April 18th, 2008
There’s a powerful drug available on the open market. Initially it’s a stimulant, a tiny little sniff of its green leaves enough to throw its users into a wild, uninhibited frenzy. This is often followed by extreme lethargy, drooling, and unconsciousness.
Incredibly enough thousand of Americans buy products laced with this drug every day. They never even give it a second thought. It is socially acceptable to use it in public; and its users are considered by most people to be highly entertaining, enough so that it’s deliberately handed out to them.
It seemed appropriate this weekend to consider the thousands of people across this country that are most rabidly opposed to the legalization of marijuana who wouldn’t hesitate to buy a catnip mouse.
Yeah, the drug that I’ve described is catnip. If it did to us what it does to cats, it wouldn’t be legal. But it doesn’t, and so there’s no controversy over the fact that we have an entire industry dedicated to getting our cats high.
There’s no dancing around that issue: We get our pets high on a weed.
If it was a case of someone getting their dog drunk, which happens too, they’d quite possibly face prosecution for animal cruelty. Meanwhile there are birds flocking to orchards every fall to get themselves falling-off-the-perch drunk on fermented fruit.
If dogs could make beer, who’s to say that they wouldn’t drink it? The elephants pickled on fallen monkey fruits that routinely wreak havoc on rural villages in southeast Asia certainly don’t have issues about self-medication.
And while drunken elephant rampages aren’t front-page news in this country, neither is the catnip industry. A German Shepherd tippled on schapps would provoke outrage, but Muffy’s afternoon ‘nip binge is unremarkable.
I swear that I’ll never figure this country out. Could we just settle on one standard? Why is it that a plant that gets our cats high can remain entirely acceptable, when one that has nearly identical effects in humans is routinely cited as a gateway to self-destruction?
Ponder that one, but not too deeply because you’ll have to keep up with the news, the Timothy Jordan Show News for this 18th of April, Ought-Eight.
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“To date, the war in Iraq is a classic case of failure to adopt and adapt prudent courses of action that balance ends, ways, and means.”
That’s the opinion of retired Col. Joseph Collins in a paper recently published by the National Defense University. He describes a civilian and military leadership in this country that went into Iraq with grand plans for the war itself, but left the post-war effort undermanned, underfunded, and listless.
It sounds like the U.S. government had gotten a hold of some catnip of their own. A frenzied leap into war, followed by… oh… *yawn*… I think I’ll take a nap.
*snore*
Wha? Col. Collins explains that, “a series of faulty assumptions was one of the most significant factors in our postwar policy.” The most significant of these assumptions in his opinion, “…was that the war would be difficult, the peace relatively easy, and the occupation short and inexpensive.”
Looking back on the records it’s hard to fault his reading of the nation’s leadership. They certainly did their best at the time to create an impression in the public that the war would be over quickly and inexpensively. That, as we know, was a fatal assumption. There are children alive in Iraq who have no memory of the Saddam Hussein era.
And at the rate of which we’re bringing political stability to Iraq, their children will still be waiting for the Americans to leave.
Despite his systematic rundown of the almost premeditated failures at every level of the war planning process, Col. Collins remains a true believer. He describes the war as a “must win”.
And that may be the most important part of the message that he’s bringing to our military leadership, that despite the ever-bleaker chance of reconstructing and reconciling Iraq, there’s a need to soldier through.
It’s unfortunate that our military leadership continues to be so short-sighted. They’re focused on the coming bloodshed in Iraq as if it’s the end of a war. Unfortunately the term “long war” is looking, at least to this correspondent, entirely appropriate in this case. We’re not done with Iraq by a longshot, but it’s time, for now, to take a moment and lick our wounds.
• Choosing War: The Decision to Invade Iraq and Its Aftermath, by Dr. Joseph Collins PDF (1MB)
And while we’re doing that, it’s probably well past time to take a serious look at the Patriot Act.
In July of 2005 FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress that areas of the Patriot Act needed to be expanded because access to private information crucial to an ongoing terrorism investigation had been blocked. According to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the information in question was the educational history of an Egyptian-born graduate student.
The FBI told Congress that a National Security Letter issued to North Carolina State University had been rejected by the school, and that this was proof that the government was in desperate need of greater powers to secretly compel the release of private information.
Congressional leaders, appalled by the specter of FBI requests going unanswered, agreed to broaden the Patriot Act. It was a victory for the FBI, all the sweeter because they lied.
The FBI already had the information that they’d requested. An agent working out of the Charlotte field office had used a Federal subpoena to legally obtain the records in question. But FBI headquarters didn’t approve of the normal judicial process, so rather than accept the information already in their hands, they ordered the Charlotte field office to return the documents and resubmit their request with an improperly written, and therefore illegal, National Security Letter.
That letter was rejected by the University, conveniently providing Director Mueller with his talking point to illustrate the government’s need for an expanded Patriot Act.
It wasn’t until early in 2007 that the incident was reported to the Inspector General’s office, even though the Washington Post wrote a story about the improper National Security Letter only a few months after it happened in 2005. Nearly two years, and a number of debates in Congress about the Patriot Act, passed before the FBI investigated an abuse of its powers that was already public record.
What could they have been doing in the meantime? Cleaning out the gutters? Catching up on a stack of old magazines?
