Quote of the Day...

By Oren Hazi:

This is how we lose our rights. Not overnight in one fell swoop, but gradually, after getting worn down again and again, and after hundreds of mini-panic-attacks, and with ever-ratcheting procedural changes that effectively invalidate the assurances and safeguards that we're given. I give up. The terrorists have won.

Quote of the Day...

Mark Steyn:

There is a stupidity to this, but also a kind of decadence. Until the 1960s, it was assumed by all sovereign states that they had the right to choose which non-nationals were admitted within their borders. Now, to suggest such a thing risks the charge of “nativism” and to propose that, say, Swedes are easier to assimilate than Chechens is to invite cries of “Racist!” So, when the morgues and emergency rooms are piled high, the only discussion acceptable in polite society is to wonder whether those legless Bostonians should have agitated more forcefully for federally mandated after-school assimilationist basketball programs.

Read the whole thing...

Boston Marathon Bombers' Mother...

First, listen to this interview with her:


Then read Rachel Lucas' reaction. She says it ever so much better than I could.

And yes, my hand did involuntarily levitate...

My Kind of Humor :)

Mark Steyn vs. Political Correctness...

Mr. Steyn is not happy with those who see the world through “Princess Fluffy Bunny” glasses.  A sample:

The politicization of mass murder found its perfect expression in one of those near-parodic pieces to which the more tortured self-loathing dweebs of the fin de civilisation West are prone. As the headline in Salon put it, “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American.” David Sirota is himself a white American, but he finds it less discomforting to his Princess Fluffy Bunny worldview to see his compatriots as knuckle-dragging nutjobs rather than confront all the apparent real-world contradictions of the diversity quilt. He had a lot of support for his general predisposition. “The thinking, as we have been reporting, is that this is a domestic extremist attack,” declared Dina Temple-Raston, NPR’s “counterterrorism correspondent.” “Officials are leaning that way largely because of the timing of the attack. April is a big month for anti-government and right-wing individuals. There’s the Columbine anniversary, there’s Hitler’s birthday, there’s the Oklahoma City bombing, the assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.” Miss Temple-Raston was born in my mother’s homeland of Belgium, where, alas, there were more than a few fellows willing to wish the Führer happy birthday back when he was still around to thank you for it. But it was news to me it was such a red-letter day in the Bay State. Who knew? At NPR, “counterterrorism” seems to mean countering any suggestion that this might be terrorism from you know, the usual suspects.

But do go read the whole thing!

Boston Marathon Bombings: Good Advice...

I read this entire column, nodding in agreement, before looking at the byline: Bruce Schneier.  The security sage is on the spot with some excellent advice:

As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it'd be easy to be scared. It'd be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something -- anything -- to keep us safe.

It'd be easy, but it'd be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators' hands -- and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don't have to be scared, and we're not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there's one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.

It's hard to do, because terrorism is designed precisely to scare people -- far out of proportion to its actual danger. A huge amount of research on fear and the brain teaches us that we exaggerate threats that are rare, spectacular, immediate, random -- in this case involving an innocent child -- senseless, horrific and graphic. Terrorism pushes all of our fear buttons, really hard, and we overreact.

But our brains are fooling us. Even though this will be in the news for weeks, we should recognize this for what it is: a rare event. That's the very definition of news: something that is unusual -- in this case, something that almost never happens.

Do go read the whole thing...

Forget Reservoirs and Power Grids...

After 9/11 there was a surplus of crazy talk about the vulnerability (and need to protect) public infrastructure like water reservoirs (easily poisoned, the thinking was) and electrical power grids (remote high-tension lines are vulnerable).  Fortunately the level of this crazy talk has dropped significantly upon the realization of two things: (1) protecting all this infrastructure was completely impossible (it's too darned big and distributed), and (2) it really isn't as vulnerable as it seems (there's lots of redundancy built in).

This news story about divers trying to sever an Internet cable feeding Egypt got me to thinking about the vulnerability of the Internet to terrorists.  Those Internet cables, which I've written about before, are vulnerable to attack and (if severed) could have large economic impacts.  Furthermore, the routers that terminate those cables are potentially vulnerable to attack over the Internet itself (hacking, in other words). 

In most of the developed world there is sufficient redundancy in these cables that it would be very difficult for an attacker to cause serious economic harm.  For instance, New York City has dozens of Internet “feeds” connecting it to the rest of the Internet.  Taking out all those feeds at once would be exceedingly difficult.

In some other parts of the world (like Egypt), this is not true – there may only be a few (sometimes even just one!) Internet feed connecting an entire region to the Internet.  If a terrorist organization were to take out those feeds, that region would likely suffer considerable damage.  Very little international business today is conducted without the use of the Internet.  Even simple things, such as buying bulk loads of spices from Madagascar, often rely on the Internet for the marketing, sales, negotiation, funds transfer, and coordination of the purchase.  In those places, I would think the Internet cable would be a prime target for the bad guys...

