Nobody's Business

Searching Bags, Searching Minds

Random bag searches recently became standard procedure in the New York subway system.

I'm trying to understand the people who believe that this somehow advances the cause of western society; that by becoming less free, we're protecting our freedom against attacks by terrorists.

Would you also consent to random stops and searches in department stores? If not, why not? And if that is OK, how about restaurants? How about anywhere where lots of people gather and terrorists could maximize civilian casualties — let's say, baseball games? Block parties? Movie theaters? School cafetarias? The beach? The opera? Would that be OK? If not, why not?

Would you mind being patted down, wanded, questioned, and ordered to remove your footwear every time you walk into Grand Central Terminal or a BART station? If that's too much, how about just a simple bag search every time you enter such transportation hotspots? And if security personnel find something in your bag that alarms them — a pair of scissors, say, or knitting needles, or a bottle of wine, all of which could be used to highjack a train and crash it — what is the allowed procedure then? What may they ask of you at that point?

What part of your person may security officers search? A female terrorist might hide a bomb in her underwear (you'll recall that Chechen women are said to have brought two Russian passenger planes down with bra bombs). So, if you're a woman, would you consent to a random bra search now and then, whereby a trained, uniformed security cop pulls you out of a crowd at Times Square or Disneyworld or Washington D.C.'s Union Station, and gives your breasts a quick pat and a squeeze? If not, why not?

And if that is all right, then under which circumstances, and at which locations, would you also consent to a full cavity search? May a trained professional at the Mall of America discreetly place you behind a curtain, request that you spread your buttocks, and shine a flaslight up your anus? If not, why not?

Where do you draw the line, and why there? Remember, these measures are simply intended to make us all safer. They're designed to defend our freedom against the terrorists, right?

Also, should the Fourth Amendment be more loosely or more strictly applied as the official terror warning level goes down, then back up again? Which rights and liberties are worth holding onto, in your view, and which parts of the Constitution may be safely suspended or abolished?

Lawmakers Tackle Gassy Cows

I swear I didn't find this in The Onion. Honest.

How much gas does a cow emit? The findings will be used to write the state's first air quality regulations for dairies and could affect regulations nationwide. ... [A]ir quality specialists and animal emissions experts [are] in the middle of a heated dispute coming to a head Aug. 1, when the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District will announce its new emissions factor for cows — the amount of VOCs [volatile organic compounds], in pounds, that a cow releases each year. The number will eventually determine which dairies must apply for air quality permits and invest in mitigating air pollution equipment.

You read that right. After mandating everything from how many pages school books may have to how toilets must be flushed, California lawmakers are now about to regulate actual living beings. Indeed, these fearless leaders are — not to put too fine a point on it — cracking down on cow farts. If there's a nuttier example of legislative overreach, I have yet to come across it.

The Sims — Special Government Idiocy Edition!

This article in the Washington Post highlights what happens when you mix post-9/11 paranoia, big government, lack of institutional intelligence (sorry for the redundancy), and vast pools of taxpayers' money.

Three years ago, Sunnye L. Sims lived in a two-bedroom apartment north of San Diego, paying $1,025 in monthly rent. Then she landed a dream job, with $5.4 million in pay for nine months of work. Now she owns a $1.9 million stucco mansion with lofty ceilings on a hilltop, featuring sun-splashed palm trees and a circular driveway. "She really went uphill," said Jerry Collins, a maintenance man at her former apartment complex who recalled Sims talking about her ambitions.

Sims is not a Hollywood starlet. She is a meeting-and-events planner who built her fortune on a U.S. government contract. In 2002, her tiny company secured a no-bid subcontract to manage logistics on an urgent federal project to protect the nation's airports in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Sims, now 42, recruited hundreds of people to help hire a government force of 60,000 airline passenger screeners on a tight deadline. With little experience, her tiny company was asked to help set up and run screener-assessment centers in a hurry at more than 150 hotels and other facilities. Her company eventually billed $24 million.

