Specter: man or mouse? The blogosphere moots...

It seems that few people, even those who are celebrating the extra step towards the magic 60 Senate seats, have much positive to say about the beloved aisle-hopper. From a quick review of some of my favourite blogs, I’ve assembled a kind of blogospheric conversation on the topic... and the old truism that nobody likes a traitor, not even those who stand to benefit, seems to hold out pretty well.

Certainly, any concerns about Specter himself to one side, no-one short of the true believer is posing this as a good day for the Republicans. ‘Good Riddance’, even in this RINO’s case, can't help but ring false when a party is about to lose its only significant weapon in the senatorial arsenal. As Connecting.the.Dots says, this “is the latest sign of an eight-year process--the shriveling of the Republican Party to a one-size-fits-all collection of conservatives that started in 2001 with Sen. Jim Jeffords leaving and even John McCain flirting with the idea after being splattered by the Rove smear machine in the primaries a year earlier... This politically suicidal process cries out for psychiatric intervention, shrinks to stop the GOP from shrinking itself down to Rush Limbaugh and a few office-holding lookalikes.”

But if this is a bad sign for a rumpish conservative movement – perhaps an inevitable part of the process of political defeat, which only in time will see moderates returning to the fold when the Dems inevitably overstretch themselves? – it’s not produced a wave of enthusiasm for Mr. Specter himself. Freedom Writing voices the widely-held concern of many moderates. He says, ‘I have to wonder if Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele wasn't on to something when he said, "Sen. Specter didn't leave the GOP based on principles of any kind. He left to further his personal political interests because he knew that he was going to lose a Republican primary due to his left–wing voting record."’

BuckNaked Politics shares similar feelings, noting the ‘muted cheers and tepid jeers’ accompanying the switch. “Obviously this is good news for the Democratic Party, though progressives like me aren't going to be dancing in the streets or anything over the party's acquisition of yet another conservative Democrat if not an actual DINO.” And, from the perspective of damage to divided government, Bipartisan Rules goes even further, firmly concluding that “While Specter will undoubtedly be venerated by the likes of Paul Krugman and Rachel Maddow, this move is clearly nothing more than a last-ditch attempt to save his political career ... At this site, of course, we think that an entirely Republican - or Democratic-controlled government is a recipe for disaster (see: 1992 to 1994 and 2004 to 2006), so we are disappointed by Specter's move.”

Bark Bark Woof Woof valiantly answers for the defence, here. “Mr. Specter's decision is based not only on the fact that Pennsylvania is trending to the Democrats and that he faced a daunting challenger in the Republican primary from former Rep. Pat Toomey who is a hard-right-winger, but that the Republican Party, both in Pennsylvania and nationally, is pushing the moderates out.”

My question is this: does this actually change the way votes will turn out in the Senate? Will the switch actually put a notoriously free-wheeling senator under Democratic party discipline? Would the stimulus package, where Specter helped remove hundreds of millions from the original proposal, have gone through differently if this switch had already happened? And what measures in the future will Specter vote for that, as a Republican, he’d have opposed? As Undiplomatic points out, “Predicting how this guy will shift is about as reliable than predicting next week’s weather.”

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Arlen Specter switching sides?

Dramatic news that could help take the Democrats over the 60 limit for the Senate, Politico.com's Ben Smith seems to have confirmed reports that Arlen Specter is switching sides to the Democrats, running in 2010 on the Democratic ticket.

Whilst we wait for further reports, it might be worthwhile reading the interesting piece that Specter released in the New York Review of Books on the need to roll back presidential power. Personally, I couldn't agree more...

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Notes on Torture Memo (III)

With the Bybee memo of August 2002, the message is immediately clear. The opening paragraph reveals: “We further conclude that certain acts may be cruel, inhuman or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within ... [the Convention Against Torture’s] proscription against torture.” As an aside, it also concludes that the Convention’s relevant clauses may turn out to be unconstitutional if they infringe the President’s authority to conduct war.

To make this case, Bybee looks at a number of cases of torture from other parts of the world to show that the kinds of acts we are talking about in relation to CIA interrogations can be considered comparatively “mild”, if such a word can ever be used in this context. Many acts committed by other nations are of an order of magnitude more shocking. The European Court of Human Rights, for instance, concluded that (i) wall standing; (ii) hooding; (iii) subjection to noise; (iv) sleep deprivation; and (v) deprivation of food and drink – all acts that the US has been documented doing – “were inhuman and degrading but did not amount to torture.” In the same cases, accounts of a prisoner receiving a severe beating were also concluded not to be torture. Although the drafter is far too intelligent ever to make such a crass statement (not least because the memo is a legal opinion on the applicability of the CAT, not a policy paper), the implicit conclusion is that any of these five acts is permissible.

It might be worth responding to these general points at a high level.