Is This What Obama Is Hiding?

The terrorists who killed our ambassador to Libya and three others were using weapons provided by the U.S.

I don't have the words...

Terrorism Tradecraft...

Interesting article from Stratfor...

Quote of the Day...

Today's quote is from John Yoo, currently a professor of law at Berkeley, formerly in G. W. Bush's Justice Department:

Candidate Obama campaigned on narrowing presidential wartime power, closing Guantanamo Bay, trying terrorists in civilian courts, ending enhanced interrogation, and moving away from a wartime approach to terrorism toward a criminal-justice approach. Mr. Obama has avoided these vexing detention issues simply by depriving terrorists of all of their rights—by killing them.

This is from an article Mr. Yoo has in today's Wall Street Journal.

My readers will, I think, be unsurprised to learn that I have no problem with executing, assasinating, murdering, vaporizing, or otherwise killing terrorists.  If the methods used are unsavory or inhumane, that also gives me no problem.  None at all, on either count.  I have more concern about the proprieties of killing cockroaches than I do about some asshole who thinks killing innocent people is ok.

I do, however, have a problem with a president setting himself up as the sole arbiter of who we target for such killings.  There are way too many problems with such an arrangement, not least of which are trusting the accuracy of the information made available to the president and trusting the judgement of the president.  Furthermore, it's not farfetched to note that a logical extension of Obama's process is to use drones in the U.S. to assasinate people here whom the president designates as enemies – with no due process at all, justified as required by the emergency situation.  The opacity and lack of accountability in Obama's chosen “kill list” process is, I believe, simply unacceptable – and downright dangerous.

Mr. Yoo has skin in this argument as a member of the previous administration.  Nonetheless, his point about the far greater transparency and accountability in the Bush administration is well taken – especially given the rhetoric of candidate Obama in 2008...

CIA Thwarts Terrorist...

Now there's perhaps one of my very favorite word pairs: “thwarts” and “terrorist”!

There's not a lot of detail available, other than the most important: terrorist fail.

Something Went Terribly Wrong...

Consider this story:  Three Iranian would-be terrorists are in a house, apparently working on a bomb, when something goes terribly wrong.  The explosives go off, blowing the house to smithereens.  The three terrorists run out of the house.  Two, uninjured, run away.  The third, bloody, tries to hail a cab.  The cab leaves, and the terrorist throws a grenade after it – and misses.  Then the police arrive, so the terrorist throws a grenade at them.  He misses again – the grenade hits a tree, bounces back, and blows the terrorist's own legs off.

It's like the Keystone Kops of terror.

I'm not sure what your reaction to this story is.  The politically-correct reaction is probably along the lines of “Jeez, we should really feel sad that this poor man was injured, maybe we should demonstrate for U.N. funding of terrorist training.”  Or something along those lines.

My own reaction: BWA-HA-HA-HA!!!

Islamic Terrorists Are Like King Salmon...

Via reader Jim M.:

Taliban Body Desecration...

Reader Larry E. writes:

I don't think I've seen you comment on this yet.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/united-states-marine-corps-investigating-online-video-appears-show-marines-urinating-corpses-taliban-fighters-article-1.1004795

I realize the 24 hour news cycle likes to take things to extreme but I have a hard time worrying too much about the actions of these guys. While maybe unprofessional and stupid to video tape, this type of thing is hardly an unusual event. Anyone that has read the accounts of the war in the pacific, like "the old breed' will remember many similar accounts and really, much, much worse. De-humanizing the enemy is part of the process. Absolutely no one in the chain of command or those PR types commenting could possibly be surprised. They are just covering themselves and the foolishness of the situation.

These are not police officers. This is not your favorite city. You don't get a group of people to rush through a hail of bullets and mortar fire to kill a bunch of other people without a change in the normal thought processes. Most of their training is about effectively killing other people. Putting them into an environment where they are under constant threat from everyone around them and giving them a long list of rules before they can engage the enemy is asking for trouble and it is unfair to put our military in those positions. Does anyone seriously think they don't get some satisfaction when they do manage to kill some of the enemy?

CoyoteBlog has a recent post along very similar lines (so short I'm reposting the whole thing, hoping Warren won't mind):

There are a lot of ways to parse this story about the alleged video of soldiers urinating on corpses in Afghanistan. It seems ugly, but desecration of corpses has a long history in Afghan conflicts (often consisting of cutting off male-only body parts). And it’s bizarre to see people more upset about peeing on corpses than with corpsifying them in the first place.

