Security Schmemcurity

Digby has it exactly right on the TSA's "lovepats", body scanners and the security theater.

Oh, by the way, in unrelated news (yeah, right) body scanner manufacturers doubled lobbying money over 5 years.

On 9/11, Against Revisionism

President Bush did not keep us safe. 9/11 happened under his watch. The same goes for all the people in his administration who would like us to forget that the worst act of terrorism against the United States happened as they and their neo-con friends had been plotting to invade Iraq and to occupy the Middle East in the name of a nascent American empire, under the guise of the Project for the New American Century.

That's important to remember. Remembering is the best tribute to all who perished on 9/11 and since, in two misconceived, miscarried wars which cost this country its prosperity and the future of its middle-class.

The Insufferable Repuglycan Fearmongering About KSM's NY Trial

No sooner had AG Eric Holder announced that the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed was going to be held in NYC, close to the 9/11 site, than Repuglycans started throwing their fearmongering shit aroud like the truly despicable monkeys they are (no offense to monkeys).

Driftglass at the Daily Kos throws some of the shit back in their faces.

The Republican Idea of a Technicality

After AG Eric Holder announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 conspirators will be tried on U.S. soil, in U.S. federal courts (which have a 100% conviction rate in federal terrorist cases), the right rose in protest of the DOJ's decision, saying that there is a danger that the terrorists might be released on "a technicality". Let me translate what these people mean by technicality, for the naive amongst you: if any evidence is introduced in trial that resulted from the torture of KSM, who at one point was waterboarded 183 times--in one month!--all that evidence, and any evidence which was subsequently obtained as a result of torture, could be thrown out by the judge. If the government were not able to build a case based on evidence obtained independently of KSM's torture, then--yes--KSM could, theoretically, walk out of court a free man. But that's the price you pay when you jettison the rule of law and replace it with one man's sense of what is or should be lawful when the going gets tough.

If you are on the side of those who would consider torture a mere technicality, then I pity you and I fear you. Because if this country ended up in your hands it would cease (as it did for the eight year of the Bush administration) to be a country we should be proud of. It would be no different than any of the many post-Soviet Union "-stans", where torture is a staple of their undemocratic diet.

Those who believe that torture is a justified, effective mean of obtaining information would do well to read A Question of Torture, by Alfred McCoy.

9/11, Seven Years On

On the anniversary of one of America's blackest days, ask yourself: Are you ready for more wars?

Fool Me Once, Shame On Me...

Fool me 935 times, shame on...

935, according to the following study by the Center for Public Integrity, is the number of false statements that member of the Bush Administration, including the President himself, made in the lead up to the war in Iraq. 935 lies. Enough to dupe the "other" Americans (not me, I am proud, sadly, to say).

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The study points out that

[o]n at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials [Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld], along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both.

To the administration's credit, as pointed out in a comedy sketch on today's Randi Rhodes Show, none of the lies were about sex.

American Travelers, In A Post 9/11 World

[Originally posted at TheDailyFuel.com on June 5, 2007]

Every so often, the most powerful Americans remind us that we live in a post 9/11 world. We are asked to sacrifice our freedoms in the name of added security. The President does it, the AG's office does it, neo-con talking heads remind us in their acerbic rants on TV and radio that the enemy hates us for our freedoms (so, understandably, the best way to dissuade them from attacking us must be to shed as many of the freedoms we currently enjoy, lest they should be envious.) The country, by and large believes that it is so, that added security requires sacrificing some liberty, in spite of the well-known quote that "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." And then, Andrew Speaker, a.k.a. Mr. drug-resistant TB, comes along and shatters the myth of American security.

The fact that Mr. Speaker had to come along to remind us of America's and the world's vulnerability is quite ironic. Since the multiple terrorist strikes of 9/11, several security analysts have repeatedly warned the public and Congress that the United States is vulnerable to terrorist attacks at many levels: port security is a sieve, as too many containers enter the country without inspection; chemical plants, not to mention nuclear power plants, are not adequately protected; the food chain is exposed, not only to external attacks, but to endemic health and sanitation problems at food processing plants and farms (e-coli in your spinach, salmonella in your peanut butter, tainted food, imported from one of the most unsafe food-producing nations in the world, for your pets); and, finally, border security remains largely a joke. That must be true, if a man with an almost incurable disease, high on a government no-travel list, can exit and re-enter the country unchallenged by border patrol, in spite of the security alerts that popped up on the examining agent's computer screen.

The facts surrounding this international incident also speak volume about the attitude that many Americans sport toward the rest of the world, which fosters understandable suspicion, even some resentment, in the rest of the world. Far from being uneducated or ignorant, Mr. Speaker is an attorney, educated at the University of Georgia School of Law. Handsome, cocky, and jock-like(at least based on his photos), he chose to treat the world community with utter disregard: first by leaving his country in spite of the knowledge that he had tubercolosis, and then by refusing to check into the Italian healthcare system (ranked 2nd in the world by the World Health Organization, well ahead of the United States, ranked 37th,) claiming that he had to return to the United States to get the life-saving treatment that he could not possibly get anywhere else in the world. Italians were understandably miffed, because-as reported by Associated Press--some of the leading research in TB is being done by Italians. Dr. Mario Raviglione, the Italian who heads the WHO's tuberculosis department, added "This is a developed country," Raviglione said. "I'm pretty sure [Italians] would have been able to do the right thing and provide Mr. Speaker with the proper treatment."

