I'm glad Uber has been locked out of New York City. Good!
They long had troubles with regulators -- because you need to be licensed and approved by the tax authorities. There have been problems both with murder of unregulated limo drivers and murder or robbery of passengers, and regulation of drivers is a good thing to have.
Throughout this saga has been the snotty assholery of the founder of Uber, using the usual geekitude and literalism to try to Fisk his way out of regulation:
Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, rejected criticisms that the
service violated city rules against prearranged yellow-taxi rides.
“Prearrangement means it’s basically on behalf of a base,” he said in an
interview. “We’re not working with a base.”
Supposedly peer-to-peer means that "there is no base," but of course the arranger of the peer-to-peer system *is* the base, duh.
I also find utter, total bullshit this idea that some industries "need" distruptiong and that some assholes from Silicon Valley "get to" disrupt them -- and never suffer disruption themselves.
Guess what Uber, the market called, and its disrupting *you*, now.
Yes, the market.
The logic of all the geeks snottily writing on this topic is that somehow evil monopolies are working to keep out these nimble, bright, clever geeky guys working with apps who might charge a little more but have this great disruptive idea for an over-regulated sulky market that "needs" disrupting. (The great geek philosopher Paul Carr has recently written a piece on Pando Daily questioning the whole concept of "disruption").
The problem with the "monopoly" concept or the "need" for more competition is that there already is a market FULL of competitors. Outsiders tend to think of the medallions issued by the Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC) as a monolith. But obviously all those people with medallions compete *with each other*. There already is a slew of competition -- yellow taxis with other yellow taxis, limousines with limousines, and already the illegal or semi-legal jitneys in places like Coney Island and the Bronx.
The TLC doesn't endlessly hand out medallions because then the market would overflow with new immigrants looking to make a buck, or new college graduates or journalists out of a job and needing to feed their families, and they would endlessly drive around taking a few fares, but not enough to pay the rent on their medallion.
Flooding a market isn't freeing a market; dumping is not a free market, either. While Silicon Valley may see "protectionism" in this ecology, and that's their prerogative, to the people living in this ecology it's how you keep the market in fact free -- free from outsiders so diluting it as to make it cease functioning as a viable market.
Markets are a balance, and while there is naturally and endless supply of immigrants looking for entry-level jobs without a lot of skills and even limited language requirements, there isn't an endless supply of geeks with big ideas from Silicon Valley trying to "disrupt" a market. Most geeks stay inside apps in iphones and don't get out to the real world.
Obviously "sheltering" a thriving ecosystem of numerous competitors from what amounts to dumping isn't the same kind of "misguided anti-competitive" policy that oh, Apple i-phone maintains in the smart phone market, eh? LOL. But ultimately Ygelsias mkes it seem like the TLC is the "problem" that needs "reform" or that it can change its rules and is therefore arbitrary. (Matthew is also upset that the world isn't rolling over immediately for computer-driven driverless cars that really aren't at all proven as safe, or not conceding that the jobs related to America's car industry and promotion of people driving their own individual cars are things worth saving to avoid worsening the recession.)
But here's my main complaint about all this:
New York is a city of immigrants and people "in between jobs" more than many others. And the cab industry is where they find the jobs. Buying a medallion costs a fortune, and renting the taxi for the day from a medallion owner is something like $125 or $150 a day now, which means you work to pay your rent the first few hours of every day. It's a tough business, as I have had relatives in it. Some then graduate out to the limousine business, which has a little better working conditions -- it's really the limousine business that Uber competes directly with, not the yellow cabs. And then there are still jitney cabs in some remote areas that fill the gap between the last subway and buses that never come, and people's homes -- and they also serve the poor neighborhoods taxis won't go into.
So the ecology of cabs in NYC is very, very full. There are numerous car services and limos or "black cars" already working on the principle of being called by phone and charged on an expense account with just a number, or using a credit card. The streets are filled with cabs already although you "can never get one when you need it" or so it seems (it's gotten better as the price has gone up).
So enter Uber, which is unregulated and competing with immigrants and others fiercely trying to make a living for their families. Whatever the "monopolies" and "industries crying out for disruption" that elites from Silicon Valley see in this situation, the real situation is one where city authorities protect the ecology of immigrants trying to make a living -- and protect it fiercely, through the TLC. They protect the investment -- hundreds of thousands of dollars -- that medallion owners have alread made in this industry. It's a symbiosis everyone is happy with.
Silicon Valley is always telling us they are making "a better world". Why is it better to throw immigrants out of jobs and destroy the investment of medallion owners, themselves often immigrants who worked their way up?
The Uber customers -- Silicon Alley types who love apps and have big expense accounts and need drivers to ferry them home for their bar hopping -- well, they can only elicit resentment. It's the same problem we face with Silicon Valley everywhere we turn: why do they give jobs only to people overseas? Why do they give jobs only to their own very selective guild class? And here they go again -- giving fares to their own imported app-run service. Why can't their geeks at Twitter and Google and all the other start-ups in Silicon Alley take the cabs and limousine car services we already have in this city, give them their custom, and help the economy instead of just drain from it? Isn't it enough that we already pay hundreds of dollars for their gadgets?
Yes, it's protectionism of sorts -- although not in the caricature that the geeks portray it as. It's protectionism of an existing market FULL of competition. OVERFULL of competition. And the TLC here, whatever its evils, isn't so much a problem as an enabler of people's *livelihoods*.
Geeks would like to portray Uber as crashing up against some evil imperialist and bureaucratic city system protecting only evil rich and power guys somewhere -- they always invoke that sort of socialist class-war claim, even as capitalists.
But the people they are harming are new immigrants and college kids and unemployed people who just lost their jobs. Go away, Uber, keep it on the Internet -- which has already done enough damage to this town.
The idea for indicting the Iranian autocrat Ahmedinajad for his incitement of genocide of the Israeli people has been around for awhile.
It was well-articulated in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal in May 2012 by Robert Bernstein, once chair of Human Rights Watch and now head of his own organization, Advancing Human Rights, which seems to be more even-handed that HRW about how Israel and the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East are addressed; a lawyer Stuart Rabinowitz who has worked on human rights missions; and Irwin Cotler, former attorney general of Canada who has long been a defender of human rights.
This idea has been discussed a fair amount in both Jewish communities and various human rights groups. Jewish groups are divided on it as they are on many issues now. Human rights groups, including HRW, tend to disagree with making this a priority, because they fear it sounds too much like suppressing free speech, even repugnant speech, which is what the Iranian mullahs do.
They also fear that the vague nature of the threat might not constitute an actual "incitement of imminent violence" -- under the Supreme Court definition in Brandenburg v. Ohio -- and that in an international court, it wouldn't stand up, and therefore weaken the cause of censuring Ahmedinajad and would undermine Israel's efforts to defend itself legitimately.
People argue whether Ahmedinajad even ever said such a thing, but that's entirely not the issue, as he is on the record, in public, at the UN, again and again, advocating viciously against Israel, to the point that all the Western nations walk out. There's no question Iran under its present leadership would like to see Israel sink into the sea as it is now and instead be taken over by Palestinians.
What court could try such a theoretical genocide incitement case? The International Criminal Court has dealt with verbal incitement to genocide in regard to Rwanda, but it's only one case, and not really what the ICC tends to focus on. Neither Iran or Israel signed the ICC statute.
The human rights authors suggest various creative steps on how this could be done at the ICJ, or via the Security Council:
Such precedents should lead state parties to the Genocide Convention to
file complaints against Iran—which is also party to the
convention—before the International Court of Justice. Member states
should also request that the U.N. Security Council pass a resolution
condemning Iran's incitement to genocide. They should also request that
the council refer the matter to the prosecutor of the International
Criminal Court, who can indict Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and their
collaborators, as it has Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. This threat
of criminal prosecution should be added to existing diplomatic and
economic pressures meant to deter terrorism and nuclear-weapons
development by Tehran.
The ICJ is probably the only theoretically possible way this could be done, but of course, it opens the door to countries bringing frivolous suits against Israel to the ICJ which they've loved to do and have tried to do in the past.
