Remember remember 11 November

LGM argues that 11/11 shouldn't just be a day for veterans, but for WWI. But that will never happen.

Uses the post as an excuse to link Robert Bourne's 1918 essay that gave us the famous quote "War is the health of the state." I had not read that in a long time - would make a fantastic pairing with Weber for week 2 of CP.

The gist: In republics, the state fades - or at least we think that it does. In reality it lies dormant waiting for war to allow it to take over again.

With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world. The result is that, even in those countries where the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle. Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State in which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State in which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to the stern pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government's disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part.

The patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation, and government.

LGM commentary reminds us of Bourne's own situation when he wrote this - destitute, because he was driven from opinion journalism by the Wilsonian insanity of WWI.

torture comes home

Pat Fitzgerald continues his reign of righteousness, this time taking down a cop who'd gone on a 20+ year torture tour through the CPD. FDL:

That's right, you read it correctly, torturing suspects while they were in custody. Twenty years of torturing suspects. The statute of limitations had run out on the physical assaults on the victims and the city of Chicago had not tried to rescind his pension. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald had retired Chicago police commander Jon Burge arrested this Tuesday morning.

TAPPED notes that he got these ideas from his military career:

Wilson said Burge wired him up to a black box and turned a crank that generated an electric shock. This technique bore a striking resemblance to what American troops in Vietnam called "the Bell telephone hour"--shocking prisoners by means of a hand-cranked army field phone. In defending himself against Wilson's suit he said he'd never seen a black box, and though he'd served as a military policeman in the Mekong delta in 1968 and '69 had never heard of field phone interrogations. He bristled at the suggestion that Americans in Vietnam had conducted them.

Burge's peers from the Ninth Military Police Company, however, remember such torture in considerable detail.

See The Chicago Reader's story "Torture Tools" for the full deal.

And see also this interview with Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy.

We're gonna have some big problem in the future, Freikorps-style.

scary new world

From Wired -- Visible Man: an artist and professor mistakenly put on the terrorist watch list can't clear his name... so instead he started a web site, TrackingTransience.net, that makes his life an open book.

There are already tons of pictures there. Elahi will post about a hundred today — the rooms he sat in, the food he ate, the coffees he ordered. Poke around his site and you'll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.

Elahi's site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list — and once you're on, it's hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book. Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he's doing. Indeed, his server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.

Why do this?

The idea is to give them all info in real time, so they feel no need to investigate him.
So it dawned on him: If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? "I've discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away," he says, grinning as he sips his venti Black Eye. Elahi relishes upending the received wisdom about surveillance. The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately. Plus, no ambitious agent is going to score a big intelligence triumph by snooping into your movements when there's a Web page broadcasting the Big Mac you ate four minutes ago in Boise, Idaho. "It's economics," he says. "I flood the market."

So it's both an interesting reaction and a FUCKING SCARY SIGN of the lengths we have to go through in this new security state.

media cluelessness part 9,752

Glen:

No matter how corrupt and sloppy the establishment press becomes, they always find a way to go lower. Time Magazine has just published what it purports to be a news article by Massimo Calabresi claiming that "nobody cares" about the countless abuses of spying powers by the Bush administration; that "Americans are ready to trade diminished privacy, and protection from search and seizure, in exchange for the promise of increased protection of their physical security"; and that the case against unchecked government surveillance powers "hasn't convinced the people." Not a single fact -- not one -- is cited to support these sweeping, false opinions.

Some good examples of how this goes against public opinion polls. And how it MIGHT just be influenced by the media's own vapid coverage:

Here is a Nexus count of how much media coverage certain stories have received over the last 30 days, including the Surveillance State stories which Calabresi cites as proof that Americans don't care about their constitutional liberties:

* "Spitzer and prostitutes" -- 2,323 results

* "Spitzer and Kristen" -- 1,087 results

* "Obama and Rezko" -- 1,263 results

* "Obama and Jeremiah Wright" -- 466 results

* "Wall Street Journal and data mining" -- 9 results

* "FBI and National security letters" -- 149 results

* "Intelligence Oversight Board" -- 21 results

This is what establishment journalists like Calabresi always do. Their industry obsesses on the most vapid, inconsequential chatter. They ignore the stories that actually matter. And then they claim that Americans only care about vapid gossip and not substantive issues -- and point to their own shallow coverage decisions as "proof" of what Americans care about. That thought process was vividly evident with their obsession with the Edwards hair "story," when they all chattered about it endlessly, promoted it in headlines, and then, when criticized for that, claimed that it was obviously something Americans were interested in, pointing to their own media fixation as proof that Americans cared.

Do I smell something burning? Fiddle away, motherfuckers!!

prison diary

American writer has a freak-out on a BA flight to London... he's arrested and spends two months in a British jail. His story discusses the climate of fear in international travel, Muslim prisoner underclass in Britain, immigration, the prison system, etc. Pretty good, especially his interactions with Muslim prisoners.