Ahistorical conservatism

Kavin D. Williamson, National Review:

Whatever kind of conservatism is arguing that we should invest the president with sole, secret, unreviewable authority to order the assassination of U.S. citizens because the alternative is unworkable (!) in the considered view of John Tabin, because war exists (!) — I am not that kind of conservative, I suppose. I propose we call that school of thought ahistorical, morally illiterate conservatism.


We’ve had wars for a long time without authorizing the premeditated extrajudicial killing of U.S. citizens. Treason is a crime. You get charged with it, dragged into court, tried by a jury of your peers, etc. The penalty for treason is not assassination without trial, and there is nothing in our Constitution or tradition to suggest that it is. This seems to me a deeply foolish and ill-considered argument.

It’s also worth noting that al-Awlaki mostly is accused of being a propagandist — giving sermons, writing articles, and otherwise behaving as “the bin Laden of the Internet,” as he is known. You want to try him for treason or inciting terrorist violence, I’m content to see him hang. If our covert-ops guys light up some al-Qaeda redoubt in the mountains and al-Awlaki bites the dust, no tears from me. But those are very different things from having the U.S. government draw up a list of its own citizens to be targeted for assassination. The fact that the Obama administration went out of its way to make this fact public tells us something interesting, too: It is making a specific political point, and establishing a specific precedent. It is crossing an old and important line, and conservatives should never let the rule of unintended consequences be very far from our minds

On an entirely different topic, David Boaz, Cato:

Charles Krauthammer calls same-sex marriage “the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history.” Really? Some might say that ending “till death do us part” was more radical. And maybe ending the requirement that the bride promise to “love, honor, and obey.” And how about the end of polygamy? Polygamy was probably the most common marital system in the broad sweep of human history, but now it is virtually unknown in the Western world; indeed, ahistorical conservatives warn that allowing two people of the same sex to make a vow of marriage could lead to polygamy.

Terrorism suspects arrested in Norway and Germany

Matt Yglesias:

As ever with these things it’ll take several days to figure out what, if anything, was really going on here but the Norwegian Police Security Service says it’s busted a terrorist cell in cooperation with American, British, and German agencies and arrested three men, two in Norway one in Germany:

She added, “‘We believe this group has had links to people abroad who can be linked to Al Qaeda, and to people who are involved in investigations in other countries, among others the United States and Britain.”

One of the men arrested was a 39-year-old Norwegian citizen of Chinese origin who belonged to the Muslim Uighur group, she said. Another was a 37-year-old Iraqi citizen who came to Norway in 1999 and has permanent residency.

The third man was a 31-year-old Uzbek citizen who also has permanent residency in Norway.

I think this once again underscores a couple of important points. One is that for all the disparagement of the “law enforcement and intelligence” approach to counterterrorism from the right, this is all we’ve got. International terrorists aren’t the same as average criminals, but the basic methods involved in apprehending them are similar. An aircraft carrier doesn’t help, and soldiers don’t have the right training. The other is that the most dangerous “safe havens” are inside western cities and not in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. There’s no way to perpetrate a terrorist attack on a western target if you’re in Peshawar, still less if you’re in the mountains somewhere. If you’re in Oslo with a Norwegian passport, you can hop on a plane and go anywhere. And yet somehow we’re debating a $37 billion supplemental appropriation for a war in Afghanistan while the total FBI budget is around $7 billion. I’m not saying we should necessarily go out and triple the FBI’s counterterrorism budget, but if you want to think about spending lots of money on catching terrorists that seems like the smart place to do it.

Malkin award nominee

"Here is the fact: Democrats are saying they would prefer to see tens of thousands of Americans die than to see a KSM subjected to sleep-deprivation or to have his “phobias exploited.” I doubt that this reflects the values of most Americans."

—Andy McCarthy, NRO

Terrorists and the right are co-dependent

Yglesias goes there. He's right, though.

Ready-made right-wing talking points

Democrats are aligned with the terrorists!

Quote of the day

"You really think this kid can‘t be convicted? You really think we don‘t have enough evidence beyond the—beyond the, I don‘t know, 300 or so eyewitnesses who were on the plane? The fact that we have the weapon that he tried to use? The fact that he confessed? You think that‘s not enough to get this kid convicted? You have that little faith in our criminal justice system? That little faith in the rule of law? You don‘t believe that a supermax federal American prison is capable of holding this kid?

You think it might be cool, instead, to martyr this kid as some impressive soldier, instead of some idiot confused rich kid who couldn‘t even handle blowing up his own junk with a bomb that was secreted in his own underpants? We‘re supposed to take national security advice from you guys? Really?" —Rachel Maddow

(via the Dish)

Airborne terror by the numbers

Nate Silver does the non-fancy math:

Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas.

