Libertarian Leanings

Moderation

Watch how much Tylenol you take this hangover season.

Use it correctly and acetaminophen, best known by the Tylenol brand, lives up to its reputation as one of the safest painkillers. It's taken by about 100 million people a year, and liver damage occurs in only a small fraction of users.  But it's damage, often avoidable, that can kill or require a liver transplant.

The problem comes when people don't follow dosing instructions -- or unwittingly take too much, not realizing acetaminophen is in hundreds of products, from the over-the-counter remedies Theraflu and Excedrin to the prescription narcotics Vicodin and Percocet.

Disturbing trend

From Frontpage Magazine,

In Australia, Norway, Sweden and other Western nations, there is a distinct race-based crime in motion being ignored by the diversity police: Islamic men are raping Western women for ethnic reasons. We know this because the rapists have openly declared their sectarian motivations.

When a number of teenage Australian girls were subjected to hours of sexual degradation during a spate of gang rapes in Sydney that occurred between 1998 and 2002, the perpetrators of these assaults framed their rationale in ethnic terms. The young victims were informed that they were “sluts” and “Aussie pigs” while they were being hunted down and abused.

In Australia's New South Wales Supreme Court in December 2005, a visiting Pakistani rapist testified that his victims had no right to say no, because they were not wearing a headscarf.

Why, Clinton would never...

For those inclined to bask blissfully in the misconception that eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant was something the Clinton administration would never have permitted, Newsmax has something for you.

On Wednesday, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, chided reporters for suggesting that Clinton ordered the same kinds of surveillance of U.S. citizens as Bush. Leahy claimed in a press conference that Clinton acted under an "entirely different power.

"If you go back to Clinton and (President Jimmy) Carter, those are searches under a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) provision into embassies, foreign embassies, things of that nature," Leahy argued. "It's an entirely different situation."

But in at least one well-documented case, Clinton authorized domestic electronic surveillance of a U.S. citizen without a warrant. FBI agents were allowed to break into the home of 31-year CIA veteran Aldrich Ames in 1993 to install eavesdropping devices.

An FBI summary of the case described it this way: "FBI Special Agents and Investigative Specialists conducted intensive physical and electronic surveillance of Ames during a ten-month investigation. Searches of Ames's residence revealed documents and other information linking Ames to the Russian foreign intelligence service."

In defense of the Clinton administration, national security was at stake.  Ames ultimately pled guilty to espionage.  But call me cynical, I wouldn't automatically suspect national security to be the overriding motivation behind anything the Clinton administration might have been up to.  Via AJ Strata.

A NORAD Mission

From 1968 to 1972 I was on active duty with the US Air Force as a radar maintenance man.  The stuff I worked on was long range ground radar, part of the NORAD system of electronic surveillance that included the DEW Line, a radar system put in place in the 50s.  The DEW in DEW Line stood for Distant Early Warning.  It was a line of radar sites strung across the top of North America intended to provide the earliest possible warning of an attack by the Soviet Union.  The shortest route for aircraft or missiles to get from the USSR to the continental US was over the North Pole.

1969 found me in St Albans, Vermont assigned to the 764th Radar Squadron at St Albans Air Force Station.  This was not anywhere near the DEW Line, but our equipment was DEW Line vintage which by that time was pretty nearly obsolete.  In an age when integrated circuits were coming into use, this old stuff was vacuum tube technology.  The Air Force had much more advanced systems already online with airborne radar, satellites, and more.  It was easy for us in St Albans to get the sense that our NORAD Mission was not all that critical.  But we did our thing and the time passed uneventfully.

Imagine how gratifying it is to learn years later that there was a critical element to our mission after all.

NORAD Observes 50th Anniversary of Tracking Santa
By Sgt. 1st Class Gail Braymen, USA
Special to American Forces Press Service

PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo., Dec. 22, 2005 – The North American Aerospace Defense Command is observing its 50th anniversary of tracking Santa Claus on his annual rounds, NORAD officials said here.

The tradition of tracking Santa began in 1955, when a local Sears, Roebuck and Co. store ran a newspaper ad urging children to make a phone call on Christmas Eve and talk to Santa Claus. As fate would have it, the phone number was misprinted and, instead of reaching Santa, youngsters found themselves talking with Air Force Col. Harry Shoup of the Continental Air Defense Command at Cheyenne Mountain.

