Amazing Grace

Today, on the 200th anniversary of the British Parliament's vote to end the slave trade, a film that recounts William Wilberforce's long struggle to win passage of that legislation is opening. For more about the film, Amazing Grace, go here. And for a very interesting commentary claiming that the vote to end British involvement in the slave trade was the first victory of the global human rights movement, go here.

The Ten-Step Program

A broad coalition of human rights organizations and religious groups has issued a document outlining ten steps the United States Congress must take to restore the moral authority of the United States.

The complete document is available here, but, briefly, the coalition is calling on Congress to

1. restore habeas corpus;
2. stop renditions to torture;
3. abolish secret prisons;
4. hold abusers accountable;
5. hold fair trials;
6. prohibit abusive interrogations;
7. close Guantánamo Bay;
8. respect the laws of war;
9. protect victims of persecution from being defined as terrorists; and
10. end indefinite detention without charge.

Among the organizations that are part of the coalition are Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Concerned Foreign Service Officers, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, the United Methodist Church, General Board of Church and Society, and even the conservative Rutherford Institute.

W. in Germany

In Germany, Karneval reaches its peak each year on "Rose Monday" (Rosenmontag), the day before the Mardi Gras celebrations in other parts of the world. Parades with elaborate floats characterize Rosenmontag in the Rhineland.

Here, via Spiegel Online, is a float from this past Monday's parade in Mainz.

Continuing the George W. Bush theme, this float from the parade in Düsseldorf depicts W. getting a whiff of Ahmadinejad's "armpit [Achsel] of evil." [Via Wikipedia.]

The Value of an Education

"A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad."

--Theodore Roosevelt

Swords Into Plowshares

It occurred to me recently that a blog called Swords Into Plowshares should, at some point, include a photograph of the sculpture in New York depicting that very activity. Here you have it.

The statue was created by Russian artist Evgeniy Vuchetich and presented by the Soviet Union to the United Nations in 1959. It stands on United Nations Plaza, just outside the Organization's headquarters.

Aptly Named

Ben Young has a post about "vulture funds" that is well worth reading, especially for those concerned about debt relief for developing countries.

Rogue Aid

China, which is sitting on over $1 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, has suddenly become one of the world's most generous states. Taking a page from the United States and the Soviet Union, both of which used foreign aid to try to secure the loyalty of strategically important regimes during the Cold War, China has been offering resource-rich states development assistance without international oversight or other onerous restrictions.

But Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy and author of Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy, says there are some problems with the way China is throwing its money around:

Call it rogue aid. It is development assistance that is nondemocratic in origin and nontransparent in practice, and its effect is typically to stifle real progress while hurting ordinary citizens.

What, exactly, is the problem? The kind of no-strings-attached aid China provides not only fails to address corruption, inefficiency, environmental problems, or other issues that international development organizations such as the World Bank consider when structuring development packages, it also bolsters dictators who steal from their people or commit serious human rights abuses.

The problem, Naím says, is that "rogue aid" serves the interests of the states that provide it, not the interests of the people such aid is ordinarily designed to serve. So, Naím concludes,

States like China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela have the cash and the will to reshape the world into a place very unlike the one where we want to live. By pushing their alternative development model, such states effectively price responsible aid programs out of the market exactly where they are needed most. In place of those programs, rogue donors offer to underwrite a world that is more corrupt, chaotic and authoritarian. That sort of aid is in no one's interest, except the rogues.

Don't Drink Bottled Water

Here's a simple thing you can do to help the environment: Don't drink bottled water. (Click on the link to find out why.)

The Bad Old Days

Paul Kennedy has an excellent essay in today's Los Angeles Times that reminds those of us who are older--and informs those of us who are younger--that the Cold War was a very dangerous time.

Why The Scream Was Stolen

Last August, Norwegian police recovered Edvard Munch's iconic work, The Scream, which had been stolen from the Munch Museum two years earlier. This story in tomorrow's Guardian tells how it happened and why the theft occurred in the first place.

Rendition on Trial

Twenty-six Americans, most of whom are believed to be CIA agents, and six Italian intelligence officials have been indicted in Milan for their role in the abduction and extraordinary rendition from Italy of a terrorism suspect, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr.

It is uncertain whether Italy's government will request the suspects' extradition from the United States. Even if such a request is forthcoming, the U. S. government is almost certain to refuse. However, Italian law permits trials in absentia.

On Wednesday, the European Parliament, following a lengthy investigation, issued a report that accuses the U.K., Germany, Italy, and several other EU member states of allowing their airspace and, in some cases, airports in their territories to be used for approximately 1,200 unlawful CIA flights transporting terrorism suspects in cases of extraordinary rendition.

Why I'm Not a Fan

James Donaghy of the Guardian, noting that Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan has complained to producers about the impact of 24 on foreigners' perceptions of the United States, neatly summarizes what I dislike about the show: "The Emmy-winning 24 doesn't just tap into American paranoia about the terrorist threat--it pours gasoline on to it, followed swiftly by a flaming rag."

