The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Your right to be "secure in your persons, houses, papers, and effects" "shall not be violated" by "unreasonable searches and seizures". That right can be over-ridden, allowing the unreasonable search or seizure, by a warrant issued "upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Note that under your interpretation, if a police officer sees someone committing a rape he can't arrest the guy until somebody comes down from the station with a warrant because arrests are "seizures."
The Courts actually have a lengthy list of types of search they consider reasonable. The upshot is that if they see the crime happen, they don't need a warrant to arrest the perp; if they're in a context or place where of course there're searches (like the border) they can search you; if they need to do shit now, without waiting 20 minutes for some guy to show up with paperwork, they can do shit now.
Obviously, if you're too poor to afford a lawyer (as most young black men in the maw of the law are), you're not gonna get an evidentiary hearing so the police can make almost any bullshit interpretation of "reasonable search" blessed by the courts; but it's not unusual for the courts to ban evidence against people who aren't too poor.Also note this is precisely how the Founders intended it to work. They would actually open your mail, and read it, without a warrant.
Unfortunately for you,. no decision-maker has ever taken it solely from your perspective.
It was Saudi nationals who attacked us over 14 years ago, not Afghani's. Bin Laden was found in a house in Pakistan over 4 years ago, not a mountain in Afghanistan yesterday. So I ask again, why do we still drop bombs on Afghani civilians?
Talk about insane troll logic. Bin Laden was thrown out of Saudi Arabia. Implying that we should punish the Saudis for something they exiled him for is just stupid, and makes the entire rest of your argument sound like it was written by a college sophomore. OBL was in Afghanistan when he planned S11. He fled to Pakistan because we invaded Afghanistan, which sheltered him for the very Pakistani reason that they are unable/unwilling to not hedge their bets where an Islamist leader is concerned.
And the reason we're still there is the other side is still the Taliban, and the government is still millions and millions of Afghani people who risked their lives to oppose the Taliban specifically because we said we would stay until the job was done.
You're bringing up 9/11 like it just happened. It was 14 years ago. Over 2300 U.S. troops dead and over 22,000 U.S. troops wounded. Many thousands more dead and wounded Afghani civilians (children) caught in the middle.
Insane troll logic part two: As this Kunduz debacle proves, it would be virtually impossible for a US-Air Force-free Afghanistan to keep the Taliban from taking over.
If the Taliban take over civilian casualties go through the roof because the Taliban only follow their interpretation of the Koran, and their interpretation of the Koran is very heavy on the "kill them all and let God sort them out" principle.
Which tends to lead to political unrest, and in the context of a supposedly-Koran-based-theological state political unrest = warfare.
We do have a moral reason to leave -- hospital patients are being bombed by American forces. Just think about that for a moment. Accident or no, if it were an American hospital that was hit, it would not be called "collateral damage" and you would be outraged. And of course, incidents like these make Daesh, et al., stronger not weaker. Backwards thinking indeed.
If you look at Afghani history since the coup of '78 it's been constant warfare. War deaths have averaged 37,976-56,337 depending on whether you believe the low estimate or the high estimate. In the 14 years we had ground troops the high estimate is 98,290 for all sides, and all 13 years. That average is under 8k a year. In the nine months since we pulled out the ground-pounders it's 11,361.
So your argument basically boils down to "These 19 people shouldn't have died, so we should pull out and let 37,000 other people die every single year, bhecause at least our hands will be clean."
Here's the thing: I'll believe my military did a lot of bad shit if you can show me a motive. For example, we embarked on multiple murderous bombing campaigns against the Japanese mostly because of racism (notably, we refused to use similar tactics against the Nazis on the basis they would not work).
There is no motive for blowing up a hospital. Even if somebody in DC had a thing about MSF, they had to know it would be the top story of the counter-offensive and they'd get canned.
OTOH, getting through to NATO officials in Kabul is not gonna get a bombing campaign called off quickly unless they're the exact guys involved in the actual bombing. Getting through to our official in DC will also not stop the bombing, unless the official in question is one of a) the President, b) the Chair of the Joint Chiefs, or c) the Secretary of the Air Force. And 2 or 3 AM Saturday in Afghanistan is roughly 6 or 7 PM Friday in DC, which means none of those guys is going to be easily reachable at his office, and they were doubtless dealing with the operator at the switchboard.
I'm stunned they got results in less then an hour.
Hell, did you read your source? The reason they were bombing it in the first place was "The Afghan interior ministry said a group of 10 to 15 militants were found hiding in the hospital."
So the bureaucracy has to deal with a guy on the phone, from the hospital, saying "we're civilians please don't kill us", and balance that against the Afghan troops (identified in other sources as police) swearing up and down that there's a squad-level unit in the hospital killing them. If that guy on the phone is lying then dozens of Afghan troops will die, and your mission will be compromised forever because the survivors won't trust you. If the troops are lying you have a hospital full of corpses. Which means that maybe the safe bet is to not bomb, OTOH the troops are known quantities who have been vetted by your bureaucracy. The guy in the building is an unknown quantity who may Taliban. You have no clue because all you've got is a voice on the phone.
In other words, just because the news story you read has one side of the story (in this case, the MSF's firm, and so far unconfirmed, claim that there were not 10 to 15 Taliban in their building), a bunch of commentary on an issue tangentially related to this (the Red Cross Guy, for example, is linking the attack to others on their personal, and most of those are done by the Taliban), and a throw-away line about why we actually did it the logical conclusion is not that our military are mindless butchers who kill without reason. The logical conclusion is that you should read something from somebody who elaborates on that one line.
Look man, bottom line: This is a war. People will die. Many of them will be innocent. The first report, from both the military and the civilians, will always be one-sided, because neither the military nor the civilians are magical psychics who can figure out the other side's case without hearing it. Generally there's elements of truth to both.
