International Studies

If I were a more diligent blogger, I would have been live-blogging from the International Studies Association annual meeting in San Diego this past week. But I'm not, and so I didn't. Still, there were a few things worth noting from the conference.

First, pirates are finally getting their due. A panel on Saturday was titled "The Pirate: Historical and Theoretical Aspects of Piracy as a Recurring Feature of North/South Division." Three of the four papers on the panel were by scholars from the London School of Economics, so apparently LSE has become pirate central in the academic world. My favorite title from the panel was this one: "Taking the 'Arr' out of IR: Private Security Responses to Piracy and Waterborne Non-State Political Violence." (I wonder about the sub-title, though, since piracy is "waterborne non-state political violence." Nonetheless, those who recall this post will know why I like the title.)

Second, I learned that Rowman & Littlefield has an edited volume coming out in May entitled Harry Potter and International Relations. One of the editors, Daniel Nexon, blogs at The Duck of Minerva.

Third, Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars continues to inspire reflection and debate. A panel I attended on Thursday--"The Moral Foundations of World Order"--invoked Walzer repeatedly.

Fourth, feminist IR is alive and well. J. Ann Tickner, a pioneer in the field, is the new president of ISA. Her presidential address drew heavily on the insights of feminists working in the field.

As I have time, I'll try to comment more on what I learned at ISA.

Thomas Lubanga

On Friday, Thomas Lubanga was turned over to the International Criminal Court by the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to stand trial for war crimes. Lubanga, founder of the Union des Patriotes Congolais (UPC), becomes the first person to be turned over to the ICC for prosecution.

The ICC issued warrants for the arrest of five members of the Lord's Resistance Army, a Ugandan rebel group, in July of last year. There is also an investigation into the situation in Darfur ongoing by the ICC.

Tsotsi

Last night I saw Tsotsi, the South African film that won the Academy Award for "Best Foreign Film." Based on the 1989 novel by Athol Fugard, it's a powerful story that shows the enormous gulf separating rich and poor--Jo'burg and Soweto--in modern South Africa.

How Many More?

We've already learned many of the disgusting details of torture perpetrated by Americans in Guantanamo, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. Now we learn about a special interrogation facility in Baghdad called Camp Nama. Eric Schmitt and Carolyn Marshall write in today's New York Times,

As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room.

In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations.

How many more stories like this one are out there waiting to be discovered? Or consider this question from Marty Lederman, former Attorney Advisor in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel: "How many stories such as this must be published before the rest of the world justifiably views the U.S. as one of the world's principal purveyors of torture and inhumane treatment?"

Three Years On

The war in Iraq is now moving into its fourth year. General George Casey, who last July predicted there would be significant reductions in the number of American forces in Iraq beginning this spring or summer, has stated that those reductions will now have to wait until late this year at the earliest.

Meanwhile, former Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi is less optimistic, according to the Guardian (London):

In London, Mr Allawi told BBC 2's Sunday AM programme: "We are losing each day, as an average, 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."

Britain's defence secretary, John Reid, rejected that assessment. In Baghdad's green zone, he said that most of Iraq was under control: "There is not civil war now, nor is it inevitable, nor is it imminent".

In Washington, the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, also appeared on television to play down ideas of civil war. He told the CBS programme Face the Nation that the surge in attacks aimed at fomenting sectarian conflict simply reflected the insurgents' "state of desperation".

The remark echoed a similarly optimistic phrase used by Mr Cheney in March last year, when he claimed the insurgency was in its "last throes". Yesterday, he maintained that that description was still "basically accurate".

Three years on, and Vice President Cheney remains clueless. The very fact that there's even a debate about whether a civil war exists should tell him something. Indeed, it should tell all of us something.

Cyber Threats Meet Biological Threats

Every once in a while, I'm tempted to buy one of the tabloids I see while standing in the supermarket checkout line. Tonight I saw this headline on the front page of the Weekly World News: "Computer Virus Spreads to Humans!" It was, of course, accompanied by a photo of a woman sitting in front of a computer blowing her nose--visual proof of the headline's veracity!

In Seeking Security in an Insecure World, Dan Caldwell and I placed considerable emphasis on the fact that many of the security threats we face today are interconnected. I have to confess, though, that we failed to anticipate the possibility that computer viruses might become the next biological threat.

(Incidentally, if you click on that Weekly World News link, I'm pretty sure you'll lose points off your IQ.)

Bones

In Chris Hedges' War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (a book I highly recommend), there is this anecdote from the post-Napoleonic period, drawn from the London Observer, November 18, 1822:

It is estimated that more than a million bushels of human and inhuman bones were imported last year from the continent of Europe into the port of Hull. The neighborhood of Leipzig, Austerlitz, Waterloo, and of all the places where, during the late bloody war, the principal battles were fought, have been swept alike of the bones of the hero and the horse which he rode. Thus collected from every quarter, they have been shipped to the port of Hull and thence forwarded to the Yorkshire bone grinders who have erected steam-engines and powerful machinery for the purpose of reducing them to a granularly state. In this condition they are sold to the farmers to manure their lands.

I have not previously read or heard this grim account of the Napoleonic Wars' aftermath. Has anyone seen other descriptions of turning human bone into fertilizer following these, or any other, wars?

A Clash with Pirates

Two U.S. warships were involved in a clash with suspected pirates off the coast of Somalia early this morning. Sailors aboard the USS Cape St. George, which was patrolling in the Indian Ocean along with the USS Gonzalez as part of a Dutch-led maritime security operation, fired on a fishing boat in international waters after men aboard the boat brandished a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and fired on the American vessel. One suspect was killed, five were wounded, and twelve others were taken into custody.

This is the second encounter between U.S. Navy ships and suspected pirates this year. Last November, a luxury cruise liner was attacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia. The cash-strapped Somali government signed a $50 million contract with an American company late last year to provide protection against pirates, but it is not clear what, if anything, the American company is doing about the problem.

Immigration Reform and Reality

Rosa Brooks, writing in today's Los Angeles Times, has a good idea for a new reality show:

Call it "Aliens." The contestants will be drawn from the U.S. Congress. To start, they'll have their credit cards, cellphones, computers and cars confiscated. Next, they'll be sent--with their families--to live in rural villages and urban shantytowns in poor countries. Each will be assigned a menial job in his new home, for which he will receive a dollar a day.

Most members of Congress won't last more than a few episodes, of course. Their kids will quickly lose the puppy fat that comes from a hearty American diet and instead gain the bloated tummies that characterize children with nutritional deficiencies. This development will frighten off the faint of heart.

The remaining contestants will be given the opportunity to compete in an even tougher game. They'll be instructed to make their way to a distant country, but they won't be provided with money, a passport or transportation. Hardships along the route will include fording flood-prone rivers, crossing dangerous deserts on foot and evading the armed gangs of smugglers and traffickers who will attempt to rob, rape and kidnap them.

Contestants will then have to covertly cross a border into a country guarded by armed agents.

Those who make it will then have to find food, shelter and employment in a place where they don't know the language and are in constant danger of being detected, detained and deported by the authorities. The only jobs available to them will be low-paying and often backbreaking labor.

What's the prize, you ask? Any contestants who manage to survive a full season will be offered the opportunity to draft a new immigration reform bill for the United States.

Or we could just build a fence along 2,000 miles of border like this wacko suggests, also in today's Los Angeles Times.

The New Human Rights Council

I am slow posting about this, but the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday voted 170-4 (with three abstentions) to create a new Human Rights Council. The United States, along with Israel, Palau, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands, voted against the resolution creating the new Council.

