Read 'em and Weep (literally)

I haven't been able to get these two stories out of my head.

• The leaked memo from the Embassy in Baghdad describing how grim the situation really is there. Read the entire report (pdf) if you have the courage, and


• This Washington Post's "Fatal Inaction" story subtitled The world's most powerful military failed to provide the armor that would have saved scores of American lives. One father would like to know why.

Unbelievable. What a misadventure this war has been from the start. We'll be dealing with the wreckage for decades.

My Email to Senator Barbara Mikulski Regarding Net Neutrality

Dear Senator Mikulski,

The first time I voted for you, I was living on South Montford Avenue
near Patterson Park. At the time I was an employee of what was then
called the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company of Maryland. The
descendent of that company, Verizon, is now one of the two leading
Internet Service Providers in this region.

I am very alarmed by what I read regarding the legislation coming out
of the House that basically allows ISPs to enhance/degrade
connections to selected websites. This is easier to do than you
might think.

Let's say my ISP is VeriZomcast and they obtain a financial stake in
the internet phone company Vonage, what's to stop them from degrading
my connection from their hubs to any Vonage competitors? There are
all kinds of ways VeriZomcast could make it appear that Vonage is
better (and the competitor worse) by routing "competitor traffic"
through older equipment or even introducing the equivalent of
"static" to degrade the performance. The only way customers would
learn of this would be by a VeriZomcast whistleblower. Even then they
could argue that the routing of the "competitor traffic" through
older equipment was not intentional. How would customers be able to
prove otherwise? This is an open invitation for mischief.

It also has implications for the marketplace of ideas. If VeriZomcast
decided it didn't like the website of, say, the Baltimore City Paper,
it wouldn't take a programming genius to figure out how to route that
traffic through slower parts of the network or even to introduce the
Internet equivalent of dropped calls. I suspect your staffers might
know a current Verizon employee or two who can vouch that this is
technically possible. Please, PLEASE, don't just take my word for
it. And please, PLEASE, don't let the ISPs get away with this. Back
when TV's had "rabbit ears" did you watch the channels that had a lot
of snow over the ones that came in clearly? ISP will effectively
have the power to introduce "snow" on links to sites that they want
people to avoid. The result being to drive traffic to sites that are
more favorable to their financial/political interests. If
VeriZomcast enters into a partnership with Sinclair Broadcasting,
which TV website do you think will stream video the fastest?

P.S. I can understand your "trusting your gut" when it came to
General Hayden. I hope you're right.

Does America Have Any Inviolate Principles Anymore?

The United States has often failed to live up to the principles it espouses (see slavery, Japanese internment camps) but these failings have never been portrayed as a problem with the principles themselves. That seems to have changed with the current administration. The blogger known as "Anomymous Liberal" wrote a rather compelling piece called "Defining America Down" which points out...

America has long been a country dedicated to leading by example. It has been a country that tries to hold itself to its own high standards, regardless of how its enemies behave. That's why there have been countless documented examples over the years of enemy soldiers seeking out American troops in order to surrender, knowing that Americans would not mistreat them. That's the idea of America boiled down to its essence. It's a belief that America, for all its arrogance and annoying self-righteousness, is a country that stands for something important. It's a country that very much believes in its own principles and endeavors heroically to live up to them. That kind of reputation did not develop overnight; it was earned, slowly and painstakingly, by the deeds and actions of countless Americans over many decades.

And it's exactly that reputation that the Bush administration has carelessly pissed away over the last four years. Confronted by a particularly brutal and unprincipled enemy, our leaders decided that our principles were the problem. They were just too confining. So almost immediately, the Administration began defining America down. Torture was essentially defined out of existence. Novel legal theories were introduced justifying the circumvention of long-standing prohibitions. International treaty obligations and rules of war were disregarded. The rule of law itself was up-ended--in secret, by executive decree. Many of the most celebrated American principles were hastily cast aside. Just yesterday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Pentagon has decided to omit the prohibition on "humiliating and degrading treatment" from the Army Field Manual on interrogation. Just add it to the list.

This defining down of American principles has not gone unnoticed by the rest of the world. They see a country famous for its embrace of freedom and individual rights spying upon its own citizens without warrants and locking away its own citizens without due process of law. They see a country famous for its humane treatment of captives building secret torture prisons, engaging in widespread abuse and humiliation of detainees, and using an off-shore prison at Guantanamo Bay as a way of circumventing its own laws and constitutional principles. And worst of all, they see a country that appears to have no more interest in leading by example, a country more concerned with getting itself out of prior commitments and finding ways to exempt itself from the rules. A reputation that took the better part of a century to earn may soon be little more than a memory.

As one of the commentors noted, the protesters in Tiananmen Square chose the Statue of Liberty as their symbol. Obviously to them America stood for something. Unfortunately, now we seem to be becoming just another country.

A nation better than most, no doubt, but not the flawed but generally principled nation we once were.