Published May 5, 2013. Last revised July 4, 2013
One of the terrorists that killed three and grievously wounded many more with two bombs at the finish line of the recent Boston Marathon is dead and the other wounded and in custody. Investigation continues here and in Russia into who may have helped before or after with the bomb making or by obstructing justice by hiding evidence.
The security organizations and local police, with help of ubiquitous surveillance cameras and observant bystanders, including at least one of the severely wounded, quickly and competently got the bad guys. They have traced three of the bombers' friends, who, in the manner of 19-year-olds, showed poor judgement and a misplaced loyalty by aiding and abetting after the fact. And our guys continue the very difficult job of investigating the why of the matter. What they find will be presented by prsecutors in the public trial that is our honored tradition.
A personal aside: We stayed recently for four days at the Charlesmark hotel on Boylston street (recommended), across from the Boston Public Library and a block or so from Copley Square. The city of Boston has no more lovely, lively neighborhood. While our hearts beat for the families and friends of the dead and shattered, the trashed neighborhood is a loss, hopefully temporary, to Bostonians and their visitors as well.
In the aftermath the second guessers are out and about, bloviating about "connecting the dots" and gravely disclosing just how this tragedy could have been easily adverted if only the alphabet soup of the FBI, CIA, DHS and the NSA had cooperated more and shared what they knew among themselves and with local police. The television talk show is their natural habitat: thank you, God, for the mute button.
These critics' favorite weapon is hindsight. My favorite definition of hindsight is: "Looking up that place where the sun don't shine." Ancient seers stared at the equally obnoxious entrails of chickens with equally irrelevant results.
Consider the working day of the intelligence analyst. If his file of new emails didn't overflow over night it soon will in the morning as various embassies, field offices and clandestine operatives supply bits and pieces of knowledge about suspected plots afoot. In the 12 years since 9/11, when lack of cooperation among agencies was indeed a problem, a growing habit of sharing most everything has only expanded our analyst's data flow. His task of sifting the evidence and evaluating and prioritizing possible threats is hard. Determining after the fact what happened and how in a perfect world it could have been prevented is easy. Once a successful plot has gone down, terrorists crow about rather than carefully conceal their intentions.
Of course Congress must needs hold hearings separately in each branch. Watching them prance and preen for the cameras while browbeating their witnesses and asking irrelevant questions is stomach turning. They are rehearsing the play that will be performed when they seek reelection, nothing more. Consequently as a group they have the attention span of a tribe of idly curious monkeys. The men and women who grapple with the responsibility of turning bits and pieces of facts, conjecture and misinformation into intelligence the nation can use, can only sit there, listen to the flowery non sequiters and try to be polite.
Agency spokes persons can only murmur the hard truth that our enemies abound and will occasionally succeed in doing us harm no matter how hard we try to prevent it, or how much navel gazing the politicians and the chattering classes indulge in after the fact.
Let Winston Churchill explain what we are now -- and of late -- called upon to endure and how we can eventually win: "Let us therefor brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that if [the United States] lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour." We the people are ready. Our leaders have a ways to go.
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Guantanamo Redux
President Obama, who directed that Guantanamo be closed on the second day of his first term, has once again vowed to close the notorious prison. He is shamefully late. Nor is he blameless. While Congress -- with both parties in rare agreement -- has shackled him with legislative road blocks, the law does give him a discretionary waiver to order transfers to willing countries' He has chosen not to use it.
Guantanamo is an abject failure Only 166 remain of the total of 779 who have been detained there. Military tribunals, a dubious source of fair trials, have managed to convict only seven. Later in the proceedings three more have been convicted and only six of the remaining population may face trial. As the President recently observed, the federal courts' track record is much better.
The remaining prisoners range from Kalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged master mind behind 9/11 who isn't going anywhere, to Shaker Aamet, a British resident captured in 2001 by a War Lord, and allegedly handed to the American forces in return for the bounty on offer. According to The Economist, a respected British publication, Aamet could be repatriated to Great Britain which is well able to monitor him. Some 86 of the residual prisoners were in 2010 vetted for transfer because, like Aamet, they claim their only sin was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and evidence was lacking to refute them. All are still there.