Rather than hanging up, Shoup and his troops answered every child's call that night with a report of Santa's location. CONAD personnel kept up the practice until 1958, when NORAD was formed and took over Santa-tracking duties...

Last Christmas Eve, volunteers at Cheyenne Mountain answered nearly 55,000 phone calls and 35,000 e-mails from children around the world. During December 2004, the NORAD Tracks Santa Web site had 912 million hits from 181 countries.

My Air Force service has always been a source of pride.  This adds to it.  Via Solomon.

Merry Christmas everybody.

Scheuer on McCain

Jack Kelly of Irish Pennants points to a startling editorial column by former CIA Counterterrorism official Michael Scheuer.  It's startling to me, anyway.  I had Scheuer pegged as your typical grandstanding lefty, out to make hay on anti-Bush sentiment.  His book Imperial Hubris came out around the same time as a string of books that disputed administration claims or second guessed war on terror strategies.  Well.  Listen to this.

What to make of Mr. McCain? His behavior raises the question of whatever became of U.S. veterans who never sought to make political or economic hay from their wartime records. Former Sen. George McGovern and the actor Jimmy Stewart flew, respectively, 35 and 25 combat missions over Nazi Germany. They and tens of thousands of other World War II veterans chose not to draw attention to their own bravery and combat records. In Mr. McCain, we have a man who has been dining out on his POW experience for a quarter-century, and is now using it to grandstand on the so-called "torture" issue to advance his campaign for the presidency. This is not to question the Arizona senator's personal bravery and patriotism -- there is no question on these points -- but merely to reflect on his tawdry, self-serving behavior in comparison to men like Mr. McGovern, Mr. Stewart, and their contemporaries. The senator's "no-torture campaign" reveals him for what he is: A little man, with mediocre intelligence, a taste for bullying and an appalling temper who thinks the presidency is his birthright.

Mr. McCain's attack on "CIA torture" will have the same impact as The Post's: It will kill Americans.

Questions of legality

The Democratic leadership are so easily distracted from national security concerns when the prospect of damaging the President has them salivating.  They pretend the President poses a grave threat to civil liberties by his approval of National Security Agency monitoring al Qaeda without first getting a warrant.  Oh, Democrats don't really mind if the NSA doesn't bother to get a warrant before listening in on Qaeda suspects chatting among themselves overseas.  But should an overseas terrorist under surveillance suddenly decide to make a phone call into the U.S., Democrats would say the NSA is obliged to stop listening and start filling out the warrant applications.  The press helps, by making a dishonest argument of it.  Here's a sample from the Salem, Oregon StatesmanJournal.

Surveillance without a warrant not legal, poll majority says
December 21, 2005

We asked: Accused of acting above the law, President Bush defended a domestic phone and e-mail spying program as an effective tool in disrupting terrorists and said it was not an abuse of Americans' civil liberties. Is surveillance without a warrant legal if the president authorizes it?

You said: Comments appear here as they were submitted to the Statesman Journal. They are listed in the order in which they came with the most recent at the top.

As is typical of mainstream press, abeit local press, when facts don't match the story you'd like to write, take a poll and report that.  A fairer question would have been, "Is surveillance without a warrant to obtain foreign intelligence legal if the president authorizes it?"  But no.  The deliberate implication is that the surveillance was for Republican Dark Purposes.  As you might imagine, responses to the poll were almost entirely unfavorable to the President's position.  Here's one.

NO!! President Bush shows us once again that he believes the laws of our nation are merely suggestions if they get in the way of his agenda.
Marie , graduate school, health care, Salem

While the majority of poll responses came down hard on Bush, it's not clear the courts would do the same.  An Opinion Journal editorial makes the case that monitoring international phone calls and emails to and from al Qaeda suspects is not illegal.

The courts have been explicit on this point, most recently in In Re: Sealed Case, the 2002 opinion by the special panel of appellate judges established to hear FISA appeals. In its per curiam opinion, the court noted that in a previous FISA case (U.S. v. Truong), a federal "court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information." And further that "we take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President's constitutional power." [my emphasis]

Former Associate Attorney General John Schmidt goes further by saying the President clearly has the authority to order such activity.  Mr Schmidt, who served in the Clinton Administration Justice Department, cites the same case and some others as he weighs in with this,

In the Supreme Court's 1972 Keith decision holding that the president does not have inherent authority to order wiretapping without warrants to combat domestic threats, the court said explicitly that it was not questioning the president's authority to take such action in response to threats from abroad.