The UN Security Council will not refer anything of this nature as it is too divided. The UNSC can't even agree on what to do about Syria with the permanent members Russian and Chinese casting vetos that favour Syria, and various fellow travelers among the elected members chiming in. The UNSC could never get to the point now of even referring the Syria case -- far more real and atrocious than the still-theoretical Ahmedinajad incitement -- so it won't make up its mind to act on indicting Ahmedinajad. It's rare for the SC to deal with individuals in this fashion in any event.
Each day that Israel isn't sunk into the sea by Iran of course makes Ahmedinajad seem as if he didn't have "incitement to imminent violence" but just a general sort of hate -- the kind that can "pass" under a Brandenburg reading -- like indeed the anti-Muslim hate video that sparked unrest around the Middle East and was seized on as an item for the Obama Administration to apologize for.
Even so, I'm all for continuing to think how this could be done and perhaps even attempting it -- but first after sitting down and really gaming out how the opposition will address it. All it takes to diminish the good idea of gaining accountability for the I-ranter is for the usual suspects to decide that when Obama says it's time for Assad to go, he's "inciting genocide," too, because he is bolstering the false hope of the opposition in Syria that the US and the world will come to their aid and help them get rid of Assad -- instead of standing idly by while they get slaughtered. This really bears thinking through.
The point that Romney is really making, however, isn't so much the literalism of this particular case -- as the Iranian leader could be indicted -- and is eminently indictable in an ideal world -- for lots, lots more, involving jailing, torturing and killing his own people and harming Jews within his own country. What he's saying is that we need to think of ways besides "killing our way out" of the conflicts in the Middle East and think of ways to get the Islamic world to cease the embrace or the tacit approval of violence. That means articulating right and wrong so that it becomes part of the international vernacular. So this means instead of cutting international broadcasting, we should be increasing it and making it better, and it means other kinds of "soft war" interventions like circumvention technology, helping dissident groups get published, and so on. The sort of thing Bernstein has attempted on a relative shoestring with support of cyberdissidents.org which could be supported at a grander level if a new Administration focused on it.
Americans love to watch the British parliamentary debates on television, because the Prime Minister comes in for such a rumble when he comes out and faces all the wigged members of parliament. There are more than two parties, of course, and there is a richness and drama of debate that we never have in our Congress.
The presidential elections seem to be the closest thing to this peppering of the prime minister of questions -- finally -- given that Obama just doesn't "do" press conferences and doesn't debate so much as name-call and "fact-check" and "opp-research" through these encounters -- not debating different ideas and strategies, but spending time on emotional anecdotes, or trying to play "gotcha" with Romney and claiming he is "all over the map".
What I got a sense of from the Romney campaign here was that they are willing to come up with some different ideas to do something about Iran other than just fret about its bomb. The indictment of Ahmedinajad may not be the best or most practical idea, but they should keep them coming as we do need a variety of ways to deter Iran and make it possible for moderates to be encouraged and to succeed.
Of course it can. Its algorithms and mechanics means that virtually on any topic, it throws up Wikipedia as the first result, and that tilts to the left.
It also throws up the most highest-traffic blogs on many searches, and those are its own favoured tech blogs and the world of nerds like Reddit, TechCrunch and such.
A writer named Robert Endle goes further and believes that Google is really cooking the results because Eric Schmidt has to make a deal with Obama to win the trade wars with Apple and have Obama stop anti-monopoly probes by the FTC...or something. That sounds far-fetched but I don't know, I think he's right that Google can and does throw elections and doesn't even know its own power.
The Times has a ridiculous piece by a guy claiming to already predict the outcome of the elections based on people's searches. What is the source for this "aggregated, anonymous" market research? In which states? With what samples? With what error or bias?
I don't think that a search with "KKK" and "Obama" after the elections in 2008 is necessarily all by KKK members -- I can't believe they operate like that. I think it's more likely worry about what the KKK might do, and an effort to see if they had done anything yet.
Google does throw elections -- with things like what Dan Savage did to Rick Santorum's name, turning it into an obscenity because he didn't like his anti-gay views and felt therefore he deserved to have every search of his name turn up first a gay obscenity. Well, why does he get to do that?! Google throws up its hands and says it can do nothing about what "the people" want to do, which is to link to this stuff. But they link it because it's there to link, and most people coming to the page are not looking for that, but for information. Finally Google seems to have turned a corner and changed that.
Interestingly, just as Google is being scrutinized as a thrower of elections, it is stumbling financially.
Although, you wouldn't know it from TechCrunch, as the stories of Google's loss of 20% value of its stock the other day (!) -- $24 billion! -- rapidly got pushed down beneath an avalance of first snarky posts and then glowing positive reports about all the wonders of Google in their report.
You have to go to the mainstream media like the Daily Mail to see the starker version of the story about the printing screwup and the share loss. (But it isn't really about the printing issue, as the report was going to have to report losses in spite of analysts' expectations anyway).
Why did Google do poorly? Well, the Daily Mail tells you: "However, analysts blamed the poor performance on Google's $12.5billion (£8billion) acquisition of Motorola, the struggling cellphone manufacturer which has been left behind by its more fashionable rivals."
Obviously, Google loved having a piece of hardware it could call its own in every person's hand, and not just have their OS on a phone they didn't totally control -- and of course they want mobile search and mobile ads.
Then there's this, a complaint from those trying to SEO themselves into fortunes:
Webmasters will say because Google's search results are less relevant, driving less searches and less clicks on ads. Well, the earnings release says that paid clicks were up 33%.
But a guy in the comments called "Google Is Rigged" explains it better:
In short Google is f-cked, they rigged search, filled it with fraudulent ads and there's very little else they can do now. Dear Webmasters: All your lost traffic is going to Google Adwords, shifted by the Google crooks little by little since Mayday.
I need more information on that, because I don't know if in fact Google is guilty of putting fraudulent ads in search now, but THAT they have more ads in search results when they said they were never going to do that seems to be the case.
TechCrunch, as I said, is really a challenge to wade through to find these stories of the 20% loss 3 days ago. There's page after page of Google fluff stories to positively spin the behemoth -- Youtube campaign to help nonprofits; Google ventures hires its first designers in residence, "a small but interesting update to its Knowledge Graph panel" -- even "Google CEO Larry Page Puts Focus On Multiscreen Experiences With Chrome, Google+ And Advertising " and "Larry Page To Google’s Investors: “You Should All Run Out And Buy The Nexus 7 For $199? " and "Google’s Mobile Run Rate Is Now $8 Billion, Up From $2.5 Billion A Year Ago" and "Google Adds 25 Million New Building Footprints To Google Maps On Desktop And Mobile" -- all not contrasted with this big loss.
To be sure, there were stories on the stock dive here and here, but again, with the story that revenue is up even with net income down -- as if that's somehow a saving grace. TechCrunch came up with this interesting information that is virtually impossible to find from Google's own "about" on its website as I've often complained on G+:
Yet, Motorola is a burden as well as Motorola records a $527 million GAAP operating loss. The acquisition added 20,293 employees. At that time, it represented a 59 percent increase in Google’s total headcount. Google reports 53,546 full-time employees as of September 30 compared to 54,604 as of June 30. Google directly employs 36,118 people, and 17,428 employees are in Motorola’s business unit. Google has cut around 1,000 jobs in a quarter, with Motorola taking a big hit.
So Google only has only 53,456 employees? As I've often said, these tech giants so influencing our lives don't create jobs, and keep their revenue abroad so they don't have to pay taxes here, they really are destructive. And here it turns out that Google only *directly* employes 36,000 plus, and the rest are in the failing Motorola unit that could be cut further.
Then there's more stumbling lately with Google, and it isn't clear how it will end: Brazil ended its relationship of having newspapers in Google, and France is in a wrangle with Google over the same issues. There's this idea that Google search ads to traffic for newspapers. Except it doesn't. There's a complaint then that the newspapers want to be paid for the use of their content, even snippets, and Google refuses this, claiming fair use -- but then of course, they get the ad revenue on the search with the side clicks, and the newspaper doesn't! People don't get past the snippets!
So Google has really pissed of its SEO or "Webmaster" ecosphere, and pissed of old media content providers, the newspapers. Where will it end?
The question is whether the stumbling Google becomes more desperate to throw the elections. There's no question that Obama would be more friendly to them than Romney. Yet another reason to vote for Romney to keep Google from growing too powerful and threatening our freedoms.
