Reason Magazine - Topics > Terrorism

Truth and the Gitmo Detainees

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 07:00:00 EDT

"Islamic terrorists have constitutional rights," lamented one conservative blog when the Supreme Court said Guantanamo inmates can challenge their detention in court. "These are enemy combatants," railed John McCain. The court, charged former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy of National Review, sided with foreigners "whose only connection with our body politic is their bloody jihad against Americans."

The operating assumption here is that the prisoners are terrorists who were captured while fighting a vicious war against the United States. But can the critics be sure? All they really know about the Guantanamo detainees is that they are Guantanamo detainees. To conclude that they are all bloodthirsty jihadists requires believing that the U.S. government is infallible.

But how sensible is that approach? Judging from a little-noticed federal appeals court decision that came down after the Supreme Court ruling, not very.

The case involved Huzaifa Parhat, a Chinese Muslim who fled to Afghanistan in May 2001 to escape persecution of his Uighur ethnic group by the Beijing government. When the U.S. invaded after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Uighur camp where he lived was destroyed by air strikes. He and his compatriots made their way to Pakistan, where villagers handed them over to the government, which transferred them to American custody.

You might think you would have to do something pretty obvious to wind up in Guantanamo. Apparently not. The U.S. government does not claim Parhat was a member of the Taliban or al-Qaida. He was not captured on a battlefield. The government's own military commission admitted it found no evidence that he "committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition partners."

So why did the Pentagon insist on holding him as an enemy combatant? Because he was affiliated with the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, a separatist Muslim group fighting for independence from Beijing. It had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks but reputedly got help from al-Qaida.

But the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, after reviewing secret documents submitted by the government, found that there was no real evidence. It said the flimsy case mounted against Parhat "comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true." And it ruled that, based on the information available, he was not an enemy combatant even under the Pentagon's own definition of the term.

Is this verdict just another act of judicial activism by arrogant liberals on the bench? Not by a long shot.

Of the three judges who signed the opinion, one, Thomas Griffith, was appointed in 2005 by President Bush himself. Another, David Sentelle, was nominated in 1985 by President Reagan—and had earlier joined in ruling that the Guantanamo detainees could not go to federal court to assert their innocence (a decision the Supreme Court overturned).

The administration could hardly have asked for a more accommodating group of judges. Yet they found in favor of the detainee on the simple grounds that if the government is going to imprison someone as an enemy combatant, it needs some evidence that he is one.

Parhat may not be an exceptional case. Most of the prisoners were not captured by the U.S. in combat but were turned over by local forces, often in exchange for a bounty. We had to take someone else's word that they were bad guys.

A 2006 report by Seton Hall law professor Mark Denbeaux found that only 8 percent of those held at Guantanamo were al-Qaida fighters. Even a study done at West Point concluded that just 73 percent of the detainees were a "demonstrated threat"—which means 27 percent were not.

The Parhat case doesn't prove that everyone in detention at Guantanamo is an innocent victim of some misunderstanding. But it does show the dangers of trusting the administration—any administration—to act as judge, jury, and jailer. It illustrates the need for an independent review to make sure there is some reason to believe the people being treated as terrorists really deserve it.

If any particular detainees are as bad as the administration claims, it should have no trouble making that case in court. But there is nothing to be gained from the indefinite imprisonment of someone whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Keeping innocent people behind bars is a tragedy for them and a waste for us.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Hooray for Uribe

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:00:00 EDT

In December 1996, the Peruvian Marxist guerrilla group Tupac Amaru (MRTA) occupied the Japanese embassy in Lima, taking hostage a group assembled to celebrate the birthday of Emperor Akihito. Four months later, Peru’s strongman president, the now-imprisoned Alberto Fujimori, ordered a team of elite Peruvian soldiers to retake the building. The handful of rebels who managed to survive the initial assault, witnesses later reported, were bound, dragged into a courtyard, and executed by members of the Peruvian army. Not a single member of the MRTA made it out alive.

A rather different tactic was employed by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, whose special forces freed 15 hostages held by the Marxist terror group FARC on Wednesday. The hostages included three American contractors and former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt. Dressed like a group of slightly menacing Berkeley baristas, the army infiltrators disguised themselves in Che Guevara t-shirts (seriously) and camouflaged uniforms, easily convincing the FARC that they too were fist-clenching, Lenin-reading members of the jungle politburo. It was an elaborate, cleverly plotted ruse—one that was guaranteed to fool a platoon of knuckle-dragging, forest-dwelling communist revolutionaries.

And it was a stunning—and, to Latin America watchers, unexpected—success. While it is tempting to indulge in the reflexive optimism that follows such a victory, the war against the FARC isn’t over yet. Nevertheless, it is also difficult to disagree with The Economist’s immediate post-raid assessment. The operation, said the magazine, was “a disaster for the FARC and its sympathizers in Latin America who hoped to use the hostage issue to weaken Mr Uribe.” In other words, it was a disaster for not only the FARC, but also for Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, all of whom have expressed some degree of sympathy or ideological affinity for the group.

While outwardly congratulatory, many in Latin America and Europe could muster only lukewarm praise for the Uribe government, which is viewed by many as ideologically suspect and too friendly with the Bush administration. As one blogger at The Economist noticed, more than a few European newspapers were more interested in criticizing Uribe’s policies than they were in discussing the rescue of Betancourt. The French paper Libération championed Betancourt’s cause, The Economist noted, but “could barely bring itself to congratulate Mr Uribe and the Colombians this morning,” choosing instead to upbraid the government’s “implacable” war against the guerrillas.

In the fever swamps of the far left, the reaction was predictably full of non sequiturs about Uribe’s dubious past associations and rumor-mongering about the fortuitous timing of the operation. The left-wing radio station Pacifica devoted a significant chunk of its coverage following the raid to questioning both the “timing” of the operation (more on this in a moment) and the institutional corruption of the Uribe administration—but nothing on the FARC’s unspeakably brutal crimes against the Colombian peasantry.

A Huffington Post writer dismissed as fake the evidence gleaned from laptops captured in the raid that killed FARC commander Raul Reyes in March. The material, which was verified by Interpol and suggested connections between FARC and officials in Venezuela and Ecuador, was most likely ginned up by the “death squad President Alvaro Uribe.” (The same author recently praised Evo Morales for “turn[ing] over the tortilla of our consciousness about Indians, race and power.”)

There is an understandable desire to bludgeon Uribe’s credibility by citing, for instance, his shady family and political connections. And there is quite a bit to unpack here. While it’s unfair to compare President Uribe to the buffoonish President Chavez, his critics are indeed justified in expressing skepticism of the timing of the raid, which they claim is designed to distract the public from a very Chavista-like scandal. Uribe’s second term election victory was secured after Congress lifted a ban on the serving of consecutive terms—a victory secured through good old-fashioned bribery, say his critics. The court recently ruled against the president on this very issue, forcing Uribe to issue a furious denial.

And his accusers are also correct to criticize the positively Bolivarian attempt to hold on to power for a third term, with party activists collecting signatures to force a referendum on the issue. While not directly involved in the campaign to extend his rule, Uribe has thus far refused to eliminate the possibility of yet another presidential mandate.

And then there is “Plan Colombia”—the wasteful, destructive, and counterproductive drug war operation inaugurated by former U.S. President Bill Clinton (and expanded by President George W. Bush) and former Colombian President Andres Pastrana. Drugs and the FARC are deeply intertwined, but it is optimistic to think that an end to the Colombian drug war would precipitate the end of the guerrilla war.

So yes, the Uribe government is far from perfect—it is Latin America after all, so we must judge on a steep curve—but as even the left-leaning Guardian acknowledged this week, Uribe is indeed a "skilled politician" who "has been able to bring a degree of order, security and prosperity to the country that was scarcely believed possible when he took office in 2002."

So what to do now? With FARC against the ropes and Uribe’s popularity at all time highs, former KGB “agent of influence” Richard Gott, author of a hagiographic biography of Hugo Chavez and a pro-Castro history of Cuba, advised that a “new Democratic government in the United States in January should put pressure on Uribe to engage in negotiation.” The New York Times said much the same: “President Álvaro Uribe should now capitalize on that disarray and offer the rebels, who long ago traded the business of political liberation for drug trafficking, a political settlement.”

During his press conference with the freed hostages, Uribe himself made a vague offer to FARC, one quickly endorsed by Betancourt: “This is an invitation to the FARC to make peace, to start releasing the hostages they still hold captive.” It is rather important to note that this was not the first in a new round of negations, but a stern demand for peace, offering no reciprocal action by the government.

So let’s bring this back around to where we started. Looking at the Peruvian example of fighting a war against left-wing guerrillas, we see a protracted, bloody war that the government ultimately won, crushing both the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru, two Maoist terror organizations who demanded nothing less than the restructuring of civilization according to the Chairman’s book of insane aphorisms. And there could, of course, be little political negotiations when there was almost nothing to negotiate. That was a situation understood by the rebels, and one that prompted them to enter into the business of kidnap and assassination.

