End the War on Freedom

An eye for an eye, and the whole world goes blind. -- Ghandi

I pray for those who lost loved ones in yesterday's calamity. I fear for our government's response. Personally, I think the proper response is to withdraw U.S. military from all foreign soil and end government weapons sales to all foreign countries. Focus on defending America, not the rest of the world.

Then we can turn to an effective method for preventing hijackings. Allow airplane passengers and crew to travel armed. Train crew members in armed defense against hijackers. Replace airport security with airplane security, provided free of charge by the passengers and crew. Make it crystal clear that hijackers will be shot, and the shooters will be lauded and decorated. Sorry for the cruel joke in today's title. I couldn't resist. It is apt. Had the passengers and/or crew in the hijacked planes been armed, they might have been able to stop the hijackers.

If we can find the individuals responsible for this atrocity, then we should try, convict, and execute them, but bombing a country thought to be harboring them will only make matters worse. I pray that enough folks in Congress realize this.

Eric S. Raymond at NewsForge - Decentralism against terrorism -- first lessons from the 9/11 attack - This is the sanest article I've read yet about the proper U.S. response to the attack. I'm copying the whole thing, to make sure it doesn't get lost. [newsforge]

Some friends have asked me to step outside my normal role as a technology evangelist today, to point out in public that a political panic reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attack could do a great deal more damage than the attack itself.

Today will not have been a victory for terrorism unless we make it one. If we reward in any way the Palestinians who are now celebrating this hideous crime in the streets of the West Bank, that wil have been a victory for terrorism. If we accept "anti-terrorism" measures that do further damage to our Constitutional freedoms, that will have been a victory for terrorism. But if we learn the right lessons, if we make policies that preserve freedom and offer terrorists no result but a rapid and futile death, that will have been a victory for the rest of us.

We have learned today that airport security is not the answer. At least four separate terror teams were able to sail right past all the elaborate obstacles -- the demand for IDs, the metal detectors, the video cameras, the X-ray machines, the gunpowder sniffers, the gate agents and security people trained to spot terrorists by profile. There have been no reports that any other terror units were successfully prevented from achieving their objectives by these measures. In fact, the early evidence is that all these police-state-like impositions on freedom were exactly useless -- and in the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center lies the proof of their failure.

We have learned today that increased surveillance is not the answer. The FBI's "Carnivore" tap on the U.S.'s Internet service providers didn't spot or prevent this disaster; nor did the NSA's illegal Echelon wiretaps on international telecommunications. Video monitoring of public areas could have accomplished exactly nothing against terrorists taking even elementary concealment measures. If we could somehow extend airport-level security to the entire U.S., it would be just as useless against any determined and even marginally competent enemy.

We have learned today that trying to keep civilian weapons out of airplanes and other areas vulnerable to terrorist attack is not the answer either -- indeed, it is arguable that the lawmakers who disarmed all the non-terrorists on those four airplanes, leaving them no chance to stop the hijackers, bear part of the moral responsibility for this catastrophe.

I expect that in the next few months, far too many politicians and pundits will press for draconian "anti-terrorist" laws and regulations. Those who do so will be, whether intentionally or not, cooperating with the terrorists in their attempt to destroy our way of life -- and we should all remember that fact come election time.

As an Internet technologist, I have learned that distributed problems require distributed solutions -- that centralization of power, the first resort of politicians who feed on crisis, is actually worse than useless, because centralizers regard the more effective coping strategies as threats and act to thwart them.

Perhaps it is too much to hope that we will respond to this shattering tragedy as well as the Israelis, who have a long history of preventing similar atrocities by encouraging their civilians to carry concealed weapons and to shoot back at criminals and terrorists. But it is in that policy of a distributed response to a distributed threat, with every single citizen taking personal responsibility for the defense of life and freedom, that our best hope for preventing recurrences of today's mass murders almost certainly lies.

If we learn that lesson, perhaps today's deaths will not have been in vain.
--
Eric S. Raymond

"The power to tax involves the power to destroy;...the power to destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create...." -- Chief Justice John Marshall, 1819.

