Tag Archives: ethics

Some Ally

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Under pressure from its Arab neighbors, Qatar has expelled some key players in the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood, whose mission, among other things, is to overthrow secular governments throughout the Middle East and replace them with MB-approved governments. Those expellees are making a beeline for…Turkey, a NATO member and supposedly staunch Middle East ally of the US.

However.

In addition to giving asylum to the MB’s leadership, Turkey

  • is host to the Palestinian Authority’s Hamas branch “overseas command center”
  • allows ISIS to use Turkey’s territory to sell ISIS-stolen oil on Turkey’s black market
  • refused to join the US’ effort to eliminate ISIS in Iraq and Syria—Turkey won’t even allow air missions against ISIS to originate from allied bases in Turkey
  • allows “radical Islamists” to freely cross its borders with Syria and Iraq

And this:

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Saturday that 49 hostages who were seized by Islamic militants in Iraq [from the Turkish Consulate in Mosul] have been freed and safely returned to Turkey….

Given what ISIS does with its other hostages, and that coziness outlined above, this sounds like part of a payoff.

Some ally, indeed.

More Party-of-No Yeses

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The House passed three more bills in this short period before the mid-term election campaign recess.

One bill makes it illegal for IRS workers to use personal email accounts to conduct official business.

It’s already illegal to do this in many circumstances, as all official business communications must be recorded and saved. It’s also already contrary to IRS policy; although the IRS has ignored this policy whenever that became convenient.

This is, at bottom, an obvious move, too: private enterprise has, for years, held the flip side—the use of company equipment to conduct personal business—to be a fire-able offense; although they allow some limited personal use.

Another bill guarantees groups that are denied tax-exempt status the right to appeal the decision to a separate IRS office.

Also an obvious move. No government decision should be appeal-proof at the outset.

The third bill addresses complaints from groups that have had their confidential taxpayer information improperly disclosed by IRS employees. The bill allows the IRS to tell victims about the status of investigations into the disclosures. Current law forbids the IRS from releasing such information.

Here, I disagree slightly: the bill should require the IRS to disclose status information, not merely permit it. Still, it’s a step in the right direction.

Watch these three obvious moves die in the Democratic Party-controlled Senate.

How Does This Work?

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A Senate investigation released Wednesday [17 Sep] found that hackers linked to the Chinese government broke into US military transportation companies’ computer networks 20 times in a year.

But the Senate Armed Services Committee says officials of the US Transportation Command, responsible for moving troops across the globe in times of crisis, were told about just two of those incidents. If a system was compromised, they may not have known, the panel said.

[Emphasis added.] How is it possible that military transporters were not told that systems on which their functions depended had been compromised? Who made the decision to withhold these critical data? Why is that person/those people not being called to account? Why are those contractors who sat on these data still under contract?

Words Have Consequences

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KT McFarland pointed out some of their consequence in a Friday interview on Fox News‘ Happening Now program against the backdrop of the Russian-supported “rebellion” in Ukraine and the just being agreed “cease fire” between those “rebels” and Ukrainian forces.

It seems that President Barack Obama, while spending a day in Estonia, had assured the Estonians that NATO would, of course, rush to their defense in the event of “an attack” on Estonia. The next day, Obama repeated that assurance, sort of. This time, he said NATO would rush to Estonia’s defense in the event of “an armed attack” on Estonia.

McFarland had two comments on those phrases. The first was technical: NATO, in fact, is sworn to come to the aid of any member who has been subjected to “armed attack” not to “attack.”

Her second comment was substantive. Putin has not engaged in an armed attack against Ukraine. Instead, he fostered unrest in Crimea as a prelude to seizing and occupying that peninsula, and since he’s fostered unrest in two oblasts of eastern Ukraine with the same goal. Next, he’s infiltrated soldiers and un-uniformed fighters; he’s infiltrated weapons up to and including the SAM equipment used to shoot down a Malaysian airliner and a number of Ukrainian fighter jets; he’s infiltrated armored weapons; he’s infiltrated advisors; his forces have taken the lead in reversing the “rebels'” battle fortunes, and his forces have taken the lead in driving a land corridor along Ukraine’s Sea of Azov coast to give Russia a land connection to occupied Crimea. In short, Putin has attacked Ukraine without an overt armed attack.

With Obama’s carefully rephrased assurance to Estonia, he has given Putin a green light to press his campaign in similar fashion against that NATO member and the other Baltic States (each of which also is a NATO member).

Now, McFarland is a very sharp political analyst, and she picked up on this subtlety. Vladimir Putin is a very smart man, and he very clearly understands the import of Obama’s changed phrasing, also.

But, contrary to the attitudes of many on the right, so is Barack Obama a very smart man. This man, say I, this man of letters from Harvard, this highly skilled politician, understands full well everything he says, in all of the implications flowing from his words. That’s why he says them.

No, this change of phrasing is simply more of the flexibility that Obama promised Putin in 2012, “after his last election.”

Good, and Bad

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The 6th Circuit, in a case involving an assault on an Amish man by various members of his community because he didn’t conform to their standards, came to the right answer, but then it did the wrong thing with its answer.

The assaulters were convicted of their assault, with the crime and the conviction treated by the prosecutor and the trial court as a hate crime. The Circuit Court ruled, though,

Personal conflict, not religion, was the driving motive behind beard- and hair-cutting attacks targeting Amish, an appeals court panel ruled Wednesday in overturning the hate-crime convictions of 16 men and women.

This is good, because our crimes don’t need to be gussied up with froo-froo, and adding “hate” to the definition of a crime in order to create a new crime is such froo-froo. When we criminalize hate, we criminalize the contents of a man’s mind—and that’s no thing a government should be involved with. Full stop. All that needs criminalization—if anything—is the actual deed done. Our thoughts must be beyond government’s reach, no matter the good intentions in trying to go that far.

But the ruling is bad because it overturned the convictions altogether, rather than remanding the case for resentencing. That the men were convicted of a crime with a motivation means the men were convicted of a crime.

Now the victims must consider reliving those events in a new trial, and that’s also bad.

The 6th Circuit’s opinion can be read here.