Now:
Looks like yesterday's Amtrack scare was, thankfully, nothing more. But it makes one point exceedingly clear. If a threatening note can stop a train for 90 minutes, what about 10 threatening notes and one one pipe bomb? What about 5 threatening phone calls and car rammed into a bus?
It is spectacularly easy to commit acts of terrorism that'll inject terror into the everyday life of the American populace. That's why it's so crucial to forget this idiotic trope that we can prevent terrorism solely by attacking terrorists (it only takes five) or that the government -- much less the President -- will have the primary role in keeping Americans safe.
When the right says we can't [vote Democrat/play with puppies/have premarital sex/etc] or "the terrorists will have won", they're correct in one important respect. The terrorists can never take back America and send our civilization rocketing backwards to theocracy, but they can inject so much fear into daily life that they make an open democracy unworthy of upkeep. The only defense against this is empowering individual citizens with the knowledge that terrible things very well may happen and their critical role is to deal with them in a calm, rationale fashion that befits our heritage and the society we live in. Reactions like those of the woman trapped on a plane with fourteen Syrian musicians are the largest danger we face -- they can't take down our country, but they can make life here essentially unlivable. A government that simply asks for power without offering mental security is bringing us in the wrong direction. A whole half of the electorate that counsels fear and insecurity as a response to every situation with the potential for threat is even worse.
Per The Ghost of Bill Hicks' request, my read of this story is that some right-wing woman, conditioned to fear Arab men on airplanes, noticed some odd behavior and freaked out over it. I don't really blame her, I think it's a sad reflection of what the fear-mongering in this country has done. Future air-based attacks likely won't come from passengers but ground based terrorists equipped with surface-to-air missiles. The really sad part is that there's essentially nothing being done -- and little we can do -- about that threat.
People have a way of looking backwards to figure out what to be scared of. Pre-9/11, a hijacked flight was a horrible, but generally survivable, event. The next day, it was a fatal act. However, we forget that the terrorists primarily used the planes for their missile capabilities; they didn't just want to detonate the aircraft. If they were after simple body counts, they could start suicide bombing all across America with none of the bother and all of the fear (currently, people are only scared in planes, if they began suicide bombing movie theatres and Starbucks, they'd be afraid everywhere). Since hijackers no longer have complacent passengers to work with, plane based attacks simply aren't likely.
Bottom line is that terrorists can always attack. We're a big country with big borders and lots of material with which to do very bad things. The only way forward is to reduce the number of people who want to take advantage of our weaknesses. George Bush is determinedly doing the opposite; never have so many hated us. I'd say this woman was scared of the wrong thing, my fear is that this guy will be reelected and, in three years, we're going to wake up one morning with something totally new and unexpected to be terrified of.
I'm not sure what to make of the allegations against Iran, but I do know one thing -- ALL of the hijackers passed through America. That some of them also passed through Iran is proof of nothing but the presence of solid ground that supports the weight of human beings, even evil ones. If we've got evidence of collaboration, that needs to be looked at; but having hijackers step foot on their soil makes Iran no more complicit than America.
We've really got to get more serious about air safety than this. If you mandate a clear dress code for air marshals, particularly one that doesn't fluctuate with the seasons, you give potential targets a way to neutralize the marshal's threat. So long as they can identify the person, they can simply take them out first, using their advantage of surprise to neutralize the only flier capable of seriously derailing their plans.
Now, I'm of the opinion that terrorists aren't going to attempt onboard hijackings any longer because the precedent is that passengers won't survive. Previously, everyone felt they'd be okay so they didn't attempt to overpower their captors, but as with Todd Beamer and his hastily formed militia, when they know their future is death they're violently unwilling to become a missile aimed at their countrymen. Nonetheless, if the government does believe flights are still in danger, they shouldn't be hampering security's effectiveness by imposing a 1950's-era dress code.
Richard Clarke's got an informative review of Anonymous's Imperial Hubris. He synthesizes current intelligence into a pretty damning picture of where we stand vis-a-vis Al-Qaeda right now. If Americans realized we were losing the battle this badly, Bush would lose in a landslide. As it is, his hopeful rhetoric, steely-eyed threats and misdirection may keep voters misinformed for the next few months. Clarke's review does a great job of explaining exactly how different the reality is from the illusion.
David Adesnik gets it:
No, I don't think that could happen. These terrorists seem incapable of recognizing that kindness is often a far more dangerous weapon than violence. If they understood that, then I would truly be afraid.
In other OxBlog news, Josh Chafetz has an EXCELLENT essay in the Times Book Review on why poor white males don't vote Democrat. I'll have more to say on it later; for now, read it.
