Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Big News Cycle
Big news cycle today, with varying topics, so I’ll be forced to wander.
First, my Chicago Tribune gave its own version of fair-and-balanced coverage to the wiretapping scandal: three opinions, one maintaining the wiretapping was illegal, one article that couldn’t make up its mind, and a third maintaining it was illegal.
The article maintaining it was legal actually managed to muster an intelligent defense of it, something our president and secretary of state were inexplicably unable to do (Bush’s defense was, laughably, “trust me”). It was written by one John Schmidt, a former associate attorney general and a real, live lawyer. He cites several court precedents that confer on the president the power to use wiretaps and searches “for foreign intelligence purposes without warrant.”
His argument is seemingly undermined by his following quote. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review wrote in 2002 that the courts have ruled “the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence.” But this argument isn’t about gathering intelligence in Zibabwe. It’s about gathering intelligence from U.S. citizens and residents. Of course the president has the authority to covertly use wiretaps to spy on foreign powers.
His next citation seems to undermine his case even further. He mentions that FISA doesn’t grant the president the authority to use warrantless electronic surveillance to intercepts communications “sent by or intended to be received by a particular, known United States person,” when the intelligence gathering is “intentionally targeting that United States person.”
He argues that September 11th justified this kind of response, but that is a weak argument. As I have written before, it is besides the point of it being illegal. Terrorist attacks don’t excuse illegal responses by the government. The president has also said that he will continue to use warrantless searches, which seems to be quite an extended “response.”
And So It Continues…
The Tribune again continues its War on Truth, highlighting the nascent democracy of Iraq.
I tire of all the ex post facto arguments about why the war is still a good thing because “look at all the good we’re doing.” This war was sold to the American people based on the presumption we were countering an “immanent threat.” That presumption has been proved false. Even if critics won’t acknowledge the mountain of evidence that the president flat-out lied, where is the outcry over being sold a war based on faulty intelligence? Despite what good we may fish from this debacle, where are the cries for responsibility from a president who sold a war to his people on a premise that was proved false? Where are the reforms that might ensure this never happens again? Why was George Tenet, the CIA director ostensibly responsible for all this bad intelligence, given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003?
The message seems to be that we don’t even need a good reason to invade a country (even if that reason, I might add, never justified an invasion according to international law). The message seems to be that a president can start a war with another country for any reason that sounds remotely justifiable, invade and conquer, and if the reason turns out to be bogus, well, so what?
Neither the United States nor any other country on Earth has the right to invade a country because it’s ruled by a dictator or it possesses the same weapons of mass destruction we have, according to international law and common sense. We don’t have a right to turn Zibabwe into a war zone because Mugabe is a dictator. We don’t have a right to invade Iran because they have a nuclear program. We don’t have a right to invade Israel because it still stands in violation of more UN Security Council resolutions than Saddam Hussein ever did.
Nor should we want to. There are dozens of dictators around the world and there will continue to be well into the lifetimes of our grandchildren. This one war in Iraq is costing us 100 billion dollars a year and a thousand combat fatalities a year. It has done massive damage to Iraqi infrastructure that still hasn’t been repaired two-and-a-half years after the fact. It has cost Iraqi civilians 100,000 lives.
This is why we use diplomacy, however slow or tedious the process.
But now that we’re there we can’t pull out before democracy is established, right?
Why not? We seemed to have to no problem doing that in Afghanistan, where a mere 20,000 troops support a free and democratic government that controls little outside of Kabul. Warlords and Taliban control the rest of the country. Much of the country could still be the base for terrorists that right-wing commentators warn us could spring up in Iraq. Opium production is rolling again. America has forgotten.
So why can’t we do the same in Iraq? What makes Iraq so much more important? Why is it so vital to make sure all of Iraq is secure?
We all know the answer. O-I-L. To let the production of sweet, sweet crude get interfered with would be dangerous. To let the country fall into the hands of Shia extremists would be…well, Iran.
