We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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There is an interesting article in the Virginian-Pilot called Gun shop owner sues ATF over reports. The owner of a gun shop in Virginia is suing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms because it has demand records of the shop’s used gun sales. The owner says the government is compiling a database of gun owners, which is strictly illegal. I particularly liked:
“While no one has accused me of committing a crime, they’re going on a fishing expedition, and I’m not going fishing with them,” Marcus said in a recent interview from his shop.
Excellent. The state can only tie liberty in knots if enough people are willing cooperate with it. Don’t cooperate.
Here are some insights sent in by Samizdata reader George Guttman. Agree or disagree, they are reasonable points to make:
So the father of American Taliban member John Walker says “he is just a 20 year old kid”.
Well so are the US Marines we have had to send to Afghanistan to protect ourselves from “kids” like that. Come on, take some responsibility.
Why is September 11th referred to as a “Tragedy?” Let’s call it what it was…A terroristic act of war…kinda puts an angle of reality on it.
Why is a US military tribunal “wrong” for foreign terrorists… when it is also what US military personnel face.
There is a great little observation on Instapundit noting the fact that militia is not automatically a dirty word to BigMedia(tm) anymore. A short but very interesting piece.
Whilst I understand what Dale Amon is saying and largely agree that the American public will be far more resolute now than has been the case since the Vietnam War, I think you should not underestimate the capacity of George Bush’s political enemies to make mischief.
If you think the likes of Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, Edward Kennedy, Charles Schumer et al. are going to stand resolutely by the President if large numbers of body-bags start coming home, then I think you vastly overestimate their attachment to the interest of American society as opposed to their own narrow political interests. What is more, there are large sections of the US media who will do their damnedest to undermine the Republican Party the moment they no longer think it will be commercial suicide to be seen as ‘unpatriotic’.
For all its many and varied flaws, the British media and the elements of the body politic that actually matter are wired rather differently. That is the reason I made those remarks in my earlier article.
Unlike many of the more inbred nitwits in the British media (i.e. the Daily Mail), I do not subscribe to the idea that all the US military’s special forces all have two left feet and that the United States will immediately recoil with horror at the first sight of American blood. I have lived in the USA on many ocassions and have met enough people in the SpecOps community that I know otherwise. I agree with you that Al Qaeda did a very good job of delivering aversion therapy to the US public regarding casualties. But do not underestimate the vipers within when things start to get messy. They will play the ‘bring the boys back home card’ the instant they they think can safely do so. Perhaps I am wrong about them, but I suspect otherwise.
Perry de Havilland raised a point that:
Bush presides over a nation which has a rather squeamish view of war, at least with regard to American casualties
Which is only true within a certain context. Americans don’t really much care to go off somewhere and die for their foreign policy. That is absolutely true. But Americans in defense of America are quite capable of sustaining terrible punishment without flinching. A documentary “The Battle of Midway” aired on the BBC last night and shows the levels of courage of our recruits and the levels of carnage that the home front will endure when we’re really pissed off.
It’s that damn libertarian streak in the country. We just won’t go marching off to die just because some damn fool has a flag and wants a parade.
That is al Qaeda’s mistake. They successfully moved their issues from the foreign policy arena (ho hum) to the personal. We took 9000 casualties (notice that no one in the media is giving casualties in the usual way, total dead and wounded?) in a matter of hours. I think you have to go back to Gettysburg to get numbers like this in a single day. They got our attention alright, but not in quite the way they had hoped for.
With 9000 casualties on our own territory, a few thousand more won’t phase us. We’re even mentally prepared for the possibility they might kill another 100,000 of us with a dirty little nuke. That would be a very bad idea on their part because then we’d REALLY be pissed off. It is not in the best interests of anyone on this planet for us to get that ticked off.
So no. We aren’t afraid of casualties when we are fighting for ourselves and for our right to live our own way in our own place. Those who have made the Japanese mistake are in for a severe lesson. When riled as a people, we are without a doubt the meanest, nastiest, hardest-assed sons of bitches on the planet, bar none.
…it is much, much worse.
Thomas M. Sipos writes from experience. He is an American attorney who has seen it all from the inside. His exposé article How to Make Money in Soft Tissue Injury makes compulsive reading. It is written in a style that rather reminds me of a less stoned version of Hunter S. Thompson: brutally cynical with an air of detached surrealism.
Highly recommended.
An article in the Sunday Times today suggests that Tony Blair is exasperated that his wish to see a major deployment of ground troops to Afghanistan is being ignored by George Bush.
Meanwhile, Blair has had no support from America in his efforts to increase the coalition forces on the ground. He is said by military sources to have become “utterly frustrated” that the US “cannot see that it can achieve its tactical goals more quickly is the military, humanitarian and diplomatic strands of this operation run in tandem”. Washington is “myopically focused on Bin Laden and the Taliban”, the sources said.
