Nothing will prevent bored, spoiled sons of rich Saudis to kill innocent people.
Nothing will prevent them from trying. There are plenty of ways to prevent them from actually pulling it off. The question is which of those things is appropriate and acceptable and which aren't.
There's an important distinction here between the notion of natural, or divine, rights, and the regular kind of rights.
In the conventional sense, a right is nothing more or less than a legally guaranteed liberty. You have a right to free speech because the Constitution says that the government is not allowed to restrict your liberty to speak. (There's an understood "within reason" attached to the Bill of Rights, of course.) In that sense, there is no right to privacy. Nor is there a right to anything else that's not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution or the laws of our land.
But there's also this tradition of natural or divine rights. That's what the ninth amendment refers to. Basically the idea is that people have certain rights, granted by the Creator, whether the government endorses them or not. The ninth amendment doesn't say anything about what those unenumerated divine rights might be. In fact it doesn't even guarantee that there are any. It merely acknowledges the possibility and leaves everything else as an exercise for the reader.
The problem is that everybody has a different idea of what our divine rights are. We don't have much to go on in the way of authoritative sources; the Declaration of Independence calls out life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but even Thomas Jefferson waffled on those: in all drafts but the last one, the list included life, liberty, and property. And both lists are unacceptably vague for any sort of day-to-day use. It's all well and good to say that we have a right to liberty, but that doesn't mean everybody is allowed to do whatever he wants without restrictions of any kind. The divine rights are unalienable, but they can certainly be abridged when the need arises. This is another instance of that understood "within reason" I referred to earlier.
So here's how it all breaks down. All people have certain unalienable rights. Never mind what those rights are. Certain specific instances of those rights have been set aside for protection in law; these rights are guaranteed, and cannot be impinged upon by the government. (Within reason.) The rest of them, however, are left unspecified, and they most certainly can be impinged upon by the government, though we universally agree that they shouldn't be. But since nobody agrees on precisely what those other, unspecified divine rights are, the question of whether a particular liberty is a right or not is always open for debate.
Basically all it takes is one person to say, "You know, I don't actually believe that there's a divine right to privacy," and the tenor of the whole discussion has to shift. Suddenly it's no longer a question of how the right to privacy should be protected and where the limits on it are, if any. Suddenly it's a question of whether there's a right to privacy at all.
That's where we are right now. Because there are a lot of people out there, myself included, who are not convinced that a prima facie argument has been made for a divine right to privacy.
Yeah, I saw that one, too. Part of a larger report, I think, that was shamelessly and unabashedly anti-anti-war. The best part was that "Umm" you mentioned, the protestor's response, lasted for a full ten seconds, which is an eternity in TV news. Ten full seconds of dead air, which spoke more about the anti-war movement than a thousand scathing editorials.
The best one-liners from Fox News of late have been these. (I'm paraphrasing from memory.)
The United Nations-- remember them?
A group of Iraqis attacked Coalition forces today by driving a bus into the side of an armored vehicle on purpose. So the gunner opened up on them with the vehicle's 25 mm machine gun... on purpose.
Yes, I watch Fox News. Yes, they have a fairly unique notion of "equal time." That doesn't necessarily mean they're always wrong.
a US cluster bomblet (probably not being dropped on Baghdad, but possible)
Where, then, did the other 642 bomblets come down? (I just picked 644 as an example; different cluster munitions have different numbers of sub-munitions, but I'm not aware of any that just have one or two.)
or an artillery shell (much more likely)
We don't have any artillery in range of Baghdad. At least as far as is publicly known; it's hard to believe that we could have gotten an M109 within about 20 miles of Baghdad without the Iraqis making one hell of a stink about it.
It could have been the Iraqis, it could have been the US. We'll probably never know.
Unfortunately, I think that's the one and only absolute truth in this: that we may never know.
Did anyone notice that there is a brand new/. article about GPS being a new tech in phones about three slots down? And the military is already banning them?
GPS in a cellular phone is new and fancy. GPS in a satellite phone is old hat.
That whole imbroglio surprises me. Iraqi civilian casualties are thought to be a key part of the Hussein (or post-Hussein) battle plan. It seems to me that a general who bombs Iraqi citizens would be more likely to be promoted than fired, as long as he did it without getting caught.
