Landmines are indiscriminate. They blow the legs of anybody who steps on them (usually children and farmers). In fact, landmines are just as indiscriminate as poison gas.
abandon the poor to die? citation please. and no im not looking for "cutting food stamps" or "want to push grandma over a cliff" bullshit that is normally used.
Because the basic assumptions of Libertarianism are flawed. Libertarianism as expressed by Rand, and economic theories based on or expounded by Libertarianism are flawed from the beginning because it assumes people will always act rationally and without fraud.
According to Atlas Shrugged, all you have to do is give people a place to work free of government regulation, and selfish free-market innovators will invent perpetual motion machines that draw electric power from static electricity in the air.
In addition to everything the Democrats do, the Republicans want to destroy the government, take away your right to abortion, and abandon the poor to die.
This is not an hypothetical case. In my last job we were in direct competition with IBM and were exchanging crucial pricing information through email. There has been precedents of ECHELON being used to gain economic intelligence (google "echelon airbus boeing" to learn about that)
Oh please. Every government engages in industrial espionage. The French are so well known for it that CEOs for pharmaceuticals that check-in to local hotels are told not to use the fax machine or internet there, and to keep their laptops in their room, and to bring their own locks to secure it and not use the hotel safe or in-room safe as the cleaning crew often isn't the usual maid service. I mean, this is SOP.
So because everybody does it, it should be legal and I should accept it when my own country does it to me, without even a national security interest?
I disagree with your assertion that since you're not a terrorist, the NSA has no interest in you and/or what you do. Law enforcement tools are always used to their fullest extent.
National security agencies will use their tools not only against criminals, but against their political enemies who are engaging in Constitutionally-protected activities. For example, J. Edgar Hoover used to tap Martin Luther King's telephones, and then spread personal information about King's sex life to try to harm the integration movement.
Or a recent example. Eliot Spitzer was the Democratic governor of New York, and he was an effective governor who was aggressive about shaking things up. Banks have to report every transaction by every customer of $10,000 or over to federal authorities, and every transaction under $10,000 that looks "suspicious." So the feds get this huge flow of reports. One of the reports was on Spitzer. They investigated and found out as the result of this fishing expedition that he had used an escort service, which was probably legal and almost never prosecuted. Nonetheless, the Republican Attorney General decided to prosecute Spitzer for this, and leaked his name to the press. The Republican AG offered Spitzer a "deal" -- if the effective Democratic governor resigned, the Republican AG wouldn't prosecute him. Spitzer resigned, and was replaced by David Patterson, who didn't want the job and nobody, including Patterson, thought was qualified.
So there you have a partisan use of confidential information that a federal agency got through its financial monitoring process, that a Republican AG used to get rid of an effective Democratic governor.
The more electronic monitoring we have, the more it will be used improperly by politicians to damage their enemies.
"went to college, got drunk and smoked pot...and made connections. GWB
and BHO
got farther with his connections than you or I did with our productive skills."
Just trying to be non-partisan.
Paul Krugman says that you should beware of false balance. Every president is a child of privilege. I'm no Obama fan. I think Obama is an opportunist who deceived a lot of his voters and implemented some terrible policies.
But Obama did graduate Harvard Law School, where he edited the law review, and he taught at U. Chicago Law School. At Harvard Law School, everybody is a child of privilege, but he excelled even among the children of privilege.
GWB by all accounts was a self-admitted drunk at Yale and Harvard. He got through Yale because his father was a Senator and a rich alumnus. Nobody's going to fail a kid like that. He went through Harvard for the same reason. GWB got an MBA, not a law degree, from Harvard. There's a reason for that. You can bullshit your way through an MBA, but even a Senator's son can't bullshit his way through a law degree, and a bar exam, much less a professorship.
GWB was really stupid and ignorant. After all his talk about literacy, reporters asked him what his favorite book was. He said, the Bible. Somebody asked him what his favorite passage was, and he said he'd have to go upstairs and get it. You could get better answers in a high school English class.
Interesting view. I started college at 16. If I could do it again, I would rather have gone to a better high school and taken more time.
When I work on a project, I usually allocate about 10% of the time to planning, most of it at the beginning. First, you start with an overview. Then you go into specifics.
