Month: January 2010

Technicalities

by digby

Atrios writes:

This may be nothing new – just new to me – but I was surprised to hear Odierno react with such strong language to the news that the case against those (allegedly) involved in the Blackwater massacre was thrown out. On NPR he said that innocent people had been killed and that he feared the ruling would inspire a backlash against the troops and contractors.

I missed the show, but I thought along similar lines when I read the story this morning in the New York Times. There are a number of contradictions that rise to the surface with this ruling.

First, imagine that these Blackwater guards were terrorist suspects who were brought to trial for allegedly massacring 17 innocent people and were released on what right wingers call a “technicality.” How do you think they would be reacting to such a thing? And conversely, would we see some on the left reacting with outrage to the ruling because clearly guilty people were going free due to prosecutorial misconduct?

I also wondered about what Odierno speaks of. If it was unconscionable to release pictures of abuse because it would outrage the Muslim world, what would this do? And at what point do you have to say that worrying about such things when one is following our constitution and the rule of law (as opposed to illegally invading a foreign country)is something that we have to live with?

To me, this is fairly easy even though I think that these Blackwater contractors were likely guilty. If the Bush Justice department broke the law in the course of their prosecution (probably on purpose, mind you) then the judge had no choice but to dismiss these charges. It’s the way our system works. But the case brings up an interesting problem: what if the government doesn’t really want to prosecute some criminals because they’ve employed them to commit the crime? After all, we’ve now seen two high profile Republican criminals have their charges dropped because of prosecutorial “misconduct” by the Bush Justice Department. (Ted Stevens is the other one.)It’s a problem, isn’t it?

This is why you count on having an independent DOJ, which we certainly didn’t have during the Bush years. And unfortunately, many of the same people are still in place. And since we can’t look in the rearview mirror, you have to doubt that anything will be done about this Blackwater “error” either.

So there are a lot of interesting threads to this story. But perhaps those comments by Odierno are the most important. We have shown that we are willing to lock terrorist suspects up for years with no due process. We have later admitted that many of them weren’t really guilty of anything. But here we have a case where it’s pretty obvious that these men murdered innocent people in broad daylight and they were set free because our laws require that the government follow certain legal procedures. Calling it a double standard doesn’t even come close to explaining to the Iraqis how this can happen. All they see is injustice.

Sadly, with the way our government works these days the response to Odierno’s concerns will be that we just won’t ever bring charges against any contractors again lest this same thing happen. And injustice becomes institutionalized. Again.

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A Stopped Clock

by digby

Setting aside a Schlaes-infected, ahistorical first paragraph, David Brooks is actually making sense:

All this money and technology seems to have reduced the risk of future attack. But, of course, the system is bound to fail sometimes. Reality is unpredictable, and no amount of computer technology is going to change that. Bureaucracies are always blind because they convert the rich flow of personalities and events into crude notations that can be filed and collated. Human institutions are always going to miss crucial clues because the information in the universe is infinite and events do not conform to algorithmic regularity. Resilient societies have a level-headed understanding of the risks inherent in this kind of warfare.But, of course, this is not how the country has reacted over the past week. There have been outraged calls for Secretary Janet Napolitano of the Department of Homeland Security to resign, as if changing the leader of the bureaucracy would fix the flaws inherent in the bureaucracy. There have been demands for systemic reform — for more protocols, more layers and more review systems. Much of the criticism has been contemptuous and hysterical. Various experts have gathered bits of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s biography. Since they can string the facts together to accurately predict the past, they thunder, the intelligence services should have been able to connect the dots to predict the future. Dick Cheney argues that the error was caused by some ideological choice. Arlen Specter screams for more technology — full-body examining devices. “We thought that had been remedied,” said Senator Kit Bond, as if omniscience could be accomplished with legislation. Many people seem to be in the middle of a religious crisis of faith. All the gods they believe in — technology, technocracy, centralized government control — have failed them in this instance. In a mature nation, President Obama could go on TV and say, “Listen, we’re doing the best we can, but some terrorists are bound to get through.” But this is apparently a country that must be spoken to in childish ways. The original line out of the White House was that the system worked. Don’t worry, little Johnny. When that didn’t work the official line went to the other extreme. “I consider that totally unacceptable,” Obama said. I’m really mad, Johnny. But don’t worry, I’ll make it all better. Meanwhile, the Transportation Security Administration has to be seen doing something, so it added another layer to its stage play, “Security Theater” — more baggage regulations, more in-flight restrictions.

I hope Brooks knows that he’s talking to his pants-wetting right wing buddies, because they are the ones who seem to believe they’ve magically transported into a real life version of 300 every time a jihadist sneezes and run to the TV demanding that we instantly turn ourselves into the old East Germany so we can be “safe.”

