Detaining Citizens and Shutting Down Free Speech

December 15, 2011 By Elizabeth Scalia

(photo source)

So, as we approach the end of 2011 and enter full-force into the tumult of another election year, just a show of hands, here. How many are starting to believe — like the lady in the next chair in my hair salon — that “there’s not gonna be another election: this maniac is going to declare a state of emergency and stay in power forever.”

Which if I recall, was pretty much what the left was warning about George W. Bush, at around this time, in 2007. (Just google “Bush” and “martial law”!)

I don’t care what Hofstadter said, the Paranoid Style has been a constant two-party phenom for a while, now. Both parties. All the time.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that we slip out of this year with the government pondering ways to shut down the internet and to, um…detain American Citizens in unprecedented ways:

Under the legislation suspects can be held without trial “until the end of hostilities”. They will have the right to appear once a year before a committee that will decide if the detention will continue.

The Senate is expected to give final approval to the bill before the end of the week. It will then go to the president, who previously said he would block the legislation not on moral grounds but because it would “cause confusion” in the intelligence community and encroached on his own powers.

But on Wednesday the White House said Obama had lifted the threat of a veto after changes to the law giving the president greater discretion to prevent individuals from being handed to the military.

He was gonna veto the thing, you see…until they re-wrote it to give the president more power. Which will always be used wisely, of course.

Just think — it wasn’t all that long ago President Obama was saying terror suspects should be read their Miranda rights

Meanwhile, although the Senate is giving this miserable bill wide bi-partisan support, somehow…it’s all those damned Republicans, again:

Critics accused the president of caving in again to pressure from some Republicans on a counter-terrorism issue for fear of being painted in next year’s election campaign as weak and of failing to defend America.

Human Rights Watch said that by signing the bill Obama would go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.

Funnily enough, for a president who wants to bypass congress whenever possible, he doesn’t mind working with them on this one, at all.

The lady in the next chair at the salon is feeling paranoid. Among the haircutters and customers, there is a narrative building: “There’s a giant new building — they say it’s a ’tissue factory’ but there’s all this security!” “There is a big rail engine (‘you can see it from the Expressway!’) and new tracks are being laid, to support big cargo to and from the tissue factory!” “That’s a lot of tissue!”

And Soylent Green is people. Sigh. We are living in mad, crazy days.

Read more here and here and yeah, here.

This is a really big deal. And the government is pushing it through when everyone is distracted by Christmas.

I’ve linked to this exquisite little short film before, but somehow these headlines and the paranoia under the foil and heat lamps are making me yearn for something this sweet, familiar and fully of hope.

YouTube Preview Image

Related:
Obama’s Justice Department Joins Britain’s Climategate Leaker Manhunt
“Every dictator lives off a rumor mill”

Filed Under: 'Remaking' America, Touch of evil, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

The Towers in Korea: What Humanity? – UPDATED

December 11, 2011 By Elizabeth Scalia

I saw this yesterday and wondered if it was a hoax:

The designers of the towers, Dutch architectural firm MVRDV, have responded to the controversy by quickly publishing an apology in English. “It was not our intention to create an image resembling the attacks,” the designers insist, “nor did we see the resemblance during the design process.”

They did not see the resemblance during the design process? The problem with this assertion – apart from its inherent implausibility – is that they have admitted the contrary in Dutch. Thus Jan Knikker of MVRDV told the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, “I have to admit that we also thought of the 9/11 attacks.”

If this is real, it suggests that humanity has strayed so far from itself — its origins; it’s Creator — that it is in touch with something bestial and fiendish. I wonder when we finally finish ourselves off?

UPDATE: The designers apologize.

Filed Under: "Remaking" Ourselves Tagged With: , , ,

“Fast & Furious” and “H.R. 1540″ Ideology breeds Incuriosity? UPDATED

December 6, 2011 By Elizabeth Scalia

H.R. 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, has already passed the House, and is currently before the Senate. One section of the bill gives the President the authority to detain indefinitely American citizens, picked up on American soil, because they are allegedly supporting the enemy (H/T)

Imagine Jane Fonda coming home after posing on enemy anti-aircraft weapons, with this sort of law in place. Some might like it, but I suspect , even those who dislike Fonda, would not its breadth or width.

