Sunday, June 15, 2008

This week

I’m still torn on whether to write more frequent, shorter entries, or stick to my current methodology of posting rather long, meandering pieces every week or so.

Let me know what you think, by clicking on that “email me” link to your right.

As for this past week, it’s been something of a mish-mash; no major political stories, just revisiting the old ones.

The futility of . . . well, this, for example

I think this Sunday’s Candorville says it best.

I’ve recommended in previous entries to get your news from a variety of places, and to carefully evaluate the reliability and thoughtfulness of the source.

Nowhere is this more true than on the Internet, where the hoi polloi gets bullhorns, all set to the same volume.

Including me.

Now, admittedly, I’m trying (or at least, under the delusion that I’m trying) to provide thoughtful, enlightened entries in favor of what appears to be a political movement on life-support, abandoned long ago by the GOP and largely forgotten by everyone else. But I have, at last count, no more than a half-dozen readers. I may have the same bullhorn as everyone else, but I’m speaking in a calm voice with little in the way of self-promotion.

I’m okay with that. I’d rather be promoted by word-of-mouth anyway. As to whether I am making a positive contribution, I’ll leave that judgment up to you. Just let me know what you think, if you have a moment.

Interrogation, torture, and “the ticking time bomb”

Since this administration began, I’ve experienced an escalating tension. It’s a little like seasickness—you get on a boat thinking, “Well, this won’t get too bad,” but it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse until you’re green, heaving, desperately wishing the ride would end. More and more people are joining you at the gunwales to lean over the side and commit more nutrients to the deep as the captain continues to happily sail into the heart of the storm. Eventually, fully three-quarters of the passengers are hurling, the captain insisted five years ago that we had already reached our destination, officers are jumping ship in droves, and yet a quarter of the passengers are looking at the rocks that the storm is driving the ship into and screaming, “Don’t contradict the captain—he knows what he’s doing!”

For me, this has been a long series of “no, they can’t have done that, it must be just a maverick, just mismanagement” moments only to find out that the administration was indeed much more involved, and in fact, did everything it could to promote the mismanagement. Yes, we had spectacular examples of this—Hurricane Katrina (“heck of a job, Brownie!”), the Iraq War (“mission accomplished!”)—but all of it pales to the suspension of basic human values represented by what is happening in Guantanamo and other dungeons of the Bush Inquisition.

And all of it has been, and continues to be supported, by the GOP senators and representatives who serve as groupies of this administration, and by those fearful and gullible GOP voters and supporters that serve as this administration’s dwindling base.

Those making the case for torture have time and again relied on the “ticking time bomb” scenario—and this has never, never made sense to me. In some ways, it encapsulates the utter stupidity of this administrations’s policy of torture—oh, yes, excuse me, “enhanced interrogation”—because it simply cannot work the way that they would have us suppose. It is so stupid, so monumentally idiotic, that it is hard to adequately describe exactly how stupid it is without resorting to scatological terms. It not only cannot work, but it actively makes things worse.

Eye of the beholder

To understand why it doesn’t work, you’re going to have to take a rather sobering look at the mind of a terrorist.

Terrorism is driven by several fundamental ideas.

• The absolute belief that one is doing the right, just and noble thing.
• The willingness and courage to set aside one’s own survival for what one perceives is the greater goal.
• The willingness to set aside all ethics and compassion for others in accomplishing the greater goal.
• The fortitude to accept whatever happens in the course of accomplishing the greater goal.

These are traits that, depending on whose side you’re on, can appear either noble or treacherous.

Terrorism doesn’t really have a legal definition. “The use of terror, especially as a means of coercion” is about as exact as it gets, but in general, it’s safe to say that our current view of terrorism is defined by the creation of fear or political turmoil through violence upon non-combatants, mostly civilians.