I continue to comment on the Benghazi here on this blog instead of one of my other geographical or institutional blogs because I continue to feel it's about information, media, the spectacle and the Wired State, i.e. about how -- as the Russians would put it -- the Obama Administration is using "administration resources" to stay in power.
So I greeted with skepticism the news from Josh Rogin at The Cable that Daryl Issa -- beloved by the progs when he opposed SOPA/PIPA with libertarian glee, but now hated if he opposes Obama -- had dumped dox and harmed people.
That is, not because I don't believe dumping documents and doxing people, i.e. outing their identity online, is something to support in the name of "transparency" -- I don't see that it always is, and I don't buy the line that forced transparency is really transparency.
Rather, I have to wonder whether Josh Rogin, so piously reporting this alleged immorality, was as even-handed with WikiLeaks as he is with a figure on the right. I don't recall him fretting about harm to WikiLeaks sources.
Of course, there's some very important differences here, and it's not about -- as one annoyance in the comments claims, the difference between an elected congressman and a foreign organization -- um, an anarchists' collective, to be more precise.
WikiLeaks incited and enabled the theft of classified documents, and while they claimed to have warned State and given them the option to redact names, and they claimed to have worked with newspapers to redact names, the reality is, they didn't -- with thousands and thousands of documents, even before their ex-colleague dumped them in a fit of pique. For this, that German ex-Wikileaks guy can't really be blamed that much, because Assange had evidently at one point -- remember? -- enabled anyone to download the encryped zipped file that he was going to release the password to if "something happened" to him i.e. if he was facing imminent arrest or something.
Issa, on the other hand, lawfully received documents that were vouchsafed to him not as top secret but as "sensitive" during the Congressional hearing, and gave them a wider audience. That might be overstepping his understood or even legal bounds, but it isn't the crime of theft and exposure that WikiLeaks committed, for the ever-vigilant moral equivalency squad.
To be sure, I don't know exactly what Issa accomplished with this dump, and whether the charges against him that he was playing politics to harm Obama in the debates and the elections might stick. I haven't studied them but I don't see (yet) what is any sort of smoking gun here that would stick Obama -- who is already looking bad enough just with his failure to call Benghazi "a terrorist attack," as Romney rightly pointed out in the debates.
Then there's this. To hear Rogin tell it, the people whose identity is exposed are people who are providing sensitive information to the US government and face irreparable harm if they are shown to be doing so.
But wait. Benghazi is supposed to be "a stronghold of the opposition" to Qaddafi, whom we helped. Moreover, Libya is supposed to be sorry about what happened to our diplomats, and is supposedly happy to have us there. It's supposedly dealing with Al Qaeda, which is exaggerated, supposedly, even though there are "500 militias", at least some of which seem to be aspiring AQIM franchises.
So I'm not getting this. If a Libyan port contractor is helping with opening the port, and his identity as merely doing his job is exposed, and with the supposedly conquering-hero beloved Americans, where's the harm? I mean, if Libya is doing as well as we're supposed to believe in the first place, from Obama and other Administration officials.
In other words, it's only in a grimly dangerous environment with AQ behind every bush that we could be cowering about people's identities exposed, like a women's rights activist. Oh, so that in fact is what we're dealing with? Dangerous, vengeful terrorists? Maybe it wasn't a place to try to open up hospitals?
So, yeah, I'm not happy with Issa burning those people -- but I'm wondering if they are really burned, and I'm wondering how they *can* be burned if everything is so wonderful in Libya!
Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist, has a post up at his blog about the two or three screens people are using to consume media or interact online during major events like the presidential debates.
I had three screens and several windows going, and I wonder if the continuous partial inattention -- as I call it! -- in fact makes comprehension suffer, but then, there's always that replay instantly available on Youtube. So really what happens is you might have three screens with continuous partial attention, but you take another hour reading all the recaps and blogs and viewing the videos again to make up for that inattention!
On the 4th of the July, when I snapped this photo of my daughter, I realized that our picnic at my son's house was involving the three screens. There was the TV he had in that rental for the summer -- we don't have one at home. It was tuned to Discovery Channel, and there was a show on about the Titanic explorations undersea which we were watching. Then he had his laptop out and ended up putting on a Youtube song he wanted me to hear, and the sound was turned off the TV, which I believe had captions anyway, and then we had the Youtube and the Discovery channel. My daughter was constantly looking at her iphone and IMing her friends and yet somehow responding to Titanic, the song, and the "live room chat," if you will. I hardly bothered with my own phone -- I just am not in the habit of holding my phone and checking it all the time.
We had our picnic with hotdogs and chips and pickles and lemonade and beer, danced, looked at other Youtubes, watched some other History Channel program and went for a walk along the river. I'm not sure two screens or even three screens enhance people's interactions at all. They may chop them up and blenderize them.
For the debates at home, we don't have a TV. So we had a laptop propped up with one of the mainstream news sites (ABC wasn't loading so I think it was NBC), and then I also had Youtube/politics loaded on my desktop, and then I had Twitter going in the other window, and also Google to look up things like the Rose Garden speech on Benghazi in yet another window. I also had my cell phone that is sending Facebook updates to the screen -- but that was definitely in the background as I don't like arguing with friends on Facebook, such as they are, about politics, because friends of friends are the absolute nastiest people in the metaverse I have found.
Youtube/politics had the feature of a running twitter stream with its own hashtag, which is a bit annoying as it takes up space and you have to add #debates yourself, but the advantage is that it gave a running ticker of everyone's thoughts who were tweeting while watching Youtube. Youtube isn't exactly the New York Review of Books. There's a lot of what are snottily called by the left now "low information voters" there. But you do learn interesting things by watching these more ordinary people who aren't the geeks on the main platforms dominating everything i.e. Facebook on TechCrunch or Reddit.
You discover, for example, that there are blacks who are supporting Romney. Imagine, a fact never reported anywhere. You find those soccer moms or Wal-mart coupon clippers who far from being undecided are in fact supporting Romney and vigorously informed on all the answers to the "fact-checkers". I tweeted something about how Ledbetter was only a lawsuit to seek equality, not the same thing as an ERA, and I had a bunch of Wal-mart moms in the south with Tea Party insignia immediately reweeting me. There's the ubiquitous left that is part of ubiquitous computing, and you see how much they merely retweet and cut and paste and don't think for themselves-- and they imagine the people in the flyover states are stupid. The way in which the left clung to their silly binders' meme -- like their lame Big Bird meme -- even as the right was earnestly debating the real politics of the US in Libya was very telling.
Anyway, Youtube/politics hung, too, frustratingly, although I don't think it had as much traffic as in the first debate. I had to try to get CNN working, and with the raw feed cameras for both candidates it was confusing. At one point I got tired of all the screens and went to lay down, secure in the knowledge that I could get an instant set of clips of the whole thing somewhere, as it happened, it was CNN that had them first.
I got back fortunately to watch live the scene where Romney and Obama, each armed with their opp research, duked it out over Benghazi and Candy Crawford revealed her hand as biased media by stumping for Obama, then lurched around trying to defend Romney to balance herself.
Then I spent an hour looking at every site from Mother Jones to Breitbart to see what they were all saying to see who had "won" -- and of course, some media were trying to force popularity of #Romneywinning and #Obamawinning like they were all Charlie Sheen.
I don't know if I am really better informed today watching debates in the new media set-up than I was in 1976 when Prof. Marshall McLuhan gave us an interesting assignment at the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto.
We had to split into two groups -- one half would listen to the Carter-Ford debates on the radio, and the other on TV, and then we would meet back the next day in the living room of the old mansion facing Queen's Park where the Centre was located to discuss who we felt had won. I opted for radio, as again, we didn't have a TV. I thought Ford had won because Carter's southern accent, the further north you got, seemed to work against him. But my friend who saw the debate on TV, and an ad for Carter sitting back on his porch in a rocking chair as if he were down home folks found him appealing, and found Ford bureaucratic. In any event, we were witnessing how the media is the message and -- it still is, even as the screens multiply.