There is an important distinction that must be made between the Fujimori tactics noted above—which routinely involved extrajudicial executions and the torture and disappearance of detainees—and those of Uribe, who claims to have insisted that the FARC hostage takers not be harmed during the raid. And while his critics rail against waging war against the FARC, it is only now, with the organization in full retreat, that the government can start making demands and "negotiate." This is, in other words, fast becoming the type of "negotiation" we saw aboard the battleship USS Missouri in 1945.

All of this is good news for Colombia, President Uribe, the families of the released, and the country’s economy (the Colombian peso surged the following day). But last word must go to Betancourt, who after years in captivity wisely warned both the Latin American left and her captors to let Colombia choose its own destiny: "I think (Chavez and Correa) are important allies in this process—but on the condition of respect for Colombian democracy. Colombians elected Alvaro Uribe. Colombians did not elect the FARC.”

And with President Uribe's approval rating hovering around 80 percent, don't expect Colombians to elect the FARC anytime soon.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor at reason.

What Price Justice?

info@reason.com (Jeff Taylor) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:00:00 EDT

You want a happy ending. You want to say that everything eventually worked, that the system got it right in the end, that the latest twist in the seven-year long anthrax attack saga is a turn for the better. Except you can't.

On June 27th former federal bioweapons researcher Steven Hatfill essentially won his dispute with a federal government that had suspected him of unleashing anthrax letters on America in the fall of 2001. While admitting no wrongdoing, the feds agreed to pay Hatfill $5.8 million. In other words, the feds admitted they screwed up. Big time.

This sounds like a victory, and it surely is for Hatfill, who was hounded by the FBI and identified by hapless Attorney General John Ashcroft as a "person of interest" in the case. But the bigger picture remains bleak.

Most striking is the fact that the masterminds behind bold acts of terrorism—Osama bin Laden and the anthrax killer—remain at large despite untold of amounts of blood and treasure spent to catch them. Moreover, the anthrax attacks, unlike the use of airliners as guided missiles, remains an eminently repeatable mode of mass mayhem. Authorities still do not know exactly how the deadly compound was formed, where, or by whom.

The investigative missteps in the anthrax case were huge and there is no sign that procedures have changed in such a way as to avoid repeat. In fact, counter-terrorism measures have only become more hair-trigger and susceptible to political or panicked influence from outside the immediate investigation.

Former FBI agent Brad Garrett, who was part of the original anthrax investigation, recently reflected on how top brass in D.C. tried to micromanage every step of the investigation. FBI Director Robert Mueller demanded and received daily briefings on the case, which predictably tried to convey "progress" even if the facts suggested otherwise. This, of course, is not investigation, but ass-covering.

Any semi-complex problem requires getting smart people together and then leaving them alone to solve it. Trust, it turns out, is a key investigative tool. But the FBI didn't trust itself or others in 2002 and there is little reason to believe that anything has changed.

Instead, the FBI turned from trust to fear, now the defining element in America's counter-terrorism toolkit—from shock-and-awe to waterboarding. Clumsy and obvious surveillance was maintained on Hatfill with hopes of cracking him. Then a wholly implausible circus of "anthrax alerting" bloodhounds was staged to further ratchet up the pressure. In all likelihood, the "results" of these dog sweeps were fabricated by the feds, then leaked to gullible reporters to further pressure Hatfill.

This mind-set does not look for evidence or leads, let alone the truth. Such activity is not investigative, but prosecutorial. Guilt has been decided, the only question is how to make the case. It is no coincidence that a unitary executive branch that claims the power to imprison without the need for independent review or verifiable evidence produced and sanctioned this approach in the anthrax case.

There are now several distinct possibilities in the anthrax mystery, all with backers on the Internet and elsewhere. One is that the feds have no clue who might have been responsible. This is possible, beyond depressing to consider. Disputes over whether the anthrax spores themselves were "weaponzied" took up an inordinate amount of investigative energy, perhaps allowing the killer to cover all tracks leading back to him or her.

Then there is the case-making theory. This is the notion that the government has a suspect or suspects, but has yet to come up with enough evidence to merit an arrest. A close cousin of this view is the "Central New Jersey" theory; the idea that the anthrax used in the attacks was cooked up in the Garden State among a narrow range of possible circumstances.

Finally, we have most tin foil-plated view, one that on my blacker days I can readily see. Namely, the anthrax attacks were undertaken by a person or persons with ties close enough to the federal government that it is effectively impossible to prosecute them. Too many secrets would spill out.

All of these possibilities are dysfunctional enough for the next occupant of the Oval Office to undertake a top-to-bottom reform of America's counter-terrorism efforts. Otherwise, justice will remain elusive and arbitrary for citizens like Steven Hatfill.

Contributing Editor Jeff Taylor writes from North Carolina.

Habeas Half-Truths

info@reason.com (Robert A. Levy) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:00:00 EDT

In a key decision at the close of its term, the Supreme Court held that 270 detainees at Guantanamo Bay have a constitutional right to habeas corpus, by which they can petition a federal court for a hearing to challenge their detentions. Regrettably, that narrow holding has been misinterpreted and exaggerated by defenders of Bush administration policies to suggest that federal courts will replace military courts in conducting criminal-like trials of alien battlefield detainees. That is not what the Court said. Let's see if we can dispel some of the half-truths and untruths regarding the Court's holding in Boumediene v. Bush.

Writing for a 5-4 majority, split along liberal-conservative lines, swing Justice Anthony Kennedy reached the following conclusions: First, Guantanamo is "technically not part of the United States," but it is under our "complete and total control." Therefore, second, Gitmo detainees have habeas rights that are secured by the U.S. Constitution. Third, Congress can suspend those rights only "when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." Fourth, Congress's attempt in the Military Commissions Act to suspend habeas rights for alien detainees did not establish the pre-conditions required by the Constitution. Fifth, the existing procedures by which detainees can contest their detentions—Combat Status Review Tribunals—are not adequate substitutes for habeas. Accordingly, sixth, the relevant provisions of the Military Commissions Act are unconstitutional and Gitmo detainees may exercise their habeas rights in federal court.

Significantly, the Court did not resolve the question of whether habeas rights attach to alien detainees held outside the United States, other than Guantanamo. Neither did the Court indicate that specified detainees must now be released; nor did it address the effect, if any, of its ruling on military trials currently scheduled.

What, then, gives rise to the confusion and hyperbole surrounding the Boumediene opinion? In part, the problem can be traced to selective excerpts from dissenting opinions by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia. Roberts, for example, wrote that the administration currently offers "the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants." Scalia was similarly blunt: "Today, for the first time in our nation's history, the court confers a constitutional right to habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war."

Both of those characterizations can be read to suggest, erroneously, that the Court has mandated changes to the procedures now extended to all alien detainees. In fact, the Court carved out a narrow exception, applicable only to Guantanamo because of its unique status under our treaty with Cuba. Although Cuba is the legal sovereign, the question whether U.S. territory is involved turns on "objective factors and practical concerns, not formalism," wrote Justice Kennedy. Traditionally, U.S. constitutional rights vest when the challenged governmental acts take place on U.S. territory.

Equally important, administration backers such as former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo argue, "A judge's view on how much 'proof' is needed to find that a 'suspect' is a terrorist will become the standard applied on the battlefield. Soldiers will have to gather ‘evidence,'...take statements from ‘witnesses,' and probably provide some kind of Miranda-style warning upon capture." That characterization is misleading on several fronts.

First, habeas is not about proof of war crimes or other terrorist acts, but about the designated status of detainees. They may be designated as lawful combatants (i.e., POWs), unlawful enemy combatants (e.g., al Qaeda), or innocent non-combatants. If innocent, they should be released. If POWs, they may not be interrogated and must be released when hostilities end. If unlawful combatants, they may be interrogated, then tried by military tribunal. Habeas rights are not extended to persons adjudicated to be enemy combatants; they are extended to persons accused of being enemy combatants but entitled, as a threshold matter, to dispute that accusation.

The criteria for unlawful combatant designations are straightforward: They do not wear uniforms or other insignia of a command structure, do not openly possess weapons, and will not commit to abide by internationally recognized laws of war. Those criteria were applied by screening tribunals during the Persian Gulf War: 1200 detainees were screened and more than 800 were released. The same process, if applied during the Iraq and Afghan wars, would have eliminated the need for the Supreme Court to resolve unchartered questions about habeas for alien detainees at Gitmo.

Second, Boumediene does not establish Gitmo habeas procedures—not for granting or conducting hearings, not for applying rules of evidence, not for defining the burden of proof. Perhaps the Court should have addressed those points, but it did not. The Court simply afforded a federal civil court remedy for unjustified detention. If Congress wants to establish reasonable rules, it may do so—just as Congress enacted the Uniform Code of Military Justice and approves the Federal Rules of Evidence. What Congress may not do is wait five years, then cave in to administration proposals that effectively pre-determine the outcome of detainee hearings in the government's favor.

Third, under the Geneva Conventions and Defense Department regulations, each detainee whose initial designation as an unlawful combatant is disputable has an opportunity to challenge that designation before a screening tribunal. The Boumediene case arose in the first instance because the Bush administration tried to circumvent those procedures. Instead of convening screening tribunals, the president unilaterally declared all of the detainees at Gitmo to be unlawful enemy combatants, thus entitled to little or no rights. Those declarations might have been correct for many of the detainees, but not all of them.

