GOP helps al Qaeda get guns right here in the USA

Really? If the shoe were on the other foot, that's what Republicans would claim.

Even al-Qaida gloats about what's possible under U.S. gun laws. In June 2011, a senior al-Qaida operative, Adam Gadahn, released rallying people to take advantage of opportunities those laws provide.

"America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms," Gadahn says, explaining that "you can go down to a gun show at the local convention center" and buy a gun without a background check.

Then a faint smile crosses Gadahn's face. "So what are you waiting for?" he asks.

Under current laws, if a background check reveals that your name is on the national terrorism watch list, you're still free to walk out of a gun dealership with a firearm in your hands — as long as you don't have a criminal or mental health record.

Republicans in the Senate really did block any tightening of background checks - including measures obvious to anyone who actually wants to keep deadly weapons away from violent people. Read the whole (short) NPR story from Ailsa Chang. It's really effing unbelievable.

The honest truth is that nearly all Republican legislators are willing to allow felons and people who are dangerously mentally ill to own guns. Why should potential terrorists be any different?

The Republican Party's leaders think the only point at which we can stop violence is once it has already started - every school, every theater, every political rally an O.K. Corral.

Even rank and file Republican voters know that this is utter madness. You'd think they might do something about it.

Semper Fi

(h/t Boston Globe)

Like Bolsheviks, Nazis, Viet Cong, and Khmer Rouge

The Taliban know that every girl who learns to think and every father who teaches his daughter to think, subverts  the backwardness and evil of fundamentalist Islam. Thinking is a threat to their fervently chosen ignorance. The Taliban are more than willing to kill in defense of their radical refusal to grow into liberal society.

Sirajuddin Ahmad, the spokesman for the Taliban in the Swat Valley, said that Ms. Yousafzai became a target because she had been “brainwashed” into making anti-Taliban statements by her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai.

“We warned him several times to stop his daughter from using dirty language against us, but he didn’t listen and forced us to take this extreme step,” he said.

Both father and daughter remain on the Taliban’s list of intended victims, he said.

This reminds me Kurtz's apologia in "Apocalypse Now":

I remember when I was with Special Forces... seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn't know what I wanted to do!

Kurtz's eventual response was a descent into the heart of darkness, into monstrous depravity, into insane homicide.

What should our response be? Could we retain our moral character, retain our judgement, which Kurtz called our defeat, and nonetheless issue a secular fatwa that anyone who harms Malala Yousafzai or her father Ziauddin will be subject to a U.S. lethal finding?

Moderation needs space and time and tolerance to grow. Extremists of all stripes know this and murder moderates. Would it benefit moderates to exact a deadly cost from the extremists, or would it simply drive others into their arms?

America is already using drones for targeted assassination as a tool of war, if not statecraft, despite a long-standing inclination not to - in reaction to out-of-control spy agencies during the Cold War. Israel has used assassination. Killing the guilty, the enemy, the vicious murderer of your children has visceral appeal, and there's often no civil authority in these cases. Has that been for the good or the bad? It's hard to tell.

It's hard to imagine our government could responsibly manage vengeance orders, when it can't manage a just civilian death penalty. It can't even manage political asylum very well.

But I know that I wish Sirajuddin Ahmad dead. The shooters who have gravely wounded Malala, I wish dead. Their commanders, dead.

Traditional war-making has proven a very poor tool to accomplish those just deaths without a mortgage of further deaths uncounted. This reasoning is how liberals like me get to law as the best tool to accomplish punishment of the guilty. It lacks the immediacy of gunning down your enemies, but it lasts better.

Public domain photo from the Library of Congress, found here.

Asleep at the switch

Bushists and neocons might have given their best efforts and still not prevented 9/11. But they didn't even try, despite many warnings:

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous.

Unconscionable.

Chinese water torture

If the U.S. government waterboards suspected terrorists - or someone unlucky enough to have alienated the wrong people in Pakistan's ISS - the New York Times won't call it torture. There are memos defending it!

If the Chinese government waterboards suspected grafters, suddenly the Times finds the word torture in its vocabulary - and not just the lawyered up extreme definition that the Bushists put forward in John Yoo's bullshit memos. (Those memos alone are war crimes.)

When party members are caught breaking the rules — or even when they merely displease a superior — they can be dragged into the maw of an opaque Soviet-style disciplinary machine, known as “shuanggui,” that features physical torture and brutal, sleep-deprived interrogations.

Thank god

Thank god we don't have any armed lunatic wingnuts here in America.

