As their government withers without international aid, Palestinians are tailoring modest lives to desperate times. Bartering, borrowing and doing without, thousands of people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are improvising their way through a deepening financial crisis with help from native sons, virtual strangers and each other.
Government salaries directly or indirectly sustain roughly 1 million people in the occupied territories, and in places such as this one the money serves as the economic lifeblood of the community. Town officials say a majority of the village’s roughly 2,000 people rely on Palestinian Authority salaries as their chief source of income.
the washington post
The short term answer, of course, is for Hamas to down arms, recognize Israel and get on with governing. Which will not happen for a while.
Longer tern you have to ask what sort of country the PA would become when one million of its citizens are directly dependent upon the government - such as it is - for their living. The comparison to the vibrant Israeli economy could not be more stark.
At some point, and I hope it is soon, the Palis are going to have to get past the victim mentality which has been their lot for the last fifty years and get on with making their way in the world. And the best partners and possibly friends they have will be the Israelis. The Arab world is interested in the Palestinians as a cause; but it is incapable of actually helping them except as a matter of welfare.
The Troll of Ramallah’s legacy lives on.
Written by jay on May 12th, 2006 with no comments.
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USA Today has published a story which is putting the left side of the US blogosphere into a lather. The National Security Agency has been, quietly, creating a data base of all of the telephone calls made in the US - with the exception of those in the QWest area as QWest was not co-operating. Oddly, the NSA started doing this shortly after 9/11.
Now, it is not as if the NSA is monitoring the content of the calls. One of the commentors on Right Wing Nuthouse offers informed speculation as to what this data might be used for:
But let me tell you what I think they’re doing with it based on my experience in the IC. It’s what we would call traffic analysis. First we start with a huge and comprehensive database of all the calls in the USA for the last 5 years. I don’t know for sure, but this database probably only contains the meta-data on the calls – things like the number called, duration of call, time, etc. I doubt, and certainly hope, that the actual contents of the calls are not collected, though that capability is certainly available and feasible. To me, that would be a gross violation of the Constitution.
Now, the NSA gets the phone number of some terrorist operating in the USA. They can then search this database and retrieve the information on every single phone call placed by that number. Any phone numbers the terrorist called will also have their numbers searched, and pretty soon you’ll have a big historical network of phone and data traffic that revolves around one particular phone number. After analyzing that network, requests for wiretaps, searches, and other procedures can be conducted against the phone numbers and their owners who are associated with the terrorist phone number.
right wing nuthouse
Assuming for the moment this is pretty much what the NSA is up to it is difficult to object to.
The general concept of privacy rights makes a great deal of sense if it is the IRS or even the criminal justice folks who are using advanced technology to discover information about citizens. However, where the issue is terror and the technology may be able to stop attrocities like 9/11 it is a whole other question.
There is a huge divide in the US between people who have fallen back into the happy idea that Islamic terrorism is really just a law enforcement issue albeit on a global scale and those who see Islamic terrorism as an act of war. If you see it as about criminal justice then the full protections of the American Constitution apply and the entire idea of domestic surveilance of any sort is suspect. If you see it as war then elements of the Constitution will be suspended for the duration.
It is not at all clear that the NSA data gathering program violates Constitutional protections but, in a sense, that is beside the point. The prior and more basic question is whether or not the United States is at war and what that implies.
President Bush is conducting national policy on the basis that the United States is at war. He has shown some but not a lot of restraint in the conduct of that war. One area in which he has shown tremendous restraint is in forebearing from prosecuting the people who are leaking this sort of information to the media - apparently for political purposes.
By providing this information the leakers have, once again, revealled an element of the secret war against the jihadis. Now, ask yourself what the reaction would have been had some Bletchley Park type decided to “out” the fact the British had cracked Enigma and were reading German signals. And propose that this individual had cited as his justification that the program was in violation of British law or that Churchill was a drunk or that the right policy to deal with Hitler was to let him keep most of Europe so that the Communists could be kept at bay. Such a person would have had a short trial and, depending upon whether they were military or civilian, would have been shot or hung for treason.
For the moment there have been no terror attacks in the United States since 9/11. This could change. A suicide bomber at the front door of Macys or a dirty bomb assembled in a Chicago appartment building would bring the war back to the front burner of even the most left wing Americans. And, right then, the question of the legitimacy of the leakers’ motives would be subsumed in the desire to find the people who betrayed their country and let the jihadis kill more Americans.
The point which seems to be lost on the civil libertarians and the lefty Bush haters is that while it is completely legitimate to disagree with Bush and the conduct of the war thus far, it is entirely illegitimate to selectively leak national security information for political ends. At this point I would think the President entirely right to appoint a Special Prosecutor with full security clearance to find and prosecute the leakers - likely beginning with CIA leaker Mary McCarthy - to the full extent of the law. A law which includes treason and which still imposes the death penalty upon traitors during time of war.
(And don’t prosecute anyone for the sorts of bogus process things which seem to be the best Fitz can come up with in the increasingly farcical Plame investigation.)
Written by jay on May 12th, 2006 with no comments.
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