Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Terrorism

  • Blaming and Sympathizing with Groups

    Blaming and Sympathizing with Groups

    Peace dove
    From OpenClipart.org

    I didn’t want to comment on the murder of 49 people in Orlando, not because I don’t sympathize with the victims or condemn the killing, but because I dislike getting tangled up in politics on this blog.

    If a Christian commits an illegal act, we often separate him (or her) from “our” Christianity, or even claim that the perpetrator was not a Christian at all. From local history here in the Pensacola area, I recall Paul Hill who committed murder here at the entrance to an abortion clinic. Paul Hill was an ordained (and later defrocked) pastor. He built his view on principles that were held by a large number of Christians. Yet when he went so far as to take two lives because of those views there were those who said he wasn’t really a Christian.

    That’s a claim of convenience. It keeps us clean. It prevents us from having to examine ourselves, and that is very unfortunate, even dangerous.

    On the other hand, we have the problem of someone looking at Paul Hill and saying, “See! That is what Christians do! Paul Hill was a Christian and he was also a murderer. So also all Christians!” That is an equally dangerous view. A faith tradition as broad and varied as our own is bound to have some people who go off the rails. If some Christians are opposed to abortion as murder, someone is bound to decide to become a vigilante and “fix” the problem. This isn’t an argument against the view that abortion is murder. Rather, it tells us that human beings will carry things too far, or perhaps jump the rails to something completely different.

    In fact, we can have similar results in society as a whole. I am always concerned when legislation is proposed and passed in the heat of emotions following an event. Rarely, I believe, is such legislation the best choice. We are capable of passing immoral laws because we are outraged by evil. Evil can generate more evil.

    Neither blaming the entire group of which a person is a part, nor excluding that person from your own group will help. A person who, up to yesterday, you would have called part of your own religious (or other social) group has now committed a crime does not become something else when he commits a crime. He was something else while living among you. The terrorist, murderer, or child molester of tomorrow may be sitting down the pew from you in church. There are evil people out there and there are triggers waiting to start them on doing evil deeds.

    The same is true of other faiths and social groups. There are Muslims who are appalled by acts of terror. There are Muslims who are evil. Just as we would wish to have the evildoer separated from our faith, and don’t like the idea of “Christian terrorist,” so Muslims would like to have terrorists separated from their faith. We don’t want to have all Christians blamed for the Paul Hills of the world. Muslims don’t want to all be blamed for the actions of one man in Orlando.

    This is not a matter of numbers. Some will point out to me that there are more Muslims espousing terror and violence by far than Christians. I’m not going to argue the statistics. I recently spoke at an interfaith event along with a number of other people, including a Muslim Imam. He’s a fine person and an advocate of peace. He doesn’t cease to be those things because others commit acts of terror. He is who he is, and so are millions of others.

    We need to grant them the courtesy we want people to grant us. We are each who we are apart from what other people who may claim the same label(s) does. Where attitudes of our group contribute, we need to fight that. In my experience, peace advocates tend to fight just such attitudes.

    And then there are the victims. It was interesting watching who mentioned what. The victims were from the LGBT community, gathered at a place where one would expect to find them. It appears that the perpetrator of this act of terror hated and despised gay people. This is also a fact and needs to be mentioned. LGBT people are targetted these days for who they are. It’s monstrously wrong to do so and we need to be aware that it is happening and conscious of what makes that happen. Think: What is it in my language or behavior that might make someone else think a gay person is less of a person than I am? Then don’t do or say that.

    We need to sympathize with those who are injured, and in doing so, we need to be willing to name them and to name the reasons they were targetted. We need to condemn evil, and at the same time give the same courtesy we would expect to the innocent.

    About a year after 9/11 I was traveling and rode in a taxi with a driver who was a Sikh. I made bold and asked him whether he had been threatened following the attacks because of his appearance. I recognized him as Sikh, but he might easily have been misidentified as a Muslim (some Sikhs were). He told me that for several months he could not wear his turban because of the threats. It was unfortunate that a man with no connection to Islam, much less the terrorists, was treated in this way.

