November 2004

With the recent shooting of an injured insurgent in Iraq by an American marine, the usual shouts of American war crimes are returning to the media. And if it is true that the insurgent really was injured, and really was unarmed, and really was a prisoner of war, then what he did was very wrong and he should be punished as such.

However, has anybody ever thought about judging our enemy by the same rules that we are judged?

I pulled the following from the handy website GenevaConventions.org, an indexed, plain-English guide to the Geneva Conventions:

• The insurgents have been using mosques and other places of worship as a base of operations, and often launch attacks out of them. According to the Geneva Conventions, places of worship cannot be used as a base of military operatons.
• One of the toughest problems our soldiers have been struggling with is differentiating civilians from combatants. The insurgents are operating from within the civilian population and are attempting to blend in to conceal themselves. Feigning civilian status is tantamount to false surrender, a prohibited action. At the very least, they would be acting as guerillas yet not openly displaying their arms, which is also forbidden.
• While we’re on the subject, insurgents have started luring American soldiers with false surrender and then attacking. This, of course, is also forbidden.
• It is belived that many of the insurgents are actually foreign fighters being paid to come to Iraq and fight the Americans. In this case, they would be mercenaries, who, surprise surprise, are not allowed protection under the Genevea Conventions.
• The day before the shooting of the injured insurgent, a soldier in the same unit was killed by a booby-trapped body of a dead insurgent. Under the Geneva Conventions, the dead are to be respected (i.e. not used as booby traps).
• And the biggest, ugliest, nastiest Geneva Convention violation of all? The systematic slaughter of innocent civilians by the insurgents. A war crime, according to the conventions.

I’m not saying that this means we should ignore any war crimes committed by Americans. If we’re all going to follow the rules, we all need to stand up and admit that we are guilty if we really were wrong. Those individuals committing war crimes should be punished for their actions.

However, I feel that it is extremely important that if we are going to be judged by the rules of war, our enemy should be as well.

Well, I got back from Seattle this afternoon. It was a great trip. Amazon was awesome, Seattle was awesome, and I was really glad I went out.

As is to be expected, I took a whole bunch of photos while I was there.

I’m on my way to Seattle right now. Well, not quite yet, but I’m sitting in Pittsburgh airport waiting to board. They’ve got free wireless now. Good stuff.

I did get TSA’ed though. Big Quadruple-S Sweepstakes Winner!

A nice man named Robert patted me down, but he didn’t give me his number afterwards.

Overall it wasn’t all that bad of an experience, but it does kind of shake you up a bit. I’m pretty careful about not packing anything bad, but there is that “Shit, what if I DO have something?” moment. Basically they just make you wait in line forever, check your bags for bomb residue before searching them, and make sure you aren’t metallic.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; But the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his [candle] at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breath, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

• Thomas Jefferson

I just finished Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas. Great book. Highly recommended.

From its website:

The Internet revolution has come. Some say it has gone. What was responsible for its birth? Who is responsible for its demise? In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig explains how the Internet revolution has produced a counterrevolution of devastating power and effect. The explosion of innovation we have seen in the environment of the Internet was not conjured from some new, previously unimagined technological magic; instead, it came from an ideal as old as the nation. Creativity flourished there because the Internet protected an innovation commons. The Internet’s very design built a neutral platform upon which the widest range of creators could experiment. The legal architecture surrounding it protected this free space so that culture and information - the ideas of our era - could flow freely and inspire an unprecedented breadth of expression. But this structural design is changing - both legally and technically. This shift will destroy the opportunities for creativity and innovation that the Internet originally engendered. The cultural dinosaurs of our recent past are moving to quickly remake cyberspace so that they can better protect their interests against the future. Powerful conglomerates are swiftly using both law and technology to “tame” the Internet, transforming it from an open forum for ideas into nothing more than cable television on speed. Innovation, once again, will be directed from the top down, increasingly controlled by owners of the networks, holders of the largest patent portfolios, and, most invidiously, hoarders of copyrights. The choice Lawrence Lessig presents is not between progress and the status quo. It is between progress and a new Dark Ages, in which our capacity to create is confined by an architecture of control and a society more perfectly monitored and filtered than any before in history. Important avenues of thought and free expression will increasingly be closed off. The door to a future of ideas is being shut just as technology makes an extraordinary future possible. With an uncanny blend of knowledge, insight, and eloquence, Lawrence Lessig has written a profoundly important guide to the care and feeding of innovation in a connected world. Whether it proves to be a road map or an elegy is up to us.

I’m supposed to write an “External Viewpoint Report” (read: Book Report) on it for one of my classes, and I’ll probably post it here if anyone is looking for a good summary of the book.

It’ll be Creative Commons licensed, of course.