Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Thoughts for Tax Day:  A friend sent this article on various rules that restrict the U.S. government from investigating terrorists.  The implication of the article is that we’d all be better off if the CIA and the FBI could work unfettered.  Certainly the widows and orphans of September 11th would be better off.  Yet our government has a history of pouring tremendous amounts of effort in the wrong areas, often resulting in months or years of misery for innocent people.  One of the more humorous recent examples is Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan’s detainment at the Vancouver airport.  We want the Federales to be strong enough to hunt down Saudi terrorists in flight schools but sufficiently weak that we can throw them off our own backs when necessary.

[As noted on Prairie Home Companion on Saturday, if you’re sending a check to the IRS this year put a couple of extra stamps on the envelope because it’s going all the way to Iraq.]

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This story on Sami Omar al-Hussayen is worth the pain of (free) registration at WashingtonPost.com.  Here are a couple of excerpts:

Defense attorney David Nevin portrayed his client as a well-liked leader of the university’s Muslim Student Association who had been quick to publicly condemn the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Hussayen, the father of three young boys, is not an angry Muslim who hates the West, he said. On the contrary, Nevin added, he comes from a well-to-do family that has traveled the world. “He doesn’t hate the United States. He doesn’t hate Western values. That’s not who he is,” Nevin said.

Hussayen, 34, a doctoral candidate in a computer science program sponsored by the National Security Agency, is accused of creating more than a dozen jihadist Web sites and of moderating a global e-mail group that in February 2003 posted an “urgent appeal” for Muslims in the U.S. military to supply information about American forces and facilities in the Middle East that could be selected as targets for acts of terrorism.

Displaying a chart that showed the links among more than a dozen Web sites, [federal prosecutor] Lindquist told the jury that Hussayen managed “an Internet network — a platform,” and that “the content of this platform was extreme jihad — terrorism.”

…

The Saudi Embassy has pressed for Hussayen’s release and is paying for his top-flight legal defense team, which includes Joshua Dratel, who represented Wadih Hage, a former aide to Osama bin Laden.

The case is interesting because Mr. Hussayen’s main defense is based on the First Amendment though he is not a U.S. citizen.  If the U.S. government doesn’t like someone residing in a foreign country it is free to shoot a missile at the guy’s car and summarily kill him.  If, on the other hand, an enemy manages to score himself a student or tourist visa and arrives on our shores we can’t touch him because he is now entitled to a variety of protections under the Constitution that were designed for (presumably loyal) citizens.  In a global economy where location isn’t supposed to matter one’s rights under the U.S. Constitution depend exquisitely on location.  If you’re one meter outside the border you can be imprisoned indefinitely without being charged or tried.  If you’re one meter inside the border you have all the rights of someone born in the U.S.

Continuing the theme of techie terrorists named “Sami”, Sami Al-Arian, the computer engineering professor from University of South Florida, attempted a First Amendment defense as well [Mr. Al-Arian, a Kuwaiti national whose application for U.S. citizenship was turned down based on his fraudulent registration to vote in the early 1990s, is a great example of the American Dream because the taxpayers of Florida are still paying his salary while he sits in federal prison awaiting his trail in January.]

The Ancient Greeks took the rules of hospitality, xenia, very seriously.  Certainly running off with your host’s wife was out of the question and thus the abduction of Helen was a sufficiently serious breach to warrant the Trojan War.  Most of our recent troubles with terrorism stem from Arab guests in or immigrants to the United States.  So far the government’s response seems to be an attempt to reduce the number of guests and/or screen them more thoroughly for existing connections to terrorist organizations.  In the long run, however, this seems doomed to fail.  You can’t expect someone to abandon his beliefs simply because he is visiting the United States or has immigrated here, even if one of those beliefs is hatred of American society.  My prediction:  within the next five years there will be calls to restrict constitutional rights to citizens.  It will be noted that in 1787 everyone in the U.S. was either a citizen, the property of a citizen (slaves), or expected to become a citizen.  It will be argued that times have changed.  Thanks to commercial airlines millions of people land on our soil every year with no intention of joining the society.  Thus a distinction should be made between U.S. citizens and guests.  The counterargument will be that the rights of the Constitution are universal and should not only be extended to guests on our shores but also to human beings anywhere on the planet.  We shouldn’t be supporting dictators in poor countries if they won’t guarantee U.S.-style rights to all of their citizens and certainly we should not be engaging in extrajudicial assassination of our enemies.

