Category ►►► Pompous Pedantry

November 24, 2006

Doom Is Nigh - for "Movement Libertarianism"

Daniel Weintraub, in his excellent Bee-blog California Insider, published a brief little post about the 92 year old woman who was shot by Atlanta police after she opened fire on them when they attempted to execute a search warrant. This is Weintraub's entire take on the matter:

The government is spying on peace protestors in Sacramento and killing a 92-year-old woman in Atlanta after breaking down her door in a "no-knock raid" while looking for a drug dealer. Maybe it is time for the government to take a time-out.

As a fellow libertarian, I found his take rather disturbing. I thought maybe he simply wasn't aware of all the facts and was just believing the liberal hype. So I sent him links to the two stories on Patterico's Pontifications that brought forward factors that should mitigate too quick a pronouncement of police brutality:

• Libertarians Jump the Gun in Story of Shooting in Atlanta
• Is the Search Warrant in the Atlanta Shooting Case “Public Record”?

(Patterico just now put up another post, Cops in Atlanta Shouted that They Were Police and Wore Vests Labeled “Police”; but I didn't send this one to Weintraub.)

Weintraub's response confirmed what I thought originally: he e-mailed me that, since he opposed the entire drug war and supports legalization, the fact that the cops were serving a lawful search warrant when she opened fire did not change his mind at all: police shouldn't break through doors (even after identifying themselves as police) to catch drug dealers. If they had to enforce such laws (Weintraub asks), why didn't they just stake out the residence and arrest him outside?

Daniel Weintraub and I are both libertarians, and his response perfectly encapsulates the terrible crisis facing contemporary libertarianism... which will shortly kill it if not addressed. His comment, and his subsequent defense of it appealing to the libertarian impulse against anti-drug laws, has touched a raw nerve: this, on a nutshell, is why, since 9/11, I find myself reluctant to admit I'm a libertarian. Libertarianism has not responded well (or at all, actually) to the crises we face today.

First, I also support legalization of all drugs (except antibiotics). But that's not the point, and it wasn't the point Weintraub made -- no matter what he intended.

First, surely he doesn't believe that cops should only enforce laws they personally support? For a libertarian, that would be far worse than the situation now -- since a libertarian (such as myself) must assume that the laws the cops don't support are precisely those that protect our liberties from abuse by the government. Police tend to be authoritarian; that's why they're drawn to law enforcement. Do we really want them picking and choosing which laws they like?

The points about the shooting that Weintraub's brief brief missed, which Patterico brought out, are these:

1. The police were attempting to search the premises on the basis of a legitimate search warrant -- not the "wrong house" (as early reports claimed);
2. It was the old woman, not the cops, who began shooting;
3. She shot three officers before they returned fire;
4. Bullets fired by a 92 year old are just as deadly as bullets fired by a 22 year old;
5. The police have every legal right, and 95% of Americans would say moral right, to return fire when fired upon.

If you're going to attack the cops' actions, you must respond to these points; if not, the natural response of readers who have learnt them is to dismiss you as a crank, which I'm sure was not Weintraub's intention.

He raises the question of why they didn't just arrest that one guy. But how should they know he's the only person involved in the crime? For that matter, how does Weintraub know that the old lady wasn't involved herself? Old people commit crimes too. Maybe she liked the money.

Patterico also notes that a few days ago, a Texas state trooper pulled over a motorist to cite him for violating the state's seatbelt law. Now, I oppose seatbelt laws too, though I always wear my seatbelt (and always have since long before the same law was enacted in California); but again, I hope we agree that police shouldn't get to pick and choose which laws they enforce and which they routinely ignore.

As he approached, the motorist, who later stated he thought the stop was "unconstitutional," stepped out of his car and shot the officer point blank with a Ruger Mini-14 -- a gun that is functionally identical to the semi-automatic version of the M-16. The officer died.

The motorist was 72 years old. The police video got out to YouTube, and it's clear the officer hesitated to shoot at the motorist when the guy pointed his rifle... probably because he didn't want to shoot an old man; this hesitation led to his death.

We libertarians oppose seatbelt laws; so should we blame the Texas trooper for stopping the motorist, and think he more or less got what he deserved for enforcing such an anti-liberty law as the seatbelt requirement? Is this a mature political philosophy?