First: it is possible to wrangle about what is and isn’t torture, and this is not necessarily a moral abdication – as long as the intent is not to obscure the meaning of the word so as effectively to permit greater latitude to torturers (which one may conclude may well be the case here). But defining the term in a strict and narrow way, as the Bush administration did, does not change the fundamental ethics of personal conduct, it simply speaks to the question of legality. Even were one to accept the Bybee definition of torture – which I think many of us don’t – the appropriate response is not, “Great, this leaves us free to commit cruel, inhuman and degrading acts,” but, “Ok, so a new law should be passed to ban US agents from committing acts that are against what we stand for but don’t technically count as torture in our narrow, legalistic definition of the word.” Just because the law permits it, it doesn’t make it right. This, of course, is exactly what John McCain did in Congress in 2005.

Indeed, the point is clearly made in the already morally dubious argument provided by the Reagan administration that Bybee cites to highlight this distinction between torture and other acts. Torture, they argued, is “to be distinguished from lesser forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, which are to be deplored and prevented, but are not so universally or categorically condemned as to warrant the severe legal consequences that the Convention provides in case of torture.” Deplored and prevented, not defended and encouraged!

Second: I cannot believe that anyone except the most ahistorical and legalistic mind can truly believe that the Framers’ decision to leave the prosecution of war in the hands of the executive branch was intended to give the president dictatorial powers in time of war. The constitution was founded by a group of individuals profoundly committed to limiting the scope for executive tyranny, which was the whole intention behind the – now sadly anachronistic – system of checks and balances. Because the question at the time was primarily whether a war was just or not, power over the decision to go to war was passed to congress. This was a clear statement of intent that the president should not, even in times of war, ride roughshod over the principles of justice and accountability on which the system was built, even if the speed of war might require the president to act without immediately consulting congress.

Since the Johnson era, if not as far back as Wilson, the decision to go to war has in practical terms been ceded by the legislature to the executive: which is a failing on their part. But, as with my first point, the legal conclusion that the constitution gives wide latitude to the president to conduct warfare should not be sufficient to show that the president is free to order his people to torture. If anything, it is evidence that the power of the president during times of war needs to be legally contained.

It’s a dangerous thing to talk of the banality of evil outside the context of the Holocaust and genocide. But it’s indubitable, reading this memos in detail, that the Bush White House was governed by a legalistic mentality which seems entirely to fit with its approach to going to war in Iraq. In this worldview, law is not a distillation of moral conduct but a set of constraints on otherwise free action. The function of law is not, then, to clarify appropriate behaviour, but to something be got around. The self-serving conclusion that X, Y, and Z do not compare with grosser acts of torture, refracted through this mindset, ends up leading them to conclude that it’s ok to be cruel, degrading and inhumane.

In this context,  the legal decisions passed on to them by Bybee, Yoo and others are only enabling acts. The real crimes were conducted by the people who ordered the CIA to behave in the way it did. The real crimes were committed within the White House.

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Notes on Torture Memo (II)

In the next section of the Yoo memo, he addresses the question of why domestic law should not apply to US army staff or others who are conducting interrogations abroad when the Uniform Code of Military Justice appears to suggest it does.

The special maritime and territorial jurisdiction laws of the Uniform Code of Military Justice allow for the prosecution of crimes committed on US bases by army officers under domestic criminal law, as long as the sentence for the crime exceeds one year.

However, if it is less than a year, the matter is handled by the army. Actions which would constitute a conventional crime of simple assault or assault by striking, beating or wounding carry a sentence of six months, and therefore domestic law is not applicable. With more serious assaults – assault resulting in serious bodily injury, assault with a dangerous weapon (which could include a broom or similar), assault with intent to murder, assault with intent to maim or torture – or the crime of maiming, “Because the statute requires specific intent, i.e., the intent to maim, disfigure or torture, the absence of such intent is a complete defense to a charge of maiming.” In short, as long as the interrogator does not use a weapon and can prove that all injuries beyond simple assault were unintentional consequences of the interrogation, the provisions for prosecution under domestic law do not apply. Of course, the kicker is assault with intent to torture (see below).

Moreover, “a federal, non-military officer [i.e. CIA agent] who is conducting interrogations in a foreign location, one that is not on a permanent U.S. military base or diplomatic establishment, would not be subject to the federal criminal laws applicable in the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction.” By contrast, members of the armed forces are subject to the UCMJ restrictions wherever they were conducting the interrogation, whether in a US or non-US base.

This is why the CIA is so central to the violation of conventional norms of war, as indeed it has been since its inception. I always thought ‘black sites’ were set up in order to remove dangerous individuals from the public eye for reasons of public relations. This memo seems to suggest that the legal constraints on the CIA in a black site are effectively non-existent, unlike in a US military base, and implies therefore the reason for putting KSM or similar in a black site was precisely in order to give the CIA operative greater latitude to torture. This reveals quite how much high-level legal thought went into this effort to torture detainees. It also raises the possibility that CIA agents went beyond even the torture activities we know of in black sites.

The lessons from this section of the memo seem clear: use the CIA, only conduct actions that classify as simple assault on US bases, or can be explained as accidents that came about as an unintended result of a simple assault, and do what you like on black sites.

This reveals once again the central importance of two further positions held by the Bush administration: the claim that these extreme interrogation methods are not torture, and the claim that the Geneva Convention does not apply to unlawful combatants. I addressed the second in my previous post. As to the first, Yoo argues that torture only applies to “an extreme form of cruel and inhuman treatment” which causes “severe pain and suffering” and is “intended to cause severe pain and suffering.” This means that “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” is not torture.

