Taco Bell and Human Rights

Diana Rozendaal--she's the one on the left--is much too nice to challenge me directly, but because I know both the goodness of her heart and her well-articulated views on animal rights, she challenges me nonetheless (in a good way). Specifically, she challenges the choices I make about food three times a day--sometimes more, if the truth be told. (Perhaps I should make it clear that I don't eat bears.)

Some choices we make about food--steamed or stir-fried, for example--are matters of preference, but, whether we recognize it or not, many of our choices related to food are moral choices. Some even involve human rights rather than animal rights so that even vegetarians (and vegans) are not off the hook. Eric Schlosser makes the point very persuasively in Fast Food Nation. In an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, he demonstrates that our commitments regarding human rights are tied up in some of the choices we make concerning what--and where--we eat. Fortunately (for some fast food junkies), Taco Bell has finally done the right thing for farm workers in Florida.

Honoring John Paul II

Nicholas Kristof writes today of the lip service being paid to the principles espoused by John Paul II:

President Bush and other world leaders are honoring John Paul II in a way that completely misunderstands his message. We pay him no tribute if we lower our flags to half-staff and send a grand presidential delegation to his funeral, when at the same time we avert our eyes as villagers are slaughtered and mutilated in the genocide unfolding in Darfur.

The column recounts some of the atrocities that are still occurring in Darfur and notes, yet again, the need for a security force and not just humanitarian aid.

Kristof is not one to mince words. He concludes, "If there is a lesson from the papacy of John Paul II, it is the power of moral force. The pope didn't command troops, but he deployed principles. And it's hypocritical of us to pretend to honor him by lowering our flags while simultaneously displaying an amoral indifference to genocide."

If you want to honor the memory of John Paul II this week and you don't have the kind of public relations budget the White House has, do what Kristof recommends: Write or call to urge your representatives in Congress to pass the Darfur Accountability Act, introduced at the beginning of March by Democratic Senator John Corzine and Republican Senator Sam Brownback. Perhaps those men and women who recently met at midnight on a Sunday in an effort to save the life of one woman in Florida could be troubled to spend a few minutes during a regularly scheduled session of Congress to try to save tens of thousands of lives in the Sudan. It's worth asking about.

The Bolton Hearings

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will conduct hearings on the nomination of John Bolton to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations on Thursday at 9:30 a.m. Bolton's nomination should be rejected by the Senate for reasons that Suzanne Nossel, who served at the U.N. with Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, condenses for us in a top ten list here.

Kissinger's Angioplasty

I'm a bit slow reporting this news, but the Los Angeles Times noted last week that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger underwent angioplasty in a New York hospital. Angioplasty is a procedure designed to improve blood flow to the heart. Doctors would not say what purpose the surgery served in Kissinger's case.

[Via Arms Control Wonk.]

The Global Oil-Production Peak

James Howard Kunstler details the implications of the global oil-production peak in a new book entitled The Long Emergency. Rolling Stone has an excerpt that is very definitely worth reading if you don't mind having your day ruined. (Of course, if petroleum problems can ruin your day and you already know that oil prices reached another all-time high yesterday, then perhaps you might as well go ahead and read Kunstler's article.)

[Via Matthew Gross.]

John Paul II, 1920-2005

Pope John Paul II has died at the age of 84. There will be many analyses of his papacy in the coming days, but a few points from an international relations perspective are worth noting here.

As a native of Poland, John Paul brought to the Vatican an uncommon combination of qualities. He was finely attuned to the principles of power politics--realism--but, at the same time, strongly convinced of the significance of human rights. These characteristics merged in what might have been the defining feature of the first half of his papacy, his staunch opposition to communism. In Eastern Europe, his anticommunism provided moral support (although little else) for those who were determined to end Soviet domination. In Latin America, however, it caused him to be suspicious of those trying to overthrow right-wing dictatorships. Like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, John Paul seemed far less concerned about authoritarian regimes than about communist dictatorships.

The Catholic Church under John Paul's leadership made common cause with Muslims and evangelical Protestants against all proposals to control population growth or slow the spread of HIV/AIDS that were not based on sexual abstinence alone. Africa, where the Catholic Church experienced its greatest growth during John Paul's papacy, experienced enormous human suffering during the same period due to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. While Catholic teachings on birth control are generally ignored in the United States and Europe, they have generally been accepted, often with disastrous results, by new converts in Africa.

His extensive travels, his efforts to communicate in the local language wherever he went, and his obvious concern for the downtrodden made John Paul II enormously popular among Catholics all over the world. He was not, however, responsible for the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. In fact, it would be closer to the truth (although still hyperbolic) to say that, with the rise of abortion as a wedge issue in American politics, he was responsible for the decline of the Democratic Party in the United States.

Darfur - ICC Update

The U.N. Security Council voted yesterday to refer the situation in Darfur to the International Criminal Court prosecutor. The United States, in a reversal of its previous position on the matter, decided not to block the referral. The U.S. was one of four Security Council members to abstain on the vote.

Human Rights Watch describes the Security Council vote and its significance here. The U.N. News Centre story is here.

The Security Council press release on the vote includes the text of the resolution by which the referral was accomplished and this description of the U.S. representative's explanation of the American abstention:

Following the vote, ANNE WOODS PATTERSON (United States) said her country strongly supported bringing to justice those responsible for the crimes and atrocities that had occurred in Darfur and ending the climate of impunity there. Violators of international humanitarian law and human rights law must be held accountable. Justice must be served in Darfur. By adopting today’s resolution, the international community had established an accountability mechanism for the perpetrators of crimes and atrocities in Darfur. The resolution would refer the situation in Darfur to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for investigation and prosecution.

While the United States believed that a better mechanism would have been a hybrid tribunal in Africa, it was important that the international community spoke with one voice in order to help promote effective accountability. The United States continued to fundamentally object to the view that the Court should be able to exercise jurisdiction over the nationals, including government officials, of States not party to the Rome Statute. Because it did not agree to a Council referral of the situation in Darfur to the Court, her country had abstained on the vote. She decided not to oppose the resolution because of the need for the international community to work together in order to end the climate of impunity in the Sudan, and because the resolution provided protection from investigation or prosecution for United States nationals and members of the armed forces of non-State parties.

The United States was and would be an important contributor to the peacekeeping and related humanitarian efforts in the Sudan, she said. The language providing protection for the United States and other contributing States was precedent-setting, as it clearly acknowledged the concerns of States not party to the Rome Statute and recognized that persons from those States should not be vulnerable to investigation or prosecution by the Court, absent consent by those States or a referral by the Council. In the future, she believed that, absent consent of the State involved, any investigations or prosecutions of nationals of non-party States should come only pursuant to a decision by the Council.

Although her delegation had abstained on the Council referral to the Court, it had not dropped, and indeed continued to maintain, its long-standing and firm objections and concerns regarding the Court, she continued. The Rome Statute was flawed and did not have sufficient protection from the possibility of politicized prosecutions. Non-parties had no obligations in connection with that treaty, unless otherwise decided by the Council, upon which members of the Organization had conferred primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.

She was pleased that the resolution recognized that none of the expenses incurred in connection with the referral would be borne by the United Nations, and that instead such costs would be borne by the parties to the Rome Statute and those that contributed voluntarily. That principle was extremely important. Any effort to retrench on that principle by the United Nations or other organizations to which the United States contributed could result in its withholding funding or taking other action in response.

The Council included, at her country’s request, a provision that exempted persons of non-party States in the Sudan from the ICC prosecution. Persons from countries not party who were supporting the United Nations’ or African Union’s efforts should not be placed in jeopardy. The resolution provided clear protection for United States persons. No United States person supporting operations in the Sudan would be subject to investigation or prosecution because of this resolution. That did not mean that there would be immunity for American citizens that acted in violation of the law. The United States would continue to discipline its own people when appropriate.