Police identified the suspect as Anders Behring Breivik, 32, a right-wing fundamentalist Christian, while acquaintances described him as a gun-loving Norwegian obsessed with what he saw as the threats of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration.

Hmm, lots of familiar grievances... Unemployment, however, is below 4% in Norway and not part of Breivik's grievance list. Damn socialist economy!

Will this attack damage Norway's social democratic consensus, as 9/11 and the Bushists' exploitation of it did ours?

Thomas Hegghammer, a terrorism specialist at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, said the manifesto bears an eerie resemblance to those of Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, though from a Christian rather than a Muslim point of view. Like Mr. Breivik’s manuscript, the major Qaeda declarations have detailed accounts of the Crusades, a pronounced sense of historical grievance and calls for apocalyptic warfare to defeat the religious and cultural enemy.

It's worth noting that 93 dead (known so far) from a total population of under 5 million has close to twice the demographic impact of 9/11. In their awful grief, Norwegians now have the chance to show resoluteness or panic, just as we did ten years ago. Most likely, they will show a mix, just as we did.

Why Republicans whine it's the Democrats' fault

Because they're so damn delusional from the constant intake of their party's official bullshit that they can't remember who really screwed up.

No comment necessary

The next penis bomber

When we fly, we have to take off our shoes because of the Shoe Bomber.

When we fly, we have to show our junk or let it be felt up by the TSA because of the penis bomber.

Memo to al Qaeda: Please don't put a charger up some moron's ass, as in Man on Fire, and send him onto a plane. (As if please ever worked...)

The terrorists sometimes get more effect from not blowing up a plane.

Update (11/24): Patrick Smith of Salon has two more examples:

The scanners are also the latest turn in what is an unwinnable arms race. First came Sept. 11 and suddenly pointy objects are contraband. Then came Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," and TSA decreed that all passengers must remove their shoes. Next we had the London liquid bombers, and suddenly your shampoo and toothpaste are consigned to 3-ounce containers. Then came the Christmas Day underwear bomber, and as a result we're being body-scanned and groped.

Mission accomplished

Click image for full Rob Rogers/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoon.

A trillion here, a trillion there

The actual funding appropriated for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has reached $1,000,000,000,000. That's a whole shitload of zeroes. That's more than $3,000 apiece that we owe on our credit cards from China Bank. Over and above Duhbya's tax cuts for the rich.

The trillion dollar tab doesn't include any planning whatsoever for anticipated long-range costs such as health care and other earned perks for veterans. Linda Bilmes has in the past carefully estimated those as costing additional trillions. And of course, we're still running up the tab.

It's stunning that only World War II is still "ahead" in costs. It's stunning that the margin is less than a factor of four:

Since the the 9/11 terror attacks, the United States has spent an estimated $1.15 trillion. World War II cost $4.1 trillion when converted to current dollars.

My question, which the big media absolutely has refused to look into since these wars began in 2001, is why? WWII saw millions of men under arms, a huge output of materiel, a vast and expensive air- and sealift. What's different about these modern wars that make them so much more costly?

A few possibilities:

• War profiteering is worse. (Is it? There's no Harry Truman to look into it.)
• We've privatized many logistical operations that we used to do more cheaply with underpaid uniformed personnel.
• We've privatized many security operations (for more than $100,000 a man) that we used to do more cheaply with underpaid uniformed personnel.
• We're spending millions a pop in modern weaponry to atomize the tents of goatherders.

Any journalists want to look into this? Or is reprinting Pentagon press releases just too much more comfortable than real work?

Smashed, stoned, and burnt

Montana reactionaries firebomb a couple of marijuana dispensaries. Yeah, Montana has medical marijuana! Who knew?

No one was hurt, like an ELF political arson. When ELF burns down a real estate development to make a political statement, the right-wing goes even more hysterical than usual.

I wonder (only rhetorically) whether they'll piss their pants over this similar piece of political terror.

Of course not. Consistency is not something the wingnuts even recognize could guide their behavior.

Fortunate, son

Click image for full John Trever/Albuquerque Journal cartoon.

The front door is closed

This week, the Supreme Court closed its front door. Over the door is engraved in Vermont marble one of the fundamental aspirations of America, EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.

The court took this step because it fears terror. Never mind the symbolism.

This week, evidence led to the arrest of a Pakistani, naturalized to be an American citizen, for what was, by all appearances, his plot to blow up Times Square. Front door, back door, side door, it didn't matter to him.