I suspect in this case what will come out is that the Afghan Police were making it up out of spite. They have the motive to lie, and get the building destroyed. OTOH, MSF personal may not have seen, or heard, a fireteam or three on the roof, and have 19 very good reasons to be extremely adamant in their contention that said fireteams did not exist.
It got approved because the Afghan Police specifically asked for it to be leveled. They alleged that the hospital was being used as a firebase:
The Ministry of Defense said “terrorists” armed with light and heavy weapons had entered the hospital compound and used “the buildings and the people inside as a shield” while firing on security forces. Brig. Gen. Dawlat Waziri, the ministry’s deputy spokesman, told The Associated Press that helicopter gunships fired on the militants, causing damage to the buildings.
Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said 10 to 15 “terrorists” had been hiding in the hospital at the time of the strike.
“All of the terrorists were killed but we also lost doctors,” he said. He said 80 staff members at the hospital, including 15 foreigners, had been taken to safety. He did not say what sort of strike had damaged the compound.
Around 2pm the Taliban seized the medical compound, according to Sarwar Hussaini, the spokesman for the provincial police chief.
“Fighting is continuing between Afghan security forces and the Taliban,” he said.
This isn't Google maps. This is war. It's way too chaotic to trust automatic measures.
The Taliban had taken over Kunduz. this means they could easily have killed the entire MSF staff, taken them hostage, or simply informed that them the roof was going to be a machine gun nest for the foreseeable future. Your entire automatic no-kill map should have been wiped out the minute the Taliban took the City.
The machine gun nest thing is precisely what the Afghan Police told the Air Force happened.
So the interesting question in this little fuck-up isn't "Why did the US Military fuck up?" it's "Were the Afghans lying through their fucking teeth about taking fire from the hospital, and if so why did they do that?"
"probably" seems too much of a leap from the available information, I think "possibly" would be more accurate word to use at this time.
From what I can tell, it's likely there was no internal US Military mistake. At all. Maybe an Afghan one, tho.
Afghan forces asked us to blow up the building. We blew up the building. This is the bottom bit of the story.
Then it turned out that it was a hospital said Afghan forces were pissed at because the hospital treated Taliban. They are also still alleging the Taliban had taken over the hospital and was using it as a firebase.
"Do we have a moral reason to be involved in this country?" Is only a relevant question before you go in. And in September or December 2001, it was pretty clear that the only way we were going to get Osama out of his mountain hideaway was an invasion.
Now the question is "Do we have a moral reason to leave?" And the answer to that question is almost always no, because there's a government full of people who are significantly less objectionable then the enemy, who are depending on us to not be executed on international TV in the name of Daesh.
That is actually available. The glass bottles of "Mexican Coke" you see everywhere taste different because they used Cane Sugar. But those are only sold in 12 Oz sizes.
Pepsi is better. There's 20 Oz, in Cherry, Vanilla, and standard. Sometimes there's 12 packs of cans. In theory they're "Limited Time" items, but avaliaboilty around Cleveland has been going up.
Or read the calorie count, paying careful attention to serving size. The Oreo serving size for example, is typically 2 or 3 cookies, not the half the package you're actually going to eat.
Food companies will always have a very good motive to include things that are sugar but aren't called sugar, because sugar is very tasty but people have figured that industrialized food production means we eat too damn much of it, and therefore they avoid it. But 150 calories is 150 calories, no matter whether you call it sugar or "nectar of the cane."
We'll have to send somebody to Kunduz to try and figure out whose full of shit, for political and ethical reasons. But until that guy gets there and finishes, and/or a lot more info becomes public we don't really know what went on.
In the mean-time, it is both extremely tragic, and not surprising. It's a war, not a bake sale. People die.
Case law is clear. Border control can search your ass on the border. That's why they can look for weed in your car at the border crossing. It's called the Border Search Exception.
It's less clear then I thought about the ability to rifle through your electronic doohickeys, because the Ninth Circuit (which deal with cases from Cali), has ruled that the Feds need a a "reasonable suspicion" to read your damn hard drive, but they have failed to explain what that shit means. It's entirely possible they'll rule Mayor Silva is fucked if DHS turns up kiddy porn or something.
Reread the Fourth. It's quite specific. The algorithm is that if a search or seizure is unreasonable, your right to privacy applies, and that right can only be over-ridden by warrant issued by the Courts. In the absence of an "unreasonable search or seizure" you have no Fourth Amendment rights.
The attack's not a done deal, but the number of people who can call the plane back is incredibly small. Probably on the order of a dozen in the pilot's official chain-of-command, most of whom aren't reachable because they're in DC; a guy (generally an Air Force Intel officer) who liases with friendlies to prevent green-on-green incidents, who has no fucking clue about MSF because neutral medical organizations are not in the habit of accepting liaison officers (that would make un-nuetral); a couple other people the pilots know and trust who happen to be in their units; and that's about it.
Look at it this way: you're an infantry unit under attack in Kunduz province. You call in an air strike. Would you be happy if it got called off in the middle because the Taliban happened to have a guy with a Mancunian accent, a great cover story, and a SatPhone? If the answer is you'd be pretty fucking pissed off, then the Air Force is not gonna set up a system whereby MSF can call in and get a bombing raid called off on the authority of the dude manning the phones at the local airbase. And since it'll take at least five minutes to convince that dude to start putting you through to the rest of his chain-of-command, looking for the dude whose chain includes both said base and the pilot of the aircraft involved, 30 minutes is, indeed, fucking lightspeed.
Particularly since they probably aren't timing it from when they got through to a human to start their spiel, they're timing it from when the first bomb started falling.
The Afghan Police concerned are still swearing up and down they were taking fire from the building.
Maybe they were... it wouldn't the first time that an enemy used a hospital or other "off limits" location to fight from.
MSF has a lot of credibility, and they have no particular reason to blame us rather then blaming the Taliban fighters who "borrowed" the third floor. If they say the Taliban weren't shooting from the building they probably know damn well the Taliban weren't shooting from the building.
