The Deplorable Word
The words in Genesis warning that “you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die” were never more apt than today. To understand why requires a detour to David Brooks’ article Florence and the Drones. Brooks argues from Machiavelli that all Princes must occasionally judge some men too dangerous to live — even when the Prince in question is the President and the men condemned are Americans.
Machiavelli … had a different concept of political virtue. … In the real world, a great leader is called upon to create a civilized order for the city he serves. To create that order, to defeat the forces of anarchy and savagery, the virtuous leader is compelled to do hard things, to take, as it were, the sins of the situation upon himself … Machiavelli tells us that men are venal self-deceivers, but then he gives his Prince permission to do all these monstrous things, trusting him not to get carried away or turn into a monster himself.
But Brooks adds one big proviso. Citing the Founders suspicion of unfettered power he concludes that the Prince should only be allowed to do “monstrous things” only insofar as he could be watched.
Our founders were more careful. Our founders understood that leaders are as venal and untrustworthy as anybody else. They abhorred concentrated power, and they set up checks and balances to disperse it.
Our drone policy should take account of our founders’ superior realism. Drone strikes are so easy, hidden and abstract. There should be some independent judicial panel to review the kill lists. There should be an independent panel of former military and intelligence officers issuing reports on the program’s efficacy.
If you take Machiavelli’s tough-minded view of human nature, you have to be brutal to your enemies — but you also have to set up skeptical checks on the people you empower to destroy them.
But Brooks leaves one detail out. The ultimate basis upon which a Prince decides to drone somebody — or not to drone that somebody — is information. Information that is presented, gathered and evaluated outside the formal courts of law is exculpatory or derogatory. It is what is determines whether the target lives or dies.
Much of this information is plucked from what used to be called “the ether”: from signals intelligence, computer forensics, network intrusions and things of that nature. Since the words that we speak, the knowledge we possess, the links that we make are increasingly kept on computers it is naturally this knowledge that the Prince wants to examine.
For that reason the Department of Homeland Security has claimed the power to engage in the “suspicionless” search and seizure up to within 100 miles inland of the nation’s border. This in the interests of national security. An example of what this means in practice was illustrated by this incident.
At an Amtrak inspection point, Pascal Abidor showed his U.S. passport to a federal agent. He was ordered to move to the cafe car, where they removed his laptop from his luggage and “ordered Mr. Abidor to enter his password,” according to the lawsuit.
Agents asked him about pictures they found on his laptop, which included Hamas and Hezbollah rallies. He explained that he was earning a doctoral degree at a Canadian university on the topic of the modern history of Shiites in Lebanon.
He was handcuffed and then jailed for three hours while the authorities looked through his computer while numerous agents questioned him, according to the suit, which is pending in New York federal court.
But stop for a moment to consider: what is your computer? Or equally vexing, where is your computer? In the case of Pascal Abidor it was a physical thing. But it is not always so physical. Many readers out there may have a GMail or Hotmail account. Where does that live? Suppose you had nothing but a Chromebook or a similar device which has nearly no local storage, storing all such applications and data ‘remotely’ — as we quaintly put it. Where is your computer then?
Suppose you enter a country without any computer at all and simply rent one past the 100 mile border limit? Is that your computer? The issue was more than hypothetical for three Americans of Palestinian descent who were stopped at Ben Gurion airport and told to log in to their Gmail accounts.
During her questioning, Doughman says her interrogator pointed a browser to gmail.com and said “log in.” Shocked, Doughman complied. The interrogator then searched through her email using keywords such as “Palestine” and “International Solidarity Movement,” occasionally reading lines out loud and writing down contact names and other personal info.
Their computers were apparently not even physically present. The information sought was online. The real issue, as the recent jurisprudence in the US courts shows, is really not about whether the government can access your computer. It is really about whether it can force you to divulge your password.
The state apparently could, until an 11th circuit court decision court reversed a lower court ruling. For the moment the issue is in the courts. Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy explains:
The important decision is In re Grand Jury Subpoena Duces Tecum Dated March 25, 2011. From the opinion by Judge Tjoflat:
We hold that the act of Doe’s decryption and production of the contents of the hard drives would sufficiently implicate the Fifth Amendment privilege. We reach this holding by concluding that (1) Doe’s decryption and production of the contents of the drives would be testimonial, not merely a physical act; and (2) the explicit and implicit factual communications associated with the decryption and production are not foregone conclusions.
First, the decryption and production of the hard drives would require the use of the contents of Doe’s mind and could not be fairly characterized as a physical act that would be nontestimonial in nature. We conclude that the decryption and production would be tantamount to testimony by Doe of his knowledge of the existence and location of potentially incriminating files; of his possession, control, and access to the encrypted portions of the drives; and of his capability to decrypt the files.
We are unpersuaded by the Government’s derivation of the key/combination analogy in arguing that Doe’s production of the unencrypted files would be nothing more than a physical nontestimonial transfer. The Government attempts to avoid the analogy by arguing that it does not seek the combination or the key, but rather the contents. This argument badly misses the mark. In Fisher, where the analogy was born, and again in Hubbell, the Government never sought the “key” or the “combination” to the safe for its own sake; rather, the Government sought the files being withheld, just as the Government does here. Hubbell, 530 U.S. at 38, 120 S. Ct. at 2044 (trying to compel production of documents); Fisher v. United States, 425 U.S. at 394–95, 96 S. Ct. at 1572–73 (seeking to access contents possessed by attorneys).
