Month: May 2007

Patrick Cockburn, intrepid Iraq-based investigative reporter, discusses the daily slaughter in Iraq, the Iraqi parliament’s vote for the U.S. to leave, recent attacks in the Green Zone, the factional differences and the “surge.”

MP3 here.

Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent of The Independent, has been visiting Iraq since 1978. He was awarded the 2005 Martha Gellhorn prize for war reporting in recognition of his writing on Iraq. He is the author of, his memoir, The Broken Boy (Jonathan Cape, 2005), and with Andrew Cockburn, Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (Verso, 2000). His latest book, The Occupation: War, Resistance and Daily Life in Iraq is published by Verso in October 2006.

Associate law professor Steve Vladeck explains the various legal applications and implications of the U.S. government’s war against, and now prosecution of, Jose Padilla.

MP3 here.

Security expert Richard Forno discusses the Un-American “Real ID” card, the states’ reactions to it, how citizens of non-compliant states will be marginalized, why more liberty creates better security, and the myth of cyber-terrorism.

MP3 here.

Richard Forno’s career includes helping build the first incident response and computer crimes investigation program for the United States House of Representatives and serving as the first Chief Security Officer at Network Solutions (the InterNIC) where he designed and managed the global information assurance program for one of the Internet’s most critical infrastructures.

Since then, he has consulted with military and commercial clients on assorted critical infrastructure protection and information operations projects. He has advised technology startups and in addition to his current activities as a Principal Consultant for KRvW Associates, is a Visiting Scientist at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is a course instructor for the CERT Coordination Center.

In 2001, Richard developed (and delivered) American University’s first modern course on information security and conducted regular guest lectures at the National Defense University in Washington, DC from 2001-2003. He is a founding member of the Academic Advisory Board for Northern Virginia Community College’s Information Security Program and also participated in the 2000 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Information Security Education Research Project. In 2006 he co-founded the Senior Information Operations Advisory Council that brings together senior thought leaders from across the IO community to support the evolution of sound IO doctrine, analysis and application.

Richard continues to speak at government, industry, and academic symposia. Along with several articles and columns written over the years, he is the author of The Art of Information Warfare (1999), Incident Response (2001), and the curmudgeonly Weapons of Mass Delusion: America’s Real National Emergency (2003). Additionally, he contributed chapters to the books Cyberwar 2.0: Myths, Mysteries and Realities (1998) and Inventing Arguments (2005).

Both a technologist and student of national security studies, Richard holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in international relations from American University and Salve Regina University, and is a graduate of Valley Forge Military College and the United States Naval War College. Aside from information operations, his current academic and professional research centers on the influence of technology on national security, particularly the issue of security informatics and disclosure.

In the spirit of Benito Giuliani, who demands of anyone who disagrees with him to “take it back,” one of his big supporters, one Saulius “Saul” Anuzis, implements the program of the Leader:

“The chairman of the Michigan Republican Party said today he will try to bar presidential candidate Ron Paul from future GOP debates. … Michigan party chairman Saul Anuzis says he will circulate a petition among Republican National Committee members to ban Paul from more debates.

“At the debate, Paul said ‘Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we’ve been over there. We’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years.’ Anuzis called the comments ‘off the wall and out of whack.'”

What’s off the wall and out of whack isn’t Ron Paul, but the un-American desire to silence anyone who deviates from the party line. Comrade Saulius brings to mind a passage from a piece by Lew Rockwell in the August, 2006 issue of The American Conservative:

“In many ways today’s conservatives are party men and women not unliike those we saw in totalitarian countries, people who spout the party line and slay the enemy without a thought as to the principles involved. Yes, they hate the Left. But only because the Left is the ‘other’ … They sometimes invoke the names of thinkers such as F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. But their real heroes are talk radio blabsters, television entertainers, and sexpot quipsters.”

These people are really afraid — cornered like rats, their party torpedoed by the neocons and sinking fast, Republican hatchet-men like Comrade Saulius have a simple solution to the crisis of the GOP: silence all dissent from the official orthodoxy.

This attitude is frankly un-American, and clearly Comrade Salius needs instruction in the basic principles of Americanism. So give him a call at home and tell him (politely!) what you think of his plan to punish Ron Paul for his ideological “crimes” by excluding him from the debates — I’m sure he’ll appreciate hearing from you.

(517) 394-9940

Aside from the catcalls and epithets arising from the neocons, in the saner precincts of the internet the response to the sight of Ron Paul standing up to the bully Giuliani is somewhat heartening.

Over at the Cato Institute, David Boaz has a perceptive analysis of the catalytic role Paul could play in the GOP primaries as the sole antiwar Republican in the pack, and yet notes that Giuliani did score points with the orthodox Bushians. As noted here, some of the Cato-ites tend to look down their noses at Paul, and this interesting piece from McClatchy quotes Michael Tanner, author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution, recently published by Cato, which at least acknowledges Paul’s tremendous contribution: 

“He’s performing an enormously valuable service. His very existence on the stage pressures the others. There is a small-government, libertarian conservative base in the Republican Party. It may or may not be as big as the religious right. It’s open for the taking.”

Unfortunately, Tanner spoils this by adding Paul is “kind of quirky. He has some issues that give him a fringe-y air.” According to the Cato-ites, it is “fringe-y” to talk about the real cause of inflation — expansion of the money supply by the Federal Reserve. They frown on Ludwig von Mises, the Austrian economist who upheld a pure theory of market economics, and much prefer the supposedly more “pragmatic” Milton Friedman just because he’s more “mainstream.” The problem for Cato is that Ron Paul continues to uphold the libertarian philosophy their own “younger” generation of Beltway-centric know-it-alls is moving rapidly away from.

