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No Government Takeover of Public Safety!

April 24, 2010 | Permalink

You remember Richard Clarke. He was the counter-terrorism adviser to Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and (briefly) George W. Bush. He’s the guy who implored the second Bush Administration in January of 2001 to keep a close eye on Al Qaeda, and move forward with measures to that effect which were still in place from the recently departed Clinton administration. In response, the Bush administration blew off Clarke’s warnings and demoted him to non-cabinet level status.

Richard-Clarke

photo: Aude/Wikimedia Commons

He was later made Special Adviser to the President on cybersecurity, but resigned from the G.W. Bush administration in 2003. A year later Clarke testified before the 9/11 Commission; the Bush White House, knowing that his testimony would reveal their fuck-ups, undertook one of their trademark Karl Rove-style campaigns of character assassination. Some would disagree, but I believe an objective eye would conclude that the smear tactics damaged the Bush administration’s credibility far more than Clarke’s.

These days, Clarke runs a security consulting firm and serves as an adjunct lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. This past Monday he was interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, principally about his new book Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It.1 After describing the serious threat posed by internet-based attacks, Clarke had this to say about the present state of our defenses against such attacks:

CLARKE: …Now, who’s defending us? Who’s defending those pipelines and those railroads and the banks? The Obama Administration’s answer pretty much is, “You’re on your own.” [The Pentagon's] Cyber Command will defend our military. Homeland Security will someday have the capability to defend the rest of the civilian government — it doesn’t today. But everybody else will have to do their own defense.

That is a formula that will not work in the face of sophisticated threats.

GROSS: When you’re saying everybody else is on their own, does that include the electricity grid, the power grid, banking…? Read the rest of this entry »


Torturama 2: Electric Boogaloo

October 23, 2006 | 1 comment

Here’s something I never thought I’d say: kudos to Bill O’Reilly.

From FOX News, via Andrew Sullivan:

O’REILLY: Now Brian Ross of ABC said — reported the CIA waterboarded [Khalid Sheik] Mohammed. That is dunked him in water, tied him down and then that broke him. Is that true?

BUSH: We don’t talk about techniques. And the reason we don’t talk about techniques is because we don’t want the enemy to be able to adjust. We’re in a war.

O’REILLY: Is waterboarding torture?

BUSH: I don’t want to talk about techniques. And — but I do share the American people that we were within the law. And we don’t torture. We — I’ve said all along to the American people we won’t torture, but we need to be in a position where we can interrogate these people.

O’REILLY: But if the public doesn’t know what torture is or is not, as defined by the Bush administration, how can the public make a decision on whether your policy is right or wrong?

BUSH: Well, one thing is that you can rest assured we’re not going to talk about the techniques we use in a public forum. No matter how hard you try because I don’t want the enemy to be able to adjust their tactics if we capture them on the battlefield.

But what the American people need to know is we’ve got a program in place that is able to get intelligence from these people. And we’ve used it to stop attacks.

Before we begin scanning the skies for flying pigs, it should be known that the tough questioning in this excerpt is not necessarily typical of the interview as a whole. Nevertheless, O’Reilly deserves credit for putting the waterboarding question directly to Mr. Bush – it was more than anyone else had done.

Bush’s ham-fisted evasion, “We’re not going to talk about techniques… because we don’t want the enemy to be able to adjust” is ludicrous on several levels. First, it’s such an obvious smoke screen that it practically begs for a Colbert-esque “I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ ” The absurdity is dialed up further with the notion that Bush’s answering the question would enable the enemy to “adjust.” This assumes that the preceding several weeks of public controversy over such interrogation methods somehow escaped the terrorists’ notice. To top it off, the president apparently believes that our foes are capable of turning themselves into amphibians in order to resist being waterboarded. This just in: Aqua-Man has defected to Al Qaeda.

George W. Bush is not just a bad president – he’s an embarrassment to the office. The loftiest hope I can summon for the next two years is that he does as little further damage as possible. The toll his policies have taken on the American citizenry is severe, and the stain he is leaving on the good name of our country will take years to scrub away.