HIATUS May 10-Sept. 11
No postings on LFTC until Monday, September 11.
No postings on LFTC until Monday, September 11.
3 posts: (1) CIA Change: Does It Matter?--The Home Front; (2) Immigration: Conviction + Calculation = A Bill This Year?--The Home Front; (3) Darfur: Let George Do It?--Weenie Watch.
Having sailed through a passel of articles pro & con re the change at CIA, I think they all miss the point. The real question is: Is America today capable of building even a competent, let alone top-flight, intelligence agency? I think not. Why do I feel this way?
Because America, as a society, is: (1) legalist, obsessed with law and legality; (2) moralist, in which right and wrong, in the old-fashioned sense, still matter more than in any other major country; and (3) media-centric, in that mass media are free to publish pretty much anything, without fear of adverse consequence, secrecy be damned. Intelligence activities are: (1) law-free, in that they often skate the edge of, and cross over, lines drawn by the law; (2) amoral, in that actions are weighed on purely utilitarian grounds, independent of whether moral or immoral; and (3) clandestine, for all the obvious reasons. See a pattern?
Other democracies are less constrained. Britain can have a better intelligence service because they have Draconian legal prohibitions against disclosure. French intel is effective because their national morality is pour la patrie, sauve qui peut. Israeli intel is effective because their survival literally hinges on same. America, in some ways for the better but as to intel for the worse, is not Britain, France or Israel.
Michael Barone sees a real chance that a compromise bill on immigration, acceptable to "conviction" pols and "calculation" pols, is within reach, because votes want a bill strongly enough to force action. Stronger security and some form of provision for those already here, Barone believes, can pass this year. Pols do not, he say, want to face voters having done nothing.
Mark Steyn, who has an unmatched talent for writing amusing pieces about unfunny crises, pounces on George Clooney over Darfur, where Gorgeous George demands decisisve UN action. Steyn explains in his inimitable way why the UN will never intervene in time to save anyone: because powers like Russia and China have a veto in the Security Council (as does France, too). So, writes Steyn, unless Clooney supports a "coalition of the Anglosphere willing" nothing will happen. Clooney and Angelina Jolie do not grasp what every sane individual not ideologically in denial understands: Decisive action by the UN is the world's foremost oxymoron.
5 posts: (1) Iraq: Turning Point?--Us v. Them; (2) 20th Hijacker: After the Farce--3/11, 9/11 & N/11; (3) Modern Marriage, Muslim Style--Weenie Watch; (4) "United93": NOT Hollywood's Film--Class & Crass; (5) 21st Century Campus Brownshirts--The Home Front.
Ex-Green Beret Jack Kelly writes that by shifting from IEDs & suicide bombs to more conventional guerrilla tactics, the insurgents are playing into our hands. Seems that there is now a shortage of foreign fighters and suicide fanatics. Even Gulf War & Vietnam hero Barry McCaffrey, long a 43 critic, believes that the tide is turning.
The pathetic conclusion to the 20th hijacker trial spurred comment, above all, on the jurors having apparently weighed heavily that the defendant had been abused as a child, had a rotten upbringing, etc. Andrew McCarthy compellingly explains the magnitude of the judicial farce, showing why terrorists should not be sent into courtrooms. Peggy Noonan thinks we are obsessed with seeking a "moral high ground" staked out by our elites; Dan Henninger thinks the jurors might have been reminded of what mattered had they seen United 93 before voting; Rich Lowry thinks we suffer from a fixation on therapy as a nostrum of everything. The NY Post says the defendant is headed for solitary in a "supermax" prison, which Dan Henninger thinks unlikely, because "our moral betters" will never stand for it; the Post also says that France is weighing asking extradition to France so he can do his time in a French jail. Who says the French do not have a sense of humor?
Using the criminal justice system for this kind of case turns everything into a farce, and gives the defendant a public stage. He gets to rant in court, his lawyers seek to bring witnesses from high up, ask access to classified documents, and then jurors turn themselves into pretzels seeking a rationale for mitigation. Jurors are famously hard to predict--they are, simply put, capable of anything in any case at any time. To entrust cases like this to a jury invites the circus we have endured now for nearly five years.
And what do our enemies do? The latest is that online editions of video games are being re-programmed by Islamists so that Muslim youths learn to zap American troops. With jihadist Islam the family that plays together slays together. Let Mark Steyn wrap up the trial circus, in which, he writes, the defendant prevailed using West Side Story's "Office Krupke Defense" ("I'm depraved because I'm deprived!"), and thus was right to say he won:
"Hard to disagree. Not
just because he'll be living a long life at taxpayers' expense. He'd
have had a good stretch of that even if he'd been "sentenced to death,"
which in America means you now spend more years sitting on Death Row
exhausting your appeals than the average "life" sentence in Europe.
America "lost" for a more basic reason: turning a war into a court case
and upgrading the enemy to a defendant ensures you pretty much lose
however it turns out. And the notion, peddled by some sappy member of
the ghastly 9/11 Commission on one of the cable yakfests last week,
that jihadists around the world are marveling at the fairness of the
U.S. justice system, is preposterous. The leisurely legal process
Moussaoui enjoyed lasted longer than America's participation in the
Second World War. Around the world, everybody's enjoying a grand old
laugh at the U.S. justice system."
