I have recently returned from a long vacation, and will now resume posting. Thanks for waiting.
- The Opera Democrat
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Nibbling away at Liberty
“The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.”
- Edward Burke – letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol 1777.
“By no later than the summer of 2004 the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decide to torture prisoners and how they went about it.
- Mark Danner - New York Review of Books.
Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here! [a croupier hands Renault a pile of money] Croupier: Your winnings, sir. Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
- From the movie Casablanca released in 1942
Like Captain Renault standing in the middle of Rick’s café, Americans are “shocked” that we tortured detainees. They are shocked that the torture went on before the “legal” opinions justifying such actions were written, and they are shocked at the extent and variety of methods used.
Hard on the heels of the April 22 release of the Senate Armed Services Committee report on the treatment of detainees, new memos are coming to light detailing the sloppy and incompetent thinking of Bush Administration lawyers that enabled such torture to occur.
A lot of ink has been spilled on how torture cost America its moral authority in the world. Few have mentioned what it says about ourselves that we let it go on for so long with so little comment.
As John Danner noted, Americans have known about the torture of detainees for five years. After all, in 2006 a major news magazine ran a cover story on whether or not we should torture people. At the time this struck me as an alarm bell that America was losing its way. The sad part was the fact that this cover story did not stir any controversy. It seemed much like getting no response after running a cover story about whether or not bank robbery should be legal in an economic downturn.
Then there was the exchange between Sen. Kennedy and then Atty. Gen. Designate Alberto Gonzales in his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Gonzales made the argument if an action didn’t kill a prisoner it wasn’t torture. I watched mesmerized as Sen. Kennedy, a member of the Judiciary Committee of the US Senate, seriously discuss with a future Attorney General of the United States, whether or not breaking a detainee’s arm was torture. What was more amazing was C-Span was the only network that carried this exchange.
At that time our leaders were unwilling to stand up for what was right because they felt it was more important to toe the party line. The political opposition did not stand up for what was right because they did not want to seem “soft on terrorism,” and risk their political futures.
Americans again seem to have lost the spring that drives the motor of our moral outrage. Without that outrage we are pawns to whatever scheme our government wants to implement, as our government knows it will never be held accountable.
Our acquiescence to the torture of detainees is a moral stain as deep as the stain of Jim Crow or the WWII Japanese internment camps.
We shrug off torture casually in the same way people at the beginning of the 20th Century shrugged off lynching. “Maybe” they said “we lynched a few innocent people by mistake – but heck we were bound to have hung a few guilty ones as well.” The violence became so prevalent and accepted that lynching became social events for the whole town, and on the floor of the US Senate, some Senators defended the “right” of their States’ citizens to take the law in their own hands and execute people at will.
Many have argued that while Obama works to fix the economy or reform health care he doesn’t have time for this “distraction.”
They are wrong.
To ignore torture and “move on” as both McCain and Obama have suggested is to turn around and retrace the steps we have slowly but surely taken on the road to justice.
It is just as important to fix our moral compass as it is to fix our economy. It is just as important to provide moral courage as to provide health care coverage. Otherwise the next generation will look at us with the same shudder of revulsion we feel when we see pictures of Manzanar or old photographs of smiling people posing with a dangling corpse.
If we do not hold both the Bush Administration officials who designed these programs, and Congressional leaders who acquiesced to them to account, our liberty will be “nibbled away for expedients, and by parts.”
- Edward Burke – letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol 1777.
“By no later than the summer of 2004 the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decide to torture prisoners and how they went about it.
- Mark Danner - New York Review of Books.
Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here! [a croupier hands Renault a pile of money] Croupier: Your winnings, sir. Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
- From the movie Casablanca released in 1942
Like Captain Renault standing in the middle of Rick’s café, Americans are “shocked” that we tortured detainees. They are shocked that the torture went on before the “legal” opinions justifying such actions were written, and they are shocked at the extent and variety of methods used.
Hard on the heels of the April 22 release of the Senate Armed Services Committee report on the treatment of detainees, new memos are coming to light detailing the sloppy and incompetent thinking of Bush Administration lawyers that enabled such torture to occur.
A lot of ink has been spilled on how torture cost America its moral authority in the world. Few have mentioned what it says about ourselves that we let it go on for so long with so little comment.
