...maintained an even weight. No idea how, given the frequency of full breakfasts, surf-and-turf dinners, and spirits.
...read four books, including one about a giant prehistoric shark that terrorizes the California coast after escaping from a supposedly-secure entertainment facility. Those bureaucratic fools, to be sucked into the enormous jaws of death by the weight of their own hubris.
...absorbed the data from three fantasy football draft prep magazines. The clock is ticking and you guys are TOAST this year.
...spent two marvelous mornings boogie-boarding, wave-jumping, and hole-digging with my daughter and son at the beach. Blessings abound.
...indulged in two spirited discussions with my enormously sincere and well-meaning dad on the pointlessness of the right's agitation over the Cordoba mosque in Manhattan. Diverting and humbling, as I was reminded once again of the limitations on my rhetorical prowess.
...squeezed in 18 holes of golf with dad where we didn't talk politics, although I did develop a private theory about how my swing is a lot like the war in Iraq, what with all the various things that can go wrong and get in the way of victory.
...hung out at the pool with the kids and my amazing mom, who somehow never runs out of steam and always makes us feel like the absolute center of the universe.
...spent more time just chillin' with my beautiful, wonderful wife than I have in quite a while. The time just flew, and I can't wait to get home from work tonight.
And with that, we look forward to Christmas.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Monday, June 14, 2010
The case of Maher Arar: Confirming the worst impulses of our legal system
In November, I wrote about the case of Arar v. Ashcroft, in which the Second U.S. Court of Appeals ruled 7-4 that an innocent man, Maher Arar, had no legal recourse against the government of the United States in redress of his claims of extraordinary rendition by American agents to Syria, where it has been well documented that the man was tortured for nearly one year, before his ultimate release back to Canada. Today, without further comment, the Supreme Court declined to hear Maher Arar's petition for review of his case, which effectively closes the matter for the judicial branch.
Let us review. Maher Arar, it is universally understood at this time, has committed no crime. He was picked up by mistake. The US Government has no current interest in detaining, investigating, or punishing him. The substance of the government's defense against Maher Arar's claims is that his rendition was actually a simple deportation, and that we received assurances from Syria that, if we sent him there in chains and a box so that his alleged ties to al Qaeda could be investigated, he wouldn't be tortured. Assurances from Syria. The Canadian government has performed a full investigation of the matter, and not only exonerated Arar of all charges and excoriated their own personnel and the American agents involved in the rendition, but also paid Arar a $9M settlement in recognition for his year's worth of unimaginable pain and suffering. Being tortured by Syrians. (Follow the link to my original post if you're up for the gory details.) The United States government, by contrast, has come to the final substantive legal conclusion not that Arar's claims are untrue or that no one in the government did anything wrong, but that our system of government doesn't permit him to have the question adjudicated by an impartial court. To repeat - the highest court in the land says that people under no suspicion of criminal activity don't get to petition the court with claims that they were tortured with the full knowledge of the United States government. They don't even get the courtesy of a hearing.
Remember why they hate us - because America is so damned free that they just can't take it.
I am certain to be told, as I so often am, that the case of Maher Arar is yet another sad case of the "realities of war." Much like the targeting of American citizens for assassination, the inadvertent killing of civilians by robot bombers, the operation of secret prisons beyond the reach of due process of human rights evaluation, the erosions of every last civil protection that generations of Americans have died to instill and preserve - these are all just unfortunate, unavoidable circumstances that have been inexorably forced upon this great nation by the intransigence of gangster theocrats. One knows not when it will end, or how far it will go before we can abate our sacred vigilance, only that everything we do must be Right and Good because we are a Right and Good people, who only ever does what is necessary to stave off destruction at the hands of our ruthless enemies, people so vile and cunning and malicious that they care not a whit for human dignity and the sanctity of all life, even to the point that they are willing to torture and kill innocents if it helps their cause. People who hold themselves accountable to no law, no mandate of the people, no standard whatsoever other than victory. Of course, we should and must wage total war against these people, and any self-imposed restraints on which we might rely out of nostalgia or misguided idealism must be wiped away - even if that means torturing and killing innocents if it helps our cause. Even if it means that our government should be held accountable to no law, no mandate of the people, no standard whatsoever other than victory.
It's been some time since I've written a full article on this blog, as opposed to simply posting links that reflect my point of view. I've committed to find the time in the future. There is much to discuss, for those of us with a visceral appreciation for both the blessings and responsibilities of representative government. We just put a stake in the ground that says we can torture innocent people and there's nothing anyone can do about it, and Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court all seem to be on the same page. And I'm guessing most of you only read it here, which means that it isn't even news. Sleep well, good friends.
Let us review. Maher Arar, it is universally understood at this time, has committed no crime. He was picked up by mistake. The US Government has no current interest in detaining, investigating, or punishing him. The substance of the government's defense against Maher Arar's claims is that his rendition was actually a simple deportation, and that we received assurances from Syria that, if we sent him there in chains and a box so that his alleged ties to al Qaeda could be investigated, he wouldn't be tortured. Assurances from Syria. The Canadian government has performed a full investigation of the matter, and not only exonerated Arar of all charges and excoriated their own personnel and the American agents involved in the rendition, but also paid Arar a $9M settlement in recognition for his year's worth of unimaginable pain and suffering. Being tortured by Syrians. (Follow the link to my original post if you're up for the gory details.) The United States government, by contrast, has come to the final substantive legal conclusion not that Arar's claims are untrue or that no one in the government did anything wrong, but that our system of government doesn't permit him to have the question adjudicated by an impartial court. To repeat - the highest court in the land says that people under no suspicion of criminal activity don't get to petition the court with claims that they were tortured with the full knowledge of the United States government. They don't even get the courtesy of a hearing.
Remember why they hate us - because America is so damned free that they just can't take it.
I am certain to be told, as I so often am, that the case of Maher Arar is yet another sad case of the "realities of war." Much like the targeting of American citizens for assassination, the inadvertent killing of civilians by robot bombers, the operation of secret prisons beyond the reach of due process of human rights evaluation, the erosions of every last civil protection that generations of Americans have died to instill and preserve - these are all just unfortunate, unavoidable circumstances that have been inexorably forced upon this great nation by the intransigence of gangster theocrats. One knows not when it will end, or how far it will go before we can abate our sacred vigilance, only that everything we do must be Right and Good because we are a Right and Good people, who only ever does what is necessary to stave off destruction at the hands of our ruthless enemies, people so vile and cunning and malicious that they care not a whit for human dignity and the sanctity of all life, even to the point that they are willing to torture and kill innocents if it helps their cause. People who hold themselves accountable to no law, no mandate of the people, no standard whatsoever other than victory. Of course, we should and must wage total war against these people, and any self-imposed restraints on which we might rely out of nostalgia or misguided idealism must be wiped away - even if that means torturing and killing innocents if it helps our cause. Even if it means that our government should be held accountable to no law, no mandate of the people, no standard whatsoever other than victory.
It's been some time since I've written a full article on this blog, as opposed to simply posting links that reflect my point of view. I've committed to find the time in the future. There is much to discuss, for those of us with a visceral appreciation for both the blessings and responsibilities of representative government. We just put a stake in the ground that says we can torture innocent people and there's nothing anyone can do about it, and Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court all seem to be on the same page. And I'm guessing most of you only read it here, which means that it isn't even news. Sleep well, good friends.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Health care reform: What hath we wrought
Before everyone forgets all about it (which could happen any day now), here are my thoughts on Barack Obama and the Democrats' legislative victory this week. As followers of this page know, I'm on record supporting the bill that is now the law of the United States, on the rudimentary grounds that it is intolerable in 21st century America, that access to the health coverage I take for granted be denied to individuals on the sole basis that they actually require health care. Every other factor in the debate, for me, is subject to that moral imperative, including economic costs and political realities. Put another way, if the government is going to spend itself into oblivion, I'd at least prefer it spend on this.
However. To my friends on the left, let there be no doubt that true progressives got rogered here but good, in two ways. First, the liberal wing in Congress proved yet again that they'll never actually abandon the Democratic party agenda when the chips are down; not in the way the far right will ultimately hang the Republicans out to dry. Second, as Greenwald articulates the way no one else can, this bill represents a massive expansion of the same private insurance industry whose worst practices it purports to correct. Nothing that would have reined in the free-market-gaming at the heart of this matter and truly lowered prices over the long term (e.g. interstate competition, bulk price negotiation, re-importation, and most especially, a public option) was ever truly on the table, because Barack Obama didn't think he could get this done if he had to fight with the insurance companies and the Republicans at the same time. And so the price for near universal coverage is an individual insurance mandate, which, while probably economically and Constitutionally sound, is nevertheless offensive to personal liberty. We could have done better, and this victory represents a continuation of a lousy precedent that keeps the public sphere beholden to cloistered corporate interest.
Second, also to my friends on the left, let no one doubt that the estimated costs of this program are likely way, way lower than reality, absent a high level of vigilance over the long term. My friend Paul lays out some examples on his blog of analogous government projections which turned out to be short - there's no reason to think this is going to be any different. The CBO score that came out Friday got the Democrats over the top - but that was political cover, not true economic reality. The reform is gonna need some reform, and it will be required long after Barack Obama leaves office. This is our responsibility now.
Third - to my friends on the right, I don't begrudge you the differences in philosophy or economic projections. What I do feel compelled to challenge, what I feel is somewhat unworthy of you, is the constant accusation that in enacting this reform, the Democrats have ignored the will of the American people, betrayed their oaths of public service, or, less prosaically, rammed this sucker down our throats. To wit, a couple of links. First, a recent CNN poll, from before the vote, that shows 52% of the American people either supporting the bill or opposing it because it isn't liberal enough. Not passing anything would not have pleased anyone in that group, so it was the will of the American people all along that something be done rather than nothing. Second, an overnight Gallup poll from immediately after the bill passage that shows an almost immediate increase in support the Democrats' achievement - it polls at an even split now, after only one day, which indicates that support is on the rise in the same way that Barack Obama's approval ratings after his election exceeded the percentage of votes that he got. And finally, a poll from FiveThirtyEight showing the high favorability ratings for all the individual components of the bill, even while approval for the full bill lagged behind, indicating more dissatisfaction with the legislative process than with the substance. None of this is to say that public opinion won't continue to shift, or that those in opposition to reform are wrong on the merits - only that sustaining an accusation that the Democrats are subverting the "will of the people" is like nailing jello to a wall. It doesn't stick, and we would all be wise to simply ignore the Republicans saying otherwise. The plain fact of the matter is that Barack Obama won an election the same way Scott Brown did, and so did 219 House Democrats and 59 Senate Democrats (from states representing over 70% of the people, by the way), and a lot of them were elected to do stuff just like this. That was the will of the American people. I have no idea what's going to happen this November or in 2012, mind you - and neither does anyone else - but my humble guess is that it will have a lot more to do with the candidates themselves and the economy than with this health care bill.
And about all those projections of doom and gloom, creeping socialism, tyranny, and the loss of the American soul. The skyrocketing premiums, the loss of personal wealth, the insurmountable government debt, the stalled innovation, the dearth of doctors - all those possibilities are empirically testable, through careful and honest analysis, now that this bill has become law. Better than that, if they do start to occur, there are legislative remedies for all of them, and elections every two years that can make a difference. We aren't done here, and we haven't just started - we're in the middle of a long, circuitous process that doesn't live or die with one bill. Keep at entitlement reform, keep tearing down barriers to competition, keep fighting - above all, go win elections by espousing good policy for Pete's sake, and keep in mind that being the opposition isn't the same thing as being the enemy.
Because here's what I love about all this: hidden deep within all the screaming matches, the mathematical acrobatics, the obfuscations, the anecdotes and the generalizations, is a real honest-to-God conversation about what kind of country we are, and what our contract with one another really means. What is the central political challenge of Western democracy? Is it ensuring that those who come by their wealth honestly don't have it unfairly confiscated and redistributed? Or is it promoting the general welfare, setting the conditions that provide the most opportunity and do the most good for the most people? Both of these are moral imperatives in public life, and neither the proponents of one nor of the other can claim to be the only ones on the side of angels. The left too often indulges an overconfidence about what can be achieved by government, and too easily glosses over unintended consequences. The right, by the same token, often fails to recognize that there are other threats to liberty in modern life besides government, and that government at its best can be an affirmative check against those forces. What we as a people strive for is balance, and balance, if it comes at all, comes only by way of argument and the democratic process. In summary, political wisdom chooses its companions very selectively, and among these are Temperance, Humility, Generosity, Compassion, and if one is so inclined, faith in and hope for this great country.
God bless America.
However. To my friends on the left, let there be no doubt that true progressives got rogered here but good, in two ways. First, the liberal wing in Congress proved yet again that they'll never actually abandon the Democratic party agenda when the chips are down; not in the way the far right will ultimately hang the Republicans out to dry. Second, as Greenwald articulates the way no one else can, this bill represents a massive expansion of the same private insurance industry whose worst practices it purports to correct. Nothing that would have reined in the free-market-gaming at the heart of this matter and truly lowered prices over the long term (e.g. interstate competition, bulk price negotiation, re-importation, and most especially, a public option) was ever truly on the table, because Barack Obama didn't think he could get this done if he had to fight with the insurance companies and the Republicans at the same time. And so the price for near universal coverage is an individual insurance mandate, which, while probably economically and Constitutionally sound, is nevertheless offensive to personal liberty. We could have done better, and this victory represents a continuation of a lousy precedent that keeps the public sphere beholden to cloistered corporate interest.
Second, also to my friends on the left, let no one doubt that the estimated costs of this program are likely way, way lower than reality, absent a high level of vigilance over the long term. My friend Paul lays out some examples on his blog of analogous government projections which turned out to be short - there's no reason to think this is going to be any different. The CBO score that came out Friday got the Democrats over the top - but that was political cover, not true economic reality. The reform is gonna need some reform, and it will be required long after Barack Obama leaves office. This is our responsibility now.
Third - to my friends on the right, I don't begrudge you the differences in philosophy or economic projections. What I do feel compelled to challenge, what I feel is somewhat unworthy of you, is the constant accusation that in enacting this reform, the Democrats have ignored the will of the American people, betrayed their oaths of public service, or, less prosaically, rammed this sucker down our throats. To wit, a couple of links. First, a recent CNN poll, from before the vote, that shows 52% of the American people either supporting the bill or opposing it because it isn't liberal enough. Not passing anything would not have pleased anyone in that group, so it was the will of the American people all along that something be done rather than nothing. Second, an overnight Gallup poll from immediately after the bill passage that shows an almost immediate increase in support the Democrats' achievement - it polls at an even split now, after only one day, which indicates that support is on the rise in the same way that Barack Obama's approval ratings after his election exceeded the percentage of votes that he got. And finally, a poll from FiveThirtyEight showing the high favorability ratings for all the individual components of the bill, even while approval for the full bill lagged behind, indicating more dissatisfaction with the legislative process than with the substance. None of this is to say that public opinion won't continue to shift, or that those in opposition to reform are wrong on the merits - only that sustaining an accusation that the Democrats are subverting the "will of the people" is like nailing jello to a wall. It doesn't stick, and we would all be wise to simply ignore the Republicans saying otherwise. The plain fact of the matter is that Barack Obama won an election the same way Scott Brown did, and so did 219 House Democrats and 59 Senate Democrats (from states representing over 70% of the people, by the way), and a lot of them were elected to do stuff just like this. That was the will of the American people. I have no idea what's going to happen this November or in 2012, mind you - and neither does anyone else - but my humble guess is that it will have a lot more to do with the candidates themselves and the economy than with this health care bill.
