Monday Reads
Posted: November 29, 2010 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Barack Obama, Claire McCaskill, DADT, DHS, Health care reform, hypocrisy, ICE, Julian Assange, Lindsey Graham, Wikileaks 129 Comments
Good Morning!! The long holiday weekend is officially over. Of course the big story is still the latest Wikileaks release.
This McClatchy story at the Miami Herald points out that despite hysterical warnings from U.S. officials there is “no evidence that WikiLeaks releases have hurt anyone”
American officials in recent days have warned repeatedly that the release of documents by WikiLeaks could put people’s lives in danger.
But despite similar warnings before the previous two releases of classified U.S. intelligence reports by the website, U.S. officials concede that they have no evidence to date that the documents led to anyone’s death.
Before Sunday’s release, news organizations given access to the documents and WikiLeaks took the greatest care to date to ensure no one would be put in danger. In statements accompanying stories about the documents, several newspapers said they voluntarily withheld information and that they cooperated with the State Department and the Obama administration to ensure nothing released could endanger lives or national security.
The newspapers “established lists in common of people to protect, notably in countries ruled by dictators, controlled by criminals or at war,” according to an account by Le Monde, a French newspaper that was among the five news organizations that were given access to the documents. “All the identities of people the journalists believed would be threatened were redacted,” the newspaper said in what would be an unusual act of self censorship by journalists toward government documents.
I see no reason to believe this release will be any different. Yes, there will be embarrassment for various world leaders–so what? We have a right to know what our government is doing. I say more power to whistleblowers the world over.
The New York Times posted an exchange of letters between Julian Assange and the U.S. government. The letter show that Wikileaks was very open to withholding information if it would really cause harm to anyone.
In other news, Claire McCaskill is attempting to distance herself from Obama, now that he’s no longer seen as the messiah. Will wonders never cease? You’d think McCaskill would go down with the ship, but I guess she’d rather hang onto her job in the Senate than continue her worshipful attitude toward the President.
Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” McCaskill said that she’d voted against the president on cap-and-trade, the second round of cash-for-clunkers, comprehensive immigration reform and every omnibus bill.
McCaskill said she’d also sometimes disagreed with Obama when he was a senator.
“My record of independence, frankly, stretches back for a long period of time,” she said.
When asked to name an issue where Obama had fallen short, the senator said his move into healthcare legislation at a time when he should have been focusing on job creation was “very difficult,” and therefore economic issues “didn’t get the attention they needed.”
The Obots continue to drop like flies. It would be nice if Nancy Pelosi would get the message and start standing up for Democratic principles for a change.
I’m not sure what to think about this next story. The DHS and ICE have summarily shut down more than 70 websites. Supposedly these sites were involved in counterfeiting products or encouraging theft of intellectual property, but what is the recourse for a site that is wrongly shut down?
From the Wall Street Journal: Website Closures Escalate U.S. War on Piracy
A federal crackdown that shut more than 70 websites last week is the latest sign of an escalating war against counterfeit and pirated products, using legal tactics that may be closely scrutinized by civil-liberties groups.
Domain names of the affected sites—which offered such diverse goods as scarves, golf gear and rap music—were seized by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Department of Homeland Security, under court-approved warrants.
This is controversial because civil actions are generally used in piracy cases.
ICE’s latest crackdown is based on procedures used in criminal cases, including seizing domains and assets of suspect websites without prior notification of their owners, lawyers tracking the case said.
“It’s time to stop playing games,” said Chris Castle, a Los Angeles attorney who has represented copyright holders as well as technology companies involved in digital music.
Here a two different reactions to the government shutting down websites.
From Stephen J. Vaughn-Nichols at ZDnet: The Rise of Web Censorship
Back in 1964, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart of famously wrote on what was, and wasn’t “hard-core pornography” that, “I know it when I see it.” Today, free speech on the Web is impeded by far more restrictions than just what is, or isn’t, pornographic. On the Web in 2010, even the appearance of enabling file-sharing of copyright materials seems to be enough for the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to shut down Web-sites without notice.
But here’s the problem, according to Vaughn-Nichols:
I have no use for sites that traffic in counterfeit goods such as fake autographed sports jerseys or designer purses. I do, on the other hand, worry when a site like Torrent-Finder is shut down.
