We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Pundits seem to have very negative opinions about the recent Presidential Directive on legal jurisdiction. So much so I wonder if anyone has actually read the document. I have and I cannot find anything particularly damning. It places captured enemy forces under military rather than civilian law. The directive is carefully targetted at al Qaeda and only non-citizen al Qaeda at that. So why the fuss?
Perhaps the answer lies in history. The directive is quite a normal one for a country at war. It would once have seemed so obvious a need as to be hardly newsworthy. The difficulty is the United States has not fought a normal war, to an end condition of total victory, since World War II. That is over half a century ago. Most of those who would understand the necessity of it are retired or no longer with us.
Make no mistake, this is a war. The al Qaeda are our enemy every bit as much as the Nazi Party of Germany was our enemy. I cannot imagine Himmler and Goering being tried in front of a “normal” court; nor can I imagine bin Laden (assuming the lads who find him constrain themselves from carving him into Purina Pig Chow) being given a New York defense lawyer and allowed to fight a 10 year court battle. He and his people are not just ordinary killers. They are not just ordinary terrorists. They are the founders and leaders of a distributed military force that declared the annihilation of the United States as a religious duty. They have proven their words in deeds.
Given that bin Laden publicly declared war on America in 1996 and has since had his troops carry out military actions against the United States, it behoves us to treat those forces no differently than any other military force in any other war. That means captured soldiers are treated under the Geneva Convention. There is another side however. We will define certain members of al Qaeda not simply as terrorists, but as war criminals writ large. Even if we ignored every other attack by al Qaeda and called them normal military actions, even if we ignored evidence about TWA800; even if we ignored the thousands of African civilians killed and injured by the attacks on US Embassies… we are still left with September the 11th.
There is no doubt, under any sane interpretation, ramming large civilian airliners into giant civilian office towers while faced with a totally unpreperared populace is a war crime of an obscene magnitude.
Because al Qaeda operate as a co-ordinated and trained military force, much of the information we have on them comes via classified means rather than normal public criminal investigations. Criminals and mere terrorists can be tracked down and tried over time; an army must be dealt with differently. We know we cannot catch them all, at least not all at once. It behooves us to not allow yet to be captured enemy forces to learn from our court transcripts.
We simply cannot afford to hand them such valuable intelligence. If they understand our most secret technical means they can more readily avoid them; if they know our channels of information they can act to disrupt or inject false information into them; if they know our informers they will kill them.
A military tribunal is just right. The al Qaeda declared war; therefore they are enemy soldiers. We will try them with reasonable fairness and perhaps somewhat more mercy than they would give were the tables turned. But mark my words: those directly responsible, those directly in the chain of command that extends from the burning rubble of the World Trade Center to the caves of Afghanistan are going to swing at the end of a stout rope. It may take 10 years to round them up; but it will only take a few months to finish the job.
The negative reporting from services like CNN can be quite insidious at times. The following quote is a good example:
Atef is believed to be responsible for supervising the training of operatives. Prosecutors say he provided military training and assistance in 1993 to Somali tribes who violently opposed the United Nations’ intervention in Somalia’s civil unrest. In an October 1993 battle, Somali tribesmen killed 18 U.S. Army Rangers.
The statement is accurate. It is what is left unsaid that makes one wonder where they are coming from. The Somali “tribesmen” who surrounded the US Army squads took over 1000 casualties for their trouble. A nearly 50 to 1 casualty ratio. Doesn’t sound at all like the Somali lads won when you put it that way, now does it? In fact, I have a better description of the battle.
The Great Somali Turkey Shoot.
I recommend that everyone immediately read this item from the Fletcher Conference, Remarks Prepared for Delivery by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. It is a brilliant piece in and of itself. On top of that it supplies text from several Special Forces dispatches. This is our first taste of the real story. And what a story it is.
From Wolfowitz’s words you will gain insight on what the war on the ground must be like. I cannot help but find myself liking and respecting these Northern Afghan people whose personality peaks through the dispatches. It is the stuff movies are made of. Our forces have not just been fighting side by side with the Afghans, they have been fighting side by side on horseback. Horses and sabers, tanks and satellites and batwinged black stealth bombers and lasers all mixed together like something out of a Space Opera. We are truly entering strange and interesting times.
