Droning On And On

Joan Walsh on droooooooones and wrestling with her unbearable guilt of being Joan Walsh:

There are (at least) two issues here: The use of drones generally, and their use to kill American citizens. Some values should apply to both. No doubt drone warfare is sometimes preferable to traditional combat – but can’t we debate when, and why? Isn’t it possible that removing the risk of losing American lives by using unmanned predators will make it easier for decision-makers to risk the lives of those who aren’t Americans? Shouldn’t we know more about when and why drone strikes are launched, as well as who’s been killed, at the cost of how much collateral damage, most important, the number of “non-combatants” — innocent people – who are killed?

On the question of targeting U.S. citizens: I’m proud of the extraordinary rights we enjoy as Americans, and I don’t know why so many people shrug at the notion that the president can abrogate those rights if he decides, based on evidence (which he doesn’t have to share) that you’re a terrorist. When it comes to Anwar al-Awlaki, who renounced his citizenship and made many public commitments to al-Qaida, those questions don’t keep me awake at night. But don’t we want assurances that the evidence against every citizen who winds up on that list is just as clear? Don’t we want more oversight, even after the fact?

Did I miss the part where American military action only started killing non-combatants on January 21, 2009?  Did I also miss the part where IEDs keep blowing off arms and legs and shearing off chunks of our soldiers’ skulls, creating a huge number of folks coming back home with truly awful injuries?  We’ve had this debate about people being killed in military action since this whole American experiment began, folks.  Here’s the thing, if we’re going to be over there doing this kind of thing, and right now that’s the policy, I’d rather see drones than boots on the ground.  You can go on and on about targeted killings of US citizens at a coldly impersonal distance without due process, and yet we’ve got 300 million devices in the country called “firearms” that quite often end up doing just that.  Due process is not always exercised in those situations either, guys.  People where you live can get killed guns without warning.  Maybe there’s an investigation, maybe there’s even a trial.  But there are plenty of times where who pulled the trigger is never found, and the killer never brought to justice.

Where’s your outrage over that?  Did I miss the part where Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was the only US teenager ever killed for bullshit reasons?  You know what else is a “targeted killing of American citizen?”  Any cops who draw their weapon on someone and pull the trigger, and guess what, they don’t always shoot the right person.  There’s oversight in those situations, but not always.  I’m a hell of a lot more worried about that than I am what’s going on in Waziristan, people.  If you’re going to perpetually scream “DROOOOOOOOONES YOU OBOT” at me, go to the nearest large metropolitan police department and make sure you personally solve every homicide that comes in the door.

Otherwise, have a darkened Superdome full of seats.

It is not endemic to the Obama administration, or Obama foreign policy.  Steve M. nails it:

But if you’re especially outraged at targeted killings of American citizens, if you think they’re more horrifying than everything else that’s been done in the wars we’ve fought, that strikes me as a sense of non-combatant privilege. Many of us — maybe only many white Americans? — not only assume we’re entitled to due process, we expect never to be on a battlefield. In other words, we expect never to be in a situation in which due process doesn’t apply.

To me that’s a sense of privilege. So I see what’s wrong with the drone program, but it’s a subset of what’s wrong with war. Some Americans expect to be shielded from this sort of suffering at all times, and are shocked that a few Americans aren’t.

War is hell.  The Pentagon is in the business of conducting said warfare in the most casualty-efficient way possible that still achieves the goal of ending the metabolic processes of The Bad Guys.  The problem isn’t drones, the problem is the perpetual war machine that’s predated this President for a very, very long time.  We’re screaming about al-Awlaki’s kid when My Lai, the bombing of Dresden, and Nagasaki and Hiroshima happened.  Let’s face it, for America, that’s effing progress.  We still need to move forward and I’d like to see drones not have to be used at all (because we weren’t in Af-Pak at all anymore) but let’s not pretend that President Obama somehow has the most blood on his hands of a US President, either, shall we?

Thanks.  Sorry to ruin your Sunday.

