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How to Use Rational Fanatics: Suicide Terrorism Explained (fwd)
by Jei 16 Sep '01

16 Sep '01

Written by: Ehud Sprinzak is dean of the Lauder School of Government, Policy, and Diplomacy at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. ^^^^^^ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 14:04:52 -0400 From: Matthew Gaylor <freematt(a)coil.com> To: Matthew Gaylor <freematt(a)coil.com> Subject: Rational Fanatics: Suicide Terrorism Explained

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Germany refuses to join in NATO military action
by Jim Choate 16 Sep '01

16 Sep '01

http://www.paknews.com/main.php?id=6&date1=2001-09-16 -- -- ____________________________________________________________________ Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. George Santyana The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Italian defence minister rules out Italian troops role
by Jim Choate 16 Sep '01

16 Sep '01

http://asia.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/world/article.html?s=asia/headlin… -- -- ____________________________________________________________________ Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. George Santyana The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Frank Sudia's proposal: Let's revive encryption key escrow
by Steve Schear 16 Sep '01

16 Sep '01

In "Encryption and the Restoration of National Sovereignty," you said: "No one disputes that unbreakable encryption impairs government ability to intercept suspect communications and issue warrants for stored data. The citizens have gained "unreviewable discretion" to communicate without oversight. They did not have this power before. Now they do." "This was a direct loss of sovereignty by the Government, with a corresponding "gain" by the citizens. Conversely, the restoration of investigative capabilities cannot be considered "taking freedom and liberty from the People," since they never historically possessed this freedom." ======================================================================== The Fourth Amendment was adopted in direct response to the English Parliament's practice of giving colonial revenue officers complete discretion to search for smuggled goods by means of writs of assistance. The writs permitted colonial authorities, including British troops, to enter homes and offices at will and search any person or place they wanted. The early Americans rebelled against these general searches, and on the eve of the Declaration of Independence, Samuel Adams said he regarded the opposition to general searches as "the Commencement of the Controversy between Great Britain and America." It is fair to say that absolute protection from general government searches is one of this country's founding principles. When the framers struck the original balance between personal privacy and the needs of law enforcement, remote listening devices had not yet been invented. But it is clear that had they existed, the framers would not have approved of them. By definition, electronic surveillance constitutes a general search, not a search limited to specific objects, people and places as required by the Fourth Amendment. Wiretapping, bugs, and keys to encrypted messages intrude on the most intimate aspects of human life. They hear/see everything and everyone, indiscriminately. Like vacuum cleaners, they sweep up all the details of innocent and often intimate private conversations. A tap on the phone of one person necessarily captures the conversations of anyone who happens to use that phone or call that number. Unlocking one person's encryption code subjects all who electronically communicate with that person to government surveillance. Even obtaining a court warrant does not fix this problem. Electronic eavesdropping cannot be regulated by a warrant precisely because of its dragnet quality; the object to be seized or the premises to be searched cannot be limited or even specified, because it is in the very nature of the technology to catch everything. In 1927, during the height of federal enforcement of National Alcohol Prohibition, the Court attempted to come to grips with electronic eavesdropping for the first time. Roy Olmstead, a bootlegger convicted entirely on the basis of evidence from wiretaps, argued before the Court that a search had been conducted without a warrant and without probable cause in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. In a 5-4 opinion, the Court ruled that a physical entry (a "trespass") must be committed before the Fourth Amendment's protection could be invoked. Since the wiretaps were physically placed outside Olmstead's home, the Court reasoned, there was no government intrusion and therefore no Fourth Amendment protection. The Olmstead decision defined the law for forty years, and during that period, the government was able to engage in virtually unrestricted electronic spying. The Olmstead case, by a narrow 5-4 margin, destroyed the original balance of the Fourth Amendment, but it was also the occasion for Justice Louis D. Brandeis' prescient dissent in which he warned that, "The progress of science in furnishing the government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wire-tapping." Brandeis wrote that because wiretaps indiscriminately pick up every conversation within their reach, they constitute the kind of general search prohibited outright by the Fourth Amendment, and that even a warrant requirement would not give sufficient protection. Unfortunately for our privacy rights, Brandeis' dissent has never been adopted by the Court, although it did overrule its Olmstead decision in 1967 when it belatedly recognized that the Fourth Amendment applied to wiretapping and electronic spying (Katz v. U.S.). Nonetheless, Justice Brandeis' account of the framer's intentions is right on the mark: "The makers of our Constitution...sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred as against the Government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of the rights of man and the right most valued by civilized men." Cryptography can help shift the balance of the Fourth Amendment back to what the framers originally intended. And that is what the FBI is against. The government's own records show that electronic surveillance is of marginal utility in preventing or solving serious crimes. It did not, for example, stop or lead to the apprehension of the Unabomber, Timothy McVeigh, or the first World Trade Center bombers. Those crimes were solved by good detective work. Serious crimes of violence, including terrorist crimes, are almost never the targets of electronic surveillance. Electronic surveillance does, however, lead to violations of the privacy rights of vast numbers of innocent Americans. According to the government's own statistics, 2.2 million conversations were intercepted in 1996, of which 1.7 million were deemed innocent by prosecutors. Electronic surveillance is absolutely inconsistent with a free society. Free citizens must have the ability to conduct instantaneous, direct, spontaneous and private communication using whatever technology is available. Without the assurance that private communications are, indeed, private, habits based upon fear and insecurity will gradually replace habits of freedom.

