Too good (and important?) not to share

Barry Ritholtz shared a classic Stephen Colbert rant about the incredibly shaky justification that the Obama administration recently used to order a drone attack on a U.S. citizen (I'm sorry, "terrorist") living abroad. It's a really well-done piece by Colbert, and it raises some pretty important questions, too.

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It seems that our leaders are only too eager to leave the Constitution behind ever since 9/11. That, to me, seems incredibly short-sighted, regardless of the short-term outcomes.

Why I didn't pop champagne last night

Last night was, by any measure, a remarkable night to be an American. Shortly before we were all set to turn in for the weekend (at least, those of us who weren't watching Celebrity Apprentice were), we all received the news that we had been awaiting for nearly a decade--Osama bin Laden, the architect of one of the most terrifying days in American history, had been killed.

Immediately, across the country, the celebrations began, and with good reason. Bin Laden was the head of one of the world's most dangerous and ruthless organizations, one which has claimed "credit" for countless instances of unfathomable death and destruction around the world. Regardless of your thoughts on American foreign policy pre- or post-9/11, there has never been and will never be any justification for the wanton murder of innocent civilians, no matter their national, political, or religious affiliation. The events of September 11, 2001 were then and remain today some of the most cowardly and despicable acts ever committed in human history--I will never forget the unspeakable terror, anger, and overall emotional confusion that I felt that day and in the subsequent weeks, nor do I want to. That day, for better or for worse, will in large part define the lives of multiple generations of American citizens.

Bin Laden was the bogeyman to end all bogeymen, and finally he has been removed from the earth. His death is a loud international reaffirmation of American strength (seriously, the guys who ultimately took him out are absolute badasses, and deserve whatever recognition we can bestow upon them), and it also represents the long-overdue resolution of what had been a significant source of American embarrassment. With all our intelligence-gathering resources and military might, for years we had been tragically, almost comically unable to find the one man we were actually looking for--that ended last night, to our enemies' dismay. In a nation that is increasingly desperate for good news, this certainly qualifies.

Why, then, did I find myself struggling to share in the excitement that seemingly every other American seemed to be oozing from every orifice?

For one, I must confess that I don't exactly feel any safer today than I did yesterday. While Osama was clearly the figurehead and primary inspiration for al Qaeda, and that organization is nowhere near as strong or as organized as it was a decade ago, I by no means think that the death of bin Laden represents the death of al Qaeda. On the contrary, the world is littered with loyalists who are sympathetic to the bin Laden cause (much as it was in 2001, when 19 of them proved just how far they were willing to go to support his vision), and I do worry at least somewhat of the possibility of a symbolic "counter-punch" in support of al Qaeda's now-martyred former leader. The US State Department acknowledged as much when it immediately issued a blanket travel alert for citizens heading overseas.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, I don't think last night was the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning. To treat bin Laden's death as though it in any way represents an end to terrorism or to the United States' complex relationship with al Qaeda is foolhardy at best, extremely dangerous at worst. Any celebration, then, must first recognize that last night's victory is one mostly of symbolic importance, not necessarily strategic importance. The semi-jingoistic cries of "justice" and "revenge" after Osama's bloodshed left me wondering whether this was in fact a consideration for many of last night's revelers.

But beyond that dynamic, I am most troubled by my nagging wonder/worry as to whether or not the ends (if last night was, in fact, an end) of the American response to 9/11 justified the means. America and its government rolled out an aggressive, multi-faceted response to the economic, diplomatic, and psychological shock of 9/11, and the decisions made in the attacks' aftermath (both immediate and distant) are still being felt today, for better or for worse. To summarize...

• In order to restore confidence in the economy and in financial markets, we eased our monetary policy to an unprecedented degree, holding interest rates artificially low for an extended period, and (perhaps inadvertently) in the process stoking a housing bubble that would eventually burst with devastating consequences.

• At the same time, we passed tax cut after tax cut under the guise of economic stimulus, which, when combined with our decision to pour hundreds of billions into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, created a ballooning national debt and perpetual budget deficits that are now nearing nightmare proportions.

• By unilaterally attacking Afghanistan (and later Iraq) under the Bush Doctrine, we put significant strain on key diplomatic relationships, and black eyes like the Abu Ghraib incident and the waterboarding controversy tarnished our nation's image to a degree that we still may not fully appreciate. It may take decades or generations for our nation to recapture the moral and diplomatic high ground that we ceded in the aftermath of 9/11.