Meanwhile, on the left side of the spectrum, over at The Nation, they get right to the core issue of Benito’s demagoguery:

“Rudy Giuliani made clear in Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate that he is not ready to let the facts get in the way of his approach to foreign policy.”

And from none other than the War Party’s former Grand Inquisitor, Andrew Sullivan:

“They’re scared, aren’t they? The Internet polls show real support for him. Fox News’ own internet poll placed him a close second, with 25 percent of the votes from Fox News viewers. We have a real phenomenon here – because someone has to stand up for what conservatism once stood for.”

Coming from this guy, who once attacked Susan Sontag for saying essentially the same thing about 9/11 as Ron Paul did, that’s quite a mouthful. Yes, I know, I know — we’re all sick of Sullivan — but this almost makes up for his past sins….

Hike on over to National Review Online, where they’re having Ron Paul Day, in the guise of a general symposium on the South Carolina Republican debate: I especially liked Kate O’Beirne’s remark:

“I thought [McCain’s] most uncomfortable moment was during the introductions when the sidebar bios reminded us that he is only a year younger than Ron Paul, who is old enough to remember that Republicans used to want to eliminate Cabinet agencies — now that’s old!”

What the debate showed is that the Republican committment to war and torture trumps the old Republican philosophy of fiscal sanity and limited government: this is why Giuliani, the furthest from a traditional conservative Republican sensibility in temperament as well as ideology, is widely viewed as having won. His rise represents the triumph of Bizarro Conservatism, otherwise known as neoconservatism: Ron Paul’s campaign represents the death-agony of the old Goldwater-Taft-limited government legacy of the GOP. Or at least that’s the scenario we’re all supposed to believe. Whether it plays out like that, in the long run, remains to be seen. In any case, the gang over at National Review is caught in a conundrum: they all proclaim that Rep. Paul is a “fringe” candidate, and yet they can’t stop talking about him.

According to Jonah Goldberg, Paul’s raising the banner of Robert A. Taft makes him “irrelevant.” But then why is every commentary on the debate in NRO fixated on him? I’ll tell you why: because Paul offers not only a coherent alternative to the crazed foreign policy views of the neocons, but also one that has deep roots in the GOP (as I pointed out in my soon-to-be-reprinted Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement). As I have argued at length over the years, the anti-imperialist legacy of the Old Right is ready for a revival, and the neocons are deathly afraid of it: that’s why the NROdniks are up in arms about Paul’s heresy.

To Jonah, bringing up the ghost of Taft is an “argument from authority” — which is an oddly anti-traditionalist trope coming from an avowed “conservative.” As far as the neocons are concerned, however, history is something to be made, not revered or even remembered. Yesterday may belong to Ron Paul and Robert A. Taft, but tomorrow belongs to Benito Giuliani, who isn’t running for President but for Maximum Leader.

At least Jonah tried to engage Paul, and what he represents, intellectually, albeit in his typically facile manner, but the real exemplar of the new mutant “conservatism” of leader-worship and sado-masochistic paeans to waterboarding is one Kathleen Parker, whose overtly sexual “big Daddy” imagery of Rudy “spanking” Ron Paul shows the psychopathology of red-state fascism. She writes:

“Giuliani played daddy tonight and spanked Ron Paul for blaming the U.S. for 9/11. Big points for calling on Paul to withdraw his absurd statement. Message: Don’t mess with Rudy.”

These people are twisted in more ways than I care to imagine: this is Weimar “conservatism” of a most degenerate sort, and it is really impossible to argue with Ms. Parker’s pornographic politics. To the cadre of Bizarro conservatism, the biggest Daddy wins the title of Maximum Leader, and dissidents are “spanked.”John Derbyshire, on the other hand, isn’t buying Giuliani’s act:

“Ron Paul vs. Rudy Giuliani punch-up about the motivation of the 9/11 attackers. Ron Paul put forward the ‘blowback’ theory, which I first heard on or about Sept. 12, 2001, from Pat Buchanan, and which is perfectly plausible, though in my opinion an over-simplification. Rudy: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before.’ For goodness sake, Rudy. Don’t you READ? The reality is, Rudy, that entire books have been written to promote the blowback theory. Have your staffers read some of them & write up abstracts for you. You NEVER HEARD of this theory? Gimme a break.”

I agree with this, but would add: it all depends on the meaning of the word “hear.” Of course Giuliani has heard of the “blowback” theory, in one form or another, but did he really hear it in the sense of understanding it intellectually? The totalitarian mindset of a man like Giuliani doesn’t admit to ideas he disagrees with: he merely reacts, with indignation, as Benito did in response to Paul’s disquisition on the long history of our deliberately provocative policy in the Middle East. Of course Giuliani was being disingenuous when he exclaimed that he’d “never heard” of such an explantion for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and that’s because intellectual dishonesty is part and parcel of who Giuliani is, and what he aspires to become. If you think he’s lying now, just wait until he’s President. The man is a danger to the Republic, and its only fitting that he should take umbrage at Ron Paul, the Republic’s last defender in Washington: it’s a classic confrontation of good (Paul) and evil (Benito) — and you couldn’t ask for a more dramatic narrative.