My column at First Things today wonders if we all acquiesce to new and troubling laws too easily, based on mere ideology?

She was a “stalwart conservative” and a bit of a rugged individualist—she could shoot a gun and dress a kill (if I had known of Sarah Palin’s existence at the time, I’d have favorably compared the two)—and her concerns about the legislation were sound. She feared giving too much power into the hands of the government, or even into the hands of a president she basically liked, because she fully expected—in the natural way of things—that these expanded powers would eventually be abused. Her patriotism, she declared, demanded that she put her concern over her party loyalty: “Once people acquire power,” she wrote, “they don’t give it up at some later date, they just add to it.”

I thought her concerns were valid and well-expressed, and was surprised to see this formerly very popular commenter quickly became unwelcome within the forum. An image formed in my mind of birds flying in unison, and then suddenly dive-bombing in turn against a non-conformist who had been deemed unfit for the formation. In a matter of weeks the objector was gone, but before she left, she made a point of posting the Ben Franklin-attributed quote: “Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security”. She predicted her compatriots would regret their legislative overreach, and that someday they would hear candidates pledge to reduce intrusive government powers, only to further extend them upon attaining their office—thanks to the very precedents then being cheered on.

Now, of course, with a Democrat in the White House, we’re seeing many people who screamed about the Patriot Act having little-to-nothing to say about either this story or this one.

I’ve said it before and will say it again — it’s not good for the country when its press becomes selective about what it feels is worth examining, or not. But if the press will not do due diligence, it’s up to the rest of us to inform ourselves.

To be fair, CBS News does seem to be Curious about “Fast and Furious” but otherwise, it’s a non-story to the press.

Odd. Remember when they all chimed in that George W. Bush was “incurious”? You could have made a montage of them all using the word.

You can read my whole column, here

UPDATE:
Ed Morrissey has an excellent piece and video on the “Fast and Furious” story, to bring us all up to speed.

Glenn Reynolds: links (thanks, Glenn!) and also makes a seriously cogent observation:

. . .fans of civil liberties should always vote for Republican presidents, since they’re the only ones that get press scrutiny.

I’ve never looked at it that way, but he is very right: if the press will only critically examine vitally important policies when a Republican is in charge, then that alone might be reason enough to vote one in. I’d said repeatedly that I’d rather have a critical press questioning everything, than a complacent one playing advocate or Sgt. Schultz!

Ace has more Fast and Furious

Filed Under: The Fourth Estate, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Prayers for Norway – UPDATED

July 22, 2011 By Elizabeth Scalia

(photosource)

A day of terrible stories out of Norway:

20.46 Oslo’s mayor Fabian Stang said that the capital was struggling to come to terms with the idea that it had joined the list of cities targeted by bombers.
“Today we think about those people living in New York and London who have experienced this kind of thing,” he told Sky News. Living without any sympathy for other people, for me, it’s impossible to understand. “I do not think it is possible for us to understand what has happened today but hopefully we will be able to go on and that tomorrow Oslo will be a peaceful city again.”

And then

A gunman has opened fire at Norway Labour Party’s youth camp on the island of Utoya, fifty miles south of Oslo, shooting several people.

An eyewitness told Norwegian broadcaster NRK he saw more than 20 bodies after the camp shooting, on the shore and in the water. It is understood panicked teenagers had tried to flee the island by swimming as the gunman opened fire.

Up to 700 people are believed to be on the island, mostly teenagers aged between 14 to 18.

In each case, the death tolls are rising by the hour.

This is very tragic.

I wonder what Norway is thinking about this. Or rather, what they will think, when they’ve passed this first shock. Oslo — which bends over backwards to be accommodating, is “tolerant to a fault” to some (but not all) ideas, and admitted to giving Jimmy Carter a Peace Prize as “a kick in the leg” to the warmonger George W. Bush — probably believed that her placid neutrality would render her immune to this sort of senseless evil.