A Military Perspective on Prisoner Abuse

The abuse, including torture and murder, of prisoners in U.S. custody is still not getting the attention it requires. In a column aptly titled "We Can't Remain Silent," Bob Herbert writes about the responses of two retired officers, Rear Admiral John Hutson and Brigadier General James Cullen, to the scandal. To put it briefly, both are supporting the lawsuit filed against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld by Human Rights First and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Herbert correctly notes that, in the absence of a serious high-level investigation of prisoner abuse, the problem is likely to get worse rather than better.

A report released this week by Human Rights First said that the number of detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan has grown to more than 11,000, and that the level of secrecy surrounding American detention operations has intensified.

Burgeoning detainee populations and increased secrecy are primary ingredients for more, not less, prisoner abuse.

What needs to happen next? How about the appointment of a special counsel to investigate torture by Americans in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo, and elsewhere?

The Iron Curtain

No, this is not a post about the Cold War or about communism. On the contrary, it's about my recent sleep patterns and the inadequacy of the existing curtains in my bedroom.

Lately I've been waking up each morning--Saturdays and Sundays included--at the precise moment--6:08 today--that the sun rises over the ridgeline and shines through my thin curtains and equally thin eyelids. It's not a huge problem--I'd have to get up soon after that anyway most mornings and there is, after all, something virtuous about being up with the sun--but certainly on Saturdays it would be nice to be able to sleep a little later. So, I've been wondering where I could get a piece of the Iron Curtain to replace my flimsy cotton (or polyester or rayon or who knows what) curtains.

What does this have to do with international relations (besides being the pretext for a very lame joke related to the Cold War)? Daylight saving time arrives this Sunday morning to give me an extra hour before the sun shines in my eyes each morning and, more importantly, to give us all an extra hour in the evening to watch baseball, cook out on the grill, read by natural light, and watch more baseball. What, I ask again, does this have to do with international relations?

Daylight saving time saves energy. As a nation, we turn on our lights (and our TVs and other appliances) later each evening and we engage in more outdoor activities that burn body fat rather than fossil fuels. And Americans aren't the only ones. Europeans push their clocks forward a week earlier each year than we do here in the United States.

In today's New York Times, David Prerau argues on the basis of data demonstrating that more evening daylight saves both energy and lives (because traffic accidents and crime are reduced) that we should extend daylight saving time by at least another week or two. I'm all for it--unless it turns out I can get me a piece of that Iron Curtain real cheap.

Global Dimming

It appears that we're not as bright as we used to be. I don't mean that we're getting dumber, although that's certainly possible (and it would explain how you-know-who ended up in the White House). The world is simply not receiving as much sunlight as it used to and this "global dimming" may be temporarily mitigating the effects of global warming. This, at least, is the contention of climatologists whose studies were presented on the BBC science program Horizon. (The transcript of the program is available here.)

According to Dr. David Travis, an American climatologist, when air travel was suspended in the United States for three days after 9/11, the temperature range across the country increased one degree centigrade. In climate terms, this was a surprisingly large and sudden increase. Dr. Travis attributes the increase to the rapid decrease in the amount of water vapor (contrails) deposited by aircraft into the atmosphere.

What is the relationship between global dimming and global warming? Dr. Peter Cox addresses this question in the BBC program:

We've got two competing effects really, . . . the greenhouse effect, which has tended to warm up the climate. But then we've got this other effect that's much stronger than we thought, which is a cooling effect that comes from particles in the atmosphere. And they're competing with one another. And we know the climate's moved to a warmer state by about 0.6 of a degree over the last hundred years. So the whole thing's moved this way. If it turns out that the cooling is stronger than we thought then the warming also is a lot stronger than we thought, and that means the climate's more sensitive to carbon dioxide than we originally thought, and it means our models may be under sensitive to carbon dioxide.

In other words, we may be underestimating the true impact of global warming because of global dimming's cooling effect. If you're thinking this means we don't have to worry about global warming, then perhaps we should discuss the possibility that we're not as bright as we used to be.

(Via Kevin Drum.)

The Benefits of Higher Gasoline Prices

As the price of the higher grades of gasoline at service stations in Malibu pushes up against the $3.00 barrier, it's difficult to think that even higher prices might be desirable. Nonetheless, that's the argument that Michael Mandelbaum of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies makes in Newsday.

Several points are worth noting about Mandelbaum's case for higher gasoline prices. First, it is an argument that has been made many times before. In fact, it forms an important part of the conclusion in Michael T. Klare's recent book entitled Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum.

Second, higher gasoline prices might not be necessary if the government were willing to impose conservation measures by other means. Higher corporate fuel economy standards, luxury taxes on gas-guzzling vehicles such as the Hummer and the Escalade, the end of tax credits for "farm vehicles" driven by people who have never set foot on a farm, and so on would all encourage conservation, which is the purpose of Mandelbaum's proposal to raise gasoline prices.

Third, gasoline prices have increased--and will continue to increase--even in the absence of the policies that Mandelbaum and others advocate. Market-driven increases, however, will put more money in the pockets of OPEC members and the oil companies while gasoline taxes would insure that higher prices would result in more money being available for socially beneficial purposes.

Mandelbaum's argument is certainly one that deserves to be debated in the United States. Chances are, though, that it won't be.

Murdering Prisoners with Impunity

Tomorrow's New York Times reports that the Army will not prosecute seventeen soldiers believed to be responsible for the deaths of three prisoners. Army investigators had recommended prosecution. This decision leaves twenty-one soldiers facing possible prosecution for the deaths of twenty-eight prisoners under American custody in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Romero's Legacy

It was twenty-five years ago this week that Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated while saying mass in the chapel of a hospital in San Salvador. More than a decade of political repression and civil war would pass in El Salvador before anything close to the kind of social change that Romero advocated would occur, but, during the bleak decade of the 1980s, his memory inspired not only Salvadorans but oppressed peoples throughout Latin America.

Many people today regard Romero as the patron saint of the struggle for human rights, even if he has not been officially canonized. In 1998, a statue of Romero, along with those of nine other twentieth-century martyrs (including Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer), was added to the front of Westminster Abbey.

For more on Romero and his legacy, see this article by Richard Higgins in yesterday's Boston Globe.

Murdering Prisoners

Please read Thomas Friedman's column in the New York Times today. He is, justifiably, outraged by the deaths of at least twenty-six prisoners in American custody, apparently due to torture. He writes:

Yes, I know war is hell and ugliness abounds in every corner. I also understand that in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, we are up against a vicious enemy, which, if it had the power, would do great harm to our country. You do not deal with such people with kid gloves. But killing prisoners of war, presumably in the act of torture, is an inexcusable outrage. The fact that Congress has just shrugged this off, and no senior official or officer has been fired, is a travesty. This administration is for "ownership" of everything except responsibility.

It is time for the "culture of life" coalition that brought Congress into session on Palm Sunday to legislate on behalf of Terri Schiavo to address the matter of torturing prisoners to death. Distinctions between the guilty and the innocent, often noted when the subject is the death penalty, are irrelevant here. None of those prisoners killed has been found guilty of anything other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Apparently when President Bush said yesterday that government "must err on the side of life," he intended to exempt the hundreds of Muslim men who have been swept up by the American military since 2001.