Requiring Doe to use a decryption password is most certainly more akin to requiring the production of a combination because both demand the use of the contents of the mind, and the production is accompanied by the implied factual statements noted above that could prove to be incriminatory. See Hubbell, 530 U.S. at 43, 120 S. Ct. at 2047. Hence, we conclude that what the Government seeks to compel in this case, the decryption and production of the contents of the hard drives, is testimonial in character.
Moving to the second point, the question becomes whether the purported testimony was a “foregone conclusion.” We think not. Nothing in the record before us reveals that the Government knew whether any files exist or the location of those files on the hard drives; what’s more, nothing in the record illustrates that the Government knew with reasonable particularity that Doe was even capable of accessing the encrypted portions of the drives. . . .
This throws into sharper contrast some of the issues touched on by David Brooks. Droning is not just about due process; it is inextricably connected with the issue of what the State can know and not know. The constraint on condemnation or exculpation is information. And you have to be careful that the state gets not only the parts that get you into trouble but also the parts that get you out of it. If page 1 may doom you and page 2 may save you, how much is in your interest to reveal to the state?
Some say all of it. Why not reveal all to the state if “you have nothing to hide”? The state assumes that whenever it can’t get at something, there is something to hide. In the 11th circuit decision quoted by Kerr, the state based its demand for a password on the fact that parts of the defendants hard disk were encrypted. And therefore they alleged it probable that the defendant had something to hide. But the defendant successfully argued that empty encrypted sections of the disk could be inaccessible. The state had no grounds for presuming that whatever was inaccessible was probably of a criminal nature. It could literally be nothing.
Of course many of us might conclude that one way to completely safe from the drones is to live your life like the Truman Show. In full view. With nothing hidden no guilt can be imputed. You hope. So while the debate over how to regulate drones has been centered around the question of due process, by its nature its resolution will involve to an almost equal degree the 4th and 5th Amendments.
Do you get to keep the contents of your mind and its aides-memoir secret? Perhaps not in all history have questions of knowledge become of such practical importance to the world. When a word can attract a drone and also deflect it, then access to what’s in your head can become very consequential.
The situation calls to mind a scene in CS Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. Children traveling through dimensions find themselves in an magnificent but dead city ruled by a Queen. They look out on the empty glory and asked how the city came to die. It died through the Deplorable Word.
Low down and near the horizon hung a great, red sun, far bigger than our sun. Digory felt at once that it was also older than ours: a sun near the end of its life, weary of looking down upon that world. To the left of the sun, and higher up, there was a single star, big and bright. Those were the only two things to be seen in the dark sky; they made a dismal group. And on the earth, in every direction, as far as the eye could reach, there spread a vast city in which there was no living thing to be seen. And all the temples, towers, palaces, pyramids, and bridges cast long, disastrous-looking shadows in the light of that withered sun. Once a great river had flowed through the city, but the water had long since vanished, and it was now only a wide ditch of grey dust.
“Look well on that which no eyes will ever see again,” said the Queen. “Such was Charn, that great city, the city of the King of Kings, the wonder of the world, perhaps of all worlds. Does your uncle rule any city as great as this, boy?”
“No,” said Digory. He was going to explain that Uncle Andrew didn’t rule any cities, but the Queen went on:
“It is silent now. But I have stood here when the whole air was full of the noises of Charn; the trampling of feet, the creaking of wheels, the cracking of the whips and the groaning of slaves, the thunder of chariots, and the sacrificial drums beating in the temples. I have stood here (but that was near the end) when the roar of battle went up from every street and the river of Charn ran red.” She paused and added, “All in one moment one woman blotted it out for ever.”
“Who?” said Digory in a faint voice; but he had already guessed the answer.
“I,” said the Queen. “I, Jadis the last Queen, but the Queen of the World.”
The two children stood silent, shivering in the cold wind.
“It was my sister’s fault,” said the Queen. “She drove me to it. May the curse of all the Powers rest upon her forever! At any moment I was ready to make peace—yes and to spare her life too, if only she would yield me the throne. But she would not. Her pride has destroyed the whole world. Even after the war had begun, there was a solemn promise that neither side would use Magic. But when she broke her promise, what could I do? Fool! As if she did not know that I had more Magic than she! She even knew that I had the secret of the Deplorable Word. Did she think—she was always a weakling—that I would not use it?”
“What was it?” said Digory.
“That was the secret of secrets,” said the Queen Jadis. “It had long been known to the great kings of our race that there was a word which, if spoken with the proper ceremonies, would destroy all living things except the one who spoke it. But the ancient kings were weak and softhearted and bound themselves and all who should come after them with great oaths never even to seek after the knowledge of that word. But I learned it in a secret place and paid a terrible price to learn it. I did not use it until she forced me to it. I fought to overcome her by every other means. I poured out the blood of my armies like water—”
“Beast!” muttered Polly.
“The last great battle,” said the Queen, “raged for three days here in Charn itself. For three days I looked down upon it from this very spot. I did not use my power till the last of my soldiers had fallen, and the accursed woman, my sister, at the head of her rebels was halfway up those great stairs that lead up from the city to the terrace. Then I waited till we were so close that we could see one another’s faces. She flashed her horrible, wicked eyes upon me and said, “Victory.” “Yes,” said I, “Victory, but not yours.” Then I spoke the Deplorable Word. A moment later I was the only living thing beneath the sun.”
From the Deplorable Word to the Deplorable Password. Power in our technological age is increasingly about information. Who said one couldn’t learn anything from Genesis? Or that magic was dead? Ask the snake, is the knowledge worth it, or what?