For that matter, Iraqi ministers and generals aren't usually fired. Unless by "fired" you mean "killed."
The whole thing smells fishy. Not fishy in the "it was a US bomb" sense; if that had been a US munition, it would have made a much, much bigger crater and killed a hell of a lot more people, that much is for certain. But what it was, exactly, is still a mystery.
Just out of sheer perversity, my money is on the meteor theory.
Re:Not as far fetched as it would seem
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That means at some point a very large percentage of the world's population accepted it.
First of all, the original point was the 200 years ago "blacks were considered non-human." My intent was to point out that this was, by far, a minority opinion, and I think you would agree with that. I hope.
But to go beyond that point, let's be a little more clear about the crux of the debate. When you say "a very large percentage," are you asserting a majority, or what? For that matter, do we even have population figures for 1,800 years ago, even estimates? Let's say every single Chinese person and every single Roman person thought slavery was a dandy idea. (Clearly a false assumption, but let's just run with it for hijinx.) What does that total up to? Half of the world? Something less?
I would say that the best way out of this is for us to agree that slavery as an acceptable practice has been found in many cultures throughout history, but that this doesn't necessarily means that a given person chosen out of all of humanity and subjected to a survey would have necessarily expressed the opinion that slavery was just fine, or that slaves were "non-human."
Fair enough?
Re:First, human self-knowledge
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But "The Sims" exists, and for all its flaws it's damn impressive!
True, but "The Sims" is a simulation. There's no self-awareness there. In that way, it's only slightly more sophisticated than "Eliza."
But my point here is embarassingly cliche: the difference between the illusion of intelligence and actual intelligence is hard to define, but real. I won't try to pretend that there's any real insight here; what I'm saying was old hat when Turing was a boy.
Re:First, human self-knowledge
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A very loose-- okay, absurdly loose, valid only in the metaphorical sense-- interpretation of Godel's Theorem would imply that this may be impossible.
Re:The Forbin Project
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A very good movie about what happens with an AI.
You appear to have a definition of "very good" that is altogether new to me.
Re:Not as far fetched as it would seem
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Remember, a mere 200 years ago (a blink in human history), blacks were considered non-human, and therefore not eligible for pay or benefits.
In all fairness, that opinion was only held by an almost insignificantly tiny fraction of humanity.
Your point is well taken: opinions can change over time in ways that, in retrospect, seem unbelievable. But I hope my point is well taken, too: the notion that slavery was acceptable was never universal, or even particularly common. At any given point in history, the fraction of humanity who held slaves or who approved of holding slaves was very small.
I wonder how? The Russians lost 300.000 men in the battle of Berlin.
Consider this: the people who are planning and executing this war are not idiots. They know all about the Battle of Berlin, too.
I heard it described not too long ago this way. (I'm paraphrasing a Pentagon official.)
There will be no house-to-house fighting in Baghdad. If we find a building with soldiers holed up inside, we're going to retreat to a safe distance and clear the area of as many civilians as possible. Then we're going to give the enemy soldiers an opportunity to surrender. If they refuse, we're going to hit the building with a precision munition or an artillery shell or a rocket. We will then give the survivors another opportunity to surrender.
At the time, I thought that was a neat idea, but I didn't know how it would play out in real life. Turns out that's exactly what our forces are doing. Did you watch the skirmish in Umm Qasr a few nights ago? It was broadcast live by the BBC for something like three or four hours, and picked up by virtually every western news network and rebroadcast in real time. Our troops came under fire, so they retreated to a safe position and dug in. They gave the enemy an opportunity to surrender, which they refused. The troops then hit their building with a shoulder-launched missile. They gave the survivors another opportunity to surrender, which they again refused. So they called in the tanks, and hit their building with a 120mm shell. Problem solved, with no Allied casualties.
We would rather take Baghdad without any casualties and without destroying any buildings. But if forced to make a choice, we will destroy a building rather than putting our soldiers at risk.
