dan collier

Uncle Sam on the Line – Former Attorney General John Ashcroft wrote the preceding New York Times editorial in reference to the seemingly unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping that was first authorized by the Bush administration under his watch and the subsequent attempt to grant the teleco companies retroactive immunity for their suspected crimes. The resulting letters to the editor begin to explain why his logic and motive are suspect.

Senator Russ Feingold points out the most important, if obvious, fact:

Telecom companies that cooperate with a government wiretap request are already immune from lawsuits, as long as they get a court order or a certification from the attorney general that the wiretap follows all applicable statutes.

Bush’s wiretapping plan circumvents an established practice that had worked since being enacted in 1978. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows for retroactive warrants in the case of emergency, so the telecoms could have complied with emergency requests but still required warrants for on-going spying. If the president didn’t believe the FISA court would agree to the wiretaps his administration requested, it raises troubling questions about who he intended to target and why.

I regularly make and receive international phone calls so this issue is personal to me. But even assuming I’m not being bugged, wiretapping as a defensive measure is also a bad idea in practice. For those that require privacy it is very easy to run a telecommunications server in a location unavailable to the federal government’s spying. It would still be possible to intercept the raw voice streams, but it is the end-to-end connection data that is most important for raising the flags that lead to wiretapping. Anyone can walk into an internet cafe and make calls through private telecommunications servers and the FBI/CIA will be unable to determine who is calling whom, making it impossible to determine the nationality and location of callers as Bush’s new wiretapping rules require. The software and hardware required is cheap or free (I worked writing and implementing such software for a time). For that matter, terrorist plans could easily be rerouted through the US Post Office or as asynchronous recordings on obscure secure websites.

Are we really expecting terrorists to call on AT&T before they come? No, and that is why warrantless wiretapping is wrong. It is an ineffective spying technique against intelligent terrorism, but quite effective at diminishing our perceived right to privacy.

On Torture and American Values – The New York Times published this excellent editorial a few days ago.

Once upon a time, it was the United States that urged all nations to obey the letter and the spirit of international treaties and protect human rights and liberties. American leaders denounced secret prisons where people were held without charges, tortured and killed. And the people in much of the world, if not their governments, respected the United States for its values.

Senator Ted Kennedy wrote an editorial for Salon yesterday about the same topic.

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Ayaan Hirshi Ali on Colbert Report – A Somalian immigrant to The Netherlands, Ayaan became a member of the Dutch parliament. Her criticism of fundamentalist Islam has led to death threats. She is currently a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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The Top 10 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and Politics – Previously, the only blog on the list I read was Carl Bildt, the current Foreign Minister and former Prime Minister of Sweden. I can’t think of a modern politician I like more than Bildt. His blog is interesting because it is really a typical blog, a running conversation (in Swedish) of his thoughts on just about everything.

The video gets funnier as it goes along.

4 suicides – Interesting art on a delicate subject. Blublu.org has lots of great street art photos listed under “Walls“. Here are a few of my favorites(1, 2, 3).

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Joint Failure – I’ve posted before about Andrew Bacevich. In his recent “Ideas” piece for the Boston Globe, he questions the suitability of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as currently established. In this piece he reviews the problem, claiming that the problem started early in the history of JCS.

Although himself a five-star general, Eisenhower railed in private throughout his presidency about members of the Joint Chiefs conspiring to undermine his policies whenever they happened to collide with cherished interests of the military services. His Farewell Address, warning that the “military-industrial complex” could well “endanger our liberties or democratic processes,” amounted to a tacit admission that as commander-in-chief he had lost control of his generals.

The problem more recently is generals that were unable or unwilling to offer honest and forthright advice to policy makers. I heard Bacevich on NPR’s On Point this morning discussing possible alternatives to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Seemingly humble and wise, he appears to be more interested in starting the discussion than providing easy answers. In another recent editorial for the LA Times, he slams the ’08 candidates offering the sound-bite solution of increasing the size of the military to fight fundamentalist terrorism.

Newsweek has an interesting book excerpt that explores the role of Harry Truman in the founding of the state of Israel. The book is Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989. Without discounting the validity of a Jewish state or Truman’s good intentions, I’m not sure I would classify this particular series of decisions as courageous. Unless we’re using Churchill’s definition:

Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.
– Winston Churchill

To skip all the ads and pagination, you might try the print version.

The Semiwarriors – An essay by retired Army Lieutenant Colonel and current Boston University professor of international relations Andrew J. Bacevich was published in April. Mr. Bacevich’s son died this week in Iraq.

In this article, Mr Bacevich argues that a long-term movement toward constant conflict and the rise of an imperial American presidency go hand-in-hand. It is particularly heartening to read a complete rebuke of the Bush Doctrine from a conservative scholar.

The Big Lie propagated by the architects of the Iraq War is not that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction nor that he was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden; it is that they possessed a secret formula for keeping America safe, the essential ingredient in that formula being a mandate to engage in open-ended war. Although the semiwarriors advising Bush fancied that they had discovered something original, they were really peddling the same elixir concocted by James Forrestal some six decades ago. Having drunk deeply of that elixir, President Bush is now left holding the bag, with others–chiefly young soldiers and their families–picking up the tab.

After reading this article, I had to read Eisenhower’s farewell address again (with video).

Bill Moyers’ asks his readers if there is something in the DNA of foreign policy elites. When I saw that interview initially, I thought the question sounded like an excuse.