Author: geoff

UPDATE: OK, so this is now revealed as a hoax. But it has led many people to come forward with their own stories of similar incidents – see Juan Cole’s piece here.
UPDATE: Over at BoingBoing there’s a lively debate about whether this is actually a hoax.
It’s a lousy time to study 20th century history in the USA. Case in point:

A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s tome on Communism called “The Little Red Book.”
Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library’s interlibrary loan program.
The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand’s class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents’ home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.

Quite apart from the intimations of “1984”, I can’t help but be appalled at the extraordinary inefficiency, wastefulness, and pointlessness of the whole effort. Of course chasing student inter-library loans is a good way of creating a public illusion of frantic activity, and it’s a lot easier than actually figuring out how to secure the homeland.
UPDATE: Over at Boing Boing they’ve pointed out that this terrorist document is available from Amazon.com. I think we should each buy a copy and then invite the young men from the DHS [why do I always visualize them as Mormon missionaries?] over for a nice cup of tea and a sit-down.

No, not that George – George Washington.
I’ve been reading a lengthy thread over at the Volokh Conspiracy about the constitutionality of Bush’s authorization of domestic wiretapping by the NSA. The debate has followed fairly predictable lines between essentialists and consequentialists, but one item stood out. The contributor Medis was interpreting Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, and (s)he noted:

As an aside, I note that one of the first things George Washington did when he was appointed commander of the Continental Army was ask for the Continental Congress to provide Articles of War based on the British Articles of War (which in turn were based on Roman Articles of War). He believed that such regulations gave the British (and the Romans before them) an advantage in conducting war, and he wanted the same advantage for his forces.

He actually later complained about the Articles of War passed by the Continental Congress, citing various insufficiencies. At that point, however, he did not decide to simply ignore Congress and make his own rules. Instead, he went back to the Continental Congress and asked them to pass new, better, Articles of War.

Finally, as the first President (and thus the first Commander in Chief), Washington once again asked the First Congress to pass a law adopting the (new) Articles of War that had regulated his forces in the Revolutionary War. Apparently, this person who had commanded our armed forces in what is still the most important war in the history of our country, and in many respects the war which had become the most desperate at times, nonetheless thought, based on his own experience, that Congress should be providing rules to regulate the conduct of the armed forces.

What a difference from today’s George, who seems to think that being Commander in Chief in an undeclared war means that all legal constraints are optional. As Medis observed elsewhere in the same thread:

And I agree with another commentator that if it is true that the Administration deliberately did not seek action in Congress on this issue because of “political risk”, we again encounter a very frightening principle–that somehow we can’t “risk” operating as a democracy during war. Again, that can’t be right: except perhaps when it is impossible to seek new legislation given emergency time constraints, the President has a duty to faithfully execute the existing laws until those laws are actually changed, even during war.