A question. Has anyone yet attempted to leverage yesterday’s tragedy at Fort Hood into a defense of the Patriot Act’s “lone wolf” provision? Maybe the question is not if, but when. I’m thinking of starting a pool.
Of course it may not be necessary. Yesterday [correction--last month] the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to extend three provisions: roving wiretaps; section 215, or the “libraries provision” diminishing privacy rights; and the “lone wolf” provision, which should probably be renamed the “pack of wolves” provision, for its potential (arguably inevitable) future misuse against political “radicals”, as defined by whatever pack is in power.

update: Speaking of grassroots terrorism, if the Seattle police are right, a man now in critical condition who was shot and arrested earlier today for the assassination-style killing of a Seattle police officer was waging a terrorist campaign of his own (with at least one accomplice) against the city’s police department.  According to police, Christopher Monfort, an Obama-lookalike with a similar biracial background, is also a suspect in an arson case involving the torching of several police vehicles at a motor pool. The arsonist left a note promising to kill police officers. Monfort was a UW graduate and sometime activist:

Monfort received a bachelor’s degree from the UW in March 2008, according to the university’s degree-validation Web site. His major was in Law, Societies and Justice.

Last year, Monfort belonged to the McNair Scholars Program, part of the university’s office of Minority Affairs and Diversity. The program aims to steep undergraduate students in sophisticated research, preparing them for graduate work.

Monfort provided this title for his project with the McNair program: “The Power of Citizenship Your Government Doesn’t Want You to Know About: How to Change the Inequity of the Criminal Justice System Immediately, Through Active Citizen Nullification of Laws, As a Juror.”

In an abstract of his project, Monfort said he planned to “illuminate and further” the scholarship of Paul Butler, a law professor at George Washington University. Butler is a proponent of jury nullification, a controversial principle whereby jurors feel free to disregard a judge’s instructions and acquit a defendant no matter the strength of the evidence.

Butler has argued that such nullification may be particularly appropriate in cases where black defendants are charged with nonviolent crimes.

“It is the moral responsibility of black jurors to emancipate some guilty black outlaws,” Butler wrote in a 1995 Yale Law Journal article, adding: “My goal is the subversion of American criminal justice, at least as it now exists.”

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For the Blue Dogs, Tuesday was a fire bell in the night.

Virginia Republicans led by Robert McDonnell crushed the most conservative Democrat nominee in decades, rolling up a victory that rivaled Ronald Reagan’s rout of Walter Mondale.

New Jersey GOP nominee Chris Christie, whose campaign had been the despair of its backers, won a 5-point victory over Jon Corzine, despite huge Democratic advantages in money and voter registration, two visits by Barack Obama and the presence on the ballot of a third-party candidate who took votes away from Christie.

Maine has gone Democratic in five straight presidential elections. Yet voters overturned a gay-marriage state law, 53-47, the 31st straight victory for traditionalists. This replicates California’s rejection of gay marriage, 52-48, in a year Obama carried the state by 24 points and 3 million votes.

Democrats see green shoots in the capture of New York’s 23rd congressional district, which has been Republican since Ulysses Grant. Yet, even here, the conservative showing was impressive.

GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava is a fellow traveler of the Albany crowd of Gov. David Paterson. She is pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro “card-check” — a euphemism for eliminating the secret ballot for workers deciding on whether they want a union. Read more…

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Three cheers for the smug. No doubt Michael Steele and Newt Gingrich had a lot to celebrate last night as not only two company men like Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell were elected to governorships in their respective states, but Doug Hoffman’s loss of Congressional District that was in Republican hands since before the War Between the States can also lead the smug to say “I told you so!”

Actually Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate, was a company man too, of Conservative Inc.  But he had the smart sense to take advantage of the outrage many local Republicans and rightists within district had when party bosses picked a company woman far more to the left than they were, thinking it was smart politics, and wound up driving them to Hoffman, who had the Conservative Party ballot line. Ultimately it wasn’t enough as Democrats plus what’s left the old institutional Republican base basically said what the election results of 2008 said, this has become a Democrat district.

