THE SEDUCTIONS OF DECLINE

Mark Steyn on America
http://www.marksteyn.com/
Tuesday, 02 February 2010

From the January 25th issue of National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/

Sometimes you do live to see it. In my book America Alone, I point out that, to a five-year old boy waving his flag as Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession marched down the Mall in 1897, it would have been inconceivable that by the time of his eightieth birthday the greatest empire the world had ever known would have shriveled to an economically moribund strike-bound socialist slough of despond, one in which (stop me if this sounds familiar) the government ran the hospitals, the automobile industry and much of the housing stock, and, partly as a consequence thereof, had permanent high unemployment and confiscatory tax rates that drove its best talents to seek refuge abroad.


'The Sacking of Rome 455' by Karl Briullov (1836)

A number of readers, disputing the relevance of this comparison, send me mocking letters pointing out, for example, Britain’s balance of payments and other deteriorating economic indicators from the early 20th century on. True. Great powers do not decline for identical reasons and one would not expect Britain’s imperial overstretch to lead to the same consequences as America’s imperial understretch. Nonetheless, my correspondents are perhaps too sophisticated and nuanced to grasp the somewhat more basic point I was making. Perched on his uncle’s shoulders that day was a young lad who grew up to become the historian Arnold Toynbee. He recalled the mood of Her Majesty’s jubilee as follows: “There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We are comfortably outside all of that I am sure.” The end of history, 1897 version.

Permanence is an illusion – and you would be surprised at how fast mighty nations can be entirely transformed. But, more importantly, national decline is psychological – and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline. Within two generations, for example, the German people became just as obnoxiously pacifist as they once were obnoxiously militarist, and as avowedly “European” as they once were menacingly nationalist. Well, who can blame ‘em? You’d hardly be receptive to pitches for national greatness after half-a-century of Kaiser Bill, Weimar, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust.

But what are we to make of the British? They were on the right side of all the great conflicts of the last century; and they have been, in the scales of history, a force for good in the world. Even as their colonies advanced to independence, they retained the English language, and English legal system, not to mention cricket and all kinds of other cultural ties. Even in imperial retreat, there is no rational basis for late 20th century Britain’s conclusion that it had no future other than as an outlying province of a centralized Euro nanny state dominated by nations whose political, legal and cultural traditions are entirely alien to its own. The embrace of such an alien fate is a psychological condition, not an economic one.

Is America set for decline? It’s been a grand run. The country’s been the leading economic power since it overtook Britain in the 1880s. That’s impressive. Nevertheless, over the course of that century and a quarter, Detroit went from the world’s industrial powerhouse to an urban wasteland, and the once golden state of California atrophied into a land of government run by the government for the government. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and sclerosis to California became the basis for the nation at large? Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: Unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the American economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet. But what will ensure it is if the American people accept decline as a price worth paying for European social democracy.

Is that so hard to imagine? Every time I retail the latest indignity imposed upon the “citizen” by some or other Continental apparatchik, I receive e-mails from the heartland pointing out, with much reference to the Second Amendment, that it couldn’t happen here because Americans aren’t Euro-weenies. But nor were Euro-weenies once upon a time. Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road To Serfdom is psychological: “There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought,” he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944. “It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel.

The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, non-interference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.” Two-thirds of a century on, almost every item on the list has been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (40 per cent of people receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and authority” – the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something”, the cost to individual liberty be damned. American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government and not witness, in enough of the populace, the same descent into dependency and fatalism. As Europe demonstrates, a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two. Look at what the Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population: That’s what happened in Britain.

But that’s to cast decline in its least favorable light, after it’s had a couple of generations to work its dark magic. As it’s happening, incremental decline is extremely seductive. Great powers aren’t Chad or Rwanda, where you’re sliding from the Dump category to the Even Crummier Dump category. Take a city like Vienna. Once upon a time it was an imperial capital. The empire bust up, but the capital still had magnificent architecture, handsome palaces, treasure houses of great art, a world-class orchestra, fabulous restaurants… Who wouldn’t enjoy such “decline”? You benefit from all the accumulated capital of the past without being troubled by any of the tedious responsibilities. Have another coffee and a piece of strudel and watch the world go by. To be sure, everything new – or, at any rate, everything new that works – is invented and made elsewhere. But genteel decline from the heights can be eminently civilized, especially to those of a leftish bent. Francophile Americans passing through bucolic villages with their charmingly state-regulated charcuteries and farmland wholly subsidized by the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy can be forgiven for wondering whether global hegemony is all it’s cracked up to be.

Whether decline will seem quite so bucolic viewed from a Jersey strip mall rather than the Dordogne remains to be seen. Yet in the geopolitical sense it can be marvelously liberating. You still go to all the best parties and have a seat at the top table – Britain and France are members of the UN Security Council and the G7 and every other group that counts – and even better, when the check comes, you’re not the one stuck with the tab. You can preen and pose on the world stage secure in the knowledge that nobody expects you to do anything about it: It’s no surprise to find the post-great powers of Europe are the noisiest promoters of every fashionable nostrum from the iniquities of the Zionist Entity to the perils of “climate change”. The European Union has attitudes rather than policies. A couple of years back, Bret Stephens, then editor of The Jerusalem Post, opened his mail to find a copy of something called "Conclusions of the European Council", a summary of the work done during the six months of Ireland’s “Euro-presidency”. A braver man than I, he read it, at least as far as Item 80:

“The European Council expresses its deep concern at the recent events in the Eastern Congo, which could jeopardise the transition process."

And that and a couple Euros will get you a café au lait. The EU is free to flaunt its “concern” – whoops, “deep concern” - over events in the Eastern Congo precisely because nobody in the Eastern Congo or anywhere else expects Europe to do a thing about it. The Continent increasingly resembles those insulated celebrities being shuttled around town from one humanitarian gala to another – like Barbra Streisand and Leonardo Di Caprio jetting in to join Barack Obama and Al Gore in bemoaning Joe Sixpack’s carbon footprint.

And when you put it like that, what’s the downside?

Okay, since you ask, here’s my prediction: American decline will not be like France’s or Austria’s. For one thing, we don’t appreciate how unusual the last transfer of power was. If you’re not quite sure when that took place, the British historian Andrew Roberts likes to pinpoint it to the middle of 1943: One month, the British had more men under arms than the Americans. The next month, the Americans had more men under arms than the British. The baton of global leadership had been passed. And, if it didn’t seem that way at the time, that’s because it was as near a seamless transition as could be devised – although it was hardly “devised” at all. Yet we live with the benefits of that transition to this day: To take a minor but not inconsequential example, one of the critical links in the Afghan campaign was the British Indian Ocean Territory. As its name would suggest, that’s a British dependency but it has a US military base – just one of many pinpricks on the map where the Royal Navy’s Pax Britannica evolved into Washington’s Pax Americana with nary a thought: From US naval bases in Bermuda to the ANZUS alliance Down Under to NORAD close to home, London’s military ties with its empire were assumed by the United States. Britain’s eclipse by its transatlantic progeny is one of the smoothest transfers of power in history – and unlikely to be repeated.

Now look beyond the anglosphere. Why did decline prove so pleasant in Europe? Because it was cushioned by American power. The United States is such a perversely non-imperial power that it garrisons not ramshackle colonies but its wealthiest “allies”, from Germany to Japan. For most of its members, “the free world” has been a free ride. And that, too, is unprecedented. Even the few Nato members that can still project meaningful force around the world have been able to arrange their affairs on the assumption of the American security umbrella: In the United Kingdom, between 1951 and 1997 the proportion of expenditure on defense fell from 24 per cent to seven, while the proportion on health and welfare rose from 22 per cent to 53. And that’s before New Labour came along to widen the gap further.

Those British numbers are a bald statement of reality: You can have Euro-sized entitlements or a global military, but not both. What’s easier to do if you’re a democratic government that’s made promises it can’t afford? Cut back on nanny-state lollipops? Or shrug off thankless military commitments for which the electorate has minimal appetite? A Continental might take the view that this is democracy’s safeguard against an old temptation. After all, declining powers frequently turned to war to arrest their own decline or another’s rise – see the Franco-Prussian, the Austro-Prussian, the Napoleonic Wars and many others. But those were the days when traditional great power rivalry was resolved on the battled. Today we have post-modern post-great power rivalry, in which America envies the way the beneficiaries of its post-war largesse have been able to opt out of the great game entirely. In reality-TV terms, the Great Satan would like to vote itself off the battlefield. On its present course, as Dennis Prager put it, America “will be a large Sweden, and just as influential as the smaller one.”