Killing prisoners has been regarded as murder for centuries. In the confusion of battle at Agincourt, King Henry V ordered the killing of French prisoners merely as an expedient. Shakespeare makes the order a matter of reprisal after the French killing of the English boys attending the camp, but still condemns it. Gower, in Henry V, Act IV, Scene vii, says,

'Tis certain there's not a boy left alive; and the cowardly rascals that ran from the battle ha' done this slaughter: besides, they have burned and carried away all that was in the king's tent; wherefore the king, most worthily, hath caused every soldier to cut his prisoner's throat. O, 'tis a gallant king!

We are to understand the commentary as ironic. "O, 'tis a gallant king!" is uttered with a sneer by every Gower who understands his role. Neither Shakespeare nor Holinshed, the chronicler on whom he relied for his material, considered the killing of prisoners to be justifiable.

It is no more justifiable today.

Reforming the Commission on Human Rights

On Monday, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan released his plan (entitled In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All) for reforming the United Nations as the Organization approaches its sixtieth anniversary. Reform of the Security Council has, rightly, attracted the most attention in the press (see the links here), but the proposal for an enhanced Human Rights Council may be equally important.

As the following statement from the report (paragraph 183) makes clear, the Secretary-General has chosen not to suggest a specific institutional form for the proposed Human Rights Council. The report states:

If the United Nations is to meet the expectations of men and women everywhere--and indeed, if the Organization is to take the cause of human rights as seriously as those of security and development--then Member States should agree to replace the Commission on Human Rights with a smaller standing Human Rights Council. Member States would need to decide if they want the Human Rights Council to be a principal organ of the United Nations or a subsidiary body of the General Assembly, but in either case its members would be elected directly by the General Assembly by a two-thirds majority of members present and voting. The creation of the Council would accord human rights a more authoritative position, corresponding to the primacy of human rights in the Charter of the United Nations. Member States should determine the composition of the Council and the term of office of its members. Those elected to the Council should undertake to abide by the highest human rights standards.

It is clear from paragraphs 165 and 166, however, that the Secretary-General would prefer to see a strong, independent Human Rights Council occupying a position roughly equivalent in stature to the Security Council and the Economic and Social Council. The report speaks of a need "to restore the balance" that was originally designed to exist among the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, and the Trusteeship Council, "with three Councils covering respectively, (a) international peace and security, (b) economic and social issues, and (c) human rights." Replacing the Trusteeship Council with a body focused on international justice requires, according to the report, "a far-reaching overhaul and upgrading of our existing human rights machinery."

The Secretary-General is asking for action on his proposals in September of this year. In the next six months, it is imperative that human rights NGOs and other civil society groups examine carefully proposals for a Human Rights Council and then work to generate public support for their preferred plan. Reform of the U.N.'s human rights machinery has the potential to move enforcement of international human rights law to the next step, but not if the Bush Administration is able to take the same approach to a new Human Rights Council that it has taken with the International Criminal Court. Surveys consistently show that the American people approve of the U.N. and international efforts to promote human rights. That support will have to be translated into political pressure between now and September.

ANWR

This past week, the Senate--by a 51-49 vote--defeated an effort to remove from the budget bill a provision that will permit drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. That act of folly calls to mind these words from a recent essay by the poet, novelist, and essayist Wendell Berry:

We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all—by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians—be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.

["Compromise, Hell!" Orion, November/December 2004]

Reforming the United Nations

Tomorrow, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan will present to the General Assembly a series of proposals for reforming the United Nations. The proposals, drawn primarily from last November's Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, include two different options for expanding the Security Council, reform of the Human Rights Commission, and the establishment of a new Peacebuilding Commission. The recommendations to be presented are also said to draw from the Task Force Reports of the Millennium Project, a U.N. initiative aimed at reducing global poverty.

On Friday, the Secretary-General's spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said that "the elements of the Monday report are viewed as a package deal, with something to offer to everyone." U.N. member states will be asked "to accept it as a package" when the report, entitled "In Larger Freedom," is taken up at the General Assembly Summit in September. Whether the United States, with its bull-in-a-china-shop approach to the U.N., will be willing to accept the complete package remains to be seen. Certainly the element relating to the Human Rights Commission is specifically designed to address American criticisms, but adding additional permanent states to the Security Council--states such as Germany, Japan, India, and Brazil--even without veto power is unlikely to please the Bush Administration.

For more on the proposals, see yesterday's frontpage Los Angeles Times story or the story in today's New York Times. Links to the Secretary-General's report will likely be available through this site tomorrow.

Mark Fiore on Darfur

Genocide is not an easy subject for a political cartoonist to address. Mark Fiore, however, is one of the best. Here, in one of his animated cartoons, he takes on the situation in Darfur.

George F. Kennan (1904-2005)

America's most influential diplomat of the twentieth century, George F. Kennan, has died at his home in Princeton, N.J. at the age of 101. Kennan is best remembered as the author of the "Long Telegram" and the Mr. X article, an essay in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs entitled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." These two documents were instrumental in establishing the intellectual foundations of the American policy of containment.

Here's the obituary in the New York Times.

Film Watch

Currently in limited release is Gunner Palace, a documentary that depicts two months with the Army's 2/3 Field Artillery unit deployed in Baghdad.

Premiering Saturday (March 19) on HBO is another film about the Rwandan genocide, Sometimes in April. Although fictional, this movie is said to use dialogue taken from the transcripts of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

Privately Funded Humanitarian Intervention

A group of Swarthmore College students led by Mark Hanis and Andrew Sniderman has begun raising funds to purchase supplies for the African Union's peacekeeping mission in Darfur. Why? To end the genocide. Isn't this something the governments of the world are supposed to do? Of course. But they're not. And so those who believe that the international community has an obligation to take action against genocide are forced to sell raffle tickets and hold bake sales to buy walkie-talkies and flak jackets for peacekeepers.

A couple of months ago, Sniderman explained an important part of what the Genocide Intervention Fund (GIF) is all about in an op-ed published in Swarthmore's campus newspaper:

To be sure, private citizens cannot provide the requisite financing to field an entire peacekeeping mission. That is why the GIF hopes to leverage its financial contributions into a powerful lobbying tool to pressure governments to pursue a comprehensive action plan to end the genocide in Darfur. The GIF seeks to strengthen and catalyze government and U.N. action, not replace it.

There are, of course, many problems inherent in private funding of military operations as this recent comment in the Boston Globe points out. Nonetheless, this effort is primarily about "naming and shaming." The Genocide Intervention Fund seeks to make people aware of what Sudan's government is doing and what our government is not doing.

11 M

One year ago today, on a day now remembered as "11 M," Spain suffered its worst terrorist attack in history as 191 people were killed in a series of bomb explosions on trains during the morning commute. The Spanish newspaper ABC provides a series of images from today's commemoration.

Tokyo, March 1945

Exactly sixty years ago, on the night of March 9-10, 1945, the United States conducted a bombing raid that reduced Tokyo to a smoldering ruin. Using incendiary bombs in a deliberate attempt to generate a firestorm in a city filled with wooden buildings, the raid by 334 B-29 bombers resulted in the deaths of 100,000 people and left 500,000 homeless. One of the American pilots reported being able to smell burning flesh while flying over the city at an altitude of 5,000 feet.

Over the next five months--culminating in the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945--the U.S. killed half a million Japanese--mostly civilians--in bombing raids on seventy cities. General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the campaign, later said, "If we had lost the war, we would have been tried as war criminals."

More Unilateralism

The United States is withdrawing from a protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations that grants the International Court of Justice jurisdiction over disputes arising under the Convention after having lost a case brought by Mexico involving 51 Mexican nationals on death rows in the U.S. The details are here.

