Month: September 2013

Rural GOP Siskiyou County in California votes to secede from the state

by David Atkins

This is funny:

The Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 this afternoon to pursue seceding from California.

More than 100 people packed the supervisors’ chambers late this morning for a discussion on whether the county should issue a declaration that it wants to secede from the state. Nearly all those in attendance appeared to be for the move.

Among those in attendance was Erin Ryan, field representative for Rep. Doug LaMalfa. She said that she and other LaMalfa staff members supported the effort to secede, but she did not know LaMalfa’s thoughts on it.

Board Chair Ed Valenzuela was the sole vote against the declaration today. He said he was elected to solve problems within the system.

In August, county residents lobbied the board to consider separating from the state over a laundry list of complaints including a lack of representation in Sacramento for the Republican-majority county, issues pertaining to water rights and the rural fire prevention fee.

This is an empty threat, of course. There is approximately zero chance that the California legislature would grant secession to a Republican county that doesn’t like being part of an overwhelming liberal state majority, and doesn’t want to do a small part to pay the state back for protecting its residents from forest fires.

It’s not as if Siskiyou County would be able to survive better as an independent state. Like most Republican counties in California, Siskiyou gets more money from Sacramento than it pays in.

There is a certain strain of localism and libertarianism which says that each area should be free to govern itself as it pleases if it doesn’t like being a minority outcast in a politically hostile whole. But if that’s the case, then blue cities in red states across America should start declaring independence from their surrounding areas as well, and the makeup of Congress would need to be altered accordingly.

As long as we’re all in it together as a nation, areas like Siskiyou County will need to realize that the price of receiving the many benefits of being in a state like California is the obligation to help out with the common good–even if the good people of Siskiyou can’t fully pull their own weight in that regard.

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The 12 Dimensional Chess Solution

by digby

Back when Ezra was just a blogging pup I used to enjoy his occasional forays into humor and satire.  He’s quite a funny fellow.  Today marks the first time I’ve seen it come out in patented bloggy snark in a long time.  And it bites:

Privately, Hill aides joke that everything is going exactly to President Obama’s plan. It’s just that that plan is to stay far, far away from Syria.

This is the (tongue-in-cheek) 12-dimensional chess interpretation of the Obama administration’s Syria strategy. Boxed in by red-line rhetoric and the Sunday show warriors, the Obama administration needed to somehow mobilize the opposition to war in Syria. It did that by “fumbling” the roll-out terribly.

The arguments were lengthy and unclear. The White House expressly admitted that their strikes wouldn’t save Syrian lives or topple Assad or making anything better in any way, and they were instead asking Americans to bomb Syria in order to enforce abstract international norms of warfare. It would be the first military action in American history that wasn’t meant to save lives or win a war but to slightly change the mix of arms a dictator was using to slaughter his population.

All this was helpful in creating opposition. But then Obama turned on a dime and decided to go to Congress at the last minute, making his administration look indecisive and fearful of shouldering the blame for this unpopular intervention, putting the decision in the hands of a body famous for being unable to make decisions, giving the argument for strikes more time to lose support, and giving an American public that opposes intervention in Syria more time and venues to be heard.

It goes on. The sad thing is that I’m quite sure that, like me, he’s heard people making this argument seriously.

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A broad coalition of law enforcement officers who have spent the past three decades waging an increasingly militarized drug war that has failed to reduce drug use doesn’t want to give up the fight. 

Organizations that include sheriffs, narcotics officers and big-city police chiefs slammed Attorney General Eric Holder in a joint letter Friday, expressing “extreme disappointment” at his announcement that the Department of Justice would allow Colorado and Washington to implement state laws that legalized recreational marijuana for adults. 

If there had been doubt about how meaningful Holder’s move was, the fury reflected in the police response eliminates it. The role of law enforcement is traditionally understood to be limited to enforcing laws, but police organizations have become increasingly powerful political actors, and lashed out at Holder for not consulting sufficiently before adopting the new policy. 

It’s a little bit difficult to understand why they feel so strongly about this. The people of these states have spoken. Why should these cops care so much? I assume it has to do with the usual authoritarian mindset. But it’s also about money. The Feds have traditionally spent a lot of money in the war on marijuana and a fair amount of it flowed downhill through “partnerships” with the state and local authorities. And I also expect that the extremely lucrative practice of legally stealing the assets of drug suspects also results in some nice sharing of the ill-gotten loot. (It has certainly added up to some big bucks in California where medical marijuana has been legal for years.)