In short, the CIA is in the right because it limits itself only to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. As Yoo puts it, “the United States is within its international law obligations even if it uses interrogation methods that might constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, so long as their use is justified by self-defense or necessity.” I doubt any further comment about this statement is either necessary, or can do justice to its moral turpitude.

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Notes on Torture Memo (I)

I’ve started reading through the John Yoo memo on torture / detaining non-citizens in foreign nations (March 14, 2003), and want to post some early thoughts before continuing, with the usual caveat that I ain’t a lawyer, so would be ready to be informed why I'm wrong...

The substance of Yoo’s argument seems to be that:

1. The constitution places the power to wage war entirely in the hands of the Commander in Chief.
2. Domestic law does not apply in a state of war: a soldier who kills is not prosecuted for the domestic crime of murder, and so the Fifth Amendment does not apply.
3. Moreover, even if it did it wouldn’t matter, as the Supreme Court has ruled that non-citizens have no legal rights under US law outside US sovereign territory.
4. Equally, the Eighth Amendment is explicitly applicable only to persons on whom criminal sanctions have been imposed, whilst detention during wartime is not punishment, it is simply detention.

In this way, it becomes very clear from the outset that the defence of the administration’s actions is based on the firm assertion that a state of war exists between their detainees and the US government. In this sense, the internment of Japanese during World War II or the establishment of prisoner of war camps in third nations during other wars are no different to Guantánamo. This is presumably why defenders of the Bush line feel that the real story here is the warrantless assumption of presidential power by congress.

But if the defence of internment is entirely based on the conditions of conflict being warlike, then there is no legal justification for denying the internees the status of ‘prisoners of war’. At this point, the 1996 War Crimes Act (which made it a criminal offence in US law to commit a grave breach of the Geneva Convention) kicks in. So as far as I can tell, by stressing the warlike state of conflict between the United States and the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Cheney et. al. are effectively promoting themselves from common or garden lawbreakers to the hallowed status of war criminals.

Aware of this danger, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 formalised the working designation of ‘unlawful enemy combatant’ to square the circle: that is to create a status for these detainees in which their detention was legitimated by a state of war and yet the conditions of that detention were not beholden to the Geneva Convention and War Crimes Act on conduct during wartime. The Geneva Convention states that there are only two types of belligerents: lawful combatants of an enemy state at war with you, and unlawful (i.e. civilian) combatants who do not represent a state and are therefore to be prosecuted under conventional domestic law. The 2006 definition of unlawful combatant status as one that is both of and not of war, therefore, is the lynchpin to the justification of the long-term internment of prisoners under conditions where the Geneva Convention does not apply in full. To hold prisoners and mistreat them, they have to be unlawful combatants. (Second caveat: I've yet to get on to the bit where Yoo explains why the Geneva Convention is only partially applicable, so I may have got the wrong end of the stick here... Stay tuned.)

Nevertheless, I hesitantly make a prediction. The repudiation of unlawful enemy combatant status by the Obama administration makes it almost impossible to avoid criminalising White House actions during the Bush years. For without this definition the detainees were either prisoners of war, in which case Cheney and minions were war criminals, or they were unlawful combatants protected under the Geneva Convention, in which case Cheney broke the Fifth and Eighth Amendments, and probably several more.

John Yoo writes, “The Framers understood the Commander-in-Chief Clause to grant the President the fullest range of power recognized at the time of the ratification as belonging to the military commander.” (4-5) The Framers’ intent was clearly, indubitably not to permit the President to have the power to order the torture of individuals, even in wartime. Amongst the complaints listed by Jefferson against George III in the Declaration of Independence, one might note:

• “He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries”
• “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power”
• He has given assent to “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”
• “He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation”

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Return to violence in Iraq?

Reports of twin suicide bombings in Samarra and 150 killed inevitably raise the fear of an upsurge of violence in Iraq as the US disengagement from the region accelerates. As Iraq Body Count and others show, the rate of violence today is a fraction of the levels it reached in 2006 and 2007, before the revision of the counter-insurgency strategy under Petraeus, and certainly one shouldn’t assume a pattern from just a few incidents, however horrific. But equally it would be foolish not to at least consider the possibility that the withdrawal of US troops will create space for a military contest of political power in the streets.

The bombings made me think of George W. Bush’s 2007 speech on the impact of the withdrawal from Vietnam, one of the few speeches he made in eight years worth paying attention to. In a long speech in which he quoted critics of the Vietnam war who claimed that the source of violence in Southeast Asia was solely the US presence, Bush replied that “the price of American withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent civilians whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people’, ‘re-education camps’, and ‘killing fields.’”

Criticism of the speech was widespread. First, people pointed out that it was hardly a ringing endorsement to compare Iraq to Vietnam. (With hindsight, a more sympathetic way of putting this is that the comparison was a gutsy call; certainly hawks have not been keen to make Vietnam analogies most of the time.) Second, they noted that blaming the post-withdrawal violence in Vietnam on the withdrawal ignored the impact US bombing and warfare had on the ravaged societies of Indochina. As Rosa Brooks in the LA Times said, “it's more accurate to attribute their suffering to the prolongation of the war itself, rather than to the U.S. withdrawal as such.”