The same thing they gave in exchange for the stuff they bought to build all those ballistic missiles. The same thing they gave in exchange for those Russian GPS jammers and night-vision goggles and so on. The same thing they gave in exchange for those aluminum rods that everybody and his sister agrees are only practical for use in uranium processing centrifuges. The same thing they gave in exchange for literally tens of thousands of gallons of rocket fuel. The same thing they gave in exchange for literally tens of thousands of doses of atropine, an antidote for nerve gas. All of these things were bought, in massive quantities (except for the GPS jammers; they bought six of those) since the 1991 war. With money they should have used to buy food and medicine.
Recent history has told us that economic embargo only affects to the people, that won't blame their gov, but to whom imposes the embargo.
Hey, if you want to argue that the sanctions program was a dumb idea, I'm right there with you. But when you argue that sanctions killed innocent people, I step right up and call bullshit.
Does your government feed your children? Mine don't.
Indirectly it does. Your stores have food in them in part because the government pays for it to be there. In Iraq, the government is solely responsible for putting food in stores; that's how things are under totalitarian socialism.
And the US has a lot to blame in this 650.000 children that died.
Absolutely, I agree. The past twelve years of nightmarish horror are the responsibility of the whole world. If we had marched to Baghdad in 1991 and overthrown the Baath party then and there, none of this would have happened.
Of course, if Saddam Hussein had stepped down and allowed a democratic government to take his place, none of this would have happened, either.
Oh, for crying out loud. I don't want to take the time to school you on this, so I'm just going to cherry-pick a few key points. You have the responsibility, as a thinking adult, to read the act for yourself and draw your own conclusions. If you don't want to read the act itself, you have the responsibility to read and compare the interpretations of many groups, not just left-wing lobbyists who have a clear agenda to push.
The first thing the EFF got wrong was their interpretation of the "expanded surveillance" stipulations. Yes, USA PATRIOT defines some new surveillance procedures. But these new procedures cannot be employed without getting a warrant from a federal judge, and that's no trivial task. The EFF misses this completely:
The government may now spy on web surfing of innocent Americans, including terms entered into search engines, by merely telling a judge anywhere in the U.S. that the spying could lead to information that is "relevant" to an ongoing criminal investigation.
This is incorrect. You can't get an electronic wiretap warrant by merely telling a judge anywhere in the US that such a warrant is needed. You have to convince a judge in the appropriate district that the warrant is needed. This is no different under USA PATRIOT than it was before.
The EFF also says, pertaining to roving taps:
The government need not make any showing to a court that the particular information or communication to be acquired is relevant to a criminal investigation.
That's simply untrue. The standard for relevance and appropriateness has not been modified. It's just as hard to get a warrant after USA PATRIOT than it was before; in fact, because the powers of the FBI have been expanded in some ways, it's even harder, because the judge must weigh the invasiveness of the surveillance against the benefits to be gained from it.
The EFF says First it allows ISPs to voluntarily hand over all "non-content" information to law enforcement with no need for any court order or subpoena. sec. 212.
Section 212 of the USA PATRIOT act is titled "Emergency disclosure of electronic communications to protect life and limb." To protect life and limb. The section amends title 18 of the US Code, which previously prohibited an ISP from revealing any information about its users, to add an exception: an ISP may voluntarily reveal information to the FBI if the provider reasonably believes that an emergency involving immediate danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requires disclosure of the information without delay. In other words, if an ISP thinks they have information pertaining to "immediate danger of death or serious physical injury," they can call the FBI. This is something every individual has the right, in fact the obligation under law, to do whenever the need arises. Extending the privilege to ISP's is not the bugaboo that the EFF seems to think it is.
The EFF goes on: They are 1) 802 definition of "domestic terrorism" (amending 18 USC 2331), which raises concerns about legitimate protest activity resulting in conviction on terrorism charges, especially if violence erupts.
The definition of "domestic terrorism" in the statute as amended by USA PATRIOT is: "the term 'domestic terrorism' means activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States." In other words, domestic terrorism is any serious crime-- acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of criminal law-- that is intended to scare people, influence the government by scaring people, or
Your math is impeccable. Your reasoning is a complete non-starter.
Look at the facts. The UN- and US-imposed sanctions have never affected imports of food or medicine. Iraq has always been able to import exactly as much food and medicine as it needs. They've always had plenty of revenue to do so, too, even right at the height of the sanctions program. In fact, the UN has on several occasions all but begged Iraq to import more food and medicine.