I have lived in the United States for a while now. I am sincerely grateful for the hospitality I have enjoyed and the fairness with which I have been treated since I moved to the United States. But in my fourteen years (to date) in this country, I have too often encountered the ignorance of the world, the prejudice and the misguided sense of superiority that Mr. Speaker so carelessly displayed by refusing care in a foreign country (where he probably would have been treated at much lesser expense than anywhere in the United States), and, first, by his disregard for a world which too many Americans consider much like their amusement park, and little else. That is the only possible explanation of why Mr. Speaker, regardless what he has said after his return to the U.S., decided to take on vacation with him one of the deadliest contagious diseases known to man.

The most conspicuous Americans travellers in the last five years or so have been Messrs. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, and Ms. Rice, who have globetrotted in search of support (and finding little) for a criminally-misjudged foreign policy; the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers ordered to carry out that policy around the world; and now, finally, Mr. Speaker, Al Qaeda's dream of a bacteriological weapon. Perhaps, it is time that the world should suggest that Americans sacrifice just one more freedom in the name of security (the world's): the freedom to travel.

Port Security: A Foreign Concern For This Administration?

[Originally posted at TheDailyFuel.com on February 22, 2006]


Much has been made of the recent sale of six major U.S. ports from P&O, a British company, to DP World, a port operator based in the United Arab Emirates. The Bush administration defends its approval of the sale by vouching that a thorough security review of the deal has taken place, and that Americans have nothing to fear from the acquisition. Still, opposition to the administration's approval of the transfer has been vocal and has united the two political parties like nothing else has in recent memory. Is this just an opportunistic maneuver by a group of senators eager to be perceived as patriots in an election year, or is there cause for real concern?

Perhaps a good starting point for an analysis of this issue might be Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff's statement to Tim Russert on last Sunday's "Meet The Press." To those who are troubled by the fact that financial support for the 9/11 terrorists has been traced back to the U.A.E. and who point out the fact that two of the hijackers where from that Arab nation, Mr. Chertoff responded that no one ever raised an objection to the British ownership of the same ports even though Richard Reed, the would-have-been shoe-bomber on a post 9/11 transatlantic flight to the U.S., was British. In other words, just because a country 's citizenship might include a few people who genuinely hate the United States and would like harm us, we cannot criminalize the whole country. If the same principle were applied to similar situations, what should we say about the Saudi or Chinese interests that control many vital sectors of the American economy? In spite of Mr. Chertoff's other blunders, painfully evident in his handling of the Katrina debacle, it is hard to find fault with Mr. Chertoff’s line of reasoning on this particular count. Why, the majority of port terminals at the Port of Los Angeles is controlled by foreign companies, some of which hail from countries that are not exactly staunch U.S. allies, such as China, and congress has not made a big deal of that little fact.

Defenders of the acquisition also point out that Dubai Ports World would only take over commercial operations at the six ports in question (New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia). Security would remain the responsibility of the U.S. government. Besides, worrying about who operates docks in this country is less important than knowing who operates docks in countries hostile to the United States (where dangerous weapons would be loaded.)

Keeping all this in mind, I would remind those who are genuinely worried about the security of our ports that the real cause for jitters is that less than 5% of the cargo coming into the United States is ever subjected to inspection. Admittedly, the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Customs are not adequately staffed and equipped to monitor the humongous volume of incoming traffic. That is the real scandal, and one that both the President and Congress have failed to address in a meaningful way since 9/11. In fact, the inadequacy of port security is such a well known weakness that it has been repeatedly used as an example by those who question the administration's commitment of keeping America secure, long before this latest issue arose.

For congressmen who are vocal about national security issues, there is no lack of areas where their energy and their attention is needed. In one worrisome example, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has jurisdiction "to review applications for a license, [or for] transfer of a license [...] to determine whether the applicant [for nuclear reactors] is owned, controlled, or dominated by a foreign interest." However, as the staff of the NRC warned in 1999, there was no procedure in place for those cases in which ownership changed after a license has been granted. The remedy instituted by the NRC in 2000 relies on self-certification of changes in ownership rather, than in direct government control of nuclear reactors licensees.

Also, a Government Accountability Office investigation conducted in 1995 on the effectiveness of the Exon-Florio amendment to the Defense Production Act of 1950, an amendment specifically designed to prevent foreign takeovers that could jeopardize U.S. security, revealed that the nation's security interests may not be as well protected as they should be for a number of reasons. For example, notification of a transfer of ownership interest to the Committee for Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS), the entity responsible for oversight of the Exon/Florio provision, is voluntary, and not all companies comply with this voluntary requirement. Since there is no official record of how many foreign acquisitions are not reported to CFIUS, it is hard to determine the impact on national security of never-reported deals. However, the GAO identified unreported deals in such sectors as biotechnology, aviation, advanced materials and aerospace. Also, Exon-Florio does not define national security interests in detail, so it is up to the declarant to establish whether a deal jeopardizes national security. To the best of my knowledge, these aspects of the Exon-Florio amendment have not been corrected to date.

Rather than spending time scrutinizing a deal that is far from extraordinary in an increasingly global economy, our representatives in Washington might be inclined to examine the effect that other less advertised threats, such as our ballooning deficit, have not only on the lives of Americans, but also on national security. As this administration continues to dig us into a deeper economic hole, its eagerness to transform the government by offloading more of its traditional functions to private interests, many of which happen to be foreign, is the only thing more pernicious than the deficit itself. For a nation whose dependence on an influx of foreign capital and on imported energy sources has rapidly grown in recent years, the true issue with national security lies not in which foreign nations should be allowed to privately own pieces of U.S. infrastructure; rather, we should ask ourselves if private ownership of public infrastructure is always a good idea, and whether growing reliance on external financial support is wise in a world where divisions are festering and are threatening stability more and more.