Antiwar.com Blog

I meant to write this post about six weeks ago, so forgive me if anyone’s asked the question already, but: Would you buy this car on eBay?

Before all the warbloggers whooped and hollered about US government photos of the car in which Italian agent Nicola Calipari was killed by US forces, they should have asked themselves that question. Which I’m sure they would have, if they weren’t partisan hacks with heads full of concrete. Take a look at the listings on eBay Motors. Notice how almost every listing has photos of the car from at least a dozen angles, interior and exterior as well as under the hood? Now if you, dear reader, a person with a healthy amount of skepticism and an interest in

Wow. BBC reporter and weblogger Stuart Hughes is being blackmailed and threatened by a Romanian hacker who has hijacked his blog. Apparently, the guy took over Stuart’s blog and demanded that he post about the Romanian journalists held hostage in Iraq.

Daster again! I told you to help our romanian journalists hostages in Iraq and you ignored me! That’s mean you don’t care about them……ok…this is an Ultimatum! If tomorrow our journalists will die, i promise you that i’ll distroy you!!! I have all your accounts. I’m not a bad guy but if you’ll ignore me again i swear i’ll distroy you!!!I hope that you are sure now that’s not a joke….don’t make me angry…
[…]
If you are not worried about you, or your family…ignore me again…Anyway next time (wich means tommorow if you don’t publish any thing about journalists) i’ll block your credit card, your cell phone ,and your access to internet……see you soon!

Romanian hacker, DASTER!

People posting comments are saying that Daster has done this before.

Yaron Brook, director of the Ayn Rand Institute, speaking at Tufts University:

“[President George W.] Bush has not taken the actions necessary to defeat terrorism,” Brook said in his opening statement. “Instead, he has unnecessarily sacrificed [American] soldiers’ lives … because we hesitated to kill so-called innocents.” …

He made reference to World War II, when Allied leaders authorized the bombings of German and Japanese cities, including the dropping of atomic bombs over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “Doing so saved thousands of lives and ultimately ended the war,” Brook said.

“All Americans today owe their lives to leaders who do whatever it takes to win the war – [those past leaders] were willing to kill anyone. Civilians of enemy nations are part of the [enemy] war machine,” he said. …

Brook attacked just-war theory’s principles that force used in war must be proportionate to the threat. “In my view this is horrific,” he said. “That’s saying we must balance the deaths of U.S. soldiers and civilians with the deaths of enemy soldiers and civilians … and sacrifice the greatest nation in the history of the world to the worst countries today.”

He also criticized just-war theory’s idea that combatants should be distinguished from non-combatants. “Directly targeting civilians is perfectly legitimate,” Brook said. “If it’s possible to isolate the truly innocent – such as children and freedom fighters – at no military cost, then do so. But insofar as the innocent cannot be isolated … they should be killed without any moral hesitation.” …

Disheartening stuff, but on the upside there’s this:

He said Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia are nations that currently pose large threats to the United States, but that Bush will not and is not doing anything because “a man truly dedicated to self-defense cannot justify going to war with them. Iran threatens the United States the most, but we can’t attack because there has been no genocide and there is no universally-accepted monster in power there.”

That has to be the least accurate criticism of George W. Bush I’ve ever come across. Remember it when Dubya starts agitating for war with Iran this summer.

In the comments section at bottom, this wonderful response from a student:

What is Objectivism? Some sort of collectivist/socialist ideology?

I find it monstrous to kill innocent civilians for the crimes of their leaders and their armies. That’s nothing but collectivism at its most ugly. Morality and justice pertains to individuals, not to collective entities like the state.

I wonder if Mr. Brooks would support me killing a random black guy because one robbed me last week. After all, there is some small chance that any given one could attack me. If I killed every one I saw, I’d surely be safer. Indeed, doing anything less would be “altruistic”.

This guy sickens me.

And another gem:

Objectivism : Conservatives :: Scientology : Hollywood

(Hat tip: Anti-State.com)

Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere. Ha ha ha!

Or not.

Jacob Hornberger reminds us of the true nature of our unlimited republic:

“Zacarias Moussaoui’s guilty plea to terrorism charges in U.S. federal district court does not end the Pentagon’s threat that hangs over the head of every federal judge who has jurisdiction over an indicted terrorist defendant.

Moussaoui’s punishment must still be decided, either by a jury or by the judge if both Moussaoui and the government waive a jury. The problem is that the Pentagon and the Justice Department are still claiming the power to remove Moussaoui from the jurisdiction of the federal court and transfer him to the military for punishment, including execution. Don’t forget that that’s in fact what they’ve done to Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri and that they are fighting for the power to do this to every other American citizen and every foreigner whom they suspect of being a terrorist.