The worst thing you can do is work as hard as you can in the wrong direction.
Sometimes you can be rowing so hard you don't have time to look at your compass.
But I'm dismayed at the results of the 2000 presidential election. Nader got 3% of the vote. He cost the Democratic Party the election.
There were 3 million voters who would have voted Democrat, and won the election for them, except that the Democratic Party was treating the left wing of their own party with contempt.
So you'd think the Democratic Party would have learned from that -- if you tell the progressive Democrats to fuck off, they won't vote for you.
But no. Once Obama got in (with all that help from the left) he immediately rejected the strongest, most rational progressive policy, single payer health care. When the progressives tried to drum up support for single payer, using the same kind of TV commercials that the right wing was using so successfully, Rahm Emanuel called them "fucking retarded" to their faces. And then the next day, when it got out, he apologized to the retarded organizations.
That sends a message to me: The Democratic Party would rather lose the presidential election than even listen politely to the left. They'd rather serve their corporate contributors than make even the slightest accommodation to the people who vote for them.
So the strategy of using a third party as a kind of gate to amplify the Democratic party towards the left doesn't seem to be working.
So what's the goal of a third party? To ultimately win more votes than the Republicans or Democrats? One, two, many Vermonts? That doesn't seem likely any time soon. I don't see any popular uprising.
In Europe, when the government tries to raise college tuition, students riot in the streets. Here, students are being turned into indentured servants by privatized loans, a legitimate outrageous injustice, and students don't do anything.
If you can figure out how to get democracy back in America, let me know. I don't think I'll be alive to see it.
If you won't go to jail for your beliefs, then they might not be that important to you.
Most of the major social movements, and you are hoping for a social movement, required confronting the state, and risking jail time. Civil rights in US easiest example, but Indian independence and anti-apartheid movement are others.
I know people who went to jail for their beliefs.
I don't suppose you have, have you?
I'm ready to go to jail for my beliefs -- and I've confronted the authorities many times -- but I don't want to give up my life by doing something that is futile and won't work.
I know people who went down South to work in the Civil Rights movement in the U.S., and one of them got killed. I wish I had gone with them. I didn't realize then how important it would be.
The Communists taught them two important ideas: (1) You have to change the system. Incremental change will only make things worse. (2) The way to get something is to organize the people. And they taught people, like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, how to organize.
A lot of Communists left the party, and unfortunately went into the conservative movement, where they used the same techniques. When the Tea Party went to meet-your-Congressman meetings and shouted everybody else down, that was exactly what the Communists used to do.
Unfortunately, we don't have anything like the Communist Party around any more to show people how to organize. Occupy Wall Street was a good try, but we don't have that culture any more.
Now we just had a whole generation fall in love with Obama, who, with Rahm Emanuel, was just a front for the same corporate interests as the Republicans, and who got his campaign contributions from the same corporate interests as the Republicans.
In medicine, the similar problem is that doctors who are getting payments from drug companies are on the guidelines committees that recommend drugs. These agencies are usually in the government or medical professional societies.
For example, there was a committee to establish guidelines for treatments to stop smoking. Several of the members of that committee were getting grants, speakers' fees, etc. from the companies that make stop-smoking drugs. There was a lot of debate about how effective the stop-smoking drugs were, whether they were effective at all, and what their adverse effects were. The committee recommended the drugs.
Lots of drugs like that.
If it were a unanimous vote, I wouldn't be concerned, but for some of these votes, if you took everybody off the committee who was on the payroll of the drug company, they wouldn't have approved the drug for that application. The excuse is that most of the people with expertise are getting grants from the drug companies, and if you eliminated them, you wouldn't have enough experts to make the best judgments. I don't believe it.
(As for the vaccine and public health programs being used as cover by intelligence agencies, I haven't heard of that being done recently, with the one prominent exception of the Pakistani doctor who set up a fake vaccination program to help find Osama bin Laden. The Pakistanis prosecuted him and he 's now serving I think 30 years in jail, which he deserves. It doesn't happen too often -- but it only takes one to destroy the credibility of medical workers around the world.)
