St. Augustine on killing people from a great distance

While the Washington Post is busy having quasi-fascist hard-ons for the rescue operation the US Navy did off the coast of Somalia...

The three quick shots off the fantail of the USS Bainbridge that terminated the piracy incident in the Indian Ocean early Sunday night made a number of points for various pointy-headed political pundits to chew on, cudlike, for a few weeks. But one they'll probably miss is the following: The three shots make clear to a wider public what has been clear to people who pay attention to such things -- we are in the golden age of the sniper.

He has become a kind of chivalric hero. He is the state, speaking in thunder, restoring order to the moral universe. Or he is civilization, informing the barbarians of the fecklessness of their plight. He is the line in the sand, the point of the spear, the man with the rifle, one of the few, the proud. He is also the intellectual of combat, in some ways, bringing a cool logic to what is normally hot, messy and exhausting.

... yes, seriously, one can do worse than reflect on the circumstances which led four presumably impoverished people living in a failed state to take arms onto a sea of troubles. Here's Johann Hari on piracy off the coast of Somalia:

In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the "pirates" have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a "tax" on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence".

No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters – especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But in a telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali: "We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas." William Scott would understand.

(h/t Zunguzungu in this thread)
Also, the words of St. Augustine, quoted by Noam Chomsky, spring to mind:

...an apt and true reply [was] given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “What meanest thou by seizing the whole earth? Because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.
--St. Augustine, The City of God

"I don't know who is being protected here." I wonder if the police do.

Laws intended for counter-terrorism are being misused in an increasingly heavy-handed approach to policing protests, a new parliamentary report warns today.

The 70-page report, published by the joint committee on human rights after almost a year's inquiry, said it was concerned by evidence of the use of the powers, under legislation including the Terrorism Act, against peaceful protesters.

The report comes as pressure mounts on authorities over plans for the policing of a series of high-profile protests, including at next month's G20 summit in London. The event, due to be attended by Barack Obama and other world leaders, is expected to draw thousands of protesters to Docklands, London. The findings are likely to anger demonstrators, after the news that thousands of riot police will be deployed in response.

The report says: "Whilst we recognise police officers should not be placed at risk of serious injury, the deployment of riot police can unnecessarily raise the temperature at protests."

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O'Brien said the cordons were put in place because a group of about 200 people were violent. "There was no real deliberate attempt to say you are all going to stay here for hours," he said.

He said people had been allowed to leave throughout the day, and that by about 7.30pm those left were people who wanted to be there, and they were asked for their names as they left as part of the inquiry. "What I saw there at that time was a couple of hundred people who did not want to go. They had ... been the agitators throughout the day," he said.

The Guardian saw and spoke to many people who were clearly not agitators, but who were refused permission to leave.

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"this short film shows the campers calling out "this is not a riot" and holding their arms in the air, while riot police surge forward wielding batons and shields in an unprovoked attack."

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"Police said yesterday that a man who died at the G20 protests near the Bank of England had been walking home from work when he collapsed."

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"I don't know who is being protected here." Beautiful video reporting by the Guardian.

"In other words, they were a lot like us"

Lawrence Wright talks about Al-Qaeda. He's the author of The Looming Tower. The central argument is that the uniting sociological factor among jihadists today is alienation and cultural displacement. Most members join in a different country from where they were born. Also: moslems are 1/5th of the world's population, but roughly half of all poor people are moslem.

Looks like an incredibly interesting talk. I'm going to watch it later.