Sure, more press conferences, closing Guantanamo and such could all be doable in Obama II -- but then there's some really bad ideas, like the off-mike pledge to Medvedev that after he was elected, he'd have more latitude and could reach arms agreements with Putin. Bleh.
So I started thinking there's a lot of things that just have to be done differently -- and that's why we need a new president and that's why I'm voting for Romney. I do hope he hits all these topics hard at the next debate. In each and every case, he can distinguish himself from Obama. There's still ethnic votes to be won over. There are still religious votes to be won over. There are human rights and freedom votes to be won over.
China - Don't be scared at all the nervous nellies complaining about the call-out of currency manipulation -- it's been done before and it's OK to do with a country to whom we are so much in debt. Debtors have leverage over creditors in the world system. Raise human rights issues, from jailing of dissidents to forced one-child policy and censorship of the Internet -- and the hacking of our companies and government sites. Raise pointedly that 100,000 Chinese students and professors, many children and relatives of the elites, are in this country as a privilege, not a right, and while we would like to encourage exchange, it has to be mutual. Point out that the Chen story almost didn't end well, and raised troubling questions about how protective the US will be in making good its promises of caring about human rights. Chen's relatives are still being persecuted.
Ratched back the military pivot -- why are we sending gunships to the China Sea to their patch instead of sending home Chinese students if we develop severe problems with the Chinese? I mean, it really is that simple. If they want the goods of our society -- educational, technical know-how, prestige, culture -- then they have to stop harming us.
Iran -- the red line of an inevitable military response if Israel is attacked should be enunciated clearly, along with a determination to work with the international community to try to deter Iran in every way. Engagement doesn't work. We're lucky we got our hikers out but Iran continues its war on its own people with massive numbers of beatings, arrest, torture, killings. Raise human rights issues as an integral part of the policy. Stress that Obama was reluctant to meet with human rights activists and didn't openly support them, which made them vulnerable.
Israel - Cease the pressure on settlements which didn't work anyway -- it was never balanced and it's not really the issue -- when there's peace, settlements will be dealt with. Instead, put the pressure on the terrorists who run Palestine, and condemn violence, authoritarianism, and terror on their part publicly. Establish the red line about the response if Israel is attacked and rather than parsing whether to pre-emptively strike and how and when, instead focus together on isolating and pressuring Russia as the lynchpin to make pressure on Iran -- which it never does and must be compelled to make if it doesn't want a military strike in this region near its sphere of influence.
Saudi Arabia -- End the love affair.
Egypt -- make aid contingent on good behaviour.
Russia -- this is a major area where Obama is weak and wrong. Stress support for the Magnitsky Act, to provide sanctions for impunity in human rights violations. Note that Obama and his supporters such as Sen. John Kerry have inexplicably failed to back this simple piece of legislation that only affects a list of some 60 officials, and isn't any kind of blockade of Russia. Urge that JacksonVanik's application be retired, but Magnitsky put in place. Note the expulsion of USAID with nary a whisper from the US government, and note the appalling spectacle of 40 Radio Liberty staffers in Moscow being fired and hustled out of the office by security. This image is the epitome of the Obama accommodationism and should be highlighted vividly. Re-hire the 40 and station them in the Baltic republics or Prague and make sure all radio broadcasting remains both impartial and critical regarding Russia and ends the Obama-era apologetics and accommodationism. Re-purpose the USAID funds to NED, Freedom House, IBB, etc. with a focus on Internet freedom. Say that arms controls agreements have to be based on trust, and the Russians had just ended a long-time program to verify dismantling of nukes that certainly doesn't add to trust. As for the Czech radar stations and Polish missiles, note that these may have to be revived given the outright threat from Russian generals to bomb any US placements in Europe pre-emptively if they thought Iran would be bombed.
NATO -- don't expand it, it's not worth it.
OSCE -- keep funding levels, and work toward expulsion of Belarus and membership of Afghanistan.
Syria -- Stress Russia's complete and total ownership of the mass crimes against humanity in Syria, recipient of $1 billion in Russian aid, and direct all calls for overflights, safe zones, action, etc. to Russia, and tell the EU that they must pressure Russia. The US will not go behind its existing three wars with Muslim countries, even if one is "over" and the other two are winding down. The US supports Turkey in whatever it decides to do.
Afghanistan - Stick to the timetable, and open up discussions about having a chapter 7 UN peace-keeping mission, as the notion that the Afghan army can keep its own security has not proven true.
Central Asia -- Stress the danger to the countries neighboring Afghanistan, where there is also US engagement and some military presence because of the need to ferry in supplies and get heavy equipment out during the draw-down due to the need for routes alternative to Pakistan. Opportunities were lost under Obama by too much obsequiousness to these dictators, and a more balanced approach is in order, especially given that with Turkmenistan, keeping quiet on human rights didn't even work to get US oil companies partnerships with the regime.
Sudan -- Obama has been strangely weak on Africa, given his connection to Kenya, and seems to have followed both the "progressive" or socialist line about "Africa for Africans" and also the line of the 1960s through 1980s black liberation movements that any African leader must be supported even if a tyrant because he would represent a victim of imperialism. Ask Amb. Rich Williamson for a detailed plan for both Sudan and South Sudan and to explain everything that went wrong with Obama's first appointee who catered to the Sudanese regime too much.
Africa -- there is much, much to be doing in Africa from the DRC even to Kenya. The Obama Administration has upped aid deliveries without upping rhetoric for rights and against corruption and crime.
Haiti -- it's terrible that this tiny country on our shores, connected to us with so many emigres, should be so neglected. Get the inspiration and engagement going again to try to help Haiti turn the corner.
Mexico - Is it time to think of real military assistance to the Mexican government to combat drug cartels? Or perhaps an international police force through the UN? OK, I'm thinking out loud here and they're not very good ideas. But I can't think of a greater real threat to our country than these tons of drugs destroying our people and cities, and the violence south of the border spilling up north. It must be quelled. Easing of immigration restrictions are to be contigent on progress in the drug wars that yes, must be continued to be fought as a specific war, not because our side is an anti-fun evil security state but because the drug lords themselves wage war by behading people. It's that simple. It's a war because they make it a war.
Guantanamo -- Close it, move the prisoners to Montana, and continue to get European states to take some of the inmates.
Cuba - End the embargo and love-bomb Cuba with tourists, business people, students so that the society begins to recover from its isolation. Enlist Florida Cuban emigres in this program basically to overrun Castro.
Internet -- the Internet is both domestic and foreign policy, not some special souped-up "21st century statecraft," but ordinary domestic and foreign policy.
This brings a to-do list that involves definitely firing all the Obama appointees to the FTC, FCC etc and rolling back their collectivist ideologies like "net neutrality". The market will handle the challenges corporations face in managing scarce resources and *user* demand which is not the same thing as "controlling free speech" -- don't be silly.
o After review of all the wastage in the gov2.0 programs, close them and
open them in more modest form as merely modernization under civilian
control, not techies burrowing in with their agenda to overthrow
representative government. Re-open the program with new people unrelated
to Tim O'Reilly and Google. Be selective about partners from Silicon Valley.
o No to having the ITU run the Internet but no to having the Internet
Governance Forum run it with NGOs, either. The pluralism of the Internet
must be maintained with states, corporations, NGOs, and individuals.
Yes to SOPA/PIPA -- it is perfectly fine, intellectua property needs to
be protected, and anyone with problems of how it is being implemented --
see you in court, you'll be reassured in fact that lawsuits won't be
necessary. Yes to CISPA, the US must work with the private sector to
bolster security.
o Prosecute Bradley Manning speedily. No one should be held so long in pre-trial detention, mainly in solitary, he can include his hardship pre-trial as time served and have a fair sentence.
o Unless the DOJ and the military have one hell of an airtight case, announce that Julian Assange will not be prosecuted, but declared him persona non grata, along with any other officers or significant supporters of WikiLeaks. Applaud corporations like Amazon and PayPal for refusing to serve WikiLeaks. Explain that real damage was done, not all of which can be publicized so as not to further harm individuals. Sever completely any and all contacts with the circumvention technology Tor, in the Navy and the State Department, and review how much damage was done by funding and developing it.
o Continue to promote the Internet freedom proposals made by the US at OSCE and support the law championed by Chris Smith (R-NJ) for preventing support of rogue regimes with technology. Internet freedom does not mean collectivist ideologies such as handing over "development" to states that will use the notion to control user freedoms.
o Enhance cybersecurity through military and civilian agencies and through countering the activities of the CryptoParty and other anarchists working toward a closed, authoritarian society for the Internet under their own rules under the guise of enhacing privacy for users. Counter Anonymous, the Pirate Party, etc. through both legal deterrents and by public rhetoric. They don't represent freedom but revolutionary expediency and arbitrary rule.
o Talks on the control of cyberweapons are a good idea, but Russia should not control them, and the ideas of Kaspirsky of forming an "independent" agency like the atomic agency should be scuppered because they are a stalking horse for Russia. Existing multilaterals such as the UN and OSCE are perfectly fine for pursuing both the Internet freedom and cybersecurity policies.