Retief does not seem quite so fictional tonight.
After a nightmare of some three months duration, Peter Bunch and Diana Thomas (Australia), Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer (USA), Georg Taubmann, Katrin Jelinek, Margrit Stebner and Silke Durrkopf (Germany) are safe. Personally I did not have hope that any, let alone all of them would live through the war. I am ecstatic to be so absolutely and totally wrong.
Although it was American Special Forces who extracted them, according to CNN it was the Northern Alliance who rescued them:
Taubmann said the eight were freed from the prison by anti-Taliban forces. “The Massood people came, and others from the alliance, and broke into the prison and just opened the doors … We were really scared, and then the alliance people came in … and we were free and we got out of prison and we walked through the city and the people came out of their houses and hugged us and greeted us, and they were all clapping …
We should note that far from hating them for being citizens of western coalition nations, the people of Ghazni were happy to see them safe and out of the hands of the hated Taliban. Far from gaining the enmity of the people of Afghanistan as many in the media would lead you to believe, they see us a friends taking common cause with them. We have both suffered terribly from the Taliban and their al Qaeda friends. The Afghans even more so than us.
I think if Afghans are the least bit angry at us, it is over one question only:
“What took you guys so long?”
Carla Howell is near a breakthrough in Massachusetts that will go down in history as the Second Boston Tea Party. Her “Initiative to End the Income Tax in Massachusetts” has now succeeded in collecting and delivering 101,139 signatures to the various town clerks for certification. This is a wide enough margin to ensure success even if the Clerks were hostile to the measure. They need only pickup the certified lists from those 351 Town Clerks on December 3rd and deliver them all to the State House by December 5th. Words cannot express the gratitude owed to her and her team.
This initiative to abolish the Massachusetts state income tax will appear on the ballot in 2002. It will generate an enormous amount of national publicity. How could anyone ignore such chutzpah? That people would actually dare to not just roll back, not just cap, but to actually abolish a major tax?
We might actually win this one. It is a possibility. Very few citizens actually want to pay taxes. Hardly anyone ever votes for a politician who says they want to raise taxes. But until now, no one has ever had the opportunity to directly vote on it, to “Just Say No” to taxation.
Carla and her team have done a magnificent job. She is once again proving herself to be the most effective local libertarians in our entire quarter century history as a political party. But they need help. These things do not pay for themselves. If you want to help her to fight the good fight, you should make a donation now and as often as you can afford to.
Win, Lose or Draw, we can make this the turning point. The point at which the growth of the State is not just slowed but actually reversed.
It is up to you.
The fact that Bill Ayers was a Weather Underground member 30 years ago does not affect his right to express any view whatsoever. The Opinion Journal got it very wrong this time by coming out behind those who would prefer he just go away. True, his book and his expressed views are inappropriate and tasteless and bound to get a lot of people angy. That is not the issue.
The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States does not make exceptions for taste, timing or disagreeableness of content. So I think the Mary Ellen Keating from Barnes and Noble was spot on when she said:
Granted, we live in troubled times. The reprehensible acts of the terrorists were designed to promote fear, divisiveness, even hatred among fellow Americans. We cannot let them win. Removing Mr. Ayers’ book from our shelves or canceling a previously scheduled appearance is out of the question. To do so would be to give in to our fears, and ultimately to validate the position of our enemies.
If Mr. Ayers seems to be promoting blowing up buildings as a means of change, then we are free to stand outside with signs and express dissent. We are free to not buy his book. Those who feel so inclined are free to complain to Barnes and Noble (as some have done) and to take their business elsewhere if they so chose.
But from where I sit, Mary Ellen has a better understanding of what a free country is about than do the complainers. As I have said before, “A flag you can not burn is not worth fighting for”.
That is the difference between us and ‘them’.