Four federal courts of appeal subsequently faced the issue squarely and held that the president has inherent authority to authorize wiretapping for foreign intelligence purposes without judicial warrant.

In the most recent judicial statement on the issue, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, composed of three federal appellate court judges, said in 2002 that "All the ... courts to have decided the issue held that the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence ... We take for granted that the president does have that authority."

This comes via John Hinderaker of Power Line who took things a step further by emailing reporters at the New York Times who published the revelations of NSA monitoring.

This morning, I sent the following email to New York Times reporters Eric Lichtblau and Adam Liptak (other Times reporters who have participated in the NSA stories do not publish their email addresses):

In your reporting in the Times you appear to have tried to create the impression that the NSA's overseas intercept program is, or may be, illegal. I believe that position is foreclosed by all applicable federal court precedents. I assume, for example, that you are aware of the November 2002 decision of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, in Sealed Case No. 02-001, where the court said:

"The Truong court [United States v. Truong Dinh Hung, 4th Cir. 1980], as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information. *** We take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President's constitutional power."

In view of the controlling federal court precedents, I do not see how an argument can be made in good faith that there is any doubt about the NSA program's legality. Therefore, I wonder whether you are somehow unaware of the relevant case law. If you know of some authority to support your implication that the intercepts are or may be illegal, I would be interested to know what that authority is. If you are aware of no such authority, I think that a correction is in order.

Thank you.

John Hinderaker

I will post any response I receive.

Power Line is not so easy for Times reporters to ignore.  An exchange of responses is here, none of which have satisfied Mr. Hinderaker.  Says Mr. Hinderaker,

In my opinion, you should not convey the impression to your readers that the NSA surveillance is likely illegal unless there is, at a minimum, a respectable argument, supported by legal authority, to that effect. Do you think there is such an argument? If so, what is it, and what is the authority?

Thanks again for responding.

Since I haven't heard from Mr. Lichtblau for some time, I'm going ahead and posting the discussion we've had so far. I hope that Mr. Lichtblau will respond to my criticisms of the Times' coverage in my last email; if so, I'll post his answer. In any event, we greatly appreciate his taking the time to engage us in this conversation.

Meanwhile in back the Strata-Sphere, AJ Strata has taken a look at something clearly and unquestionably illegal -- the leak to the Times that revealed surveillance of international calls.  His post is of great interest because he makes a pretty good case for who may have done the leaking.

Mac Ranger was pointing out the Sen Rockefellar had tipped the media to his concerns, illegally, because he was mentioned in the NY Times article. But if you notice, I have emphasized something else in that paragraph regarding a FISA judge.

Recall the reporting on the FISA judge’s resgination

U.S. District Judge James Robertson, one of 11 members of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, sent a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. late Monday notifying him of his resignation without providing an explanation.

Two associates familiar with his decision said yesterday that Robertson privately expressed deep concern that the warrantless surveillance program authorized by the president in 2001 was legally questionable and may have tainted the FISA court’s work.

I now suspect Judge Robertson resigned for leaking information to the press regarding the NSA process - which he would know all too well if FISA was reviewing the NSA surveillance in a post action, verification role.

Tom Maguire has noted the heretofore deafening silence from those members of Congress who attended the dozen or so briefings that were given.  On the Democratic side they're now saying they disapproved all along.  Sure...

Update:  The Washington Times reports that there are previous administrations agree with President Bush on warrantless searches.  The Times even provides a supporting quote from none other than Jamie Gorelick of "wall" fame.

"The Department of Justice believes -- and the case law supports -- that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes and that the president may, as he has done, delegate this authority to the attorney general," Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick said in 1994 testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

And what does she says now?

In an interview yesterday, Miss Gorelick acknowledged her testimony before Congress but said it pertained to presidential authority prior to 1994, when Congress expanded FISA laws. Left unanswered, she said, is whether that congressional action trumped the president's "inherent authority."

"The Clinton administration did not take a position on that," she said

Does she hold out hope for criminality?  Perhaps, but while the Clinton administration didn't take a position on presidential authority after the expansion of FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review did.

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, composed of three federal appellate court judges, said in 2002 that "All the ... courts to have decided the issue held that the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence ... We take for granted that the president does have that authority."

Update II:  Riddle me this! 

