Rick Warren is an insulting choice
Preacher Rick Warren's views are simply too extreme for Obama's supporters.
By Katha Pollitt
December 22, 2008
To understand how angry and disappointed many Democrats are that Barack Obama has invited evangelical preacher Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural, imagine if a President-elect John McCain had offered this unique honor to the Rev. Al Sharpton -- or the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. I know, it's hard to picture: John McCain would never do that in a million years. Republicans respect their base even when, as in McCain's case, it doesn't really return the favor.
Only Democrats, it seems, reward their most loyal supporters -- feminists, gays, liberals, opponents of the war, members of the reality-based community -- by elbowing them aside to embrace their opponents instead.
Most Americans who've heard of Warren know him as the teddy-bearish, Hawaiian-shirted head of the Saddleback megachurch in Orange County and the author of "The Purpose Driven Life." Perhaps they also know he's the rare right-wing Christian pastor who sometimes talks about poverty and global warming and HIV. His concern for those issues has given him a reputation as a moderate and has made him the darling of Democratic Party think tanks, ever hoping to break the Republican lock on the white evangelical vote.
But on the signal issues of the religious right he is, as he himself has said, as orthodox as James Dobson.
And as inflammatory. Warren doesn't just oppose gay marriage, he's compared it to incest and pedophilia. He doesn't just want to ban abortion, he's compared women who terminate pregnancies to Nazis and the pro-choice position to Holocaust denial. (Hmmm ... If a fertilized egg is as precious as a born Jewish human being, does that mean a born Jewish human being is only as valuable as a fertilized egg?)
Speaking of Jews, Warren has publicly stated his belief that they will burn in hell, presumably along with everyone else who hasn't accepted his particular brand of Christianity (i.e., the vast majority of people in the world). And forget about evolution -- the existence of homosexuals, he's argued, disproves Darwin. And while we may not know how old the Earth is, the Saddleback website assures us that dinosaurs and humans coexisted.
Warren claims that his views are mainstream, pointing out that in 30 states, the majority of voters have banned gay marriage. Popular doesn't mean right, of course, but regardless of what Americans think about gay marriage, on other so-called social issues, he's way out in far-right field.
Take abortion. Most Americans, whatever their personal feelings, are pro-choice. On election day, anti-choice initiatives went down to defeat in all three states where they were on the ballot. Most Americans do not think the one-third of American women who terminate a pregnancy are running a concentration camp in their wombs, and would have no trouble choosing between saving a Jew from a gas chamber and a fertilized egg from a fire at the clinic.
Or take marriage. At his Saddleback Church, wifely submission is official doctrine: The church website tells women to defer to their husband's "leadership" even when he's wrong on important issues, such as finances. Never mind if she's an accountant and he flunked long division, or if she wants to beef up the kids' college fund and he wants to buy shares in the Brooklyn Bridge. The godly answer is supposed to be "yes, dear." Is elevating this male chauvinist how President-elect Obama thanks women, who gave him more than half his votes?
Or take foreign policy. In electing Obama, Americans overwhelmingly rejected President Bush's Wild West approach to foreign policy. Apparently Warren didn't get that memo either. Unlike many evangelical preachers, he issued a statement against torture, but despite his access to Bush, he told Beliefnet.com that he never raised the subject of torture with him. ("I just didn't have the opportunity," he said -- although he apparently found plenty of time to lecture Obama about abortion.)
On "Hannity & Colmes," he agreed that the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, should be killed because "the Bible says God puts government on Earth to punish evildoers." Really? The Bible says the United States should murder the leaders of other sovereign states? How many other heads of state does Warren want to do away with? If Ahmadinejad, who is, after all, a more-or-less democratically elected leader, had shared his inauguration with an imam who had called on national television for the assassination of President Bush, Americans would be calling for the nuking of Tehran.
In a news conference Thursday, Obama defended the choice of Warren: "It is important for the country to come together even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues." That's all very well, but excuse me if I don't feel all warm and fuzzy. Obama won thanks to the strenuous efforts of people who've spent the last eight years appalled by the Bush administration's wars and violations of human rights, its attacks on gays and women, its denigration of science, its general pandering to bigotry and ignorance in the name of God.
I'm all for building bridges, but honoring Warren, who insults Obama's base as perverts and murderers, is definitely a bridge too far.
Katha Pollitt, a poet, essayist and critic, writes the "Subject to Debate" column in the Nation. She is the author, most recently, of "Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories."
Monday, December 22, 2008
Thursday, December 18, 2008
N.Y. Times (December 18, 2008)
December 18, 2008
EDITORIAL
The Torture Report
Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.
Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.
The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons.
It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War. Until the Bush administration, their only use in the United States was to train soldiers to resist what might be done to them if they were captured by a lawless enemy.
The officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the “war on terror” — the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted the conventions.
•
That order set the stage for the infamous redefinition of torture at the Justice Department, and then Mr. Rumsfeld’s authorization of “aggressive” interrogation methods. Some of those methods were torture by any rational definition and many of them violate laws and treaties against abusive and degrading treatment.
These top officials ignored warnings from lawyers in every branch of the armed forces that they were breaking the law, subjecting uniformed soldiers to possible criminal charges and authorizing abuses that were not only considered by experts to be ineffective, but were actually counterproductive.
One page of the report lists the repeated objections that President Bush and his aides so blithely and arrogantly ignored: The Air Force had “serious concerns regarding the legality of many of the proposed techniques”; the chief legal adviser to the military’s criminal investigative task force said they were of dubious value and may subject soldiers to prosecution; one of the Army’s top lawyers said some techniques that stopped well short of the horrifying practice of waterboarding “may violate the torture statute.” The Marines said they “arguably violate federal law.” The Navy pleaded for a real review.
The legal counsel to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time started that review but told the Senate committee that her boss, Gen. Richard Myers, ordered her to stop on the instructions of Mr. Rumsfeld’s legal counsel, Mr. Haynes.
The report indicates that Mr. Haynes was an early proponent of the idea of using the agency that trains soldiers to withstand torture to devise plans for the interrogation of prisoners held by the American military. These trainers — who are not interrogators but experts only on how physical and mental pain is inflicted and may be endured — were sent to work with interrogators in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo and in Iraq.
On Dec. 2, 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld authorized the interrogators at Guantánamo to use a range of abusive techniques that were already widespread in Afghanistan, enshrining them as official policy. Instead of a painstaking legal review, Mr. Rumsfeld based that authorization on a one-page memo from Mr. Haynes. The Senate panel noted that senior military lawyers considered the memo “ ‘legally insufficient’ and ‘woefully inadequate.’ ”
Mr. Rumsfeld rescinded his order a month later, and narrowed the number of “aggressive techniques” that could be used at Guantánamo. But he did so only after the Navy’s chief lawyer threatened to formally protest the illegal treatment of prisoners. By then, at least one prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, had been threatened with military dogs, deprived of sleep for weeks, stripped naked and made to wear a leash and perform dog tricks. This year, a military tribunal at Guantánamo dismissed the charges against Mr. Qahtani.
The abuse and torture of prisoners continued at prisons run by the C.I.A. and specialists from the torture-resistance program remained involved in the military detention system until 2004. Some of the practices Mr. Rumsfeld left in place seem illegal, like prolonged sleep deprivation.
•
These policies have deeply harmed America’s image as a nation of laws and may make it impossible to bring dangerous men to real justice. The report said the interrogation techniques were ineffective, despite the administration’s repeated claims to the contrary.
Alberto Mora, the former Navy general counsel who protested the abuses, told the Senate committee that “there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq — as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat — are, respectively, the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.”
We can understand that Americans may be eager to put these dark chapters behind them, but it would be irresponsible for the nation and a new administration to ignore what has happened — and may still be happening in secret C.I.A. prisons that are not covered by the military’s current ban on activities like waterboarding.
A prosecutor should be appointed to consider criminal charges against top officials at the Pentagon and others involved in planning the abuse.
•
Given his other problems — and how far he has moved from the powerful stands he took on these issues early in the campaign — we do not hold out real hope that Barack Obama, as president, will take such a politically fraught step.
At the least, Mr. Obama should, as the organization Human Rights First suggested, order his attorney general to review more than two dozen prisoner-abuse cases that reportedly were referred to the Justice Department by the Pentagon and the C.I.A. — and declined by Mr. Bush’s lawyers.
Mr. Obama should consider proposals from groups like Human Rights Watch and the Brennan Center for Justice to appoint an independent panel to look into these and other egregious violations of the law. Like the 9/11 commission, it would examine in depth the decisions on prisoner treatment, as well as warrantless wiretapping, that eroded the rule of law and violated Americans’ most basic rights. Unless the nation and its leaders know precisely what went wrong in the last seven years, it will be impossible to fix it and make sure those terrible mistakes are not repeated.
We expect Mr. Obama to keep the promise he made over and over in the campaign — to cheering crowds at campaign rallies and in other places, including our office in New York. He said one of his first acts as president would be to order a review of all of Mr. Bush’s executive orders and reverse those that eroded civil liberties and the rule of law.
That job will fall to Eric Holder, a veteran prosecutor who has been chosen as attorney general, and Gregory Craig, a lawyer with extensive national security experience who has been selected as Mr. Obama’s White House counsel.
A good place for them to start would be to reverse Mr. Bush’s disastrous order of Feb. 7, 2002, declaring that the United States was no longer legally committed to comply with the Geneva Conventions.
EDITORIAL
The Torture Report
Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.
Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.
The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons.
It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War. Until the Bush administration, their only use in the United States was to train soldiers to resist what might be done to them if they were captured by a lawless enemy.
The officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the “war on terror” — the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted the conventions.
•
That order set the stage for the infamous redefinition of torture at the Justice Department, and then Mr. Rumsfeld’s authorization of “aggressive” interrogation methods. Some of those methods were torture by any rational definition and many of them violate laws and treaties against abusive and degrading treatment.
These top officials ignored warnings from lawyers in every branch of the armed forces that they were breaking the law, subjecting uniformed soldiers to possible criminal charges and authorizing abuses that were not only considered by experts to be ineffective, but were actually counterproductive.
One page of the report lists the repeated objections that President Bush and his aides so blithely and arrogantly ignored: The Air Force had “serious concerns regarding the legality of many of the proposed techniques”; the chief legal adviser to the military’s criminal investigative task force said they were of dubious value and may subject soldiers to prosecution; one of the Army’s top lawyers said some techniques that stopped well short of the horrifying practice of waterboarding “may violate the torture statute.” The Marines said they “arguably violate federal law.” The Navy pleaded for a real review.
The legal counsel to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time started that review but told the Senate committee that her boss, Gen. Richard Myers, ordered her to stop on the instructions of Mr. Rumsfeld’s legal counsel, Mr. Haynes.
The report indicates that Mr. Haynes was an early proponent of the idea of using the agency that trains soldiers to withstand torture to devise plans for the interrogation of prisoners held by the American military. These trainers — who are not interrogators but experts only on how physical and mental pain is inflicted and may be endured — were sent to work with interrogators in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo and in Iraq.
On Dec. 2, 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld authorized the interrogators at Guantánamo to use a range of abusive techniques that were already widespread in Afghanistan, enshrining them as official policy. Instead of a painstaking legal review, Mr. Rumsfeld based that authorization on a one-page memo from Mr. Haynes. The Senate panel noted that senior military lawyers considered the memo “ ‘legally insufficient’ and ‘woefully inadequate.’ ”
Mr. Rumsfeld rescinded his order a month later, and narrowed the number of “aggressive techniques” that could be used at Guantánamo. But he did so only after the Navy’s chief lawyer threatened to formally protest the illegal treatment of prisoners. By then, at least one prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, had been threatened with military dogs, deprived of sleep for weeks, stripped naked and made to wear a leash and perform dog tricks. This year, a military tribunal at Guantánamo dismissed the charges against Mr. Qahtani.
The abuse and torture of prisoners continued at prisons run by the C.I.A. and specialists from the torture-resistance program remained involved in the military detention system until 2004. Some of the practices Mr. Rumsfeld left in place seem illegal, like prolonged sleep deprivation.
•
These policies have deeply harmed America’s image as a nation of laws and may make it impossible to bring dangerous men to real justice. The report said the interrogation techniques were ineffective, despite the administration’s repeated claims to the contrary.
Alberto Mora, the former Navy general counsel who protested the abuses, told the Senate committee that “there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq — as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat — are, respectively, the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.”
We can understand that Americans may be eager to put these dark chapters behind them, but it would be irresponsible for the nation and a new administration to ignore what has happened — and may still be happening in secret C.I.A. prisons that are not covered by the military’s current ban on activities like waterboarding.
A prosecutor should be appointed to consider criminal charges against top officials at the Pentagon and others involved in planning the abuse.
•
Given his other problems — and how far he has moved from the powerful stands he took on these issues early in the campaign — we do not hold out real hope that Barack Obama, as president, will take such a politically fraught step.
At the least, Mr. Obama should, as the organization Human Rights First suggested, order his attorney general to review more than two dozen prisoner-abuse cases that reportedly were referred to the Justice Department by the Pentagon and the C.I.A. — and declined by Mr. Bush’s lawyers.
Mr. Obama should consider proposals from groups like Human Rights Watch and the Brennan Center for Justice to appoint an independent panel to look into these and other egregious violations of the law. Like the 9/11 commission, it would examine in depth the decisions on prisoner treatment, as well as warrantless wiretapping, that eroded the rule of law and violated Americans’ most basic rights. Unless the nation and its leaders know precisely what went wrong in the last seven years, it will be impossible to fix it and make sure those terrible mistakes are not repeated.
We expect Mr. Obama to keep the promise he made over and over in the campaign — to cheering crowds at campaign rallies and in other places, including our office in New York. He said one of his first acts as president would be to order a review of all of Mr. Bush’s executive orders and reverse those that eroded civil liberties and the rule of law.
That job will fall to Eric Holder, a veteran prosecutor who has been chosen as attorney general, and Gregory Craig, a lawyer with extensive national security experience who has been selected as Mr. Obama’s White House counsel.
A good place for them to start would be to reverse Mr. Bush’s disastrous order of Feb. 7, 2002, declaring that the United States was no longer legally committed to comply with the Geneva Conventions.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Jennifer Daskal - Salon.com (December 11, 2008)
Chaos in the 9/11 courtroom
In Guantánamo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants don't know the rules -- and neither does the judge.
By Jennifer Daskal
Dec. 11, 2008 |
When alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants entered the Guantánamo Bay courtroom Monday, they came armed with a plan to martyr themselves at the hands of a tainted legal system. By the afternoon, the plan was in disarray.
The five defendants wanted to plead guilty, but only if it brought them their desired outcome. "If we plead guilty, can we still be sentenced to death?" Mohammed asked U.S. Army Col. Stephen Henley, the military commission judge responsible for trying the men.
Full article here:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/12/11/guantanamo/index.html/a>
In Guantánamo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants don't know the rules -- and neither does the judge.
By Jennifer Daskal
Dec. 11, 2008 |
When alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants entered the Guantánamo Bay courtroom Monday, they came armed with a plan to martyr themselves at the hands of a tainted legal system. By the afternoon, the plan was in disarray.
The five defendants wanted to plead guilty, but only if it brought them their desired outcome. "If we plead guilty, can we still be sentenced to death?" Mohammed asked U.S. Army Col. Stephen Henley, the military commission judge responsible for trying the men.
Full article here:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/12/11/guantanamo/index.html/a>
Juan Cole - Salon.com (December 12, 2008)
Does Obama understand his biggest foreign-policy challenge?
The president-elect wants to work with the Pakistani government to "stamp out" terror. It's not nearly that simple.
By Juan Cole
Dec. 12, 2008 |
A consensus is emerging among intelligence analysts and pundits that Pakistan may be President-elect Barack Obama's greatest policy challenge. A base for terrorist groups, the country has a fragile new civilian government and a long history of military coups. The dramatic attack on Mumbai by members of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e Tayiba, the continued Taliban insurgency on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the frailty of the new civilian government, and the country's status as a nuclear-armed state have all put Islamabad on the incoming administration's front burner.
But does Obama understand what he's getting into? In his "Meet the Press" interview with Tom Brokaw on Sunday, Obama said, "We need a strategic partnership with all the parties in the region -- Pakistan and India and the Afghan government -- to stamp out the kind of militant, violent, terrorist extremists that have set up base camps and that are operating in ways that threaten the security of everybody in the international community." Obama's scenario assumes that the Pakistani government is a single, undifferentiated thing, and that all parts of the government would be willing to "stamp out" terrorists. Both of those assumptions are incorrect.
Full article here:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/12/12/pakistan//a>
The president-elect wants to work with the Pakistani government to "stamp out" terror. It's not nearly that simple.
By Juan Cole
Dec. 12, 2008 |
A consensus is emerging among intelligence analysts and pundits that Pakistan may be President-elect Barack Obama's greatest policy challenge. A base for terrorist groups, the country has a fragile new civilian government and a long history of military coups. The dramatic attack on Mumbai by members of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e Tayiba, the continued Taliban insurgency on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the frailty of the new civilian government, and the country's status as a nuclear-armed state have all put Islamabad on the incoming administration's front burner.