You see, Torrent-Finder, which is back up under a new domain name, Torrent-Finder.info doesn’t host Torrent file or even BitTorrent file trackers. It’s just a search engine dedicated to file torrents such as movies, TV shows, or software programs. You can find the same file torrents with Google if you know what you’re doing. Torrent-Finder, and sites like it, just makes specific kinds of file searches easier.
I think its fine for the government to try to block the sales of fake LeBron James Miami Heat jerseys and the like. It’s when we start moving into the murkier land of intellectual property and the “right” to block searches, that I start getting worried.
From Elliot’s blog, which is devoted to “domain name investing news and tips”: Why I Am Not Worried About Domain Name Seizures
I will preface this by saying that I don’t like the idea of the government acting as judge and juror, while not seeming to give the website and/or domain name owners the opportunity to defend their actions. It’s scary that the government can simply take over some websites at it’s whim without the owner’s chance to defend his or her actions.
However, if the companies that own the websites are or were doing something illegal while violating the rights of people in the US (whom ICE is responsible to protect), this seizure is not such a huge deal as some might make it out to be….
Eventually, these website operates should have their day in court, but taking away their platform is a way to temporarily stop them from doing what the government believes is an illegal act (although it seems pretty simple to move to another domain name). I don’t know where to draw the line when it comes to seizures such as this, but if a company happens to be brazenly flouting the law, I am not opposed to government intervention. If these website operators are in the right, then they will certainly have their day in court.
I don’t know, this whole thing makes me uneasy, especially with the TSA being permitted to violate the 4th amendment rights of airline passengers. To me this feels like an attempt to begin censoring the internet.
Here’s an interesting story on possible effects on the health care law if Congress makes serious attempts to cut the deficit: Deficit battle threatens job-based health care
Budget proposals from leaders in both parties have urged shrinking or eliminating tax breaks that help make employer health insurance the leading source of coverage in the nation and a middle-class mainstay.
The idea isn’t to just raise revenue, economists say, but finally to turn Americans into frugal health care consumers by having them face the full costs of their medical decisions.
Such a re-engineering was rejected by Democrats only a few months ago, at the height of the health care overhaul debate. But Washington has changed, with Republicans back in power and widespread fears that the burden of government debt may drag down the economy.
Death panels, anyone?
Hypocrisy watch? Senator Lindsey Graham says DADT won’t be repealed.
The South Carolina Republican, a proponent of the law banning openly gay service in the armed forces, said definitively that there was no support for repeal on the Republican side of the aisle. He called for an additional study to determine whether the military itself favored overturning the 17-year-old legislation.
“This is a political promise made by Senator Obama when he was running for president,” said Graham, during an appearance on Fox News Sunday. “There is no groundswell of opposition to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell coming from our military. This is all politics. I don’t believe there is anywhere near the votes to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. On the Republican side, I think we will be united in the lame duck [session] and the study I would be looking for is asking military members: Should it be repealed, not how to implement it once you as a politician decide to repeal it. So I think in a lame duck setting Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is not going anywhere.”
Please, someone, snap some pics of Lindsey Graham next time he hits a gay bar. I wonder what his pals McCain and Lieberman would say then?
According to interviews with the Daily Beast, the Taliban is laughing at the U.S., Britain, and NATO, because they negotiated with a fake Taliban leader for months.
Taliban commanders in Afghanistan reacted with amusement this weekend to news of an impostor who, by claiming he was a senior Taliban leader, managed to fool NATO officials and get invited to high-level peace talks.
The man pretending to be insurgent leader Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour was in fact a shopkeeper from Quetta in Western Pakistan, they said.
“Imagine,” Mohammad Hafiz, a senior Taliban commander, told The Daily Beast, “if a shopkeeper from Quetta can make a fool of them and keep them engaged in talks for months, how do they believe they can defeat the Taliban?”
Hafiz, himself a close aide to the insurgent leader Mansour, said Taliban commanders were laughing at the fact that American and British officials could be so easily deceived. But he and other insurgent leaders denied the shopkeeper was a plant; in fact, they said, they wouldn’t mind finding him and having a chat.
That is pretty pathetic. It’s time to get out of Afghanistan. Iraq too.
What stories are you following today?
