James Landrith is...Taking The Gloves Off: syndicated

left-libertarian blogger, publisher, USMC veteran and civil liberties activist

 

Census Data Not So Confidential After All 
March 8, 2010
Mary L. G. Theroux

The current $350 million ad campaign for the 2010 Census, including the much-maligned $2.5 million Super Bowl spots, urges individuals to “Tell your story.” The Census Bureau is particularly eager for minorities and illegal immigrants to do so, as they are traditionally believed to be the most undercounted.

Yet widespread non-compliance, especially among those most likely to be discriminated against by a majority, may not be rooted strictly in the “ignorance” the ads are designed to overcome. History—including very recent history—shows that the information provided to the Census can be used against you.

The most recent examples occurred in 2002 and 2003, when the Census Bureau turned over information it had collected about Arab-Americans to Homeland Security.

Data from the 1940 Census was used to intern Japanese, Italian, and German Americans following the U.S.’s entry into the war, and to monitor and persecute others who escaped internment. In addition to providing geographic information to the War Department, the Census Bureau released the name, address, age, sex, citizenship status and occupation of Japanese Americans in the Washington, D.C., area to the Treasury Department in response to anunspecified threat against President Franklin Roosevelt in 1943.

There may well be other instances of such data sharing of which we remain unaware, as the full scope of the personal information released during World War II has only recently been brought to light.

Thus, while the Census Bureau assures us that “your confidentiality is protected. Title 13 requires the Census Bureau to keep all information about you and all other respondents strictly confidential,” these exceptions negate such assurances. Of course, the release of the “strictly confidential” data was also perfectly legal: during World War II, under the terms of the Second War Powers Act, and more recently, under the terms of the USA PATRIOT Act, now extended by the Obama administration.

In preparation for this year’s census, 140,000 workers were hired to collect GPS readings for every front door in the nation. Such pinpoint precision will certainly simplify the process of locating any individual or group that may be identified as a threat to “national security” in the future. Remember, for example, the 1976 Senate Report in which 26,000 Americans were slated for roundup by the FBI in the event of a national emergency at the height of the Cold War. Now that the U.S. Government’s Terrorist Watchlist has exceeded one million, the GPS data acquired could be instrumental in accomplishing such a roundup.

Meanwhile, the data is also shared a little more broadly than advertised. Stanford University recently joined UC Berkeley, Duke, the University of Michigan, UCLA, and others in having its very own census data center. As the director of the new center explained, “The Census Bureau is very interested in making the centers more accessible to scholars who can use the data they provide.”

As Henry Brady, dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley and principal investigator for the California Census Research Data Centers helpfully added: “We’re trying to make centers where lots of federal agencies will let us use their data.”

While reassurances are repeated that the data is held under the strictest security, and will only be used for innocuous projects like “government programs and solutions to our problems,” do we really want academics to social engineer policy solutions based on sensitive personal data? After all, they may turn out to be no more desirable than the “solutions” provided by government programs like internment and renditioning. Without the protections afforded by a right to privacy, there’s little chance of escaping a political will to enforce discriminatory policies.

This “mission creep” for the Census thus pushes up against a level of discomfort no amount of advertising dollars can likely assuage. Many will no doubt choose to follow former Senate majority leader Trent Lott’s advice to skip any Census questions they feel violates their privacy—which may well include any exceeding the Constitution’s mandate for an “actual Enumeration.” Unfortunately, choosing privacy now costs more: legislation recently passed raises the fine for “anyone over 18 years old who refuses or willfully neglects to complete the questionnaire or answer questions posed by census takers” from a limit of $100 to $5,000—a fact not advertised even in the small print.

The Spanish Noose Around Chavez's Neck 
March 3, 2010
Alvaro Vargas Llosa

WASHINGTON—An investigation triggered by the contents of computer files captured during a raid on a guerrilla camp in Ecuador has now suggested a Venezuelan link between the ETA terrorist organization in Spain and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. A Spanish court’s decision to indict 13 Spaniards and Colombians as a result of that investigation should shame those who questioned the validity of the computer files at the time of the raid. Among those indicted is Arturo Cubillas Fontan, an ETA member employed by Venezuela’s Ministry of Agriculture and married to Goizeber Odriozola, the chief of staff of Hugo Chavez. Cubillas, believed to be the main contact between the FARC and ETA, is accused in the indictment of coordinating the training of ETA members in urban guerrilla warfare. The indictment also alleges that the FARC sought logistical help from ETA in Madrid in connection with an alleged plot to assassinate Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

The Spanish investigation got under way thanks to evidence obtained by Colombia after the 2008 raid on the camp controlled by Raul Reyes, a key FARC commander. Colombian troops found 17,000 files and 37,000 documents in three satellite computers, two external hard disks and three memory sticks. Once Dipol, the Colombian secret service, studied the content, Interpol was brought in to authenticate the files and confirm that Colombia had not tampered with them. Colombia then discreetly shared relevant parts with the countries named in the files.

