Yesterday, at the Press Club in D.C., Rev. Jeremiah Wright gave a speech (transcript here) describing his church and its mission. He spoke of the ‘invisibility’ of his church’s liberation theology, about the need for an honest racial conversation, about the value of moral equality, about the need to transform injustice into justice, about global economic injustice, about his church’s many significant contributions to poverty, and about reconciliation through the acknowledgment of past grievances and forgiveness of such grievances.
During the question period a moderator read questions given to him by members of the press. They asked Wright, among other things, about his previous assertion about God damning America, whether he owes Americans an apology, Louis Farrakhan, and whether he is disappointed that Obama has distanced himself from him.
In other words, the questions and his, in my opinion level-headed responses to them, bore no relationship to the content of the speech he came there to deliver.
Today, as a way of recapping Wright’s speech and Obama’s response to it, the U.S.’s two most important editorial boards write:
NY Times: It took more time than it should have, but on Tuesday Barack Obama firmly rejected the racism and paranoia of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., and he made it clear that the preacher does not represent him, his politics or his campaign.
and,
WaPost: Did Mr. Obama climb out of that hole yesterday? It seems to us that the whole sorry episode raises legitimate questions about his judgment. Given the long and close relationship between Mr. Obama and the Rev. Wright, voters will ask: How could Mr. Obama have been surprised by the Rev. Wright's views?
“Racism”? I challenge the Times editorial board to point to anything in Wright’s speech that could be reasonably judged racist. How about the Washington Post’s reference to Wright’s ‘views’ as if they were bombastic and condemnatory? Which views exactly? They mean the one asserting that there is global poverty and economic injustice? Or the one about the value of moral equality? Or the one which asserts that the U.S. government has committed numerous injustices throughout its history for which it has never formally apologized?
Our mass media seems to live and report on activities from another planet, and confuses them with the happenings of our planet.
Of course, this is not true of all media outlets, as Bill Moyer’s excellent interview with Wright proves (video and transcript here).
One further unfortunate aspect of all this is to see Obama debasing himself with ridiculous political posturing. Commenting on Wright’s speech, Obama declares, “Upon watching it, what came clear to me was that it was more than just him defending himself. What became clear is that he was presenting a worldview that contradicts who I am and what I stand for. What particularly angered me was his suggestion that my previous denunciation of his remarks was political posturing.”
So, Obama stands against global economic justice, moral equality, and the church’s work to alleviate poverty? Or, if not, which ‘worldview’ is he referring to? It’s also mildly amusing that Obama is angered by Wright’s calling his political posturing, political posturing. Is he angry that he has to do it, or that someone is pointing out the obvious truth that he is engaged in it?
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Rev. Wright's alleged sins that Obama pretends to condemn
Guantanamo circus
Yesterday, the former chief prosecutor in Guantanamo took the stand--for the defense, in former Osama bin Laden driver Salim Hamdan's trial. No wallflower or bleeding heart liberal (he once compared detainees to vampires shrinking away from the bright light of American justice!), Col. Morris Davis testified that the military commissions set up to try detainees is essentially rigged and politically influenced. In addition to pointing out Bush political appointee's desire to use evidence secured through torture and the chilling demand by his superior that there can't be any acquittals, Morris asserted that "'There was that constant theme that if we don't get this thing rolling before the election, it's going to implode.' 'Once you get the victim families energized and the cases rolling, whoever took the White House would have difficulty stopping the process.'"
Evidently, the light of American justice no longer shines so bright.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Silencing debate to achieve political good by MT Nguyen, NYC
Political dialogue is an ideal and if well-functioning seeks to discover political good. It has been repeatedly argued that this mechanism for discovering and articulating political good is the best we have. Arguably, since there is no Form (Plato™) of the political good and at any rate no agreed upon means to approach it even if it did exist, we must ground society’s pursuits on co-deliberation and subsequent collective decision. Dialogue and the freedom of speech which grounds it is the cornerstone of the value we place on our democracy.
I am not interested in debating these particular points, but rather want to explore some conditions for genuine political dialogue. In their absence, we do not have dialogue but its simulacrum. In their absence, dialogue cannot fulfill its promise to lead to political good. It is important to be able to distinguish the two because tyranny and other modes of vice often employ the mechanisms of dialogue in order to delay, divert, confuse, and obfuscate the search for and discovery of political good. In such circumstances, dialogue establishes and solidifies political power through illegitimate means. In such cases, I want to suggest, we need to silence debate’s simulacrum, stop debating, and employ principled political power to achieve political good.