So...who is going to be national security advisor and secretary of state? I do hope it is not Robert Zoellick or Condi Rice simply because I don't think he will agree to sufficiently pressure Russia as it needs to be pressured on all fronts now, and she won't push on human rights but focus on arms control. But I don't have a clear sense of who this could be, so concentrated on whom it should not be (Susan Rice, John Kerry). Because of Benghazi and Afghanistan failures, Panetta has to be replaced, and an old-school spy who understands Russia as a threat must be installed. Richard Williamson would be an asset in any position, he is slotted as UN ambassador but I would hope for something better. I just don't have an opinion yet on Tim Pawlenty. I'd be fine with Lieberman as secretary of state. Elliott Abrams, despite his past, would be fine as NSA.
Effigies of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi (C) are seen during an
anti-Gaddafi protest in Benghazi March 6, 2011. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem
I wrote yesterday about how I had the feeling that the interchange during the presidential debates had the contrived feeling of opp research and pre-Googling of word search-strings, and I wondered if there was a briefing book that had some of these details already included. The Docent's Memo blog goes further and believes there was collusion between Crawford and the Obama Truth Team on preparing the transcript for a "gotcha" during the debate.
I wonder: Did Crawford's preparatory briefing memos did contain an expectation that Romney would raise the issue of the terrorists in Benghazi and call out the president for not frankly calling them terrorists. Crawford had backtracked there on the stage during the debate, conceding that Romney was right it had taken weeks for the Administration to back away from the video tape version of the story, and then on the talk shows she said today that Romney was right "in the main" but that he had "chosen the wrong words".
James Taranto -- keeping the honour of uniform? -- is willing to give Crawford the benefit of the doubt, saying that she wasn't merely plumping for Obama, but had spoken out of an earlier conviction she got from finding that at least the words "acts of terror" were in the speech. Taranto is curiously even willing to go so far as to concede different interpretations are admissible regarding this text and that phrase, as to its referents and antecedents. That is so unlike him, I'm not getting this. There's no question that "acts of terror" was a generic, with 9/11 as the antecedent, and there's no question that Obama shied away from the use of the very word "terrorist" -- and that all of this must be seen in context with the UNGA speech where he emphasized "denigration of religion" and "slander of the prophet" -- two horribly ill-defined phrases that represent actually an undermining of existing US policy at the UN.
I'm left uncertain about what was really happening with Crawford. The tone of her voice sounds not rehearsed, but if anything, flustered. She wants to "factcheck" and say that there is indeed such a search-string, but she's the one who in fact comes out with "the wrong word" when she says "He did, in fact, sir, so let me, let me call it an act of terror [Inaudible]." That makes it sound like the "it" refers to Benghazi -- not the mere fact that the search string was indeed in the text. Obama even asks her to speak louder, confident he has trumped Romney with this "easter egg". She then repeats, "He did call it an act of terror" -- even though a sincere reading of the full text should yield the conclusion that he didn't call Benghazi that act; he only made a generic reference.
Throughout Obama's intervention and Romney's challenge, Crawford is studying several sheets of paper on her podium, and then waves them when Obama says "Get the transcript". Did he mean that she literally had the transcript right there? Or that just in principle, one could easily get it on Google and an i-pad? Whatever the case, she was awfully well-prepared -- "He did call it an act of terror in the Rose Garden," she supplied -- although surely she must have known that the search string alone was not enough, and the context did not bear out an interpretation that meant Obama was presenting a frank denunciation of a terrorist act in Benghazi.
Astoundingly (or maybe not so much of an accident, comrade), the terrorist suspect himself, sipping mango juice at a hotel plaza, told the Times in Kirkpatrick's article that it *was* the hate video that agitated the local extremists into a hastily-made plan to assault the compound. Isn't that neat! He even had an alternative (and seemingly fanciful) version of the events that involved using weapons that were found in the American compound itself against the Americans. He claimed only to admire Al Qaeda and not be affiliated with it, and even had a remonstration straight out of Obama's narrative and his defenders in the comments -- he said Americans were only playing politics in their elections with their discussion of the various motivations and scenarios. Well!
Does the Times have journalistic rules of engagement when they interview terrorists and give them a platform? How do they factcheck their claims?
Whether the brazen Ahmed Abu Khattala merely admires Al Qaeda, is loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda, or run in strict discipline by Al Qaeda mastermines, isn't he still a terrorist?
Kirkpatrick claims Republicans are in a "muddle" about the facts. There isn't any "muddle" about Benghazi in the debaters challenging Obama's narrative. Obama shies away from even using the term "terrorist". His Rose Garden and Colorado speeches used the term "acts of terror" as genericas in codas to speech that had 9/11 as an antecedent; he was reluctant for two weeks to call a spade a spade and say "Benghazi was a terrorist attack".
The reporting here seems to try to assist Obama in this endeavour, the minimize terrorism in general and stress what are seemingly more fixable problems like Muslim sentiment about "denigration" of their religion or "slander of the prophet" -- two undefinable terms Obama used in his UNGA speech.
It isn't just about Obama trying to downplay any resurgence of Al Qaeda, which will be interpreted differently by different players. It's about an entire worldview that says we must treat terrorism as ordinary crime like breaking and entry and vandalism or murder, and make it police work, not an animated military cause. And we see where that gets us now -- not far. Our diplomats are still killed and the terrorists enjoy impunity, drinking mango juice.
The compound-as-weapons-depot involved in rebel negotiations might dovetail with Sinclair's strange conspiracy theory said to be based on US government sources that Amb. Stevens was in Benghazi to take back weapons once given to militants that they then didn't want to give back. Sinclair is discredited, the sources could surely find someone far more credible if they really had such a story, and this just doesn't sound like any DDR program I've ever heard about anywhere -- sending in an envoy especially in such a high-profile way -- the same envoy also involved in opening hospital programs? I have to wonder if it really would be done that way, even given the American desire to disarm, demobilize and rehabilitate former militias.
We're sure to see a lot more wacky stuff like this before we get more of the story -- the right is still talking crazily about Amb. Steven being raped and his body being "dragged through the streets" of Benghazi like our soldiers in Mogadishu, although there is no evidence for this (the photos and videos only show that he was picked up and taken to a hospital, although there are different possible interpretations of what is going on when a lot of men are crying "God is Great!" and hauling him away).
The most disturbing scene in the debate last night -- and indeed, the most disturbing I've seen in political life in America in a long time -- came with Obama's response to Romney's challenge over Obama's statements regarding the attack on the US compound in Benghazi where our ambassador and three other diplomats were killed.
I really felt watching these scenes (the clip is above) as if we were seeing the inklings of an authoritarian society in which it would be impossible to challenge the manipulations of the president in power through the traditional means of media, Congress, the courts...
When Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, there was plenty of pushback from the media and all kinds of groups. I myself marched in a protest that had at least 50,000 in it in New York City. There have always been plenty of people around to push the meme "Bush lied, people died" -- in fact long after it became clear that most of the 100,000 people killed in Iraq were killed by terrorists, not our soldiers, and not militants who attack other armed people.
With Obama's wars, it's been so much harder -- first of all, we had the vacuous "support our troops" meme that the nearly non-existent peace movement under Bush developed as a strategy to try to stay relevant and appear patriotic -- when the best way to support troops is not send them overseas, of course. There's always been this cerebral quality to the mixture of Samantha Power's right-to-protect notions and "leading from behind" (she is one of Obama's National Security Council staffers) and Obama's college-professor pinpoint drone strikes. As if there is sort of a modern, cleaner, greener way to wage war -- successfully.
