Calls For Police State Meet With Deafening Silence From Libertarians

I knew that it was a matter of time that someone would take the lesson from the bumbling terror cell plots in the UK that we need to look at everyone continually at every waking moment. Little surprise that it was Joe Lieberman (Lieberman - CT), who advocated for a police state this morning on ABC:

Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said Sunday he wants to “more widely” use surveillance cameras across the country.

“The Brits have got something smart going in England, and it was part of why I believe they were able to so quickly apprehend suspects in the terrorist acts over the weekend, and that is they have cameras all over London and other of their major cities,” Lieberman said.

“I think it’s just common sense to do that here much more widely,” he added. “And of course, we can do it without compromising anybody’s real privacy.”

Before you laugh and scoff that this is the work of a crackpot, remember that this is the Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee in the Senate.

Look, Britain's CCTV did not stop any terror attack, quick thinking by law enforcement combined with embarrassingly little knowledge of science on the part of the would-be bombers did. They simply don't prevent crime, and that's not even their object. It couldn't possibly be their object unless you wanted to hire a million or so people to be official government watchers. Detection and prosecution is their object, and in this case, I think the British were able to apprehend people in Glasgow, for example, because the guy ran out of the car on fire. The British have grown more comfortable with having 4 million CCTV cameras in their country, though there are critics. In American, we have a little thing called the Fourth Amendment which would potentially disallow unreasonable searches. It's ingrained in the American character to be mindful of their own privacy and resist efforts to take it away. So calling for a "Big Brother" setup in America is fairly nutty and potentially illegal. In other words, perfect for someone like Lieberman to call for.

You would think that this would alarm the libertarians that populate the Republican Party and particularly the conservative blogosphere. But we've learned over the past several years that, as long as you're taking away civil liberties in the name of fighting really dumb terrorists, libertarians will nod in assent or mumble uncomfortably about something else, like how that guy in line at the convenience store with the turban looked a little suspicious. Outside of this mild criticism at RedState, pretty much nobody on the right has anything to say about the chair of the Senate committee on Homeland Security calling for blanketing the country with surveillance cameras. This includes the Ole Perfesser, who yesterday got all hyped up about "Big Brother" scanning your driver's license when you buy beer, and who in the past has waged a one-man jihad against traffic cameras. Somehow, Joe Lieberman openly pining for CCTV nationwide isn't rousing much interest. Of course, it has nothing to do with robots, so maybe that's to be expected.

We have a continuing threat from terrorism (in many ways due to our bungling in international relation), but not one that requires the stripping of all of our civil liberties enshrined in the fabric of this republic. There used to be a lot of constitutionalists that understood that. Not these days, because they've become so shell-shocked and scared from 9/11 PTSD that they are willing to gladly surrender to a de facto police state in America.

All Things Plame

(This, incidentally, is my 4,000th post. Go read them all if you have a spare week and a half.)

One thing about Valerie Plame, she's a fighter. Despite suffering all the slander from the right, the end of the career for which she was trained, heaps of abuse, she's still as strong as ever.

Valerie Wilson, the former Central Intelligence Agency operative at the heart of an investigation that reached into the White House, sued the agency in federal court in New York today over its refusal to allow her to publish a memoir that would discuss how long she worked for it.

Although that information is set out in an unclassified letter to Ms. Wilson that has been published in the Congressional Record, the C.I.A. insists that her dates of service remain classified and may not be mentioned in “Fair Game,” the memoir Ms. Wilson hopes to publish in October.

Agency employees sign agreements requiring them to submit manuscripts to the agency for permission before they are published.. Ms. Wilson’s suit said she worked with agency officials for 10 months to avoid disclosing national security information. But the agency’s refusal to allow her to include material already in the public domain, the suit said, violates her right to free speech.

The CIA is in different hands than when Plame worked there, remember, and this is a textbook case of bureaucratic incompetence. They said that they sent Plame a letter with her dates of employment by mistake. The information, then, is public BUT classified at the same time. There's probably a good deal of political pressure to keep this book off of the shelves, as well.

Meanwhile, the judge involved in sentencing will make public all of the panty-sniffing letters sent by the conservative movement on Libby's behalf, so we'll be able to see out in the open their love for a criminal. Here's a sample, from Libby's lawyers:

Prosecutors want Libby to serve up to three years in prison for lying about his conversations with reporters regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose 2003 outing touched off a leak investigation.