What was disclosed in the media was only part of a gold mine of information about the structure, the funding and the international connections of the Colombian terrorists. Venezuela immediately began a campaign to discredit the notion that those computers existed or, if they did, contained incriminating evidence. Allies of the Chavez regime, including governments, political leaders, intellectuals, nongovernmental organizations and some media outlets, were recruited to feed the campaign.

The idea that computer files could survive an attack by Super Tucano fighters and Black Hawk helicopters was ridiculed. The notion that contacts between Ivan Marquez, a FARC representative, and Chavez were registered in writing was scoffed at. How could Venezuela give FARC $300 million and serve as a conduit for the arming of Colombian terrorists with weapons imported from Russia, and leave proof of the triangulation in a laptop? The Organization of American States did not move a finger in the face of such a blatant violation of the 2002 Inter-American Convention Against Terrorism.

And yet the evidence was overwhelming. Among other witnesses, Bertrand de la Grange, an authoritative investigative journalist, gained access to the files—which had survived the attack because they were held in metallic suitcases. His first reports were published in Mexico’s Letras Libres and then picked up around the world. They explained the “five rings” of the FARC’s structure, including “Ring 3,” which operated out of Venezuela with Chavez’s help, and “Ring 5,” which spread its tentacles to 15 countries, among them Spain. The author concluded that there was “a network of international complicity of unsuspected dimensions.”

I asked de la Grange how decisive the information in the computer files was for Spain’s National Court’s investigation. “It was the main evidence,” he told me. “Those files had already led to the arrest of Remedios Garcia for aiding FARC in Spain and helped dismantle several networks of support for FARC in Europe.”

Venezuela’s ties to FARC are ancient. In December of 2004, Colombia arrested Rodrigo Granda, FARC’s chief of international relations, after bounty hunters captured him in Venezuela and took him to the border. Julio Montoya, of Venezuela’s MAS party, revealed that some 500 FARC members had been granted Venezuelan citizenship and operated on the Zulia-Tachira corridor along the border with the two countries.

Chavez’s ties to terrorism go beyond FARC and ETA. A few months ago, New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau accused Venezuela of helping Iran circumvent international sanctions in connection with its nuclear program. According to Morgenthau, a Venezuelan barred by the U.S. Treasury from conducting business here because of his terrorist connections, Ghazi Nasr al Din, is working under a false name at the Venezuelan embassy in Lebanon.

The political significance of the Spanish National Court’s indictments cannot be underestimated. Spain’s left-wing government has been a friend of Cuba and Venezuela; it even sold Chavez weapons a few years ago. Madrid has resisted attempts by the European Union to denounce Venezuelan and Cuban human rights violations. Faced with such massive evidence coming out of its country’s own courts, how can the government maintain its policy without paying a devastating price at the polls?

The President’s Bipolar Energy Policy 
March 2, 2010
William F. Shughart II
Clarion-Ledger

Supporters of generating electricity with nuclear power cheered after learning that President Obama had included federal guarantees in next fiscal year’s budget to clear the way for starting work on the first two new U.S. nuclear power plant in decades. The same people jeered when they also saw that the president proposed eliminating funding for a national nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, originally scheduled to open this year, but delayed by congressional diversions of monies appropriated for the site to other spending programs.

So with one hand, Washington plans to facilitate the construction of a new nuclear power plant by shielding owners from liability for future accidents, but with its other hand, doesn’t want to finish building a repository to safely store nuclear waste. By taking such action, the president essentially said “Never mind!” to the nation’s public utility customers, who for more than 25 years have paid one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour to finance the digging of the hole at Yucca Mountain, which now will be filled in.

John Maynard Keynes would be proud of Mr. Obama. After all, Keynes advised building pyramids and burying money in bottles for people to dig up as economic pump-priming policies during the Great Depression.

Schizophrenia likewise afflicts the administration’s approach to America’s oil and gas industry. The president, as have all White House occupants since the 1970s, wants to promote American “energy independence,” especially so of unfriendly countries like Iran and Venezuela. He also presides over an economy plagued by a 10 percent unemployment rate and a federal budget deficit exceeding $1.5 trillion.

