What would Mao Zedong say?
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Category Archives: Politics – Foreign Policy
Why Do We Impose the TSA on Ourselves?
Two items exhibiting the dubious judgment of government bureaucrats caught my attention today.
The first is that Securities and Exchange Commission going to try and make a fraud case against Goldman Sachs. Inasmuch as the SEC couldn’t uncover Bernie Madoff or Stanford Financial’s sketchy affairs despite being told about them, how on earth is the agency going to prove fraud in a transaction between sophisticated investors who knew what was going on? Expect a financial settlement any day now.
Meanwhile, let’s check out another government agency’s bumbling decision-making:
More than thirty organizations across the political spectrum have filed a formal petition with the Department of Homeland Security, urging the federal agency to suspend the airport body scanner program.Leading security expert Bruce Schneier stated, “Body scanners are one more example of security theater.
Last year, the organizations asked Secretary Janet Napolitano to give the public an opportunity to comment on the proposal to expand the body scanner program. Secretary Napolitano rejected the request.
Since that time, evidence has emerged that the privacy safeguards do not work and that the devices are not very effective. “At this point, there is no question that the body scanner program should be shut down. This is the worst type of government boondoggle — expensive, ineffective, and offensive to Constitutional rights and deeply held religious beliefs,” said Marc Rotenberg, President of EPIC.
And if Bruce Schneier‘s opinion isn’t good enough for you, take heed of what a leading security expert who is constantly on the front lines says about the scanners:
A leading Israeli airport security expert says the Canadian government has wasted millions of dollars to install “useless” imaging machines at airports across the country.
“I don’t know why everybody is running to buy these expensive and useless machines. I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747,” Rafi Sela told parliamentarians probing the state of aviation safety in Canada.”That’s why we haven’t put them in our airport,” Sela said, referring to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport, which has some of the toughest security in the world.
Sela, former chief security officer of the Israel Airport Authority and a 30-year veteran in airport security and defense technology, helped design the security at Ben Gurion.
Despite what the experts say, he wasteful airport security process that we have allowed the Transportation Security Administration to impose on us continues unabated at a substantial direct cost and an even greater indirect one.
It’s bad enough that the TSA’s procedures do virtually nothing to discourage serious terrorist threats. What’s worse is that the inspection process is really just “security theater” that makes only a few naive travelers feel safer about airline travel.
And if all that weren’t bad enough, the worst news is that once a governmental “safeguard” such as the TSA procedures are adopted, Congress has no interest in dismantling it even when it’s clear that process is ineffective, expensive and obtrusive to citizens. Stated simply, the TSA has become a jobs program for thousands of registered voters.
James Fallows sums up the absurdity of the situation well:
TSA + defense contractor + security theater vs Israeli expert + Schneier + common sense.
Hmmm, I don’t know what to believe.
Another absurd cost of security theater
How much wasteful spending on security theater is enough?
Bruce Schneier links to U.S. Representative John Duncanís Congressional observation about the Federal Air Marshals Service:
Actually, there have been many more arrests of Federal air marshals than that story reported, quite a few for felony offenses. In fact, more air marshals have been arrested than the number of people arrested by air marshals.
We now have approximately 4,000 in the Federal Air Marshals Service, yet they have made an average of just 4.2 arrests a year since 2001. This comes out to an average of about one arrest a year per 1,000 employees.
Now, let me make that clear. Their thousands of employees are not making one arrest per year each. They are averaging slightly over four arrests each year by the entire agency.
In other words, we are spending approximately $200 million per arrest.
Let me repeat that: we are spending approximately $200 million per arrest.
One could quibble that spending per arrest is not an entirely fair measure of effectiveness. A good deterrent effect means fewer arrests, right?
Nevertheless, itís a pretty good indication of misdirected resources if a law enforcement agencyís officers are more likely to be arrested than to make arrests.
Exposing the myth of American exceptionalism
Conrad Blackís prison routine allows him time to think and write, which is a good thing in view of the enormous waste that results from his dubious imprisonment.
This week Lord Black takes aim at the myth of American exceptionalism promoted in this recent Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnurus essay (Walter McDougall has examined the origins of this myth in detail in the first two books of his fine three-part series on American history). In challenging the myth, Lord Black takes dead aim at a common topic on this blog ñ the overcriminalization of American life:
The wages of this [Cold War] victory have included the stale-dating of the authorsí claim that America ìis freer, more individualistic, more democratic, and more open and dynamic than any other nation on earth.î It is more dynamic because of its size, the torpor of Europe and Japan, and the shambles of Russia.
