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]
|
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.
Carla Howell is near a breakthrough in Massachusetts that will go down in history as the Second Boston Tea Party. Her “Initiative to End the Income Tax in Massachusetts” has now succeeded in collecting and delivering 101,139 signatures to the various town clerks for certification. This is a wide enough margin to ensure success even if the Clerks were hostile to the measure. They need only pickup the certified lists from those 351 Town Clerks on December 3rd and deliver them all to the State House by December 5th. Words cannot express the gratitude owed to her and her team.
This initiative to abolish the Massachusetts state income tax will appear on the ballot in 2002. It will generate an enormous amount of national publicity. How could anyone ignore such chutzpah? That people would actually dare to not just roll back, not just cap, but to actually abolish a major tax?
We might actually win this one. It is a possibility. Very few citizens actually want to pay taxes. Hardly anyone ever votes for a politician who says they want to raise taxes. But until now, no one has ever had the opportunity to directly vote on it, to “Just Say No” to taxation.
Carla and her team have done a magnificent job. She is once again proving herself to be the most effective local libertarians in our entire quarter century history as a political party. But they need help. These things do not pay for themselves. If you want to help her to fight the good fight, you should make a donation now and as often as you can afford to.
Win, Lose or Draw, we can make this the turning point. The point at which the growth of the State is not just slowed but actually reversed.
It is up to you.
The fact that Bill Ayers was a Weather Underground member 30 years ago does not affect his right to express any view whatsoever. The Opinion Journal got it very wrong this time by coming out behind those who would prefer he just go away. True, his book and his expressed views are inappropriate and tasteless and bound to get a lot of people angy. That is not the issue.
The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States does not make exceptions for taste, timing or disagreeableness of content. So I think the Mary Ellen Keating from Barnes and Noble was spot on when she said:
Granted, we live in troubled times. The reprehensible acts of the terrorists were designed to promote fear, divisiveness, even hatred among fellow Americans. We cannot let them win. Removing Mr. Ayers’ book from our shelves or canceling a previously scheduled appearance is out of the question. To do so would be to give in to our fears, and ultimately to validate the position of our enemies.
If Mr. Ayers seems to be promoting blowing up buildings as a means of change, then we are free to stand outside with signs and express dissent. We are free to not buy his book. Those who feel so inclined are free to complain to Barnes and Noble (as some have done) and to take their business elsewhere if they so chose.
But from where I sit, Mary Ellen has a better understanding of what a free country is about than do the complainers. As I have said before, “A flag you can not burn is not worth fighting for”.
That is the difference between us and ‘them’.
An article in Wired reports a victory against the ‘forces of darkness’ with a US court refusing to allow the French state to impose Internet restrictions across the world. Does this mean I think wacko groups like the KKK or Nazi historical fantasists are ok? No I don’t. However I do not want my judgement and prejudices to have force of law, unlike the lawyer for the forces of statist authoritarianism, Stephane Lilti.
“If this ruling, which we will appeal against in the United States, is upheld, it will give total impunity to all those who seek technological asylum in the United States,” Stephane Lilti told Reuters. “This would make America a haven for all types of people on the extreme right and racists … for us French it will be extremely difficult to ensure our justice system’s decisions are respected because we will be dealing with someone who can take refuge in a U.S. computer.”
Excellent. Every time we can make a repressive law in France or anywhere else unworkable, the light of liberty shines a little brighter across the entire world. Why should anyone respect the French justice system’s decisions to repress free speech? Notice Lilti does not seem to worry about ‘the extreme left’. I guess this means a post to the Internet in support of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot is just fine by him.
What force advocating statist lawyers like Lilti do not choose to realise is that the best way to destroy irrational buffons like the KKK is not by forcing them underground but by actually shining the light of day on them. Let them out into the open where everyone can see what preposterous little people they are by reading their own words… sort of like the way Stephane Lilti is exposed by his words as a noxious enemy of liberty who rails in fury against the rest of the world’s refusal to be a party to the repression of French internet users.
As Sinead O’Connor put it in a song:
Though their own words.
they will be exposed,
they’ve got a severe case
of the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’
So I would like to raise my glass to all you technological asylum seekers, yearning to speak free…the brave ones, the oppressed ones, the articulate ones and yes, even you stupid hateful ignorant ones.
And to those who would gag us, censor us and unplug us… fuck you
An interesting article by Saritha Prabhu, who give an nice perspective on what the war against terrorism actually means to ‘the man in the street’ in The Tennessean.
Living in an affluent western society it is easy to forget that for most of the rest of the world, when a war suddenly comes snarling across your border it is not something you only get ‘feel’ by watching the BBC or CNN.
There is an interesting Boston Herald article about the draconian plans to, in effect, declare martial law in the USA in the event of a bioweaponized attack of smallpox.
Probably the best computer game yet made is Deus Ex, in which you, the player, take on the role of J. C. Denton, an ‘enhanced’ agent of uncertain background and shifting loyalties.
Initially you start out as a good little statist secret policeman working in the USA and supporting FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (which actually does exist in real life) as it tries to distribute vaccine to key people as a terrible disease ravages New York city in the near future… and fighting against the ‘terrorist’ bad guys who for some reason are trying to thwart FEMA. Eventually you end up working for these self same ‘terrorists’ and fighting against your previous employer when it turns out that the plague is really just an excuse for FEMA to mastermind a coup d’etat, suspend all civil rights and take over the US government.
Read the Boston Herald article and then ask yourself…is reality starting to take it’s lead from computer games? Scary thought.
Deus Ex is a superb game. Unlike most ‘first person shooters’ in which you interact with people mostly by shooting them, in Deus Ex you have to actually talk to them (and of course some you do indeed end up shooting). This is a game which actually has characters expressing political and moral views, from mystical totalitarianism to cynical statism to well armed libertarianism! Also, how many other computer games do you know of in which during a visit to Paris, you can find yourself being subjected to a believably idiotic existentialist argument? Likewise, whilst stealing some weapons from an arms dealer’s house, if you click on a book next to his bed you will find yourself reading a chapter of Common Sense by Tom Paine. Elsewhere, you may or may not encounter two utterly incidental characters who are clearly very closely based on The Story of O. This is a superb and intelligent game that does not treat the player like an ignoramus.
However let’s hope it is not also an accurate vision of the future!
|
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.
|
