The Liberty City 7--The Black Panthers Revisited?

The Geek does not consider the recent (non) verdicts to be a "major" setback to Federal efforts directed against "homegrown" terrorism or the domestic funding of overseas terror groups. It wasn't a defeat for genuine law enforcement; it was an example of how the Feds don't learn from history. Not even from their own.

Back in the late Sixties and early Seventies there was a national organisation called the Black Panther Party (BPP). It started in Oakland, CA and spread rapidly across the country with major branches in Chicago and New York City.

To put it simply: The Black Panthers scared the pants off both the US government and most Americans.

The Panthers were labeled "terrorists." Not once or twice but over and over again. Not just by the easily scared and those who pander to fear. No. The label was almost universal in its application.

The BPP didn't help its image by widely quoted outbursts of rhetorical overkill. It didn't cool fears with recurrent photos of its leaders and members brandishing guns and angry expressions.

The Federal government launched a suppressive effort. Local police "intelligence" squads pawed the ground to join the FBI in the effort to squash the BPP like a bunch of grapes.

With a (metaphorical) whoop and holler the local cops and the Feeb went after the Panthers with means that were not fair but most assuredly foul. These included not only the usual employment of "technical" surveillance (you know, wiretaps and bugs), mail covers, physical surveillance including photography, breaking and entering, theft.

The efforts against the BPP relied as well on the use of informers, often cops in radical clothing.

The line between informing and provoking is neither sharp nor clear. Informing might be a legal albeit tasteless practice. Provoking criminal actions, including conspiracy, is not.

The effort paid off with a number of high profile arrests and trials. Most of the trials ended in acquittals, hung juries, or guilty verdicts overturned on appeal.

The reason?

The informers, the centerpiece of the government's case, turned out to have been the driving force of the alleged conspiracy. The informer had become the provoker. Often the only overt action required to demonstrate the existence of a criminal conspiracy was performed by or at the strenuous urgings of the informer.

Now, get a grip on this. The purpose of the arrests, the trials, and all the surrounding media hype was not, repeat, not to obtain a conviction.

In the campaign against the BPP, the intent of all the actions, both legal and illegal, was the organisational disruption of the party. The goal with the Panthers was the same as it had been a decade earlier with the Communist Party USA. Fatal organisational disruption.

The goal was achieved. The BPP joined the CPUSA in the scrap heap of failed political parties.

The efforts taken against the Panthers, the tactics used against the CPUSA, were neither nice nor necessary. Nonetheless, their effectiveness cannot be doubted.

So much for the videotape of history. Now for the Liberty City Seven.

As the government's case unfolded these past weeks, the Geek was struck by the similarities with the Panther trials. The defendants were members of a politically, socially, and economically marginalised segment of American society. They were given to wild talk, boasts that bestowed upon the speaker an aura of potency.

Like so many of the Panthers, the Liberty City 7 talked the talk of potency because their lives gave no opportunity to walk the walk of the truly potent.

The defendants may, again like so many of the Panthers thirty plus years earlier, have had an eye firmly on the main chance. "Hey, man, if there's money in this al-Qaeda dude, lets get ours."

What that means is that the defense contention that the Seven were out to scam the scamster not launch Big Sears into low Earth orbit is inherently credible.

No wonder the jury took nine days to throw up their hands on six of the Seven while acquitting the seventh.

Is there a lesson to this?

Of course there is. The Geek is not given to bloviating for its own sake. The lesson is at least twofold.

The first lesson is this. Organisational disruption works only when there is an organisation to disrupt. There wasn't one in this case. In other cases such as the Holy Land Foundation case there is. Thus, even mis-trials are good.

The second lesson is this. The government at all levels treads a very fine line between using legal (and less than legal) methods to protect society against genuine threats and employing the manifold coercive tools at its disposal against small men with big mouths or unpleasant ideas.

In the Holy Land Foundation matter and others, the Federal government stood on the correct side of the line. With the Liberty City Seven case, it did not.

Moral of the story: Target selection is critical. That means choose only those targets which are genuine threats. With its resources, government at all levels should be able to parse between impotent loud talkers and real deal wannabe terrorists. It ought to be able to identify those whose actions fund or support off-shore terrorist groups and ignore those individuals who support humanitarian enterprises.

At the least the feds ought to realize that every time they come a cropper by failing to properly identify and prosecute a genuine threat, they not only boost the confidence of real blackhats, they lower the trust in the good judgement (and taste) of the government on the part of the rest of us.

Will The OIC Ever Understand Freedom of Expression?

Not a chance--if the recent statement of the Secretary General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference is any indication.

Flying well under the radar of the Western mainstream media, the fifty plus members of the OIC held a two day meeting in Istanbul to consider ways and means of countering a phenomenon the member states don't like.

The term used by the OIC is "Islamophobia."

More correctly, the little something which annoys the OIC is called "Free Speech."