And about all those projections of doom and gloom, creeping socialism, tyranny, and the loss of the American soul. The skyrocketing premiums, the loss of personal wealth, the insurmountable government debt, the stalled innovation, the dearth of doctors - all those possibilities are empirically testable, through careful and honest analysis, now that this bill has become law. Better than that, if they do start to occur, there are legislative remedies for all of them, and elections every two years that can make a difference. We aren't done here, and we haven't just started - we're in the middle of a long, circuitous process that doesn't live or die with one bill. Keep at entitlement reform, keep tearing down barriers to competition, keep fighting - above all, go win elections by espousing good policy for Pete's sake, and keep in mind that being the opposition isn't the same thing as being the enemy.
Because here's what I love about all this: hidden deep within all the screaming matches, the mathematical acrobatics, the obfuscations, the anecdotes and the generalizations, is a real honest-to-God conversation about what kind of country we are, and what our contract with one another really means. What is the central political challenge of Western democracy? Is it ensuring that those who come by their wealth honestly don't have it unfairly confiscated and redistributed? Or is it promoting the general welfare, setting the conditions that provide the most opportunity and do the most good for the most people? Both of these are moral imperatives in public life, and neither the proponents of one nor of the other can claim to be the only ones on the side of angels. The left too often indulges an overconfidence about what can be achieved by government, and too easily glosses over unintended consequences. The right, by the same token, often fails to recognize that there are other threats to liberty in modern life besides government, and that government at its best can be an affirmative check against those forces. What we as a people strive for is balance, and balance, if it comes at all, comes only by way of argument and the democratic process. In summary, political wisdom chooses its companions very selectively, and among these are Temperance, Humility, Generosity, Compassion, and if one is so inclined, faith in and hope for this great country.
God bless America.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Holder fumbles on bin Laden question
I can't decide whether it's a good thing or a bad thing how politically inept Eric Holder is starting to look. In response to Republican badgering about what would happen if we caught bin Laden (military vs. civilian courts, etc.), Holder says the question is moot, because either bin Laden's own people or the US military is just going to kill him if we ever find him. Then General McChrystal gets up and says, um, no, our stated objective is to bring bin Laden in alive. So we can bring him to, you know, Justice - however the Department of JUSTICE determines that should be done, Mr. Head of the Department of Justice.
On the one hand, I'd rather Holder be good at upholding the law than keeping his foot out of his mouth in front of Congress. And it certainly not his fault that Obama and Emmanuel continue to hang him out to dry. But geez, every time he goes up to the Hill...
On the one hand, I'd rather Holder be good at upholding the law than keeping his foot out of his mouth in front of Congress. And it certainly not his fault that Obama and Emmanuel continue to hang him out to dry. But geez, every time he goes up to the Hill...
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
To what purpose religion, and the DC/Catholic dispute
Douthat has a column this week bemoaning the democratization and dilution of mysticism in modern spirituality, which he views as an unfortunate but somewhat unavoidable side effect of religious tolerance and multiplicity. Paraphrasing Luke Timothy Johnson, he writes:
Douthat goes on to speculate that it's the fact of having so many choices in how to pursue faith, that ultimately blocks the kind of ascetic bliss that can come from total surrender to one particular, grounded, transcendent reality. In our search amongst all the options to find something that "works best for us", we give up the prospect of being truly surprised by God. Twas not always the case, he writes, and he wonders whether that possibility of transformation can be easily recovered in the modern age.
Douthat's work is eloquent, and it's truly a pleasure to read this kind of rumination on the op-ed page of the Times. I think he's right that transformative spirituality is tougher when you're in front of a smorgasbord. However, I think there's an extent to which Douthat has things backwards; he thinks that faith loses its power to transform because of the smorgasbord, but speaking as a Catholic, maybe the smorgasbord persists because the Church is losing it's power to transform, surrendering the personal Mission to serve in exchange for abstract statements of moral principle.
The District of Columbia's law permitting homosexual marriage went into effect last month. The Catholic Church asked for a number of exemptions so that they didn't have to recognize those marriages as part of their public operations - the District declined. In response, the Church is planning to discontinue its decades-old foster care program, on the grounds that they now won't be able to deny gay parents from fostering needy children. Also, they've decided to discontinue medical benefits for all spouses, gay and straight, that work for Catholic Charities, to avoid having to pay them for newly married gay couples. On balance, I suppose I wish DC had granted the exemption. But they didn't, which forced the Church into a choice between enforcement of the Magisterium's dictates and continuing service to the public and their employees. They chose the former.
Without delving too much into the merits of the Church's decision, I'm left to wonder why, exactly, they never thought to discriminate against couples where one of the parties had been divorced and remarried - a condition about which Church teaching is just as clear. With a supremely bad taste in my mouth, I find myself indulging a suspicion that partisan politics has infected the American Church in a fairly severe manner - which also explains why it's shown itself willing to scuttle universal health care to prevent poor women from accessing non-taxpayer-provided abortion funds, and why it's been virtually silent on the subject of torture (see here for an excellent analysis of why the Church's anti-consequentialist position on abortion should lead to a similar unambiguous and vociferous rejection of torture policy - even though it hasn't). But all of this is somewhat beside the point, which is that to my mind the Church doesn't exist to enshrine any particular set of moral principles. What we should be doing is finding every way we can to continue Jesus Christ's mission on earth. He abhorred ostentatious pronouncements of self-righteousness, and welcomed with open arms even those who the world perceived as sinners. His instructions regarding humility, and unfailing service to the needy, lacked any any all ambiguity. Accordingly, I believe He wouldn't have wanted this.
Mysticism is one way to be transformed by God. Another way - Jesus' way - is the total public surrender of the self, in service to fellow men and women. That's what the Church is supposed to be about, more than anything else. In DC, this cutting ourselves off from the masses because we don't want to be stained with what we perceive as their sins - it is not in keeping with our best traditions of faith and charity. No wonder the smorgasbord looks so enticing to so many.
For my part, I'm a Catholic, for better or for worse. I believe what Jesus said to Peter, and I believe in the value of the sacraments, and the communion of saints. I won't pretend not to partake from the buffet, for my own reasons, but to truly and finally leave the Church would be as disruptive and unthinkable to me as renouncing my American citizenship. Just like America, measuring the Church's fulfillment of its Great Promise requires constant vigilance, reflection, and patience - and that's ok. I'm no better, after all - what is this blog if not an ostentatious pronouncement of self-righteousness. But I don't mind saying I'm disappointed by the behavior in DC - I think we can do better.
As society has become steadily more materialistic...our churches have followed suit, giving up on the ascetic and ecstatic aspects of religion and emphasizing only the more worldly expressions of faith. Conservative believers fixate on the culture wars, religious liberals preach social justice, and neither leaves room for what should be a central focus of religion — the quest for the numinous, the pursuit of the unnameable, the tremor of bliss and the dark night of the soul.
Douthat goes on to speculate that it's the fact of having so many choices in how to pursue faith, that ultimately blocks the kind of ascetic bliss that can come from total surrender to one particular, grounded, transcendent reality. In our search amongst all the options to find something that "works best for us", we give up the prospect of being truly surprised by God. Twas not always the case, he writes, and he wonders whether that possibility of transformation can be easily recovered in the modern age.
Douthat's work is eloquent, and it's truly a pleasure to read this kind of rumination on the op-ed page of the Times. I think he's right that transformative spirituality is tougher when you're in front of a smorgasbord. However, I think there's an extent to which Douthat has things backwards; he thinks that faith loses its power to transform because of the smorgasbord, but speaking as a Catholic, maybe the smorgasbord persists because the Church is losing it's power to transform, surrendering the personal Mission to serve in exchange for abstract statements of moral principle.
The District of Columbia's law permitting homosexual marriage went into effect last month. The Catholic Church asked for a number of exemptions so that they didn't have to recognize those marriages as part of their public operations - the District declined. In response, the Church is planning to discontinue its decades-old foster care program, on the grounds that they now won't be able to deny gay parents from fostering needy children. Also, they've decided to discontinue medical benefits for all spouses, gay and straight, that work for Catholic Charities, to avoid having to pay them for newly married gay couples. On balance, I suppose I wish DC had granted the exemption. But they didn't, which forced the Church into a choice between enforcement of the Magisterium's dictates and continuing service to the public and their employees. They chose the former.
Without delving too much into the merits of the Church's decision, I'm left to wonder why, exactly, they never thought to discriminate against couples where one of the parties had been divorced and remarried - a condition about which Church teaching is just as clear. With a supremely bad taste in my mouth, I find myself indulging a suspicion that partisan politics has infected the American Church in a fairly severe manner - which also explains why it's shown itself willing to scuttle universal health care to prevent poor women from accessing non-taxpayer-provided abortion funds, and why it's been virtually silent on the subject of torture (see here for an excellent analysis of why the Church's anti-consequentialist position on abortion should lead to a similar unambiguous and vociferous rejection of torture policy - even though it hasn't). But all of this is somewhat beside the point, which is that to my mind the Church doesn't exist to enshrine any particular set of moral principles. What we should be doing is finding every way we can to continue Jesus Christ's mission on earth. He abhorred ostentatious pronouncements of self-righteousness, and welcomed with open arms even those who the world perceived as sinners. His instructions regarding humility, and unfailing service to the needy, lacked any any all ambiguity. Accordingly, I believe He wouldn't have wanted this.
Mysticism is one way to be transformed by God. Another way - Jesus' way - is the total public surrender of the self, in service to fellow men and women. That's what the Church is supposed to be about, more than anything else. In DC, this cutting ourselves off from the masses because we don't want to be stained with what we perceive as their sins - it is not in keeping with our best traditions of faith and charity. No wonder the smorgasbord looks so enticing to so many.
For my part, I'm a Catholic, for better or for worse. I believe what Jesus said to Peter, and I believe in the value of the sacraments, and the communion of saints. I won't pretend not to partake from the buffet, for my own reasons, but to truly and finally leave the Church would be as disruptive and unthinkable to me as renouncing my American citizenship. Just like America, measuring the Church's fulfillment of its Great Promise requires constant vigilance, reflection, and patience - and that's ok. I'm no better, after all - what is this blog if not an ostentatious pronouncement of self-righteousness. But I don't mind saying I'm disappointed by the behavior in DC - I think we can do better.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
John Yoo's latest affront to decency
For Lent this year, as in every year, I'm attempting to swear off french fries, and contempt for any and all other members of the human race. I'm doing much better with the french fries so far. John Yoo is not helping, what with his latest braying, narcissistic rant in the Wall Street Journal about how grateful Barack Obama should be to him for preserving his commander in chief powers.
I haven't the time this morning to deconstruct every self-pitying contrivance the Journal has seen fit to publish in this op-ed, but I can't help myself in pointing out two things.
One, Yoo is following the script that last week's release of the OPR report on his and Jay Bybee's misdeeds in the Office of Legal Counsel, and senior attorney David Margolis's refusal to adopt the recommendations of professional sanction, represent a full vindication of everything Yoo did. This is just absolutely wrong. Margolis agreed with every substantive claim the OPR made about Yoo and Bybee's biased, shoddy, inaccurate, and destructive work on behalf of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, to say nothing of the fact that said work was also rejected by his own Justice Department after years of damage. What saved Yoo from a disbarment recommendation was solely the fact that everyone knew he was an ideologue to begin with, and he actually believed in the president's policy objective independent of the law. What Yoo is saying now is simply a lie.
The second point I have to make is in reference to the last few paragraphs of today's op-ed, where Yoo characterizes the repudiation of his brand of unchecked presidential and military ruthlessness as unserious and manifestly dangerous, and far worse, co-opts the American military to do it:
This absolutely makes my blood boil with, yes, contempt, and it does me no good with God to hide it, even during Lent. This is how the story of the SEAL deaths is actually described, by the sole survivor who lived it, Marcus Luttrel:
I won't comment on the ultimate wisdom, or lack thereof, of Mr. Luttrel's decision not to murder the Afgahn civilians who ultimately betrayed him and his men, except to say God bless their memories and there but for the grace of Heaven go I. But no matter what, John Yoo's assertion, five years after the fact, that the SEAL team leader ordered those civilians released, not because he wasn't a stone cold killer and detaining them in the middle of a covert operation was impossible, but rather because he shared Yoo's irrational fear of an overactive civil liberties lobby and therefore suppressed his best military judgment, is a supremely detestable and self-serving distortion of the available facts.
I don't want to see John Yoo imprisoned, or disbarred, or flogged in the street. I only want him to shut the f**k up. He can rot away at Berkeley for the rest of his miserable life, for all I care - but make no mistake, he is absolute poison. That's ten dollars in the jar for me; I'm off to Penance.
I haven't the time this morning to deconstruct every self-pitying contrivance the Journal has seen fit to publish in this op-ed, but I can't help myself in pointing out two things.
One, Yoo is following the script that last week's release of the OPR report on his and Jay Bybee's misdeeds in the Office of Legal Counsel, and senior attorney David Margolis's refusal to adopt the recommendations of professional sanction, represent a full vindication of everything Yoo did. This is just absolutely wrong. Margolis agreed with every substantive claim the OPR made about Yoo and Bybee's biased, shoddy, inaccurate, and destructive work on behalf of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, to say nothing of the fact that said work was also rejected by his own Justice Department after years of damage. What saved Yoo from a disbarment recommendation was solely the fact that everyone knew he was an ideologue to begin with, and he actually believed in the president's policy objective independent of the law. What Yoo is saying now is simply a lie.
The second point I have to make is in reference to the last few paragraphs of today's op-ed, where Yoo characterizes the repudiation of his brand of unchecked presidential and military ruthlessness as unserious and manifestly dangerous, and far worse, co-opts the American military to do it:
This is no idle worry. In 2005, a Navy Seal team dropped into Afghanistan encountered goat herders who clearly intended to inform the Taliban of their whereabouts. The team leader ordered them released, against his better military judgment, because of his worries about the media and political attacks that would follow.
In less than an hour, more than 80 Taliban fighters attacked and killed all but one member of the Seal team and 16 Americans on a helicopter rescue mission. If a president cannot, or will not, protect the men and women who fight our nation's wars, they will follow the same risk-averse attitudes that invited the 9/11 attacks in the first place.
This absolutely makes my blood boil with, yes, contempt, and it does me no good with God to hide it, even during Lent. This is how the story of the SEAL deaths is actually described, by the sole survivor who lived it, Marcus Luttrel:
The four Seals zigzagged all night and through the morning until they reached a wooded slope. An Afghan man wearing a turban suddenly appeared, then a farmer and a teenage boy. Luttrell gave a PowerBar to the boy while the Seals debated whether the Afghans would live or die.
If the Seals killed the unarmed civilians, they would violate military rules of engagement; if they let them go, they risked alerting the Taliban. According to Luttrell, one Seal voted to kill them, one voted to spare them and one abstained. It was up to Luttrell.
Part of his calculus was practical. "I didn't want to go to jail." Ultimately, the core of his decision was moral. "A frogman has two personalities. The military guy in me wanted to kill them," he recalled. And yet: "They just seemed like -- people. I'm not a murderer."
Luttrell, by his account, voted to let the Afghans go. "Not a day goes by that I don't think about that decision," he said. "Not a second goes by."
At 1:20 p.m., about an hour after the Seals released the Afghans, dozens of Taliban members overwhelmed them. The civilians he had spared, Luttrell believed, had betrayed them. At the end of a two-hour firefight, only he remained alive.