Human Rights Watch summarizes some of the key features of the new Human Rights Council:

• The council will meet at least three times a year for ten weeks--an improvement on the commission’s single annual six-week meeting--with a right for one-third of the council members to call additional sessions “when needed.”
• The old commission’s system of independent “special rapporteurs” and other special procedures, which is one of the great strengths of the U.N. human rights system, will be retained, as will the tradition of access for human rights NGOs.
• Members of the council are committed to cooperate with the council and its various mechanisms--an improvement on current practice, in which some members of the commission refuse to grant unimpeded access to U.N. human rights investigators.
• The right of the council to address serious human rights situations through country-specific resolutions is reaffirmed.
• A new universal review procedure will scrutinize the records of even the most powerful countries--an important step toward redressing the double standards that the commission was often accused of applying.

For more, see the Washington Post story here. The Amnesty International USA news release, which emphasizes the need for states that respect human rights to be elected to the 43-member Council, is available here.

Abu Ghraib: 279 Photos

Salon.com has posted 279 photos and 19 videos from Abu Ghraib. The images and accompanying documentation come from the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, which first investigated the scandal on the basis of materials provided by Spc. Joseph Darby.

The introduction to the collection of photos and videos is well worth reading for context and commentary. It concludes with these words:

Finally, it's critical to recognize that this set of images from Abu Ghraib is only one snapshot of systematic tactics the United States has used in four-plus years of the global war on terror. There have been many allegations of abuse, torture and other practices that violate international law, from holding prisoners without charging them at Guantánamo Bay and other secretive U.S. military bases and prison facilities around the world to the practice of "rendition," or the transporting of detainees to foreign countries whose regimes use torture, to ongoing human rights violations inside detention facilities in Iraq. Abu Ghraib in fall 2003 may have been its own particular hell, but the variations of individual abuse perpetrated appear to be exceptional in only one way: They were photographed and filmed.

[Via Body and Soul.]

Workers without Rights

What's it like to be a Latino day laborer in the United States? This article in yesterday's Washington Post profiles Daniel Rodriguez, a day laborer from Nicaragua who lives and works in the Washington metropolitan area.

The Genocide Continues

Our attention has wandered. We (most of us, anyway) were never very focused on Darfur, but the focus we once mustered seems to have disappeared. And yet the genocide continues.

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times continues to press Americans to focus on what is happening in Darfur and now, increasingly, in neighboring Chad. Last month, writing in the New York Review of Books, he recounted some of what he has seen:

On one of the first of my five visits to Darfur, I came across an oasis along the Chad border where several tens of thousands of people were sheltering under trees after being driven from their home villages by the Arab Janjaweed militia, which has been supported by the Sudan government in Khartoum. Under the first tree, I found a man who had been shot in the neck and the jaw; his brother, shot only in the foot, had carried him for forty-nine days to get to this oasis. Under the next tree was a widow whose parents had been killed and stuffed in the village well to poison the local water supply; then the Janjaweed had tracked down the rest of her family and killed her husband. Under the third tree was a four-year-old orphan girl carrying her one-year-old baby sister on her back; their parents had been killed. Under the fourth tree was a woman whose husband and children had been killed in front of her, and then she was gang-raped and left naked and mutilated in the desert.

Kristof also provided both some important information about the background of the genocide and some suggestions for what should be done. He pointed readers in the direction of an aid worker's blog, Sleepless in Sudan (now closed, but still well worth reading), and two recently published books: Darfur: A Short History of a Long War by Julie Flint and Alex de Waal and Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide by Gerard Prunier.

Read Kristof's NYRB essay here and then look for the December 5, 2005, entry in Sleepless in Sudan to see what we should be doing.

Milosevic

One of the most important trials in the history of international criminal law has ended with the death of the defendant, apparently of natural causes. Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader who engineered ethnic cleansing campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s, had been on trial for crimes against humanity since 2002 before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. He was found dead in his jail cell last night.

Today's New York Times story on Milosevic's death notes,

Mr. Milosevic was the first former head of state to stand trial for genocide before an international tribunal, and its proceedings, which began in February 2002, had already produced the longest war crimes trial in modern history. His death came as the trial was drawing to a close: he was in the final weeks of his defense, and his concluding statement was expected in late April or May. The judges' verdict was expected by the end of this year.

For more on Milosevic, see this obituary, this news analysis by Roger Cohen, and this brief statement by Carla del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the ICTY.

Double Standards

The State Department released the 2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices today. In the section on Saudi Arabia, we find the following statement:

Ministry of Interior (MOI) officials were responsible for most incidents of abuse of prisoners, including beatings, whippings, and sleep deprivation. In addition, there were allegations of beatings with sticks and suspension from bars by handcuffs. There were allegations that these practices were used to force confessions from prisoners.

Compare the State Department’s criticism of Saudi Arabia to this report from the Observer (London) dated January 2, 2005:

A British detainee at Guantanamo Bay has told his lawyer he was tortured using the 'strappado', a technique common in Latin American dictatorships in which a prisoner is left suspended from a bar with handcuffs until they cut deeply into his wrists.

People in other countries pay attention to these inconsistencies. Americans, by an large, seem not to.

A God of Tolerance?

As Sunnis and Shi'ites in Iraq attack one another in an effort to avenge grave religious offenses, including the attack on the Askariya shrine, and as Muslims in many other parts of the world turn to violence to express their outrage over offenses against the prophet Mohammed, James Carroll reminds us that, "in history's supreme irony, holy war is the most savage war of all."

But, Carroll suggests, the haste with which believers of all kinds rush to defend God may come from a misunderstanding of the divine.

Believers--whether Jewish, Muslim, or Christian--tend to view God as Someone like us--only much, much greater. In the words of a beautiful Irish hymn, God is the "High King of Heaven." In Arabic, the idea is expressed by the expression Allah akbar! (God is great!) In English (at least as spoken by Americans in the twenty-first century), the preferred expression may be "God is awesome!" (The state of Washington has allowed someone to reduce the phrase to license-plate English: AWSMGOD. I know, because I saw a car bearing such a plate parked on campus today.)

Carroll points out that the divine is more nearly apprehended in each of the great monotheistic religions through an awareness that God is beyond all human comprehension. God is, in other words, wholly other. This, according to Carroll, should make all of us--Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike--see belief in God as a reason for toleration.

In Islam, as much as Judaism and Christianity, as this Christian understands it, the core theological tradition so affirms such otherness of the deity that no merely familial, tribal, or national claims can be made upon it. Indeed, that the Holy One is wholly other is the first principle of human toleration, since no single person or group has an exclusive claim on the divine. The second principle of toleration is that God, as its author, belongs to the entire cosmos, not to any mere part of it.

God is other, yet, as each tradition affirms, God is also the creator, fully invested in creation. "I was a hidden treasure," as the Koran reports God telling the Prophet. "I loved to be known. Therefore I created the creation so that I would be known." God creates, that is, to be known by all that God creates. God's family, tribe, and nation--are everyone and everything.

Obviously, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity have all had trouble keeping these principles of toleration straight, with each of the monotheisms having regularly reduced God to a tribal deity, and loyalty to God to a cause of war. We see just such a thing unfolding in the streets of Muslim cities today, as self-appointed defenders of the greatness of God are the ones, in fact, defiling it.

The brief version of the lesson is this: If God is beyond the comprehension of any one person or group or sect, then it is an offense against God to attack those who understand God differently.

The longer version of the lesson is in Carroll's column here.

Birds and Humans

In today's Boston Globe, James Carroll considers what the spread of avian flu means for the troubled relationship between humans and nature. Here is his conclusion:

The deep memory of Genesis posits a human dominion over nature, but the banishment from Eden indicates an alienation from it. Today, the so-called environment is discussed as if it is a surrounding bubble, like a space capsule that can be replaced when it is trashed.

