16 September 2006 >> Glenn Reynolds has some advice for vendors of electronic media:

Get this straight content providers: Our computers belong to us. If we’re in the mood, we might let you sell us some stuff to run on them. But they don’t belong to you, and we’re not likely to surrender control over our own bought-and-paid-for hardware, which we often rely on to do our jobs and run our lives, simply in exchange for letting you sell us something. (Honestly, most of what you’re selling isn’t all that good anyway, and you’re lucky that people buy it at all. So don’t get greedy. And while click-through license agreements may make it legal, they won’t make you any more popular.)

16 September 2006 @ 7:53PM >> According to Rocco DiPippo of a blog called The Autonomist, the story I covered in “The Taliban’s Free Pass” on Thursday may not be accurate. DiPippo contacted an official at the U.S. Military’s Central Command who said, “Normally cemeteries and other religious places and spaces would be areas where we would try to avoid given their religious and cultural sensitivity, but there is no blanket prohibition, circumstances always vary.”

The CENTCOM official, Major Matthew McLaughlin, said that the sensitivity to sites like cemeteries “was not the driving force behind the decision not to engage this target — inappropriate to say any more on the rationale.”

It is understandable that the military would like to avoid attacks in sites that would be perceived as culturally inflammatory, and it makes sense to treat such sites with greater caution. But it would border on military malpractice to let high-value targets elude us because of that alone. Although it sounds like that may not have happened in this case, Major McLaughlin implies that the military’s default position is to stand down whenever the enemy occupies certain hallowed ground. I’m sure members of the Taliban and al Qaeda are aware of this, and I’m sure they take advantage of it.

I would hope that the rules of engagement allow such decisions to be made quickly enough that they could be acted upon before the opportunity slips away. How many layers in the chain of command need to sign off on a strike in this type of situation? How much time could that process take? As a civilian, I’d be curious to know.

Because my current impression is that we’re still holding back against an enemy that sees our restraint as weakness. And I’m not sure they’re wrong. Sensitivity is not necessarily a helpful trait in war.