Of course, it’s usually the victors who get to define what terrorism is. Strictly speaking, The Sons of Liberty, the same group behind the Boston Tea Party, were terrorists; several credible accusations of tarring and feathering were made against them. (Far from being a benign punishment, this practice resulted in deep burns, permanent, painful scars, and too often the death of the victim.) They did go after military targets as well—for example, burning the HMS Gaspée in 1772, which sparked a British response that led directly to the American Revolution. But much of their antagonism was directed at civilians: customs officers, the British gentry, tea merchants, and other Loyalist civilians.

For another example, Sherman’s march to the sea during the American Civil War certainly still provokes reactions on both sides of that spectrum; it was certainly instrumental in defeating the Confederacy, but its cost on the civilian population forever besmirched Sherman’s reputation, and continues to affect Southern perceptions to this day.

For another rather more prescient example, we can look to the Philippine-American War (1899–1902), which wound up killing 4,196 American soldiers (only 1,020 combat deaths; the rest from disease), between 16,000 and 20,000 Philippine soldiers, and anywhere between 250,000 and 1,000,000 civilians in that conflict. The tactics used by American troops usually included burning entire villages to the ground, concentration camps (which merely intensified the effects of disease) and torture (specifically “the water cure,” in which the victim is forced to drink huge quantities of water resulting in distention and pain, and then often beaten to produce vomiting in order to continue the torture), but in many cases went beyond that—prisoners were arbitrarily shot, people were needlessly mutilated, and so on.

In some ways, it was a different time—soldiers bragged about the atrocities committed against Filipinos, both soldiers and civilians, in letters home. As more of these reached publication in anti-imperialist newspapers, the War Department began reacting—not to stop the atrocities, but instead to convince the authors of the letters to write a retraction. It got so bad that military commanders considered court-martialling soldiers for speaking the truth, but wound up not doing so as it would simply confirm that systematic atrocities had been committed.

Samuel Clemens (“Mark Twain”), one of our most celebrated American authors, wrote

I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess. Perhaps we could not have avoided it—perhaps it was inevitable that we should come to be fighting the natives of those islands—but I cannot understand it, and have never been able to get at the bottom of the origin of our antagonism to the natives. I thought we should act as their protector—not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now—why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.

In retrospect, he could have easily been writing about the Iraq war.

We would like to think of Americans as being more enlightened now, but as this administration has shown, we haven’t advanced much since we were fighting in the jungles of the Philippines over a hundred years ago.

Of course, in conflicts such as these, the larger force is portrayed as carrying out a “military operation”—the weaker force is usually accused of “underhandedness,” “lack of courage,” “guerilla warfare” and “terrorism.” The underdog in such conflicts often has little choice but to resort to indirect tactics if a significant impact is desired.

Furthermore, any sufficiently motivated person can justify the use of terrorist tactics—whether it’s Timothy McVeigh’s protesting government actions at the David Koresh’s compound in Waco, Texas, or other terrorists who claim to serve God, Allah, their country, their race, the unborn, animals, whatever—justifications for terrorism abound.

“The ticking bomb”

The scenario: The government has uncovered a plot to detonate a large bomb in the nation’s capital by a small organization comprised of members of a foreign nation. The foreigners are citizens of a country that the government invaded some years previously; outraged by what they consider a violation of their sovereign rights, plus atrocities and torture committed against their fellow citizens, plus anger over what they view as a direct assault on their religious values, they have been carrying out a campaign of terrorist attacks, this one at the very heart of the nation. Investigation has revealed that the bomb will be going off on a significant holiday celebrated by the foreign culture, but not where the bomb is. And that holiday is very close now—less than a week away.

The government has captured a high-level operative. Taking no time to consider ethics, they resort to torture to extract detailed information on where the bomb is and how to disarm it. The operative resists as long as he can, then finally gives up the information that they need. Authorities investigate, but find no bomb at the specified location. They come back to the operative, who expresses astonishment. More torture reveals the name of another operative, a government official, who is then taken into custody. Torturing him reveals nothing at first—merely protestations of innocence—but eventually he implicates more government officials who know something of the plot. More people are rounded up, but time is running out. The information they get is conflicted, and while they manage to corroborate some things, it appears that many of the leads they have are false. They return to the first operative, who eventually gives up one more name, but the deadline is nearly up.