Wikileaks Drops the Big One (continued)
Posted: November 28, 2010 Filed under: Diplomacy Nightmares, Live | Tags: Wikileaks 68 CommentsThe Wikileaks U.S. diplomatic documents dropped today. The world’s major newspapers have the details as does the Wikileaks site itself. It is becoming more apparent that this is a huge amount of data.
US diplomats are alleged to have been requested by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to spy on the diplomats of other countries at the United Nations. That was the purpose of the “National Humint Collection Directive,” which has been seen by SPIEGEL. The document was signed by Clinton and came into force on July 31, 2009.
The information to be collected included personal credit card information, frequent flyer customer numbers, as well as e-mail and telephone accounts. In many cases the State Department also required “biometric information,” “passwords” and “personal encryption keys.” In the US, the term biometric information generally refers to fingerprints, passport photos and iris scans, among other things.
The US State Department also wanted to obtain information on the plans and intentions of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and his secretariat relating to issues like Iran, according to the detailed wish list in the directive. The instructions were sent to 30 US embassies around the world, including Berlin.
The detailed document also reveals which UN issues most interested the US government. These included: “Darfur/Sudan,” “Afghanistan/Pakistan,” Somalia, Iran and North Korea. Other top issues included Paraguay and the Palestinian Territories, eight West African states including Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Senegal, as well as various states in Eastern Europe.
As justification for the espionage orders, Clinton emphasized that a large share of the information that the US intelligence agencies works with, comes from the reports put together by State Department staff around the world.
“SPARE US YOUR EVIL”: The King expressed hope the U.S. would review its Iran policy and “come to the right conclusion.” Brennan responded that President Obama was personally reviewing U.S. Iran policy and wanted to hear the King’s thoughts. Abdullah asserted that Iran is trying to set up Hizballah-like organizations in African countries, observing that the Iranians don’t think they are doing anything wrong and don’t recognize their mistakes. “I said (to Mottaki) that’s your problem,” recounted the King. Abdullah said he would favor Rafsanjani in an Iranian election, were he to run. He described Iran not as “a neighbor one wants to see,” but as “a neighbor one wants to avoid.” He said the Iranians “launch missiles with the hope of putting fear in people and the world.” A solution to the Arab/Israeli conflict would be a great achievement, the King said, but Iran would find other ways to cause trouble. “Iran’s goal is to cause problems,” he continued, “There is no doubt something unstable about them.” He described Iran as “adventurous in the negative sense,” and declared “May God prevent us from falling victim to their evil.” Mottaki had tendered an invitation to visit Iran, but Abdullah said he replied “All I want is for you to spare us your evil.” Summarizing his history with Iran, Abdullah concluded: “We have had correct relations over the years, but the bottom line is that they cannot be trusted.”
The Hill reports the Wikileaks claim that there was a cyber attack on the site prior to release of the data.
Just hours ahead of an expected release of three million classified U.S. documents, the website WikiLeaks said it has been the target of a computer attack.
“We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack,” WikiLeaks tweeted midday Sunday.
Fifteen minutes later, WikiLeaks vowed that it would go ahead with the document dump, which is expected to include State Department cables that Washington fears will wound foreign relations, through its media partners, who received advance access to the documents, if they couldn’t get the site back up in time.
“El Pais, Le Monde, Speigel, Guardian & NYT will publish many US embassy cables tonight, even if WikiLeaks goes down,” WikiLeaks tweeted.
The Guardian site was also briefly down Sunday morning with a 404 error.
Notable Tweets from Notable Tweeters:
benpolitico Ben Smith
RT @tomgara: @arabist nails it: this Wikileaks dump is more significant for the Arab world than it is for the US http://bit.ly/e2tVLM
Wikileaks Drops the Big One
Posted: November 28, 2010 Filed under: Diplomacy Nightmares, Live | Tags: Wikileaks 110 Comments
Newspapers around the world are dropping the latest Wikileaks documents. The site itself is inaccessible but its tweets say that it is not under attack of any kind.
We’ll be adding to this post as links become available.
This overview was just put up by Huffpo.
The New York Times and The Guardian have published classified State Department documents provided to them by the online website WikiLeaks. The WikiLeaks website appeared to be inaccessible, and WikiLeaks said in its Twitter feed that it was experiencing a denial of service attack. WikiLeaks also provided the documents to Spain’s El Pais, France’s Le Monde, and Germany’s Der Spiegel.