Both points are valid. The problem is that the blame game doesn’t actually do anything about the violence, it just tells us who’s morally culpable for creating the conditions for it. This might be acceptable when discussing the long gone war in Vietnam, but the withdrawal from Iraq is unfolding right now, and our actions will have dramatic consequences. Whether it was the decision to intervene or the decision to withdraw, the violence of post-US Vietnam happened. And we should expect, or at least prepare for the possibility, that groups will seek to profit through violence in the same way in Iraq. If violence does tick up, it won’t help dead Iraqis’ families to sagely note that it’s all George Bush’s fault. We know that ... go ahead and indict him ... but surely finding a way to minimise the deaths that are yet to happen is the key point.

The fact is that the diminution in violence in Iraq is a product of a highly complex balance of forces, which I certainly don’t fully understand and I’m not sure many other people do, either. Indeed, the prospect of America withdrawing might actually even be both an opportunity for violence for some groups and a reason not to resort to violence for others. Certainly, statements that once the US is gone all the problems of Iraq will vanish are naive, self-serving, and dangerous.

Like it or not, American power plays a central part of this balance of forces. Withdrawing troops is vital for Iraq and for America, but it is guaranteed to have major political consequences, even if we don’t know exactly what they are. It is not a comment on the wisdom or otherwise of withdrawing, and it is not a moral statement about who was to blame for the invasion, to argue that means the administration needs to be exceptionally careful in the way it manages this process. Obama has stated this, and I hope he means it.

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Anyone round here actually volunteer to be a guinea pig?

Even pro-stimulus post-budget reports here in the UK are struggling to ignore quite how astonishingly indebted we have been, we are, and quite how long it'll be before we can pay any of this mountain of debt off. I may well have had my mid-life crisis by the point at which Britain counts as a prudent economy once more.

So, truth or not, it's relieving to hear that at least one smarty-pants has hope for us. The UK stimulus package and the dramatic fall in the value of the pound bode well for our economy, according to Paul Krugman. "Right now I'm actually quite hopeful about Britain," he says.

By my (probably dodgy) calculation, the early stimulus over here combined with our chronic debt situation may well make Britain a perfect test case for the rival economic models of today's left and right. Whichever comes first - national bankruptcy or national recovery - we'll be able to content ourself at least that we're contributing to the stock of general knowledge about macroeconomic policy.

So that's alright then...!

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Numbers

Given that most of us agree that one incident of torture is already one too many, what is it about the introduction of raw data to the narrative of the past eight years that adds such additional grotesquery to the already contemptible behaviour of the Bush administration? (See emptywheel’s notes on the 183 instances of waterboarding on Khalid Sheik Mohammed and 83 instances on Abu Zubaydah.)

The difference between an indeterminate number of waterboardings and 183 times, or 266 times, is palpable and profound. In the first world, we know something bad might have happened, we even know we may be indirectly implicated in it, and we struggle with this. But we are free to conjure our own vision of that bad event in our own way. Perhaps we imagine things that don’t make us too uncomfortable, or we fill in the gaps from images presented to us elsewhere. Since we don’t have a name for the CIA agent who was in charge, we put Jack Bauer in the cell with KSM instead, and he threatens his captive for a couple of minutes, shows him how grim his fury is with some steely stares and B-grade dialogue, and this hardened terrorist cracks just in time for the ad break. Fuzziness in the factual background of an event allows us rely on our imagination, which is often spoilt by the garbage we watch and read and listen to. The torture becomes something less than torture: it becomes an unpleasant act taken for necessary purposes against an obscure and opaque bad guy in a darkened room in a country we can’t find on a map by some people we don’t know or really care about ... even if they are Americans.

The biggest trick played by the supporters of the Bush administration’s policy was to shift the debate over torture from the act itself to the effectiveness of the act, since this allowed us not to deal with the reality of the act being committed and instead just think about the consequences of action versus inaction at an abstract level, as if it wasn't already going on. This left us weighing up an imaginary instance of violence perpetrated by our side against an idea, a promise, of a safer nation. Two unknowns, two possibilities, balanced against each other, and our prejudices and fears free to determine which side we take. But the real equation was never an abstract, half of it was already happening. The equation was torture taking place in our name, balanced against the possibility of a safer future: a crime justified by a hope.

So…

183 cases of waterboarding is not Jack Bauer. An indeterminate number of waterboardings allows enough room for Jack Bauer to sneak in through the side door, but once it becomes 183 the fiction of our fiction becomes clear.

183 cases of waterboarding is repeated psychological and physical torture, torture of a single individual, time and again, day after day, whether they provide useful information that day or not, with no prospect of it ending, with the possibility of death perhaps coming to seem like the only release. It is the sort of morally unconscionable act that can only be committed by sane people in the name of a higher power, a higher power which distracts us from the blood and pain of the real world.

183 cases of waterboarding is weeks and months of fear and trembling.

As emptywheel notes, the repetition may suggest that waterboarding was ineffective. But if you continue to argue the toss, this remains perfectly debatable: all the CIA agents involved need to say is that they got lots of good information from KSM or Zubaydah and the debate continues.