I won't comment on the ultimate wisdom, or lack thereof, of Mr. Luttrel's decision not to murder the Afgahn civilians who ultimately betrayed him and his men, except to say God bless their memories and there but for the grace of Heaven go I. But no matter what, John Yoo's assertion, five years after the fact, that the SEAL team leader ordered those civilians released, not because he wasn't a stone cold killer and detaining them in the middle of a covert operation was impossible, but rather because he shared Yoo's irrational fear of an overactive civil liberties lobby and therefore suppressed his best military judgment, is a supremely detestable and self-serving distortion of the available facts.
I don't want to see John Yoo imprisoned, or disbarred, or flogged in the street. I only want him to shut the f**k up. He can rot away at Berkeley for the rest of his miserable life, for all I care - but make no mistake, he is absolute poison. That's ten dollars in the jar for me; I'm off to Penance.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Blistering, mind-numbing stupidity at Newsweek.
Decades from now, perhaps on a slow-news week during the Timberlake administration, historians will look at the first years of the 21st century and study how, in the United States, temporary erosions in government accountability and civil liberties were accompanied by a staggering reduction in the probative and intellectual standards of the Establishment press. Exhibit A could likely be yesterday's inexplicable posting of an internal discussion amongst the Newsweek editorial staff, regarding the use of the word "terrorist" in our common discourse in the light of last week's Texas suicide bombing/plane crash directed at the IRS. For reasons that surpass understanding, the leadership at Newsweek decided to make available for public consumption an exchange of ideas that would have any reasonably demanding tenth grade civics instructor throwing up her hands in disgust. Here are a few tastes, but by all means read the whole thing:
A managing editor at a national news magazine, thinking about whether Timothy McVeigh can still be called a terrorist, and proposing that the word only be used when scary foreign people do bad things. For Americans who maim and kill their fellow civilians, we'll just call those people radicals, separatists, protesters, and survivalists. (Funny, I had no idea those things were crimes.) Then, a helpful suggestion that if the perpetrator thinks he's only killing people who wronged him, then that's not really terrorism. Like if you're just trying to kill anyone happening to work at the IRS that day, as opposed to say, the people who worked at the Pentagon on 9/11, then that's not terrorism. But this one's my favorite:
Bombing the IRS, if you're an American, is just a crazy political statement, whereas true "terrorists" are easily identifiable because they have beards.
And it goes on and on like that. None of these august members of the Fourth Estate, oddly, have the idea to Google the federal statutes, which define terrorism thusly:
No mention of a rhetorical pass if the suspect is making a decent political point, or if he's a scary foreigner. But here we have journalists, partly responsible for guiding public opinion, actively proposing that terrorism, against which we are generally at war, should be defined solely as acts perpetrated by foreign madmen who just hate our freedom and couldn't possibly have a coherent political thought in their heads, whereas if an American takes it upon himself to kill his fellow citizens to make a political statement, that's different. We certainly shouldn't apply any terms that inspire our universal outrage and repudiation - that guy's just a protester, and since he's an American, maybe therefore we ought not to dismiss his point of view entirely. I suppose I should be happy on some level that we aren't going to war with everyone who hates the tax code in response to Texas - but is it any wonder how wars in Muslim countries get started and sustained when people think this way?
This double standard isn't limited to Newsweek. To wit, here's Rep. Steve King, R-IA, talking to ThinkProgress (what is it about Republican Congressmen names King):
"Sad the incident happened." Can you imagine a government official opportunistically using a terrorist attack (like the Christmas Day attempted bombing) to shore up his or her case against civilian deaths in Afghanistan? And here's Jed Babbin making a JOKE about the Texas suicide bombing and fellow tax protester Grover Norquist at CPAC:
Look, I can concede that there are close cases here when we try to apply the terrorist label. Nidal Hasan attacked what could be perceived as a military target at Fort Hood, although no one could ever claim he or anyone else was under a direct threat from unarmed troops that hadn't yet deployed to a battle zone. Scott Roeder's murder of George Tiller unquestionably had a political context, but his target was specifically Tiller, not just abortion policy in general. (For the record, they're both terrorists as well.) But for the love of Pete, Joseph Stack flew a plane into a building because he didn't like government policy, and he killed an innocent man in the process, and yet we have members of the press and the government unwilling or unable to treat his crime like the textbook definition of terrorism that it is. As long as that's because either his looks, his name, or his politics reminds us too much of ourselves, then we are truly lost.
It's worth pointing out that we could be having the same exact discussion about the word "torture". To most defenders, acts like waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, beatings, etc. are unquestionably torture when Someone Else does it to us. Of course John McCain was tortured, that's the perfect word to use. But when Americans do the exact same things, use the exact same tactics, to detainees in the war on terror, it couldn't possibly be torture - even when the victims turn out to be completely innocent - because we're the Good Guys, and our hearts are always in the right place even when we cross the line once in a while. Again, little wonder we can't seem to help ourselves.
Hat tip to Greenwald on this, with another great post.
Kathy Jones, Managing Editor (Multimedia)
Did the label terrorist ever successfully stick to McVeigh? Or the Unabomber? Or any of the IRS bombers in our violence list?
Here is my handy guide:
Lone wolfish American attacker who sees gov't as threat to personal freedom: bomber, tax protester, survivalist, separatist
Group of Americans bombing/kidnapping to protest U.S. policies on war/poverty/personal freedom/ - radical left-wing movement, right-wing separatists
All foreign groups or foreign individuals bombing/shooting to protest American gov't: terrorists
Patrick Enright, Senior Articles Editor
Yeah, maybe the distinction depends too on whom you're attacking — if it's the people you think wronged you (like the IRS), you're a protester/separatist/etc., and if it's indiscriminate killing of clearly innocent people, you're a terrorist.
A managing editor at a national news magazine, thinking about whether Timothy McVeigh can still be called a terrorist, and proposing that the word only be used when scary foreign people do bad things. For Americans who maim and kill their fellow civilians, we'll just call those people radicals, separatists, protesters, and survivalists. (Funny, I had no idea those things were crimes.) Then, a helpful suggestion that if the perpetrator thinks he's only killing people who wronged him, then that's not really terrorism. Like if you're just trying to kill anyone happening to work at the IRS that day, as opposed to say, the people who worked at the Pentagon on 9/11, then that's not terrorism. But this one's my favorite:
Dan Stone, Reporter
Yep, comes down to ID. This guy was a regular guy-next-door Joe Schmo. Terrorists have beards in live in caves [sic]. He was also an American, so targeting the IRS seems more a political statement – albeit a crazy one – whereas Abdulmutallab was an attack on our freedom. Kind of the idea that an American can talk smack about America, but when it comes from someone foreign, we rally together. Or in the case of the Christmas bomber, vie for self-righteousness.
Bombing the IRS, if you're an American, is just a crazy political statement, whereas true "terrorists" are easily identifiable because they have beards.
And it goes on and on like that. None of these august members of the Fourth Estate, oddly, have the idea to Google the federal statutes, which define terrorism thusly:
the term "Federal crime of terrorism" means an offense that
-
(A) is calculated to influence or affect the conduct of
government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against
government conduct
No mention of a rhetorical pass if the suspect is making a decent political point, or if he's a scary foreigner. But here we have journalists, partly responsible for guiding public opinion, actively proposing that terrorism, against which we are generally at war, should be defined solely as acts perpetrated by foreign madmen who just hate our freedom and couldn't possibly have a coherent political thought in their heads, whereas if an American takes it upon himself to kill his fellow citizens to make a political statement, that's different. We certainly shouldn't apply any terms that inspire our universal outrage and repudiation - that guy's just a protester, and since he's an American, maybe therefore we ought not to dismiss his point of view entirely. I suppose I should be happy on some level that we aren't going to war with everyone who hates the tax code in response to Texas - but is it any wonder how wars in Muslim countries get started and sustained when people think this way?
This double standard isn't limited to Newsweek. To wit, here's Rep. Steve King, R-IA, talking to ThinkProgress (what is it about Republican Congressmen names King):
KING: I think if we’d abolished the IRS back when I first advocated it, he wouldn’t have a target for his airplane. And I’m still for abolishing the IRS, I’ve been for it for thirty years and I’m for a national sales tax. [...] It’s sad the incident in Texas happened, but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary and when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the IRS, it’s going to be a happy day for America.
"Sad the incident happened." Can you imagine a government official opportunistically using a terrorist attack (like the Christmas Day attempted bombing) to shore up his or her case against civilian deaths in Afghanistan? And here's Jed Babbin making a JOKE about the Texas suicide bombing and fellow tax protester Grover Norquist at CPAC:
"I'm really happy to see Grover today. He was getting a little testy in the past couple of weeks. And I was just really, really glad that it was not him identified as flying that airplane into the IRS building."
Look, I can concede that there are close cases here when we try to apply the terrorist label. Nidal Hasan attacked what could be perceived as a military target at Fort Hood, although no one could ever claim he or anyone else was under a direct threat from unarmed troops that hadn't yet deployed to a battle zone. Scott Roeder's murder of George Tiller unquestionably had a political context, but his target was specifically Tiller, not just abortion policy in general. (For the record, they're both terrorists as well.) But for the love of Pete, Joseph Stack flew a plane into a building because he didn't like government policy, and he killed an innocent man in the process, and yet we have members of the press and the government unwilling or unable to treat his crime like the textbook definition of terrorism that it is. As long as that's because either his looks, his name, or his politics reminds us too much of ourselves, then we are truly lost.
It's worth pointing out that we could be having the same exact discussion about the word "torture". To most defenders, acts like waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, beatings, etc. are unquestionably torture when Someone Else does it to us. Of course John McCain was tortured, that's the perfect word to use. But when Americans do the exact same things, use the exact same tactics, to detainees in the war on terror, it couldn't possibly be torture - even when the victims turn out to be completely innocent - because we're the Good Guys, and our hearts are always in the right place even when we cross the line once in a while. Again, little wonder we can't seem to help ourselves.
Hat tip to Greenwald on this, with another great post.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Listen to General David Petraeus
This is a REAL voice on national security:
"I have always been on the record, in fact, since 2003, with the concept of living our values. And I think that whenever we have, perhaps, taken expedient measures, they have turned around and bitten us in the backside. We decided early on in the 101st Airborne Division we're just going to--look, we just said we'd decide to obey the Geneva Convention, to, to move forward with that. That has, I think, stood elements in good stead. We have worked very hard over the years, indeed, to ensure that elements like the International Committee of the Red Cross and others who see the conduct of our detainee operations and so forth approve of them. Because in the cases where that is not true, we end up paying a price for it ultimately. Abu Ghraib and other situations like that are nonbiodegradables. They don't go away. The enemy continues to beat you with them like a stick in the Central Command area of responsibility. Beyond that, frankly, we have found that the use of the interrogation methods in the Army Field Manual that was given, the force of law by Congress, that that works."
Video here.
"I have always been on the record, in fact, since 2003, with the concept of living our values. And I think that whenever we have, perhaps, taken expedient measures, they have turned around and bitten us in the backside. We decided early on in the 101st Airborne Division we're just going to--look, we just said we'd decide to obey the Geneva Convention, to, to move forward with that. That has, I think, stood elements in good stead. We have worked very hard over the years, indeed, to ensure that elements like the International Committee of the Red Cross and others who see the conduct of our detainee operations and so forth approve of them. Because in the cases where that is not true, we end up paying a price for it ultimately. Abu Ghraib and other situations like that are nonbiodegradables. They don't go away. The enemy continues to beat you with them like a stick in the Central Command area of responsibility. Beyond that, frankly, we have found that the use of the interrogation methods in the Army Field Manual that was given, the force of law by Congress, that that works."
Video here.
OPR report on Bush-era torture released
Last Friday, the Justice Department finally released its report from the Office of Professional Responsibility regarding the legal work of Messrs. John Yoo and Jay Bybee, which provided the Bush Administration lawful cover to systematically dismantle America's commitment to domestic and international prohibitions on cruel and inhumane treatment. The final recommendation of the OPR was that both attorneys receive professional sanction for being in breach of their duties as officers of the court, in that they failed to provide thorough, objective, and independent advice to their client, the government of the United States. Also released with the OPR report, however, is a refusal to accept the OPR's recommendation, from David Margolis, the senior Justice official responsible for adjudicating disputes of this nature within the Department. Mr. Margolis agrees with the substance of OPR's assessment of the legal work of Yoo and Bybee, but finds that no clear enough standard of behavior actually exists in the Department of Justice against which these attorneys could be held in violation. So while they indisputably showed "poor judgment", they're more or less off the hook.
I'm of two minds on today's events, neither of which involves any real outrage. On the one hand, what I feel in reading these reports - as I struggle to digest the process by which the country's most powerful attorneys deliberately twisted, manipulated, or simply ignored centuries of theory and precedent in service to facile, long-discredited thuggery - is just kind of a detached sadness and revulsion. Sort of like watching seagulls pick away at the dessicated carcass of a beached whale, and reflecting how something once great and majestic can so easily be reduced to dead rotting weight. I won't reproduce the entire case against Yoo and Bybee here - this piece does a pretty thorough job of it - except to say that Margolis's defense more or less boils down to the fact that these lawyers can't be held responsible for doing what everyone expected them to do anyway, which was to find a way to justify Bush and Cheney's desired policy, no matter what a truly objective, independent assessment would yield in the longer term. John Yoo is on the record as saying that the President of the United States is not bound by any law whatsoever when he is acting in defense of the nation - up to and including the mass murder of civilians. What difference would it make to him that US Courts have prosecuted foreign and domestic individuals for waterboarding? Why would he care that the eventual exposure of the administration's activities would render moot any future prosecution of our enemies, for similar violations? Why would it matter at all to him that the federal statutes prohibiting cruel and inhumane treatment tie those standards specifically to the protections that American citizens enjoy under the fifth, eighth, and fourteenth amendments? The President wanted a legal opinion, and John Yoo had a law degree; that's all that was ethically required. Not competence, not thoroughness, not consensus. Just John Yoo. That's how this works.
So, one guy says waterboarding's legal, then another bunch of guys says no it's not and anyone who says otherwise is a lousy lawyer, then another guy says ok, maybe it's not legal, but if people who think it is are acting in the interest of the President, who are us simple folk to say any different, and so on, and so forth. Kind of despicable all around; but actually I think today is a good day on balance, because at long last it's all out in the open. David Margolis actually has a history of preferring OPR reports to remain sealed, so as not to unnecessarily humiliate targets of internal DoJ investigation. But now, all Americans finally get to see how all this sausage is made, and consider the consequences of allowing the parts of the DoJ which check the government to rot like a beached whale. This is our right, more than anything else - to know the truth. Defenders of the Bush Administration have already begun to claim that the OPR report and Margolis's addendum exonerate Yoo and Bybee, which of course they don't. Should the public choose to find out the truth for ourselves, by reading the actual words of the parties involved, now we can do that.
One final point on the report...I was unaware until I read it that the waterboarding torture of Abu Zubaydah actually was claimed to have supported allegations against Binyamin Mohamed, once suspected of being involved in a dirty bomb plot against the US. I've written about Mohamed before; he was released last year because he was INNOCENT OF ALL CHARGES, and his case was the subject of a dispute between the British High Court and American intelligence agencies, regarding the release of classified information pertaining to his treatment while in custody. The seven originally redacted paragraphs in the Court's opinion have also been released, to the consternation of American authorities, and the government of Great Britain is now on the record finding that the US engaged in behavior that would be in violation of British and international law had it happened there. As this Washington Post article documents, just as the torture of Abu Zubaydah produced bad intel on Binyamin Mohamed, the cruel and inhumane punishment of Binyamin Mohamed produced bad intel on other detainees, which were also ultimately released. This is worse than just honest mistakes that unfortunately resulted in the pain and suffering of some foreigners - this was an unconscionable waste of resources by people trusted to keep us safe. Until Cheney and Bush came along, everyone knew that this stuff didn't work, that it was the sole hallmark of fools and tyrants, and that it would produce more bad intelligence than good. To this day, not a single verified case of actionable plot-related intelligence against al Qaeda has been successfully attributed to the "enhanced interrogation program", although there have been dozens of documented deaths from it. And yet, even after Bush himself shut it down as useless and detrimental, the program's defenders continue to stroll the op-ed pages of the country's biggest papers crowing about unfair politicizing of sound legal opinions, and how Barack Obama is undoing all the great work they did for this country. Insanity.