But that’s sort of the whole point of senseless and cowardly evil. Because it is senseless, there is no safe place; there is no safe position or ideology that will shield anyone from a force of evil, and a means of “movement,” that is willing to lash out in any direction, at any moment. And because it is cowardly, it targets children and the everyday unarmed.

This must be shaking Norway to its foundations. And perhaps it needs to. There is no immunity in ideology. Evil doesn’t care about it, except as it may exploit it.

I pray for the injured, and all of the families of the dead, and for parents of children at camp — and for all of us. This attack will only serve to make so put people — already dealing with uncertainty and economic strife — that much more on edge. And will probably lead to more restrictions upon the rights and freedoms of those very same everyday unarmed, who are just trying to live their lives amid a leadership vacuum that is apparent from nation-to-nation.

A miserable day just got worse.

UPDATE:
Don Surber: :Last week, a Norwegian prosecutor filed terror charges against an Iraqi-born cleric for threatening Norwegian politicians with death if he is deported from the Scandinavian country. The indictment centered on statements that Mullah Krekar — the founder of the Kurdish Islamist group Ansar al-Islam — made to various news media, including American network NBC.”

Yes, and in another article I read that these terrorists are listing “unspecified insults against Muhammed.”


Instapundit:“Turds”.
Ace: Was the shooter also the bomber?
Pajamas Media: lots of updates
Michelle Malkin: Called it quickly
My Pet Jawa: Lots of stuff
Brutally Honest: War in Oslo

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Osama bin Laden & Obama – UPDATED

May 11, 2011 By Elizabeth Scalia

As I was in Rome when the story of bin Laden’s killing broke, I was rather glad to be too busy to really process it. Justice is satisfying, to an extent, but I tended to take the view so well-expressed by the Vatican, and many others, that the cheering in the streets over a human death is perhaps not appropriate or what we want to become.

Should the White House show the pictures of the dead bin Laden? I’m of two minds. Mussolini was shown in death, so why not bin Laden? I am not feeling especially worried about terrorists “hating us more” for showing the pictures. They’ve been hating us pretty steadily since the 1970′s, so it seems a vague and cowardly argument, to me.

By the same measure, though I did agree with President Obama that there was no need to “spike the football.” So I take a dim view of the fact that this utterance seems to have come with the usual expiration date, as he seems to be spiking it for fun and profit with some regularity, lately, and with his usual and long-standing lack of generosity.

Recall that when Sarah Palin stepped into the GOP ticket in ’08, Obama and his crew could not even be generous enough to call her the Governor of Alaska, instead deriding her as a “small-town” mayor. He has not grown any more gracious in office, as this demonstrates, so color me unimpressed.

Moreover, I am getting the sense that President Obama has discovered that there is value — when all of your domestic policies are tanking or proving unpopular, ineffective or just not real — to being a wartime president, and he seems to see no irony at all in the fact that nabbing bin Laden would not have been possible if he had succeeded in blocking the Bush policies he so ardently fought while in the senate.

I keep wondering what the ego-gratifying “new cowboy/wartime president” suit may escalate down the road.

So, this is worth reading: 9 Elements You Cannot Separate from Healthy Leadership

But I am getting off topic. What I wanted to do was link you to a few good pieces on OBL that I was unable to showcase yesterday, but since it’s today, let’s begin with Ed Driscoll’s revelent links at Instapundit.

A very interesting take from Jen Pierce: Storyless in Abbottabad: Welcome to the Future:

The point is not that killing Osama bin Laden is a moral crisis akin to an abortion crisis or to dropping an A-bomb on a couple of million people. The point is it will leave a mark, just like that, because what has been done is done. Things are different now. The point is, we can’t take it back. And we don’t know what we have done–because we don’t know. We are now officially in the era of Targeted Killings. Our enemies aren’t nations but angry rogues as dangerous as they are ridiculous, hidden, elusive, and unknowable. They could have a dirty nuke or a flaming bag of dog poo. This isn’t news. It hasn’t been for awhile. But you know when you say a word like “slacks” over and over again, and it starts to feel weird and you have no idea what it refers to anymore, no idea what point of reality it is supposed to mark or correspond with? (In linguistics they call it “semantic satiation.” I remember doing it with the word slacks when I was a kid so I call it, in my head, “the slacks thing”). Occasionally, its like I have to wake up all over again and remember that our enemy isn’t this massive, shadowy, snowy world where God is dead and they call us dogs, an enemy so enormous that it refers to itself with initials, because its name is so big.