And that’s the optimistic scenario – because the only reason Sweden can be Sweden and Germany Germany and France France is because America is America. Who will cushion America’s decline as America cushioned Europe’s?

Furthermore, is “a large Sweden” even possible? Insofar as it works at all, Big Government works best in small countries, with a sufficiently homogeneous population to share common interests.

There’s a fascinating book by Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore called The Size of Nations, in which the authors note that, of the ten richest countries in the world, only four have populations above one million: America (300 million people), Switzerland (seven million), Norway (four million) and Singapore (three million). Small nations, they argue, are more cohesive and have less need for buying off ethnic and regional factions. America has been the exception that proves the rule, because it’s a highly decentralized federation. But, as Messrs Alesina and Spolaore put it, if America were as centrally governed as France, it would break up. That theory is now being tested by the Obamacare Democrats, and, as we see with the wretched Ben Nelson’s cornhusker kickback or the blank check given to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when American-style Big Government starts “buying off ethnic and regional factions” the sky’s the limit. To attempt to impose European-style centralized government on a third of a billion people from Maine to Hawaii is to invite failure on a scale unknown to history. Which is to say that, domestically, Washington’s retreat from la gloire will be of an entirely different order of business from Paris’s.

And overseas? If America becomes Europe in its domestic disposition and geopolitical decline, then who will be America? Of the many competing schools of declinism, perhaps the most gleeful are those who salivate over the rise of China. For years, Sinophiles have been penning orgasmic fantasies of mid-century when China will bestride the world and America will be consigned to the garbage heap of history. It will never happen: As I’ve been saying for years, China has profound structural problems. It will get old before it gets rich.

Russia? The demographic deformation of Tsar Putin’s new empire is even more severe than Beijing’s. Russia is a global power only to the extent of the mischief it can make on its acceleration into a death spiral.

The new Caliphate? Even if every dimestore jihadist’s dreams came true, almost by definition an Islamic imperium will be in decline from Day One.

So there’s no plausible new kid on the block? Isn’t that good news? Not exactly. Much of the timing of American decline depends on Beijing, which will make the final determination on such matters as when the dollar ceases to be the world’s reserve currency. Given that they hold at least the schedule of our fate in their hands, it would be rather reassuring if they had the capability to assume America’s role as the global order-maker. But they don’t and they never will. The most likely future is not a world under a new order but a world with no order – in which pipsqueak states go nuclear while the planet’s wealthiest nations, from New Zealand to Norway, are unable to defend their own borders and are forced to adjust to the post-American era as they can. Yet, in such a geopolitical scene, the United States will still remain the most inviting target – first, because it’s big, and secondly, because, as Britain knows, the durbar moves on but imperial resentments linger long after imperial grandeur.

One sympathizes with Americans weary of global responsibilities that they, unlike the European empires, never sought. The United States now spends more on its military than the next 40 or so nations combined. In research and development, it spends more than the rest of the planet put together. Yet in two rinky-dink no-account semi-colonial policing campaigns, it doesn’t feel like that, does it? A lot of bucks, but not much of a bang. You can understand why the entire left and an increasing chunk of the right would rather vote for a quiet life. But that’s not an option. The first victims of American retreat will be the many corners of the world that have benefitted from a unusually benign hegemon. But the consequences of retreat will come home, too. In a more dangerous world, American decline will be steeper, faster and more devastating than Britain’s – and something far closer to Rome’s.

In the modern era, the two halves of “the west” form a mirror image. “The Old World” has thousand-year old churches and medieval street plans and ancient hedgerows, but has been distressingly susceptible to every insane political fad from Communism to Fascism to European Union. “The New World” has a superficial novelty – you can have your macchiato tweeted directly to your iPod – but underneath the surface noise it has remained truer to older political ideas than “the Old World” ever has. Economic dynamism and political continuity seem far more central to America’s sense of itself than they are to most nations. Which is why it’s easier to contemplate Spain or Germany as a backwater than America. In a fundamental sense, an America in eclipse would no longer be America.

But, as Charles Krauthammer said recently, “decline is a choice.” The Democrats are offering it to the American people, and a certain proportion of them seem minded to accept. Enough to make decline inevitable? To return to the young schoolboy on his uncle’s shoulders watching the Queen-Empress’ jubilee, in the words of Arnold Toynbee: “Civilizations die from suicide, not from murder."

Caulfield and the Librarians

Another Perspective

By Tom Bethell on 2.2.10 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

We all know about J.D. Salinger's young hero, Holden Caulfield, and the three days he spends in New York City. We know that beneath Holden's youthful bluster and swear words -- he says "goddam" on every page, almost, and when he sees "F[--]ck you" scrawled on a wall, he tries to erase it -- he has a heart of gold, if you really want to hear the truth of it.

Despite his inner goodness, the librarians of America saw things differently. They "censored" the book. Between 1961 and 1982, according to a Wikipedia entry, Catcher in the Rye became "the most censored book in high school libraries in he United States."

Censored! Holden Caulfield? Doesn't that just go to show what narrow-minded people librarians really are. Stereotype confirmed!

But maybe the librarians knew something that the rest of us have overlooked.

Late in the book, Caulfield decides to visit his old high school English teacher, a Mr. Antolini. He was by then married and living in "a swanky apartment over in Sutton Place," a pretty good place for a high school English teacher from Elkton Hills to land up.

Anyway, Caulfield and Antolini talk for a while, and Antolini has several highballs. Holden thinks that his old teacher is in danger of becoming an alcoholic. They keep on talking, but Holden is tired. He has been up for two days without sleep. Mr. Antoloni says he can sleep on the couch, and Holden says okay. They make up the couch and Holden goes to sleep. Then he is rudely awakened. His old teacher has crept back into the room and and is ruffling his hair. "He was sort of petting me or patting me on the goddam head," Holden says.

He sprang to his feet. "What the hellya doing?"

Holden is alarmed because he knows "more damn perverts than anybody you ever met."

Antolini, it turns out, is a pervert, "perverty." Something "perverty" had happened, Holden decides. So he bolts for the apartment door. Antolini was a "flit." He had been making a "flitty pass at me."

Antoloni tries to get him to stay and go back to his couch. But Holden leaves anyway, goes to Grand Central Station, and gets in touch with his much-loved sister, "old Phoebe."

So there you have it. Holden talks about perverts and flits, in a book published by Little Brown in 1951, and reprinted a million times since then.
A Back Bay paperback edition reappeared in 2001.

Is it allowed, in the 21st century, to use words like that? Notice that the New Yorker refused to published Catcher in the Rye, but they did publish Salinger's unreadable story "Hapworth 16, 1924." So maybe Harold Ross at the New Yorker was alert to these nuances of political incorrectness long, long ago.

I probably shouldn't reveal this, because it is inside information. But the librarians have known all along that Catcher was an "incorrect" book, and it wasn't because of all the superfluous goddams and the (rare) four letter words. And get this. Now that its famous author is dead they are planning to mount a huge censorship raid and remove this prejudiced volume from library shelves across the land.

Do they have the blessing of the Human Rights Commission? You had better believe that they do.

When I asked a source at Little Brown if they would allow a book to appear today in which a gay man is called a "pervert" or a "flit," he laughed openly.

"The question answers itself," he said.

If you haven't read Catcher in the Rye yet, better get a hold of it soon.

Because it is likely to disappear from the shelves before you can say flit.

Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages, and most recently Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary? (2009).

Link: Caulfield and the Librarians

McGwire Is Testing a Loyal Baseball Town

By BEN SHPIGEL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
February 2, 2010


Jeff Roberson/Associated Press

Mark McGwire, the Cardinals' new hitting coach, speaking Jan. 17 after the team's Winter Warm-Up event, at which he received a standing ovation.

ST. LOUIS — The night Mark McGwire slugged his record-breaking 62nd home run, Bob Beumer was cheering from the upper reaches of the old Busch Stadium. That ticket stub is on display in his basement, where it joins some photographs, a few autographed baseballs and other McGwire mementos from the home run chase in 1998 that gripped the nation and revived the sport. Now, though, for Beumer and many other Cardinals fans, those days seem a bit less triumphant.

“It’s like when you find out your favorite grandfather didn’t turn in his income taxes,” Beumer said of McGwire, the Cardinals’ new hitting coach, who recently admitted using performance-enhancing drugs for most of his career. “You didn’t like him any less, but you squint at him and look at him a little funny because you wish he wouldn’t have done that.”