A paradigmatic case of disingenuous political dialogue is the case of the holocaust deniers. They present the silencing of their argument in terms of a free speech issue. It is true that their attempts to promote their views have been in various ways thwarted, but does a free society bear a responsibility to promote any view no matter how unreasonable? For the majority of us, debate with holocaust deniers is pointless because we acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that contradicts their central tenet. Now, although it is fruitless for us to continue it, the other side insists that the majority view is the product of a massive hoax. The belief in the value of political dialogue seems to undermine our unilateral withdrawal from the discussion, and this principle suggests that it would be wrong to thwart discussion, any discussion. The first condition of political dialogue is that it should proceed as long as one side remains unconvinced and continues to say more. However, if this is the implication of our valuing political dialogue, that we must continue debating with those who hold (from one point of view) outrageously erroneous beliefs, perhaps the value is not that important after all. It seems to embroil us in an unacceptable relativism and/or skepticism about the truth of beliefs in which we are extremely confident. Must we draw these implications? Is there another way?
I believe there is, for what can happen is the recognition that one’s interlocutor is not really debating with one at all. This recognition (to be sure, a difficult point at which to arrive) releases parties from the responsibility to dialogically engage and allows them to explore other avenues, e.g. silencing opponents. This approach needn’t deny that dialogue is the correct approach to articulating political good or that there is a discoverable political good. It embraces neither relativism nor skepticism. It implies only that, given things as they are, because there is no dialogue there can be no responsibilities to further it. Applied to holocaust deniers the idea is that we can easily recognize the vicious political agenda behind their calls for a public hearing. It is this agenda, and not dialogue leading to truth, that they want to promote. And there is no political principle that compels the promotion of any political agenda no matter what.
It is true that this is treading on thin ice, for it is difficult to show that we are not silencing a political opponent merely because we do not agree with him. This makes it important to reflect upon the conditions for genuine dialogue. I’ll merely take up two vital but often ignored ones.
One essential condition of dialogue is sincerity. Even in a context in which the substance of debate is hotly contested, in which either side is unlikely to be persuaded by the other, the presumption remains that both sides believe what they assert and are engaged in the practice of justification to the other. Discussion is undermined when an interlocutor merely asserts his views and fails or refuses to acknowledge the challenges presented by his opponent; that is, there can be no dialogue when the interlocutor engages in monologue. This is, to varying extents, always the case, because when the subject matter is of great importance, the opposing sides have already to a large degree made up their minds. Nevertheless, we can demand a good faith effort to bear an open mind and to present a coherent case that can be openly discussed.
A different but connected condition of genuine political dialogue is friendship. This might seem like a strange concept to deploy in our agonistic democracy where political contestants seem to disdain one another, but it is not. The idea of political dialogue as an essential component of political good requires friendship at least in the sense that the project of discovering political good is a shared one grounded in a mutual respect for its participants. Obviously, the concept of friendship here does not refer to mutual personal emotional attachment, but rather civic friendship. This is not compatible with mutual disdain, but is compatible with, as typical friendships are, heated argument and permanent disagreement.
We in the U.S. are now in the midst of a simulated public discourse over whether certain undisclosed (really, open-ended) interrogation techniques (read: torture) are morally permissible and legitimate or whether they are morally impermissible and/or violate international law. This so-called dialogue continues and promises to continue until some indefinite time in the future. For those of us who believe that there can be no debate regarding torture, it is frustrating (to say the least) to observe this continuing back and forth between congress and members of the Bush administration. We believe the back and forth must end, for while it occurs people are having their dignity stripped, are being degraded, tortured and killed. Dialogue, just like other activities, can have dire consequences.
As I have been arguing, however, we do not need to end discussion on the grounds that we do not believe what the other side says or that it leads to bad consequences. We can end it by suggesting that the other side is toying with us, holds us in contempt, and is insincere in its pronouncements. There is no space here to demonstrate that the Bush administration’s actions evidence a failure of each of the conditions for genuine discussion. For anyone following their moves, however, the case is not difficult to make: the legal acrobatics in a ‘torture memo’ written by a tenured law professor who, by all accounts, otherwise possesses a sound legal mind; the paranoid secrecy and duplicity which discloses information and relevant documents only upon being compelled; the ever changing, unprincipled, and obfuscating interpretations of the concept of torture; and, lastly, the contemptible and surely insincere attempt to distinguish Spanish Inquisition waterboarding from U.S. waterboarding. Each new month brings us a fresh perspective on the Bush administration’s tactics and none of them evidence any attempt to justify to others and do anything but push forward through brute force and occasional gerrymandering an egregious political agenda.
