Fear of a White Powder

There's a test of common sense going on in Connecticut. The story about the white powder that was puffed up to a terrorist threat is well worth watching.

A pair of fun runners used flour to mark a trail through an Ikea parking lot for their running club, and for doing so, they've been charged with a felony.

"You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know," [New Haven Mayoral spokesperson] said. "It could be a terrorist, it could be something more serious. We're thankful it wasn't, but there were a lot of resources that went into figuring that out."

[What would be more serious than a terrorist?!]

While it's clear that overreacting authorities exercised poor judgement and caused a needless ruckus, what is unclear is just how they will handle the embarrassment. No one likes to be embarrassed but those that like it least are them that carry badges and are charged with keeping us safe.

Regardless of how obvious it is that the cops of New Haven freaked out, they will need to pin the blame on the fun runners. The authorities cannot be wrong, just as admitting they screwed up was just not possible for the federal prosecutors of Jose Padilla.

In the Padilla case, no evidence of an actual crime existed so the virtual crime of conspiracy was what prosecutors resorted to. Padilla was convicted of agreeing to agree to a crime in the future. But such preemptive crime fighting runs counter to the principle of innocent until proven guilty. By defintion, the only evidence that someone intended to commit a crime is heresay.

The virtual crime in the Ikea white powder case is "Breach of Peace," which appears in the Connecticut legal code (ch. 943, sec. 53-169 to 53-180) as related to "false information concening bombs." But the false information concerning any possibility of a threat was born in the misjudgement by authorities who mistook obviously harmless baking flour to be a dangerous substance.

If authorities possessed even rudimentary knowledge of the still unsolved(!) anthrax attacks of Fall 2001, they never would have sounded the alarm that they did.

They would have known that anthrax spread by hand in an outdoor setting would be most dangerous to those handling it, and that the anthrax powder sent in the mail in 2001 was not even white colored but brown and granular in its consistency.

Apparently, securing the homeland doesn't include resources like Wikipedia, and doesn't require common sense either, at least not when you can charge innocent people with fake crimes.

How Hitler and the American Republican Party Seized Their Power

An article in the Los Angeles Times made me think of the old days. Because nothing is new, and Bush ripped his moves from the playbook of the Nazi Party, I could not help thinking of Hitler when I read of how Congress' attempt to enforce the law against White House malfeasance is being scuttled by a Justice Department that puts the president above the Law.

The essential brilliance in Hitler's political skill is the same as our current president's. With a nation fearful of terrorism, co-opt the legal apparatus first, and all other power will follow. As is painfully clear, our elected legislators matter not a wot, if the Department of Justice ignores them.

The scandal that began with the sacking of attorneys at the DoJ is about the White House attempt to secure lasting power to the Republican Party despite the outcomes of future elections. What we who oppose this coming fascism need to fear, as (some) Democrats do their best to slow the process, is an event to parallel the 1933 arson attack on the Reichstag. The leaders of both, the Nazi party, and the Project for the New American Century knew that a national emergency will allow citizens to give up their civil liberties.

Two weeks after the fire, Hitler obtained the 2/3 majority from the German Congress that made him the dictator and above all constitutional constraints.

Good Terrorists

This week in Alabama, the ATF uncovered a paramilitary group with a cache of weapons, but the newspapers hardly mentioned it. The AP wire appears to be the only coverage. Perhaps news organizations are taking their cue from the Justice Department, who's been quick to downplay their own bust, stressing that the "ragtag" group "had no apparent plans to use the weapons."

"They just have a beef with the government, and they stockpile munitions," U.S. Attorney Alice Martin said at a news conference in Fort Payne.

With the same level of prominence given the arrest of the Alabama Free Militia, the AP's follow-up gives the group's lawyer a platform to tell the world that machine guns, grenades, and explosives are "much ado about nothing."

It's hard to imagine such a blasé attitude about an anti-government militia with a cache of weapons if the militia members were Muslims instead of these good ol' boys.
These fellers seem to be the right kind of terrorists. The type we don't need to worry about, and don't need to put on the news. These good terrorists have been no big deal to us for a long time. Did you hear about the abortion clinic bomber recently arrested in Austin TX? Probably not.

Or how about the good terrorist known to have planted a bomb on a Cuban plane that killed over 70 people, you know, the anti-Castro guy that is currently being protected by the US government? An American court determined he can't be sent back to Cuba or Venezuela to stand trial because he might be tortured there.