Judging from our reckless disregard, we humans seem to imagine that we can have a destiny independent of the earth on which live; even that word "on" suggests the problem, since the truth is that we humans are the earth. It is more than where we come from, where we go. Indeed, we get our name from "humus," the word for earth. Did we think we could forget that and not suffer for it?

If the worst case unfolds, and the dreaded transmission mutations occur, avian flu might be taken as nature's revenge for the human despoiling of the planet. The best case will be that this outbreak came as a timely reminder that the health of humanity and the health of nature, including beloved winged creatures, are the same thing.

Read the entire column here.

The Neocons' Mess

Francis Fukuyama, a professor at SAIS in Washington, D.C., has an article in today's New York Times Magazine on the neoconservatives and what should be done to clean up the mess they've created in American foreign policy. He argues for a "realistic Wilsonianism" that recognizes the important role the United States has played and should continue to play in support of human rights and democracy around the world while also recognizing that there are serious limits to the promotion of such values by military means.

As I have argued since November 2001, Fukuyama suggests that "war" is the wrong label for the struggle against terrorism. As he puts it,

we need to demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other types of policy instruments. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world.

The entire article, entitled "After Neoconservatism," is well worth reading not only for its policy prescriptions but for its brief description of what it is that animates the neoconservatives.

[UPDATE: Over at Balkinization, Jack Balkin has a few interesting comments about Fukuyama's article, including this one: "What struck me . . . was how many of his claims about what was wrong with the Bush Administration's policies were available in 2001, and, indeed, were stated over and over again by critics of the Administration in the run up to the Iraq war."]

Indian Reservations as Weak States

In Seeking Security in an Insecure World, Dan Caldwell and I note that "by failing to extend the rule of law over all of their territories, weak states may provide safe havens for terrorists, transnational criminal organizations, international fugitives, and other actors that are a menace to international society" (p. 124). The role played by weak states in international drug trafficking illustrates the point very well.

In Afghanistan, opium production is booming as a consequence of the inability of Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul to control the country's hinterlands where warlords and tribal leaders hold sway. In Colombia, narcoterrorists and revolutionaries who support themselves by trafficking cocaine have long operated beyond the reach of the government. And in Nigeria, corrupt officials and a weak central administration have made that country a major hub of drug trafficking in spite of the fact that few drugs are actually produced there.

Many of the same conditions that afflict weak states around the world--dire poverty, high rates of unemployment, weak law enforcement, and failing social services--are present on Indian reservations within the United States. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that reservations have become the newest hubs of international drug trafficking. According to this story in the New York Times, "large-scale criminal organizations have found havens and allies in the wide-open and isolated regions of Indian country." The comparison between Indian reservations within the United States and weak states around the world seems inescapable:

For traffickers of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, painkillers and people, reservations offer many advantages. Law enforcement is spotty at best. Tribal sovereignty, varying state laws and inconsistent federal interest in prosecuting drug crimes create jurisdictional confusion and conflict.

The deep loyalty that exists within tribes, where neighbors are often related, and the intense mistrust of the American justice system make securing witnesses and using undercover informants extremely difficult. And on some reservations, Indian drug traffickers have close relationships with tribal government or law enforcement officials and enjoy special protection that allows them to operate freely, investigators say.

At home and abroad, promoting good government, meeting human needs, and building capacity in weak states are all essential elements in any effort to address the problem of drug trafficking.

Means and Ends

"As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy."

--Christopher Dawson, The Judgment of the Nations (1942)

Arar's Suit

A federal judge in Brooklyn has dismissed a lawsuit brought by Maher Arar under the Torture Victim Protection Act. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was detained by Homeland Security officials at New York's Kennedy International Airport in September 2002 and sent to Syria where he was tortured for a year before being released without having been charged.

For more on Arar's story, see this post from February 2005.

The New Abu Ghraib Photos

The Sydney Morning Herald has fifteen of the Abu Ghraib photos shown for the first time on Australian television last night. The SMH also reports that, according to a recently released poll, 60 percent of Australians now have a "mainly negative" view of the United States.

Still More Abu Ghraib Photos

Dateline, an Australian news program, has sixty of the Abu Ghraib photos that, up until now, have been suppressed by the Pentagon. The program airs soon, so expect extensive news coverage tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos has some of the new photos here. (Warning: The images are disturbing.)

[Via Kevin Drum.]

Misunderstanding Muslims?

According to James Carroll's column in yesterday's Boston Globe, both the cartoon controversy and the war in Iraq indicate that we are.

Cheney

Okay. You know what this post is going to be about.

I genuinely believed that Dick Cheney's "hunting accident" over the weekend would be beyond satire. One-liners? Not a problem. There will be a million of them floating around by the time the late-night comics have finished with the story. But some things (like Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace Prize, at least according to Tom Lehrer) just appear to be beyond satire.

Clearly, I underestimated Tom Borowitz. His column today begins with these words:

Vice President Dick Cheney revealed today that he shot a fellow hunter while on a quail hunting trip over the weekend because he believed the man was the fugitive terror mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Mr. Cheney acknowledged that the man he sprayed with pellets on Saturday was not al-Zawahiri but rather Harry Whittington, a 78-year-old millionaire lawyer from Austin, blaming the mix-up on “faulty intelligence.”

Go ahead. Read the whole thing. Then come back. I'm not done with this yet.

Here are my modest contributions to the Cheney-palooza:

• So Cheney shot a lawyer. What's the big deal? The legal limit in Texas is ten.
• In spite of the fact that there was an ambulance present in the vice president's entourage, Cheney insisted on carrying Whittington to the hospital strapped to the hood of his pickup truck.
• Of course, most Americans were simply relieved that Cheney wasn't the one shot. If anything were to happen to him, George Bush would become president.
• Before Whittington was taken to the hospital, Cheney insisted that the ambulance driver stop at a taxidermist's so he could get an estimate.
• I'm not suggesting anything, but doesn't Dick Cheney sometimes go hunting with Antonin Scalia?

Foreign newspapers and on-line news sites got a little more creative with their headlines about the Cheney story than most American papers did, but it's worth noting that the Washington Post seems to have loosened up a bit. Columnist Eugene Robinson's comment on the episode ran under the headline "Ready, Fire, Aim." Dan Froomkin criticized the slow response of the White House in a column entitled "Shoots, Hides and Leaves."

Care to see what the professionals said? Read on.

Jon Stewart: "Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a man during a quail hunt ... making 78-year-old Harry Whittington the first person shot by a sitting veep since Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, of course, (was) shot in a duel with Aaron Burr over issues of honor, integrity and political maneuvering. Whittington? Mistaken for a bird."

Jay Leno: "I think Cheney is starting to lose it. After he shot the guy he screamed, 'Anyone else want to call domestic wire tapping illegal?'"

David Letterman: "But here is the sad part: before the trip Donald Rumsfeld had denied the guy's request for body armor."

Jon Stewart (again): "Now, this story certainly has its humorous aspects. . . . But it also raises a serious issue, one which I feel very strongly about. . . . Moms, dads, if you're watching right now, I can't emphasize this enough: Do not let your kids go on hunting trips with the vice president. I don't care what kind of lucrative contracts they're trying to land, or energy regulations they're trying to get lifted, it's just not worth it."

The Nation notes that it is now obvious that Cheney's five draft deferments were a good thing: "It has become clear that Cheney was doing the country a service when he avoided service."

Just don't forget to read Borowitz.

[Update: Borowitz does it again. Here's the opening line of his second Cheney column: "Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced today that his department would immediately implement a “Cheney Alert” system to warn Americans if an attack by Vice President Dick Cheney is imminent."]