But does Obama understand what he's getting into? In his "Meet the Press" interview with Tom Brokaw on Sunday, Obama said, "We need a strategic partnership with all the parties in the region -- Pakistan and India and the Afghan government -- to stamp out the kind of militant, violent, terrorist extremists that have set up base camps and that are operating in ways that threaten the security of everybody in the international community." Obama's scenario assumes that the Pakistani government is a single, undifferentiated thing, and that all parts of the government would be willing to "stamp out" terrorists. Both of those assumptions are incorrect.
Full article here:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/12/12/pakistan//a>
Monday, December 8, 2008
N.Y. Times (December 8, 2008)
December 8, 2008
Editorial
Tortured Justice
The nation’s courts continue to grapple with the abuses committed by President Bush’s administration in the name of fighting terrorism. The extent of the damage to American liberties, and how lasting it will be, will be told in part by the outcome of two cases that are to be heard by the federal courts.
On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that turns on Mr. Bush’s claim that he can order people living in the United States to be detained by the military indefinitely without charges. The case involves Ali al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar who was in the United States legally. He was declared an enemy combatant in mid-2003 and has been held in a Navy brig since then.
The detention was upheld by an appeals court panel, which should be quickly and definitively reversed by the Supreme Court. This intolerable reading of the law would leave a president free to suspend the rights of anyone, including American citizens.
The other, equally notorious case is being heard on Tuesday by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan. It involves Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian with no ties to terrorism who became a victim of the Bush team’s lawless policy of “extraordinary rendition” — the outsourcing of interrogations to foreign governments known to torture prisoners.
Mr. Arar’s ordeal began in 2002, when he was seized by federal agents as he tried to change planes on his way home to Canada from a family vacation. After being held incommunicado in solitary confinement and subjected to harsh interrogation without proper access to a lawyer, he was “rendered” to Syria, where he was tortured. He was locked up for almost a year in a dank underground cell the size of a grave before he was finally let go.
The Canadian government later declared that it had provided erroneous information about Mr. Arar to American authorities. It apologized to him in 2007 and agreed to pay him $10 million. Last June, the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general, Richard Skinner, and its former inspector general, Clark Ervin, said at a Congressional hearing that officials may have violated federal criminal laws in sending Mr. Arar to Syria, knowing he was likely to be tortured.
Yet that same month, a three-judge federal appeals panel dismissed Mr. Arar’s civil rights lawsuit on flimsy national security grounds and, absurdly, his failure to seek court review of his rendition within the time period specified in immigration law. In essence, the 2-to-1 ruling rewarded the administration’s egregiously bad behavior in denying Mr. Arar’s initial requests to see a lawyer, and then lying to his attorney about his whereabouts, which obstructed his access to the courts.
In addition, by treating this as an immigration case, the ruling overlooked reality. The salient issue is the improper and unconstitutional tactics used by United States officials to obtain information they wrongly thought Mr. Arar possessed. That point was emphasized by Judge Robert Sack in his cogent dissenting opinion from the first appeals court ruling.
We took it as an encouraging sign when the appellate court took the rare step of scheduling Tuesday’s rehearing before its entire bench before an appeal was filed. A decision allowing Mr. Arar’s case to proceed would recognize the court’s essential role in protecting constitutional rights. It also would firmly reject the Bush administration’s seamy efforts to frustrate accountability for executive branch excesses.
The Obama administration will then have to decide whether to defend the indefensible when the case comes to trial. That will provide an interesting test of the new Justice Department’s commitment to due process.
Editorial
Tortured Justice
The nation’s courts continue to grapple with the abuses committed by President Bush’s administration in the name of fighting terrorism. The extent of the damage to American liberties, and how lasting it will be, will be told in part by the outcome of two cases that are to be heard by the federal courts.
On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that turns on Mr. Bush’s claim that he can order people living in the United States to be detained by the military indefinitely without charges. The case involves Ali al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar who was in the United States legally. He was declared an enemy combatant in mid-2003 and has been held in a Navy brig since then.
The detention was upheld by an appeals court panel, which should be quickly and definitively reversed by the Supreme Court. This intolerable reading of the law would leave a president free to suspend the rights of anyone, including American citizens.
The other, equally notorious case is being heard on Tuesday by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan. It involves Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian with no ties to terrorism who became a victim of the Bush team’s lawless policy of “extraordinary rendition” — the outsourcing of interrogations to foreign governments known to torture prisoners.
Mr. Arar’s ordeal began in 2002, when he was seized by federal agents as he tried to change planes on his way home to Canada from a family vacation. After being held incommunicado in solitary confinement and subjected to harsh interrogation without proper access to a lawyer, he was “rendered” to Syria, where he was tortured. He was locked up for almost a year in a dank underground cell the size of a grave before he was finally let go.
The Canadian government later declared that it had provided erroneous information about Mr. Arar to American authorities. It apologized to him in 2007 and agreed to pay him $10 million. Last June, the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general, Richard Skinner, and its former inspector general, Clark Ervin, said at a Congressional hearing that officials may have violated federal criminal laws in sending Mr. Arar to Syria, knowing he was likely to be tortured.
Yet that same month, a three-judge federal appeals panel dismissed Mr. Arar’s civil rights lawsuit on flimsy national security grounds and, absurdly, his failure to seek court review of his rendition within the time period specified in immigration law. In essence, the 2-to-1 ruling rewarded the administration’s egregiously bad behavior in denying Mr. Arar’s initial requests to see a lawyer, and then lying to his attorney about his whereabouts, which obstructed his access to the courts.
In addition, by treating this as an immigration case, the ruling overlooked reality. The salient issue is the improper and unconstitutional tactics used by United States officials to obtain information they wrongly thought Mr. Arar possessed. That point was emphasized by Judge Robert Sack in his cogent dissenting opinion from the first appeals court ruling.
We took it as an encouraging sign when the appellate court took the rare step of scheduling Tuesday’s rehearing before its entire bench before an appeal was filed. A decision allowing Mr. Arar’s case to proceed would recognize the court’s essential role in protecting constitutional rights. It also would firmly reject the Bush administration’s seamy efforts to frustrate accountability for executive branch excesses.
The Obama administration will then have to decide whether to defend the indefensible when the case comes to trial. That will provide an interesting test of the new Justice Department’s commitment to due process.
Frank Rich - N.Y. Times (December 7, 2008)
December 7, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Brightest Are Not Always the Best
By FRANK RICH
IN 1992, David Halberstam wrote a new introduction for the 20th-anniversary edition of “The Best and the Brightest,” his classic history of the hubristic J.F.K. team that would ultimately mire America in Vietnam. He noted that the book’s title had entered the language, but not quite as he had hoped. “It is often misused,” he wrote, “failing to carry the tone or irony that the original intended.”
Halberstam died last year, but were he still around, I suspect he would be speaking up, loudly, right about now. As Barack Obama rolls out his cabinet, “the best and the brightest” has become the accolade du jour from Democrats (Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri), Republicans (Senator John Warner of Virginia) and the press (George Stephanopoulos). Few seem to recall that the phrase, in its original coinage, was meant to strike a sardonic, not a flattering, note. Perhaps even Doris Kearns Goodwin would agree that it’s time for Beltway reading groups to move on from “Team of Rivals” to Halberstam.
The stewards of the Vietnam fiasco had pedigrees uncannily reminiscent of some major Obama appointees. McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, was, as Halberstam put it, “a legend in his time at Groton, the brightest boy at Yale, dean of Harvard College at a precocious age.” His deputy, Walt Rostow, “had always been a prodigy, always the youngest to do something,” whether at Yale, M.I.T. or as a Rhodes scholar. Robert McNamara, the defense secretary, was the youngest and highest paid Harvard Business School assistant professor of his era before making a mark as a World War II Army analyst, and, at age 44, becoming the first non-Ford to lead the Ford Motor Company.
The rest is history that would destroy the presidency of Lyndon Johnson and inflict grave national wounds that only now are healing.
In the Obama transition, our Clinton-fixated political culture has been hyperventilating mainly over the national security team, but that’s not what gives me pause. Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates were both wrong about the Iraq invasion, but neither of them were architects of that folly and both are far better known in recent years for consensus-building caution (at times to a fault in Clinton’s case) than arrogance. Those who fear an outbreak of Clintonian drama in the administration keep warning that Obama has hired a secretary of state he can’t fire. But why not take him at his word when he says “the buck will stop with me”? If Truman could cashier Gen. Douglas MacArthur, then surely Obama could fire a brand-name cabinet member in the (unlikely) event she goes rogue.
No, it’s the economic team that evokes trace memories of our dark best-and-brightest past. Lawrence Summers, the new top economic adviser, was the youngest tenured professor in Harvard’s history and is famous for never letting anyone forget his brilliance. It was his highhanded disregard for his own colleagues, not his impolitic remarks about gender and science, that forced him out of Harvard’s presidency in four years. Timothy Geithner, the nominee for Treasury secretary, is the boy wonder president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He comes with none of Summers’s personal baggage, but his sparkling résumé is missing one crucial asset: experience outside academe and government, in the real world of business and finance. Postgraduate finishing school at Kissinger & Associates doesn’t count.
Summers and Geithner are both protégés of another master of the universe, Robert Rubin. His appearance in the photo op for Obama-transition economic advisers three days after the election was, to put it mildly, disconcerting. Ever since his acclaimed service as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, Rubin has labored as a senior adviser and director at Citigroup, now being bailed out by taxpayers to the potential tune of some $300 billion. Somehow the all-seeing Rubin didn’t notice the toxic mortgage-derivatives on Citi’s books until it was too late. The Citi may never sleep, but he snored.
Geithner was no less tardy in discovering the reckless, wholesale gambling that went on in Wall Street’s big casinos, all of which cratered while at least nominally under his regulatory watch. That a Hydra-headed banking monster like Citigroup came to be in the first place was a direct byproduct of deregulation championed by Rubin and Summers in Clinton’s Treasury Department (where Geithner also served). The New Deal reform they helped repeal, the Glass-Steagall Act, had been enacted in 1933 in part because Citigroup’s ancestor, National City Bank, had imploded after repackaging bad loans as toxic securities in the go-go 1920s.
Well, nobody’s perfect. Given that John McCain’s economic team was headlined by Carly Fiorina and Joe the Plumber, the country would be dodging a fiscal bullet even if Obama had picked Suze Orman. But I keep wondering why the honeymoon hagiography about the best and the brightest has been so over the top. Washington’s cheerleading for our new New Frontier cabinet superstars has seldom been interrupted by tough questions about Summers’s Harvard career or Geithner’s record at the Fed. For that, it’s best to turn to the business press: Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times, for one, has been relentless in trying to ferret out Geithner’s opaque role in the catastrophic decision to let Lehman Brothers fail.
No doubt the Pavlovian ovations for the Obama team are in part a reaction to our immediate political past. After eight years of a presidency that valued cronyism over brains (or even competence) and embraced an anti-intellectualism apotheosized by Sarah Palin, it’s a godsend to have a president who puts a premium on merit. I also wonder if a press corps that underrated Obama’s political prowess for much of the campaign, demeaning him as a professorial wuss next to the brawny Clinton and McCain, is now overcompensating for that mistake. No one wants to miss out a second time on triumphal history in the making.
This, too, is a replay of what happened when Kennedy arrived, beating out the more seasoned Richard Nixon and ending eight years of Eisenhower rule. “Rarely had a new administration received such a sympathetic hearing at a personal level from the more serious and respected journalists of the city,” Halberstam wrote. “The good reporters of that era, those who were well educated and who were enlightened themselves and worked for enlightened organizations, liked the Kennedys and were for the same things the Kennedys were for.” They couldn’t imagine that “men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government in this century” would turn out to be architects of America’s “worst tragedy since the Civil War.”
Post-Iraq, we’re unlikely to rush into a new Vietnam. But we ignore the past’s lessons at our peril. In his 20th-anniversary reflections, Halberstam wrote that his favorite passage in his book was the one where Johnson, after his first Kennedy cabinet meeting, raved to his mentor, the speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, about all the president’s brilliant men. “You may be right, and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say,” Rayburn responded, “but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”
Halberstam loved that story because it underlined the weakness of the Kennedy team: “the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience.” That difference was clearly delineated in Vietnam, where American soldiers, officials and reporters could see that the war was going badly even as McNamara brusquely wielded charts and crunched numbers to enforce his conviction that victory was assured.
In our current financial quagmire, there have also been those who had the wisdom to sound alarms before Rubin, Summers or Geithner did. Among them were not just economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Nouriel Roubini but also Doris Dungey, a 47-year-old financial blogger known as Tanta, who died of cancer in Upper Marlboro, Md., last Sunday. As the Times obituary observed, “her first post, in December 2006, took issue with an optimistic Citigroup report that maintained that the mortgage industry would ‘rationalize’ in 2007, to the benefit of larger players like, well, Citigroup.” It was months before the others publicly echoed her judgment.
For some of J.F.K.’s best and brightest, Halberstam wrote, wisdom came “after Vietnam.” We have to hope that wisdom is coming to Summers and Geithner as they struggle with our financial Tet. Clearly it has not come to Rubin. Asked by The Times in April if he’d made any mistakes at Citigroup, he sounded as self-deluded as McNamara in retirement.
“I honestly don’t know,” Rubin answered. “In hindsight, there are a lot of things we’d do differently. But in the context of the facts as I knew them and my role, I’m inclined to think probably not.” Since that interview, 52,000 Citigroup employees have been laid off but not Rubin, who remains remorseless, collecting a salary that has totaled in excess of $115 million since 1999. You may be touched to hear that he is voluntarily relinquishing his bonus this Christmas.
Rubin hasn’t been seen in a transition photo op since Nov. 7, and in the end Obama chose Paul Volcker as chairman of his Economic Recovery Advisory Board. This was a presidential decision not only bright but wise.
Op-Ed Columnist
The Brightest Are Not Always the Best
By FRANK RICH
IN 1992, David Halberstam wrote a new introduction for the 20th-anniversary edition of “The Best and the Brightest,” his classic history of the hubristic J.F.K. team that would ultimately mire America in Vietnam. He noted that the book’s title had entered the language, but not quite as he had hoped. “It is often misused,” he wrote, “failing to carry the tone or irony that the original intended.”
Halberstam died last year, but were he still around, I suspect he would be speaking up, loudly, right about now. As Barack Obama rolls out his cabinet, “the best and the brightest” has become the accolade du jour from Democrats (Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri), Republicans (Senator John Warner of Virginia) and the press (George Stephanopoulos). Few seem to recall that the phrase, in its original coinage, was meant to strike a sardonic, not a flattering, note. Perhaps even Doris Kearns Goodwin would agree that it’s time for Beltway reading groups to move on from “Team of Rivals” to Halberstam.
The stewards of the Vietnam fiasco had pedigrees uncannily reminiscent of some major Obama appointees. McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, was, as Halberstam put it, “a legend in his time at Groton, the brightest boy at Yale, dean of Harvard College at a precocious age.” His deputy, Walt Rostow, “had always been a prodigy, always the youngest to do something,” whether at Yale, M.I.T. or as a Rhodes scholar. Robert McNamara, the defense secretary, was the youngest and highest paid Harvard Business School assistant professor of his era before making a mark as a World War II Army analyst, and, at age 44, becoming the first non-Ford to lead the Ford Motor Company.
The rest is history that would destroy the presidency of Lyndon Johnson and inflict grave national wounds that only now are healing.
In the Obama transition, our Clinton-fixated political culture has been hyperventilating mainly over the national security team, but that’s not what gives me pause. Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates were both wrong about the Iraq invasion, but neither of them were architects of that folly and both are far better known in recent years for consensus-building caution (at times to a fault in Clinton’s case) than arrogance. Those who fear an outbreak of Clintonian drama in the administration keep warning that Obama has hired a secretary of state he can’t fire. But why not take him at his word when he says “the buck will stop with me”? If Truman could cashier Gen. Douglas MacArthur, then surely Obama could fire a brand-name cabinet member in the (unlikely) event she goes rogue.
No, it’s the economic team that evokes trace memories of our dark best-and-brightest past. Lawrence Summers, the new top economic adviser, was the youngest tenured professor in Harvard’s history and is famous for never letting anyone forget his brilliance. It was his highhanded disregard for his own colleagues, not his impolitic remarks about gender and science, that forced him out of Harvard’s presidency in four years. Timothy Geithner, the nominee for Treasury secretary, is the boy wonder president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He comes with none of Summers’s personal baggage, but his sparkling résumé is missing one crucial asset: experience outside academe and government, in the real world of business and finance. Postgraduate finishing school at Kissinger & Associates doesn’t count.
Summers and Geithner are both protégés of another master of the universe, Robert Rubin. His appearance in the photo op for Obama-transition economic advisers three days after the election was, to put it mildly, disconcerting. Ever since his acclaimed service as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, Rubin has labored as a senior adviser and director at Citigroup, now being bailed out by taxpayers to the potential tune of some $300 billion. Somehow the all-seeing Rubin didn’t notice the toxic mortgage-derivatives on Citi’s books until it was too late. The Citi may never sleep, but he snored.
Geithner was no less tardy in discovering the reckless, wholesale gambling that went on in Wall Street’s big casinos, all of which cratered while at least nominally under his regulatory watch. That a Hydra-headed banking monster like Citigroup came to be in the first place was a direct byproduct of deregulation championed by Rubin and Summers in Clinton’s Treasury Department (where Geithner also served). The New Deal reform they helped repeal, the Glass-Steagall Act, had been enacted in 1933 in part because Citigroup’s ancestor, National City Bank, had imploded after repackaging bad loans as toxic securities in the go-go 1920s.