Nice methods only work on nice people, and lest we forget the Stalinists and Maoists of the Cold War were a hardcore bunch. The way to stop them was to find and kill them. Murdering Communists outright was a perfectly reasonable way to stop them. Stalinism/Maoism clearly merits extermination where practical and mercy merely allows them to survive and regroup. They can't regroup if they are dead.
Change the names, and that's what the Stalinists said. Not much difference between you and the Stalinists, except for the color of your T-shirt.
If you want to punish everybody who has committed torture, fine. Henry Kissinger is on the list.
If you want to be selective, I don't buy that. You're not against torture. You're just using it as an excuse to justify your political goals that have nothing to do with torture.
The Mujahadeen which we supported were the precursor to the Taliban. That article from the Telegram makes it clear. The "terrorist" describes fighting against the Soviets.
The military document you link to refers to the enemy in quotes by one side or the other. The "enemy" is how one side sees the other. A historian like Herodotus tells the story of each side, without taking sides.
There are some chicken hawks like Richard Perle who want this country to attack supposed enemies in the middle east. I don't buy it. They're Richard Perle's enemies, they're not my enemies.
As to the difference between drone attacks and crucifixion, it's very hard for a drone attack to deliberately kill someone in two to three days of agony, while that's the point of crucifixion.
If you burn somebody on 50% of his body, with napalm or conventional weapons, he's going to die in two or three days of agony as painful as anything else he could suffer.
If I gave you a long list of U.S.-supported torturers who were just as bad, would that change your opinion? Start with Pinochet.
Well, let's take a look at your facts. According to this story, the Taliban, if that's what this man is referring to, were supported by the U.S. to fight the Soviets. So at that time, they weren't our enemies. They did the same brutal murders (of Najibulla, for example) and the U.S. smiled and patted their heads.
Now they switched alliances and they're "our" enemies.
I don't think dividing the world into "good guys" and "bad guys," depending on whether they're committing brutal murders on our behalf or against it, is useful.
For that reason, I don't think the term "enemies" is useful either. Historians don't use that word.
All during the cold war, when somebody would criticize violations of human rights in America, our leaders would point to the USSR and tell us that in Russia it was even worse.
Most of our cold-war propaganda was based on making Russia's lack of freedom a caricature of our own lack of freedom.
For example, our propagandists said that in Russia, people weren't free to travel. (Not true. I've met people who grew up in the Soviet Block and traveled all over the Soviet Block. East Germany was a popular vacation spot.)
But there was a bitch in the passport office who took it upon herself to decide who was a good American who had a right to travel and who was a bad American and couldn't get a passport.
One of the people who couldn't get a passport was Linus Pauling. He was a great scientist, but he came to the conclusion that the world couldn't survive a nuclear war and we had to disarm. As a result, the passport office wouldn't let him travel -- when it was important for him to get to scientific meetings in England and Europe to exchange ideas with other scientists. Some people think he Pauling would have discovered the double helix before Crick and Watson if he could have travelled.
But that's what happens when you disagree with the government in America.
I don't understand how we could legally arrest Bout. He wasn't a citizen of the U.S., he was never in the U.S., and he never committed a crime on U.S. soil.
He was a citizen of a country that often supported the side opposite of ours in conflicts, but that's not a crime.
Kissinger gave material support to regimes that were committing war crimes. If Russia wants to prosecute Kissinger, would we be legally required to turn him over? If Kissinger's airplane was forced to stop in Russia, could the Russians arrest him?
Maybe you don't believe in following international law. Maybe you believe in realpolitik and might makes right. OK, but you no longer have grounds for moral outrage when a militant group sets off a truck full of dynamite outside your embassy. They're just playing by the same rules you are.
Bout was an arms dealer who sold to both sides, as arms dealers, including Americans, often do.
I don't like arms dealers, but they're in a legal and sometimes necessary business.
They arrested somebody who couldn't break American law because he was never in America and wasn't a citizen.
I don't like Dick Cheney or Eric Prince either, and they've broken the law just as much as Bout did.
The U.S. never extradited Luis Posada, who bombed a Cuban civilian airliner and killed everybody on board, including a soccer team, despite many requests, and the U.S. never prosecuted Posada itself.
Let's follow the law and put them all in jail. Or ignore the law and don't put anybody in jail. But don't just enforce (dubious extraterritorial) laws against a Russian and not against Americans.