If President Bush had followed prescribed procedures, several Gitmo habeas cases over the past few years would never have been litigated—or would have been resolved in the administration's favor. In other words, this is a problem of the president's own making. Forty detainees have been held for more than six years without charges filed against them. Some detainees who deny being enemy combatants have never been given an opportunity to show their detention is unwarranted. To its credit, the Supreme Court has finally said "enough."

Robert A. Levy is senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and co-author of The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom.

Christopher Hitchens Tortured (Seriously)

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:57:00 EDT

Christopher Hitchens underwent waterboarding for a Vanity Fair story. His conclusion?

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Below is an excerpt from his day in the life of a torture victim:

In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

Check out the full story here. See the video here. Jacob Sullum on waterboarding here.

Idiot Tested, Not TSA Approved

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:28:00 EDT

Several years too late, the Transportation Security Administration is simplifying the lives of travelers by approving the use of X-ray-friendly laptop cases. According to the New York Times:

Two problems with the existing laptop cases are that security officers have difficulty seeing inside them with X-ray equipment, and many of the cases are so crammed with extra gear — power cords, a mouse and the like — that the computer is obscured.

To solve these problems, Ron Davis from Pathfinder Luggage says that the company's cases will be made of "nylon and foam," because "the X-ray machine will see right through that."

As it happens, I've been using an Incase Neoprene Sleeve to hold my MacBook for more than two years now. I know that it's X-ray friendly because, A) it holds only my computer and no other accessories, B) Neoprene is a type of foam; and C) the last several times I've flown, I neglected to remove my laptop from its case on the conveyer belt, and not once did a TSA employee ask me to take it out and send it back in. Why? Because the case didn't obstruct the views on the monitor.

Yet the TSA is refusing to set up an approval process, or a list of minimum technical specs, because X-rayable features on laptop cases should be "self evident." As a result, companies cannot "state nor imply that the bags were certified or approved by the T.S.A. or use a T.S.A. logo on them," and customers will have to hope they guessed right before placing their zipped computer on the belt.

It will be immediately apparent if a laptop case is not properly designed for unobscured visual inspection because it will not give security officers a clear X-ray image, Mr. Hawley said. The case and laptop will be removed from the belt for a close look by security officers, he said.

The recap: The current TSA policy is to let no one send his laptop through the X-ray machine while still inside its case. The new TSA policy entails encouraging manufacturers to come up with new cases, which the administration can't and won't endorse. It will then test those cases by letting all passengers send their encased laptops through the conveyer belt, whether they own a new one or not (because not even TSA employees will be able to tell the difference), then removing all the ones whose contents are obscured. Fantastic policy, and fantastically late.

Editor Jacob Sullum wrote here about the TSA's nipple checking policy.

Bush Administration Loses Guantanamo Claim

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:51:00 EDT

A panel from the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit looks at the evidence from the first "secret" case out of Guantánamo, and finds it lacking.

In the first case to review the government’s secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims. The unclassified parts of the decision were released on Monday.
With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.
The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem "The Hunting of the Snark": "I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."
"This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true," said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The unanimous panel overturned as invalid a Pentagon determination that the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, a member of the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority in western China, was properly held as an enemy combatant.
The panel included one of the court’s most conservative members, the chief judge, David B. Sentelle.

More "judicial activism" like this would be welcome. Only about eight percent of the prisoners in Gitmo are suspected to be actual Al Qaeda fighters. Thus far, just one of the 680 held at the facility at the height of its capacity in May 2003 has been convicted. The Bush administration's approach to actual evidence against the people it has been detaning has thus far amounted to little more than "just trust us." It's a good thing the courts are asking for a bit more than that.

Would President McCain Obey the Law?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:00:00 EDT

In asking Congress to allow warrantless surveillance of Americans' international communications, President Bush is seeking permission to do something he believes he does not need permission to do. Like a parent confronted by a defiant teenager, Congress is giving in while insisting it isn't.

Federal law already says the government may listen to the phone calls or read the email of people in the United States only if it follows procedures established by statute. The amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) approved by the House last week say it again. Twice. In effect, Congress is saying, "We mean it. Seriously."

In Congress' defense (did I really say that?), it's hard to think of an effective statutory response to a president who, like Bush, feels free to ignore the law when it forbids him to do what he thinks is necessary to fight terrorism. The only solution to that problem is to replace Bush with a president who is more inclined to respect the rule of law and the separation of powers.

Although he may change his tune if he's elected (especially since he'll face a Democrat-controlled Congress disinclined to check his power), Barack Obama at least claims to believe in these principles. "As president," he told The Boston Globe in December, "I will follow existing law, and when it comes to U.S. citizens and residents, I will only authorize surveillance for national security purposes consistent with FISA and other federal statutes."

The Illinois senator disappointed many of his supporters by backing the FISA amendments, which not only approve warrantless wiretaps but grant retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies that assisted the Bush administration's illegal post-9/11 surveillance program. Still, he emphasized that Congress has the authority to restrict or rescind the president's spying powers.

"Under this compromise legislation," Obama said, "the president's illegal program of warrantless surveillance will be over. It restores FISA and existing criminal wiretap statutes as the exclusive means to conduct surveillance, making it clear that the president cannot circumvent the law and disregard the civil liberties of the American people."

By contrast, Obama's straight-talking opponent, John McCain, has vacillated on this issue and now seems unwilling to give a straight answer to the question of whether, as president, he would obey the law. "I think that presidents have the obligation to obey and enforce laws that are passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, no matter what the situation is," McCain told the Globe in December. "I don't think the president has the right to disobey any law."

Yet a McCain adviser contradicted that position in a May letter to National Review Online, saying the Arizona senator believes "neither the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people...understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001." He added that "John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from [terrorist] threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution."

The reference to Article II implies that the president has constitutional authority to flout statutory restrictions on wiretaps, the very position that McCain disavowed in December. Pressed by The New York Times to explain the blatant contradiction, a campaign spokesman wrote in an email message, "To the extent that the comments of members of our staff are misinterpreted, they shouldn't be read into as anything otherwise." Thanks for clearing that up.

In response to the Times story, McCain himself claimed "it's ambiguous as to whether the president acted within his authority" when he ordered the warrantless wiretaps. No more need be said on the subject, according to McCain, because we should "move forward" instead of "looking back." The question for voters is whether they want to move forward with a president whose commitment to obey the law is ambiguous.

Afghanistan: 'An Inspiration to the Cause of Freedom'

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:25:00 EDT

Here is our government's official take on Afghanistan, circa March 2006:

The democratic process taking hold in Afghanistan is an inspiration to the cause of freedom, President Bush said in the country's capital, Kabul, today.
"I hope the people of Afghanistan understand that as democracy takes hold, you're inspiring others," Bush said while visiting Afghanistan for the first time. "And that inspiration will cause others to demand their freedom."
Bush said he was "enthralled" to see the progress being made in Afghanistan. As evidence of this progress, he pointed to the growth of an entrepreneurial spirit enabling Afghans to realize their dreams, to young girls going to school for the first time, to the country's free press, and to the standing-up of a well-trained military dedicated to the sovereignty of the nation...
Bush emphasized that the U.S. is committed to the "universal" value that all humans desire to be free. "And we know that history has taught us that free societies yield the peace," he said. "We want peace for our children, and we want peace for the Afghan children, as well."

Here is a recent news item of a sort that has become familiar in the last few years:

An Afghan journalist accused of distributing an unacceptable translation of the Koran should be put to death, says former Prime Minister Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai.

Former journalist Ghows Zalmay, who was also the spokesman for Afghanistan's Attorney-General, was arrested in November last year for distributing a translation of the Koran into Dari, one of Afghanistan's two official languages.

Ahmadzai, who ran in the 2004 presidential election against current President Hamid Karzai, told Adnkronos International (AKI) he supported the death penalty for Zalmay.

"Today Afghanistan is full of vices. Several Afghan restaurants serve liquor, despite it being illegal and on top of it, such material is distributed," Ahmadzai told AKI.

"I am in favour of his death."

The point is not to take a cheap shot at the Bush administration with a facile juxtaposition. (Well, that's not the only point.) Clearly, Bush oversold the "freedom" angle, perhaps because he mistakenly assumed that democracy inevitably leads to liberty. If most Afghans agree with Ahmadzai that death is an appropriate penalty for an unauthorized translation of the Koran, executing Zalmay would be democratic, but it would not exactly be "an inspiration to the cause of freedom."

Bush's second mistake, we have to hope, is that American security depends on the freedom of people in other countries. This, I gather, was the main rationale for the invasion of Iraq, which the Bush administration advertised as a pre-emptive strike against an aggressive dictator armed with weapons of mass destruction. Although I never supported that war, I did think that military action against Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan was justified. I did not realize it meant that the U.S. would be committed to transforming Afghanistan into not just a democracy but a liberal democracy, on the theory that "free societies yield the peace." Can't we settle for a regime that is less inclined to welcome anti-American terrorists, even if it continues to ban liquor and arrest heretics? And if that is in fact what our government is aiming for, how is this approach different from old-style realism?