Well, nobody’s perfect. Given that John McCain’s economic team was headlined by Carly Fiorina and Joe the Plumber, the country would be dodging a fiscal bullet even if Obama had picked Suze Orman. But I keep wondering why the honeymoon hagiography about the best and the brightest has been so over the top. Washington’s cheerleading for our new New Frontier cabinet superstars has seldom been interrupted by tough questions about Summers’s Harvard career or Geithner’s record at the Fed. For that, it’s best to turn to the business press: Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times, for one, has been relentless in trying to ferret out Geithner’s opaque role in the catastrophic decision to let Lehman Brothers fail.
No doubt the Pavlovian ovations for the Obama team are in part a reaction to our immediate political past. After eight years of a presidency that valued cronyism over brains (or even competence) and embraced an anti-intellectualism apotheosized by Sarah Palin, it’s a godsend to have a president who puts a premium on merit. I also wonder if a press corps that underrated Obama’s political prowess for much of the campaign, demeaning him as a professorial wuss next to the brawny Clinton and McCain, is now overcompensating for that mistake. No one wants to miss out a second time on triumphal history in the making.
This, too, is a replay of what happened when Kennedy arrived, beating out the more seasoned Richard Nixon and ending eight years of Eisenhower rule. “Rarely had a new administration received such a sympathetic hearing at a personal level from the more serious and respected journalists of the city,” Halberstam wrote. “The good reporters of that era, those who were well educated and who were enlightened themselves and worked for enlightened organizations, liked the Kennedys and were for the same things the Kennedys were for.” They couldn’t imagine that “men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government in this century” would turn out to be architects of America’s “worst tragedy since the Civil War.”
Post-Iraq, we’re unlikely to rush into a new Vietnam. But we ignore the past’s lessons at our peril. In his 20th-anniversary reflections, Halberstam wrote that his favorite passage in his book was the one where Johnson, after his first Kennedy cabinet meeting, raved to his mentor, the speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, about all the president’s brilliant men. “You may be right, and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say,” Rayburn responded, “but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”
Halberstam loved that story because it underlined the weakness of the Kennedy team: “the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience.” That difference was clearly delineated in Vietnam, where American soldiers, officials and reporters could see that the war was going badly even as McNamara brusquely wielded charts and crunched numbers to enforce his conviction that victory was assured.
In our current financial quagmire, there have also been those who had the wisdom to sound alarms before Rubin, Summers or Geithner did. Among them were not just economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Nouriel Roubini but also Doris Dungey, a 47-year-old financial blogger known as Tanta, who died of cancer in Upper Marlboro, Md., last Sunday. As the Times obituary observed, “her first post, in December 2006, took issue with an optimistic Citigroup report that maintained that the mortgage industry would ‘rationalize’ in 2007, to the benefit of larger players like, well, Citigroup.” It was months before the others publicly echoed her judgment.
For some of J.F.K.’s best and brightest, Halberstam wrote, wisdom came “after Vietnam.” We have to hope that wisdom is coming to Summers and Geithner as they struggle with our financial Tet. Clearly it has not come to Rubin. Asked by The Times in April if he’d made any mistakes at Citigroup, he sounded as self-deluded as McNamara in retirement.
“I honestly don’t know,” Rubin answered. “In hindsight, there are a lot of things we’d do differently. But in the context of the facts as I knew them and my role, I’m inclined to think probably not.” Since that interview, 52,000 Citigroup employees have been laid off but not Rubin, who remains remorseless, collecting a salary that has totaled in excess of $115 million since 1999. You may be touched to hear that he is voluntarily relinquishing his bonus this Christmas.
Rubin hasn’t been seen in a transition photo op since Nov. 7, and in the end Obama chose Paul Volcker as chairman of his Economic Recovery Advisory Board. This was a presidential decision not only bright but wise.
Chris Hedges - Truthdig.com (December 8, 2008)
The Best and the Brightest Led America Off a Cliff
Posted on Dec 8, 2008
By Chris Hedges
The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredded constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, advanced placement classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools and blind deference to all authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. The collapse of the country runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and halls in places like Cambridge, Princeton and New Haven to the financial and political centers of power.
The nation’s elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent and often subversive. They organize learning around minutely specialized disciplines, narrow answers and rigid structures that are designed to produce certain answers. The established corporate hierarchies these institutions service—economic, political and social—come with clear parameters, such as the primacy of an unfettered free market, and with a highly specialized vocabulary. This vocabulary, a sign of the “specialist” and of course the elitist, thwarts universal understanding. It keeps the uninitiated from asking unpleasant questions. It destroys the search for the common good. It dices disciplines, faculty, students and finally experts into tiny, specialized fragments. It allows students and faculty to retreat into these self-imposed fiefdoms and neglect the most pressing moral, political and cultural questions. Those who defy the system—people like Ralph Nader—are branded as irrational and irrelevant. These elite universities have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology, self-advancement and information systems are the only things that matter.
“Political silence, total silence,” said Chris Hebdon, a Berkeley undergraduate. He went on to describe how various student groups gather at Sproul Plaza, the center of student activity at the University of California, Berkeley. These groups set up tables to recruit and inform other students, a practice know as “tabling.”
“Students table for Darfur, no one tables for Iraq. Tables on Sproul Plaza are ethnically fragmented, explicitly pre-professional (The Asian American Pre-Law or Business or Pre-Medicine Association). Never have I seen a table on globalization or corporatization. Students are as distracted and specialized and atomized as most of their professors. It’s vertical integration gone cultural. And never, never is it cutting-edge. Berkeley loves the slogan ‘excellence through diversity,’ which is a farce of course if one checks our admissions stats (most years we have only one or two entering Native Americans), but few recognize multiculturalism’s silent partner—fragmentation into little markets. Our Sproul Plaza shows that so well—the same place Mario Savio once stood on top a police car is filled with tens of tables for the pre-corporate, the ethnic, the useless cynics, the recreational groups, etc.”
I sat a few months ago with a former classmate from Harvard Divinity School who is now a theology professor. When I asked her what she was teaching she unleashed a torrent of obscure academic code words. I did not understand, even with three years of seminary, what she was talking about. You can see this absurd retreat into specialized, impenetrable verbal enclaves in every graduate department across the country. The more these universities churn out these stunted men and women, the more we are flooded with a peculiar breed of specialist. This specialist blindly services tiny parts of a corporate power structure he or she has never been taught to question and looks down on the rest of us with thinly veiled contempt.
I was sent to boarding school on a scholarship at the age of 10. By the time I had finished eight years in New England prep schools and another eight at Colgate and Harvard I had a pretty good understanding of the game. I have also taught at Columbia, New York University and Princeton. These institutions, no matter how mediocre you are, feed students with the comforting self-delusion that they are there because they are not only the best but they deserve the best. You can see this attitude on display in every word uttered by George W. Bush. Here is a man with severely limited intellectual capacity and no moral core. He, along with “Scooter” Libby, who attended my boarding school and went on to Yale, is an example of the legions of self-centered mediocrities churned out by places like Andover, Yale and Harvard. Bush was, like the rest of his caste, propelled forward by his money and his connections. That is the real purpose of these well-endowed schools—to perpetuate their own.
“There’s a certain kind of student at these schools who falls in love with the mystique and prestige of his own education,” said Elyse Graham, whom I taught at Princeton and who is now doing graduate work at Yale. “This is the guy who treats his time at Princeton as a scavenger hunt for Princetoniana and Princeton nostalgia: How many famous professors can I collect? And so on. And he comes away not only with all these props for his sense of being elect, but also with the smoothness that seems to indicate wide learning; college socializes you, so you learn to present even trite ideas well.”
These institutions cater to their students like high-end resorts. My prep school—remember this is a high school—recently build a $26-million gym. Not that it didn’t have a gym. It had a fine one with an Olympic pool. But it needed to upgrade its facilities to compete for the elite boys and girls being wooed by other schools. While public schools crumble, while public universities are slashed and degraded, while these elite institutions become unaffordable even for the middle class, the privileged retreat further into their opulent gated communities. Harvard lost $8 billion of its endowment over the past four months, which raises the question of how smart these people are, but it still has $30 billion. Schools like Yale, Stanford and Princeton are not far behind. Those on the inside are told they are there because they are better than others. Most believe it.
The people I loved most, my working-class family in Maine, did not go to college. They were plumbers, post office clerks and mill workers. Most of the men were military veterans. They lived frugal and hard lives. They were indulgent of my incessant book reading and incompetence with tools, even my distaste for deer hunting, and they were a steady reminder that just because I had been blessed with an opportunity that was denied to them, I was not better or more intelligent. If you are poor you have to work after high school or, in the case of my grandfather, before you are able to finish high school. College is not an option. No one takes care of you. You have to do that for yourself. This is the most important difference between them and elites.
The elite schools, which trumpet their diversity, base this diversity on race and ethnicity, rarely on class. The admissions process, as well as the staggering tuition costs, precludes most of the poor and working class. When my son got his SAT scores back last year, we were surprised to find that his critical reading score was lower than his math score. He dislikes math. He is an avid and perceptive reader. And so we did what many educated, middle-class families do. We hired an expensive tutor from The Princeton Review who taught him the tricks and techniques of taking standardized tests. The tutor told him things like “stop thinking about whether the passage is true. You are wasting test time thinking about the ideas. Just spit back what they tell you.” His reading score went up 130 points. Was he smarter? Was he a better reader? Did he become more intelligent? Is reading and answering multiple choice questions while someone holds a stopwatch over you even an effective measure of intelligence? What about those families that do not have a few thousand dollars to hire a tutor? What chance do they have?
These universities, because of their incessant reliance on standardized tests and the demand for perfect grades, fill their classrooms with large numbers of drones. I have taught gifted and engaged students who used these institutions to expand the life of the mind, who asked the big questions and who cherished what these schools had to offer. But they were always a marginalized and dispirited minority. The bulk of their classmates, most of whom headed off to Wall Street or corporate firms when they graduated, starting at $120,000 a year, did prodigious amounts of work and faithfully regurgitated information. They received perfect grades in both tedious, boring classes and stimulating ones, not that they could tell the difference. They may have known the plot and salient details of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” but they were unable to tell you why the story was important. Their professors, fearful of being branded political and not wanting to upset the legions of wealthy donors and administrative overlords who rule such institutions, did not draw the obvious parallels with Iraq and American empire. They did not use Conrad’s story, as it was meant to be used, to examine our own imperial darkness. And so, even in the anemic world of liberal arts, what is taught exists in a moral void.
“The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic,” William Deresiewicz, who taught English at Yale, wrote in “The American Scholar.” “While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite.”
Intelligence is morally neutral. It is no more virtuous than athletic prowess. It can be used to further the rape of the working class by corporations and the mechanisms of repression and war, or it can be used to fight these forces. But if you determine worth by wealth, as these institutions invariably do, then fighting the system is inherently devalued. The unstated ethic of these elite institutions is to make as much money as you can to sustain the elitist system. College presidents are not voices for the common good and the protection of intellectual integrity, but obsequious fundraisers. They shower honorary degrees and trusteeships on hedge fund managers and Wall Street titans whose lives are usually examples of moral squalor and unchecked greed. The message to the students is clear. But grabbing what you can, as John Ruskin said, isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists.
Most of these students are afraid to take risks. They cower before authority. They have been taught from a young age by zealous parents, schools and institutional authorities what constitutes failure and success. They are socialized to obey. They obsess over grades and seek to please professors, even if what their professors teach is fatuous. The point is to get ahead. Challenging authority is not a career advancer. Freshmen arrive on elite campuses and begin to network their way into the elite eating clubs, test into the elite academic programs and lobby for elite summer internships. By the time they graduate they are superbly conditioned to work 10 or 12 hours a day electronically moving large sums of money around.
“The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a
letter or a number or a name,” Deresiewicz wrote. “It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.”
“Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul,” he went on. “These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the
university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers. Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions. I don’t think there ever was a golden age of intellectualism in the American university, but in the 19th century students might at least have had a chance to hear such questions raised in chapel or in the literary societies and debating clubs that flourished on campus.”
Barack Obama is a product of this elitist system. So are his degree-laden Cabinet members. They come out of Harvard, Yale, Wellesley and Princeton. Their friends and classmates made huge fortunes on Wall Street and in powerful law firms. They go to the same class reunions. They belong to the same clubs. They speak the same easy language of privilege and comfort and entitlement. They are endowed with an unbridled self-confidence and blind belief in a decaying political and financial system that has nurtured and empowered them. These elite, and the corporate system they serve, have ruined the country. These elite cannot solve our problems. They have been trained to find “solutions,” such as the trillion-dollar bailout of banks and financial firms, which sustain the system. They will feed the beast until it dies. Don’t expect them to save us. They don’t know how. And when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, they will be exposed as being as helpless, and as stupid, as the rest of us.
Posted on Dec 8, 2008
By Chris Hedges
The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredded constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, advanced placement classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools and blind deference to all authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. The collapse of the country runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and halls in places like Cambridge, Princeton and New Haven to the financial and political centers of power.
The nation’s elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent and often subversive. They organize learning around minutely specialized disciplines, narrow answers and rigid structures that are designed to produce certain answers. The established corporate hierarchies these institutions service—economic, political and social—come with clear parameters, such as the primacy of an unfettered free market, and with a highly specialized vocabulary. This vocabulary, a sign of the “specialist” and of course the elitist, thwarts universal understanding. It keeps the uninitiated from asking unpleasant questions. It destroys the search for the common good. It dices disciplines, faculty, students and finally experts into tiny, specialized fragments. It allows students and faculty to retreat into these self-imposed fiefdoms and neglect the most pressing moral, political and cultural questions. Those who defy the system—people like Ralph Nader—are branded as irrational and irrelevant. These elite universities have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology, self-advancement and information systems are the only things that matter.
“Political silence, total silence,” said Chris Hebdon, a Berkeley undergraduate. He went on to describe how various student groups gather at Sproul Plaza, the center of student activity at the University of California, Berkeley. These groups set up tables to recruit and inform other students, a practice know as “tabling.”
“Students table for Darfur, no one tables for Iraq. Tables on Sproul Plaza are ethnically fragmented, explicitly pre-professional (The Asian American Pre-Law or Business or Pre-Medicine Association). Never have I seen a table on globalization or corporatization. Students are as distracted and specialized and atomized as most of their professors. It’s vertical integration gone cultural. And never, never is it cutting-edge. Berkeley loves the slogan ‘excellence through diversity,’ which is a farce of course if one checks our admissions stats (most years we have only one or two entering Native Americans), but few recognize multiculturalism’s silent partner—fragmentation into little markets. Our Sproul Plaza shows that so well—the same place Mario Savio once stood on top a police car is filled with tens of tables for the pre-corporate, the ethnic, the useless cynics, the recreational groups, etc.”
I sat a few months ago with a former classmate from Harvard Divinity School who is now a theology professor. When I asked her what she was teaching she unleashed a torrent of obscure academic code words. I did not understand, even with three years of seminary, what she was talking about. You can see this absurd retreat into specialized, impenetrable verbal enclaves in every graduate department across the country. The more these universities churn out these stunted men and women, the more we are flooded with a peculiar breed of specialist. This specialist blindly services tiny parts of a corporate power structure he or she has never been taught to question and looks down on the rest of us with thinly veiled contempt.
I was sent to boarding school on a scholarship at the age of 10. By the time I had finished eight years in New England prep schools and another eight at Colgate and Harvard I had a pretty good understanding of the game. I have also taught at Columbia, New York University and Princeton. These institutions, no matter how mediocre you are, feed students with the comforting self-delusion that they are there because they are not only the best but they deserve the best. You can see this attitude on display in every word uttered by George W. Bush. Here is a man with severely limited intellectual capacity and no moral core. He, along with “Scooter” Libby, who attended my boarding school and went on to Yale, is an example of the legions of self-centered mediocrities churned out by places like Andover, Yale and Harvard. Bush was, like the rest of his caste, propelled forward by his money and his connections. That is the real purpose of these well-endowed schools—to perpetuate their own.
“There’s a certain kind of student at these schools who falls in love with the mystique and prestige of his own education,” said Elyse Graham, whom I taught at Princeton and who is now doing graduate work at Yale. “This is the guy who treats his time at Princeton as a scavenger hunt for Princetoniana and Princeton nostalgia: How many famous professors can I collect? And so on. And he comes away not only with all these props for his sense of being elect, but also with the smoothness that seems to indicate wide learning; college socializes you, so you learn to present even trite ideas well.”
These institutions cater to their students like high-end resorts. My prep school—remember this is a high school—recently build a $26-million gym. Not that it didn’t have a gym. It had a fine one with an Olympic pool. But it needed to upgrade its facilities to compete for the elite boys and girls being wooed by other schools. While public schools crumble, while public universities are slashed and degraded, while these elite institutions become unaffordable even for the middle class, the privileged retreat further into their opulent gated communities. Harvard lost $8 billion of its endowment over the past four months, which raises the question of how smart these people are, but it still has $30 billion. Schools like Yale, Stanford and Princeton are not far behind. Those on the inside are told they are there because they are better than others. Most believe it.