Small wonder that 100 (the prison's count) to 130 (defense lawyers tally) of the inmates are on a hunger strike, including Aamet. They are being force fed through a tube snaked through a nostril and down the throat through the esophagus and into the stomach. This procedure is difficult enough with willing sedated patients, and a bloody nightmare when the victim resists. Of course prisoners must be tied down once the tube is in place, or they may drag it back out.
Many Americans who are unable to eat normally for various reasons also use a feeding tube for nourishment. However their doctors surgically prepare an opening to the stomach in which the tube can be easily inserted. My father had a feeding tube so placed shortly before he died. Dinner of fortified liquids was bereft of taste and aroma, but also without discomfort.
So Guantanamo remains open for business, although nobody has arrived or departed in a year. The Economist reports that only one part of the base has been shuttered. It is the diplomatic office that found countries willing to take those that the military quietly released in the early days , thereby tacitly acknowledging that their dragnet had swept up many a bewildered bystander.
Why Guantanamo? Specifically, why is it still open? History reveals that when the American people are sufficiently shocked and scared by bombings and other attacks, they compromise their freedoms and sully their heritage to buy a little safety The attack on 9/11 was such a time. The Patriot Act is only the latest to breech the Constitution. Equally notorious was the executive order President Roosevelt was persuaded to sign so a bigoted army general could relocate Japanese-American citizens from California to inland concentration camps after Pear Harbor. Collectively we lost our nerve. Even the Supreme Court went along with this puerile program. After World War I the Justice Department went on a witch hunt for socialist subversives. The McCarthy era fought the Cold War by refining that process with dubious lists of communists, bycharacter assassinations and qirh demeaning loyalty oaths.
What's to be done? Of course close the prison. Barack Obama needs to show some spine and repatriate the residue except for the really bad guys. He needs to play the part of Commander-in-Chief and bring the military to heel. He needs to order the State Department to get back on the job and explain to countries unwilling to take back their wayward citizens that there will be consequences if they don't.. Finally we, too, need reminding that liberties dearly bought are worth risking our lives to keep and honor, even if those who hate and threaten us are bearded smelly towel heads prone to careful plots and sudden sneaky violence.
Remember the President's explicit Constitutional responsibility to see that the laws be safely executed? Perpetual detention in our system is lawful only for the violently insane. Congress can rant and rave and even sue. But I'll bet that the Supreme Court remembers habis corpus among other parts of the Constitution's Bill of Rights.
Some will say that foreigners are not to be accorded our rights and privileges. They have a narrow point, especially since "enemy combatant" has become the accepted term of art to categorize Guantanamo's inhabitants. But prisoners of war get to go home when the war is over, and our two wars are thankfully winding down. And a foreign national convicted of crimes under our laws while on our land, is given an explicit sentence after his day in court. Perpetual detention without telling the detainee why is straight out of Kafka. That is no place from which to retrieve an American
way of justice.
Guantanamo is an abject failure Only 166 remain of the total of 779 who have been detained there. Military tribunals, a dubious source of fair trials, have managed to convict only seven. Later in the proceedings three more have been convicted and only six of the remaining population may face trial. As the President recently observed, the federal courts' track record is much better.
The remaining prisoners range from Kalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged master mind behind 9/11 who isn't going anywhere, to Shaker Aamet, a British resident captured in 2001 by a War Lord, and allegedly handed to the American forces in return for the bounty on offer. According to The Economist, a respected British publication, Aamet could be repatriated to Great Britain which is well able to monitor him. Some 86 of the residual prisoners were in 2010 vetted for transfer because, like Aamet, they claim their only sin was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and evidence was lacking to refute them. All are still there.