Yoo Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:28:00 EDT

Last week, ex-Bush executive power rationalizer John Yoo penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal heaping the usual criticisms on the Supreme Court's Boumediene decision, which held that the government can't just snatch people up off the street, then hold them forever without ever giving them a trial.

Glenn Greenwald dresses Yoo down here. Cato's Tim Lynch has a go at him here. Meanwhile, Gene Healy finds an intriguing article written for Cato a few years ago attacking Bill Clinton for his unilateral, imperious approach to foreign policy. That article's author? John Yoo.

Hack-tastic!

Terrorized by the Supreme Court

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:00:00 EDT

A lot of people who strongly believe in the war on terror are not above sowing a little terror of their own. From the reaction to last week's Supreme Court decision on Guantanamo, you would think the detainees were all going to be trained, armed and set free at Ground Zero, with free shuttle service to the nearest airport.

John McCain denounced the ruling, which said inmates may ask for federal court review under a procedure known as habeas corpus, as "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country." Former Bush Justice Department official John Yoo warned that henceforth, captured enemy fighters will be read their Miranda rights. The irrepressible Wall Street Journal had a cartoon with a judge atop a cage labeled "Gitmo" watching masked inmates stream out wearing suicide vests and lugging AK-47s.

All this outrage builds on the dissent registered by Justice Antonin Scalia. The court's decision "will make the war harder on us," he thundered. "It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

Well, it won't have that effect unless it leads to inmates being released—which it has not, will not anytime soon, and may not ever. If and when it does, he may have a point, though not necessarily a powerful one.

Anytime you let someone out of prison, even if he's innocent, you create the possibility that he will someday kill someone. Scalia makes much of the supposed fact that 30 of the detainees freed from Guantanamo "have returned to the battlefield." Just because they were later captured or killed, however, doesn't mean they "returned" to the war.

Some of them may have been victims of mistaken identity, which could explain why those softhearted folks at the Pentagon let them go. But stick a blameless unfortunate in a cage for six years, abusing him in the process, and when he comes out, he may seek revenge. The only way to eliminate the risk is to keep all the detainees locked up forever.

Even the Bush administration has not gone that far. It was happy to free more than 500 inmates over the years. When it did, by the way, nobody accused the president of causing more Americans to be killed.

Besides, any releases are only speculative right now. To have a chance at freedom, a prisoner will have to make a plausible case that he's innocent. The administration had already planned to try 80 of the detainees before military commissions, which suggests it has abundant evidence of guilt.

Presumably the Defense Department has information to show that many, if not all, of the others were connected to al-Qaida or other enemy forces. If the government presents incriminating evidence that the inmate can't refute, a habeas corpus petition will be about as useful to him as a snowboard.

Nor are the courts likely to let the American Civil Liberties Union draw up the standards for release. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the majority opinion, indicated the judiciary will err on the side of caution.

"Habeas corpus proceedings need not resemble a criminal trial," he stipulated, for those worried about Miranda warnings. Though inmates have rights, he noted, "it does not follow that a habeas corpus court may disregard the dangers the detention in these cases was intended to prevent."

Let's suppose there's an inmate whom the Pentagon thinks was fighting for al-Qaida but lacks any supporting evidence it can use in court. Does he now have a get-out-of-Gitmo-free card? Not necessarily.

In that case, says Northwestern University law professor Ronald Allen, the government could classify him as a prisoner of war—who, like POWs in previous wars, may be held until the hostilities cease. The trouble, from the administration's point of view, is that he would then be entitled to standard POW protections, such as being treated humanely and not being punished for refusing to answer questions. But at this point, that's a small price to pay.

It's also a small price to say that if the executive wants to capture someone, treat him as an unlawful enemy combatant and hold him for the rest of his life, it should have to justify that decision to someone other than itself. Critics of this decision are terrified that the courts will have the power to free innocent men. But really, the alternative is a lot scarier.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Is the Habeas Ruling Really One of the Worst Decisions in American History?

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 07:59:00 EDT

As Matt Welch recently noted, John McCain is none too happy with Boumediene v. Bush, calling the Supreme Court's recognition of habeas corpus for enemy combatants "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country." Could that possibly be true? As a measuring stick, I'd suggest using The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom, a new book by the Cato Institute's Robert Levy and the Institute for Justice's Chip Mellor.

On issues ranging from eminent domain abuse to the restriction of civil liberties during wartime, Levy and Mellor paint a consistent—and consistently depressing—picture of the Court upholding and enhancing government actions at the expense of individual rights. That's as good a definition of a "worst decision" as you'll ever get: state power trumping individual liberty.

Where does Boumediene fall on that scale? Even if you accept Chief Justice John Roberts's dissent, which argues that the Court permanently weakened the separation of powers by substituting its judgment for that of "the people's representatives," the decision hardly sinks to the depths of, say, Korematsu v. United States, where the majority upheld Franklin Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

In Roberts's view, Congress already protected "whatever rights the detainees may possess" via the Detainee Treatment Act, making the Court's actions both unwarranted and unnecessary. Moreover, his dissent predicts that, "the habeas process the Court mandates will most likely end up looking a lot like the DTA system it replaces." If this is correct, then the real problem with Boumediene isn't the risk it poses to national security (as McCain has stressed) but its long-term political fallout. That's at least a debatable point, though I'd argue that the Court has upheld the separation of powers by exercising a necessary check on the other branches. Furthermore, as legal blogger Marty Lederman has noted:

On the basic habeas question, perhaps the most explanatory line of the majority opinion is this one: "The test for determining the scope of [the Suspension Clause] must not be subject to manipulation by those whose power it is designed to restrain." In other words, because the Government chose to detain these prisoners at GTMO for the very purpose of avoiding a judicial check on the legality of the detentions, the Court will ensure that the constitutional guarantee extends to the naval base.

But for the last word, I turn to the increasingly libertarian George Will, whose column yesterday made short work of McCain's legal scholarship:

Did McCain's extravagant condemnation of the court's habeas ruling result from his reading the 126 pages of opinions and dissents? More likely, some clever ignoramus convinced him that this decision could make the Supreme Court—meaning, which candidate would select the best judicial nominees—a campaign issue.

The Limits of Power

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 07:00:00 EDT

One of the ancient axioms of chemistry is, "The dose makes the poison." What may be beneficial in small doses can be harmful in large ones. A couple of aspirin can cure a headache, but a couple of hundred will kill the patient.

That insight applies in other areas, too. In wartime, you don't want the sort of president we had in, say, James Buchanan—who thought that while the South had no right to secede, he had no right to stop it, either. You want a president willing to act, quickly and forcefully.

But those qualities can be taken too far. If a powerful, assertive executive were an unmixed blessing, the United States would never have revolted against King George III.

From the beginning of the war on terror, the Bush administration has had two central objectives. The first is protecting the nation against its enemies. The second is asserting the president's near-absolute authority to wage this war. That approach involved a crucial error: It couldn't advance the second goal without undermining the first.

That's because ours is not a system designed to unleash the power of the government. It's a system designed to control it. By conceiving the president as a virtual monarch in national security matters, George W. Bush and his subordinates have provoked active resistance from both Congress and the courts—which might have been avoided with a more cooperative and pragmatic approach.

The latest illustration came Thursday, when the Supreme Court ruled by a 5-4 vote that the administration overstepped lawful bounds in its treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo. For the first time, the justices said foreign enemy combatants held outside our borders may appeal to the federal courts.

This is a welcome development because it upholds certain basic rights and safeguards that are due even to suspected terrorists. It's a worrisome development, on the other hand, because it requires the judiciary to assume grave responsibilities in a realm where it has no special competence.

The ideal is not for the courts to step into these matters. The ideal is for the elected branches to act with enough respect for constitutional values that the courts would see no need to step in.

But that happy optimum was not to be. The administration asserted that in time of war, even an unconventional war against a shadowy foe, the executive branch has the power to capture a foreigner abroad and hold him for the rest of his life, without any independent review by the courts.

Short of claiming the right to do that to an American citizen arrested on U.S. soil—a claim the administration had also made, only to see it repudiated by the courts—that's about as vast and dangerous a power as you could find. So it is not surprising that the Supreme Court balked.

The justices insisted that the constitutional guarantee of habeas corpus, which lets prisoners challenge their confinement, must be respected. Except when Congress formally suspends that right, wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy, it assures that "the judiciary will have a time-tested device...to maintain the 'delicate balance of governance' that is itself the surest safeguard of liberty."

The response among the administration's allies on Capitol Hill was predictably angry. Republican Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri said the court "chose to give foreign terrorists the constitutional rights and privileges of U.S. citizens."

But the Constitution is very clear in extending protections to non-citizens present on sovereign U.S. territory or the functional equivalent, which Guantanamo clearly is. And how does Bond know the inmates are terrorists? The Court's chief objection was that the existing review process gives detainees no plausible means to demonstrate their innocence.

Such measures may be unnecessary if you're fighting the Wehrmacht or the Imperial Japanese Navy, whose members are easy to identify. But against an adversary like al-Qaida, mistakes are far more likely—and, given the open-ended nature of the conflict, far more harmful.