One More On Swartz (and MIT)

I want to respond to a couple of things mistermix wrote this morning about MIT’s response to Aaron Swartz’s death, but first, some preliminaries.

1:  This topic has become a lightening rod for a stunningly unproductive comment war between those who see Swartz as presumptively criminal who couldn’t take the heat his own actions had invited, and those who see him as  a martyr to the positive cause of internet and data freedom and to the defensive one of resistance to overweening corporate and government interests.

My own view is much closer to the side of those who see Swartz as a driven idealist, on the side of the angels, largely unprepared for real life.  It’s overwhelmingly clear that he believed deeply in acting morally according to a particular moral code and that he was aware that this commitment could bring him into conflict with existing legal (and more everyday) constraints. It is clear, to me at least, that his goals, what he thought the good was for which he was willing to enter into such conflict, is in fact a major social benefit:  information, if it doesn’t always want to be free* wants to be genuinely accessible — or rather, we as citizens, members of a polity that utterly depends on an informed electorate, need to have ready access to the words, numbers and wisdom required to perform our civic work.  Does that mean Swartz or anyone else should get out of jail free when they challenge someone else’s intellectual property claims?  No, and Swartz and his legal team did not seek do so, according to the Kevin Cullen/Boston Globe column to which mistermix linked.  For those without access to the Globe, here’s the datum:

Swartz and his lawyers were not looking for a free pass. They had offered to accept a deferred prosecution or probation, so that if Swartz pulled a stunt like that again, he would end up in prison.

I have no problem with that proposed resolution; seems about right to me.  Much more appropriate than this:

That said, YMMV, on either side. [much, much more past the jump]. More »

Institutional Interests

Kevin Cullen in the Boston Globe, writing about Aaron Swartz: (via)

Swartz and his lawyers were not looking for a free pass. They had offered to accept a deferred prosecution or probation, so that if Swartz pulled a stunt like that again, he would end up in prison.

Marty Weinberg, who took the case over from Good, said he nearly negotiated a plea bargain in which Swartz would not serve any time. He said JSTOR signed off on it, but MIT would not.

“There were subsets of the MIT community who were profoundly in support of Aaron,” Weinberg said. That support did not override institutional interests.

When I read Tom’s piece about MIT’s President appointing a panel to study MIT’s response to Swartz, I figured that President’s haste indicated that there were some dirty hands at MIT who wanted to kick the can down the road. And what better way to do that than to follow the blue-ribbon example of Linda P.B. Katehi, still Chancellor of the UC Davis system, who used a panel to wiggle out of any accountability for her role in the pepper spraying of the Occupy protest on her campus. It doesn’t matter what the panel reports. What matters is that the panel’s report will be a long time in coming. When the report finally arrives, the outrage at those who insisted on draconian punishments for a “crime”–from which Swartz didn’t profit, which was completely non-violent, and which probably had minimal effect on the alleged victim (JSTOR)–will be attenuated by the passage at time.

This isn’t to say that MIT bears sole or even main responsibility for Swartz’ prosecution. The Department of Justice, the US Attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz (sign a petition to get rid of her here), and a Congress so beholden to the entertainment interests that they pass laws that allow 50 year sentences for downloading are also at fault. As Lawrence Lessig points out, the bankers who almost destroyed our financial system aren’t facing anything like the punishment Swartz faced.

One more thing: there is a thread here connecting DougJ’s observation about the crypto-conservatism of totebaggers and the ability of administrators like Katehi, and perhaps some at MIT, to push off accountability with a well-written report. During my ill-spent youth at different universities, it was clear to me that a fair number of the “liberal” members of the academy would accept very weak justifications for sketchy institutional behavior as long as those justifications were whitewashed through a committee of colleagues with a good reputation. A key component of conservatism is reflexive support of current institutions. By that measure, a lot of academic totebaggers are conservatives, and I’ll bet that many of them who are proud of their past time in the protest line will find some reason to excuse MIT’s role in the bullying persecution of Aaron Swartz.