[A more concise restatement of the above is “Guantanamo Bay might be just the beginning.”]

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My 4-year-old Thinkpad with a 2-year-old 48 GB disk drive is literally falling apart, having sustained one or two drops too many.  I want to replace it with a new Thinkpad with a 160 GB hard drive but sadly the drive makers aren’t producing high-capacity 2.5″ drives.  Anyone out there had good luck with Tablet PC?  I’m thinking about getting this Toshiba to take on a trip to Ecuador and Peru (leaving April 20/21).  It won’t have a high-capacity hard drive but it might be a fun toy and would at least do a few things that my current notebook can’t.

Please comment if you own or have owned a Tablet PC.

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Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine carried an interesting essay on the subject of why universities spend so much time and effort to achieve racial diversity.  Here’s an excerpt:  “the reason we like the problem of racism is that solving it just requires us to give up our prejudices, whereas solving the problem of economic inequality might require something more — it might require us to give up our money”.

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The charms of the installation art exhibits in Marfa, Texas are often lost on Americans but the place is very popular with German tourists.  My favorite new experience in Marfa was a dark room filled with blue LEDs hung from wires (photo doesn’t really do it justice due to massive overexposure compared to the darkness you feel with just your eyes) by Erwin Redl.  Shortly before our little group was enjoying the high desert scenery and trying to understand the art, the Associated Press reported that “In a scene reminiscent of Somalia, frenzied [Iraqi] crowds dragged the burned, mutilated bodies of four American contractors through the streets of a town west of Baghdad on Wednesday and strung two of them up from a bridge” (source).

A German couple talked about how they’d met some retired U.S. Air Force pilots in California.  “They were lied to,” the wife noted.  “They were just 19-year-olds and nobody told them they would be bombing civilians.  Otherwise they would never have bombed German cities.”  The implication was that bombing civilians was so clearly immoral that nobody would do it knowingly.  Certainly the results of the bombing were terribly painful for Germans:

“The total bomb tonnage for the Second World War dropped by both the RAF and the 8th and 15th Air Forces in Europe on Germany totalled 1,234,767 tons of bombs more than 60 percent of which were dropped between July 1944 and April 1945. The Allied aerial onslaught killed no fewer than 305,000 German factory workers or area residents in targeted cities. It wounded about 780,000 other persons, made 1,865,000 people refugees, compelled the removal of another 4,885,000 additional persons, and cut off 20,000,000 people from their public utilities. By the third quarter of l944, coping with the aftermath of the Allied air strikes tied down an estimated four and one-half million workers, about 20 percent of the non-farm labor force, in cleaning and rebuilding operations.” (source)

Equally certain is the fact that for every German civilian killed or inconvenienced by bombing there was a statistical chance that an Allied soldier’s life would be spared.  The German death camp system for Jews was also impaired in efficiency and brought to an earlier end by the Allied bombing of German civilians.  Apparently there is a large school of thought within Germany at least that saving the lives of Allied solders and Jews did not justify killing German civilians randomly in hopes of striking those who were useful to the war effort and/or death camp system.

1940s summary:  We were at war with the German and Japanese governments and we killed many civilians who did not support those governments and with whom we had no quarrel.

What about today?  I have not been following events in Iraq very closely but I seem to recall American officials saying that it is tough to prevail against our enemies there because we can’t find them.  They hide amongst the general population and only come out at night in small bands.  Yet last week in Fallujah a huge group of people who apparently hate Americans and are prone to expressing that hatred violently exposed themselves in broad daylight, right in the open.  What better opportunity for rolling out the helicopter gunships?  Apparently the military commanders in Iraq did not think so because they didn’t bother to attack any of the rioters.