Knowing all this we need to adjust our response and make them appropriate to the conditions at hand. M.L. King recognized this more than 40 years ago when he abandoned dialogue with white supremacists who promised much but delivered nothing, and began employing civil disobedience. The call to confront an egregious agenda does not mean, obviously, that anything goes or that politics is reduced to brute exertions of power. The language and value of persuasion, dialogue, and debate are with us and our democracy, and this is verified by their use even by those who do not believe in their value. We can confront (non-dialogically) insincere and disdainful political opponents by compelling them with whatever legitimate powers we have to live by words and concepts they themselves use. We can do this not with the purpose of crushing them, but to bring them back into the fold, motivating them to engage us on terms grounded in civic friendship. If we are to articulate through political dialogue our conception of political good, sometimes principled political force used in the service of dialogue is the only way to do it.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Propaganda
It's not terribly surprising, but the New York Times's recent blockbuster demonstrates connections between allegedly objective military analysts/talking heads who work for the various networks and the Bush administration.
"Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as 'message force multipliers' or 'surrogates' who could be counted on to deliver administration 'themes and messages' to millions of Americans 'in the form of their own opinions.'"
In the nature of things, there were repeated denials of wrongdoing. Read the article to make up your own mind.
Holding accountable for human rights abuses
Roger Alford at OpinioJuris has a very instructive post (and link to his article) on an emerging legal strategy for holding nations accountable for human rights abuses. There are various legal barriers/difficulties to directly sanctioning nations, so some have taken to suing corporations which work with rights abusing nations instead. The upshot and hope of this strategy is that the corporations will in turn incorporate rights preserving/protecting measures in their contracts with sovereign nations. If sued, corporations will have legal avenues to pursue nations to have them help pay for damages. The upshot is that nations will then have a monetary incentive for avoiding rights abuses.
I'm not crazy about the idea of a market for human rights violations (Alford does not advocate this, but merely describes it), but if it helps facilitate a downturn in their incidence, then so much the better.
His accompanying law review article is well worth reading.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
The Record-Breaking President
With the presidential election looming, one is naturally driven to evaluate the recent past. Like many, I had a hunch that Bush will be seen as one of the worst presidents in US history. But I no longer have it; now it’s confirmed. Bush has earned the podium in the history of the Gallup Poll. He has broken records such as “the most disapproved president,” “the president disapproved for the longest time,” and a few others. It seems that at the very least Bush has broken the record of breaking the most negative records in the history of the Gallup Poll.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
The End of an Era
Fernando Lugo has won the presidency in Paraguay. Lugo leads an alliance between leftists and liberals, forged to defeat the Colorado Party which had been in power for longer than he had been alive. This defeat tops a long transition to democracy in South America. Unlike Argentina, Brazil and Chile, Paraguay’s dictatorship had been intimately associated with the Colorado Party which remained in power long after Stroessner, head of the party and army, left office in 1989. The Colorado Party had dominated Paraguayan politics based on a heavy, overarching political structure, in spite of permanent suspicions of corruption and electoral fraud.
An important question is what changed in South America that allowed for democracy? A full answer will probably require many considerations. But there is at least one important historical event that obviously plays a tremendous role in the explanation: the end of the Cold War. All dictatorships in South America during the 60s and 70s were US-supported (although the Paraguayan one begun in the 50s). After the Cuban experience in the late 50s, and the subsequent Chilean experience during the late 60s, the US began to see South America as a limb infected by the Communist plague and decided to apply shock therapy.
This is not to say that the US was the cause of the extreme political polarization that marked South American politics at the time. This polarization was inherent to these countries and exacerbated by the Cold War itself. In fact, it seems reasonable to regard it as the main cause of the political disaster of the 70s and 80s in South America. Hadn’t the US supported those dictatorships, probably the USSR would have funded inverse but equally cruel regimes.
Be as it may, with the Cold War in the past and much less attention from the super powers, South America has got that long needed breath to reorganize its politics and strive. Moreover the course seems to be set toward a more progressive form of society. Paraguay joins Chile, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Ecuador in having democratically elected socialist/liberal governments. Congratulations to Paraguay.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
The banalization of torture
This Washington Post article must be read to see one comi-tragic implication of our waterboarding policy. The plaintiff and defendant claim not to have known what waterboarding is. I'm highly skeptical of that, especially in the case of the defendant.
The ultimate quote: “And it's widely acknowledged that the supervisor, Joshua Christopherson, then told the assembled sales team, whose numbers had been lagging: ‘You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there. I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales.’”
I’ll leave it at that, so you can go read the article.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Socratic method
Socrates’ method, sometimes called the Elenchus, aims to reveal the cognitive health of his interlocutors. After answering a range of questions, typically concerning ethical concepts, the interlocutor is supposed to come to the conclusion either that his beliefs are consistent with one another, meaning that he is cognitively healthy, or that they are not, meaning that there is some cognitive dissonance and disease.