And the clinging to the secular cybernetic religion of these surgical-striking guns way after the campaigns are shown to fail has also been a hallmark of Obama. He keeps saying he killed Osama bin Ladn. But if that were enough, Al Qaeda would be considerably weakened and Benghazi wouldn't have happened, right?
When he rightly questioned the pre-emptive apologies in our Embassy in Cairo, Romney punctured the apologetics that in fact stretch back to Obama's obsequious Cairo speech in 2009. And for that, he was declared nearly blasphemous -- as if we have a blasphemy law ourselves that says that no one dare criticize the sitting president when foreign policy escapades go wrong.
There's the moment in this tape when Romney arches his eyebrows and really demands accountability from Obama in the way nobody else has been able to do in these four years -- not the wimpy "progressives" and not the right, that seems burrowed in its own cocoon and missing opportunities sometimes.
Obama reacted by behaving like a creature at bay. His cold "proceed, governor" -- as if to say "where are you going with this? Because my opp research will kill you" -- was not enough to quell Romney, who came back again, brazenly. He's willing to behave like an opposition even if no one else will.
And then the scolding. Obama literally wagged his finger! "We don't do that," he intoned, as if speaking to a toddler who had tantrumed over a toy and needed to be sent to a "time out" and instructed in the ways of what "we" do.
Again, that sense of *blasphemy*. When our men our killed overseas, and we're receiving their bodies back home, we're not supposed to question anything about how and why they were killed.
This is the sort of thing that holds true at some family funerals. I remember once being at a funeral of a woman who died suddenly, where some of us were still quietly discussing whether doctors hadn't done enough and whether any of us could have somehow intervened better. And we were sternly reminded not to speak in earshot of relatives and to can it, because death is death, it's over, and you have to make peace with it. Obama was like that -- even though we should go on questioning every element of Benghazi over and over again because we are not getting the truth.
I don't want to live in a country where the chief executive -- and the commander-in-chief as Obama sternly reminded us, as if he were Putin! -- can't be questioned -- and even in a staged debate with the opposition candidate.
The Fisking and opp research "fact-checking" that had to have gone on around the "act of terror" issue is breath-taking. When Romney lunged and made his charge against the president, that he had waited 14 days before admitting that this was a terrorist attack -- and not a spontaneous mob upset over a hate video -- the president felt absolutely confident that he could trip him up with a transcript.
Like legions of forums-dwellers (and that's the kind of person he has working for him), Obama was able to say "linkies" and "pix or it didn't happen" and come up with a word-search string that said "act of terror" seeming to trump Romney's claim that Obama had hedged on admitting it *was* a terrorist attack.
I don't recall Obama admitting this at all on the 12th, and I was very confident Romney could really nail him on this, because all the speeches in those days focused on the video, and mob protests, not Al Qaeda, despite the September 11 anniversary.
Yet when I instantly Googled the transcript and read it, and saw where Obama was getting his search-string from, I still saw Romney was right and horribly, the president was opp-researching and Fisking his way out of this rightful challenge.
I've followed Benghazi very closely from the first few hours the news broke about it, constantly calling attention to Sean Smith's last words, that seem to imply that he didn't trust the guards they had and found it suspicious that they were taking pictures of the compound. He felt he was going to die -- and he did, horribly. That tells us there wasn't any mob outside the gates -- Sean didn't report it hours before the attack. What you can also draw from a Guardian reporter's effort to try to shore up Obama's accounts is that in fact those on the scene knew right away there wasn't any mob outside the gates -- they jumped over the wall and didn't have to blow up the gates.
So I was surprised the Candy Crawford was able to instantly jump in and refer to a Rose Garden transcript as well -- as if she, too, spends her days laboring deep in the comments on news sites and blogs and follows all the linkie-loos to all the search-strings. (She later backed down and admitted that Romney was mainly right, but the damage was done.)
Both the president's alacrity in transcript-literalizing and her instant -- and improper -- lurch to his defense are not just a sign of the times where people live parsing transcripts and search strings -- it had some help. There had to have been a briefing packet. The opp research had to have had intel -- and it wouldn't take much digging to find -- that Romney was going to pounce on this failure to raise the *terrorist* nature of this attack. After all, Commentary had this all covered days ago, as did the National Review. That's where the opp researchers got it -- and developed their offensive defense.
Romney should have fought this round by mentioning the UN speech, where the hate video -- not terrorism -- is mentioned again and again. He should have pointedly drilled on the *apologetics* again by noting two really bad phrases in that speech actually counter to US policy hard-won at the UN -- Obamas' condemnation of the ill-defined "denigration" of religion and his other ill-defined usage of the concept of "slander of the prophet". Ugh. Who would define that, the OIC?! Let's hope Romney gets another good crack at this -- a lot is at stake here, including the very nature of our free society.
I used to have more respect for Josh Rogin who seemed, despite his obvious "progressive" leanings to be reporting stories accurately. Now, like a good little forums nerd arguing on Reddit, he mines both the Rose Garden and the Colorado transcripts for search strings and plays gotcha, then tries to offset the obvious contexts. There's a very felt need of the liberal media to help Obama out on this against those "evil conservatives" -- and it's creepy because they are right. Here's one of my comments on the many debates on this, here at The Cable on Foreign Policy:
The search strings "acts of terror" are generics, and read in
context, indicate the obvious: that President Obama did not call the
*Benghazi attack itself* a *terrorist attack or act of terror* but used
the term at the end of his speech to make a generic statement.
Romney was mainly concerned to address the apology of the US Embassy
in Cairo when he first made his statement, and when initial news reports
about Benghazi said a "State Department official" was killed but didn't
say it was the ambassador and three other people yet. Romney can't be
blamed for *rightly* condemning what in fact was an unnecessary
pre-emptive apology for a film that in fact the Egyptian government
decided to broadcast to incite further hatred on Egyptian TV.
On September 13, Obama merely repeated his *generic* statement put in
the negative: "No acts of terror" would deter the US. Again, he failed
to specifically mention that Benghazi was a *terrorist* attack in
keeping with the Administration's overall policy of minimizing terrorist
attacks and not seeming to deem them a special kind of warfare, but
treating them as crimes.
That Romney didn't use this literal search string doesn't mean
anything at all, as he is challenging the president rightfully on his
slow response on calling this what it was: a terrorist attack.
Sure, Matt Olsen of the *counterterrorism* center called it what it
was -- and we seem to see that all along, US intelligence and
counter-terror agencies did see this as an act committed by Al Qaeda and
not a spontaneous mob, but for some reason, the White House spun this,
or suppressed this, or intelligence itself may even have been slow in
confirming the story and may have even set up Obama and/or Ambassador
Rice to take the fall for this.
That *on September 20* -- nearly two weeks after the attack! -- Ryan
Willians and Jay Carney are FINALLY calling this a terrorist attack
after days and days of drilling of Victoria Nuland at the daily press
briefings at the State Department, and other press conferences --
doesn't trump Romney's rightful challenge to the president. It only
shows that they finally conceded what others had said from day one.
Indeed, the White did not admit Benghazi was an act of terror from
day one, and they are now tap-dancing and using their generics and their
posturing to justify this lapse. But the UN speech in which the video
was repeatedly mentioned, and the other bad ideas were promoted of
recognizing "denigration of religion" and "slander of the prophet" as
something to be eliminated (how to define this?!) In fact, with this
speech, Obama was not in step with the hard-won language negotiated in a
joint US-Egyptian resolution at the UN Human Rights Council that
repudiated the idea of "defamation of religions" in favour of a tighter
definition of "incitement to imminent violence". Obama has helped undo
that progress now.
The reason Obama can feel so angrily self-justified in his
prevaricating here about when and how he condemned terrorism is that
from the very beginning of his term in office, he has sought to
differentiate himself from Bush's "war on terror" and has believed that
he can deliver technological pinprick strikes against targets in
sanitary, consequence-free actions, and also help remove those "root
causes" of terrorism in terrorists' unhappy childhood with various
friendlier policies and increases in foreign aid and projects abroad --
the very kinds of projects like a hospital upgrade that Amb. Stevens was
bravely working on when he killed.
