Even though I detest the members of Al Qaeda who are fighting in Afghanistan (simply for the fact that they’re religious fanatics who want to impose their screwed up ideals on everybody else), I feel like their basic human rights ought to be respected. As such, much as I loathe them, I don’t think it’s right that they be summarily executed, regardless of what Donald Rumsfeld wants. That said, these guys make it really hard to excuse not just shooting them on the spot. There were rumors that the hundreds who were killed in the school in Mazar-i-Sharif were shot after they killed Northern Alliance members who went in to accept their surrender. Then the same thing happened in Kunduz — they gunned down the Northern Alliance soldiers after radioing that they were surrendering. And now, hundreds of these guys revolted after surrendering and being taken prisoner and were all killed. If you attack people after surrendering, it makes it extremely unlikely that they’ll be willing to accept your surrender in the future. I don’t expect people to take many Al Qaeda prisoners from this point on, and truthfully, they’ve brought it on themselves.

There’s been a lot of concern lately about Burhanuddin Rabbani, the political leader of the Northern Alliance. He was quite belligerent after Kabul was occupied by the NA, telling the British to stay the hell out, rejecting the idea that Zahir Shah would return to lead the country, and generally being uncooperative with efforts by the UN to bring all the players to the table. Since then, though, he seems to have moderated his approach significantly. First he said that he would be OK with stepping aside if the Bonn conference reached a consensus on a government that didn’t involve him, and now saying that individuals who were associated with the Taliban can be part of a new government. The book on Rabbani all along has been that he’s not interested in being a power monger, and his recent statements lend credence to that assessment.

MEMRI’s executive director, Steve Stalinsky, has written an article for the National Review about hostility toward the United States in the Egyptian media. I’ve been reading everything MEMRI translates for the past month or so, and have been shocked at the depth of hostility and ignorance in the Egyptian pieces that they’ve translated. Granted, MEMRI doesn’t translate every article in every Middle Eastern media outlet, so I don’t know how pervasive this hostility is, but there are a large number of Egyptian publications that have no problem printing anti-American crap that’s almost completely false.

Paul Krugman in the New York Times: An Alternate Reality

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blockquote> From an economist’s point of view, the most revealing indicator of what’s really happening is the post- Sept. 11 fondness of politicians for “lump-sum transfers.” That’s economese for payments that aren’t contingent on the recipient’s actions, and which therefore give no incentive for changed behavior. That’s good if the transfer is meant to help someone in need, without reducing his motivation to work. It’s bad if the alleged purpose of the transfer is to get the recipient to do something useful, like invest or hire more workers.

So it tells you something when Congress votes $15 billion in aid and loan guarantees for airline companies but not a penny for laid-off airline workers. It tells you even more when the House passes a “stimulus” bill that contains almost nothing for the unemployed but includes $25 billion in retroactive corporate tax cuts

For some reason I only today became aware of Spinsanity, a seemingly non-partisan site that flags the use of “manipulative and subrational rhetoric in American politics.” The site is very well done, and the analysis is really spot on.

Spain is not going to extradite the 8 members of the terrorist cell that they broke up last week to the United States unless we guarantee that they won’t be tried by military tribunals. In fact, chances are no European country will extradite unless we try the terrorists using normal criminal procedure, and guarantee that they won’t face the death penalty. It’s truly shocking how out of line our criminal justice system is with the systems in Europe. (Link via Interesting People.)

Two words: Magic Lantern. The scariest paragraph in the article:

At least one antivirus software company, McAfee Corp., contacted the FBI on Wednesday to ensure its software wouldn’t inadvertently detect the bureau’s snooping software and alert a criminal suspect.

Needless to say, I won’t be using McAfee’s antivirus software on my computers.

The weird thing is that a system like this relies on poor security on the victim’s machine in order to be installed successfully. Does this mean that the FBI, which is responsible for investigating and fighting some computer-related crime, has an incentive not to help vendors find and close security holes? If the FBI relies on a particular buffer overflow to implant their trojan on the computers they want to snoop, do they keep the vendor in the dark or encourage them to leave the security hole in their software? This approach is fraught with major problems …

Looking at old copies of my site in the Web Archive, I discovered that one of the intermittent database server errors that have plagued this site was archived for posterity.

Does anyone know what the legal recourse is for people, companies, and charities that have had their assets frozen by the US government for allegedly supporting Al Qaeda? I keep reading and hearing denials of involvement with Al Qaeda, but I have no idea what these organizations can do about the asset freeze. Just the other day, NPR had a story about Muslim charities that are on the US government list, and today I read about a Somalian ISP that’s had its assets frozen. I have no idea whether these organizations provide financial support for terrorists, but it does seem like they’re being punished without any proof of their complicity.

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