Expats Against Bush

Happy New Years, now Duck!

It's good to see that our war on terror is making the world a safer place and that we can celebrate our freedom by marking the new year in an appropriate manner.

Er.....

Bush signed some of Patriot II into law on December 13th

Apparently on December 13th, as Saddam Hussein was being "captured", George W. Bush was signing into law elements of the 2nd generation USA PATRIOT act specifically dealing with financial data. The FBI can now directly request data from any "financial institution", defined as:

banks, [...] stockbrokers, car dealerships, casinos, credit card companies, insurance agencies, jewelers, airlines, the U.S. Post Office, and any other business "whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters."

Furthermore the FBI can now do this completely free of any court supervision, and without demonstrating probable cause - and any "financial institution" complying with a data request is under automatic gag rules preventing it from disclosing such requests to you - the owner of the data in question. Sure, this is meant for terrorism deterrence, but can there be much doubt that given enough time, the temptation to abuse these powers in normal domestic cases will be too high to avoid?

Christmas in Iraq

You may remember our interview with a soldier in southern Iraq earlier this month. I emailed him to ask for updates on how the Saddam capture has gone down, what the reaction to the TIME Person of the Year issue was, and how they will be celebrating Christmas over there. Our thoughts are with all our folks over there as we expats have at least some idea what it means to have to spend the holidays away from home occasionally - of course under vastly different circumstances.

In any case, his message follows:

The Saddam capture was less spectacular here than one might imagine. There were initially a few people who didn't believe it was him. In general there is a hope that the number of attacks will be going down in the future, but there are doubts that the capture will affect the numbers much. I'd say that the general feeling is "That's nice, but it doesn't affect our situation." I haven't had that much contact with local nationals lately, but I understand they were happy with the capture.

We heard about the Time person of the year cover from Stars and Stripes, but I haven't gotten my copy in the mail. I haven't really heard much about the article.

My unit is taking the day off. There is a big Christmas dinner planned in the Dining Facility, a dance of sorts tonight, and church services at the chapel. Mostly we're relaxing and catching up on sleep. There are some Christmas trees up around the base, and there was unbearable Christmas music blasting through the PX in the weeks leading up to the holiday. There is a special mission to run Christmas dinner to some of the guys on duty at an outpost 2 hours north of us.

We're trying to keep Christmas pretty low key. It's difficult to be 6500 miles from home and family during the holidays. The phones are definately busy today. A number of people are saying "bah humbug" to it all. One guy put a sign outside his tent warning that "carolers will be fired upon."

Good to see they're keeping a sense of humor about things. It's just too bad they're over there at all. It didn't need to be this way. We are only at the start of this unending "war on terror" and I think that next Christmas many more soldiers will be away from home for the holidays.

Merry Christmas

Expats Against Bush wishes you all a (Merry Christmas / Happy Hannukah / your flavor here) - if not in the embrace of your family, then at least in the embrace of someone near and dear to you.

Courting the Hispanic vote

Bush's longterm election campaign machine is in full swing, with the announcement that he will push for changes in the immigration laws allowing legal status for some temporary immigrant workers.

This seems pretty squarely aimed at courting the Hispanic voting base, and, combined with Schwarzenegger stumping for Bush in the elections next year, may spell bad news for California's electoral votes. Let's hope Californians show more common sense than they did when they elected Arnie earlier this year.

9/11 Should have been prevented

An interesting piece from CBS News here in which the head of the 9/11 independent commission publicly states that 9/11 could and should have been prevented:

"As you read the report, you're going to have a pretty clear idea what wasn't done and what should have been done," he said. "This was not something that had to happen.[...]There are people that, if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position they were in at that time because they failed. They simply failed."

Speaking for myself, I have to balance this news with my immediate reaction that this sounds like a bit of Monday-morning quarterbacking. It's easy to say that if our number one priority before 9/11 was to stop people flying planes into buildings we could have done it. But that was only one possibility amongst thousands of terror scenarios.

Still, if this commission is able to identify real weaknesses within our intelligence system then they should obviously be addressed. I just hope this administration has the cojones to admit it and take the necessary measures.

Christmas Posting

Hi all,

Later today I am flying back to the States and will be there until the 29th of this month. I'm going to chill out, catch up with family and friends and shop for cheap clothes and gadgets. I'm going to eat my own weight in steak, and freeze my $%^*& off. In short, I'm going to have a normal family Christmas.

So for the next couple of weeks, my posting to EAB is going to take on a rather more leisurely pace, though it won't stop completely. If I can manage to drag my bloated carcass to a family member's PC I should be able to dash off the occasional missive.

I want all of you to do the same - go home, see your families, reflect on the year past, and come back in January refreshed and ready to go. I have some good ideas and initiatives I will be kicking off in the New Year, and I want you all to have a think over Christmas of what we can do once the election year kicks off properly. Things are looking a bit shaky on the election front at the moment, but as we all know a lot can happen in 11 months...

Dubya wants the Death Penalty for Saddam

Whether you're pro- or anti-death penalty, you have to admit that George Bush saying he'd like to see Saddam paying the "ultimate penalty" is going to ruffle some feathers.

I am personally against the death penalty, but I wouldn't have wasted any tears had Saddam been killed while resisting arrest. I was glad to see that Saddam had not gone down guns blazing; for a while at least the Islamists were denied a martyr figure.

I'll be interested to see how this develops. Just last night on the BBC I was watching Jeremy Paxman interview two Muslim women activists, one in the UK and one in the US. Both of them expressed something that wouldn't have occurred to me: the Arab world (they couldn't speak for the rest of the Islamic world) was reacting with anger to the undignified way that Saddam was put on display after his arrest, viewing it as an American affront to "uppity Arabs", reminding them that even their leaders could be humiliated by the Americans at any time or place. Personally that was a new slant for me; I thought showing Saddam in such circumstances was a good way to stick a pin in any bubble of myth that was growing around Saddam amongst the Iraqi resistance - Your Mythic Leader in Absentia is now the latest perp on the Baghdad edition of COPS.

Would it be better for Saddam to rot in jail till the end of time? Or would it be better to let the Iraqi people have their revenge? Now that Dubya has weighed in with his preference and said that he'd be happy to see Saddam dead (not exactly a new idea, to be sure) can there be any doubt that any Iraqi-led trial and judgment resulting in Saddam's presumably public beheading / hanging / whatever would be seen as a thinly disguised long arm of American retribution? Will that, in the end, make him a martyr?

What does Saddam's capture mean for Howard Dean?

Readers fearful that Saddam's capture might guarantee Bush's reelection will be encouraged by this article

Read Dean's statement here

We're back

No thanks to TypePad (but thanks due to some bulletin board folks), Expats Against Bush is back online now. As it happens, somewhere within the domain redirection process from Expatsagainstbush.org the link broke down. Still no word on why this happened yet, but it looks like we're back in business.

Looking forward to your comments on the Saddam issue....