America's Shame

An investigation by the widely respected National Journal of government records relating to 446 detainees at Guantanamo has uncovered a shameful story of official lies, routine abuses of due process rights, and, not surprisingly, the long-term detention of many innocent people. Stated briefly, the facts are these:

1. Contrary to frequent assertions that the prison at Guantanamo holds only the worst terrorists--those who would be killing Americans in Afghanistan or plotting the next 9/11 if freed--most are victims of mistaken identity or are, at worst, low-level Taliban or Al Qaeda soldiers with no knowledge of operational issues.
2. Due to the frustration that Pentagon officials felt over their inability to gain information from these prisoners (who, of course, had no useful information to provide in the first place), increasingly harsh interrogation techniques were authorized by the Pentagon and employed at Guantanamo.
3. Torture produced information--almost all of it false.
4. On the basis of false accusations, innocent people being held at Guantanamo were "proved" to be dangerous terrorists.

If this sounds far-fetched, please read the story. Or at least consider some of these excerpts, which, I remind you, are based on government files and Combatant Status Review Tribunal records:

A. False Accusations

Much of the evidence against the detainees is weak. One prisoner at Guantanamo, for example, has made accusations against more than 60 of his fellow inmates; that's more than 10 percent of Guantanamo's entire prison population. The veracity of this prisoner's accusations is in doubt after a Syrian prisoner, Mohammed al-Tumani, 19, who was arrested in Pakistan, flatly denied to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal that he'd attended the jihadist training camp that the tribunal record said he did.

Tumani's denial was bolstered by his American "personal representative," one of the U.S. military officers--not lawyers--who are tasked with helping prisoners navigate the tribunals. Tumani's enterprising representative looked at the classified evidence against the Syrian youth and found that just one man--the aforementioned accuser--had placed Tumani at the terrorist training camp. And he had placed Tumani there three months before the teenager had even entered Afghanistan. The curious U.S. officer pulled the classified file of the accuser, saw that he had accused 60 men, and, suddenly skeptical, pulled the files of every detainee the accuser had placed at the one training camp. None of the men had been in Afghanistan at the time the accuser said he saw them at the camp.

The tribunal declared Tumani an enemy combatant anyway.

B. Flimsy Evidence

"There is no smoking gun," said John Chandler, a partner in the Atlanta office of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan. One of his Guantanamo clients, picked up in Pakistan, is designated an enemy combatant in part because he once traveled on a bus with wounded Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan. The prisoner denies it, saying it was only a public bus. But then there's the prisoner's Casio watch. According to the Defense Department files, his watch is similar to another Casio model that has a circuit board that Al Qaeda has used for making bombs. The United States is using the Qaeda-favored Casio wristwatch as evidence against at least nine other detainees. But the offending model is sold in sidewalk stands around the world and is worn by one National Journal reporter. The primary difference between Chandler's client's watch and the Casio in question is that the detainee's model hasn't been manufactured for years, according to the U.S. military officer who was his personal representative at the tribunal.

C. Coerced Statements

One man slammed his hands on the table during an especially long interrogation and yelled, "Fine, you got me; I'm a terrorist." The interrogators knew it was a sarcastic statement. But the government, sometime later, used it as evidence against him: "Detainee admitted he is a terrorist" reads his tribunal evidence. The interrogators were so outraged that they sought out the detainee's personal representative to explain it to him that the statement was not a confession.

A Yemeni, whom somebody fingered as a bin Laden bodyguard, finally said in exasperation during one long interrogation, "OK, I saw bin Laden five times: Three times on Al Jazeera and twice on Yemeni news." And now his "admission" appears in his enemy combatant's file: "Detainee admitted to knowing Osama bin Laden."

I continue to wonder why Americans aren't outraged. More and more, I'm being forced to conclude that Americans' commitment to human rights may be, on the whole, very weak.

(For two appropriately outraged reactions, see Stuart Taylor's editorial in the National Journal and this commentary at Body and Soul, where I first saw the story.)

Muslim Protests

Muslims all over the world have joined in an increasingly violent series of demonstrations protesting a set of cartoons that depict the prophet Mohammed. The cartoons, which originally appeared last September in a Danish newspaper, have recently been reprinted throughout Europe and elsewhere.

One explanation for the spread of the protests was offered by an unidentified government official in the United Arab Emirates: "You have no choice but to join the chorus. Anyone who doesn't speak up will look as if they tacitly accept the prophet to be insulted."

This situation brings to mind Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Huntington, arguing that conflict between Christians and Muslims has very deep roots, states that conflict is "a product of difference, particularly the Muslim concept of Islam as a way of life transcending and uniting religion and politics versus the Western Christian concept of the separate realms of God and Caesar" (210).

However offensive the cartoons may be, the Muslim world's reaction can't help but baffle most Westerners. Muslim anger and Western bafflement together lend support to the notion of a "clash of civilizations." And that, in turn, lends support to the forces of reaction on both sides.

Bono in D.C.

In a sermon--yes, a sermon--reminiscent of the speech he gave at the Labour Party Conference at Brighton in September 2004, Bono yesterday challenged an audience that included President Bush and many members of Congress to view aid to Africa as a matter of justice, not charity:

Justice is a higher standard. Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice; it makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties, it doubts our concern, it questions our commitment.

Sixty-five hundred Africans are still dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease, for lack of drugs we can buy at any drug store. This is not about charity, this is about justice and equality.

Take a few minutes to read Bono's sermon. It's important. It's what we once called "speaking truth to power."

[Via Sojourners.]

"Addicted to Oil"

These words were spoken by President Bush in his State of Union address earlier this evening. He said, "Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem. America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world."

Several points that Dan Caldwell and I make in Seeking Security in an Insecure World support the concern expressed by President Bush:

• "The extent of American dependence on oil can best be captured in two key numbers. Petroleum accounts for 40 percent of the energy consumed in the United States; in the transportation sector, the figure is 97 percent." (p. 160)
• "Questions surrounding the dependability of oil-exporting countries (that is, the combination of their internal stability and their willingness to supply particular customers, including the United States, Japan, and the European Union) take on considerable urgency when one looks at who the leading oil exporters are. The top ten net petroleum exporters are Saudi Arabia, Russia, Norway, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Kuwait, Nigeria, Mexico, and Algeria. Only Norway and Mexico are considered 'free,' according to the annual assessment of political liberties and civil rights conducted by Freedom House. Saudi Arabia's monarchy, in contrast, is considered one of the world's most repressive regimes. Several countries on the list are also among the world's most corrupt business environments." (p. 161)
• "The dilemmas associated with petroleum politics are becoming more, not less, difficult to address, because oil consumption continues to increase worldwide. The U.S. Department of Energy projects global oil consumption to grow an average of 1.9 percent per year between 2003 and 2025. For its part, the United States, which used 19.71 million barrels of oil per day in 2001, will be consuming 28.30 million barrels per day by 2025. The annual rate of growth in petroleum consumption in the United States from 2003 to 2025 is projected to be almost double what it was from 1980 to 2003. Meanwhile, domestic production peaked in 1970 at 9.6 million barrels per day and has been slowly declining ever since." (pp. 161-62)

This last point describes the problem that President Bush seeks to address through his proposals for new fuel technologies designed to reduce American dependence on imported oil. His prescription is good--as far as it goes.

If only he could have also brought himself to mention conservation--the one solution that doesn't require years of research and development.

Tonight's SOTU

According to the Borowitz Report, the White House has decided to simulcast tonight's State of the Union address in English in an effort to boost President Bush's sagging approval ratings.

Are We at War?

James Carroll asks an important question in his column in today's Boston Globe: "Is America actually at war?"

Certainly there is a war ongoing in Iraq, but Carroll suggests that we have no enemy there: the insurgents who almost daily attack American troops merely want the invader and occupier to leave. With respect to the broader "war on terror," Carroll notes that the United States is not actually engaging its real enemy "because Al Qaeda is a free floating nihilism, not a nation, or even a network."

