Category Archives: Arsenal Pulse

Brief thoughts and mini-analyses on stories in the news.

Supreme Court says cell searches require warrants

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Finally a decent ruling on search & seizure from the Roberts Court: Police cannot search your phones during an arrest without a warrant anymore.

The justices ruled unanimously that police almost always need a warrant to go through the cellphone of someone they arrest. Because phones today hold such vast and personal stores of information, the court held, searching them without a warrant is different from going through, say, the glove compartment of an arrestee.

 
Reactions:

Civil libertarians hailed the Supreme Court decision on police searches of cellphones as a landmark for privacy in the digital age — but the cops themselves say it could tie their hands during investigations.

 
oh boohoo. no1curr

Unfortunately this is the tip of the iceberg from the crowd that believes everything is justified for “security,” no matter how proportional. That disturbing attitude was captured in a quote from Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, the country’s largest police union:

“There’s more at stake here than due process.”

 
I mean, I’m not sure why we’re even bothering with law enforcement, national defense, and democracy if we’ve reached a point where due process is a minor, irrelevant point or nothing more than an inconvenience. It’s kind of part of the point of the U.S. system.

So, put a screen lock on your phone with a strong PIN or password, because those enforcers with a less than consistent relationship to the rule of law might take liberties even after this ruling. Other than that, best of luck.

At least the Supreme Court is on your side on this one. Until you need to find a lawyer to back up your position on that, at which point you had better be wealthy enough to afford a good one, because the Supremes made the public defender system optional if states don’t feel like funding it enough to function.

Maliki appears to fully switch foreign alliances

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Maliki, having been dumped by the Americans, enthusiastically announced the purchase of military jets from Russia and welcomed airstrikes by the Assad regime in Syria on Iraqi border positions held by ISIS rebels.

It sound as if he has thrown himself in with the Russian and Syrian governments, who are already allied with Iran, his primary benefactor, in the Syrian civil war and on the nuclear issue.

US still labeling its longtime Kurd allies “terrorists”

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Turns out the United States is still refusing to de-list its closest and longest political allies in Iraq — the two major Kurdish parties — as “tier III” terrorists (see update at the bottom for the definition) even after expending huge amounts of resources explicitly to protect them with a no-fly zone from 1991-2003, during which time they formed a competitive representative democracy on their own.

Earlier this year, Iraqi Kurdish media outlet Rudaw commented on the problem as follows:

Listing the KDP and PUK as Tier III terrorist groups stems from the classic US perception that any non-state militant actor rebelling against the state, may be listed as a terrorist group regardless of the goal the group seeks to achieve.

But now since that era of rebellion against dictator Saddam Hussein is gone, Iraqi Kurdistan is expecting the US to delist its parties from the category of terrorist groups.

 
This de-listing problem — which the State Department continually claims is being fixed — was news to me, though not surprising given how long Nelson Mandela got stuck on the terrorist watch list from way back in the day (when we were still allied with the Apartheid regime in South Africa).

But of all countries, Turkey, their past mortal enemy, is treating them better than the United States has been recently. (Or at least is positively treating the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party, with whom the ruling AK Party of Turkey has formed a strategic partnership, as explored on our blog in depth recently. Remains to be seen if they would be as friendly if the opposition Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, slightly more sympathetic to Baghdad than the KDP is, were to win the next elections.)

Flag-of-Iraqi-Kurdistan

Update for clarity, October 20, 2014: Below is the explanation of the admittedly nebulous “tier III” status as described by the website of the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services.

These organizations are defined by law as “a group of two or more individuals, whether organized or not, which engages in, or has a subgroup which engages in,” terrorist activity. Tier III organizations are also called “undesignated terrorist organizations” because they qualify as terrorist organizations based on their activities alone without undergoing a formal designation process like Tier I and Tier II organizations.

Instead, the determination of whether a group can be considered a Tier III organization is made on a case-by-case basis, in connection with the review of an application for an immigration benefit. Tier III organizations arise and change over time.

So, the list fluctuates a lot more than the tier I list of “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” or the tier II list of false charities and other criminal enterprises supporting organized terrorism. Thus, a tier III listing is less severe than a tier I formal designation, but it is not by any means flattering, and Americans could potentially still get into trouble for supporting such an organization, including the major Kurdish political parties in Iraq. Likewise, party supporters could be blocked from entering or moving to the United States. It’s also more puzzling, given that it’s a more flexible list, that the Kurdish parties haven’t been removed previously. Unfortunately, tier III is a persistently confusingly applied category that regularly covers U.S. allies and U.S.-recognized political opposition parties, according to the Baltimore Law Review.