So is the rate of infant mortality in Iraq really related to the sanctions, which haven't had any affect on Iraq's ability to take care of children? Or is it more likely that the rate of infant mortality has been affected by the decision of the Iraqi regime to spend their treasury on the military instead of on food or medicine imports? Or possibly by the decision of the Iraqi regime to systematically deny medical assistance to the Kurds and the Shiites, as part of the repression of the uprisings that followed the 1991 war?
The rates of birth and death simply don't tell the whole story.
The US citizens need to wake up, and thankfully a lot have already done so.. like Michael Moore.
I was all set to reply to you, correcting your obvious errors and challenging your insinuations, until I got to this line. At this point, it was clear that your post was merely an extremely subtle joke.
Yes. Have you ever considered the cost of outfitting 100,000 aid workers, engineers, construction workers, and interim government officials with them? Believe it or not, it's actually cheaper and easier to built cell phone towers.
You need to survey it, build towers etc. - its a BIG country !
It's not that big a country. It's comparable in area to California, but about half of that is uninhabited desert, so it's more like Idaho. And most of the population is centered in about five large cities. We will be able to cover those cities in cell service, thereby taking care of most of the need, in just a few months.
The insfrastructure is buggered even before the war - power, landline system etc.
No, actually Iraq has a very solid power and telecommunications infrastructure. The war has thus far left most of that infrastructure intact, destroying only some buried cable junctions.
Who the hells going to be able to buy them ?
This system isn't intended to be used by the people, although of course they'll have access to it. It's intended to be used by the foreign aid workers and others who spend up to two years rebuilding Iraq.
I'm not a bleeding-heart liberal going on about 'feed the people first instead of giving them internet access' but it must be bloody obvious in this case.
It's not a matter of "this first then that." It's a matter of doing this along with that so we can eventually do that more effectively.
Will we find a way to create an Iraqi government that is acceptable to the Iraqis AND to the United States? Will it last?
Yup.
What's that? Don't believe me? I don't know why not. My hypothesis is just as supported by the facts as yours.
Will we find a way to quell the anti-american hatred that our actions have incited?
The world has always been replete with groups who hate America. This has never bothered us in the past, and it doesn't really bother us now. Changes in the 20th century have allowed those who hate us to strike out at us more directly and more damagingly, but we can live with that.
Will we avoid suffering severe economic hardships made worse by this conflict? Will we find that we've irreperably damaged our relationships with other nations of the world?
Will you ever stop spewing unsupported, unsupportable FUD?
Pretty damn weak, dude. If you want to pull a conspiracy theory out of your rear end, you'd be better off pursuing the Cheney-Halliburton connection. That one's nonsense, too, but at least it's slightly less absurd nonsense.
But I trust the Electonic Frontier Foundation's analysis of it.
You shouldn't. Their analysis got several points seriously wrong. Don't depend on their interpretation; educate yourself more thoroughly before forming an opinion.
Nothing in UN resolution 1441 specifies that a massive attack and invasion is authorized.
Resolution 678 authorized "all necessary means" to enforce relevant UN resolutions (which includes the subsequent ones such as 1441) and restore peace and security to the area. This war is many things, but a violation of international law is not one of them. Why? Because the people who make these decisions are not idiots. They know how to read and interpret the various applicable treaties and resolutions, too.
When the world said NO to war, Bush should have listened.
The world did not say no to war. The world was never asked, because neither the endorsement nor the permission of the world was required.
Now he's going to take the fall like Blair.
Seeing as how the latest polls show Mr. Blair's support skyrocketing since last week, I certainly hope President Bush takes the fall in just that same way.;-)
And if you weren't suckled onto the teet of mainstream news outlets, you'd realize the world is overwhelmingly against this war. Even Britain's people.
Fortunately the world is not a democracy.
I'm not joking when I say they're thinking about trying Blair like a war criminal. Here's the link:
I hope you'll understand if I don't rely on an op-ed in the Guardian for insightful political commentary. That's right up there with going to RJR for hard science on the health consequences of smoking.
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Nothing will prevent bored, spoiled sons of rich Saudis to kill innocent people.
