Robert L. Campbell
Since the University of Southern Mississippi's current Computer Use Policy was adopted in the October 2002, the administration of President Shelby Thames has claimed the authority to read any email sent from or received on a university computer, to copy the contents of any hard drive on any university computer, and to seize computers from employees at any time, for any reason.
Although the policy is more starkly worded than most, it doesn't differ in essentials from those presently in force at other universities, or in the corporate world. It appears that under current law, a company-owned computer has the same status as a company-owner meat slicer or drill press. The same managers and administrators who would be prohibited from opening snail-mail sent or received by employees, or from listening to their telephone conversations without their permission, can legally read any employee's email whenever they feel like it.
I might add that from Shelby Thames' point of view, as revealed in the open hearing on April 28, it would seem that merely using university computers to send emails inquiring about Angeline Dvorak's credentials or making negative comments about Shelby Thames' performance constituted a"misuse of university equipment." Thames took the greatest offense, in his testimony, at the low opinion of him expressed in some of Gary Stringer's emails. Under the Computer Use Policy currently in force, the expression in email of any sentiment not approved by Shelby Thames could be taken to constitute misuse of university equipment.
From a legal standpoint the USM Computer Use Policy would presumably pass muster. (I leave aside the issues raised by Thames' monitoring of student emails, which his April 28 testimony revealed he was also doing.) But an organization in which management retains the power to read every employee's email is an organization in which management is proclaiming that it trusts no employee and brooks no criticism or dissent from any employee. Indeed the prevalent reaction to Thames' email surveillance, from the media and the public, has been revulsion. Marshall Ramsey's May 22 cartoon in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger says it all. (For those who have not been following the saga, Larry Templeton is the Athletic Director at Mississippi State; around May 19 his performance seemed to be a much more urgent concern to the ruling clique on the state College Board than Shelby Thames' was.)
So here, you would think, is a golden opportunity for the faculty of USM, via their respresenatives in the Faculty Senate, to put forward a model electronic communications policy for the university. The question is not what is allowed under current law. What matters is what kinds of rules should be followed and what kinds of practices ought to prevail in a good organization.
In fact, a simple, bold, clear policy could be formulated: Email sent and received on university computers is presumed private. Neither email surveillance nor copying of hard drives nor seizure of computers will take place, except when the university is cooperating with a law enforcement agency in investigating a violation of the law. And in those cases, a public announcement as to who was subject to email surveillance, over what period of time, will be made as soon as charges are brought against the individual, or the decision is made not to bring any. Actions taken in violation of the new policy by any university employee, including the president, will constitute grounds for termination.
Of course, Shelby Thames will accept such a policy over his dead body. But that does not matter, for even if he could somehow be prevailed on to accept the policy, no one would ever trust him to abide by it. The important consequence is this: once the policy has been put in front of him, Thames, his flunkies, and his political sponsors will bear the burden of explaining, to the media and to the public, why they are rejecting it. Meanwhile the faculty can make endorsing the new policy a condition of acceptability for any new President of USM.
The USM Faculty Senate is the body that would normally be expected to act on this kind of issue. But it has yet to take the initiative. Indeed, the recent compromise regarding Angie Dvorak's misrepresentations on her vita looks like a reversion to Faculty Senate business as usual. Even if the deal was cut in anticipation that she would leave USM (and of course Angie Dvorak is still on the payroll, drawing the same salary for a job with perhaps half of her old responsibilities), it let her off too easily.
Here is what has happened instead. The President's Council, a body of persons handpicked by administrators that Thames created for public relations purposes in early May, offered a weak proposition that Thames consult with a two or three-person advisory committee before undertaking any email surveillance. Thames indicated that he might accept this arrangement, but has yet to make any commitment to it. There is a real question, in fact, whether Thames will end up consenting to any proposal that comes out of the PC. Many observers believe that Thames is simply waiting a few months, until the IHL Board is ready to declare itself content with his efforts to"improve communication" on campus--at which point he will disband the PC or quit bothering to meet with it.
Why the email surveillance issue is so important is revealed by the following exchange at the May 26 meeting of the President's Council:
Thames seemed surprised that some in the university community distrust his administration.
"I think I made a statement last week to this group that e-mails are not being monitored," he said."Are you telling me people don't believe that?"
The response was a chorus of"Oh, yeah."
At the meeting, Thames had insisted Glamser and Stringer were the only employees whose email he had monitored since he became President of USM in May 2002. Lee Gore, the University Attorney, had further claimed that only 4 such investigations had been done in the last 14 years. (Of course, by the date when Thames allegedly ordered the investigation of Glamser and Stringer, Gore had been shouldered aside in favor of Thames'"Director of Risk Management," Jack Hanbury. And why should Lee Gore be expected to know who was subject to email surveillance while he was out of the loop and doing his time in Siberia?)
Since at the public hearing on April 28, Thames read intercepted emails from Gary Stringer dating as far back as January 31, 2003, virtually no one believes that Thames gave the email surveillance order to Jack Hanbury on January 16, 2004, as he claimed in his testimony. In late May, Thames responded to the Hattiesburg American's request for details under the Mississippi Public Records Act with the assertion that there was no written record of his supposed order on January 16, 2004 to Jack Hanbury to spy on Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer's email.
Many observers believe that there is no such documentation because there was no such order. Instead, they maintain that Angie Dvorak herself had already arranged for surveillance to be done on Gary Stringer. What's more, the surveillance may have begun as far back as May 2003. Dvorak could easily arrange for Stringer's email to be intercepted and his hard drives to be copied via her relationship with Pileum Corporation, whose contract with USM to manage information technology she oversaw. Not only was Jill Beneke, the President of Pileum, sitting near Thames at the April 28 hearing; Thames pointedly included in his testimony an email to Gary Stringer from an anonymous source, suggesting that Stringer investigate the university's contract with Pileum Corporation. Yet in his 30-minute statement at the end of the hearing, Stringer said he had not followed up on the tip, and in fact had no idea what Pileum Corporation was or what it did. If Stringer had known about Pileum, Thames would have ended up with very few intercepted emails to read out loud.
No student or employee of the University of Southern Mississippi has any reason to expect email or computer privacy until Shelby Thames is removed from office, the information technology contract with Pileum Corporation is terminated, and a strict new email privacy policy is adopted.