It’s a guy with a limp and a bad set of kidneys.

She suggests the jubilant left may yet find itself in a free-fall. A different take, you’ll want to read the whole thing.

Ron Moreau also wonders if this might be Obama’s biggest mistake

Dana Vachon at Daily Beast: Osama died a fool and has no legacy

Mark Shea at Crisis: Our Ruling Classes and Reality Management:

Because of this politicized quasi-liturgical celebration of national communion in the American Spirit, everything in this narrative depends on the Purity of the Sacrifice and of the Political High Priest who offers it to achieve its main goal: namely, winning approval for himself. So controlling the message is everything. If it turns out that the whole “bin Laden hid behind a woman and was armed” thing is, well, false (as the White House has since acknowledged), then the flock naturally start wondering about the accuracy of the rest of the story. Some of the flock, already inclined to think Obama so untrustworthy that they can’t even believe he is an American citizen — despite massive evidence that he was born in Hawaii, as state records clearly show — quickly concluded that bin Laden is either a) not dead or b) that he died years ago, and the administration is concocting some massive fraud on a scale of faking the moon Landings.

Conspiracy Theories are often unhelpful and unwelcome. Sometimes, though, they’re true

Jonah Goldberg: Why the Rush?

Christopher Hitchens calls Noam Chomsky an idiot:

It’s no criticism of Chomsky to say that his analysis is inconsistent with that of other individuals and factions who essentially think that 9/11 was a hoax. However, it is remarkable that he should write as if the mass of evidence against Bin Laden has never been presented or could not have been brought before a court. This form of 9/11 denial doesn’t trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and its civil society. After all, as Chomsky phrases it so tellingly, our habit of “naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk … [is] as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes ‘Jew’ and ‘Gypsy.’ ” Perhaps this is not so true in the case of Tomahawk, which actually is the name of a weapon, but the point is at least as good as any other he makes.

Related:
Richard Fernandez: America as Jackie Chan

UPDATE: Don’t miss this piece by Allison Salerno, whose husband narrowly escaped with his life on 9/11 — Because Mercy is Greater than Justice:

We all fall short of the glory of God. As Christians, the task before us is to seek to be as merciful as Christ Himself. We can thank God for the witness of Blessed Pope John Paul II’s life. He faced evil head on, (shown above meeting with his would-be murderer) and yet somehow found the strength to forgive. As Pope Benedict XVI tells us: “Forgiving is not ignoring but transforming.”

Joe Carter: Harper’s and the Guantanamo Murders Conspiracy

CIA Deniers are the New “birthers”

In the Arena, Is is OK to be glad?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Military Religious Freedom A-Ok for Druids, "Meh" for Catholics

May 9, 2011 By

Plundering the Deacon’s Bench, again…

The Colorado Springs Gazette reports that the Air Force Academy is now accommodating its Wiccan and Druid cadets with their own chapel:

Add Wiccans and Druids to the list of faiths that have their own chapel at the Air Force Academy.

A circle of stones around an altar was dedicated on a hilltop above the campus Tuesday with earth-centered prayer and speeches about religious liberty at the academy, a school that has long faced criticism as a bastion for evangelical Christianity.

“This outdoor worship space is something we have created to help people of all religions,” Lt. Gen. Michael Gould, the academy’s superintendent, said before a ribbon cutting on the site.

The academy is home to about 10 cadets who regularly attend “earth centered” worship groups. Earth-centered is a catch-all phrase for groups including New Age religion, paganism, Wicca, Druids and ancient Norse beliefs.