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The Enduring Power of Stupidity By Charles Platt
by Matthew Gaylor 16 Sep '01

16 Sep '01

[Charles Platt is senior writer for WIRED Magazine]

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US on the move
by citizenq＠hushmail.com 16 Sep '01

16 Sep '01

C-130s or equivalent passing overhead nearby on northerly course, about one every 2 minutes. thrum thrum beat the drum.

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Re: SYMBOL
by Jim Windle 16 Sep '01

16 Sep '01

On Sun, 16 Sep 2001 15:42:57 Bill Stewart wrote: > > >Donald Trump is a capitalist - if building his proposed >kilometer-high New Trump Tower would have made sense without >the subsidies he's been so good at talking New York into giving him, >it'd probably be built by now. It's not. > I agree completely that the real issue will be economics. Though, as I remeber, like most Manhattanites I try to tune "the Donald" out when he started spouting, the issue wil Trumps proposal to build the world's tallest building in the old railroad yards he is developing on the West Side was not the economics of the building, which he thought worked, but rather his inability to get the necessary zoning approvals. Another developer, Silvestein, had a 99 year lease on the WTC while the Port Authority continued to own the property. Siverstien has already called for the site to be redeveloped, though what if any rights he enjoys to do so under the 99 year lease on now non-existent buildings I don't know. As Trump seems at the moment at least to be syclically solvent I am sure he will make a high profile proposal to redevelop the site as well. Jim Windle >Rebuilding it doesn't make sense, though I did enjoy the picture >that's been floating around the net of the replacement building, >four towers shaped like a hand with the middle finger extended. :-) >If it weren't for the near-infinite value of land in Manhattan, >I'd say it would be better to build your basic eternal-flame monument there. > >At 09:47 AM 09/16/2001 -0700, Tim May wrote: >>The looming Bauhaus boxes of the World Trade Center never inspired me >>in the slightest way. > >Agreed - the Empire State building and Chrysler Building are cool, >but the WTC was ugly, though the view from the restaurant was impressive. > >(...and the John Hancock tower in Boston at least had the entertainment value >of guessing where the next glass window was going to fall off...) > > >>By contrast, the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis in Athens >>really _did_ inspire me. I guess this is why I like the Getty Center so much. > >And the Parthenon lasted over 2000 years - it didn't turn into a ruin >until the Turks blew up the ammunition storage there in the ~1850s. > >>Some years ago (mid 1960s), IBM decided to move the bulk of its >>headquarters operations _out_ of Manhattan to places like Armonk and >>Yorktown Heights, north of NYC. They found many of their execs were >>already living in those areas, and younger workers could buy actual homes >>in the suburban areas. Likewise, my old company, Intel, decided ... > >The Internet makes it possible for anybody to work from anywhere they want. >Of course, that's why everybody moved to the San Francisco Bay Area >to be near the action :-) > > Join 18 million Eudora users by signing up for a free Eudora Web-Mail account at http://www.eudoramail.com

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RE: CNN disinformation? (fwd)
by Jei 16 Sep '01