Beumer, 62, is the former owner of Hamilton Jewelers, which was a stalwart advertiser and sponsor of the Cardinals for more than three decades.

“The best way I can describe it,” Beumer said, “is that he’s brought a very big uneasiness to Cardinals baseball.”

That is a popular sentiment in this grand baseball town, where for the last three weeks they have gone crazy, folks, gone crazy trying to reconcile their feelings about the most divisive local baseball issue of their time. Should McGwire be forgotten or forgiven, jeered or cheered? Is he a villain or merely a product of his era? What is more relevant, the imprint his four and a half seasons in Cardinals red left on their lives, or the black mark it left on the record books?

Everyone and no one seems to know for sure.

The minute-long standing ovation McGwire received at the Cardinals’ annual Winter Warm-Up event Jan. 17, his first public appearance since admitting to steroid use, less than a week earlier, represented only a small cross section of the fan base. Bernie Miklasz, a longtime sports columnist at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, likened it to the reception Sarah Palin or President Obama received at their parties’ nominating conventions.

“If you get away from the hardcore base, there’s been a legitimate and powerful debate whether this is a good thing or not,” said Miklasz, referring to McGwire’s taking over as the hitting coach. “People are talking about the past, they’re arguing about the past.”

Miklasz, who also hosts a weekday radio show on WXOS-FM, said that in 25 years working here, he had never seen or heard the community divided about anything involving the Cardinals. “Everyone just wants to know whether the family is ever going to get back together again,” he said.

St. Louisans are not accustomed to controversy swirling around their sports heroes. From Stan Musial to Albert Pujols, Kurt Warner to Marshall Faulk, iconic players have largely excelled on the field and lived clean lives off it. In a sense, fans here have been mentally preparing for McGwire’s admission since 2005, when he dodged questions about steroid use before Congress.

When McGwire ultimately confessed, during an orchestrated series of interviews Jan. 11, including one with The New York Times, many of those same fans were left with a hollow feeling. Despite several opportunities, McGwire repeatedly dismissed any link between performance-enhancing drugs and his remarkable power. If McGwire had acknowledged even receiving an inadvertent benefit from taking steroids, Miklasz said he thought a majority of local fans would forgive him.

“This is a very loyal town, but people are having a very hard time processing all of this,” said Tom Burke, 53, a lawyer from Town and Country, Mo. “For most people, that just isn’t complete enough of a story. It’s not realistic enough. To me, it seems like the Cardinals underestimated the fallout that was going to occur.”


Jeff Roberson/Associated Press

Shortly after he admitted steroid use, Mark McGwire drew a crowd at the Winter Warm-Up in St. Louis.

First and foremost was the recent criticism of McGwire by several members of the Cardinals family. Adolphus Busch IV, scion of the family that once owned the team, said in a statement that McGwire “deliberately cheated the game,” “stole its most coveted records” and “was paid millions while perpetrating a fraud.” Jack Clark, a popular first baseman on two pennant-winning teams in the 1980s, said that seeing McGwire in uniform made him want to throw up and that McGwire, like all steroid users, should be barred from baseball forever.

Perhaps the most resonant criticism came from Whitey Herzog, a beloved former manager, who at a dinner in Appleton, Wis., said he could not fathom how McGwire received a standing ovation at the Winter Warm-Up and that Clark was roundly booed. “Now what the hell is the matter with society when that happens?” Herzog said.

Herzog, whose Hall of Fame plaque will depict him wearing a Cardinals cap, did not want to revisit that topic when he was approached last week in the driveway of his suburban St. Louis home. “I don’t want to talk about that,” he said, closing the garage door behind him.

“Their voices represent an important part of the Cardinals, which is their storied past,” said Tom Ackerman, the sports director and a morning anchor at KMOX-AM. “St. Louis people love this team, but they also love what it has represented, and there’s a lot of respect for the people who have put the team together and have helped build the franchise into what it is today. Whether people agree or disagree, they’re listening.”

One person who appreciated Herzog’s reaction in Wisconsin was Rick Kordenbrock, a high school social studies teacher from Ladue, Mo. Kordenbrock said he felt “duped and hoodwinked” into thinking that McGwire’s prodigious power was all natural.

“All these great players like Hank Aaron and Willie Mays and Frank Robinson — that’s who McGwire cheated,” Kordenbrock, 55, said. “He cheated the history of the game.”

The Cardinals realized the public-relations risk involved in bringing back McGwire, who has been out of baseball since retiring in 2001, but their general manager, John Mozeliak, said in an interview that Manager Tony La Russa still would have been granted permission to hire McGwire had they known about his steroid use. Asked about the outcry from Herzog and Clark, Mozeliak said he respected their opinions and added that he was encouraged that other Cardinals icons, like Red Schoendienst, have expressed their support, as have other Hall of Famers like Aaron, Ernie Banks and Mike Schmidt.

“Our ownership and I are of the mind-set that steroid use shouldn’t ban you from the game of baseball for life,” Mozeliak said. “It’s a mistake, but if you own up to it, you should be forgiven and should be allowed to be work in the game and do whatever you like.”

The former Cardinals great Bob Gibson has also come out in support of McGwire. He said Monday on the Post-Dispatch Web site that it was time to move on, an echo of what many fans have said. Gibson also took issue with Herzog and Clark.

“Those two aren’t in the Cardinals family,” he said. “I don’t think that’s going to be an issue with anybody other than between McGwire and them — which it probably should be. I don’t think it’s their place to criticize him the way they did.”

McGwire has begun working with some Cardinals hitters in Huntington Beach, Calif., and is scheduled to arrive at the team’s spring training complex in Jupiter, Fla., in about two and a half weeks. Burke said he hoped that once the daily rhythms of baseball resume, the chatter on sports-talk radio would focus exclusively on more important things — like the Cardinals’ search for a reliable fifth starter or contract extension talks with Pujols — and that McGwire’s presence would not become more of a distraction.

These are some of the things that pop into Burke’s mind on those occasions when he travels along the Mark McGwire Highway, a stretch of Interstate 70 near the city limits. He says he expects to attend about 25 Cardinals games this season, and at some point, probably during batting practice, McGwire will amble onto the field, and Burke may be moved to respond.

“Booing isn’t part of my repertoire, but I’m hardly in the standing ovation category, either,” Burke said. “Maybe a mild golf clap. Or maybe just no reaction at all. That might be best.”

Lack of Intelligence

Why didn’t the Obama administration interrogate the Christmas bomber?

By Stephen F. Hayes
The Weekly Standard
February 8, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 20
http://www.weeklystandard.com/

On January 27, the secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, was roundly criticized at a meeting of the House Homeland Security Committee. She had ducked the hearing, which was about the Christmas Day terrorist attack, and lawmakers were animated. The surprise was that it was Democrats doing most of the attacking.

“She was invited to testify at this very important hearing, and she should have been here,” said Jane Harman, Democrat from California. “I am very personally disappointed that she isn’t here.”

Chris Carney, from Pennsylvania, was more direct. “I am very dismayed that the secretary herself isn’t here,” he said. “I mean it’s probably fair to ask: ‘Where the hell is Secretary Napolitano?’ ”

Napolitano, who had been scheduled to be overseas, was in town and that evening was seen on national television at the State of the Union address. But she chose not to attend the congressional hearing.

Who can blame her? Immediately after the attack, the White House dispatched her to make its case on the Sunday talk shows, where Napolitano claimed that “the system worked.” At a press briefing on the attack, Napolitano said that she was surprised Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was showing so much “determination” to strike in the United States and acknowledged that she did not expect the group to send individuals—as opposed to groups—to conduct attacks. And earlier last month, at a Senate hearing on the same subject, she was roundly castigated for those comments and for the fact that she was not a part of the decisionmaking process that resulted in the terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, being mirandized fewer than 12 hours after he was detained.

Napolitano is a convenient scapegoat. After all, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs also claimed on national television that the system worked. The head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter, left for vacation the day after the attack. Top White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan told him to go. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair did not know that the elite interrogation unit proposed by the White House— the high-value detainee interrogation group (HIG)—does not yet exist. And the president, three days after interrogators supposedly elicited valuable intelligence about Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula from Abdulmutallab, claimed that the attack was the work of “an isolated extremist.”

That last claim was the subject of an exchange between Representative Peter King, Republican of New York, and the NCTC’s Michael Leiter at the January 27 hearing.

Asked how the president could have made such a claim, Leiter made it clear that the intelligence community had told the White House about Abdulmutallab’s involvement with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—something the bomber acknowledged in his initial interview with the FBI.

