Obsidian Wings

Zombies Chew Tinfoil...

The beginning of the second to last sentence of the angriest Lileks Bleat I have ever read.

Not that I'm disagreeing with him about most of it, mind you. Especially about the zombis.*

Moe

*I had a pretty good riff going on about how I probably wasn't going to do link posts like this one in the future, which then went into a complex discussion of the conventions of blogging and how nobody explains what they are or why they are. It was a very baroque digression of a footnote. Then my computer connection booted me offline and I lost it all. It was all very metaphorical.

I have learned two things from this:

1). The universe is quite possibly a literary critic;

and

2). Highlight and Control-C are the blogger's friends.

Selective Prosecution

This is ridiculous. The Justice Department is prosecuting Greenpeace for boarding a ship to protest illegal trade of mahogany. What Greenpeace did was illegal, and they were arrested by the Coast Guard, as is routine in a non-violent civil disobedience protest like this one.

What is not routine is that:
1) the Justice department is prosecuting Greenpeace as an organization in criminal court, with a maximum penalty of probation and a five year fine. There is apparently some possibility that they will lose their tax exempt status. Quoting from the linked article, "While organizations sometimes face criminal prosecution for the actions of their members, especially in racketeering, fraud and securities cases, it is extremely rare — if not unprecedented — for the government to pursue criminal charges against organizations in “the free speech area,” [GW Law Professor Jonathan Turley] says.

2) And what law are they using to prosecute them? Why, it's an 1879 law prohibiting "sailor mongering," which MSNBC describes as "boarding ships before they had moorage, often using alcohol or prostitutes to lure the crewmen ashore, leaving the vessel unattended.' " Well, that's understandable. We certainly want to protect our sailors from being mongered.

3) So just how common are sailor mongering prosecutions? It depends what century you're talking about. If you're talking the 19th century, the law was cited in two cases, most recently in 1890. If you're talking the 20th or 21st century, there appear to have been zero (this is again according to Turley.)

4) Another disturbing thing about this case is that there may have been a bad faith plea bargain. From the article, after the FBI got involved with the investigation and imprisoned the Greenpeace activists who boarded the ship: "Six people, including the two who boarded the ship, pleaded guilty under the “sailor mongering” law on condition that other charges would be dropped. Later, says Greenpeace’s Wetterer, it was clear that the Justice Department had launched a separate federal grand jury investigation, which led to the criminal indictment in July of this year."

I would assume their guilty plea will be used against them in the current case.

I'm not a fan of Greenpeace, and this is almost funny--sailor mongering? But the implications are not funny. It seems like a pretty clear case of selectively prosecuting the administration's political opponents. Which is both illegal, and troubling. Our whole criminal justice system gives prosecutors an incredible amount of authority--as my criminal law professor put it, we "wildly overcriminalize and leave prosecutors to sort it out." Because of strict sentencing guidelines and the fact that so many cases are plea bargains, a prosecutor may have more power to determine a defendant's fate than a judge in many cases. The whole thing falls apart if they abuse this power.

It's also the sort of thing that makes liberals (and not only liberals) very nervous about giving DOJ broad new anti-terror powers, when terror is very vaguely defined, or leaving John Aschroft with authority over an investigation with more potential to damage the administration than any silly Greenpeace protest.

Edited to add:
1. this is by Katherine.
2. this is the first time, ever, that my MSN start page has linked to an interesting article.

You always hurt the ones you love.

I'm von, I'm the third poster on the site, and I'm currently consumed by the following question:

What the hell has going on at Daily Kos?

I used to read Daily Kos. He was an insightful commentator on the Iraq war, and it didn't hurt that his politics and mine have certain similarities. But what most impressed me was that his commentators ran the gamut from liberal to conservative, and the resulting debates on his comment boards were sometimes excellent.

Of late, however, Daily Kos has become yet another organ of the Democratic Party. It is now a place where the like-minded gather to chat about like-minded things, or to analyze exactly how stupid the unlike-minded are. Consequently, the unlike-minded seldom go there, and the quality of debate has declined. There's also been an unfortunate political "cleansing" of the blogroll (goodbye, Tacitus).

There's nothing wrong with this, of course. It's Kos's blog, and he can do with it what he wants. Most of his posts are still quite good (this bit of holier-than-thou-ism notwithstanding), and his guest posters can be excellent (Meteor Blades in particular). But I do lament the loss of something special in DKos. It used to contain that rarest of blogosphere attributes: actual, honest, fair-sided debate among all members of the political spectrum. No longer.

I mean not to launch a blog war here.* I write to encourage DKos and other bloggers to do their best to keep their comment boards open to all reasonable people who are willing to reasonably discuss the issues of the day. Particularly with the presidential campaigns heating up, it's good to remember that these are interesting times, and they require interesting debate.

Blogs are our coffee houses, people. Let's keep them open.

von

*But, if you are inclined to respond with tae kwan LGF, please direct it at me (von) and not the other posters.

from the left...

Hi. I'm Katherine , host #2. The liberal one. I try not to froth at the mouth, and to paraphrase my mother, I don't hate Bush, I just hate the way he's acting.

I've been volunteering for the Howard Dean campaign on and off since last March, which should give an idea of both my place on the spectrum and general political geekiness. It's also probably a useful disclaimer, but I hold no rank and get no money and have no intention of turning this into the 70 bazillionth Dean blog so I don't think it will be any problem.