Christo-Fascists Phone It In

Why is it that Cosimo Cavallaro's "My Sweet Lord" (the chocolate Jesus sculpture recently ejected from a group show in New York) seems so unimportant as an issue of freedom of expression? Is it because the piece is so funny, in a way that Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" wasn't? Perhaps it's because the kerfuffle was ultimately good for the artist, who received several offers for the piece, in addition to very memorable publicity.

Or, is it because we are all ready to accept censorship by threat of violence. Death threats are not legitimate protests, but rather intended to create fear in innocent people. This is terrorism, plain and simple. Are we ready to accept it now as a way of life?

Radical Muslims used violence to react to the Muhammad cartoons printed in a Danish newspaper, and now radical Catholics are using violence to quash an artwork. Most notable is just how easy it was for the religious bullies to get their way. The curator resigned, but the street remains silent.

In the eighties, the NEA Four caused a mass movement of artists and a protracted court battle. In the end, however, the government beat those artists. They won their law suit in 1993, but the Supreme Court reversed that victory in 1998 by declaring that Obscenity was a legitimate reason to deny funding. Further, Congress eliminated the NEA's Grants to Individuals Program.

So is that what happened? The bastards just won is all? And to the victor of the war for expression goes the right to silence artists merely by phoning it in?

ps - Apparently, threatening to kill is also effective for intimidating bloggers, too.

KSM- Tortured Enough?

The Pentagon has released some sanitized versions of what are purported to be Khalid Sheik Mohammed's confessions.

News sources are expressing skepticism over whether his many claims are to be trusted.

Ummm, why does anyone have any confidence in the statement itself? After the rendition, the secret prisons, the torture, and the supremely opaque camp x-ray, does this statement really have any credibility?

Well, it seems like the press has gobbled it up anyway. But really, how do we even know there is a Khalid Sheik Mohammed?

The final irony is that the immediate redaction by the military panel of KSM's allegations of torture at the hands of his CIA interrogators actually lends credence to the rest of his statement.

How To Win in Court Every Time

Why is it that torture is not usually allowed in coercing evidence from suspected criminals?

And why does the Bush Administration want to allow hearsay and testimony obtained by torture now in their prosecutions of prisoners of Guantanamo?

Simply put, they can't get convictions any other way. They cannot convict these men with normal evidence obtained through legal means, because they don't have enough of it.

That is why we have elevated to an art the practice of legal contortion. I'm referring to the pattern of creating means to violate legal precedent and moral principle. We've used language ("enemy combatant," "harsh tactics"), place (Guantanamo, off-shore CIA prisons), and now, we just wanna beat it out of 'em.

Remem Boring

Five years on, it's time to remember the 9/11 victims. These memories have filled columns, airwaves, and moments of silence all this past week, but starting tomorrow, for the next 364 days we can return to forgetting.

Remembering the victims of 9/11 is often a way to make a point, like when we disagree about art, history, or real estate. The victims also come in handy for sentencing convicted terrorists.

In time, perhaps September 11 will become a day like Memorial Day, which means more about barbecues than dead veterans.

Fear Campaign, Once Again

When two news items showed up next to each other on my Google News, I thought, 'hey, maybe these stories are related …' -duh.

But, talk about a desperately slow news day, or the lame state of our passive journalism. I guess we're all tired of that same old Death-in-Iraq-Rising-Poverty-Corrupt-Government-Katrina-Anniversary story. These were Google's top stories:

Illegal TV

There's something contradictory about outlawing a TV channel in America. Last week a guy was arrested for hooking up a satellite to receive Hezbollah's Al-Manar. Of course, we have laws against providing support to terrorist organizations, but outlawing the reception of a TV signal feels a lot like a limit on freedom of speech.

The whole thing gets a bit Byzantine with the details. Hezbollah is categorized as a terrorist organization, but that started in 1997, before stateless rogues added political party to their business plans (like IRA, PLO, EZLN, and most recently Muqtada Al-Sadr). Hezbollah politically controls 21% of the municipalities of Lebanon. They understand Tip O'Neill's aphorism that "all politics is local."

(Political states have been using terrorism to execute foreign policy for years; it's reasonable to expect that terrorist groups would eventually take up politics to effact their domestic agendas.)

On top of all this, the federal law forbidding support for terrorists has an explicit exemption for news and media. So it turns out, the guy wasn't charged with breaking that law, but rather for conspiracy to break that law. Conspiracy to do something that isn't illegal, however, seems like a pretty weak charge to me.

He's a regular guy trying to make a living in Brooklyn. I expect they'll soon realize this is a lame case with nothing to prosecute, but they will be too embarrassed to drop it. It'll be the sequel to the Jose Padilla case.

