Democracy in Action

[John Cole]

Here's a link to Elaine Scarry's article on the demands of citizenship, democracy, and our right to know. It's a rather long essay but well worth reading.

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR27.5/scarry.html

The paragraph below presents part of Scarry's thesis:

September 11 involved a partial failure of defense. If ever a country has been warned that its arrangements for defense are defective, the United States has been warned. Standing quietly by while our leaders build more weapons of mass destruction and bypass more rules and more laws (and more citizens) simply continues the unconstitutional and--as we have recently learned--ineffective direction we have passively tolerated for fifty years. We share a responsibility to deliberate about these questions, as surely as the passengers on Flight 93 shared a responsibility to deliberate about how to act. The failures of our current defense arrangements put an obligation on all of us to review the arrangements we have made for protecting the country. "All of us" means "all of us who reside in the country," not "all of us who work at the Pentagon" or "all of us who convene when there is a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff." What the Chiefs of Staff think, or what analysts at the Pentagon think, is of great interest (as are the judgments of men and women who by other avenues of expertise have thoughtful and knowledgeable assessments of security issues); it would be a benefit to the country if such people would now begin to share those views with the public. But such views can in no way preempt or abridge our own obligation to review matters, since the protection of the country falls to everyone whose country it is.

[Wake up CALL]

John how are we to protect this country if you seize our guns? You just can't have it both ways, at least in reality. Perhaps in a liberal dream-land it works, or perhaps in one of those parallel universes.

[MMMMMM]

Interesting article. Have to go out but a couple of quick observations:

1) the author almost makes a case for the lifting of most gun control laws;-)

2) the author seems to somehow think that if we were to give up nuclear weapons, we would be able to persuade others to do the same; and further, that if they were to so agree, that they wouldn't cheat on this agreement. IMO this outlook is hopelessly naive. The chances are about 100% that others would cheat on this agreement, and that therefore we would later be in position to either a) be blackmailed on grand scale, or b) be forced to surrender, even with an excellent conventional army, much as Hirohito was forced to surrender, or c) wake up some day looking at a country in total ruins

Discussing in any detail the issues related to increasingly centralized top-down military comand and structure will have to wait (it does merit further discussion). My quick take is that we should have both grass-roots military capability (an armed citizenry) and a highly effective, more advanced military capable of acting on grander scale whenever necessary, with the most technologically advanced weaponry and military systems in the world.

As a final note, the Iraq war was in effect authorized by Congress, for in the months preceding it, Congress gave the President express authority to wage just such a war at his discretion. Also, popular opinion favored the war, so it is presumed that if even a citizens' referendum were to have been held on the matter, the Iraq war would have been approved.

[adios]

I started to read this article and it's basic premises were so wrong I found that it wasn't worth continuing with. One of the author's basic presmises is that the US has acted unconstitutionally in Korea, Viet Nam, etc. To quote specifically:

The constitutional requirement for a Congressional declaration of war has not been used for any war since World War II: the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the war in former Yugoslavia were all carried out at the direction of the president and without a congressional declaration, as were the invasions of Panama, Grenada, and Haiti.

As many have pointed out on this forum the Constitution leaves a lot of room for intermpretation and to make the preceeding statement as fact without some sort of legal reasoning to support is it the very least disingenuous and one sided. Congressional resolutions were certainly enough in the minds of Congressional members to satisfy Constitutional requirements.

Here's where a false premise leads to an erroneous conclusion:

This bypassing of the Constitution in the case of conventional wars and invasions has been licensed by the existence of nuclear weapons and by the country’s formal doctrine of Presidential First Use, which permits the president, acting alone, to initiate nuclear war.3

Total nonsense and ridiculous.

Do you really believe this crap from the article:

Among the many revelations that occurred on September 11 was a revelation about our capacity to act quickly. Speed—the realpolitik that has excused the setting aside of the law for fifty years—turns out not to have been very real at all. The description that follows looks at the timetables of American Airlines Flight 77—the plane that hit the Pentagon—and United Airlines Flight 93—the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania when passengers successfully disabled the hijackers’ mission. Each of the two planes was a small piece of U.S. ground. Their juxtaposition indicates that a form of defense that is external to the ground that needs to be defended does not work as well as a form of defense that is internal to the ground that needs to be protected. This outcome precisely matches the arguments that were made at the time of the writing of the Constitution about why the military had to be “held within a civil frame”: about why military actions, whether offensive or defensive, must be measured against the norms of civilian life, must be brought into contact with the people with whom one farms or performs shared labor, or the people with whom one raises children, or the people with whom one goes to church or a weekly play or movie. Preserving such a civil frame was needed to prevent the infantilization of the country’s population by its own leaders, and because it was judged to be the only plausible way actually to defend the home ground.

Sorry John this is a terrible, worthless piece that bares no resemblence to reality. The author makes a lot of dubious premises that aren't backed up in the least and uses them to prove that 1 == 0, at least that's my take on it.

As an aside in a former life I participated in a study of airport security funded by the FAA. I was working at a DOE national lab facility involved with security systems for DOE facilities. So we were viewed as "experts" on intrusion/detection systems. The long and the short of it is that airport security is still probably weak. We figured that airplanes were most vulnerable from insider threats and my guess is that they still are. The success of the hijackers on 9/11 leads me to two conclusions:

1) That the scenario of suicide terrorists hijacking airplanes had not been considered or factored in.

2) Security at airports was horifically lax, much more lax than what was commonly believed.


Obvious conclusions but far different than what the author makes from what I can tell. Occam's razor.

[John Cole]

Read the entire article and ignore, for now, the parts you find illogical.

[John Cole]

Scarry does not take a postion about seizing guns; instead, she explores the successful actions of citizens armed with information and how our government conspires against us to conceal information and avoid presenting the truth to us.

[Wake up CALL]

[ QUOTE ]
Scarry does not take a postion about seizing guns; instead, she explores the successful actions of citizens armed with information and how our government conspires against us to conceal information and avoid presenting the truth to us.



[/ QUOTE ]

John she first makes an assumption that our government is conspiring against it citizenry. Certainly this is a stretch even for an ardent flag burning, gun confiscitating, propaganda spewing liberal.