I was summarizing somebody who was quoted in the NYT story. I myself tend to agree with you.
I think the story shows that education is necessary but not sufficient to eliminate poverty. Look at the countries that have eliminated poverty. Free education was part of it. They also had a social safety net, and other things that we should also have.
Interesting. Hezbollah also used a cell phone database to track down informers. They searched for anomalies, such as cell phones that were only used for a short period of time or from specific locations. Apparently spies used dedicated cell phones to call their handlers.
Backed by Iran, Hezbollah has built a professional counterintelligence apparatus that Nasrallah - whom the U.S. government designated an international terrorist a decade ago - proudly describes as the "spy combat unit." U.S. intelligence officials believe the unit, which is considered formidable and ruthless, went operational around 2004.
Using the latest commercial software, Nasrallah's spy-hunters unit began methodically searching for traitors in Hezbollah's midst. To find them, U.S. officials said, Hezbollah examined cellphone data looking for anomalies. The analysis identified cellphones that, for instance, were used rarely or always from specific locations and only for a short period of time. Then it came down to old-fashioned, shoe-leather detective work: Who in that area had information that might be worth selling to the enemy?
The effort took years but eventually Hezbollah, and later the Lebanese government, began making arrests. By one estimate, 100 Israeli assets were apprehended as the news made headlines across the region in 2009. Some of those suspected Israeli spies worked for telecommunications companies and served in the military.
Slashdot Mirror
If napalm burns half the skin on your body, you'll die one of the most agonizing deaths known to medicine over the next week.
(A lot of explosives produce burns and have the same results.)
Landmines are indiscriminate. They blow the legs of anybody who steps on them (usually children and farmers). In fact, landmines are just as indiscriminate as poison gas.
Is this the first time they crossed this line?
No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._United_States
IIRC, the USPS did this as long ago as the 80s...
Jacobson v. United States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._United_States
The bad news is that it was a 5-4 decision.
The current Supreme Court probably wouldn't vote that way again today.
It's almost impossible to win an entrapment defense today.
abandon the poor to die? citation please. and no im not looking for "cutting food stamps" or "want to push grandma over a cliff" bullshit that is normally used.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118781024289705455.html
Because the basic assumptions of Libertarianism are flawed. Libertarianism as expressed by Rand, and economic theories based on or expounded by Libertarianism are flawed from the beginning because it assumes people will always act rationally and without fraud.
According to Atlas Shrugged, all you have to do is give people a place to work free of government regulation, and selfish free-market innovators will invent perpetual motion machines that draw electric power from static electricity in the air.
False equivalence. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/opinion/krugman-the-centrist-cop-out.html
The Republicans are worse.
In addition to everything the Democrats do, the Republicans want to destroy the government, take away your right to abortion, and abandon the poor to die.
This is not an hypothetical case. In my last job we were in direct competition with IBM and were exchanging crucial pricing information through email. There has been precedents of ECHELON being used to gain economic intelligence (google "echelon airbus boeing" to learn about that)
Oh please. Every government engages in industrial espionage. The French are so well known for it that CEOs for pharmaceuticals that check-in to local hotels are told not to use the fax machine or internet there, and to keep their laptops in their room, and to bring their own locks to secure it and not use the hotel safe or in-room safe as the cleaning crew often isn't the usual maid service. I mean, this is SOP.
So because everybody does it, it should be legal and I should accept it when my own country does it to me, without even a national security interest?
I disagree with your assertion that since you're not a terrorist, the NSA has no interest in you and/or what you do. Law enforcement tools are always used to their fullest extent.
National security agencies will use their tools not only against criminals, but against their political enemies who are engaging in Constitutionally-protected activities. For example, J. Edgar Hoover used to tap Martin Luther King's telephones, and then spread personal information about King's sex life to try to harm the integration movement.
Or a recent example. Eliot Spitzer was the Democratic governor of New York, and he was an effective governor who was aggressive about shaking things up. Banks have to report every transaction by every customer of $10,000 or over to federal authorities, and every transaction under $10,000 that looks "suspicious." So the feds get this huge flow of reports. One of the reports was on Spitzer. They investigated and found out as the result of this fishing expedition that he had used an escort service, which was probably legal and almost never prosecuted. Nonetheless, the Republican Attorney General decided to prosecute Spitzer for this, and leaked his name to the press. The Republican AG offered Spitzer a "deal" -- if the effective Democratic governor resigned, the Republican AG wouldn't prosecute him. Spitzer resigned, and was replaced by David Patterson, who didn't want the job and nobody, including Patterson, thought was qualified.