16 Sep '01

I hate to point out the obvious, but doesn't this whole WTC thing seems to be like it's a mossad operation to others? I have no proof, of course, but the economics and the reverse-engineering of the logics of the whole events point to this conclusion. 1) Israel has been very well prepared in that the current and ex-prime ministers have been very well available and have been talking on international television about this incident from the moment it started. 2) The below news is very beneficial to Israel 3) Israel benefits the most from this incident politically 4) They have the resources to do something like this 5) Their politicians don't care about killing innocent people 6) They have done it before to the Americans (Sinking one of their ships) 7) The Mossad recruit palestinians for suicide missions and kill the volunteers before they commit a bombing -> a short extention would be to use them for their own benefit by having them do suicide attacks in the US to gain support for their policies in the middle east, and have US attack the neighboring arab countries threatening Israel. 8) Osama has denied responsibility, yes he is "implicated" somehow by the evidence. 9) Osama would not seem to benefit from this politically or economically, or gain any support by doing this in the Arab countries, as has been made clear 10) Iraelis' claim to have warned USA before hand... etc. etc. etc. Tons of coincidences and reportings of facts about this whole incident in the news. Israel is very prominently playing this for all it's worth, and seems incredibly very well prepared. Of course, this does not mean that they had anything to do with it. I'm just pointing out that they are getting the biggest benefit, together with the military-industrial and spy-complexes of the USA. Certainly a nice conspiracy theory? ;-) On Sat, 15 Sep 2001, [anton.raath] wrote: > :- anybody could confirm the following? > > The authenticity of the "Palestinians celebrating footage dates back to > 1991" meme has been hotly debated on the Net over the last few days, and > last I heard nobody reputable was able to confirm that CNN was faking it. > Personally, I take CNN reports with a pinch of salt, but this might just be > a little too obvious to be true. > > For more speculation on this topic, there's a discussion at Plastic: > http://www.plastic.com/article.pl?sid=01/09/15/0020252&mode=thread > > A! > ====================================================== > anton l. raath > > > > Intelligence Forum (http://www.intelforum.org) is sponsored by Intelligence > and National Security, a Frank Cass journal (http://www.frankcass.com/jnls/ins.htm) >

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The Assault on Civilization by David Kelley
by Matthew Gaylor 16 Sep '01