And the police need all this extra money to buy more para-military gear so they can do stuff like this:

Taboos for you but not for me

by digby

Ezra posted an interview with an expert on the chemical weapons taboo that’s well worth reading. I was struck by this:

RP: Skeptics say countries figure out ways to do what they want to do. The United States in 2013, for instance, doesn’t need chemical weapons. It has other ways to accomplish its military ends. There are two responses. One is that these weapons can have indiscriminate effects. Presuming the Assad regime used this weapon, it was because they didn’t accomplish their goals with conventional weapons alone. Conventional weapons in cooperation with chemical rounds can have a much bigger effect if you’re trying to target a large area. So perhaps people have been spared, compared to a world without a taboo in which this is a regular part of war.

Second, there’s a really interesting way in which chemical weapons have helped contribute to a larger effort to constrain war. In the 1980s there was an effort to ban anti-personnel land mines. I was at a lot of those diplomatic conferences. I was really struck by how many times diplomats from various countries made the argument that we’ve already banned one weapon and so we can do this. That precedent made it seem a lot more possible. I’m really convinced that if there wasn’t a quite successful track record on restraining chemical weapons, many more countries around the world would think it preposterous that you could ban a weapon that’s used as widely as land mines. So I think there are some spillover benefits.

Funny thing about that …

U.S. won’t join landmine ban, administration decides

November 24, 2009 6:05 p.m. EST

Washington (CNN) — The United States won’t join its NATO allies and many other countries in formally banning landmines, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said during his midday briefing Tuesday.

“This administration undertook a policy review and we decided our landmine policy remains in effect,” Kelly said in response to a question. “We made our policy review and we determined that we would not be able to meet our national defense needs nor our security commitments to our friends and allies if we sign this convention.”

I know we have a lot more moral authority than anyone else because we’re good and they’re evil and all. But honestly, it would be really refreshing if American politicians just stopped with the lugubriously moralizing about upholding norms. As I have written before, I am all for norms. I think we need many more of them when it comes to state violence. But we have just gone through a period when our leaders tried to legalize torture. And as that article so pithily points out, when the US doesn’t feel it can “meet its national defense needs” without using a heinous weapon that maims and kills civilians, it blithely refuses to ban them no matter what the rest of the world has done.

I get that the ban against chemical warfare is of long standing and it’s a very bad thing for that to fall away. But if the US wants to lead on this with any credibility it will stop melodramatically evoking Hitler and behaving as if it’s acting as the agent of Jesus Christ and Gandhi on the world stage. It’s unseemly to say the least.

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At long last sirs …

by digby

McClatchey reports on yet another authoritarian government policy that makes no sense:

Federal agents have launched a criminal investigation of instructors who claim they can teach job applicants how to pass lie detector tests as part of the Obama administration’s unprecedented crackdown on security violators and leakers.

The criminal inquiry, which hasn’t been acknowledged publicly, is aimed at discouraging criminals and spies from infiltrating the U.S. government by using the polygraph-beating techniques, which are said to include controlled breathing, muscle tensing, tongue biting and mental arithmetic.

So far, authorities have targeted at least two instructors, one of whom has pleaded guilty to federal charges, several people familiar with the investigation told McClatchy. Investigators confiscated business records from the two men, which included the names of as many as 5,000 people who’d sought polygraph-beating advice. U.S. agencies have determined that at least 20 of them applied for government and federal contracting jobs, and at least half of that group was hired, including by the National Security Agency.

By attempting to prosecute the instructors, federal officials are adopting a controversial legal stance that sharing such information should be treated as a crime and isn’t protected under the First Amendment in some circumstances.

“Nothing like this has been done before,” John Schwartz, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection official, said of the legal approach in a June speech to a professional polygraphers’ conference in Charlotte, N.C., that a McClatchy reporter attended. “Most certainly our nation’s security will be enhanced.”

“There are a lot of bad people out there. . . . This will help us remove some of those pests from society,” he added.