L. Neil Smith at Sierra Times - Morning of Horror - L. Neil thinks that the government response to this tragedy will kill more innocents than were killed by today's terrorism. I hope he's wrong. I fear he's right. And he wasn't counting all the innocents in the countries the U.S. will attack in an effort to get the terrorists responsible. [sierra]

First of all, expect never to learn the truth about what happened at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and elsewhere this morning of September 11, 2001, any more than we did with regard to the murders of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, at Ruby Ridge, Waco, or Oklahoma City. Ambiguity and uncertainty serve far too many political interests.

...

What should those who value their freedom do? Every chance you have, from this moment on, whether it's on talk radio, or on the letters to the editor page, on the Internet while it's still possible, or in communication with everyone you know -- it's time for even the most apolitical to write to senators and congressmen -- emphasize two points:

First, inform them that closing down the First or Second or any other Amendment is not an appropriate response to what's happened, and that any politician or bureaucrat in office who attempts to capitalize on today's horrors is committing the same sort of blatantly criminal act I've always insisted must be punished under Bill of Rights enforcement.

Second, these things happen to nations with imperial ambitions. There has never been a major act of terrorism I know of that hasn't resulted from an act of government that violated somebody's rights. The way to keep this sort of thing from happening again is to stop those violations.

Claire Wolfe at Sierra Times - Who did this? - No comments. I'll let Claire speak: [sierra]

May there be a true hell for those who engineered this, and may they suffer through an eternity for each and every victim who was so much as scratched today. May they feel every broken bone, every torn limb, every screaming pain of every burn, every desperate smoke-filled breath, every spike of panic -- and every wail of grief within everyone who loves the wounded or dead. May they feel every drop of sweat, every ache of exhaustion, every bit of wrenching nausea felt by every rescue worker. Forever.

Then may they suffer another eternity of hell for every victim who, in the name of "protection" from sadistic, senseless monsters, loses the rights that make life worth living.

In the end, those victims will far outnumber the dead.

J.J. Johnson at Sierra Times - Welcome to the War - J.J. tells us the reason we got here, and part of the way out. [sierra]

Why did this happen to us? A lesson from our forefathers not to get involved with foreign entanglements. A lesson from our forefathers not to disarm its people. A lesson for our government not to ignore their Constitutional limitations. It may be hard for us to criticize ourselves in the wake of this tragedy but if we do not learn from our mistakes, we are doomed to repeat them.

...

From initial reports we received on how the aircraft were seized, there will be many questions about what should been done to improve airport security. Far removed from these discussions, I'm sure, will be the necessity of allowing air travelers to carry at least light weapons on aircraft. There will be those who immediately dismiss this as rhetoric. We can only respond with, "if it could save one life". In this case, one person with a firearm on the two planes which crashed into the World Trade Center (and one aimed at the Pentagon) could have saved between 20,000 and 50,000 lives.

John Silveira at Backwoods Home Magazine - Terrorist attack! Was this predictable? - Mr. Silveira has been predicting something like this for at least six years. He's worried about the coming "security measures". He warns that it will get worse unless America ends its roll as world policeman.

For the last few years I've been trying to tell people that, to a significant portion of the world, we are the terrorists. And, while we've been smugly sitting in front of our TVs watching our smart bombs hit targets with relative immunity to ourselves, the people who were targeted have been looking for ways to get even. It was just a matter of time. I've got to admit I didn't see it happening this way. I was afraid terrorists would get their hands on some of the small tactical nuclear bombs that seem to be unaccounted for in the dissolved Soviet Union and set them off in major cities, both here in the U.S. and in Western Europe. And this may as yet happen at some future date.

Dave Duffy at Backwoods Home Magazine - Should we retaliate against terrorists? - Mr. Duffy recommends strongly against bombing coutries claimed to be harboring terrorists. That's how we got here.

Before we retaliate against "suspected terrorists" or terrorists states, I suggest we sit back a while, grieve for our dead, and thoughtfully ponder the question: "Will bombing other nations eliminate terrorists attacks, or will it merely escalate things?"