But Americans do not do themselves a favor by not recognizing the terrible erosion of their countryís education, justice, and political systems, the shortcomings of U.S. health care, the collapse of its financial industry, the flight of most of its manufacturing, and the steep and generally unlamented decline of its prestige.
. . . Rampaging and often lawless prosecutors win 95 percent of their cases (compared to 55 percent in Canada), by softening the pursuit of some in exchange for inculpatory perjury against others, in the plea-bargain system. The U.S. has six to fourteen times as many imprisoned people as other advanced prosperous democracies, and they languish in a corrupt carceral system that retains as many people as possible for as long as possible. There are an astounding 47 million Americans with a ìrecord,î and the country glories with unseemly glee in the joys of the death penalty. Due process and the other guarantees of individual rights of the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments (such as the grand jury as any sort of assurance against capricious prosecution) scarcely exist in practice.
Most of the Congress is an infestation of paid-for legislators from rotten boroughs, representing the interests that finance their elections and exchanging earmarks with their colleagues like casbah hucksters. . . .
Lord Black can sure still turn a phrase — ìcasbah hucksters.î Ha!
No way to fight a war
Here we go again. U.S. military forces are put on the defensive because of what might be an unfortunate mistake in prosecuting the war against the Taliban.
When are we going to learn that fighting wars under unrealistic rules of engagement is a waste of time and precious resources?
A reasonable case can be made that the U.S. should not be conducting military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Similarly, a reasonable case can be made that such operations are necessary for the defense of the U.S.
But once the decision is made to commit military forces, no reasonable case can be made — particularly given the enormous difficulties faced— that U.S. Armed Forces should be constrained from winning the war by unrealistic rules of engagement.
If we are unwilling to stomach to do the dirty business that is necessary to win such wars, then we have no business getting involved in them in the first place. The defense summation in Breaker Morant brilliantly frames the issue in the context of Britain’s involvement in the Boer War:
A culture of abuse
The big legal news over the weekend is the Department of Justiceís decision not to recommend disciplinary proceedings against Cal-Berkeley law professor John C. Yoo and federal appellate Judge Jay S. Bybee for their participation in a series of DOJ memos that provided the dubious legal basis for the use of torture against enemy prisoners after the attacks of September 11, 2001. John Steele has done a great job of cataloging the blogosphereís reaction to the DOJís decision.
The DOJís report outraged Jack Balkin, who opined that ìthe standard for attorney misconduct is set pretty damn low, and is only violated by lawyers who (here I put it colloquially) are the scum of the earth. Lawyers barely above the scum of the earth are therefore excused.î On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal contends that the report vindicates Yoo and Bybee. Yoo provides his own defense here.
Although the DOJís report paints a fairly clear case of Yoo and Bybee providing a colorable legal cover for what the interrogation tactics that the Bush Administration wanted to pursue come hell or high water, that conduct is utterly unsurprising. The DOJ has been engaging in torture-like treatment over the past year of Allen Stanford, who is still awaiting trial. Similarly, the DOJ has regularly engaged in other astonishing abuses of power in connection with the prosecutions of Jeff Skilling, Jamie Olis and many others.
Our failure to hold governmental officials responsible for abuse of power toward our fellow citizens helped create the culture in which the leap to sanction torture against enemy combatants was a small one. That culture will be very difficult to change.
Lone Survivor
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I recently finished reading Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 (Little, Brown and Company 2009), Marcus Luttrell’s engrossing story of his experience in surviving a vicious battle against the Taliban in Afghanistan. I recommend the book highly to anyone who is interested in United States foreign policy.
Lone Survivor is not a great book. A substantial part of it – particularly the parts of Luttrell’s Navy SEAL training – are repetitive and unnecessary. Likewise, Luttrell’s political views are somewhat simplistic and do not add much to the story.
But Luttrell’s story is spot on in portraying the troubling problem that the U.S. Armed Forces face in fighting wars under rules of engagement that constrain doing what is necessary to accomplish the purpose of the war. During their mission, Luttrell and his squad mates had to make a key decision under the rules of engagement — and it was not even a clearly wrong one — that ultimately resulted in a disaster for the squad.