And finally, in the background to all this, the American government disrupts a huge plot to set off explosives inside New York City, without military tribunals, or enhanced techniques, or indefinite detention laws. Naijbullah Zazi has pled guilty to conspiracy to commit terrorism, and is cooperating with authorities, while facing a certain life sentence. What say the critics? Nothing yet - but I'll let you know...
I'm of two minds on today's events, neither of which involves any real outrage. On the one hand, what I feel in reading these reports - as I struggle to digest the process by which the country's most powerful attorneys deliberately twisted, manipulated, or simply ignored centuries of theory and precedent in service to facile, long-discredited thuggery - is just kind of a detached sadness and revulsion. Sort of like watching seagulls pick away at the dessicated carcass of a beached whale, and reflecting how something once great and majestic can so easily be reduced to dead rotting weight. I won't reproduce the entire case against Yoo and Bybee here - this piece does a pretty thorough job of it - except to say that Margolis's defense more or less boils down to the fact that these lawyers can't be held responsible for doing what everyone expected them to do anyway, which was to find a way to justify Bush and Cheney's desired policy, no matter what a truly objective, independent assessment would yield in the longer term. John Yoo is on the record as saying that the President of the United States is not bound by any law whatsoever when he is acting in defense of the nation - up to and including the mass murder of civilians. What difference would it make to him that US Courts have prosecuted foreign and domestic individuals for waterboarding? Why would he care that the eventual exposure of the administration's activities would render moot any future prosecution of our enemies, for similar violations? Why would it matter at all to him that the federal statutes prohibiting cruel and inhumane treatment tie those standards specifically to the protections that American citizens enjoy under the fifth, eighth, and fourteenth amendments? The President wanted a legal opinion, and John Yoo had a law degree; that's all that was ethically required. Not competence, not thoroughness, not consensus. Just John Yoo. That's how this works.
So, one guy says waterboarding's legal, then another bunch of guys says no it's not and anyone who says otherwise is a lousy lawyer, then another guy says ok, maybe it's not legal, but if people who think it is are acting in the interest of the President, who are us simple folk to say any different, and so on, and so forth. Kind of despicable all around; but actually I think today is a good day on balance, because at long last it's all out in the open. David Margolis actually has a history of preferring OPR reports to remain sealed, so as not to unnecessarily humiliate targets of internal DoJ investigation. But now, all Americans finally get to see how all this sausage is made, and consider the consequences of allowing the parts of the DoJ which check the government to rot like a beached whale. This is our right, more than anything else - to know the truth. Defenders of the Bush Administration have already begun to claim that the OPR report and Margolis's addendum exonerate Yoo and Bybee, which of course they don't. Should the public choose to find out the truth for ourselves, by reading the actual words of the parties involved, now we can do that.
One final point on the report...I was unaware until I read it that the waterboarding torture of Abu Zubaydah actually was claimed to have supported allegations against Binyamin Mohamed, once suspected of being involved in a dirty bomb plot against the US. I've written about Mohamed before; he was released last year because he was INNOCENT OF ALL CHARGES, and his case was the subject of a dispute between the British High Court and American intelligence agencies, regarding the release of classified information pertaining to his treatment while in custody. The seven originally redacted paragraphs in the Court's opinion have also been released, to the consternation of American authorities, and the government of Great Britain is now on the record finding that the US engaged in behavior that would be in violation of British and international law had it happened there. As this Washington Post article documents, just as the torture of Abu Zubaydah produced bad intel on Binyamin Mohamed, the cruel and inhumane punishment of Binyamin Mohamed produced bad intel on other detainees, which were also ultimately released. This is worse than just honest mistakes that unfortunately resulted in the pain and suffering of some foreigners - this was an unconscionable waste of resources by people trusted to keep us safe. Until Cheney and Bush came along, everyone knew that this stuff didn't work, that it was the sole hallmark of fools and tyrants, and that it would produce more bad intelligence than good. To this day, not a single verified case of actionable plot-related intelligence against al Qaeda has been successfully attributed to the "enhanced interrogation program", although there have been dozens of documented deaths from it. And yet, even after Bush himself shut it down as useless and detrimental, the program's defenders continue to stroll the op-ed pages of the country's biggest papers crowing about unfair politicizing of sound legal opinions, and how Barack Obama is undoing all the great work they did for this country. Insanity.
And finally, in the background to all this, the American government disrupts a huge plot to set off explosives inside New York City, without military tribunals, or enhanced techniques, or indefinite detention laws. Naijbullah Zazi has pled guilty to conspiracy to commit terrorism, and is cooperating with authorities, while facing a certain life sentence. What say the critics? Nothing yet - but I'll let you know...
Monday, February 15, 2010
Dick Cheney admits to a being a war criminal
From the transcript of his This Week interview:
"I was a big supporter of waterboarding."
Sullivan sums it up nicely - but just keep in mind that the current president has said waterboarding is torture. Torture is a war crime. It doesn't matter who's doing it, or to whom it's being done. Torture is a war crime. So OK, there have only ever been three choices here, but now they're starker than ever, since we have a clear admission.
1. Prosecute Dick Cheney under the federal war crimes statutes. If waterboarding is torture, and torture is a war crime, and the Bush Administration ordered that waterboarding be done, then Eric Holder is himself in violation of law if he doesn't investigate and prosecute.
2. Redefine waterboarding as not being torture (putting ourselves on the other side of our allies, the International Red Cross, and hundreds of years of domestic precedent), and thereby abdicate any authority we might have to prosecute our enemies for waterboarding American troops.
3. Decide that whatever standards we may want to apply to the rest of the world, they don't apply to the American government when one President or another says otherwise, so screw all y'all.
What will the Obama administration choose? Doing nothing implies either option 2 or option 3, and he's already on the record as not supporting option 2. Option 3 might make the troops safer, but does anyone want to explain how Option 3 keeps us average folks safer? Anyone?
"I was a big supporter of waterboarding."
Sullivan sums it up nicely - but just keep in mind that the current president has said waterboarding is torture. Torture is a war crime. It doesn't matter who's doing it, or to whom it's being done. Torture is a war crime. So OK, there have only ever been three choices here, but now they're starker than ever, since we have a clear admission.
1. Prosecute Dick Cheney under the federal war crimes statutes. If waterboarding is torture, and torture is a war crime, and the Bush Administration ordered that waterboarding be done, then Eric Holder is himself in violation of law if he doesn't investigate and prosecute.
2. Redefine waterboarding as not being torture (putting ourselves on the other side of our allies, the International Red Cross, and hundreds of years of domestic precedent), and thereby abdicate any authority we might have to prosecute our enemies for waterboarding American troops.
3. Decide that whatever standards we may want to apply to the rest of the world, they don't apply to the American government when one President or another says otherwise, so screw all y'all.
What will the Obama administration choose? Doing nothing implies either option 2 or option 3, and he's already on the record as not supporting option 2. Option 3 might make the troops safer, but does anyone want to explain how Option 3 keeps us average folks safer? Anyone?
Friday, February 12, 2010
The case of Anwar al-Awlaki: the Presidential death sentence
More details and commentary continue to trickle in regarding President Obama's claimed authority to assassinate American citizens as part of the fight against Islamic terrorism. Exhibit A is Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric from a Falls Church, VA mosque who was in contact with Nidal Hasan prior to his rampage at Fort Hood in November, and who, following that act of multiple murder, praised Hasan as a warrior for Islam. More recently, reports have emerged that al-Awlaki also had contact with Umar AbdulMutallab, the Christmas Day attempted bomber, and is also a top recruiter for al Qaeda in Yemen, our most recently opened front in the war on terror.
Wow. Pretty damned open and shut, wouldn't you say? All the evidence seems to point to this guy being a clear and present threat to the safety of American citizens, and if the CIA has the means and opportunity to take him out, who could call them wrong for doing so, Fifth Amendment or no Fifth Amendment? Except maybe, since we are after all talking about a death sentence here, perhaps looking just one layer deeper won't hurt.
Inconvenient fact #1: Authorities were aware of the emails between Hasan and al-Awlaki for months prior to the Fort Hood massacre. In those emails, the cleric sympathizes with Hasan's frustration at the Muslim casualties from the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan, which far outweigh American losses, both military and civilian. But, officials found no direct incitement to violence in the correspondence. There was never even enough evidence to put Hasan on restricted duty, much less to charge his penpals with conspiracy to commit murder.
Inconvenient fact #2: Al-Awlaki's statements of support after the Ft. Hood murders, in which he praises Hasan's choice of a military target rather than a civilian one, are protected speech in this country. We are free to despise and vilify him for it, and to point out all the myriad ways in which he is wrong, but in a nation where we permit White Power parades to be put on by modern day Nazis and openly elude to armed revolution in the context of health care reform, that speech is, like it or not, legal. He can't even be arrested for it, much less executed without trial. Put it this way, if Jeremiah Wright came out and said the same things about Fort Hood, how would we respond?
Inconvenient fact #3: The evidence that (anonymous) officials tell us we have linking al-Awlaki to ongoing al Qaeda recruiting efforts comes from two places: Umar Farouk AbdulMuttalab and Yemeni intelligence. Now look, I'm the first one to say I'm thrilled that the Christmas bomber is cooperating with authorities after being arrested, Mirandized, and charged in the civilian justice system, but even so - can we really not think of any reason to take that son of a bitch's word with a grain of salt? And the Yemenis - please - we're giving them $70M in military aid to fight terrorism inside their borders. We're gonna want to see some results from that - handing us an American citizen who's on the record saying despicable things about us, and is probably somewhere in Yemen right now, costs them very little. Call me unconvinced.
According to Al-Awlaki's family, he's currently hiding in Yemen not with terrorists, but with local tribespeople. Naturally, since we've announced our intention to kill him, he's keeping his head down, except to give interviews to al Jazeera where he praises the actions of Hasan and wishes Abdulmuttalab had chosen a military target, even while insisting that he had nothing to do with the planning or execution of either of those attacks. Who the hell knows whether he's guilty of everything the government says he is, or if it's his family who's right, and the guy is just an outspoken fanatic with no operational impact on terrorist activities at all. The point is that adjudicating the distinction between those two possibilities is extraordinarily critical to our way of life in this country. Before the American government gets to just put someone's name on a list and execute them on sight, they're supposed to have to prove their case better than this.
I hold no particular sympathy for Anwar al-Awlaki - I find his his willingness to praise the actions of terrorists, and violence in general, totally and completely repugnant. For all I know there is plenty of evidence that I have not seen which would convict al-Awlaki of material support for such terrorism. But that's the point - no one has seen or evaluated that evidence, and the accused has had no opportunity to confront it. The decision to kill this cleric from Falls Church was made by the President of the United States alone, with no independent review by a judge or by Congress, and that too is repugnant to me. Extra-judicial assassination is one more authority our government has claimed, along with the torture of both the innocent and the guilty, that until now was the exclusive province of the most backward, fanatical, and theocratic regimes on the planet.
And if your response to all this angst is that this isn't about crime and punishment, it's about self-defense, and our President doesn't need an independent justification to do what he thinks is best when we're at war, then leaving aside just how comfortable we are with accepting the idea of a global battlefield and Presidential war powers without end, I'd like to understand just what's so wrong about Anwar Al-Awlaki's argument in the first place. If an individual like himself can be attacked and executed as a military target, plain and simple, then what do we say when he asks, what's different about Fort Hood? The USS Cole? The Pentagon? How do we justify our moral outrage at those acts of terrorism? Are we better than the enemy, or are we all just soldiers after all?
One final point. This whole discussion would be a hell of a lot more interesting to me if I thought that the execution of someone guilty of all the things of which Anwar al-Awlaki is accused would do much good in the overall fight. An analogy I've heard brought up is what we'd be justified in doing if an American nuclear scientist with classified information was defecting to the Soviets, and the CIA had him in their sights as he crossed through East Berlin. Well, candidly I'm not too sure about that situation either. But the comparison gives al-Awlaki far too much credit. If you think there is any shortage of charismatic Muslim extremists ready to encourage young fools to take up arms against the United States, and if you further think that we can reduce that overall number by sending in unmanned drones on bombing missions with individual targets (missions which have an unfortunate habit of also killing civilians), then I think you're way more credulous than me. Case in point: reports this week indicate that the US has successfully taken out the operational head of the Taliban in tribal Pakistan, Hakimullah Meshud. (This assumes we got him - he's been reported dead three times in the past four weeks). This victory comes six months after we successfully took out his predecessor, Baitulla Meshud. There are evidently three or four individuals in the Taliban hierarchy angling to replace the man recently killed...and maybe that replacement will be either less effective or less motivated to continue the fight. Maybe not. Around, and around, and around we go.
Wow. Pretty damned open and shut, wouldn't you say? All the evidence seems to point to this guy being a clear and present threat to the safety of American citizens, and if the CIA has the means and opportunity to take him out, who could call them wrong for doing so, Fifth Amendment or no Fifth Amendment? Except maybe, since we are after all talking about a death sentence here, perhaps looking just one layer deeper won't hurt.
Inconvenient fact #1: Authorities were aware of the emails between Hasan and al-Awlaki for months prior to the Fort Hood massacre. In those emails, the cleric sympathizes with Hasan's frustration at the Muslim casualties from the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan, which far outweigh American losses, both military and civilian. But, officials found no direct incitement to violence in the correspondence. There was never even enough evidence to put Hasan on restricted duty, much less to charge his penpals with conspiracy to commit murder.
Inconvenient fact #2: Al-Awlaki's statements of support after the Ft. Hood murders, in which he praises Hasan's choice of a military target rather than a civilian one, are protected speech in this country. We are free to despise and vilify him for it, and to point out all the myriad ways in which he is wrong, but in a nation where we permit White Power parades to be put on by modern day Nazis and openly elude to armed revolution in the context of health care reform, that speech is, like it or not, legal. He can't even be arrested for it, much less executed without trial. Put it this way, if Jeremiah Wright came out and said the same things about Fort Hood, how would we respond?
Inconvenient fact #3: The evidence that (anonymous) officials tell us we have linking al-Awlaki to ongoing al Qaeda recruiting efforts comes from two places: Umar Farouk AbdulMuttalab and Yemeni intelligence. Now look, I'm the first one to say I'm thrilled that the Christmas bomber is cooperating with authorities after being arrested, Mirandized, and charged in the civilian justice system, but even so - can we really not think of any reason to take that son of a bitch's word with a grain of salt? And the Yemenis - please - we're giving them $70M in military aid to fight terrorism inside their borders. We're gonna want to see some results from that - handing us an American citizen who's on the record saying despicable things about us, and is probably somewhere in Yemen right now, costs them very little. Call me unconvinced.