According to The New York Times, the cables reveal how foreign leaders, including Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barak and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, urged the U.S. to confront Iran over its nuclear program.
“The cables also contain a fresh American intelligence assessment of Iran’s missile program,” The Times reports. “They reveal for the first time that the United States believes that Iran has obtained advanced missiles from North Korea that could let it strike at Western European capitals and Moscow and help it develop more formidable long-range ballistic missiles.”
The White House has made a statement and you can read that on the HuffPo piece too.
From Der Spiegel on line: A Super Power’s View of the World
The tone of trans-Atlantic relations may have improved, former US Ambassador to Germany William Timken wrote in a cable to the State Department at the end of 2006, but the chancellor “has not taken bold steps yet to improve the substantive content of the relationship.” That is not exactly high praise.
And the verdict on German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle? His thoughts “were short on substance,” wrote the current US ambassador in Berlin, Philip Murphy, in a cable. The reason, Murphy suggested, was that “Westerwelle’s command of complex foreign and security policy issues still requires deepening.”
Such comments are hardly friendly. But in the eyes of the American diplomatic corps, every actor is quickly categorized as a friend or foe. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia? A friend: Abdullah can’t stand his neighbors in Iran and, expressing his disdain for the mullah regime, said, “there is no doubt something unstable about them.” And his ally, Sheikh bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi? Also a friend. He believes “a near term conventional war with Iran is clearly preferable to the long term consequences of a nuclear armed Iran.”
[MABlue here]
I can’t wait to find out more in the hard copy of Der Spiegel tomorrow. As a subscriber, I normally get the new edition Saturdays in my mail. This week however, that did dot happen. So far, nobody has seen tomorrow’s edition where there’s more.
There are additional interesting links on the website of Der Spiegel:
Orders from Clinton: US Diplomats Told to Spy on Other Countries at United Nations
Foreign Policy Meltdown: Leaked Cables Reveal True US Worldview
Diplomatic Cables Reveal US Doubts about Turkey’s Government
The Germany Dispatches: Internal Source Kept US Informed of Merkel Coalition Negotiations
WikiLeaks FAQ: What Do the Diplomatic Cables Really Tell Us?
BBC News has a fine overview of some of the major issues addressed in the cables.
The NYT: Cables Shine Light Into Secret Diplomatic Channels
Some of the cables, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, were written as recently as late February, revealing the Obama administration’s exchanges over crises and conflicts. The material was originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to revealing secret documents. WikiLeaks intends to make the archive public on its Web site in batches, beginning Sunday.
The anticipated disclosure of the cables is already sending shudders through the diplomatic establishment, and could conceivably strain relations with some countries, influencing international affairs in ways that are impossible to predict.
The Guardian: US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomacy crisis
• More than 250,000 dispatches reveal US foreign strategies
• Diplomats ordered to spy on allies as well as enemies
• Hillary Clinton leads frantic ‘damage limitation’…
At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables – many of which are designated “secret” – the Guardian can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN’s leadership.
These two revelations alone would be likely to reverberate around the world. But the secret dispatches which were obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistlebowers’ website, also reveal Washington’s evaluation of many other highly sensitive international issues.
These include a major shift in relations between China and North Korea, Pakistan’s growing instability and details of clandestine US efforts to combat al-Qaida in Yemen.
Among scores of other disclosures that are likely to cause uproar, the cables detail:
• Grave fears in Washington and London over the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme
• Alleged links between the Russian government and organised crime.
• Devastating criticism of the UK’s military operations in Afghanistan.
• Claims of inappropriate behaviour by a member of the British royal family.
The US has particularly intimate dealings with Britain, and some of the dispatches from the London embassy in Grosvenor Square will make uncomfortable reading in Whitehall and Westminster. They range from serious political criticisms of David Cameron to requests for specific intelligence about individual MPs.
Is WikiLeaks being sabotaged? They alleged the site has been hacked.
WikiLeaks claims attack before expected document release
Just hours ahead of an expected release of three million classified U.S. documents, the website WikiLeaks said it has been the target of a computer attack.
“We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack,” WikiLeaks tweeted midday Sunday.
Some of the latest updates
From the Guardian update:
Haaretz focuses on the June 2009 memo. This quotes Israel’s defence minister, Ehud Barak, telling visiting American officials that a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities was viable until the end of 2010, but after that “any military solution would result in unacceptable collateral damage.”