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics provides a wealth of statistical information on air traffic. For this exercise, I will look at both domestic flights within the US, and international flights whose origin or destination was within the United States. I will not look at flights that transported cargo and crew only. I will look at flights spanning the decade from October 1999 through September 2009 inclusive (the BTS does not yet have data available for the past couple of months).

Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.

These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.

Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.

There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

Stop. Fucking. Panicking.

[Take 2] Barad-dûr was an inside job

I futzed the link before, but this is funny.

Earlier: Where were you when the death star fell?

Photos of the day

Former servicemen cried as they said goodbye to their fellow soldiers, at the end of their army-service term, at a railway station in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, China, Wednesday.



Rabbi Avraham Berkowitz climbed stairs at Chabad House in Mumbai Wednesday. The site, home to the Mumbai chapter of the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish movement, was one of several sites attacked by gunmen on Nov. 26, 2008. The coordinated attacks claimed 166 lives. A Pakistani court has indicted seven people in the terrorist acts.



Fans, one holding a painting of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, cheered as they listened to her speak before she signed copies of her book “Going Rogue” in The Villages, Fla., Tuesday.

(via WSJ)

Why is the trial a problem?

Josh Marshall counters:

[..] most of the criticism comes under three distinct but related arguments:

1. Civilian trials give the defendants too many rights and protections and thus create too big a risk they'll get acquitted and set free.
2. Holding the prisoners and trial in New York City puts the city's civilian population at unnecessary risk of new terror attacks.
3. Holding public, civilian trials will give the defendants an opportunity to mock the victims, have a platform to issue propaganda or gain public sympathy.

The first two arguments strike me as understandable but basically wrong on the facts. The third I find difficult in some ways even to understand and seems grounded in bad political values or even ideological cowardice.

(continued)

Quote of the day

"After eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September 11th will finally face justice. They will be brought to New York -- to New York -- to answer for their alleged crimes, in a courthouse just blocks away from where the twin towers once stood."

—Eric Holder, U.S. Attorney General

Sen. Webb (D-VA) on the terror trials

Via TPM:

"I have never disputed the constitutional authority of the President to convene Article III courts in cases of international terrorism. However, I remain very concerned about the wisdom of doing so. Those who have committed acts of international terrorism are enemy combatants, just as certainly as the Japanese pilots who killed thousands of Americans at Pearl Harbor. It will be disruptive, costly, and potentially counterproductive to try them as criminals in our civilian courts.

"The precedent set by this decision deserves careful scrutiny as we consider proper venues for trying those now held at Guantanamo who were apprehended outside of this country for acts that occurred outside of the country. And we must be especially careful with any decisions to bring onto American soil any of those prisoners who remain a threat to our country but whose cases have been adjudged as inappropriate for trial at all. They do not belong in our country, they do not belong in our courts, and they do not belong in our prisons.

"I have consistently argued that military commissions, with the additional procedural rules added by Congress and enacted by President Obama, are the most appropriate venue for trying individuals adjudged to be enemy combatants."

For most of the detainees now in Guantanamo, this is probably true. But I think the Obama administration appreciates that because previous commissions enacted by Bush lacked the fairness and legitimacy of due process, merely reforming them is not enough. We must break with that past somehow.

Viewed in this light, trying KSM and a handful of others in New York seems inspired and fitting.

May they get their just desserts at an indisputably fair trial. And may the rest of the mess Bush left at Guantanamo be dealt with fairly but more quietly with the new commissions.

Where were you when the death star fell?

(be sure to watch through "controlled demolition")

...not to mention the fact that two missles were able to blow up the entire death star. Seriously, in all of recorded history no death star has ever been brought down by just two missles. There had to be explosives planted inside the death star. There is no way to two missles could have brought down the death star.

And don't even get me started on whether or not the emperor was born within the Galactic Federation Planets...

Israel's undiplomatic ambassador

Andrew takes down Michael Owen and gets letters.

In praise of a pre-9/11 world

What Wilkinson said.

It really says something that the Glenn Becks of the world are celebrating 9/12, doesn't it?

Political utility of terror threats

WASHINGTON — Tom Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security, asserts in a new book that he was pressured by top advisers to President George W. Bush to raise the national threat level just before the 2004 election in what he suspected was an effort to influence the vote.

After Osama bin Laden released a threatening videotape four days before the election, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushed Mr. Ridge to elevate the public threat posture but he refused, according to the book. Mr. Ridge calls it a “dramatic and inconceivable” event that “proved most troublesome” and reinforced his decision to resign.