Libby's lawyers said Thursday would be unfair. Citing numerous letters from former colleagues and friends, they said Libby deserved only probation.

"His dedication to promoting freedom abroad and keeping American citizens safe at home is beyond question," the attorneys wrote [...]

One letter quoted by Libby's attorneys, from a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said: "I always came away from our encounters thinking how lucky the country was to have someone of his caliber helping think through the great security challenges we all faced."

How lucky indeed to have someone so angry at criticism that he goes after the critic's family the way the Mafia would. How lucky to have someone who believes national security should be defined by his ideological beliefs alone.

And just to put a cap on this sorry episode, read this bit from leading intellectual light Glenn Reynolds, who pretty much admits that nothing in the insaneosphere is true at all.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Just talked to a reporter from Salon who wanted to know if I was going to "retract" an earlier blog post in which I said it looked as if Plame wasn't covert. I noted that one normally issues a retraction for original reporting, not commenting upon other people's news stories.

In other words, I don't have to be responsible for anything I say, nor does anyone else on the right, because we just comment on other people's news stories. That's the dedication to the truth we've come to expect from the insaneosphere.

If Instapundit Was Around In 1995

Bombing at the Oklahoma City Federal Building. Nobody seems to know what's happened yet, but these things do seem to take place in locations where it's not legal for people to carry bombs. Maybe the bomber could have been stopped by other people with bombs who could have bombed him before he got on with his bombing.

(I should add that he wasn't the worst offender of the right, the sickening nature of Debbie Schlussel's posts on the Virginia Tech tragedy, where she first tried to blame it on a "paki," then decided in her head that a slain Jewish faculty member wasn't getting as much credit as a Muslim kid who shot footage of the incident, are almost unspeakably malicious and stupid.)

UPDATE: John Derbyshire is a lunatic. I love these conservatives who think they're heroes for telling strangers how they should act. They really think they're in a fucking video game and not real life. They're beneath contempt.

Taste Of Your Own Medicine

It's amazing how crazy these right-wingers get when forced to defend their own beliefs. Case in point: the Instapundit.

It's finally happened.

The mainstream media finally sees Putz for what he is: not a moderate, reasonable "non-partisan" -- but a hard-right extremist. Columnist Paul Campos not only takes Putz to task for his assassination fantasies, he does so by equating him Ward Churchill -- exactly the right analogy.

See, Reynolds claimed that we should be quietly killing Iranian atomic scientists, as if that's possible. And now Paul Campos calls him on it.

Murder is the premeditated unlawful killing of a human being. Glenn Reynolds, the well-known University of Tennessee law professor who authors one of the Internet's most popular blogs, recently advocated the murder of Iranian scientists and clerics.

Of course Iran is not at war with America, but just as Reynolds spent years repeating Bush administration propaganda about Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, he's now dutifully repeating the administration's claims about supposed Iranian government involvement in Iraq's civil war.

Moreover, even if Iran were at war with the United States, the intentional killing of civilian noncombatants is a war crime, as that term is defined by international treaties America has signed. Furthermore, government-sponsored assassinations of the sort Reynolds is advocating are expressly and unambiguously prohibited by the laws of the United States.

Instapundit's amazing first reply is that Iran in fact HAS been at war with the US since taking hostages in 1979. Scott Lemieux gets this exactly right:

My question: when does he start calling for Michael Ledeen to be put on trial for high treason for helping to sell arms to a country the U.S. is at war with?

Ledeen and half the Reagan Administration, you mean.

Insty's second reply was printed today in the Rocky Mountain News, and Blue Texan does a nice job of eviscerating it.

Your false dilmmea! ("I'm just sayin'--isn't it really more reasonable to kill a few scientists and mullahs than nuke the whole country?"):

Campos chose to devote an entire column (“The right’s Ward Churchill,” Feb. 20) to a blog entry of mine from last week, in which I wondered why the Bush administration wasn’t acting covertly to kill radical mullahs and atomic scientists, rather than preparing a major attack on Iran. (Silly me, I thought this was advocating a less warlike approach).

Your apples-to-oranges comparison! ("Heads of state and terrorists" = "scientists and religious leaders"):

History first: There’s nothing beyond the pale about suggesting assassination and covert action as an alternative to warfare. In 1998, Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Joseph Biden, D-Del., asked the government to look into assassination as a means of dealing with terrorists; Sen. Chuck Robb, D-Va., suggested assassinating Saddam Hussein the same year. On Jan. 3, 2001, Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., introduced legislation to facilitate the assassination of terrorists.