Let’s try this out on Americans, particularly those who were recently polled.
A recent AP/Ipsos poll registers Bush at a 70% disapproval rating for his handling of the economy.
Yesterday, just in time for paying one’s taxes, McCain outlined his economic policy in a speech (text here) at Carnegie Mellon. He advocates making permanent Bush’s tax cuts, as well as a whole host of other tax cuts, free (really?) trade, and ‘reforming and protecting’ of Medicare and Social Security (I’m scared to know what ‘reform and protect’ means; perhaps something like ‘to destroy in order to make better’). In other words, as many have pointed out, he is more or less like Bush with respect to handling the economy.
Putting those two together, the consistent position would be that McCain’s numbers on the economy should be fairly low.
However, yesterday Reuters/Zogby released its poll. The relevant question was whether McCain, Clinton or Obama would be a better steward of the economy. The results: McCain led, 3pts over Obama and 5 over Clinton.
At this point, Socrates would expect his interlocutor, recognizing the disease of his mind, to alter one of his beliefs, given that they are in tension with one another. Can we expect Americans, who are evidently blinded by McCain’s reputation as a straight shooter, to be as rational?
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
If "terrorists" doesn't work out, we've got a backup official enemy
The following comes by way of our friend, Josephus P. Franks, who writes at Brand R denotes Respectability.
See also On Hypocrisy Over Tibet by John V. Whitbeck
I love listening to the U.S. government denounce the Chinese government for the latter's lack of respect for human rights - it's like watching a serial rapist berate Larry Flynt for degrading women. It's cheap irony, but good fun. I can't understand why anyone wouldn't enjoy this - after all, wouldn't it be a blast to watch a press conference where some grand dragon wizard from the Klu Klux Klan denounces Univision for disproportionately showing light-skinned Latin Americans in their broadcasts?
It's hard to pick a favorite aspect of this situation - is it that the U.S. government practices torture as an instrument of policy while its representatives criticize China's human rights standards? Or is it that Western media sources used images of Tibetan protests in Nepal - whose monarchical government, before it was overthrown by the Maoists, enjoyed friendly relations with the U.S. government - and pawned them off as pictures of Chinese police cracking down on peaceful protesters?
[The Washington Post expresses its regret that its graphic artists are on strike. The editorial board has taken on all Photoshop responsibilities.]
Politics and hunger
According to the Wall Street Journal, global food prices have risen over 80% in the past 3 years. Citizens of the bottom billion countries spend over 60% of their income on food. That amounts to trouble. And indeed recently there have been ‘food riots’ in these countries, not to speak of starvation and the continuing crisis of world poverty.
As spelled out in several major newspapers here and here, food shortages are the result of multiple causes: recent droughts in Australia, Morroco and S. Africa and poor conditions in other important agricultural areas, escalating prices for oil, fertilizer and seed, and increased demand from emerging economies like India and China. In addition to these, many foreign ministers are pointing towards a political cause: the U.S. ethanol biofuel policy. The U.S. mandates that by the year 2017, 15% of road fuel used in this country come from ethanol. It subsidizes corn farmers for this. Sounds relatively harmless and perhaps even beneficial for the environment, except for the fact that corn isn’t the most efficient product to convert into ethanol, sugar cane is. In the face of that, what is our response? This: sugar cane ethanol imports into the U.S. (primarily from Brazil) are taxed to the tune of 25%. In addition to that economic puzzle, diverting corn to fuel production raises world corn prices (the U.S. is responsible for 50% of the world’s corn production).
Showing his sensitivity to the situation, Senator Charles E. Grassley (R-IO) (as quoted in the New York Times) “called the recent criticism of ethanol by foreign officials ‘a big joke.’ He questioned why they were not also blaming a drought in Australia that reduced the wheat crop and the growing demand for meat in China and India.
'You make ethanol out of corn,' he said. ‘I bet if I set a bushel of corn in front of any of those delegates, not one of them would eat it.’”
Evidently, Grassley can’t distinguish natural causes from political ones, and rich delegates from the world's poor. One could blame droughts in one sense (as a causal contributor), but not in the moral sense (moral blame), as one can with political shenanigans. Clearly, he has a political agenda to push, and I don’t know the merits of that agenda to judge, but to perversely suggest that corn is primarily a fuel product and not a food one--that is the big joke, one for which the world's poor are paying the price.