The nature of the insurgency in Iraq is more complicated than Carroll suggests, but it's hard not to be struck by the fact that the most serious part of the conflict there began only after President Bush proclaimed "Mission Accomplished" almost three years ago. It's equally difficult to ignore the fact that Osama bin Laden and his associates continue to taunt the United States via videotape over four years after the 9/11 attacks prompted Bush to proclaim a "war on terror."

Declaring a "war on terror" was a mistake in part for what it has done for bin Laden. Carroll makes the point well:

Bin Laden was a self-mythologized figure of no historic standing until George W. Bush designated him America's equal by defining 9/11 as an act of war to be met with war, instead of a crime to be met with criminal justice. But this over-reaction, so satisfying at the time to the wounded American psyche, turned into the war for which the other party simply did not show up.

Saddam Hussein is on trial, but what no doubt amazes observers in the Muslim world is that Osama bin Laden is not.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day--the Day of Remembrance. It commemorates the victims of the Holocaust on the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.

For more on the anniversary, and for a moving poem by Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, go here.

HRW World Report 2006

Human Rights Watch released its annual report on human rights last week. The United States comes in for significant criticism. The press release accompanying the report's publication states,

New evidence demonstrated in 2005 that torture and mistreatment have been a deliberate part of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism strategy, undermining the global defense of human rights, Human Rights Watch said today in releasing its World Report 2006.

The evidence showed that abusive interrogation cannot be reduced to the misdeeds of a few low-ranking soldiers, but was a conscious policy choice by senior U.S. government officials. The policy has hampered Washington’s ability to cajole or pressure other states into respecting international law, said the 532-page volume’s introductory essay.

For an overview of the report's conclusions regarding human rights practices in the U.S., go here. To order the report or download the PDF version, go here.

[UPDATE: Today the International Herald Tribune discusses the Human Rights Watch World Report 2006 in an editorial entitled "An Indictment of America." It begins:

When Human Rights Watch, a respected organization that has been monitoring the world's behavior since 1978, focuses its annual review on America's use of torture and inhumane treatment, every American should feel a sense of shame. And everyone who has believed in the United States as the staunchest protector of human rights in history should be worried.

Many nations--Belarus, Uzbekistan, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Cuba, Sudan and China to name only some of the worst--routinely trample on human rights in a way that neither the United States nor any of its allies would ever countenance. But the United States wrote the book on human rights; it defined the alternative to tyranny and injustice. So when the vice president of the United States actually lobbies against a bill that bans "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment," Human Rights Watch is justified in delivering harsh criticism.

The entire editorial is available here.]

Is Bush a Wilsonian?

George W. Bush has spoken grandiloquently about the need to spread democracy throughout the Middle East. He has been pilloried by realists for failing to assess and employ American power effectively. Could it be that he is, in fact, a Wilsonian?

G. John Ikenberry takes up the question in this interesting essay.

"Vast, Lawless Areas"

The lines on a map tell us which state is legally entitled to exercise sovereignty over a particular territory, but they say nothing about whether that authority translates into effective control.

The Rio Grande, from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico, become the southern boundary of the United States in 1845 when Texas was admitted to the Union as the 28th state. Almost forty years later, the absence of effective control over vast stretches of West Texas was acknowledged when the county commissioners of Pecos County appointed a notorious drunk and small-time thief to be justice of the peace. Thus Judge Roy Bean came to be the "Law West of the Pecos," dispensing beer and frontier justice from the porch of a saloon called the Jersey Lilly.

Developing states, like the United States in the nineteenth century, often include what are effectively ungoverned territories in which lawlessness (or its alternative, frontier justice) is the norm. The same is true of states in the middle of a war.

A story in yesterday's New York Times reminds us that Pakistan is a state lacking effective control over parts of its territory. Carlotta Gall and Mohammad Khan write,

Two years after the Pakistani Army began operations in border tribal areas to root out members of Al Qaeda and other foreign militants, Pakistani officials who know the area say the military campaign is bogged down, the local political administration is powerless and the militants are stronger than ever.

Both Osama bin Laden, who released a new audiotape of threats against the United States this week, and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are believed to be living somewhere in the seven districts that make up these tribal areas, which run for more than 500 miles along the rugged Afghan border and have been hit by several American missile strikes in recent weeks.

The officials said they had been joined by possibly hundreds of foreign militants from Arab countries, Central Asia and the Caucasus, who present a continuing threat to the authorities within the region.

The tribal areas are off limits to foreign journalists, but the Pakistani officials, and former residents who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution, said the militants--who call themselves Taliban--now dispensed their own justice, ran their own jails, robbed banks, shelled military and civilian government compounds and attacked convoys at will. They are recruiting men from the local tribes and have gained a hold over the population through a mix of fear and religion, the officials and former residents said.

As in Texas west of the Pecos during the 1880s and 1890s, a semblance of government exists in the tribal areas of Pakistan, but it is not an authority that is responsive to Gen. Pervez Musharraf's government in Islamabad and its avowed determination to root out members of Al Qaeda from the border regions. This is why the United States felt compelled to use an unmanned Predator aircraft to attack a suspected Al Qaeda meeting place in Bajaur on January 13. On one level, the attack was a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty (as the anti-American demonstrations that followed pointed out), but on another level complaints about the violation of Pakistani sovereignty are clearly divorced from the reality on the ground.

In what must be considered an early contender for the understatement of the year, an American military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the New York Times, "With vast, lawless areas in which Taliban-style justice holds sway, Pakistan faces serious challenges."

Pakistan's challenges, however, are ones that America and the world also face. In the 1880s, the crime that occurred in ungoverned territories was, for the most part, a local problem. Not any more. Thanks to all those factors that together create what we call globalization, Pakistan's ungoverned tribal regions are right next door to all of us.

An Event at Dutton's

Dan Caldwell and I will be at Dutton's Brentwood Bookstore tomorrow (Sunday) at 2:00 p.m. discussing Seeking Security in an Insecure World. Please stop by if you're in the area.

Iraq: A New Estimate

In Tuesday's Los Angeles Times (I'm still trying to get caught up), Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz presented a brief overview of a paper they recently presented at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association (available here). As entertaining as Freakonomics may be and as helpful as it may be to have some numbers available when arguing public policy, I am generally skeptical of the economists' faith in their own ability to assign particular values to almost everything--including human lives. Still, Bilmes--a former assistant secretary of Commerce--and Stiglitz--winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics--make a compelling argument for considering more than just the direct costs of the war, which are currently moving beyond $250 billion.

The argument, reduced to its simplest (i.e., monetary) terms, is this: The final cost to the United States of the war in Iraq is likely to be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion dollars. The wide range of the estimate is primarily due to the war's uncertain duration. The longer the United States is in Iraq, the closer we'll come to the $2 trillion figure.

For those who are inclined to judge the war in Iraq in terms of cost-benefit analysis, having a comprehensive accounting of the costs is an essential starting point.

MLK and Nonviolence

It has been a busy week, so here at the end of it I need to do some catching up.

One thing I failed to post earlier this week was a link to a wonderful essay by Taylor Branch published in the New York Times on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Branch, who has recently published At Canaan's Edge, the third volume in his monumental biography of Dr. King, describes the way that King and the movement he led employed the core values of America and a deep commitment to nonviolence to transform our nation and the world. He laments the fact, however, that we have largely abandoned King's legacy and that we have failed to see the utility of King's methods for our present struggles:

Only hours before his death, Dr. King startled an aide with a balmy aside from his unpopular movement to uplift the poor. "In our next campaign," he remarked, "we have to institutionalize nonviolence and take it international."

