October 2007

Pulling the Plug: A Technical Review of the Internet Shutdown in Burma

Worth reading: "it can happen here."

Greg Djerejian notes this scary passage from a recent Dick Cheney speech:

As time passed, the terrorists believed they'd exposed a certain weakness and lack of confidence in the West, particularly in America. Dr. Bernard Lewis explained the terrorists' reasoning this way: "During the Cold War," Dr. Lewis wrote, "two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: 'What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?'" End quote.

To which Djerejian responds:

It's really an appallingly strange time in our country. We have a singularly powerful Vice-President (compared to any of his predecessors)--openly quite enamored by the tactics employed by the Soviet Union--our former arch-foe whose human rights standards we derided. Indeed, we fought a decades-long Cold War so that Western style constitutional freedoms would trump Soviet authoritarianism. But yes, from this Sovietophile posture, use of torture and black-sites and detention without habeas corpus protections makes all the sense in the world, doesn't it? Because we have a Vice-President all but openly emulating and cheer-leading the tactics of the KGB, not in the wilds of Wyoming, but to a soi disant sophisticated audience in Washington DC. Put differently, he is very proud of his world-view, indeed eager to share it with Beltway 'elites'. Who will clear this dangerous rot out of Washington and help us restore our good name? The stakes are high, that is, the preservation of the American democratic model as a leading force for moderation and rule of law on the world stage.

Throughout the speech Cheney refers to militants from different countries, with different religions, and different reasons for fighting as "the terrorists," as if they were one enemy working in concert. This is glib propaganda, meant to manipulate you and separate you from your money, in taxes for the benefit of his war contractor friends.

Two semi-related items on a "we the people vs the forces of darkness" theme:

Protest at Blackwater headquarters. Glad someone else is disturbed by the rise of this private police force. It should be shut down. We have an army and police--we don't need this company run by Christiofascists whose leader has a Hitler haircut.

This blog post describes how government agents detained a 9/11 suspect and threatened to torture or imprison his family in Egypt. A surface-to-air radio was found in his hotel room that subsequently turned out to be a pilot's left in the closet. Nevertheless the detainee confessed after the threats to his family, and is now suing for violation of his civil rights. The appeals court agreed he had a case, and published an account of what the government did to him in its summary judgment opinion. Several bloggers downloaded and posted it. Then the appeals court withdrew the opinion and redacted all the stuff about torture threats as "classified." Except it's not a secret, thousands now have the original opinion and are circulating it around the Web.