According to Al-Awlaki's family, he's currently hiding in Yemen not with terrorists, but with local tribespeople. Naturally, since we've announced our intention to kill him, he's keeping his head down, except to give interviews to al Jazeera where he praises the actions of Hasan and wishes Abdulmuttalab had chosen a military target, even while insisting that he had nothing to do with the planning or execution of either of those attacks. Who the hell knows whether he's guilty of everything the government says he is, or if it's his family who's right, and the guy is just an outspoken fanatic with no operational impact on terrorist activities at all. The point is that adjudicating the distinction between those two possibilities is extraordinarily critical to our way of life in this country. Before the American government gets to just put someone's name on a list and execute them on sight, they're supposed to have to prove their case better than this.
I hold no particular sympathy for Anwar al-Awlaki - I find his his willingness to praise the actions of terrorists, and violence in general, totally and completely repugnant. For all I know there is plenty of evidence that I have not seen which would convict al-Awlaki of material support for such terrorism. But that's the point - no one has seen or evaluated that evidence, and the accused has had no opportunity to confront it. The decision to kill this cleric from Falls Church was made by the President of the United States alone, with no independent review by a judge or by Congress, and that too is repugnant to me. Extra-judicial assassination is one more authority our government has claimed, along with the torture of both the innocent and the guilty, that until now was the exclusive province of the most backward, fanatical, and theocratic regimes on the planet.
And if your response to all this angst is that this isn't about crime and punishment, it's about self-defense, and our President doesn't need an independent justification to do what he thinks is best when we're at war, then leaving aside just how comfortable we are with accepting the idea of a global battlefield and Presidential war powers without end, I'd like to understand just what's so wrong about Anwar Al-Awlaki's argument in the first place. If an individual like himself can be attacked and executed as a military target, plain and simple, then what do we say when he asks, what's different about Fort Hood? The USS Cole? The Pentagon? How do we justify our moral outrage at those acts of terrorism? Are we better than the enemy, or are we all just soldiers after all?
One final point. This whole discussion would be a hell of a lot more interesting to me if I thought that the execution of someone guilty of all the things of which Anwar al-Awlaki is accused would do much good in the overall fight. An analogy I've heard brought up is what we'd be justified in doing if an American nuclear scientist with classified information was defecting to the Soviets, and the CIA had him in their sights as he crossed through East Berlin. Well, candidly I'm not too sure about that situation either. But the comparison gives al-Awlaki far too much credit. If you think there is any shortage of charismatic Muslim extremists ready to encourage young fools to take up arms against the United States, and if you further think that we can reduce that overall number by sending in unmanned drones on bombing missions with individual targets (missions which have an unfortunate habit of also killing civilians), then I think you're way more credulous than me. Case in point: reports this week indicate that the US has successfully taken out the operational head of the Taliban in tribal Pakistan, Hakimullah Meshud. (This assumes we got him - he's been reported dead three times in the past four weeks). This victory comes six months after we successfully took out his predecessor, Baitulla Meshud. There are evidently three or four individuals in the Taliban hierarchy angling to replace the man recently killed...and maybe that replacement will be either less effective or less motivated to continue the fight. Maybe not. Around, and around, and around we go.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
LOST RETURNS!!!
There is something magnificent about the moment a fantasy epic begins it's final chapter. That instant where you get ready to take one last ride with beloved characters before saying goodbye. Like when the lights went down for Revenge of the Sith, or cracking the binding on The Deathly Hallows, Tuesday night was one of those moments - a warmed apple turnover topped with ice cream, a new bottle of Syrah, the company of my wife, and a 50-inch plasma TV on which was displayed season six premiere of LOST.
I know many who gave up on Lost in season two when they introduced the Others, or season three when we learned they got off the island, or season five when all the timeline hopping started. My conviction remains that those people are missing out big time, because LOST isn't about an island, or a plane crash, or time travel, or anything of the kind. What it's about is far more important - it's about whether hope itself is justified, and whether faith will someday be vindicated. It's about whether our choices matter, and in just what respect. Whether regardless of we do or how we act, everything is fated to end exactly the same way, or whether as Jacob says, it only ends once, and anything and everything up until then is just progress.
Governments and religions, even those which claim universal inclusion and participation, are invariably corrupted by the allure of power and the curse of vanity. Art, on the other hand (and storytelling in particular) merely invites us, at our own pace, to reflect together on what we have in common, what makes us special, and what's going to aid us in our pursuit of the good life. And with all my heart, I believe that it is far better for men and women to reflect on such things, even at a subconscious level, than to not. So when seven to ten million people every week choose to share such an experience, like every Tuesday at 8 PM this spring, it gives me hope, when it seems so much else in this world only serves to divide us. Imagination, inspiration, a shared vicarious triumph over our personal and cultural demons - these opportunities are few and far between, and they should be savored. I'm loving this - the premiere was fantastic, and I can't wait for next week.
I know many who gave up on Lost in season two when they introduced the Others, or season three when we learned they got off the island, or season five when all the timeline hopping started. My conviction remains that those people are missing out big time, because LOST isn't about an island, or a plane crash, or time travel, or anything of the kind. What it's about is far more important - it's about whether hope itself is justified, and whether faith will someday be vindicated. It's about whether our choices matter, and in just what respect. Whether regardless of we do or how we act, everything is fated to end exactly the same way, or whether as Jacob says, it only ends once, and anything and everything up until then is just progress.
Governments and religions, even those which claim universal inclusion and participation, are invariably corrupted by the allure of power and the curse of vanity. Art, on the other hand (and storytelling in particular) merely invites us, at our own pace, to reflect together on what we have in common, what makes us special, and what's going to aid us in our pursuit of the good life. And with all my heart, I believe that it is far better for men and women to reflect on such things, even at a subconscious level, than to not. So when seven to ten million people every week choose to share such an experience, like every Tuesday at 8 PM this spring, it gives me hope, when it seems so much else in this world only serves to divide us. Imagination, inspiration, a shared vicarious triumph over our personal and cultural demons - these opportunities are few and far between, and they should be savored. I'm loving this - the premiere was fantastic, and I can't wait for next week.
Monday, February 1, 2010
OPR Memo on Torture soon to be relased; McConnell calls Bush soft on Terror
One particularly crucial missing link in the ongoing effort to discover just what the hell went on during the Bush Administration's systematic dismantling of America's prohibitions on torture is the 2006 report from the DoJ's Office of Professional Responsibility. The Bush team's protection from prosecution in these matters relies almost entirely on the assessment of three lawyers that subjecting al Qaeda suspects to drowning, freezing, beating, sleep deprivation, etc. was perfectly legal. However, it has long been known that the Justice Department's independent review of the legal reasoning undertaken in that assessment was so flawed and weak as to rise to the level of professional misconduct. Accordingly, it has long been obvious that, far from having taken an independent analysis of domestic and international legal precedent as pertains to torture, the public's lawyers simply told the President what he wanted to hear in a deliberate attempt to provide impunity and avoid future prosecution for war crimes. The only question has been, what has been taking so long for Obama's Justice Department to release said OPR memo to the public (after all, the legal memos which permitted the torture in the first place have themselves been released). Well, now we know - the OPR report was taking so long to be released because it was being rewritten to soften the findings.
A career lawyer at Justice has downgraded the initial assessment of the OPR - which originally said that DoJ lawyers Yoo, Bradbury, and Bybee violated their professional responsibilities by providing legal cover to the President - to say that they simply showed "poor judgment" in doing so. Poor judgment, which included a finding that the President was not bound by the Convention Against Torture or the corresponding federal statutes in a time of war, even though said treaty specifically calls out war and other emergencies as circumstances that do not rise to the level of exemption. Poor judgment, which failed to recognize the fact that waterboarding has been prosecuted by the United States as a crime of torture in both domestic law enforcement cases and international war crimes tribunals. Poor judgment, which included making this assessment only after the President was unable to secure a pledge from other divisions of justice that American agents wouldn't be prosecuted for torture after following orders from the President.
Once the new, whitewashed report comes out, it will, conveniently, remove any obligation on Obama's DoJ to take any action against Bush's lawyers, and will even remove the specter of professional rebuke for these fine public servants. And from there, anyone happy with the government's current position on torture - which is that the President can do whatever the hell he wants, whenever he wants - can rest assured that those of us who disagree are simply exercising a different legal judgment. No true law really applies - only the good graces of the executive branch. It's worth pausing here to note that the federal statutes defining cruel and unusual punishment for the purposes of interpreting the Convention Against Torture specifically refer to the same standards one would use to interpret the Eigth Amendment of the Constitution. Just imagine what will happen the next time a US citizen is abused in federal custody, now that the Obama administration has effectively notarized the Bush administration's decision to torture foreign detainees. We have officially joined the ranks of Iran, Libya, and Saudi Arabia in our legally sanctioned conduct against foreign threats.
In other news, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has gone on the record saying that George W. Bush made some serious mistakes in the war on terror. Namely, he never should have tried Richard Reid and others in a civilian court the way Obama's trying to treat Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and he let too many people go from Guantanamo Bay. Starting a war under false pretenses, expanding unfunded entitlements in an unprecedented manner, nominating his own in-house counsel to the Supreme Court - no objection to any of these. But following the model of Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, Winston Churchill, etc. when it comes to the treatment of non-state terrorists, and releasing detained individuals when we have no evidence that they did anything wrong - now the Senator's ready to speak out against this breach of the public trust. McConnell also confidently predicted that Congress has enough votes to cut off any funding Barack Obama might need to try any al Qaeda members in criminal court, or to close Gitmo as he desires.
On this fine morning I find myself reflecting on just how marvelous all this must make Osama bin Laden feel. After decades of treating him and his ilk like the common scum they are - with same accord as we would any other violent criminal - the United States is finally ready, on a bipartisan basis no less, to concede that today's Islamic terrorists are so dastardly, so cunning, so powerful and Batman-villainesque, that we must abandon our normal modes of operating and disavow our faith in ordinary law enforcement and civilian justice. He and his band of warriors have roused our attention so greatly and irreversibly, that we're now prepared to opine that even George W. Bush didn't take the threat seriously enough. Al Qaeda has caused us so much fear that we dare not let them into our cities and our courtrooms, even in chains, lest they turn our centuries-old system of justice against us. He must be very proud to be given this much respect.
I also find myself wondering, as our leaders go on TV to talk about how scared we should all be, just what I would say to a citizen of Pakistan or Afghanistan about why he should throw his lot in with the Americans at this particular point in history, now that we've shed our faith in the rule of law, our moral authority in the treatment of our enemies, and now finally our serenity in the face of simple-minded fanatics with nothing to offer the world but outdated revolutionist rhetoric and bombs in their underwear.
A career lawyer at Justice has downgraded the initial assessment of the OPR - which originally said that DoJ lawyers Yoo, Bradbury, and Bybee violated their professional responsibilities by providing legal cover to the President - to say that they simply showed "poor judgment" in doing so. Poor judgment, which included a finding that the President was not bound by the Convention Against Torture or the corresponding federal statutes in a time of war, even though said treaty specifically calls out war and other emergencies as circumstances that do not rise to the level of exemption. Poor judgment, which failed to recognize the fact that waterboarding has been prosecuted by the United States as a crime of torture in both domestic law enforcement cases and international war crimes tribunals. Poor judgment, which included making this assessment only after the President was unable to secure a pledge from other divisions of justice that American agents wouldn't be prosecuted for torture after following orders from the President.
Once the new, whitewashed report comes out, it will, conveniently, remove any obligation on Obama's DoJ to take any action against Bush's lawyers, and will even remove the specter of professional rebuke for these fine public servants. And from there, anyone happy with the government's current position on torture - which is that the President can do whatever the hell he wants, whenever he wants - can rest assured that those of us who disagree are simply exercising a different legal judgment. No true law really applies - only the good graces of the executive branch. It's worth pausing here to note that the federal statutes defining cruel and unusual punishment for the purposes of interpreting the Convention Against Torture specifically refer to the same standards one would use to interpret the Eigth Amendment of the Constitution. Just imagine what will happen the next time a US citizen is abused in federal custody, now that the Obama administration has effectively notarized the Bush administration's decision to torture foreign detainees. We have officially joined the ranks of Iran, Libya, and Saudi Arabia in our legally sanctioned conduct against foreign threats.
In other news, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has gone on the record saying that George W. Bush made some serious mistakes in the war on terror. Namely, he never should have tried Richard Reid and others in a civilian court the way Obama's trying to treat Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and he let too many people go from Guantanamo Bay. Starting a war under false pretenses, expanding unfunded entitlements in an unprecedented manner, nominating his own in-house counsel to the Supreme Court - no objection to any of these. But following the model of Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, Winston Churchill, etc. when it comes to the treatment of non-state terrorists, and releasing detained individuals when we have no evidence that they did anything wrong - now the Senator's ready to speak out against this breach of the public trust. McConnell also confidently predicted that Congress has enough votes to cut off any funding Barack Obama might need to try any al Qaeda members in criminal court, or to close Gitmo as he desires.
On this fine morning I find myself reflecting on just how marvelous all this must make Osama bin Laden feel. After decades of treating him and his ilk like the common scum they are - with same accord as we would any other violent criminal - the United States is finally ready, on a bipartisan basis no less, to concede that today's Islamic terrorists are so dastardly, so cunning, so powerful and Batman-villainesque, that we must abandon our normal modes of operating and disavow our faith in ordinary law enforcement and civilian justice. He and his band of warriors have roused our attention so greatly and irreversibly, that we're now prepared to opine that even George W. Bush didn't take the threat seriously enough. Al Qaeda has caused us so much fear that we dare not let them into our cities and our courtrooms, even in chains, lest they turn our centuries-old system of justice against us. He must be very proud to be given this much respect.
I also find myself wondering, as our leaders go on TV to talk about how scared we should all be, just what I would say to a citizen of Pakistan or Afghanistan about why he should throw his lot in with the Americans at this particular point in history, now that we've shed our faith in the rule of law, our moral authority in the treatment of our enemies, and now finally our serenity in the face of simple-minded fanatics with nothing to offer the world but outdated revolutionist rhetoric and bombs in their underwear.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
SOTU
He took us all to church, that was nice. I love a guy waxing poetic about the indomitable greatness of the American spirit and all that, and the man does have talent. All in all, though, from a policy point of view I didn't find much about the speech that was particularly amazing, or particularly horrible. It was a little interesting that after announcing an aggressive jobs program, he gave the Republicans some specific red meat with nuclear power and offshore drilling - but then only issued what I thought was a rather vague insistence that they get on board with health care or get out of the way.
From my amateur perspective, nothing matters to Obama's political future more than passing health care - and I think he could have gone further to put Congress on notice...a deadline, or something. The speech wouldn't have done anything on its own, anyhow, so maybe it doesn't matter. The next few weeks will be tell the true tale of whether Barack Obama really wants to govern.
From my amateur perspective, nothing matters to Obama's political future more than passing health care - and I think he could have gone further to put Congress on notice...a deadline, or something. The speech wouldn't have done anything on its own, anyhow, so maybe it doesn't matter. The next few weeks will be tell the true tale of whether Barack Obama really wants to govern.
Go ahead, call me paranoid
Pop quiz: Does an American citizen enjoy a Constitutional protection against being summarily executed by his own government without trial or due process, based on suspicion of terrorist affiliations? If you answered yes, of course he does, that's ridiculous, then you haven't read today's Washington Post:
Just to be clear, we aren't talking about people who pick up a weapon and begin firing on American forces, or are intercepted in the midst of an attack. The President is asserting the right to put your name on a list, and if they can find you anywhere in the world, to send in the military to kill you. This authority is governed by no specific statute, and comes with no judicial oversight. One assumes that in practical terms and for the time being, the practice is limited to overseas operations and people with strange sounding names. Nevertheless, there is evidently no real right to provide evidence in your own defense or confront witnesses, much less a trial of any kind. Just the good graces and judgment of the President of the United States.