The
word to use isn't "lying" -- that implies sinister intent, when it's
more about being embedded in a world view about how to handle the war on
terror -- and an inexplicable refusal to admit that it needs to be
waged because the terrorists make a war on us -- not because of who we
are or what we do or invasions of Iraq or Afghanistan, but because they
are deadly ideological movements, supported by states with deadly
ideological movements, and always have been. This author follows the
same blueprint.
It doesn't matter if someone is smarter here than someone else, or
connected better with better intel reports. What matters is the mindset
that assesses the information and the context -- which is one of
apologizing to extremists when they get angry and minimizing terror.
Amb. Rice didn't lie. Indeed, she couched her reports to the media in
perfectly reasonable terms -- that her version of the story was based
on the initial reports and the best available interpretation. She
certainly left room for herself to change her story later. But I do
wonder why she was sent out there to evangelize so heavily, and whether
in fact it was a set-up. Amb. Rice is not usually the one to make hese
types of so very public media appearances doing the rounds on foreign
policy -- Clinton and her aides are. Did they need her to buy time for
themselves? Was it intelligence -- not the White House per se -- that
set her up?
We get it that a lot of first reports are confusing or wrong or
contradictory. But a Guardian reporter who is now trying to help Obama
with his version of the story reports in fact what everyone knew right
away: there was no mob demonstrating at the gates. The gates were not
blown up. The terrorists jumped over the wall. And this would have been
reported in the classified cables in near real-time by the security
specialists on the ground. The speculation about mobs was made by the
media based on the template first provided by the pre-emptive apology
and Cairo demonstration.
Yes, it's hard to overcome initial narratives. But this wasn't the
likely initial narrative coming from the cables. When those cables are
revealed, we will see this.
Analysts might hedge their language, but there's a difference between
seeing a mob and not seeing a mob. Sean Smith's last words are very
important here. He was chatting with his game buddy online in the hours
before the attack. He reported no mobs. Instead he ominously said
"assuming we don't die tonight" and spoke of the "police" in the
compound in scare quotes, taking pictures. Why were they taking
pictures? Were they casing the joint for an attack? Did Sean not feel
safe with these people? He then later reported gunfire and broke off
contact and was soon killed. I hope the FBI examines all this. In fact,
I'm amazed that the media and government officials don't raise Sean's
last words -- and don't try to track down what they mean in full.
Sure, everybody can hedge their best on Al Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb. But come on guys. They have committed numerous attacks. Libya
is a place where Ian Martin, the UN representative, suffered an attack
on his convoy that wasn't very much publicized. There were other such
attacks and threats. The ambassador even ceased his routine of jogging
in the morning for awhile before resuming it, due to threats. That they
may or may not come from this or that group or splinter shouldn't
distract from the fact that AQIM is an active group already determined
to make deadly attacks and is a likely suspect.
Nice word parsing on the Sunnis and Shiites, but now look at the
100,000 civilians killed in the Iraq war. Now would you say the
overwhelming majority were killed by terrorists, backed by Iran and
Syria and others, by militants settling scores, or American soldiers? If
you are honest and intelligent analyst, you would have to concede that
the overwhelming majority of these killings -- 50 people in a
marketplace here, 50 people at a place of worship there, 50 people at a
school there, 50 people in line to get a job in the police over there --
they were killed by terrorists. Not militants. Terrorists. Because
that's what terrorists do -- kill civilians who are weak, not other
fighters and not just symbols of power.
It's great the Administration "evolved". They evolved because we have
a democracy where the opposition candidate drilled and drilled the
dilatory president on this, and we have a free press that continued to
ask questions over and over again. We can and should blame the president
for being in an ideological mindset that minimizes terror -- and
therefore incites it in the end.
Yes, we all know from millions of forums fights that companies don't technically "censor," because they are private companies and can decide what to allow to be published by their service under their terms of service.
Yet in a de facto manner, large social media platforms are becoming the public commons we all rely on to give meaning and effect to our First Amendment free speech rights.
So when they decide to remove content, even while they are not state actors per se, they can have a considerable effect on the public space.
Twitter salved its conscience -- and enabled its various fanboyz to claim it was doing something smart rather than oppressive -- by saying that the view of the censored tweets would only be removed in the country that had filed the complaint. Others on the World Wide Web would get to see the contact.
They also said they would file notices of the censorship at chillingeffects.com -- a site maintained by Electronic Frontier Foundation which was expecting to demonstrate that most takedown notices are about copyright -- and hence the claim of IP rights is the ostensible "chilling effect".
I don't know what terrible "chilling effect" I've suffered because some cricket club decided to protest the use of its logo, but EFF is hoping to shore up its dubious notion that copyright claims are some kind of civil rights abuse.
Sent via: Fax Re: Ban on "Besseres Hannover"; Closure of user account
Dear Madam, Dear Sir,
the enclosed letter gives you the information that the Ministry of the Interior of the State of Lower-Saxony in Germany has banned the organisation "Besseres Hannover". It is disbanded, its assets are seized and all its accounts in social networks have to be closed immediately. The Public Prosecutor (State Attorney's Office) has launched an investigation on suspicion of forming a criminal association.
It is the task fo the Polizeidirektion Hannover (Hannover Police) to enforce the ban.
The organisation "Besseres Hannover" uses the Twitter account besseres-hannover@hannoverticker https://twitter.com/hannoverticker
I ask you to close this account immediately and not to open any substitute accounts for the organisation "Besseres Hannover".
Please confirm that you have received this letter and let me know what measures you have taken.
Yours sincerely,
[signature] Head of Police Admin Dept
If you check out the account belonging to the group, which means "Better Hannover" [sic] -- that is, if you're not in Germany -- eventually you'll figure out it's a neo-Nazi group that seems to want to drive Turkish workers out of Germany, and is using the word "Democracy" to claim that their racist sentiments have legitimacy.
Germany has had anti-Nazi laws in place, and because this group evidently used the Hitler salute and incited racism, the laws could be invoked and international social media companies could be asked to comply with their ruling. And so Twitter did.
@amac It's not the first time. Twitter suspended the account of @guyadams in July because of NBC interests, now it's state censorship! #1984
But Guy Adams, the journalist who swore at the head of NBC for having the audacity to to block access to prime-time broadcasting during the British Olympics , was reinstated after a Twitter storm of outrage and a request by NBC to let him return so that they didn't have to continue to be the butt of protests. It seems Twitter itself had contacted NBC and told them how to file a complaint when they noticed Adams' angry tweets.
There are probably other acts of censorship we don't know about, when oppressive governments, posing as individuals, put in complaints about dissidents whose views they don't like, pretending they had violated the TOS.
Each week, Twitter removes numerous accounts following complaints of spam or harassment. I see these often in my Qwitters account, where each week I get a message of the people who unfollowed me, and which of them were removed or discontinued (and this usually means removed). Rarely these are griefer accounts that I myself have filed abuse reports on; evidently these accounts I see banned all the time are removed because others complain about their harassment and/or advertising or porn spam.
I'm not finding the original suspension of Guy Adams a "1984 moment" as some of the geeks claimed. He published the email address of the CEO of NBC, and that was a violation of privacy. Literalists claimed this wasn't really an outing of privacy, because anyone could supposedly reconstruct the email address.
So what? Private contact information is private contact information, even if you can figure it out. It's about inciting harassment of people at work or home, not the technicalities of whether it really is private or not. Why do you get to do that?! There are plenty of other avenues for making your complaints known -- hey, and one of them is your high-profile Twitter account as a sports journalist, you know? Plus the issue that was getting these geeks into such a lather was -- once again -- really a question of copyright. Some people were circumventing the restrictions put in place by broadcasters to ensure their advertisement sales had meaning by tunneling around them with VPN. But who is going to pay for the sports broadcasting if they can't sell ads and broadcast as they wish? Why the petulant sense of entitlement?
Next up for Twitter -- likely notices from India or Turkey or Singapore or maybe Russia -- countries that have the ability to play the censorship game and resources --officials to file the complaints and track their compliance. Will we see an Islamic government file a complaint about the anti-Muslim movie made in the US that sparked protests and even deaths and was endlessly discussed as a possible cause -- and then a pretext -- for the attack on our embassy in Benghazi?