The people I loved most, my working-class family in Maine, did not go to college. They were plumbers, post office clerks and mill workers. Most of the men were military veterans. They lived frugal and hard lives. They were indulgent of my incessant book reading and incompetence with tools, even my distaste for deer hunting, and they were a steady reminder that just because I had been blessed with an opportunity that was denied to them, I was not better or more intelligent. If you are poor you have to work after high school or, in the case of my grandfather, before you are able to finish high school. College is not an option. No one takes care of you. You have to do that for yourself. This is the most important difference between them and elites.
The elite schools, which trumpet their diversity, base this diversity on race and ethnicity, rarely on class. The admissions process, as well as the staggering tuition costs, precludes most of the poor and working class. When my son got his SAT scores back last year, we were surprised to find that his critical reading score was lower than his math score. He dislikes math. He is an avid and perceptive reader. And so we did what many educated, middle-class families do. We hired an expensive tutor from The Princeton Review who taught him the tricks and techniques of taking standardized tests. The tutor told him things like “stop thinking about whether the passage is true. You are wasting test time thinking about the ideas. Just spit back what they tell you.” His reading score went up 130 points. Was he smarter? Was he a better reader? Did he become more intelligent? Is reading and answering multiple choice questions while someone holds a stopwatch over you even an effective measure of intelligence? What about those families that do not have a few thousand dollars to hire a tutor? What chance do they have?
These universities, because of their incessant reliance on standardized tests and the demand for perfect grades, fill their classrooms with large numbers of drones. I have taught gifted and engaged students who used these institutions to expand the life of the mind, who asked the big questions and who cherished what these schools had to offer. But they were always a marginalized and dispirited minority. The bulk of their classmates, most of whom headed off to Wall Street or corporate firms when they graduated, starting at $120,000 a year, did prodigious amounts of work and faithfully regurgitated information. They received perfect grades in both tedious, boring classes and stimulating ones, not that they could tell the difference. They may have known the plot and salient details of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” but they were unable to tell you why the story was important. Their professors, fearful of being branded political and not wanting to upset the legions of wealthy donors and administrative overlords who rule such institutions, did not draw the obvious parallels with Iraq and American empire. They did not use Conrad’s story, as it was meant to be used, to examine our own imperial darkness. And so, even in the anemic world of liberal arts, what is taught exists in a moral void.
“The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic,” William Deresiewicz, who taught English at Yale, wrote in “The American Scholar.” “While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite.”
Intelligence is morally neutral. It is no more virtuous than athletic prowess. It can be used to further the rape of the working class by corporations and the mechanisms of repression and war, or it can be used to fight these forces. But if you determine worth by wealth, as these institutions invariably do, then fighting the system is inherently devalued. The unstated ethic of these elite institutions is to make as much money as you can to sustain the elitist system. College presidents are not voices for the common good and the protection of intellectual integrity, but obsequious fundraisers. They shower honorary degrees and trusteeships on hedge fund managers and Wall Street titans whose lives are usually examples of moral squalor and unchecked greed. The message to the students is clear. But grabbing what you can, as John Ruskin said, isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists.
Most of these students are afraid to take risks. They cower before authority. They have been taught from a young age by zealous parents, schools and institutional authorities what constitutes failure and success. They are socialized to obey. They obsess over grades and seek to please professors, even if what their professors teach is fatuous. The point is to get ahead. Challenging authority is not a career advancer. Freshmen arrive on elite campuses and begin to network their way into the elite eating clubs, test into the elite academic programs and lobby for elite summer internships. By the time they graduate they are superbly conditioned to work 10 or 12 hours a day electronically moving large sums of money around.
“The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a
letter or a number or a name,” Deresiewicz wrote. “It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.”
“Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul,” he went on. “These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the
university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers. Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions. I don’t think there ever was a golden age of intellectualism in the American university, but in the 19th century students might at least have had a chance to hear such questions raised in chapel or in the literary societies and debating clubs that flourished on campus.”
Barack Obama is a product of this elitist system. So are his degree-laden Cabinet members. They come out of Harvard, Yale, Wellesley and Princeton. Their friends and classmates made huge fortunes on Wall Street and in powerful law firms. They go to the same class reunions. They belong to the same clubs. They speak the same easy language of privilege and comfort and entitlement. They are endowed with an unbridled self-confidence and blind belief in a decaying political and financial system that has nurtured and empowered them. These elite, and the corporate system they serve, have ruined the country. These elite cannot solve our problems. They have been trained to find “solutions,” such as the trillion-dollar bailout of banks and financial firms, which sustain the system. They will feed the beast until it dies. Don’t expect them to save us. They don’t know how. And when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, they will be exposed as being as helpless, and as stupid, as the rest of us.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Corinne Reilly - McClatchy Newspapers (December 5, 2008)
McClatchy Washington Bureau
Posted on Fri, Dec. 05, 2008
Reporter reflects: 'Their grief is my last remembrance of Iraq'
Corinne Reilly | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: December 05, 2008 03:39:26 PM
It was hard to see exactly what was happening from the back seat of the beat-up armored Mercedes that was taking me to Baghdad International Airport. Through the dirty, 2-inch-thick windows I could make out four Iraqi soldiers standing on the side of the road, locked together in one big hug. I'd been watching them for a few minutes, along with my driver, Suhaib, and McClatchy's British security adviser, Kevin. Why are they hugging? I wondered.
After seven weeks in Iraq, I was less than two hours from leaving the country. Whatever was happening outside had stopped traffic, and I was wondering whether it would make me miss my flight to Amman, Jordan.
One of the soldiers broke from the hug and turned toward the traffic. He was crying. They were all crying. Kevin phoned a friend who runs the airport's security.
"It was a suicide bomber a few hours ago," he reported after he hung up. "Two Iraqi soldiers killed."
By the time we passed, the bodies and the wreckage had been cleared, but the mourners lingered. Just before we were allowed to move, two Iraqi men in civilian clothes appeared. One joined in the hugging. The other dropped to the ground, and we watched him rock back and forth in the dust with his face in his hands. "Probably relatives of the dead," Kevin speculated.
I saw a lot of people cry while I was in Iraq, but I think of the hugging soldiers and the rocking civilian most often. Maybe it was the strangeness of seeing uniformed soldiers in tears. Maybe it's because they're the last sad scene I saw before I flew away. Or maybe it's the way they made me feel: guilty, because I got to leave.
Whatever the reasons, I'm glad that I think about them, glad that their grief is my last remembrance of Iraq. Because for all the stories of reduced violence and political and social successes there, Iraq remains, for the most part, a devastated country.
It's OK to revel in what's been achieved, but only for a moment. Because the real story of Iraq, the one that deserves thoughtful attention, is about everything that's still left to accomplish there.
In the few weeks that I've been home, I've had countless conversations about Iraq. The questions people ask me are usually the same: "Do they want us there?" "What's it really like on the ground?"
On my flight back to California, the man sitting next to me wanted to know whether the U.S. is winning.
"No one in the media will just call it like they see it," he complained. "Are we winning or aren't we?" Both his question and his insistence annoyed me. I tried to explain that the yes-or-no answer he wanted doesn't exist.
Has violence dropped dramatically across Iraq? Yes, by at least 75 percent since the height of the bloodshed in 2007, according to most estimates. Is the U.S. moving closer to a time when it can safely exit Iraq? Most agree that it is. But is Iraq a stable democracy? Or stable at all? No. Will it be someday? Maybe.
And within those battles, there are other struggles to consider. Roughly half of Iraqis who want to work can't find jobs. About as many don't have reliable access to safe drinking water. Millions of children don't attend school.
Millions of families who fled their neighborhoods because of violence still haven't gone home; much of Iraq remains segregated, with Sunni and Shiite Muslims still hesitant to mix. Poverty and electricity shortages are widespread, health care is out of reach for many, and corruption and incompetence are rampant in the government ministries that are supposed to be remedying all these problems.
One Iraqi lawmaker, Mahdi al Hafedh, explained it to me this way: "With many of the problems facing our people, we don't even know how bad they are because the government lacks the capacity to properly assess and measure them. So it's hard to imagine how we will begin to fix it all."
As much as anything, these struggles will determine Iraq's future. They complicate armed fights and aggravate the political instability, and all of that makes it hard for me to imagine a time in the near future when Iraqi families won't be called to bombing sites to cry.
I asked a lot of the Iraqis I interviewed what they think their country's future holds. Some wouldn't even venture a guess.
The answers I did get varied widely, but none was very optimistic. The insurgents and the militias are behaving only so the Americans will leave, some people speculated. They're saving their energy for after the U.S. withdraws, they said. Most Iraqis agreed that the religious, sectarian, ethnic and political tensions that have underlain the violence have been suppressed, but by no means purged.
"It feels so much safer than a year ago," a young man, Hussam Abdul Hammed, told me on the last day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. "But still I am afraid to really trust the improvements."
U.S. officials in Iraq also seemed unconvinced that the progress is permanent.
One afternoon in late October, I was eating lunch at a cafeteria at Camp Cropper, a U.S. base near the Baghdad airport. A few higher-ranking Americans were sitting with me.
"So where do you live?" asked one of them, a brigadier general who was trying to make polite conversation. I said that I lived in a hotel in Baghdad's Karrada district with some other Western reporters.
"What's Karrada? Is that in the IZ?" he asked, referring to the International Zone, a heavily protected, walled-off section of the capital that houses the U.S. Embassy and most nonmilitary American officials who are living in Iraq.
"Karrada is a neighborhood," I answered.
"A neighborhood in the IZ?" he responded, his forehead scrunched in confusion.
"No," I said. "A neighborhood out in Baghdad."
"Wow," the general said. He seemed to disapprove. "That's a risky choice."
This was one of the many differences I observed between what U.S. officials said publicly about Iraq and what they admitted privately.
I saw their distrust of the improvements in the way they operated, too. Civilian officials still don't leave secured areas without heavy protection from the military or private contractors, and visits to Iraq by high-ranking Americans still go unannounced until the last minute for fear that they'll inspire attacks or assassination plots.
Once when I was returning to the IZ with a State Department official after covering a trial, I was stunned as the convoy of private security contractors that transported us tore through the streets of Baghdad, forcing Iraqis off the road and barreling over medians to avoid traffic and return us to safety as quickly as possible.
I wondered whether there was some nearby threat I didn't see. Were we being followed? Had shots been fired in the distance that I didn't hear?
No, the State Department official explained. This is how they always drive.
For all the pessimism and doubt, however, many Iraqis I spoke to said they thought that their country would never regress to the rampant killing it was witnessing 15 months ago.
"The people won't stand for that again," said Nadil al Sahie, a university professor. "We've had enough."
I hope he's right, and I think he might be. But whether the real story of Iraq will become one about success and peace is a far larger and tougher question, and how long it might be before we can tell that story is impossible to say.
(Reilly, a staff writer at the Merced (Calif.) Sun-Star, reported from Iraq for McClatchy from Sept. 17 to Nov. 6.)
Posted on Fri, Dec. 05, 2008
Reporter reflects: 'Their grief is my last remembrance of Iraq'
Corinne Reilly | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: December 05, 2008 03:39:26 PM
It was hard to see exactly what was happening from the back seat of the beat-up armored Mercedes that was taking me to Baghdad International Airport. Through the dirty, 2-inch-thick windows I could make out four Iraqi soldiers standing on the side of the road, locked together in one big hug. I'd been watching them for a few minutes, along with my driver, Suhaib, and McClatchy's British security adviser, Kevin. Why are they hugging? I wondered.
After seven weeks in Iraq, I was less than two hours from leaving the country. Whatever was happening outside had stopped traffic, and I was wondering whether it would make me miss my flight to Amman, Jordan.
One of the soldiers broke from the hug and turned toward the traffic. He was crying. They were all crying. Kevin phoned a friend who runs the airport's security.
"It was a suicide bomber a few hours ago," he reported after he hung up. "Two Iraqi soldiers killed."
By the time we passed, the bodies and the wreckage had been cleared, but the mourners lingered. Just before we were allowed to move, two Iraqi men in civilian clothes appeared. One joined in the hugging. The other dropped to the ground, and we watched him rock back and forth in the dust with his face in his hands. "Probably relatives of the dead," Kevin speculated.
I saw a lot of people cry while I was in Iraq, but I think of the hugging soldiers and the rocking civilian most often. Maybe it was the strangeness of seeing uniformed soldiers in tears. Maybe it's because they're the last sad scene I saw before I flew away. Or maybe it's the way they made me feel: guilty, because I got to leave.
Whatever the reasons, I'm glad that I think about them, glad that their grief is my last remembrance of Iraq. Because for all the stories of reduced violence and political and social successes there, Iraq remains, for the most part, a devastated country.
It's OK to revel in what's been achieved, but only for a moment. Because the real story of Iraq, the one that deserves thoughtful attention, is about everything that's still left to accomplish there.
In the few weeks that I've been home, I've had countless conversations about Iraq. The questions people ask me are usually the same: "Do they want us there?" "What's it really like on the ground?"
On my flight back to California, the man sitting next to me wanted to know whether the U.S. is winning.
"No one in the media will just call it like they see it," he complained. "Are we winning or aren't we?" Both his question and his insistence annoyed me. I tried to explain that the yes-or-no answer he wanted doesn't exist.
Has violence dropped dramatically across Iraq? Yes, by at least 75 percent since the height of the bloodshed in 2007, according to most estimates. Is the U.S. moving closer to a time when it can safely exit Iraq? Most agree that it is. But is Iraq a stable democracy? Or stable at all? No. Will it be someday? Maybe.
And within those battles, there are other struggles to consider. Roughly half of Iraqis who want to work can't find jobs. About as many don't have reliable access to safe drinking water. Millions of children don't attend school.
Millions of families who fled their neighborhoods because of violence still haven't gone home; much of Iraq remains segregated, with Sunni and Shiite Muslims still hesitant to mix. Poverty and electricity shortages are widespread, health care is out of reach for many, and corruption and incompetence are rampant in the government ministries that are supposed to be remedying all these problems.
One Iraqi lawmaker, Mahdi al Hafedh, explained it to me this way: "With many of the problems facing our people, we don't even know how bad they are because the government lacks the capacity to properly assess and measure them. So it's hard to imagine how we will begin to fix it all."
As much as anything, these struggles will determine Iraq's future. They complicate armed fights and aggravate the political instability, and all of that makes it hard for me to imagine a time in the near future when Iraqi families won't be called to bombing sites to cry.
I asked a lot of the Iraqis I interviewed what they think their country's future holds. Some wouldn't even venture a guess.
The answers I did get varied widely, but none was very optimistic. The insurgents and the militias are behaving only so the Americans will leave, some people speculated. They're saving their energy for after the U.S. withdraws, they said. Most Iraqis agreed that the religious, sectarian, ethnic and political tensions that have underlain the violence have been suppressed, but by no means purged.
"It feels so much safer than a year ago," a young man, Hussam Abdul Hammed, told me on the last day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. "But still I am afraid to really trust the improvements."
U.S. officials in Iraq also seemed unconvinced that the progress is permanent.
One afternoon in late October, I was eating lunch at a cafeteria at Camp Cropper, a U.S. base near the Baghdad airport. A few higher-ranking Americans were sitting with me.
"So where do you live?" asked one of them, a brigadier general who was trying to make polite conversation. I said that I lived in a hotel in Baghdad's Karrada district with some other Western reporters.
"What's Karrada? Is that in the IZ?" he asked, referring to the International Zone, a heavily protected, walled-off section of the capital that houses the U.S. Embassy and most nonmilitary American officials who are living in Iraq.
"Karrada is a neighborhood," I answered.
"A neighborhood in the IZ?" he responded, his forehead scrunched in confusion.
"No," I said. "A neighborhood out in Baghdad."
"Wow," the general said. He seemed to disapprove. "That's a risky choice."
This was one of the many differences I observed between what U.S. officials said publicly about Iraq and what they admitted privately.
I saw their distrust of the improvements in the way they operated, too. Civilian officials still don't leave secured areas without heavy protection from the military or private contractors, and visits to Iraq by high-ranking Americans still go unannounced until the last minute for fear that they'll inspire attacks or assassination plots.
Once when I was returning to the IZ with a State Department official after covering a trial, I was stunned as the convoy of private security contractors that transported us tore through the streets of Baghdad, forcing Iraqis off the road and barreling over medians to avoid traffic and return us to safety as quickly as possible.
I wondered whether there was some nearby threat I didn't see. Were we being followed? Had shots been fired in the distance that I didn't hear?
No, the State Department official explained. This is how they always drive.
For all the pessimism and doubt, however, many Iraqis I spoke to said they thought that their country would never regress to the rampant killing it was witnessing 15 months ago.
"The people won't stand for that again," said Nadil al Sahie, a university professor. "We've had enough."
I hope he's right, and I think he might be. But whether the real story of Iraq will become one about success and peace is a far larger and tougher question, and how long it might be before we can tell that story is impossible to say.
(Reilly, a staff writer at the Merced (Calif.) Sun-Star, reported from Iraq for McClatchy from Sept. 17 to Nov. 6.)
McClatchy Newspapers (December 5, 2008)
McClatchy Washington Bureau
Posted on Fri, Dec. 05, 2008
Supreme Court to hear case of Qatari student held by U.S.