    But it is equally unfortunate that Muslims with no connection to the terrorists are treated in that way because of hate for their group. We make every effort to be separated from evil acts by those who call themselves Christians. We should be equally sympathetic to those in other religious groups who are trying to do the same thing. It’s easier to blame the group. It’s more productive to be precise and accurate.

    Not to mention more Christ-like.

     

  • A Bad Detention Bill

    I agree with Ed Brayton’s comments on the Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010.

  • Causes, Excuses, Reasons, and Justifications

    I’m giving in to my tendency to write about broad principles rather than specific situations, though of course I’ll have to use a few specific situations as examples. I’ve heard this issue raised numerous times in numerous different situations. It can be stated this way: Does finding causes and reasons for an event or an action constitute justifying it or providing an excuse for it?

    We often encounter this in court cases with certain types of “justification” argument. Does the fact that a defendant was abused as a child provide justification for his or her criminal actions as an adult? It is very likely that the way someone grew up contributed to criminal activity later, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a good excuse.

    In politics I’ve heard this frequently in connection with the Palestinian situation. If anyone starts talking about reasons that Palestinians might be angry, there’s a quick negative reaction from supporters of Israel. Somehow we’re supposed to imagine that Palestinians are naturally evil and want to blow as many Israelis up as possible. If we find any reason for their anger and alienation, then we are justifying acts of terrorism. (Note that I refer here to folks in the United States, elsewhere in the world Israel is not so popular.)

    Similarly when we talk about the current war on terror, any discussion of reasons why people might hate us, why they might be angry, and why some might go so far as to try to kill us. But the fact is that terrorists are not born terrorists; they become terrorists. This involves the education to hate that can occur in their culture, but it also results from their experiences or those of folks close to them. Like it or not, if you blow up people’s houses and kill some of them, a certain number will become angry enough to be driven to be more radical than they are.

    The fear, of course, is that if we find reasons why terrorists have become what they are we will diminish the sense of them being evil, and provide excuses for their actions. This would in turn result in appeasement rather than vigorous suppression. But if we ignore the very real reasons why people become terrorists, we can quite easily design methods of responding to them that tend to produce more terrorists rather than less.

    I do believe that there are people who have become evil beyond hope of our doing anything to change them, so they must be dealt with forcefully. At the same time there are many people who have been pushed over the edge, and many sympathizers whose position has not been settled.

    That’s why any anti-terrorism policy needs to include both a diplomatic and a military option, and any anti-crime policy needs to deal both with enforcement and with the causes of crime. It’s easier to think of just one or the other; to propose that we simply hunt down every terrorist and invade and occupy every nation that supports terrorism. Similarly we can propose solely a diplomatic solution. Most unfortunately it seems to be easier to propose the violent solution than the diplomatic one.

    Similarly it’s easier to propose draconian penalties than to deal with education, economic issues, and the quality of enforcement (equipment, sufficient number of officers, and so forth) that might prevent crime before it occurs.

    If we use an examination of the causes to provide an excuse for evil actions, then there will be a significant danger. But we must examine the causes, and we must correct those that we are able, or we risk multiplying our problems as we try to solve them.

  • Different When WE Do It

    As I’ve watched the debates about various aspects of our behavior as a nation (the United States), I am very concerned with the way we seem to be able to rationalize things that normally would be totally unacceptable. The same action can be acceptable when we do it and a gross violation of justice when done by someone else. Something that is acceptable done to another person is a horrible violation of our rights if it is done to us.

    Here are just a few stray thoughts . . .

    When we grab terrorists and torture them, we are just protecting ourselves. When Russia does it in Chechnya, it’s a human rights violation.

    When we arrest someone without a warrant it’s a necessary part of defending ourselves against terrorism. When someone else does it, it’s an abuse of power.

    When we invade a country it’s preemptive defense; when someone else does it it’s naked aggression.

    This extends to our personal lives. As a nation we have a low view of congress, but we generally have a favorable view of our own congressman. We like it when our congressman brings home the pork; all those other congressmen ought to stop! We dislike attorneys as a profession, but we generally like our own attorney–at least as long as he wins.