Judges on Surveillance Court To Be Briefed on Spy Program

By Carol D. Leonnig and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 22, 2005; Page A01

The presiding judge of a secret court that oversees government surveillance in espionage and terrorism cases is arranging a classified briefing for her fellow judges to address their concerns about the legality of President Bush's domestic spying program, according to several intelligence and government sources.

Several members of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said in interviews that they want to know why the administration believed secretly listening in on telephone calls and reading e-mails of U.S. citizens without court authorization was legal.

Does this mean we're supposed to believe the "court that oversees government surveillance in espionage and terrorism" didn't authorize the monitoring?  Are we also supposed to believe the targets were U.S. citizens?  The real question is, can the press keep this story alive until to '06 elections?

Update III:  The New York Times was originally hoping their blockbuster to hit the '04 election cycle.  Missing that, they were most likely hoping to keep the story alive but under wraps until the '06 elections, but the imminent threat of being scooped by the release of James Risen's book State of War forced their hand. 

Times journalists told NPR the approaching release of Risen's book forced senior editors to focus grudgingly on the NSA story. They otherwise would have been scooped in a book by one of their own correspondents. (Risen had been on book leave for the first five months of 2005, according to the Times.)

What a shame.

Update IV:  The Justice Department responds.

Add a pinch of cumin

From Strategy Page,

...American Crime Scene Investigators were taken aback when they first found traces of cumin in bomb site debris. It took some additional investigating to reveal that this was the result of local bomb making practices, not a recipe gone really, really bad.

The resort to improvised explosives for their bombs means the bombs have less power, and cause fewer injuries. The explosives shortage is largely a result of two years of American and Iraqi troops tracking down Saddam’s lost shells and explosives. In the past year, hundreds of terrorist weapons caches have been found and destroyed.

Remember when...

Bush was considered bin Laden's most effective recruiter?  A trip down Memory Lane takes us to this Amazon customer review of Al Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam, by Jason Burke.

Bush, as Burke points out, is bin Laden's most effective recruiter. Every time the US military does something in the Middle East, bin Laden's notion of a cosmic struggle between the West and Islam is reinforced. Another is that democracy is the answer--actually, as Burke demonstrates, pro-Western regimes in countries like Egypt and Pakistan have had to use authoritarian tactics to suppress popular Islamism. Finally, Burke shows how the war in Afghanistan was basically successful in destroying terrorists' bases of operations, but that the US invasion of Iraq, by giving those terrorists an new place to operate, was a major setback. Bush's advisors should give this a read if they aren't all illiterate.

Call it a fad, the popular theory back in September of 2004, just before the presidential election. It's representative of tortured Democratic logic that tries hard to persist, absurdly concluding that following Zarqawi into Iraq to take it away as a base of operations after first successfully doing it in Afghanistan, is somehow a setback.

What an invaluable review, one that makes it entirely unnecessary to go out and buy the book, not that I would anyway.  The review makes clear that Mr. Burke threw this thing together when it was so much easier to be pessimistic about the War on Terror.  Nowadays you have to work at it.  It's either that or be downright delusional.

Long a stronghold for Islamic extremists and the world's second-most populous Muslim nation, Pakistanis now hold a more favorable opinion of the U.S. than at any time since 9/11, while support for al Qaeda in its home base has dropped to its lowest level since then. The direct cause for this dramatic shift in Muslim opinion is clear: American humanitarian assistance for Pakistani victims of the Oct. 8 earthquake that killed 87,000. The U.S. pledged $510 million for earthquake relief in Pakistan and American soldiers are playing a prominent role in rescuing victims from remote mountainous villages...

While support for the U.S. has surged, there's also been a dramatic drop in support for Osama bin Laden and terrorism. Since May, the percentage of Pakistanis who feel terrorist attacks against civilians are never justified has more than doubled to 73% from less than half, while the minority who still support terrorist attacks has also shrunk significantly. There's been a similar increase in the number of Pakistanis disapproving of bin Laden, which rose to 41% in November up from only 23% in May.

It may very well be that our improving image resulted from earthquake and tsunami support, but that doesn't fully explain things -- like the changing attitudes about terrorist attacks against civilians or the growing disapproval of bin Laden.  And another thing -- I would be willing to bet there hasn't been anyone, at any time in history, as successful as President Bush at sending terrorists into paradise in large numbers.  We should fervently hope his successor can match him as a recruiter for al Qaeda.