Meanwhile, the adoption of such a policy could have wide-ranging impact. Employees in many organizations fear that their email is being read by managers. And it is common for professors and other university employees to avoid using both university email and university phone lines when discussing matters they do not want administrators to know about. It is worth noting that employees of many universities--not just USM--frequently believe that nothing they say over a university phone line is private, even though there are legal prohibitions against listening in on telephone conversations.
The USM Faculty Senate has a choice. If it moves swiftly to put forward a strict email privacy policy, it will do groundbreaking work and ensure loads of favorable publicity for its cause, while hastening the end of the Thames regime. If it falls back on reacting to administrative initiatives, or seeking to smooth things over with Thames and his administrators, it will have done its part to keep Shelby Thames in office for another two years, while insuring that one of his very worst policies remains in force after he is finally fired or his contract runs out.
For breaking news, follow the USM AAUP chapter's message board.
David T. Beito
David T. Beito
In a typical statement, Tom J. Tubb, chairman of the party, declared in 1955: “I don't believe that the Negro ought to be allowed to vote in Democratic primaries....The white man founded Mississippi and it ought to remain that way." (Earl M. Lewis, “The Negro Voter in Mississippi,” Journal of Negro Education 26 (Summer, 1957), 342).
Now, Reid McKee, a former Liberty and Power blogger, who is the main man at Moteworthy, is publicizing an explosive scandal that brings back uncomfortable memories of the Democratic tradition of Tom J. Tubb .
George Dale, the current Democratic state insurance commissioner, has stated that he and other party officials had sought a white person (and only a white person) to be chair of the party.
I supported the dumping of Trent Lott from the Senate leadership but his comments were tame compared to Dale's. Had these words been uttered by a Republican of similar rank to Dale, I suspect that they would already be headline news. Will the Democratic party demand his scalp (as it did Lott's)? I doubt it.
Listen to Dale’s comments here. They are devastating and crystal clear in their meaning.
Somewhere Tom J. Tubb must be smiling.
Pat Lynch
Saddam must now be correctly categorized as certainly not even in the top 5 most dangerous world leaders at the time of the invasion. Of the top three we know that Iran is far closer to nukes; North Korea has them; Sudan trains terrorists and ethnically cleanses non-Arabs. But Saddam was obviously not as dangerous as Assad in Syria or even Chavez in Venezuela, who could seriously disrupt the U.S. economy and fully install a Cuban style society in a country with major oil reserves the U.S. needs now. This war just keeps looking more and more silly.
Roderick T. Long
After the libertarian (r)evolution, when there's no more news about presidents and senators and occupation forces, what will fill our newspapers?
After all, as Gertrude Himmelfarb teaches us, the political realm is the Realm of the Rational. So after the death of politics, as Karl Hess called it, won’t we be thrown back on what Himmelfarb considers the irrational"inanimate forces" of civil society?
On the other hand, Hess described politics as a form of"residual magic" that"denies the rational nature of man." So maybe, just maybe, there's scope for rational activity outside the political sphere. And in a libertarian society some of the front page space currently devoted to blather about the State might give some attention to actual, rational achievements of the sort that under the current régime get buried somewhere in the back pages.
Which brings me to a subject far more interesting, and far better deserving of respectful attention, than the sanguinary antics of the ruling class. I refer of course to concrete.
The concrete of the future, that is. Concrete that's stronger, more flexible, and – would you believe transparent?
Well, translucent anyway.
Check out the story here.
Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Yesterday, my friend Stan Rozenfeld alerted me to a column written by conservative John Podhoretz over at National Review Online, a review of the new movie"Spider-Man 2" entitled"The Best of the Worst." (I see that Franklin Harris mentioned this on July 1. Also, check out Jim Henley's lengthy July blogging on Spider-Man.)
I confess I've not yet seen"Spider-Man 2," though I did enjoy the first film in the series. And I also confess to being a bit of a comic-book geek while growing up, with a collection that included everything from Batman, Superman and Aquaman to Classics Illustrated. In adulthood, I've frequently marveled over the artistry of an Alex Ross or the intellectual complexity of graphic novels, such as Kingdom Come.
Well, Podhoretz doesn't much appreciate this form of expression. A self-confessed “anti-comic-book snob,” he dismisses comics as “the most immature and illiterate of cultural forms,” “the province of powerless boys . . . a cultural embarrassment because the common culture has unthinkingly and stupidly accepted them as an art form.” Podhoretz views this acceptance as the “natural outcome of the youth-worship that took over American culture in the 1960s . . .”
Reading Podhoretz, I almost felt the ghost of psychiatrist Frederick Wertham, who had conducted studies into abnormal behavior in young people and, in his book Seduction of the Innocent (1954), claimed that American youth had been corrupted through their consumption of comic books, which depicted latent homosexuality (Batman and Robin), fantasies of sadistic joy (Superman), and un-woman-like behavior (Wonder Woman). This eventually prompted Estes Kefauver’s judicial committee to hold congressional hearings in 1954 on the subject of “Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency.”
Podhoretz doesn't go that far. He simply argues that comics are, well, stupid. He ridicules those who revel in the"very potent fantasy outlet" that comics provide,"a comforting outlet for those who feel totally powerless." He's just tired of hearing about
the wonders of supercharged adolescent fantasies as embodied in the comic book. They present archetypes of heroism, focus on the hidden power of the social outcast, yada, yada, yada. At best, we have been told, they are the contemporary version of the Norse sagas. Their fans use terms like"Golden Age" and"Silver Age" to differentiate them, and can go into extraordinary detail about the difference between your Marvel comic and your DC comic.
Podhoretz, not surprisingly the author of Bush Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane, seems to give credence to those who think the Bush people"radiate negativity." In the end, however, he simply confesses that he's just pissed off because he"didn't preserve comic books from the 1960s and 1970s in little clear plastic bags," while his friends did, and now, they've"made thousands of dollars on them by selling them to comic-book stores whose owners and managers always seem to resemble Jabba the Hut—if Jabba the Hut wore a t-shirt with a Metallica logo on it. So maybe I'm a little bitter."
Well, get over yourself, Johnny! As my colleague Aeon Skoble has written, since the 1960s, the comic genre has become a “vehicle for consciousness-raising every bit as much as popular films and television shows." The visual iconography of comics is worth celebrating. The"sequential art" that it constitutes has often provided youth with a projection of the heroic that encapsulates a romantic aesthetic. Scott McCloud, taking a cue from master comics artist Will Eisner, reminds us that the medium is rooted in epic stories, which were pictured on walls among the ancient Egyptians and the pre-Columbians, or in tapestries (e.g., the Bayeux Tapestry), or even in “collage novels” (such as those of Max Ernst).
