Month: March 2013

What a waste:

New York City police spent an estimated one million hours in staff time making low level marijuana possession arrests between the years 2002 and 2012, according to the findings of a study released today by the Marijuana Arrest Research Project and the Drug Policy Alliance.

Authors of the study report that City law enforcement personnel engaged in approximately one million hours of police officer time to make 440,000 marijuana possession arrests over the past 11 years. Authors further estimated that those arrested for marijuana possession in New York City have spent five million hours in police custody over the last decade.

Authors concluded: “[I]t is clear that the marijuana arrests have taken police off the street and away from other crime-fighting activities for a significant amount of time.”

Daniel Klaidman reports that the White House is ready to transfer control of the drone program from Langley to the Pentagon:

The proposed plan would unify the command and control structure of targeted killings and create a uniform set of rules and procedures. The CIA would maintain a role, but the military would have operational control over targeting. Lethal missions would take place under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which governs military operations, rather than Title 50, which sets out the legal authorities for intelligence activities and covert operations.

But it probably won’t satisfy critics of the program’s secrecy:

For one thing, targeted killing operations will likely be run by the highly secretive Joint Special Operations Command, the umbrella organization for shadow warriors like the Navy SEALs and Delta Force. And while they run clandestine, rather than covert operations, JSOC is not known for its eagerness to advertise its operations with the press or Congress.

In fact, there’s at least a chance that the change could mean less congressional oversight rather than more. There’s nothing in the law that says the military has to brief congressional committees about its lethal activities. The CIA, on the other hand, is compelled under Title 50 to notify Congress of its intelligence activities.

Dashiell Bennett has more on those legal distinctions. Ackerman suggests that the new policy is a red herring:

What matters more than which bureaucratic entity operates the drones is what the politicians ostensibly in charge of those bureaucracies want to do with them. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky)’s 13-hour filibuster earlier this month vented congressional dissatisfaction with the secrecy, scope and intensity of the global targeted-killing program. It remains to be seen if Paul and his colleagues wish to trim the edges of that lethal program or constrain it more substantially. Congress has been more bellicose than the Obama administration.

(Photo: Committee ranking member US Senator Chuck Grassley (L) and Senator Dianne Feinstein (R) listen as committee chairman Senator Patrick Leahy (C) speaks during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill, March 20, 2013 in Washington, DC. The committee called drone industry experts to testify about the future use of drones in law enforcement. By Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)

Tom Nichols urges the US to think small:

The Cold War mission of deterring another nuclear superpower by preparing for global nuclear combat, insofar as that idea ever made sense, is now a part of history and should be left behind. The new mission for U.S. nuclear weapons for at least for the next two decades, if not longer, should be one of minimum deterrence, meaning the prevention of a major nuclear attack on America with a small nuclear force — perhaps as low as 300 strategic weapons — targeted only for retaliation for the attempted destruction of the United States and nothing else.

This is not a radical proposal: some American military and civilian leaders gravitated to the idea of a minimum deterrent as early as the 1950s.

Along the same lines, Tom Jacobs flags a recent paper (pdf) that tested how willing Americans are to use nuclear weapons:

“We initially set up the study assuming there would be a strong aversion to using nuclear weapons,” he said in an interview. “The design was created to determine how strong an incentive to use (nukes) do we have to create before people reluctantly sign on. How much of a military advantage would the nuclear option have to give above the conventional option before people would say, ‘We have to do this’?

“We found you barely have to put a finger on the scale.”

Fiction writer David Cameron attempted to expose the unfairness of literary journals by submitting to them an already published New Yorker story under guise of a fake, unpublished writer. The journals all rejected the story. David Haglund yawns:

Many other writers have indulged in this silly exercise before. There was the guy who sent Jane Austen novels to several U.K. publishers five years ago, as if it made sense to write 19th-century-style fiction in 2007. (Even assuming that some of the publishers did not recognize, e.g., Pride and Prejudice—which I doubt—it would still read like pastiche, and not very interesting pastiche.) There was the other guy who sent part of a lesser Jerzy Kosinski novel around. That same guy (and they are all, for some reason, guys) submitted the script of Casablanca to a bunch of movie agents—as if the movie business had not changed a whit since 1942, and those agents who were foolish enough not to recognize the classic dialogue were proving some point about how the people at the top have no idea what they’re doing.

Fallows highlights this video, which is sympathetic to the Steubenville rapists, as an extreme example of false equivalence:

A petition asking CNN to apologize, as of this writing, has over 245,000 signatures. Elias Isquith analyzes:

Basically what I think happened is that the people who run these shows are overworked. They get sloppy. And lazy. If we consider that the victim’s anonymity made it exceedingly difficult to run he-said/she-said coverage, it’s kind of a no-brainer that we’d end up with reports that have much more in common with one of those unbearably maudlin SportsCenter “stories” about athletes triumphing in the face of adversity than they do with actual news.

The weeping rapists were right there. TV gold. And the girl? She didn’t even give us a single little tear! No Casey Anthony, her.

The Onion’s take on the subject here.

It comes (via David Corn) from Richard Perle on NPR:

Montagne: Ten years later, nearly 5000 American troops dead, thousands more with wounds, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead or wounded. When you think about this, was it worth it?

Perle: I’ve got to say I think that is not a reasonable question. What we did at the time was done with the belief that it was necessary to protect this nation. You can’t a decade later go back and say we shouldn’t have done that.

Neoconservatism: never look back; never question; never take responsibility; always avoid accountability. Just seek power. Then wage war.

“Is it really too much to ask that those who supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq so enthusiastically at the time, and whose second thoughts have been far less fierce and full-throated than their initial enthusiasm, not deploy virtually the exact same crusading rhetoric about the necessity of the use of U.S. power in the name of overthrowing tyrants, and of America serving as an armed midwife to the birth of democracy in the Middle East, with regard to Syria as they did a decade ago with regard to Iraq?” – David Rieff, TNR, in what appears to me to be a direct rebuke of Leon Wieseltier’s continued ambivalence.

Bruce Schneier believes so:

Resilience — building systems able to survive unexpected and devastating attacks — is the best answer we have right now. We need to recognize that large-scale attacks will happen, that society can survive more than we give it credit for, and that we can design systems to survive these sorts of attacks. Calling terrorism an existential threat is ridiculous in a country where more people die each month in car crashes than died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

If the U.S. can survive the destruction of an entire city — witness New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina — we need to start acting like it, and planning for it. Still, it’s hard to see how resilience buys us anything but additional time. Technology will continue to advance, and right now we don’t know how to adapt any defenses — including resilience — fast enough.