	Scenario 1	Scenario 2	Scenario 3
Government:	Extraterrestrial	China	United States
Terrorists:	Earthlings	Americans	Iraqis
Capital:	Homeworld	Beijing	Washington DC
Holiday:	New Year’s Day	Independence Day	Laylat al-Qadr

Scenario 1 could be a decent sequenl to Independence Day, and Scenario 2 could be a decent remake of Red Dawn. Both of those scenarios would probably inspire enthusiasm in this country, and be considered tales of heroism against a superior enemy. Yet we expect Scenario 3 to generate no such enthusiasm among those who this nation has harmed, and find ourselves superciliously angry about such a possibility.

But set that aside for the moment. Take any of the scenarios, and imagine the operative being interrogated. If the operative can just delay long enough, just hold off the authorities until the bomb goes off—mission accomplished. Information cannot be given up too easily, because it wouldn’t be believed. False information then should be given out, preferably implicating people in the enemy government, who would then be brought in and interrogated severely enough to provide even more bad information. When they come back, express astonishment and regret—“It was supposed to have been there! They must have known I’d have been captured. Maybe—there was a secondary target we discussed, maybe it’s there!” More false leads. All the operative has to do is delay, delay, delay until it goes off.

In the eyes of those who celebrated the attacks of 9/11, such operatives are considered patriots and heroes. They are considered courageous—and no matter how repelled you are by such acts, one has to admit that voluntarily sacrificing one’s own life takes some level of courage. (I realize that Bill Maher got savaged when he suggested this, but he was essentially correct.)

Torture cannot trump fanaticism.

This is why the “ticking time bomb” scenario cannot be used as an intelligent justification for torture. Insisting that it is betrays such a fundamental level of stupidity and lack of historical perspective and understanding of the human condition that the overall effect is breathtakingly dim.

Indeed, continuing to justify torture will simply lead to situations where there won’t be a ticking time-bomb at all: it will just get detonated by someone who bears so much anger at this nation for what it has done to his family, or his country, or his faith that he or she no longer cares about their own life, and is willing to sacrifice it to take along thousands or millions of civilians for the ride to oblivion.

Yeah. Don’t you feel safer with this administration’s legacy now?

“Activist judges” and “originalism”

The GOP has long been bashing its broken drum about “activist judges,” and over the past year I’ve been hearing the same from some of my conservative friends. The idea is that judges shouldn’t be making law, they should be enforcing it. While technically true, it also seems to mean that judges shouldn’t make decisions about laws—only that they should be in the business of enforcement.

Antonin Scalia feels the same way, only he seems to lump it all together with his idea of “originalism,” a philosophy which seems to want to embrace the original concepts of the Founding Fathers with regards to the original Constitution.

I’m sorry. Both ideas are utter hogswallop.

Judicial “activism”

Last I checked, the judiciary is one of the three major branches of government that serve as this nations’s network of “checks and balances,” thereby helping to prevent abuse of power. James Madison wrote that these “should not be so far separated as to have no constitutional control over each other,” and indeed, this has been the case since the Supreme Court was formed.

The modern-day GOP wants you to forget all that.

In fact, the judiciary is the only branch which has the power to interpret the law, and also has the power to strike down laws that conflict with the Constitution or some more important law as determined by the court.

This is what allows it to contain abuse by the legislative or executive branches.

This isn’t to say that all judicial “activism” is benign. Susette Kelo, et al. v City of New London, Connecticut, et al., for example, was (in my opinion) a disturbing decision of the Supreme Court regarding eminent domain, and certainly strains the idea of coopting land for the public purpose (in fact, in that case, it was coopted for a private developer). But then, this sort of overreaching is what other branches of government are supposed to check, and in fact, this is exactly what happened: a new bill was introduced, S. 1313, or the “Protection of Homes, Small Businesses, and Private Property Act of 2005.”