Apparently, they think a lot of those “bad people” are working in the government. You can’t help but be reminded of this sort of thing:

This is crazy:

The undercover stings are being cited as the latest examples of the Obama administration’s emphasis on rooting out “insider threats,” a catchall phrase meant to describe employees who might become spies, leak to the news media, commit crimes or become corrupted in some way.

The federal government previously treated such instructors only as nuisances, partly because the polygraph-beating techniques are unproven. Instructors have openly advertised and discussed their techniques online, in books and on national television. As many as 30 people or businesses across the country claim in Web advertisements that they can teach someone how to beat a polygraph test, according to U.S. government estimates.

In the last year, authorities have launched stings targeting Doug Williams, a former Oklahoma City police polygrapher, and Chad Dixon, an Indiana man who’s said to have been inspired by Williams’ book on the techniques, people who are familiar with the investigation told McClatchy. Dixon has pleaded guilty to federal charges of obstructing an agency proceeding and wire fraud. Prosecutors have indicated that they plan to ask a federal judge to sentence Dixon to two years in prison. Williams declined to comment other than to say he’s done nothing wrong.

Always remember, if they want to put you away, they can always find a law to make that happen. But this strikes me as the kind of thuggish behavior practiced by the anti-abortion zealots: scare people out of exercising their constitutional rights with a threat of “nice little career you’ve got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.”

And isn’t the real point here that if polygraphs are so lame that people can be taught how to beat them, maybe they aren’t the most reliable security devices and shouldn’t be used at all? Seriously

This kind of silliness is making me really wonder just what kind of fools are coming up with this nonsense. Like this lunacy, for instance:

The British government has asked the New York Times to destroy copies of documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden related to the operations of the U.S. spy agency and its British partner, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), people familiar with the matter said.

The British request, made to Times executive editor Jill Abramson by a senior official at the British Embassy in Washington D.C., was greeted by Abramson with silence, according to the sources. British officials indicated they intended to follow up on their request later with the Times, but never did, one of the sources said.

On Friday, in a public statement, Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, said his newspaper, which had faced threats of possible legal action from British authorities, on July 20 had destroyed copies of leaked documents which it had received from Snowden.

Rusbridger said that two days later, on July 22, the Guardian informed British authorities that materials related to GCHQ had made their way to the New York Times and the independent investigative journalism group ProPublica.

Rusbridger said in his statement that it then took British authorities “more than three weeks before anyone from the British government contacted the New York Times.

“We understand the British Embassy in Washington met with the New York Times in mid-August – over three weeks after the Guardian’s material was destroyed in London. To date, no-one has contacted ProPublica, and there has been two weeks of further silence towards the New York Times from the government,” Rusbridger said.

Rusbridger added that, “This five week period in which nothing has happened tells a different story from the alarmist claims made” by the British government in a witness statement it submitted on Friday to a London court hearing regarding an investigation by British authorities into whether the handling of Snowden’s leaks violated British anti-terrorism and official secrets laws.

How useful.

But hey, if we really want to “enhance our security” we can put everyone under 24 hour surveillance and lock up anyone who doesn’t conform. (They’re doing it in Waziristan already.) Why play games?

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Limited strikes accomplish none of our stated objectives in Syria

by David Atkins

Watching the Senate hearing on authorizing use of military force in Syria, I was constantly frustrated by the lack of logical clarity in most of the arguments being made.

There are two key arguments in Syria that are quite separate but are often conflated: the question of chemical weapons, and the question of Syria’s future stability and Assad’s capabilities. The question of what to do in Syria is actually a two-by-two grid. Should we enforce the protocols against gas attacks? If so, do limited strikes accomplish that goal? Are we trying to turn the tide of the civil war? If so, do limited strikes accomplish that goal?

Bashar al-Assad has killed over 100,000 in Syria with conventional weapons, actions that only registered a dull background roar in the national news cycle. It was only when the regime allegedly used chemical weapons to kill a little over 1,000 people that suddenly the American government seemed to be taking the situation more seriously.

So it would seem that the key question here is one of chemical weapons. As it turns out, that’s an argument the world needs to have. Does it make sense to maintain red lines over chemical weapons when we now have conventional weaponry capable of doing equal or greater amounts of indiscriminate damage? Perhaps. There’s a compelling argument that even some norms against mass death and violence are better than none, and there is something viscerally creepy about poison gas attacks.