Newly-minted WSJ columnist Bret Stephens opens his tenure as WSJ's new "Global View" columnist with tales of Islamic marriage in Germany. Turks import brides--often pre-teen--into Germany, marry them without their consent and drag them into a life of domestic servitude. There are 2.6 million Turks living in Germany. This week Angela Merkel is introducing legislation that would require prospective immigrant brides to first learn German and to be at least 21 years of age. Says a prominent Turkish author whose efforts exposed the trade: "It's the women who have felt the relapse into Sharia the most. The boys might be slaves to their families, but on the streets they are free, and besides they can always look forward to a wife they can suppress. It's the women who explode." In the past 6 years there have been 55 "honor killings" in Germany--girls killed by male family members for disobeying Islamic law. Europe is losing the culture war, bending over backwards to be tolerant of the intolerant, while 43 prattles on about the "Religion of Peace."
George Will calls seeing United93 a "civic duty." Of the movie made by Englishman Paul Greengrass, Will says: "He imported into Hollywood the commodity most foreign to it: good taste." Thank heavens Tinseltown's denizens did not make the film. He notes that despite 57 percent of 2005's film-goers being ages 12 to 29, 29 percent of those who went to see United93 have been under 30.
Will tartly contrasts United93 with Oliver Stone's JFK: "Greengrass's scrupulosity is evident in the movie's conscientious, minimal and minimally speculative departures from the facts about the flight painstakingly assembled for the Sept. 11 commission report. This is emphatically not a 'docudrama' like Oliver Stone's execrable 'JFK,' which was 'history' as a form of literary looting in which the filmmaker used just enough facts to lend a patina of specious authenticity to tendentious political ax-grinding."
Some 9,000 students at NYC's New School are protesting Dean Bob Kerrey's choice of commencement speaker: John McCain. Among their complaints: McCain is "anti-gay." Free speech? Seems the students agree with Islamists that the concept is a non-starter.
5 posts: (1) "United 93" Flying Highest at Box Office--Class & Crass; (2) Global Hegemony or Tribalism?--"It's the Earth Stupid!"; (3) Petrodollar Perversity--"It's the Earth Stupid!"; (4) Kofi Means "CofI"--Turtle Bay Tortoise; (5) 20th Hijacker Hijacks America, Finally--3/11, 9/11 & N/11.
The 20th hijacker laughed his way to victory in escaping death in his penalty trial. Worse was this: America's maladroit notion of using the criminal justice system in a 9/11 trial was bound to fail. At the outset, upon indictment, there were four possible verdicts: (1) guilty + death; (2) guilty + life imprisonment; (3) not guilty by reason of insanity; (4) not guilty. Verdict 1 would have made the defendant a martyr, with massive media coverage--mostly anti-US--of a protracted process leading to the world's most highly visible execution since Eichmann, and with much of the world far less sympathetic to capital punishment for anyone. Verdict 2 (the one rendered) gave him a trial in which to rant and sneer at the families. Worse, it gave him his dream of fame: The same result--confinement for life--could have been achieved by holding him as an unlawful combatant for the duration of a decades-long war. Verdict 3 would have been a major embarrassment, plus it would have encouraged future acquittals of terrorists, by endorsing the idea of suicidal terrorists as inherently insane. And Verdict 4 would have hampered future conspiracy trials by making direct nexus a prerequisite for surefire conviction. This kind of debacle is what happens when counter-terror policy is mesmerized by reflexive hyper-legalism.
Grand news: United 93 has flown to the top box office ranking in the latest figures. The astute James Bowman writes at TAS that the heroism of Todd ("Let's roll") Beamer & others was wrongly downplayed--apparently at the behest of relatives of the less-heroic passengers in 93 that day; he also objects to what he saw as a sympathetic humanizing of the terrorists, citing the cell-phone sentiment uttered by the Islamist pilot to his lady love, "Ich liebe dich." Bowman also thinks it too soon to place the events in perspective. Kathryn-Jean Lopez dissents and says it is ripe for showing.
The normally astute Bowman misses the point of the German expression of love in this film. Yes, it humanizes the terrorists, but human they are, and their evil exists side by side with endearments for loved ones; humanity is a prerequisite for imposing moral responsibility on human actors. The foreign language quote that matters is the pilot's last words, that end the film: "Allahu Akbar!" It is the triumph, so to speak, of the fanatical Arabic "God is great!" over the gentle German "I love you" that captures the horror of the terrorists.
Ralph Peters tells us that based upon his travels, he believes that tribalism will trump globalism. He says that the global elites are a detached jet-set class divorced from the interests of the rest of humanity, much of which recoils at global markets and retreats to tribal cultural and familial loyalties. The Kikuyu in Kenya see themselves as Kikuyu first, not Kenyans; the Basques in Spain are resurgent, etc. Globalism is thus miles wide and inches deep. Atavists thus make use of modern technology--to advance atavism.
Historically, visionaries have seen prospects for world peace enhanced by modern communications. Increasingly it looks like modern communications enhances the spread of pathological beliefs and undermines rational views. Most irrational of all is motion video, whose emotional intensity trumps facts presented in more abstract forms such as the daily paper. The violent pathology that is Islamism thus plays out on a world stage, as does impotence of the largely passive civilizations it assails. If world media neuters America, the last best hope for enlightened life, their members will be among the first casualties of their folly.