    The other guy’s defense attorney is a sleaze who is prostituting himself to get a criminal off; our attorney is just using the best possible strategy to see to it that we get a just result.

    When we consider the justification–or more likely rationalization–for some of the things we are doing in the war on terror, we need to ask ourselves how we would react if some other country, or some other person, did the same things. I think we would find it much harder to justify these actions when done by others than when we do them.

    There is, of course, the argument that we must do these things in order to survive. But let me ask this: If I survive by lowering myself to the point of torturing someone else, just who is it that survived? Do I want to be that person?

    Who would Jesus torture?

  • Stupidity and Lack of Accountability in Enforcement

    Because I’ve been blogging lately about how law enforcement can get out of hand and start to look very much like [tag]terrorism[/tag] itself when it is not accountable, I want to call attention to a couple of incidents in which I found at Aetiology (Mail harmless bacteria, go to jail). You can find further information at Effect Measure.

    In these cases minor errors on the part of individuals involved in research got blown way out of proportion, and yet the authorities can’t simply back off. They have to find someone to blame, thus justifying all of their time and expense.

    But I think there’s something else at work here. Back in 1985, shortly I first established a computer BBS system (The Wind Dragon Inn, in Bellevue, NE), with a majestic 20 MB HD and 1200 bps modem, I got a call from an FBI agent. She was investigating a case of credit card fraud, and the individual charged with fraud had called my BBS. I’m not sure what the precise connection was, whether he had charged the call to a stolen card, or whether there was some other fraud involved.

    The agent asked me what I sold–nothing. Then she wondered why people would call that number. I explained that they would connect to the BBS and exchange messages or download public domain software. I was unworried because I was fanatical about only having legitimate software available for download. She asked once again then whether it was possible I had been defrauded. I said, no, it wasn’t, because there was no money being exchanged over the BBS at all.

    I thought that was it, but then she asked the question. “What exactly is a computer bulletin board?”

    For the next half hour I discussed how bulletin boards functioned, what people did with them, how e-mail (such as it was) was handled in those wondrous FidoNet days. She thanked me profusely for taking the time to help her out. Her bosses had dumped the case on her and she had no background for it.

    I thought that was a minor case due to the newness of the computer industry, but the more I see the more I suspect that there is a great deal of ignorance driving enforcement in very technical areas. People are evaluating risks who do not have the basic knowledge needed. I’m sure there are experts around somewhere, but I suspect that such overreactions do not come from people who truly understand what they are dealing with, but rather with people whose training amounts to concentrated seminars on the general outlines.

    True accountability for law enforcement should involved persons who are intimately familiar with the standards and dangers of the particular fields, whatever those are. We see too many appointments in government much like the ones in FEMA (not to mention other agencies) at the time of Katrina, in which government officials who didn’t even have a fig-leaf worth of knowledge were trying to run the relief effort with predictable results.

    Respect for law enforcement is good. People who deserve respect welcome accountability.

  • What I Want for Election Day – A Counter-Terror Strategy

    It’s getting within a quarter or so of the first votes, so I thought I’d put in a few posts on what I, as a self-proclaimed moderate independent want for election day. I have to note that it doesn’t look thus far like I’m going to get it, but one can always wish, no?

    The great weakness of our candidates, I believe, is that they lack any evidence of strategic thinking on dealing with terror. From one side we are hearing the “we’re in a war” beat, and we are told that we will go hunt terrorists for however long it takes and wherever they are hidden. What we are not told is how this strategy is ever to come to a close, or how the resources for such a strategy are to be provided.

    On the other hand we have those who would pull out of [tag]Iraq[/tag]–an option devoutly to be desired in my view. At the same time, they haven’t laid out any long term plan that would substantially reduce or eliminate terrorism as a threat in the world. Iraq was a bad idea. Whether you are just plain anti-war, or simply prefer your wars to accomplish something, you can get on board with that. Incidentally, I would also like to see the withdrawal accompanied by an assessment of just what a foreign army can actually accomplish in Iraq, no matter how good that army is, and a measurement against that realistic standard. “Unified and democratic” isn’t likely to be on that list of potential objectives.