The nation would do well to incorporate this goal into our mission abroad, reinforcing the place of nonviolence among the fundamentals of democracy, along with equal citizenship, self-government and accountable public trust. We could also restore Dr. King's role in the continuing story of freedom to its rightful prominence, emphasizing that the best way to safeguard democracy is to practice it. And we must recognize that the accepted tradeoff between freedom and security is misguided, because our values are the essence of our strength. If dungeons, brute force and arbitrary rule were the keys to real power, Saudi Arabia would be a model for the future instead of the past.

Much of this bears repeating, but perhaps no line moreso than this one: "The best way to safeguard democracy is to practice it." The pithy expression is Branch's, but the lesson it conveys is Dr. King's.

It is a lesson that our generation needs to re-learn.

Conference Call

Dan Caldwell and I will be discussing our new book, Seeking Security in an Insecure World, on a conference call tomorrow (Thursday) morning beginning at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time. The call, sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, will involve groups from twenty colleges and universities around the country.

If any readers of Swords Into Plowshares have an opportunity to participate in the call, please let us know that you're on. And if you don't have a chance to make your comment or ask your question, feel free to use the comment space here to do so.

Domestic Surveillance and "Necessity"

When legal arguments fail, "necessity" is often the justification of those who are determined to act with or without the law. As Oliver Cromwell put it, "Necessity hath no law." But, as William Pitt (the younger) recognized, because it is unbound by law, necessity is also "the argument of tyrants."

Most of the actions taken by the Bush Administration that have most seriously damaged the reputation of the United States as a nation committed to the defense of human rights and individual freedoms have, at one time or another (and often repeatedly), been presented as being necessary to the defense of Americans. Like all consequentialist claims, these are very difficult claims to assess, particularly when an extraordinary degree of secrecy--extraordinary for a democracy, at least--is also presented as a necessity in the "war on terrorism."

Today's New York Times offers a bit of evidence on which we can begin to assess the argument that the Bush Administration's domestic surveillance program--the one that evades both the Fourth Amendment and FISA--is necessary. Consider this extended excerpt:

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.

As the bureau was running down those leads, its director, Robert S. Mueller III, raised concerns about the legal rationale for a program of eavesdropping without warrants, one government official said. Mr. Mueller asked senior administration officials about "whether the program had a proper legal foundation," but deferred to Justice Department legal opinions, the official said.

President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program as a "vital tool" against terrorism; Vice President Dick Cheney has said it has saved "thousands of lives."

But the results of the program look very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.

"We'd chase a number, find it's a schoolteacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism--case closed," said one former F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration."

Journalists, no matter how resourceful and thorough, will never be able to offer the public a definitive assessment of the efficacy of an operation like this one. What they can do (and, in this case, have done) is to raise questions about the veracity of an important claim being presented to the public. The next step is for Congress to use its oversight function to get to the bottom of the story in a way that journalists, being unable to compel testimony, cannot.

Next month, as the Senate Judiciary Committee takes up the constitutionality of the Bush Administration's domestic surveillance program, Congress also needs to begin asking questions, behind closed doors if necessary, about the claim that the program has saved "thousands of lives."

MLK on Love and Justice

"Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love."

--Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)

[via Central Dallas Ministries]

The Imperial Presidency

An editorial in today's New York Times is unusually blunt in its criticisms of President Bush, who, according to the piece, "seems to see no limit to his imperial presidency." This is a point that has been made previously with respect to President Bush by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the author of the classic work entitled The Imperial Presidency. Schlesinger's original argument, summarized in a more recent book he wrote entitled War and the American Presidency, is this:

Confronted by presidential initiatives in foreign affairs, Congress and the courts, along with the press and the citizenry too, often lack confidence in their own information and judgment and are likely to be intimidated by executive authority. The inclination in foreign policy is to let the president have the responsibility and the power--a renunciation that results from congressional pusillanimity as well as from presidential rapacity.

The imperial presidency is, or ought to be, a matter of concern to both Republicans and Democrats who believe the system of checks and balances on which the Constitution is based is worth preserving. After all, "congressional pusillanimity" at present is Republican pusillanimity. Thus far, however, most Republicans in Congress--with the noteworthy exception of Sen. John McCain--have willingly acquiesced in almost every post-9/11 expansion of presidential authority. Fortunately, Sen. Arlen Specter has promised to hold hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee on the legality of President Bush's domestic eavesdropping. But whether those hearings will represent a reassertion of legislative authority or merely the appearance of a genuine check on the executive remains to be seen.

The Judgment of Other Nations

In The Federalist No. 63, James Madison wrote,

An attention to the judgment of other nations is important to every government for two reasons. The one is, that, independently of the merits of any particular plan or measure, it is desirable, on various accounts, that it should appear to other nations as the offspring of a wise and honorable policy; the second is, that in doubtful cases, particularly where the national councils may be warped by some strong passion or momentary interest, the presumed or known opinion of the impartial world may be the best guide that can be followed.

At the White House today, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany reiterated her call for the prison at Guantanamo to be closed. President Bush, still convinced that there is some benefit to the United States to having a prison available beyond the jurisdiction of American courts, demurred.

When "the judgment of other nations" calls the United States to be faithful to its own highest values, it would be good to pay attention.

Syriana

The plot of Syriana brings together a number of touchy issues in American foreign policy--arms transfers, covert operations, and Middle Eastern oil politics, to name but a few. Also included are the income gap in the Middle East, terrorism, torture, and assassination as a tool of state policy. The highly combustible mix has confused some reviewers (those unable to keep up) and offended others (those unable to face reality). Both groups probably need either to grow up or to stick to films from Disney.

Is the plot real? No, not in the sense of being a faithful depiction of historical events. But the significant plot elements all have parallels in the recent history of American foreign policy. The investigation of the U.S. intelligence community conducted by the Church Committee in the 1970s, the congressional investigation of the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s, and the 9/11 Commission’s investigation of events leading up to the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 all could have supplied inspiration for the screenplay (although former CIA agent Robert Baer’s book See No Evil is cited in the film’s credits).

What seems to bother some conservatives most about Syriana is its suggestion that the government of the United States might engage in morally dubious activities for the sake of maintaining American access to Middle Eastern oil. Others seem troubled by the connection drawn in the film between dismal social conditions and the recruitment of suicide bombers. Two very carefully researched books--Michael Klare’s Blood and Oil and Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon’s The Age of Sacred Terror--offer ample evidence to validate both points.

Syriana may lack subtlety and it may have some loose ends in the plot, but its fundamental problem is its message: The United States is heavily dependent on Middle Eastern oil and that dependence necessitates significant compromises with what we proclaim to be our values. Most Americans would rather not be told that.

Coming Attractions

Having given the blog a holiday break, I'm back. This New Year's Day post will, however, be brief--merely a preview of coming attractions. Here are a few of the things I plan to write about in the coming days:

First, two recent movies--Syriana and Munich--are well worth discussing. I plan to look at both from an IR perspective.

Second, I'll be looking back at some of the better books that I read during 2005. Expect a few recommendations.

Third, a play I saw this afternoon at the Mark Taper Forum--Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates--suggested some interesting questions about the history of American foreign policy and Thomas Jefferson's notion of an "Empire of Liberty." I hope to look at the historical record and see if we can find some of the roots of what playwright Robert Schenkkan calls "the divided heart of America."

Fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, etc.--there remains much to be said about torture, the Bush Administration's domestic spying, homeland security failures, the disparagement of international law, and the increasingly ambitious attempts by the Bush Administration to revive the "imperial presidency" cut short by the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974.

The new year may not be pretty, but it will certainly be interesting.