Reuters found this nugget: Saudi king urged U.S. to attack Iran: WikiLeaks
Saudi King Abdullah repeatedly urged the United States to attack Iran‘s nuclear program and China directed cyberattacks on the United States, according to a vast cache of U.S. diplomatic cables released on Sunday in an embarrassing leak that undermines U.S. diplomacy.
The NYTimes has published the letter exchange between the US Government and Julian Assange:
Letters between Wikileaks and the U.S. Government
Notable Tweets from Notable Tweeters:
benpolitico Ben Smith
RT @TimOBrienNYT: “@evgenymorozov: Saudi King Abdullah proposed implanting Bluetooth chips in Gitmo detainees http://goo.gl/uGln1
ggreenwald Glenn Greenwald
Must-read is right RT @mmhastings “must read: Simon Jenkins on why journalists should defend Wikileaks http://tinyurl.com/37yal4l “
washingtonpost The Washington Post
Leaked cables suggest diplomats ordered to engage in spying, news orgs report http://wapo.st/ecD3Ak#p2#tcot#wikileaks
ggreenwald Glenn Greenwald
To follow WikiLeaks disclosures, @GregMitch is live-blogging documents: http://bit.ly/hl4Vze
Greg Mitchell is at The Nation. I just read this one and it was a wonderful surprising story. Quick, some one get this man to write a book and get a screenwriter!!!
3:40Amazing story of how a 75-year-old American rode a horse over a mountain range to Turkey to finally get home from Iran.
BreakingNews Breaking News
China’s Politburo ordered hacking campaign against Google, per WikiLeaks documents – AFP http://yhoo.it/ihF2rE
GregMitch Greg Mitchell
WikiLeaks site, now up, reveal docs will actually be released for “months” to “do them justice.” http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/
Wikileaks began on Sunday November 28th publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents will give people around the world an unprecedented insight into US Government foreign activities.
The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret.
The embassy cables will be released in stages over the next few months. The subject matter of these cables is of such importance, and the geographical spread so broad, that to do otherwise would not do this material justice.
The cables show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in “client states”; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.
This document release reveals the contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors – and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reflect their wishes, they should ask to see what’s going on behind the scenes.
Every American schoolchild is taught that George Washington – the country’s first President – could not tell a lie. If the administrations of his successors lived up to the same principle, today’s document flood would be a mere embarrassment. Instead, the US Government has been warning governments — even the most corrupt — around the world about the coming leaks and is bracing itself for the exposures.
The full set consists of 251,287 documents, comprising 261,276,536 words (seven times the size of “The Iraq War Logs”, the world’s previously largest classified information release).
The cables cover from 28th December 1966 to 28th February 2010 and originate from 274 embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions.
Saturday Reads
Posted: November 27, 2010 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Jeffrey Rosen, Korea, Rey Decerega, Samuel Alito, Soviet Union, The Onion, TSA, Wikileaks 86 Comments
President Obama after being injured while playing basketball
Good Morning!! You probably heard the top story on all the commercial and cable networks last night. President Obama got a split lip from a flying elbow while playing basketball Friday, and needed 12 stitches.
The White House has identified the person whose elbow injured President Barack Obama during a pickup game of basketball on Friday as Rey Decerega, who works for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.
Decerega had better watch his back. He did manage to do a little public sucking up:
The White House also released a statement from Decerega, NBC News said: “I learned today the president is both a tough competitor and a good sport. I enjoyed playing basketball with him this morning. I’m sure he’ll be back out on the court again soon.”
Perhaps that will help. Good Luck Ray Decerega!
U.S. officials are freaking out over the upcoming release of diplomatic documents by Wikileaks. According to The Independent:
Frantic behind the scenes wrangling was under way last night as US officials tried to stem the fallout from the expected release of up to three million confidential diplomatic communiques by the Wikileaks website.
Over the past 48 hours, American ambassadors have had the unenviable task of informing some of the country’s strongest allies that a series of potentially embarrassing cables are likely to be released in the coming days….
Downing Street yesterday confirmed that the US ambassador in London had already briefed the Government on what might be contained in the files. Similar meetings were also reported in Turkey, Israel, Canada, Denmark, Norway and Australia.
[MABlue here]
abc has more on the “Big Freakout”. there must really be some unsavory stuff in that report. Apparently, most of the stuff comes from Bradly Manning.
