Here’s one person’s story of flying without ID. All this time, money, and privacy abandoned just for the ritual of security theater.
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Defense and Foreign Policy
Putin: “War Has Started” with Georgia
Some unfortunate “he said/he said” violence in the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia looks likely to escalate into full-blown war. Unsurprisingly, Eduard Kokoity, the leader of the province, and the Russian prime minister and president are blaming the Georgians for starting it. The Georgians are blaming the Russians for starting it. Washington is several thousand miles away, so it’s hard to tell from here.
What’s not hard to tell, however, is how dangerous the situation is. Recall that President Bush made a full-court press to get Georgia (and Ukraine) onto Membership Action Plans at the recent NATO summit in Bucharest. In a heroic move, the Germans spiked the deal, saving us from ourselves. But both Barack Obama and John McCain favor Georgian accession into NATO — and with it, a full-on security commitments as Article V of the NATO charter makes clear.
Here’s Barack Obama’s absurd statement on the question from last month:
As I stated in April this year, I am committed to upholding the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Georgia. This commitment has long been a fundamental building block of U.S. policy, and it will not change under the Obama administration. I also affirm Georgia’s right to pursue NATO membership. This aspiration in no way threatens the legitimate defense interests of Georgia’s neighbors.
I’m sure the Russians are interested to learn that Obama considers himself an expert on “the legitimate defense interests” of their country. I wonder what the Kremlin thinks are the legitimate defense interests of the United States.
Unfortunately, of course, McCain is hardly a paragon of good sense on the question. He has been fairly pawing at the ground for years to get a run at Russia, and this opportunity seems as good as any.
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Where Have We Heard This Before?
Quote of the day comes to us courtesy of John Bolton, discussing Iran:
“I think regime change would be preferable, because I think that would lead to greater stability in the region as a whole.”
I have an eerie feeling that I’ve heard this somewhere before, but I just can’t place it…
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Air Security Follies and the Death of Innocence
Airport security is nothing if not a rich pageant and an endless source of amusement. Yesterday, I saw none other than Tweety Bird pass through the TSA checkpoint at Reagan National Airport. I am not joking (so far).
From my vantage some distance behind her in line, I couldn’t quite see the entire process, but I did see that she was sent to secondary search — perhaps for lack of ID, perhaps because the magnetometer suggested her bulbous, yellow head was full of daggers and C‑4. She opted for secondary in a side-room, away from public view.
When I got to the front of the line, I managed to quiz the TSA ID-checker about whether Ms. Bird had presented government-issued ID. She had not.
But I had seen Tweety emerge from secondary in just a few short minutes. This does not square with the new procedure whereby people without ID are subject to dossier review against TSA’s public records databases, a time-consuming process by all reports.
One of two possibilities presented itself:
It may be that the new dossier-check policy does not apply to birds. After all, birds are likely to have exceedingly thin files. They have no Social Security Numbers — not yet, anyway — and little access to the financial services that would form the basis of a credit file. Only a few birds own vehicles or property (the emancipated pets of deceased, eccentric millionaires). So, perhaps, for lack of records about them, birds have of necessity been made exempt.
But this would open a gaping hole in our air security system. Al Qaeda would have to do nothing more than recruit birds to carry out attacks on air transportation. They wouldn’t even have to be “clean-skin” birds with no history of terrorism (or “clean-feathers,” I suppose). Birds that we knew to be associated with the bombing of the USS Cole, for example, (waterfowl, one assumes) would easily be able to access air transportation for lack of a check of their IDs against the terrorist watch-list at the airport.
Putting a bird on a plane to attack us — how diabolically, ingeniously ironic. Have we no defense against it?
Though I’ve been disappointed before — like, with the entire concept of watch-listing — I can’t believe that the DHS and TSA would leave open such a vulnerability.
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Building Afghanistan
Building a state in Afghanistan is the job of the Afghans. The United States can help, especially with infrastructure projects and military training, but our principle objective there should not be counter-insurgency, but counter-terrorism. That mission requires no surge in American or NATO forces.
Don’t take it from me, take it from Rory Stewart, the crazy Scotsman and former employee of the British Foreign Office, who walked across Afghanistan in 2002 with a dog, lived to write a great book about it, and now lives in Kabul.
Stewart’s article is latest in an outbreak of Afghanistan surge skepticism.
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Crime vs. Terrorism in Providence
The New York Times reports that Providence’s police would prefer to spend their federal grants on crime rather than terrorism. That is because there is crime in Rhode Island but no terrorism.
This conflict is national, as I discussed here. Because our domestic counter-terrorism bureaucracy is largely our crime-fighting bureaucracy, the more you chase terrorists, the less you chase criminals. Some of the counter-terrorism money is new, but much of it comes by cutting back on other things. The FBI only has so many agents and the Justice Department so much grant money. Police officers only have so much time.
The result is pressure to divert counter-terrorism resources to crime-fighting. There are not enough terrorists to go around, so terrorist fusion centers become all-hazards fusion centers. Police departments try to use counter-terrorism funding to buy things — like police cars — that aid their actual work. Scandals about misused homeland security funds follow. But maybe the misallocating police had a better grasp on local risks than the grant-giving feds.
This was all summarized by the Wire. Early on, Detective McNulty struggles to interest the FBI in his investigation of Baltimore drug dealers, going so far as to call them terrorists to try to meet FBI criteria. Later, as a beat cop, he complains about the uselessness of a counter-terrorism course but uses notebooks they give him there for his kids’ school supplies.
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Losing Elections, Losing Wars
Senator John McCain’s advisers evidently told him to crank up the rhetoric a bit yesterday, because his longstanding stump speech line about “rather lose an election than lose a war” became this:
When we adopted the surge, we were losing the war in Iraq, and I stood up and said I would rather lose a campaign than lose a war. Apparently Sen. Obama, who does not understand what’s happening in Iraq or fails to acknowledge the success in Iraq, would rather lose a war than lose a campaign.
There’s something strange about the logic of that statement. McCain’s implying that “losing” the war will win Obama the election — that the American people want to “lose.”
And, it turns out, by McCain’s definition of losing, he’s correct. A Rasmussen/FOX survey reports today that 63% of Americans want troops home from Iraq within one year:
Twenty-four percent (24%) would like to see the troops brought home immediately while 39% say they should be brought home at some point within a year.