Moreover, as Paul Buhlemaintains, the increased interest in the impact of comics derives from the fact that “mass culture, from the early moments when we could take it in as children, has affected us.” Since the '60s especially, comics, as an “underground” art form, have encapsulated “resentment toward, and resistance of, authority in all forms,” which has “added up to a barely visible political aesthetic."
That some of this"political aesthetic" has been of a left-wing vintage is undeniable. But there are many libertarian and even Randian messages that are contained in the world of comics (see, for example, the works of Steve Ditko and Frank Miller). Indeed, Ayn Rand's influence on popular comics is something that I will be discussing in a forthcoming article,"The Illustrated Rand," which will appear in the first of two issues of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, celebrating the Rand Centenary in 2004-2005. Heck, even Batman has featured a story that referenced the works of Ludwig von Mises!
And that is the point, of course: You know that ideas are making an impact when they have been filtered through"popular" art forms, including illustrated media, such as comics and cartoons.
Perhaps some people are just so irritated by comics because they sometimes project a youthful heroism and anti-authoritarianism that rubs against the reactionary grain.
Keep up-to-date with Not a Blog.
Pat Lynch
What he's essentially articulating is the precautionary principle. The idea that we have to act BEFORE the risk becomes serious in order to prevent it. Of course the problems with relying on this principle aren't insignificant. First we have to clearly see the risk. Second we have to project what that risk might be in five or ten years. Third, in this case, we have to rely on politicians to tell us what the risk is and trust that they are acting without undue influence from politics.
As I think most libertarians would agree, one can perhaps (and I emphasize, perhaps) see a case for this war based on that principle. Of course libertarians, like David Beito who has articulated this far better than I can, by and large reject the use of the principle by politicians, but I think we can all agree that if you're going to use the principle, Iraq wasn't completely off base.
A second argument we're hearing more of from the conservatives is that Saddam was just a bad guy. Bush claims how much better off the Iraqi people are, now that they live in"freedom" albeit under martial law. So I'd argue that in addition to the precautionary principle, Bush is also using a humanitarian argument to sell this war, especially now that no WMD were found.
Here again, libertarians believe that while the idea of nation-building is noble it's also doomed to failure. History is littered with examples where nation building fails and precious few examples where it works, especially when no prior nation really existed.
I think the pressing logical and political problem for conservatives who argue for this war lies not with those of us who reject using both the precautionary principle and nation-building justifications under any circumstances (and by the way I'd place myself in that camp). Instead the problem lies in justifying to mainstream voters where Bush decided to wage this precautionary war based on the reduction of future risk. There were three likely candidates for such a war that Bush mentioned after Afghanistan. Of those three Iraq was the easiest. But were those three the best candidates to give us both the most precautionary and humanitarian bang for the billions and billions of bucks?
Sooner or later someone is going to notice that Bush conspiciously left off Sudan from his axis, and guess what, Sudan fits both criteria perfectly, far better perhaps than Iraq. Sudan is widely acknowledged as a haven for terrorists, even a guy named Osama Bin Laden as this 1997 Global Security briefing on Sudan points out. We all seem to forget that Bin Laden basically lived in this country and set up training facilities there in the late 90's. Furthermore their"government" had ties to Iran and other Islamic terrorist groups. Unlike Saddam, the Sudanese government isn't secular; they've been supporters of anti-Western groups for years.
And someone might want to point out to people in the Bush administration other than Colin Powell that there's a major humanitarian crisis in Sudan that, as far as I can tell, exceeds Saddam's past atrocities. I'm pretty sure the people of Darfur would appreciate a little American style, martial law freedom more than the folks in Falluja do.
The kicker? Bush, Blair, and Europe want to impose sanctions to isolate this government that is harboring terrorists, killing its citizens and pursuing a policy of ethnic cleansing. In contrast, sanctions and isolation weren't good enough for Iraq, which was under intense supervision by the UN in 2003. Did the war in Iraq save American lives, or will our failure to act in Sudan cost us dearly in the future? How do we measure the difference between innocent Iraqis and Sudanese? Using the precautionary principle is like looking into crystal balls, and both only work really well in fairy tales.
Charles W. Nuckolls
Cruz achieved the epithet"bobble-head" earlier this year when he devoted a front-page article to covering the making and marketing of a bobble-head doll in the shape of long-dead Alabama football coach Bear Bryant.
Cruz's reporting about campus affairs at the University of Alabama generally followed the same style and form, maintaining a rigorous avoidance of investigation or analysis.
The Alabama Scholars Association, an affiliate of the National Association of Scholars, created a special section on its website devoted to the"bobble-head" journalism of Gilbert Cruz. (See www.alabamascholars.org) We are pleased that after only a couple of months of relentless lampooning, Mr. Cruz decided it would be in his best interests to leave.
We understand he will now be employed in the entertainment industry, in a job much better suited to his talents as a soft-ball writer of fluff and flummery.
Bottom line: If you are dissatisfied with the reporting in your local newspaper, start a website and lampoon the heck of it.
David T. Beito
Since we are playing the counterfactual game, why not raise a related question: was the American Constitution was a good thing? For the moment, let's limit the discussion to the issue of slavery. A compelling argument can be made that the future of that institution would have been much less secure under a United States governed by The Articles of Confederation .
The lack of a Fugitive Slave Clause in the Articles, for example, deprived the pro-slavery states of a powerful weapon and subsidy. In a more general sense, the weaker federal government of the Articles would have found it much more difficult to protect and spread slavery through the incorporation of new territories such as the Louisiana Purchase and Texas.
I plan to more fully ponder possible advantages and disadvantages of our first constitution on July 12, the anniversary of when the Articles of Confederation was first proposed in 1777.
Roderick T. Long
Jacob Levy has responded to my previous post. Concerning the analogy I there drew between confused criticisms of anti-interventionism in military policy and confused criticisms of anti-interventionism in the economy, Jacob writes that it's"fallacious to treat the cases as so closely analogous" and indeed that I have"usefully offered one of the neatest accounts I've seen of the fallacy that leads people to treat strict non-interventionism as a matter of libertarian principle" -- since"Politics is not economics, and international politics is really not economics, and terrorism is really, really not economics."