    On the domestic front, it seems to me that we are in the business of kind of patching this or that element up haphazardly. What does a nation that is alert to [tag]terrorism[/tag], has the law enforcement and intelligence capabilities to detect such attacks, and can deal with the legal aftermath look like?

    On the Republican side, it seems to me to look more and more like a terrorist state, where we just “trust” the executive branch of the government to do the right thing without any sort of accountability. More law enforcement is no good unless it is also smarter law enforcement. What will it be like to live in this country at the end of the process? I suspect that most of these candidates haven’t really thought about that. On the Democratic side, many candidates are interested in protecting our rights, but what precisely are they going to do instead?

    I could suggest many things such as a large increase in the number of linguists and specialists in Middle Eastern culture in our government and intelligence agencies. Our current strategy and intelligence shows a great lack in that area. I’m not talking about a minor change–I’m talking about a massive increase. That is just one thing that I think is not being given the attention that it deserves. There are many others.

    Do I personally have a strategy to propose? Not in detail, but then I’m not running for president. I can certainly tell you the key priorities of such a strategy.

    1. Military action limited to responses to attacks and search and destroy for specific terrorist targets. War is only a potential under the strict standards that require a short period of time and a clear improvement to result.
    2. Eliminate the option to prescribe a government for other countries. Let them figure it out, even if a dictatorship results. When the issue is genocide, respond with the international community, not unilaterally.
    3. Increase in law enforcement personnel and equipment. Much of the money being spent on Iraq would have been much better spent in this country. There are techniques and and technologies available to make travel much safer.
    4. Strong emphasis on intelligent intelligence.
    5. Education, education, education, both for personal safety and a better understanding of the world. We need a shift from a purely North-American/European emphasis in our historical and cultural education, to a greater inclusion of Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American material.
    6. Constant accountability. Nobody should be able to spend money, or more importantly kill people without having some responsible layers of accountability. Executive privilege and “state secrets” are being way overused. Some people may think this makes them safer, but instead it makes the agencies involved lazier, and less likely to pursue the highest probability activities.

    I don’t want much, do I?

    I’ll continue over the next few weeks with occasional posts on what I’d like to see in presidential and congressional candidates. Right now, I expect to be wearing a figurative clothespin on my nose when I go to the polls.

  • 9-11 Links

    I want to link to a few posts from other blogs, both from the Moderate Christian Blogroll and from other blogs to which I subscribe.

    Crossinator remembers his day on 9/11/01.
    Through a Glass Darkly gives us a relevant quote from the Gettysburg address.
    Tom Sims reminds us of both positive and negative things that have come from that day.
    Levellers is observing a day of blogging silence.

    And the following don’t have anything to do with 9/11, but I wanted to mention them anyhow:

    Bruce Alderman is not going to be raptured and Christine is giving us more nifty poetry with a great picture.

    I wrote the devotional for my wife’s devotional list, and though I didn’t plan a 9/11 theme, one jumped out, grabbed me, and made me insert it. It is here.

  • JFK Terrorist Plot

    This news caught my attention not just because of its general importance, but because of the involvement of people from Guyana. I lived in Georgetown, Guyana as a teenager and have some fond memories of the country. When they mention that Abdul Kadir is a former Member of the Guyanese parliament, I’m betting most readers have to go look up where Guyana is. But when they mention he was once mayor of Linden, Guyana, I know where that is. My youth group sang and played in the town square once, oh so long ago.

    None of that is terribly relevant to the story. The important thing here is good police work, and down to earth human intelligence combining to thwart a dangerous terrorist attack. This is one of the aspects of the war on terror that I think is being terribly neglected at this point. No matter what we do militarily in other countries we will still have to have substantial security here at home. Notice that the people involved here are from Guyana and Trinidad & Tobago, two countries that are not high on the list of terrorist sources. This points out the difficulties of completely blanketing the world in the type of security we want.

    One blog I read regularly has already commented on the importance of law enforcement, and treating terrorism as a law enforcement problem rather than a military one. There is a good point here, but not a sufficient one. Treating terrorism purely as a law enforcement problem is not going to be sufficient either.