That said I still trust the Afghan police story to some extent. As you point out, getting a guy into a non-combat zone to harass the government is well within the Taliban's capabilities. I'm about 75/25 for the MSF.
There is a Holy Shit you're bombing friendlies protocol. But the MSF is not a friendly. It's a neutral. That's kinda the entire point, and the most likely explanation is actually that some Afghan Cop got pissed at them for being too neutral and asked for the strike out of revenge for them treating the Taliban.
As a non-friendly, MSF does not have a guy in the theater chain-of-coimmand, with has a hotline to the guy who knows exactly which squadron to call to scrub the exact bombing raid going on in Kunduz province at this second. That would probably take 10 or 15 minutes. MSF's gonna have to call somebody (probably at the Embassy, because getting too close to the military would be taking a side), who has to figure out who to call to get to the "you're bombing the wrong damn thing Ghost Squadron" guy. And since none of this happens on a militarily secure phone line, with a protocol for verifying that the MSF guy isn't saying this because 150 Taliban have taken over the building and are threatening to cut his head off on international TV, they've also got to go through some process to verify the MSF guy is an actual MSF guy and is not lying.
He is definitely guilty of going to a Chinese-government-sponsored Mayor's conference, bringing his actual every-day electronics and not some super-special throw-away ones that will be expected to be bugged, and despite the recent bullshit accord that has got to sound some alarms.
It could get creepy. He has also been accused of using his position on the school board to get little girls into a bathroom where he had video equipment.
In the Ninth Circuit they can search electronic devices with "reasonable suspicion" at the border. The Ninth has not explained precisely what that means.
Which means that as long as the Obama Administration can articulate some suspicion of somebody involved in the Mayor's conference he went to they've got a case.
But the summary specifically mentions no warrant, which means that the first reaction upon reading it is "What the fuck? That is so unconstitutional," when it should be "Why would they need a warrant at the border?" Silva does not seem to understand that searches at the border are, by definition, reasonable and therefore exempt from the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement.
What's interesting is the passwords bit. Mayor Silva can't be forced to testify against himself in Court, so no data they get from the devices could be used against him in Court; and he can't be the guy they're investigating.
The Afghan police requested the airstrike. Everyone (including me) assumes they were lying because MSF has a very good reputation, but if the Taliban take a city, and an allied paramilitary unit says that retaking it requires blowing up a building that was used as a hospital before the invasion, because guys on top of it are killing them, you're not gonna subject them to the fifth degree before you do it.
A half-hour is lightning-fast in terms of stopping it when it turned out the Afghan police were wrong. The Air Force is a 308k person bureaucracy, the guy whose number MSF has is probably not in the chain-of-command of the relevant unit, and quite possibly is not on a first name basis with anyone in that unit, so they have to call that guy. He who has to rustle up someone who is in that unit (and is trusted by the brass of that unit) and can verify he's not the kind of idiot who would fall for an obvious Taliban trick.
And they do precisely what they say they'll do. They blow up the exact building the airmen intended to blow up.
The problem in this case is the Afghan police told the Air Force they were taking fire from the MSF hospital, and they needed it to be leveled. Since the Taliban controlled the entire fucking city, including the hospital, a whole yesterday, the Air Force didn't bother to check the pre-Taliban-list of targets you shouldn't level in Kunduz.
The Afghan Police are still swearing up and down they were being attacked from the hospital, MSF speculates this whole fiasco is revenge for MSF's "treat anyone, even Taliban" policy, and I doubt the US Government will make a determination over whether the raid was justified until they can prove conclusively whether the Afghan Police are making shit up. Which will be somewhat difficult, given that said police specifically asked for most of the evidence to be destroyed.
Dude, 30 minutes is a half-hour. This is not a 5-man start-up where everybody has the authority to do everything. It is not the Starship Enterprise where you can get someone in responsibility simply by hailing the bridge. It is a 308k-airmen bureaucracy.
The guys doing the bombing are in an Air Force Squadron that reports to a Lieutenant Colonel. I doubt MSF has his number, the number of the full Colonel who commands the Wing, etc. Even if they had that number how'd they know that particular colonel was the one blowing up their hospital?
So they had to call somebody fairly high up in the chain-of-command, or in the Embassy. Then he'd have to verify they were who they said they were, then he has to figure out which squadron is involved, then he has to call that Lieutenant Colonel has to call his guys in the air and tell them to stop. And you have to add at least 10 minutes for everyone to verify they're not being bullshat by a Taliban fighter with an impeccable accent.
Keep in mind military terminology is really old. Way older then you.
They're surgical strikes, and smart bombs, compared to ones we used in the last big war against the Nazis. Both us (against the Japanese), and the Brits (against Germany) used night bombing campaigns to avoid enemy air defenses, and had to work their tails off to make sure they hit the intended city. Avoiding specific buildings was simply not possible. Day-bombing raids (used by us against the Germans), was better, but would still have been unable to avoid leveling the hospital if used against a built-up area:
As U.S. participation in the war started, the USAAF drew up widespread and comprehensive bombing plans based on the Norden. They believed the B-17 had a 1.2% probability of hitting a 30 metres (100 ft) target from 6,100 metres (20,000 ft), meaning that 220 bombers would be needed for a 93% probability of one or more hits. This was not considered a problem, and the AAF forecast the need for 251 combat groups to provide enough bombers to fulfill their comprehensive pre-war plans.[21] The bombsight was used for first time in March 1943.[29]
For all it's sins, the military we've got uses significantly less brutal solutions then were possible in any previous generation. It's not their fault that Presidents much prefer airstrikes (which have large civilian casualty-numbers if they go wrong) to special forces-ops (which can turn low casualty operations into political disasters because we really liked those 18 guys).