Jacob has usefully offered another example of the mistake for which I chided him earlier: criticising antiwar libertarians (in this case, me) for something other than what they said. In the present case he has misunderstood the point of my analogy. The point was not to argue that, just as libertarians oppose intervention in the economy, so they should oppose intervention in foreign affairs. Indeed, as I said explicitly in my original post, the purpose of that post was not to argue for the antiwar position at all, but only to complain of Jacob's mischaracterising of that position.
The analogy I was making was thus not between the case for economic libertarianism and the case for antiwar libertarianism. Rather, the analogy I was making was between an (imaginary, and to libertarians obviously ludicrous) bad argument against economic libertarianism and an (all too real, and alas, apparently not obviously ludicrous to all libertarians) bad argument against antiwar libertarianism.
However, since Jacob has raised the question of the former analogy, let's consider whether there is one.
One possible misunderstanding needs to be gotten out of the way right off the bat. It might be thought that antiwar libertarians are treating military intervention per se as a violation of the nonaggression principle. We are not. Insofar as military intervention is being conducted in order to overthrow or defang an unjust régime, it could in principle be justified as defensive rather than initiatory force.
I say"in principle" because military intervention in the real world usually involves violations of the nonaggression principle, since such interventions cause collateral damage (for the libertarian case against collateral damage see here and here) and are funded through tax extortion -- as well as indirectly advancing aggression by fueling civil liberties violations and the military-industrial complex back at home."War is the health of the State," and all that. (See Chris Sciabarra's Understanding the Global Crisis: Reclaiming Rand's Radical Legacy and Arthur Silber's I Accuse: To Those Who Pave the Way for the New Fascism.)
But let's leave all that aside and asks whether, in purely economic terms, the libertarian arguments against economic intervention apply at all to military intervention. And surely they do. Remember, this is government action we're talking about; given the severe informational and incentival problems that governments inherently face, the odds that they will intervene where and how they ought are just about nil -- and the results of such failures are much more sanguinary than an inefficient Post Office.
As David Friedman reminds us:"It is difficult to run a successful interventionist policy, and as libertarians we do not expect the government to do difficult things well." (Machinery of Freedom, p. 215.) Jacob complains that in its handling (i.e., losing) of the Iraq War"the Bush Administration has failed basic tests of competence in policymaking and execution, and of trusteeship of long-term interests like alliances and trade negotiations and moral credibility." This apparently came as a surprise to him -- whereas it's exactly what the antiwar libertarians expected and predicted. Why should states stop acting like states when they're fighting terrorism? (Jacob thinks Kerry will be better; I'm not sure why.)
But the parallel between military interventionism and economic interventionism is stronger still. Back in 2002 I argued as follows, and the argument still strikes me as compelling:
Ludwig von Mises used to argue that a market economy regulated by governmental intervention, hailed by many as a middle path between socialism and laissez-faire, is an inherently unstable system: each additional interference with private commerce distorts the price system, leading to economic dislocations that must be addressed either by repealing the first intervention or by adding a second, and so on ad infinitum.Now Jacob's objection to this line of reasoning is that it assumes terrorist behaviour is predictable in the same way that the behaviour of economic actors responding to a price control is predictable -- that it ignores subjective factors like ideology. For Jacob there's"no invisible hand that leads the radical Islamists of the world to respond violently to our wrongs rather than our rights, or even more frequently to our wrongs than to our rights."
I'm reminded of Mises' argument every time the boosters of America's current rush to empire tell us:"Well sure, maybe you dovish types are right when you say that the 9/11 attacks could have been avoided if we'd pursued a less provocative Middle East policy. But it's too late to debate that issue now. We can't turn back the clock; we have to deal with the situation as it currently exists. Given the threat we face now, we have to pursue that threat and eliminate it."
The problem with this argument is that it's timeless. Hawks were saying things like this long before 9/11, about the threats that we faced then. Every time America goes off on one of its bombing or invading romps, resentment grows among the bombed and invaded. From this resentment sprout new threats to America's security. To protect against these threats, America engages in further bombing and invading, which creates still more resentment, which breeds still new threats, prompting still more bombing and invading, and so on ad infinitum.
Mises' insight that interventions breed more interventions is as true in foreign policy as it is in domestic economy. And just as the logical endpoint of the cycle of economic interventions is complete socialism, so the logical endpoint of the cycle of military interventions is world conquest. In both cases, the only way to avoid the goal is to stop the cycle.
Invisible hand? I'm talking about a visible fist. And I don't see how I'm ignoring ideology; I'm just making the quite ordinary observation that people are more likely to respond violently to people who attack them than to people who don't. That doesn't mean unprovoked attacks don't occur; it just means that provoking produces more violent responses than non-provoking. If what the terrorists hate about us is our freedom and prosperity, why aren't they attacking Switzerland? Can Jacob really claim with a straight face that U.S. foreign policy has nothing to do with al-Qaeda's behaviour?
Suppose I go out into any street in the world -- Peoria or Fallujah -- and start randomly punching people on the street. I feel fairly confident in predicting that the percentage of people who hit, kick, or shoot me will be far higher among those I hit than among those I didn't hit. As I wrote in my very first blog entry ever:
Do the terrorists hate us for our (relatively) libertarian culture, or for our un-libertarian foreign policy? Well, pretty obviously, both. The question is whether they would be motivated to give their lives in an attack on this country if they had only the cultural grudge against us, rather than the military grudge as well? Sure, I imagine some would still be willing. ... All the same, I for one find it hard to imagine al-Qaeda having quite as easy a time recruiting suicide hijackers on the basis of a mere horror of Baywatch.And recruitment is really the issue here. Jacob thinks it's"simply untrue that the Iraqi sanctions prompted 9/11," since those sanctions were not"a wrong of any great importance to Bin Laden." Now I don't know whether bin Laden cared about the Iraqi sanctions or not, but the sanctions certainly were one more grievance that helped to fuel resentment against the U.S. in the Islamic world. I rather suspect that bin Laden was thrilled with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, since it simultaneously hurts one enemy (Hussein) and makes another (the U.S.) look bad -- while bringing much closer the prospect of a fundamentalist régime in Iraq. But bin Laden has nevertheless loudly proclaimed his outrage over the invasion, because he's playing to an audience, and that audience isn't us.
