Rhinocrisy

Following a post on Sepia Mutiny about those six imams who got kicked off a U.S. Airways flight, I did some reading around. The subject was briefly covered in a few shoddy press releases, skimpy on the details, and then wildly overblown for a few weeks by right-wing blogs. So far I have learned:

• The imams were doing a “security test” to look for weak points in the airline’s protocol.
• Some of them requested seat-belt extensions, which “research” by Greg Lang has revealed is “one heck of a weapon”.^*
• They seated themselves according to the layout favored by the 9/11 hijackers.
• They deliberately orchestrated this stunt in order to make money/raise a kerfuffle/make it easier for future terrorists to overwhelm our security.

Amy Goodman seems to be the only person who got the imams’ story, which, not surprisingly, is completely innocuous.

A while ago I read a really nice Fake Moon Landing web-site, which simultaneously argued from two different (absurd) positions - the moon landing was fake, done in a studio, etc., but at the same time the astronauts were clearly being dogged by aliens. Similar site here. This sort of having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too is infuriating, to say the least. Kind of makes you jealous of Superman, who at least gets to tangle with a smart opponent.

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^* This really deserves no comment, but let me just point out that, given the incredible range of dangerous items one can take onto an airplane, including a near-limitless number of potential edged weapons, a seat belt extender is perhaps the stupidest fucking choice you could make.

Brass band with tubas! Silly parade float. Tumblers! Clowns! Tumbling clowns! Tumbling clowns with tubas! Hooray! The Democrats have saved us from… err.. wait, what’s that? Is that a cloud? Is someone raining on my parade? No! Nooo!! Quick! Cover the crepe-paper flowers decorating the giant bust of Richard Helms! Secure those blue-liveried donkeys! Cover those color guard girls with a plastic tarp! For the love of god, someone get John Kerry off the mic before something terrible happens!

Gosh, isn’t that just awful? Even AFTER losing their majority in the Senate and the House, the Bush Administration has the gall, the nerve, the gumption to refuse the right of Guantanamo prisoners to challenge their detention? And on top of that to further claim that they can arbitrarily detain any non-citizen in the United States without the right to a hearing? Those rat bastards! How do they think they can get away with this? Rubbing their lawlessness in our faces!

Wait… what? What’s that you say, small boy?

[Puts hand to ear.]

You say this is all on the legal-up-and-up? They passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 just at the end of October, stripping away habeas corpus rights for non-citizens and legalizing the detention process? What, even creating legal means for allowing torture to be used as testimony?? Oooh, the nerve! The sheer nerve! Well, their last-minute-Charleying won’t save them, this time! The new Democratic majority will overturn that law, lickety-split. We’ll show them to mess with the will of the American People!

What is it now? Be quiet, small boy, be quiet! No one wants to hear from you. Wait… say that again… are you certain? It passed both the Senate and the House with substantial support from the Democrats? They sold us out? Even when electoral victory was imminent? Why? Why, small boy, why would they do such a thing?

Now what do we do? Who shall save us when our saviors themselves have left us in the mud? Leave me alone, small boy. I’m going to sit in this puddle and weep.

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Please excuse me for not making this a Seussian jingle, as it deserves to be. Busy week.

Check out this bizarre segment on Fox News, where a reporter has himself waterboarded in order to, essentially, redeem the technique. His report concludes that, since he was “feeling fine” moments after his “torture”, waterboarding was really “an efficient mechanism to get someone to talk and still have them alive and healthy”.

This should go without saying, but judging from the comments on the linked thread, it needs to be said: this is deeply fucked up. Let’s first briefly mention the fact that there really is no way to properly simulate torture in this situation - the victim is a volunteer, his interrogators^* are merely demonstrating, and he is free to tap out if he feels uncomfortable. Needless to say, this bears little resemblance to actual torture. Other accounts of waterboarding I have read emphasize that the purpose is to convince the subject that they are going to die; that this is an execution.

Now, what is apparently being proposed is that torture (as the reporter candidly calls it) is fine so long as it doesn’t do physical damage to the subject, or cause excrutiating pain. I’m appalled that this is being discussed. We are not seeking the most efficient and least physically invasive mechanism of information-extraction, here. The reason torture is unacceptable is not because it merely leaves scars on the victims (although, obviously, mental scars do not fade as quickly as physical ones), but because it makes a beast of both the torturer and the tortured, both of whom must lose a part of their humanity in the process.^† Cruelty should not be held as a virtue by civilized people. And I think civilization (in the sense of civility) is something we should still be aspiring towards.

But it seems I am wrong. I simply don’t comprehend how we’ve lost our way so thoroughly. This flies in the face of the most basic principles of freedom,^‡ which we allegedly prize so highly that we fight and die in wars around the world to preserve. We’re off the slippery slope. We’re in freefall down a sheer rock face. And there’s broken glass at the bottom.

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^* Who are apparently active duty soldiers, and quite gleeful that they know not only how to perform these torture techniques, but lots more. Presumably this story was reported with the eager cooperation of the Pentagon. I don’t know what to make of their desire to advertise their prowess in this odious field, especially since the “reporter” neglected to clarify where or whence this training came from.