Wednesday Evening Open Thread: The Internet Is for Cats

I’m probably late to this party, but as a fan of Men in Black, I find it amusing nonetheless. From the Guardian:

There is a hacker terrorising Japan with a computer virus, bomb threats and riddles. Meanwhile, a stray cat wandering a small island near Tokyo holds important clues on its collar. This is no movie. This happened this week. An unnamed hacker in Japan really did leave a memory card on a stray cat’s collar, and journalists and authorities really did have to crack a few riddles to locate said ownerless feline.

If befuddled agents of the NPA (National Police Agency) didn’t already get the point, they should now: they are being toyed with, and the lack of headway they’ve made after months of taunting is more than a little embarrassing. This is after the NPA “extracted” what appears to be false confessions from four suspects, who have been recently released. The hacker is clearly trying to paint authorities as inept, and succeeding.

So far, according to Wired, Japanese authorities have only been able to identify two things about the hacker: one, he or she programs in the popular programming language C#, and two, he or she knows how to use proxies so they can post on the largest text-based forum on the internet, 2channel. While western audiences might not be familiar with 2channel, its US equivalent 4chan should ring a bell…

No motive for this hacker has surfaced yet, but the possibility that this is a big protest against the country’s new anti-piracy law – a measure that went into effect in October 2012 that means offenders can be imprisoned for up to two years – can’t be ruled out. Of course, this could just be a teen flexing his or her cyber muscles and trying to make a name for themselves, an always important cause to a young internet citizen….

***********
Apart from herding cats, what’s going on in your neighborhoods?

‘Privacy’ Is for Suckers

You’ll tell us what we ask for, citizen, and we’ll tell you what we please. From the NYTimes:

In 2007, Robert M. Nelson, an astronomer, and 27 other scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory sued NASA arguing that the space agency’s background checks of employees of government contractors were unnecessarily invasive and violated their privacy rights.

Privacy advocates chimed in as well, contending that the space agency would not be able to protect the confidential details it was collecting.

The scientists took their case all the way to the Supreme Court only to lose last year.

This month, Dr. Nelson opened a letter from NASA telling him of a significant data breach that could potentially expose him to identity theft.

The very thing he and advocates warned about had occurred. A laptop used by an employee at NASA’s headquarters in Washington had been stolen from a car parked on the street on Halloween, the space agency said.

Although the laptop itself was password protected, unencrypted files on the laptop contained personal information on about 10,000 NASA employees — including details like their names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and in some cases, details related to background checks into employees’ personal lives. …

US v. Hamdan Military Commission Conviction Overturned by Conservative DC Circuit

Hamdan, you may recall, was Osama Bin Laden’s driver and cook, and as such was believed to have lots of insider information regarding the terror chief’s plans. He was convicted of Material Support to Terrorists, which was not a crime under US law at the time he engaged in the acts for which he was convicted.

In a unanimous opinion:

“Because we read the Military Commissions Act not to sanction retroactive punishment for new crimes, and because material support for terrorism was not a pre-existing war crime under 10 U.S.C. § 821, Hamdan’s conviction for material support for terrorism cannot stand. We reverse the decision of the Court of Military Commission Review and direct that Hamdan’s conviction for material support for terrorism be vacated.”

Hamdan had already served the vast majority of the 66 months to which he was originally sentenced.  He was deported to Yemen, from where he continued his legal fight that culminated in today’s decision.

I have no information as to whether or not the Government will seek certoriari at the US Supreme Court.  This particular ruling has been described as “a lightning bolt at the heart of the military commissions system” by a military defense attorney of my acquaintance.

In other Military Commissions news, the tribunal resumed hearings on Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four charged co-conspirators.

Sharpened Pencils or W-88s–when you really have to kill somebody, which is less impolite?

Arising out of the mega thread earlier, commenter Corner Stone noted, if I understood him correctly,  that the problem with discussing the use of military force by the US government tends to get diverted into frog-hair splitting about which technology we should use to kill people, versus the policies that lead us to killing people on the other side of the world in the first place. More »

If you’re going to spy on us, at least be competent about it…

The shootings in Aurora were preventable. The killer was able to buy his weapons and ammo legally after he’d begun to unravel mentally. It is perfectly plausible that even a basic screening would have raised red flags. But, of course, God forbid we should do anything of the sort.