This is a bigger deal than it seems. In 2006, an investigative panel found that “officers and faculty members periodically used their positions to promote their Christian beliefs and failed to accommodate the religious needs of non-Christian cadets.” As the New York Times’ Laurie Goodstein reports:

Lt. Gen. Roger A. Brady of the Air Force, who led the 16-member group, said in a news conference at the Pentagon that the academy and the Air Force as a whole were struggling to define the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable religious expression in a government institution, a reflection, he said, of a debate under way across the country.

“We believe that people were doing things that I think were inappropriate,” General Brady said. “They had the best intentions toward the cadets. I think in some cases they were wrong.”

He said his panel had referred seven cases of questionable behavior to the Air Force for further investigation but declined to elaborate.

Among the incidents highlighted in the report were fliers that advertised a screening of “The Passion of the Christ” at every seat in the dining hall, more than 250 people at the academy signing an annual Christmas message in the base newspaper that said that “Jesus Christ is the only real hope for the world” and an atheist student who was forbidden to organize a club for “Freethinkers.”

The academy has 19 clubs for religious groups. Many of the clubs and educational programs are led by outsiders, some affiliated with ministries in Colorado Springs, the headquarters for many evangelical Christian organizations. The report recommended that the academy supervise those programs more closely because of complaints that some guest speakers had violated Air Force standards of religious respect.

The group found that several incidents widely covered by news organizations were overblown. The report said a chaplain who reportedly exhorted cadets in a worship service to tell their classmates to accept Christ or “burn in hell” was merely using language “not uncommon” for his Pentecostal denomination.

Prosyletizing in military units remains a touchy issue. Perhaps the leading watchdog is Air Force Academy graduate Mikey Weinstein. An attorney, and as he assures skeptics, a “registered Republican,” Weinstein founded the Military Religious Freedom Foundation in 2006. The MRRF’s goal: “ensuring that all members of the United States Armed Forces fully receive the Constitutional guarantees of religious freedom to which they and all Americans are entitled by virtue of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.” Toward that end, it’s reported an Air Force colonel for distributing a video housed on the Catholic 4marks.com site, which also included images of President Obama wearing a swastika armband.

In 2009, the MRRF was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Although this particular video came from a Catholic source, Weinstein seems concerned chiefly with the missionary activities of evangelical Protestants. He’s described their theology as “dominionist,” which means, broadly, that they are encouraging soldiers to conquer for Christ. I can’t speak to the accuracy of that statement, but Laurie Goodstein has found that — at least in the Air Force — numbers of evangelical chaplains are multiplying, even as numbers of Catholic and mainline Protestant chaplains are decreasing:

The churches that once supplied most of the chaplains say they are now having trouble recruiting for a variety of reasons. Many members of their clergy are now women, who are less likely to seek positions as military chaplains or who entered the ministry as a second career and are too old to qualify. The Catholic Church often does not have enough priests to serve its parishes, let alone send them to the military.

There are also political reasons. Anne C. Loveland, a retired professor of American history at Louisiana State University and the author of “American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military, 1942-1993,” said the foundation for the change in the chaplaincy was laid during the Vietnam War.

“Evangelical denominations were very supportive of the war, and mainline liberal denominations were very much against it,” Ms. Loveland said. “That cemented this growing relationship between the military and the evangelicals.”

In other words, finding an atheist in a foxhole is much easier than finding an a Catholic or Episcopalian at headquarters.

So it’s very good to know the Air Force is now making an effort to ensure the spiritual welfare of non-Christians. But Catholics may be harder to help. According to Msgr.Timothy Broglio, who presides as archbishop over all Catholic service members, 275 priests are currently serving over 300,000 troops. That’s a ratio of one priest to 1,100 laymen — not bad, actually, compared to the ratios in many U.S. cities. But the troops who need pastoral care the most are hardest to reach. A friend of mine, a U.S. Navy vet with an impressive network of Catholics in arms, tells me that his friend, who was flying helicopters in Afghanistan, was lucky to make one Mass each month.

Too bad private contractors can’t fill the gap.