Look - even if I virulently disagree, I can sort of understand at least the philosophy behind suspension of privacy rights in a time of war, and maybe even the transient allure of indefinite detention powers. I'm not giving an inch on torture - but now Obama can just decide to kill someone? An American? You know it's not like they don't get bad intelligence, people - seriously, are we all just supposed to take our chances here?
In other not-unrelated news, the most loudly repeated tale from the last eight years that torturing a high-value member of al Qaeda was effective has been walked back by the guy shopping it around the Beltway. No harm done there, I suppose.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests," said one former intelligence official.
The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy."
Just to be clear, we aren't talking about people who pick up a weapon and begin firing on American forces, or are intercepted in the midst of an attack. The President is asserting the right to put your name on a list, and if they can find you anywhere in the world, to send in the military to kill you. This authority is governed by no specific statute, and comes with no judicial oversight. One assumes that in practical terms and for the time being, the practice is limited to overseas operations and people with strange sounding names. Nevertheless, there is evidently no real right to provide evidence in your own defense or confront witnesses, much less a trial of any kind. Just the good graces and judgment of the President of the United States.
Look - even if I virulently disagree, I can sort of understand at least the philosophy behind suspension of privacy rights in a time of war, and maybe even the transient allure of indefinite detention powers. I'm not giving an inch on torture - but now Obama can just decide to kill someone? An American? You know it's not like they don't get bad intelligence, people - seriously, are we all just supposed to take our chances here?
In other not-unrelated news, the most loudly repeated tale from the last eight years that torturing a high-value member of al Qaeda was effective has been walked back by the guy shopping it around the Beltway. No harm done there, I suppose.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
West Wing Quote of the Day
[Toby is articulating the benefits of the World Trade Organization, against the vapid arguments of a group of protesters he calls "anarchists wannabees on vacation".]
TOBY ZIEGLER: You want the benefits of free trade? Food is cheaper. Food is cheaper, clothes are cheaper, steel is cheaper, cars are cheaper, phone service is cheaper. You feel me building a rhythm here, that's because I'm a speechwriter, I know how to make a point. It lowers prices, it raises incomes - you see what I did there with "lowers" and "raises" there, that's called the science of listener attention. We did repetition, we did floating opposites, and then you end with the one that's not like the others, are you ready? Free trade stops wars. Free trade stops wars! And then we figure out a way to fix the rest! One world, one peace, I'm sure I saw that on a sign somewhere.
TOBY ZIEGLER: You want the benefits of free trade? Food is cheaper. Food is cheaper, clothes are cheaper, steel is cheaper, cars are cheaper, phone service is cheaper. You feel me building a rhythm here, that's because I'm a speechwriter, I know how to make a point. It lowers prices, it raises incomes - you see what I did there with "lowers" and "raises" there, that's called the science of listener attention. We did repetition, we did floating opposites, and then you end with the one that's not like the others, are you ready? Free trade stops wars. Free trade stops wars! And then we figure out a way to fix the rest! One world, one peace, I'm sure I saw that on a sign somewhere.
Monday, January 25, 2010
This is battlefield Earth
Barack Obama's justice department announced last week that approximately 50 detainees at Guantanamo Bay are to be imprisoned indefinitely, without being targeted for either civilian trial or military commission. The reasoning, according to the government is that these 50 prisoners (approximately 25% of all those currently held at Gitmo) are "to difficult to prosecute and too dangerous for release". 40 other prisoners are set for trial, and 110 are targeted for release (if their own countries will take them back).
There is absolutely nothing controversial about a country at war detaining prisoners captured on the battlefield, and holding them until the conflict has ended. That's because prisoners of war aren't criminals - once the war has ended, they get to go home. Perpetrators of war crimes, by contrast, don't get to go home when the conflict is over - they get prosecuted under due process, and then punished for those crimes, up to and including by execution. This group of 50 individuals has been given a third designation by the government, the people who we know are guilty, but we can't prove it, so just trust us. This category was created not with any special law passed by Congress, but exists (according to the Obama administration) by virtue of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force against al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Let's review. The "battlefield", just so we all understand, is the planet. The ACLU has just released a handy little chart that shows where the Gitmo detainees were picked up - this is a worldwide arrest pattern, and it includes the United States. Also, this particular "war" is not likely to coherently end in our lifetimes - even if Iraq and Afghanistan tamper down in the next 10 years, it's difficult to imagine a final victory over Islamic terrorism ever really conclusively happening - sort of like drugs or poverty. So, Barack Obama has asserted the government's right to arrest anyone, anywhere in the world, and imprison them forever without independent due process, simply by asserting that they're too dangerous to release but too difficult to prosecute. I have to ask - where the hell are the people who don't trust the government to run a health insurance plan in all this?
If these people were dangerous, there'd be some kind of evidence against them. If that evidence were related to sensitive national security information, there are rules for handling classified material that have worked fine for decades. If that evidence was obtained by torturing the suspects, then it's inherently unreliable. The fact we're even talking about this, under a Democratic president, with no substantive opposition, is simply amazing, and unprecedented.
I'm trying to find a list of the 50 to confirm this, but if I'm not mistaken, one of the individuals who won't be going home any time soon is British/Saudi national Shaker Aamer, who, it just so happens, claims to have been tortured by asphyxiation at Gitmo the same night in 2006 that three inmates died under suspicious circumstances. I'm just saying.
There is absolutely nothing controversial about a country at war detaining prisoners captured on the battlefield, and holding them until the conflict has ended. That's because prisoners of war aren't criminals - once the war has ended, they get to go home. Perpetrators of war crimes, by contrast, don't get to go home when the conflict is over - they get prosecuted under due process, and then punished for those crimes, up to and including by execution. This group of 50 individuals has been given a third designation by the government, the people who we know are guilty, but we can't prove it, so just trust us. This category was created not with any special law passed by Congress, but exists (according to the Obama administration) by virtue of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force against al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Let's review. The "battlefield", just so we all understand, is the planet. The ACLU has just released a handy little chart that shows where the Gitmo detainees were picked up - this is a worldwide arrest pattern, and it includes the United States. Also, this particular "war" is not likely to coherently end in our lifetimes - even if Iraq and Afghanistan tamper down in the next 10 years, it's difficult to imagine a final victory over Islamic terrorism ever really conclusively happening - sort of like drugs or poverty. So, Barack Obama has asserted the government's right to arrest anyone, anywhere in the world, and imprison them forever without independent due process, simply by asserting that they're too dangerous to release but too difficult to prosecute. I have to ask - where the hell are the people who don't trust the government to run a health insurance plan in all this?
If these people were dangerous, there'd be some kind of evidence against them. If that evidence were related to sensitive national security information, there are rules for handling classified material that have worked fine for decades. If that evidence was obtained by torturing the suspects, then it's inherently unreliable. The fact we're even talking about this, under a Democratic president, with no substantive opposition, is simply amazing, and unprecedented.
I'm trying to find a list of the 50 to confirm this, but if I'm not mistaken, one of the individuals who won't be going home any time soon is British/Saudi national Shaker Aamer, who, it just so happens, claims to have been tortured by asphyxiation at Gitmo the same night in 2006 that three inmates died under suspicious circumstances. I'm just saying.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Citizens United vs. FEC
Few things fill me with a greater sense of nostalgia then when I get to agree and make common cause with my conservative friends. I'd have thought that my objection to wholesale expansion of government surveillance and detention powers would more often have done the trick on that score, but for reasons that surpass understanding, the ground has proved less fertile than I imagined. Today, however, huzzah! A partial sliver of a half-hearted alignment, in the case of Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission.
In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court has struck down regulations limiting corporate and union sponsorship of campaign advertisements. (Hey, surprise, George Will loves it! Dahlia Lithwick hates it! Moving on.) Justice Kennedy's opinion trumpeted the Court's ruling as a triumph for free speech, while Justice Stevens' heartfelt dissent lamented the coming tsunami of profit-seeking short term influence into the electoral process.
Make no mistake - outsized corporate influence of congressional and presidential campaigns is at the heart of every single policy dysfunction in this country, from health care to defense to banking to agriculture subsidies. Congress is collectively 100% beholden to the ongoing interests that fund the ambitions of its members, and while I do find the entire corrupt edifice flatly disgusting, it's a mistake to place all the blame for it on the corporations themselves. If you're angry (and you should be), focus your ire on a) party leaders that select candidates based on their ability to raise money rather than their talent for serving the public, b) individual politicians who care more about getting and staying in office that about anything they might be able to accomplish while they're there, c) a press that abdicates their responsibility to insist on disclosure and accountability, and most importantly, d) an uneducated and passive public who prefers to participate in partisan cage matches and root for the home team than they do about real results.
However satisfying it might be, in this theater of the absurd, to restrict the amplification of corporate speech when we find its effects distasteful, the First Amendment simply does not permit it. The framers didn't even put a helpful little caveat in there, like "a well-regulated militia being necessary"...there's no wiggle room on freedom of expression, save imminent danger. (There are some interesting arguments out there as to whether corporations are entitled to as much freedom of speech, but they are unconvincing to me. Happy to discuss.) More fundamentally, however, is the fact that Constitution or no Constitution it's almost never a good idea to try to fix a imbalance in the marketplace of ideas through authoritarian censorship.
To use an analogy which I hasten to point out is loose and merely illustrative in nature (so no one freak out), a few years ago the President of William and Mary used his discretionary authority to remove an Anglican altar cross from permanent display in the College's oldest chapel, where by custom it had been for nearly 100 years (there were built in exceptions for non-sectarian events held in the chapel). The President's reasoning was that the Cross, and its attendant Christian expression, created an unwelcoming environment for students and faculty who did not share the faith. The fact that the President was never quite able to empirically justify these concerns, or even properly articulate them for that matter, was somewhat beside the point. At issue for myself and others was that by deciding for himself the proper levels of amplification of various points of view, he was (inadvertently, we presumed) making the campus a less diverse place, not a more diverse place. A legitimization of administration-imposed limits in one arena held the specter of indeterminate limits to be imposed elsewhere in the future; and the costs of that kind of regulation ultimately outweigh the benefits. What the President should have been doing to satisfy his diversity agenda, rather than attempt to dampen what he perceived as a dominant voice, was work tirelessly to ensure that a wide variety of avenues and opportunities for expression remained open and accessible to all, and then let the marketplace work. Secondarily, he could have focused his attention on correcting any negative consequences of a dominant Christian expression - if he could find them, that is - as opposed to focusing on the expression itself. (I pause here to note that the President's other, somewhat vague argument - that there were Establishment Clause concerns in play with the Cross given the school's state status - was also well countered and disposed of by our august opposition committee, but that's another post for another time.)
Similarly, the appropriate remedy for outsized corporate spending in the democratic process isn't arbitrary limits on corporate spending. If corporate spending is indeed dominant, that can be remedied by improving the abilities of individual citizens to organize and make their voices heard. Some of this government can help with, through vastly expanded public campaign financing options (public money that would be very well spent), and some of it is plain old fashioned grass roots on our own dimes. Barack Obama's primary campaign (though not his general election campaign) proved that this is at least possible, and entrenched interests can be defeated - so there's no reason to throw up our hands now. The other thing that absolutely must be done is to impose stricter limits and harsher penalties on the means by which politicians are personally enriched by their corporate relationships, by exploring things like term limits, tighter restrictions on the revolving door to the private sector, more stringent disclosure rules, etc. The incentives for our illustrious leaders need a thorough recalibration - and that can be achieved by the democratic process.
Of course, that's all theory. In practice, the political environment at the moment is unlikely to support any of these things, at least in the short term - but as I said, we really only have ourselves to blame for that. No one ever said that advanced citizenship is easy, but it seems a small price to pay in the end. We need to work to find the hidden interests and stop rewarding the violators by continuing to send them back to office. Throw them all out and demand better, even if it damns the whole broken two-party system in the process.
In recognition of the very real difficulties we face, however, I will go so far as to say that the Court was in no sense obligated to rule as they did, even if all else being equal, I agree with them on principle. As Richard Hasen outlines, this decision was actually among the more egregious cases of judicial activism in recent memory, given the long-standing case law in play. Historically the Court has refrained from making grand Constitutional pronouncements except in extreme circumstances - and a dearth of corporate money in the system doesn't remotely qualify. Again, that doesn't make it wrong on the law, but it does make it politically insensitive and probably unwise. It also shows the real-world consequences of having right-wing Presidents appointing justices to the Court (Roberts and Alito joined the decision, Sotomayor dissented). A silver lining of the whole she-bang might be that we can finally put to rest the notion that only liberal justices "legislate from the bench."
In any event, progressives, don't lose too much hope - something tells me this ruling could come in very handy if, say, Sarah Palin gets the GOP nomination. It all began over something called "Hillary: The Movie"...what's good for the goose, and all.
In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court has struck down regulations limiting corporate and union sponsorship of campaign advertisements. (Hey, surprise, George Will loves it! Dahlia Lithwick hates it! Moving on.) Justice Kennedy's opinion trumpeted the Court's ruling as a triumph for free speech, while Justice Stevens' heartfelt dissent lamented the coming tsunami of profit-seeking short term influence into the electoral process.
Make no mistake - outsized corporate influence of congressional and presidential campaigns is at the heart of every single policy dysfunction in this country, from health care to defense to banking to agriculture subsidies. Congress is collectively 100% beholden to the ongoing interests that fund the ambitions of its members, and while I do find the entire corrupt edifice flatly disgusting, it's a mistake to place all the blame for it on the corporations themselves. If you're angry (and you should be), focus your ire on a) party leaders that select candidates based on their ability to raise money rather than their talent for serving the public, b) individual politicians who care more about getting and staying in office that about anything they might be able to accomplish while they're there, c) a press that abdicates their responsibility to insist on disclosure and accountability, and most importantly, d) an uneducated and passive public who prefers to participate in partisan cage matches and root for the home team than they do about real results.
However satisfying it might be, in this theater of the absurd, to restrict the amplification of corporate speech when we find its effects distasteful, the First Amendment simply does not permit it. The framers didn't even put a helpful little caveat in there, like "a well-regulated militia being necessary"...there's no wiggle room on freedom of expression, save imminent danger. (There are some interesting arguments out there as to whether corporations are entitled to as much freedom of speech, but they are unconvincing to me. Happy to discuss.) More fundamentally, however, is the fact that Constitution or no Constitution it's almost never a good idea to try to fix a imbalance in the marketplace of ideas through authoritarian censorship.
To use an analogy which I hasten to point out is loose and merely illustrative in nature (so no one freak out), a few years ago the President of William and Mary used his discretionary authority to remove an Anglican altar cross from permanent display in the College's oldest chapel, where by custom it had been for nearly 100 years (there were built in exceptions for non-sectarian events held in the chapel). The President's reasoning was that the Cross, and its attendant Christian expression, created an unwelcoming environment for students and faculty who did not share the faith. The fact that the President was never quite able to empirically justify these concerns, or even properly articulate them for that matter, was somewhat beside the point. At issue for myself and others was that by deciding for himself the proper levels of amplification of various points of view, he was (inadvertently, we presumed) making the campus a less diverse place, not a more diverse place. A legitimization of administration-imposed limits in one arena held the specter of indeterminate limits to be imposed elsewhere in the future; and the costs of that kind of regulation ultimately outweigh the benefits. What the President should have been doing to satisfy his diversity agenda, rather than attempt to dampen what he perceived as a dominant voice, was work tirelessly to ensure that a wide variety of avenues and opportunities for expression remained open and accessible to all, and then let the marketplace work. Secondarily, he could have focused his attention on correcting any negative consequences of a dominant Christian expression - if he could find them, that is - as opposed to focusing on the expression itself. (I pause here to note that the President's other, somewhat vague argument - that there were Establishment Clause concerns in play with the Cross given the school's state status - was also well countered and disposed of by our august opposition committee, but that's another post for another time.)