Monday, April 14, 2008
The Invisible Hand's Inclination for Baseball by Matias Bulnes, NYC
Baseball season is starting and this introduces changes in the day-to-day pace of life of many of us. When thinking about it, it strikes me as remarkable how important a role Baseball plays in the lives of many. Millions follow their team’s performance on TV, the newspaper, or in casual conversation. Moreover, Baseball oftentimes serves as an opener for social interaction or as a standard of personal identification. According to the magnitude of this role, people are willing to spend an important portion of their income and time on Baseball, and hence it has become a highly compensated human activity. Baseball players make millions and there can hardly be any doubt that they are located on the high part of the wealth pyramid. And as with Baseball, so it happens with Basketball, Football, Tennis, Soccer, Car Races, Boxing, etc. In contemporary societies there are enormous incentives for hitting balls, driving cars or kicking each other to the highest possible degree of perfection.
By contrast, let’s consider the case of natural scientists. Undoubtedly the natural sciences have been the hotbed for much of the technological development of the last few hundred years. This technological development, in turn, is to an important degree responsible for the kind of life our societies enjoy. Telephones for being in touch with our loved ones, electric light for extending our hours of activity, refrigerators for conserving our food, TV’s for watching Baseball and other forms of entertainment, medicine for ensuring the birth of our children, to mention only a few, have given us the choice of living more comfortably. Barring reactionary arguments, it is hard not to see the natural sciences as an indispensable factor in raising the quality of life of mankind over the last centuries (to various degrees depending on the time and location). Nevertheless, society compensates such a crucial occupation as that of the natural scientist with meager salaries compared to other occupations. In particular, top sportsmen make more than ten or twenty times what top natural scientists make. There is no need to have a sharp eye to notice a discrepancy between the importance of these two occupations for the development of our societies and the compensations attached to them. Could it be the case that the invisible hand has a capricious inclination for Baseball players over natural scientists? Could it be the case that Free-market Economy is after all irrational in distributing the incentives in society?
Let’s begin by being fair to the invisible hand. Perhaps, despite initial appearance Baseball is an indispensable human activity, or at least important enough so as to be better compensated than natural sciences. Where could this importance be? One could say that Baseball is an efficient form of entertainment and that people need entertainment during their leisure time in order to be more productive during working time. However, this does not explain why we need to spend such an obscene amount of money in entertainment. Presumably, we would get an equally entertaining Baseball season by paying the players one tenth of what they get paid now. In fact, we see very competent doctors, lawyers, journalists and scientists working for much less than Baseball players. Wouldn’t a $200,000 salary make for quite an incentive to play Baseball? If it works for anybody else, why wouldn’t it work for Baseball players?
A more plausible argument would be admitting that Baseball is not intrinsically important but insisting that it nonetheless produces very important psychological effects. For instance, one could try to make the case that watching Baseball we are first-hand witnesses of success and failure, glory and demise, all of which reinforce competitive attitudes in the audience crucial for the bloom of society. Moreover, the argument would go on, these obscene salaries exacerbate the contrast between success and failure intensifying thereby these attitudes. Now setting aside the extravagancy of this argument, it relies on an empirical claim that seems by all lights doubtful. Surely everybody knows many people who are competitive and, more importantly, competent in their activities and have no interest in sports whatsoever. It is even unclear that statistically speaking sports fans are thirstier of success than others. Simple observation defies this argument.
Another argument I have heard in conversation is that Baseball is important because people are willing to spend a significant portion of their income on it. Baseball fans spend hundreds and even thousands of dollars a year on Baseball tickets or cable TV and this shows that it is important—for them. After all, the argument goes, what other measure of importance can there be if not the preferences of the economic agents? In response, let’s point out that not only are there many other measures of importance but there must be if the hypothesis of the invisible hand is to have any traction. For defining importance as whatever accords to the preferences of the economic agents is just begging the question whether the invisible hand can rationally regulate the incentives in society. The metaphor of the invisible hand as used by libertarians refers precisely to the preferences of the economic agents. As a consequence, the argument amounts to the claim that Baseball is important just because the invisible hand allocates certain resources to it, begging thus the question whether the invisible hand does a good job allocating resources.
But perhaps the best response one can give to these arguments is that there are fairly credible explanations for why our societies fail to compensate certain activities in accordance with their importance. Consider natural sciences and its perceived benefits for society. Usually scientific advancements take a long time to turn into technology. Furthermore, once technology has been derived from science it usually takes decades or centuries to reach the masses. For example, even though scientists had been working on a theory of electricity since at least the XVII century, electric light was not massified until the XX century. Meanwhile the very idea of using electricity to massively distribute light was no more than uncertain speculation. Be as it may, because of this separation in time between the scientific work and its tangible benefits for regular people, scientists, unlike Baseball players, have no negotiation power in the societies they live in. Hanged up on a wall of my workplace, there is a caricature of philosophers going on a strike. Their slogan is “no more search for the truth unless our demands are met.” The joke also represents how much regular people would care if scientists went on a strike. And in a free-market economy, economic incentives are fastened to how much people care. This is why Baseball players make so much money and natural scientists so little.