Jane Mayer's story in The New Yorker, from which the information about Gen. Finnegan's complaint is drawn, tells why the show feeds American paranoia: It's produced by Joel Surnow, a self-described "right-wing nut job." Mayer writes:

For all its fictional liberties, "24" depicts the fight against Islamist extremism much as the Bush Administration has defined it: as an all-consuming struggle for America’s survival that demands the toughest of tactics. Not long after September 11th, Vice-President Dick Cheney alluded vaguely to the fact that America must begin working through the "dark side" in countering terrorism. On "24," the dark side is on full view.

But shouldn't we all be able to enjoy the thrills provided by 24 knowing that sane people will return to real life when it's over? It is, after all, just a television show on a network known for its strained relationship with reality.

Gen. Finnegan isn't so sure. According to Mayer,

Finnegan, who is a lawyer, has for a number of years taught a course on the laws of war to West Point seniors—cadets who would soon be commanders in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. He always tries, he said, to get his students to sort out not just what is legal but what is right. However, it had become increasingly hard to convince some cadets that America had to respect the rule of law and human rights, even when terrorists did not. One reason for the growing resistance, he suggested, was misperceptions spread by "24," which was exceptionally popular with his students.

To be fair to 24, misperceptions spread by the Bush Administration are another reason for diminishing respect for the rule of law and human rights.

[Update: Roger Alford and Peggy McGuinness at Opinio Juris have also commented on 24 today.]

Texts and Contexts

James Carroll ponders the evolution of reading and its impact on social organization (including democracy) in an intriguing column published yesterday. Here's a sample of what he has to say:

Once again, as occurred when the scroll became the book, innovations in technology that change the primal experience of reading are causing a shift in consciousness. Words on a subtly flickering screen come to the eye differently than from the page, and who knows yet what that difference does? The main note of interaction between readers and what is read electronically has become interruption, since the Internet, e-mail, instant messaging, talk radio, and even audio books all assume a simultaneous multiplicity of experience. Mutations inevitably follow in the way humans relate to language.

Whether silently or aloud, with interruptions or without, read the whole thing.

The Worst of the Bad Guys

I'm not a regular reader of Parade, the popular Sunday newspaper insert, but for reasons that Peter Howard at The Duck of Minerva articulates well, the annual "World's Worst Dictator" issue is worth a look. Omar al-Bashir of Sudan retains his position at the top of the list, followed by Kim Jong-il, who was also second on last year's list.

Equatorial Guinea's Teodoro Obiang Nguema, father of Malibu's own Teodoro Nguema Obiang, is eleventh on the list. Here's what Parade has to say about him:

Obiang seized control of this small, oil-rich West African nation by executing the previous dictator--his uncle. In July 2003, state radio announced that Obiang “is in permanent contact with The Almighty” and that he "can decide to kill without anyone calling him to account and without going to Hell." Obiang himself told his citizenry that he felt compelled to take full control of the national treasury in order to prevent civil servants from being tempted to engage in corrupt practices. To avoid this corruption, Obiang deposited more than half a billion dollars into accounts controlled by Obiang and his family at a bank in Washington, D.C., leading a U.S. federal court to fine the bank $16 million.

The complete list of the twenty worst dictators is available here.

Photos from the League

The League of Nations Archives in Geneva and the Indiana University Center for the Study of Global Change maintain an outstanding online archive of photographs from the League. The archive, located here, includes photographs of League assemblies, conferences, individual delegates, buildings, and much more.

A Deal with North Korea

This looks like good news. It also looks an awful lot like the 1994 Agreed Framework that the Clinton Administration negotiated with North Korea--several North Korean nuclear weapons ago.

No Cuts

The BBC reports that authorities in Beijing have begun campaigning against cutting in lines (or "queue-jumping," as the BBC calls it). The campaign, which (inexplicably) occurs on the eleventh of each month, is intended to teach Beijing residents to be more polite in advance of the world's arrival for the 2008 Olympics.

Next on the government's list of social ills to be corrected: spitting.

Four Wars

Phillip Carter, in a piece published in Slate yesterday, breaks down the problems of trying to fight the four different wars in Iraq that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates identified last week. It's a brief essay that is well worth reading.

[Via Washington Monthly.]

And So It Begins

I didn't expect to begin posting any comments on the 2008 presidential campaign this early, but Barack Obama's official announcement of his candidacy today in Springfield, Illinois deserves mention because it came with an early indication that he'll be running a very disciplined and effective campaign.

The indication? Almost simultaneously with Obama's speech in Illinois, I got a call from a campaign volunteer asking for my support.

I'm keeping my options open, but I couldn't help but be impressed by the coordination.

Love and Peace

"Every act of love is an act of peace, no matter how small."

--Mother Teresa

[Via Sojourners.]