Movement libertarians (as opposed to Republican libertarians -- and not just the Libertarian Party) have opposed, almost en masse, virtually every security response we made to 9/11; but they have proposed nothing to take their place. They're worse on this score than the liberals, who at least accept that we need some security. The whole L. Neil Smith/Sam Konkin/New Libertarian/New Isolationist branch of libertarianism ("movement libertarianism") flatly states that "George Bush is the real enemy," and jihadism is either ficticious -- lies spread by "the State" -- or merely the moral, libertarian response of Moslems to our "oppression" of them (which they never specify).

This puts me in a real crisis of conscience: I have considered myself a movement libertarian since I was 19 years old; but on the other hand, liberties don't just float in air: liberty and duty are the obverse and reverse of the same coin.

E.g., as a libertarian, I believe that every sane, non-criminal, mature person should be allowed to carry a concealed gun. But by the same coin, it's also the duty of every person to intervene, as best he can, to protect the innocent from criminal attack. That's the bargain, that's the duty side of the liberty of carrying a gun. Without such social trade-offs, society crashes to the ground. Even libertarian "saints" like Murray Rothbard, Friederich Hayek, and Robert Heinlein understood that.

Suppose we had a libertarian society where anyone who wanted was allowed to carried a gun. Now suppose there is a violent criminal assault against an innocent victim who cannot fight back -- a child, say, or an old person, or a petite woman who cannot handle a gun properly, or a handicapped person. If none of the smug libertarians standing around intervene to save the innocent, if they "stand on their principles" that it's the responsibility of the victim to defend himself (even if he physically can't), and if such attacks therefore become routine... how long do you think that "libertarian society" will last? A society of pure narcissism is unsustainable.

The failure to recognize any duty whatsoever (in trade for liberty) is the great failing of the contemporary libertarian movement: it has morphed from Jeffersonian liberalism to ultimate narcissism. Most libertarians today demand an end to drug laws, not because they really believe in liberty -- because if they did, they would be at war with the greatest destroyers of libertry in the world today, Communists and jihadis -- but because they want to smoke dope.

Most contemporary "libertarians" are in fact simple libertines; but a society of human beings cannot be governed by libertinism. Even those who are not libertines but actually support (verbally, that is) human freedom have been duped by libertines into believing that we can have liberty without the responsibility to defend it, by force if necessary.

But Weintraub didn't just attack the Atlanta cops; he also attacked "spying on peace protestors in Sacramento" as a similar example of (one must presume) un-libertarian activity by the State.

Can he really be unaware that many of those "peace protester" groups -- such as International ANSWER, International Solidarity Movement, and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) -- are in fact front groups for either Stalinists or jihadis? That they raise money for terrorists and aid and abet "sleeper cells?"

Don't libertarians support "spying" on people who are plotting to take away our liberty, and who have demonstrated the willingness to kill us by the thousands in order to do so?

And we know that we libertarians oppose the drug war, but what about the drug problem? Drugs do, in fact, cause terrible problems in society -- and not just those associated with the artificially high price of drugs, like burglary and robbery to support the habit.

Drugs are very dangerous and destructive. So where is the libertarian program to minimize that destruction? I have been a movement libertarian for 27 years now, ever since I read David ("son of Milton") Friedman's book the Machinery of Freedom... and I have never heard anything but mantras that people have the freedom to "kill themselves." All right in theory; but in practice, rampant drug use destroys minds, souls, and society... what are we libertarians going to do about that, to take the place of the anti-liberty "drug war?"

The sound of crickets chirping.

Weintraub fails to mention that the "92 year old woman" opened fire on the officers first while they were simply trying to conduct a search pursuant to a lawful search warrant. They didn't simply kick down a door and assassinate some random nonagenarian, which is what his phrasing implied. Do we libertarians say that the cops should just refuse to enforce laws we don't like? Or are we saying those officers got what they deserved, and in future, they should just walk away whenever someone resists using deadly force?

If libertarianism continues down the path it currently follows, it will utterly discredit itself -- and utterly discredit the principle of maximal liberty in the process. If libertarians, working hand in hand with liberals, manage to overturn all the security measures we've enacted since 9/11 woke us up (movement libertarians oppose the Patriot Act, tracking terrorist financing, aggressive interrogation of enemy combatants, the Iraq war, the Afghanistan War, and surveillance of any kind, against any target, by "our enemy, the State"), then we will get hit again and again... and the response will not be pretty.

The American people, who (quite understandably) want to survive, will demand intrusions upon our liberty so much more severe than what we have now that even liberals will look back and long for the days of the Patriot Act, NSA surveillance, and the SWIFT program.