The company, Eclipse Events Inc., was among the most important of the 168 subcontractors hired by prime contractor NCS Pearson Inc. The cost of the overall contract rose in less than a year to $741 million from $104 million, and federal auditors concluded that $303 million of that spending was unsubstantiated. Spurred by that audit, federal agents are examining the entire contract and focusing on Eclipse, according to government officials and Pearson.

[...] Eclipse came out of nowhere, starting as a one-woman operation based in Sims's apartment. She was hired in a hurry, through word of mouth, recommended by someone who did not review her background in detail. She had worked for more than a decade as an event planner for the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. But her company, Eclipse, did not exist as a corporation until Sims got the Pearson subcontract; two weeks later, she filed incorporation papers. Over the next several months, Sims hired hundreds of freelance meeting planners, many of them sight unseen.As the number of hotel assessment sites expanded — the Transportation Security Administration doubled the number of screeners to be hired — Eclipse's subcontract grew to $24 million from $1.1 million.

Though Eclipse is being investigated for possible overcharging and fraud, at this point is seems just as likely that what the tiny company did was on the up-and-up. If I charge the federal gub'mint a thousand dollars for a pound of apples and its accountants readily pay me, the ludicrous cost of the purchase doesn't necessarily signify I did anything illegal.

Of course, my pricey apples would be a terrific bargain compared to what the Transportation Security Administration, through Pearson, paid Sunnye Sims for her contribution.

The auditors noted that Sims not only paid herself $5.4 million in compensation as "President/Owner" but also that she gave herself a $270,000 pension.

For a nine-month project. Nice work if you can get it.

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Also in the WaPo story:

Her friends dismissed the possibility of impropriety, saying [Sims] and [Eclipse VP] Sullivan are both devout Christians who would never take advantage of the government for personal gain.

Well, OK then. Christians. I see. Devout ones — like, they go to church and stuff. Yeah. No way would Christians ever outrageously enrich themselves. Glad that's settled.

"Moroccans Beat Up van Gogh's Son, 14"

Since the murder of Theo van Gogh, last November, his now 14-year-old son Lieuwe has twice been physically attacked by young Moroccans, or (more likely) Dutch citizens of Moroccan descent. [Link, in Dutch.] Van Gogh's parents said this in an interview on national television.

They insisted their grandson had done nothing to provoke the assaults. In one incident, recalled Anneke van Gogh, Theo's mother, "[Lieuwe] was walking the dog in the Watergraafsmeer area of Amsterdam, and they came up to him and said, 'Is your name van Gogh?' Lieuwe said no, of course, but they beat him anyway."

She also recounted how, some time after Theo van Gogh's assassination, a group of Moroccans appeared in the street where he had lived, inquiring about Lieuwe's whereabouts. It was the neighbors' impression that the visitors weren't there to offer condolences, and the police were called — but according to the filmmaker's mother, no one bothered to show up. That would have been in keeping with local officers' alleged non-action after the two beatings Lieuwe received. The cops were called then, too, Anneke van Gogh told the TV interviewer, but they declined to make an appearance.

Recently, Lieuwe was transferred to another class, in another building of his school, after he'd been repeatedly bullied by Muslim pupils. His grandmother said that Lieuwe had had to endure taunts like "Good thing they killed your dad."

The news of the attacks on the 14-year-old came just a day after Theo's killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, was sentenced to life without parole. Through the verdict, Lieuwe held his head high. His response afterwards was that he would send Bouyeri a postcard with the words "Theo Forever."

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UPDATE, 5 p.m. EST: Murkiness intrudes. The Amsterdam Police Department denies that it didn't respond to the alleged violence against Lieuwe van Gogh. But the boy might have perpetrated a hoax, in the cops' view; they're saying he possibly made the episodes up. The van Gogh family, however, maintains that Lieuwe has been truthful, although it now appears there may have been just one actual physical attack on the fourteen-year-old — plus one planned attack, possibly involving a gun.

As (and if) more details emerge, I'll post them here.