Michael Doyle | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide whether the president has the power to detain indefinitely an alleged enemy combatant who was seized on U.S. soil and now imprisoned in a Navy brig in South Carolina.
In another landmark challenge to the Bush administration's war-on-terror strategy, lawyers for Ali Saleh Kahlah al Marri say the Qatari native and former graduate student has been improperly held on nothing but the president's say-so for more than five years. They want him to be charged with a crime or released.
"Immediate review is further warranted by the fact that al Marri's continued isolation at the brig, now in its sixth year, is seriously and irreversibly harming his mental health," said Marri's attorney, Jonathan Hafetz, in a legal filing.
Hafetz added Friday that the case, al Marri v. Pucciarelli, should demonstrate that "individuals cannot be imprisoned for suspected wrongdoing without being charged with a crime and tried before a jury." Hafetz is a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been representing Marri.
The court's decision, issued without comment, means that at least four Supreme Court justices think that Marri has a case that's sufficient enough to merit a formal hearing. The hour-long oral arguments will likely take place next spring, after President George W. Bush has left office.
So far, the Supreme Court has ruled on four war-on-terror cases, overturning the Bush administration's actions in three of them.
Between now and the arguments in the spring, President-elect Barack Obama and his legal advisers will have to decide how they might modify Bush's argument. Under Bush, administration lawyers have argued that the executive branch has broad powers in a time of war, even if Congress hasn't declared war.
In this case, the Bush administration's argument is that Marri represents a "continuing, present, and grave danger" to U.S. safety, and that as a suspected enemy combatant he can't be released without endangering the country.
"Congress intended to authorize detention of al Qaida agents who, like (Marri), come to this country to commit hostile or war-like acts," Solicitor General Gregory Garre argued in a legal filing. "And a contrary conclusion would severely undermine the military's ability to protect the nation against further al Qaida attacks at home."
Garre is a Bush appointee who'll be replaced by someone of Obama's choosing.
"Under the (administration's) rationale, American citizens may be imprisoned indefinitely merely upon suspicion of being linked in some way to potential terrorism," said former FBI Director William Sessions and 11 other former federal judges in a legal filing.
Unlike other 21st century detainees whose names have now entered into Supreme Court history, such as Yemeni native Salim Hamdan, Marri has never been held at Guantanamo Bay. He wasn't seized on the Iraq or Afghanistan battlefields, and his legal challenge won't affect how long the Guantanamo Bay prison will remain open.
Instead, the Marri case will test how much power the president gained as a result of the post-9/11 authorization of force passed by Congress.
"We hope that President-elect Obama will resoundingly reject the current administration's breathtaking claim that the United States may hold a civilian in military detention indefinitely," said Sharon Bradford Franklin, senior counsel at the Constitution Project, a Washington nonprofit group tackles a variety of controversial legal issues and seeks consensus among partisans.
FBI agents seized Marri at his Peoria, Ill., home on Dec. 12, 2001. The married father of five was a computer science graduate student at Bradley University, where he'd earned his bachelor's degree in 1991.
Investigators initially held Marri as a material witness in an investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Authorities eventually charged him with credit card fraud and identity theft. Those charges were later dropped. About a month before his July 2003 trial was set to begin, Bush issued a one-page declaration that Marri was an enemy combatant.
A laptop computer seized at Marri's house contained highly technical information about making cyanide gas, the FBI says. The computer also stored more than 1,000 credit card numbers, information about creating false identities and coded e-mail messages purportedly to a computer address associated with al Qaida.
"The evidence shows that, between 1996 and 1998, (Marri) received training at an al Qaida terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, where he learned about the use of poisons," Garre argued on Bush's behalf.
With Bush's declaration, Marri was removed from the U.S. criminal justice system and placed in solitary confinement at the Consolidated Naval Brig in South Carolina. The brig's top officer, Navy Cmdr. John Pucciarelli, is the other party named in the case, although the real defendant is the Bush administration.
Posted on Fri, Dec. 05, 2008
Supreme Court to hear case of Qatari student held by U.S.
Michael Doyle | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide whether the president has the power to detain indefinitely an alleged enemy combatant who was seized on U.S. soil and now imprisoned in a Navy brig in South Carolina.
In another landmark challenge to the Bush administration's war-on-terror strategy, lawyers for Ali Saleh Kahlah al Marri say the Qatari native and former graduate student has been improperly held on nothing but the president's say-so for more than five years. They want him to be charged with a crime or released.
"Immediate review is further warranted by the fact that al Marri's continued isolation at the brig, now in its sixth year, is seriously and irreversibly harming his mental health," said Marri's attorney, Jonathan Hafetz, in a legal filing.
Hafetz added Friday that the case, al Marri v. Pucciarelli, should demonstrate that "individuals cannot be imprisoned for suspected wrongdoing without being charged with a crime and tried before a jury." Hafetz is a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been representing Marri.
The court's decision, issued without comment, means that at least four Supreme Court justices think that Marri has a case that's sufficient enough to merit a formal hearing. The hour-long oral arguments will likely take place next spring, after President George W. Bush has left office.
So far, the Supreme Court has ruled on four war-on-terror cases, overturning the Bush administration's actions in three of them.
Between now and the arguments in the spring, President-elect Barack Obama and his legal advisers will have to decide how they might modify Bush's argument. Under Bush, administration lawyers have argued that the executive branch has broad powers in a time of war, even if Congress hasn't declared war.
In this case, the Bush administration's argument is that Marri represents a "continuing, present, and grave danger" to U.S. safety, and that as a suspected enemy combatant he can't be released without endangering the country.
"Congress intended to authorize detention of al Qaida agents who, like (Marri), come to this country to commit hostile or war-like acts," Solicitor General Gregory Garre argued in a legal filing. "And a contrary conclusion would severely undermine the military's ability to protect the nation against further al Qaida attacks at home."
Garre is a Bush appointee who'll be replaced by someone of Obama's choosing.
"Under the (administration's) rationale, American citizens may be imprisoned indefinitely merely upon suspicion of being linked in some way to potential terrorism," said former FBI Director William Sessions and 11 other former federal judges in a legal filing.
Unlike other 21st century detainees whose names have now entered into Supreme Court history, such as Yemeni native Salim Hamdan, Marri has never been held at Guantanamo Bay. He wasn't seized on the Iraq or Afghanistan battlefields, and his legal challenge won't affect how long the Guantanamo Bay prison will remain open.
Instead, the Marri case will test how much power the president gained as a result of the post-9/11 authorization of force passed by Congress.
"We hope that President-elect Obama will resoundingly reject the current administration's breathtaking claim that the United States may hold a civilian in military detention indefinitely," said Sharon Bradford Franklin, senior counsel at the Constitution Project, a Washington nonprofit group tackles a variety of controversial legal issues and seeks consensus among partisans.
FBI agents seized Marri at his Peoria, Ill., home on Dec. 12, 2001. The married father of five was a computer science graduate student at Bradley University, where he'd earned his bachelor's degree in 1991.
Investigators initially held Marri as a material witness in an investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Authorities eventually charged him with credit card fraud and identity theft. Those charges were later dropped. About a month before his July 2003 trial was set to begin, Bush issued a one-page declaration that Marri was an enemy combatant.
A laptop computer seized at Marri's house contained highly technical information about making cyanide gas, the FBI says. The computer also stored more than 1,000 credit card numbers, information about creating false identities and coded e-mail messages purportedly to a computer address associated with al Qaida.
"The evidence shows that, between 1996 and 1998, (Marri) received training at an al Qaida terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, where he learned about the use of poisons," Garre argued on Bush's behalf.
With Bush's declaration, Marri was removed from the U.S. criminal justice system and placed in solitary confinement at the Consolidated Naval Brig in South Carolina. The brig's top officer, Navy Cmdr. John Pucciarelli, is the other party named in the case, although the real defendant is the Bush administration.
N.Y. Times (December 7, 2008)
December 7, 2008
In Iraq, Anger at Guards, and Comfort Over Charges
By KATHERINE ZOEPF and TARIQ MAHER
BAGHDAD — On Nisour Square, here in the Iraqi capital, where at least 17 civilians were killed last year by guards working for the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, Iraqis reacted with satisfaction and anger to the news that five Blackwater guards had been indicted by the United States Justice Department.
“They started shooting randomly at people without any reason,” recalled Ali Khalf Selman, a traffic policeman who said he witnessed the killing of 21 people on the day of the shootings. “I wish I could see the criminals in person, and I hope that they will pay a price for killing people who just happened to be in the wrong place on that bad day.”
The shootings occurred on Sept. 16, 2007, as a Blackwater convoy traveled through Nisour Square, which was crowded with pedestrians, police officers and cars. The guards have said that they fired after coming under attack, and Blackwater has maintained that its guards did nothing wrong.
Iraq has not yet filed any claims against Blackwater, said an Iraqi official, who asked not to be identified because he had not been authorized to speak on the subject.
The Nisour Square shootings have had a deep impact on the Iraqi government’s relationship with the Bush administration, and immunity for security contractors became a major issue recently in negotiations of the security pact that lays the ground rules for American troops’ continuing presence in Iraq.
“This was one of the main issues in the pact,” said Shatha al-Abousi, a Sunni member of Parliament. “It was a big problem, giving immunity to American soldiers and bodyguards. But everywhere on earth the guilty one must pay. It is a good thing this issue was completely solved in the pact.”
Also this week, McClatchy Newspapers reported that about 1,000 men from several South Asian countries who had been hired by a subcontractor for the American military were held for months in conditions like slavery near Baghdad International Airport.
The men had paid middlemen to obtain jobs in Iraq with Al Najlaa International Catering Services, a Kuwait-based subcontractor to KBR, a contractor that provides services to the United States military, the McClatchy report said. When they arrived in Iraq, it said, they were held in cramped conditions in warehouses, without being given jobs, salaries or adequate food.
The American military did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the laborers’ situation.
KBR responded with a brief statement, saying that it “in no way condones or tolerates unethical or illegal behavior.” A spokeswoman for KBR, Heather L. Browne, wrote in an e-mail message that “KBR has been in discussions with the government on this issue and we will continue to monitor the situation.”
Joseph Logan, a Middle East researcher for Human Rights Watch, said: “This seems to be a case of an unscrupulous employer going bad on its obligations to workers in an extremely dangerous environment. I haven’t traced the chain of contracts but it seems hard to believe that KBR wouldn’t be aware of the way their partners who provide them with labor hire employees. It’s hard to believe that these practices would be a complete surprise to the final contractor.”
In the northern city of Kirkuk on Saturday, a suicide bomber attacked a police academy, killing one person and wounding 15, the authorities said.
Saman Ghafour, a police captain who witnessed the attack, said that the suicide bomber appeared to be 12 to 16 years old. It was the second time in a week that a suicide bomber who appeared to be young had attacked an Iraqi police academy, and a leading Iraqi daily newspaper, Al Sabah Al Jadid, published an article suggesting that the use of children as suicide bombers was a new tactic of the insurgency.
Atheer Kakan and Anwar J. Ali contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Kirkuk, Iraq.
In Iraq, Anger at Guards, and Comfort Over Charges
By KATHERINE ZOEPF and TARIQ MAHER
BAGHDAD — On Nisour Square, here in the Iraqi capital, where at least 17 civilians were killed last year by guards working for the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, Iraqis reacted with satisfaction and anger to the news that five Blackwater guards had been indicted by the United States Justice Department.
“They started shooting randomly at people without any reason,” recalled Ali Khalf Selman, a traffic policeman who said he witnessed the killing of 21 people on the day of the shootings. “I wish I could see the criminals in person, and I hope that they will pay a price for killing people who just happened to be in the wrong place on that bad day.”
The shootings occurred on Sept. 16, 2007, as a Blackwater convoy traveled through Nisour Square, which was crowded with pedestrians, police officers and cars. The guards have said that they fired after coming under attack, and Blackwater has maintained that its guards did nothing wrong.
Iraq has not yet filed any claims against Blackwater, said an Iraqi official, who asked not to be identified because he had not been authorized to speak on the subject.
The Nisour Square shootings have had a deep impact on the Iraqi government’s relationship with the Bush administration, and immunity for security contractors became a major issue recently in negotiations of the security pact that lays the ground rules for American troops’ continuing presence in Iraq.
“This was one of the main issues in the pact,” said Shatha al-Abousi, a Sunni member of Parliament. “It was a big problem, giving immunity to American soldiers and bodyguards. But everywhere on earth the guilty one must pay. It is a good thing this issue was completely solved in the pact.”
Also this week, McClatchy Newspapers reported that about 1,000 men from several South Asian countries who had been hired by a subcontractor for the American military were held for months in conditions like slavery near Baghdad International Airport.
The men had paid middlemen to obtain jobs in Iraq with Al Najlaa International Catering Services, a Kuwait-based subcontractor to KBR, a contractor that provides services to the United States military, the McClatchy report said. When they arrived in Iraq, it said, they were held in cramped conditions in warehouses, without being given jobs, salaries or adequate food.
The American military did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the laborers’ situation.
KBR responded with a brief statement, saying that it “in no way condones or tolerates unethical or illegal behavior.” A spokeswoman for KBR, Heather L. Browne, wrote in an e-mail message that “KBR has been in discussions with the government on this issue and we will continue to monitor the situation.”
Joseph Logan, a Middle East researcher for Human Rights Watch, said: “This seems to be a case of an unscrupulous employer going bad on its obligations to workers in an extremely dangerous environment. I haven’t traced the chain of contracts but it seems hard to believe that KBR wouldn’t be aware of the way their partners who provide them with labor hire employees. It’s hard to believe that these practices would be a complete surprise to the final contractor.”
In the northern city of Kirkuk on Saturday, a suicide bomber attacked a police academy, killing one person and wounding 15, the authorities said.
Saman Ghafour, a police captain who witnessed the attack, said that the suicide bomber appeared to be 12 to 16 years old. It was the second time in a week that a suicide bomber who appeared to be young had attacked an Iraqi police academy, and a leading Iraqi daily newspaper, Al Sabah Al Jadid, published an article suggesting that the use of children as suicide bombers was a new tactic of the insurgency.
Atheer Kakan and Anwar J. Ali contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Kirkuk, Iraq.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Eugene Jarecki - HuffingtonPost.com (December 3, 2008)
Keeping Track of Change (It Takes More Than Hope)
For anyone seeking real reform of America's foreign and defense policies in the years ahead, Obama's introduction of his national security team was a mixed bag. Set against an increasingly worrisome national security environment -- from the mounting tensions in India/Pakistan to Sunday's New York Times front-page story about epidemic U.S. military-industrial corruption to this week's Washington Post story about Pentagon plans to station 20,000 U.S. troops on the American homeland by 2011 -- it was at least refreshing to see a new row of faces to replace those who have brought us the tragic missteps of recent years. Yet what these appointments really suggest about Obama's broader prospects for reform requires vigilant public attention.
As someone who seeks fundamental reform of so much of the American system, I've been heartened to see a growing number of voices on the airwaves and blogosphere express concern at certain choices made by the Obama transition team that are hard to reconcile with the public's hopes for change. This kind of unrelenting pressure for reform is vital and has already provoked an entirely healthy discourse even among Obama's most ardent supporters, between those who seek far-reaching change and those who see themselves as more pragmatic. Since Obama has not yet even been inaugurated, these voices can only speculate on what his governance might look like, and there's a danger of being either prematurely critical or overly complacent. Still, it's never too early to be vigilant. Let us not forget that it was Obama himself who invited each of us to fulfill our end of the contract between citizen and president in an historic effort to bring about change.
For my part, I like making lists. So rather than over-interpret any single decision, I thought it would be a good idea to catalog some key appointments and policy statements thus far - the promising alongside the worrisome - to take stock of and prepare for the bigger picture the transition has begun to paint of what lies ahead.
First, the good news:
• Continuing Inspiration for Change. Obama continues to inspire millions to believe that change is both necessary and possible. His transition team reports having received 200,000 applications for jobs in his administration.
• Economic Crisis Leadership. Obama has swiftly made key appointments and policy statements to fill a "leadership vacuum" to calm domestic and global economic jitters.
• Expanding U.S. Employment. In an echo of the New Deal, 2.5 million jobs will be created to improve U.S. infrastructure.
• Revoking Unconstitutional Bush Policies. It's been suggested that work is already under way to reverse politically-motivated executive orders ranging from climate change and reproductive rights to stem cell research.
• Ethical Hiring Practices. The transition team is said to be subjecting candidates for administration posts to unprecedented ethical scrutiny.
• Improving International Relations. Reciprocating the world's resounding approval of his election, Obama is expected to appoint ambassadors who are experienced diplomats rather than follow his predecessor's example of awarding ambassadorships to big campaign donors.
• Guantanamo Closure. Obama has stood by his campaign promise to close Guantanamo and end U.S. torture practices.
• Transparent Governance. The announcement of Obama's plan to give weekly updates on YouTube - a high-tech echo of FDR's fireside chats - is inspiring.
• Restoring Cabinet Level Status for U.N. Ambassador. Signaling real change in America's approach to foreign affairs, the appointment of a new and improved Dr. Rice to the role of U.N. Ambassador was compounded by the announcement that the position will also be restored to cabinet rank.