Sorry Tony, but whilst you and your new best friend George make a fine couple at photo opportunities, there is no disguising that there are two fundamentally different world views at work here.
Tony Blair is the leader of a reformed socialist party who regards it as axiomatic that the role of the state is being ‘my brother’s keeper’. By extension Blair wants to take up ‘The White Man’s burden’ in Afghanistan. He wants stout and resolute British soldiers to prevent those messy Afghans from sliding into barbarism in the post-Taliban order. He presides over a nation which has a realistic view of the realities of war and has fought its last few rather well. As a result, the general British public has quite a high tolerance of combat casualties.
George Bush is the leader of a corporatist capitalist party with a significant anti-corporatist and anti-interventionist wing. He has support for a war of retaliation and the destruction of Al Qaeda and anyone who stands between the USA and Al Qaeda. Bush presides over a nation which has a rather squeamish view of war, at least with regard to American casualties, and very little interest in open ended military commitments. Whilst images of women in Kabul walking unmolested without burqas causes Americans entirely justified satisfaction, few seriously think that is why their airforces and special ops teams are killing people in their names.
Blair is not just wrong, he is dangerously wrong. An absolute prerequisite for coherent military operations is having clear and unambiguous goals. The Americans have set themselves exactly that: the destruction of Al Qaeda and any who give them succour. What Tony Blair is doing is applying his fuzzy socialist logic to a very simple strategic question and attempting to turn clarity into ambiguity. This is not a peacekeeping operation, it is not a nation building operation, it is not a humanitarian operation, it is a war against Taliban/Al Qaeda in reprisal for the mass murder of civilians in America: to think anything else is just a dangerous distraction. As I have been saying, we simply have no business trying to civilize Afghanistan at bayonet point, not only it is wrong, it simply will not work. Fortunately it seems that Bush and his advisors are able to see that too.
I can forgive the fact that our intelligence personnel and police missed the bits and pieces that might have prevented 9-11. Despite the excellent hindsight of some writers, it really isn’t all that easy to put such together. Security and police around the world held pieces of the puzzle; but they did not share them because they did not know there was a puzzle. Some of the kamikaze war criminals crossed paths with law enforcement; but in a free society law enforcement does not breathe down the neck of every “suspicious” individual they run in to. Above all, no one… not me, not you, not the head of the CIA, not even Tom Clancy… could have imagined what was to come.
But my forgiveness has its’ limits. The following is simply beyond the pale, an inconceivable level of incompetence on the part of our public servants:
The Economist In the House of Anthrax
After the September 11th attacks, it was generally agreed that western intelligence agencies had failed through lack of “human intelligence”-men on the ground, as opposed to spy satellites and computers monitoring phone calls and e-mails. This failure was to be rectified. Yet since the fall of Kabul on November 13th, journalists have been fanning out across the city. They have stripped houses such as this one, and others directly connected to the al-Qaeda network, of all sorts of documents and other valuable evidence. These have included the names and addresses of al-Qaeda contacts in the West. For the West’s intelligence agencies, September 11th was Black Tuesday. There may be no words with which to describe their failure in the week since the fall of Kabul.
I would very dearly like an explanation why our multi-billion dollar intelligence service didn’t have anyone in those houses in Kabul before the media. Perhaps we should just replace the lot of them with the reporters. But what are we to do with all the failed spies then? Are any small towns perhaps in need of dogcatchers? Our ex-intelligence people might, just might be on the ball enough to find a lost dog if it’s big enough. And in a safe suburban Beltway neighborhood. In the middle of the street…
…with a dayglo “Stray Dog” sign hung around it’s neck.
I never thought that the US state which gave us the supreme statist elitist mouthpiece of Ted Kennedy would ever be worthy of anything other than derision and contempt, even from a resident of the “Socialist Republic of New Jersey”. Carla’s tea party clearly demonstrates I was wrong and I humbly apologize to the libertarian residents of Massachusets. Hail and well met!
I will be very curious to see how the mainstream media handles this tax revolt. Personally, I think they will treat it the same way they do most of the “Shall Issue” right to carry a concealed firearm legislation so popular in the US. Namely, avoid it as much as possible, then give it very minimal airtime during which you ignore all the great positives, vastly inflate the very small negatives, and spew dire warnings of calamity and anarchy. When the people get the law passed anyway and none of the horrendous predictions comes to pass, just pretend it never happened but work to get the law repealed by publishing every story of gun violence you can find, even if they occur in countries far removed culturally and geographically.