How the Yes-Men Triumph

Stuart Bowen is the Special Inspector General of Iraq Reconstruction; his job is to keep tabs on how the government spends our tax dollars in Saddam's former empire. Although he was and remains a diehard Bush loyalist, he's been giving the administration the occasional Maalox moment. According to the Wall Street Journal,

During a routine audit last summer of an American office in charge of doling out reconstruction funding in Hillah, Iraq, U.S. government investigators made a series of startling discoveries. The office had paid a contractor twice for the same work. A U.S. official was allowed to handle millions of dollars in cash weeks after he was fired for incompetence. Of the $119.9 million allocated for regional projects, $89.4 million was disbursed without contracts or other documentation. An additional $7.2 million couldn't be found at all.

In addition,

[T]he American occupation authority failed to keep track of nearly $9 billion that it transferred to Iraqi government ministries, which lacked financial controls and internal safeguards to prevent abuse. One Iraqi ministry cited in the audit inflated its payroll to receive extra funds, claiming to employ 8,206 guards when it actually employed barely 600.

You'd think that the Republicans — the party of [cough] fiscal responsibility and small government, after all — love Mr. Bowen's graft- and fraud-busting work. You'd be wrong. Paul Bremer, Iraq's former occupation chief, has attacked him for having accounting standards that are too high (honest, you can't make this stuff up). The Pentagon has sought to curb Mr. Bowen's authority, mindful that the man who was supposed to be a don't-rock-the-boat pencil-pusher has turned out to be an earnest reformer, doggedly fighting waste and excess.

Now defenders of Mr. Bowen's office are trying to keep it from being shut down next year. The bill that created Mr. Bowen's position empowered him to probe the rebuilding effort until 10 months after 80% of the reconstruction funds were contracted out. That point is likely to be reached this month, which means that the office will close next summer — well before the money will actually have been spent. Earlier this month, Sen. [Russ] Feingold [D-Wis] introduced a bill extending the life of Mr. Bowen's office, but the measure's prospects are uncertain. 

What's not uncertain is that in government, it doesn't pay to be a squeaky wheel, or even to do your job without fear or favor. Yes-men, acolytes, and Pollyannas tend to fare infinitely better in Washington DC.

I guess Stuart Bowen didn't get that memo.

Rucksack-Wearing Sikhs Fight Back

...with an all-revealing see-through backpack that clearly — ha! — signals the wearer's non-terrorist intentions (click on the image to enlarge). The innovative new product somehow reminded me of this faux law-enforcement poster.

Laughing in the face of terror and paranoia is a commendable (and recommended) response. Whichever precious things sick psychokillers with bomb belts think they can destroy — sorry gents, hard-hitting humor isn't one of them. [hat tip: Harry's Place]

German Police Registers Homosexuals

From a post on David's Medienkritik, via PMM BlogNoot:

According to reports in the German media, computer software used by police in the German states of Bavaria, Thuringia and North Rhine-Westphalia allows authorities to explicitly identify and register homosexuals involved in criminal investigations by sexual orientation. Additionally, locations frequented by homosexuals ... have been categorized by police as sites for potential crime.

Oh well, at least gay people in Germany don't have to sew pink triangles onto their clothing anymore. Es lebe der Fortschritt!

My I.D. Card? Here You Are, Officer

The Brits are having a controversial national I.D. card shoved down their throats — just like the Americans. The Dutch are ahead of them in that regard: in January of this year, carrying an official I.D. became mandatory in the Netherlands, and Dutch cops have already managed to fine 34,000 people for flouting the requirement.

Thankfully, such civil disobedience, if that's what it is, is further facilitated by online I.D. generators like this German site (hat tip: GeenStijl). I falsified my own data for the occasion and intend to carry my fake German Ausweis in lieu of a government-mandated one when the time comes. Fuck 'em.

Please post more I.D. obfuscation sites in the comments section. Other creative tips and techniques on thwarting the various I.D. requirements are also welcome.

Does Mark Steyn Futz His Facts?

Mark Steyn is a terrific, wryly funny writer who's not afraid to take on radical Islam, and he proved it again yesterday with this column in The Australian (thanks to Louis for the link). But is Steyn using a fictitious story to make his point? Here are the first four paragraphs of his ripping good yarn.