Now, the developments that are, at minimum, twists on the spirit and pledges of the campaign and, at maximum, a troubling departure from them:
• Protracted Iraq Timetable. Though opposition to the Iraq War was a defining feature of Obama's early candidacy, his position on a timetable for withdrawal has grown elastic with time. Though he had already begun to retreat from his original 16-month troop withdrawal commitment long before last week's the Status of Forces Agreement arrangement was struck with Iraq, this agreement, which makes December 31, 2011 a date certain for withdrawal, may spare Obama the awkward work of having to explain a softening of his originally firm commitment.
• Gates and Lieberman. To further dilute his once-impassioned antiwar position, Obama's decisions to have kept Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, an opponent of any date-certain withdrawal from Iraq, and to have come to the defense of Joe Lieberman maintaining his senate chairmanships, may be politically shrewd but are dissonant with the antiwar spirit of his campaign.
• FISA and Wiretapping. Obama dismayed many supporters when he voted for last summer's FISA legislation, granting telecom companies legal immunity from prosecution for wiretapping. More broadly, there has to date been no evidence of any movement to redress his predecessor's far-reaching assaults on civil liberties.
• War Crimes Accountability. The new Obama Justice Department is not expected to launch criminal probes of forged intelligence, torture, and other unlawful practices undertaken by the Bush administration. But without real accountability for these trespasses, what motivation will there be in Washington for reform?
• Continued Tax Cuts for Wealthy? There have now been indications from Obama's advisors that may allow a Bush tax cut for the wealthy to expire on schedule in 2011 rather than repealing it sooner, as previously promised.
• Lobbyists Appointed to Transition and Cabinet Positions. Despite his lauded vetting practices and his campaign pledge that "no political appointees in an Obama administration will be permitted to work on regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years," Obama has selected a number of people for his transition team and cabinet (including Tom Daschle) who have served as lobbyists or worked for lobbying firms in the fields in which they will be involved.
• Clinton Era Appointees. Without speculating on the pros or cons of any single cabinet appointee, the number of Clinton-era cabinet appointments so far, from Hillary Clinton to Rahm Emmanuel to Eric Holder to Robert Rubin protégé Timothy Geithner, is surprising and begs the question: how much change is likely to come from an abundance of representatives of an old guard?
• Misplaced Rhetoric Toward Russia. During the late phases of his campaign, Obama escalated his rhetoric toward Russia in the wake of its five-day war with Georgia in August 2008. Given the now growing evidence that Georgia initiated the conflict and that the Bush administration concealed this from the American public, Obama's anti-Russian rhetoric represents both a non-change from the belligerence of the Bush years and seems to betray the undue influence of longstanding Cold War strategists among his advisors.
• A Nuclear Double Standard Toward Iran. When, just days after his election, Obama declared it "unacceptable" for Iran to possess a nuclear weapon in a world where other nations (including Israel) have nuclear weapons, he sent a signal that echoes the position taken by the Bush administration over the past eight years. Right or wrong, this position is read around the world as a double- standard on nuclear policy. Had Obama instead spoken of the need for global nuclear disarmament (Iran, Israel, and the U.S. included), this message would have been a departure from the posture of the Bush years.
• Surging in Afghanistan. While the matter of the worsening situation in Afghanistan is a sensitive one, Obama's late campaign call for a surge in the war-torn country was a departure from the antiwar platform on which he first appealed to the American people. It seemed instead to suggest a shifting of certain troops from Iraq, where Obama had opposed such a surge, to Afghanistan, rather than simply bringing those troops home. Another model for implementing a peacekeeping presence in Afghanistan might have been more compatible with the spirit of Obama's original commitments to reducing unilateral U.S. military activity overseas.
• Saber-Rattling at Bin Laden. While a police action to capture al Qaeda leadership should have been America's first priority after 9/11 and it remains a stain on the Bush administration that it knowingly distracted the nation with other pursuits, pursuing Bin Laden, who is believed to be in Pakistan, implies expansion of U.S. military activity into the territory of this increasingly unstable nuclear power. Though it is hard to argue with the need to capture Bin Laden and hold him accountable, Obama's sweeping statements toward killing the leader beg the question: at what cost?
(Note to reader: If, while reading the above list, you feel I have omitted something, positive or negative, please post a comment to that effect so we can begin to build a comprehensive "change checklist" as the new administration gets under way)
On a host of other issues from the drug war to the death penalty to the Patriot Act to military-industrial and other corporate corruption to gay marriage to reproductive rights to gun control to gays in the military, it is not yet clear to what extent Obama will defy or fulfill the hopes expressed by his supporters during the campaign. But broadly speaking, what the various cabinet appointments and statements of policy above illustrate is an administration and worldview that are simply more centrist than change-oriented. To those who are critical of this, it represents a retreat from the inspiring passions of the campaign. To those who support it, the choices simply reflect the necessary pragmatism to get things done in Washington. They see Obama as avoiding the error of Clinton's first term, in which his early struggles were attributed to an overabundance of inexperienced Washington players on his team. This may be a smart lessons-learned strategy, but when there have been virtually no reform-oriented or progressive candidates appointed or even floated as names for cabinet-level posts, one has to wonder whether the pragmatism argument isn't perhaps being overplayed.
To his credit, Obama addressed this in a two-part answer when asked about the impression of centrism in his appointments at last Monday's press conference. First, he recognized the need to balance the impulse for change with a measure of pragmatism, stating that his administration would "combine experience with fresh thinking." That's reassuring. But he then went further, making the bolder statement that, notwithstanding his cabinet appointments, "the vision for change...comes from me. That's my job, is to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure, then, that my team is implementing it." After eight years of vaulting executive power exercised by a "decider" in the White House to whom Congress and the public gave so much power, being told by a leader basically to trust him is uncomfortably familiar. Worse still, it contradicts the crowning message of the Obama campaign.
"I am asking you to believe," candidate Obama rousingly told us, "not just in my ability to bring about a real change in Washington...I'm asking you to believe in yours."
Well, there's the rub. For what Obama correctly recognized as a candidate he -- and we -- must now remember: that no person, no matter how talented, inspiring, or well-intended, can single-handedly bring about the kind of far-reaching reforms that our deeply wounded society needs. It will instead require unrelenting vigilance from all of us - including making ourselves heard when Obama's path appears more inclined toward conciliation than reform. When in recent weeks comparisons to Lincoln were drawn to explain some of Obama's counter-intuitive cabinet appointments, Congressman John Conyers offered the wonderful retort, "it tells me I'm going to have to be Frederick Douglass to his Abraham Lincoln." Recalling the pressure Douglass exerted on the 16th president's policymaking, Conyers did us the great service of speaking to the much-needed Frederick Douglass inside each of us, underscoring that we the public must be prepared to commit ourselves - beyond any level of civic engagement we've known before -- to exert pressure on our political leadership to make the changes we seek. For it was Douglass, after all, who noted that "power concedes nothing without demand."
Eugene Jarecki's 2006 film Why We Fight won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival as well as a Peabody Award. His new book, The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril has just been released by Simon & Schuster/Free Press.
For anyone seeking real reform of America's foreign and defense policies in the years ahead, Obama's introduction of his national security team was a mixed bag. Set against an increasingly worrisome national security environment -- from the mounting tensions in India/Pakistan to Sunday's New York Times front-page story about epidemic U.S. military-industrial corruption to this week's Washington Post story about Pentagon plans to station 20,000 U.S. troops on the American homeland by 2011 -- it was at least refreshing to see a new row of faces to replace those who have brought us the tragic missteps of recent years. Yet what these appointments really suggest about Obama's broader prospects for reform requires vigilant public attention.
As someone who seeks fundamental reform of so much of the American system, I've been heartened to see a growing number of voices on the airwaves and blogosphere express concern at certain choices made by the Obama transition team that are hard to reconcile with the public's hopes for change. This kind of unrelenting pressure for reform is vital and has already provoked an entirely healthy discourse even among Obama's most ardent supporters, between those who seek far-reaching change and those who see themselves as more pragmatic. Since Obama has not yet even been inaugurated, these voices can only speculate on what his governance might look like, and there's a danger of being either prematurely critical or overly complacent. Still, it's never too early to be vigilant. Let us not forget that it was Obama himself who invited each of us to fulfill our end of the contract between citizen and president in an historic effort to bring about change.
For my part, I like making lists. So rather than over-interpret any single decision, I thought it would be a good idea to catalog some key appointments and policy statements thus far - the promising alongside the worrisome - to take stock of and prepare for the bigger picture the transition has begun to paint of what lies ahead.
First, the good news:
• Continuing Inspiration for Change. Obama continues to inspire millions to believe that change is both necessary and possible. His transition team reports having received 200,000 applications for jobs in his administration.
• Economic Crisis Leadership. Obama has swiftly made key appointments and policy statements to fill a "leadership vacuum" to calm domestic and global economic jitters.
• Expanding U.S. Employment. In an echo of the New Deal, 2.5 million jobs will be created to improve U.S. infrastructure.
• Revoking Unconstitutional Bush Policies. It's been suggested that work is already under way to reverse politically-motivated executive orders ranging from climate change and reproductive rights to stem cell research.
• Ethical Hiring Practices. The transition team is said to be subjecting candidates for administration posts to unprecedented ethical scrutiny.
• Improving International Relations. Reciprocating the world's resounding approval of his election, Obama is expected to appoint ambassadors who are experienced diplomats rather than follow his predecessor's example of awarding ambassadorships to big campaign donors.
• Guantanamo Closure. Obama has stood by his campaign promise to close Guantanamo and end U.S. torture practices.
• Transparent Governance. The announcement of Obama's plan to give weekly updates on YouTube - a high-tech echo of FDR's fireside chats - is inspiring.
• Restoring Cabinet Level Status for U.N. Ambassador. Signaling real change in America's approach to foreign affairs, the appointment of a new and improved Dr. Rice to the role of U.N. Ambassador was compounded by the announcement that the position will also be restored to cabinet rank.
Now, the developments that are, at minimum, twists on the spirit and pledges of the campaign and, at maximum, a troubling departure from them:
• Protracted Iraq Timetable. Though opposition to the Iraq War was a defining feature of Obama's early candidacy, his position on a timetable for withdrawal has grown elastic with time. Though he had already begun to retreat from his original 16-month troop withdrawal commitment long before last week's the Status of Forces Agreement arrangement was struck with Iraq, this agreement, which makes December 31, 2011 a date certain for withdrawal, may spare Obama the awkward work of having to explain a softening of his originally firm commitment.
• Gates and Lieberman. To further dilute his once-impassioned antiwar position, Obama's decisions to have kept Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, an opponent of any date-certain withdrawal from Iraq, and to have come to the defense of Joe Lieberman maintaining his senate chairmanships, may be politically shrewd but are dissonant with the antiwar spirit of his campaign.
• FISA and Wiretapping. Obama dismayed many supporters when he voted for last summer's FISA legislation, granting telecom companies legal immunity from prosecution for wiretapping. More broadly, there has to date been no evidence of any movement to redress his predecessor's far-reaching assaults on civil liberties.
• War Crimes Accountability. The new Obama Justice Department is not expected to launch criminal probes of forged intelligence, torture, and other unlawful practices undertaken by the Bush administration. But without real accountability for these trespasses, what motivation will there be in Washington for reform?
• Continued Tax Cuts for Wealthy? There have now been indications from Obama's advisors that may allow a Bush tax cut for the wealthy to expire on schedule in 2011 rather than repealing it sooner, as previously promised.
• Lobbyists Appointed to Transition and Cabinet Positions. Despite his lauded vetting practices and his campaign pledge that "no political appointees in an Obama administration will be permitted to work on regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years," Obama has selected a number of people for his transition team and cabinet (including Tom Daschle) who have served as lobbyists or worked for lobbying firms in the fields in which they will be involved.
• Clinton Era Appointees. Without speculating on the pros or cons of any single cabinet appointee, the number of Clinton-era cabinet appointments so far, from Hillary Clinton to Rahm Emmanuel to Eric Holder to Robert Rubin protégé Timothy Geithner, is surprising and begs the question: how much change is likely to come from an abundance of representatives of an old guard?
• Misplaced Rhetoric Toward Russia. During the late phases of his campaign, Obama escalated his rhetoric toward Russia in the wake of its five-day war with Georgia in August 2008. Given the now growing evidence that Georgia initiated the conflict and that the Bush administration concealed this from the American public, Obama's anti-Russian rhetoric represents both a non-change from the belligerence of the Bush years and seems to betray the undue influence of longstanding Cold War strategists among his advisors.
• A Nuclear Double Standard Toward Iran. When, just days after his election, Obama declared it "unacceptable" for Iran to possess a nuclear weapon in a world where other nations (including Israel) have nuclear weapons, he sent a signal that echoes the position taken by the Bush administration over the past eight years. Right or wrong, this position is read around the world as a double- standard on nuclear policy. Had Obama instead spoken of the need for global nuclear disarmament (Iran, Israel, and the U.S. included), this message would have been a departure from the posture of the Bush years.
• Surging in Afghanistan. While the matter of the worsening situation in Afghanistan is a sensitive one, Obama's late campaign call for a surge in the war-torn country was a departure from the antiwar platform on which he first appealed to the American people. It seemed instead to suggest a shifting of certain troops from Iraq, where Obama had opposed such a surge, to Afghanistan, rather than simply bringing those troops home. Another model for implementing a peacekeeping presence in Afghanistan might have been more compatible with the spirit of Obama's original commitments to reducing unilateral U.S. military activity overseas.
• Saber-Rattling at Bin Laden. While a police action to capture al Qaeda leadership should have been America's first priority after 9/11 and it remains a stain on the Bush administration that it knowingly distracted the nation with other pursuits, pursuing Bin Laden, who is believed to be in Pakistan, implies expansion of U.S. military activity into the territory of this increasingly unstable nuclear power. Though it is hard to argue with the need to capture Bin Laden and hold him accountable, Obama's sweeping statements toward killing the leader beg the question: at what cost?
(Note to reader: If, while reading the above list, you feel I have omitted something, positive or negative, please post a comment to that effect so we can begin to build a comprehensive "change checklist" as the new administration gets under way)
On a host of other issues from the drug war to the death penalty to the Patriot Act to military-industrial and other corporate corruption to gay marriage to reproductive rights to gun control to gays in the military, it is not yet clear to what extent Obama will defy or fulfill the hopes expressed by his supporters during the campaign. But broadly speaking, what the various cabinet appointments and statements of policy above illustrate is an administration and worldview that are simply more centrist than change-oriented. To those who are critical of this, it represents a retreat from the inspiring passions of the campaign. To those who support it, the choices simply reflect the necessary pragmatism to get things done in Washington. They see Obama as avoiding the error of Clinton's first term, in which his early struggles were attributed to an overabundance of inexperienced Washington players on his team. This may be a smart lessons-learned strategy, but when there have been virtually no reform-oriented or progressive candidates appointed or even floated as names for cabinet-level posts, one has to wonder whether the pragmatism argument isn't perhaps being overplayed.
To his credit, Obama addressed this in a two-part answer when asked about the impression of centrism in his appointments at last Monday's press conference. First, he recognized the need to balance the impulse for change with a measure of pragmatism, stating that his administration would "combine experience with fresh thinking." That's reassuring. But he then went further, making the bolder statement that, notwithstanding his cabinet appointments, "the vision for change...comes from me. That's my job, is to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure, then, that my team is implementing it." After eight years of vaulting executive power exercised by a "decider" in the White House to whom Congress and the public gave so much power, being told by a leader basically to trust him is uncomfortably familiar. Worse still, it contradicts the crowning message of the Obama campaign.
"I am asking you to believe," candidate Obama rousingly told us, "not just in my ability to bring about a real change in Washington...I'm asking you to believe in yours."
Well, there's the rub. For what Obama correctly recognized as a candidate he -- and we -- must now remember: that no person, no matter how talented, inspiring, or well-intended, can single-handedly bring about the kind of far-reaching reforms that our deeply wounded society needs. It will instead require unrelenting vigilance from all of us - including making ourselves heard when Obama's path appears more inclined toward conciliation than reform. When in recent weeks comparisons to Lincoln were drawn to explain some of Obama's counter-intuitive cabinet appointments, Congressman John Conyers offered the wonderful retort, "it tells me I'm going to have to be Frederick Douglass to his Abraham Lincoln." Recalling the pressure Douglass exerted on the 16th president's policymaking, Conyers did us the great service of speaking to the much-needed Frederick Douglass inside each of us, underscoring that we the public must be prepared to commit ourselves - beyond any level of civic engagement we've known before -- to exert pressure on our political leadership to make the changes we seek. For it was Douglass, after all, who noted that "power concedes nothing without demand."
Eugene Jarecki's 2006 film Why We Fight won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival as well as a Peabody Award. His new book, The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril has just been released by Simon & Schuster/Free Press.
BBC News (December 2, 2008)
Guantanamo 'a stain on US military'
By Gordon Corera
Security correspondent, BBC News
Video here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7761315.stm
The tribunals used for putting suspects on trial at Guantanamo Bay are a "stain on America's military", a former military prosecutor has told the BBC in his first interview since resigning.
For Lt Col Darrel Vandeveld, a devout Catholic, the twin responsibilities of religious faith and military duty led to a profound moral crisis.