183 makes it a tangible event. We find ourselves with information which has not been mediated by our experience of fiction. We can start to build up a real picture of what was taking place in our name.

And that’s why 183 real incidents of torture matter a great deal more than one unconscionable idea.

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Maureen Dowd: “bla blah bler bleurgh”

Dowd’s Op-Ed piece was as banal and provocative as usual this morning. But it was also self-serving in a particularly aggravating way, another instance of whiney journos complaining about how the Internet is unfairly ruining their profit margins (albeit disguised by a jocular manner intended to show that really she's not angry. No, really.) Google and Craigslist have “hijacked journalism,” Dowd explains. Has Google a right, she asks – as if the phrasing of the question did not make clear Dowd’s view of the answer – “to profit so profligately from newspaper content at a time when journalism is in such jeopardy”?

The message is no different to the moans from music distributors about Napster, or a hundred other ways in which traditional media have been screwed by a distribution mechanism which, at root, reveals how little it is that the traditional media do. (Indeed, it’s really not that far from the self-righteous justifications for bonuses at hedge funds, either. They’re all presuming that the value of their service is absolute and large, and not a function of the market and liable to being superseded.)

Face it, this is sour grapes, not a genuine argument. In a deliberate McLuhanite fudge, these groups are intentionally occluding the difference between the medium and the message. Journalism isn’t in jeopardy, newsprint is. Napster didn’t put music in jeopardy, it just screwed CD retailers and distributors. You can’t defend the print press on the grounds of their commitment to investigative journalism, since investigative journalists are doing pretty well on websites and blogs these days, since virtually none of the investment in the press goes into investigative journalism, and since mainstream investment in investigative journalism has been consistently declining over the past decade as the press dumbed down and put pictures of Angelina Jolie on the front cover in the hope of playing to the audience’s jockstraps.

The real problem is not that everyone can steal content from the New York Times, it’s that with the direct AP wire feed or the corporate press release available at a single click of a button, the Internet has made it possible to see how little genuine editorial work or creativity has gone into most journalistic output. (There are great exceptions, of course, but they are undoubtedly exceptions.) You can even now trace the same sentences moving from press release to wire service to mainstream media. If you think what you do is really so valuable, go ahead and charge for it. And we'll go somewhere else.

And don’t talk to me about opinion. Yes, Maureen, you can come up with opinionated guff on a regular basis. But so can the rest of us: and I and my internet buddies don’t expect a whopping great salary for spouting off the views we so carefully researched down the pub last night. We freely admit their value is largely determined by the community they reside in, and nothing more.

In a sideswipe clearly unrelated to the core argument about stolen earnings, meanwhile Dowd points out that Google is also a “leader in stripping away privacy”. OH MY GOD. I know that the US press isn’t as bad as the British tabloids, but give me a break, will you? The newspaper industry has been at the forefront of pushing back the private sphere for at least two centuries, right back to when it started circulating spurious rumours (that turned out to be true) about Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings. Now the Internet comes along and does it better, and all of a sudden its gripey gripey moaney moan.

Grow up, face the music. The new system provides better value for money than the old one. Information is distributed better. Redundant functionality is replaced. People are freer to express their opinions. Ideas can spread more quickly and effectively. Your old monopoly on the channel of distribution is close to cardiac arrest. And, frankly, no-one in their right mind is going to be sorry to see it go.

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Fiddling while Rome burns

CNN reports that a statue of Ronald Reagan is to be placed at the National Statuary Hall Collection at the US Capitol and unveiled in early June.

Am I the only person who feels statues to Reagan are probably a little inappropriate for today’s capitol? Aside from the corrosive legacy of Reaganomics shattering into pieces as we speak, there’s the small fact of Reagan’s persistent contempt for congress throughout his presidency, most notably expressed through his years-long defiance of congressional bans on providing aid to the Nicaraguan Contras. Not the best timing, guys...

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Inching by millimetres (if that's not a contradiction in terms)

Arguably, the essence of political leadership is knowing just how far you can push.

Obama has obviously concluded that when it comes to Cuba, it's not far. The lightening of restrictions just announced may, as the New York Times puts it, represent "the most significant shift in United States policy toward Cuba in decades," but it is only a marginal change, and it underpins a policy that is predicated on the politics of Florida changing before relations between the US and Cuba resume heading in the right direction. Obama's decision not even to associate himself with this, allowing senior aides to make the announcement, also reveals how politically poisonous this issue can be - especially when the mid-terms start approaching next year.

It may be depressing to see Obama not push for more, but it may also be wise. Ford, Carter, George Bush Sr., and Clinton all suffered in the polls and in the donation boxes from trying to moderate the US line on Cuba. Only Reagan and Bush Jr. have managed to avoid that fate, by taking a hard-line position in both cases. Opening up dialogue through encouraging the exchange of peoples and hoping that a new generation of Cuban-Americans lose the reflexive anti-Castroism of the previous generations is passive but realistic. It suggests that perhaps we should view the US-Cuban dispute less as a case of frosty diplomatic relations, and more as a peace process in a long-standing civil war...? But even here, it might fail. Cuban politics have a nasty habit of running free from even the most conservative plans - witness Clinton's run-in with the Brothers to the Rescue.