But at the end of the day this is what I think is broken about the Afghan conflict. You don’t send warriors into a brutal guerrilla war with no rules and simultaneously expect them to be goodwill ambassadors as well. Given that these are two activities whose Venn diagrams of skills and mindsets have so little overlap, the military does a pretty good job trying to do what its being asked, but over the long run it’s a losing game (somewhere in here there is an Ender’s Game reference about trying to meld empathy with killer instincts).

By the way, exactly what is our goal in Afghanistan, will someone remind me? We have been successful when __________________ ?

I haven't commented before because I have such mixed and confused feelings about it, and I'm not at all sure we know what actually happened.  Warren nails it when he says there are a lot of ways to parse this story.  Things that occurred to me as I read it:

• Is it even a true story, portraying an actual event?  Or is this an amateur and fictional production?
• Where's the outrage about the enemy's behavior?  Remember Daniel Pearl, anyone?
• So the men we have trained to be the world's most effective killers have, in fact, killed some of the enemy – but then we don't want them to celebrate this?  (very close to one of  Larry's comments)
• I don't like the possible consequences of this video being publicized.  It is exactly the sort of fodder that helps the enemy recruit new suicide bombers and fighters, and incites the locals to resistance against our troops.

In the end, I realized that my only negative reaction to this event (assuming it really did happen) is that I regret the consequences of it being public.  I share Larry's assumption that this sort of thing happens all the time in war; even a brief reading of wartime history (take your pick of wars – it doesn't matter at all which one you look at) will convince you that this is an inevitable consquence of asking one group of people to kill another.

So I'm left unsurprised that this sort of thing happened, convinced that this is far from the only time it has happened in Afghanistan (on both sides), but wishing it hadn't become a public property.  I'm also feeling sad for the American soldiers involved, because it seems likely that their commanders will be required to make an example of them...

New Terrorist Threat...

The Wall Street Journal's commentary pages today prominently feature an article by Andrew Krepinevich, who describes a new and parlous terrorist threat: attacking offshore oil rigs.

Well, maybe.  His whole point, really, is that offshore oil rigs are “soft” targets, meaning easy to attack.  Sure they are.  So are many other targets (dams, water supplies, hydrocarbon storage facilities, mass transit, etc., etc. ad infinitum).  I'm not convinced there's anything special about the offshore oil rigs.  But I have a real problem with those, like Krepinevich, who think that we should try to defend all these things.  To steal someone else's phrasing: we do that, and the terrorists really have won...

The Correct Way to Arrest a Terrorist...

I want those cops on my side!

PC in the Military...

Remember this guy?  He's Major Hasan, the Muslim extremist who happened to be an Army psychiatrist – who attacked his fellow soldiers in Ft. Hood just over a year ago, killing 12 of them.

Dorothy Rabinowitz has an excellent piece in today's WSJ discussing the results of the military reports on the incident.  An excerpt:

In this report, titled "A Ticking Time Bomb" and put out by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, there is a detail as dazzling in its bleak way as all the glowing misrepresentations of Dr. Hasan's skills and character, which his superiors poured into their evaluations of him. It concerns the Department of Defense's official report on the Foot Hood killings—a study whose recital of fact made no mention of Hasan's well-documented jihadist sympathies. Subsequent DoD memoranda portray the bloodbath—which began with Hasan shouting "Allahu Akbar!"—as a kind of undefined extremism, something on the order, perhaps, of work-place violence.

This avoidance of specifics was apparently contagious—or, more precisely, policy. In November 2010, each branch of the military issued a final report on the Fort Hood shooting. Not one mentioned the perpetrator's ties to radical Islam. Even today, "A Ticking Time Bomb," co-authored by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I., Conn.) and Susan Collins (R., Maine), reminds us that DoD still hasn't specifically named the threat represented by the Fort Hood attack—a signal to the entire Defense bureaucracy that the subject is taboo.

There is something seriously amiss when the military can't (or won't) see the obvious evidence of our main enemy's infiltration into its own ranks.  The political correctness/multicultural movement is bad enough in the civilian world.  In the military, it puts our warriors unnecessarily in harm's way...

WTF: Weapon of Mass Destruction Found in the U.S.?

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this story.  The Daily Mail isn't exactly at the top of the list of reputable new sources.  On the other hand, the Obama administration would probably behave in exactly the way this article implies they are (hiding evidence of terrorist success), and the lamestream media here definitely has a history of supporting the administration. 

So I'm left wondering...

Terrorists and the Washington Monument...

Bruce Schneier weighs in.

Listen to the man, folks.

Flowers...

Poignant story of Olga Grushin's reactions to the news of the recent bombings in Russia.  She's living in America, but her parents live very near the site of the bombings...