– Max Lindenman

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

A Failed Voyeur to War

May 7, 2011 By

This is a silly story about a sad story.

In January of 2005, American troops opened fire on a car that turned out to be carrying an Iraqi family. Both parents were killed outright, the sons was badly injured. Getty Images photographer Chris Hondros snapped an image of the daughter standing in the blood spatter. Half-blanketed by darkness, she is reduced to pairs of tiny feet and hands, and a wide-open, screaming mouth.

The New York Times has tracked the girl down. In “Face That Screamed War’s Pain Looks Back, 6 Hard Years Later.” Tim Arango gives us her name, Samar Hassan, and fills in her missing years.

Now a striking 12-year-old, Samar lives on the outskirts of Mosul in a two-story house with four other families, mostly relatives.

The household is a cramped bustle of activity as women cook and clean and children scramble about. Samar’s older sister, Intisar, and her husband, an unemployed former police officer, care for her. Two of his sons are policemen, and their salaries support the extended family.

The pains of war have been visited on thousands of Iraqis, but even here Samar’s story stands apart. Three years after her parents were killed, her brother Rakan died when an insurgent attack badly damaged the house where she lives now. Rakan had been seriously wounded in the shooting that killed their parents, and he was sent to Boston for treatment after Mr. Hondros’s photos were published. An American aid worker, Marla Ruzicka, who helped arrange for Rakan’s treatment, was herself later killed in a car bomb in Baghdad.

Intisar’s husband, Nathir Bashir Ali, suspects his house was bombed by insurgents as retribution for sending Rakan to the United States. “When Rakan came back from America, everyone thought I was a spy,” he said.

Samar left school last year because she was too shy and not doing well, Mr. Ali said, although Samar said she would like to return and hoped to be a doctor when she grew up. She leaves the house only on infrequent family excursions and has two friends who visit to play with dolls and chat. She spends her days cleaning, listening to music on her purple MP3 player and watching episodes of her favorite television show, the Turkish soap opera “Forbidden Love,” about lovers named Mohanad and Samar.

“I am Samar,” she said, wearing a long red dress and sitting on the couch next to Mr. Ali.

Two of her siblings, also in the car when their parents were killed, sat nearby.
“I’ve taken them many times to the hospital, where they get pills” for emotional problems, Mr. Ali said. “All of them take pills.”

There’s something especially horrible in hearing about an adolescent who is, on the one hand, normal enough to over-identify with a soap opera character, but is too damaged, on the other, to attend school, or to go without medication.

But even as I write that, I mistrust my reactions. In I Married a Communist, Philip Roth has a character rail against sentimentality: “People give up and want to fake their feelings.. They want to have feelings right away, and so ‘shocked’ and ‘moved’ are the easiest. The stupidest.” The truth is, from the moment I began reading the article, I began taking sides. My first impulse was to defend the troops who shot Samar’s parents and brother: “Oh, come on,’ I said, to some imaginary antagonist. “Those guys had no idea who they were shooting at. The family must have run through a checkpoint.”

My next move was to find some vindication in the news that insurgents had targeted Samar’s family — and very deliberate. “Aha! See? They’re the real bad guys. Told you.”

This could well be normal. Yesterday, in weighing the pros and cons of releasing bin Laden’s post-mortem photos, I cited “Looking at War,” in which Susan Sontag argues that graphic images of war gain their meaning from the political context in which the events depicted took place. They’re never photos of something that just happened; they’re photos of something that someone did to someone else. Ultimately, who a viewer is, and whose side he takes, shapes what he sees. Seeing an awful picture, or even learning the sad backstory behind that picture (or the forestory that followed it), is not going to convert too many people to the cause of pacifism.

She writes: “The destructiveness of waging war — short of total destruction, which is not war, but suicide — is not in itself an argument against waging war, unless one thinks (as few people do) that violence is never justified…” In other words, war is hell — now what?

Maybe some people have deep enough minds for this kind of moral bottom-lining. Not me. That’s why I think I’ll turn the page and get back to writing film reviews and charming anecdotes.

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