Bull in a China Shop

On Monday, President Bush nominated John R. Bolton to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Just a few weeks ago, Bolton's ouster from his position as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security was being viewed as a sign that the neo-cons would have less influence in the second Bush Administration. Throughout his career, Bolton has repeatedly expressed nothing but contempt for the U.N. and its work. As I noted in a comment on a previous post, he was the one who wrecked the U.N.'s effort in 2001 to regulate the international trade in small arms and light weapons (SALW).

The Guardian stated, "European hopes that the Bush administration would bring a more multilateral approach to its foreign policy were dealt a blow yesterday with the nomination of an outspoken hawk as America's ambassador to the UN." It also noted that Bolton said in a public address eleven years ago, "The secretariat building in New York has 38 storeys. If it lost 10 storeys, it wouldn't make a bit of difference." According to the BBC, Bolton "has in the past been quoted as saying there is no such thing as the United Nations."

Bolton has been implacably hostile toward the International Criminal Court. In the Winter 2001 issue of Law and Contemporary Problems, Bolton wrote, "America's posture toward the ICC should be 'Three Noes': no financial support, directly or indirectly; no cooperation; and no further negotiations with other governments to 'improve' the ICC. Such a policy cannot entirely eliminate the risks posed by the ICC, but it can go a long way in that direction." He reportedly asked to be permitted to sign the letter "unsigning" the Rome Statute for the ICC in May 2001 and said that doing so was "the happiest moment of my government service."

Finally, here's Bolton's view of the Security Council: “If I were doing the Security Council today, I’d have one permanent member because that’s the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world.”

Clearly, John Bolton perfectly embodies this administration's values. As Press Secretary Scott McClellan said on Monday, “The person that he has selected to nominate to the position of Ambassador to the United Nations is someone that shares the President’s strong commitment to making sure that multilateral organizations are effective.” Okay.

International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day. This would be a good time to recall that

• 600,000 women per year--one every minute of every day--die of causes (mostly preventable) related to pregnancy;
• three-fourths of the world's refugees and internally displaced persons are women;
• 70 percent of the world's illiterates are women;
• women produce 80 percent of the world's food while receiving under 10 percent of the world's agricultural assistance; and
• the United States has still not ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

ICTY Update

Another high-ranking official--the sixth since October--has decided to surrender himself to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to face war crimes charges. This time it is Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj of Kosovo. During the 1998-99 war in Kosovo, Haradinaj commanded Kosovar guerrillas. He is alleged to have ordered the killing of Serbian civilians and Albanian "collaborators" during the Kosovo conflict.

Why are so many officials now deciding to turn themselves over to the ICTY? Kosovo is seeking independence from Serbia and needs international support for its efforts. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the secretary general of NATO, said that "Kosovo is entering a crucial period during which it will be judged on its progress meeting the standards set by the international community. Cooperation with the tribunal is one of those standards." Elsewhere, leaders in Serbia and Bosnia are anticipating their countries' efforts to join the European Union, efforts that will also require "meeting the standards set by the international community."

It would be difficult to find a better example of what Joseph Nye calls "soft power."

Da Nang, 1965

Forty years ago today, 3,500 Marines went ashore at Da Nang in South Vietnam. By the end of the year, there would be over 180,000 U.S. troops in South Vietnam.

The deployment in Da Nang, the first insertion of American combat troops into the country, came in response to a request by Gen. William C. Westmoreland, commander of the U.S. Military Assistance Command in South Vietnam. Up to this point, Americans in Vietnam were involved principally in training the South Vietnamese Army. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution adopted by Congress the previous summer had opened the way for more extensive U.S. involvement in the war.

By the time South Vietnam's capital Saigon fell in 1975, a total of 58,209 American troops had been killed in Indochina.

U.S. Marine, Da Nang, March 1965

Hans Bethe (1906-2005)

Hans Bethe, one of the twentieth century's greatest theoretical physicists and most articulate peace activists, died today at the age of 98 at his home in Ithaca, N.Y. A key figure in the Manhattan Project, Bethe later worked tirelessly to try to reduce the threat posed by nuclear weapons. In 1967, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for his theoretical work explaining the process that fuels the Sun and other stars.

Born in Strasbourg in 1906, Bethe studied in Frankfurt and Munich as a young man. In 1932, he joined the faculty at the University of Tubingen. When Hitler's government adopted a civil service law banning Jews from teaching and other government jobs, Bethe, whose mother was Jewish, was dismissed. In 1935, Bethe joined many of Central Europe's greatest scientists by leaving Europe for the safer shores of the United States. He joined the faculty of Cornell University where he would teach for six decades.

When theoretical physicists suggested, in 1938, that it might be possible to develop an atomic bomb, Bethe and many other physicists trained in Central Europe worried that the Nazis might be moving forward on such a project owing to Germany's ascendancy in the field of theoretical physics. J. Robert Oppenheimer was asked by the United States Government to establish a project to develop an atomic bomb and, in 1943, Oppie appointed Bethe to be the head of the theoretical division at Los Alamos where the Manhattan Project was headquartered. Bethe, like many other scientists, overcame his opposition to war and his objections to the development of nuclear weapons because he feared what might happen if Hitler won the race to develop an atomic bomb.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bethe concluded that nuclear weapons had to be controlled. He spent much of his time after World War II trying to convince policy makers that the arms race had to be stopped.

In 1995, Bethe headed up the Atomic Scientists Appeal, which called upon "all scientists in all countries to case and desist from work creating, developing, improving, and manufacturing further nuclear weapons--and, for that matter, other weapons of potential mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons."

The Strange Case of Giuliana Sgrena

Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena is back in Italy after having been taken hostage, released, and then fired on by American troops on her way to the Baghdad airport. The Italian secret service agent who negotiated her release, Nicola Calipari, was killed by the Americans. According to Sgrena, the man who rescued her died in her arms.

The editor of Sgrena's paper, Il Manifesto, wrote today:

Pochi minuti, tanto è durata la nostra gioia. Il tempo che passa tra una telefonata e l'altra: quella che ci annuncia la liberazione di Giuliana e quella che ci precipita nell'assassinio della persona che più di ogni altra ha lavorato per liberarla.

[A few minutes--that's how long our joy lasted. The time that passes between one phone call and another: one that told us of Giuliana's freedom and another that was occasioned by the assassination of the person who, more than any other, had worked to free her.]

Sgrena, whose reporting had been consistently critical of the American military's action in Iraq, insisted that the assault on the car in which she was riding was completely unprovoked. American sources say that the car was approaching a checkpoint very fast and ignored signals to slow down. But how likely is it that Italian secret service operatives would ignore signals to slow down when approaching heavily armed American troops in Baghdad?

Here, according to the Observer, is the Italian version of events:

Sgrena told colleagues the vehicle was not travelling fast and had already passed several checkpoints on its way to the airport. The Americans shone a flashlight at the car and then fired between 300 and 400 bullets at it from an armoured vehicle. Rather than calling immediately for assistance for the wounded Italians, the soldiers' first move was to confiscate their weapons and mobile phones and they were prevented from resuming contact with Rome for more than an hour.

I do not want to believe it, but I fear there may be more to this story than we will ever see in the American press, nothwithstanding President Bush's promise to the Italians of a full investigation.

Two Views of Democracy

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

"I understand democracy as something that gives the weak the same chance as the strong."

Albert Camus:

"Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority."

International Law and the U.S. Supreme Court

The last section of the majority opinion (written by Justice Anthony Kennedy) in the case of Roper v. Simmons (No. 03-633), which finds the imposition of the death penalty on juveniles to be unconstitutional, refers to international norms and their relavance to constitutional issues in the United States. (For more on this case, go here.) Here are portions of that section of the opinion:

Our determination finds confirmation in the stark reality that the United States is the only country in the world that continues to give official sanction to the juvenile death penalty. This reality does not become controlling, for the task of interpreting the Eighth Amendment remains our responsibility. Yet at least from the time of the Court's decision in Trop [v. Dulles (1958)] the Court has referred to the laws of other countries and to international authorities as instructive for its interpretation of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishments."