The defining encounter of the age was not between Mohammed Atta's jet and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but that between Mohammed Atta and Johnelle Bryant a year earlier. Bryant is an official with the US Department of Agriculture in Florida, and the late Atta had gone to see her about getting a $US 650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world's largest crop-duster. A novel idea.

The meeting got off to a rocky start when Atta refused to deal with Bryant because she was but a woman. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly. When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn't get the 650 grand in cash that day, Atta threatened to cut Bryant's throat. He then pointed to a picture behind her desk showing an aerial view of downtown Washington — the White House, the Pentagon et al — and asked: "How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it?"

Fortunately, Bryant's been on the training course and knows an opportunity for multicultural outreach when she sees one. "I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from," she recalled. "I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could."

So a few weeks later, when fellow 9/11 terrorist Marwan al-Shehhi arrived to request another half-million dollar farm subsidy and Atta showed up cunningly disguised with a pair of glasses and claiming to be another person entirely — to whit, al-Shehhi's accountant — Bryant sportingly pretended not to recognise him and went along with the wheeze. The fake specs, like the threat to slit her throat and blow up the Pentagon, were just another example of the multicultural diversity that so enriches our society.

Steyn uses this stunning account to great effect, seamlessly segueing into an incontrovertible conclusion.

For four years, much of the western world behaved like Bryant. Bomb us, and we agonise over the "root causes" (that is, what we did wrong). Decapitate us, and our politicians rush to the nearest mosque to declare that "Islam is a religion of peace". Issue bloodcurdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all the Jews and infidels, and we fret that it may cause a backlash against Muslims. Behead sodomites and mutilate female genitalia, and gay groups and feminist groups can't wait to march alongside you denouncing Bush, Blair and Howard. Murder a schoolful of children, and our scholars explain that to the "vast majority" of Muslims "jihad" is a harmless concept meaning "decaf latte with skimmed milk and cinnamon sprinkles".

Exactly.

But hang on now. As much as I like (and second) where Steyn is going with this, I'm honor-bound, in this case, to spoil the party and ask: Did the surreal, farcical encounter between Atta and Bryant really happen? There's something very fishy about Bryant's account of the meeting, as many people have pointed out after Bryant came forward in a 2002 ABC TV interview. Just check out this story, and this one, and then this one. Ask yourself, as did the writer of that third article I just linked to,

The fabulously wealthy Osama bin Laden, with all the resources of a worldwide terrorist empire at his disposal, was too cheap to put up a mere $650 thousand? Given all the long-range planning and additional resources he poured into the preparations for the 9/11 attacks, this hardly seems possible. Even more unbelievable is the idea that the hijackers had been counting on that government loan to finance their plans, and, when they didn't get it, had to radically shift course. 

Like so many details in Bryant's account, Atta's supposed re-appearance in Bryant's office, wearing glasses to allow him to pretend he was someone else, strains credulity. Did Atta think Bryant wouldn't recognize the man who'd repeatedly insulted her as "merely a woman" just weeks before, and, worse, had threatened to cut her throat?

In Steyn's earlier recounting of the bizarre get-together, he and Bryant further claimed that Atta had literally thrown wads of cash at his host because he wanted to buy, on a whim, the aerial photograph of Washington DC that was hanging on the wall behind her.

These are scenes worthy of a Monty Python sketch. If Atta was the well-educated, highly disciplined operative we've been hearing about — an evil "mastermind," by many accounts — could he also have been a kook who, with his outrageous behavior, virtually begged to fall under suspicion and to be arrested right there and then?

Or take this little factoid: Atta allegedly also asked Bryant — she said — how she'd feel if someone wiped out major American cities just as the U.S. had "destroyed cities in my country." Um, did Atta also have "Osama Bin Laden Forever" tattooed across a blood-red heart on his forehead, by any chance?  Come on — he would have had to be the worst kind of bumbling idiot to be drawing attention to himself with such a highly charged, alarming question. But more to the point: Atta was an Egyptian, as far as we know. Which Egyptian cities has the West wiped out? Which cities anywhere in Islam's sphere of influence? (Remember, the meeting allegedly took place in 2000, well before coalition forces retaliated against Afghanistan's Taliban regime, and well before the invasion of Iraq.) Again, it doesn't add up, and it doesn't pass the smell test.

