06 August 2007

Justice Matters



Every day is an anniversary of something. Today happens to be one that we remember selectively because of The Bomb, and youthful Colonel Tibbets and the aircraft named for his mother, Enola Gay, and sixty-six thousand Japanese dead at the base of the mushroom cloud.

It is a question of justice, really, and in the public memory the need to memorialize a profound change in the terms of reference for global civilization. There are Americans now who staff a center of remembrance at Hiroshima, even as there were Americans-   prisoners - who died in the blast. There were at least ten of them, crewmen of three aircraft shot down near the city on July 28, 1945, after a raid on the nearby Imperial Naval facility at Kure.

The records say there were twenty Americans killed there, but it was a lie. The survivors of two other aircraft, shot down in May, were dissected alive to further medical knowledge for the staff of the Anatomy Department of Kysuhu University. They were added to the list of those killed by The Bomb to conceal the war crimes.

That was an injustice on a personal, if monstrous, scale. The perpetrators were evntually convicted of murder, but eventually freed. There were as many Allied prisoners transported by Hell Ships- unmarked merchant vessels that were often sunk by the advancing Americans- as died at Hiroshima. But this is not an exercise in equivalency, or revision. That is what happened, and all those anniversaries have been more conveniently been forgotten. There would be too many of them.

We are left with this one, since it is the very poster child for horror and injsutice. I submit that it is worth remembering all of the victims today, and include the Chinese civilians massacred by the Imperialists. After all, it is only fair, and if we must amalgamate the memory of murder, this is one of those times of the year when there should be time to do so.

Europe, and particularly France, are on the famous August break, and our Congress is eager to do the same. French President Nicolas Sarkozy is actually taking his summer holiday in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, of all places.

Considering the amount of time President Bush spends on the ranch down in Texas, it was a little surprising that he was still in town yesterday. He had some thing to take care of before leaving to bake in the Crawford sun.

He signed into law the legislation that DNI Mike McConnell has been pushing for since he was appointed to the highest intelligence post early this year.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FISA, for short, has been a problem in the war on Terror. Some of the problems are public, the aspects revealed by the New York Times two years ago, and some of them are not.

That is part of what has Attorney General Gonzales so tongue-tied in his dealings with the Senate of late, which has enabled so many to pile on what is perceived as his general incompetence. An inkling of the magnitude of the problem is that both House and Senate rolled the measure swiftly to approval.

At issue is the authority of the Government, and particularly the National Security Agency, to intercept international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens without FISA warrants.

The new law is said to go far beyond the minor procedural corrections necessary to work within the framework of the original FISA legislation, which was passed in 1978 and before the Internet was invented.

Taken strictly, the old law applied the “wiretap” regulations of the 1970s to the sea of internet communications. It required, at least theoretically, warrants to be issued to look at individual e-mails.

Telephone communications also now flow via fiber cable, and the only way to sift through it all is by massive computer-crunching, key-word searches using advanced algorithms and sophisticated targeting gleaned from the mining of vast databases.

If the law had not been passed, NSA would effectively have been locked out of the war. The consequences might, given the opportunity of the enemy to create another Hiroshima. Given the bitter partisan climate on the hill, it must have been a compelling case for the members of Congress.

This is a triumph for the new DNI, and it may enable us pre-empt the next attacks by the stateless predators. Perhaps it is also another step into a world in which we have no privacy and the old freedoms fall away. Under the new law, the Attorney General and the DNI can determine what communications can be monitored. That is a dramatic streamlining of a process that was awkward at best, and had the practical effect of battalions of Justice Department action-officers badgering a few embattled FISA jurists around the clock.

I have talked to people who were in that loop, and they are tired. They will welcome the August break.

There is a sunset provision on the new law. It will require re-authorization in six months, which in the bureaucracy means that preparation for re-enactment needs to begin immediately. But at least everyone gets August off.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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