Similarly, the appropriate remedy for outsized corporate spending in the democratic process isn't arbitrary limits on corporate spending. If corporate spending is indeed dominant, that can be remedied by improving the abilities of individual citizens to organize and make their voices heard. Some of this government can help with, through vastly expanded public campaign financing options (public money that would be very well spent), and some of it is plain old fashioned grass roots on our own dimes. Barack Obama's primary campaign (though not his general election campaign) proved that this is at least possible, and entrenched interests can be defeated - so there's no reason to throw up our hands now. The other thing that absolutely must be done is to impose stricter limits and harsher penalties on the means by which politicians are personally enriched by their corporate relationships, by exploring things like term limits, tighter restrictions on the revolving door to the private sector, more stringent disclosure rules, etc. The incentives for our illustrious leaders need a thorough recalibration - and that can be achieved by the democratic process.
Of course, that's all theory. In practice, the political environment at the moment is unlikely to support any of these things, at least in the short term - but as I said, we really only have ourselves to blame for that. No one ever said that advanced citizenship is easy, but it seems a small price to pay in the end. We need to work to find the hidden interests and stop rewarding the violators by continuing to send them back to office. Throw them all out and demand better, even if it damns the whole broken two-party system in the process.
In recognition of the very real difficulties we face, however, I will go so far as to say that the Court was in no sense obligated to rule as they did, even if all else being equal, I agree with them on principle. As Richard Hasen outlines, this decision was actually among the more egregious cases of judicial activism in recent memory, given the long-standing case law in play. Historically the Court has refrained from making grand Constitutional pronouncements except in extreme circumstances - and a dearth of corporate money in the system doesn't remotely qualify. Again, that doesn't make it wrong on the law, but it does make it politically insensitive and probably unwise. It also shows the real-world consequences of having right-wing Presidents appointing justices to the Court (Roberts and Alito joined the decision, Sotomayor dissented). A silver lining of the whole she-bang might be that we can finally put to rest the notion that only liberal justices "legislate from the bench."
In any event, progressives, don't lose too much hope - something tells me this ruling could come in very handy if, say, Sarah Palin gets the GOP nomination. It all began over something called "Hillary: The Movie"...what's good for the goose, and all.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
West Wing Quote of the Day
[Sam and Ainsley have been debating the Equal Rights Amendment, and the discussion has devolved to standard left v. right.]
SAM SEABORN: You know, you Republicans are so fond of calling government depraved because it won't regulate what you can see on a newsstand, or what sex we're allowed to have sex with, or a woman's right to choose - but don't you dare regulate this deadly weapon in my pocket, because that would violate my freedom.
AINSLEY HAYES: Yes, and you Democrats are all for freedom of speech unless it means prayer in a public school, and you're all for the freedom of information act unless I want to find out if my fourteen-year-old has had an abortion...
SS: Well, we believe in the ERA.
AH: And good for you.
SS: How can you possibly have an objection to-
AH: Because it's humiliating Sam. An amendment to the Constitution that says I'm equal under the law to a man - I'm mortified there's reason to think I wasn't before. I'm a citizen of the United States of America, not part of a special class that requires your protection. I don't need to have my rights handed down to me by a bunch of old, white men. The same 14th amendment that protects you, protects me, and I went to law school, just to make sure. And with that, I'm going back down to the mess, because I think I may have seen there, a peach.
[exits]
SS: I could have countered that, but I'd already moved on to other things in my head.
SAM SEABORN: You know, you Republicans are so fond of calling government depraved because it won't regulate what you can see on a newsstand, or what sex we're allowed to have sex with, or a woman's right to choose - but don't you dare regulate this deadly weapon in my pocket, because that would violate my freedom.
AINSLEY HAYES: Yes, and you Democrats are all for freedom of speech unless it means prayer in a public school, and you're all for the freedom of information act unless I want to find out if my fourteen-year-old has had an abortion...
SS: Well, we believe in the ERA.
AH: And good for you.
SS: How can you possibly have an objection to-
AH: Because it's humiliating Sam. An amendment to the Constitution that says I'm equal under the law to a man - I'm mortified there's reason to think I wasn't before. I'm a citizen of the United States of America, not part of a special class that requires your protection. I don't need to have my rights handed down to me by a bunch of old, white men. The same 14th amendment that protects you, protects me, and I went to law school, just to make sure. And with that, I'm going back down to the mess, because I think I may have seen there, a peach.
[exits]
SS: I could have countered that, but I'd already moved on to other things in my head.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
The case of Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani et. al.; The Guantanamo "Suicides"
Many Americans are fond of exhorting the mainstream Muslim community to take a more active role in denouncing the depredations of al Qaeda and their terrorist allies. The theory is that if Islam is a religion of peace, the truly faithful wouldn't permit murderous extremists to carry their standard, and the fact that such denouncements have not occurred to our satisfaction counts as evidence that perhaps the face of "true" Islam is accurately represented by the terrorists themselves. The more bellicose among us, it has further seemed to me, have even permitted this perceived lack of outrage to mitigate the regret one might feel at the often-indiscriminate death and destruction meted out in Muslim countries by the American military, as though merely sharing elements of a culture with violent criminals quite reasonably comes with a high but predictable price.
This week, Harpers Online published an article by Scott Horton, which lays out in exhaustive, stomach-turning, journalistic detail the evidence that in 2006, agents of the United States government tortured three men to death at a secret facility adjacent to the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Horton further outlines the facts that lead one to suspect the government of an immediate and far-reaching effort to cover up the crimes, by manufacturing evidence of a coordinated suicide by the Guantanamo prisoners, mutilating the bodies to prevent independent autopsies, and of course, telling lie upon lie upon lie to the American people.
One is of course free to dismiss this as a wild conspiracy theory, but I challenge you to do that after reading the article in full. This is not a brand new story; soon after the news broke in 2006, a group of law students and faculty at Seton Hall University pored over the official government reports and found dozens of anomalies and inconsistencies, which led them to suspect something was seriously amiss. But now, the evidence Scott Horton brings to bear includes corroborated reports from American military personnel at Guantanamo, some of them decorated, most of them with the most conservative and patriotic credentials. These are individuals who claim to have heard screams frequently emanating from a facility near Guantanamo that wasn't supposed to exist. Who say they saw the bodies of three men being delivered to the medical facility from outside the base, as opposed to from the prison block like the government said following the suicide reports. Who have taken great personal risk in telling the story Horton reports.
For what it's worth, even though it shouldn't much matter, the three dead men in question were quite far from the 'worst of the worst' typically associated with the US's 'enhanced interrogation' programs. One had been sold to the Americans for a $5000 bounty, under the shaky claim that he had once served as a Taliban cook. Another was found living in a flat where the government thought Abu Zubaydah may once also have stayed. Each, as it happens, were on a list of prisoners to be released from American custody, on the grounds that there was no evidence that they had the intent or ability to inflict harm on the national interest. This is the group that, after their deaths, the government claimed committed suicide in an act of asymmetrical warfare against the United States, by binding their own feet and hands, shoving rags down their own throats, and hanging themselves in their cells, all at the exact same time, and all without base security noticing what was happening until it was too late.
Horton does not draw any final conclusions in his article, understanding that a criminal investigation is the only proper mechanism to do so. Indeed, one of the provisions of the Convention Against Torture, signed by Ronald Reagan and ratified by a Republican Congress, mandates that signatories investigate all credible allegations of torture-related crimes to a satisfactory conclusion. Barack Obama, on the other hand, has fully embraced a policy of "looking forward, not backward" when it comes to alleged crimes perpetrated by the Bush administration (outside those of a few low-level scapegoats), which of course puts him at odds with international law. In such an environment, there's not much for Horton to do but put the available facts into the public domain, which he has done without the notice, to date, of the liberally biased mainstream press.
If you've been reading this blog for a while - if you read this, this, this, and this , to note a few - maybe you're wondering if I don't take some kind of grotesque pleasure in continually writing about this stuff; if I've begun to crave the exposure of American malfeasance, because it satisfies some kind of newly minted, liberal, anti-authoritarian fetish. I assure you, that couldn't be farther from the truth. There's a reason why a terrorist attack on the citizens of the United States of America is a bonafide outrage - not just because it's where my family and I live, but objectively, transcendentally so. What makes this country special isn't geography or economy, or even culture - it's the one belief we all supposedly share, that government's authority over the individual is limited, by laws established by citizens of equal value, and more fundamentally than that, by the Truth of universal human dignity. Accordingly, the mere possibility that murder by torture of innocent people could have occurred in the 21st century, under the American flag, makes me absolutely sick to my stomach. And whether any of us like it or not, we are dealing with much more than mere possibility. Sooner or later, we will have to come to terms with all this, as we did with Jim Crow and Korematsu. That day can't come soon enough. In the meantime, though, we ought to take great care before judging too harshly the inaction of Muslims who fail to act strongly enough for our tastes against the criminals in their midst.
This week, Harpers Online published an article by Scott Horton, which lays out in exhaustive, stomach-turning, journalistic detail the evidence that in 2006, agents of the United States government tortured three men to death at a secret facility adjacent to the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Horton further outlines the facts that lead one to suspect the government of an immediate and far-reaching effort to cover up the crimes, by manufacturing evidence of a coordinated suicide by the Guantanamo prisoners, mutilating the bodies to prevent independent autopsies, and of course, telling lie upon lie upon lie to the American people.
One is of course free to dismiss this as a wild conspiracy theory, but I challenge you to do that after reading the article in full. This is not a brand new story; soon after the news broke in 2006, a group of law students and faculty at Seton Hall University pored over the official government reports and found dozens of anomalies and inconsistencies, which led them to suspect something was seriously amiss. But now, the evidence Scott Horton brings to bear includes corroborated reports from American military personnel at Guantanamo, some of them decorated, most of them with the most conservative and patriotic credentials. These are individuals who claim to have heard screams frequently emanating from a facility near Guantanamo that wasn't supposed to exist. Who say they saw the bodies of three men being delivered to the medical facility from outside the base, as opposed to from the prison block like the government said following the suicide reports. Who have taken great personal risk in telling the story Horton reports.
For what it's worth, even though it shouldn't much matter, the three dead men in question were quite far from the 'worst of the worst' typically associated with the US's 'enhanced interrogation' programs. One had been sold to the Americans for a $5000 bounty, under the shaky claim that he had once served as a Taliban cook. Another was found living in a flat where the government thought Abu Zubaydah may once also have stayed. Each, as it happens, were on a list of prisoners to be released from American custody, on the grounds that there was no evidence that they had the intent or ability to inflict harm on the national interest. This is the group that, after their deaths, the government claimed committed suicide in an act of asymmetrical warfare against the United States, by binding their own feet and hands, shoving rags down their own throats, and hanging themselves in their cells, all at the exact same time, and all without base security noticing what was happening until it was too late.
Horton does not draw any final conclusions in his article, understanding that a criminal investigation is the only proper mechanism to do so. Indeed, one of the provisions of the Convention Against Torture, signed by Ronald Reagan and ratified by a Republican Congress, mandates that signatories investigate all credible allegations of torture-related crimes to a satisfactory conclusion. Barack Obama, on the other hand, has fully embraced a policy of "looking forward, not backward" when it comes to alleged crimes perpetrated by the Bush administration (outside those of a few low-level scapegoats), which of course puts him at odds with international law. In such an environment, there's not much for Horton to do but put the available facts into the public domain, which he has done without the notice, to date, of the liberally biased mainstream press.
If you've been reading this blog for a while - if you read this, this, this, and this , to note a few - maybe you're wondering if I don't take some kind of grotesque pleasure in continually writing about this stuff; if I've begun to crave the exposure of American malfeasance, because it satisfies some kind of newly minted, liberal, anti-authoritarian fetish. I assure you, that couldn't be farther from the truth. There's a reason why a terrorist attack on the citizens of the United States of America is a bonafide outrage - not just because it's where my family and I live, but objectively, transcendentally so. What makes this country special isn't geography or economy, or even culture - it's the one belief we all supposedly share, that government's authority over the individual is limited, by laws established by citizens of equal value, and more fundamentally than that, by the Truth of universal human dignity. Accordingly, the mere possibility that murder by torture of innocent people could have occurred in the 21st century, under the American flag, makes me absolutely sick to my stomach. And whether any of us like it or not, we are dealing with much more than mere possibility. Sooner or later, we will have to come to terms with all this, as we did with Jim Crow and Korematsu. That day can't come soon enough. In the meantime, though, we ought to take great care before judging too harshly the inaction of Muslims who fail to act strongly enough for our tastes against the criminals in their midst.
Friday, January 15, 2010
George Will on the Constitutionality of Health Care Reform
George Will has an op-ed in yesterday's Washington Post where he questions the constitutionality of the Democrats' plans to introduce an individual mandate to purchase health insurance, as part of the overall reform package. His skepticism on this point is based on the quite reasonable view, presumably held by all good conservatives, that the government's primary purpose (and thus the Constitution's) is to protect individual liberties from encroachment by the majority. Under this theory, government action that possesses even broad democratic support, and certain societal benefit, should be struck down in the event it causes the individual to be inappropriately compelled or constrained.
The first item to point out here is Will's very selective discomfort when it comes to this kind of thing. In short, he thinks a lot of things are unconstitutional, and doesn't mind saying so, particularly when those things are championed by liberals (campaign finance reform comes to mind). On the other hand, he's significantly less troubled in other areas which would seem to have equal relevance to the subject of individual liberty (for example, unrestricted surveillance, indefinite detentions, and generally, selective enforcement of the first, fourth, fifth, and eighth Amendments). To my mind a "true" conservative the way he describes one might worry more about the government's asserted right to spy on, arrest, and torture anyone it suspects of illicit activities, but I can't seem to find any op-eds from Will to that effect. Seems to me Will's conservatism is one where money talks, and that's about it. (Even his recent abandonment of ambiguity on the subject of Afghanistan relies heavily on simple cost-benefit analysis.) And listen, that's fine - he's entitled to as wide and selective a range of opinion as anyone else, and more often than not he has something very worthwhile to say - but let's not pretend that his brand of constitutional analysis is any more or less pure than that of the unwashed masses. His are as fundamentally political a set of priorities as anyone's, at the end of the day.
On the merits, Will correctly points out that the constitutional basis for the mandate, for its supporters, is going to be the "necessary and proper" component of the Commerce Clause. His is a slippery slope argument - if Congress can call an individual mandate to purchase health insurance necessary and proper, what's to stop it from saying the same thing about, say, calisthenics enforced by the threat of increased taxes? Of course, Will knows very well that the law doesn't require the political branches to behave in a manner that ensures absolute logical consistency; good judgment, checked by the electoral process, is both built into the system and relied upon to produce flexibility and prevent excess. That's why Will is less interested in actually striking the mandate than he is in shoring up the conservative case against it. But for the record, I can tell you why the individual mandate is actually "necessary", in much more than a political sense: the private insurance market can't survive without it. As I've written before, the whole point of the individual mandate is to compensate for the new regulations that force health insurance companies to cover sick people at reasonable rates. Once you tell those companies that they can't deny coverage based on existing conditions or cap payouts in times of catastrophic need, they will absolutely certainly go out of business unless there are enough healthy people paying into the premiums. So if you want to continue relying on the private insurance market to raise the coverage level, an individual mandate to buy into the system is the only way to keep the whole thing solvent. Sounds necessary and proper to me - I'd be shocked if that wasn't enough for the High Court.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but there was always another path to take here. If the government were permitted to operate a public health insurance option, there's be no need to regulate the insurance companies, and no need to enforce an individual mandate. Which means that the public option would not only have increased health insurance coverage across the country, but in comparison to the current plan, it's also is friendlier to both individual liberty and free market principles. Not sure, but I think I just made the case that "true" conservatives should have been supporting the public option all along...