My online collegue Matthew Roberts asked were the neocons trying to co-opt the “Tea Party” movement to which I replied: “Don’t they always?” Anyone who watched ”Nightline” on Monday and its profile of the NY-23 race also saw former House Minority Leader Dick Armey being interviewed in a Florida condo lent to him by a wealthy supporter of Freedom Works, the Beltway organization he leads. Freedom Works apparently has a lot of wealthy benefactors, especially corporate benefactors that Armey is loathe to name because of fears of “retaliation.” What they really fear is that they won’t be able to give to both sides so they can hedge their bets, as good men of business often do.  And having such benefactors allows Armey to rake in a cool half-mil for his services which I’m sure he believes he’s worth. If there’s any better example of what I speak of when I say “Conservative Inc.” I can’t think of any.

Read more…

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My recent trip to the Baltic included a week with the Royal Swedish Navy and the Swedish Marines, the First Amphibious Regiment. The hospitality of both surpassed anything I could have expected, including a chance to conn one of the superb Class 90 patrol craft through the skerries. At 40 knots the boat rode like a Pullman car but also turned like a Fokker DR-1. Any navy interested in controlling green or brown water would be wise to take a look at the Class 90.

As my hosts stressed to me, the Swedish armed forces have a strong Third Generation heritage. Historically they had close ties with the German military. While Swedish armies often fought in Germany, Sweden never went to war against Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II was an honorary admiral in the Royal Swedish Navy.

But Swedish officers also told me that their Third Generation heritage is under threat. In part the danger is inherent in any military. In peacetime, the drill field comes to predominate over the battlefield. Techniques, which are done by formula and can therefore seemingly be evaluated “objectively,” become the focus of training. Tactics, which should never be schematic and can only be analyzed subjectively, receive less and less training time until they are subsumed in techniques. In consequence, the Third Generation is reduced to maneuver warfare buzzwords while the culture is lost. This happened more than once even in the Prussian/German army. The best counter to it is lots of free-play training.

But the Swedish Third Generation heritage faces another threat: us. Sweden is working more with NATO and the U.S. than it did in the past, and in each combined operation the Swedes are forced to conform to the Second Generation American model (which is also the NATO model). Gradually, that model is taking over, because it is the standard expected of everyone who works with the Americans. That is true all over the world. The great sucking sound heard by anyone who cooperates with the Americans or NATO comes from the drain that leads ever downwards, back into the Second Generation. Read more…

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Don’t assume they’re not thinking about it. In fact they are. Seriously. Noah Shachtman at Wired found this scoop at Inside Defense (subscription only). One retired Lt. Col. George Crawford has written a report for the U.S Military’s Joint Special Operations University calling for a “National Manhunting Agency,” to train elite units of global terror-trackers (picture Dog The Bounty Hunter meets Starship Troopers).

From Shachtman’s report:

…Sometimes, that will mean operating “in uncooperative countries.” In those cases, the teams must be prepared “to act unilaterally, with no support or coordination with local authorities, in a manner similar to that employed by Israel’s Avner team in response to the Munich Olympics massacre.” (That was the controversial unit, fictionalized in Steven Spielberg’s movie, that allegedly roamed the world, assassinating Palestinian militants in response to the 1972 Olympic attack.)

The hit squads would only be one part of the manhunting agency, according to the Joint Special Operations University monograph, uncovered by Inside Defense. “Dedicated teams must be assembled, able to respond ‘on-call’ in the event of a raid on a suspect site or to conduct independent ‘break-in and search’ operations without leaving evidence of their intrusion,” Crawford notes.

Manhunting will also “require personnel who are experts at conducting surveillance of particular facilities, personnel, or activities without arousing suspicion or being detected,” he adds. “Picture in your mind a typical city street scene, with a little old lady walking her dog, the phone repair crew descending into a manhole, two little old men playing an innocent game of checkers, or the homeless person sleeping on the park bench, and you are on the right track.”

Such a group wouldn’t just go after terrorists. “Human networks are behind narcotics trafficking, arms proliferation, piracy, hiding war criminals from authorities, human trafficking, or other smuggling activities,” Crawford writes. “Human networks also lie at the core of national governments, offering an increased potential to nonlethally influence state actors with precision. A robust manhunting capability would allow the United States to interdict these human networks.”

This is frightening on so many levels. I mean, slow down pal, we already have the most famous al Qaeda hunter, Gen. Stan McChrystal, running things in Afghanistan. Plus, there is no need to reinvent the wheel, Team America is already on the job:

“The only thing standing between order and chaos — is us”

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