Now, in all fairness, it should be said that this explanation works only under the assumption that people don’t care about science. But this seems to be fairly obvious from plain observation. Although institutionally science plays a significant role in our societies, when it comes to people’s preferences there can hardly be any doubt that they care much more about Baseball than about natural sciences. And in a free-market economy people’s preferences, not institutional significance, determines economic incentives. Not only is the folk generally ignorant of science and its connection with technology, also it is widely accepted even within Economics that the folk is most strongly driven by short-term considerations. As a result, even if people were completely aware that a strike of natural scientists may jeopardize their chances of improving their quality of life in the far future it is unclear that this would produce the slightest distress in them.
In sum, aside from the comparison between Baseball and natural sciences, the short-term orientation of economic agents gives us independent reasons to expect that their preferences may not distribute the incentives in society rationally. The contrast between Baseball and natural science only goes to confirm what should have been expected. Moreover, this is just one instance of a distortion that should be much more widespread among other human activities. Intervention in the market is therefore necessary to correct for this distortion. I propose to intervene by allowing Baseball players to receive whatever salaries the market pays them but severely increase their tax burden so we can use that money to compensate natural scientists or other crucial human activities in accordance with their importance.
Friday, April 11, 2008
FTA with Colombia has failed
Fortunately, the House has put a stop to Bush’s FTA (Free Trade Agreement) with Colombia. This is the first time the fast-track procedure gets delayed and may have as consequence that the FTA will never be capitalized if Clinton or Obama gets elected. This is also a huge blow to Bush in his struggle against Congress. He had sent this project for fast revision without the consent of the House’s leaders. The political assumption was that the House would not have the courage to stop the project since it wouldn’t want to call into question the US’s credibility in negotiating FTA’s in the future. But the House did have the courage right when Bush needs to show political authority. Congratulations to the House and shame on Bush’s political ineptness.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Deliberating about torture
New details are emerging about the role of senior members of the cabinet in approving our use of torture. The CIA has already admitted to waterboarding 3 detainees. And we know they sought and acquired the approval of the Justice Department. And we know that the OLC offered legal language to justify torture. What we didn’t have a glimpse of is a picture of the executive deliberations that approved the whole shebang.
Until now. ABC News reports that a ‘principals committee’ met often to deliberate on and ultimately approve particular uses of harsh or 'enhanced' interrogation tactics. The committee consisted of Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft. The CIA was evidently nervous about the legal boundaries of these tactics, and each time it sought the direct approval of the committee and Bush.
After many iterations of this approval process, the report asserts that Rice (who was National Security Advisor at the time) told the CIA that “This is your baby. Go do it.” This meant that the CIA had the implicit and general approval of the committee and no longer required explicit approval.
Approval by committee does not mean of course that each member of the committee approved. We know for other reasons that Dick “It’s a no brainer” Cheney and Rumsfeld categorically approved of such measures. However, the report suggests that Powell expressed reservations. Sadly, however, those reservations were not moral, but were rather grounded in the ‘image’ of the US abroad. That is, we would look bad to the world if we approved torture. Indeed.
Now, the article paints these deliberations against a background of “great concern that another terror attack on the nation was imminent.” My historical memory is bad, but I don’t recall any talk of an imminent threat in the Spring of 2002. Does anyone else? We know that one fruit of these interrogations was the capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of 9/11. (For some that alone would justify torture.) But, against this background, we might wonder whether revenge for 9/11 played more of a decisive role in these deliberations than preventing an imminent attack.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Lessons from M.L. King by MT Nguyen, NYC
Last week marked the 40th anniversary of M.L. King’s death. Virtually every newspaper ran some piece or other praising King, his movement and its accomplishments. Most writers wanted to tell a success story, connecting King’s actions with the increasing economic prosperity of African-Americans. The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, an otherwise sober writer, pointed to Stanley O’neal (former CEO of Merrill Lynch) as the ultimate proof of progress. It would have been ‘unimaginable’, Robinson boasts, for a black man to attain such a grand position in King’s time. Or perhaps, to use another of Robinson’s examples, progress is to be measured in terms of the increasing number of blacks who enjoy houses in a suburban cul-de-sac. Be that as it may, are we really to understand the significance of King’s movement in terms of how many potential Wall St. CEO’s it paved the way for or how many cul-de-sacs it paved?