• Finally, we created a new department--Homeland Security--whose operatives at the TSA may indeed have made our airways safer, but who have done so at no trivial expense to our privacy and dignity when we fly. This invasion of privacy does not seem to be limited to air travel, as we have all learned that the recently-renewed Patriot Act is in fact incredibly expansive in scope.

Ultimately, as I sit here and assess the overall outcomes of the past 10 years, I can't help but wonder whether America is stronger or weaker than it was on September 10, 2001. Our unemployment is high, as is our national debt and budget deficit, the level of our political rhetoric has plunged to what seems like historic lows, we've lost thousands of young soldiers in pursuit of terrorists like bin Laden, and we've consistently sacrificed our personal freedoms, all in the name of preventing another day like September 11th. At which point, I can only sit back and ask myself--even in death, is it at least possible that bin Laden has the last laugh? In catching Osama, did the United States lose a bit of its soul, compromising many of the values and principles that made it great to begin with?

As a proud American, I certainly hope not.

In masterminding the 9/11 attacks, a key part of bin Laden's thesis was that the United States had become a paper tiger, a big, tough-talking, but complacent bully that couldn't take a punch. By capturing and killing bin Laden, our nation finally landed a significant counter-punch, albeit a decade delayed. But it is by no means a knockout, or even a knockdown--our nation still has much work left to do here at home. The best possible counter to the events of 9/11 is a real return to the traditional American unity and prosperity that has clearly eluded us in recent years; at the risk of sounding trite in these heady times, the best revenge against al Qaeda lies not in capturing its leader, but in living well.

It's time for all of us to step up and, one way or another, ensure that the costs we've endured and continue to endure in our pursuit of bin Laden do indeed prove to be "worth it". Last night was, as I've said, merely the end of the beginning. Today marks the beginning of the rest of the story. What can I do, what can you do, what can we all do to ensure that it's a happy ending for America? The real work starts now.

Learning the wrong lessons

I was disappointed (though hardly surprised) to hear yesterday of the dramatic and tragic airport bombing in Moscow. I've long worried that all of our expensive efforts to make airplanes safer have been in vain because they have largely ignored the airports themselves, and in fact possibly ironically made them less safe.

Specifically, as I've mentioned here before, I think that the incredibly long security lines that TSA screening has created makes those crowded "unsecure" areas among the most dangerous places a person could put himself. Why would a terrorist bother trying to sneak contraband onto a plane when he could just as easily create as much terror and human injury by simply detonating a bomb in the security line? Unfortunately, as soon as the news of the Moscow bombing broke, it was already clear that some people were in danger of learning the wrong lesson from the incident.

Experts say it is significant that those who masterminded the attack chose to bomb the arrivals hall of the airport -- Moscow's busiest -- because it was an easier target than the heavily-policed departures area.

"Arrivals has always been thought of as the 'soft' area of an airport," explained CNN's Richard Quest.

"Nobody is flying anywhere, the baggage has all been screened, because it has been on planes already, and crucially, people are leaving the airport. It's very rare that you ever saw somebody carrying a bag in to arrivals."

Security analyst Will Geddes told CNN: "The arrivals area is generally less secure .You have a large proportion of members of the public, people meeting friends and family...

Experts agree that airports worldwide, not just those in Russia, are likely to review their procedures in the wake of the Moscow attack...

And Quest said airports may begin screening people who come to meet friends and family at arrivals.

"What will happen is that the barrier will get further and further back, so no longer is it just at departures, but at the airport door, or in some cases on the road as you drive up to the terminal.

I think that all of this analysis is missing the point--in my mind, it's not significant at all that this incident happened in the arrivals area. It's only significant that it happened in the airport, rather than on an airplane. It just as easily could have happened in the departures area (in the security lines that I mentioned) as in the arrivals area. As this article suggests, our TSA would have been completely incapable of detecting an attack like the one perpetrated in Moscow.

We can move the security checkpoint all the way out to the interstate if we want to, but then you'll just have a long queue of cars (waiting to be inspected) that create a newly inviting target for terrorists. Sooner or later, no matter how much "security" you provide, there will inevitably be a crowd of people waiting to get into the secure area. Simply put, there will always be inviting targets for terrorists--trying to minimize those targets may be a laudable goal, but it misses the point.

We can't realistically prevent terrorism by removing the terrorists' targets--we never would have thought of the World Trade Center (or the Pentagon) as a target, until it became one. It is a very natural and human desire to want to gather in a central location, and by the very definition of terrorism, that means that we will naturally leave ourselves vulnerable to attack.