Small wonder that 100 (the prison's count) to 130 (defense lawyers tally) of the inmates are on a hunger strike, including Aamet. They are being force fed through a tube snaked through a nostril and down the throat through the esophagus and into the stomach. This procedure is difficult enough with willing sedated patients, and a bloody nightmare when the victim resists. Of course prisoners must be tied down once the tube is in place, or they may drag it back out.
Many Americans who are unable to eat normally for various reasons also use a feeding tube for nourishment. However their doctors surgically prepare an opening to the stomach in which the tube can be easily inserted. My father had a feeding tube so placed shortly before he died. Dinner of fortified liquids was bereft of taste and aroma, but also without discomfort.
So Guantanamo remains open for business, although nobody has arrived or departed in a year. The Economist reports that only one part of the base has been shuttered. It is the diplomatic office that found countries willing to take those that the military quietly released in the early days , thereby tacitly acknowledging that their dragnet had swept up many a bewildered bystander.
Why Guantanamo? Specifically, why is it still open? History reveals that when the American people are sufficiently shocked and scared by bombings and other attacks, they compromise their freedoms and sully their heritage to buy a little safety The attack on 9/11 was such a time. The Patriot Act is only the latest to breech the Constitution. Equally notorious was the executive order President Roosevelt was persuaded to sign so a bigoted army general could relocate Japanese-American citizens from California to inland concentration camps after Pear Harbor. Collectively we lost our nerve. Even the Supreme Court went along with this puerile program. After World War I the Justice Department went on a witch hunt for socialist subversives. The McCarthy era fought the Cold War by refining that process with dubious lists of communists, bycharacter assassinations and qirh demeaning loyalty oaths.
What's to be done? Of course close the prison. Barack Obama needs to show some spine and repatriate the residue except for the really bad guys. He needs to play the part of Commander-in-Chief and bring the military to heel. He needs to order the State Department to get back on the job and explain to countries unwilling to take back their wayward citizens that there will be consequences if they don't.. Finally we, too, need reminding that liberties dearly bought are worth risking our lives to keep and honor, even if those who hate and threaten us are bearded smelly towel heads prone to careful plots and sudden sneaky violence.
Remember the President's explicit Constitutional responsibility to see that the laws be safely executed? Perpetual detention in our system is lawful only for the violently insane. Congress can rant and rave and even sue. But I'll bet that the Supreme Court remembers habis corpus among other parts of the Constitution's Bill of Rights.
Some will say that foreigners are not to be accorded our rights and privileges. They have a narrow point, especially since "enemy combatant" has become the accepted term of art to categorize Guantanamo's inhabitants. But prisoners of war get to go home when the war is over, and our two wars are thankfully winding down. And a foreign national convicted of crimes under our laws while on our land, is given an explicit sentence after his day in court. Perpetual detention without telling the detainee why is straight out of Kafka. That is no place from which to retrieve an American
way of justice.
Thursday, May 2, 2013
A Sequestering We Will Go
Update 2 July 2013
Two months have passed. We are still sequestering across the board. It is still no way to run a government. But the sky has not fallen. The slow recovery from financial hubris that we have managed is still slow, perhaps slower,but not reversed. The trillion dollar plus deficits that Obama inherited from Bush have been cut nearly in half, thanks to the recovery, the retreats from Iraq and Afghanistan, and, yes, to the sequester itself. Government still continues to function.
What happened? First, Congress stooped paying attention, pleasantly distracted by the need to hold non-stop hearings on a set of juicy pseudo scandals at the IRS, (Why, the very idea that all those Tea Party charitable groups were doing too much politicking. And did you hear that extravagant conferencing in nice venues, while hastily stopped several years back by the Obamas, had gone on before?) the State Department, (How could a bunch of rag heads succeed in killing a popular ambassador? How come our UN rep couldn't explain how State botched a project being run by the CIA?) and at the NSA (We hear they are actually connecting the dots between suspicious foreign phone calls and loyal American citizens using high technology meta data, whatever that is.)