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Ok, can we have our money back now?

From the Financial Times:

"US stocks completed their fifth straight week of gains on Thursday after Wells Fargo ignited a market surge by saying it would make record profits for the first quarter of 2009...

"Wells Fargo leapt 31.7 per cent to $19.61 after it more than doubled its expectations for first quarter earnings, with the integration of the recently-purchased Wachovia going more smoothly than expected.

"This came as the banking sector in general received a lift after the New York Times reported that all 19 banks undergoing government “stress tests” were likely to pass, with Federal Reserve officials finding the financial system in better shape than expected.

"Citigroup rose 12.6 per cent to $3.04 on the news, while Bank of America jumped 35.3 per cent to $9.55 and JPMorgan picked up 19.4 per cent to $32.75."

Obviously, I'm sure it's not even necessary to mention this, since it'll be the first thing on the CEOs minds ... ahem ... but does this mean we can have our money back now, please? Oh, what's that you say, Mr. CEO? Aaah, I see, this is different money...

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Justice, democracy, international co-operation

Peru’s Supreme Court today convicted former president Alberto Fujimori to twenty five years in prison for his involvement in a series of human rights abuses during the 1990s. Despite the fact that Fujimori was already serving a six year sentence for other crimes, this amounts to a major victory in the cause of international human rights.

Fujimori came to power in 1990. The country at the time was suffering deeply from runaway inflation and attendant social decomposition caused in large part by the government’s profligacy during the first administration of Alan Garcia (who is currently Peru’s president once again). Fujimori ran against and defeated the famed Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, criticising his rival for being overly supportive of the neoliberal orthodoxy (the ‘Washington Consensus’), but ironically then proceeded to implement an aggressive programme of neoliberal reforms upon taking power, restoring fiscal discipline to a country that had lacked it for so long - but at great cost to the poorest Peruvians, who had to face uncontrolled prices for basic commodities and the dismantling of public infrastructure and dismantling of unions and other community organisations.

In part because of this peculiar political manoeuvring, Fujimori focused on the long-running battle with the Peruvian Maoist insurgency, Sendero Luminoso, as a way of maintaining his image as a man of the people. He looked to extend his presidential power in both the economic and military spheres. This culminated in 1992 with the so-called autogolpe (“self-coup”) in which Fujimori suspended the constitution and purged the apparatus of government – to much popular acclaim, it has to be said, since Congress was notoriously corrupt.

In his decision to seize virtually all state power for himself, Fujimori was defying the general trend in the 1980s and 1990s in the Americas away from authoritarianism, and was undermining democracy in a country that was already struggling to cope with severe problems of economic collapse and endemic corruption. So, in order to legitimate his claims to rise above the constitutional system, he continued to intensify his war on the Sendero Luminoso, using death squads overseen by his notorious head of intelligence, Vladimiro Montesinos. He also orchestrated a massive campaign of surgical sterilisation of indigenous women – as many as 300,000 women were sterilised – which, whilst known as ‘Voluntary Surgical Contraception’ is alleged to have involved a great deal of coercive or forced sterilisation.

By the end of the 1990s, disaffection, not to mention rumours of widespread corruption and graft, were to be heard everywhere in Peru. The loss of faith in Fujimori’s regime culminated in 2000, when it was revealed that Montesinos had made literally hundreds of videos of him bribing various senior politicians and public figures. It seemed that virtually no major power in the country had not been caught up in the webs of corruption coming outwards from the Fujimori apparatus. Montesinos fled the country, and Fujimori’s government fell soon after. Fujimori then jumped ship himself, to Japan.

For a long time, it seemed unlikely that Fujimori would face any consequences for his actions. Like so many criminal leaders, it seemed that a quiet life of exile and decline was ahead. Japan responded unenthusiastically to the efforts of president Alejandro Toledo to have Fujimori sent back. But there were signs that perhaps something might happen. With hindsight, it was extremely important that the OAS and several major Latin American nations were vocal in their opposition to the Fujimori autogolpe in 1992: standing up for democratic norms being something that fellow Latin American nations rarely did in previous decades. Indeed, in the end Fujimori finally came to justice through international co-operation on human rights grounds that centred on exactly these networks of opposition. He travelled to Chile in 2005 in the hope of reorganising his political party and returning to Peru to run once again for the presidency. Instead, the Chilean government – perhaps because it benefited itself from international efforts to bring Pinochet to justice – arrested and extradited Fujimori to Peru to face criminal charges.

Of course, there is a political element here. One can safely assume that the Garcia government is happy to see its successor regime's leader be brought low. But the politics of revenge is far less important than the lesson that, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, it has become possible for former heads of state to be tried and prosecuted for crimes they committed against their own people – and not simply by imperial powers executing victors’ justice (as in Iraq), but also by networks of co-operating nations who share a fundamental commitment to the norms of liberal justice and human rights. In a time of so much international instability, these intermittent signs of law and order actually working properly are to be treasured.

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Oh, what a tangled web we weave

So, if I’m following current diplomatic thinking correctly ...