So there you have a partisan use of confidential information that a federal agency got through its financial monitoring process, that a Republican AG used to get rid of an effective Democratic governor.
The more electronic monitoring we have, the more it will be used improperly by politicians to damage their enemies.
"George W. Bush...
and Barack H. Obama
"went to college, got drunk and smoked pot...and made connections. GWB
and BHO
got farther with his connections than you or I did with our productive skills."
Just trying to be non-partisan.
Paul Krugman says that you should beware of false balance. Every president is a child of privilege. I'm no Obama fan. I think Obama is an opportunist who deceived a lot of his voters and implemented some terrible policies.
But Obama did graduate Harvard Law School, where he edited the law review, and he taught at U. Chicago Law School. At Harvard Law School, everybody is a child of privilege, but he excelled even among the children of privilege.
GWB by all accounts was a self-admitted drunk at Yale and Harvard. He got through Yale because his father was a Senator and a rich alumnus. Nobody's going to fail a kid like that. He went through Harvard for the same reason. GWB got an MBA, not a law degree, from Harvard. There's a reason for that. You can bullshit your way through an MBA, but even a Senator's son can't bullshit his way through a law degree, and a bar exam, much less a professorship.
GWB was really stupid and ignorant. After all his talk about literacy, reporters asked him what his favorite book was. He said, the Bible. Somebody asked him what his favorite passage was, and he said he'd have to go upstairs and get it. You could get better answers in a high school English class.
Look at his interview with Carole Coleman of Irish TV. http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/06/20040625-2.html He can't answer even the most reasonable, obvious challenging question.
Interesting view. I started college at 16. If I could do it again, I would rather have gone to a better high school and taken more time.
When I work on a project, I usually allocate about 10% of the time to planning, most of it at the beginning. First, you start with an overview. Then you go into specifics.
The worst thing you can do is work as hard as you can in the wrong direction.
Sometimes you can be rowing so hard you don't have time to look at your compass.
I vote for the third party in every election.
But I'm dismayed at the results of the 2000 presidential election. Nader got 3% of the vote. He cost the Democratic Party the election.
There were 3 million voters who would have voted Democrat, and won the election for them, except that the Democratic Party was treating the left wing of their own party with contempt.
So you'd think the Democratic Party would have learned from that -- if you tell the progressive Democrats to fuck off, they won't vote for you.
But no. Once Obama got in (with all that help from the left) he immediately rejected the strongest, most rational progressive policy, single payer health care. When the progressives tried to drum up support for single payer, using the same kind of TV commercials that the right wing was using so successfully, Rahm Emanuel called them "fucking retarded" to their faces. And then the next day, when it got out, he apologized to the retarded organizations.
That sends a message to me: The Democratic Party would rather lose the presidential election than even listen politely to the left. They'd rather serve their corporate contributors than make even the slightest accommodation to the people who vote for them.
So the strategy of using a third party as a kind of gate to amplify the Democratic party towards the left doesn't seem to be working.
So what's the goal of a third party? To ultimately win more votes than the Republicans or Democrats? One, two, many Vermonts? That doesn't seem likely any time soon. I don't see any popular uprising.
In Europe, when the government tries to raise college tuition, students riot in the streets. Here, students are being turned into indentured servants by privatized loans, a legitimate outrageous injustice, and students don't do anything.
If you can figure out how to get democracy back in America, let me know. I don't think I'll be alive to see it.
If you won't go to jail for your beliefs, then they might not be that important to you.
Most of the major social movements, and you are hoping for a social movement, required confronting the state, and risking jail time. Civil rights in US easiest example, but Indian independence and anti-apartheid movement are others.
I know people who went to jail for their beliefs.
I don't suppose you have, have you?
I'm ready to go to jail for my beliefs -- and I've confronted the authorities many times -- but I don't want to give up my life by doing something that is futile and won't work.