Terrorists crashing planes is a scary thing. But the truth is that crashing planes is a scary thing. Yet people get on them every day by the thousands with the knowledge that it might happen — for any number of reasons, all of which we hope are being prevented by the people we employee to ensure it that it is. But sometimes planes go down. It’s part of life. This time it didn’t. Hooray. You’d think we’d be celebrating the quick thinking of the passengers and instead we’re hiding under the bed snuffling about how daddy didn’t keep us safe.

Terrorism is an awful thing, but this bozo from Nigeria with explosives in his pants is not going to destroy America as we know it even if he did manage to do the unthinkable. But we can do that for him by allowing these panic artists, fearful children and political opportunists to turn the nation upside down every time a bozo like him attempts something. It’s nothing but an excuse for the authoritarians to take the country further down the police state road in the name of “keeping us safe” while the media gets to pretend they are living out some virtual Ernie Pyle fantasy, except with really good hair and make-up.

The panic is the point. That’s why they do terrorist attacks in the first place. And the damned bozo certainly succeeded, at least among the elites who, as far as I can tell, have worked themselves up into some kind of fugue state and are now practically speaking in tongues. It’s embarrassing.

Update: Adele Stan at Alternet writes about the nation’s PTSD, here. It’s interesting. Did the last decade traumatize us so badly that we’ve lost our ability to cope?

(I actually think that most of the people who repeatedly rend their garments about “Islamofascism” are either war porn junkies or political opportunists. But that’s just me.)

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A Cup Of Kindness

by digby

Happy New Year!

People release balloons in Tokyo, Japan, as part of the New Year countdown.

I want to take this opportunity to thank some fellow bloggers for helping with my fundraiser this year, especially TBOGG who put his Basset Brigades on the case. They are a lot of fun, and generous to boot. Also Mike Lux, the most popular man in the blogosphere, who plugged it more than once and my pal John Amato, who always comes through. I’m vastly grateful to the others who put out the word as well.

I also want to thank those of you who donated anonymously, particularly the wonderful person from Hawaii. I wish I could thank you personally, but this will have to suffice.

I have had an issue with my email this week and so it is taking me a bit longer to get back to all of you individually than usual. But they’re coming. In the meantime, I hereby raise a glass to all of you for being so kind and generous and wish everyone a very Happy New Year.

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Them Whut Brung Him

by digby

Here’s a great piece by Micah Sifry about the disconnect between Obama and some members of his base.

The truth is that Obama was never nearly as free of dependence on big money donors as the reporting suggested, nor was his movement as bottom-up or people-centric as his marketing implied. And this is the big story of 2009, if you ask me, the meta-story of what did, and didn’t happen, in the first year of Obama’s administration. The people who voted for him weren’t organized in any kind of new or powerful way, and the special interests–banks, energy companies, health interests, car-makers, the military-industrial complex–sat first at the table and wrote the menu. Myth met reality, and came up wanting.

And even someone as cynical as I was about the race was a little bit surprised at how clumsily the White House has handled the politics. It’s felt gratuitous, as if the plan was to repeatedly disappoint the base in order to prove their centrist bonafides. That sort of triangulation may have been necessary at another time, but right now it foolishly has moved the debate to the right when the right was badly discredited. It seems to be a matter of policy preference. And there is probably a price to pay for that.

This is an excellent observation:

Now, there is a new enthusiasm gap, but it’s no longer in Obama’s favor. That’s because you can’t order volunteers to do anything–you have to motivate them, and Obama’s compromises to almost every powers-that-be are tremendously demotivating.

Maybe that doesn’t matter. But I suspect that it’s not a great idea when the other side is highly motivated — a state which anyone who has observed the right for very long could have predicted, Obama’s pie-in-the-sky promises to end politics as we know it notwithstanding.

This article is very interesting. The Obama movement always felt like a particular moment in time rather than a long term shift to me. This piece delves into how that’s played itself out during this first year.

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Taking The Field

by digby

… for the Battle Royale, the Washington Post officially joins with the Peterson Foundation to pimp the deficit as the greatest threat the world has ever known.

Dean Baker:

To end the decade, the Washington Post acknowledged that it is no longer a serious newspaper. It ran a piece written by the Peter Peterson Foundation financed Fiscal Times as a regular news article. The piece conveys Peterson’s view that there is a drastic budget crisis which requires circumventing normal congressional procedures. It implies that the huge surge in deficit in the last year was attributable to the irresponsibility of Congress rather than an economic collapse that resulted from incredibly incompetent policy and Wall Street greed. No serious newspaper would publish a piece from an obviously interested party like the Peterson Foundation as a news story.

True. But the Washington Post owners certainly will do everything they can to protect their wealth. It’s how they roll.

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