Update: Daniel Stein has a different take. And he's got more on Frank here.
The President and the right-wing blogs seem to have found an anthem for Paul Johnson's death. Now, there's no doubt that his beheading is a senseless tragedy perpetrated by scum, but the refrain chosen goes no farther than presenting the obvious. Drink This has a particularly good summation when she says:
This underscoring of their eviltude is coupled with a swat at any and all imaginary leftists driven to cowardice by the beheading. It's present in the above quote when she notes that ignorance doesn't negate existence, and it's similarly alive in the President's reaction:
Of course, the point is being missed totally. If these people don't value human life, and we know they do not, threatening them with death is probably not the way to go. Nonetheless, that's what our resolve amounts to; a willingness to use unimaginable force to eliminate terrorists. So long as they look like normal people and don't much care if civilians die, that's not going to work (see War, Iraq). Maybe Johnson's death should serve to remind us that we do indeed value life, and such ideals might be more powerful against terror than, well, terrifying arms. No one's arguing that we shouldn't cut down terrorists where they stand, but their propensity to move around and run away makes that strategy slow and exceedingly inefficient. Were we to tweak other parts of our War on Terror so as to, say, stop pissing off the Arab world, begin presenting ourselves in concert with our ideals, and present the money and resources necessary to put the Madrassa schools that grow endless supplies of terrorists out of business, we might win this thing. Maybe the lesson here shouldn't be that terrorists are evil and don't value human life, but that we're good and do value it? Isn't that a more fitting legacy for Paul Johnson?
Now far be it for me to question some as virtuous as Putin, but this is going to get overblown for no good reason:
"After the events of September 11, 2001, and before the start of the military operation in Iraq, Russian special services several times received information that the official services of the Saddam regime were preparing 'terrorist acts' on the United States and beyond its borders," he told reporters.
"This information was passed on to our American colleagues," he said. He added, however, that Russian intelligence had no proof that Saddam's agents had been involved in any particular attack.
John Cole calls me idiotic for repeating Rumsfeld's statement "It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to [terror]."
Cole's inability to argue civilly aside, context doesn't invalidate the criticism, it simply complicates it. The entire quote is:
Rumsfeld: I’m certain we have not been successful. As the Prime Minister, I forgot whether he mentioned it in his remarks or at the dinner table, but clearly, if the schools that are teaching young folks are teaching them terrorism and suicide bombing and hatred instead of mathematics or science or language or things that can help them become productive members of the society, we’ve got a problem. The world has a problem. And it’s quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this.
The US (and our "coalition") has NO comprehensive plan to change the conditions leading to terrorism. We have plans for attacking terrorists, but social conditions lie utterly ignored and unhelpful ideological currents are rendered worse daily as we detonate weddings and torture prisoners. It's not that there are no coherent plans for dealing with the problems, it's that Rumsfeld has consciously ignored them. While he laments the meager funds aimed at starting non-demagogic schools, he runs a policy spending $200 billion to unpopularly occupy a country that didn't birth a single one of the 9/11 terrorists. Instead of changing the schools, he's giving them lesson plans on US Imperialism and Western overreach. That he knows what needs to be done yet doesn't do it makes him either incompetent or counterproductive -- either way, the guy's not doing his job. Criticism of such myopic policy-making isn't "idiotic", blind support of it is.
Update: Hah! Now that's dodging a criticism! Resort to ad hominem's, complaints over misinterpretation and psychological analysis. Refrain from mentioning that what Rumsfeld is begging the world to do he himself is not doing. Ignore that this makes his department an obstacle on the road to global coherence. Forget what hypocrisy means. Get hung up on semantics. Get really angry. Demand that others read what Tagorba says. Forget that Tagorba is simply saying that Rumsfeld is criticizing a global approach. Don't mention that America is part of the globe, thus we are part of a global approach. Be John Cole.
This is why we must vote Winston for President:
My Plan for the $200 Billion:
Burn it. Put it in a big fucking pile, pour gas on it and burn it up. Reduce it to ashes. Scatter it to the four winds.
Wasteful, you say? A foolish allocation of funds? Au contraire, mon frere. Speaking purely from a national security perspective for a moment and ignoring humanitarian considerations, my plan is far, far more efficient and cost-effective than that of the Bush Administration. Had we employed my plan, at least we wouldn't be spending our own money to help our enemies, we'd merely be wasting it...It's like the difference between throwing away that $1000 and giving it to the Aryan Nation for its recruitment drive. By comparison, throwing the cash away is positively thrifty. By comparison, it's a brilliant plan.