Nothing will prevent them from trying. There are plenty of ways to prevent them from actually pulling it off. The question is which of those things is appropriate and acceptable and which aren't.
There's an important distinction here between the notion of natural, or divine, rights, and the regular kind of rights.
In the conventional sense, a right is nothing more or less than a legally guaranteed liberty. You have a right to free speech because the Constitution says that the government is not allowed to restrict your liberty to speak. (There's an understood "within reason" attached to the Bill of Rights, of course.) In that sense, there is no right to privacy. Nor is there a right to anything else that's not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution or the laws of our land.
But there's also this tradition of natural or divine rights. That's what the ninth amendment refers to. Basically the idea is that people have certain rights, granted by the Creator, whether the government endorses them or not. The ninth amendment doesn't say anything about what those unenumerated divine rights might be. In fact it doesn't even guarantee that there are any. It merely acknowledges the possibility and leaves everything else as an exercise for the reader.
The problem is that everybody has a different idea of what our divine rights are. We don't have much to go on in the way of authoritative sources; the Declaration of Independence calls out life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but even Thomas Jefferson waffled on those: in all drafts but the last one, the list included life, liberty, and property. And both lists are unacceptably vague for any sort of day-to-day use. It's all well and good to say that we have a right to liberty, but that doesn't mean everybody is allowed to do whatever he wants without restrictions of any kind. The divine rights are unalienable, but they can certainly be abridged when the need arises. This is another instance of that understood "within reason" I referred to earlier.
So here's how it all breaks down. All people have certain unalienable rights. Never mind what those rights are. Certain specific instances of those rights have been set aside for protection in law; these rights are guaranteed, and cannot be impinged upon by the government. (Within reason.) The rest of them, however, are left unspecified, and they most certainly can be impinged upon by the government, though we universally agree that they shouldn't be. But since nobody agrees on precisely what those other, unspecified divine rights are, the question of whether a particular liberty is a right or not is always open for debate.
Basically all it takes is one person to say, "You know, I don't actually believe that there's a divine right to privacy," and the tenor of the whole discussion has to shift. Suddenly it's no longer a question of how the right to privacy should be protected and where the limits on it are, if any. Suddenly it's a question of whether there's a right to privacy at all.
That's where we are right now. Because there are a lot of people out there, myself included, who are not convinced that a prima facie argument has been made for a divine right to privacy.
Yes. But terrorism is also a legitimate and serious threat. Dismissing it out of hand as "FUD" is foolish.
Hard to enjoy those essential liberties when you're dead.
Yeah, I saw that one, too. Part of a larger report, I think, that was shamelessly and unabashedly anti-anti-war. The best part was that "Umm" you mentioned, the protestor's response, lasted for a full ten seconds, which is an eternity in TV news. Ten full seconds of dead air, which spoke more about the anti-war movement than a thousand scathing editorials.
It's called "PowerBook G4 and iBook: How to Calibrate a New Battery for Best Performance", search for it at support.apple.com.
Or just click here.
Twirlip, I found this from your journal. I'm surprised you didn't post it here.
That's what kind of day I'm having: I plum forgot about it. Thanks for the hat tip, though.
- The United Nations-- remember them?
- A group of Iraqis attacked Coalition forces today by driving a bus into the side of an armored vehicle on purpose. So the gunner opened up on them with the vehicle's 25 mm machine gun... on purpose.
Yes, I watch Fox News. Yes, they have a fairly unique notion of "equal time." That doesn't necessarily mean they're always wrong.a US cluster bomblet (probably not being dropped on Baghdad, but possible)
Where, then, did the other 642 bomblets come down? (I just picked 644 as an example; different cluster munitions have different numbers of sub-munitions, but I'm not aware of any that just have one or two.)
or an artillery shell (much more likely)
We don't have any artillery in range of Baghdad. At least as far as is publicly known; it's hard to believe that we could have gotten an M109 within about 20 miles of Baghdad without the Iraqis making one hell of a stink about it.
It could have been the Iraqis, it could have been the US. We'll probably never know.
Unfortunately, I think that's the one and only absolute truth in this: that we may never know.
Did anyone notice that there is a brand new /. article about GPS being a new tech in phones about three slots down? And the military is already banning them?
