Cheering for Death and Other Reactions to Last Night's News

Last night, Jacob and I both took to Twitter, as we tend to do these days when big news is released. It was a crazy two hours or so of speculation and confirmation, dark jokes, reactions to the MSM coverage, elation and bloodlust, and odd looks at the elation and bloodlust. I wanted to share a few of my reactions from the announcement of Osama bin Laden's death, its coverage, America's reaction, and what it means going forward.

The Court Dabbles in Terrorist McCarthyism

Today the Court came down with a decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project. A lot of writing will be done in the next few days about how this decision distorted the First Amendment's doctrine, so I figured I'd jump in the fray. First, the Times Editorial's synopsis (because they did it for me, so why write my own?):

The case arose after an American human rights group, the Humanitarian Law Project, challenged the law prohibiting “material support” to terror groups, which was defined in the 2001 Patriot Act to include “expert advice or assistance.” The law project wanted to provide advice to two terrorist groups on how to peacefully resolve their disputes and work with the United Nations. The two groups — the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party — have violent histories and their presence on the State Department’s official list of terrorist groups is not in dispute.

But though the law project was actually trying to reduce the violence of the two groups, the court’s opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. on behalf of five other justices, said that did not matter and ruled the project’s efforts illegal. Even peaceful assistance to a terror group can further terrorism, the chief justice wrote, in part by lending them legitimacy and allowing them to pretend to be negotiating while plotting violence.

That's pretty perverse. Talking to terrorist groups, giving them legal advice, is now material support and thus illegal. The Court premised this on the old argument that money is fungible so aiding one section of a group (the humanitarian/political vs. the terrorist) is aiding all the others. While this argument is not obviously true with money (see, e.g., the US tax code, which separates the political non-profits from the apolitical, even if they're the same people), the Court then expanded it saying that by teaching them how to navigate the legal system or to act politically to achieve their goals rather than violently, a person is freeing up resources that the group would have used to now be used on terror. This just makes no sense. If they're acting as a terror group, they're never going to spend resources on teaching themselves how to act peacefully, so someone convincing them to do so is adding a service - it's not all zero sum.

Further Evidence that "Terrorists" are not White.

The last time I wrote about this, I didn't include anything about counter-terrorism advisor's John Brennan's speech:

Conspicuously absent from Brennan’s list of seven terrorist incidents is any discussion of the “individuals radicalized here at home” by the Christian Hutaree “militia,” a group secretly planning coordinated, deadly attacks in Michigan. Brennan also forgets about the 2009 shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, carried out by a dedicated white supremacist. Brennan’s lengthy speech makes no mention of the danger posed by right wing radicals like Joseph Stack, who flew an airplane into an IRS building. Most tellingly, Brennan didn’t express any concern about terror inflicted against Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian communities in the form of violent hate crimes, including a pipe bomb that exploded at a mosque in Florida not long before Brennan’s speech.

In short, Obama’s chief counterterrorism advisor seems to reserve the use of the word “terrorism” exclusively for violent acts that are carried out by Muslims.

More on Obama's National Security Strategy

My last post pointed to some of the good and bad rhetorical devices in Obama's National Security Strategy. While rhetoric and language choice are important, I'd also like to highlight a post on the ACLU Blog of Rights about how terrible and hypocritical it is functionally, once you get past the rhetoric.

While the strategy makes some vague commitments on human rights, it contradicts its own promises. It states that "our moral leadership is grounded principally in the power of our example," but then goes on to outline a strategy involving indefinite detention without charge or trial on the very same page.

White Terrorists Have Predictable Behavior, So They Don't Count

Channing Kennedy has a very good post up at RaceWire about the good and the bad about the new National Security Strategy. The good:

There’s a lot improved over the previous version from 2006 (the one that used the word “preemption”), and a lot to praise. The Obama version doesn’t use the phrase the “War on Terror” or “radical Islam,” and it reiterates the administration’s intentions to close Gitmo; it’s not afraid of a “multipolar” world power structure. And it’s not every National Security Strategy that calls to “Promote Dignity by Meeting Basic Needs” via cooperative efforts to eradicate extreme poverty and childhood illness in Africa.

When Is a Terrorist Attack Not a Terrorist Attack?

There was a terrorist attack on US soil Monday. I was going to write myself, but Matt Yglesias wrote about it in close to the same tone that I would have, so I'll send you there. Like he does, I'll leave the answer to my headline question as an exercise for the reader.