In this case it doesn't seem like a US Military internal fuck-up at all. It seems like some embittered Afghan police officer sent in the coordinates of the hospital on purpose because MSF treats Taliban casualties. The Afghan Police concerned are still swearing up and down they were taking fire from the building.
My issue with your argument isn't so much in the facts, it's that people who don't understand the process completely will only remember the bit about the President being more important 18months from now, and thus they'll be stunned when (pretty much inevitably) the winning candidate runs on a platform of restricting the NSA. But fails completely in all attempts to revolutionize privacy protection at the NSA because the entire fucking system is specifically designed so that replacing one individual can not revolutionize anything. Then instead of drawing the logical conclusion (that the system is working precisely as the Founders intended, with nobody having the power to change anything unilaterally), they'll start talking about the dirt the NSA must have on Hillary/Rand/Marco/whomever.
The case of GitMo is actually quite instructive. You would think not spending money shipping food to Cuba for prisoners would be cheaper then wrapping up operations, and you'd be right. The problem is there's be costs involved in wrapping up the operation, and those need to explicitly approved by Congress, despite the fact the entire point of the facility is to keep the prisoners subject to said President's "Commander-in-Chief" powers rather then his more restricted law enforcement powers. In the case of the NSA if there's a termination fee to some contract involved, or even a guy who would have to be paid for a couple days of doing nothing before he got transferred to another project, then Congress has the capital-P-Power to extent the programs indefinitely unilaterally.
And if Obama announced he was cutting an anti-terror program Clapper said was useful how long do you think it would be before there was a movement in Congress to thwart him by adding a line item to the budget? A couple of those schmucks would actually switch over from strong pro-Civil liberties to strong-anti Civil Liberties simply to spite Obama. Hell, the NSA's specific budget is classified. For all we know there's already that line item.
And I think you're severely under-estimating all of DC's culpability in this. Bush had pretty much a blank check to do whatever he wanted on September 12th, 2001 (note: this is actually how Checks and Balances are supposed to work. The President gets checked, and can do jack-squat, until there's a crises, then he assumes powers similar to those of an Ancient Roman Dictator). He approved this programs. Any attempt by him to disclaim the damn things is one of those age old "lying or stupid?" things. Obama has a little more deniability, because PRISM was actually passed as legislation by Congress before he became President. But not really, because he voted for it.
People like to delude themselves that some stupid bureaucrat deep in the bowels of some agency that nobody had heard of prior to these programs being enacted is the whole problem, and that One Simple Trick (either a Court Case, or the President's signature) will end it.
But the Courts aren't gonna step on Congress's toes, especially when all Constitutional cases against the programs can be brought into pretty serious question lawsimplyby checkinga couplelegal dictionaries, both Presidents clearly prefer a world where this shit happens to one where it doesn't, and Congress itself has ay least one statute authorizing the whole shebang.
And how effective has Obama been in getting rid of GitMo?
If Congress wants to spend money on a program there's not much the President can do. If Congress doesn't want to spend money on a program there's also not much he can do.
So while the new President is somewhat important in this then the Queen would be for a Canadian version, you're simply mistaken if you think the NSA will stop doing this shit without Congressional agreement.
If Thatcherism was so unpopular, why didn't Thatcher lose?
Falklands. Which isn't really Thatcherism. Thatcherism is economics (monetarism).
Can't explain 1987, or John Major's defeat of an anti-Thatcherite in '92.
In the UK you had a massive unemployment crises. Both problems were solved, by right-wing governments
Not really. As I said Labour were campaigned against for having 1 million unemployed. Thatcher took it to 3 million. And the apparent wealth of the late 80s was North Sea Oil revenue, plus selling off nationalised companies, selling off public housing plus people feeling richer due to house-price inflation. None of these are part of a real sustainable economic boom, they are selling off the family silver. Thatcherism was economically illiterate, and a failure.
If that was the case you would expect that the UK would have had an economic collapse in the mid-90s, when there were no more things to privatise and the oil price was in the teens.
Even those of us who agree with you in theory wonder about how in touch you are with reality, and worry that you'll do shit like re-open coal mines that were a useless drag on the economy from the 50s until Thatcher closed them.
The closing of the mines was never about economics. Thatcher closed them because the mineworker's union had brought down the previous Tory government. For sure there's been times since when mining wouldn't have been worth it due to the world price, and other times when it would. But they aren't going to be reopened - they are destroyed. And Corbyn values the environment.
Sanders the front-runner? What are you smoking?
Just something I heard in passing on Colbert. Looks like it was in Iowa and or New Hampshire. It's still remarkable.
Like I've said, he's almost certain to win those two states.
His problem is that most Democrats aren't rural white progressives. Those guys have been wiped out over the past 20-odd years.
probably because said friend has read the economic data (which shows that, on balance, Thatcher was right), but never seen the bits of the UK Thatcher had to destroy to be right economically.
I'm pretty sure that's wrong on all counts.
Here's the thing. For the past 25 years, neo-liberalism has been the only game in town. People have become to accept is as being the natural way. That's why Corbyn is getting a lot of opposition right now. But the election os 4.5 years away. That's a long time for the idea of a real alternative to become familiar. And when it comes to it, more than left/right ideology, what the UK electorate votes for is a leader with conviction. That appears to believe what he says and says what he believes. Miliband didn't have that. Corbyn does.
Economic growth in the UK beat Europe which didn't buy into the neo-liberal agenda with nearly the fervor of Thatcher. Ands if she's too young to remember any of the Thatcher years it's rather hard for her to have seen the coal-mining towns Thatcher gutted, now isn't it?
Corbyn's got a chance. The Opposition always does. But he's going to have top flesh out his anti-Thatcherism into something that takes into account that in 1980 most of what she did was a good idea; if he plans on convincing anyone outside the "Ding dong the witch is dead" community to vote for him.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's quote the Amendment here:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Your right to be "secure in your persons, houses, papers, and effects" "shall not be violated" by "unreasonable searches and seizures". That right can be over-ridden, allowing the unreasonable search or seizure, by a warrant issued "upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Note that under your interpretation, if a police officer sees someone committing a rape he can't arrest the guy until somebody comes down from the station with a warrant because arrests are "seizures."