Like it or hate it, we are at war; the war was declared by the other side in 1979; and those people have not the slightest interest in, concern for, or even the vaguest understanding of liberty for Daniel Weintraub or Dafydd ab Hugh: to them, most of Americans are dhimmis, fit only to serve the Faithful... and Weintraub and I are nothing but Zionist pigs, fit only for death, as their version of the Koran demands. Why aren't libertarians standing up as a group -- or even as individuals -- to defend liberty against these monsters?

And if we're ever going to see the day Weintraub and I both hope for, where no drugs (in his case) or only one class of drugs (in mine) are proscribed or controlled by the State, then the absolute worst way to go about it is to imply that officers who get shot while trying to execute legitimate search warrants, and who return fire against the person shooting (rather than just walking away and refusing to enforce the law), are simply assassins who like killing old women.

We cannot skate by on Harry Browne libertarianism. Now that he's dead, let's bury that crabbed and egocentric vision of libertarianism deep, at a crossroads, with a stake through its heart.

We need a robust and responsible libertarianism that equally recognizes responsibility and duty alongside liberty, tails alongside heads, the yang to complement the yin. We need a libertarianism that can identify the true enemies of liberty, not simply those closest to home. And we need a libertarianism that accepts practicality when necessary, rather than always being willing to let the other guy die for our lofty theories.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 24, 2006, at the time of 5:12 PM | Comments (62) | TrackBack

November 10, 2006

Mrs. P Rallies the Troops

Incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was interviewed by Brit Hume on Special Report Wednesday. Hume asked her whether it was more important to win in Iraq or more important to leave Iraq.

Here is her inspirational answer:

The point is, this isn't a war to win, it's a situation to be solved. You define 'winning' any way you want, but you must solve the problem.

This certainly compares very favorably with the less sophisticated Shakespearian speech by King Hal in the Life of King Henry the Fifth, act 4, scene 3 -- the speech that ends this way:

It's too bad Shakespeare didn't have Nancy Pelosi editing him; the play would have been much shorter, and it would be easier for students to memorize the important bits.

Hatched by Lee on this day, November 10, 2006, at the time of 4:59 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

September 14, 2006

Qwik Hitz

Just some musings that don't seem large enough to warrant separate posts apiece. These are the nagging questions that sometimes jolt me awake in the middle of the day.

You're either with us...

In the international arena, we are fighting a battle that ultimately reduces to civilization versus barbarity.

But in the national arena, the real battle is between courage and cowardice: every man and woman in the county is either acting courageously... or he is playing the coward.

May I cut in?

Since this phase of the war against jihadi terrorism began five years ago, the British have been our most stalwart allies, while the French our weakest and most untrustworthy -- so much so that many of us consider Crock Jacques Chirac to have at least one doddering foot in the training camps of our enemies.

But now it appears that over the next two years, the British will drift away from the United States as Tony Blair leaves -- but the French will likely become much closer to us, if, as expected, Nicholas Sarkozy is the next president of France.

When the music changes, are our minds flexible enough to change partners?

Hair of the dog

Scientists have devised a fascinating scheme to repopulate the world with wooly mammoths by recovering mammoth semen (no jokes) from the creatures' frozen mammoth generative organs (all right, so I couldn't help myself).

Perhaps they'll come in handy when the global-warming crowd flip-flops again and begans warning, in dire, sepulchral tones, of the pending catastrophe of global cooling. You wouldn't want your mammoth to get cold, would you?

The premature-death tax

The current estate tax -- or "death tax," as anyone without pennies on his eyes calls it -- is currently slated to drop and drop until it finally reaches 0% in 2010; but then, the next year, if nothing it done in Congress to permanize the cuts, it's scheduled to leap right back up to where it began: 47%.

So if the Democrats continue to block meaningful permanent reform of the death tax... how many additional premature deaths will occur in late 2010 -- either voluntarily or with a little help from heirs -- as rational people act rationally, if not morally, to save an inheritance?

Call this figure the Democrats' "premature-death" tax.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 14, 2006, at the time of 7:00 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 19, 2006

The Value of Uniqueness

The most typical response from those who support same-sex marriage to anyone who opposes it is this: "suppose your state adopted same-sex marriage; would that somehow hurt your own relationship with your wife? Would you love her any less just because two guys or two girls could also get married?"

The second question masquerades as a restatement or clarification of the first, but it's actually an insulting irrelevancy. We're not talking about love; pure love between any number of people has never been illegal. Only certain manifestations of love have been legally proscribed.

One such manifestation is sex. Sex other than within a traditional marriage used to be illegal nearly everywhere within Christendom (and Jewishdom); over the centuries, societies recognized the foolishness of trying to enforce marital fidelity by law.