Prof. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, OIC Secretary General kicked off the International Conference on Islamophobia with a florid diatribe against the "defamation" of Islam. See http://www.oic-oci.org/oicnew/topic_detail.asp?t_id=711.

In the course of his remarks, the professor not only demonstrates that he has no concept of free speech, open inquiry, or the clash of ideas, he exhibits a complete lack of historical awareness and caps it off by proving Sam Huntington was right--we are engaged in a "clash of civilizations."
"Prove it!" You challenge.

OK, let's listen in. Here is how the prof sees freedom of expression. To put it simply, he understands it as one big "yes, but."

Another bone of content with the proponents of Islamophobia is the question of the freedom of expression. Although all agree that any freedoms are always linked to responsibility, such as respecting human rights, and avoiding any form of incitement to hatred or defamation of religion, we find that some circles in
the West tend to ignore this basic universal and moral value. There is a
tendency here to consider that narrow and local interpretation of the universal
values, comes above any other given value, thus putting the local, ethical or
moral values in total contradiction with the universal values.

Perhaps the General Secretary has been too busy constructing this tortured logic to have noticed that Muslims have a great experience at inciting hatred and defamation of religion. If he needs a refresher in this, the professor needs only to go to Cairo and wander through the bookstores. If this is too hard, he can check http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/eng/eng_n/hi41207e.htm and link on to a number of other excellent examples of Islamic "literature" which defames and incites hatred for Judaism.

Then there is the GenSec's take on history. Read on, "No Muslim has ever been accused of demonizing or vilifying any of the sacred religious Christian symbols or national one." It is a fact of history that Muslims have demonized and vilified both Christian and Western national symbols. It is ludicrous to say otherwise.

(The only rival in the ludicrousness department might be the "apology" of some overly politically correct people offered to Muslims for the Crusades. The Geek might think that the "apology" was justified if the Muslims offered a similar mea culpa for the conquest of the Iberian peninsula, or the attempted conquest of Vienna. More to the point of reality, "apologies" for historical realities are utterly irrelevant exercises in feel-good verbiage.)

The SecGen pays lip service to the "dialogue between civilizations," but the essential subtext indicates that the OIC actually believes in a "clash of civilizations."

"The subtext?" You ask.

Consider the first field of the OIC's website, http://www.oic-oci.org/oicnew/index.asp. It shows a global map with the member countries shown in red. Now, play along with the Geek in a little thought experiment. Picture the headlines in, say, the Washington Post, or the London Times, if an OCC (Organization of the Christian Conference) were to be formed. Were to post a website with a global map where all the predominantly or exclusively Christian countries were displayed in blue.

Pretty ugly, right?

Of course, the world will never have to deal with an OCC or a map where blue countries cover the majority of the world. The historical trajectory of the post-Reformation period militates against the idea of an OCC taking form regardless of the fantasies of some Christian evangelicals. Politics and religion in the West may be linked by values or ideas, but they are not joined hip and head as Islam posits and Islamists demand.

Get a grip on this. In the preliminaries to the recent Annapolis Conference, the Palestinian Authority negotiators made it clear that the PA would not accept characterising Israel as a Jewish State. Presumably, the OIC has no problem with this stance or, if it does, the problem has been well hidden.

Yet neither the PA nor the OIC have any difficulty with the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. There is no indication that the OIC would make a face at any of the member countries designating themselves as Islamic.

Now, think for a moment what the reaction of the OIC's Secretary General would be if a country would rename itself a Christian republic. There is no doubt in the Geek's mind that such an action would be quickly and loudly decried as "Islamophobic." Heck, the resulting brouhaha would make the lunatic protests over the Danish cartoons last summer (over which the SecGen spills more than a few words) look like love making.

In short, the subtext of the OIC as represented in its Secretary General's speech is simple: What's ours is ours. What's yours is negotiable.

Admittedly, there have been some awfully stupid actions taken by Western governments to limit speech, inquiry, and debate in recent days and years. One need only recall the "Truth in History" laws of Germany and Austria which criminalise something called Holocaust Denial. Many of the speech codes adopted by American universities in the search for sensitivity protecting political correctness fall in the same category of idiocy.

What the OIC obviously wants is much more than either of these examples. What it wants is nothing less than either a highly constricting self-censorship on the part of Western media, academia, and politics or imposition of such limitations by the United Nations.

The UN General Assembly is no advocate of free speech. It is no upholder of free inquiry. It is no friend of wide open, free swinging debate. This has been shown not simply by the repressive measures imposed on journalists (including bloggers) and academics. It has been shown not only by past actions taken by the UN or a subdivision thereof to limit journalism or satellite broadcasting.

The generally negative, not to say destructive, view of free speech afflicting the UN has been shown in recent weeks by the expressed attitude of its Special Rapporteur on Racism, who has been a major cheerleader for governmental action against "Islamophobia" which he, like the OIC, equates with the worst excesses of racism.

