perfidy

As an added fun Wednesday bonus, check out these nutty charts and documents from the Total Information Awareness Office! 

Those government pointy-heads sure have some ca-razy ideas! 
 

Andrew Sullivan is writing over at MSNBC about the government's increased efforts to rely on private data-collection firms to get the information they are barred from collecting themselves. 

Now, that's just a dirty trick, not to mention stupid. Private data collection firms don't have a great duty to verify the truth of their data any more than the government does. It has taken Li'l Sister Two-Cents years to clear her name, after another person with the same name ran into huge credit trouble. The databases just never seemed to be be updated, time and again. 

This is the awesome power the Gubmint wants to harness? I guess we shouldn't look forward to them changing the name on the J. Edgar Hoover building after all. 
 

I've been reading more and more about civil liberties, and the proposed revisions to the USA-PATRIOT act that are apparently forthcoming soon. It's chilling stuff. 

A story is out today that that a senior Intel engineer has been detained without being charged for giving money to an Islamic charity. The FBI claims that the charity in question has ties to Al Qaeda, but upon investigation, The Register has found that those connections are mostly imaginary. The best they can do is demonstrate that one time, a member of Al Qaeda gave money to the same, prominent, charity-- not the other way around. 

Think about that. A real guy, a computer nerd regular smart-guy Joe, detained indefinitely, without due process, for giving money to a charity that a branch of the government decided in retrospect may be loosely associated with terrorism. I don't like the implications of that one goddamn bit. 

Anyway, on to USA-Patriot II. Matt Welch has an update today on Alternet, and Nat Henthoff had a cutting analysis in the Village Voice at the end of February. Thanks to the Center for Public Integrity I have my own copy of the bill to read. Here's what I found. Among other fun pursuits, the US government would be given the power to:

• revoke one's citizenship --" the intent to relinquish nationality need not be manifested in words, but can be inferred from conduct"
• hold any person indefinitely in secret, without notifying a soul
• make it a crime to tell anyone about subpoenas served under Patriot II
• start a national DNA database of arrestees, as long as they are labelled as potential terrorist conspirators of any kind, or as long as the DNA "may assist in the investigation and identification of terrorists and the prevention of terrorism"
• specifically limit the recourse of private citizens, and the recourse of courts acting on their behalf who have been wrongly detained or investigated
• wiretap anyone for fifteen days, without a warrant, provided that at some point in the recent past that Congress has approved military action or a national emergency has been called
• grant immunity to businesses who report on employees' activities, even if the tips are false
• revoke habeas corpus for permanent resident aliens
• and spy on US citizens on behalf of other countries.

The document also contains language that would make the "sunset" provisions in the original PATRIOT act -- this is, certain draconian measures set to expire in five years -- permanent. There's also a bunch of more minor nibbles at liberty -- the government could look at your credit report at will (secretly), would operate under less judicial control when wiretapping citizens, gets expanded FISA powers, etc., etc., etc. 

As I've said before, it's a bad thing when the residents of a free nation begin fearing their government as I begin to fear mine. The worst part about it is the powerlessness I feel. What can I do? Write my congressmen? Write John Kerry?? I wouldn't trust John Kerry to save orphans from drowning, if he could find a political downside!! 

I'm going to do write them, but whoopdiddleydoo. I'm a broke secretary who doesn't have the scratch to donate to campaigns. Therefore, I don't count so much. Sure, I'll vote against anybody who supports the act, but by that time, the law will be in place and since it's all secret police without due process, it will be very, very hard for someone to sue the government for acting outside the bounds of the Constitution. Bye bye, checks and balances! These could be dark times indeed, if the Justice department uses the war as cover to ram through measures such as these. If I may be totally cynical for a moment, this is one of the reasons I thank God that terrorists have not been able to hit us again as they hit us two years ago. 

And you don't think any of this could happen to you? Did you ever give money to Irish causes? How about PETA, ELF, or a Right-To-Life cause? Or to an Israeli relief charity? A Palestinian relief charity? Your local mosque? Good luck to you then. I understand full well that I'm looking at the situation and seeing the worst possible outcome. But, for some reason, I tend to do that when it's civil liberties at stake. Must be the idealist in me. I better get to work on repressing that.