Luttrell’s story is also insightful from a cultural standpoint. After fending off over a hundred Taliban attackers in battle, Luttrell was ultimately saved by members of an Afghan community who decided to resist the Taliban. The cultural dynamics at play are as confusing as they are fascinating.
Should the United States be sending true American heroes such as Luttrell and his comrades into such a complicated cultural conflict under rules that hinder them from accomplishing the mission?
It is a question that should be much more difficult for our government’s leaders than it appears to be.
A better kind of security theater
The Reason.tv video below puts the Transportation Security Administration’s silly security theater policies in perspective, while Bruce Schneier provides another excellent post on the kind of security (including some security theater) that makes much more sense.
Is anyone in Washington, D.C. even listening?
Thinking about security theater
Given the Homeland Security Department and Transportation Security Administration’s typically over-the-top reaction (see also here) to the Christmas Day attempt to blow up a jet flying into Detroit from Amsterdam, one wonders at what point the government’s elaborate "security theater" will finally make flying so miserable that it will choke the life out of the U.S. airline industry? Professor Bainbridge provides a good roundup of the blogosphere’s discussion of that and related issues.
The latest incident also reminded me of this prophetic Bruce Schneier post from about a month ago. Schneier does the best job that I’ve read of explaining why a balance between legitimate and symbolic is helpful in deterring terrorism, but that most of Homeland Security’s security theater is utterly misguided, as well as a waste of time and resources.
The entire post is excellent, but two points he makes are particularly important.
First, Schneier observes that the governmental impulse "to do something" in response to an attack is mostly misdirected:
Often, this ‘something’ is directly related to the details of a recent event: we confiscate liquids, screen shoes, and ban box cutters on aeroplanes. But it’s not the target and tactics of the last attack that are important, but the next attack. These measures are only effective if we happen to guess what the next terrorists are planning . . . Terrorists don’t care what they blow up and it shouldn’t be our goal merely to force the terrorists to make a minor change in their tactics or targets . . .
Even more importantly, Schneier points out that the right kind of security theater — that is, the best way to counteract the damage that terrorism attempts to inflict upon all of us — is to act as if we are not scared of it:
The best way to help people feel secure is by acting secure around them. Instead of reacting to terrorism with fear, we — and our leaders — need to react with indomitability.
By not overreacting, by not responding to movie-plot threats, and by not becoming defensive, we demonstrate the resilience of our society, in our laws, our culture, our freedoms. There is a difference between indomitability and arrogant ‘bring ’em on’ ehetoric. There’s a difference between accepting the inherent risk that comes with a free and open society, and hyping the threats . . .
Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country’s way of life; it’s only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage.
Schneier is spot on. Rather than making air travel increasingly distasteful, Homeland Security and the TSA ought to be encouraging Americans to spit in the terrorists’ collective eye by traveling even more by air under reasonably tolerable and legitimate security arrangements.
Who Fears Freeing Whom?
In this lengthy NY Times Magazine piece from this past weekend, Andrew Meier decries the Russian government’s unjust prosecution and treatment of former Yukos chairman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky:
Many can’t quite embrace an oligarch as a prisoner of conscience. He is a titan who fell from favor, some say, not a dissident physicist or a novelist arrested for a subversive manuscript.
Whatever his sins, though, Khodorkovsky was not jailed for breaking the law. His courting of the Bush White House and pursuit of oil partners at home and abroad infuriated the Kremlin. But his gravest error was to challenge Putin.
The reason behind his imprisonment, Khodorkovsky claims, “is well known and widely discussed. It was my constant support of opposition parties and the Kremlin’s desire to deprive them of an independent source of financing. As for the more base reason, it was the desire to seize someone else’s efficient company.”
His motives may have been mercenary, but Khodorkovsky in his cell has come to embody the fiat of the state, its arbitrary and boundless power. To date, the authorities have brought charges against 43 former Yukos employees and associates, conducted more than 100 raids . . .
Meanwhile, the Times and most of the rest of the mainstream media have largely ignored — and often promoted — similar mistreatment and persecution of business executives in our own country.
Yeah, Russian criminal justice system is corrupt. America’s is far superior.