Modern summary:  We are at war with subsets of the civilian population in various countries around the world but we are only willing to attack governments.  It is tough to see a path to victory via this strategy because we’re actually at peace with the governments of France, Germany, et al., and in many cases close personal friends with the owners of countries such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, et al.  We can only occasionally find a government or country owner that we don’t like, e.g., the Taliban in Afghanistan or Saddam in Iraq.  Our military is able to dispose of said government or dictator very quickly but with victory we become the new government in that corner of the world.  And then we discover that it was not the former dictator trying to kill us but rather a subset of the civilians in that country.

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The tour of the Salk Institute yesterday reminded me of what a land of opportunity California has been for immigrants.  Jonas Salk was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants (bio) and obtained enough funding from the March of Dimes to develop the polio vaccine (perfected in the mid 1950s; our tour guide said that the disease was due to be eradicated from the world by now but Muslims in places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan are refusing to take the vaccine because they believe it causes sterility).  By 1960 Salk had obtained $20 million to build the Salk Institute and hired Louis Kahn (bio), who’d emigrated to the U.S. at the age of 5.

It seems that nearly every corner of California has been a place where an immigrant’s dream has come true.

[More:  see the movie My Architect.]

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After a tour of Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute complex in La Jolla I went to lunch with some local friends.  These guys used to make big money programming or administering computer systems and small money playing blackjack.  Now their computer jobs are gone and they’re living off their card-counting trips to the casinos.  One friend was missing, however.  His last job was a $150,000/year position as a system administrator for a large publisher.  He was never part of the blackjack team, however.  What’s he doing now?  After a nationwide search the best job that he could find is doing tech support for America Online in Tampa, Florida.  He earns $10.50/hour now.

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The Tyco CEO and CFO are in the news right now after a mistrial (story).  Allegedly they looted $600 million from the company.  This sounds bad but if you look at this profile of Tyco, the $600 mil is less than the most recent quarter’s income of $720 million and only about 1% of the company’s market value of $58 billion.  Let’s compare that to some other looters in the news:

• Richard Grasso took $200 million or so that he took from the New York Stock Exchange, a non-profit org.  Grasso’s haul is roughly comparable to ten years of profits for the NYSE.  Grasso got his looting approved by his friends on the Board and therefore won’t face criminal prosecution though the NY State attorney general is trying to force him to repay some of his booty.


• Jack Welch, in his autobiography, talks about having transferred 30 percent of General Electric from the investors into the hands of “employees” (the lions share to himself and a few other top guys presumably).


• William T. Esrey and Ronald LeMay looted $311 million in one year alone from Sprint, about half of the company’s profits in a good year.  They were not prosecuted for their looting but the IRS became upset with their scheme to avoid paying any taxes on this income.

From the very fact of their prosecution we can infer that the Tyco guys did not dot their i’s and cross their t’s as effectively as the average corporate looter but is there any evidence that their looting was above average?

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Some of the topics covered are rather ancient and/or embarrassing but if you’re curious to hear what I sound like… http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail94.html

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A post for airplane nerds only…

Mountains climbing nearly to 12,000′ separate the Los Angeles basin from the Palm Springs and Joshua Tree area.  A layer of clouds between 4000′ and 6000′ covered all of the Los Angeles airports.  Thus it was necessary to proceed from Sedona into Los Angeles on an Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) clearance.  The minimum enroute altitude on the direct airway from Twentynine Palms into LA is 13,500′ due to the fact that this airway goes straight over some of the tallest peaks.  I was flying along at 14,000′, breathing bottled oxygen, and got called by ATC:  “Fly heading 230 for a train.”

I banked the airplane and looked down wondering what kind of monster freight train they might have out West that would require an airplane at 14,000′ to adjust its course.

Then I realized that perhaps the call was “Flying heading 230 for terrain.”

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