Google and Twitter perlustrators, who style themselves as urban sophisticates living in a transnational meta-layer beyond the sectarian scrum of people obsessed with their guns and religions, think that the will produce a body of work that will illustrate what shouldn't be censored -- and once exposed, will be less censored (copyrighted content) or what "everyone can agree on" (neo-Nazi rants against immigrants).
I'm skeptical about their claims and the assumption they have usurped not only from sovereign nations but in fact courts with more transparent aspects of their workings -- and laws and jurisprudence, such as they might be. What some countries will do is simply block Twitter completely rather than fuss with filing comlaints about this or that individual tweet or Twitterer.
Transfer of remains ceremony, Andrews Air Force Base, September 14, 2012. State Department photos by Michael Gross.
Lots of people are searching for phrases like "Sean Smith's last words" and coming to this blog today -- which makes me wonder if somewhere, the right people are finally going to pay attention to the clue he left in his last words.
Certainly anyone who wondered whether the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi was merely a demonstration of people upset over the anti-Muslim film getting out of hand, or something more sinister and planned would have only to follow what Sean wrote in chat -- his gallows humour in writing to a gaming friend about future plans “assuming we don’t die tonight. We saw one of our ‘police’ that guard the compound taking pictures.”
We've heard from some of the relatives that they don't want Romney to "politicize" the deaths of their loved ones -- by which they mean criticizing Obama for their deaths in election season.
Time and again we've seen this "progressive" slam of Romney for "not even knowing that the ambassador had been killed" before protesting the language used in the Cairo apology (and it was indeed an apology". Well, Romney cannot see into the future even on a 24/7 news cycle, and it's ok to question EVERYTHING about Obama's foreign policy, specifically when our diplomats are killed abroad.
Interestingly, it's CNN that has stayed on this story and dogged the Obama Administration for answers as the press should. CNN has always been liberal to leftist but in the last months of Obama's first and possibly only term, it has become more critical -- on this story and others, like "fact-checking" the fact-checkers on the debates.
I'm afraid I can't accept the idea that these deaths don't get to be "politicized" -- by which some of the relatives seem to imply even being discussed -- or becoming the subject of sharp probes by Romney or Republican congressmen such as Daryl Issa.
Of course they can be "politicized" -- asking that they not be politicized is itself a form of politicization and tends towards letting Obama off the hook before the elections. Likely these relatives are Obama supporters.
But their relatives are public figures; they are our representatives abroad. Their deaths are a function of Obama's poor policy in Libya, where we "led from behind" but also emblematic of problems in all of Obama's foreign policy, especially in the Middle East.
The Obama Truth Team are going around everywhere and planting the meme now -- notably in the New York Times editorial page (but first in all the lefty blogs and tweets) -- that Ryan voted for reduction in budgets for embassy security abroad, so that the Romney team has no right to question the State Department's cutting of the budget.
Nonsense. Of course they do. Budget-cutting across the board simply has to be made to address the monstrous deficit. Cutting out the fluff in Liechtenstein is not the same thing as refusing to renew a mere 60-day contract for one embassy in a war zone -- please.
Biden may not have been in the loop for an embassy security request -- so Newt Gingrich is wrong -- and playing the progs' game -- when he accuses Biden of "lying" about this. To be sure, I had to wonder why Biden didn't at least read the media like the rest of us following foreign policy -- and see the news of the Congressional hearings where officials were describing their frustration in not getting renewal of 60-day security contracts, and even the notion that the worst thing in getting security for Embassies was "the Taliban inside the building".
The "Taliban inside the building" of course is the faction that downplays terrorism, overplays success during and after wars, minimizes dangers, over-emphasizes the success of hearts-and-minds civilian programs and so on.
Today, Hillary Clinton is falling on her sword and taking full blame for the lack of security. Of course, the real problem is Al Qaeda, not Hillary or Biden or anyone else.
But there's no question that a mindset of our elites -- that we can go overseas and change foreigners with various aid programs supplemented or preceded by surgically-precise high-tech warfare -- is a real problem in the world and sadly, the reason for a lot of our failures. It's a mindset of projects and contracts instead of deterrence and counterpropaganda.
The very system of contracting instead of assigning of these duties to full-time military is of course part of the problem. Of course it makes us more vulnerable, if we have to use dubious local militas and ex-fighters and sobels (soldier-by-day, rebel by night), and it also makes vulnerable foreign civilians more exposed to the abuses that these contractors inevitably perpetuate.
Other brainiacs think they have trumped arguments on this subject by pointing out that the request for security rebuffed was for Tripoli, not Benghazi, and that the ambassador was making a trip there, not stationed there. But that's pointless, as security for Tripoli means forces can be deployed better elsewhere as well. And security travels with the ambassador or has to be reinforced where he stays.
I keep coming back to thinking of these men sitting late at night in this facility with shoddy security where they were soon to meet their deaths.
The ambassador wrote in a diary that -- again, we had to learn from CNN about, and not the State Department, and despite the complaints of relatives -- he was uneasy about his security. And yet he didn't feel so uneasy as to not hold a meeting there after hours with a Turkish diplomat until 8:40, and he didn't feel that it was a place he should avoid on the horrible date of 9/11 -- when terrorist threats of attacks on that date had been made around the world.
In fact, as we know from a piece that has fallen out of sight, the ambassador was expecting to go to a hospital the next day to assist in the launching of a program -- the sort of activity you do in a country when you think the war is over and the reconstruction has begun.
The piece is an op-ed by Ethan Chorin, who was supposed to meet Amb. Stevens on the day after he was killed. I say "fallen out of sight" simply because it says a lot about the ambassador's actual activities and preoccupations, yet hasn't been discussed.
Chorin writes on September 13 -- two days after the attack:
ON Wednesday morning [September 12], my colleagues and I were to meet in Benghazi with
J. Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador to Libya, to discuss a
plan for a new division of emergency medicine at Benghazi Medical
Center, the largest and most modern hospital in eastern Libya. The
meeting never took place. The night before, militants laid siege to the
American Consulate in Benghazi, killing the ambassador and three other
Americans. The ambassador was taken, without a pulse, to the hospital we
hoped to upgrade.
So the ambassador was thinking of Benghazi -- always described as an "opposition stronghold" during the war -- as a place safe enough to work on hospital upgrades -- reconstruction work, not war. Of course, he was a very savvy and seasoned man and spoke the local language, but he seems to have treated the dangers of the area more as a kind of occupational hazard that was under control than as a real threat -- we know he had suspended his morning jog after some attacks but then resumed them.
Chorin writes:
The draft agreement we were working on was the kind of visionary effort
to improve life in Libya that Ambassador Stevens liked — in this case, a
collaboration between doctors in Boston and Benghazi, brokered by a
nongovernmental organization that a Libyan-American and I had organized
after the recent revolution.
In horror, Chorin describes how he spoke to the ambassador late Tuesday night about plans for the hospital visit and how enthusiastic Stevens was, and then spoke to the security detail about the logistics -- only to have him swear and hang up after saying "We have a problem here."
Further, he describes the ambassador's thinking on the "root causes" of the problems of Libya:
Mr. Stevens understood that Libyans had suffered under Col. Muammar
el-Qaddafi, and that conflict and post-revolutionary instability were to
be expected. He also understood that some, if not all, of the hatred
that had pushed some of Libya’s youths to join radical factions in
Afghanistan and Iraq had sprung from years of neglect and oppression.
Now, he felt, new opportunities needed to be created to wean these
people away from ideologies rooted in hate.
No doubt that was one reason he made a point, as ambassador, of
continuing to visit Benghazi, the East’s largest city, despite the clear
risks; there had been attacks on other high-level diplomats there in
the previous months. It is a mystery at this point why the consulate
compound was so lightly fortified, but I would not be surprised if Mr.
Stevens had decided to stay overnight in Benghazi simply because his
list of planned meetings with Libyans there was too long to be
accomplished in one afternoon.
Chorin makes a passionate and eloquent plea -- based on Amb. Stevens' own life's commitment and work -- to stay the course in Libya and keep engaging and not pull out.
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