What matters is not so much what bin Laden cares about aswhat his potential recruits care about -- and I don't see anything"mechanistic" about the assumption that there might be correlations between a) the amount of damage the U.S. inflicts on the Muslim world, b) the number of Muslims who feel angry and resentful toward the U.S., and c) the number of potential al-Qaeda recruits. This isn't any sort of praxeological law; it's just common sense. Assuming that there's no such correlation, that anybody who becomes a terrorist would have been a terrorist anyway, seems enormously unrealistic. Indeed, in the context of defending U.S. foreign policy it seems like wishful thinking of, well, Panglossian proportions.
Pat Lynch
For Clarence Page in today's Chicago Tribune those goals are in direct conflict at Harvard. It seems that their admissions office has been called to task by several prominent black faculty for letting in"too many" immigrant"black" students instead of American"blacks." Of course this is a dirty little secret that universities have tried to keep quiet for years. They've stretched the boundaries of what a"minority" is to fill quotas and reach thresholds since the establishment of these policies in the 1960's.
More interesting to me is the notion that someone who is obviously black isn't really"black." On the surface I guess we aren't righting the wrongs of American discrimination by allowing Africans and Carribean students into American universities - instead we're correcting years of funding Cold War conflicts and perpetuating poverty in these countries. One can make a pretty strong case that anyone who makes it from the third world is probably walked a tougher road than someone from the U.S.
But more importantly if we want diversity to make a difference today, who cares where these folks come from? For students to benefit from a diverse campus that means realizing not only that American"blacks" but also African and Carribean"blacks" are their equals? That to me is the only plausible defense of affirmative action now, but I'm open to being wrong on that point.
Donald J. Boudreaux
E.J. Dionne, in Monday's Washington Post, criticizes the Bush administration for extending the enlistment period of U.S. soldiers; Dionne says that this practice is conscription.
I don't know the details of the contracts between Uncle Sam and his soldiers. If the contracts reasonably are read to allow the Pentagon to extend enlistment periods, then no conscription is taking place. This question is one of fact: what are the terms of the contracts?
Let's assume, for argument's sake, that the contracts do not permit Uncle Sam to extend enlistment periods -- that he's extending enlistment periods unilaterally. If this is so, then this practice is indeed a species of conscription and Dionne is right to condemn it as unfair and unjust.
But Dionne goes astray by suggesting that fairness would be achieved with full-fledged conscription. If it’s unfair to conscript one subset of people, it's equally unfair to conscript any other subset.
Amazingly, advocates of the draft hoodwink themselves into believing that full-fledged conscription would affect everyone more or less equally. In fact, only able-bodied young people would be drafted. Everyone over the age of, say, 35 would be exempt. And although many such people have children who would be drafted, not all do.
The actual effect of conscription is to relieve taxpayers of the need to pay wages sufficient to attract enough people into the military. Far from spreading the burdens of war, conscription concentrates them cruelly on those who are forced to serve.
Gene Healy
From the CFR's terrorism page:
The United Nations’ economic sanctions on Iraq are one of the grievances most frequently mentioned by Osama bin Laden, the leader of the al-Qaeda terrorist network.... in his 1998 declaration of war on America and its allies, bin Laden insisted that a “great devastation” had been “inflicted on the Iraqi people.” In a videotape released a few weeks after September 11, bin Laden said, “Millions of innocent children are being killed in Iraq and in Palestine, and we don’t hear a word from the infidels.”
Here's the 1998 fatwa:
Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.
Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.
The (sadly) obligatory caveat: by pointing this out, of course I don't mean to suggest that Bin Laden is some sort of freedom fighter and America somehow deserved 9/11. I lack language sufficient to the task of condemning Bin Laden and his followers except to say they're sorts of people who make me wish there was a Hell.
But"know your enemy" has been sound strategic advice from Sun Tzu onward. Too many prowar libertarians have adopted a"they hate us just because we're beautiful" perspective on the relationship between American foreign policy and terrorist blowback.
Pat Lynch
Arthur Silber
I had begun this essay with a different title: A New Law for Adults -- Moderate Assaults Now Permitted. Can you imagine for one moment that anyone would assent to a law of the kind suggested by that statement? Think about the howls of justified outrage that would greet a proposal to pass a law stating:"After review of many studies and having consulted the opinions of numerous experts, we have concluded that it is sometimes acceptable for one spouse to smack the other, if he or she does so to inflict 'moderate punishment' for disapproved behavior. However, this new law should not be taken as permission for any adult to go further. Any physical behavior by one spouse which results in genuine physical or mental harm to the other will be prosecuted to the full extent permitted by other relevant laws."
With the exception of the most emotionally deadened and hardened people, those people who do not care too much about the extent to which they might reveal their own propensities to violence, I cannot imagine that anyone would view such a law as justified, moral or even humane in the most basic sense. Yet, when it comes to the most defenseless human beings of all -- young children -- even an allegedly" civilized" nation sees fit to treat those children as insensate, unfeeling objects, and as property belonging to parents, who may now feel free to inflict violence on their children,"for their own good":
British lawmakers on Monday voted against a ban on parents spanking their children, and decided instead to tighten existing rules.It is a measure of the limitless denial in which the great majority of people live that the leaders of a country can seriously offer arguments such as those quoted above to justify violence against children. And make no mistake: any kind of smack, no matter how"light" or"moderate," is violence. But Blair's government doesn't"want to criminalize parents," for committing criminal acts.After a three-hour debate in the House of Lords, peers rejected the ban by 250 votes to 75.
Instead, they voted by 226-91 to allow moderate spanking, but make it easier to prosecute parents who physically or mentally abuse their children by spanking. ,,,
Britain is out of step on the issue with several European countries, including Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Austria, where all physical punishment of children is illegal.
Pressure groups insist children must have the same legal protection from being hit as adults and had called for the law to be changed. Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has repeatedly shied away from a ban, fearing it will be accused of intruding into family affairs.
The current law dates back to a case in 1860, when a judge ruled that physical punishment of children should be allowed as a"reasonable chastisement." ...
In the House of Lords on Monday, Liberal Democrat peer Lord Lester successfully proposed a measure to allow moderate spanking, but remove the"reasonable chastisement" defense if parents harmed a child physically or mentally. If the amendment is also approved by the Commons, the new law will make it easier for authorities to prosecute violent parents.