But there is another mass killing in the news recently, one that was equally preventable, the Ft. Hood shooting. The FBI report on their conduct here is fascinating to read. A couple of things really jumped out at me.

First, the shooter, Nidal Hasan tried to communicate several times with Anwar al-Aulaqi, who all of you know was the American-born radical cleric put on a kill list (and later killed) by President Obama through some sort of secret process. Well, al-Aulaqi is wholly non-committal in his exchanges with Hasan. Hasan clearly tries to bait him into something, but al-Aulaqi only answers him twice, both times blandly. For a firebrand cleric who is accused of planning attacks on the U.S. left and right, he’s surprisingly uninterested in taking advantage of this new contact. I found it odd.

Second, and more importantly, the FBI just dropped the ball. On December 17, 2008, Hasan writes to al-Aulaki:

“There are many soldiers in the us armed forces that have converted to Islam while in the service. There are also many Muslims who join the armed forces for a myriad of different reasons. Some appear to have internal conflicts and have even killed or tried to kill other us soldiers in the name of Islam…. Would you consider someone like [this] or other soldiers that have committed such acts with the goal of helping Muslims/Islam… fighting Jihad and if they did die would you consider them shaheeds.” [typos are Hasan's]

Now, basically, the question he is posing is this: Service members take an oath when then join, and oath breaking is frowned upon. So he’s asking whether members of the armed forces can still be considered Shahid, if they kill fellow servicemen in the name of Islam despite breaking their oath? Shahid is basically jihadi-speak for, do I still get the 72 virgins?

Now, I’m sorry, but that has to trigger a full investigation. It just has to. What the hell is the point of spying on people and collecting all this email traffic if an Army officer can write to a radical cleric on our watch list and ask whether it is permissible for members of the armed forces to kill fellow servicemen and women without triggering a full investigation?

We have a massive surveillance regime in place, and yet here is a case of a perfectly preventable attack that was missed. Depressing.

Meanwhile, we just put a guy in jail for 17 years for an idiotic “plot” to blow up the Capitol and Pentagon with model airplanes! An absurd plot that was largely driven by FBI provocateurs.

Par:AnoIA Strikes

Per Quinn Norton, at Wired‘s Threat Level blog, “Anonymous Launches WikiLeaks-esque Site for Data Dumps“:

Frustrated by the lack of impact from Anonymous’ otherwise famous hacks and data dumps, and the slow pace of material coming out of WikiLeaks, participants in the Anonymous collective have launched a WikiLeaks-like site called Par:AnoIA (Potentially Alarming Research: Anonymous Intelligence Agency).

Paranoia, which debuted in March, is a new publishing platform built by Anonymous to host Anonymous data leaks that’s trying to find a solution to a problem that plagues news sites, government transparency advocates, and large-website owners everywhere: how to organize more data than any human could possibly read.

The site marks a departure from the groups’ previous modus operandi, where it would publicly drop the documents, make them available in a torrent — usually as a zip file, and then move on. By contrast, the goal of Paranoia is to curate and present content to a hopefully interested public….

But there’s no science to how and when big data leaks make an impact. The very idea is so new, no one even knows yet how to study it. With Paranoia, Anonymous joins much more established projects like IBM’s Many Eyes, the Associated Press’s Overview, and the consortium of journalistic entities behind Document Cloud testing the proposition that building tools and specialized hosting can solve the problem with data engagement.

Much, much more information at the link. I freely admit I am not competent to judge the technological value of this project, but I do admire the acronym.

The First Rule of Drone Club, or “Requirement of Non-acknowledgement”

If you’ve got a little spare time for reading this weekend, I would like to recommend Tom Junod’s article in the new Esquire on “The Lethal President“:

You are a good man. You are an honorable man. You are both president of the United States and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. You are both the most powerful man in the world and an unimpeachably upstanding citizen. You place a large premium on being beyond reproach. You have become your own deliberative body, standing not so much by your decisions as by the process by which you make them. You are not only rational; you are a rationalist. You think everything through, as though it is within your power to find the point where what is moral meets what is necessary.