Overtures to Syria offer the possibility of progress with Israel on the Golan Heights. Progress with Syria offers the possibility of restraining Hamas and Hezbollah, and thus reopening the peace process in Palestine. Detaching Syria from Iran further isolates the latter, which strengthens the US hand in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Controlling proliferation in the Middle East allows for the cancellation of the missile defence shield without alienating East European NATO allies. Cancelling the shield improves relations with Russia, allowing for broader progress on nuclear disarmament and perhaps even the signing of a comprehensive test ban treaty, although North Korea’s missile test is also evidence of the importance of nuclear disarmament – and nuclear disarmament also aids US efforts to reduce the budget deficit without hitting central “military-industrial” lobbyists. By offering the removal of the missile shield as an end goal, Russia is then incentivised to further negotiations with Iran rather than undermine them. Progress with Iran will aid the process of removing US troops from Iraq, which will allow for a greater redeployment of forces in Afghanistan, which will put additional pressure on the Al Qaeda strongholds in the frontier regions of Pakistan, further focusing the Pakistani government on the problem of Islamic fundamentalism rather than its rivalry with India in Kashmir which can then be settled peacefully.

Did I miss anything out? It all sounds so easy when you put it like this...!

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Churchill reinstated

The jury has decided that Ward Churchill was fired on account of his 'roosting chickens' article, not only the basis of academic misconduct and, despite awarding him only $1 in damages, he will presumably now be reinstated, says the LA Times. On this matter, I couldn't agree more with Jonathan Zimmerman's assessment in The Salt Lake Tribune. As I said before, the sloppy history he engaged in could be contained by the academic fraternity, but it did his cause a disservice all the same.

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Mea Culpa

Earlier this week I sneered cynically at the possibility that this could be a significant meeting , and months back I was pretty rude about the G-20.

Today I have to say, I’m eating my hat - or at least part of it. Not so much on the details of the agreement, although first glance makes these seem good in themselves – increased money for the IMF, arms discussions with Russia, action on tax havens – but because of the wholly constructive atmosphere seems to have characterised this summit. For the first time in a long time, possibly ever, we saw a functional meeting of leaders representing over three quarters of the world’s economy - in which all participated, if not as equals then at least as actors. They did so because there was a recognition from the great powers that growth required action alongside the BRIC nations and Saudi Arabia. And they did so because, despite all the talk about the death of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, more than at any point in history there is a basic convergence around the world on the fundamentals of how to manage an economy. The truly enormous changes represented at this summit were not just about the balance of regulation and deregulation, although these are of course profound, they were (a) that the G-20 is really now a group of twenty; and that (b) it is possible for a new concert of great powers to emerge.

This crisis was never just about the risky behaviour of bankers in Wall Street and Fannie Mae overlending, it was also about the imbalance in global trade patterns, fuelled for so long by loose credit, collapsing, and a rebalance in global power finally coming about. This rebalancing took a significant step forwards today. That the solution will be engineered by China and Saudi Arabia as well as Europe and the United States requires a different approach to politics from now on. Money, as they say, talks.

A great deal of this shift can be laid at the door of a single man: Barack Obama. The approach he took to negotiations by all accounts could not have contrasted more profoundly with the hectoring and haranguing that nations around the world had become used to under George W. Bush. That sincere and cosmopolitan leadership in the United States can have such an immediate impact is not only a testament to Obama’s political assets, it’s further proof of what a terrible block on progress his predecessor was.

Fundamentally, Bush concerned himself with what were, for want of a better phrase, imperial politics. His primary concerns were with regions within the informal control of the United States – especially in the Middle East. Obama’s approach seems fundamentally more macro-political than this, closer to Franklin Roosevelt than Woodrow Wilson in its realistic appraisal of the importance of great power in the global game. It’s no coincidence that the great diplomatic coup on the side of this meeting was with Russia; this has been coming for months now.

Continue to expect Obama’s attention to be as fully focused on Russia and China as Afghanistan in the next three years. Indeed, Russia and China (and Iran) may ultimately provide the roadmap to Kabul.

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The ivory tower

In Colorado, a jury is currently deliberating the case of Ward Churchill, the Ethnic Studies professor fired by the University of Colorado (UC) on grounds of serious academic misconduct who subsequently brought a lawsuit against them for wrongful dismissal (see also here).

The chronology in this case is about the only thing that's beyond dispute. After the 9-11 attacks, Churchill wrote a provocative article in which he claimed that the people in the towers were participants in a global capitalist network which oppressed peoples around the world and that, to use a phrase borrowed from Malcolm X, the attacks were thus essentially a case of chickens coming home to roost. As bureaucratic participants who claimed innocence from the larger endeavour in which they participated, those killed in the World Trade Center were essentially a group of ‘little Eichmanns’, he said. This article percolated through the internet for some time, but achieved national interest in February 2005, at which point the usual elements in the national media took up the issue with some alacrity.