Get a grip on this unpleasant reality. The OIC, and presumably the majority of the countries which comprise it, are hellbent on imposing limits on us in the West. The organization wants to stuff a gag to end all gags in our collective mouth.

It's simple. If you can't say something nice (that is something we at the OIC like) about Islam or Muslims--say nothing at all.

Get a grip on this, OIC. The answer to speech you don't like hearing isn't censorship. It isn't a gag. It isn't accusations of "racism." The answer to speech you don't like is more speech.

Why don't you blokes try something new? Try entering the debate. Try listening to opposing views. Try to heal your hyper-sensitivity to words or pictures that might be considered (even by non-Muslims) offensive.

Heck, guys, debating sure beats suicide bombing.

You really ought to try it.

The Iran Nuke NIE--Politics Or Good Work?

Having spent a good chunk of years as a close student of the whacky world of intelligence, the Geek must profess himself mystified and baffled by the bloviation and hyperventilation crowding the mainstream media and blogosphere over the new NIE regarding Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Sure the new NIE is antipodal to the 2005 effort.

So what?

Get a grip on this. An intelligence estimate is never fixed in stone for all eternity--unless, of course, the intelligence community is totally out to lunch.

There are many, to the Geek at least, self-evident reasons for this reality. First, new information surfaces. Second, the analysts may revisit old information with new eyes. Third, the target may change its intentions, actions, capabilities.

In the present case all three factors were present.

It has been acknowledged that new information regarding the Iranian program emerged over the summer and early fall. The success of the (formerly) covert program to encourage defections from the Iranian nuclear effort which started in 2005 has been obliquely acknowledged. Finally, the new information including the success of the "brain drain" operation encouraged reopening the old files and looking at their content with newly opened eyes.

Not surprisingly, this interlocking set of considerations occasioned an analytical product at great variance with the previous one. For this the intelligence community deserves high marks and thanks from We the People. The community did its job--and did it well.

To do the job, and, more importantly, to release an unclassified summary, required the executives of the sixteen agencies involved ignore command pollution from the neocon ninnies in and around the White House. To the further credit of these executives, the political sensitivities of the current administration and its allies were ignored so the product might be released.

Despite the fact that the NIE in no way discounts the threat Iran will or might present to the US and other countries in the not too distant future, neocon ninnies have taken it under attack. Senator John Ensign (R-NV) has said that he will introduce a bill establishing a bipartisan commission to assess the NIE and report back to Congress in six months. Take a look at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/06/AR2007120602457.html.

The model is the 1995 effort by congresswallahs to discredit a controversial NIE which concluded there was no likelihood of any country beyond the major nuclear powers (Russia and China) obtaining a missile capability which would directly threaten the US before 2010. The Republicans didn't like this. (Neither did a posse of neocon Democrats.) The result was the formation of a commission under the command of Donald (Don't You Be Dissing Me!) Rumsfield. To the shock of no one with an IQ above single digits, the Rumsfield Commission concluded that the NIE was wrong as a soup sandwich, muttering darkly to the effect that virtually every country other than Somalia could possess arsenals bulging with ICBMs before fifteen years were out.

(We are now only two years from the deadline year. How many countries beyond the old nuclear club members have ICBM capability? How many are projected to demonstrate one within the next twenty-four months?)

The intelligence community did not play politics with the 1995 NIE. Neither did it make policy. It did its job. Did it well. Very well when it is considered that the time frame was lengthy.

The intelligence community is not playing politics with the new Iranian nuke NIE. Neither is it making policy. It is doing its job.

The neocon ninnies howled back in 1995. They are howling now. John Bolton, a man noted for his ability and willingness to call upon others to fight, bleed and die, has termed the NIE a "quasi-putsch." http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-bolton9dec09,1,233789.story?coll=la-headlines-world. If that isn't politicising the NIE, what is?

Norman Podhoertz, the Gramps of all neocons, is equally intemperate even though he eschews Bolton's colorful language. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/06/AR2007120602457.html. But, the former editor of Commentary and current advisor to Rudy Giuliani, has long been in favor of bombing Iran. It is not surprising that he would be darkly suspicious of any piece of paper arguing that there was no immediate need for this action--particularly one signed off by all sixteen agencies of the intelligence community.

The politics have come. Not from the analysts or executives of the intelligence community. No. Not them. The source of politicization has been those whose ox has been gored. The folks who were so wrong on Iraq. The neocon ninnies.

Intelligence estimates can be and have been wrong. The Geek thought those regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction back in 2002 were of the grilled watermelon sort. He believed the same of the 2005 view of Iran's nuclear weapons program.

The latest estimate doesn't cloy in the Geek's nose. But, the reactions of Bolton, Ensign, Podhoretz and the "experts" at the American Enterprise Institute do.