." They find it much easier to yell about Obamacare now rather than protest the war back then. The anger and frustration has been building for 8 long years (longer still when you consider the 1996 congressional election and the impeachment of Clinton). Their buttons are easy to push, and as we can see, the Rushes and Becks of the world know where those buttons are.

It's going to be a very angry fall and winter.

THEY KEPT US SAFE

Writing for The Daily Dish, Chris Bodenner quoting Zachary Roth of Talking Points Memo, looks at Chaney's speech from earlier today:

"Zachary Roth points out "the most radical argument" of Cheney's "extremely radical" speech. Cheney:

And when [our enemies] see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don't stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along. Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for - our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity.

Rule of law and democratic debate, even years after the emergency of 9/11, are deemed weaknesses. Roth:

In other words, the very act of debating torture, or the process by which we try detainees, is encouraging terrorists to strike. The implication, of course, is that dissent of any kind is dangerous.

Then Bodenner offers up the zinger:

My translation of Cheney's speech: they hate us for our freedom, so let's just get rid of the freedom part and then we'll be safe.

Ya, that's pretty much the way it sounded to me. It was another part of the speech, though, that got under my skin. For what seems to be the millionth time, a spokesperson for the Bush administration trotted out "(We) kept us safe for 71/2 years." In this speech Chaney went even further. He outlined how the Clinton administration treated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as a police matter and then we were hit at the Embassies in Africa, and the bombing of the Cole and so on. Then 9/11 happened and our heroes treated it as a reason to start two wars and...wait for it..."The homeland hasn't been hit again!" Did you catch the old switch-a-roo.

When it's the Clinton bunch, every time a terrorist struck, anywhere in the world, that counts against the Clinton policies. Even though the people who did the WTC bombing where caught, tried, convicted and are now serving their time right here in a prison in the good old USA, somehow Chaney and the other apologists for the Bush years can't see that Clinton kept us safe, here at home, from 1993 until 9/11/01. During Bush and Chaney's watch our forces have been attacked to the tune of over 4,200 dead and tens of thousands wounded. But no, we haven't been attacked here at home.

I'm really getting quite tired of these guys either thinking we're all too dumb to notice this stuff, or they believe it like the true believers they are. Some choice.