This isn’t about terrorism anymore. In truth, it never has been. This is about geopolitical power, just like Vietnam, just like Korea, just like Nicaragua. This is about the U.S. installing and maintaining a friendly government in an area of the world the U.S. government considers to be strategically important. This is about the same global chess game that the U.S. government has been playing with real people’s lives for generations.
The Wall
Speaking of Israel, the Crusade to Take Land From Brown People continues. Front page on my Tribune today is the story. Israel is constructing a 30 foot high concrete wall (condemned by the international community) around itself to “protect” itself from terrorists.
This might actually make sense if they were constructing the wall on their border. Instead, as shown by the helpful little map in the story, the wall wanders all over the West Bank, interfering with Palestinian traffic in Palestinian land, virtually encircling Jerusalem. You know, that city that isn’t theirs except in their own minds.
Am I hallucinating? Is no one else seeing this?
Israel says it wants peace, but refuses to cede land it seized way back it 1967. Every month they do something like this, then act shocked and outraged when suicidally angry bombers detonate themselves in populated areas.
This is why Israel has violated more Security Council resolutions than any other nation on Earth. It is not the product of some demented, world-wide conspiracy. It is the product of forty years of actions like this.
This is the black heart of the reason Arabs hate America: we support Israel, politically and financially, like no other nation on Earth. Throw in our support for the despotic Saudi monarchy and our overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Iran in 1953 and you have the reasons why Arabs hate us almost in total.
It wouldn’t take an invasion to ameliorate these situations, just a little diplomacy. A public condemnation, maybe, of Israeli excesses. That would be a start.
New York is Paralyzed; Mayor is Apoplectic
Though I usually don’t write about this stuff, this time I had to. This story is almost like an Onion parody of itself. I’ve taken a few liberties inserting additional material to clarify the original writing. My additions are in italics.
NEW YORK-Commuters used cars, cabs, boats, trains and their own foot power to make the journey to and from work here Tuesday, the first day of a transit strike that shut down the nation’s largest bus and subway system.
The strike, which was called at 3 am Tuesday, prompted the 33,000 members of Transport Workers Union Local 100 to walk off the job for the first time in 25 years.
Under state law, public employees…are prohibited from striking. The law provides for fines of up to two days’ pay for each day a worker is on strike.
And on Tuesday afternoon, a Brooklyn judge cited Local 100 for violating the law and imposed a fine of $1 million for every day the strike continues.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who walked across the Brooklyn Bridge during the morning rush hour, ostensibly to show that somehow he, too, is affected by the strike, condemned the strike as “selfish” and “morally reprehensible,” though he has never taken public transportation in his life.
In an unusually fiery statement, Bloomberg said the union leadership “has thuggishly turned their backs on New York City and disgraced the noble concept of public service, for which I, for example, paid a record 72 million dollars for in my last election campaign.
…The age at which employees could retire with full pensions was another sticking point in the talks. The authority wanted to raise the age from 55 to 62 for new employees.
Emotions about the strike ran high. A businessman from suburban Westchestere County, who would give his name only as Brad, said the union had no right to strike.
“If these workers don’t like their contract, they should quit that job and get another,” he said, clearly not understanding that if the workers all quit the situation would be even worse, “That’s what people in the private sector do, and that’s what they should do. Goddamned union labor! These thugs don’t know how hard it is to be a suburban businessman from Westchestere County who has to take a cab to work for awhile!”
New York City Comptroller William Thompson estimated that the first day of the strike would cost the city 400 million in lost sales and other revenues, with the total rising to 1.6 billion if the walkout lasts a week.
Ouchie. No wonder the mayor is unleashing the “fiery” rhetoric. Ironically, this massive shortfall could be covered by a personal check written by the billionaire mayor, but this “noble concept” would be going too far, of course.
The strike is illegal and the union will have to pay its fines. I just couldn’t resist loosing a few barbs in the direction of a billionaire mayor decrying the degradation of the “noble concept of public service,” a noble service that involves driving a bus for $30,000 a year and seeing your profession’s retirement age get pushed back.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 7:09 PM 
