Work Your Brain — 11/1/06

Tales of the Detainee Kind

• The Case Of Bilal Hussein — Justin Gardner @ Donklephant reports on Bilal Hussein, an AP war photographer, accused by the U.S. military of helping some insurgents kidnap a couple journalists. Only those journalists have been rescued and they say Hussein is a hero. The AP wants to know why he’s been detained since April with no charges having been filed against him while right-wing bloggers call for his head.
  

  Six months is more than enough time to get some facts together and make a case against Hussein. The military hasn’t done that, and they should…or else they should release Hussein without charge.

  As Gardner points out, Hussein isn’t the first journalist to be treated as such.

• More Tales of Guantánamo — Dr. Steven Taylor @ PoliBlog talks about Abdul Rahim Al Ginco, who had been a prisoner of the Taliban and thought he was saved when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Instead, because of a propaganda tape made by his captors, he’s been detained at Guantánamo Bay for the last 5 years.
  

  Now, it is entirely possible that the US is correct about Ginco, however it is also perfectly possible that his story is exactly as it is detailed in the piece. At a minimum, this type of situation details precisely why we need a system to determine whether the people we have in captivity should, in fact, be there. This is not analogous to capturing uniformed German soldiers who can be held until the end of fighting. Instead, it is clear that to some degree the prisoners we are holding have been caught up in a dragnet, with their guilt to be figured out later. As such, a process that accepts that notion is needed, rather than one that seems to assume that all the detainees are guilty, and potentially all al Qaeda masterminds.

  That last sentence is what has been my biggest argument with right-wing bloggers. How do you argue with people who automatically assume that all of the detainees are guilty simply because they are detainees? In a country that professes that you are innocent until proven guilty how can there be so many people ready and willing to believe that those doing the detainee capturing aren’t making mistakes and capturing and detaining innocent people among the terrorist people?

Police State A Breath A Way

• On The Insurrection Act — Echidne of the Snakes has a post up talking about something I’ve been warning about. How much easier it is for our current President to declare Martial Law since Hurricane Katrina thanks to a revision of the Isurrection Act. Interestingly, she points out that the conservative blogs reaction to angry liberal bloggers’ response to this revision is that it’s all the fault of the liberals in the first place for complaining about Bush’s response time to Katrina. Somehow I don’t think Martial Law was what liberals had in mind as the answer. And you know, I hate to point this out, but Republicans have been trying to set this up for a long time.

Unpatriotic Questions

• Ask a Stupid Question… — Shakespeare’s Sister @ Ezra Klein is tired of the empty accusation by right-wingers like Lynne Cheney and Bill O’Reilly who demand of thinking liberals, “Do you want us to win in Iraq?” She’s not alone. She points out that the question isn’t as simple as they want to make it and how dare they want to make it an act of treason if we don’t blindly behave like cheerleaders shouting our “Yes! Yes! Yes! Win! Win! Win!” in response to the question.
  

  I despair that patriotism and pragmatism have become mutually exclusive. Before that “easy” question can be answered by anyone with two brain cells still knocking together, a few other question have to be answered, like What is the definition of winning? and Can we win it? and If so, how are we going to? You know, the kind of questions that certain people resistant to the hypnotic combination of flag-waving and fear-mongering were asking before the war, people who were dismissed as unpatriotic cuckoos. To continue to question whether a person with legitimate questions and concerns wants to win is to obfuscate the frustrating reality that those other questions still have not been answered, three years on.

• Dereliction of Duty — Christy Hardin Smith @ Firedoglake wants to know how many of those 103 American soldiers that died in October were killed by American weapons sent to Iraq and misplaced, most likely into the stockpiles of insurgents and religious militia. She thinks those in charge need to be held accountable and she thinks the buck should stop at George Bush’s desk.
  

  The AP has more (via WaPo). And if you do not understand how important this is for our military personnel, take a peek at this WaPo story. Or this and this and this from Newsweek. And so much more in so many more places. These are real, live human beings we send to fight and survive, sometimes whole, sometimes not, and sometimes not to survive at all. THey have families, friends, children, parents…and they deserve better than they have gotten the last few years.

  This election is about a lot of things but, in no small part because so many of us have friends and family in the military, the ballots cast this year are about how we feel about Iraq. Do you think things are going better or worse? Because a vote for a Republican (or a de facto Republican like Joe Lieberman) means that you want to “stay the course” — the Republican party has had several years of failure and worsening chaos. It is high time for a change.

Election 2006: Battleground America

• Despite it All, The Democrats Could Still Fail — Alan Stewart Carl @ Donklephant has a great editorial up about how despite all of the cheerleading and chest-thumping and mud-slinging, the Democrats can still lose this election despite themselves. In fact, they have a history of losing at the last minute despite being certain of victory.
  

  What if voters decide that the Democrats’ muddled views on Iraq and less-than-justifiable plans for withdrawal are worse or no worse than what the Republicans are offering? What if voters decide that, while corrupt, Republicans are no worse than Democrats. What if the Republicans’ lone selling points of keeping the tax cuts and being better suited to defend our nation trump the Democrats’ selling point of … um … being different.

  And there’s the problem. Democrats are selling change but, on a national scale, they haven’t exactly laid out a new course. Sure healthcare is a problem, but what will Democrats do about it? Sure the Iraq War is a mess, but what will Democrats do to win the conflict (or are they resigned to defeat)? The party is relying on mass dissatisfaction to push voters their way. But they’ve done little to pull voters in. If they fail, that is why they’ll fail.