GPS in a cellular phone is new and fancy. GPS in a satellite phone is old hat.
That whole imbroglio surprises me. Iraqi civilian casualties are thought to be a key part of the Hussein (or post-Hussein) battle plan. It seems to me that a general who bombs Iraqi citizens would be more likely to be promoted than fired, as long as he did it without getting caught.
For that matter, Iraqi ministers and generals aren't usually fired. Unless by "fired" you mean "killed."
The whole thing smells fishy. Not fishy in the "it was a US bomb" sense; if that had been a US munition, it would have made a much, much bigger crater and killed a hell of a lot more people, that much is for certain. But what it was, exactly, is still a mystery.
Just out of sheer perversity, my money is on the meteor theory.
That means at some point a very large percentage of the world's population accepted it.
First of all, the original point was the 200 years ago "blacks were considered non-human." My intent was to point out that this was, by far, a minority opinion, and I think you would agree with that. I hope.
But to go beyond that point, let's be a little more clear about the crux of the debate. When you say "a very large percentage," are you asserting a majority, or what? For that matter, do we even have population figures for 1,800 years ago, even estimates? Let's say every single Chinese person and every single Roman person thought slavery was a dandy idea. (Clearly a false assumption, but let's just run with it for hijinx.) What does that total up to? Half of the world? Something less?
I would say that the best way out of this is for us to agree that slavery as an acceptable practice has been found in many cultures throughout history, but that this doesn't necessarily means that a given person chosen out of all of humanity and subjected to a survey would have necessarily expressed the opinion that slavery was just fine, or that slaves were "non-human."
Fair enough?
But "The Sims" exists, and for all its flaws it's damn impressive!
True, but "The Sims" is a simulation. There's no self-awareness there. In that way, it's only slightly more sophisticated than "Eliza."
But my point here is embarassingly cliche: the difference between the illusion of intelligence and actual intelligence is hard to define, but real. I won't try to pretend that there's any real insight here; what I'm saying was old hat when Turing was a boy.
A very loose-- okay, absurdly loose, valid only in the metaphorical sense-- interpretation of Godel's Theorem would imply that this may be impossible.
A very good movie about what happens with an AI.
You appear to have a definition of "very good" that is altogether new to me.
Remember, a mere 200 years ago (a blink in human history), blacks were considered non-human, and therefore not eligible for pay or benefits.
In all fairness, that opinion was only held by an almost insignificantly tiny fraction of humanity.
Your point is well taken: opinions can change over time in ways that, in retrospect, seem unbelievable. But I hope my point is well taken, too: the notion that slavery was acceptable was never universal, or even particularly common. At any given point in history, the fraction of humanity who held slaves or who approved of holding slaves was very small.
Is Twirlip of the Mists Ron Rivest?
;-)
No, but thanks for asking.
The name "Twirlip of the Mists" comes from a book. I guess I'm not the only one who thought of using it as a pseudonym.
You may now begin the mod-bombing.
Consider this: the people who are planning and executing this war are not idiots. They know all about the Battle of Berlin, too.
I heard it described not too long ago this way. (I'm paraphrasing a Pentagon official.)At the time, I thought that was a neat idea, but I didn't know how it would play out in real life. Turns out that's exactly what our forces are doing. Did you watch the skirmish in Umm Qasr a few nights ago? It was broadcast live by the BBC for something like three or four hours, and picked up by virtually every western news network and rebroadcast in real time. Our troops came under fire, so they retreated to a safe position and dug in. They gave the enemy an opportunity to surrender, which they refused. The troops then hit their building with a shoulder-launched missile. They gave the survivors another opportunity to surrender, which they again refused. So they called in the tanks, and hit their building with a 120mm shell. Problem solved, with no Allied casualties.
We would rather take Baghdad without any casualties and without destroying any buildings. But if forced to make a choice, we will destroy a building rather than putting our soldiers at risk.
What do you give in exchange?