* * *

Respondent and his amici have submitted, and petitioner does not contest, that only seven countries other than the United States have executed juvenile offenders since 1990: Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and China. Since then each of these countries has either abolished capital punishment for juveniles or made public disavowal of the practice. . . . In sum, it is fair to say that the United States now stands alone in a world that has turned its face against the juvenile death penalty.

* * *

The document sets forth, and rests upon, innovative principles original to the American experience, such as federalism; a proven balance in political mechanisms through separation of powers; specific guarantees for the accused in criminal cases; and broad provisions to secure individual freedom and preserve human dignity. These doctrines and guarantees are central to the American experience and remain essential to our present-day self-definition and national identity. Not the least of the reasons we honor the Constitution, then, is because we know it to be our own. It does not lessen our fidelity to the Constitution or our pride in its origins to acknowledge that the express affirmation of certain fundamental rights by other nations and peoples simply underscores the centrality of those same rights within our own heritage of freedom.

Justice Scalia, in a scathing dissent, sneers at the values of the "so-called international community." While Scalia's dissent is based generally on his abhorrence of what he perceives to be judicial activism, from a foreign policy perspective it is clear that there is something else at play here. Is there an international community with norms that ought to influence, if not bind, its members and, if so, is the United States a part of that community? Increasingly, we will see debates over this question played out in both foreign policy and domestic policy. Should the United States get the approval of the U.N. Security Council to go to war in Iraq, or should we act unilaterally? Should we ratify the ICESCR, CEDAW, the CRC, and the Rome Statute, or should we preserve our freedom to act according to our own standards of law and morality? Should our fiscal policies take into account the needs of the global economy, or is it each president's responsibility to act on the basis of American welfare alone (and can the two be separated)? Over and over again, people like Justice Scalia cling to a world that is disappearing. There is an international community and we ignore it at our own peril.

1500

This brings the total number of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq to 1,500.

March 2, 1836

On this date in 1836, the Republic of Texas declared its independence from Mexico with much lofty rhetoric (covering baser motives) in a meeting held at Washington-on-the-Brazos. Four days later, the Alamo fell, but Santa Ana's hubris (and Sam Houston's army) caught up with him at San Jacinto six weeks later and, on April 21, independence was actually secured.

To Texans (except for the nuts issuing Texas passports in Overton) and non-Texans alike, I'd recommend spending a little time today putting your boots up, opening up a Shiner, and listening to Lyle Lovett (maybe the Live in Texas--read as an imperative--album and especially "You're Not from Texas [But Texas Wants You Anyway]"). If you happen to be in Austin, stop by Iron Works Barbecue, order the brisket plate, and think of me.

Perhaps, having just identified myself pretty closely with Texas nationalism, this is not a good time to mention this, but to those who find Texans a little hard to take, consider this: That's pretty much how people in the rest of the world feel about Americans. Texans, in fact, are just Americans on steroids. The point, I think, is well made by comparing the Texas Declaration of Independence to the Declaration of Independence of the United States. And if you need a further clue to the character of Texans--and Americans--note that the man whose name became synonymous with dissent--Samuel A. Maverick--was among the signers of the Declaration back on March 2, 1836.

Glacial Progress on Human Rights

In 1992, the United States ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Article 6, Section 5 of the ICCPR states, "Sentence of death shall not be imposed for crimes committed by persons below eighteen years of age and shall not be carried out on pregnant women." Today the Supreme Court brought the United States into conformity with this provision of international human rights law by ruling, in a 5-4 decision, that the use of the death penalty for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds violates the Eighth Amendment. (Those under sixteen were exempted in a 1988 Supreme Court decision from the imposition of the death penalty.) The Court's ruling sets aside the death penalty in approximately seventy cases nationwide.

How did the United States manage to evade this provision of international human rights law for so long? In 1992, when the Senate gave its advice and consent to the ratification of the ICCPR, it attached a number of reservations, understandings, and declarations (RUDs). One of the reservations stated, "[T]he United States reserves the right, subject to its Constitutional constraints, to impose capital punishment on any person (other than a pregnant woman) duly convicted under existing or future laws permitting the imposition of capital punishment, including such punishment for crimes committed by persons below eighteen years of age." This reservation was an embarrassment to the United States at the time of the ICCPR's ratification. The Supreme Court has performed a noteworthy service by making it moot.

One has to wonder why the United States Senate can't simply have more respect for international human rights norms rather than assuming that if we do it here (at least in a few states), it can't be wrong.

The Soldier's Heart

PBS aired an excellent documentary tonight on the subject of psychological problems affecting soldiers returning from Iraq. "The Soldier's Heart," on Frontline, will be available for viewing on the PBS web site beginning on Friday. Meanwhile, the site associated with the show presents a number of interviews and other materials related to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other combat-related psychological problems. Among the findings related on the program (and in documents provided on the web site) is this one: An Army study has found that one in six soldiers returning from Iraq suffers from PTSD, anxiety, or depression.

A bonus on the web site is a selection of war poetry and prose. Especially worth noting (I think) is British poet Wilfrid Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" from World War I.

Invisible Children

To those of you who have seen Invisible Children, I would be very interested in seeing your comments. To those of you who haven't seen it, find a showing somewhere and see it. It is a very powerful film. (At least go to the web site and find out what it's about.)

Why is it so difficult to get Americans to care about Africans?

Peter Benenson (1921-2005)

Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty International, died Friday in Oxford, England at the age of 83.

It is a story of the sort that warms my heart because it is the story of one person fearlessly taking action against great injustices: In 1961, on reading of two students who had been jailed in Portugal for drinking a toast to liberty, Benenson wrote an essay for the Observer (London) suggesting that ordinary people turn their outrage over prisoners of conscience worldwide into action by writing letters of protest to the governments that were imprisoning, torturing, and executing people for their beliefs. What began as a one-year campaign turned into a global movement that evolved into the world's largest and most respected human rights organization.

Not only did Benenson demonstrate by his own actions the power of one person to change the world, he did it with humility. Consider this from the AI tribute to him:

Inordinately modest and self-effacing, the one-time lawyer who launched Amnesty International in 1961 would never claim credit for the sea-change of the last 40 years. He was offered knighthoods by almost every successive British Prime Minister but he never accepted.

Each Prime Minister who wrote to him received a personal response from Benenson--who typed his own letters until late in life--in which he would cite the current human rights violations Amnesty was confronting in the UK. He would suggest, without mincing his words, that if the government wished to take account of his work for human rights, what mattered was to redress those abuses.

Here, from the Observer, is an obituary. The obituary from the New York Times is here. Read, and be inspired to act.

Seeking Security in an Insecure World

That's the title of the book I've been working on with my colleague Dan Caldwell. The manuscript was sent off to our editor at Rowman and Littlefield today. We'll be eagerly awaiting her feedback concerning the publication schedule.

Now back to blogging! (Note to my students: Yes. Now I'll get those papers graded.)

Another Update

This is bad. I keep checking my blog to see if I'm finished editing the book. Apparently I'm not.

[Call me paranoid, but I'd like to emphasize here that I'm kidding. This post should not be construed as suggesting that (1) I'm waiting for someone else to finish the book or (2) I haven't been working my tail off lately.]

An Update on the Book

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.