16 Sep '01

http://www.objectivistcenter.org/pubs/dk_assault_on_civilization.asp The Assault on Civilization by David Kelley, Executive Director Most of us still find it impossible to grasp the destruction of the World Trade Center. It was real, we saw it, but it does not belong in any reality we can understand. We saw the airliners, full of people who might have been us, streak incomprehensibly toward the walls of steel and glass. We saw them morph into fireballs that trapped thousands of people, working at their desks on a routine morning, in an inferno that killed most of them. We saw the shimmering towers collapse, and the towers of volcanic smoke that rose to take their place in the New York skyline. The images have been imprinted on our minds, never to be forgotten, but they will not compute. In that sense, the terrorists succeeded. They have rocked our sense of reality. They have confronted us with a horror we could not have imagined, and may never assimilate. But they have also revealed, for everyone to see, the real nature of their cause. The assault is being described as an act of war against America, and it is. But unlike the Pentagon, the World Trade Center had no military significance. Unlike the White House--which the fourth, unsuccessful plane had apparently targeted--it had no political significance for U.S. policy in the Middle East, or anywhere else. The attack on the twin towers cannot be seen as an effort, even a twisted effort, to redress the grievances of people who feel dispossessed. It was an act of sheer destruction, for the sake of destruction. With rare unity, Americans have grasped that this was an assault on their values, and it was. The buildings were obviously chosen as symbolic targets. But the values are not uniquely American, or even uniquely Western. They are the values of civilized life anywhere. This was an assault on civilization as such. When it was built in 1973, the World Trade Center was an engineering marvel, innovative in structural design and in the construction techniques invented to erect the towers on that site. Though larger, taller structures have since been erected, New Yorkers were justly proud of these towering symbols of technical, industrial audacity. The buildings' tenants were a cross-section of a productive economy: insurance companies, engineers, banks and investment houses, law firms, educators, employment agencies, construction companies, travel agencies. The tenants included great names in American finance--Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Lehman Brothers. They included Empire Health Choice, which provides health insurance and medical services to millions of people in New York State. Dow Jones, one of the world's great publishing companies, had offices in the South Tower. The top floors of the North Tower housed the transmitting facilities for the major broadcasters in New York. Fuji Bank of Japan occupied three floors, and scores of businesses from other countries had offices in the building. Befitting its name and the intent of the builders, it was a crossroads of international commerce, a symbol not only of wealth but of trade as the civilized mode of human interaction. "World trade means world peace," said the chief architect, Minoru Yamasaki. "The World Trade Center buildings in New York had a bigger purpose than just to provide room for tenants. The World Trade Center is a living symbol of man's dedication to world peace. The World Trade Center should, because of its importance, become a representation of man's belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of men, and through cooperation, his ability to find greatness." These towers became landmark of the skyline of New York City, which has always been a powerful symbol in its own right, a beacon of freedom and opportunity. From the Statue of Liberty to the Empire State Building, that skyline was forged from the melting pot where the best in man is refined from the accidents of race and nationality. In Ayn Rand's Fountainhead, the famous novel of a New York architect, one character says that when he sees the city, "I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body." Many of us wished we could have done just that when we saw the towers finally crumple and collapse. Technology, achievement, trade, law, peace, freedom-these were the values under attack. They are not American values but human values, the values of civilized life. Though it is not yet known for certain which particular terrorist band committed the atrocity, we have every reason to believe they sprang from a fanatical subculture of Islamic fundamentalism. But our enemy is not Islam, which created one of the world's great civilizations, nor is it the Arab or Iranian or Afghani peoples. Our enemy is the nihilism of this subculture. The terrorist leaders claim to speak for Palestinians. But the grievances of that people, even if legitimate, cannot explain the motivation for this act, much less justify it. The terrorists claim to speak for the victims of Western imperialism. But any literal imperialism is a thing of the past, long since redressed by the wealth that Europe and America have showered on these countries. It is clearly not the military or political power but the cultural power of the West that they resent. What makes them denounce America as the great Satan is nothing as superficial as Coca-Cola or blue jeans. It is our secular culture of freedom, reason, and the pursuit of happiness. They hate our individualism; what they want is an authoritarian society where thought and behavior are controlled by true believers. They hate capitalism as a system of trade, production, innovation, and progress; what they want is a return to a primitive mode of existence from which these "materialist" aspirations have been banished. They hate the political system of individual rights, the rule of law, and secular government; what they want is a tribal society ruled by command. The nihilist subculture is a worldwide phenomenon. We see it in the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo sect that released poison gas in the Tokyo subways. We see it in the hate-filled eyes of Christian killers in Northern Ireland. We see it in the eco-terrorists who spike trees and blow up electrical transmission towers. We see it in less murderous forms in the anti-globalization protesters who want to stifle international trade. We see it in the theorists of primitivism from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the Unabomber. Civilization has always attracted parasites who wanted to steal wealth from those who produce it. But this phenomenon is different. The nihilists do not seek wealth for themselves. They want to destroy the wealth of others. They do not seek freedom from domination. They want to abolish freedom. They do not seek a place at the table of world commerce. They want to smash the table. They do not seek a better life. They glory in death. They represent the worst form of envy, the most vicious form of human evil. They hate us not for our sins but for our virtues, and they will not be appeased. The United States and its allies must cease the policy of trying to counter terrorism by negotiation. Negotiation is an exercise of reason that civilized people use to resolve their differences. We are not dealing with civilized people. We must cease the policy of excusing their violence by their poverty and trying to buy them off with subsidies. We are not dealing with people who seek such gain. We must declare war on the terrorists and use whatever force it takes to render them incapable of posing any further threat. In the early 1800s, Thomas Jefferson sent the United States navy to rid the Barbary coast of pirates. We urge President Bush and the Congress to undertake a similar campaign not merely against the perpetrators of this outrage but against every nest of terrorists who have declared themselves, by the death and destruction they have wrought, to be enemies of mankind. In doing so, we will be acting in our own self-defense, with the moral authority of those who have been attacked. But we should understand and declare to the world that we are acting to preserve a world order on which civilized values depend, and civilized peoples everywhere must join in this cause. * * * ) 2001 The Objectivist Center Formerly the Institute for Objectivist Studies For inquires about The Objectivist Center or sample copies of our brochure, catalog or newsletter, please send your postal address to toc(a)objectivistcenter.org. Please send comments, questions, and suggestions about the website to webmaster Shawn Klein. The Objectivist Center 11 Raymond Ave., Suite 31 Poughkeepsie, NY 12603 845-471-6100 (voice) 845-471-6195 (fax) toc(a)objectivistcenter.org __________________________________________________________________________ Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. --- ************************************************************************** Subscribe to Freematt's Alerts: Pro-Individual Rights Issues Send a blank message to: freematt(a)coil.com with the words subscribe FA on the subject line. List is private and moderated (7-30 messages per week) Matthew Gaylor, (614) 313-5722 ICQ: 106212065 Archived at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fa/ **************************************************************************

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Re: Pakistan's Price: $30bbn per trick
by Subcommander Bob 16 Sep '01

16 Sep '01

At 12:18 PM 9/16/01 -0500, measl(a)mfn.org wrote: >It appears Pakistan has closed the deal: we retire thirty billion in their >debt, and they agree to act as our proxy. Damn they're cheap! > >Personally, I would have held out for a *lot* more... > They should get the Serbs to negotiate; they got $100 million for turning in Milosevic to the US. But with CI chiefs in FBI, CIA coming in at around a million each, they may have gone for the easy deal... ........ Fox News just interviewed a Catholic priest who blessed the future violence.

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