Then, until recently, what were considered the most extreme versions of sex (to some people) were outlawed by the all-purpose word "sodomy," which typically referred, it seemed, to anything the judge wouldn't do with his own wife. I have argued for nearly twenty years that our organic documents -- especially the Declaration of Independence -- recognize a general "liberty interest" that more or less says the government should not try to regulate purely private "matters of conscience."

This, the Libertarian Axiom, has never been accepted as generally true; but in specific cases it has. And in particular, in the 2003 case of Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court struck down all laws banning "sodomy," however defined.

So let's drop the "love" and "sex" stuff and get back to marriage.

First, same-sex marriage is not itself a "liberty interest." Liberty is the freedom to do something, to undertake some action -- from saying something to assembling to transacting business to having sex. But legal recognition of a same-sex union as "marriage" does not confer any freedom of action; you are already free to have gay sex, to live together, to call yourselves married in other than legal circumstances.

Rather, it's a demand for social approval of certain actions... and "social approval" is never a liberty interest.

Thus, society can restrict what kinds of relationships get dubbed "marriages" without restricting liberty. But should it? Does same-sex marriage actually harm society... and more specifically, does it actually harm already existing marriages?

The answer to the first question above -- does legal same-sex marriage somehow hurt my relationship with my wife? -- is Yes, of course it does... because it cheapens the unique value of that relationship.

Semantic note, it wouldn't hurt my relations with my wife (we would still interact the same)... but it would hurt the relationship as a separate entity, just as it would if we suddenly discovered the rabbi who married us was really an imposter, and we weren't actually legally married.

The reason is that uniqueness is itself a value; take away the unique nature of marriage, and the value is greatly diminished. All that stands between marriage and shacking up is that unique nature.

Illustration: suppose you go out with the girl of your dreams. Or, if you are a girl, the boy of your dreams. (If you are gay, please reverse those... see how ecumenical I am?) You have been friends with this person for some time, and you secretly love her. Him. Whatever.

At the end of the date, this person turns to you, takes you by the hands, and says "Pat" -- let's hope your name actually is Pat -- "I love you." Then the person kisses you passionately.

You're ecstatic. You're walking on air. All the way hope, it's like a Fred Astaire movie.

Then the next day, you tell you friends... and they solemnly inform you that she (or he) says that to every person she dates... kiss and all.

Now how do you feel? You feel like crap, because you realize that there was no uniqueness in that proclamation: she loves everybody, which is the same as saying she doesn't love anybody, especially not you. What made the three words valuable (even holy or sacred) was your mistaken idea that they were unique, something she shared with you and with nobody else. As soon as you realize those same words were offered to every Tom, Joaquin, and Yuri, they cease to have any value.

So we agree, I hope, that uniqueness itself is a quality that can imbue a situation or relationship with high, even holy value. Make the unique universal, and the value it adds vanishes altogether.

Back to marriage. Relationships have value not only to individuals but to the groups and societies those individuals form. A lawyer-client relationship, for example; it's useful to the individuals involved, but it's also useful to society to have an avenue where people can get advice without having to worry that their problems will be spread all over the community.

So we reward such relationships with special privileges (confidentiality, for example) -- and we confine them by special rules (defining who is a lawyer and who is a client of that lawyer). This is because we, as a society, believe that lawyer-client relationships benefit our society -- so we want to encourage them, and we also want to regulate them to ensure people are not just taking advantage of rights without fulfilling the obligations.

Marriage is the same: society has decided (rightly, in my opinion) that traditional marriage is a huge benefit not just to the individuals involved (typically more than two: husband, wife, but also children and potentially Grandma and Grandpa), but also to society as a whole: it nurtures children in the best possible environment, it combines the male with the female principles, it civilizes men, it protects women, and it provides an axis around which the wheels of larger institutions rotate, including property ownership, parental obligations, and our interaction with the government from testimony to taxes.

So we encourage it. But such encouragement is meaningless and useless if it's universally applied to every imaginable relationship of one or more human beings.

A "marriage" of thirteen women and six men is not the same as a traditional marriage: it does not have the same qualities, it does not have the same effect, it does not underpin our society the same way as does the particular relationship we have always called Marriage.

When society jettisons all distinctions between different types of relationships and chooses (or is forced) to call everything "marriage," then Marriage loses its uniqueness as an institution, hence its value to society and the individuals within the marriage.