So if Congress and the president refuse to provide the checks needed to guard against error and abuse, they should not be surprised to find them imposed by the courts. Whatever the Supreme Court may not know about fighting a war, it knows something the elected branches should have kept in mind: In America, the only legitimate power is a limited power.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Did the Supreme Court Make Things Worse for Future Enemy Combatants?

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 19:09:00 EDT

There's a lot worth thinking about in Justice Antonin Scalia's harsh Boumediene v. Bush dissent, but one passage jumped out right away. After noting that the Bush administration used the naval base at Guantanamo Bay precisely because it believed that enemy combatants would not enjoy habeas corpus and other constitutional rights while being held there, Justice Scalia suggests the following: "Had the law been otherwise, the military surely would not have transported prisoners there, but would have kept them in Afghanistan, transferred them to another of our foreign military bases, or turned them over to allies for detention." Here's the kicker: "Those facilities might well have been worse for the detainees themselves."

Given that "allies" such as Egypt and Syria regularly torture their prisoners, I'd certainly agree that things "might well have been worse" elsewhere. But isn't Justice Scalia contradicting President Bush, who famously declared that "torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture." And maybe I'm reading too much into it, but Scalia's words sure sound like an implied threat. You liberals think Guantanamo is bad? Next time you won't even know where the prisoners are held.

Ring Barers

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

The Transportation Security Administration warns that “incidents of female terrorists hiding explosives in sensitive areas are on the rise all over the world.” By “sensitive areas,” the TSA does not mean airplane cockpits or cargo holds; it means breasts and vaginas.

Still, that does not explain why TSA agents at the airport in Lubbock, Texas, forced Mandi Hamlin to remove her nipple rings on February 24, saying she could not board her flight to Dallas until she did so. The removal was a painful and embarrassing process that required the use of pliers and elicited snickers from the screeners.

It was also contrary to the policy described on the TSA’s website, which says passengers with body piercings may have to undergo “additional screening for a pat-down inspection” if their intimate jewelry sets off the walk-through metal detector. In Hamlin’s case it didn’t, and she says it never has. Instead she was selected for secondary examination at random, and the screener’s wand reacted to her nipple rings. Hamlin explained the situation and offered to show a female screener her breasts in private to verify that the nipple rings were not explosives or weapons. She was not permitted to do so.

Nor was Hamlin offered the choice implied by the TSA’s website, which says “you may ask to remove your body piercing in private as an alternative to a pat-down search.” Hamlin says she would have preferred a pat-down but was never given the option.

An internal investigation nevertheless concluded that TSA personnel “properly followed procedures.” At the same time, the agency said, “TSA has reviewed the procedures themselves and agrees that they need to be changed.” From now on, it promised, “TSA will inform passengers that they have the option to resolve the alarm through a visual inspection of the article in lieu of removing the item in question.”

The TSA may also have to tweak its procedures for passengers with feeding tubes. In March a screener at the Orlando International Airport forced a teenaged traveler to unseal his backup feeding tube, contaminating it and putting his life at risk. After press inquiries, the TSA apologized and opened an investigation.

Would President McCain Obey the Law? 'It's Ambiguous.'

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:30:00 EDT

In a column I wrote a couple of months ago, I noted that John McCain seemed to have a less expansive view of presidential authority than George W. Bush. Now the distance between them seems to be shrinking. In a recent letter to National Review Online, McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin reported that the Arizona senator believes President Bush acted within his constitutional authority when he violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by approving warrantless monitoring of international communications involving people in the United States. According to Holtz-Eakin, who was responding to an NRO post by Andrew McCarthy that questioned whether McCain was sufficiently supportive of Bush's position on this issue, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate believes "neither the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and the trial lawyers, understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001."

Holtz-Eakin added that as president, "John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from [terrorist] threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution." The reference to Article II clearly implies that McCain would feel free to violate any statute he believed impeded his ability to conduct anti-terrorist surveillance.

As The New York Times noted on Friday, that position directly contradicts the one McCain took in response to questions about executive power posed by The Boston Globe last December:

Mr. McCain was asked whether he believed that the president had constitutional power to conduct surveillance on American soil for national security purposes without a warrant, regardless of federal statutes.
He replied: "There are some areas where the statutes don't apply, such as in the surveillance of overseas communications. Where they do apply, however, I think that presidents have the obligation to obey and enforce laws that are passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, no matter what the situation is."
Following up, the interviewer asked whether Mr. McCain was saying a statute trumped a president's powers as commander in chief when it came to a surveillance law. "I don't think the president has the right to disobey any law," Mr. McCain replied.

Note that McCain says there are some areas where FISA's warrant requirements "don't apply," not some areas where they are superseded by the president's inherent powers. The example he gives, "surveillance of overseas communications," refers to email and telephone calls between parties who are both located abroad, which are not covered by FISA's warrant requirement, rather than the domestic-to-foreign communications that were the subject of Bush's order. His statement is a clear disavowal of the notion that "the president has the right to disobey the law." But instead of saying Holtz-Eakin got McCain's views wrong, the senator's campaign offered a series of nonresponses:

Tucker Bounds, a McCain campaign spokesman, said Mr. McCain's position on surveillance laws and executive power "has not changed."
"John McCain has been an unequivocal advocate of pursuing the radicals and extremists who seek to attack Americans," Mr. Bounds wrote in an e-mail message, adding that Mr. McCain's "votes and positions have been completely consistent and any suggestion otherwise is a distortion of his clear record."
Asked whether the views Mr. Holtz-Eakin imputed to Mr. McCain were inaccurate, Mr. Bounds did not repudiate the statement. But late Thursday Mr. Bounds called and said, "to the extent that the comments of members of our staff are misinterpreted, they shouldn't be read into as anything otherwise."

Thanks for clearing that up. The day the Times story appeared, McCain treated anyone who might have been troubled by it to some of his legendary straight talk:

"It's ambiguous as to whether the president acted within his authority or not,'' he said, saying courts had ruled different ways on the matter. "I'm not interested in going back. I'm interested in addressing the challenge we face today of trying to do everything we can to counter organizations and individuals that want to destroy this country. So there's ambiguity about it. Let's move forward.''

There is no ambiguity as to whether FISA required warrants for the sort of surveillance Bush authorized the National Security Agency to conduct, and the argument that Congress unintentionally amended FISA when it authorized the use of military force against Al Qaeda and the Taliban does not pass the laugh test. The only real issue is whether the president has the constitutional authority to disregard statutes such as FISA when they get in the way of actions he considers necessary to prevent terrorist attacks. In December, McCain said the president does not have that authority; now he says "there's ambiguity about it."

Pace Holtz-Eakin, this issue is not of interest only to "the ACLU and trial lawyers"; pace McCain, it is not an excuse for pointless recriminations about long-ago actions that are irrelevant to "addressing the challenge we face today." As we "move forward," there are few questions more important than whether the president is bound to obey the law even when it conflicts with his own ideas about how best to fight terrorism. If McCain cannot give a straight answer to that question and stick to it, he does not deserve the vote of anyone who believes in the rule of law and the separation of powers.

State Troopers Fail to Appreciate Geek Chic

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:32:00 EDT

So here's the chain of events:

Nice 19-year-old girl from MIT goes to pick up her boyfriend at the airport last September. Perhaps in honor of that special occasion, Star Simpson is wearing a sweatshirt that she made herself. It consists of a circuit board wired with green LEDs.

She makes an inquiry at the information desk, and then "Troopers, with machine guns aimed at Simpson, surrounded her outside the terminal and ordered her to raise her hands."

Months later, after fighting off criminal charges about a hoax bomb, Simpson wound up with a sentence of 50 hours of community service, pronounced yesterday. She also issued an astonishingly groveling apology through her lawyer:

"I want to apologize for the results of my conduct on Sept. 21, 2007," Simpson said in the statement. "Although I never intended to act in a disorderly fashion, I now realize that the shirt I created caused alarm and concern at Logan Airport.
"I am appreciative to the Massachusetts State Police for their diligence in protecting our citizens and apologize for the expense that was caused that day," she added.

Simpson "is scheduled to return to MIT this fall for her junior year but will spend the first semester with other MIT students installing an electrical power grid in a Guatemalan village."

You know, after she finishes those 50 hours of community service.

The opening sentence of the Globe's coverage pretty much captures the absurdity of the situation: Star Simpson "apologized for the actions that nearly led to her being shot by State Police as a suspected terrorist."

Via Hit & Run reader Jilly

Counterterrorism, Conflict Prevention, or Hunger: Which Would You Spend Money On?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 27 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Copenhagen, May 26—The Copenhagen Consensus 2008 Conference, in which leading economic experts aim to prioritize the world's biggest problems, began in earnest today. The idea is that there is an "extra" $75 billion to spend over the next five years on pressing global challenges, and the Copenhagen Consensus will identify where we can get the biggest bang for our aid bucks. The public presentations took place at the Youth Forum in a Copenhagen Business School (CBS) auditorium housed in a black glass and granite building, the architectural lovechild of Bauhaus and Darth Vader. On a rainy, dreary day in Denmark who wouldn't want to stay inside for ten hours listening to lectures on how to solve terrorism, civil conflicts, and hunger?