I will say that on the night, on Christmas night we advised the White House, and I think the White House immediately said, that we believe this was an attempted terrorist attack. I will also add that during this entire look back—an ongoing investigation, as you know—different pieces of information have come forward which have made it more and more clear, I think, each day of his connections to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

King pressed Leiter: “Who would have allowed him to say ‘isolated extremist’ when he was not isolated?”

“Congressman, I know that the National Counterterrorism Center and others were providing intelligence to the White House on an ongoing basis,” replied Leiter. “I simply don’t know how those statements were produced.”

The White House hasn’t been any more forthcoming. Asked for details on the handling of Abdulmutallab, Gibbs has provided little information. At a White House briefing, he was asked about a media report that Abdulmutallab had been interrogated for fewer than 50 minutes before FBI agents read him his rights. Gibbs claimed that he did not know how long the interrogation lasted. But in an earlier appearance on Fox News Sunday, Gibbs had not disputed a claim from Chris Wallace that the interrogation lasted just 50 minutes. Gibbs further claimed that FBI interrogators “were able to get all that they could out of him.”

That, of course, is nonsense. Several sources confirm that Abdulmutallab’s interview lasted 50 minutes. And while Abdulmutallab did share some information about his time in Yemen, sources say that intelligence professionals, particularly those who have been tracking Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, are furious that they did not have any opportunity to learn more from a person who might have fresh knowledge about the group and its leaders. One source told me that there is virtually no one in the intelligence community who will defend the decision to mirandize Abdulmutallab after talking to him for less than an hour.

The failure to obtain more from Abdulmutallab is all the more significant because intelligence officials are conducting fewer interrogations today than at any time since the 9/11 attacks. There are three reasons: (1) The administration has dramatically changed U.S. interrogation policy, sources say, and there is widespread confusion about what is permissible; (2) the HIG, which is supposed to conduct interrogations, does not yet exist; and (3) there are fewer terrorists to interrogate because the administration prefers to kill them with drone strikes rather than capture them on the ground.

The administration never misses a chance to make the last point—indeed, President Obama mentioned it in his State of the Union address. But you cannot interrogate a dead terrorist, which makes it all the more imperative that you get everything you can from any terrorists you do capture.

“The determination to place Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab into the U.S. civilian court system was made without the input or knowledge of the director of National Intelligence, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, or the secretary of Homeland Security,” said Senator Susan Collins, ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

This mistake likely foreclosed the collection of additional intelligence information and may have prevented the collection of valuable intelligence about future terrorist threats to the United States. We know that interrogations of terrorists can provide critical intelligence, but our civil justice system, as opposed to military detention, encourages terrorists to “lawyer-up” and stop answering questions.

That was the case here. Abdulmutallab had provided some information to law enforcement officials immediately after his capture, and we surely would have obtained more if we had treated this foreign terrorist as an enemy belligerent and placed him in the military tribunal system instead.

Abdulmutallab sits in jail today with intelligence that we could be using to prevent future attacks. Top administration and intelligence officials—including Blair, FBI director Robert Mueller, and CIA director Leon Panetta—will have an opportunity to explain that fact at a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee this week.

If they show up.

Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.

Film Review: 'Edge of Darkness'

The Current Cinema

Life and Death Matters
by Anthony Lane
The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/arts
February 8, 2010

Running at more than five hours, over six episodes, “Edge of Darkness” was a tense eco-drama—not something you see every day—which appeared on British television in 1985. It was directed by Martin Campbell, who, a quarter of a century later, is revisiting the fray. In the interim, he has made one lusty Zorro movie, one limp Zorro movie, two of the most propulsive James Bond films, “GoldenEye” and “Casino Royale,” and, lest we forget, “Vertical Limit,” which sounds like a biopic of Tom Cruise but is, in fact, an enjoyably stupid thriller about mountaineers. Now Campbell has redirected “Edge of Darkness,” trimming it to less than two hours, moving the action from Yorkshire to Boston, and taking on board, as his screenwriters, Andrew Bovell and William Monahan—something of a Boston specialist, what with his Academy Award for “The Departed.”

Mel Gibson, who looks and sounds not a day over sixty-five, plays a policeman named Thomas Craven. The name is a joke, since the movie insists, time and again, that he has all but dispensed with fear. Warned by a fellow-officer that “someone armed and dangerous” is on the loose, Craven replies, “What do you think I am?” This is delivered not with a wink and a wild grin—we are not, thank Heaven, in “Lethal Weapon” territory—but with a pared-down, dead-eyed plainness, which goes with Craven’s salty hair, thinning at the back, and the frown lines carved across his forehead like rifts in a relief map. He wears a loose-fitting suit that he might have picked up at a morgue. “I’m the guy with nothing to lose who doesn’t give a shit,” he says. You’re telling me.

As a rule, Gibson’s characters look stranded unless they have sins to atone for, or frustrations to vent. Craven smiles when his daughter, Emma (Bojana Novakovic)—a scientific researcher home on a visit—arrives at the train station, but the smile is awkward and shifty, as if he were anticipating trouble. And here it is: a masked gunman at his front door, presumably aiming at Craven but hitting Emma by mistake. She dies in his arms, the only child of a single man, and from this point Craven is set on his vengeful path—weirdly calm, in the confident knowledge that blood will have to be spilled. The most rousing sequence comes much later, as a hit-and-run driver, having already picked off an innocent woman, turns the car around and comes back to flatten Craven, too. And does he flee, or dodge, or hurl himself aside? No, he takes his gun and marches firmly toward the oncoming vehicle, as if the road beneath his feet were the dust of the O.K. Corral, firing at the windshield as he goes. It’s been thirty years since “Mad Max,” but, when it comes to man vs. machine, Gibson is still up for a fight.

The original plot has not been altered much, though perhaps it should have been. In both cases, Craven soon discovers that Emma was the intended victim, and that she had been an activist, bent on exposing the crimes of the nuclear industry. In the Britain of 1985, riven by a miners’ strike and by continuing unease over the siting of American nuclear weapons on British soil, “Edge of Darkness,” all downpours and dour moods, felt true to its title. (And people were haunted by the Eric Clapton score.) To nudge it closer toward documentary, Campbell showed us Emma, on her final night, chairing a political meeting that was addressed by a real-life Member of Parliament. The new film, unrolling in a prosperous city, and released at a time when some environmentalists are arguing in favor of nuclear power, settles for the stale conceit of an honest soul confronting a venal private sector. Emma worked at Northmoor, a firm that conducts nuclear research under government contract while quietly building a few weapons, for foreign buyers, on the side. (Not, I would venture, the most plausible part of the story.) We know this before being told, because Northmoor’s chairman is played by Danny Huston, who, being a Huston, is so lofty, fine-mannered, and molasses-voiced that he might as well wear a T-shirt with the words “Do Not Trust This Man” picked out in plutonium.

In short, where the old “Edge of Darkness” was an ordeal, digging up surreal images from the conspiratorial murk, the reboot is an adventure—an efficient, politically inert fantasy that uses the hammer blow of violence to palm itself off as pertinent and gritty. The Craven of twenty-five years ago, searching through his daughter’s bedroom after the murder, found a vibrator, a gun, and a Teddy bear; the Craven of 2010 comes up with just the gun. That says it all. As if in deference to the story’s roots, we also get a mysterious and dapper Cockney (Ray Winstone), who is brought in—by whom, we never find out—with the sole purpose, as he admits, of making everything unintelligible. Well, mate, you done that all right. I liked the pace and the pulse of the film, but it launches no genuine surprise and, despite being irradiated with scenes of sickness and morbid one-liners, has little afterglow. Compare a work like Fritz Lang’s “The Big Heat,” which also showed a cop and his loved one assailed by the forces of grand corruption; where Lang left his anxious viewers in no doubt that society could chew up the best of them, Campbell leaves us thrilled yet reassured. One man, it seems, can stanch the flow of evil—not difficult, perhaps, when the evil isn’t half as forbidding as the man. Gibson is the best thing about “Edge of Darkness,” at once despairing and decisive, although I’m not sure he was wise to agree to the scene where Craven says to a bigwig, “You’d better decide whether you’re hanging on the cross or banging in the nails.” Sorry, Mel. That was the other movie.


REVIEW: ‘Edge of Darkness’ Takes You to the Edge of Boredom
by John Nolte
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/
January 29, 2010

It’s sure nice to have Mel Gibson back on the big screen carrying a gun, seeking revenge for the death of a loved one and quivering with righteous rage. But after seven years off-screen what a shame he couldn’t find a better script. “Edge of Darkness” is a mess. Convoluted, poorly structured and lacking in the important emotional turning points and character moments necessary to make this kind of thriller work.