You love two things, your family and the law, and you have surrounded yourself with those who are similarly inclined. To make sure that you obey the law, you have hired lawyers prominent for accusing your predecessor of flouting it; to make sure that you don’t fall prey to the inevitable corruption of secrecy, you have hired lawyers on record for being committed to transparency. Unlike George W. Bush, you have never held yourself above the law by virtue of being commander in chief; indeed, you have spent part of your political capital trying to prove civilian justice adequate to our security needs. You prize both discipline and deliberation; you insist that those around you possess a personal integrity that matches their political ideals and your own; and it is out of these unlikely ingredients that you have created the Lethal Presidency…

This is not to say that the American people don’t know about the Lethal Presidency, and that they don’t support its aims. They do. They know about the killing because you have celebrated — with appropriate sobriety — the most notable kills, specifically those of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki; they support it because you have asked for their trust as a good and honorable man surrounded by good and honorable men and women and they have given it to you. In so doing, you have changed a technological capability into a moral imperative and have convinced your countrymen to see the necessity without seeing the downside. Politically, there is no downside. Historically, there is only the irony of the upside — that you, of all presidents, have become the lethal one; that you, of all people, have turned out to be a man of proven integrity whose foreign and domestic policies are less popular than your proven willingness to kill, in defense of your country, even your own countrymen… indeed, to kill even a sixteen-year-old American boy accused of no crime at all…

Because Junod is a true reporter and Esquire makes excellent use of the communications technologies now available, he has posted excerpts and updates on its Political Blog all week. The Thursday update discussed the “killer contradiction“:

I received a phone call on Tuesday from a person with intimate knowledge of the executive counter-terrorism policies of the Obama administration… The call was a surprise, not simply because I’d tried to speak to this man over the months that I was researching my story, but also because he understood the story better than most of the people who’ve read it, and thought that I “captured the President fairly.”…

And then he proceeded to explain why transparency was a goal difficult, if not impossible, to achieve, even when a simple acknowledgment would go a long way toward expiating the sin of killing an innocent American teenager in the course of a counterterrorism strike.

State secrecy, the man on the phone said, exists for a reason, and it’s generally not the reason that the Glenn Greenwalds of the world think it is — it’s not to cover up wrongdoing. It’s to protect two essential things: the sources and methods of the intelligence community, and something called “the requirement of non-acknowledgement.”…

Secrecy isn’t always the main driver here. Sometimes diplomacy is… there are deals — deals that have already been made. And part of the deal is that you don’t acknowledge the deal. If you do, then the country you made the deal with is obligated to do react, because now there’s been a violation of sovereignty. The problem is that there are a lot of these kinds of deals, because they are so easy to make. They’re a little like allowing a source to go off the record in journalism. If the source asks, Can I go off the record?, you’ll say, Of course you can, because you want the source to talk. It’s the same in statecraft. You make the deal because you want there to be a deal….

This is a very hard story to do justice in an excerpt, and I would really recommend that you read the whole thing. Obviously this is a very complicated situation, way above my pay grade. Yet I keep thinking: Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was even younger than Trayvon Martin. And all the claims thrown up by the defenders of the man who killed Trayvon Martin — Kid should never have been running around in that neighborhood, if he cared about his own life! How do we know he wasn’t just another criminal, like so many of those people are! He wasn’t a child, by the standards of his culture he was plenty old enough to get into adult trouble and pay the adult price! And besides, teenagers just like him die senselessly every day in America, but you don’t make a big song and dance about those other kids, you liberal hypocrites! — were quite rightly dismissed for the feeble excuses they are.