Next, government agencies at all levels quietly made budget adjustments among offices and projects that were actually forbidden by the sequester law. Unless some Congressional aide with a wild hair for some endeavor is checking, agency budget officials do pretty much what they and their bosses want with the money Congress votes. If necessary they apologize later. This dynamic works all the time, but especially well when arbitrary budget cuts have been levied.
Finally, all across the country people are turning to with their time and money to rescue popular programs such as Meals-On-Wheels; local parks, and arts, etc. Charity is usually late, inadequate and mis-allocated, but we do it better than any other country.
----------- ---------------- ---------------
Original post 2 May 2013 with minor emendations.
Sequester, noun and verb, has become the latest portmanteau word in Washington. It strives to explain as obscurely as possible what is plainly an arbitrary across-the-board budget cut. In Roman times sequestering meant safe keeping. By the middle ages it was a more benign way of saying excommunicate, remove from the Church. Maybe draw and quarter, head on a stake, to the fire.
Even later it acquired a more useful definition: remove from a public position or office. Now we are getting somewhere! Let us ask the people, will they, could they, rise up and apply this meaning to the Congress of the United States?.
Oliver Cromwell said and did it best long ago: "You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!" He thus dissolved the English parliament in 1653. There is much to be said for the parliamentary system.
President Obama of course cannot dissolve Congress, but he could do worse than quote Cromwell at them and suggest an extra long vacation. Given the Congressional approval rating its members might take the hint, slink away and never come back. The only other remedies allowed by our Constitution are impeachment (too hard) and defeat at the next election. This, too, is difficult, only partially achieved in our long history even by the power of the NRA. Besides, while we despise Congress, we universally think our own Congress persons ever so nice, and vote for them yet again,
Many inequities are abroad as the sequester takes hold. Congress has provided relief only one time. Not, of course for the poor, disabled, old, sick, hungry, jobless or homeless. Nor for strapped schools, libraries, parks, fire fighters or local governments. Not even for military contracts in their districts.
No, relief has been speedily given by an unprecedented burst of bipartisanship only to the nation's air traffic controllers. Start with the smaller airports without scheduled flights. Wealthy people and corporations park their private jets in such venues, and have been known to offer rides to our legislators. Congress persons are always in a hurry to somewhere, especially to their home towns and states for the long weekend (Thursday night to Tuesday morning) that is their tradition.
Then there is Reagan Washington National Airport. There may be no truth to the rumor (that I just started) that the Obama administration was quietly imposing extra heavy furloughs for the lads and ladies who staff its control tower, but Congress connected the potential dots with a speed we wish the security community would emulate. Reagan is nothing less than a lifeline to Congress, which treats it as its own. It even has its own convenient parking lot so staffers will not have to lug their bags too far. No air traffic delays -- or delays of any kind -- for them.
Back to the sequester. Everybody says, "This is no way to run a government" and they are right. But it is our way today, And it will only get worse by stunting the recovery. The only relief from the present and coming gloom is gallows humor. Some was supplied lately by cartoonist Walt Handelsman of Newsday. He turned "Sequester" into an all purpose word. A sampling: from his panel:
Agitated husband speaking to wife: "The dog sequestered on the carpet!"
Restaurant diner: "I ordered my steak rare." Waiter: "@#$%& amp; Sequester!!"
Wife to perplexed husband: "John -- this isn't working . . .I want a Sequester."
Wife in bed with back to unhappy husband: "Not tonight dear -- I have a Sequester."
'Tis better to laugh than cry. Maybe better to be lucky than wise. Let us pray.
Two months have passed. We are still sequestering across the board. It is still no way to run a government. But the sky has not fallen. The slow recovery from financial hubris that we have managed is still slow, perhaps slower,but not reversed. The trillion dollar plus deficits that Obama inherited from Bush have been cut nearly in half, thanks to the recovery, the retreats from Iraq and Afghanistan, and, yes, to the sequester itself. Government still continues to function.