--Winston Churchill

We're about to fling the monster out to the public. That's why I haven't been blogging lately. I'm determined not to blog until the monster is gone--tomorrow! (Maybe)

España dice sí

Voters in Spain have approved the new Constitution of the European Union. Turnout was a disappointing 42 percent (the lowest figure in any Spanish election since the dictatorship under Franco ended in 1975), but 77 percent of those casting votes voted in favor of the Constitution. (Of the remaining votes, 17 percent opposed the Constitution and 6 percent submitted blank ballots.)

Ignoring Genocide

In 1994, the United States evaded its obligations under the Genocide Convention by assiduously avoiding the use of the term "genocide" in reference to the violence in Rwanda. Today, the United States is evading its obligations by using the term "genocide" in reference to the situation in Darfur while ignoring the legal (and moral) implications of that determination. The difference says something important, I think, about the difference between Clinton and Bush's attitudes toward international law (although neither is commendable in these instances), but there is a more important point, expressed best as a question, that transcends partisan differences: How many different ways can the United States Government find to ignore genocide in Africa?

Spain's Referendum

On October 29, 2004, the heads of state or government of the 25 member states of the European Union signed the Treaty establishing the Constitution for Europe. All 25 states must ratify the Constitution by October 29, 2006 for it to enter into force. Three states--Hungary, Lithuania, and Slovenia--have already ratified by means of parliamentary votes. Tomorrow Spain will become the first EU member state to hold a referendum on the Treaty.

Stay tuned for the result.

Jefferson on Patience

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt. . . . If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

--Thomas Jefferson (on the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts [1798])

[via Dissent, Winter 2005, p. 100]

Syria: Friend or Foe?

Earlier this week, the United States withdrew its ambassador to Syria to protest the Syrians' alleged involvement in the assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister. In today's New York Times, however, Bob Herbert makes an excellent point. This is the same Syrian regime to which the United States Government delivered Maher Arar for torture. Is it really possible that the United States is condemning the behavior of a government that, when convenient, it employs precisely because of its lack of scruples? And that there's no demand from Congress (or from the public) for accountability?

Historically, the executive branch of the United States Government has been restrained (to some degree) with respect to covert operations by the fear of exposure and public censure. Some former intelligence agency heads have said they based decisions concerning secret activities on whether or not they would be willing to defend the decision when and if the operations became public knowledge. That restraint will disappear if there are no negative repercussions when the veil of secrecy is lifted. Perhaps it already has.

Consider what we've seen recently:

• Prisoners in U.S. custody are tortured in multiple locations and only a few low-ranking personnel from Abu Ghraib are prosecuted. There is no public outcry.
• President Bush is reelected in an election campaign in which both candidates avoid talking about torture in spite of the prominence of the Abu Ghraib scandal.
• The President asks Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who says he accepts responsibility for Abu Ghraib, to stay on. Only liberals seem outraged.
• Alberto Gonzales, a principal architect of the American effort to define away torture, is confirmed by the Senate as the U.S. attorney general with support from every single Republican and six Democrats.
• And the U.S. condemns Syria within weeks of revelations that a Canadian citizen--an innocent man--was sent by the United States to Syria to be tortured. No one seems to care.

The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer--a pacifist at the outset of World War II who, by the end of the war, supported the violent overthrow of Hitler's regime--said, "If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction." We're on the wrong train, but most Americans haven't even bothered to get up out of their seats.

Kyoto, 2005

The Kyoto Protocol enters into force today. The New York Times highlights the impact of the free-rider problem. (The United States is, of course, the biggest free rider.) The Guardian (London) notes Tony Blair's interest in getting the United States "back into dialogue" with the rest of the world concerning global warming. The Los Angeles Times notes that "the U.S. and Australia are the only large, developed nations not taking part" in the treaty. The Washington Post story emphasizes the point that the treaty's value is primarily symbolic as it appears unlikely to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Meanwhile, the NHL has just announced that its season has been cancelled. Draw your own conclusions.

Conch'd Out

On the subject of separatist movements, Steve Serbalik mentioned the Conch Republic in class yesterday. Here's what Footnotes to History has to say about it.

In April of 1982, the U.S. Border Patrol blocked Highway 1, which connects the Florida Keys with mainland Florida. The purpose was to search for illegal aliens and drugs, but it also impeded the lucrative tourism industry in the Keys. The Key West City Council passed a resolution declaring the secession of the Keys as the Conch Republic, in order to protest the action. The Conch Republic declared war on the United States and then, taking their cue from The Mouse That Roared, surrendered and applied for economic aid. A few weeks later, the roadblock was removed and the crisis ended.

Adam Holdridge's comment on the post concerning separatist movements ("What about the People's Republic of Santa Monica?") made me think of the Conch Republic. Perhaps it could serve as a model for the PRSM.

Incidentally, for those who are unaware of this, Santa Monica has long been known for its progressive public policies. The "People's Republic of Santa Monica" label is generally considered a conservative put-down of a city that believes in rent control, legislation friendly to homeless people and so on.

And, on a lighter note--and one that bears only the most tenuous relationship to the former topics (although it does get us back to conchs, which, because "conch" is pronounced "konk," is spelled "conchs" and not "conches")--here's a link to the New York Times Magazine interview with Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog. (Triumph, some of you will recall, said in reference to liberal talk-radio Air America, "I own a conch shell with more listeners.")

Government Fights Compensation for Torture Victims

It's not what you might think. The Los Angeles Times reports today that the Bush Administration is fighting in court to stop U.S. pilots captured and tortured by Saddam Hussein's government during the 1991 Persian Gulf War from collecting the punitive damages a U.S. judge previously awarded them.

Birds of a feather . . .

Legal Objections at Guantanamo

The New York Daily News reported yesterday that objections to harsh interrogations techniques raised by military attorneys at Guanatamo were brushed aside by Pentagon officials.

Judge advocates--uniformed legal advisers known as JAGs who were assigned to a secret war crimes task force--repeatedly objected to aggressive interrogations by a separate intelligence unit at Camp Delta, where Taliban and Al Qaeda suspects have been jailed since January 2002.

But Pentagon officials "didn't think this was a big deal, so they just ignored the JAGs," a senior military source said.

[Via Balkinization.]

Embedded in Iraq

Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Leeson spoke at Pepperdine tonight. Leeson won the Pulitzer for photos taken in Iraq in 2003 while embedded with Task Force 2-69 Armored of the Army's 3rd Brigade.

You can read some of Leeson's reflections on his work and see thirty of his photos here. (Click on the link at the bottom of the essay to go to the photographs.)

Dr. Anna Howard Shaw (1847-1919)

Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, an ordained minister, medical doctor, and leader of the American women's suffrage movement, was born on this date in 1847. Although she was born the year before the Seneca Falls Convention and lived to be seventy-two years old, Dr. Shaw did not live to see the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote.

Dr. Shaw graduated from the Theological School of Boston University in 1878. She was ordained by the Methodist Protestant Church in 1880. In 1885, she earned an M.D. from Boston University. That same year she began to work full-time for women's suffrage and for temperance.

In 1904, Dr. Shaw became president of the organization founded by Susan B. Anthony, the National Woman's Suffrage Association. She served in that position until 1915.

As a minister, Dr. Shaw never performed a marriage ceremony using the word "obey." She liked to point out that, notwithstanding that fact, she knew of no divorces among couples she had married.

Dr. Shaw's obituary from the New York Times (with many more details of her life) is here.

Dresden, 1945

On February 13, 1945, the Royal Air Force bombed Dresden, a German city once known as the "Florence on the Elbe." Over 800 bombers dropped over 2,500 tons of bombs. The resulting firestorm, similar to one generated in Hamburg during a July 1943 bombing raid, killed perhaps 40,000 to 50,000 people. (No official death toll has ever been established. Estimates range from 25,000 to 400,000.)