• EFF, Report on the Improper Use of an NSL to NC State University
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It certainly wasn’t catching terrorists, or at least real terrorists. And as it turns out this week, they weren’t even building actionable cases against the short-bus terrorists they were catching.
In 2006 we were told of a plot by seven men based out of Miami, a plot to blow up a national icon, the Sears Tower. Calling themselves the “Seas of David,” the group mixed religions, martial arts, and paintball.
The indictment against them charges that in addition to the Sears Tower plan, they also conspired to provide support to al Qaeda, and to blow up FBI offices.
Their contact with al Qaeda? Well he was a government informant. The Seas of David crew wasn’t exactly subtle about their organization. Their leader, Narseal Batiste, was known to roam the neighborhood in his bathrobe trying to recruit new “brothers” for his organization. They stood guard outside their warehouse Temple in quasi-military uniforms bearing the Star of David and wearing ski masks. Amazingly enough this activity wasn’t what attracted the government’s attention.
That didn’t happen until someone complained about Mr. Batiste trying to raise money for his group in a 7-11.
I never knew that 7-11 sold terrorist venture capital shares. Oh yeah, they don’t.
While promising to the government informant that his group of seven was ready to form an Islamic Army, oddly for Islamic terrorists, none of the men had taken the step of converting to Islam. Several were practicing Roman Catholics, better suited to Opus Dei than al Qaeda.
Their arrest was international news, waved about by the Bush administration as a sign that their Global War on Library records was working.
But despite putting the group through several months of caging by the FBI informant and over 1,800 intercepted phone calls, the Federal case has remained unconvincing to jurors. Earlier this week the six remaining defendants saw the second case against them stall as the jury deadlocked over their guilt.
Their defense has been simple. Not only did they never convert to Islam, they also never actually had anything more dangerous than a hunting knife and some paintball guns in their hands. They were far from preparing to form an Islamic Army to wage a ground war against the U.S. government.
They met with the government informant, the group’s lawyers claim, because they intended to swindle $50,000 out of a man claiming to represent al Qaeda. If that’s true, they would have dealt that terrorist organization one of its greatest defeats at American hands.
It’s uncertain at this time if the government will try to bring another case against them, or on what charges. Conspiracy to defraud a federal agent posing as an al Qaeda member?
The story certiainly won’t end with this most recent hung jury, as documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation indicate. According to the FBI documents several other wiretapping cases were begun as a result of their investigations into the Seas of David.
The status of those cases, based upon an investigation into what’s quite possibly a fake terrorist group, remains unknown, but probably won’t for long.
• Wired: Threat Level, Miami Terrorism Case Built on Wiretaps Crumbles, Again
• TPM, Seas of David indictment
• TPM, Seas of David references
• EFF, FBI Freedom of Information Act documents PDF (7.5MB)
Thanks to recent the efforts of Comcast to pack the house at an FCC meeting in Boston to discuss the anti-consumer actions of Comcast, the FCC held a make-up meeting at Stanford University this week.
Held in quite possibly the national region least friendly to corporate domination of content on the Internet, the meeting at Stanford was well-attended by network neutrality supporters. Prominent among them was Lawrence Lessig, a local hero of this News segment.
Dr. Lessig’s introduction at the conference is a work of art, laying out a case that the burden of proof should be on the telecommunications companies. Given that the Internet is currently supposed to be content neutral, he says that the telecoms need to show how allowing them to regulate the flow of content online will improve the Internet, rather than impede its development.
His best example against their case may have been the analogy to an electrical outlet that works depending on the brand of appliance that’s plugged in. If the electrical grid wasn’t neutral, consumers could find themselves paying extra to use a DVD player made by Toshiba instead of Sony.
That’s the threat of a telecom-managed Internet.
Hop on over to lessig.org to see Dr. Lessig’s introduction to the FCC meeting.
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He’s an excellent guy, but I’m pretty sure that it’s a constant kind of excellence. He’s just generally excellent, and around here we like to recognize moments of excellence, moments like this one. It’s…
We talked last week about Lenore Skenazy’s effort to give her son a little freedom, and the outrage generated by people terrified by the idea of their precious little snowflakes actually stepping outside. She didn’t win the Award again this week, although she did create a website called Free Range Kids to promote her ideas.
Damn near excellent. It actually may be excellent, but she won last week.
No, this week the winner has to be Wikileaks. Their growing organization is an uncensored wiki media website dedicated to exposing oppressive governments, but they also expose other questionable groups.
One of those groups tried to fight back this week. On the 9th of March Wikileaks posted some key documents from the Church of Scientology, including some handwritten by L. Ron Hubbard himself.
The Church of Scientology was NOT pleased. They issued what wikileaks called an “abusive” request for the documents to be taken down.
The wikileaks group responded that, “Wikileaks will not comply with legally abusive requests from Scientology any more than Wikileaks has complied with similar demands from Swiss banks, Russian off-shore stem cell centers, former African Kleptocrats, or the Pentagon. Wikileaks will remain a place where people of the world may safely expose injustice and corruption.”
That’s damn excellent, and wikileaks is this week’s winner of the Award of Excellence.
• Wikileaks, Church of Scientology’s ‘Operating Thetan’ documents leaked online
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And that’s the News for April 18th, Ought-Eight.