What happened? First, Congress stooped paying attention, pleasantly distracted by the need to hold non-stop hearings on a set of juicy pseudo scandals at the IRS, (Why, the very idea that all those Tea Party charitable groups were doing too much politicking. And did you hear that extravagant conferencing in nice venues, while hastily stopped several years back by the Obamas, had gone on before?) the State Department, (How could a bunch of rag heads succeed in killing a popular ambassador? How come our UN rep couldn't explain how State botched a project being run by the CIA?) and at the NSA (We hear they are actually connecting the dots between suspicious foreign phone calls and loyal American citizens using high technology meta data, whatever that is.)
Next, government agencies at all levels quietly made budget adjustments among offices and projects that were actually forbidden by the sequester law. Unless some Congressional aide with a wild hair for some endeavor is checking, agency budget officials do pretty much what they and their bosses want with the money Congress votes. If necessary they apologize later. This dynamic works all the time, but especially well when arbitrary budget cuts have been levied.
Finally, all across the country people are turning to with their time and money to rescue popular programs such as Meals-On-Wheels; local parks, and arts, etc. Charity is usually late, inadequate and mis-allocated, but we do it better than any other country.
----------- ---------------- ---------------
Original post 2 May 2013 with minor emendations.
Sequester, noun and verb, has become the latest portmanteau word in Washington. It strives to explain as obscurely as possible what is plainly an arbitrary across-the-board budget cut. In Roman times sequestering meant safe keeping. By the middle ages it was a more benign way of saying excommunicate, remove from the Church. Maybe draw and quarter, head on a stake, to the fire.
Even later it acquired a more useful definition: remove from a public position or office. Now we are getting somewhere! Let us ask the people, will they, could they, rise up and apply this meaning to the Congress of the United States?.
Oliver Cromwell said and did it best long ago: "You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!" He thus dissolved the English parliament in 1653. There is much to be said for the parliamentary system.
President Obama of course cannot dissolve Congress, but he could do worse than quote Cromwell at them and suggest an extra long vacation. Given the Congressional approval rating its members might take the hint, slink away and never come back. The only other remedies allowed by our Constitution are impeachment (too hard) and defeat at the next election. This, too, is difficult, only partially achieved in our long history even by the power of the NRA. Besides, while we despise Congress, we universally think our own Congress persons ever so nice, and vote for them yet again,
Many inequities are abroad as the sequester takes hold. Congress has provided relief only one time. Not, of course for the poor, disabled, old, sick, hungry, jobless or homeless. Nor for strapped schools, libraries, parks, fire fighters or local governments. Not even for military contracts in their districts.
No, relief has been speedily given by an unprecedented burst of bipartisanship only to the nation's air traffic controllers. Start with the smaller airports without scheduled flights. Wealthy people and corporations park their private jets in such venues, and have been known to offer rides to our legislators. Congress persons are always in a hurry to somewhere, especially to their home towns and states for the long weekend (Thursday night to Tuesday morning) that is their tradition.
Then there is Reagan Washington National Airport. There may be no truth to the rumor (that I just started) that the Obama administration was quietly imposing extra heavy furloughs for the lads and ladies who staff its control tower, but Congress connected the potential dots with a speed we wish the security community would emulate. Reagan is nothing less than a lifeline to Congress, which treats it as its own. It even has its own convenient parking lot so staffers will not have to lug their bags too far. No air traffic delays -- or delays of any kind -- for them.
Back to the sequester. Everybody says, "This is no way to run a government" and they are right. But it is our way today, And it will only get worse by stunting the recovery. The only relief from the present and coming gloom is gallows humor. Some was supplied lately by cartoonist Walt Handelsman of Newsday. He turned "Sequester" into an all purpose word. A sampling: from his panel:
Agitated husband speaking to wife: "The dog sequestered on the carpet!"
Restaurant diner: "I ordered my steak rare." Waiter: "@#$%& amp; Sequester!!"
Wife to perplexed husband: "John -- this isn't working . . .I want a Sequester."
Wife in bed with back to unhappy husband: "Not tonight dear -- I have a Sequester."
'Tis better to laugh than cry. Maybe better to be lucky than wise. Let us pray.
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