Good reading Saturday:

The Selective Conscience by New York Times op-ed columnist Bill Keller.

"Why, aside from their roots in the Vietnam antiwar movement, are human rights activists not more open to the idea that America can use its unmatched muscle for good? In large part because Republican administrations — in truth, Democratic ones as well — have paid human rights little more than lip service, and little even of that."

"The Bush administration's enthusiasm for human rights would be more believable if it were less selectively applied...."

"Finally, promoting freedom abroad will ring a little false as long as the administration is so often, so instinctively, scornful of freedom at home. The automatic recourse to preventive lockup, the lack of confidence in the criminal justice system, the casual regard for privacy and presumption of innocence, the obsessive secrecy — you don't have to be a libertarian to wonder how dearly this administration cherishes the values it promises to export."

The Death of Operation Tips by Nat Hentoff, Village Voice

Reflecting on how little media coverage there was of the provision in the Homeland Security Act that killed Operation Tips.

"Section 880. Prohibition of the Terrorism Information and Prevention System—Any and all activities of the Federal Government to implement the proposed component program of the Citizen Corps known as Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) are hereby prohibited." (Emphasis added.)

Apparently, Dick Armey was successful in having Tips removed from the House version of the Homeland Security Bill, but Sen. Joseph Leiberman refused Sen. Patrick Leahy's request to remove it from the Senate version. After the bill was passed, Leahy issued this statement, which Hentoff says was ignored by the media:

"I am pleased the bill, in section 880, forbids the creation of Operation TIPS." Leahy noted that originally, the Justice Department had described the operation as "giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious . . . activity." Or, as the department's Web site put it, "potentially terrorist-related activity."

"If it hadn't been for Dick Armey, Operation TIPS would be well under way. Before the Senate passed the House version of the Homeland Security Bill, I called John Ashcroft's office and asked when the attorney general would honor Armey's principled removal of Operation TIPS from the House bill. I was told cheerily by an Ashcroft spokeswoman that "Operation TIPS is still a law, and we're going right ahead with it."

"Recently, a source inside the Justice Department told me that—contrary to what I originally wrote in this column—Operation TIPS not only wasn't Ashcroft's idea, but he was uncomfortable with the project. Being a team player, he never criticized this national-spying-corps plan publicly."

Hentoff then goes on to praise Ashcroft's prior history as a privacy protector, something we reported on here, although to us, it did not indicate that Ashcroft used to be a civil libertarian so much as he had done a politically expedient flip-flop.

In any event, Hentoff is now justifiably focused on Poindexter and the Total Information Awareness Program.

"Meanwhile, as described by Robert O'Harrow Jr. in the November 12 Washington Post, the emblem in Admiral Poindexter's Total Information Awareness office is a variation on the great seal of the United States: "An eye looms over a pyramid and appears to scan the world. The motto reads: Scientia Est Potentia, or 'knowledge is power.' "