Like Moe, this is my first blog. I used to want to grow up to be I.F. Stone, though, so it was only a matter of time. I'm surprised to be doing it with a certified VRWC member and a moderate. There are three reasons why:
1) They asked.
2) They're smart people whom I respect a lot.
3) I can't say this concisely so I'm going to get at it with a quotation. This is from Albert Camus, my favorite non-fiction writer, from "Preface to Algerian Reports." (Camus' family was from Algeria).:

"In this way the Right abandoned the monopoly of the moral reflex to the Left, which yielded to it the monopoly of the patriotic reflex. The country suffered doubly. We could have used moralists less joyfully resigned to their country's misfortune and patriots less ready to allow torturers to claim they were acting in the name of France....

If I annoy anyone by writing this, I ask him merely to think for a moment about the divergence between the ideological reflexes. Some what their country to identify itself wholly with justice, and they are right. But is it possible to be just and free in a dead or subjugated nation? And does not absolute purity for a nation coincide with historical death? Others want the very body of their country to be defended against the whole universe if need be, and they are not wrong. But is it possible to survive as a people without doing reasonable justice to other peoples? France is dying through inability to solve this dilemma."

This is not meant as a description of, or analogy to, either the left or the right in America in 2003. It would not be accurate in general, and it would be a particularly bad description of Iraq, where if I had to guess I'd say the right had the better humanitarian argument and the left the better national security argument.*

But I think it is a danger, one that we can't afford. And it will be a greater danger if we can't talk to each other seriously.

* I know, I'm weird. And I'm referring to the pre-war debate rather than the decision to stay in or go now. We need to stay; I'm more sure of that than of my opposition to the war.

Oh, Boy! A Post About Uzbekistan!

By Moe Lane

...a title which is glaringly out of sync with the generally sober tone of this entry, but really, our corner of the world is filled with the sorts of people who would really, really want to read about Uzbekistan, as opposed to the ones outside our corner of the world, who would really, really not rather. Either way, the title fits.

Moving along: Uzbekistan. Former Soviet republic, independent state, home to a nasty regime... and a benefit of American aid. We made a deal back in the aftermath of 9/11 to put a base there, and I've seen a bunch of people ask the question, "So, if we're suddenly in the topple-dictators-business, why was Iraq bad enough to deserve Shekinah and Uzbekistan not?"

Now, it's a relatively simple matter to note this aid can be justified. We needed an airbase; Afghanistan (and later, Iraq*) was well below Uzbekistan on the scale of 'financing foreign terrorism' (I have not seen credible evidence that Uzbekistan has ever been linked to acts of foreign terror; it seems to be entirely self-directed in its nastiness) and sometimes the choice is between bad and worse, rather than good and bad. One step at a time, choose your battles when you can, and whatever meme that you care to choose.

However, it has been several years since the liberation of Afghanistan and six months since that of Iraq. Now would be a good time to ask ourselves, "Given that the presence of an American military base usually implies that we're on good terms with the local government, and given that the need for the Khanabad air base could be well reassessed in the light of our current geopolitical situation, will our continuing presence there hinder or help further reforms in that country?" On the whole, I think that it might not be a bad idea to let the existing aid packages run their course and tie future aid to human rights improvements: it's something that the late Senator Wellstone favored, and I think that it's not a bad idea.

Interesting final note: the amount of aid actually given to Uzbekistan is of some interest. A number of $500 million for 2002 was reported here (via TalkLeft - hi, Jeralyn!). However, the State Department reported $160 million for 2002 and this report gives a number of $43 million in 2003. I suspect that the different numbers represent different interpretations of 'foreign aid', but I can't be certain, as the Guardian does not provide links to their source material.

Moe

*Ah, first footnote. It is the position of this blogger (though not necessarily that of his esteemed co-bloggers) that the payment of significant sums of money to the families of successful Palestinian suicide bombers does in point of fact come under the heading of 'financing foreign terrorism'. Please calibrate your viewers accordingly.

Howdy, howdy, howdy

Well, it's official: I've succumbed to the Dark Side of the Force and started a blog.

It was probably inevitable; Lord knows I like to ramble on about things, and it's not too surprising that I'd eventually take it up to the next level, or whatever the phrase is. So, here we are, at this time, in this place, and now we figure out where to go next. Time to let me tell you how this is going down.

First off, it's a group blog. I've got two fellow-posters here - I won't give names yet, as I don't know whether they want to use a handle or not - and we'll all be making entries. They're both smart people who can write in a straight line, so that's all right, then. I'm pretty sure that I won't agree with them all the time, but I don't expect that I'll feel sorry for inviting them in.

Second, this is not, strictly speaking, a Right-wing blog: it's pretty much a centrist one. While I carry my Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy card with pride, my fellow-bloggers do not. They aren't froth-at-the-mouth Bush-haters, mind you - which will probably disqualify them as being on the Left for a very small yet vocal group of people - but they are most assuredly not Republicans. I look forward to their insights and challenges to my own ideological leanings. I also have a somewhat larger list of people (of varying political beliefs) whom I'm going to hit up for special guest posts from time to time: but for at least the start, three bloggers is probably an optimal number to regularly post here.

Third, this is not going to be a completely political weblog, either. Mostly political, yes: but there will be nonpolitical entries a go-go and as the spirit moves us.

Fourth, I've just violated the Rule of Three, so I'd like to thank the people over at Tacitus for nagging me into getting a blog and Tac himself for the helpful suggestions. He didn't suggest the layout, so don't blame him for the color scheme.

Moe