Or is the root of the problem the decision to fight terrorism through law enforcement? To convert war into a judicial process? War was by its definition is illogical and unbearable. War was madness, an insanity that could only be escaped through the door of victory. The administration has tried to furnish this madhouse with stupid idealistic tapestries, thereby making us think it possible to abide in what Sherman once called Hell.
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Wretchard
“Much of this information is plucked for what used to be called “the ether”: from signals intelligence,”
I’m guessing the “for” ought to be a “from”.
Great article, sometimes when I put on my tinfoil hat I imagine that the list of sites I visited, and the articles that I read on the net would become proof of a strange attitude of mind if in fact they are collecting and analyzing all of our daily travels as we collect information about the impending storm.
“to drone” I like it!
Kind of like this: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/
In the past we innocently believed that it was important to protect the freedoms of individuals from the coercive powers of the State. Naively we asserted that if governments did not consider our rights and freedoms in their actions then the Law and the courts would do it for them.
Now, instead of protecting our freedoms from the coercive actions by the State, the courts often work hand in glove with the State to remove and to deny traditional rights and freedoms. In the case of demanding unfettered access to computers or other sources of digital information, it is the right to privacy that is being taken away. To justify this violation of our privacy, the State claims it is all in a good cause – the fight of caring government to make us safer – and all we have to do to feel safer is give up a few rights to our privacy.
The deplorable words spoken by the State are “you are no longer a private individual”.
Before scanners, nosy airport staff used to rifle through one’s hand luggage. My response to that was to make sure the first things they came across were dirty underwear and a half eaten sandwich. Amazing how that shortened up the snooping process. I wonder if there are any digital equivalents that will make the State lose interest in snooping around somebody’s digitally stored information. Maybe bore the snoopers to tears with a hard drive full of every EPA regulation ever made?
A prince, being truly a subject of war, has excuses. But Obambus drones like a callous emperor universal. That’s why it grates on those who would welcome a leader sufficiently circumspect to name and kill our warring enemies.
I never understood the folks who said Obama was a great orator, I always thought he droned on and on. But I always had the option to stop listened before he droned me to death.
Guess I don’t have that option any more.
All this is so predictable and frustrating. Of course these idiots will push the boundaries – that’s the predictable part.
What isn’t so predictable is what the response will be. We keep getting these shocks to our culture. One of these days it’ll be the shock that broke the mirage’s back, and people will be forced to admit it’s all gone south.
But our judicial process is already illogical. Crimes against citizens are given short shrift, but crimes against the State are prosecuted with all possible vigor. Prosecutors use “questionable” (meaning deplorable) tactics to secure guilty pleas in over 95% of cases. Jury trials are nearly a thing of the past.
War was madness, an insanity that could only be escaped through the door of victory. The administration has tried to furnish this madhouse with stupid idealistic tapestries, thereby making us think it possible to abide in what Sherman once called Hell.
I think this administration is full of people who are right at home in a madhouse. Right at home in Hell too, for that matter.
In the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, the court naturally focused on admissability of evidence and on the validity of gathering evidence. Their reasoning seems very sound to me.
However, in combating terrorism, intelligence is far more critical than evidence.
Sheer random search, seizure, interrogation etc is a lousy way of gleaning intelligence. There has to be a distinct probability factor factored in ahead
of time or you are virtually guaranteed to come up with nothing useful.
And in courts of law, evidence that does not conform to the tenets of good intelligence is not fit for human consumption.
#1 fixed typo
Bobby Lee sat his horse on Marye’s Heights and watched as the Union troops “melted like snow” under the hellish drone of Confederate rifle fire, and said; “It is well that war is so terrible, lest we should grow fond of it.”
By the use of autonomous machines we have relieved ourselves of the discipline imposed by having to witness just how terrible the war we wage is.
And our leaders have grown fond of it. It is power without a price.
I wonder if the relentless roll of casualties bore down on FDR, and aged him so rapidly in his last four years?
The frat boy was gone completely from G. Bush by the time he left office. All those coffins on all those planes rolling down the tarmac at Andrews, day after day.
Of course the drones will never produce the 6,000 dead in an hour at Cold Harbor, or 100,000 in a day on the fields of Picardy.
But they can produce a sense of invulnerability in Obama, and a rage of impotence in his targets.
The combined working of these two can easily lead us to events terrible enough to melt our fondness for war ’Like snow.’
““suspicionless” search and seizure up to within 100 miles inland of the nation’s border.”
Customs Officers, all from agencies within Homeland Security, from the US Coast Guard, ICE, Border Patrol, and CBP, are authorized to conduct warrantless searches at the border or the functional equivalent of the border without restraint by the 4th Amendment. That last bit, the “functional equivalent of the border” or a “point of entry,” includes any airport and any ship that could be bound for the United States. That is why the Coast Guard rides on Navy ships to conduct searches of drug runners in the Caribbean.
Note that the TSA is not on that list. They conduct administrative safety inspections, not warrantless searches. TSA “officers” are not LEOs but are really just government agents. If TSA finds something they can deny entry and make a referral to a LEO.
How much of the US is within 100 miles of an airport? What percentage of the population are normally located in that area? Under the Obama Administration doctrine any person or object within 100 miles of any point of entry is without 4th Amendment protection.
It was always true that a Customs Officer engaged in hot pursuit could follow a suspect anywhere and then search them. If someone hadn’t been cleared then they were not legally in the US and the 4th Amendment protections did not apply. The ex cathedra assertion that being within 100 miles of the border lays you open to a warrantless search without any hot pursuit from a point of entry or location outside the US is novel and troubling.