First issue: Transnational terrorism. The world is spending way too much on counterterrorism activities, concluded University of Texas-Dallas economist Todd Sandler. He argued that there is no solution to transnational terrorism; it can be put into remission but cannot be eliminated. To fulfill his Copenhagen Consensus challenge obligations, Sandler looked at five separate possible policies including business as usual at the Department of Homeland Security. In every case, except one, the costs were far greater than the benefits. Sandler admitted that "the number of lives lost or ruined by transnational terrorism is rather minor compared with other challenges considered by the Copenhagen Consensus." On average, only 420 people are killed and 1249 injured each year in transnational terrorist attacks.

Right now we get just nine cents of value for every dollar we spend trying to stop terrorists. Sandler looked at the benefits and costs of a more proactive effort fighting terrorism and again found that we would be getting about 12 cents of protection for every dollar we spent. And what about hardening valuable targets against attacks? Such defensive measures return 28 cents on every dollar expended. Sandler suggests that prime-target nations adopt "more sensitive foreign policies" and hand out $8 billion in no-strings attached foreign aid to buy love around the world. He admits that the costs and benefits of this proposal are hard to quantify. The only proposal that Sandler thought might work is doubling the budget of Interpol to $116 million to increase its counterterrorism capabilities. He then assumed that an enhanced Interpol would prevent one spectacular incident per year. On that assumption, we might get $15 in benefits for very dollar spent.

Each initial report is challenged by two other experts offering their perspectives. In this case, UCLA political scientist Michael Intriligator pumped up the paranoia, warning that terrorists might get THE bomb. And then where would we be? In his paper, Intriligator suggested that enough fissile material is missing to cause concern. On the other hand, former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix told the New Scientist earlier this month, "The risk of terrorists getting [nukes] is pretty small, because trafficking has not been enormous. Maybe a kilo of highly enriched uranium has gone missing from Russia, but their security has got much better."

In his perspective paper, Claremont-McKenna College economist Brock Blomberg tried a different set of calculations and basically came up with the same benefit cost ratios as Sandler, except he found that boosting Interpol's budget was a marginal benefit at most. After the session, I asked Sandler and Blomberg how we could go about dismantling the costly and largely ineffective post 9/11 counterterrorism measures in the U.S. They both looked bemused. Sandler opined that maybe one day some of the hassles at the airport will go away, but didn't foresee any lessening of border controls. Blomberg simply noted that once these things are established they never go away. So, for years to come, we're set to waste billions of dollars on security measures that we know are not cost effective. Sandler observed, "It is human nature to overspend on unlikely catastrophic events." All too true. On the other hand, it's unlikely that the Copenhagen Consensus will endorse counterterrorism spending as a high priority.

The next big issue was how to address the security challenges in conflict-prone countries. The chief presenter was Oxford University economist Paul Collier, the director of the Center for the Study of African Economics and author of The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (2007). At the first Copenhagen Consensus conference in 2004, Collier offered a number of ambitious proposals for preventing both intranational and international conflicts but, he told me ruefully, the experts in 2004 didn't put them on the top priority list. So this time Collier decided to concentrate on a more modest set of proposals that aim to prevent violence from erupting anew in post-conflict countries.

Collier argued that his proposals address the fundamental need for security on which all of the other Copenhagen challenges are built. One cannot effectively deliver food, medicine, education, gender equality, and so forth if a country is tearing itself apart. Civil wars are economic development in reverse. Civil wars occur in the poorest least hopeful countries in the world and last on an average of seven years. Total losses range between $60 billion to $250 billion per civil war and it takes 14 years for the economies of countries to recover from the conflict. Statistics show that post-conflict countries have a 40 percent chance of falling back into violence within ten years of halting an earlier conflict. Collier also noted that coups are less damaging than civil wars to the prospects of countries, costing about $8 billion per regime change. Collier declared that "democracy is not a guarantee against coups, economic development is." He added that at low income levels democracy even makes insurrection more probable.

Collier argued for a package of proposals in which international peace keeping forces would be deployed at the conclusion of civil wars. He estimated that this would cost $850 million per year and reduce the risk of a resurgent civil war over ten years by 30 percent, yielding benefits of $75 billion. In that case, the benefits of $75 billion would clearly outweigh the costs of $8.5 billion in peace keeping expenses. Another low-cost proposal is over-the-horizon guarantees that there would be international military intervention on behalf of democratically elected governments threatened by rebellion. A relatively small number of peace keepers could operate a permanent base in a post-conflict country to which much larger forces could be dispatched quickly whenever a threat arises. Collier assumes that such arrangements could avoid three out of four new civil wars in low-income countries over a decade. He estimates that such guarantees would cost $2 billion annually. Avoiding just one civil war would result in benefits in excess of $60 billion.

In his perspective paper, Andrew Mack, director of the Human Security Report project at Simon Fraser University in Canada, noted that violent conflict around the world has been dropping rapidly since 1990. The number of conflicts is down 40 percent, coups down 40 percent, and genocides down 80 percent. What accounts for this "explosion of peace?" Mack attributes it to the fact that international peace making efforts led by the U.N. have become more effective after the end of the Cold War. Peace making via third party mediation is up 400 percent. In addition, Mack noted that coups have become less lucrative for would-be tyrants because aid donors are refusing to shovel money at countries in which coups occur. For example, the Foreign Assistance Act prohibits most forms of U.S. economic and military assistance to countries whose elected head of state is deposed by a military coup. Since 1990, this provision has been invoked against the Central African Republic, Cote d'Ivoire, Comoros, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, and Niger. Mack is skeptical of proposals for international military interventions, noting the failure to stop the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the ongoing conflicts in Darfur.

The third session dealt with proposals on how to alleviate hunger and malnutrition. Sue Horton from Wilfred Laurier University in Canada was the main presenter. She began by pointing out that 75 percent of the world's malnourished children live in Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. She estimated that about 2.8 million children die each year from malnutrition and argued that 700,000 of these deaths could be averted by low cost nutritional interventions. Between 100 and 140 million children are vitamin A deficient; 633 million people suffer from goiter due to lack of iodine; and two billion suffer from iron deficiency. In addition, new research is showing that zinc deficiency compromises children's immune responses. All of these micronutrient deficiencies reduce physical and cognitive abilities.

To highlight the importance of micronutrients, Horton cited a 2008 longitudinal study in Guatemala which followed up with men who had received supplements when they were three years old and younger between 1969 and 1977. Amazingly, the men who had received supplements below age three had wage rates which were 34 to 47 percent higher than those of controls, and annual incomes which were 14 to 28 percent higher.

Horton offered a set of proposals which would expand micronutrient supplementation for vitamin A and zinc in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa; increase micronutrient fortification of cereals and salt with iodine and iron; further research to breed new grains that deliver more micronutrients (biofortification); expand deworming programs; and offer nutrition education, especially on the benefits of breast feeding, to women in developing countries. Horton calculated that implementing these solutions would cost $1.2 billion per year and yield $15 billion in benefits. Apparently, due to some misunderstanding, she didn't realize that the Copenhagen Consensus process gives her $15 billion to allocate annually. With that amount of money, her proposals could be scaled up considerably. From the point of view of cost-effectiveness, Horton pointed out that these projects can be administered by non-governmental organizations if governments are too incompetent to do so. Her proposals may well move to the top of the Copenhagen Consensus priority list.

Commenters of both perspectives favored Horton's solutions, but wanted to expand them. One of the chief measures for child malnutrition is "stunting," that is, being significantly smaller than average for one's age cohort. Emory University nutritionist Reynaldo Martorell noted that a recent study which looked at well-nourished children in Accra, Ghana; Muscat; Oslo, Norway; New Delhi, India; and Davis, California, found no significant differences in growth rates and body length between children under age five.

Tuesday's Copenhagen Consensus sessions will consider solutions for air pollution, diseases, sanitation and water, and global warming.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Disclosure: Danish taxpayers are paying my travel expenses to attend CC08. There are no conditions placed upon my reporting.

Where in the World Can We Do the Most Good?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Mon, 26 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Copenhagen, May 25—The opening press conference for the Copenhagen Consensus Center's 2008 conference took place in one of the gilt-edged ballrooms at the Moltkes Palace. The action unfolded beneath a bas-relief depicting heroic Danish burghers in top hats carrying a banner supplemented by bas-reliefs on pilasters portraying such everyday tools as hammers, pliers, squares, and drawing compasses. The PowerPoint question displayed on the screen behind the head table of notables was, "Where can we do the most good for the world?" Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen began, "The Copenhagen Consensus is a simple but powerful idea. The world faces a number of serious challenges. We only have limited means to solve them, so where do we start?"

That's the question that the Copenhagen Consensus Center conference for 2008 (CC08) will try to answer this week. The Copenhagen Consensus Center is the brainchild of "skeptical environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg. Headquartered at the Copenhagen Business School, the CC08 is convening leading economic experts with the aim of ranking 10 of the world's biggest problems. The expert panel is supposed to figure out which ones should receive priority and which should be bumped further down the queue. To make the exercise concrete, the experts are notionally deciding what challenges should be allocated an "extra" $75 billion in foreign aid over the next four years.