Once again, huzzah and kudos to Bootsy to pointing me to this depressing article from Editor & Publisher. It discusses the media's coverage of the Iraq crisis prior to the actual war, suggests that the American public is horribly misguided about the war in Iraq, and blames the media for making the situation worse. I'm not going to argue with the media-bashing, but more worrying are the poll numbers. Check it out: 

In a Jan. 7 Knight Ridder/Princeton Research poll, 44% of respondents said they thought "most" or "some" of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers were Iraqi citizens. Only 17% of those polled offered the correct answer: none. This was remarkable in light of the fact that, in the weeks after 9/11, few Americans identified Iraqis among the culprits. . . . In the same sample, 41% said that Iraq already possessed nuclear weapons, which not even the Bush administration claimed. Despite being far off base in crucial areas, 66% of respondents claimed to have a "good understanding" of the arguments for and against going to war with Iraq. . . . 

The same survey found that 57% of those polled believed Saddam Hussein helped terrorists involved with the 9/11 attacks, a claim the Bush team had abandoned. A March 7-9 New York Times/CBS News Poll showed that 45% of interviewees agreed that "Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks," and a March 14-15 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found this apparently mistaken notion holding firm at 51%. . . . 

Carroll Doherty, editor of the Pew Research Center, told me last week: "It's very rare to find a perception that's been so disputed by experts yet firmly held by the public. There's almost nothing the public doesn't believe about Saddam Hussein."

Oh, for God's sake. It's not old news that the American people will believe anything, but this is remarkable. 

Well, maybe it's not so remarkable. 77% of Americans believe angels exist. Half of Americans believe that humans once co-existed with dinosaurs. Reportedly, 60% of Americans believe in psychic powers. Luckily, only 7% of Americans believe The King is still alive. 

All of this only proves that public opinion, whether for or against the war, is not rooted as much in facts as in each person's personal interpretation of history. And, as we all know, history is not necessarily fact-based.

As I'm sure we all are insanely aware, the Supreme Court is hearing the UMich affirmative action case today. I suddenly find within me an overwhelming urge to support affirmative action, mainly because Justice Scalia is such a penis.

I have been hacking away at a huge wordy essay detailing why I think that affirmative action causes more problems than it solves, and I have axed it in favor of this simple statement: Affirmative action causes more problems than it solves. Rather, affirmative action is not equipped to address the problems it should be, and stands in the way of its own ultimate goal of reducing America's obsession with race.

AA comes from noble sentiments and honorable motives, and I support it in principle. But, without dismissing several hundred years of history and systematic repression, there are many social, cultural, economic, and geographic factors aside from race that determine how a child's education should go. It's my sense that economic factors influence more about a person's educational path than does race, yet colleges do not consider economics when deciding admissions policy. You can show me case after case of a brilliant student who, since he or she is from Bushwick, doesn't have the chance to go to Yale. I will in turn show you case after case of brilliant hillbillies from Bluefield who are in the same boat. Worse, affirmative action stands in its own way. Now, when we want to talk about race-based issues in education, we talk about affirmative action. Unfortunately, AA doesn't address the big race-based education issues that remain. For example, take the high incarceration rate among young black men. A felony rap means not being eligible for federal student aid, a Clinton policy that cut off a large swath of society from easy access to higher education. Affirmative action can't touch that, though it's partly a race-based education issue. Public schools are in the shitter all over the place, and students advance grades without learning basic skills. Affirmative action can't compensate for that either, though that's what it was meant to do. Instead, the debate remains confined to a few issues such as quotas/not quotas, and cuts the real problems out of the debate.

Two problems ensue. First, by leaving some of the biggest issues outside the discussion, AA weakens its own agenda of equalizing access to education regardless of race. Second, every day that AA programs continue to exist is one more day that race remains an issue in education-- hardly a step towards an institutionally colorblind society.

The US is not, and should never be, colorblind. Black identity, and for that matter, Irish identity, Latvian identity, and Ohio Briar-Hopper identity are too rich to discard. But affirmative action is a right-minded half-measure that does not address the full complexity of the problems it purports to solve. Institutional colorblindness (as opposed to social/cultural colorblindness) is a noble goal, and it's becoming clear that affirmative action won't achieve it as currently structured. Am I in favor of getting rid of it totally? Not really. But a major re-thinking of its fundamental premises are in order, to ensure that it actually does the job it's intended to do.

Did I mention that "Scalia" means "penis" in Ewok?

n.b. Reasonable people may differ. I welcome any and all discussion, rebuttal, and ad hominem attacks. I'm a big boy now.