Think I’m making this up? At last count 33 of the 50 states have some form of “Shall Issue” legislation. Another 11 have a more restrictive form of carry laws. Only 6 absolutely forbid it. A show of hands, please, from those who learned that from the big media.
In the case of tax repeal, it will be interesting to see how the self serving career politicians supping at the trough of our tax dollars will argue that we need to keep the status quo. Look for a smoke screen of the beneficial state protecting society’s down-trodden and sheltering us all with its superior security.
It should be very enlightening.
Carla Howell’s group in Massachusetts have met the deadline! Over one hundred thousand Massachusetts voter signatures have been delivered to the Town Clerks for certification. The Second Boston Tea Party is brewing up strong and Samizdata will be keeping a close watch on this effort to end the Massachussetts income tax.
Today it’s Massachusetts. Tomorrow it will be other States. Her fire will spread to other states with Ballot Initiatives. Small Government really is a beautiful thing.
Even those of us not in the USA can celebrate a Thanksgiving Day for Carla’s accomplishment.
A Normal War Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has commented:
…almost every argument in favor of military tribunals invokes Johnnie Cochran, Alan Dershowitz, and the O.J. trial.
This may be the point of some but it is certainly not my argument. Enemy soldiers and leadership are not tried in civilian courts. The Bush Directive is rather lenient. In wartime a citizen who works for the enemy is tried for treason in a military court and then shot. The same is true for spies and saboteurs unless their continued existence is of use to the war effort. One need look no further than the fate of German agents who attempted to infiltrate England during the war.
They’re dead.
Under normal wartime practice, any al Qaeda found operating within the United States who are not in uniform and are found guilty of espionage or attempted or actual sabotage would be executed after a military trial. If the persons who attempted access to a West Virginia powerplant were caught, they would be tried as war time spies and sabatours. The persons distributing Anthrax in mail would also be liable to war time law and subsequent execution as sabateurs.
War isn’t a nice game. You play it rough and the stakes are your life.
Pundits seem to have very negative opinions about the recent Presidential Directive on legal jurisdiction. So much so I wonder if anyone has actually read the document. I have and I cannot find anything particularly damning. It places captured enemy forces under military rather than civilian law. The directive is carefully targetted at al Qaeda and only non-citizen al Qaeda at that. So why the fuss?
Perhaps the answer lies in history. The directive is quite a normal one for a country at war. It would once have seemed so obvious a need as to be hardly newsworthy. The difficulty is the United States has not fought a normal war, to an end condition of total victory, since World War II. That is over half a century ago. Most of those who would understand the necessity of it are retired or no longer with us.
Make no mistake, this is a war. The al Qaeda are our enemy every bit as much as the Nazi Party of Germany was our enemy. I cannot imagine Himmler and Goering being tried in front of a “normal” court; nor can I imagine bin Laden (assuming the lads who find him constrain themselves from carving him into Purina Pig Chow) being given a New York defense lawyer and allowed to fight a 10 year court battle. He and his people are not just ordinary killers. They are not just ordinary terrorists. They are the founders and leaders of a distributed military force that declared the annihilation of the United States as a religious duty. They have proven their words in deeds.
Given that bin Laden publicly declared war on America in 1996 and has since had his troops carry out military actions against the United States, it behoves us to treat those forces no differently than any other military force in any other war. That means captured soldiers are treated under the Geneva Convention. There is another side however. We will define certain members of al Qaeda not simply as terrorists, but as war criminals writ large. Even if we ignored every other attack by al Qaeda and called them normal military actions, even if we ignored evidence about TWA800; even if we ignored the thousands of African civilians killed and injured by the attacks on US Embassies… we are still left with September the 11th.
There is no doubt, under any sane interpretation, ramming large civilian airliners into giant civilian office towers while faced with a totally unpreperared populace is a war crime of an obscene magnitude.
Because al Qaeda operate as a co-ordinated and trained military force, much of the information we have on them comes via classified means rather than normal public criminal investigations. Criminals and mere terrorists can be tracked down and tried over time; an army must be dealt with differently. We know we cannot catch them all, at least not all at once. It behooves us to not allow yet to be captured enemy forces to learn from our court transcripts.
We simply cannot afford to hand them such valuable intelligence. If they understand our most secret technical means they can more readily avoid them; if they know our channels of information they can act to disrupt or inject false information into them; if they know our informers they will kill them.
A military tribunal is just right. The al Qaeda declared war; therefore they are enemy soldiers. We will try them with reasonable fairness and perhaps somewhat more mercy than they would give were the tables turned. But mark my words: those directly responsible, those directly in the chain of command that extends from the burning rubble of the World Trade Center to the caves of Afghanistan are going to swing at the end of a stout rope. It may take 10 years to round them up; but it will only take a few months to finish the job.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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