A series of complaints were then directed to UC about Churchill. These tended to include the following elements:

• that Churchill’s ideological position was unacceptable in the United States and an abuse of academic freedom;
  
• that Churchill had engaged in deliberate and repeated instances of academic misconduct relating to plagiarism, poor research and intent to deceive; and
  
• that Churchill had misrepresented his ethnicity as Native American in order to cement his credentials

UC then launched an investigation, which unanimously concluded in May 2006 that Churchill had engaged in academic misconduct, though it quite rightly refused to consider the question of Churchill’s ‘roosting chickens’ article or his ethnic background, which were not within its purview. The Standing Committee Report concluded that Churchill had engaged in a “pattern of repeated misrepresentation”, which included “[p]roviding misleading or incorrect citations, bending accounts to fit one’s desired interpretation, or simply making up information ...” Probably most notable amongst the specific claims were:

• allegations made that the US army had intentionally created ‘smallpox blankets’, infected with the disease, for the purpose of distributing amongst Native Americans with the intention of killing them (a claim which Churchill defends on the grounds of Native American oral history); and
• “ghost-writing” an article for another academic and then citing that article in support of a subsequent claim in an article written under his own name (which Churchill defends as acceptable academic practice)

Subsequently, in July 2007, after an 8 to 1 vote, Churchill was fired, at which point he filed a lawsuit claiming wrongful dismissal. Now, the case is approaching an end.

The views on each side are pretty predictable. The right-wing press is using Churchill as a whipping boy for the lack of rigour in the pinko academic world. Defenders of Churchill are claiming the attacks on his scholarship were only cover for the real intention, which was silencing him for his dissenting politics. Since no-one denies that the furore was driven by both his 9-11 essay and doubts about his academic integrity, this polarisation can hardly be surprising.

My view, for the little it’s worth, is based on the fact that few academics worth their salt would not have approached Churchill’s work without a healthy degree of scepticism even before 2001. I have only read a couple of pieces by Churchill – some of his stuff on COINTELPRO and an article on the American Indian Movement. I’m not sufficiently expert in either area to comment extensively on their scholastic foundations, but there was no doubt to me upon immediate reading that Churchill’s work is very ideologically-driven, and essentially stuck in the 1960s, though equally not without merit and certainly thought-provoking. He offered little in terms of the natural cautiousness most academics have beaten into them at grad school, and included few warnings about the inherently risky nature of oral history when he used it (a point raised by non-specialist grad students I discussed one article with during a class a year or so ago); and certainly ghost-writing articles for other academics does not sound like normal academic practice to me. I just found out reading about the case today that Churchill’s qualifications only include an MA in communications theory and no doctorate; I can’t say I’m especially surprised.

That a healthy suspicion of his more outlandish claims was the norm in academia, I have no doubt. Concerns about his academic credentials and suggestions of plagiarism had already circulated in academic venues in the 1990s, and I’m sure than most experts in his field would be well aware of his ideological background. If they weren’t, a brief reading of some of his work (as in my case) is enough to reveal it. In this sense, the academic community was doing its job.

But the case does unfortunately play into a broader debate about intellectualism in American life. The danger of letting informal mechanisms of referencing and scholastic debate alone determine the place of Churchill’s work is that it helps to perpetuate the idea that academia is unable to police itself according to its own standards of rigour: a claim that’s untrue, but not surprising if one considers the perspective of a non-academic outsider given the bare facts about the case. It’s not hard to see how critics of Churchill among the Campus Watch fraternity could argue that it was only when public outrage was brought to bear that the academic world stepped into action to censure Churchill and uncovered these issues of misconduct.

In this sense, Churchill’s dismissal is not so much about purging and purifying the academic world, which was already pretty well able to cope with such challenges (certainly able to approach such questions with more nuance than the media), as it is about academics engaging in contentious public debates. Rightly or wrongly, the University of Colorado concluded that failing to act against Churchill ran the risk of discrediting the entire discipline of Ethnic Studies, and this was a conclusion that only followed from the fact that Churchill had established himself as a radical dissenter over the past few decades.

It’s a shame that such disciplinary mechanisms might occasionally prove necessary, especially when in academic terms it probably wasn't - but perhaps this is the price of leaving the ivory tower? No wonder so many fine academics prefer to debate their work with each other and veer away from the risks of engaging with the public... leaving the role of public intellectual open to iconoclastic, dogmatic, and self-promoting ‘scholars’ - scholars like Churchill.

Sources for more information:

UC’s page on the case

Debate on Chronicle of Higher Education
Wikipedia Entry on Ward Churchill (with some good links)

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Sometimes this stuff just writes itself

Following her whistle stop visit to Miami fashion week, Dayana Mendoza, the Venezuelan Miss Universe travelled on to Guantánamo Bay, which she was pleased to discover was a "relaxing, calm, beautiful place." Amongst other things, she got to meet the military dogs, who "did a very nice demonstration of their skills," got to see the jail, where the inmates shower and take art classes. She even found an "unbelievable" beach. "I didn't want to leave," Mendoza said, "it was such a relaxing place, so calm and beautiful."

Now I realise why so many people still seem to be there. And here's me thinking they actually wanted to leave!

Postscript: The Miss Universe blog on which this was posted has obviously been getting a lot of traffic. They've taken down the original post and put up a much more bland comment about their commitment to USO. "Dayana Mendoza’s comments on her blog were in reference to the hospitality she received while meeting the members of the U.S. military and their families who are stationed in Guantánamo," they hastily clarified.

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