And finally, your bogus WWII analogy! ("Just look at what we did to those Nazis when our nation was at war with them!"):

“Similarly, the September 1944 Allied bombing raids on the German rocket sites at Peenemunde regarded the death of scientists involved in research and development of that facility to have been as important as destruction of the missiles themselves. Attack of these individuals would not constitute assassination.”

This might be the first time Reynolds has been called out as a violent extremist. It's something he employs on a regular basis, and he can't take being on the other side. Especially when it was done in such a fact-based way. We've had a similar imbroglio with Mark Steyn, who said this...

Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can't buck demography -- except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out -- as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can't outbreed the enemy, cull 'em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia's demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.

And then tried to backtrack and say he wasn't ENDORSING ethnic cleansing there, just predicting it as an outcome. Charming man. Humorously, one person that leapt to Steyn's defense was Instapundit himself, who has said in the past that genocide is "unavoidable."

It's amusing to see these people try to run away from their own words. They've been tarring their enemies with the foulest rhetoric for years, even decades, and now it's coming back to haunt them.

4 Year-Olds

Maybe the right is fabricating Abe Lincoln quotes to make their own moral depravity look better:

IRAN IN IRAQ: This has been obvious for a long time anyway, and I don't understand why the Bush Administration has been so slow to respond. Nor do I think that high-profile diplomacy, or an invasion, is an appropriate response. We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists....Basically, stepping on the Iranians' toes hard enough to make them reconsider their not-so-covert war against us in Iraq.

....[T]o be clear, I think it's perfectly fine to kill people who are working on atomic bombs for countries -- like Iran -- that have already said that they want to use those bombs against America and its allies, and I think that those who feel otherwise are idiots, and in absolutely no position to strike moral poses.

It's kind of hilarious that these fantasists have swallowed the "24" style of politics completely whole. They actually think, like Matthew Yglesias says that a super-secret team of mercenary ninjas exist within the CIA (but off the books, so, you know, it's quiet) to pick off Iranian nuclear scientists and then, presumably, use a neuralizer to wipe everyone's memory of these scientists and mullahs clean. These are the same people who think government should be abolished or minimized because it's so inefficient.

In addition, as Kevin Drum notes, it doesn't seem to reach the minds of these people that this is an act of terrorism that they're advocating. They mean to assassinate leaders in foreign countries without a declaration of war, and believe they can do so with impunity.

These are the biggest children this nation has ever produced, people whose minds are so addled by early-80s action movies and a belief in their own righteousness that they can make themselves believe anything is possible and also necessary and just. One would hope that such stupidity was limited to the mewling cabbages in the blogosphere, but not so (h/t)

In a pattern that would become familiar, however, a chill quickly followed the warming in relations. Barely a week after the Tokyo meeting, Iran was included with Iraq and North Korea in the "Axis of Evil." Michael Gerson, now a NEWSWEEK contributor, headed the White House speechwriting shop at the time. He says Iran and North Korea were inserted into Bush's controversial State of the Union address in order to avoid focusing solely on Iraq. At the time, Bush was already making plans to topple Saddam Hussein, but he wasn't ready to say so. Gerson says it was Condoleezza Rice, then national-security adviser, who told him which two countries to include along with Iraq. But the phrase also appealed to a president who felt himself thrust into a grand struggle. Senior aides say it reminded him of Ronald Reagan's ringing denunciations of the "evil empire."

Once again, Iran's reformists were knocked back on their heels. "Those who were in favor of a rapprochement with the United States were marginalized," says Adeli. "The speech somehow exonerated those who had always doubted America's intentions."

Yes friends, we're moving toward war with Iran because Michael Gerson needed to fill out the sentence.

This is an example of how lies beget other lies. We were clearly angling to go into Iraq by Feb. 2002, but didn't want to tell anybody, so we grouped Iran in there, leading to the practical end of the reform movement in that country, leading to a more hardline and strident approach, leading to hyped-up rhetoric and a need to lie again to justify the rhetoric (so now we decide that the "highest levels of the Iranian government" have sold bombs to insurgents, except when they haven't).

So these are children too, just as willing to believe magical thinking; just as willing to buy into myths that the government is both bloated and slow, yet lightning-quick and lethal, at the same time; just as willing to deny everything but what they want to believe, and then deny that they believe THAT when it all goes wrong.

The problem with these children is that they're running the country.