And food for thought: these days a small atomic bomb can be made the size of a suitcase. How far are we willing to let the escalation go?

anti-state.com says:

Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com - Terror: The price of hegemony - U.S. government policy caused this tragedy. The Israeli's chose to live at war with Palestine. When did we get to vote on it? [anti-state]

What's going on is this: the war is coming home. The war fought by America and its chief Middle East ally against the Palestinian uprising has moved from the street of Gaza to the boulevards of the imperial metropolis. What Americans are facing, now, is what the Israelis face on a daily basis. For us, these attacks are a horror of monumental proportions, something so out of the ordinary that to call it 'unusual' would be something of an understatement: for the Israelis, this is a way of life.

Jason Smith at anti-state.com - Some Things Are Just Too Big To See - Empires fall. All of them. But it's the little people who suffer. [anti-state]

Our government is in the hands of madmen. Not many people care. Not many people even realize it. They have excellent propaganda machine plus a content and largely ignorant and/or drugged populace.

However, Apathy and Ignorance has a price.

The destruction they have caused and are causing to countless millions of people just like you, except poorer, in Iraq, Columbia, Yugoslavia and other countries we have no business destroying, is coming to our shores now.

James Dale Yohe at anti-state.com - Thousands Dead in the Pursuit of Empire - Tom Brokaw said yesterday that we need to "rethink" our civil liberties. Not! We need to rethink our imperialist government. [anti-state]

After the smoke clears and this disaster is put behind us, there is more to fear from the Brokaws and political elite of this country than from all the terror bombers and like savages in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership - Now Is The Time for Americans to Defend America - Some will call for disarmament of Americans or martial law. In reality, we need to be able to defend ourselves, individually. [jpfo]

William Norman Grigg at New American - Fight the Right War - John McCain, Tom Brokaw, William Cohen, and Tony Blair are making noises about limiting civil liberties. This is a really bad idea. [wnd]

If this crime has been carried out by a foreign power, or coalition of foreign powers, a declaration of war would be an appropriate (if tragic) response. If the attack was perpetrated by a quasi-state terrorist network, such as that operated by Osama bin Laden, the Constitution provides the means to respond: Congress has the authority to "define and punish" such crimes as piracy and terrorism, and to grant "letters of marque and reprisal" against the likes of bin Laden -- should he or his associates bear the responsibility for these attacks.

Why review such arcane matters at a time like this? It is important to recognize right away that the attack upon our nation provides neither the need nor the justification for the use of extra-constitutional measures.

Harry Browne at WorldNetDaily - When will we learn? - Violence begets violence. Always. [wnd]

Our foreign policy has been insane for decades. It was only a matter of time until Americans would have to suffer personally for it. It is a terrible tragedy of life that the innocent so often have to suffer for the sins of the guilty.

When will we learn that we can't allow our politicians to bully the world without someone bullying back eventually?

Dave Winer has links to many pictures and stories including Grace Sue's photo essay showing the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers (before and after photos, it happened too fast to capture with a still camera) [script]

Jerry Pournelle has lots of mail on the cowardly atrocities. Will move here next week. [pournelle]

Some other stories and discussion: BBC, kur05hin, Wired, Mark Allen (pictures), Slashdot #1, Slashdot #2, Slashdot #3 (lots of links), World New York (lots of links).

Hysteria at Slashdot [/.]:

PLEASE Please please try to avoid getting hysterical about this. I'm finding message boards filled with frothing hatred, wanting bloody revenge against entire countries.

Don't escalate this into war. There are no winners if it goes to war. We'll all just end up discovering that the terrosits do nukes. Some major American city will be vapourized in re-retaliation.

And get in touch with your State and Federal representatives. Protest any movement toward restricting your personal freedoms -- because they are going to lock you down. Protest any over-aggression -- because you will pay when the terrorists re-retaliate.

Time is NOT of the essence! Insist that things move carefully and cautiously. The world is in a delicate situation for the next few months. Treat it like a fragile, crystal bowl... and don't drop it.

virg_mattes at Slashdot - Loss of Life and Perspective - a good piece on the huge difference between an act of war and an act of terrorism. Armies are useless against terrorists, harmful even. [/.]

CNN - The text of President Bush's address Tuesday night, after terrorist attacks on New York and Washington - No martial law. Yet.

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