The Courts actually have a lengthy list of types of search they consider reasonable. The upshot is that if they see the crime happen, they don't need a warrant to arrest the perp; if they're in a context or place where of course there're searches (like the border) they can search you; if they need to do shit now, without waiting 20 minutes for some guy to show up with paperwork, they can do shit now.
Obviously, if you're too poor to afford a lawyer (as most young black men in the maw of the law are), you're not gonna get an evidentiary hearing so the police can make almost any bullshit interpretation of "reasonable search" blessed by the courts; but it's not unusual for the courts to ban evidence against people who aren't too poor.Also note this is precisely how the Founders intended it to work. They would actually open your mail, and read it, without a warrant.
Backwards from your perspective.
Unfortunately for you,. no decision-maker has ever taken it solely from your perspective.
It was Saudi nationals who attacked us over 14 years ago, not Afghani's. Bin Laden was found in a house in Pakistan over 4 years ago, not a mountain in Afghanistan yesterday. So I ask again, why do we still drop bombs on Afghani civilians?
Talk about insane troll logic. Bin Laden was thrown out of Saudi Arabia. Implying that we should punish the Saudis for something they exiled him for is just stupid, and makes the entire rest of your argument sound like it was written by a college sophomore. OBL was in Afghanistan when he planned S11. He fled to Pakistan because we invaded Afghanistan, which sheltered him for the very Pakistani reason that they are unable/unwilling to not hedge their bets where an Islamist leader is concerned.
And the reason we're still there is the other side is still the Taliban, and the government is still millions and millions of Afghani people who risked their lives to oppose the Taliban specifically because we said we would stay until the job was done.
You're bringing up 9/11 like it just happened. It was 14 years ago. Over 2300 U.S. troops dead and over 22,000 U.S. troops wounded. Many thousands more dead and wounded Afghani civilians (children) caught in the middle.
Insane troll logic part two:
As this Kunduz debacle proves, it would be virtually impossible for a US-Air Force-free Afghanistan to keep the Taliban from taking over.
If the Taliban take over civilian casualties go through the roof because the Taliban only follow their interpretation of the Koran, and their interpretation of the Koran is very heavy on the "kill them all and let God sort them out" principle.
Which tends to lead to political unrest, and in the context of a supposedly-Koran-based-theological state political unrest = warfare.
We do have a moral reason to leave -- hospital patients are being bombed by American forces. Just think about that for a moment. Accident or no, if it were an American hospital that was hit, it would not be called "collateral damage" and you would be outraged. And of course, incidents like these make Daesh, et al., stronger not weaker. Backwards thinking indeed.
If you look at Afghani history since the coup of '78 it's been constant warfare. War deaths have averaged 37,976-56,337 depending on whether you believe the low estimate or the high estimate. In the 14 years we had ground troops the high estimate is 98,290 for all sides, and all 13 years. That average is under 8k a year. In the nine months since we pulled out the ground-pounders it's 11,361.
So your argument basically boils down to "These 19 people shouldn't have died, so we should pull out and let 37,000 other people die every single year, bhecause at least our hands will be clean."
Here's the thing:
I'll believe my military did a lot of bad shit if you can show me a motive. For example, we embarked on multiple murderous bombing campaigns against the Japanese mostly because of racism (notably, we refused to use similar tactics against the Nazis on the basis they would not work).
There is no motive for blowing up a hospital. Even if somebody in DC had a thing about MSF, they had to know it would be the top story of the counter-offensive and they'd get canned.
OTOH, getting through to NATO officials in Kabul is not gonna get a bombing campaign called off quickly unless they're the exact guys involved in the actual bombing. Getting through to our official in DC will also not stop the bombing, unless the official in question is one of a) the President, b) the Chair of the Joint Chiefs, or c) the Secretary of the Air Force. And 2 or 3 AM Saturday in Afghanistan is roughly 6 or 7 PM Friday in DC, which means none of those guys is going to be easily reachable at his office, and they were doubtless dealing with the operator at the switchboard.
I'm stunned they got results in less then an hour.
Hell, did you read your source? The reason they were bombing it in the first place was "The Afghan interior ministry said a group of 10 to 15 militants were found hiding in the hospital."
So the bureaucracy has to deal with a guy on the phone, from the hospital, saying "we're civilians please don't kill us", and balance that against the Afghan troops (identified in other sources as police) swearing up and down that there's a squad-level unit in the hospital killing them. If that guy on the phone is lying then dozens of Afghan troops will die, and your mission will be compromised forever because the survivors won't trust you. If the troops are lying you have a hospital full of corpses. Which means that maybe the safe bet is to not bomb, OTOH the troops are known quantities who have been vetted by your bureaucracy. The guy in the building is an unknown quantity who may Taliban. You have no clue because all you've got is a voice on the phone.
In other words, just because the news story you read has one side of the story (in this case, the MSF's firm, and so far unconfirmed, claim that there were not 10 to 15 Taliban in their building), a bunch of commentary on an issue tangentially related to this (the Red Cross Guy, for example, is linking the attack to others on their personal, and most of those are done by the Taliban), and a throw-away line about why we actually did it the logical conclusion is not that our military are mindless butchers who kill without reason. The logical conclusion is that you should read something from somebody who elaborates on that one line.
Look man, bottom line:
This is a war. People will die. Many of them will be innocent. The first report, from both the military and the civilians, will always be one-sided, because neither the military nor the civilians are magical psychics who can figure out the other side's case without hearing it. Generally there's elements of truth to both.
I suspect in this case what will come out is that the Afghan Police were making it up out of spite. They have the motive to lie, and get the building destroyed. OTOH, MSF personal may not have seen, or heard, a fireteam or three on the roof, and have 19 very good reasons to be extremely adamant in their contention that said fireteams did not exist.