Bracing for WikiLeaks’ Release of Diplomatic Documents, State Department Warns Allies
Senior U.S. officials warn that the next round of WikiLeaks documents would be considerably more damaging than the two previous WikiLeaks document dumps.
“This is outrageous and dangerous,” a senior U.S. official told ABC News. “This puts at risk the ability of the United States to conduct foreign policy. Period. End of paragraph.”
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff also weighed in today, telling CNN he hoped these kinds of leaks will eventually be plugged.
According to op-ed commentator Jerome Taylor: This is a public airing of Washington’s dirty linen
What makes the release of diplomatic cables so potentially explosive is that they could cover a vast spectrum of information that America and her allies would like to keep secret. Cables are the diplomatic equivalent of dirty linen that no country wants to see aired in public. “Diplomatic cables might talk about political instability inside the country – there could be information about secret deals, weapons agreements, talks with dissidents, all sorts of things,” explains Yossi Mekelberg, an expert on Israel-US relations at Chatham House. “But cables are not policy papers. When I read cables I’m often surprised at how gossipy they can be.”
The informal nature of such missives has the potential to cause some serious red faces in capitals around the world.
The U.S. has now been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviet Union was.
The last Red Army troops left Feb. 15, 1989, driven out after nine years and 50 days by the U.S.-backed Afghan fighters known as mujahedin, or holy warriors. Ragtag yet ferocious, they were so spectrally elusive that the Soviet forces called them dukhi, or ghosts. A fitting term, perhaps, for a country that has been called “the graveyard of empires.”
Aren’t you proud to be an American? And our empire hasn’t even collapsed like the USSR’s–yet.
And history twists back on itself. In the Soviets’ war, the United States armed and aided the mujahedin; in this one, Russia is increasingly cooperating with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Moscow agreed this month to let the Western military alliance take armored vehicles through its territory. Last month, Russian counternarcotics agents went along on a joint NATO-Afghan drug raid.
It’s all so pointless…and yet it’s destroying us.
And what about Korea? Is our Nobel Peace Prize-winning President going to get us involved there too? It doesn’t look good:
The joint military exercises the US will conduct with South Korea’s navy on Sunday, off the Korean peninsula in the Yellow Sea, are taking on added significance as a message-bearer to North Korea, following Pyongyang’s shelling of the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong on Tuesday.
The Pentagon is quick to point out that the naval exercises are “defensive in nature” and that similar events have been held frequently. But US commanders also acknowledge that this joint exercise is a pointed reminder to the North of US military strength and America’s allegiance with South Korea. The US announced the exercises after the artillery barrage of Yeonpyeong, home to South Korean military bases and a small civilian population.
George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen has an article in the Washington Post in which he argues that the TSA’s naked body scans and “enhanced pat down” searches are unconstitutional. Interestingly, he cites a 2006 decision by then circuit court judge Samuel Alito:
…Alito stressed that screening procedures must be both “minimally intrusive” and “effective” – in other words, they must be “well-tailored to protect personal privacy,” and they must deliver on their promise of discovering serious threats. Alito upheld the practices at an airport checkpoint where passengers were first screened with walk-through magnetometers and then, if they set off an alarm, with hand-held wands. He wrote that airport searches are reasonable if they escalate “in invasiveness only after a lower level of screening disclose[s] a reason to conduct a more probing search.”
As currently used in U.S. airports, the new full-body scanners fail all of Alito’s tests. First, as European regulators have recognized, they could be much less intrusive without sacrificing effectiveness. For example, Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, the European airport that employs body-scanning machines most extensively, has incorporated crucial privacy and safety protections. Rejecting the “backscatter” machines used in the United States, which produce revealing images of the body and have raised concerns about radiation, the Dutch use scanners known as ProVision ATD, which employ radio waves with far lower frequencies than those used in common hand-held devices. If the software detects contraband or suspicious material under a passenger’s clothing, it projects an outline of that area of the body onto a gender-neutral, blob-like human image, instead of generating a virtually naked image of the passenger. The passenger can then be taken aside for secondary screening.
Rosen concludes:
…there’s good reason to believe that the machines are not effective in detecting the weapons they’re purportedly designed to identify. For U.S. courts, that’s yet another consideration that could make them constitutionally unreasonable.