The provocative allegation provides fresh ammunition for critics who have accused the Bush administration of politicizing national security. Mr. Bush and his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, were locked in a tight race heading into that final weekend, and some analysts concluded that even without a higher threat level, the bin Laden tape helped the president win re-election by reminding voters of the danger of Al Qaeda.

Fearmongering alert level: PANIC (High risk of losing re-election).

Other than this nefarious political effect, I never understood how people could think the Homeland Security alert system useful. Doesn't it run counter to the whole idea of, ehm, not allowing terrorism to terrorize us?

Detainee rights

An NROite is concerned about prison rape, which is interesting coming from the Right. Presumably his concern extends to all domestic terrorists who are imprisoned. But is he as concerned about the U.S.'s high-profile torture and abuse of foreign prisoners--terrorists and other combatants? Or is he another one of those who believes that denizen criminals don't have rights so long as there is intelligence to be gleaned?

Speech highlights

A passage like this is always welcome:

there is one law that we can be most certain of, it is the law that binds people of all faiths and no faith together. It is no coincidence that it exists in Christianity and Judaism; in Islam and Hinduism; in Buddhism and humanism. It is, of course, the Golden Rule - the call to treat one another as we wish to be treated. The call to love. To serve. To do what we can to make a difference in the lives of those with whom we share the same brief moment on this Earth.

For previous acknowledgments of godlessness, see Obama at the national prayer breakfast, the inauguration, and an excellent speech from before he was a candidate. Yes, I'm keeping score.

Andrew highlights two statements from the transcript. One of fact:

Understand - I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. No matter how much we may want to fudge it - indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory - the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable.

One of faith:

In this world of competing claims about what is right and what is true, have confidence in the values with which you’ve been raised and educated. Be unafraid to speak your mind when those values are at stake. Hold firm to your faith and allow it to guide you on your journey. Stand as a lighthouse.

But remember too that the ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen. It is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what He asks of us, and those of us who believe must trust that His wisdom is greater than our own.

This doubt should not push us away from our faith. But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, and cause us to be wary of self-righteousness. It should compel us to remain open, and curious, and eager to continue the moral and spiritual debate that began for so many of you within the walls of Notre Dame. And within our vast democracy, this doubt should remind us to persuade through reason, through an appeal whenever we can to universal rather than parochial principles, and most of all through an abiding example of good works, charity, kindness, and service that moves hearts and minds

Andrew concludes:

I believe that these sentiments will resonate with all Catholics of good will and serious purpose. When we are called by God to oppose the evils of abortion or torture or terror, we need to remain civil and fair and attuned to the calm that comes from knowing that we fight the good fight...if we do not try to do better, in the passionate and righteous pursuit of peace and justice, we will advance neither one nor the other.

Here's what Obama said of abortion earlier in the speech:

That’s when we begin to say, “Maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this is a heart-wrenching decision for any woman to make, with both moral and spiritual dimensions. So let’s work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies, and making adoption more available, and providing care and support for women who do carry their child to term. Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded in clear ethics and sound science, as well as respect for the equality of women.”

Contrast with what recently appeared at NewMajority.com, a place supposedly trying to further the right's cause among moderates:

Why are so many Catholics so offended by Notre Dame’s honoring President Obama with a doctor of laws? It is not just abortion (though that matters). It is the threat that the Obama administration poses to Catholic institutions that heal the sick and teach the young. The age old question of how far Catholics must go in opposing evil approved of by the State is present here. Barack Obama threatens the conscience of Catholics, and the mission of the Catholic Church in America, more than any President before him. He threatens by legislation and court appointments, in fact, to be an American Henry VIII, destroying Catholic institutions,"

For more nonsense, I direct you to the ever-unhinged Gateway Pundit.

Notre Dame commencement

I'll take a more detailed look at the transcript later. For now, the contrast with those who loudly politicize their own theological convictions as a matter of good vs. evil (previously covered) is marked.

This speech was a success on every level. Substantive and conciliatory, the crowd loved it. I expect Obama's approval numbers to be up among all groups who watched it, including Catholics.

I also appreciated a subsequent speaker who basically said: "We can all agree torture is wrong...this view is shared by the civilized world...it was not always so." That's true, or at least it should be true. Those who seek to justify torture today are an anachronism, and can only compete for public support with the Orwellian "enhanced interrogation techniques for terrorists".

Succinct distillation of GOP absurdity

Via Andrew, A.L.:

...let's review the basic GOP position. Torture (sorry "enhanced interrogation") is good and saves lives. It does not incite or radicalize the Muslim world or help al Qaeda recruit. Releasing pictures of it, however, does do all of these things. Also, if we stop torturing people, this leads to an al Qaeda recruiting bonanza.

To say that none of this makes any sense is an extreme understatement.