The Democrats spent generations deriding the Republicans as stuck up hypocrites. They argued that character does not count, only intentions and technical skill. Their defense of the Clintons was driven by their desire to argue that it was fundamentally illegitimate for any conservative to impose their moral values by sitting in judgement on private conduct. Job applications in the private sphere are made to resemble those in government where only credentials and objective skills can be considered. The Left have given themselves an enormous escape clause however with the claim that they can pull a trump card from the most subjective criteria of all, those “intentions.” That makes the game fatally rigged. If a conservative attempts to sit in judgement then they can only use objective standards and must ignore moral qualities but a socialist can be absolved of gross incompetence or overt criminality.
The result of this is to void the Constitution and give unlimited power to the very people that we were told we could not make moral judgements about or whose private lives are not to be investigated. There has never been a POTUS who was less vetted less investigated and less experienced that Barack Hussein Obama. He is now given the power to decide who lives and dies. The war is real. The threats are real. We do need mechanisms to investigate possible threats identify targets and prosecute or eliminate as appropriate. The character of the people controlling that process and making those decisions matters.
History is rife with examples of where important intelligence was available, but was not acted upon in a timely fashion. Before 9/11 the government knew that the future hijackers were in flight school, but did not care about learning to land. On Dec 7, 1941, the Army radar station in Hawaii saw the approaching Japanese aircraft and assumed they were friendly aricraft that were expected that day.
(When you ASS U ME you make an ASS out of U and ME.)
Data collection is not the objective, getting inside your enemy’s OODA loop is.
Note that the acronym stands for Orient, Observe, Decide and Act.
The weakness of the Obama Administration is obvious just from that acronym. They do no ACT, they “lead from behind”.
We had to destroy the village to save it.
We had to destroy Freedom to keep us all free.
Uh huh.
The illusion will continue for some time, but the Republic is well and truly dead. What comes after is anybody’s guess.
Stupidity and apathy killed it. Stupidity in the people that were chosen to administer the Republic, and apathy on the parts of a lazy citizenry that thought nothing could possibly break the system, and has repeatedly voted in people who have worked against the best interests of the citizens and their Constitution.
And it can’t be fixed because no one in those high places of public office has the humility to accept defeat, has the humility to say how they have betrayed the people and the law.
Much like the Queen of Charn, they would rather see it smashed to pieces than accept the fact that they deserve to lose and go home. Too big to fail, too stubborn to quit, too proud and vain to admit they have screwed up the system they were entrusted to be stewards of.
What fun, the Administration is creating “armies” outside of legislative authority under the guise of “law enforcement.” “Who us violate Posse Comitatus! Never!”
It could be argued that taxpayer money is being used to create multiple private armies that can be merged into one under direct command of the President with no checks what so ever. How well those private armies would do if large numbers of both the populace and the “regulars” went against them is another question.
Small point:
Machiavelli was writing in contrast to what had just preceded him: that is, the attempt by Savonarola to establish “the rule of the saints” in Florence. (Machiavelli arrived back in Florence two weeks after Sav. was burned.) Instead of the idealistic state where “Christ was king of Florence”,
Machiavelli stressed the opposite–complete and utter pragmatism. He cited the example of Cesare Borgia as his ideal prince (lie, steal, cheat, deceive; do whatever is necessary for the greater good).
“In the real world, a great leader is called upon to create a civilized order for the city he serves. To create that order, to defeat the forces of anarchy and savagery, the virtuous leader is compelled to do hard things, to take, as it were, the sins of the situation upon himself”
That reminds me of the Mahabharata, how finally there was a great war that threatened to destroy all life. When the war started, both sides made “solemn promises” on how to conduct it, just like Queen Jadis and her sister. By the end, every promise had been broken. And often the promises were broken at the urging of God himself, Krishna. He ordered Yuddhistira the Truthful to lie in order to break his enemy’s will to fight; he sank Karna’s chariot wheel in the mud, then ordered Arjuna to shoot him while he was helpless; and he ordered Bhim to strike Duryodhan below the belt in their single combat, breaking his leg and defeating him. It’s a paradox, but it was all done to protect Dharma, the proper working out of the universe. God can break the rules, because God makes the rules and knows why he makes them. Was Machiavelli thinking along those lines when he allowed his Prince to do even criminal acts? Because a Prince is responsible for the proper working of his realm and can’t be judged the way a normal individual is.
The question then becomes, whose side is the ruler on? Is Obama protecting Dharma or Justice by breaking the rules? Or is he like Duryodhan, cheating and using magic for his own advantage?
An interview with Jared Diamond I heard this morning on the radio had me thinking about this very thing.
In traditional tribal societies everyone knew everything about everyone else. There were so secrets to be uncovered. If a stranger walked into your territory it was safe to assume that he was either there to attack you or to scout out a planned attack by his own village. Best bet was just to kill anyone you didn’t know.
In our modern societies we encounter strangers every day without fear. I think this tacit agreement with all of it’s social rules, rests on very thin ice. It only takes one Sandy Hook or 9/11 to throw the whole thing off for millions of people and for years down the road.
Wretchard brings up an example from Israel which is more tribal in many ways than the US. At Ben Gurion the assumption is very much the same as that of the traditional tribesman. All strangers are assumed to be hostile until otherwise proven.
In the past you might have to bring your daughter to marry the son of the Chief to remove the distrusted status of Stranger. These days you show us your facebook account and this is now common business practice in the US. Want to join our tribe here an Inentech? Give us your passwords. Oh, and we are going to need some of your urine too.