Broadly, U.S. courts have held that “routine” searches of all travelers can be conducted at airports as long as they don’t threaten serious invasions of privacy. By contrast, “non-routine” searches, such as strip-searches or body-cavity searches, require some individualized suspicion – that is, some cause to suspect a particular traveler of wrongdoing. Neither virtual strip-searches nor intrusive pat-downs should be considered “routine,” and therefore courts should rule that neither can be used for primary screening.
The only question is whether the Supreme Court will stand up for individual rights or continue to accede to the executive branch’s demands for more Presidential power.
I’m going to end with a funny, but pretty realistic, satirical piece from The Onion: Frustrated Obama Sends Nation Rambling 75,000-Word E-Mail
The e-mail, which was titled “A couple things,” addressed countless topics in a dense, stream-of-consciousness rant that often went on for hundreds of words without any punctuation or paragraph breaks. Throughout, the president expressed his aggravation on subjects as disparate as the war in Afghanistan, the sluggish economic recovery, his live-in mother-in-law, China’s undervalued currency, Boston’s Logan Airport, and tort reform.
According to its timestamp, the e-mail was sent at 4:26 a.m.
“Hey Everyone,” read the first line of the president’s note, which at 27 megabytes proved too large for millions of Americans’ in-boxes. “I’m writing to you because I need to clear up some important issues. First and foremost, I want to say that this has nothing to do with the midterm elections because I was going to send an e-mail regardless of the outcome. However, I guess one could argue that, in the end, the midterms are an important measure of a president’s overall success, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call the results a referendum. Legislatively, I feel I’ve had a lot of success that I think history will judge quite favorably. I mean, pretty much every modern president has seen his party lose seats during a midterm, you know?
Go read the whole thing. It’s really funny, in an lolsob kind of way. Oh…and Fox News published the Onion story on their website without identifying it as satire.
[MABlue’s Saturday picks] It’s all about real life crime and investigation.
From Vanity Fair: The Case of the Vanishing Blonde
After a woman living in a hotel in Florida was raped, viciously beaten, and left for dead near the Everglades in 2005, the police investigation quickly went cold. But when the victim sued the Airport Regency, the hotel’s private detective, Ken Brennan, became obsessed with the case: how had the 21-year-old blonde disappeared from her room, unseen by security cameras? The author follows Brennan’s trail as the P.I. worked a chilling hunch that would lead him to other states, other crimes, and a man nobody else suspected.
Apparently, the Chandra Levy case is not resolved: Reasonable doubt in the Chandra Levy case
How reliable is the conviction of Ingmar Guandique for the 2001 murder, when the key evidence is a disputed prison confession?
There’s a debate going on about the goodness of religion between Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens. By all accounts, Hitch won the 1st round yesterday.
Hitchens defeats Blair in Canadian religion debate
What are you reading this morning?
The Wikileaks begin: breaking news and live blogging
Posted: November 25, 2010 Filed under: Breaking News, Diplomacy Nightmares | Tags: Wikileaks 46 CommentsSome of the Wikileak documents related to U.S. diplomacy are begining to show up in Newspapers throughout the world. I just read in the Jerusalem Post that there is evidence that Turkish citizens smuggled weapons to al-Qaida.
Wikileaks is planning to release files that show Turkey has helped al-Qaida in Iraq, according to London-based daily Al-Hayat. The newspaper also reported that the US helped the PKK, a Kurdish rebel organization.
One of the documents, a US military report, reportedly charges Turkey with failing to control its borders, because Iraqi citizens residing in Turkey provided al-Qaida with supplies to build bombs, guns and ammunition.
Minkoff Minx found this in the Ottawa Star.
Canada’s official lips were sealed tight on the matter, except to confirm dual overtures from Washington — David Jacobson, the U.S. ambassador to Ottawa, gave a head’s up to Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, while the Canadian embassy in D.C. is “currently engaging” with the State Department.
Sources in Ottawa acknowledged on background that even after the U.S. briefings the scope of what’s coming remains unclear. “We are not privy to the full contents of documents which may be leaked,” foreign affairs spokesperson Alain Cacchione said in an email to the Star.
I’m watching tweet after tweet of status updates from Wikileaks like this one:
wikileaks WikiLeaks
Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd briefed by Hillary Clinton on Wikileaks, according to SMH
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