That’s how it’s supposed to work: laws are passed, the judiciary interprets and applies them, and if the legislative branch doesn’t like it, they can pass new laws.

Checks and balances. To rip off Martha Stewart: It’s a good thing. Quit freaking out.

Channelling the Founders

Antonin Scalia, on the other hand, is the current standard-bearer of “originalism,” an approach to an interpretation of the Constitution that sounds great at first, but immediately posits problems.

First of all, determining the original intent of the Founders is occasionally problematic when it comes to specific things in the Constitution. For example, that messy clause:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

This was a political compromise. Neither side got what they intended. And in fact, it is well to remember that there were fifty-five separate sets of intentions at the Philadelphia Convention, plus at least two others who were sending their thoughts via letter from Europe (Thomas Jefferson and John Adams). So whose intentions does Scalia intend on channelling? James Madison? Benjamin Franklin? Charles Cotesworth Pinckney?

Inscribed on the Jefferson Memorial is an abridged excerpt from a letter Jefferson wrote to Samuel Kercheval in 1810:

I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the same coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

In other words, Jefferson was advocating a conservative approach to the law, but not a fossilized approach.

A living constitution

There is something wonderful to be said for a living Constitution: We possess the embodiment of a set of principles and ideals that can adapt to enlightenment. Adaptation should never be taken lightly, mind you—it should be carefully considered and debated—but the need for such consideration and debate often originates from the judiciary, just as it can come from the legislative and executive branches, just as it can come from the citizens of this nation.

Conservatism is not immutable—it’s just careful.

So would you all just give it a rest on “activist judges”?

Meet the Press and Russert

Believe it or not, I first heard the news of Tim Russert’s death from Mars.

Well, not precisely. I’ve been following the MarsPhoenix Twitter feed (among a couple of dozen I follow), and that’s where I heard the news first.

I haven’t really watched Meet the Press much since the Roger Mudd and Marvin Kalb period in the mid-’80s. When Chris Wallace took over, I gradually lost interest; I had hoped that he would share the same journalistic standards as his famous father, but was repeatedly disappointed. I tuned in for a few weeks after Garrick Utley was given the moderator chair; Utley is a remarkable journalist but not the most interesting moderator for the program, and I drifted away again. I watched the first few weeks with Russert, but I felt it was a step down from Utley as far as the journalism part went, and only tuned in occasionally.

But Russert did have his moments, most notably when asking for clarification about past occasion when his guest had said or done something controversial. He’d often have video clips; watching his guests squirm was occasionally fun. I never thought of Russert as a stellar journalist, though; too often, he seemed to be willing to interrupt and interject rather than sit back and let his guests get themselves into trouble. But I enjoyed the occasional glimpses into who he was as a person. He was engaging and funny, passionate and full of bluster. And he did have one trait that I really did like—he loathed hypocrisy. He also seemed to have a sense of integrity. He may not have been my favorite journalist, but I still think of him as basically a good guy, and it’s clear that he had a profound effect on many of his colleagues at NBC.

Before he returned from Italy shortly before his death, he had met with the Pope; his passion for Catholicism was well-known, and he must have been immensely gratified by what had become a very fortunate life. I’m glad he had that moment.

I’m not sure if the show will continue; its name was officially changed a few years ago to Meet the Press with Tim Russert. Perhaps he will be the last moderator, and the show itself will have to mutate into something else. That would be a shame. The show has been, at times, one of the more challenging ones for politicians, with a willingness to hold them accountable for their past statements and actions, and Russert has admittedly been responsible for some of those times. Personally, I hope the show continues, and that NBC puts in a lot of thought into who the new moderator will be.

Requiescat in pace, Mr Russert.