His resignation has led to charges against six inmates being dropped, at least for now, and called into question the possibility of a fair legal process at Guantanamo.
"I know so many fighting men and women who are stained by the taint of Guantanamo, so I'm here to tell the truth about Guantanamo and how a few people have sullied the American military and the constitution," he told me during an interview in his home town of Erie, Pennsylvania.
A reservist, Darrel Vandeveld was called up as a military lawyer after 9/11 and served in Iraq, Bosnia and Africa.
In 2007, he became a prosecutor for the military commissions which tried terrorist suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, a role he took enthusiastically.
"I went down there on a mission and my mission was to convict as many of these detainees as possible and put them in prison for as long as I possibly could," he told the BBC.
"I had zero doubts. I was a true believer."
But his zeal did not last long.
When he arrived, he says he found the prosecutor's office in chaos, with boxes scattered around the floor, files disorganised, evidence scattered in different places and no clear chain of command.
And more seriously, he soon discovered that defence lawyers were not receiving information which could help clear their clients, including evidence that suspects had been "mistreated" in order to secure confessions.
Accused of attack
It was one case in particular, that of a young Afghan called Mohammed Jawad, which caused most concern.
Mr Jawad was accused of throwing a grenade at a US military vehicle.
Col Vandeveld says that in a locker he found indisputable evidence that Mr Jawad had been mistreated.
After Mr Jawad had tried to commit suicide by banging his head against a wall at Guantanamo, Col Vandeveld says that psychologists who assisted interrogators advised taking advantage of Mr Jawad's vulnerability by subjecting him to specialist interrogation techniques known as "fear up".
He was also placed, Col Vandeveld says, into what was known as the "frequent flyer" programme in which he was moved from cell to cell every few hours, with the aim of preventing him sleeping properly, and securing a confession.
A devout Catholic, Col Vandeveld found himself deeply troubled by what he discovered.
But the classified nature of his work meant he was unable to share his growing doubts with friends and family.
As a result, he took the unusual step of emailing a Jesuit priest called Father John Dear, who is a well known peace activist.
In his email, Col Vandeveld talked of having "grave misgivings".
Father Dear was initially unsure if the email was serious and fashioned a quick reply.
"I sort of didn't believe it. But on the off chance he was a military prosecutor I wrote back and said 'quit'."
Col Vandeveld says his jaw dropped when he read the email, adding: "I lived in dread of that answer."
But eventually he did resign and has chosen to speak out about what he saw, giving the BBC his first interview.
"I never suffered such anguish in my life about anything," he says, looking back over the period.
"It took me too long to recognise that we had abandoned our American values and defiled our constitution."
Cases dropped
Col Vandeveld was prosecuting six cases, including that of Binyam Mohamed, the last British resident held at Guantanamo.
After his resignation, charges in these cases were dropped but with the possibility they may be re-filed at any point.
Col Vandeveld declined to discuss details of Mr Mohamed's case and others which remain classified.
But Binyam Mohamed's lawyers say he was tortured as part of the CIA's extraordinary rendition programme and are hopeful that he may not be charged again, on the grounds that this might reveal too many details of the rendition programme.
Col Vandeveld was forced to undergo a mental status evaluation after expressing his concerns and his military career is over.
But he has returned to his community in Erie where local newspapers have praised the stand he took. He has no regrets.
In response to his claims, a Pentagon spokesman told the BBC: "We dispute Darrel Vandeveld's assertions and maintain the military commission process provides full and fair trials to accused unlawful enemy combatants who are charged with a variety of war crimes."
President-elect Barack Obama has said he wants to shut Guantanamo but no-one thinks it will be easy.
Col Vandeveld believes that it is possible though.
"No justice will be obtained at Guantanamo," he said. "And if that entails moving them (the suspects) temporarily to the US for trial: so be it."
By Gordon Corera
Security correspondent, BBC News
Video here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7761315.stm
The tribunals used for putting suspects on trial at Guantanamo Bay are a "stain on America's military", a former military prosecutor has told the BBC in his first interview since resigning.
For Lt Col Darrel Vandeveld, a devout Catholic, the twin responsibilities of religious faith and military duty led to a profound moral crisis.
His resignation has led to charges against six inmates being dropped, at least for now, and called into question the possibility of a fair legal process at Guantanamo.
"I know so many fighting men and women who are stained by the taint of Guantanamo, so I'm here to tell the truth about Guantanamo and how a few people have sullied the American military and the constitution," he told me during an interview in his home town of Erie, Pennsylvania.
A reservist, Darrel Vandeveld was called up as a military lawyer after 9/11 and served in Iraq, Bosnia and Africa.
In 2007, he became a prosecutor for the military commissions which tried terrorist suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, a role he took enthusiastically.
"I went down there on a mission and my mission was to convict as many of these detainees as possible and put them in prison for as long as I possibly could," he told the BBC.
"I had zero doubts. I was a true believer."
But his zeal did not last long.
When he arrived, he says he found the prosecutor's office in chaos, with boxes scattered around the floor, files disorganised, evidence scattered in different places and no clear chain of command.
And more seriously, he soon discovered that defence lawyers were not receiving information which could help clear their clients, including evidence that suspects had been "mistreated" in order to secure confessions.
Accused of attack
It was one case in particular, that of a young Afghan called Mohammed Jawad, which caused most concern.
Mr Jawad was accused of throwing a grenade at a US military vehicle.
Col Vandeveld says that in a locker he found indisputable evidence that Mr Jawad had been mistreated.
After Mr Jawad had tried to commit suicide by banging his head against a wall at Guantanamo, Col Vandeveld says that psychologists who assisted interrogators advised taking advantage of Mr Jawad's vulnerability by subjecting him to specialist interrogation techniques known as "fear up".
He was also placed, Col Vandeveld says, into what was known as the "frequent flyer" programme in which he was moved from cell to cell every few hours, with the aim of preventing him sleeping properly, and securing a confession.
A devout Catholic, Col Vandeveld found himself deeply troubled by what he discovered.
But the classified nature of his work meant he was unable to share his growing doubts with friends and family.
As a result, he took the unusual step of emailing a Jesuit priest called Father John Dear, who is a well known peace activist.
In his email, Col Vandeveld talked of having "grave misgivings".
Father Dear was initially unsure if the email was serious and fashioned a quick reply.
"I sort of didn't believe it. But on the off chance he was a military prosecutor I wrote back and said 'quit'."
Col Vandeveld says his jaw dropped when he read the email, adding: "I lived in dread of that answer."
But eventually he did resign and has chosen to speak out about what he saw, giving the BBC his first interview.
"I never suffered such anguish in my life about anything," he says, looking back over the period.
"It took me too long to recognise that we had abandoned our American values and defiled our constitution."
Cases dropped
Col Vandeveld was prosecuting six cases, including that of Binyam Mohamed, the last British resident held at Guantanamo.
After his resignation, charges in these cases were dropped but with the possibility they may be re-filed at any point.
Col Vandeveld declined to discuss details of Mr Mohamed's case and others which remain classified.
But Binyam Mohamed's lawyers say he was tortured as part of the CIA's extraordinary rendition programme and are hopeful that he may not be charged again, on the grounds that this might reveal too many details of the rendition programme.
Col Vandeveld was forced to undergo a mental status evaluation after expressing his concerns and his military career is over.
But he has returned to his community in Erie where local newspapers have praised the stand he took. He has no regrets.
In response to his claims, a Pentagon spokesman told the BBC: "We dispute Darrel Vandeveld's assertions and maintain the military commission process provides full and fair trials to accused unlawful enemy combatants who are charged with a variety of war crimes."
President-elect Barack Obama has said he wants to shut Guantanamo but no-one thinks it will be easy.
Col Vandeveld believes that it is possible though.
"No justice will be obtained at Guantanamo," he said. "And if that entails moving them (the suspects) temporarily to the US for trial: so be it."
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com (December 3, 2008)
Nepotistic succession in the political class
A large, and rapidly growing, percentage of high elected officials are part of politically powerful families. What accounts for this anti-democratic dynamic?
By Glenn Greenwald
Full article here:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/12/03/aristocracy/
A large, and rapidly growing, percentage of high elected officials are part of politically powerful families. What accounts for this anti-democratic dynamic?
By Glenn Greenwald
Full article here:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/12/03/aristocracy/
E.J. Dionne - Truthdig.com (December 1, 2008)
Class Bigotry Mars Auto Debate
Posted on Dec 1, 2008
By E.J. Dionne
There is a paradox at the heart of the proposed bailout of the auto industry. The rescue would have no chance of passing without the muscle of the Big Three’s unionized work force. Yet you can’t turn around without hearing someone trash autoworkers for the terrible crime of trying to earn a decent living.
The CEOs of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, having blown their earlier plea for help last month, deliver their revival plans to Congress on Tuesday and face their big test later in the week when they defend them. Democratic congressional leaders desperately want to help an industry that accounts, directly or indirectly, for some 3 million to 5 million jobs. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were astonished at how unprepared these corporate titans proved to be the last time.
By flying into town on private jets and offering few answers to their congressional interlocutors, the big shots suggested they didn’t understand that people begging for taxpayer money owe a certain deference to their potential benefactors. They must have thought they were running Citigroup.
The auto companies are having trouble securing help precisely because members of Congress are overwhelmed, even appalled, by the hundreds of billions they have already shoved out the door on behalf of the finance industry. One of Pelosi’s top lieutenants referred to the phenomenon as “bailout fatigue.”
Yet the auto industry will almost certainly be tided over precisely because the economy is in such turmoil. The dominant view in Congress is that the country can’t afford to risk the financial and human calamities that bankruptcy by the Big Three would inevitably trigger.
Assuming the CEOs have done their homework, are reasonably humble and arrive here having used less ostentatious forms of transportation, Democratic leaders are likely to push for one of two forms of aid.
The House and Senate leadership is inclined to give the industry the full $25 billion it seeks. But a top congressional aide said it is not yet clear that a bailout that large has the votes to pass both houses, let alone backing from President Bush, who would have to sign the bill. Plan B would involve passing enough assistance to keep the companies solvent until President-elect Barack Obama takes office. Obama—who carried Michigan by more than 800,000 votes and swept the rest of the industrial Midwest—has strongly signaled that he would support a properly structured bailout.
But “properly structured” is in the eye of the beholder, and if this bailout happens, it should reflect the core reason it will pass: Long-term economic growth depends upon a well-paid middle class (and that definitely includes autoworkers) with real purchasing power. If saving our auto industry means moving GM workers ever closer to Wal-Mart wages, the bailout isn’t worth doing.
A hideous class bigotry has disfigured this debate.
The failure of the Big Three is regularly attributed to the high wages and benefits earned by members of the United Auto Workers union, and it’s true that the Detroit-based auto companies operate under heavy “legacy costs” for retirees’ pensions and health coverage negotiated during the industry’s fat times.
But the blame-the-workers-first cant ignores the fact that if the Big Three had designed better cars, they would not have lost as much market share to Toyota, Nissan and other competitors. The unions did not stop management from producing a better product—and I say that as someone who has enjoyed driving Saturns for the last 15 years.
It’s also nonsense to say that the UAW has been indifferent to cost issues. The last auto contract included so many givebacks that Ron Gettelfinger, the UAW president, was threatened with a rank-and-file rebellion. He told a House committee last month that because of “these painful concessions,” the gap in labor costs between the Detroit-based auto companies and the “foreign transplant operations,” as he called Toyota and the others, “will be largely or completely eliminated by the end of the contracts.”
Appearing Sunday on CNN, Gettelfinger signaled his union was prepared to make further concessions. So the burden this week should be on the CEOs to explain how this rescue could be a good deal.
Unlike the other bailouts, this one could provide a model for how management and labor might team up to create better companies in a fairer, more productive economy. If this actually happened, the taxpayers would get their money’s worth. But if all that’s on offer is a plan to buy the CEOs a few more months or years, they should drive back to Detroit empty-handed.
Posted on Dec 1, 2008
By E.J. Dionne
There is a paradox at the heart of the proposed bailout of the auto industry. The rescue would have no chance of passing without the muscle of the Big Three’s unionized work force. Yet you can’t turn around without hearing someone trash autoworkers for the terrible crime of trying to earn a decent living.
The CEOs of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, having blown their earlier plea for help last month, deliver their revival plans to Congress on Tuesday and face their big test later in the week when they defend them. Democratic congressional leaders desperately want to help an industry that accounts, directly or indirectly, for some 3 million to 5 million jobs. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were astonished at how unprepared these corporate titans proved to be the last time.
By flying into town on private jets and offering few answers to their congressional interlocutors, the big shots suggested they didn’t understand that people begging for taxpayer money owe a certain deference to their potential benefactors. They must have thought they were running Citigroup.
The auto companies are having trouble securing help precisely because members of Congress are overwhelmed, even appalled, by the hundreds of billions they have already shoved out the door on behalf of the finance industry. One of Pelosi’s top lieutenants referred to the phenomenon as “bailout fatigue.”
Yet the auto industry will almost certainly be tided over precisely because the economy is in such turmoil. The dominant view in Congress is that the country can’t afford to risk the financial and human calamities that bankruptcy by the Big Three would inevitably trigger.
Assuming the CEOs have done their homework, are reasonably humble and arrive here having used less ostentatious forms of transportation, Democratic leaders are likely to push for one of two forms of aid.
The House and Senate leadership is inclined to give the industry the full $25 billion it seeks. But a top congressional aide said it is not yet clear that a bailout that large has the votes to pass both houses, let alone backing from President Bush, who would have to sign the bill. Plan B would involve passing enough assistance to keep the companies solvent until President-elect Barack Obama takes office. Obama—who carried Michigan by more than 800,000 votes and swept the rest of the industrial Midwest—has strongly signaled that he would support a properly structured bailout.
But “properly structured” is in the eye of the beholder, and if this bailout happens, it should reflect the core reason it will pass: Long-term economic growth depends upon a well-paid middle class (and that definitely includes autoworkers) with real purchasing power. If saving our auto industry means moving GM workers ever closer to Wal-Mart wages, the bailout isn’t worth doing.
A hideous class bigotry has disfigured this debate.
The failure of the Big Three is regularly attributed to the high wages and benefits earned by members of the United Auto Workers union, and it’s true that the Detroit-based auto companies operate under heavy “legacy costs” for retirees’ pensions and health coverage negotiated during the industry’s fat times.
But the blame-the-workers-first cant ignores the fact that if the Big Three had designed better cars, they would not have lost as much market share to Toyota, Nissan and other competitors. The unions did not stop management from producing a better product—and I say that as someone who has enjoyed driving Saturns for the last 15 years.
It’s also nonsense to say that the UAW has been indifferent to cost issues. The last auto contract included so many givebacks that Ron Gettelfinger, the UAW president, was threatened with a rank-and-file rebellion. He told a House committee last month that because of “these painful concessions,” the gap in labor costs between the Detroit-based auto companies and the “foreign transplant operations,” as he called Toyota and the others, “will be largely or completely eliminated by the end of the contracts.”
Appearing Sunday on CNN, Gettelfinger signaled his union was prepared to make further concessions. So the burden this week should be on the CEOs to explain how this rescue could be a good deal.
Unlike the other bailouts, this one could provide a model for how management and labor might team up to create better companies in a fairer, more productive economy. If this actually happened, the taxpayers would get their money’s worth. But if all that’s on offer is a plan to buy the CEOs a few more months or years, they should drive back to Detroit empty-handed.
Robert Scheer - Truthdig.com (December 2, 2008)
Will Obama Stay the Course?
Posted on Dec 2, 2008
By Robert Scheer
I do so want to believe that Barack Obama is on the right track. His brain is big, his style fresh, his pronouncements both logical and compelling, and it does feel good to have a president-elect elicit universal respect rather than make the world cringe. Indeed, he’s downright inspiring when he defends constitutional restraint on the presidency and shuns torture. Bush is so yesterday, but imagine how panicked we would now be if John McCain and Sarah Palin were about to take a turn at the wheel.
Yet, it all does hang on him. Yes, Obama. The superstar, and not that supporting cast of retreads from a failed past that have popped up in his administration in the making. Now that we have the list of his top economic and foreign policy picks—mostly a collection of folks who wouldn’t know change if it slapped them upside the head—we’ve got to hope that it’s Obama who is using them, and not the other way around.
Maybe he picked a bunch of Wall Street insiders to send a comforting message to the financial community that Obama was turning to folks just like them to get us out of the mess that they created. So far, Wall Street hasn’t done anything to pay back the taxpayers for the upward-of-a-trillion dollars wasted on that bailout. The credit markets remain frozen, and these banking grinches are stealing Christmas by further cutting individuals’ credit lines.
If there is a grand arc to Obama’s appointments strategy, it seems aimed at providing the appearance of continuity on the part of a leader who still promises to be very different. Clearly that was the case in retaining Robert Gates as secretary of defense and Marine Gen. Jim Jones as his White House national security adviser. Both choices could have been far worse. Jones has been involved in the exercise of “soft power” initiatives and seems like an otherwise sensible fellow. Gates has been a vast improvement over Donald Rumsfeld in grasping the limits of military power.