But he understood how attacking a symbol instills fear, the strategic purpose of the tactic of terror attacks.

Republicans, true to form, think that this alleged citizen terrorist, arrested for a crime on American soil, should not have been read his Miranda rights, as our law demands. Instead, they want to exploit the fear of Americans to score the cheapest political points. Never mind that the feds used a public safety exception to Miranda initially to interrogate the suspect.

Republicans in Washington - and a substantial proportion of their voters - do not believe in law. They believe in summary vigilantism. They are dismayed that the defendant has apparently confessed and is cooperating. They were eager to flay the Obama administration for not torturing this man, but now they're all dressed up in leather like a sadist with nowhere to go but home to the missus.

The Republicans are happy to risk the validity of the suspect's confession, happy to let him off the hook under our law. That would give them more political wedge issues to divide the country. Perfect!

It's scary that one of the major political parties in the United States couldn't give the slightest crap about the legal foundation of our country. They are in fact not the literal definition of conservatives. They are radicals. Their promise is coup d'etat in slow motion.

And yet they're not a marginal splinter group. They're the second largest political grouping in America.

Meaning

These scrapings off the bottom of the gene pool are terrorists (if guilty), but IEDs are not weapons of mass destruction. Murderous, evil, vicious, and criminal weapons, true, but they don't threaten mass destruction.

Some of these fringe-dwellers were arrested at home here. David B. Stone has a listed phone number, not really bright for an open seditionist.

Another day, another Republican lie

It's what they do. Dana Perino (on Fox, natch) claims:

• The shoe bomber in 2001 and the penis bomber in 2009 are "apples and oranges" even though both were goofball al Qaeda terrorists who smuggled explosives on board airplanes in their clothing, only to be subdued by passengers, Mirandized, and tried in civilian courts.
• If only the Bushists had had their military tribunals set up, they would have tried the shoe bomber in one of them. They learned their lesson on José Padilla, never mind that he wound up back in a civilian court too, insane to boot.

If there's a more obvious case of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do, I'd like to hear about it, so I can call it bullshit, too.

Perino has a smooth pink complexion, blue eyes, and blond hair. She lies for a living. She's packaging - a spokesmodel. She and Fox are a perfect fit.

Update: Glenn Greenwald had another case of Republican bullshit yesterday. Don't you dare do as I did! says Michael Mukasey.

Terrorist

The slaying of Dr. George Tiller was an act of political terrorism, intended to strike fear into doctors willing to perform abortions. Why hasn't Scott Roeder been charged under federal terrorism statutes?

What fourth amendment?

The Transportation Security Administration has surrendered its foolish diktat that peeing within an hour of landing is a security threat, but another of its other responses to the controversy is equally stupid and more disturbing. They've tried to suppress news of the policy:

The subpoenas demand presentation of “all documents, emails, and/or faxsimile transmissions (sic) in your control possession or control concerning your receipt of TSA Security Directive 1544-09-06 dated December 25, 2009.” They are signed by Dan Kuntz, senior counsel for civil enforcement at TSA.

Under the Constitution, a warrant issued by a judge should be required for any seizure of property. Yeah, we were way past that even before the so-called PATRIOT Act. Now, the Fourth Amendment is gone.

Mama warned you

"What if you were hit by a bus and had to be taken to the hospital airport!"

Click image for full Ted Rall/Universal Press cartoon.

Note to reporters on the penis-bomb

The penis-bomb fizzle in Detroit (there's a phrase I never imagined writing!) points up the utter failure of U.S. intelligence agencies. Abdulmutallab bought his ticket with cash and didn't check a bag! His own father had reported him directly to the Nigerian embassy. Our Nigerian embassy.

Systems fail, though. All systems.

What I'd like to see as follow-up to this good factual story from the New York Times is a way for me to assess whether this was a rare failure due to imperfection or a symptom of systemic failure. That requires numbers:

• How many reports are the intelligence agencies sharing?
• What proportion lead to actions (beyond entry into a database that "serves as holding area for cases that need more research")? And, no, 1700 visas revoked in eight years doesn't seem like a lot to me.
  
• What proportion of similar fact patterns to this attack elicit a no-fly order? A pat-down order? Some other protective act, where here there was none?

Who's going to report that story?

Update: An attempt at context, though I want details on the firehose intel is drinking from, and Ackerman ignores the behavioral markers - cash and no carry-on.

Update (1/9/10): Hey, my Google alert tells me the Wall Street Journal has linked to me. With such a pithy title, too, espethially if you lithp!