Gibson plays Boston Police Detective Thomas Craven, an honest cop and inattentive but loving father whose 24-year old daughter Emma comes home for a visit. Things are warm, if a bit strained between them, but she’s ill — violently ill — and on their way out the front door to the hospital she’s shotgunned in a drive-by shooting that was meant to kill him. Or was it?

The plot’s entirely too ambitious, involving defense contractors, corrupt Senators, leftist activists and a gentle yet menacing wine-sipping government fixer named Jedburgh (The Mighty Ray Winstone) whose loyalties shift all-too obviously when the plot requires a nudge — when the screenwriters are stuck. In the “Austin Powers” trilogy he would’ve been called Agent Exposition.

Wintsone continues his perfect record of making everything he’s in better, and Jedburgh is a very interesting character. You do want to know more about him. The problem is that there’s no natural place for him in the film’s narrative. He reminds me of Liev Schreiber’s mysterious John Clark in “The Sum of All Fears.” Another movie where a mysterious supporting player in a disappointing film comes off as though he’s visiting from a much better movie.

The “reluctant” witnesses are just as poorly crafted as exposition machines as Jedburgh. They’re only reluctant enough to come off as reluctant in that contrived kind of way that tells the audience Big Scary Things Are Afoot. Of course they all eventually talk, with their only motivation seeming to be the need for a plot turn.

Movies can survive these kinds of problems, though. The secret is to keep a strong hold on the trajectory of your protagonist, and that’s where “Edge” fails most. The required moments don’t exist to bring this story to life. Craven discovering his daughter was the real target should’ve hit like a ton of rocks that turned the entire narrative on its head. Instead the realization arrives courtesy of a standard A to B to C police procedural.

The other moment most unforgivably missing (that the film’s trailer promises) is when Craven’s pushed to the point where he stops being a cop, starts serving out a violent reckoning, and never looks back. Instead these unsatisfying action bits come in maddening fits and starts. In once scene Craven’s kicking a little ass, in the next he’s a cop again. You keep waiting for that vicariously satisfying turning point where Mel Gibson does what Mel Gibson does best but all you get is one long frustrating tease.

Director, Martin Campbell, the competent helmer of “Goldeneye” and the splendid Bond-reboot “Casino Royale,” adapted “Edge” from a five hour Australian miniseries of the same name that he directed back in 1986. And that may be the problem. Cramming five hours of intrigue into two hours was a mistake and the end result is too much plot at the expense of the simplicity these kinds of films require:

Daughter’s killed. Find killers. Begin Rampage.

“Taken” it is not. There’s not even a single memorable action scene, and for a Mel Gibson film it’s surprisingly humorless. The only comedy comes from how hard the plot strains to let the audience know the villains are bi-partisan – both Democrats and Republicans.

But, hey, Mel’s back. And that is one very welcome turning point.

Tags: 'Edge of Darkness', Casino Royale, Martin Campbell, mel gibson, Ray Winstone
Posted Jan 29th 2010 at 6:15 pm in Featured Story, Film, Reviews

Rigging the Numbers

We have not “convicted 195 terrorists in federal court since 2001.”

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/
February 1, 2010 4:00 A.M.

It is welcome news that the Obama administration has reversed its irrational decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 plotters in Manhattan’s federal court. So far, however, the administration has merely — and grudgingly — begun to climb out of this hole of its own making.

The president seems more poised to move his error than to correct it. Reports indicate that the administration thinks the challenge now is to find a new location in which to proceed with the same ill-advised civilian prosecution. Instead, the idea at this point should be to build a sensible strategy going forward: military commissions for now, and, ultimately, a new system for handling national-security cases.

No such luck. Rather than learn from this experience, the Left is doubling down on civilian due process. Its agitprop du jour is a bogus numbers game.

“We need to develop a greater resiliency in this country on security issues,” Sarah E. Mendelson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the New York Times. “The administration needs to remind the American public that we have convicted 195 international terrorists in federal courts since 2001.”

That 195 number is making the rounds. It is both false and an exercise in hypocrisy.

The figure is mined from “In Pursuit of Justice,” a report published by Human Rights First (HRF) in May 2008 and updated last July (available here). But the report does not claim that 195 international terrorists have been convicted. Rather, it says that 195 defendants have been convicted so far in 119 cases that have some connection, however attenuated, to terrorism. (See the report’s preface.)

HRF goes on (at page 5) to explain its methodology. It examined prosecutions that were in some way “related to Islamist extremist terrorist organizations” (emphasis added). It should be obvious enough that this does not mean the people prosecuted were necessarily “international terrorists,” or that the cases involved actual terrorism charges. But the report makes the obvious explicit:

In building our data set of terrorism cases, we have attempted to capture prosecutions that seek criminal sanctions for acts of terrorism, attempts or conspiracies to commit terrorism, or providing aid and support to those engaged in terrorism. We have also sought to identify and include prosecutions intended to disrupt and deter terrorism through other means, for example, through charges under “alternative” statutes such as false statements, financial fraud, and immigration fraud. [Emphasis added.]

This explanation makes clear that the cases HRF is talking about are, in the main, cases that no one disputes can be handled safely and efficiently by the civilian courts. For example, let’s say the FBI is investigating al-Qaeda and it interviews a person suspected of having relevant information. That person lies during the interview, so the prosecutors indict him for making false statements, and he pleads guilty. Under the HRF’s standards, that gets tallied as a conviction in a “terrorism case.” But it hardly means the defendant is an international terrorist, let alone a KSM.

The same holds true for crimes like financial fraud and material support. These often involve people in the U.S. who are not themselves terrorists. Instead, they either contribute money and other assets to the jihadist cause (e.g., by contributing money to “charities” that are actually fronts for al-Qaeda or Hamas), or else help terrorists surreptitiously move their funds from place to place.

To be sure, this is not always the case. As I recounted back in May, the Obama Justice Department gave a sweetheart deal to Ali Al-Marri. He was a hardcore terrorist, yet prosecutors allowed him to plead guilty to a charge of material support to terrorism. As a result, he got an absurdly short sentence rather than the life-imprisonment term he’d have gotten if convicted on an actual terrorism charge. Al-Marri, however, is an unusual result. At least up until 2009, if a person could be proved to have committed terrorism crimes, he was almost always charged with terrorism crimes.

No opponent of civilian trials for enemy combatants is claiming that everyone who is connected in any way to a terrorism case should be transferred to the military courts. The quarrel here is over how to handle real operatives of al-Qaeda (and its components, like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula). We are talking about jihadists who are captured plotting, carrying out, or having carried out attacks against the United States — not just anyone who happens to get ensnared in the broad net of a terrorism investigation.

A handful of the 195 convicted defendants counted by HRF really were terrorists, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are better ways than civilian trials to try enemy combatants. Calling a prosecution “successful” just means that we convicted the defendant; it does not mean that national security was well served. If, because of civilian due-process rules, we had to reveal national-defense information that we could have kept secret in a military commission — or if we had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to address security concerns that could have been obviated by having a military trial in the safety of Gitmo — then the country would have been better off getting the same result in a military commission. That is common sense.

The numbers rigging, moreover, is a bit rich coming from left-wing lawyers. They spent the seven years after 9/11 accusing the Bush Justice Department of artificially inflating its numbers to convey a false sense of counterterrorism effectiveness. How? By opening cases as terrorism investigations but disposing of them without terrorism charges — especially through the immigration laws (i.e., deporting suspected terrorists and facilitators).

That’s right: When the Bush administration used the immigration laws to boot terror suspects out of the country, the Left and its fellow travelers like CAIR claimed this was racial profiling masquerading as counterterrorism. Now, in the age of Obama, we learn from HRF that “immigration fraud” counts as a “terrorism case” — so the group can boost the numbers and claim that the same Justice Department (under the Bush administration for most of the period covered in the report) has done a great job of combating terrorism in civilian court.

In any event, the fact that Umar Farouk Whoever can safely be handled in civilian federal court for procuring his green card by fraud hardly means Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should be brought to civilian federal court for a wartime mass-murder strike targeting nearly 300 Americans — or that we should bestow on KSM the same Bill of Rights protections no longer enjoyed by the nearly 3,000 Americans he slaughtered in a wartime attack.

It’s time to cook up a new plan. Cooking the books is not going to cut it.

— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).