I don’t want to minimize the significance of economic opportunity and success as measures of a society’s justice, but it is myopic and distorting, both of the image of justice and King’s movement, to make economic prosperity the representative expression of an ambition much larger and less individually focused.
What then is King’s focus? Who is King talking to and what does he ask of them? In this context, it is instructive to study and take lesson from King’s incendiary 1968 speech, ‘Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence’. Understanding the aims related in this speech as the benchmark, a sober person would conclude that we Americans have made little progress and that the most important things are left undone.
One of the central aims of this speech is to articulate what King sees as alarming feature of the American ethos. He uses Vietnam as a lens through which to critically examine ourselves. He says, “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” And he diagnoses our illness in the following way: “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” And “The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.” Here he outright rejects a Robinsonian conception of progress. Instead, the measure of progress towards justice is to be found in nothing less than an ethical transformation of national character.
Who is King addressing? Who bears the responsibility to effect this transformation?
It is a difficult problem to pinpoint who King aims to address and hence what he is trying to do when he confronts America’s racism, extreme materialism and militarism. There are at least three different possible interpretations. First, one can say that his activities are expressions of moral outrage addressed to all Americans, aiming to open dialogue between him and them. Specifically, King hopes to appeal to the moral sensitivities of those bearing the objectionable ethos. In doing so, he hopes to effect change through persuasion. The success of his movement is measurable then, in part, in terms of the persuasive force of its moral argument. This view holds that as directed at members of a shared moral practice the argument succeeds when the moral deliberations of the racist, extreme materialist and militant are transformed by it. This assumes that the invitation to moral dialogue is accepted and those who accept are susceptible to moral change.
This view can be challenged on the grounds that it perilously assumes that dialogue and argument alone can touch, let alone transform, the 3 characters in question. This is perilous because, arguably, such characters are insusceptible to dialogue. Those who genuinely believe they alone can teach and have nothing to learn are hardly the ideal candidates for public moral discourse.
A second view of King’s target audience is more plausible. His audience consists of those who can grasp the content of his message but who are, nevertheless, unmoved to act on it. This view is supporting by his assertion that, “It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries.” The problem is not the absence of moral knowledge, but the absence of willpower. Thus, the purpose of reaching out is not so much to persuade the persuadable of truths they fail to recognize, e.g. that racial, economic and global injustice exist. The purpose is, against their inertia, to move such persons to action.
Action against what? King’s skepticism about the effectiveness of moral dialogue, at least as the only avenue to take, led him to see confrontation as necessary. What differentiated others from King was not moral knowledge but rather the commitment to reject the status quo. While others preach patience by citing ‘progress’, presuming that things would eventually, somehow, change, King committed himself to eliminating racial injustice. While those others deplore confrontation, King rejects the viciousness of the racist, materialistic and militant and the institutions supporting and supported by them, and he sought in a lifetime’s work to stand up, resist and eradicate them. It was not due (only) to the moral persuasiveness of his argument, the message of King’s vision came out of the power of his determination and his ability to move others to join him in confronting the viciousness of the American ethos. It is easy to forget amidst the frequent concatenation of King with peace that he was an incendiary figure. Many people hated him. This is not merely because he disagreed with them; rather, as Socrates did, he got in their faces and in their way.
King’s aim and his message then cannot be defined so narrowly in terms of economic prosperity. He asks for nothing less from his intended audience than to put themselves on the line, confronting the objectionable American ethos, in the service of justice, not only for Americans but for all the world’s citizens. He was in that way a cosmopolitan.
Finally, if King’s death reminds us of anything, it reminds us of the perils of his ambitions. He didn’t just die, he was murdered. In that light, one may wonder whether it reasonable to ask that others risk their lives or livelihoods for the sake of justice. It is important here to see King as not preaching, as many other moralists do, a rigid form of moral obligation. He does not speak of duties owed to others, but rather the responsibilities of individual choice, in particular, responsibilities one has to oneself. It is up to us as individuals to make up our own minds as to whether we will continue to remain silent in the complacency of our comfort or whether, in making the right choice, as King concludes, “we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Countries and Kids
When kids play sports with their friends in the streets or parks there are always various roles they have. One of them is the umpire, always assigned to the least sportive kids. Even though they call the plays in good faith nobody in the game really cares about their judgment. They let the umpire “call it” only in case they feel satisfied with the call. Otherwise, they just ignore him. This is the same role the UN appears to play in the world—especially after the Iraq War begun. And the US is, of course, the big, though kid in the game. If the UN decides to send help to US’s headache Iraq, the US will become a UN supporter. If the UN doesn’t want the US to invade some country (like Iraq 5 years ago), the US will just ignore it.