It's like saying that any two or three or fifty chums chatting with each other are the same as a lawyer talking with his client, and they get all the same rights and privileges. There are rights of universalism and rights of exclusion; marriage is the latter. When an exclusive right is granted to all, it loses any value it obtained from uniqueness... which means all value whatsoever.

So the answer is yes: if California were to change the law to allow same-sex couples to legally marry (or groups larger than two, or persons already married, or consanguineous groups, or groups that do not obtain a license or go through a marriage ceremony), it would indeed damage my relationship (not relations) with my wife: the change would diminish its value, because it would remove the quality of uniqueness that underpins that value.

Thus, there is real damage to society from opening "marriage" up to all sorts of other relationships. And make no mistake: those advocating same-sex marriage also advocate the other changes listed in the paragraph above, because they rightly recognize that their real enemy is the very concept that any form of relationship at all can be excluded from the state of matrimony. If you recognize that society, in the form of the State, has any say whatsoever in determining who is "married," then there is no reason why it cannot restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples.

Their only consistent argument is to say "marriage for all, under any form of relationship." And marriage-for-all is ths same thing as marriage-for-none: definitions are by nature exclusionary; and Humpty-Dumpty aside, when you can simply redefine a word to mean anything convenient at the moment -- then that word actually means nothing at all.

There is a fancy word for this: nihilism. And those who are most forceful in advocating same-sex marriage are by and large marital nihilists who simply want to eliminate legal marriage altogether. Bear that in mind when you listen to their blandishment; substitute "polygamy" for "same-sex marriage," and you'll see that their arguments survive intact.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 19, 2006, at the time of 2:49 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

April 24, 2006

Contemplation and Cogitation On Chatty Canaries, Cages, and Current Classified Controversies

I've been thinking about "canary traps" for the last couple of days, ever since Rick Moran of Right Wing Nuthouse suggested the possibility that the "secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe" story was just such a thing -- though he did not use that specific term (he said "sting"). It's actually a fascinating subject that lends itself to logical extrapolation.

What the heck is a "canary trap" anyway?

Suppose you believe you have a mole or leaker in your organization, and you want to find out who it is. Let's say you've narrowed it down to two suspects (the base-level canary trap).

You approach each suspect separately and give him supposed specifications on a new fighter jet the company is designing. You tell each suspect -- call them Fred and Barney -- that this information is absolutely top-secret, and they're to divulge it to nobody, inside or outside of the company. "Aviation Week would pay millions for these specs!"

In reality, however, there is no such airplane; you just made it up.

Label the specs you give to Fred "Specs-F;" Barney gets "Specs-B." Specs-F and -B each describe an advanced fighter jet, and they are substantially similar to each other... except that in Specs-F, there is a performance summary that says:

But in Specs-B, the performance summary says:

Now you keep reading Aviation Week assiduously: when the article appears, if it includes the datum that the plane can fly Mach 3.2, then you know that Fred is the leaker; if it says the plane can fly up to 175,000 feet, then you know it's Barney. If both "facts" appear, then you fire both those two clods!

Let's generalize: if there are a twenty possible suspects, you prepare twenty different versions, each of which is substantially the same except for particular "enticing" details, something no journalist could resist including. If there are a hundred different suspects, you prepare a hundred versions: the mail-merge ability of word processors make this fairly easy: you need only keep the unique paragraphs in a database, along with a link to the person who received it. When the details appear, the inclusion or exclusion of various (invented) facts point the finger at the leaker -- or leakers.

In this case, we can suppose that Porter Goss may have distributed, say, ten different versions of the secret-prison story to ten top Agency employees -- those who had already been identified as likely leakers on the basis of earlier, actual classified intelligence that found its way to the antique media... with the list of suspects possibly filtered on the basis of obvious political biases of particular CIA employees.

If Goss did this, then the version Mary O. McCarthy got -- and leaked -- had some uniquely identifying details not found in any other version. When those details showed up in Dana Priest's story, Goss knew that McCarthy was the leaker... it remained only to focus the investigation on her until they could prove it.

Who would use such a weird tactic?

Canary traps have become ubiquitous in fields ranging from Hollywood screenplays to computer-software error-trapping. Studios use them to discover who has been copying scripts and selling them to rival production companies: each suspect gets a slightly different version of the script, and your own mole inside Colossal Pictures makes a copy of the version that arrived there: et voilà, you know who leaked it.

I have used canary traps myself in debugging the simplistic, clunky, and useless programs I've written for myself. In this case, I'm not trying to find a "leaker;" I'm hunting for the particular program object that is crashing the application.