Reality very often outdoes imagination. Tom Clancy said in a September interview that he could never have sold a story whose plot depended upon 19 suicidal, homicidal maniacs working as a team. Black humour on the net in both verbal and cartoon form soon toyed with the concept of training camps for bin Laden’s crack suicide squads. They posed the weighty question: “How can they have a final exam?”
With the assistance of CNN’s crack reporting squads, we now know the answer:
Northern Alliance commanders said pockets of Taliban fighters continued to fight, some taking shelter in bombed-out buildings, while other Taliban trapped behind the opposition advance were blowing themselves up with hand grenades and land mines, rather than surrendering.
I guess they passed.
Airbus Down Jim Bennett contacted me with an obvious correction: the DC-10 had 3 engines, not 4. Two on wing pylons and one on the empennage However he still agrees that it was a more stable configuration as one engine was near the centerline.
Yet another example of insta-correction brought to you by the magic of the global Internet…
There is not a lot of information to go on yet on the crash in Queens. That said, I am just as capable of making a fool of myself as the next pundit, so I will proceed to do so.
My instructor once told me, “What is the most dangerous part of a flight? Takeoff. The runway is behind you.” What was true of a single engine Cessna is biblical for a heavy multiengine transport. Losing an engine on takeoff means a loss of power just when you need it the most. You are trying to climb out in a high angle noise-abatement attitude. Suddenly you don’t have the power to sustain that and you are heading for a stall. Even worse, you have an asynchronous thrust and a torque that even full opposing rudder might not be able to counteract. This is especially true for a plane with two very powerful wing pylon mounted engines. When one engine stops running, your airplane wants to stop climbing and do a wingover. That’s probably what happened at O’Hare a decade or more ago when a DC-10 did just that. A DC-10 has 4 engines so one would think it might have been able to recover. But there is yet a third problem in a case like today.
Engines do fall off airplanes from time to time. Pylons are designed to break away in the worst case. But that only helps in a more normal failure, not a catastrophic failure. There is every chance that at the very instant your airplane wants to do a wingover and head straight for the ground, you will have lost all or most of your hydraulics on one side. Airplanes that size are controlled by hydraulics; the hydraulic pressure is supplied by a smaller jet engine called an Auxiliary Power Unit. I’m sure you’ve heard of APU’s on the space shuttle. Well, airliners have them too. They supply the high pressure required to move ailerons and such. If you lose pressure, you can’t control the airplane. There is redundancy, but if you’ve just lost a big chunk of aeroplane… you are toast.
It’s doubtful even a computer fly-by-wire system could have dealt with it. You can fly an airplane with control surfaces and no power or with power and no control surfaces. But if you’ve lost both?
This all begs the real question. Was it or wasn’t it? There was certainly no terrorist inside the airplane. Believe me, there is no button that says “Jettison Engine”. If reports of fire on one side during takeoff were true, then it is either a terrible accident or sabotage before the takeoff. If the problems did not show until the aircraft was off the runway, it is either a engine fault, ingestion of a Pterosaur-sized avian, sabotage… or a Stinger up the exhaust pipe.
I’m sure that someone in high places will know very soon. Personally I think it was an accident. We’ll know soon enough. The signs of a Stinger induced failure should be rather unmistakeable if present.
According to Debka, the nightmare whose name I dared not speak may be upon us:
DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources think it possible that the al Qaeda chief may have accumulated as many nuclear devices of unknown types as Saddam, with only a part of his nuclear stock kept in Afghanistan; some devices may even have been smuggled into the United States.
Earlier in the same article they imply that Saddam and bin Laden are co-operating on nuclear weapons. Now Debkafile is sometimes so far in front of the story they are off the planet, but they are correct often enough that I can not reject this story out of hand. Additionally, there is little here that doesn’t jive with my own hunches and my own expectations of behavior of the various players.
No one has ever satisfactorily explained to me what happened to the missing Russian tactical nuclear weapons described in a multi-page spread here in the UK some ten years ago. Taken altogether it is enough that I suggest US residents take SFC Red Thomas’ NBC survival advice [Words of Wisdom About Gas, Germs, and Nukes, Samizdata 2001-11-08] very seriously indeed.