And finally, during Mark Steyn's research for his latest piece (I'm assuming he doublechecked his facts), did he not come across the multiple protestations that Bryant couldn't have met the terrorist ringleader (at least not when she said she did), becauase, as it turns out, he wasn't in the country then?

There may be explanations for all or most of this. But as it stands, Johnelle Bryant's story has too many holes in it to repeat it as gospel. Yet yesterday was at least the second time that Steyn made Bryant's tale the backbone of one of his columns. He might not have known about the doubts surrounding the story the first time. But what's Steyn's excuse now? Why would he use suspicious or discredited anecdotes to buttress his otherwise excellent points?

Leftists and multiculturalists everywhere have yet to face up to the very real dangers posed by radical Islam. Reiterating an infamously chimerical account as though it were a matter of record is not going to help bring about that crucial change.

Helping Hookers Who Don't Want Help

Do third-world prostitutes need to be "rescued"? That is, do they need to be forcibly taken from brothels by western aid workers and local police officers, and then required to pledge they'll never sell their bodies again?

This article in yesterday's New York Times reminds us of women in Cambodia who, after being thus rescued by pure-hearted Americans (who were using U.S. tax dollars, by the way),

...protested in front of the U.S. Embassy, claiming they had not wanted to be rescued at all. The protest appeared to have been stage-managed by the [brothel's] owners, but it illustrated how hard it is to determine whether sex workers are in brothels by choice or under duress.

And that is the question. Are these women given freedom by their so-called rescuers, or are they being deprived of it? Are they prostitutes because violent thugs force them, or because prostitution, however unattractive, is the life they've chosen after finding other options even less appealing?

The lily-white perspective of American do-gooders never seems to allow for the latter. They just can't fathom that any woman would choose to "degrade" and "humiliate" herself to make a living. But inevitably, those words mean different things to different people. It's not hard to understand why, to some, making two bucks a day working as a toilet scrubber or a factory automaton is less attractive than making ten, twenty times that amount servicing overly libidinous men.

To her credit, the subject of the Times piece, Australian aid worker Rosanna Barbero, is more pragmatic about such matters than her American counterparts.

Barbero supports freeing children and women held forcibly, but finds most other rescue operations futile: ''You're rescuing somebody and putting them back into the same situation'' that drove them to sex work in the first place. The Cambodian Women's Crisis Center acknowledges that of 48 trafficking victims it helped return to their homes in 2004, some 40 percent have already gone back to sex work. As for vocational training, Barbero says, sex workers ''are all pretty damn sick of 'We'll put you in front of sewing machines 14 hours a day and make you a better woman.' ''

She sounds pretty level-headed. But even Barbero gets it wrong, I think, when she begins railing against what she sees as the root cause of prostitution — poverty. The Times reports that

[Barbero] hopes to see the Cambodian sex industry disappear, but she holds that this will be impossible until the country's overall welfare improves.

The sex industry won't vanish — not in Cambodia and not anywhere else. And it has nothing to do with how poor or rich a nation's citizens are. After all, if poverty causes prostitution, why do rich countries have prostitutes? What accounts for women like Xaviera Hollander and Sydney Biddle Barrows and Heidi Fleiss? According to Barbero's views, shouldn't prostitution have disappeared in much of the West by now, especially in places with a relatively solid, generous welfare system like, oh I dunno, the Netherlands?

I know a woman who was a call girl for 12 years. She has no regrets. She socked away enough money to retire at 31. If she's frugal, she told me, she'll never have to work again.

Should she have been "rescued" at 19 instead, and forced into a 40-plus-year career as a filing clerk?

To be sure, a lot of prostitution is pimp-sanctioned rape, and no one deserves to be subjected to slavery and violent coercion. But neither should women who choose to enter the sex trade be subjected to forced conversion by self-righteous church ladies.

On a related note, does it strike anyone else as a tad neo-colonial that the practice is exclusively applied to prostitutes in poor countries, and not to sex workers in, say, Germany, Great Britain, or the United States?