The next day, Valentine's Day, American B-17s dropped another 771 tons of bombs while the fighter planes accompanying the bombers strafed traffic on the roads leading into and out of the city in order to compound the chaos. Still more bombing raids occurred on February 15 and March 2 as the Allies endeavored to break Germany's ability to defend itself in the final months of World War II. Many today believe the terror bombing of German cities so late in the war to have been morally unjustifiable.

Next year Dresden will mark the 800th anniversary of the city's founding.

Separatist Movements

A few days ago, in a post related to states that didn't make it, I linked to the web site of the Republic of Texas. Today's New York Times has a story about the movement to reestablish the Republic of Texas.

The organizers of the Republic of Texas "government" headquartered in Overton, Texas are--and I say this as a Texan with considerable sympathy for Texan nationalism--a couple of tacos short of a combination plate. Their movement has no chance of doing anything more than making Texas law enforcement officials wary. (Eight years ago, members of the group took hostages and were involved in a dramatic standoff with police in the mountains of West Texas. These days, members sometimes present Republic of Texas passports rather than drivers' licenses during traffic stops.) But don't all independence movements invite casual dismissal in the beginning?

To put the question differently, what does it take for a separatist movement to go from being entertainment buried deep in the paper to being front-page news? Violence is the easiest way to get attention, but it is not necessarily efficacious. Basque separatists, after all, have tried for decades to bomb their way to autonomy. What is required both for the success of a separatist movement and for eventual international recognition of the state that results is popular support. The Texans clearly lack popular support at this point.

Popular support is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for independence. There remains the requirement of success in a revolution--or the political will of the existing sovereign to accept devolution. The Chechen rebellion probably meets the requirement of popular support; it has not (yet) broken the will of the Russian government to rule over Chechnya.

Mamdouh Habib's Story

Raymond Bonner recounts Mamdouh Habib's story of torture as a detainee in the "war on terror" in tomorrow's New York Times. Habib is the Australian citizen who was released by the United States from Guantanamo on January 28.

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats have requested that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigate the CIA's treatment of detainees. Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS), the chairman of the committee, is reviewing the request.

The Yemeni Approach to Terrorism

Yemen has just announced plans to close 4,000 privately operated religious schools (madrassahs). In addition, eighteen Muslim clerics have been banned from giving sermons in Yemeni mosques. Both initiatives are intended to clamp down on religious sources of violence.

Perhaps the most unusual means of dealing with terrorism in Yemen is the religious debate. The Christian Science Monitor recently reported the story of a Yemeni judge, Hamoud al-Hitar, who is working to address the roots of Islamist terrorism by debating the Koran with convicted terrorists. Hitar went into a prison a couple of years ago to begin the exercise.

"If you can convince us that your ideas are justified by the Koran, then we will join you in your struggle," Hitar told the militants. "But if we succeed in convincing you of our ideas, then you must agree to renounce violence."

The prisoners eagerly agreed.

Now, two years later, not only have those prisoners been released, but a relative peace reigns in Yemen. And the same Western experts who doubted this experiment are courting Hitar, eager to hear how his "theological dialogues" with captured Islamic militants have helped pacify this wild and mountainous country, previously seen by the US as a failed state, like Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Since December 2002, when the first round of the dialogues ended, there have been no terrorist attacks here, even though many people thought that Yemen would become terror's capital," says Hitar, eyes glinting shrewdly from beneath his emerald-green turban. "Three hundred and sixty-four young men have been released after going through the dialogues and none of these have left Yemen to fight anywhere else."

"Yemen's strategy has been unconventional certainly, but it has achieved results that we could never have hoped for," says one European diplomat, who did not want to be named. "Yemen has gone from being a potential enemy to becoming an indispensable ally in the war on terror."

Read the rest of the story here.

Strong Words

Bob Herbert, writing in the New York Times and describing what happened to Maher Arar at the hands of the United States, uses some strong words:

Any government that commits, condones, promotes or fosters torture is a malignant force in the world. And those who refuse to raise their voices against something as clearly evil as torture are enablers, if not collaborators.

Raise your voice. Use some strong words.

More on Madness

Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (arguably one of the most important books of the past five years), has a must-read column in today's New York Times. The situation she discusses, which I've written about here and here, is one that ought to be met with outrage among Americans. (As a friend of mine said last night during a discussion of the U.S. Government's outsourcing of torture, "I can't understand why Americans aren't protesting in the streets.")

Power's column makes me believe even more strongly that Ambassador Pierre Prosper should resign. He can no longer make the argument--which we can only hope he has made privately since he hasn't made it openly--that going along with the administration on the ICC, on Guantanamo, on the conduct of the war on terror, and so on is serving a higher purpose by allowing him to stay on the job and fight for other issues of international justice. What is there that he's doing that would make any American proud?

North Korea's Announcement

North Korea has just announced that it has manufactured nuclear weapons and that it does not plan to participate in multilateral talks sought by the Bush Administration. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said, "We had already taken the resolute action of pulling out of the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) and have manufactured nukes to cope with the Bush administration's evermore undisguised policy to isolate and stifle the DPRK (North Korea)."

The Bush Administration's anti-proliferation policy appears to be faltering in both Iran and North Korea. Meanwhile, the just-released FY 2006 budget cuts U.S. contributions to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization. The CTBTO has responsibility for global nuclear weapons test monitoring.

An Apology

Governments--or, to be more specific, political leaders--have a notoriously difficult time apologizing for official mistakes. And, no, this is not a post about the failure to find WMD in Iraq or about the confirmation hearings for Condoleezza Rice and Alberto Gonzales. It is, instead, a post about an apology that was actually offered.

Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized publicly today to those who were wrongfully imprisoned for an IRA bombing in 1974. The sentences were overturned for four of the defendants--the "Guildford Four"--by a British court in 1989. The remaining defendants had their sentences overturned in 1991.

Here's the story in The Guardian.

Outsourcing Torture

Jane Mayer writes about this outrageous practice in the new issue of The New Yorker. She begins with the story of Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was arrested at JFK Airport on September 26, 2002 and flown to Jordan.

Ten hours after landing in Jordan, Arar said, he was driven to Syria, where interrogators, after a day of threats, “just began beating on me.” They whipped his hands repeatedly with two-inch-thick electrical cables, and kept him in a windowless underground cell that he likened to a grave. “Not even animals could withstand it,” he said. Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say. “You just give up,” he said. “You become like an animal.”

Arar was released a year later without ever having been charged with a crime.

Can somebody please explain to me how U.S. practice in this regard differs from that of the regimes we have repeatedly condemned over the years?

A Lot of Wheat

In a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said,

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. . . . We pay for a single fighter plane with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

How many bushels of wheat would it take today to pay for a single fighter plane? At three dollars per bushel (check the Kansas City Board of Trade wheat futures market for exact prices), it would take 86 million bushels to buy one F/A-22 Raptor at its projected cost of $258 million per plane. That's 172 times the cost that Eisenhower calculated for a single plane in 1953. Incidentally, U.S. wheat production in the coming season is expected to be 2.16 billion bushels. At three dollars per bushel, America's wheat farmers could buy twenty-five F/A-22 Raptor fighter planes. (But then there's the fact that buying only twenty-five would dramatically increase the cost per plane, meaning . . . never mind.)

No doubt America's wheat farmers could wreak quite a bit of havoc on their global competitors with twenty-five F/A-22s.