Remember when John Walker Lindh was captured and his treason blamed on hot-tubbin' hippiedom in Marin, California? Sure ya do, the potential equivocation of liberalism and treason was too good for the right to pass up on and so they took a traitor and used him to smear and demonize the left. Classic move. Now Adam Yahiye Gadahm, an American from my hometown of Orange County, is a wanted terrorist. Strange twist though -- Orange County isn't a bastion of progressivism, it's a conservative bulwark. As
Winston speaks. You listen:
This is scary, upsetting stuff:
The intelligence does not include a time, place or method of attack but is among the most disturbing received by the government since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to a senior federal counterterrorism official who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity Tuesday.
Of most concern, the official said, is that terrorists may possess and use a chemical, biological or radiological weapon that could cause much more damage and casualties than a conventional bomb.
The text of the controversial Presidential Daily Briefing has now been released. It's not very long so I suggest reading it in full, but for now, I want to highlight a few grafs:
Al-Qa'ida members — including some who are US citizens — have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qa'ida members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our Embassies in East Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s.
...
We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [deleted text] service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Shaykh" 'Umar' Abd aI-Rahman and other US-held extremists.
Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.
First, Condi's right that this is a historical document. It uses Bin Laden's history to explain why George Bush should be directly planning to preempt him. She's lying to say it's a solely historical document. The PDB speaks about current investigations and clearly states that Al-Qaeda operatives are laying the groundwork for an attack, going so far as to note their surveillance of targets in New York. The document is a clear call to action with arguments based on both historical context and current intelligence (for more on the ridiculous charge that historical evidence is different than actionable evidence, check out Jesse's great post from earlier).
This is a damaging piece of evidence as it predicts the 9/11 attacks quite perfectly. It mentions Bin Laden's ability to patiently plan attacks over a course of years, Al-Qaeda's efforts to set up an infrastructure capable of carrying out an attack on US soil, the surveillance of targets in New York and preparations consistent with a hijacking. It really couldn't be much clearer than it is. That's bad for the Bush Administration.
Lastly, the Bush Administration is getting better at dealing with the 9/11 demands. Instead of creating a drawn-out battle over releasing the PDB, they put it out within days. Considering the document's salience, they're smart to make it as small an event as possible. After reading the document, however, I think their success will be limited. It's an exceedingly powerful piece of evidence in the continuing prosecution of the Bush Administration's pre-9/11 negligence on terrorism.
I've said before that Gary Hart is a visionary. But I had no idea he was a prophet. Consider this graf Tom Schaller picked out from the Hart-Rudman report, released 12 days after Bush came into office (italics mine):
A week or two ago I suggested that John Kerry should bring out Gary Hart to corroborate and add to Clarke's claims/ Well, Salon is doing it for him. They've got a great interview up where Gary lays out exactly who he warned, what his report found and how little the Administration did. One part that particularly struck me was Bush's reliance on Cheney during this time as it synchronizes so perfectly with his refusal to testify without ol' Dick:
And then as Congress started to move on this, and the heat was turned up, George Bush -- and this is often overlooked -- held a press conference or made a public statement on May 5, 2001, calling on Congress not to act and saying he wasturning over the whole matter to Dick Cheney.
So this wasn't just neglect, it was an active position by the administration. He said, "I don't want Congress to do anything until the vice president advises me." We now know from Dick Clarke that Cheney never held a meeting on terrorism, there was never any kind of discussion on the department of homeland security that we had proposed. There was no vice presidential action on this matter.
In other words, a bipartisan commission of seven Democrats and seven Republicans who had spent two and a half years studying the problem, a group of Americans with a cumulative 300 years in national security affairs, recommended to the president of the United States on a reasonably urgent basis the creation of a Cabinet-level agency to protect our country -- and the president did nothing!
No no no, Bush is right here. The more money the terrorists have the better! I mean, what's the fun if they can't even put up a fight?
Slate makes a damn good point about the Clarke controversy:
The answer: Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet, and their silence speaks loudly.
The reaction the right had to the Socialist victory in Spain upset me in a way most partisan conflicts don't. The audacity it took to demand that the Spanish continue to fight a war they never wished to enter, all for the ironic purpose of promoting democracy, astonished and offended me in a way few positions do. Forget that the defeated Government immediately attempted to twist the attacks for political gain, forget that the Socialists were within the poll's margin of error for victory, forget that the constant proclamations that the cowardly Spanish had allowed the terrorists to win certainly reinforced any victory the terrorists might have claimed, the very idea that we could somehow evaluate their foreign policy's morality through the lens of our own interests mere days after a vicious terrorist attack showed how little these people understood 9/11. For a group that is quick to grasp for ownership of the tragedy and quicker to remind us of its significance, they completely lost the ability to treat a grieving country with even a modicum of respect.