The Drone wars take things to a new level. There are no conventions because we are the only SOBs capable of pulling it off at the current time. That will change and new rules will develop over time just as the mountain tribe and the river tribe made certain rules to prevent unwanted conflict.
I think it is already established that our lives on the internet are not in any way private. It is just too easy for other people to get to. I realized this when I was posting on a political forum where we had all assumed anonymity. It was a small group, not as big or sophisticated as PJM and we got to know each other pretty well within the limits of our mutual facade.
One day someone posted a picture of his daughter who had won a cheerleading contest. Someone else in the group, violating all assumed rules of our little community, was able to track the photo and expose the individual’s personal profile, name, address, everything. The site owner refused to banish the violator. That was it for me. I left the strange little semi-anonymous tribe.
Government will never set limits on whom it can kill or what information they can steal. Those need to be imposed by the governed or outside forces. Thus far it looks like we are not doing very well at protecting our autonomy.
Just as “Machiavelli … had a different concept of political virtue”, individuals have a very different concept of “voting twice”, “intent”, “voter fraud”, etc.
http://www.wcpo.com/dpp/news/region_central_cincinnati/downtown/Poll-worker-accused-of-voter-fraud-in-Hamilton-County-speaks-out
Even when this paid poll worker, a person who’s responsibility is to maintain the integrity of voting is presented with the fact that she voted twice, even after she admits to a newspaper reporter on the public record that she voted twice, she still states “There’s absolutely no intent on my part to commit voter fraud,” said Richardson.
The article points to her filling out absentee ballots for her and 3 others that may or may not live at her residence. Her granddaughter also voted twice. I’m sure she is simply following her grandmother’s lead. Her defense, “”Have they never heard of a simple mistake? Have they never heard of overlooking? Mailing in a ballot or registering to vote at a precinct after you’ve forgotten that you mailed in a ballot?” said Richardson.
She has been a poll worker since 1988. Since 1988 she has worked as a guardian of our democratic system of voting. It would be easy to point to absentee ballots as the culprit in all this. We have made it too easy for people to vote twice. Unfortunately, the problem is systemic. No one had to pay this women to do this. In their zeal to ensure that their side wins this woman did what she and many others do. They justify their behavior however they can and however they want. Because in the end it doesn’t matter. Until the time they walk to their mailbox only to find the check from the government is not there anymore, the police don’t answer the 911 calls anymore, their senator doesn’t respond because they are off to the Dominican Republic with their donors. I’m thinking at that point they are going to wish they had their guns and ammo back.
There are two kinds of killing by drone. One is where some suspected enemy fighters are observed, determined to be hostile and then killed at an opportune time, perhaps so to get as many of them as possible and destroy their equipment. This is no different than a manned aircraft hitting a target during an “armed reconnaissance” mission (love that term, it sounds so innocent and the exact opposite of what it really is).
The other kind of killing is when we know the guy’s name, political affiliation, and perhaps even his favorite Playboy Playmate. He is still judged to be an enemy though, so the significance of this distinction escapes me. I suspect it is because our political leadership knows that there are people who would like to do the same to them and there is a form of honor among thieves, so to speak.
When the USAAF intercepted Adm Yamamoto’s Betty bomber in 1943 and shot it down with the express purpose of killing him, before the mission the lawyers ruminated on whether it was a legal thing to do. Of course they did not consider if it was legal to kill the rest of the people aboard the Betty and the pilots of the Zero escort fighters; that was taken as self evident; they would have killed them anyway if they ran across them accidentally.
There were attempts to kill Hitler in WWII as well, and one of the best descriptions is in semi-fictional form in the novel The Wooden Wolf. I do not recall reading if there were any legal concerns over getting Hitler; maybe it’s because he was Hitler.
But in those cases we were at war, real, declared war. Even G.W. Bush called it a war. Today the Obama Admin uses the methods it does because they do not want to have to admit there is a war. As a recent AP article said, Obama is a hawk who does not want to admit it.
To paraphrase something said about Sen McCarthy, today we have people who shout from the rooftops how they are afraid that human rights are being violated and then quietly go down into the basement and order people to be killed.
That’s the express ticket to human flourishing – replace Matthew, Mark, Luke and John with Niccolò Machiavelli.
Perhaps the Grand Delusion of modernity is that people really think they are smarter than their ancestors from 500, 1000 or 2000 years ago. College professors certainly do. Idiots.
Our ancestors did not agree on how the Rules were made, but they knew there were Rules and that they didn’t originate with Uncle Henry. Why stop at Machiavelli? Nietzsche was, at least, an honest atheist. Why should humans value truth and beauty, he said, when deceit and ugliness were so much easier?
stevesmith @ 3: “Maybe bore the snoopers to tears with a hard drive full of every EPA regulation ever made?”
That would not be a single hard drive. That would need a whole server farm!
Which gets to the real point — none of this really matters, because the Deplorable Word(s) have already been spoken & written. Courts (overhead) and Homeland Security (overhead) can fence about the scope of the authority of the Executive (overhead) to control us peons. But we peons can no longer pay for all the overhead.
The Deplorable Words of governmental regulation have driven out production and raised non-productive expenditures. (See Tainter’s “Collapse of Complex Societies” — nothing new here for the human race; this has all happended before). The only difference from Lewis’s fiction is that the Deplorable Words take decades to destroy society.
What’s to be done?, as Lenin would have asked. Eat, drink, and be merry while les bon temps roule. And plan on how to convey information across a gap of reduced technology to the future inevitable rebirth of civilization. Hard drives are not going to cut it.