I know people who went down South to work in the Civil Rights movement in the U.S., and one of them got killed. I wish I had gone with them. I didn't realize then how important it would be.
One of the striking things I noticed was that many of them were Communists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlander_Folk_School http://vault.fbi.gov/Highlander%20Folk%20School
The Communists taught them two important ideas: (1) You have to change the system. Incremental change will only make things worse. (2) The way to get something is to organize the people. And they taught people, like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, how to organize.
A lot of Communists left the party, and unfortunately went into the conservative movement, where they used the same techniques. When the Tea Party went to meet-your-Congressman meetings and shouted everybody else down, that was exactly what the Communists used to do.
Unfortunately, we don't have anything like the Communist Party around any more to show people how to organize. Occupy Wall Street was a good try, but we don't have that culture any more.
Now we just had a whole generation fall in love with Obama, who, with Rahm Emanuel, was just a front for the same corporate interests as the Republicans, and who got his campaign contributions from the same corporate interests as the Republicans.
In medicine, the similar problem is that doctors who are getting payments from drug companies are on the guidelines committees that recommend drugs. These agencies are usually in the government or medical professional societies.
For example, there was a committee to establish guidelines for treatments to stop smoking. Several of the members of that committee were getting grants, speakers' fees, etc. from the companies that make stop-smoking drugs. There was a lot of debate about how effective the stop-smoking drugs were, whether they were effective at all, and what their adverse effects were. The committee recommended the drugs.
Lots of drugs like that.
If it were a unanimous vote, I wouldn't be concerned, but for some of these votes, if you took everybody off the committee who was on the payroll of the drug company, they wouldn't have approved the drug for that application. The excuse is that most of the people with expertise are getting grants from the drug companies, and if you eliminated them, you wouldn't have enough experts to make the best judgments. I don't believe it.
(As for the vaccine and public health programs being used as cover by intelligence agencies, I haven't heard of that being done recently, with the one prominent exception of the Pakistani doctor who set up a fake vaccination program to help find Osama bin Laden. The Pakistanis prosecuted him and he 's now serving I think 30 years in jail, which he deserves. It doesn't happen too often -- but it only takes one to destroy the credibility of medical workers around the world.)
Nice methods only work on nice people, and lest we forget the Stalinists and Maoists of the Cold War were a hardcore bunch. The way to stop them was to find and kill them. Murdering Communists outright was a perfectly reasonable way to stop them. Stalinism/Maoism clearly merits extermination where practical and mercy merely allows them to survive and regroup. They can't regroup if they are dead.
Change the names, and that's what the Stalinists said. Not much difference between you and the Stalinists, except for the color of your T-shirt.
Unfortunately, everybody does it.
If you want to punish everybody who has committed torture, fine. Henry Kissinger is on the list.
If you want to be selective, I don't buy that. You're not against torture. You're just using it as an excuse to justify your political goals that have nothing to do with torture.
The Mujahadeen which we supported were the precursor to the Taliban. That article from the Telegram makes it clear. The "terrorist" describes fighting against the Soviets.
The military document you link to refers to the enemy in quotes by one side or the other. The "enemy" is how one side sees the other. A historian like Herodotus tells the story of each side, without taking sides.
There are some chicken hawks like Richard Perle who want this country to attack supposed enemies in the middle east. I don't buy it. They're Richard Perle's enemies, they're not my enemies.
As to the difference between drone attacks and crucifixion, it's very hard for a drone attack to deliberately kill someone in two to three days of agony, while that's the point of crucifixion.
If you burn somebody on 50% of his body, with napalm or conventional weapons, he's going to die in two or three days of agony as painful as anything else he could suffer.
If I gave you a long list of U.S.-supported torturers who were just as bad, would that change your opinion? Start with Pinochet.
I was one of the Taliban's torturers: I crucified people
How do you think they should be referred to?
Well, let's take a look at your facts. According to this story, the Taliban, if that's what this man is referring to, were supported by the U.S. to fight the Soviets. So at that time, they weren't our enemies. They did the same brutal murders (of Najibulla, for example) and the U.S. smiled and patted their heads.
Now they switched alliances and they're "our" enemies.