It got approved because the Afghan Police specifically asked for it to be leveled. They alleged that the hospital was being used as a firebase:
The Ministry of Defense said “terrorists” armed with light and heavy weapons had entered the hospital compound and used “the buildings and the people inside as a shield” while firing on security forces. Brig. Gen. Dawlat Waziri, the ministry’s deputy spokesman, told The Associated Press that helicopter gunships fired on the militants, causing damage to the buildings.
Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said 10 to 15 “terrorists” had been hiding in the hospital at the time of the strike.
“All of the terrorists were killed but we also lost doctors,” he said. He said 80 staff members at the hospital, including 15 foreigners, had been taken to safety. He did not say what sort of strike had damaged the compound.
Around 2pm the Taliban seized the medical compound, according to Sarwar Hussaini, the spokesman for the provincial police chief.
“Fighting is continuing between Afghan security forces and the Taliban,” he said.
This isn't Google maps. This is war. It's way too chaotic to trust automatic measures.
The Taliban had taken over Kunduz. this means they could easily have killed the entire MSF staff, taken them hostage, or simply informed that them the roof was going to be a machine gun nest for the foreseeable future. Your entire automatic no-kill map should have been wiped out the minute the Taliban took the City.
The machine gun nest thing is precisely what the Afghan Police told the Air Force happened.
So the interesting question in this little fuck-up isn't "Why did the US Military fuck up?" it's "Were the Afghans lying through their fucking teeth about taking fire from the hospital, and if so why did they do that?"
"probably" seems too much of a leap from the available information, I think "possibly" would be more accurate word to use at this time.
From what I can tell, it's likely there was no internal US Military mistake. At all. Maybe an Afghan one, tho.
Afghan forces asked us to blow up the building. We blew up the building. This is the bottom bit of the story.
Then it turned out that it was a hospital said Afghan forces were pissed at because the hospital treated Taliban. They are also still alleging the Taliban had taken over the hospital and was using it as a firebase.
You're looking at this precisely backwards.
"Do we have a moral reason to be involved in this country?" Is only a relevant question before you go in. And in September or December 2001, it was pretty clear that the only way we were going to get Osama out of his mountain hideaway was an invasion.
Now the question is "Do we have a moral reason to leave?" And the answer to that question is almost always no, because there's a government full of people who are significantly less objectionable then the enemy, who are depending on us to not be executed on international TV in the name of Daesh.
That is actually available. The glass bottles of "Mexican Coke" you see everywhere taste different because they used Cane Sugar. But those are only sold in 12 Oz sizes.
Pepsi is better. There's 20 Oz, in Cherry, Vanilla, and standard. Sometimes there's 12 packs of cans. In theory they're "Limited Time" items, but avaliaboilty around Cleveland has been going up.
Or read the calorie count, paying careful attention to serving size. The Oreo serving size for example, is typically 2 or 3 cookies, not the half the package you're actually going to eat.
Food companies will always have a very good motive to include things that are sugar but aren't called sugar, because sugar is very tasty but people have figured that industrialized food production means we eat too damn much of it, and therefore they avoid it. But 150 calories is 150 calories, no matter whether you call it sugar or "nectar of the cane."
Basically.
We'll have to send somebody to Kunduz to try and figure out whose full of shit, for political and ethical reasons. But until that guy gets there and finishes, and/or a lot more info becomes public we don't really know what went on.
In the mean-time, it is both extremely tragic, and not surprising. It's a war, not a bake sale. People die.
Dude,
Case law is clear. Border control can search your ass on the border. That's why they can look for weed in your car at the border crossing. It's called the Border Search Exception.
It's less clear then I thought about the ability to rifle through your electronic doohickeys, because the Ninth Circuit (which deal with cases from Cali), has ruled that the Feds need a a "reasonable suspicion" to read your damn hard drive, but they have failed to explain what that shit means. It's entirely possible they'll rule Mayor Silva is fucked if DHS turns up kiddy porn or something.
Reread the Fourth. It's quite specific. The algorithm is that if a search or seizure is unreasonable, your right to privacy applies, and that right can only be over-ridden by warrant issued by the Courts. In the absence of an "unreasonable search or seizure" you have no Fourth Amendment rights.
The attack's not a done deal, but the number of people who can call the plane back is incredibly small. Probably on the order of a dozen in the pilot's official chain-of-command, most of whom aren't reachable because they're in DC; a guy (generally an Air Force Intel officer) who liases with friendlies to prevent green-on-green incidents, who has no fucking clue about MSF because neutral medical organizations are not in the habit of accepting liaison officers (that would make un-nuetral); a couple other people the pilots know and trust who happen to be in their units; and that's about it.
Look at it this way: you're an infantry unit under attack in Kunduz province. You call in an air strike. Would you be happy if it got called off in the middle because the Taliban happened to have a guy with a Mancunian accent, a great cover story, and a SatPhone? If the answer is you'd be pretty fucking pissed off, then the Air Force is not gonna set up a system whereby MSF can call in and get a bombing raid called off on the authority of the dude manning the phones at the local airbase. And since it'll take at least five minutes to convince that dude to start putting you through to the rest of his chain-of-command, looking for the dude whose chain includes both said base and the pilot of the aircraft involved, 30 minutes is, indeed, fucking lightspeed.
Particularly since they probably aren't timing it from when they got through to a human to start their spiel, they're timing it from when the first bomb started falling.
The Afghan Police concerned are still swearing up and down they were taking fire from the building.
Maybe they were... it wouldn't the first time that an enemy used a hospital or other "off limits" location to fight from.
MSF has a lot of credibility, and they have no particular reason to blame us rather then blaming the Taliban fighters who "borrowed" the third floor. If they say the Taliban weren't shooting from the building they probably know damn well the Taliban weren't shooting from the building.