Book Review- 'No Boundaries: Transnational Latino Gangs and American Law Enforcement'

Big Problems, Bigger Men

How Confronting the Gang Just Might Make You a Better Man

By Charles Donelan
The Santa Barbara Independent
http://www.independent.com/
Thursday, August 13, 2009

Stopping in front of a friend's house on Santa Barbara's lower Eastside one lazy Sunday evening in July, I was confronted by a sight that at first made little sense to me. A group of eight or 10 young men, some carrying 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor, others carrying short two-by-fours, were advancing down this quiet cul-de-sac-and staring me down.

There was something in the eye contact they made that activated my sense of danger, and without thinking, I re-fastened my seatbelt and drove away. More confused than afraid, I pulled over when I got around the corner and took out a Santa Barbara street map. I suppose I was trying to convince myself that I had gotten lost-that I had somehow been on the wrong block, even though I had recognized the house.


Courtesy Photo

STRONG MEN FIGHT BACK: Author Tom Diaz's book No Boundaries dispels myths about gangs and reveals how stronger people emerge from confronting tough problems.

Meanwhile, my friend was standing in his living room watching a gang ritual, known as a "jump in," through his front window. The group I had encountered was now at the end of the street, and the young men were beating another teenager savagely. The aggression only lasted a minute, and at the end, the victim was embraced by the gang, and offered a bottle from which to drink. In fewer than 10 minutes, another member of Santa Barbara's Eastside gang had entered the fold.

What I had stumbled upon was street-gang business as usual, nothing more than the day-to-day activities of a group of mostly young kids, and seemingly nothing to worry about. Within the hour, I would be at the Santa Barbara Bowl watching Snoop Dogg celebrate his gang affiliation and lifestyle on the big stage, surrounded by a portable forest of pot plants, and backed by a giant banner proclaiming his music as "Tales From the Crips." For all I knew, the young men I had encountered on the Eastside were at the show, too.

In the course of one average summer night in Santa Barbara, I had seen gang life on the street and on the stage, and gone from witnessing a somewhat scary real-life example of the way that gangs have permeated our seemingly peaceful city to smiling and grooving to an elaborately staged cartoon-like celebration of gangs' outlaw status and lifestyle, something packaged to appeal to white teenagers. Nevertheless, there was something in the coincidence that got me thinking. How big was this problem? Had gangs really come this far, right to our Santa Barbara doorsteps? I had read all the stories and heard about other incidents, but witnessing an attack suddenly made them seem more real, and I now knew for a fact that there was more to this than Snoop was letting on.

Later that week, I spoke on the phone with Tom Diaz, an attorney and noted gun control lobbyist from Washington who has written the recently published book, No Boundaries: Transnational Latino Gangs and American Law Enforcement (University of Michigan Press). Diaz has put together what looks like the definitive account of the rise and spread of transnational Latino gangs in America. The book is extraordinarily well researched, the product of three full years of nonstop investigation that took Diaz from Los Angeles to Houston, Chicago, and Virginia, among many other gang hot spots. His conclusions are not necessarily what one would expect.

On one hand, these types of criminal organizations are a social problem without a solution. As long as there are recent immigrants struggling for a foothold in American society, it is likely that there will be people willing to exploit their marginal status by putting them to work in gangs.

On the other hand, Diaz discovered a rich mine of potential for hope among the new generation of law enforcement officials and prosecutors who have come to specialize in this area. The gangs may evolve and adapt, but the people who fight them sometimes evolve, too. Like so many of the biggest issues that confront American society today, the gang problem has become a crucible within which much damage is done, but out of which stronger, more understanding mentalities may emerge.

Growing Up Together

I was told about Diaz's book by one of my oldest friends, Bruce Riordan, a veteran federal and now city gang prosecutor in Los Angeles. Riordan, who currently heads the L.A. City Attorney's anti-gang task force, was for many years a United States Attorney, and his successful prosecution of the 18th Street gang on federal racketeering and organized crime charges in the late 1990s and early 2000s is the subject of "Death, Treachery, and Taxes," one of the Diaz book's most compelling chapters.

Riordan and I have been friends since we were teenagers-the same age as the gang members I had encountered in Santa Barbara. He was and remains an important figure in my life-a key member of my personal inner circle-and to read about him in Diaz's book was exciting. There's a tendency among men to look for values and recognition within a peer group, and to frame success in terms of comparison with their male cohort. When one member of the group rises to a certain level of renown, it becomes the occasion for both pride and another round of self-scrutiny. Like gang members, old friends are still keeping score and rooting for each other.

Having heard Riordan tell bits and pieces of the story of his epic case against L.A.'s 18th Street throughout the years, I was fascinated to see it condensed in print, especially by someone with Diaz's sophisticated perspective. In No Boundaries, true stories of gang prosecutions are given the urgency and detail of suspenseful police procedurals. Even more startling in my case was the fact that Diaz chose to describe Riordan as a character, and to put him into the context of his background and upbringing in Massachusetts, where we attended high school together. Through this third perspective, I had the chance to observe a childhood and adolescence not much different from my own, but distilled into the formative experience of someone who had gone on to become something that, on the face of it, could hardly be more different.

But, as I had learned on my way to the Bowl that night, the extremes of life, from tragedy to triumph, can lie adjacent, and big differences are often the product of an accumulation of little decisions. Had I gotten out of my car and confronted the gang on their way to the jump in, what would have been their reaction? And what would have been my fate? I'll never know.

No Boundaries is packed with violent incidents and terrifying characters, all described in a matter-of-fact style that nevertheless holds the perpetrators accountable for the misery they inflict not only on their victims, but also on their friends and on themselves. However, amid the bristling personalities of the leaders and foot soldiers of 18th Street, Mara Salvatrucha, the Latin Kings, and the Mexican Mafia, another ensemble of equally intense characters emerges in the form of those men and women who work to bring these groups to justice. The names of men such as Kevin Carwile, Frank Flores, Brian Truchon, Bruce Riordan, and Richard Valdemar take their alphabetical places in an index that places them alongside guys with names like Greedy, Termite, the Tapeworm, and the Baker.

For me, having grown up alongside someone who has become an authority on Los Angeles gangs and who has successfully prosecuted them for organized crime, the story of how these two groups-transnational Latino gangs and American law enforcement-interact has special significance. Like so many men I know, it is to my close friends from high school and college whom I look for support, guidance, and a standard for comparison. Throughout the years, I witnessed Riordan's transformation from the boy I knew growing up in Worcester, Massachusetts-gregarious, intellectual, adventurous, and full of a powerful yearning to be part of something bigger than himself-into the man who today calls the shots in some of the world's most violent conflicts between criminals and law enforcement. Reflecting on the lives, motives, and dark circumstances of the gangsters whom Riordan prosecuted became another strand in a tapestry of shared interests that link us in the project of coming to terms with our own place in history and our own roles as men in contemporary America.

Getting Into Gangs

For Tom Diaz, researching and writing about Latino gangs has been a personal journey as well. The son of a career Army officer, Diaz only recently learned something ironic about his own father. Diaz senior spent his adult life in this country passing as a Mexican, when in fact he was of Spanish descent, having immigrated to the United States from the Canary Islands. He came across the border at El Paso in 1924, at a time when Mexicans were free to enter the country and become American citizens, while most Europeans were restricted from doing so by quotas. "I still have my father's crossing card," he told me. "When he arrived, he had 50 dollars, and no profession other than as a laborer. I still wonder where I would be today if he hadn't joined the Army."

His own status as a member of the second generation of an immigrant family has made Diaz acutely aware of the vulnerability of that group. He said that it is a popular misconception that most gang members are illegal immigrants. "Statistically, first-generation immigrants are much less likely to be involved in crime," explained Diaz. "It's their children, the ones who are born here, who are most vulnerable to this situation. That's just one of the reasons why the current debates about immigration policy are often so unhelpful in relation to crime. People are proceeding from false premises about who is involved."

Another popular misconception that No Boundaries undermines is the idea that the problem originated in Central America. The rise of the powerful Salvadoran gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, has created the mistaken impression that there was a culture of organized crime in that country that has now spilled over into the United States. Not so, says Diaz. "The evidence on this is quite clear," he said. "The major transnational Latino gangs all trace their origins back to Los Angeles. What we are seeing now is a kind of 'blowback,' in which the gang members we deported in the late '90s are now returning to this country after spending several years refining their organizations and increasing their levels of violence in the prisons of Mexico and El Salvador. But they all agree on one thing-L.A. is the cradle, it's where it all began."