From the first recognized day of the war I have been reporting character and true heroism are alive and well in America. That character came packaged in all sorts of shapes and sizes including very “non-traditional” ones: a gay San Francisco rugby player as an example. We simply cannot say enough about these very ordinary people who stepped onto an airplane in a world at peace. Within a few hours they had fought and died in the first battle of the war. These individuals acted in a way that would honour the noblest traditions of any Corp of the US military. Unlike a soldier who is trained, briefed, ordered and given a mission, these people improvised their own structure and strategy on the spot and then implimented it. I find it heartening that the President and the Nation recognize this:
“Above all, we will live in a spirit of courage and optimism. Our nation was born in that spirit, as immigrants yearning for freedom courageously risked their lives in search of greater opportunity. That spirit of optimism and courage still beckons people across the world who want to come here. And that spirit of optimism and courage must guide those of us fortunate enough to live here.
Courage and optimism led the passengers on Flight 93 to rush their murderers to save lives on the ground. Led by a young man whose last known words were the Lord’s Prayer and “Let’s roll.” He didn’t know he had signed on for heroism when he boarded the plane that day. Some of our greatest moments have been acts of courage for which no one could have ever prepared.
We will always remember the words of that brave man, expressing the spirit of a great country. We will never forget all we have lost, and all we are fighting for. Ours is the cause of freedom. We’ve defeated freedom’s enemies before, and we will defeat them again.
We cannot know every turn this battle will take. Yet we know our cause is just and our ultimate victory is assured. We will, no doubt, face new challenges. But we have our marching orders: My fellow Americans, let’s roll.” — President George W Bush, November 8th, 2001.
In honouring these fine people we honour ourselves, for “They” are us. Let us hope we live up to the high bar of courage they have set for us.
Take it from me. The Pope really is Catholic. I live in Ireland. We know these things. I’ve also trompped around in America’s forests and I can likewise state with impugnity: “Bears shit in the woods”. They really do.
Now given these simple guidelines, why is it so difficult for the media to understand a similar tautology: “Civilians get killed in wars”. Sorry, it’s not nice, but dems de breaks. Innocent bystanders get killed in all sorts of random and horrible ways. Bombs miss (although that is becoming almost apologetically rare). Bullets, rockets and shells don’t go into orbit. As Myers, Rumsfeld, Stufflebeem and others have said in one form or another: “Stuff goes up, stuff comes down, people get hurt”. That’s gravity for you. It’s a real bitch ainit?
The guys on the ground aren’t very nice people. The Taliban are quite capable of killing Afghans and claiming someone else did it. They killed enough of their own before we got there, so why would anyone think they’ll stop now? And to top it off, there is a lot of shooting and shelling going on. The Northern Alliance isn’t firing blanks you know.
Lastly, there has got to be an awful lot of left over ordinance. They are still digging up and disarming bombs in London from the Blitz in 1940 fer crissakes! And that only occured for a few months sixty odd years ago. Afghanistan is filthy with unexploded modern ordinance from over twenty years of nearly continuous warfare. Civilians are lucky to survive walking to whatever passes for an outhouse in that sort of environment.
Could it be that the newsmedia focus on civilian casualties has nothing to do with newsworthiness? I have this deep down suspicion that we’re seeing the “civilian casualty” stories not because they are news, but because they are theater. Anyone with a theatrical background knows that “Kids and animals” always steal the show. The only thing that gets attention faster than a cute fluffy doggie and a towheaded (or turbanned) 8 year old are dead ones. That is what the news media is selling us. It isn’t news. It’s pandering.
Am I being harsh? Damn right I am. War is hell and nothing you can say or do will change it. Look at the aftermath of WWII. The ruins were filled with orphans, children with damaged limbs, eyes, souls. Terrible, terrible things happened to people in Europe. And yet I don’t think you will find many who would have preferred the alternative. Nor do many of us prefer the alternative of a world in which the horror of 9-11 is overshadowed by even worse events, one after another after another.
So let’s put our news focus on what matters. Winning.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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