Christmas Break

In spite of the fact that I have a lot more I want to say about the President Bush's determination that the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to his administration, I must leave the commenting to others for now. The grades are all in and it's time for a break. I'll resume posting on or about January 1.

Thanks for stopping by. Have a very merry Christmas!

Fool Me Once

No matter how things turn out in Iraq--and all people of good will must hope that a generation of Iraqis that has lived through three devastating wars and a long and brutal dictatorship will find peace and freedom--we must not forget that the United States initiated its current war in Iraq under false pretenses. The war, we were told, was necessary (even if preemptive or, more accurately, preventive) because Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction and was in league with Al Qaeda. Iraq, in short, posed a serious threat to the United States--if not directly, then through the medium of transnational terrorist organizations in common cause with Saddam Hussein.

Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. It did not have ties to Al Qaeda. These facts have been definitively established. For present purposes, it does not matter whether President Bush lied or was merely mistaken. It does not matter because, after the President's defiant admission today during his weekly radio address that he did in fact order surveillance of Americans without judicial authorization, we need only be reminded of the consequences of being wrong--for whatever reason--when dramatic claims are made in the name of national security.

President Bush said today that he had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants. He called the secret program "crucial to our national security" and said it was intended to "detect and prevent terrorist attacks against the United States, our friends and allies."

Just to be clear, President Bush acknowledged giving orders that violate the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. His claim that the authorization was "consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution" has no more validity than his administration's many attempts to define out of existence both domestic and international prohibitions against torture. His claim that his action was, and continues to be, "critical to saving American lives" is unverifiable.

The President initiated a war against Iraq in defiance of international law, the United Nations Security Council, and just war principles. He did so on the basis of claims, later proven false, that the war was necessary to protect American lives.

The President has also authorized--by his own admission at least thirty times--a program of domestic surveillance that clearly violates the Constitution (and for which legal alternatives are available). He claims, once again, to be doing so in order to save American lives.

Americans need to remember the President's own words: "Fool me once, shame on--shame on you. Fool me--you can't get fooled again."

Seeking Security in an Insecure World

Seeking Security in an Insecure World has been released. You can order it here from the publisher at a 15 percent discount. (Amazon and Barnes & Noble have not yet updated their information on the book.) It would make a great gift for everyone on your Christmas list!

For Pepperdine's press release concerning the book, go here.

Bush Relents

President Bush has agreed to accept the McCain Amendment barring cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of detainees.

Unfortunately, some people still don't get it.

Bipartisan, Bicameral Support

The House of Representatives voted today, by a 308 to 122 margin, to support the McCain Amendment. The measure, approved 90-9 by the Senate in October, is part of a $453 billion defense appropriation currently in conference committee. The vote today was on a non-binding resolution to instruct House members of the conference committee to support inclusion of the McCain Amendment in the bill reported out by the committee.

It's a modest step toward restoring America's integrity. Now what will it take to get the Bush Administration to concede that cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment is wrong?

The Right Question

"Cowardice asks the question: is it safe? Expediency asks the question: is it politic? Vanity asks the question: is it popular? But conscience asks the question: is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular--but one must take it simply because it is right."

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Torture: Recent Comments

Anthony Lewis's recent essay in The Nation, entitled "The Torture Administration," is a must-read piece. Here, via Common Dreams, is a brief sample.

The pictures from Abu Ghraib, first shown to the public on April 28, 2004, evoked a powerful reaction. Americans were outraged when they saw grinning US soldiers tormenting Iraqi prisoners. But it was seeing the mistreatment that produced the outrage, or so we must now conclude. Since then the Bush Administration and its lawyers have prevented the release of any more photographs or videotapes. And the public has not reacted similarly to the disclosure, without pictures, of worse actions, including murder.

Maureen Dowd's skewering of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's doubletalk in Europe is also well worth reading. Here is Dowd parsing the Secretary's assurances regarding torture:

"The United States government does not authorize or condone torture of detainees," [Rice] said.

It all depends on what you mean by "authorize," "condone," "torture" and "detainees."

(This also comes via Common Dreams.)

Finally, Naomi Klein points out (in an article entitled "'Never Before!' Our Amnesiac Torture Debate") that the United States has a history with torture that we ignore all too readily. It's worth a read.

* * *

Why are most Americans so willing to ignore the atrocities--certainly that is what we would call them if any other government were responsible--that are being committed by their government? Is fear really that strong? Or are we just not as good as we suppose ourselves to be?

10,000

This site logged its 10,000th visit at 7:19 a.m. Pacific Time today. Ten thousand visits is a bad day for a lot of blogs, but it's not about the numbers. I'm grateful for all the visitors I get.

Thanks to all of you who stop by from time to time.

Condi and the Media

Tim Rutten, who writes a column on the media for the Los Angeles Times, has an exceptional piece in today's paper in which he laments the tendency of American journalists today to "make a fetish of that faux-fairness that housebreaks reporting by rendering it a subset of stenography."

What is it that provoked Rutten to alliterate? It's the media's coverage of Secretary of State Rice's comments on torture during her European travels.

Secretary Rice has been reported to have set things right regarding torture thanks to her clear condemnations of illegal practices. Rutten suggests, to the contrary, that Rice's words did nothing of the sort and that the only way one would come away thinking they did is by completely ignoring the context of her remarks. As Rutten puts it in his conclusion, "Facts plus context equal truth."

What context does Rutten suggest is missing? He lists some facts to supply context:

Fact: As the [Washington] Post previously has reported, the United States has been operating a network of clandestine CIA prisons in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, where suspected terrorists and adherents of Islamo-fascism are tortured.

Fact: U.S. intelligence agents have repeatedly kidnapped people and handed them over to third countries to be tortured in a process called "extraordinary rendition."

Fact: As the New York Times has reported, U.S. officials believe that information obtained from one of Al Qaeda's most infamous operatives--Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who planned the 9/11 atrocities--cannot be used in American legal proceedings because it was obtained by torture. Similarly, false information regarding purported links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, which the administration used to make the case for invading Iraq, was obtained under torture from another terrorist, Ibn Al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was captured by the CIA in Afghanistan and turned over to the Egyptians for interrogation.

Fact: As the Post's editorial pointed out, Rice continues to argue that "'It is also U.S. policy that authorized interrogation will be consistent with U.S. obligations under the Convention Against Torture, which prohibit cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.' What she didn't explain is that, under this Administration's eccentric definition of 'U.S. obligations,' cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment is not prohibited as long as it does not occur on U.S. territory."

Rutten then notes, "Had all these facts and voices of rational authority--like [former State Department legal adviser Abraham] Sofaer's--been made part of the day-to-day reporting on Rice's tour, all her deliberate ambiguity would have come into focus for what it was: a convoluted defense of the indefensible."

Parsing the words spoken by the Bush Administration about torture is pointless and unnecessary. Actions speak louder--and far more truthfully--than words.

The UDHR

Today is International Human Rights Day. It marks the fifty-seventh anniversary of the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the seed from which modern international human rights law has grown.