Gone (and Mostly Forgotten)

What do Icaria, Minerva, Ciskei, the Republic of Natal, Tortuga, and the Kingdom of Tavolara have in common? All made brief appearances on the world stage as independent states. James L. Erwin's Footnotes to History is a fascinating web site that lists scores of short-lived countries. It's a reminder that self-determination is difficult and that it takes more to make a state than a piece of real estate and high ideals--or low ideals in the case of Tanna, Galveston, and many others. Even the august Republic of Texas lasted less than ten years (although some Texans seem to be intent on changing that).

A Self-Inflicted Wound

Yesterday, speaking in a forum at the San Diego Convention Center, Lt. Gen. Jim "Mad Dog" Mattis said, "Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight, you know. It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling." He continued: "You go into Afghanistan, you've got guys who slapped women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."

One can almost envision Lt. Gen. Mattis as Lt. Col. Kilgore (played by Robert Duvall) in Apocalypse Now delivering that famous line: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." But the napalm line was a screenwriter's creation--in an antiwar film, no less. Mattis, on the other hand, spoke his lines in a public forum and in an age when news travels fast. Based on a check of English-language sources only, the remarks have already been published in Australia, China, India, and Bulgaria, not to mention on the CNN International site. The comments have no doubt made it into the news (and into anti-American propaganda) in the Middle East as well.

Weapons sold to Iraq and to the mujahideen in Afghanistan by the United States have already been used against Americans (and may be yet again). Mattis's words are no different. They are ammunition delivered on a silver platter to those who want to attack the United States. For this reason, if for no other, the response of Lt. Gen. Mattis's superiors should have been much harsher than it has been thus far. (Defense Secretary Rumsfeld declined to comment on the remarks at a Pentagon briefing yesterday. Gen. Peter Pace, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Hagee, has "counseled" Mattis.)

No doubt Lt. Gen. Mattis can believe that "it's fun to shoot some people" and still understand that it is wrong, even in war, to shoot prisoners, soldiers who are hors de combat, and others who are not taking part in hostilities. Perhaps Gen. Pace was correct when he said that Lt. Gen. Mattis's conduct in war proves him to be a commander who "understands . . . the value of human life." Mattis's comments will inevitably raise questions about that. But, more importantly, it is a sad fact of warfare that innocents are often killed. To those who subscribe to the war convention (that is, the traditional just war theory and the laws of war that have been constructed on that moral framework), the intent of those who kill noncombatants (or those who order attacks that result in the killing of noncombatants) is morally and legally significant. One must never intend the deaths of noncombatants even where those deaths are foreseeable.

It would be easier for the whole world to believe that the thousands of deaths of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan due to American action were unintended if Mattis had said, as many soldiers before him have said, that although killing is sometimes necessary, it is always to be lamented.

60-36

That was the vote to confirm Alberto Gonzales today in the Senate. Six Democrats voted for confirmation.

A First in the Senate

Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL) spoke in Spanish yesterday on the floor of the United States Senate in favor of the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be attorney general. His speech is believed to be the first delivered on the Senate floor in a language other than English.

Although I disagree with Sen. Martinez's position on the Gonzales nomination (as anyone who has read this blog lately knows), I think his decision to address the Hispanic community from the floor of the Senate is significant and a sign of things to come. Politically, it suggests that Republicans (some of them, at least) know that the political future lies with Hispanic voters rather than with "English only" nativists.

A Reply to Delahunty and Yoo

Yesterday the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed piece concerning the nomination of Judge Alberto Gonzales to be attorney general. (Read it here.) I've responded with this letter:

Re: "Rewriting the Laws of War for a New Enemy"

Professors Delahunty and Yoo ("Rewriting the Laws of War for a New Enemy," Feb. 1) have completely missed the point regarding opposition to the nomination of Judge Alberto Gonzales to be attorney general. Whether or not the Geneva Conventions protect particular combatants, the law prohibiting torture is absolute--"non-derogable" in the language of international lawyers--and universal in the same way the ban on slavery is universal.

The Senate Judiciary Committee's questioning of Judge Gonzales focused on the issue of torture from the very first question posed by Sen. Specter: "Do you approve of torture?" When in our history has it ever been necessary to ask an attorney general nominee that question?

Judge Gonzales answered Sen. Specter's question the way any humane person must, but when questioned about specific techniques, he waffled. Perhaps we can tolerate an attorney general nominee who waffles on the exclusionary rule or federal sentencing guidelines or even the scope of the Geneva Conventions, but waffling on torture is intolerable. That is why those who care about human rights oppose Judge Gonzales.

Robert E. Williams

Gonzales Update

The Washington Post reports that, while there will be no filibuster, Democrats are beginning to line up solidly against the confirmation of Judge Alberto Gonzales to be attorney general. Here's the key paragraph in the WaPo story:

Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), the minority leader, said a "low" forecast was that 25 or 30 Democrats would vote against Gonzales, but it appeared yesterday Gonzales was in danger of receiving even more than the 42 "no" votes John D. Ashcroft got in 2001, the most opposition ever to a nominee to head the Justice Department.

If this means that Democrats are being obstructionists, so be it. Someone needs to obstruct legal opinions that condone torture.

An Irony

"Of all the ironies in the history of human rights since the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the one that would most astonish Eleanor Roosevelt is the degree to which her own country is now the odd one out."

--Michael Ignatieff (in “The Attack on Human Rights,” Foreign Affairs [November/December 2001])

Madness

Yesterday I posed the question of whether the Bush Administration might block the U.N. Security Council from referring the matter of crimes against humanity in Darfur to the International Criminal Court without offering an alternative with a chance of stopping the killing. If Nicholas Kristof, writing in tomorrow's New York Times, is correct (and he usually is), the Bush Administration is moving strongly in that direction:

Two weeks ago, President Bush gave an impassioned speech to the world about the need to stand for human freedom.

But this week, administration officials are skulking in the corridors of the United Nations, trying desperately to block a prosecution of Sudanese officials for crimes against humanity.

It's not that Mr. Bush sympathizes with the slaughter in Darfur. In fact, I take my hat off to Mr. Bush for doing more than most other world leaders to address ethnic cleansing there--even if it's not nearly enough. Mr. Bush has certainly done far more than Bill Clinton did during the Rwandan genocide.

But Mr. Bush's sympathy for Sudanese parents who are having their children tossed into bonfires shrivels next to his hostility to the organization that the U.N. wants to trust with the prosecution: the International Criminal Court. Administration officials so despise the court that they have become, in effect, the best hope of Sudanese officials seeking to avoid accountability for what Mr. Bush himself has called genocide.

Mr. Bush's worry is that if the International Criminal Court is legitimized, American officials could someday be dragged before it. The court's supporters counter that safeguards make that impossible. Reasonable people can differ about the court, but for Mr. Bush to put his ideological opposition to it over the welfare of the 10,000 people still dying every month in Darfur--that's just madness.

Columnists for the New York Times don't ordinarily use words like "madness" to describe a president's policies. Kristof is right to do so, though. The arguments against the ICC cannot begin to justify a policy that might mean impunity for Sudan's killers. This is especially true given the fact that, internationally, the Bush Administration has lost the argument over the ICC. It's a done deal. The United States can no longer prevent its creation.

So now the strategy appears to be to sabotage the Court in any manner possible. Unbelievable.

Today I have to pose a new question: What happened to Condoleezza Rice's promise during her confirmation hearings--just two weeks ago--to build better relationships with the rest of the world?

Another question seems pertinent: How long will the rest of the world put up with American petulance?

[Update: I seem to be behind the curve on this story. According to Human Rights Watch, last week U.S. Ambassador for War Crimes Issues Pierre Prosper presented to members of the Security Council a proposal for a new ad hoc tribunal for Darfur because, he said, "We don't want to be party to legitimizing the ICC." It doesn't get much plainer than that.]