Fear Thy Neighbor

By living in, and becoming acclimated to a State of Fear, fear has become the imperative. To be without fear is to misunderstand the world, if you were to take the current president's view.

In the past, to fear thy neighbor manifested itself in familiar ways: racism, homophobia, disdain for the poor. But what is new now is the overt allowance for the actions from that fear - often resulting in shameful scenes at airports (embarrassing in that they are usually simply panic with severely unjust results).

So to the question posed by the BBC journalist Sean Coughlan, (as part of their discussion of the English tourist flight from Spain on which some passengers demanded that their own suspicion of their fellow travelers must be addressed by the airline) "Is this an understandable response or paranoia and prejudice?"

The answer is YES, because both side of this false dichotomy are true, and the freak-out may be forgivable, but it is also unacceptable. Turning on your neighbors in this sort of vigilante style cannot become common.

PS - One can re-brand racism as profiling (without the 'racial' prefix), but there will always be less reprehensible ways to provide sercurity.

Still Waiting

A week after their arrests, we still have no charges for the allegedly flammable liquid-wielding Brits.

In fact, the story is barely even news anymore. Today, the major papers buried it beyond page 10 (but it's tough to compete with a break in the JonBenet case).

Security guards watched these guys for months, but when they finally arrest them for a plot akin to 9/11, they don't even have enough to make a charge?!

What they have done is get a court to extend the time allowed to hold a person without charge, and if they were as smart as Americans, they would start to figure out how to get a court to allow as evidence the affidavit of a torture victim.

So in the end, there may be no convictions, and maybe no plot (and definitely no more hair gel in your carry-on) but did George Bush get a bounce in the polls? Newsweek says … maybe, but US News … maybe not.

Crime of Looking

Many reports of the cell phone terror hysteria explained that possessing pictures of a pretty bridge, and purchasing prepaid cell phones were reasons enough to require arrest. These descriptions of suspicious behavior leave something out, but we can all fill in the omission: the arrested men looked liked Arabs.

So the crime here is the crime of looking. Looking at the Mackinac bridge while also looking Arabic.

It is polite (and crappy) journalism to leave out questions of racism. We all pretend to live in a so-called color-blind society, as if racism is a dichotomy without middle ground, as if no good people are capable of seeing or reacting to a person's race.

Let us accept that this is folly. And accept that racism in the main, exists as a matter of degrees, neither purely evil nor holy. And that bridges between peoples shall be beautiful enough to make images of them worth possessing.

PS - Even though the FBI and Michigan State police have cleared the men of connections to terrorism, county authorities in Michigan have their pride to consider.

Don't Be Afraid

Are you ready for the storm of terrorism hysteria? The big alleged British bust has yet to charge anybody with a crime, and now, in the midwest US, selling cell phones on the street is the occupation of terrorists.

It simply feels very thin to me.

One Side of the Story

Regarding the new alleged terrorist attack allegedly foiled by the British and/or American security forces: An important thing to keep in mind is that these same security forces, MI5 and Homeland Security, have consistently arrested innocent people, gone public with false charges, exaggerated threats and their own capabilities, bungled investigations, lied to the public, and even killed and imprisoned harmless citizens.

More often than not, these are the things that have been happening. Let us remember the so-called terror plots from Forest Gate, Portland, Miami, Buffalo, and Detroit. Let us remember Jean Charles de Menezes, and Rigoberto Alpizar, and Jose Padilla.

We cannot trust these so-called security forces to tell us the truth.

PS: As we read the names of the alleged terrorists this morning, we should ask why these names are released before there have been any formal charges made. And to understand how justice works in the war on terror, consider the role of public humiliation and the plea bargain as techniques to avoid embarrassing the state.

PPS - Why is 'conspiracy' is a weak charge and not even considered a crime of International Law?

oops, Your Dead

Last week, English authorities announced that the cops who killed an innocent man in the London subway will not be charged with any crime. On July 22, 2005, gunslinging officers of an anti-terrorism unit shot a Brazilian man 7 times in the head. The world was told the victim resembled a suicide bomber in all sorts of ways that turned out to be untrue.

The men who carried out this execution could not be held responsible because they "genuinely believed" that the victim, Jean Charles de Menezes, was a suicide bomber — an honest mistake, they said. It seems such genuine belief is a vital part of a system of authoritative murder.

We saw this in the Amadou Diallo case when the jury acquitted the officers who shot the unarmed man because they genuinely believed at the time that their own lives were in danger.

In this system, if a police officer is sincere when he testifies, 'oops, I made a mistake,' then killing innocent people appears to be OK.