Iran Supreme Leader not keen on working with US on ISIS

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I guess the top boss isn’t too interested in the proposal for Iran to cooperate with the United States on countering the ISIS (Sunni Arab extremist) invasion in Iraq. Mainly because Iran’s religious leadership apparently wants Iraq to remain a united, Shia-controlled, majoritarian-rule satellite of Shia Iran:

[…] as Washington’s patience for the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki diminishes, so do the prospects of coordinated efforts as Tehran sees Maliki as a reliable partner in Baghdad.

“The United States is dissatisfied with the result of elections in Iraq and they want to deprive the Iraqi people of their achievement of a democratic system, which they achieved without U.S. interference,” Khamenei said.
[…]
“The real fight is between those who want to bring back a U.S. presence and those who want Iraqi independence.”

 
As one reader asked, how soon until Iran’s most formidable Shia militant proxy, Hezbollah, shows up? They’ve already been battling groups like ISIS, quite successfully, in Syria for the past couple years.

From the U.S. perspective, this reluctance by Iran to cooperate on Iraq may be for the best, given that it’s not clear Iran’s interests are any more noble than anyone else’s. And it might clarify the confusion that is the American policy on the region. Or at least won’t make it worse.

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ISIS or ISIL: Lost in chronological, cultural translation

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Here on AFD’s blog and on our show, I’ve consistently used “ISIS” (not spelled out often at all) as the name of the group seizing control of parts of Syria and Iraq right now. Part of that is for convenience (or, as Nate said, to mockingly associate them with the spy organization on the FX animated series “Archer”) and part of that is not quite knowing how to culturally translate the meaning of the group’s name.

As a new article in the New York Times explains, that’s proven a problem for the whole English-speaking world, from governments to the media. The organization uses an old-school Arabic geographic phrase in their name which doesn’t precisely translate at a 1:1 word ratio into existing English terms for the region’s geography and history.

الدولة الاسلامية في العراق والشام, or al-Dawla al-Islamiya fil-Iraq wa al-Sham. The difficulty comes from the last word.

Al-Sham is the classical Arabic term for Damascus and its hinterlands, and over time, it came to denote the area between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates, south of the Taurus Mountains and north of the Arabian desert. Similarly, in Egypt, “Masr” may refer either to Cairo or to the whole country. Used in that sense, al-Sham takes in not just Syria but also Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, and even a part of southeastern Turkey.

That is fairly similar in extent to what Western geographers call the Levant, a once-common term that now has something of an antique whiff about it, like “the Orient.” Because of the term’s French colonial associations, many Arab nationalists and Islamist radicals disdain it, and it is unlikely that the militant group would choose “Levant” to render its name.

The fighters do not like “Syria” either, though. Syria is what the Greeks named the region in ancient times, possibly after the Assyrian people who once lived there, though that derivation is disputed. And at times in the past, the term “Syrian” was used to mean specifically a Christian Syrian, while Muslims or Jews living there would be called Shami. Today, when Arabs speak of Syria, they usually mean only the modern state, which the insurgent group is fighting to obliterate.

 
Compounding the problem is that the rebel faction appears to frequently use archaic Arabic phrases/words that are not common in modern Arabic, in place of their modern synonyms. This would perhaps be equivalent to insisting on using only Anglo-Saxon rooted words in place of every Franco-Norman rooted word in the English language.

Or I guess a bit like the pedants who insist on not using any of the newfangled American English words (and new usages) that have come into vogue since the rise of computers… But I digress. Or as George Orwell might edit me: I am getting off track.

If you disagree with our use of “ISIS,” contact us. It might impact our choice.
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Why is Iran suddenly publicly debating death sentences?

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Iran has had a wave of pardons issued by victims’ families as the condemned were standing on the gallows platform awaiting execution. And notably, Iranian media is publishing and promoting this trend. TV anchors are rallying viewers in opposition to specific instances of the death penalty and people are even crowd-funding payoff money to buy the families’ pardons (which is legally permissible). However, the overall number of death sentences has been rising too, recently

So the question is: is this a PR stunt by the elective branches of the government to make the country look better, is it a power play between branches, or is it a genuine movement to curb the death penalty?

Among the big three state executors in the world — China, Iran, and the United States — it would be remarkable if Iran had a successful anti-death penalty mass movement before the United States.

And by remarkable, I mean that would be to America’s future enduring shame and discredit. Or would be, if our country was known for historical introspection and admission of error.

What if ISIS just burns out?

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If it’s really true that Al Qaeda dumped ISIS for being too evil (which I highly doubt, as I’m sure it was more about competition, territory, or leadership) then I’d find it hard to believe that any people would allow them to rule over an area for long.

Ultimately, terrorist groups tend to hold political power only as long as they can deliver services more than they oppress people. It’s easy to take power but hard to hold it.

Is the only way to stop them really military action? What about letting them burn out under their own terribleness?