KSM will be tried in a criminal court.
The message for the next generation is that the actions of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed are not war crimes, and are not crimes against humanity.
If not this, then what is?
I’m so proud of Attorney General Holder for making the world safe from war crimes trials (at least those involving America).
Too bad he can’t make us safe from war crimes.
So Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be tried on criminal charges in a Federal court.
Here’s an experiment reminiscent of Jay Leno’s “jaywalking” videos: ask otherwise intelligent people precisely what criminal offenses he can reasonably be charged with.
The answers would be funny if they weren’t so sad.
Where to begin? He can’t be charged with anything that wasn’t illegal at the time of the crime. He can’t be charged with anything that requires he be under U.S. jurisdiction at the time of the crime. He can’t be charged with much that requires active participation in the capital crimes for which he is responsible. He probably can’t be charged with anything where the evidence is classified. He probably can’t be charged with anything that will involve evidence obtained from waterboarding.
I didn’t know this aspect of the Cuban Missile Crisis:
… On Robert Kennedy's insistence, President Kennedy placed him in charge of the CIA after the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961. McCone was smart. He constantly put himself in Khrushchev's head and he realized that summer that if he were the leader of the USSR, Cuba was exactly where he would place his short-range missiles.
McCone pressed Kennedy for U-2 flights over Cuba to see if he was right. Kennedy refused. He worried that the U-2 flights might be seen as a provocation.
McCone would not let up, even after a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in September completely rejected McCone's notion. Giving one reason after another, the NIE confidently predicted the Soviets would not place offensive missiles in Cuba at that time. But the crusty CIA director refused to accept his own agency's report. Finally, prodded by McCone and some Republicans on the Hill, including Sen. Ken Keating of New York, Kennedy acquiesced to one flight on Oct. 14, 1962.
Four weeks after the NIE assured Kennedy that all was well in Cuba, a U-2 plane flew over the Caribbean island nation for 12 minutes taking photographs that what would clearly show the missiles, launchers and everything else under construction—probably the most crucial 12 minutes in the Cold War.
Kennedy was furious—mostly at himself for having been hoodwinked by the old Russian. Upon first seeing the photos through a magnifying glass, his brother Bobby, the attorney general, let loose with a string of expletives, "Oh s—t! s—t! s—t! Those sons of bitches Russians!"
Read the whole Warren Kozak piece.
Answer below the fold.
In Kelo the Supreme Court decided that the government can take your house away if they might be able to increase tax revenues from a new owner.
As it turns out, this was wishful thinking. The city of New London did take Susette Kelo’s house away, and the proposed development crapped out.
Posts about Kelo at voluntaryXchange included this, this, this, this, this, and this one.
The big picture is that Kelo was sitting on a property that had value, and she had the option to exercise it. She chose not to. The government saw that value, got dollar signs in their eyes, and demanded that she hand over her property so that they could possess the right to exercise that option. The government went to court to secure that right, and then they failed to exercise it.
Apologists will note that the city of New London was trying to leverage a corporate site into a broader development. The involvement of a dreaded corporation is a lark. The facts are the New London was courting the company, and trying to internalize a positive externality from their presence.
There’s a Halloween allegory here. Susette Kelo is a little kid with candy. The government is a bigger boy with a plan to bully her into giving up the candy, so that he can give it to a girl, so that her pretty friend will think more highly of them. Then the bully was irresponsible and lost the candy, the girl, and her pretty friend.
Face it: the government acted like a 3-year-old.
Reports of males being harassed on the basis of sex (rather than being sexually harassed) are a growing problem.
Scott Winship argues convincingly – based on Piketty and Saez’s own data – that any increase in inequality over the last 30 years is confined to the extremely rich.
By extremely rich, I mean the top 1/200th of households in the country. This is households reporting over $600K in income to the IRS.
Outside of thin bands on the coasts, I wonder if anyone makes that. In my flyover region, I tend to doubt that anyone does make that much – we just had the most successful tort attorney in the area plead guilty to stealing about 3 times that amount, and you have to think that wouldn’t make sense if he was clearing $600K above the table.
In fact, Winship shows that the increase in inequality between the folks in the top 200th, and the top 10th is larger than between the bottom 10th and the top 10th. If anything, there seems to be less inequality in the latter group, and he excludes most aid to the poor.
His explanation for this, and it’s one that has been offered up before, is that most of the increase in inequality is because the extremely rich stopped having corporations and started having S-corporations. The latter are reported on personal income tax returns, while the former are not.
Expect the legacy media to not report these results.
Via Marginal Revolution.
The health insurance plan for employees of the Republican National Committee covers elective abortions.
Rumblings away from fault-lines may just be aftershocks from old quakes rather than precursors of the next one.
Really, really, old aftershocks – running into the hundreds of years.
So … the earthquake risk in place like Missouri and South Carolina – which have had devastating earthquakes in the last 200 years – may be much lower than previously thought.