Category: the state
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Bring Lawyers, Guns, and Money
Private Security Firms (and the Executive Branch’s willingness to use them) are infringing upon the State’s Monopoly on Violence and Death, on the Constitutional power to Declare War, and their mercenaries are in the same legal status as the members of al Qaeda; combatants in a network-tribe with no particular loyalty to the United States.…
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‘Crimson Tide’ and Curveball
In the 1995 movie Crimson Tide, Gene Hackman plays an Ramsey, a salty old, Rickover-era U. S. Navy Submarine Captain who receives orders to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against Russian rebels who have captured a missile launch facility and the access codes for the nuclear warheads stored there. Denzel Washington plays Hunter, the Harvard…
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Mission(s)
“We will lead the unified national effort to secure America. We will prevent and deter terrorist attacks and protect against and respond to threats and hazards to the nation. We will ensure safe and secure borders, welcome lawful immigrants and visitors, and promote the free-flow of commerce.” “To provide the military forces needed to deter…
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Torture
Torture is a big topic these days in the American political conversation. Senator John McCain has brought forward a proposal to unambiguously disavow all methods of interrogation deemed to be “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” by any agent of the United States, anywhere in the world. The White House has responded by shouting,…
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Wouldn’t it be nice if…
the government let people know what data it is holding about them? “The government, whether a State or Tribe or the Federal government, shall disclose the existence of all data bases and information stores and the contained fields, relationships, schema, and data dictionaries whenever that database or information store contains records of Citizens of the…
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The obligatory post about Katrina and the Flood of New Orleans
Well, its been a week since Katrina made landfall and it seems that more than anything, this has been a colossal failure of the State to meet its obligations to “protect the weak from the wicked” as Tom Paine would say, though in this case wickedness seems to be lurking in the aggregate of bureaucratic…
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Stupid Politician Tricks
So the Army is expecting that the politicians will fail and they will get stuck in Iraq for another four years. This little tidbit made the Sunday morning pundit circuit this week where politicians of both flavors said dumb politician things: from a USAToday story by Dave Moniz: From an AP report by Nedra Pickler:…
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Privacy isn’t anonymity
Over on Radar O’Reilly there is this entry about Schneier’s wholesale surveillance concept, with some excerpts focusing on the privacy issues/concerns of this increasingly common practice. I wrote some comments on the site, which I’ve reproduced here: “Isn’t this more about anonymity than privacy? Anonymity is the ability to interact with society without being recognized…
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London, again
The Guardian is reporting more bombs in the London Tubes. This is interesting as it makes the local terror intensify in the pattern of the D.C. Sniper – dull, disruptive, numbing of the local inhabitant’s desire to travel. In Washington, this meant targeting people at gas pumps and mall parking lots, in London this means…
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combatants and beneficiaries
Asymmetric warfare really does depend on the blending of the lines between combatant and “innocent.” The fluid battlefield doesn’t really offer backwaters and safe havens to those who gain from the outcome of a battle and given the right ideological arguments, one might believe that the American and British are exporting terrorist casualties to Iraq…