As President Obama ponders how to respond to those challenges, he has turned a blind eye to the domestic oil and gas industry’s potential for job creation and tax revenue. Because it supplies most of America’s energy needs, that sector supports more than nine million high-paying American jobs. It could create many more.

Aided by technological breakthroughs, more energy resources have been accessed from remoter places than ever before, with significantly less impact on the environment.

Yet for all its talk about energy independence and jobs, the Obama Administration has continued to push drilling initiatives aside. Rather than lease offshore areas in the Atlantic, Pacific and eastern Gulf of Mexico, or in the Inter-Mountain West and Alaska, it calls for yet another round of environmental studies. Never mind that those untapped areas hold enough oil and natural gas to power 65 million American cars for 60 years and heat 60 million households for 160 years.

The Destin Dome, for example, 25 miles off the coast of Pensacola, Florida, could produce up to 165 billion cubic feet of natural gas annually for the next 20 years, according to estimates filed with the Interior Department. But Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has blocked plans to lease new offshore areas for exploration and drilling.

President Obama thus fails to heed his own preference for maximizing the use of low-carbon energy sources.

The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners reports that ignoring America’s vast oil and natural gas reserves will cost our economy $2.4 trillion over the next two decades if the ban on drilling in areas now off-limits is not lifted.

It is time to stop an energy policy working at cross-purposes with economic policy. Expanding access to oil and natural gas reserves would create high-paying jobs, bring billions of dollars of revenue into federal and state treasuries and provide consumers with more clean-burning natural gas.

It is foolish to wait until foreign supplies are disrupted and energy prices spike again.

Counterproductive Counterinsurgency 
March 1, 2010
Charles Peña

A recent NATO airstrike in the province of Uruzgan—against what was thought to be a convoy of Taliban insurgents on their way to attack Afghan and foreign military forces—killed at least 27 Afghan civilians, including four women and a child. In February, more than 50 Afghan civilians are believed to have been killed in more than half a dozen U.S. and NATO military operations.

The good news is that “collateral” civilian casualties have dropped since Gen. Stanley McChrystal took over as the commanding general in Afghanistan, and he has apologized publicly for the casualties on Afghan national television. The bad news, however, is that—although they are fewer than before—civilian casualties are counterproductive to counterinsurgency.

Although there is a military component to successful counterinsurgency, it is largely about winning hearts and minds. Killing innocent civilians—even unintentionally—is a prescription for defeat.

Consider the aftermath of a U.S. airstrike (targeting an alleged local Taliban leader) in March 2007 in the Kapisa province. Four generations of a single family were killed, including an 85-year-old man, four women, and four children ranging in age from five years to seven months. According to one villager, “We used to hate the Russians much more than Americans. But now when we see all this happening, I am telling you Russians behave much better than the Americans.” The 7-year-old boy who survived the bombing said plainly enough about Americans: “I hate them.”

Such hatred harbored by a family member can become the impulse for turning someone into a terrorist. For example, the suicide bomber responsible for killing 19 Israelis in Haifa at the beginning of October 2003 was a 29-year-old apprentice lawyer, Hanadi Jaradat—an educated woman with a good job who would not ordinarily fit a terrorist profile. But she had motivation: an Israeli crackdown that resulted in the shooting death of her brother and cousin.

Reportedly, Jaradat vowed revenge standing over her brother’s grave: “Your blood will not have been shed in vain. . . . The murderer will yet pay the price, and we will not be the only ones who are crying.” After the Haifa bombing, family members said, “She carried out the attack in revenge for the killing of her brother and her cousin by the Israeli security forces.”

The Israelis justify their actions because they feel they must confront a direct and imminent mortal threat to the survival of their country. U.S. actions in Afghanistan are more connected to the survival of U.S.-created government, not the United States itself. The Taliban per se is not a direct threat to America, and local al Qaeda threats within Afghanistan are not necessarily the same as the pre-9/11 al Qaeda threat to the United States. Indeed, even Osama bin Laden and the remnants of al Qaeda leadership thought to be in Pakistan may no longer be an operational threat.

What the United States needs to recognize is that continued military operations in Afghanistan are not in our larger strategic interests. We must understand that foreign military occupation—however well intended and however successful at the tactical, operational level—is not the solution, but rather part of the problem because of the resentment it creates (both in Afghanistan and also the larger Muslim world).

We must be true to our own principle of self-determination and allow the Afghan government to be fully sovereign and make decisions for itself—even if they are not the same decisions we would make. Our only real criterion should be that the government in Kabul—even if it includes elements of the Taliban—not provide support or safe haven for al Qaeda to attack America.