I program each object in the code to print out its name before doing whatever it's supposed to do. When the program crashes, the last name on the screen is the module in which the crash occurred. (There are cleverer ways of doing this, but they require cleverer programers than I!)

Police use them, businesses use them; canary traps have shown up as plot devices in TV shows such as Mission: Impossible. You can even use them yourself, if one of your friends is gossiping about you behind your back. Because of how the practice has spread, it's tough to track the provenance of the term "canary trap" itself; many people say Tom Clancy originated it in his novel Patriot Games, but I vaguely remember seeing the term long before 1987, when that book was published. Has anybody ever asked him?

Hasn't the CIA already admitted the story was true?

John Hinderaker of Power Line is skeptical that the secret-prisons story could be a canary trap, among other reasons because some high-ranking CIA officials have "confirmed" that such prisons existed. But actually, that's not good evidence.

One point about a legal- or intelligence-related "canary trap" is that you can never admit it was a canary trap. In the present case, that fact would be known only to Porter Goss and perhaps one or two people he trusts utterly, the ones who helped him concoct it. The reason is twofold:

• First of all, if the defense attorney found out that the intel leaked was concocted, then he would argue that it constituted "entrapment," making it that much tougher to get a conviction. Is this dirty pool? Perhaps... but not as dirty as leaking critical classified intelligence to the Post or the New York Times, for our enemies to read (I mean al-Qaeda, not Reid and Pelosi).

• Second, the attorney would argue that since the leaked intelligence wasn't real, it couldn't have harmed national security; this might get his client off the hook. The fancy lawyer could always argue that the defendant knew it was fake all along and would never, ever have leaked real intelligence!

  Of course, if that were true, then the attorney would already know it was fake, and he would make that argument even if the prosecutor didn't tell him. It only makes a difference if the defendant really thought it was real, but his lawyer plans to lie about it.

So Goss will never willingly reveal that it was a canary trap, whether it was or wasn't.

Instead, the basics of the story (secret prisons) must be circulated department-wide as if they were true, because the suspect -- let's use "Mary McCarthy" as a name chosen at random -- will surely nose around first and try to find corroboration before leaking it to anyone.

Even if McCarthy doesn't suspect a trap, she may still suspect the ubiquitous bum intel that permeates any huge government bureaucracy like the Agency. If she hears the same story from five or six colleagues, however, she'll believe it and will be ready to pass it along to the Washington Post.

Thus, most of the story (let's say 90%) is circulated to everybody in the CIA who would be likely to know about such prisons if they really existed. Naturally, this list includes some high-level people: only the fine details would change from suspect to suspect.

And therefore, when the scandal breaks and top CIA personnel are hauled before Congress and questioned, nearly every one of them, from the bottom to almost the very top, will corroborate the basics of the story... because they actually think it's true. Even those two or three officials who know for a fact that it's false will nevertheless pretend it's true, just to maintain cover.

Note that this is not proof that the whole story was a canary trap, of course; but the mere fact that high-ranking officers believe it's true is likewise not proof that it is.

So is it is, or is it ain't?

Certainly, I have never heard any CIA agent claim actually to have been inside one of these secret prisons; nor have any guards been produced, nor administrators, secretaries, or even janitors. No buildings have been found, and you'd think a building as big and solid as a prison wouldn't be moved around very often.

None of the people who claim to have been held there as prisoners can lead investigators to a site or identify any of their captors or interrogators. If even the Europeans are saying there is no evidence -- when we know they're predisposed to accept "evidence" that would be laughed out of an American court -- that raises huge, huge suspicions. These suspicions are not insurmountable... but they're darned close.

Which Hinderaker himself notes, asking if "this is one secret the CIA has actually been able to keep, but for the leak."

At first, I was very skeptical of Rick Moran's canary-trap hypothesis; but now I'm only somewhat skeptical... and the only reason I'm still "somewhat skeptical" is that it would be such a Christmas gift if the whole story were concocted just to catch the chatty canary -- and I don't believe in Santa Clause.

But I sure I wish some reporter would just stand up and ask Director Goss flat out, "Porthos, old friend, tell us true: was the 'secret prisons in Eastern Europe' story just a canary trap?" On video; I want to see his facial reaction!

So how do you think he would react? Would he freeze just for a moment before sliding into a speedy denial? Would he show a reaction that Decker would notice in the movie Blade Runner? Or would he be so smooth, studied, practiced, that we would be left groping in the dark, as we are today?

I don't know, but I'd sure like to find out.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 24, 2006, at the time of 3:42 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

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