Who is Muhamed al Durah?

Richard Landes, Professor of history at Boston University, has made uncovering historical fraud something of a specialty.  Trained as a medievalist he wrote his first book on a series of forgeries that had fooled historians for centuries.  The professor has partnered with Pedro Zúquete, who holds his BA in History from University of Coimbra in Portugal and his PhD in Political Science from Bath University UK.  Together they have unveiled more recent historical fraud -- the story of Muhamed al Durah.

Muhamed al Durah grew up in El Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. On September 30, 2000, he was in Netzarim Junction where Palestinian youth had gathered to throw rocks and Molotov cocktails at the Israeli police station on the northeast corner of the intersection. He and his father took shelter behind a concrete cylinder on the southwest corner... Allegedly shot dead in a hail of bullets, captured on tape by a Palestinian photographer working for France2 [http://www.france2.fr/] television, Muhamed was buried that day as his picture went out around the world. He became the poster boy for the intifada, inspiring much of the violence, including the first rounds of suicide bombing (2001).

The story presented for public consumption, that Israeli soldiers purposely shot the boy dead, continues to serve as justification for all manner of violence against Jews in Israel and around the world.  At SecondDraft.org Professor Landes and Mr. Zúquete present their evidence of the much likelier scenario -- it was all staged for the cameras.

At funeral, the mourners already have posters of the boy: In order for them to have this, they would have had to go to his home in El-Bureij, get a picture, make the poster and copy it for distribution all in approximately one to two hours. In the meantime, his mother claims that she didn't find out about his death until the later evening news.

SecondDraft.org serves as a counterweight to the mainstream press claim that journalism is the "first draft of history".  All too often we find that first draft is rife with errors, so many of which are not accidental.

Beginning of the end or end of the beginning?

The parliamentary election in Iraq went better than anybody expected.  There was less violence and a higher turnout than in either of the two previous votes.  Some credit goes to the Sunnis.

Sunnis ready to cooperate with U.S.
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 18, 2005

AMMAN, Jordan -- Key Sunni Muslim leaders in Iraq's violent Anbar province have concluded that their interests lie in cooperating with the United States, and they are seeking to extend a temporary truce honored by most insurgent groups for last week's elections.

But at the same time, they are demanding specific steps by the U.S. military, including a reduction in military raids and an increase in development projects for their vast desert province that stretches from the edge of Baghdad to the Syrian and Jordanian borders.

You know the negotiations are getting serious when talk turns towards public works projects.  But joking aside, the fact is the Sunnis extended protection to the voters in what used to be terrorist strongholds.

Adnan al-Dulaimi, leader of a prominent Sunni bloc, confirmed yesterday that insurgent groups had prevented violence from interfering with Thursday's election for a 275-seat parliament.

His comments yesterday on a cease-fire deal -- first reported in The Washington Times on the day Iraqis voted -- provided the first public explanation for the sharp drop in violence last week. "The resistance announced it would protect polling stations and would not allow a single group to attack them, and it respected its promise.

"We thank them in the name of the Iraqi Accordance Front," Mr. al-Dulaimi told reporters in Baghdad, referring to the electoral bloc he leads.

It appears Zarqawi's nightmare is on the verge of becoming his reality.  In his famous letter he said,

The army and police have begun to deploy in those areas and are growing stronger day by day. They have put chiefs [drawn] from among Sunni agents and the people of the land in charge. In other words, this army and police may be linked to the inhabitants of this area by kinship, blood, and honor. In truth, this area is the base from which we set out and to which we return. When the Americans disappear from these areas – and they have begun to do so – and these agents, who are linked by destiny to the people of the land, take their place, what will our situation be?

If we fight them {and we must fight them}, we will confront one of two things. Either:

1 – We fight them, and this is difficult because of the gap that will emerge between us and the people of the land. How can we fight their cousins and their sons and under what pretext after the Americans, who hold the reins of power from their rear bases, pull back? The real sons of this land will decide the matter through experience. Democracy is coming, and there will be no excuse thereafter.

2 – We pack our bags and search for another land, as is the sad, recurrent story in the arenas of jihad, because our enemy is growing stronger and his intelligence data are increasing day by day. (My emphasis)

The Sunnis seem to be seeing the light.  They're beginning to realize they can vote us out, but Zarqawi remains to be defeated, wherever it is he goes when the day comes that the Iraqis will no longer have him.  That day may be upon us.