    The problem with the war in Iraq is not that it treats terrorism as a war, but rather that it stretches strategic resources without adequate return. I do think we are unbalanced in the way our resources are used, with too much going to military action and too little to intelligence and law enforcement, but that is because we are trying to occupy a country long term. Law enforcement will be much more difficult when there are countries to which terrorists can run with impunity. The key is to carefully analyze each set of actions as to cost and benefit, with the goal being security here at home, not revenge or a desire to appear to be doing something.

    This plot certainly illustrates the remaining dangers. It’s frightening to me on one point. Though they got caught by good old human intelligence (an informant), they showed a better strategic grasp than many middle eastern terrorists. The Al Qaeda attacks thus far have been aimed to create fear more than economic disruption. These guys seem to understand the value of economic disruption to their cause. We need to be on guard for attacks on this type of target.

    Of course, law enforcement at all levels involved is to be congratulated on a job well-done in foiling this plot.

  • Protecting Rights and Fighting Terrorism

    In a comment on her blog, Laura of Pursuing Holiness drew my attention to this story in the New York Times about the posse comitatus and related material about the insurrection act of 1807.

    First let me note that I consider the posse comitatus to be a good idea, but my primary point in posting about it is not to argue that point. Go ahead and read the article and study that one out for yourself.

    But the thing that worries me primarily about all of these actions is the way that we allow freedoms to be eroded without due consideration in the face of danger. There is a strong potential for trouble in both directions. If those on the libertarian side simply argue in favor of civil liberties without looking at safety issues, then eventually safety concerns will get out of hand, and popular support for certain stronger–and potentially dangerous–measures will continue to grow. We’d like to think that we can somehow get the people of the country to stand on principle though the heavens fall, but in reality, many people will give up a great deal of freedom in exchange for security.

    Amongst those who are not so libertarian (and there are people in both these groups on the left and the right), there is often a tendency to take hold of any rule that looks like it makes the law tougher and imagine that it will, in fact, increase safety. That is also very dangerous. If you pass a tough law, and safety doesn’t result, then there’s an automatic drive to get tougher and tougher until it works. I think this is part of the reasonw why we have in the United States one of the toughest criminal justice systems in the free world, and yet we also have one of the highest crime rates.

    The question, I think, is one of effectiveness. We are coming to believe our own spin. If someone on TV says that a certain action will improve our security enough times, then we become convinced that it will. If a law has a title like “Law to Increase the Security of Air Travel” or “Law to Make Everyone Smarter” we assume that each law will accomplish its goal. But when we look into those laws we may find that very little of the bill actually has to do with the topic.

    One way these things happen is when various projects are offered to particular districts in order to secure votes on some other issue. Such things are happening right now in the Iraq war vote, as Laura notes in another post. (You can follow her links to the source stories.) You might like to think that primarily your congressman is deciding whether to support or oppose a bill on principle, but that is often not the case. Why are congressmen susceptible to such pressure? Primarily because that’s what we, the people, will vote for. The key to having a strong hold on your district is bringing home the bacon, or to be more direct, the pork.

    Now I went on that detour to make this point: Because of this complex system of dealing, and because bills are often passed with many unrleated provisions attached, it is very difficult to tell in detail just what a congressman supports. Voters guides can often be accused of partisanship precisely because they have to pick and choose so carefully. John Kerry got on the wrong side of this one with his “I voted for it before I voted against it” issue on body armor. The issue gets very tangled because of the combinations of provisions.

    It was in just such a way that the provisions that weaken civil liberties in a dangerous way were tucked into a defense appropriations bill, and passed without making congressmen stand up and be counted on the specific issue. Even opponents sometimes give up on such amendments, letting them ride through because you don’t want to hold up a big bill such as defense appropriations over a minor issue. But we elect our congressmen to do just that kind of watching.

    One of the reforms that I support in connection with this issue is the Read the Bills Act (RTBA). You can find a good blog post on the reason for this bill and its intent here. This is not my central point, although it would make it considerably easier to do the things I’m about to suggest. (Hat tip on the prior post to Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

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