Open Thread: (Still) Taking Advantage of the 50% of the Population with Below-Average Smarts

FREEDUMB! on the march, reports Paul Constant, at the Stranger:

Last night, I noticed that a whole bunch of my Facebook friends posted a “Privacy Notice” to their walls, or stuccoed it to their timelines, or whatever it is you do on Facebook now. The notice reads in part that “any governmental structure” does “NOT have…permission to utilize…profile information nor any of the content contained herein” and that they are “strictly prohibited from disclosing, copying, distributing, disseminating, or taking any other action against me with regard to this profile and the contents herein.” According to the privacy notice, for some reason now that Facebook is a publicly owned company, posting the privacy notice means that the government can’t hold anything you post on your Facebook wall against you in court. This is of course bullshit….

I use the word “smarts” as opposed to “intelligence” for a reason. Some of these defiant boilerplate-flaunters are under the age of 13 25, or otherwise developmentally impaired; others no doubt are genuinely unsophisticated in the ways of governmental survelliance. But I’m sure that many of the proudest are paid-in-full MENSA members and RonPaul-for-President supporters who have no excuse but willful ignorance. I’m infinitely grateful that the Internet-as-we-know-it didn’t exist when I was young and foolish enough to be seen in public doing ridiculous things, but I was never foolish enough to believe something this ridiculous.

Bibi Gunning

Sully lays out his thoughts on the one guy who could really sink the President’s re-election chances:  Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

I don’t think you can understand the Republican strategy for this election without factoring in a key GOP player, Benjamin Netanyahu. He already has core members of  the US Congress siding openly with him against the US president and the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman – like McCain, Lieberman and Butters. Netanyahu’s war would be designed to rile up not only his own neo-fascist base, but also encourage American evangelical voters to turn out against Obama, the “anti-Christ”, while other Greater Israel fanatics, like Sheldon Adelson, keep bankrolling as many Greater Israel GOP nominees as they can. A global war which polarizes America and the world is exactly what Netanyahu wants. And it is exactly what the GOP needs to cut through Obama’s foreign policy advantage in this election. Because it is only through war, crisis and polarization that extremists can mobilize the emotions that keep them in power. They need war to win.

Here’s a prediction. Netanyahu, in league and concert with Romney, Santorum and Gingrich, will make his move to get rid of Obama soon. And he will be more lethal to this president than any of his domestic foes.

I’m of the opinion that if it really was that simple, Netanyahu would have pulled the trigger on this already.  On the other hand, maybe he’s just waiting for the GOP Hunger Games to produce a champion first.  Netanyahu isn’t going to be able to do this without lining up support from inside Israel, either.

But Sully’s right that should Bibi move, he’s going to have the entire GOP (minus Ron and Rand Paul, I guess) and a healthy chunk of Dems behind him.  I’m rather confident that the Obama administration is not only aware of this but well out in front of it.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of ways we could end up in the septic tank here and in a really friggin’ scary situation, and not all of those ways are under our direct or even indirect control.  I like the team we have at the White House and State getting us through this, however.

Crossing The Rubin Con: Endless Wargasm

Jennifer Rubin pauses from her Romney cheerleading day job to go after the 51% of America that actually learned a lesson from the decade of wars we’ve been thrust into, as the latest Pew Research poll finds there’s not too much support for backing up an Israeli attack on Iran.  With only 39% of Americans wanting the US to follow Israel into the Hot Gates of Thermopylae Tehran, Rubin chastises the Dems for not being explodey enough:

It’s stunning, actually, that in the event of a conflict between the revolutionary, jihadist state Iran and our democratic ally Israel, Democrats want us to be neutral.

The Democratic National Committee chairwoman doesn’t want to make Israel an “election” issue. Maybe before lecturing Republicans to clam up she should work on educating her own party about the U.S.-Israel relationship and about the menace of a nuclear-armed Iran. It is embarrassing for the Democratic Party’s finger-wagging chairwoman to be saddled with a constituency that is so indifferent to the plight of the Jewish state. As for Obama, it seems he’s right in sync with opinion in his party on Israel. And that is a big problem for the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship, the survival of the Jewish state and the continued credibility of the United States, which under two administrations has vowed that it is “unacceptable” for Iran to obtain nuclear weapons.