Thus, if it looks like the jury or the judge might be unwilling to impose the death penalty on Moussaoui, the military might simply take the law into its own hands and do the dirty deed itself, transferring Moussaoui to Gitmo and executing him there, independent of any federal judicial interference.

That’s why the Moussaoui case — or more accurately, the Pentagon’s claim of power to punish Americans and others without due process of law — still presents the most ominous threat to the freedom of the American people in our lifetime.”

The funny part is that the feds have said before that they don’t even really believe he was meant to be the twentieth hijacker. That was Ramzi Binalshibh. As Seymour Hersh has written,

“The assumption of government bungling was predicated on the assumption that Moussaoui was indeed the twentieth hijacker. (There were five hijackers on each of the three planes that hit their targets, but only four on the flight that went down in Pennsylvania.) Moussaoui has said in federal court that he was a member of Al Qaeda, but he has denied any involvement in the hijackings. Many present and former F.B.I. and C.I.A. officials have told me that they believe he was “a wanna-be,” as one put it, and far too volatile and unstable to handle a long-term undercover terrorist operation. Nevertheless, they said, Moussaoui may have crucial knowledge about Al Qaeda.”

Oh, well. Close enough for an execution, right?
If you’re not a terrorist, you don’t have anything to worry about.

Re: Saudi Arabia, Chris Matthew Sciabarra asks,

Of what use is “democracy” when the dominant culture would bring about a political condition that might make the current Saudi regime appear “moderate” by comparison?

Good question, though not a new one for readers of Antiwar.com. The neocons’ democratization rhetoric plays well because it’s not a total falsehood. It’s a quarter-truth. It starts from the half-truth of equating democracy, the freedom to participate in a political system, with freedom generally. Then it halves that truth again by saying that everyone wants freedom. Well, sure – every person (with the exception of certain save-us-from-ourselves ninnies in post-liberal societies) wants freedom of thought and action for himself. This innate desire for personal license – which is easily hitched to authoritarianism – is obviously light years away from a commitment to “liberty for all.” The Puritans came to America, as Garrison Keillor once quipped, “in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.”* Massachusetts was to Puritans what Woodstock was to hippies: a place where all was permitted – all that they wanted to do, that is. Which was go to church every spare moment, stamp out heresy and secularism, drown witches, etc. Now imagine the Islamist equivalent of Salem, and you have a realistic picture of a democratic Saudi Arabia.

Even in the West, the development of (classical) liberalism took millennia, and despite its broad influence, most Westerners have never fully accepted it. Witness the general tolerance of (and even enthusiasm for) eminent domain laws, the War on Drugs, standing armies, state censorship, domestic spying, and in the not-too-distant past, slavery and conscription. Nonetheless, Americans rightly recoil at the tremendous repression in Saudi Arabia, but as a result, many fail to see the true nature of the popular discontent. What if the Saudi masses really don’t want their MTV, but the freedom to stone anyone who looks at the Koran sideways?

The standard critique of U.S.-Saudi relations from neocons, New Republic-style liberals, and true-blue libertarians is that U.S. support for the monarchy has made Saudi Arabia worse off. At the risk of being expelled from the whole debate, I disagree. Yes, the Saudi monarchs have built a police state to quash any challenge to their power, mostly from the Islamist extreme, but also from a handful of moderates. Still, the place could be in far worse hands. Saudi Arabia is actually a case where U.S. meddling may have made a country less illiberal than it would be otherwise. The salient question for Americans, however, is What has this meddling done for us? As the anti-Saudi crowd constantly reminds us, 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. What they conveniently ignore is that those guys weren’t pissed off at the U.S. because they loved the Saudi monarchy, but because they hated it and our coziness with it (and Israel).

Our two options for “dealing with” Saudi Arabia are, as I see them:

1) Don’t. Leave the godforsaken place alone. Don’t prop up the government, don’t knock it down. If the monarchy hangs on, maybe the moderates will slowly grow in strength and improve things. Maybe Saudi Arabia will stay stuck right where it is. Or maybe the hardcore Islamists will take over. At any rate, disaffected Saudis will have one less excuse to ram more planes into our buildings – and if they try, then maybe we could take that monster military of ours out of countries that never screwed with us and use it for a legitimate purpose.

2) Work to topple, overtly or covertly, the status quo in the fanciful hope that the handful of native liberals will fill the power vacuum before the horde of bin Ladenites do. Once this succeeds, establish oceanfront resort in Riyadh.

*Yes, yes, there were other reasons, too, including commerce. Spare me the pedantic e-mails. It’s called humor.