It has been reported that Obama needs the evidence dumbed down to the level of Baseball Cards from which he chooses who to kill…
To me that says the man who makes the cards, makes the list.
” what is your computer? Or equally vexing, where is your computer?”
What are your papers? Where are your papers?
The Fourth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
If this does not apply to either your computer or to where you store your information, then the first amendment freedom of the press does not apply to the modern news media: it doesn’t even apply to anything beyond the movable type press and on site filing cabinets.
Wretchard elicits in my mind the thought that when we fail to meet foreign armies with the martial violence that they deserve and attempt to police the ideological commons instead that we in essence redirect the violence that should be reserved for aggressors and use it nearly indiscriminately against the common populace whom we putatively hope to protect. In effect, we should live in a dangerous police state where woman are shot in the still of the morning for impersonating a 270 pound black man. That all travel and communication be sifted by the government because 11 Arabs decided to take flying lessons. That none should have the right to protect themselves because a legally medicated psychopath killed little children in a school that was not surrounded by barbed wire. That 2500 Florencia’s are richly armed because an even more richly armed state profits from the prohibition of self-medicating behavior.
In warfare of the ages, it is the city of Charn that is destroyed and held high like a lifeless corpse to pronounce victory. The city of the commons must be destroyed to preserve it for the victory of a few. Who are we to ask what is reasonable?
Our Dear Leader has become totally confused in smudging the distinction between covert and explicit means of combat and intelligence gathering, and between foreign and domestic policy.
Covert conflict attempts to remove action from partisan debate; for example, Obama can clandestinely pursue Bush’s policy while declining to explain it daily to the press. This has a limited effectiveness and ultimately depends on the universal answer for all war policy in a representative society–success, which cures all. “Covert” warfare delays the political day of reckoning.
It is nice to have a legal rationale as a guide in covert action, but we should not expect anything consistent or comprehensive. Introducing more than the rules of war will deteriorate into an introduction of the political (and politically correct) into the arena where the action flees to avoid politics, at least for a time, in the name of effectiveness. Should a prospective drone target have the right to counsel in the targeting deliberations?
In terms of what policy does one explain the public disqualification of the Fort Hood casualties from the Purple Heart because the casualties were not the result of enemy action, while sanctioning a covert military operation to kill the person who inspired the action? And all relevant actors are/were US citizens. The answer apparently is that in the public political arena we dare not name the enemy as militant islamics, but we can and do name, and kill, the enemy in the covert arena, while the public pretrial of the actual shooter at Fort Hood drags on into its fourth year.
The Dear Leader has tried to make the covert means into public proof that he has fortitude and a policy where none exists. Hence, due process raises its inconvenient head. In addition, having dragged the formerly covert drone into the public arena, his idiot sidekicks regard it, and supportive covert intelligence methods as well, as suitable for domestic use. They have lost their bearings and were not very good at this to begin with.
I don’t get any of this.
If I have some papers in my home, the government can get a warrant and come and grab them. If I have some info on my computer, physical or cloud, ditto – let them get a warrant and go around me and get them.
If I have an encrypted document in my home, can the government force me to unencrypt it? I think not. Fifth amendment. Does Homeland Security give them a trump over that Constitution?
So what about these drone strikes against Americans or wog, at home or abroad? Well. There is no statute in domestic jurisprudence that allows it. Yet we’ve had the issue of “presidential findings” that allow Captain Willard to go after Colonel Kurtz with extreme prejudice. Hmm.
Here’s the thing, against Jihad, we don’t really have any legal, moral, or traditional answer. Well we do – under Westphalian traditions we can declare it an act of war and wipe out their entire home nation. Works for me. I don’t know what kind of legal infrastructure one can use to support drone strikes, yet in many ways they seem an almost perfect answer to Jihad, short of national annihilation. As far as I know, about the one thing the Obambus Regime has ever done well is their use of drones.
And so, I remain confused.
What else? Brooks and Machiavelli. Wellll, this is crap. Brooks seems to mean well, but Earth to NYTimes: we ain’t got no princes ‘roun heah. If you want an example of someone who took the moral burden on himself, I give you George W. Bush. And if there are any lessons from history, it is that taking on this burden will destroy you. Yet war is like that. Problem is nobody seems to want to declare war even on Jihad. So we remain in a moral fog.
Finally, the Deplorable Word. There is a lesson there too, which is that even the winner, loses. Well. I’m a big C.S. Lewis fan, but I just don’t know about this one. On this one, I might just go with Machiavelli: winning is better even if it’s not risk-free or cost-free, there is just no percentage in losing.
And perhaps even less in never declaring a winner, but that would seem to call for some different fables, perhaps the survival of the Ring.
If memory serves, any municipal airport engaged in landing and launching flights to and from destinations outside U.S. territory is a “port of entry.” By extention – and you can be CERTAIN that this administration will insist on this – all territory within a 100 mile radius of such a facility falls under the authority claimed in this execrable power grab.
Well, gee whiz, there’s a lot of grassy airstrips where small planes – “civil aviation” – can land, coming in from God-knows-where…
Consider that the same definition can be stretched to include almost any city, town, or landing along the Mississippi and its tributaries. Hmmm. How many rivers does that include? And what is the watershed of all those rivers, creeks, and streams? Hey! If you can portage a canoe along the stream bed, it qualifies as a logically irrefutable extention of the “Port of Entry” which makes it the same – LEGALLY – as the U.S. Border.