If we do need to maintain red lines on chemical weapons, then what constitutes adequate “response”? If it’s a question of making sure that world leaders observe those norms, then wouldn’t a resolution to bring Assad to the International Criminal Court be more effective? If observing norms of international law merits such a strong response, shouldn’t the United States begin by holding our own leaders accountable for their own past war crimes?

The idea behind a limited missile strike campaign is supposed to be to degrade Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons capability, purely as an effort to “enforce” chemical weapons law. But it’s questionable whether such an action would actually constitute credible enforcement of the principle. Enforcement of the principle would involve punishing the actors involved, not limiting the ability to engage in the act again. And it goes without saying that limited strikes that might degrade his chemical weapons capability will do next to nothing to address the conventional weapons capability that is giving Bashar al-Assad the upper hand in the civil war.

Which leads to the second question: is the U.S. actually attempting to alter the balance of the Syrian civil war against Bashar al-Assad? Few in government are suggesting the sort of war footing that would be required to accomplish that goal, and for good reason. The cost would be astronomically high both in blood and treasure, it would likely bog the United States down in yet another quagmire, and it is quite likely to put theocrats in power who would be even worse for human rights in Syria and abroad. Even just destroying Assad’s chemical weapons capacity might even embroil the United States in a bogged-down conflict without even the slimmest hope of a positive outcome.

So it’s not at all clear that limited strikes accomplish any of our goals in Syria.

The goal of holding Bashar al-Assad accountable for chemical weapons attacks can better be accomplished through diplomatic channels if it must be accomplished at all, given his far greater atrocities with conventional weapons. Limited strikes against chemical weapons factories accomplish next to nothing on that front.

The goal of turning the tide in the civil war is a questionable one in itself given the nature of the opposition, but it’s absolutely certain that limited strikes will do nothing to accomplish that goal.

If the world wants to enforce chemical weapons protocols, the world needs a criminal system to enforce it. If the world wants to get rid of bloodthirsty dictators like Assad, the world needs a system of truly cooperative intervention that accomplishes that objective in a maximally peaceful way. Limited cruise missile strikes from a single nation-state would be woefully ineffective on all fronts.

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The hawks have their work cut out for them

by digby

If you want to know why the rhetoric is heating up to the killing-babies-in-incubators, they’re-coming-to-spray-chemical-weapons-on-you-with-their-drone-fleet level, I think this probably explains it:

NBC/WSJ:

Americans aren’t as trusting as they used to be. And for good reason…

The liberal dilemma

by digby

I think this piece by Paul Waldman is a thoughtful rundown of the way many liberals are sorting out the difficult question of Syria (and why they’ve moved on to the discussion of the politics of it instead):

I’m paid to have opinions, and I can’t figure out what my opinion is. On one hand, Bashar Assad is a mass murderer who, it seems plain, would be happy to kill half the population of his country if it would keep him in power. On the other hand, if he was taken out in a strike tomorrow the result would probably be a whole new civil war, this time not between the government and rebels but among competing rebel groups. On one hand, there’s value in enforcing international norms against certain kinds of despicable war crimes; on the other hand, Assad killed 100,000 Syrians quite adequately with guns and bombs before everybody got really mad about the 1,400 he killed with poison gas. On one hand, a round of missile strikes isn’t going to have much beyond a symbolic effect without changing the outcome of the civil war; on the other hand, the last thing we want is to get into another protracted engagement like Iraq.

In short, we’re confronted with nothing but bad options, and anyone who thinks there’s an unambiguously right course of action is a fool. So it’s a lot easier to talk about the politics.

I honestly don’t find this quite that difficult although I am sympathetic to the emotional need to “do something.” For the second time today, I’ll offer my maxim: “If it’s not obvious that violence is the only answer then it’s not the answer.”

And in this case, it’s actually pretty clear to me. Violence is being proposed as a symbolic gesture that virtually no one expects will change a thing for the Syrian people and which could make things worse. That’s just not good enough.

This, from FRONTLINE, is instructive:

If the U.S. moves forward with limited air strikes, what happens next?