[wik] Dahlia Lithwick has a great synopsis of the proceedings at Slate, including a sound-clip of an extremely eloquent argument from Justice Breyer. From the article: "Everyone seems to agree that the racial divisions in this country are a terrible problem, and almost everyone agrees that they need to be handled via subterfuge: The affirmative action camp is for "critical masses" that look like quotas and for "diversity" that may not bring about diversity. The anti-affirmative action camp is for pretending that other remedies work when it's clear that you can't fix race problems by ignoring race. These are not really legal questions at heart; they are almost insoluble social and moral ones. Take heart in the fact that the court at least respected us enough today to address them as such."

[alsø wik] "Scalia" also means "penis" in the ancient language of Atlantis.

For his next trick, John Ashcroft has determined that EBay has violated the USA-PATRIOT Act.

That's right. America's Shiny New Anti-Terror Legislation is now being brought to bear against EBay, for the horrendous crime of facilitating payments through its PayPal service to... not terrorists... not drug lords....not Communists... Online Casinos.

Imagine. Non-terrorists prosecuted under the USA PATRIOT Act. Bet nobody saw that coming.

Imagine.

Over the last couple weeks I've grown more anti-war, as I'm sure has become clear. I don't think that my drift towards dovishness has much to do with the so-called setbacks that the press and certain pundits keep ranting about. It's a war. Plans change. Rather, my support for the mission of the war depended, and still depends, on the clarity of the Bush administration's reasons for prosecuting the war. It was about chemical weapons, which we hear rather less about these days. It was about Iraqi links to terrorism, which I've heard very little about ever. (That's not to say that someday Saddam couldn't finance a zodiac and a small nuke to motor up the Chesapeake, it's just that I think other scenarios are more pressing, and likely).

So now it's about regime change? Well, I guess so. Whatever.

Mike, your objections about the Middle East are well founded. I think the conflict with Syria will be a test case for what's to come. Will we manage to come to a diplomatic solution for their chicanery? Or will we have to go kick their ass too? If we do, I think that from the P.O.V. of Middle Eastern nations, it will be proof that the USA can no longer be reasoned with. I understand what Mark Steyn is saying. Thousands have not been slaughtered, as far as we know. But four is not a triumph; it's just a smaller tragedy. I'm with Mike on this one.

Did it strike anybody else funny (as in "not funny") that the same week that the press was crowing about the smartness of our smart weapons, and jizzing over their ability to wipe justthatbuilding off the map without so much as taking Old Widow Qumar's laundry off the line next door, the press was also crowing about the giant killin' potential of the spanky-new Mother Of All Bombs, the biggest, killin'est, bombin'est bomb that ever bombed? Just a little message-drift here, is all I'm saying.

A final note: Not a man jack of us here knows a DAMN thing about what's going on in Iraq. Reports vary wildly, as do assessments. Troop movements are noted, then vanish. Do we hold Basra? Do we not? The American media is as biased in its way as Al Jazeera, and at this point I have stopped watching the news out of sheer frustration.

Heretofore I plan not to do any posting about what is currently happening in Iraq, because I have no way of knowing. There's enough real-time warbloggers out there.

Long live Oceania! Down with Eastasia!

Johno, thanks for supplying the link to the article on De Genova, who called for the defeat of American forces in Iraq, and the deaths of American soldiers. Dr. Foner's response to De Genova's remarks, disavowing them, was appropriate. De Genova is perhaps engaging in fashionable anti-Americanism, part of a new radical chic. 

Calling for defeat of the American forces serves no purpose, and is antithetical to the goals of a peace movement. It only alienates American moderates, and possibly anti-war veterans. Just as the four Iraqi citizens who died in the first night of air attacks on Baghdad, American troops have families. It is equally tragic when American soldiers die in combat, or at the hands of suicide bombers. One of the reasons that I oppose this war is because no one should have to die to remove a leader who posed no significant threat to the United States. It should be up to the Iraqis themselves to decide what they want to do about their leadership. It is not the place of the United States to dictate who runs foreign countries; there has been quite enough of that in America's past. 

No good can come of such rantings as those offered by De Genova. He'll only make people angry, and create more support for the war. He also reminds me of people who shoot abortion doctors to preserve life, though that's a weak analogy at best. The goal of an anti-war movement should be to increase the numbers of those who oppose the war, not to increase the numbers of those who support it. But what's most important here is that nothing is served by anyone's death in Iraq. Blood is red, country of origin notwithstanding.