The same thing they gave in exchange for the stuff they bought to build all those ballistic missiles. The same thing they gave in exchange for those Russian GPS jammers and night-vision goggles and so on. The same thing they gave in exchange for those aluminum rods that everybody and his sister agrees are only practical for use in uranium processing centrifuges. The same thing they gave in exchange for literally tens of thousands of gallons of rocket fuel. The same thing they gave in exchange for literally tens of thousands of doses of atropine, an antidote for nerve gas. All of these things were bought, in massive quantities (except for the GPS jammers; they bought six of those) since the 1991 war. With money they should have used to buy food and medicine.
Recent history has told us that economic embargo only affects to the people, that won't blame their gov, but to whom imposes the embargo.
Hey, if you want to argue that the sanctions program was a dumb idea, I'm right there with you. But when you argue that sanctions killed innocent people, I step right up and call bullshit.
Does your government feed your children? Mine don't.
Indirectly it does. Your stores have food in them in part because the government pays for it to be there. In Iraq, the government is solely responsible for putting food in stores; that's how things are under totalitarian socialism.
And the US has a lot to blame in this 650.000 children that died.
Absolutely, I agree. The past twelve years of nightmarish horror are the responsibility of the whole world. If we had marched to Baghdad in 1991 and overthrown the Baath party then and there, none of this would have happened.
Of course, if Saddam Hussein had stepped down and allowed a democratic government to take his place, none of this would have happened, either.
Oh, for crying out loud. I don't want to take the time to school you on this, so I'm just going to cherry-pick a few key points. You have the responsibility, as a thinking adult, to read the act for yourself and draw your own conclusions. If you don't want to read the act itself, you have the responsibility to read and compare the interpretations of many groups, not just left-wing lobbyists who have a clear agenda to push.
The first thing the EFF got wrong was their interpretation of the "expanded surveillance" stipulations. Yes, USA PATRIOT defines some new surveillance procedures. But these new procedures cannot be employed without getting a warrant from a federal judge, and that's no trivial task. The EFF misses this completely:
The government may now spy on web surfing of innocent Americans, including terms entered into search engines, by merely telling a judge anywhere in the U.S. that the spying could lead to information that is "relevant" to an ongoing criminal investigation.
This is incorrect. You can't get an electronic wiretap warrant by merely telling a judge anywhere in the US that such a warrant is needed. You have to convince a judge in the appropriate district that the warrant is needed. This is no different under USA PATRIOT than it was before.
The EFF also says, pertaining to roving taps:
The government need not make any showing to a court that the particular information or communication to be acquired is relevant to a criminal investigation.
That's simply untrue. The standard for relevance and appropriateness has not been modified. It's just as hard to get a warrant after USA PATRIOT than it was before; in fact, because the powers of the FBI have been expanded in some ways, it's even harder, because the judge must weigh the invasiveness of the surveillance against the benefits to be gained from it.
The EFF says First it allows ISPs to voluntarily hand over all "non-content" information to law enforcement with no need for any court order or subpoena. sec. 212.
Section 212 of the USA PATRIOT act is titled "Emergency disclosure of electronic communications to protect life and limb." To protect life and limb. The section amends title 18 of the US Code, which previously prohibited an ISP from revealing any information about its users, to add an exception: an ISP may voluntarily reveal information to the FBI if the provider reasonably believes that an emergency involving immediate danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requires disclosure of the information without delay. In other words, if an ISP thinks they have information pertaining to "immediate danger of death or serious physical injury," they can call the FBI. This is something every individual has the right, in fact the obligation under law, to do whenever the need arises. Extending the privilege to ISP's is not the bugaboo that the EFF seems to think it is.
The EFF goes on: They are 1) 802 definition of "domestic terrorism" (amending 18 USC 2331), which raises concerns about legitimate protest activity resulting in conviction on terrorism charges, especially if violence erupts.
The definition of "domestic terrorism" in the statute as amended by USA PATRIOT is: "the term 'domestic terrorism' means activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States." In other words, domestic terrorism is any serious crime-- acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of criminal law-- that is intended to scare people, influence the government by scaring people, or
Your math is impeccable. Your reasoning is a complete non-starter.
Look at the facts. The UN- and US-imposed sanctions have never affected imports of food or medicine. Iraq has always been able to import exactly as much food and medicine as it needs. They've always had plenty of revenue to do so, too, even right at the height of the sanctions program. In fact, the UN has on several occasions all but begged Iraq to import more food and medicine.