As John Danner noted, Americans have known about the torture of detainees for five years. After all, in 2006 a major news magazine ran a cover story on whether or not we should torture people. At the time this struck me as an alarm bell that America was losing its way. The sad part was the fact that this cover story did not stir any controversy. It seemed much like getting no response after running a cover story about whether or not bank robbery should be legal in an economic downturn.
Then there was the exchange between Sen. Kennedy and then Atty. Gen. Designate Alberto Gonzales in his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Gonzales made the argument if an action didn’t kill a prisoner it wasn’t torture. I watched mesmerized as Sen. Kennedy, a member of the Judiciary Committee of the US Senate, seriously discuss with a future Attorney General of the United States, whether or not breaking a detainee’s arm was torture. What was more amazing was C-Span was the only network that carried this exchange.
At that time our leaders were unwilling to stand up for what was right because they felt it was more important to toe the party line. The political opposition did not stand up for what was right because they did not want to seem “soft on terrorism,” and risk their political futures.
Americans again seem to have lost the spring that drives the motor of our moral outrage. Without that outrage we are pawns to whatever scheme our government wants to implement, as our government knows it will never be held accountable.
Our acquiescence to the torture of detainees is a moral stain as deep as the stain of Jim Crow or the WWII Japanese internment camps.
We shrug off torture casually in the same way people at the beginning of the 20th Century shrugged off lynching. “Maybe” they said “we lynched a few innocent people by mistake – but heck we were bound to have hung a few guilty ones as well.” The violence became so prevalent and accepted that lynching became social events for the whole town, and on the floor of the US Senate, some Senators defended the “right” of their States’ citizens to take the law in their own hands and execute people at will.
Many have argued that while Obama works to fix the economy or reform health care he doesn’t have time for this “distraction.”
They are wrong.
To ignore torture and “move on” as both McCain and Obama have suggested is to turn around and retrace the steps we have slowly but surely taken on the road to justice.
It is just as important to fix our moral compass as it is to fix our economy. It is just as important to provide moral courage as to provide health care coverage. Otherwise the next generation will look at us with the same shudder of revulsion we feel when we see pictures of Manzanar or old photographs of smiling people posing with a dangling corpse.
If we do not hold both the Bush Administration officials who designed these programs, and Congressional leaders who acquiesced to them to account, our liberty will be “nibbled away for expedients, and by parts.”
Sunday, April 5, 2009
With This Provocative Act...
“With this provocative act, North Korea has ignored its international obligations, rejected unequivocal calls for restraint, and further isolated itself from the community of nations.”
- President Obama statement in response to North Korea’s rocket launch.
"Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary. If we believe that, then we are admitting that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable."
- President Obama’s Speech in Prague pledging to work towards the elimination of nuclear weapons
North Korea’s launch of a rocket that nearly obtained orbit before crashing into the ocean underscores the difficulty President Obama faces working towards a world free of nuclear weapons. At any point, even the most backward and paranoid regime can develop nuclear capability.
North Korea poses a further challenge to the international community. What do you do with a regime that is so isolated and poor that sanctions don’t really matter? Sanctions have been in place for years. But North Korea is willing to bear the isolation and make its people shoulder the economic price. Threatening it has only made the country more isolated and unpredictable. Indeed sanctions seem to have only intensified their fears.
But as Iraq and Afghanistan prove, regime change at the point of a gun can be difficult to accomplish and even harder to maintain. The North Koreans are comfortable that as long as they are willing to stand the economic privation they are safe from military reprisal. They also know they already have the ability to retaliate militarily by pouring across the DMZ into South Korea.
In the past the People’s Republic of China has given North Korea some aid and support, which gives the PRC leverage, but also gives North Korea some freedom to ignore world opinion. So it was no surprise that today’s UN Security Council meeting ended without any clear resolution.
This is the main threat the North Korea poses today. The more the UN flutters around wringing its hands and doing nothing the harder it will be to enforce world agreements. This will only speed the UN down the road to irrelevance it started on when it failed to effectively respond to the genocidal crisis of the 1990’s.
So international cooperation on disarmament that started the 1920’s with the Kellogg-Briand treaty renouncing war, and Five Power Naval disarmament treaties of the 1920’s and 30’s may well end with Obama and his goal to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
The Kellogg-Briand treaty outlawed war, and was negotiated by US Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand. It went into effect in 1929 and eventually signed by 63 countries - including Japan, which violated it in 1931 by invading Manchuria, Italy which violated it in 1935 by its invasion of Abyssinia, and Germany which violated it in 1939 by its invasion of Poland.