Once again, I am struck as to how Rubin seems to have completely omitted our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the country’s memory, and how we arrived at them, and that she has no issues with Israel dictating foreign policy to us.  Indeed, she is “stunned” to find that after nine years in Iraq and ten going on eleven in Afghanistan, that the American public really isn’t terribly keen on going to war with Iran and want us to stay out of an Israel-Iran fight, and want us to not invest another lost decade’s worth of blood and treasure just because Israel gets trigger-happy.

Besides the ridiculous notion that people who don’t want war are somehow not only “indifferent” towards the Israel but ostensibly against Israel’s very survival itself, I have to ask if all it took to get the US to invade Iran was Israel attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, why hasn’t Israel simply done it already if the Iranian nuclear program is such an existential threat?

Also, it’s not like the United States is truly “neutral” anyway, nor are we just standing around doing nothing to support an ally.  America is applying tough economic sanctions and has gotten the European Union to go along with them.  These sanctions get much tougher in another five months or so when the clause that the US will no longer do economic business with countries that do buy oil from Iran fully kicks in.  Hell, even FOX News is admitting the sanctions are working.  Oh, and yes, we have carrier groups hanging out in the region as well just in case Iran does something stupid, and in fact to specifically prevent Iran from doing anything stupid.  It seems to me that Israel is choosing not to act for a reason, and that reason is the sanctions are working.

But Rubin blithely insists war is the only option and goes after anyone who believes in any other approach to Iran, when President Obama is calmly proving that this just isn’t the case in reality.  After a decade of blood and trillions of dollars, America is getting tired of having its patriotism questioned by armchair Alexanders who engage in nothing but endless wargasm.  Certainly the Post’s readers deserve something slightly more nuanced than Rubin’s cartoon-inspired approach to international relations.

Working As Intended, Citizen Pierce!

Charlie Pierce, Esquire, is alarmed by a new “pediatric health” study:

Of all the numbers in this new study, the following remains an astonishing statistic: By the time they’re 23, 41 percent of American kids have been busted for something more serious than a traffic stop… To me, it’s an indication of that something is seriously out of whack in the way we’re asking our law enforcement community to interact with our children.
__
Children today grow up surrounded by the police power of the state, both the soft and hard versions of it. At almost every level of their lives, they are policed, in one way or another, either by the police themselves, or by administrators and bureaucrats to whom the police and the courts have subcontracted the job. They have no Fourth or Fifth Amendment rights as soon as they walk through the schoolhouse door. They are searched. They are tested for drugs. Their rights of free expression are tightly circumscribed. Rights unexercised atrophy. We have raised, and are now raising, generations of children who are completely ignorant of the rights they have as citizens, and we are doing it through the application of the most coercive powers the state possesses…

Another triumph for the Banana Republicans! Let’s face it, the fortunate sons of the One Percenters — ask the C-Plus Augustus — have always been able to treat the police as nothing more than well-armed security guards. Cops were for keeping those people in line and away from the better neighborhoods, unless they were toting cleaning equipment or yard tools. And the bottom Twenty Percenters, give or take, knew “the arrangement” and warned their kids about the dangers. But over the last few decades, as the unindicted Watergate co-conspirators cemented their criminal takeover under St. Ronnie and the two Bush regencies, those Americans who were once fortunate enough to consider themselves “middle class” have been ever-so-slowly relegated to the ranks of barbarians-outside-the-gated-community. And the increasing militarization of School Security (because drugs! Gangs! Forced busing! Drugs! Hippies! Also Columbine! Foreigner gangs! And did we mention, drugs!) has been one weapon for reminding the rank and file that they — we — have no rights our masters can’t find an excuse to erode.

Not Just Some Dystopian Fantasy

The new surveillance state and domestic drones.

Since that last thread had me as disgusted as I’ve ever been with the commentariat here, bonus points to the first commenter to come up with some variation of “If you haven’t done anything wrong” or “Nothing you do outside is private” to excuse this. Extra bonus points for the too cool for school kids who yawn and tell me “they’ll worry about it when they are arming them.”

*** Update ***

Maybe Charles Pierce can talk some sense into you.