Several peers called for an outright ban.
"Smacking can lead to battering which can lead to death," said Liberal Democrat peer Lord Thomas."We are presented with medical reports, social service records, school records and one can see the route to death which starts with the initial smack."
Independent peer Lord Ackner disagreed."I think we are overlooking that parents have a unique relationship with their children and in order to fulfill their parental responsibilities they have powers which they don't possess in relation to anyone else," he said.
Attorney General Lord Goldsmith backed Lester's measure and said it would"have the effect of preventing harm to children without criminalizing parents for minor disciplinary steps."
Blair's government ordered its Labour peers to vote against a ban, but allowed them a free vote on Lester's amendment.
"The government wants an outcome that maintains the balance between the parent's right to discipline and protecting the child," said Blair's official spokesman."That is why we don't want to criminalize parents. That is why we are opposed to outright bans."
It is true indeed that parents have a"unique relationship" with their children. Children depend on their parents for everything -- for shelter, for food, and for emotional and mental support and sustenance, for their very survival. That very total dependence is then used by some adults to justify violence against those same children, violence which those same parents would not be permitted against any adult. But many people are so deluded that they believe it is part of"their parental responsibilities" to assault their own children.
How would you feel if the following happened? You are at dinner with a friend. The friend expresses disapproval of your table manners. When you fail to conform to his suggested changes in your behavior, he stands up, walks over to your chair and says:"I'm sorry, but I'm only doing this for your own good." And he then slaps you.
Would you be outraged? Would you feel violated, in your person and autonomy? Would you not want to be friends any longer with a person who would permit himself such behavior, who would allow himself to believe that it was justified to inflict physical violence on another human being? Yet we see parents do this kind of thing with children in restaurants and other public places all the time. God only knows what they might permit themselves at home, in private. And precisely because children are dependent on their parents for their survival, and because children have nowhere else to go -- they can hardly change parents with the ease with which an adult might look for a new friend -- the damage inflicted is incalculable, and likely to last for a lifetime.
In another news story from today, we see a demonstration of the other end of this continuum -- and the unbelievable horrors to which this kind of denial can lead:
OSHAWA, Ont. (CP) - Two brothers kept caged and chained in their family home over 13 years reacted bitterly Monday after their adoptive parents were sentenced to nine months in jail for treatment the judge said was horrendous but well-intentioned.If you had any doubts about the immense significance of Miller's work, this ought to convince you once and for all. The crucial point to note is that the justifications offered for this monstrous sadism are precisely those justifications offered for"mild smacking." This judge -- like many other adults -- appears to sincerely believe that these adults' actions were"underscored by good intentions," and that there was"no evidence" that the parents"were sadistic." The light sentences he imposed only underscore the depth of his own denial.The boys, who were adopted as toddlers and raised in nearby Blackstock, said their parents deserved longer terms and complained the judge appeared to blame them in part for their ordeal.
"I don't feel (justice) has been served," said one boy, 17, as he stood shoulder to shoulder with his 18-year-old brother.
"I feel they should get more time." ...
When investigators visited the ramshackle two-storey farmhouse northeast of Toronto, one boy was found in a makeshift cage that was strapped to a wall and padlocked.
They were often tied to their beds, sometimes handcuffed. At one time, one brother was forced to sleep in a bare dog cage.
They were kept in diapers because they couldn't get to the washroom, subjected to rectal examinations and often beaten with a variety of household implements.
They lived in such fear, court heard, they ate their own feces to hide evidence of accidents and, deprived of water, felt compelled to drink their own urine. ...
Ontario Court Judge Donald Halikowski blasted the couple's"ill-informed system of discipline" as demeaning and damaging to the boys.
However, Halikowski said their behaviour was"underscored by good intentions," that there was no evidence the parents were sadistic. ...
Child welfare workers rejected Halikowski's suggestion that the apprehension of the boys may have caused them more emotional damage than the abuse from their parents."We are disappointed," said Wanda Secord of the Durham Children's Aid Society."We had hoped for a stronger sentence."
The younger son has denounced his adoptive mother as a"stupid bitch" and said he didn't have a childhood"because of her stupidness."
The older boy said the"unbearable" crib incidents had continued to haunt him.
Putting a young boy in a makeshift, padlocked cage is not sadistic. Tying children to their beds, with handcuffs, is not sadistic. Keeping children in diapers when they are too old to need them -- if only they could get to a bathroom -- subjecting them to"rectal examinations," and beating them often is not sadistic. And creating such fear in children that they will eat their own feces and drink their own urine is not sadistic.
Any person who defends or minimizes such acts to any extent at all is capable of inflicting the most unimaginable tortures on anyone. If you wonder what makes possible horrors such as those which occurred in the Third Reich, wonder no more.
I had wanted to return to my series on"The Roots of Horror." Very regrettably, these latest news stories provide the opportunity. The denial which underlies the justifications for the new law in Britain and for the judge's comments is the same denial that leads to criminal adults, depressed and sometimes suicidal adults, incalculable suffering, unprovoked wars of aggression, and any number of other horrors. I have talked about some of those issues in previous entries in this series (and I will post an entry with links to all the previous essays in the next few days), and I will have much more to say on these topics and a number of others in the coming weeks.
For the moment, I will only review a few salient points. The analysis I am offering in this series is derived in significant part from the work of Alice Miller. (Here is Miller's website, with links to her books and various articles.) In a post several months ago, I explained why I began to seek again for underlying causes, and I used the continued and altogether remarkable resistance on the part of many supporters of our current foreign policy to acknowledging obvious gaps and inconsistencies in their arguments. After discussing a number of other factors, I said:
There is another area that appears to be pointedly neglected by many hawks: the human costs of our actions over the last year. Our government follows this course as a matter of policy: our own non-fatal casualties are significantly undercounted and/or ignored, and the deaths and injuries to innocent Iraqis are almost never mentioned. It is as if, in a very deep sense, these human costs of our policies are not fully real to certain people, or they refuse to allow them to become real. One would think that a strong advocate of our foreign policy would at least have the good grace to acknowledge the costs to American soldiers and to their families, even if they won't mention dead Iraqis, but they almost never mention either of these subjects.Here is the very brief summary of the denial-obedience mechanism that I set out in that earlier post (and I must stress again that, for a full appreciation of Miller's argument, you need to consult her books):At a certain point, one is justified in thinking that much deeper psychological mechanisms are involved -- and to conclude that the manner in which the debate about foreign policy has been and continues to be conducted obviously involves much more than the surface issues which people are willing to identify. Repeated denial and avoidance, across a wide range of issues and engaged in by very large numbers of people, requires an explanation which consists of more than noting that people will look for information that tends to support what they already believe. That is certainly true -- but it isn't enough to explain many people's seemingly limitless ability to deny what is literally screaming in their faces.