The City of Stockton, CA, lies 75 miles to the east of San Francisco, and has a DEEP-DRAFT harbor, with berthing facilities for 17 ocean-going vessels. It’s accessible from the Pacific Ocean to vessels passing under the Golden Gate Bridge, past Angel and Alcatraz Islands, taking the northern branch of the San Francisco Bay past the Carquinez Straights, past Suisun Bay, Fairfield, and following the San Joaquin River deep channels through the delta into the heart of California’s Central Valley. Container ships can come in, carrying ANYTHING in those containers – humans, weapons, nuclear devices, WMD, whatnot. No wonder our dear leider feels it’s so important to check everyone’s political reliability…
You can be sure that his administration, which doesn’t give a shit about the hundreds of people who died as direct result of its deliberate policy of allowing military-grade weapons to be delivered to the Mexican DRUG CARTELS via Operation Fast and Furious, is not going to fret about obliterating U.S. citizens’ fourth amendment rights.
“Whadder YOU gonna do about it, punk?”
If you resist a TSA agent asking you to submit to a search, even if the agent stands near the entrance to a college football stadium in Bozeman, Montana, you will be subject to arrest and a $5,000.00 fine. This is if you resist or try to walk away; you’re not ALLOWED to say, “Well, I really didn’t want to go in and watch my kid play this last college game…” Once one of these TSA agents makes the request, YOU ARE REQUIRED TO SUBMIT to their search. And increasingly they are being deployed around the nation in places that have NO CONNECTION TO TRANSPORTATION, except that YOU have to use some sort of transportation (including foot traffic) to arrive there.
How are they trained?
Are they sworn officers of any court?
Do they swear to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic?
Or are they sworn to serve Obama the person?
Can anyone provide a convincing argument that we are NOT living in a police state RIGHT NOW?
I feel foolish when I listen to these arguments about drone killings. As people compare this to earlier wartime tactics I can’t find any side to support. Not the leftists who wring their hands over human rights and the ignoring of our system of justice. Not rightwingers who fret about government by murder. Not supporters of the tactic on either side who tell me to toughen up and look at the ends and never mind the means.
Because how I feel is summed up in Patton’s words at the end of the movie of the same name:
Correspondent: General, we’re told of wonder weapons the Germans were working on: Long-range rockets, push-button bombing weapons that don’t need soldiers. What’s your take on that?
Patton: Wonder weapons? My God, I don’t see the wonder in them. Killing without heroics. Nothing is glorified, nothing is reaffirmed. No heroes, no cowards, no troops. No generals. Only those that are left alive and those that are left… dead.
It’s more than just an aesthetic distaste. It’s the feeling that we’re taking something that should be important – taking life and losing life – and turning it into something antiseptic and meaningless. It’s now really nothing more than a stray piece of computer code, a few keys punched and then back to our lives, which are now every bit as meaningless as the deaths we’ve caused.
The use of drones fills the vacuum of a public commitment. A war must be justified by a congress that is answerable to an American public whereas a 24/7 slow drip of assassination eventually even loses its newsworthiness because such statistics accrue slowly. Macro violence draws macro protest but the death of a man, what protestations shall he utter? Blame the gun blame the drone?
Hmmm. Someone decided that David Petraeus’ political career had to be “taken out” too, I wonder who green lighted that decision?
20 @visitor
Yes, I believe an article reported that crucial decisions are placed on the Resolute desk in the form of an 7th grader’s love note (Billy, will you go out with me? Check: []Yes []No []Maybe)
But it’s actually presented in the old shop-worn form of Hegel’s dialectic of thesis/antithesis/synthesis. I also believe that the article in question basically admitted this, along with the fact that the framers of the three-checkmark-questions are the ones who do end up making the real decisions by properly shaping the “question”.
26. Dr. Mabuse
“It’s more than just an aesthetic distaste. It’s the feeling that we’re taking something that should be important – taking life and losing life – and turning it into something antiseptic and meaningless. It’s now really nothing more than a stray piece of computer code, a few keys punched and then back to our lives, which are now every bit as meaningless as the deaths we’ve caused.”
Very well said.
When, not psychopaths but governments, treat people as nothing more than ambulatory sacs of chemicals then what has become of government and what has become of us?
The Gatekeepers movie about the heads of Shin Bet describing their activities over the years, fits right into to the theme of this post.
Mad Fiddler, Lewiston Idaho is a port too, connected to the Pacific Ocean. The reach of the federal government is quite extensive.
18. No, the delusion is that intelligence and knowledge are virtues. It is plainly obvious that we know considerably more than our ancestors, but it is hubris to imagine such knowledge is a virtue. Knowledge is power, and power is not a virtue or a vice, but imagining it to be a virtue is one of the most dangerous things in this world. Terrible as Genghis Khan was, he never had access to nuclear weapons. Power without virtue kills multitudes, and if power itself be a virtue, then Mao, Stalin and Hitler were quite virtuous.
@33, I do not know more than my ancestors, nor does anyone else. I do have a different information set than my farming forbears, but that is all. Collectively, we do not know more except that there are more of us, each a store of information. The individual drive is still full of 1′s and 0′s to capacity.
We Can process the bits faster, but processing without reason is just that, processing.
Knowledge is coordinated data.
Intelligence is coordinated knowledge.
Humans are no more intelligent now than 10k years ago.
ta
M
Gizmodo reports that they’ve deployed drones to find Dorner.
The last paragraph from Gizmodo is interesting. There is ample precedent for firing on a wanted man actively resisting arrest. So what’s the difference between a police sniper and a drone? The media has built up Dorner to the point where he is larger than life. Besides he has “incredibly powerful” assault rifles which Jesse Jackson described as “able to blow up railroads” and capable of shooting down airplanes.