“It seems pretty clear that we’re not looking at an end to the fighting any time soon as a result of anything the administration is contemplating,” said Joe Stork, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division.

The conflict in Syria has now claimed at least 100,000 lives, according to the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. The U.N. has said its estimate is conservative, since so many deaths have likely gone unreported amid the violence.

Another 1.7 million Syrians have fled, seeking refuge in neighboring countries like Jordan, who fear being drawn into the conflict. Air strikes would only increase the flow of displaced Syrians, Stork said.

“It’s difficult for me to imagine how the military strikes that are being considered will improve the situation,” he said. “It’s likely to make it worse. The question is how much worse.”

A scathing report (pdf) in June from the International Crisis Group on the international response to the Syrian conflict so far said that targeted air strikes would be “half-way measures” that at best might erode the regime’s military capacity or shake up the balance of power among the rebels.

After a strategic military victory in early June, the regime has been gaining momentum in recent months, said Randa Slim, a political analyst at the Middle East Institute. Airstrikes could check that.

But, the ICG report found, limited airstrikes “would not produce what its promoters typically claim as justification: moving the regime to seriously negotiate a genuine transition.” It suggested that the U.S. and its allies would be miscalculating in thinking they could now persuade Assad — either militarily or otherwise — to agree to some kind of political resolution.

“Ultimately it would mean getting further sucked into a dangerously intensifying and malignant Sunni-Shiite sectarian regional conflict in which the West would be running a risk by picking favorites,” the report said.

Earlier this year, FRONTLINE embedded with both rebel forces and military troops for Syria Behind the Lines, and found an increasingly divided, embittered nation — and a rift that will take more than air strikes to heal. Watch it below.

Watch Syria Behind the Lines on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

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“A very measured, nuanced approach”

by digby

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The worst argument for Syrian intervention yet

by digby

Is this really supposed to persuade anyone who’s been sentient since 2002?

Along with providing more help for the Syrian rebels, McCain and Graham pressed Obama to sell the Syrian intervention to the American public. To that end, Obama on Tuesday pressed the argument that Syria’s chemical weapons use is a threat to the United States and its allies because of the possibility of transmitting not only chemical but nuclear weapons to other nations and rogue groups.

”That poses a serious national security threat to the United States and to the region, and as a consequence Assad and Syria needs to be held accountable,” Obama said. “We recognize that there are certain weapons that when used, can … can end up being transmitted to non-state actors and can end up posing a risk to allies and friends of ours like Israel, like Jordan, like Turkey and unless we hold them to account also sends a message that international norms on issues like nuclear proliferation don’t mean much.”

Every day the president is sounding more and more like George W. Bush at his most fatuous. Conflating Syria’s chemical weapons with nukes is right out of the neocon propaganda handbook. If they want to do this to preserve international norms against the use of poison gas, then they need to make that case honestly. This is embarrassing and, frankly, insulting.

There is no threat to US national security in anything but the most abstract way. Moreover, in Syria, it’s highly likely that if the Assad regime is displaced, the chemical weapons really will get into the hands of some very dicey people who could turn them on our allies. What in the world are they talking about?

And anyway, if that’s the real rationale, get ready for the Pakistan invasion:

A 178-page summary of the U.S. intelligence community’s “black budget” shows that the United States has ramped up its surveillance of Pakistan’s nuclear arms, cites previously undisclosed concerns about biological and chemical sites there, and details efforts to assess the loyalties of counter­terrorism sources recruited by the CIA.

Pakistan appears at the top of charts listing critical U.S. intelligence gaps. It is named as a target of newly formed analytic cells. And fears about the security of its nuclear program are so pervasive that a budget section on containing the spread of illicit weapons divides the world into two categories: Pakistan and everybody else.

So let’s bomb a different country. Hey, it worked out so well before.

I honestly don’t understand the administration’s behavior. I have had my issues with Obama over the years but I am very surprised, nonetheless, to see him using this kind of rhetoric to justify a military action in the middle east. I  did not expect him to go down that road, at least. He knows very well that this is an absurdity. Just because McCain and Graham (and apparently Pelosi!) advised him that he has to make absurd bellicose arguments about American national security to sell this thing to the American people doesn’t mean he has to do it.

The Iraq debacle obviously changed absolutely nothing.

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