I don't think dividing the world into "good guys" and "bad guys," depending on whether they're committing brutal murders on our behalf or against it, is useful.
For that reason, I don't think the term "enemies" is useful either. Historians don't use that word.
All during the cold war, when somebody would criticize violations of human rights in America, our leaders would point to the USSR and tell us that in Russia it was even worse.
Most of our cold-war propaganda was based on making Russia's lack of freedom a caricature of our own lack of freedom.
For example, our propagandists said that in Russia, people weren't free to travel. (Not true. I've met people who grew up in the Soviet Block and traveled all over the Soviet Block. East Germany was a popular vacation spot.)
But there was a bitch in the passport office who took it upon herself to decide who was a good American who had a right to travel and who was a bad American and couldn't get a passport.
One of the people who couldn't get a passport was Linus Pauling. He was a great scientist, but he came to the conclusion that the world couldn't survive a nuclear war and we had to disarm. As a result, the passport office wouldn't let him travel -- when it was important for him to get to scientific meetings in England and Europe to exchange ideas with other scientists. Some people think he Pauling would have discovered the double helix before Crick and Watson if he could have travelled.
But that's what happens when you disagree with the government in America.
I don't understand how we could legally arrest Bout. He wasn't a citizen of the U.S., he was never in the U.S., and he never committed a crime on U.S. soil.
He was a citizen of a country that often supported the side opposite of ours in conflicts, but that's not a crime.
Kissinger gave material support to regimes that were committing war crimes. If Russia wants to prosecute Kissinger, would we be legally required to turn him over? If Kissinger's airplane was forced to stop in Russia, could the Russians arrest him?
Maybe you don't believe in following international law. Maybe you believe in realpolitik and might makes right. OK, but you no longer have grounds for moral outrage when a militant group sets off a truck full of dynamite outside your embassy. They're just playing by the same rules you are.
A totalitarian state is one in which people used to say, "It can't happen here."
The article cited Victor Bout. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Bout
Bout was an arms dealer who sold to both sides, as arms dealers, including Americans, often do.
I don't like arms dealers, but they're in a legal and sometimes necessary business.
They arrested somebody who couldn't break American law because he was never in America and wasn't a citizen.
I don't like Dick Cheney or Eric Prince either, and they've broken the law just as much as Bout did.
The U.S. never extradited Luis Posada, who bombed a Cuban civilian airliner and killed everybody on board, including a soccer team, despite many requests, and the U.S. never prosecuted Posada itself.
Let's follow the law and put them all in jail. Or ignore the law and don't put anybody in jail. But don't just enforce (dubious extraterritorial) laws against a Russian and not against Americans.
I was summarizing somebody who was quoted in the NYT story. I myself tend to agree with you.
I think the story shows that education is necessary but not sufficient to eliminate poverty. Look at the countries that have eliminated poverty. Free education was part of it. They also had a social safety net, and other things that we should also have.
The cali cartel set up their own version of this database in Colombia and used it to sniff out any of their people who were talking to law enforcement.
Interesting. Hezbollah also used a cell phone database to track down informers. They searched for anomalies, such as cell phones that were only used for a short period of time or from specific locations. Apparently spies used dedicated cell phones to call their handlers.
http://seattletimes.com/html/politics/2016817370_apushezbollahcia.html
Hezbollah unravels CIA spy network in Lebanon
Backed by Iran, Hezbollah has built a professional counterintelligence apparatus that Nasrallah - whom the U.S. government designated an international terrorist a decade ago - proudly describes as the "spy combat unit." U.S. intelligence officials believe the unit, which is considered formidable and ruthless, went operational around 2004.
Using the latest commercial software, Nasrallah's spy-hunters unit began methodically searching for traitors in Hezbollah's midst. To find them, U.S. officials said, Hezbollah examined cellphone data looking for anomalies. The analysis identified cellphones that, for instance, were used rarely or always from specific locations and only for a short period of time. Then it came down to old-fashioned, shoe-leather detective work: Who in that area had information that might be worth selling to the enemy?
The effort took years but eventually Hezbollah, and later the Lebanese government, began making arrests. By one estimate, 100 Israeli assets were apprehended as the news made headlines across the region in 2009. Some of those suspected Israeli spies worked for telecommunications companies and served in the military.