Gates also dared challenge the military-industrial complex over egregious military spending on projects such as the $65 billion F-22 stealth fighter plane that was designed to penetrate Soviet air defenses that were never built and has yet to fly a combat sortie in either the Afghanistan or Iraq wars. That’s a start on cutting military spending, which under President Bush grew to be higher than at any time since World War II, exceeding the levels of both the Korean and Vietnam wars. Thanks to Bush, the United States now spends as much as all of the rest of the world’s nations combined to defeat an enemy armed with a weapons arsenal that, in the case of the 9/11 attacks, could have been purchased for a couple hundred bucks at Home Depot.
Unfortunately, on Monday Obama stuck with the absurd “war on terror” language he inherited from Bush in describing the attacks in Mumbai conducted by 10 lightly armed fanatics who should have been quickly dispatched by a well-functioning local paramilitary force. These terrorists did not, as available evidence would indicate, have anything to do with the Taliban or al-Quaida based in Afghanistan, where the United States continues to wage the good war, as opposed to the bad one in Iraq, that Obama invoked during the presidential campaign: “Afghanistan is where the war on terror began and where it must end.”
Both wars are bad in representing exactly the wrong way to deal with “terror,” which should properly be thought of as representing pathology to be excised with surgical precision rather than bludgeoned with conventional warfare, which only recruits new fanatics through the killing of innocent civilians.
Finally, the appointment of Hillary Rodham Clinton seems a good one. To paraphrase Obama’s remark during the primary debates, Hillary is peaceable enough, and also has the smarts to make a fine secretary of state. Her more hawkish rhetorical side will be muted by the position’s obligation to emphasize diplomacy. My prediction is that she will leave her mark by exploiting her pro-Israel creds to complete President Bill Clinton’s once promising Mideast peace initiatives to finally provide the Palestinians, and Israelis, with viable states.
The problem with Obama’s national security team is not that he has picked hawks who he cannot control; they are all professionals, who took the job expecting to go along with his game plan. The danger here, as with his economic advisers, is only that Obama may stop being Obama, the agent of change who electrified a nation.
Posted on Dec 2, 2008
By Robert Scheer
I do so want to believe that Barack Obama is on the right track. His brain is big, his style fresh, his pronouncements both logical and compelling, and it does feel good to have a president-elect elicit universal respect rather than make the world cringe. Indeed, he’s downright inspiring when he defends constitutional restraint on the presidency and shuns torture. Bush is so yesterday, but imagine how panicked we would now be if John McCain and Sarah Palin were about to take a turn at the wheel.
Yet, it all does hang on him. Yes, Obama. The superstar, and not that supporting cast of retreads from a failed past that have popped up in his administration in the making. Now that we have the list of his top economic and foreign policy picks—mostly a collection of folks who wouldn’t know change if it slapped them upside the head—we’ve got to hope that it’s Obama who is using them, and not the other way around.
Maybe he picked a bunch of Wall Street insiders to send a comforting message to the financial community that Obama was turning to folks just like them to get us out of the mess that they created. So far, Wall Street hasn’t done anything to pay back the taxpayers for the upward-of-a-trillion dollars wasted on that bailout. The credit markets remain frozen, and these banking grinches are stealing Christmas by further cutting individuals’ credit lines.
If there is a grand arc to Obama’s appointments strategy, it seems aimed at providing the appearance of continuity on the part of a leader who still promises to be very different. Clearly that was the case in retaining Robert Gates as secretary of defense and Marine Gen. Jim Jones as his White House national security adviser. Both choices could have been far worse. Jones has been involved in the exercise of “soft power” initiatives and seems like an otherwise sensible fellow. Gates has been a vast improvement over Donald Rumsfeld in grasping the limits of military power.
Gates also dared challenge the military-industrial complex over egregious military spending on projects such as the $65 billion F-22 stealth fighter plane that was designed to penetrate Soviet air defenses that were never built and has yet to fly a combat sortie in either the Afghanistan or Iraq wars. That’s a start on cutting military spending, which under President Bush grew to be higher than at any time since World War II, exceeding the levels of both the Korean and Vietnam wars. Thanks to Bush, the United States now spends as much as all of the rest of the world’s nations combined to defeat an enemy armed with a weapons arsenal that, in the case of the 9/11 attacks, could have been purchased for a couple hundred bucks at Home Depot.
Unfortunately, on Monday Obama stuck with the absurd “war on terror” language he inherited from Bush in describing the attacks in Mumbai conducted by 10 lightly armed fanatics who should have been quickly dispatched by a well-functioning local paramilitary force. These terrorists did not, as available evidence would indicate, have anything to do with the Taliban or al-Quaida based in Afghanistan, where the United States continues to wage the good war, as opposed to the bad one in Iraq, that Obama invoked during the presidential campaign: “Afghanistan is where the war on terror began and where it must end.”
Both wars are bad in representing exactly the wrong way to deal with “terror,” which should properly be thought of as representing pathology to be excised with surgical precision rather than bludgeoned with conventional warfare, which only recruits new fanatics through the killing of innocent civilians.
Finally, the appointment of Hillary Rodham Clinton seems a good one. To paraphrase Obama’s remark during the primary debates, Hillary is peaceable enough, and also has the smarts to make a fine secretary of state. Her more hawkish rhetorical side will be muted by the position’s obligation to emphasize diplomacy. My prediction is that she will leave her mark by exploiting her pro-Israel creds to complete President Bill Clinton’s once promising Mideast peace initiatives to finally provide the Palestinians, and Israelis, with viable states.
The problem with Obama’s national security team is not that he has picked hawks who he cannot control; they are all professionals, who took the job expecting to go along with his game plan. The danger here, as with his economic advisers, is only that Obama may stop being Obama, the agent of change who electrified a nation.
Washington Post (November 30, 2008)
I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq
By Matthew Alexander
Sunday, November 30, 2008; B01
I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I'm still alarmed about that today.
I'm not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me -- both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work.
Rest of the article here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/28/AR2008112802242.html?sub=AR
By Matthew Alexander
Sunday, November 30, 2008; B01
I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I'm still alarmed about that today.
I'm not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me -- both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work.
Rest of the article here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/28/AR2008112802242.html?sub=AR
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Scott Horton - Harpers.org (December 2, 2008)
December 2, 10:50 AM
How Many Americans Died Because of Bush’s Torture Program?
According to a special operations intelligence officer, the answer is a number north of three thousand–not counting the tens of thousands maimed or seriously wounded, the destruction of the nation’s reputation as a moral leader, or the damage done to our Constitution. In a stunning op-ed published in Sunday’s Washington Post, a special operations intelligence officer details his direct experience with torture practices put into effect in Iraq in 2006—long after the Pentagon had forsworn them, but while Donald Rumsfeld was still running the shop.
Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators’ bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules — and often break them. I don’t have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.
The Pentagon’s claims that it had returned to interrogations based on the venerable Field Manual, was, it seems, conscious disinformation. But the officer offers an assessment. The torture techniques consistently failed to produce actionable intelligence, he said. But the old techniques—which rest on confidence building—consistently worked and gave the interrogators access to information that saved lives. Moreover, the strategies employed to effect later were used as a much broader tactic, accentuating differences between native Iraqi Sunnis and foreign fighters, in what came to be known as the “Sunni Awakening.”
But then we come to the most chilling part of the op-ed, which the writer discloses the Bush Administration struggled to suppress:
I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for Al Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me–unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.
The torture techniques developed by the Bush torture team were the most effective recruitment tool we could ever have given terrorists. They cost thousands of American lives. And that’s a key element of the legacy of the forty-third president.
How Many Americans Died Because of Bush’s Torture Program?
According to a special operations intelligence officer, the answer is a number north of three thousand–not counting the tens of thousands maimed or seriously wounded, the destruction of the nation’s reputation as a moral leader, or the damage done to our Constitution. In a stunning op-ed published in Sunday’s Washington Post, a special operations intelligence officer details his direct experience with torture practices put into effect in Iraq in 2006—long after the Pentagon had forsworn them, but while Donald Rumsfeld was still running the shop.
Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators’ bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules — and often break them. I don’t have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.
The Pentagon’s claims that it had returned to interrogations based on the venerable Field Manual, was, it seems, conscious disinformation. But the officer offers an assessment. The torture techniques consistently failed to produce actionable intelligence, he said. But the old techniques—which rest on confidence building—consistently worked and gave the interrogators access to information that saved lives. Moreover, the strategies employed to effect later were used as a much broader tactic, accentuating differences between native Iraqi Sunnis and foreign fighters, in what came to be known as the “Sunni Awakening.”
But then we come to the most chilling part of the op-ed, which the writer discloses the Bush Administration struggled to suppress:
I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for Al Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me–unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.
The torture techniques developed by the Bush torture team were the most effective recruitment tool we could ever have given terrorists. They cost thousands of American lives. And that’s a key element of the legacy of the forty-third president.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Chris Hedges - Truthdig.com (December 1, 2008)
A mother cares for her injured child in a hospital 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, after a U.S airstike killed 3 civilians and injured five others, according to the Joint Coordination Center.
Confronting the Terrorist Within
Posted on Dec 1, 2008
By Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges was the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times. His Truthdig column appears Mondays.
The Hindu-Muslim communal violence that led to the attacks in Mumbai, as well as the warnings that the New York City transit system may have been targeted by al-Qaida, are one form of terrorism. There are other forms.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when viewed from the receiving end, are state-sponsored acts of terrorism. These wars defy every ethical and legal code that seek to determine when a nation can wage war, from Just War Theory to the statutes of international law largely put into place by the United States after World War II. These wars are criminal wars of aggression. They have left hundreds of thousands of people, who never took up arms against us, dead and seen millions driven from their homes. We have no right as a nation to debate the terms of these occupations. And an Afghan villager, burying members of his family’s wedding party after an American airstrike, understands in a way we often do not that terrorist attacks can also be unleashed from the arsenals of an imperial power.
Barack Obama’s decision to increase troop levels in Afghanistan and leave behind tens of thousands of soldiers and Marines in Iraq—he promises only to withdraw combat brigades—is a failure to rescue us from the status of a rogue nation. It codifies Bush’s “war on terror.” And the continuation of these wars will corrupt and degrade our nation just as the long and brutal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank has corrupted and degraded Israel. George W. Bush has handed Barack Obama a poisoned apple. Obama has bitten it.
The invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were our response to feelings of vulnerability and collective humiliation after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.. They were a way to exorcise through reciprocal violence what had been done to us.
Collective humiliation is also the driving force behind al-Qaida and most terrorist groups. Osama bin Laden cites the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which led to the carving up of the Ottoman Empire, as the beginning of Arab humiliation. He attacks the agreement for dividing the Muslim world into “fragments.” He rails against the presence of American troops on the soil of his native Saudi Arabia. The dark motivations of Islamic extremists mirror our own.
Robert Pape in “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” found that most suicide bombers are members of communities that feel humiliated by genuine or perceived occupation. Almost every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent—carried out attacks to drive out an occupying power. This was true in Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Kashmir as well as Israel and the Palestinian territories. The large number of Saudis among the 9/11 hijackers appears to support this finding.
A militant who phoned an Indian TV station from the Jewish center in Mumbai during the recent siege offered to talk with the government for the release of hostages. He complained about army abuses in Kashmir, where ruthless violence has been used to crush a Muslim insurgency. “Ask the government to talk to us and we will release the hostages,” he said, speaking in Urdu with what sounded like a Kashmiri accent.
“Are you aware how many people have been killed in Kashmir? Are you aware how your army has killed Muslims? Are you aware how many of them have been killed in Kashmir this week?” he asked.
Terrorists, many of whom come from the middle class, support acts of indiscriminate violence not because of direct, personal affronts to their dignity, but more often for lofty, abstract ideas of national, ethnic or religious pride and the establishment of a utopian, harmonious world purged of evil. The longer the United States occupies Afghanistan and Iraq, the more these feelings of collective humiliation are aggravated and the greater the number of jihadists willing to attack American targets.
We have had tens of thousands of troops stationed in the Middle East since 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The presence of these troops is the main appeal, along with the abuse meted out to the Palestinians by Israel, of bin Laden and al-Qaida. Terrorism, as Pape wrote, “is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics. It is a demand-driven phenomenon. That is, it is driven by the presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. The operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism a new lease on life.”
The decision by the incoming Obama administration to embrace an undefined, amorphous “war on terror” will keep us locked in a war without end. This war has no clear definition of victory, unless victory means the death or capture of every terrorist on earth—an impossibility. It is a frightening death spiral. It feeds on itself. The concept of a “war on terror” is no less apocalyptic or world-purifying than the dreams and fantasies of terrorist groups like al-Qaida.
The vain effort to purify the world through force is always self-defeating. Those who insist that the world can be molded into their vision are the most susceptible to violence as antidote. The more uncertainty, fear and reality impinge on this utopian vision, the more strident, absolutist and aggressive are those who call for the eradication of “the enemy.” Immanuel Kant called absolute moral imperatives that are used to carry out immoral acts “a radical evil.” He wrote that this kind of evil was always a form of unadulterated self-love. It was the worst type of self-deception. It provided a moral façade for terror and murder. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a “radical evil.”
The tactic of suicide bombing, equated by many in the United States with Islam, did not arise from the Muslim world. It had its roots in radical Western ideologies, especially Leninism, not religion. And it was the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist group that draws its support from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of Sri Lanka, who invented the suicide vest for their May 1991 suicide assassination of Rajiv Ghandi.
Suicide bombing is what you do when you do not have artillery or planes or missiles and you want to create maximum terror for an occupying power. It was used by secular anarchists in the 19th and early 20th centuries, who bequeathed to us the first version of the car bomb—a horse-drawn wagon laden with explosives that was ignited on Sept. 16, 1920, on Wall Street. The attack was carried out by an Italian immigrant named Mario Buda in protest over the arrest of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. It left 40 people dead and wounded more than 200.
Suicide bombing was adopted later by Hezbollah, al-Qaida and Hamas. But even in the Middle East, suicide bombing is not restricted to Muslims. In Lebanon, during the attacks in the 1980s against French, American and Israeli targets, only eight suicide bombings were carried out by Islamic fundamentalists. Twenty-seven were the work of communists and socialists. Christians were responsible for three.
The dehumanization of Muslims and the willful ignorance of the traditions and culture of the Islamic world reflect our nation’s disdain for self-reflection and self-examination. It allows us to exalt in the illusion of our own moral and cultural superiority. The world is far more complex than our childish vision of good and evil. We as a nation and a culture have no monopoly on virtue. We carry within us the same propensities for terror as those we oppose.
The Muslim Indian Emperor Akbar at the end of the 16th century filled his court with philosophers, mystics and religious scholars, including Sunni, Sufi and Shiite Muslims, Hindu followers of Shiva and Vishnu, as well as atheists, Christians, Jains, Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians. They debated ethics and belief. Akbar was one of the great champions of religious dialogue and tolerance. He forbade any person to be discriminated against on the basis of belief. He declared that everyone was free to follow any religion. His enlightened rule took place as the Inquisition was at its height in Spain and Portugal, and in Rome the philosopher Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Campo de’ Fiori for heresy.
Tolerance, as well as religious and political plurality, is not exclusive to Western culture. The Judeo-Christian tradition was born and came to life in the Middle East. Its intellectual and religious beliefs were cultivated and formed in cities such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople. Many of the greatest tenets of Western civilization, as is true with Islam and Buddhism, are Eastern in origin. Our concept of the rule of law and freedom of expression, the invention of printing, paper, the book, as well as the translation and dissemination of the classical Greek philosophers, algebra, geometry and universities were given to us by the Islamic world. The first law code was invented by the ancient Iraqi ruler Hammurabi. One of the first known legal protections of basic freedoms and equality was promulgated in the third century B.C. by the Buddhist Indian Emperor Ashoka. And, unlike Aristotle, he insisted on equal rights for women and slaves.
The East and the West do not have separate, competing value systems. We do not treat life with greater sanctity than those we belittle. There are aged survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who can tell us something about our high moral values and passionate concern for innocent human life, about our own acts of terrorism. Eastern and Western traditions have within them varied ethical systems, some of which are repugnant and some of which are worth emulating. To hold up the highest ideals of our own culture and to deny that these great ideals exist in other cultures, especially Eastern cultures, is made possible only by historical and cultural illiteracy.
The civilization we champion and promote as superior is, in fact, a product of the fusion of traditions and beliefs of the Orient and the Occident. We advance morally and intellectually when we cross these cultural lines, when we use the lens of other cultures to examine our own. The remains of villages destroyed by our bombs, the dead killed from our munitions, leave us too with bloody hands. We can build a new ethic when we face our complicity in the cycle of violence and terror.
The fantasy of an enlightened West that spreads civilization to a savage world of religious fanatics is not supported by history. The worst genocides and slaughters of the last century were perpetrated by highly industrialized nations. Muslims, including Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, have a long way to go before they reach the body count of the secular regimes of the Nazis, the Soviet Union or the Chinese communists. It was, in fact, the Muslim-led government in Bosnia that protected minorities during the war while the Serbian Orthodox Christians carried out mass executions, campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing that left 250,000 dead.
Those who externalize evil and seek to eradicate that evil through violence lose touch with their own humanity and the humanity of others. They cannot make moral distinctions. They are blind to their own moral corruption. In the name of civilization and high ideals, in the name of reason and science, they become monsters. We will never free ourselves from the self-delusion of the “war on terror” until we first vanquish the terrorist within.
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