One of the most difficult things for American law enforcement to deal with in the quest to eradicate gangs has been the unintended complicity of our own prison system in their rise. The power of the Mexican Mafia, or La Eme as it is known, comes primarily from its ability to control what happens within the walls of American prisons. "Prison is a creepy place," said Diaz. "It's suffocating even in a medium-security facility, and that's just a first impression." When things get really frightening, according to Diaz, is when one realizes that "organized crime groups control everything inside our prisons right up to the walls. They have their own system of government, and they dictate the terms of an enormous number of crucial decisions, from where someone will be housed to where they will work." This alarming vision of prison life as controlled by the gangs is only part of a larger context that Diaz terms "the invisible subject of the extent to which corruption of the type we hear about in Mexico is already happening in this country."

For Diaz, the purpose of writing No Boundaries was similar to that of his activity on Capitol Hill in support of gun control. "Listen," he said, "evil exists. Terrorism is still a threat to this country, and so are gangs. When I attend a conference, the thing I ask people to do is to think ahead. Imagine what we will be up against in 10 years, and work from there. I was in Rio de Janeiro recently, and I was talking with the chief of police there, and he said something really frightening, because he said of the United States and gangs, 'You people are where we were 20 years ago.' If you know anything about what they have been experiencing in Brazil recently-multiple police shootings, a loss of the rule of law, prisons being hijacked and completely taken over from within-then you know that what he means is serious. Gangs are not static, they will adapt because they are fluid, non-bureaucratic organizations."

What to Wish For

When asked about what gives him hope, Diaz was just as forceful, if somewhat less precise. "I do believe in the possibility of redemption, because I have seen that some men who have been involved in gangs do just stop. Some have seen all these terrible things and they walk away. But it's never easy, and some of them get killed anyway."

For the members of the law enforcement community, the answer may lie in accepting the nature of the problem as one without an obvious programmatic solution. The long years that it takes to bring these violent gangs to justice have a way of altering everyone involved. Prosecutors speak of the "you change it, it changes you" phenomenon of a big case, and generally agree that, in spite of the sense that the circumstances are overwhelming, there nevertheless is an imperative to go on trying.

Diaz sees this, as do I, in career prosecutors like Bruce Riordan, who has been transformed by confronting challenges that have taken him places he never expected, and forced him to exceed the limits of his own expectations. If there is a goal to becoming a man, beyond the trappings of custom, it might be this-to take on a problem without a solution, and to live through the changes it makes to who you are.

Mexico’s Drug War

Posted by Ryan Mauro on Feb 1st, 2010
http://www.frontpagemag.com/

The media is barely covering the bloody situation in Mexico, but the war against the drug lords there should be of the utmost concern to Americans. As high levels of violence and corruption continue to plague Mexican society, the U.S. needs to brace for a flood of narcotics, arms, and people seeking refuge crossing the border.

The drug war has resulted in about 17,000 deaths over the past three years, and Mexico has claimed the title of the country in the hemisphere with the highest number of journalists killed on its soil. To put that in perspective, about 1000 American soldiers have died fighting the war in Afghanistan since 2001. About 4400 Americans have died in Iraq since 2003.


Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

Mexican Army soldiers on patrol in Reynosa, a border town. A cartel has hired a paramilitary force to protect its turf there.

A quick look at the resume of Teodoro Eduardo Garcia Simental, a top drug lord captured this month responsible for horrendous amounts of barbaric violence in and around Tijuana, shows the brutal nature of the conflict. He and his partners destroyed the bodies of hundreds of their victims by submersing them in tubs of acid, many of whom were kidnapped and held for ransom.

The New York Times describes the conflict as follows:

“When it comes to gore, Mexico’s drug traffickers seem to compete among themselves for the title of most depraved. One will chop off the heads of victims. Another will string dead rivals from bridges or burn their genitals. Recently, hit men removed the face from a dead man and sewed it onto a soccer ball.”

The capturing and killing of top figures in the drug trade in recent months has not had an immediate impact. The Official Secretary of the Federal Judiciary in Veracruz City was found beheaded with a message carved into her chest this month. January of 2010 has doubled the previous January as having the record of the highest number of murders in Tijuana with 70 people having lost their lives.

January 10 made the record for the bloodiest single day in the conflict, with 69 assassinations in nine states, beating the previous number of 57. Ciudad Juarez has been named by the Citizen Council for Public Security as the most violent city in the world, with an average of 191 murders per 100,000 residents.

The affects of the war in Mexico are not limited to that country. It is spreading to El Salvador, which is considering establishing a curfew, a mandatory closing time for businesses, and allowing the searching of homes without warrants. A dozen people on average were killed every day in the tiny country in 2009. The other Central American countries are experiencing a similar rise in criminal and violent activity.

The inability of the government to bring stability and opportunity to its people is causing desperate measures to be implemented. Military offensives usually reserved for foreign wars are taking place on home soil. Possession of small quantities of drugs for “personal use” has been legalized, including heroin, cocaine, LSD, and methamphetamine. There is even talk of prosecuting those who glorify the drug lords in pop culture.

It also affects the War on Terror. It is now known that the Colombian narco-terrorist group known as FARC, with Venezuelan backing, has partnered up with Al-Qaeda elements in West Africa. The Chavez government’s involvement in narcotics trafficking means they can use the drug lords to destabilize the hemisphere and expand their business opportunities. Terrorist groups and other non-state actors will benefit from having a new colleague that can help them ship people and supplies into the U.S. and engage in illicit fundraising, as Hezbollah already has.

People from countries known to be strongholds for extremist groups are being caught entering Latin America in order to reach the United States. Four Somalis have been found hiding in a tractor trailer in Honduras. In Colombia, 71 illegal aliens from Somalia and Eritrea were intercepted by the authorities in early January. The smuggling business, instability and poor control of America’s southwestern border provides an open opportunity for those wishing to do us harm.

This internal strife should cause Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair and Senator John Kerry to reconsider their assurances in March of last year that Mexico was “in no danger of becoming a failed state.” The conflict is becoming closer to resembling a guerilla war, and if the drug lords succeed in carving out mini-states for themselves, the U.S. will see the chaos and criminal activity they cause spill over the border.

The Islamic Republic of Torture, Rape, and Murder

By Amil Imani
http://www.americanthinker.com/
January 31, 2010

Rape in prison is a cruel invasion of a helpless victim. In addition to the physical torment and possible transmission of sexual diseases, rape reduces the victim to subhuman status -- an object for the use of others to be discarded when no longer desired. Most civilized countries sternly guard against rapes and sexual assaults in prison, although with less than complete success. Under the barbaric rule of the mullahcracy in Iran, sexual assaults have become instruments of policy for extracting false confessions, satisfying the boundless sadism and sexual perversions of the jailers, punishing the helpless victim, and leaving him with a sense of dehumanization.

This shockingly repugnant form of violating the human person has regrettably become widespread in the Islamic Republic of Iran's prisons, particularly in dealing with the young men and women arrested for the "crime" of peacefully demonstrating in the streets to demand accountability from the government for a raft of violations it has committed and continues to commit.

For the past 32 years, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been denying and violating a long-suffering people all of its human rights. They are guilty of beating, torturing, raping, and killing prisoners of conscience -- political, religious, intellectuals, artists, and others.

Women, chronically oppressed and disenfranchised from their basic human and family rights, have been most viciously treated by the Islamic system, its hired plainclothes, and the Basij members. To maintain its suffocating rule, the regime metes out punishments reminiscent of the worst in the annals of human history. Amputation of hands and feet, blinding, hanging, and stoning the victim after the quick formality of a trial in kangaroo courts without legal representation is commonplace under the terror rule of the Islamists.

The Islamic Republic has been violating all norms of international human rights, including very harsh penalties such as beatings for even "victimless crimes" like fornication, public expression, homosexuality, apostasy, and poor hijab (covering of the women).

The Islamic Republic's infamous record is replete with instances of child execution, restrictions on freedom of speech and the press, imprisonment of journalists, discrimination against women in general, and persecution of religious minorities (with a particular systematic program of genocide against the Baha'is and their religion). The regime has ruled over a peaceful people with an iron fist while committing the most heinous crimes against humanity.

After enduring more than three decades of the Islamic regime, the great majority of the Iranian people decided to cast their ballots in the hope of effecting change in the system. The Islamic government, completely accustomed to doing whatever it wishes and ignoring the people, stole the election and declared incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner. The blatant violation of this basic right to vote and choose the official infuriated the long-suffering masses, who poured into the streets by the millions, demanding that their votes be honored. The response of the regime was to beat the demonstrators, arresting many and subjecting a great number to a raft of harsh treatments in prisons.