The first item to point out here is Will's very selective discomfort when it comes to this kind of thing. In short, he thinks a lot of things are unconstitutional, and doesn't mind saying so, particularly when those things are championed by liberals (campaign finance reform comes to mind). On the other hand, he's significantly less troubled in other areas which would seem to have equal relevance to the subject of individual liberty (for example, unrestricted surveillance, indefinite detentions, and generally, selective enforcement of the first, fourth, fifth, and eighth Amendments). To my mind a "true" conservative the way he describes one might worry more about the government's asserted right to spy on, arrest, and torture anyone it suspects of illicit activities, but I can't seem to find any op-eds from Will to that effect. Seems to me Will's conservatism is one where money talks, and that's about it. (Even his recent abandonment of ambiguity on the subject of Afghanistan relies heavily on simple cost-benefit analysis.) And listen, that's fine - he's entitled to as wide and selective a range of opinion as anyone else, and more often than not he has something very worthwhile to say - but let's not pretend that his brand of constitutional analysis is any more or less pure than that of the unwashed masses. His are as fundamentally political a set of priorities as anyone's, at the end of the day.
On the merits, Will correctly points out that the constitutional basis for the mandate, for its supporters, is going to be the "necessary and proper" component of the Commerce Clause. His is a slippery slope argument - if Congress can call an individual mandate to purchase health insurance necessary and proper, what's to stop it from saying the same thing about, say, calisthenics enforced by the threat of increased taxes? Of course, Will knows very well that the law doesn't require the political branches to behave in a manner that ensures absolute logical consistency; good judgment, checked by the electoral process, is both built into the system and relied upon to produce flexibility and prevent excess. That's why Will is less interested in actually striking the mandate than he is in shoring up the conservative case against it. But for the record, I can tell you why the individual mandate is actually "necessary", in much more than a political sense: the private insurance market can't survive without it. As I've written before, the whole point of the individual mandate is to compensate for the new regulations that force health insurance companies to cover sick people at reasonable rates. Once you tell those companies that they can't deny coverage based on existing conditions or cap payouts in times of catastrophic need, they will absolutely certainly go out of business unless there are enough healthy people paying into the premiums. So if you want to continue relying on the private insurance market to raise the coverage level, an individual mandate to buy into the system is the only way to keep the whole thing solvent. Sounds necessary and proper to me - I'd be shocked if that wasn't enough for the High Court.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but there was always another path to take here. If the government were permitted to operate a public health insurance option, there's be no need to regulate the insurance companies, and no need to enforce an individual mandate. Which means that the public option would not only have increased health insurance coverage across the country, but in comparison to the current plan, it's also is friendlier to both individual liberty and free market principles. Not sure, but I think I just made the case that "true" conservatives should have been supporting the public option all along...
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
West Wing Quote of the Day
PRESIDENT JOSIAH BARTLETT: Did you know that two thousand years ago, a citizen of Rome could walk across the face of the known world, free of the fear of molestation? He could walk across the earth, cloaked only in the protection of the words Civus Romanus. "I am a Roman citizen." Where was Morris' protection, or anyone else on that plane? Where is the retribution for the families? And where is the warning to the rest of the world, that Americans shall walk this earth unharmed, lest the clenched fist of the most mighty military force in the history of man comes crashing down on your house? In other words, Leo, what the hell are we doing here?
CHIEF OF STAFF LEO MCGARRY: We are behaving the way a superpower ought to behave.
JB: Well our behavior has produced some pretty crappy results. Matter of fact, I'm not sure it hasn't induced them.
LM: What are you talking about?
JB: I'm talking about 286 American Marines in Beirut! I'm talking about Somalia, I'm talking about Nairobi!
LM: And you think ratcheting up the body count is going to act as a deterrent?
JB: Damn right!
LM: Well then you are just as stupid as these guys who think the death penalty is going to act as a deterrent against drug kingpins. As though drug kingpins don't already live their daily lives under the possibility of execution. And their executions are a lot less dainty than ours, and tend to take place without the bother and expense of due process. So, my friend, if you want to start using American military might as the Arm of the Lord...you can do that. We're the only superpower left. You can conquer the world, like Charlemagne. But you better be prepared to kill everyone. And you better start with me, because I will raise up an army against you, and I will beat you.
---
JB: Ah, Leo...When I think about all the effort you put into getting me to run, and all the work you did to get me elected, I could pummel your ass with a baseball bat.
CHIEF OF STAFF LEO MCGARRY: We are behaving the way a superpower ought to behave.
JB: Well our behavior has produced some pretty crappy results. Matter of fact, I'm not sure it hasn't induced them.
LM: What are you talking about?
JB: I'm talking about 286 American Marines in Beirut! I'm talking about Somalia, I'm talking about Nairobi!
LM: And you think ratcheting up the body count is going to act as a deterrent?
JB: Damn right!
LM: Well then you are just as stupid as these guys who think the death penalty is going to act as a deterrent against drug kingpins. As though drug kingpins don't already live their daily lives under the possibility of execution. And their executions are a lot less dainty than ours, and tend to take place without the bother and expense of due process. So, my friend, if you want to start using American military might as the Arm of the Lord...you can do that. We're the only superpower left. You can conquer the world, like Charlemagne. But you better be prepared to kill everyone. And you better start with me, because I will raise up an army against you, and I will beat you.
---
JB: Ah, Leo...When I think about all the effort you put into getting me to run, and all the work you did to get me elected, I could pummel your ass with a baseball bat.
Two Holiday Season events in our ongoing War
Perhaps it's not a bad thing that I've been as yet unable to sit and write substantively on the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day, and on the December 28 suicide attack that killed seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan. A few weeks reflection is often clarifying, and plus there's much that I'd need to retract and correct had I relied on immediate-aftermath media reports.
Above all, on the Christmas bombing we thank Providence that the attack failed. Two issues persist though: why did all elements of the plot succeed up until the point of detonation, and why did it fail from that point forward? On the Sunday after the attack, I watched as the most pressing issue for cable news shows appeared to be whether President Obama's language and demeanor showed the Necessary Seriousness. This line of attack was led by the execrable Peter King, R-NY - but I don't really blame him. It's the public's own fault, for tolerating a media approach to politics whose sole purpose is to show us partisan gladiator battles, even when dealing with matters of life and death. And of course the Democrats were no better, rising gallantly to Obama's defense by lugging out comparisons to Bush, until Obama himself, in about the most agitated speech of his career, telling the public just how Disappointed he was for the failures of his system, and how Unacceptable it all was - not that a single person has been fired, reprimanded, or even cited over the issue, of course.
As has been said by kings and queens, the guy can give a speech, and his speeches tend to act as a bit of narrative closure for both his supporters and opponents. But in the meantime, watch what's happened. The President is compelled to sound tough and ever more bellicose against the Enemy, and now a whole new front has opened up in the war on al Qaeda in Yemen - another country to bomb, another population to radicalize. Attempts that Obama was making to close Guantanamo are further derailed, since some of the people stationed there, even though they did nothing to deserve their initial detention, might someday in the future return to a life of terrorism - certainly an odd legal principle if there ever was one. And finally, the people all but demand to have their privacy invaded further in a vain attempt to Feel Safe (70% of the public wants to be full-body scanned at the airport now). Is any of this actually making us safer? What if detaining innocent people indefinitely, based on things they might do in the future (a risk no doubt exacerbated by the abusive treatment they've reportedly received), actually generates anti-American sentiment and creates more people willing to die fighting us? What if overloading the security apparatus with the results of meaningless, sweeping, worldwide surveillance actually makes it more difficult to snuff out the cases where there's a legitimate threat, like when a guy's father actually comes to the US Embassy and reports that his son has the ability and intent to kill American civilians? Obama can rail on about working harder and smarter all he wants, but it seems like we're foregoing a legitimate discussion of effective security in favor of political theater.
As for why the attack ultimately failed, it's worth pointing our current TSA scanning procedures have evidently necessitated ever-more sartorially creative approaches on the part of al Qaeda, which is a security success of its own sort. One is also grateful for the quick thinking and bravery of the plane's other passengers, which ironically remains our best defense, even as we demand more aggressive action from the government. Finally though, the sad question must be asked, if the intent of terrorism is to induce terror and affect policy, given what's been outlined in the paragraphs above, to what extent was the Christmas Day attack actually a failure? Abdulmutallab doesn't appear to be the sharpest tack in the drawer, but is anyone wondering why he attempted to detonate his bomb in plain view of the rest of the passengers? Is it possible that, knowing how hard it is to actually smuggle a bomb onto a plane big enough to actually bring it down, that al Qaeda's primary aim was to remind Americans that they shouldn't feel safe when flying?
As for a suicide attack on Americans that did succeed, one need look no further than the bombing of a CIA outpost in Afghanistan a few days after Christmas. I think it's important to note, since there's a linguistic morality in play here as well, that strictly speaking this was not an act of terrorism. However depraved an act of betrayal the bombing was (and it was), terrorism is explicitly targeted against civilians, which the CIA in Afghanistan is not. We've been prosecuting our war in Afghanistan and Pakistan against the Taliban in large part through drones, and the CIA's been running the drones. The Agency has been sniffing out targets for unmanned bombing runs by cultivating spies in the region, and in this case, they thought they had someone who could give them al Qaeda's top people. A Jordanian double agent, as card-carrying a member of the jihadist opposition as one is likely to find, took the time to gain the Americans' trust, got close enough to do massive damage, and killed seven agents. The attack had the dual effect of robbing the US of decades of intelligence experience in the region, and also of damaging the war effort itself. There are conflicting reports about this, but it seems as though once these high-value assets reach a certain level of trust, security in terms of getting them into CIA facilities is lessened, under the theory that their information on potential drone targets is incredibly time-sensitive. In the aftermath of the December bombing, this is sure to be revisited. Also, now that it's clear just how mistaken the Agency can be about one of its assets, it brings into question the reliability of the entire drone program - how many drone missions originated from similar tips, and how many of those were motivated not by loyalty to American interest, but rather personal vendettas and territorial squabbles? Reports are that civilians continue to be killed by the attacks in large numbers - what if those providing the targets are just lying to us? In any event, this is a sad story all around - God bless the memories of those lost.
General McChrystal is saying that victory is within reach in Afghanistan, and the population is by and large in support of our efforts. I'm skeptical on both counts, but this is one arena where I pray nightly to be wrong. No peace yet.
Above all, on the Christmas bombing we thank Providence that the attack failed. Two issues persist though: why did all elements of the plot succeed up until the point of detonation, and why did it fail from that point forward? On the Sunday after the attack, I watched as the most pressing issue for cable news shows appeared to be whether President Obama's language and demeanor showed the Necessary Seriousness. This line of attack was led by the execrable Peter King, R-NY - but I don't really blame him. It's the public's own fault, for tolerating a media approach to politics whose sole purpose is to show us partisan gladiator battles, even when dealing with matters of life and death. And of course the Democrats were no better, rising gallantly to Obama's defense by lugging out comparisons to Bush, until Obama himself, in about the most agitated speech of his career, telling the public just how Disappointed he was for the failures of his system, and how Unacceptable it all was - not that a single person has been fired, reprimanded, or even cited over the issue, of course.
As has been said by kings and queens, the guy can give a speech, and his speeches tend to act as a bit of narrative closure for both his supporters and opponents. But in the meantime, watch what's happened. The President is compelled to sound tough and ever more bellicose against the Enemy, and now a whole new front has opened up in the war on al Qaeda in Yemen - another country to bomb, another population to radicalize. Attempts that Obama was making to close Guantanamo are further derailed, since some of the people stationed there, even though they did nothing to deserve their initial detention, might someday in the future return to a life of terrorism - certainly an odd legal principle if there ever was one. And finally, the people all but demand to have their privacy invaded further in a vain attempt to Feel Safe (70% of the public wants to be full-body scanned at the airport now). Is any of this actually making us safer? What if detaining innocent people indefinitely, based on things they might do in the future (a risk no doubt exacerbated by the abusive treatment they've reportedly received), actually generates anti-American sentiment and creates more people willing to die fighting us? What if overloading the security apparatus with the results of meaningless, sweeping, worldwide surveillance actually makes it more difficult to snuff out the cases where there's a legitimate threat, like when a guy's father actually comes to the US Embassy and reports that his son has the ability and intent to kill American civilians? Obama can rail on about working harder and smarter all he wants, but it seems like we're foregoing a legitimate discussion of effective security in favor of political theater.
As for why the attack ultimately failed, it's worth pointing our current TSA scanning procedures have evidently necessitated ever-more sartorially creative approaches on the part of al Qaeda, which is a security success of its own sort. One is also grateful for the quick thinking and bravery of the plane's other passengers, which ironically remains our best defense, even as we demand more aggressive action from the government. Finally though, the sad question must be asked, if the intent of terrorism is to induce terror and affect policy, given what's been outlined in the paragraphs above, to what extent was the Christmas Day attack actually a failure? Abdulmutallab doesn't appear to be the sharpest tack in the drawer, but is anyone wondering why he attempted to detonate his bomb in plain view of the rest of the passengers? Is it possible that, knowing how hard it is to actually smuggle a bomb onto a plane big enough to actually bring it down, that al Qaeda's primary aim was to remind Americans that they shouldn't feel safe when flying?
As for a suicide attack on Americans that did succeed, one need look no further than the bombing of a CIA outpost in Afghanistan a few days after Christmas. I think it's important to note, since there's a linguistic morality in play here as well, that strictly speaking this was not an act of terrorism. However depraved an act of betrayal the bombing was (and it was), terrorism is explicitly targeted against civilians, which the CIA in Afghanistan is not. We've been prosecuting our war in Afghanistan and Pakistan against the Taliban in large part through drones, and the CIA's been running the drones. The Agency has been sniffing out targets for unmanned bombing runs by cultivating spies in the region, and in this case, they thought they had someone who could give them al Qaeda's top people. A Jordanian double agent, as card-carrying a member of the jihadist opposition as one is likely to find, took the time to gain the Americans' trust, got close enough to do massive damage, and killed seven agents. The attack had the dual effect of robbing the US of decades of intelligence experience in the region, and also of damaging the war effort itself. There are conflicting reports about this, but it seems as though once these high-value assets reach a certain level of trust, security in terms of getting them into CIA facilities is lessened, under the theory that their information on potential drone targets is incredibly time-sensitive. In the aftermath of the December bombing, this is sure to be revisited. Also, now that it's clear just how mistaken the Agency can be about one of its assets, it brings into question the reliability of the entire drone program - how many drone missions originated from similar tips, and how many of those were motivated not by loyalty to American interest, but rather personal vendettas and territorial squabbles? Reports are that civilians continue to be killed by the attacks in large numbers - what if those providing the targets are just lying to us? In any event, this is a sad story all around - God bless the memories of those lost.
General McChrystal is saying that victory is within reach in Afghanistan, and the population is by and large in support of our efforts. I'm skeptical on both counts, but this is one arena where I pray nightly to be wrong. No peace yet.
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