The only viable way of preventing terrorism over the long term is trying our best to prevent the creation of terrorists. Why do people resort to terror? Who becomes a terrorist? What can we do to prevent the process of terror cell creation? These are the questions we need to answer if we are going to prevent terrorism--NOT questions like how can we prevent large crowds of people from gathering in the same place, which is by definition a fool's errand.

I don't know how to answer the questions I posed in the previous paragraph, but I can assure you that long-standing military presences in foreign lands isn't helping. Diplomacy is a tricky game for sure, but its intelligent use is the only hope we have of preventing incidents like that in Moscow yesterday. "Securing" the arrivals area is at best a red herring. I am hopeful (though not confident) that we will learn the right lessons from yesterday's attack.

[CNN]

When yesterday's heroes become yesterday's news

If you can allow yourself to get past the partisan rhetoric that is embedded in Jon Stewart's latest rant against the Zadroga Bill (a bill that proposes to provide health benefits to 9/11 first responders), what you'll see is a fairly well-reasoned critique of government and the utter absurdity that partisan bickering (and political grandstanding) sometimes creates.

The hypocrisy of passing a massive tax cut (sorry, tax cut extension) bill while sitting on this comparatively small spending bill is baffling, even if we are willing to concede that this is indeed a matter of timing and deadlines, as Senator Thune suggests in the Stewart clip.

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Yes, Stewart is typically sympathetic to the Left at the expense of the Right (this time included), and no, I don't typically share that portion of his views. But he is also one of the more fair journalists that we currently have, which is in all honesty so pathetic that it's almost laughable--Stewart himself once responded to CNN's Tucker Carlson's criticism of his journalistic integrity by saying, "You're on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls".

It's a fair response, and it makes it only that much more damning that Stewart is indeed one of the few "journalists" left who seems to be willing to investigate and point out when and how the discussion in Washington has veered off the rails.

In this case, Stewart skewers a group of politicians who have spent years spewing fear-mongering rhetoric surrounding terrorism and 9/11 (don't forget the debate over the "Ground Zero Mosque", which Republicans vehemently opposed in the name of honoring the 9/11 victims), only to turn their backs on some of the most central figures of that memorable date, simply because political tides have shifted.

When you try to sit down and make sense of the entirety of the Republican or the Democratic party platforms, and reconcile the often-contradictory stances that each party ends up taking, it's hard to take either side particularly seriously. That's why I identify with neither party, and spend my days hoping and wishing that some day good governance will overtake political wrangling as the order of the day in Washington.


[Washington Post]

On Saudi Arabia

I surprised myself this morning when I realized that I'd made nearly 200 posts here (since August) without once mentioning terrorism. Maybe it's in part because I loathe the fear-mongering that has been done in the name of preventing terrorism, or the bad politics (and bad diplomacy) that has gone into fighting it, or how many personal freedoms we citizens have been all too willing to surrender since 9/11. But I digress.

More likely, the reason for my silence on the topic is that I try to shy away from topics that I know are divisive and provoke emotional responses (religion, abortion, Ground Zero mosques, etc.). I think that those are issues on which people are less likely to have rational discourse, and what I aim for above all else here is to promote rational discourse.

That said, what has always confounded me most about our response to 9/11--and the rhetoric surrounding that response--is our complete unwillingness to confront Saudi Arabia (home to 15 of 19 hijackers) in any meaningful way. That, in light of this article from The Independent, is what finally provoked this post.

Saudi Arabia is the single biggest contributor to the funding of Islamic extremism and is unwilling to cut off the money supply, according to a leaked note from Hillary Clinton.

The US Secretary of State says in a secret memorandum that donors in the kingdom still "constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide" and that "it has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority".

In a separate diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks last night, the militant group which carried out the Mumbai bombings in 2008, Lashkar-e-Toiba, is reported to have secured money in Saudi Arabia via one of its charity offshoots which raises money for schools.

Why we haven't addressed this publicly--while spending so much time and money pursuing costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--is beyond me. Maybe I'm ignorant and just don't get it (yeah, probably). But this seems like seriously flawed foreign policy to me. To relate this to my post on Qatar after FIFA awarded it with the 2022 World Cup, how many governments like this are we willing to support in order to keep up our current energy policy? 

Say what you will about Wikileaks; I think that its ability to bring issues like this to light is of vital importance, regardless of the means. It has become relatively clear to me that there are more things than we imagined that our government thinks we are either too immature or too innocent to know about. In an administration that publicly prides itself on openness and transparency, the Wikileaks revelations seem to be dramatic departures from stated policy. At any rate, the Saudi Arabia article infuriated and confused me, and I thought I'd post it just to clear my head.


[The Independent]