That said I still trust the Afghan police story to some extent. As you point out, getting a guy into a non-combat zone to harass the government is well within the Taliban's capabilities. I'm about 75/25 for the MSF.
There is a Holy Shit you're bombing friendlies protocol. But the MSF is not a friendly. It's a neutral. That's kinda the entire point, and the most likely explanation is actually that some Afghan Cop got pissed at them for being too neutral and asked for the strike out of revenge for them treating the Taliban.
As a non-friendly, MSF does not have a guy in the theater chain-of-coimmand, with has a hotline to the guy who knows exactly which squadron to call to scrub the exact bombing raid going on in Kunduz province at this second. That would probably take 10 or 15 minutes. MSF's gonna have to call somebody (probably at the Embassy, because getting too close to the military would be taking a side), who has to figure out who to call to get to the "you're bombing the wrong damn thing Ghost Squadron" guy. And since none of this happens on a militarily secure phone line, with a protocol for verifying that the MSF guy isn't saying this because 150 Taliban have taken over the building and are threatening to cut his head off on international TV, they've also got to go through some process to verify the MSF guy is an actual MSF guy and is not lying.
He is definitely guilty of going to a Chinese-government-sponsored Mayor's conference, bringing his actual every-day electronics and not some super-special throw-away ones that will be expected to be bugged, and despite the recent bullshit accord that has got to sound some alarms.
It could get creepy. He has also been accused of using his position on the school board to get little girls into a bathroom where he had video equipment.
Reread your first source.
In the Ninth Circuit they can search electronic devices with "reasonable suspicion" at the border. The Ninth has not explained precisely what that means.
Which means that as long as the Obama Administration can articulate some suspicion of somebody involved in the Mayor's conference he went to they've got a case.
Not in literal terms.
But the summary specifically mentions no warrant, which means that the first reaction upon reading it is "What the fuck? That is so unconstitutional," when it should be "Why would they need a warrant at the border?" Silva does not seem to understand that searches at the border are, by definition, reasonable and therefore exempt from the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement.
What's interesting is the passwords bit. Mayor Silva can't be forced to testify against himself in Court, so no data they get from the devices could be used against him in Court; and he can't be the guy they're investigating.
There isn't much we could have done.
The Afghan police requested the airstrike. Everyone (including me) assumes they were lying because MSF has a very good reputation, but if the Taliban take a city, and an allied paramilitary unit says that retaking it requires blowing up a building that was used as a hospital before the invasion, because guys on top of it are killing them, you're not gonna subject them to the fifth degree before you do it.
A half-hour is lightning-fast in terms of stopping it when it turned out the Afghan police were wrong. The Air Force is a 308k person bureaucracy, the guy whose number MSF has is probably not in the chain-of-command of the relevant unit, and quite possibly is not on a first name basis with anyone in that unit, so they have to call that guy. He who has to rustle up someone who is in that unit (and is trusted by the brass of that unit) and can verify he's not the kind of idiot who would fall for an obvious Taliban trick.
It is.
And they do precisely what they say they'll do. They blow up the exact building the airmen intended to blow up.
The problem in this case is the Afghan police told the Air Force they were taking fire from the MSF hospital, and they needed it to be leveled. Since the Taliban controlled the entire fucking city, including the hospital, a whole yesterday, the Air Force didn't bother to check the pre-Taliban-list of targets you shouldn't level in Kunduz.
The Afghan Police are still swearing up and down they were being attacked from the hospital, MSF speculates this whole fiasco is revenge for MSF's "treat anyone, even Taliban" policy, and I doubt the US Government will make a determination over whether the raid was justified until they can prove conclusively whether the Afghan Police are making shit up. Which will be somewhat difficult, given that said police specifically asked for most of the evidence to be destroyed.
Dude, 30 minutes is a half-hour. This is not a 5-man start-up where everybody has the authority to do everything. It is not the Starship Enterprise where you can get someone in responsibility simply by hailing the bridge. It is a 308k-airmen bureaucracy.
The guys doing the bombing are in an Air Force Squadron that reports to a Lieutenant Colonel. I doubt MSF has his number, the number of the full Colonel who commands the Wing, etc. Even if they had that number how'd they know that particular colonel was the one blowing up their hospital?
So they had to call somebody fairly high up in the chain-of-command, or in the Embassy. Then he'd have to verify they were who they said they were, then he has to figure out which squadron is involved, then he has to call that Lieutenant Colonel has to call his guys in the air and tell them to stop. And you have to add at least 10 minutes for everyone to verify they're not being bullshat by a Taliban fighter with an impeccable accent.
30 minutes is fucking light-speed.
Keep in mind military terminology is really old. Way older then you.
They're surgical strikes, and smart bombs, compared to ones we used in the last big war against the Nazis. Both us (against the Japanese), and the Brits (against Germany) used night bombing campaigns to avoid enemy air defenses, and had to work their tails off to make sure they hit the intended city. Avoiding specific buildings was simply not possible. Day-bombing raids (used by us against the Germans), was better, but would still have been unable to avoid leveling the hospital if used against a built-up area:
As U.S. participation in the war started, the USAAF drew up widespread and comprehensive bombing plans based on the Norden. They believed the B-17 had a 1.2% probability of hitting a 30 metres (100 ft) target from 6,100 metres (20,000 ft), meaning that 220 bombers would be needed for a 93% probability of one or more hits. This was not considered a problem, and the AAF forecast the need for 251 combat groups to provide enough bombers to fulfill their comprehensive pre-war plans.[21] The bombsight was used for first time in March 1943.[29]
For all it's sins, the military we've got uses significantly less brutal solutions then were possible in any previous generation. It's not their fault that Presidents much prefer airstrikes (which have large civilian casualty-numbers if they go wrong) to special forces-ops (which can turn low casualty operations into political disasters because we really liked those 18 guys).