^† Thus falls the argument that because some US Marines underwent waterboarding and other non-injurious torture techniques as part of POW resistance training during the 1990s, it is surely not too much for those we interrogate. But the situations are not analogous. This is not a clinical exercise; we are not merely monitoring resting heart rate, galvanic skin potential, blood pressure, etc. There are human actors involved. They know what they do, and to whom. And that’s far more important than the mere biology of it.

^‡ E.g., due process, presumption of innocence, and the basic right not to be subjected to barbaric punishments.

Someone on Wikipedia kicked my memory on this: last we heard, back in 2003, the CIA had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s kids in custody, and according to this article in The Age were using them to gain leverage on their father. There’s mention of the ambiguity of their status in this Amnesty International letter to Pervez Musharraf, but there’s nothing since then in LexisNexis. One assumes they remain in custody.

T to start random searches for bombs.

Now, let’s start off by saying that I recognize the obvious, OBVIOUS constitutional argument doesn’t really hold water, since the T is not a public place - you must pay for the privilege to ride on it, and it is technically private property. That said, it’s quasi-public and a quasi-governmental organisation, and there’s nothing quasi about random bag searches - they undisputably contradict the spirit of the fourth amendment. I imagine most Americans will accept the fear-driven logic that giving up liberties like the right to privacy are necessary in order to ensure public safety. Disproofs of this tomfoolery are difficult or impossible - might-have-beens can’t be demonstrated. All I can do is state my own preference: marginal deterrents to the miniscule risk of terrorism are not worth the sacrifice of very real personal rights. Especially as, being of brown hue and lately prone to sporting the facial hair, I’m disproportionately likely to be “randomly searched”. If this happens to me, I’m going to give someone the finger and get arrested, I think.

I would like to think that the San Francisco Police Department has a new and salutary practice for dealing with terrorists: arrest them and treat them as common criminals. Yesterday, an Afghani man, Omeed Aziz Popal, ran down at least 14 people on the streets of San Francisco, most of them in largely African-American and Jewish neighborhoods. Two of the victims were outside the Jewish Community Center. Neither the cops nor the media brought up his ethnicity or that of the victims’ neighborhoods, though today’s SF Chronicle update does describe the ethnicity of the victims. The only mention of terrorism was apparently on local TV Channel 2, which said the driver claimed to be a terrorist. The police denied his assertion.

This is brilliant. Deny the guy the attention he might have been seeking. And refuse to be terrorized. Hooray SFPD.

The sad part is that this probably isn’t a new modus operandi. If Popal had used a gun or a poison instead of a car, the news worldwide would have covered this carnage and there’s no doubt that the word “terrorism” would have been thrown around. The reason it wasn’t, in this case, was most likely because people are so inured to car violence.

It’s always nice to hear from a security professional who cares about security more than he cares about getting on CNN. Bruce Schneier is such a person. His new column at Wired News is worth a read.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics.

The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want….

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer.

I’ve been saying for years, the best response to terrorists is to treat them as particularly meddlesome criminals, not as threats to the basic essence of society. That gives them too much credit and our society too little. The only reason bin Laden and friends were able to destroy much of American democracy is because of their allies in high places.

Over at UFO Breakfast, Cmdr. J. Alva Scruggs is complaining about leechers on BitTorrent downloads. This is a pretty classic kind of example of people defecting from a mutual aid scenario.

My own morning was beclouded by the discovery that my spam filter has been a mite too strict. Leaving aside the possibility of spam poetry and the fact that it led to my favorite post ever, we should consider spam a serious problem. A large study by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group concluded that something like 80-85% of incoming e-mails are spam messages. This is an alarmingly high number.

But spam isn’t a tragedy of the commons scenario like the above; leechers damage the efficacy of torrents roughly proportionately - if there are few leechers, the system survives and isn’t really bothered. On the other hand, according to Spamhaus, a mere 176 spammers are responsible for 80% of the spam generated worldwide. Your pardon for doing this, but the best analagous situation I can think of is terrorism in an open society - open structures demanded by a free society allow the possibility of massive harm by a few malicious individuals.^*

At present a grand debate over how to properly treat such malicious individuals is being played out on the world stage, with on the one side those advocating “draining the swamp” and weakening the pins that hold up the philosophical edifice that drives many terrorists; and on the other those who advocate a muscular militarism as the appropriate response: kill them all and show others what will happen to terrorists.

This is extremely bad policy with regards to terrorism, but I’m not certain the same is true for spam. It’s certainly impossible to drain the swamp - the simple motivating factor is profit, and there will always be enough gullible idiots who are interested in purchasing bulk quantities of Cialis that profit is irremovable. Technical solutions seem to be mostly ineffective. However, the judicious application of punitive measures (not necessarily catching one of them in a public restroom and administering a severe caning) might prove efficacious. Imagine the class action lawsuit that could be brought to bear, for example. That would certainly be intimidating to future spammers.

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^* This isn’t quite appropriate, since spammers actually do cause widespread harm, as opposed to the mostly hypothetical harm caused by terrorists, who on average kill only a few thousand people a year.

… You promise to veto a bill because it contains provisions condemning the use of torture against detainees and sets up comissions to investigate the possibility of torture. You do that despite the fact that it passed the Senate 90 to 9.^*

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^* The nine: Allard (R-CO), Bond (R-MO), Coburn (R-OK), Cochran (R-MS), Cornyn (R-TX), Inhofe (R-OK), Roberts (R-KS), Sessions (R-AL), Stevens (R-AK)