Paul Gordon Lauren, in The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (2nd ed.), a magisterial account of the origins of our modern understanding of human rights, describes the signficance of the Universal Declaration this way:

In creating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an international body representing the community of nations for the first time in all of history agreed on a universal vision of human rights on behalf of all men, women, and children everywhere in the world. The participants remarkably joined together to both reflect and transcend their many different political and economic systems, social and judicial structures, religious and cultural backgrounds, philosophical and ideological beliefs, stages of development and cultural settings, and histories of exclusive national sovereignty in such a way as to create the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that spoke of the "human family" as a whole and to establish a set of normative standards for all peoples and all nations. The fact that there was no single author, but rather hundreds--or, arguably, even thousands--who contributed to drafting the text, gave the proclamation and its vision even greater authority and prestige. . . . This vision proclaimed that all people everywhere possessed certain basic and identifiable rights, that universal standards existed for the world as a whole, and that human rights were matters of legitimate international concern and no longer within the exclusive domestic jurisdiction of nation-states as in the past. Yet, as those familiar with the long struggle for human rights knew from experience, tremendous distances often existed between abstract theory and actual practice. In fact, at the time of the adoption of the Univeral Declaration of Human Rights no state--not one--regardless of location, system of government, level of development, or culture, could meet its standards of achievement. Champions and opponents of human rights alike thus wondered what would happen and what it all would mean. The answer, of course, lay in the future and ultimately would depend on if, when, and how the world decided to transform this proclaimed vision into reality. (232)

"Emissions Accomplished"

You had to read all the way to the end of Andrew Revkin's story in today's New York Times about the American walkout during the climate change discussions in Montreal to find this description of a clever lobbying tactic by an NGO:

The National Environmental Trust distributed custom-printed noise-making rubber whoopee cushions printed with a caricature of President Bush and the words "Emissions Accomplished."

The rest of the story describes the effort made by the United States during the two-week-long Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to ensure that nothing would be accomplished. "Emissions Accomplished" indeed.

Disgraceful

U.N. Ambassador John Bolton today told U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour to back off. Arbour, in a statement closely related to her recent commentary in the International Herald Tribune, said the United States is eroding respect for the international prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Having apparently slipped his leash, Bolton said,

Today is Human Rights Day. It would be appropriate, I think, for the U.N.'s high commissioner for human rights to talk about the serious human rights problems that exist in the world today. . . . It is disappointing that she has chosen to talk about press commentary about alleged American conduct. I think the secretary of state has fully and completely addressed the substance of the allegations, so I won't go back into that again other than to reaffirm that the United States does not engage in torture.

Bolton also said, "I think it is inappropriate and illegitimate for an international civil servant to second-guess the conduct that we're engaged in in the war on terror, with nothing more as evidence than what she reads in the newspapers."

"Alleged American conduct"? "Reaffirm that the United States does not engage in torture"? "Nothing more as evidence than what she reads in the newspapers"? Did Bolton somehow miss the photos from Abu Ghraib? Has he not read the reports conducted by military investigators? Is he unaware that American soldiers have been convicted of charges related to the abuse of detainees? Does he think that hundreds of stories in the world's most respected newspapers are all without foundation?

Or is he just intent on causing American credibility to go even lower?

When the United States Speaks

Skepticism abounds.

Secretary of State Condolezza Rice, currently in Europe, has been telling British and German representatives that "the United States does not condone torture."

Many of those representatives have been skeptical.

"It's clear that the text of the speech [in London] was drafted by lawyers with the intention of misleading an audience," said Andrew Tyrie, a Conservative MP interviewed by the New York Times.

No Exceptions

Louise Arbour, the former chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda and, since July 2004, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, writes today in the International Herald Tribune on torture.

Her argument is not that of an activist, a polemicist, or even a lawyer. Instead, Ms. Arbour writes--simply, dispassionately, and authoritatively--as an expert on international human rights with a single point to make: "The right to be free from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment . . . may not be subject to any limitation, anywhere, under any condition." The right not to be tortured is, to use the term favored by human rights lawyers, non-derogable.

While Ms. Arbour does not cite the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in support of her position, Article 2 (2) looms large. It states, "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."

Ms. Arbour concludes with an admonition:

On Human Rights Day, I call on all governments to reaffirm their commitment to the total prohibition of torture by:

Condemning torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and prohibiting it in national law;

Abiding by the principle of non-refoulement and refraining from returning persons to countries where they may face torture;

Ensuring access to prisoners and abolishing secret detention;

Prosecuting those responsible for torture and ill-treatment;

Prohibiting the use of statements extracted under torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, whether the interrogation has taken place at home or abroad;

Ratifying the Convention against Torture and its Optional Protocol, as well as other international treaties banning torture.

"He who has ears to hear . . ."

Wikipedia

To be perfectly honest, the real point of this particular post is to make a few comments regarding web-based sources in general and Wikipedia in particular that might be helpful to my students. But because Swords into Plowshares is about international politics, a few preliminary comments may help to keep readers who aren't a part of the student population from tuning out.

Wikipedia, the web-based encyclopedia that is written, edited, and updated by any Internet user who cares to contribute, is an amazing phenomenon. Launched in 2001, the project generated over 20,000 encyclopedia articles in its first year and over 250,000 in English alone by April 2004. Another 600,000 articles in 50 additional languages were also online by that date. Today there are over 800,000 articles in English alone.

As I write this, Wikipedia.org is the 35th most commonly visited web site in the world, according to Alexa.com. It gets more hits each day than the New York Times and the Washington Post web sites put together.

Tom Friedman, in his bestseller The World Is Flat, uses Wikipedia as an example of open-sourcing, one of the "ten forces that flattened the world." On page 95, Friedman quotes Andrew Lih, author of an essay in YaleGlobal, who notes that Wikipedia

provides a manifold view of issues from the World Trade Organization and multinational corporations to the anti-globalization movement and threats to cultural diversity. At the same time malicious contributors are kept in check because vandalism is easily undone. Users dedicated to fixing vandalism watch the list of recent changes, fixing problems within minutes, if not seconds. A defaced article can quickly be returned to an acceptable version with just one click of a button. This crucial asymmetry tips the balance in favor of productive and cooperative members of the wiki community, allowing quality content to prevail.

But is there really quality content in Wikipedia? How trustworthy is the information it dispenses? Anyone wanting a general introduction to any of the hundreds of thousands of topics listed would probably be quite satisfied. But those whose lives (or grades) depended on their research might prefer to consult a more reputable source.

Recently, the Guardian (London) asked a number of experts to check the Wikipedia articles on the subjects they know best. Entries on composer Steve Reich, the Basque people, British diarist Samuel Pepys, and encyclopedias were among those evaluated. Most of the experts found problems with the articles devoted to their specialties. Some were trivial errors, some were more consequential mistakes, and a few of the problems were stylistic rather than factual. (Two evaluators thought the writing was poor.)

Essentially, the problem with Wikipedia from an academic standpoint is the same as the problem with the Internet in general. Its openness (open-sourcing) means that some of its content will be outstanding, some will be mediocre, and some will be very poor. Unfortunately, discerning the difference between the good, the bad, and the ugly may require a level of expertise beyond what is available to a reader who, we shouldn't forget, probably came to the Internet looking to be educated.

In theory, the peer-review process and the editing that occurs in the world of academic publishing serve to ensure that what is published is, if not outstanding, at least reliable. Of course, all scholars can point to peer-reviewed articles or books that they think represent a waste of paper. (I'm reminded of Dorothy Parker's famous comment about a work of fiction: "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.") But, generally speaking, scholarship is scholarship not because it is produced by scholars but because it is scrutinized (and deemed acceptable) by scholars.

My opposition to the use of Wikipedia as a scholarly source was put to the test at a recent conference. Among the half dozen or so papers that I picked up, two cited Wikipedia articles. Both papers were written by well established scholars. I had to ask myself if my own standards for quality research might be too high. But, after seeing this, I've decided they're not. With Wikipedia, it's caveat lector.

One Thousand Executions

On Friday, December 2, Kenneth Boyd was executed in North Carolina. It was the one thousandth execution in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

According to Amnesty International, a majority of the world's states--122 of them--have abolished the death penalty. Only China, Iran, and Vietnam executed more people than the United States last year.

Security and Liberty

Security is like liberty in that many are the crimes committed in its name.

--Justice Robert H. Jackson, dissenting opinion in Knauff v.
Shaughnessy (1950)