In this case it doesn't seem like a US Military internal fuck-up at all. It seems like some embittered Afghan police officer sent in the coordinates of the hospital on purpose because MSF treats Taliban casualties. The Afghan Police concerned are still swearing up and down they were taking fire from the building.
Agreed both would be better.
My issue with your argument isn't so much in the facts, it's that people who don't understand the process completely will only remember the bit about the President being more important 18months from now, and thus they'll be stunned when (pretty much inevitably) the winning candidate runs on a platform of restricting the NSA. But fails completely in all attempts to revolutionize privacy protection at the NSA because the entire fucking system is specifically designed so that replacing one individual can not revolutionize anything. Then instead of drawing the logical conclusion (that the system is working precisely as the Founders intended, with nobody having the power to change anything unilaterally), they'll start talking about the dirt the NSA must have on Hillary/Rand/Marco/whomever.
The case of GitMo is actually quite instructive. You would think not spending money shipping food to Cuba for prisoners would be cheaper then wrapping up operations, and you'd be right. The problem is there's be costs involved in wrapping up the operation, and those need to explicitly approved by Congress, despite the fact the entire point of the facility is to keep the prisoners subject to said President's "Commander-in-Chief" powers rather then his more restricted law enforcement powers. In the case of the NSA if there's a termination fee to some contract involved, or even a guy who would have to be paid for a couple days of doing nothing before he got transferred to another project, then Congress has the capital-P-Power to extent the programs indefinitely unilaterally.
And if Obama announced he was cutting an anti-terror program Clapper said was useful how long do you think it would be before there was a movement in Congress to thwart him by adding a line item to the budget? A couple of those schmucks would actually switch over from strong pro-Civil liberties to strong-anti Civil Liberties simply to spite Obama. Hell, the NSA's specific budget is classified. For all we know there's already that line item.
And I think you're severely under-estimating all of DC's culpability in this. Bush had pretty much a blank check to do whatever he wanted on September 12th, 2001 (note: this is actually how Checks and Balances are supposed to work. The President gets checked, and can do jack-squat, until there's a crises, then he assumes powers similar to those of an Ancient Roman Dictator). He approved this programs. Any attempt by him to disclaim the damn things is one of those age old "lying or stupid?" things. Obama has a little more deniability, because PRISM was actually passed as legislation by Congress before he became President. But not really, because he voted for it.
People like to delude themselves that some stupid bureaucrat deep in the bowels of some agency that nobody had heard of prior to these programs being enacted is the whole problem, and that One Simple Trick (either a Court Case, or the President's signature) will end it.
But the Courts aren't gonna step on Congress's toes, especially when all Constitutional cases against the programs can be brought into pretty serious question law simply by checking a couple legal dictionaries, both Presidents clearly prefer a world where this shit happens to one where it doesn't, and Congress itself has ay least one statute authorizing the whole shebang.
The least difficult fix is Congress.
And how effective has Obama been in getting rid of GitMo?
If Congress wants to spend money on a program there's not much the President can do. If Congress doesn't want to spend money on a program there's also not much he can do.
So while the new President is somewhat important in this then the Queen would be for a Canadian version, you're simply mistaken if you think the NSA will stop doing this shit without Congressional agreement.
If Thatcherism was so unpopular, why didn't Thatcher lose?
Falklands. Which isn't really Thatcherism. Thatcherism is economics (monetarism).
Can't explain 1987, or John Major's defeat of an anti-Thatcherite in '92.
In the UK you had a massive unemployment crises. Both problems were solved, by right-wing governments
Not really. As I said Labour were campaigned against for having 1 million unemployed. Thatcher took it to 3 million. And the apparent wealth of the late 80s was North Sea Oil revenue, plus selling off nationalised companies, selling off public housing plus people feeling richer due to house-price inflation. None of these are part of a real sustainable economic boom, they are selling off the family silver. Thatcherism was economically illiterate, and a failure.
If that was the case you would expect that the UK would have had an economic collapse in the mid-90s, when there were no more things to privatise and the oil price was in the teens.
Even those of us who agree with you in theory wonder about how in touch you are with reality, and worry that you'll do shit like re-open coal mines that were a useless drag on the economy from the 50s until Thatcher closed them.
The closing of the mines was never about economics. Thatcher closed them because the mineworker's union had brought down the previous Tory government. For sure there's been times since when mining wouldn't have been worth it due to the world price, and other times when it would. But they aren't going to be reopened - they are destroyed. And Corbyn values the environment.
Sanders the front-runner? What are you smoking?
Just something I heard in passing on Colbert. Looks like it was in Iowa and or New Hampshire. It's still remarkable.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ba...
Like I've said, he's almost certain to win those two states.
His problem is that most Democrats aren't rural white progressives. Those guys have been wiped out over the past 20-odd years.
probably because said friend has read the economic data (which shows that, on balance, Thatcher was right), but never seen the bits of the UK Thatcher had to destroy to be right economically.
I'm pretty sure that's wrong on all counts.
Here's the thing. For the past 25 years, neo-liberalism has been the only game in town. People have become to accept is as being the natural way. That's why Corbyn is getting a lot of opposition right now. But the election os 4.5 years away. That's a long time for the idea of a real alternative to become familiar. And when it comes to it, more than left/right ideology, what the UK electorate votes for is a leader with conviction. That appears to believe what he says and says what he believes. Miliband didn't have that. Corbyn does.
Economic growth in the UK beat Europe which didn't buy into the neo-liberal agenda with nearly the fervor of Thatcher. Ands if she's too young to remember any of the Thatcher years it's rather hard for her to have seen the coal-mining towns Thatcher gutted, now isn't it?
Corbyn's got a chance. The Opposition always does. But he's going to have top flesh out his anti-Thatcherism into something that takes into account that in 1980 most of what she did was a good idea; if he plans on convincing anyone outside the "Ding dong the witch is dead" community to vote for him.