So I began rereading Alice Miller. Here is one obvious and very important point about why her work has so much explanatory power: the one universal experience that all of us share -- an experience that crosses all cultures, all economic classes, and all political systems -- is that we have all been children. And as Miller demonstrates in her books in great detail, the experiences of early childhood leave patterns of thinking, feeling and behavior which last all our lives. This crucial fact is confirmed more and more, by numerous studies. Miller further shows that the most basic of the mechanisms that she analyzes are to be found in every culture, and in every historical period -- most notably, the commandment that we are to obey and respect our elders, and especially our parents.
Thus, all the facets of the denial-obedience mechanism that I summarized at the beginning of this entry are not to be found only in the United States, or only in the last century. These results can be observed throughout all of mankind's history, in every culture, and across the entire world.
[L]et me summarize my understanding of Miller's central argument. By demanding obedience above all from a child (whether by physical punishment, by psychological means, or through some combination of both), parents forbid the child from fostering an authentic sense of self. Because children are completely dependent on their parents, they dare not question their parents' goodness, or their"good intentions." As a result, when children are punished, even if they are punished for no reason or for a reason that makes no sense, they blame themselves and believe that the fault lies within them. In this way, the idealization of the authority figure is allowed to continue. In addition, the child cannot allow himself to experience fully his own pain, because that, too, might lead to questioning of his parents.Returning to the two news stories, here is Miller explaining part of the mechanism that underlies the denial of many (if not most) adults with regard to the cruelty and even outright sadism that is inflicted on countless children. In discussing an excerpt from a book by Phil Donahue (the full excerpt is in this post), Miller notes:In this manner, the child is prevented from developing a genuine, authentic sense of self. As he grows older, this deadening of his soul desensitizes the child to the pain of others. Eventually, the maturing adult will seek to express his repressed anger on external targets, since he has never been allowed to experience and express it in ways that would not be destructive. By such means, the cycle of violence is continued into another generation (using"violence" in the broadest sense). One of the additional consequences is that the adult, who has never developed an authentic self, can easily transfer his idealization of his parents to a new authority figure. As Miller says:
"This perfect adaptation to society's norms--in other words, to what is called 'healthy normality'--carries with it the danger that such a person can be used for practically any purpose. It is not a loss of autonomy that occurs here, because this autonomy never existed, but a switching of values, which in themselves are of no importance anyway for the person in question as long as his whole value system is dominated by the principle of obedience. He has never gone beyond the stage of idealizing his parents with their demands for unquestioning obedience; this idealization can easily be transferred to a Fuhrer or to an ideology."
Although Donahue's discussion ostensibly proceeds from the question of which parental behavior might exert a traumatizing and lasting effect on the child, and although it would appear to give priority to concern for the child, the second paragraph shows that basically it is concerned only with liberating parents from justified guilt feelings. They are assured that their actions pose no danger: The child will suffer no harm if he knows that he is being tormented out of"love" and"for his own good." This kind of reassurance that relies on untruths is based on the statements of"experts" quoted here and, I need hardly say, corresponds to the wishes of all parents who are not prepared to question their own behavior.In that post, I commented:"For these reasons, my view is very simple: it is always wrong to hit, slap or spank a child. Always."But might not there be a different way, other than reassurances? Might not one explain to the parents, in all honesty and frankness, why they traumatize their children? Not all of them would stop tormenting their children, but some would. We can be certain, however, that they would not stop if they were told, as were their own parents thirty years earlier, that one slap more or less does no harm, provided they love the child. Although this phrase contains a contradiction, it can continue to be handed down because we are used to it. Love and cruelty are mutually exclusive. No one ever slaps a child out of love but rather because in similar situations, when one was defenseless, one was slapped and then compelled to interpret it as a sign of love. This inner confusion prevailed for thirty or forty years and is passed on to one's own child. That's all. To purvey this confusion to the child as truth leads to new confusions that, although examined in detail by experts, are still confusions. If, on the other hand, one can admit one's errors to the child and apologize for a lack of self-control, no confusions are created.
If a mother can make it clear to a child that at that particular moment when she slapped him her love for him deserted her and she was dominated by other feelings that had nothing to do with the child, the child can keep a clear head, feel respected, and not be disoriented in his relationship to his mother. While it is true that love for a child cannot be commanded, each of us is free to decide to refrain from hypocrisy.
But some adults who are prepared to deny the damaging effects of spanking and"light smacking" will use the same arguments to"justify" outright sadism -- just as the judge did. He clings to the notion that"good intentions" lie behind parents' terrifying their children to the extent that those children will eat their own feces and drink their own urine.
What is crucial to see -- and what I know many people will nonetheless deny -- is that these are not different phenomena. They spring from the same roots, have the same ultimate causes, and lead to similar horrors, which differ only in degree, but not in kind. And those same causes lead to the torture, exterminations, war and other nightmares that the world sees over and over again.
As I indicated, I will have much more to say on this subject in the near future. For now, I will leave the final word to Alice Miller. Here is an excerpt from her article entitled,"Every Smack Is a Humiliation":
Many researchers have already proved that corporal punishment can indeed produce obedient children in the short term but, in the long term, it will have serious negative consequences on the child's character and behavior. This disastrous development toward later crimes can be prevented if there is at least one single person who loves and understands the child. During their whole childhood, dictators like Hitler, Stalin or Mao never came across such a helping witness. They learned early on to glorify cruelty and hypocrisy and to justify these actions while committing crimes against millions of people. Millions of others, also exposed to physical maltreatment in childhood, helped them to do so without the slightest remorse.Children should not be the scapegoats for the painful experiences of adults. The claim that mild punishments (slaps or smacks) have no detrimental effects is still widespread because we learned this message at a very early age from our parents, who had taken it over from their own parents. This conviction helped the child to minimize his suffering and to endure it. Unfortunately, the main damage it causes is precisely our numbness, as well as the lack of sensitivity for our children's pain. The result of the broad dissemination of this damage is that each successive generation is subjected to the tragic effects of seemingly harmless physical" correction." Many parents still think: What didn't hurt me can't hurt my child. They don't realize that their conclusion is wrong because they never challenged their assumption. ...