So is the rate of infant mortality in Iraq really related to the sanctions, which haven't had any affect on Iraq's ability to take care of children? Or is it more likely that the rate of infant mortality has been affected by the decision of the Iraqi regime to spend their treasury on the military instead of on food or medicine imports? Or possibly by the decision of the Iraqi regime to systematically deny medical assistance to the Kurds and the Shiites, as part of the repression of the uprisings that followed the 1991 war?
The rates of birth and death simply don't tell the whole story.
The US citizens need to wake up, and thankfully a lot have already done so.. like Michael Moore.
I was all set to reply to you, correcting your obvious errors and challenging your insinuations, until I got to this line. At this point, it was clear that your post was merely an extremely subtle joke.
Very droll. I salute you.
Ever heard of satellite phones ?
Yes. Have you ever considered the cost of outfitting 100,000 aid workers, engineers, construction workers, and interim government officials with them? Believe it or not, it's actually cheaper and easier to built cell phone towers.
You need to survey it, build towers etc. - its a BIG country !
It's not that big a country. It's comparable in area to California, but about half of that is uninhabited desert, so it's more like Idaho. And most of the population is centered in about five large cities. We will be able to cover those cities in cell service, thereby taking care of most of the need, in just a few months.
The insfrastructure is buggered even before the war - power, landline system etc.
No, actually Iraq has a very solid power and telecommunications infrastructure. The war has thus far left most of that infrastructure intact, destroying only some buried cable junctions.
Who the hells going to be able to buy them ?
This system isn't intended to be used by the people, although of course they'll have access to it. It's intended to be used by the foreign aid workers and others who spend up to two years rebuilding Iraq.
I'm not a bleeding-heart liberal going on about 'feed the people first instead of giving them internet access' but it must be bloody obvious in this case.
It's not a matter of "this first then that." It's a matter of doing this along with that so we can eventually do that more effectively.
Will we find a way to create an Iraqi government that is acceptable to the Iraqis AND to the United States? Will it last?
Yup.
What's that? Don't believe me? I don't know why not. My hypothesis is just as supported by the facts as yours.
Will we find a way to quell the anti-american hatred that our actions have incited?
The world has always been replete with groups who hate America. This has never bothered us in the past, and it doesn't really bother us now. Changes in the 20th century have allowed those who hate us to strike out at us more directly and more damagingly, but we can live with that.
Will we avoid suffering severe economic hardships made worse by this conflict? Will we find that we've irreperably damaged our relationships with other nations of the world?
Will you ever stop spewing unsupported, unsupportable FUD?
Pretty damn weak, dude. If you want to pull a conspiracy theory out of your rear end, you'd be better off pursuing the Cheney-Halliburton connection. That one's nonsense, too, but at least it's slightly less absurd nonsense.
But I trust the Electonic Frontier Foundation's analysis of it.
;-)
;-)
You shouldn't. Their analysis got several points seriously wrong. Don't depend on their interpretation; educate yourself more thoroughly before forming an opinion.
Nothing in UN resolution 1441 specifies that a massive attack and invasion is authorized.
Resolution 678 authorized "all necessary means" to enforce relevant UN resolutions (which includes the subsequent ones such as 1441) and restore peace and security to the area. This war is many things, but a violation of international law is not one of them. Why? Because the people who make these decisions are not idiots. They know how to read and interpret the various applicable treaties and resolutions, too.
Why don't you read the UN charter?
Oh, believe me. I have.
When the world said NO to war, Bush should have listened.
The world did not say no to war. The world was never asked, because neither the endorsement nor the permission of the world was required.
Now he's going to take the fall like Blair.
Seeing as how the latest polls show Mr. Blair's support skyrocketing since last week, I certainly hope President Bush takes the fall in just that same way.
And if you weren't suckled onto the teet of mainstream news outlets, you'd realize the world is overwhelmingly against this war. Even Britain's people.
Fortunately the world is not a democracy.
I'm not joking when I say they're thinking about trying Blair like a war criminal. Here's the link:
I hope you'll understand if I don't rely on an op-ed in the Guardian for insightful political commentary. That's right up there with going to RJR for hard science on the health consequences of smoking.