That, much more than the arguments over whether or not the terrorists won, is what incited my ire. But it's not the first time a government had given into terrorists.
Ronald Reagan's major military action was in Lebanon, where he deployed peacekeeping troops in the aftermath of Israel's 1982 invasion. Not long thereafter, a terrorist drove a truck packed with explosives into the headquarters of the First Battalion, killing 241 American servicemen. A few months later, Reagan pulled the troops out of Lebanon, placing them on offshore ships instead. Explained spokesman Larry Speakes: "We don't consider this a withdrawal but more of a redeployment."
So a terrorist killed hundreds of Americans in the hopes of getting us out of Lebanon and quickly succeeded. There was no other explanation, no other motivation for the "redeployment". In the face of terrorists, Reagan promptly gave into their demands.
So I want to know. Was Reagan an appeaser to terrorists? A coward? Unable to stand up to evil?
And if not, then how dare you open your mouth to criticize the Spanish.
I don't care which side of the aisle you're on, Richard Clarke simply makes sense on terrorism:
And that's the second reason. The attack in Madrid showed the vulnerabilities of the rails in Spain. We have all sorts of vulnerabilities in our country, chemical plants, railroads. We've done a very good job on passenger aircraft now, but there are all these other vulnerabilities that require enormous amount of money to reduce those vulnerabilities, and we're not doing that.
Russert: And three?
Clarke: And three is that we actually diverted military resources and intelligence resources from Afghanistan and from the hunt for bin Laden to the war in Iraq.
Russert: But Saddam is gone and that's a good thing?
Clarke: Saddam is gone is a good thing. If Fidel were gone, it would be a good thing. If Kim Il Sung were gone, it would be a good thing. And let's just make clear, our military performed admirably and they are heroes, but what price are we paying for this war on Iraq?
For a few weeks now, the Right's been all atwitter with proclamations that the attack in Madrid was terrorism's greatest triumph. It did, after all, throw an election. Never mind that the election was apparently tossed by the PP's lying about who carried out the attack and the popular disgust engendered from using terrorism so quickly for personal gain. That means little here. After all, as Andrew Sullivan said:
But it wasn't the new government that made this a victory for terrorism. It was the right wing commentators. Had they adopted the truthful and obvious explanation for what happened, mainly, that the PP was booted out because they tried to use the attack for political gain, the lesson everyone would have taken is terrorism shouldn't be used for political gain. Instead, the Right got started on an ever louder and shriller chorus that Al-Qaeda won, that Spain capitulated, that Europeans are afraid of terror, that the Islamo-fascists could chalk up a victory, that the terrorists, as it was, had won.
Had the Right not done everything in their power to make their misinterpretation the conventional wisdom, the terrorists certainly would be facing a muddier analysis. But by telling them so often and so loudly that they scored a victory, that the Spanish did everything they'd hoped, and that the rest of the world was furious with the weak-spined Spaniard (isolating America in a cavern of our own international arrogance is one of their favored tactics, as I remember) they happily reinforced and reaffirmed the most guarded hopes of Al-Qaeda. The terrorists didn't get a win because the people voted out the lying PP, they won because we keep telling them they did. Because we allowed them to sow dissension. Because we blamed the Spanish for doing the right thing and voting in a government that better agreed with the people. Had the Right (and the Left) immediately gone on the attack against lying politicians, it would simply have been chalked up as a defeat for the politically inept incumbent. Instead, our self-righteous commentators brought their own agendas to the table and, when the Spanish decided to go ahead and chart their own course, our spurned commentators turned around, patted the terrorists on the back, and began wailing about how they won.
Well done.
Dear Lousie,
What if we pay him $430,000 instead of $340,000 and only call him by his first name? Because then it's kind of like he's a different person and we've never paid him before. And if we do that, maybe he'll have different intelligence from now on!
Yours in the Crusade for Justice,
Lowelly Jacob
It hasn't even been a day, but the Right is already using the tragedy in Spain for political gain:
I really hate arguments as disengenuous as this one. The implication of point B doesn't follow point A because there's no evidence that John Ashcroft and the PATRIOT Act actually make us significantly safer against terrorists. It's political smearing at its worst; strongly implying a terrible charge without actually saying it. The sheer idea that, merely 12 hours after this tragedy occurred, people on the right are already using it to score point is nauseating. All serious and decent people will condemn Kate O'Beirne for this crap.