Among the experts are Nobel Prize winners in economics Vernon Smith, Thomas Schelling, Douglass North, Robert Mundell, and Finn Kydland. Other expert panelists include economists Nancy Stokey from the University of Chicago, Jagdish Bhagwati from Columbia University, and Francois Bourguignon from the University of Paris. The experts are considering detailed reports by prominent international researchers regarding ten challenges, including air pollution, armed conflicts, diseases, education, global warming, malnutrition and hunger, sanitation and access to clean water, subsidies and trade barriers, terrorism, and women and development. In each area, the researchers define the problem, suggest options for solving the problem[*], and assign a benefit-to-cost ratio (BCR) to each solution. The higher the BCR, the more cost-effective the solution is.

Prime Minister Rasmussen concretized the value of the CC08 exercise by referring to the earlier version in 2004. He noted that in 2004, CC04 participants put controlling the HIV/AIDS epidemic in developing countries at the top of the list. Consequently, the Danish government began to devote a higher proportion of its overseas development aid to combating that disease, doubling the aid from $100 to $200 million per year by 2010.

Rasmussen got ahead of the 2008 deliberations a bit when he turned to the subject of climate change. He argued that the case for action is strong, and that the world needed to cut its greenhouse gas emissions. To address the problem, Rasmussen called for "a new Green industrial revolution and a new Green world economy." Interestingly, the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus report ranked measures to address climate change at the very bottom, finding that proposals for carbon taxes and implementing the Kyoto Protocol would have costs that "were likely to exceed the benefits."

Of course, the prime minister is likely making politic noises as he gears up to host the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference. At that meeting in Copenhagen, governments are expected to adopt a comprehensive new global warming treaty on climate change. Lomborg opposes stringent limits on greenhouse gas emissions as not being cost effective when it comes to helping poor people. At the end of the week, we'll see what the experts say this time.

Lomborg followed the prime minister, claiming that the Copenhagen Consensus is not about doing what's fashionable, but instead focuses on doing what's rational. He pointed out that politicians and activists often argue that we should solve all problems. But the fact is that in a world of scarce resources, a couple of big issues will get the bulk of the available resources. Trade-offs have to be made. When Lomborg is speaking of resources, he is basically talking about foreign development aid. What the Copenhagen Consensus hopes to do is help donors, both public and private, to spend their money is ways that solve the most urgent problems.

To illustrate how issues might be ranked, Lomborg cited some findings from a paper dealing with the challenge of disease. Spending $1 billion on controlling tuberculosis would save 1 million lives and result in estimated benefits of $30 billion for a benefit-cost ratio of 30 to 1. Spending $200 million on treating heart disease in poor countries (which accounts for 25 percent of deaths in those countries) with an inexpensive "polypill" combining aspirin and statins would produce $5 billion benefits implying a 25 to 1 benefit-cost ratio. And a $1 billion spent on malaria produces a benefit-cost ratio of 20 to 1.

During the question and answer period, I noted that the CC08 process looks to shower money on problems, but does not address many of the institutional impediments for making sure that the money would actually be spent effectively. In fact, I suggested, the reason poor countries are poor is because they do not have effective governance and economic institutions. Lomborg responded that of course institutions are important, but the Copenhagen Consensus was focusing chiefly on "what can money do to help." He pointed out that the Copenhagen Consensus conference in 2004 considered corruption as an issue, but couldn't figure out how spending money would be able to help fix that problem. Earlier Prime Minister Rasmussen correctly observed, "No problem has ever been solved only by throwing money at it. We must prioritize." Unfortunately, as New York University development economist William Easterly has documented, the West has thrown $2.3 trillion dollars in aid to poor countries during the past five decades without much to show for it.

Lomborg further suggested that institutional analysis could be implicit in deciding how to prioritize the challenges. For example, if the experts decide that corruption or lack of private property rights would get in the way of effectively deploying money to solve a specific problem, they could give it a lower priority.

The deliberations of the expert panel are private, but all of the research papers and respondents to them will present their work to a forum of 80 young people drawn from 37 different countries during the week. These presentations are public and I will be reporting on their findings in daily dispatches from Copenhagen.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Disclosure: Danish taxpayers are paying my travel expenses to attend CC08. There are no conditions placed upon my reporting.

For live webcasts from CC08, go here.

[*]: Corrected from an earlier version that, due to an editing error, implied only two options were suggested.

The Body is a Terrible Thing to Waste

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Tue, 20 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Jesse Ventura has come a long way since those heady days of November 1998. A Reform Party longshot in the Minnesota gubernatorial race, Ventura ran as the outsider's outsider, a flamboyant former Navy SEAL, professional wrestler ("The Body"), and Hollywood bit player who'd already achieved the impossible, serving one term as the elected mayor of his hometown, the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park. To the surprise of everyone—except the candidate himself, or so he humbly claims—Ventura grabbed 37 percent of the vote, narrowly defeating both Democrat Hubert Humphrey III and Republican Norm Coleman. To celebrate his inauguration, Ventura wore a tie-died Jimi Hendrix t-shirt and sang "Werewolves of London" onstage with Warren Zevon.

"I'm fiscally conservative and socially moderate to liberal," he told reason in December 1998. "I've taken the libertarian exam and scored perfect on it." That libertarianism was responsible for Ventura's best ideas, including the decriminalization of marijuana and a proposal to make the state legislature spend every fourth term repealing outdated laws, not passing new ones. Not surprisingly, both plans went nowhere, though Ventura did succeed in removing at least one stupid law: a state ban on playing bingo more than twice a week at nursing homes. "I put great trust in our elderly," he deadpanned before the press, "that, with this burden lifted from them, they will not abuse this great privilege."

But while showmanship helped him on the stump, it didn't give Ventura the thick skin necessary for dealing with other politicians—or with the press, who sparked his wrath after reporting that his 22-year old son had thrown wild parties at the governor's residence. "Today," he writes in his new book, Don't Start the Revolution Without Me, "I view those media people as equivalent to pedophiles, because they attacked my children on multiple occasions."

So he called it quits as governor after one term, announcing on Minnesota Public Radio that he "will always protect my family first." Since then, Ventura has spent a semester as a visiting professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (you read that right: his seminar was called "Body Slamming the Political Establishment: Third Party Politics"), campaigned for Texas gubernatorial hopeful and fellow third party iconoclast Kinky Friedman, and retreated to Mexico's Baja peninsula, where he grew a funky beard.

Now he's back in the spotlight, promoting a bizarre new book filled with conspiracy theories and the endlessly repeated question: Will he or won't he run for president? Given that just last week Ventura was hinting that he might challenge comedian Al Franken for the Minnesota Senate seat of Republican incumbent Norm Coleman (Ventura's Republican foe from the 1998 race), it seems that The Body is desperate for whatever political action he can get.

Pathetic title aside, Don't Start the Revolution Without Me turns out to be an unexpectedly fascinating read. First and foremost, Ventura has gone whole hog into political paranoia. He devotes most of one chapter, and other lengthy passages throughout the book, to challenging the Lone Gunman theory of the John F. Kennedy assassination, a subject he's clearly obsessed with. Of Pat Buchanan's success in wresting the 2000 Reform Party presidential nomination, Ventura charges, "it was a set-up all along by the Republicans. A way to destroy the momentum for a third party." As for Pearl Harbor, "some evidence exists that FDR and Churchill were privy to the Japanese attack...but needed a catalyst to bring America into World War II."

Even the Patriot Act—a piece of villainous lawmaking, no doubt about that—falls under the shadow of conspiracy. At a whopping 342 pages, Ventura simply doesn't believe that the government could have cobbled it together in those "first scary weeks" after the attacks. "Its almost as if somebody had it all ready to be unveiled," he writes, "but just had to wait for the right moment—a Reichstag fire, a Pearl Harbor type event, to make it a reality."

This is the Bush Did It theory at its most simplistic (substitute Cheney for Bush if you prefer). As Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), the Senate's lone vote against the Patriot Act, noted at the time, the proposal contained "vast new powers for law enforcement, some seemingly drafted in haste and others that came from the FBI's wish list that Congress has rejected in the past."

But it's the 9/11 attacks themselves that have really sent Ventura over the top rope. How did those two planes bring down the Twin Towers, anyway, he wonders. "I don't claim expertise about this," he continues, before citing his "four years as part of the Navy's underwater demolition teams," but "something about the official story doesn't add up." In Ventura's view, the towers should have flattened like pancakes, "rather than the concrete being pulverized and flying through the air for blocks."

As radical journalist Alexander Cockburn has remarked of the "9/11 Truth" movement, "one characteristic of the nuts is that they have a devout, albeit preposterous belief in American efficiency." That certainly describes Ventura's repeated assertion that four hijacked airplanes should not have been able to bypass our air defenses. "Yet no bells went off, no emergency sirens, no fighter jets scrambled until very late."

As a former governor, not to mention a Vietnam vet, Ventura should know firsthand that the government screws stuff up, both the big things and the small ones. September 11 was FUBAR writ large. Yet here he displays a perversely unshakeable faith in American air traffic control.