NATO is like that bunch of kids that hover around the big, tough kid. They usually hate the big, tough kid because he messes with them all the time. But they very well know that it’s better for them to be beside him in order to be under his protection and so to be able to mess with the other kids gratuitously. The big kid, on the other hand, also needs them since his self-esteem depends on having smaller kids around who submit to him. So the followers united have some negotiation power. This is what they used today in Bucharest against the US-supported integration proposal of Ukraine and Georgia. But the smaller kids’ negotiation power can push only so far against the big kid. The US still managed to get more military support from NATO for its Iraqi haphazard adventure.
Finally Russia celebrated Ukraine and Georgia’s failure to enter NATO. Russia is like the second biggest kid who enjoys tormenting the kids that the biggest and toughest kid can’t fit in his schedule. After the proposal was rejected, Russia was relieved to know that it can continue to mess with Ukraine and Georgia for at least a couple of years before they manage to get friendly with the big kid and his gang.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
John Yoo’s ‘torture memo’
John Yoo works now at Berkeley Law (can one think of Berkeley the same way again?). He used to work for the Office of Legal Counsel. His work included writing the legal justifications for torture that the Defense Department used to ground its policies in 2003.
Yesterday, the Washington Post published his work, which was previously classified for reasons of national security (can anyone explain that?).
I don’t have the expertise to parse the legal language, but I am confident that the reasoning is flawed, because I am confident that there can be no justification of torture and a fortiori no legal justification of torture. One could argue, I suppose, that moral reasoning and legal reasoning are different. I disagree, but at any rate they are not different with respect to torture.
Perhaps the most obnoxious things about Yoo are his hubris and his contempt for the public. In his response to the WaPost article he asserted, “Far from inventing some novel interpretation of the Constitution, our legal advice to the President, in fact, was near boilerplate." Not having ever worked for the OLC or knowing anyone who has ever worked there, I am nevertheless pretty sure that he is blatantly lying. I am sure that he will be called out on this by someone at the OLC. He is lying because surely and obviously there is no legal template justifying unconstrained presidential powers.
But his lie reveals a damning truth, at least as applied to his own work. This is because by boilerplate he might be referring to his understanding of the OLC’s charge of providing legal justification (really, merely legal language) for whatever actions the executive wants justification. That is, he bought into his own reasoning: in times of war, crisis, turmoil, distress, stress, discomfort (where’s the bottom?), do whatever the president says. Since our president wanted to 'fight terror' by any means necessary, that's what John Yoo sought to justify.
Murat Karnaz and Guantanamo
Mr. Karnaz is a German national who was ‘picked up’ while traveling in Pakistan and transported by the U.S. government to Afghanistan where he was (per his testimony) interrogated and tortured. He was then shipped to Guantanamo where he wallowed for 4 years.
60 Minutes just ran an interview with him. Check it out here.
The absolute horror of this story is this: the tribunal system set up to assess the standing of detainees ignored its own government’s exculpating evidence, ruling instead to detain Karnaz based on an unsubstantiated claim made by sources unknown. Since the documents used by the tribunal have been declassified, this establishes, assuming at the minimum the sincerity of the proceedings, that they are extremely risk averse. The upshot is this: give the tribunal anything suggesting that the detainee has committed or might commit an act of terror and, even when it is overwhelmingly disconfirmed and contradicted by other available evidence, they will decide to detain him, if it were solely up to them, forever. Ticking time bombs, everywhere.
In light of this, it seems moot to insist, as the D.C. Court of Appeals has done (in Bismullah v Gates, if you’re interested), that detainees have a right to demand that the tribunal make their judgment based on all the available evidence (in particular, the evidence held by the government). It is, of course, a reasonable judgment, but what does it change for the detainees if the tribunal system is irrationally risk averse? Well, legally, it would give those responsible for reviewing the tribunal’s decisions access to relevant information. That is an advantage, but it is one to be enjoyed by the detainee only after the years it will take for review to occur. (I am assuming that the reviewing court will not be irrationally risk averse as well.)
In the nature of things, even in the face of de facto victories, the Bush administration filed an emergency petition to the Supreme Court, asking it to review the Court of Appeals decision. Evidently, they are not satisfied with having the power to detain innocent people indefinitely, they want it made into a right.
Guantanamo is a circus. The mental and legal gymnastics it forces upon us and our legal system cannot be worth it.
I saw an interview with John McCain last night. He is evidently dead set upon closing the prison. Thus, along with the commitments made by Obama and Clinton, we can be assured (hopefully) that the nightmare will end in 2009.