In a letter addressed to Mr. Rafsanjani in his capacity as head of the Assembly of Experts, Mr. Karroubi, a former speaker of the Majlis (Parliament), demanded an immediate investigation into the reports that a number of detainees had been raped during the illegal incarceration.

Mr. Karroubi wrote, "Some of those arrested [as a result] of the unrest claim that detained girls have been sexually assaulted with ... brutality."
"The young men in detention were also sexually assaulted in such a way that some are now suffering from depression and other physical and psychological problems, and are incapable of even leaving their homes," Karroubi added. "A number of detainees have stated that some female detainees were so severely raped that their genitals were damaged. Others savagely raped young boys so that they suffer from all sorts of depression and serious physical and mental damage."

Human Rights Watch also has documented cases of sexual assault in the Islamic republic prisons on individuals arrested since the fraudulent June 12, 2009 presidential election. In the most recent case, the medical examiner's office confirmed that the injuries suffered in prison by Ebrahim Mehtari, a young activist, resulted from torture and mistreatment consistent with his allegations of sexual abuse. But the Islamic Republic's judiciary authorities refused to conduct further inquiries and instead threatened Mehtari and his family with severe repercussions if they ever open their mouths regarding the sexual abuse.

Mr. Mehtari is living outside of Iran now. After his departure from Iran, the regime's security forces raided his family's house several times and threatened his family members with punishments if their son ever talked about the abuses he has received.

Another young activist, 24-year old Ebrahim Sharifi is a very brave young man who was arrested on June 23, after the fraudulent presidential elections in Iran. He told the Human Rights Watch group that he had been raped in detention while he was handcuffed, blindfolded and his feet were tied, and that he had attempted suicide several times after his release. He said that judiciary officials had refused to accept his complaint and told him that if he spoke out about his case, his family would be in danger.

The third case involves Maryam Sabri, a beautiful 21-year-old girl who was arrested on July 30 during the commemoration of the 40th day after the killing of Neda Agha Sultan -- whose shooting death during a demonstration shocked the entire world. Sabri was arrested after her photo appeared on a website connected to the IRGC, which posted photos of protesters and asked people to identify the people in the pictures so that they could be arrested. Before she was released on August 12, Sabri says, she was raped four times by the jailers.

"On August 9, in a letter published in the Etemad Melli paper, the reformist presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi wrote that some detained individuals stated that some authorities have raped detained women with such force, they have sustained injuries and tears in to their reproductive system."

In another high-profile case, the very pretty 19-year old Taraneh was not shot with a single bullet to her chest, as was the case with Neda Agha Sultan There were no bystanders in the dungeon with a cell phone to capture the prolonged torture, rape, and sodomy of this teenager.

According to reports, as well as testimony on the House floor from the honorable U.S. Congressman McCotter, on June 28, 2009, Taraneh Mousavi, a young Iranian woman, was literally scooped off the streets without any provocation on her part and with no arrest warrant. This young woman was taken to one of the regime's torture chambers, where she was repeatedly brutalized, raped, and sodomized by Ahmadinejad's agents, and with the consent of the "supreme leader," Ali Khamenei.

Near death from repeated beating, raping and sodomizing, the fragile young woman, bleeding profusely from her rectum and womb, was transferred to a hospital in Karaj near Tehran. Eventually, an anonymous person notified Taraneh's family that she had had an "accident" and had been to be taken to the hospital.

The devastated family rushed to the hospital only to find no trace of their beloved daughter. The foot-soldiers of Allah's "divine representative" Ali Khamenei decided to eliminate all traces of their savagery. These vile people decided to remove the dying woman from the hospital before the family's arrival, whereupon they burned her beyond recognition and dumped her charred remains on the side of the road.

Like Neda, another young woman whose chest was ripped by the bullet of a murdering Basij member as she peacefully walked along with a throng of peaceful demonstrators, Taraneh's tragedy gives a glimpse of the true face of Islamic fascism and its brutality. The Taranehs and Nedas of Iran shall remain as eternal testaments to the depravity of the 7th-century primitive system and the horrors it has visited on innocent people. And these young victims of the IRI tyranny are by no means isolated cases. Women are systematically exploited, maltreated, and disenfranchised from their God-given rights.

A regime that subjects its own people to boundless viciousness is showing the world its willingness to commit any crime to intimidate others and to undertake any action that would keep it in power. The Islamic Republic of Iran will continue its reign of devastation and death if not immediately disempowered by all people and nations that value universal human rights. It is timely to bring to mind the warning of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. The Islamic Republic of Iran is indeed a miscarriage of justice, a cruel repressive rule, and an imminent threat -- not only to Iranians, but to the world at large.

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What's Wrong with Celebrating Life?

By Bob Weir
http://www.americanthinker.com/
January 31, 2010

University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow hasn't even made it to the NFL yet, but he is going to be a star of the Super Bowl. The Heisman Trophy-winning passer for the Florida Gators is the first college football player to both rush and pass for twenty touchdowns in a season, and he is the first sophomore to win the highly coveted trophy. Nevertheless, his recent fame comes from an ad that will be placed among dozens of others during one of the most popular televised events of the year.

Even though the ad won't be run until Super Bowl Sunday on February 7, Mr. Tebow is already becoming a household name. His premature celebrity comes not from his athletic ability on the gridiron, but from the mere fact that he's alive. You see, during the thirty-second spot, his mother Pam reportedly will be talking about the fact that she became ill while pregnant with her fifth son during a mission in the Philippines. Ms. Tebow repudiated her doctor's advice to abort the child, and she gave birth to Tim. Ordinarily, this would rank up there with many other heart-warming success stories that celebrate life.

However, abortion proponents don't view life as something to celebrate. Hence, they are protesting the decision by CBS Television to broadcast the $2.5-million ad, which is sponsored by and paid for by Focus on the Family. "An ad that uses sports to divide rather than to unite has no place in the biggest national sports event of the year; an event designed to bring Americans together," said Jehmu Greene, president of the New York-based Women's Media Center. Also joining in the protest are the National Organization for Women and the Feminist Majority.

You've got to admit that these pro-abortion groups become more contemptible every year. Apparently, it's not enough for them to advocate the killing of fetuses in the womb, even by means of that most despicable of procedures, the late-term abortion. It's not enough that millions of unborn babies have ended up in waste disposal systems across the country since the Supreme Court in 1973 gave women the right to decide if a child should live or die.

Now, in 2010, women who made the decision to give birth to their children are being criticized for celebrating their views regarding the sanctity of life. One protest letter from The Women's Media Center took some vicious shots at the sponsoring organization and included some threats toward CBS about viewership.

By offering one of the most coveted advertising spots of the year to an anti-equality, anti-choice, homophobic organization, CBS is aligning itself with a political stance that will damage its reputation, alienate viewers, and discourage consumers from supporting its shows and advertisers.

In thinly veiled language, that means the pro-abortion crowd will attempt to boycott the network for allowing a mother to extol the virtues of her decision to choose life. Keep in mind that these are the people who call themselves pro-choice. Evidently, the only choice they agree with is abortion. That's why I refer to them as pro-abortion, not pro-choice.

During a radio talk show interview, Ms. Greene railed against the network and the sponsor of the ad, while fraudulently claiming that seventy percent of Americans are in favor of Roe v. Wade. The host quickly corrected her by citing surveys from the New York Times, hardly a bastion of conservatism, which indicated that people are now evenly divided on the abortion issue. Inasmuch as Ms. Greene had been caught trying to spread some false propaganda on the airwaves; she backed off and went into another diatribe about inequality and homophobia. The host then asked why she didn't simply find a sponsor for an ad that celebrates her group's position.

Can you imagine a commercial broadcast to tens of millions of families, telling them how important it is for women to choose to abort their babies? Even some of the groups that have a benign reputation in the pro-abortion arena would have a tough time trying to make such an ad seem civilized. Instead of trying to find a receptive audience for their negative and cynical approach to life, they'd rather impugn the motives of those who proudly announce to the world that they will staunchly support the rights of the most vulnerable among us -- the unborn. CBS is to be applauded for their courage in refusing to knuckle under to threats and intimidation from these radical groups who have had their way for too long. Moreover, Pam Tebow, her son Tim, and Focus on the Family are to be especially congratulated for celebrating the gift of life.

Bob Weir is a former detective sergeant in the New York City Police Department. He is the executive editor of The News Connection in Highland Village, Texas. E-mail Bob.

21 Comments on "What's Wrong with Celebrating Life?"