It's all of a piece, really, his belief that the media "jackals" were out to ruin him, that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone, that "the media today are controlled by the big corporations," that "certain people in the government were out to keep an eye on me," that if Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda "were responsible...it was not without some knowledge of those impending attacks on our side."

Still, I wouldn't mind seeing Ventura run for president (or for senator, or dogcatcher, or whatever). In addition to talking conspiracy, he's likely to raise all sorts of other trouble, from advocating the repeal of organized religion's tax-exempt status to mandating that every politician who votes for war have at least one relative in uniform (both proposals are in the book). That could be fun to watch. Plus, he's no longer so quick to identify as a libertarian, sneering nowadays that Minnesota's Libertarians "tend to want anarchy." Liberals and conservatives, after all, are just as responsible for Ventura's wacky ideas as libertarians ever were, and a new campaign is likely to spread the blame.

Besides, we might as well get some laughs in before the election. And Jesse Ventura is always good for that.

Damon W. Root is a reason associate editor.

Also, No One Likes the Popup Ads

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:10:00 EDT

Al Qaeda's Internet problems:

One Bin Laden tape in four months has a tremendous impact, a dozen Zawahiri tapes in two months has considerably less. In Zawahiri's Q+A, he repeatedly answered questions with an irritated "I already answered that in last month's speech" or "bin Laden already answered that in his speech." That suggests that too many messages dilutes the impact. It also reduces the likelihood of massive media coverage, since the messages become routine. The same applies for the Iraqi insurgency videos: the first exploding hummer might be thrilling, but the 76th not so much.

That's the always-interesting Marc Lynch writing about the limits of the jihadists' online efforts. They bear a striking resemblance to the limits of everyone else's online efforts. Here's some more:

I come across quite a bit of posturing and bravado in these forums, hating on 'enemies' and back-patting of 'allies'. The recent initiation of an 'al-Jazeera watch' feature on one of the forums tracking perceived slights and misrepresentation by the now maligned station reminds me of nothing so much as the partisan media criticism found on so many political blogs. There's a lot of posting of articles or news reports clipped from the media, with long comment threads of cheering or jeering. I remember seeing a bitter post on one of the main forums a few weeks ago (al-Boraq? I forget) complaining that the "internet jihad" had failed since the forum had degenerated into personal attacks and what we would call flame-wars.

Whole thing here.

Iron Man Confidential

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:11:00 EDT

Early word on the latest Marvel Comic turned big-screen spectaculah, Iron Man? It's been updated from Vietnam to the War on Terror and is techno-riffic. From the Daily News:

Downey is Tony Stark, a millionaire arms inventor who, while giving a weapons demonstration to troops in Afghanistan, is attacked and kidnapped. Shoved in a cave by terrorists who give him a week to build a rocket from spare parts, Stark - who now has a magnetized sphere in his chest that keeps shrapnel in his body from entering his aorta - instead constructs a tank-suit that looks like the Michelin Man and boasts more goodies than a Swiss Army knife.
Back home at his L.A. mountaintop bachelor pad (which of course has a workshop General Motors would kill for), Stark experiences a true change of heart, deciding to stop making war machines. So he builds a suit of armor that flies like a jet, shoots energy blasts and helps keep his ticker going as he fights injustice.
The fact that Iron Man is a B-lister in the Marvel Comics stable doesn't stop director Jon Favreau and his writers from aiming high and generally hitting the target. Meanwhile, Stark's inner circle - including Gwyneth Paltrow (sexy and bookish) as his trusty assistant, Terrence Howard (tough and loyal) as his military connection, and Jeff Bridges (bald and menacing) as a mentor-turned-villain - lend a touch of class.
But cruising above it all is Downey. Since Iron Man's helmet has no nose and a little rectangular mouth, the smartest thing Favreau did was cast a lead who's constantly alive. The few times the red-and-yellow battle gear is front and center in "Transformers"-ish action moments, Favreau often shows his star's face inside the shell-head. As Downey pumps life into every scene, it's clear the actor, long regarded as one of the best of his generation, has not let the rust set in after his battle with drugs a decade ago.

Sexy and bookish? Bald and menacing? Tough and loyal? It sounds like they're really blazing new trails!

More here.

I salute Iron Man because he, along with the board game Monopoly, Dallas, Bruce Jenner, Jimmy Carter's cardigans, and Bobby Fischer helped us beat the Russkies when it mattered (until his death earlier this year, the insaniac former chess champ Fischer was helping us defeat Islamism by identifying as anti-Western[*]). And because Iron Man points the way to the coming age of the cyborg (or cyborg-like humans), which we're already in. Everytime you see someone with a cochlear implant (look carefully) or a pacemaker or wearing a wrist-guard for carpal tunnel syndrome, there beats the adamantium heart of Iron Man. If you can't be a full-blown mutant (thanks for nothing Mom and Dad) and are a couple standard deviations down the Bell Curve from homo superior, you might as well have microprocessors and exoskeleton-like devices up the ying-yang.

But enough with the drug-story backstory on RDJ (and Iron Man, who battled the sauce longer than he did The Mandarin, one of the last great gasps of full-blown Orientalist fantasy is post-war pop cult)! Spencer Tracy had problems—including a penchant for locking himself in hotel room bathtubs for an entire weekend while drinking and pissing himself into stupor—but you don't have to know that to enjoy Bad Day at Black Rock, do you?

All you need to know about Tony Stark--a cool exec with a heart of steel and two fistfuls of "repulsor rays"--in 22 seconds:

Bonus video: Black Sabbath asks the musical question "Can he walk and talk?,' etc. in this great home-brewed video.

[*]: Corrected spelling and life status of Fischer thanks to reader UCrawford.

"Please Put Laptops and Fuel Cells in a Separate Bin"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:48:00 EDT

On Tuesday, my laptop battery died mid-sentence, mid-flight and I was screwed. I'm looking forward to the day when I will be able to just pop in a new methanol canister and keep going. I was thrilled to read today that (when the fuel cell technology becomes available sometime in 2009) the TSA won't stop me from doing just that.

The ruling helps clear the way for the industry and consumer acceptance. Fuel cells extract electrons from a reaction between methanol, ambient oxygen, and a catalytic membrane. Fuel cell makers hope to replace lithium-ion batteries as a power source in portable electronics. One advantage: no recharging time. Refueling a fuel cell only requires popping in a new fuel canister. A universal charger made from a fuel cell can charge notebooks, phones, MP3 players, and other devices, cutting down the number of chargers travelers have to carry.

So I should be good to go. As long as I don't try to carry one through a metal detector inside my shoes, that is.

Mostly, the TSA appears in our pages when it does something dumb, so let's have one cheer for something done right.

Al Qaeda vs. the Truthers

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:59:00 EDT

My brain hurts:

Al-Qaeda's deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has blamed Iran for spreading the theory that Israel was behind the 11 September 2001 attacks.

In an audio tape posted on the internet, Zawahiri insisted al-Qaeda had carried out the attacks on the US.

He accused Iran, and its Hezbollah allies, of trying to discredit Osama Bin Laden's network.

Via Thoreau, who notes that this is another case of satire as prophecy.

Now Playing in Memphis: Martial Law Lite!

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:13:00 EDT

Last week, federal, state, and local police in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas conducted a massive sweep dubbed "Operation Sudden Impact."

The operation included raids of businesses, homes, and boats; traffic roadblocks; and personal searches. They say they were looking for "terrorists." If they found any, they haven't announced it yet. They did arrest 332 people, 142 of whom they describe as "fugitives." They also issued about 1,300 traffic tickets, and according to one media account, seized "hundreds" of dollars.

From the Memphis Commercial Appeal:

While the operation was billed as a regional "anti-terrorism initiative," the scope was also broad -- everything from the serving of fugitive warrants to spot checks of boats on the Mississippi River to ensuring drivers in Tipton County had their children properly fastened into child safety seats.
"Not all of this initiative is to arrest people," said Deputy Chief Donna Turner of the Tipton County Sheriff's Department.
Many agencies put an emphasis on traffic stops. A little after 8 p.m. Saturday in Hickory Hill, Sgt. Chris Harris of the Shelby County Sheriff's Office street crimes unit stopped a white SUV that was booming with music. The driver was driving on a suspended license -- he received a citation -- and there was marijuana residue in the car, but "not enough to weigh out," Harris said.
Still, every traffic stop holds the potential of netting much more than expected.

Nashville's News Channel 5 reports agents seizing equipment from local businesses:

The FBI along with hundreds of officers said they are looking for anything out of the ordinary. Agents take computers and paperwork from businesses.
One store owner said he was told the agents were looking for stolen electronics. While some business owners feel they are being targeted, law-enforcement officers said they are just trying to track down possible terrorists before something big happens.
"What we have found traditionally is that terrorists are involved in a number of lesser known type crimes," said Mark Luttrell, Shelby County sheriff.

What's really unfortunate is the complete lack of inquisitiveness in the local media. How many of these raids were backed by search warrants? What justification did police give for the traffic roadblocks and traffic stops? Random stops and roadblocks are only legal under limited circumstances. Fishing expeditions aren't one of them, though fishing expeditions disguised as DWI checkpoints usually are.