• What If We Dodge The Bullet? — olvlzl @ Echidne of the Snakes has a terrific editorial up discussing that there’s more at stake than whether or not Republicans or Democrats win next Tuesday. He discusses what needs to be done once the Democrats win to ensure that the disasters of the last six years do not occur again. It goes far beyond just distrust in the GOP or in the White House, but also in the media. Something must be done to ensure that the rights and trust of the public are guaranteed for the future and that’s going to take a lot of work.

Women’s Issues

• First U.S. Female Genital Cutting* Trial — Jill @ Feministe reports on an Ethiopian father in Georgia is accused of cutting his two-year-old daughter’s clitoris with a pair of scissors, a practice known as clitoridectomy or “female circumcision.
• Re-Framing the Abortion Debate– Jill @ Feministe discusses an article from Alternet written by a former pro-life activist turned Pro-Choicer who says that Pro-Choice leaders need to drop the traditional talking points and go with the facts. Pro-choice is really about poverty, race and ethnicity, healthcare access, education, access to abortion and birth control, and financial and social necessity.

Travel in America

• TSA screeners still fail to find guns, bombs — Michael Hampton @ Homeland Stupidity reports that while airport screeners are doing quite well confiscating hair gel and other dangerous liquids from passengers, apparently tests this year have shown that they haven’t done so well at finding guns and actual bomb-making materials smuggled through security. Now, think about that. Those are just the ones we know were smuggled through on purpuse by our guys. Makes you feel so much safer doesn’t it?
• Fake boarding passes clear airport security — Michael Hampton @ Homeland Stupidity reports that Christopher Soghoian, a graduate researcher at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University, wanted to get the attention of Congress when he put online a Web application which generates fake boarding passes that are good enough to get you past the Transportation Security Administration checkpoint and he did, but not the way he was hoping.
  

  The fake boarding pass generator exposes long-standing flaws in airport security as implemented by the federal government which would allow people on the no-fly list to buy tickets and board flights, possibly without even going through the somewhat invasive secondary screening that everyone whose boarding pass shows “SSSS” finds themselves subjected to.

  And he sure got the attention of Congress, all right. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) denounced the web site and called for the executive branch to shut down the site and have Soghoian arrested.

• FBI raids creator of fake boarding pass generator– Michael Hampton @ Homeland Stupidity reports that even after Christopher Soghoian complied with the FBI’s insistance that he shut down his website pointing out a flaw in airport security, the FBI returned and ransacked his home while he wasn’t there and took all of his computers among other things.
  

  Christopher Soghoian created the Northwest Airlines Boarding Pass Generator to demonstrate flaws in the government’s implementation of airport security and the so-called no-fly list. A few short days later, on Friday, FBI agents visited him and, as he told it, handed him a “written order” to take down the site, and unfortunately, he did.

  Then the FBI agents kept a federal judge awake until two in the morning to get a search warrant (mirror) because Soghoian, in creating the site, supposedly engaged in “conspiracy to commit, or the commission of knowingly presenting a false and fictitious claim upon or against the United States, or any department or agency thereof,” according to the warrant.

  I’m not even entirely sure what that means, or how this particular bit of security research qualifies as a federal crime. Earlier this week, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) had called for Soghoian to be arrested for putting up the site. Maybe he knows what it means. (Update: On Sunday morning, Rep. Markey rescinded his call for Soghoian to be arrested, and said that Homeland Security should hire him instead.)

  Soghoian said he was shaken after the first FBI visit and spent the night elsewhere, and came home Saturday morning to find his door forced open, “a rather ransacked home, a search warrant taped to my kitchen table, a total absence of computers — and various other important things.”

  It’s not that he’s trying to compromise airport security. It’s that he’s pointing out that airport security already is compromised, or, as his site used to read, “The TSA Emperor Has No Clothes.”

  And it’s not that he’s some evil hacker or terrorist, either. He’s a fairly well known security researcher at Indiana University who has also done security work for Apple and Google. He obtained an M.S. in Security Informatics at Johns Hopkins University and is engaged in Ph.D. research at Indiana University. Earlier this year he created a new anti-phishing tool.

  It’s also not like this particular security problem requires any particular technical skill. Anybody who can operate Microsoft Word could exploit this airport security problem. And only the most basic knowledge of Web programming would be necessary to re-create this particular code. Sites hosting mirrors of the boarding pass generator are already starting to appear on the Internet, as I predicted Friday.

  So what we have is the FBI going after security researchers who are actually helping make us more secure. Apparently it’s perfectly fine to have bad airport security. After all, as long as nobody actually points out how bad the security is, then the security must be good! This is really how these people think.

  Maybe this should have gone under the “Police State A Breath A Way” header…

tags: detainees, Bilal Hussein, Abdul Rahim Al Ginco, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo, al-Qaeda, Insurrection Act, FEMA, Lynne Cheney, Bill O'Reilly, liberals, rightwingers, patriotism, pragmatism, American soldiers, Republicans, Democrats, GOP, Georgia, Genital Cutting, abortion, pro-choice, pro-life, TSA, airport security, bomb-making materials, Christopher Soghoian, Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, Indiana University, fake boarding passes, Ed Markey, FBI, Police State

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