So if he were cornered and on scene commander determined it would be dangerous to the officers and civilians to approach him, why not a drone?
President Barack “MIA” Obama. Look again at the photo taken in the White House situation room during the takedown on Osama Bin Laden http://tinyurl.com/bjg2mgt
His visage doesn’t even pass the laugh test.
1) Look how short he is compared to Biden sitting next to him.
2) Check out the woman’s shirt (it buttons opposite to how a man’s shirt does) and is buttoned all the way to the top, not open at the collar like the males’ shirts are.
3) Note the “Hunchback of Kenwood” look.
Check out this article fisking a photo that would make Dan Rather blush!
http://tinyurl.com/72slppa
But MSNBC and CNN still love him!
So for today’s musical interlude INFATUATION
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lru_kgkb6x8
P.S. I really like this Lee Attwater for the 21st Century gig!
I think I’ve found a dance instructor for my sailing class. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnUfY-URXzA Got to teach those kids how to have some class!
It’s a bit hard to put my finger on the deepest reason the drone strikes worry me so much, but it comes down to the idea that some mystical minded people call karma and what more ordinary people simply refer to as “what goes around, comes around”. I’ve watched the world long enough to have observed that for whatever reason, this is one of those things that almost always ends up happening. Look at current events – Syria supported Al Qaeda in Iraq for years, giving them support and comfort, thinking they were safe – now Al Qaeda is back home, helping to burn Syria to the ground. Does the issue of who’s right and who’s wrong even matter anymore when things get to that point? Was Jadis’s sister any more “right” than she was?
Or take Egypt, having supported despicable ideologies and a pathological culture for decades now; is it any surprise that Egypt itself is now sliding into a hellhole of collapse and despair?
And I hear this worried voice in my head saying, “if you people teach the world that drone strikes are an easy, acceptable thing to do, it won’t be long before they become cheap and easy for everyone to do, and the drones will be hunting your politicians, your heroes, and even ordinary citizens.”
Think about how military technology has progressed over the last century – things that were top secret, the height of technology not that many years ago are now available to anyone with a few bucks and a network connection. Extrapolate that out just 10 or 20 years, and think what it will be like when anyone with a grudge can do what we’re teaching them to do today.
We are creating our own future, and it isn’t a future any of us will want to live in.
@ 25. Mad Fiddler
“If memory serves, any municipal airport engaged in landing and launching flights to and from destinations outside U.S. territory is a “port of entry.” By extention – and you can be CERTAIN that this administration will insist on this – all territory within a 100 mile radius of such a facility falls under the authority claimed in this execrable power grab.”
This basically subsumes most of the northeast states to the will of the National City – there needs to be a term with the meaning that the District of Columbia is THE Sovereign of this nation -; all state, county, and local governments might as well be appointed by the National City; and by extension, the will of the National City overrides all Constitutional protections and local laws.
And our governors didn’t make a peep.
MF 26,
Did you see my #9 regarding Ports of Entry and % of population with 100 miles thereof? Perhaps I was to prolix. Ex-PFC Wintergreen would throw my copy in the trash.
Airport TSA officers (Agents, Screeners) like all federal employees take the constitutional oath. They are not LEOs.
Brad Thor and team put out a good novel last July regarding how a “kill list” that few see and even fewer compile may be exploited:
http://www.amazon.com/Black-List-Thriller-Brad-Thor/dp/1439192987/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360539175&sr=8-1&keywords=Brad+Thor
but as often is the case the truth is stranger than fiction.
Torture can be used to get password. Then a confession can be placed on the hard drive of the person who was tortured. 5th amendment must apply to passwords or torture will be used regularly to get confessions that will be lawful in court.
Radar‘s reporting proves it’s an exercise. They are milking the story, getting rich on… wait a minute. How do they earn money?
Is there anyone else at the Club who ever thinks that the cost of America’s trying to gain Iraq its freedom was the sacrifice of its own?
I wonder if George W. Bush, who I believe was an honest and intelligent man even if I bitterly disagreed with him on a number of issues, ever thinks this?
If there was anything good to come out of the Iraq war, at this late date I cannot see it. It looks like the failures were all real while the successes turned to ash even as we looked at them. We’ve already paid a huge price for that war, and Obama is part of it; however, I suspect a much larger bill is yet to come.
hmmm 100 miles from a border. How many states would be completely covered?
Floriduh, New Hampshire, Maryland, Delaware, Wash. DC, Hawaii, and Rhode Island alot of NJ, Michigan, MA, ME,GA,SC and NY. Guess my phone conversations are all pre-recorded.
@44 Karensky
Remember, that 100mi. radius around a port of entry – including any so-called international airport: that means all of New Jersey.
njartist, thinking a little further just what portion of our entite population comes within the 100 mile limit. Having lived in Michigan the Fedgov has always, for security purposes treated Lake Michigan as an international water meaning that Chicago and Milwaukee come into play. As an aside, back a few decades ago in one of our periodic panic/crisis plays it was suggested that we divert water from Lake Michigan to California to ease their drought. Canada though otherwise.
Back to the first point all of the coastal populatins fall within the 100 mile zone leaving just the interior cities unaffected. The St. Lawrence brings all of Northern Ohio, PA and NY into the monitoring zone all the way up to Maine, a border state. The west coast is pretty much covering 90% of that population. Are we collecting all electronic communications of 80% of the population. Omaha and Denver must be sighing relief.