Spain took it on the chin today, suffering the worst terrorist attack in their history. Which group is responsible is unclear, but it's looking like Al-Qaeda was behind it. What utter slime they are; killing innocents who did nothing worse than board the train this morning.
Andrew Sullivan dishes:
Please submit your answer in essay format and with the appropriate citations. Thanks.
At what point will the American people stand up and say this is fucking ridiculous?:
The White House and Republican Congressional leaders have said they see no need to extend the congressionally mandated deadline, now set for May 27, and a spokesman for Speaker J. Dennis Hastert said Tuesday that Mr. Hastert would oppose any legislation to grant the extension.
But commission officials said there was no way to finish their work on time, a situation they attribute in part to delays by the Bush administration in turning over documents and other evidence.
The commission said Tuesday that it had not yet received a commitment from the administration for public testimony from prominent White House officials, including Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser. The panel said it was still in negotiations over the possibility of testimony from President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
If I don't see John Kerry on a podium with representatives of the bereaved families and the head of the firefighters union decrying the Republican's habit of placing politics above our national security, I will cry myself to sleep at night.
As per Kevin's request, I think we need to examine Glenn's odd theory on the Middle East:
These folks are our enemies, and deserve to be treated as such. They don't deserve a state of their own. It's not clear that they even deserve to keep what they've got. I don't think this means that the Bush Administration should be taking direction action against them -- closing off their funding via shutting down Saddam is a good start, and a policy of slow strangulation directed at Arafat and his fellow terrorists is probably the most politic at the moment. We need to try to squeeze off the EU funding, too, especially now that it's been admitted to be part of a proxy war by the EU not just against Israel, but America.
...
I also don't write about it much because the Palestinians, fundamentally, are the cannon fodder of other people who don't like the United States, and the real way to resolve this problem is to deal with those other people. And so it's those other people who get the bulk of my attention.
But the amount of pious crap spouted about the Palestinians is so vast that every once in a while I do feel the need to cut through it by pointing out the facts.
That's not really the point, though. I tend to count myself in the Israeli camp as well, but that doesn't mean the conflict doesn't have to resolved. Think about it politically, as Glenn mentions, the Palestinians serve as the ultimate symbolic rallying cry for terrorist groups who hate us. The Arab world reports a very different picture of the conflict than we ever get, one of brutal oppression and abject humiliation, one that speaks to the fear all Arab countries have of being left behind and eventually subjugated by the West. Now, when your opponent has a powerful issue with which to recruit new followers and rally his existing ones against you, what should your move be?
If you are Glenn Reynolds, you might counsel exacerbating the issue, making your opponent stronger, confirming the fears of his adherents, and further putting yourself in danger. If you are a normal person, what you want to do is take the issue away from your opponent. It's not like this tactic is unknown in the US. Bush did it on education, Clinton did it on everything. Dean doing it on fiscal matters. To weaken your enemy you need to destroy what gives them strength. As far as terrorism goes, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is the main propaganda piece used to prove our plans to oppress Arabs, as such, we need to prove it wrong and thus defuse the hatred that feed the terrorist organizations. We do that by successfully arbitrating the conflict and getting the Palestinians settled in a land of their own. Nothing else we could do would be half as effective at stopping terrorism as that.
Glenn's way, while allowing him to retain his sense of moral superiority, also ensures that the gulf between the West and the East will widen and terrorist recruitment will rise. The end result of that is not some victory against the Palestinians, it is more dead Americans, more 9/11's, and more fear. In essence, it is a recreation of the Middle East conflict with us as the Israelis and the Arab Street as the Palestinians, and I don't know who in their right mind would want to switch places with the Israelis at this juncture.
A drug bust in the Persian Gulf has turned up apparent ties to al-Qaeda.
We were going to nuke them, but the Navy wanted to go swimming afterwards.
And remember, kids - terrorists aren't selling drugs to make money off of a lucrative black market. They're selling drugs because all drugs are evil and anti-American, unless you have enough money, in which case they're merely a potential stumbling block in an otherwise stellar career.
Heard much about this? Yeah, me neither.
"As you read the report, you're going to have a pretty clear idea what wasn't done and what should have been done," he said. "This was not something that had to happen."
Appointed by the Bush administration, Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, is now pointing fingers inside the administration and laying blame.
"There are people that, if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position they were in at that time because they failed. They simply failed," Kean said.
And remember, pledge drive -- hit the PayPal button on your left. Sorry I gotta keep doing this at the bottom of my posts, it feels awful, it's only 36 hours though for all we do on this blog over the year....show us some love.