The Five Power Naval Disarmament treaty was signed in 1921 by the US, Britain, Japan, France and Italy. This treaty severely limited the big power’s navies, but each signatory nation found ways around its limits. So despite two revisions in the 1930’s the naval treaty did little to head off the arms race before WWII.
The lesson for Obama in Kellogg-Briand and the naval treaties are, that if such initiatives are to succeed, each individual country has its own interests that need to be addressed. Both treaties were flawed by the idealistic view that all countries had the same interest in avoiding repeating the horror of WWI. But the Italians, the Japanese and Germans had powerful political and diplomatic interests that could only be met through armament and conflict, and were more compelling than a fear of war.
In today’s world it is not enough to discuss the moral need to reduce nuclear stockpiles and the threat they pose. The United States will have understand and address the interests of nations that are arming themselves. Interests such as those of the North Koreans and the Iranians may be politically unpopular and difficult to meet. But Obama and the US will succeed if they have the patience to address the unique challenges posed by each country.
After all, saber rattling and sanctions have not succeeded. It is time to try something else.
- President Obama statement in response to North Korea’s rocket launch.
"Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary. If we believe that, then we are admitting that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable."
- President Obama’s Speech in Prague pledging to work towards the elimination of nuclear weapons
North Korea’s launch of a rocket that nearly obtained orbit before crashing into the ocean underscores the difficulty President Obama faces working towards a world free of nuclear weapons. At any point, even the most backward and paranoid regime can develop nuclear capability.
North Korea poses a further challenge to the international community. What do you do with a regime that is so isolated and poor that sanctions don’t really matter? Sanctions have been in place for years. But North Korea is willing to bear the isolation and make its people shoulder the economic price. Threatening it has only made the country more isolated and unpredictable. Indeed sanctions seem to have only intensified their fears.
But as Iraq and Afghanistan prove, regime change at the point of a gun can be difficult to accomplish and even harder to maintain. The North Koreans are comfortable that as long as they are willing to stand the economic privation they are safe from military reprisal. They also know they already have the ability to retaliate militarily by pouring across the DMZ into South Korea.
In the past the People’s Republic of China has given North Korea some aid and support, which gives the PRC leverage, but also gives North Korea some freedom to ignore world opinion. So it was no surprise that today’s UN Security Council meeting ended without any clear resolution.
This is the main threat the North Korea poses today. The more the UN flutters around wringing its hands and doing nothing the harder it will be to enforce world agreements. This will only speed the UN down the road to irrelevance it started on when it failed to effectively respond to the genocidal crisis of the 1990’s.
So international cooperation on disarmament that started the 1920’s with the Kellogg-Briand treaty renouncing war, and Five Power Naval disarmament treaties of the 1920’s and 30’s may well end with Obama and his goal to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
The Kellogg-Briand treaty outlawed war, and was negotiated by US Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand. It went into effect in 1929 and eventually signed by 63 countries - including Japan, which violated it in 1931 by invading Manchuria, Italy which violated it in 1935 by its invasion of Abyssinia, and Germany which violated it in 1939 by its invasion of Poland.
The Five Power Naval Disarmament treaty was signed in 1921 by the US, Britain, Japan, France and Italy. This treaty severely limited the big power’s navies, but each signatory nation found ways around its limits. So despite two revisions in the 1930’s the naval treaty did little to head off the arms race before WWII.
The lesson for Obama in Kellogg-Briand and the naval treaties are, that if such initiatives are to succeed, each individual country has its own interests that need to be addressed. Both treaties were flawed by the idealistic view that all countries had the same interest in avoiding repeating the horror of WWI. But the Italians, the Japanese and Germans had powerful political and diplomatic interests that could only be met through armament and conflict, and were more compelling than a fear of war.
In today’s world it is not enough to discuss the moral need to reduce nuclear stockpiles and the threat they pose. The United States will have understand and address the interests of nations that are arming themselves. Interests such as those of the North Koreans and the Iranians may be politically unpopular and difficult to meet. But Obama and the US will succeed if they have the patience to address the unique challenges posed by each country.
After all, saber rattling and sanctions have not succeeded. It is time to try something else.
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