It is imperative to launch such legislation—prohibiting corporal punishment—all over the world. It does not set out to incriminate anyone but is designed to have a protective and informative function for parents. Sanctions could simply take the form of the obligation for parents to internalize information available today on the consequences of corporal punishment. Information on the"well-meant smack" should therefore be broadcasted to all, since unconscious education to violence takes root very early and inflicts disastrous imprints. The vital interests of society as a whole are at stake.
UPDATE: And if you wondered about the relevance of all this to other foreign policy events, you shouldn't wonder about that any longer, either:
According to information from the International Red Cross, more than a 100 children are imprisoned in Iraq, including in the infamous prison Abu Ghraib.As Miller notes in her article entitled"The Origins of Torture in Endured Child Abuse" (at her site, under Articles):The German TV magazine"Report" revealed that there has been abuse of children and youth by the coalition forces.
Mainz -"Between January and May of this year we've registered 107 children, during 19 visits in 6 different detention locations" the representative of the International Red Cross, Florian Westphal, told the TV station SWR's Magazine"Report Mainz". He noted that these were places of detention controlled by coalition troops. According to Westphal the number of children held captive could be even higher.
The TV Magazine also reported of evidence and eye witness reports according to which U.S. soldiers also abused children and youthful detainees. Samuel Provance, a staff sergeant stationed in the now infamous Abu Ghraib prison said that interrogating officers had pressured a 15 or 16 year old girl. Military police had only intervened when the girl was already half undressed. On another occasion, a 16 year old was soaked with water, driven through the cold, and then smeared with mud.
Many people have claimed to be appalled by the acts of perversion committed by American soldiers on ADULT people, Iraqi prisoners. Amazingly, I have never heard of any such reaction in response to the occasional attempts to expose similar practices committed towards CHILDREN as for instance in British and American schools. There, these practices come under the heading of"education." But the cruelty is the same. The world appears to be surprised that such brutality should rear its head among the American forces.And so now it is revealed that the coalition forces have abused children, as well as adults. That is hardly surprising; in fact, given the underlying causes identified by Miller, it is inevitable.After all, America presents itself to the international public as the guardian of world peace. There is an explanation for all this, but hardly anyone wants to hear it.
I urge you to read Miller's entire piece, as well as the other articles at her site.
(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.)
David T. Beito
For this reason, I had to do a double take when I first heard"Pat Novak for Hire," a radio show from the 1940s. The lead character, played by Webb, is a cynical and rather amoral detective on the San Francisco waterfront. His nemesis is a corrupt cop, Inspector Hellman, and his best friend is a dissipate bar room philosopher. The dialogue is hyper-Chandleresque. You can get the general idea by imagining a thoroughly jaded Joe Friday hyped up on speed (or perhaps after several cups of coffee laced with Mountain Dew).
After hearing Jack Webb as Novak comment on the world around him, I found it hard to believe that the same man ended up hectoring hapless hippie stereotypes in the 1960s on the evils of pot. The shows are inexpensive to order and a lot of fun.
David T. Beito
His discussion of Morris's incisive antislavery critique at the Convention is particularly valuable. Wilkinson argues persuasively that those who point to the"the context of the time" to excuse the founders for failing to take a stronger stand against slavery often forget that people like Morris repeatedly admonished them about their culpability in protecting the institution.
Pat Lynch
Arthur Silber
I see that the learned Senator Joseph Lieberman said the following, while talking about the battle against the insurgents in Iraq:
SEN. LIEBERMAN: These are the very same people who attacked us on September 11.Really? I had absolutely no idea. I thought the people who attacked us on September 11 were Al Qaeda terrorists, and that 15 of them were Saudi Arabian -- and that a lot of the Iraqi insurgents are civilians.
Well, goodness gracious. If these are the very same people who attacked us on 9/11, then it's a very, very good thing that we've killed a whole bunch of them. According to that site, which collects data from media sources (so the actual count is probably higher if anything), the number of civilian Iraqis killed so far as the result of our invasion and occupation is between 11,000 and 13,000. Good thing all those Al Qaeda terrorists are dead!
Of course, if they're not"the very same people" who attacked us on 9/11, then I guess it might be a Bad Thing that they're dead.
But I'm sure Senator Lieberman knows what he's talking about. And if he's wrong, well, you can't Defend Civilization Against the Greatest Threat Ever Known to Man without killing a few million people. And we're still just in the low thousands, so what's the big deal? Of course, if they're not the very same people, I guess a few Arabs might be a little pissed off at us. But still, we're Saving Civilization!
Honestly, some of you people just have to lighten up.
UPDATE: Some enlightenment for Senator Lieberman, courtesy of Juan Cole:
US observers keep expressing puzzlement as to why the killing of hundreds or thousands of insurgents has not had an impact in repressing the guerrillas. They don't seem to get it that Iraqi clans still matter and that when they kill an Iraqi, they anger the man's brothers, uncles, and first and second cousins, some of whom step forward to take his place. In the US a lot of people don't even know their cousins and certainly would not sacrifice their lives to avenge one. Iraq is not like that. So, it isn't really even a matter of ideologies, necessarily. The US military has incurred enough clan feuds to keep the insurgencies going. And, of course, Iraqi and Arab nationalisms are powerful enough that people hate seeing Western troops in their country. The line between being angry about it and being angry enough to pick up a gun is a thin one.
Pat Lynch
However regardless of the timing, Rove et.al. would have preferred this kind of remark after the election. Don't underestimate the public damage this confession will have on the election. Bush and Kerry have to debate, and I'm sure the press will raise this quote from Blair and wave it in front of Dubya. More fun to watch will be Vice President Strangelove's reaction to it since Cheney continues to publicly proclaim that Saddam was moments away from arming Al-Queda with ray-guns and Death Stars. Until now it's been all about a left wing conspiracy, but a public admission that WMD are as hard to find as rain forests in Iraq from their staunchest ally during the war hurts. Hopefully, this will be raised by the Democrats this fall and force the Bush White House to continue to face some uncomfortable questions about their lies before the war.
