Well, I agree that there is not much we can do about eitherr the Mafia or al Qaida. I have stated already that police measures will not be effective in any quick or short terms ense. Unlike Luke and other advocates of war, I also think that military intervention is no more, and possibly less efficacious, because al Qaida offers no conventional militray targets, and is certainly both far more expesnisve than policew ork, and more dangerous to liberty. Now, as to MJichael's remarks about breaking the Mafia by demolishing civil liberties, I think they are exaggerated. First, the Mafia has not been broken, although its power has been diminished--not least by rivalry from other criminal organizations. Second, RICO, the witness proterction program, and detention of material witness have not offered much in the way of limitation on civil liberties in the context of fighting organized crime. The biggest threat posed by RICO, in fact, has been the extension of RICO to include political proterst in a civil context. The witness protection program is just a good ides. And Michael gives no particuolar raeson to think that deterntion of material witnesses was a civil liberties problem until the war on terror began. As for Italy, I gather that the attack on civil liberties was a lot harsher, though again as far as I knwo the Mafia was not broken. The tradition of civil liberties is wseaker there anyway, although ideological diversity is
far greater. Nonetheless, the bad news is that we are going to have have to live with international terrorism in something like the war we live with the Mafia. It is not goinga way. We can bulldoze Afghanistan and kill everyone there,. we can carry the war to Iraq (which newver had anything to do with al Qaida, we can drop my bombs tahn were used in all of WWII every afternoon, and all itw ill do is cost us money (and make us more enemies). Obviosuly I do not advocate doing nothing. I advocate police work, much as we use policve work, and not military force,a aginst the Mafia. There are limits on what this can achieve. But there are limits on the daamge it can do, even if everything Michael says about civil liberties in the US and Italy is true.As I say, thsi will disappoint people like Luke who have greaet (if admittedly unverifiable) expectations the efficacy of war. They think, dammit, we ought to be able to stop this! But sometimes you can't. jks
Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote: andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >How do you organise the police work, when Taliban are in power?
>
> Sort like chasing the Mafia in an Italian neighborhood.
The mafia was never broken until until civil liberties were jimmied beyond recognition by RICO, the witness protection program, material witness jailing, etc. And in Italy itself, where is much more comparable to the Kashmir case, and where the mafia (and camorra, and ndranghetta) really could be conceived as a paramilitary force over 10,000 strong, the mafia was never broken until those laws were bent to the point that they very much resembled the main desidirata of martial law, e.g., administrative detention, the suspension of habeas corpus, the weakening of rules of evidence, in camera trials, etc.
So the mafia example seems to prove the opposite case -- that in fact normal civil law is insufficient even to stop the mafia, never mind an insurgency.
Michael
--------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20021208/cdeec96a/attachment.htm>