Online in Vietnam and China

Will Internet use transform the Communist governments in Vietnam and China or will those governments be able to harness its liberating effects? Consider these cases drawn from today's news:

Vietnam's prime minister hosted the country's highest-level online chat Friday, answering questions about everything from corruption to his personal life--a clear break from old-style communism in the rapidly changing country.

Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung answered questions preselected from more than 20,000 sent from across Vietnam and abroad. He also fielded a few live questions during the 2 1/2 hour chat, and did not shy away from thorny issues, including the lack of press freedom, the Vietnam War and government seizure of farmers' land for development. [The complete story is here.]

Here, Edward Cody reports for the Washington Post from China:

There was no sign, but Gedong's teenagers knew the way. Down a dusty alley just off Jicui Park and a few minutes' walk from local schools, the curtained door beckoned. Inside, in a dingy back room off the kitchen, a clutch of adolescent boys crowded around six computers and stared at the images flickering on their screens.

For the equivalent of 35 cents an hour, the youths were playing computer games in an underground Internet cafe, one of a half-dozen information-age speak-easies in this little farming and coal-mining town in Shanxi province 220 miles southwest of Beijing. For those unable to afford their own computers--the vast majority here--going online in a clandestine dive has become the only option; the local Communist Party leader banned Internet cafes nine months ago as a bad influence on minors.

For a detailed examination of Internet filtering in China, see this study conducted by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI). A similar, but more recent, study of Internet filtering in Vietnam, also conducted by ONI, is available here.

An Interrogator's Regrets

Eric Fair, a civilian contractor who assisted with Army interrogations in Iraq, offers a mea culpa in tomorrow's Washington Post. After describing how he carried out his assigned task of depriving a prisoner of sleep during a twelve-hour shift, he writes:

Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.

Despite my best efforts, I cannot ignore the mistakes I made at the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency. Instead, I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself. I compromised my values. I will never forgive myself.

American authorities continue to insist that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident in an otherwise well-run detention system. That insistence, however, stands in sharp contrast to my own experiences as an interrogator in Iraq. I watched as detainees were forced to stand naked all night, shivering in their cold cells and pleading with their captors for help. Others were subjected to long periods of isolation in pitch-black rooms. Food and sleep deprivation were common, along with a variety of physical abuse, including punching and kicking. Aggressive, and in many ways abusive, techniques were used daily in Iraq, all in the name of acquiring the intelligence necessary to bring an end to the insurgency. The violence raging there today is evidence that those tactics never worked. My memories are evidence that those tactics were terribly wrong.

Misdirection

A 76-year-old Thai woman who got lost twenty-five years ago has been found. FP Passport describes what happened:

The woman boarded the wrong bus when leaving on a shopping trip, and ended up 800 miles north in Bangkok. She only spoke Yawi, a dialect of Muslims in southern Thailand, and couldn't communicate with anyone in Thai or English. In hopes of returning home, she took another wrong bus to a city near the border with Burma and ended up being a beggar there for five years. In 1987, police who suspected she was an illegal immigrant arrested her, but they couldn't identify where she was from. So they put her in a social services center, where she remained for the next 20 years.

The staff at the center thought she was a mute until last month, when Yawi-speaking students happened to visit the center and the woman could finally talk to people who could understand her.

The Sydney Morning Herald has more.

Being separated from friends and family and forced to live as a pauper among people whom you cannot understand for twenty-five years is a tragedy. But a three-hour detour attributable to poor spelling is, I think, rather amusing. So, on to the next story.

My son, currently a student in Pepperdine's Florence Program, reports that a group of students studying in Pepperdine's Lausanne Program visited Florence recently. When they returned to Switzerland, they boarded a train bound for Genova, Italy rather than Geneva, Switzerland.

Outsourcing in Iraq

Today the House Government Reform Committee heard testimony from family members of the four Blackwater contractors killed in Fallujah in 2004. Also testifying today were officials from the Department of Defense and representatives of the various private security firms (including Blackwater). Tonight the PBS Newshour ran a very good segment on the use of private military firms in Iraq. The transcript is available here.

Perhaps the most interesting point in Gwen Ifill's conversation with Robert Young Pelton, author of Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror, and Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association, was Brooks' admission that private security contractors face very little accountability for their actions in Iraq and that better means for ensuring accountability are needed.

Maybe. Or maybe we just shouldn't be relying so heavily on private military firms.

Changing the Way We Think . . .

. . . and write and watch and assess and even relate to information and to each other.

I think Professor Wesch is right. Take five minutes and look at his video, posted here on FP Passport, and see if you don't agree.

Comments are open and, once again, unmoderated.

Killing the Innocent

The realization that innocent people have been sentenced to die and, in some cases, actually executed has been a key factor in prompting some states to impose a moratorium on capital punishment. In warfare, the killing of innocents sometimes leads to inquests and courts martial--if the killings occur in the context of ground combat. But, as Simon Jenkins points out in a column in tomorrow's Guardian, killing innocent people from the air hardly rates any concern at all. Jenkins writes:

When bombing from the air kills non-combatants, as it does to an appalling degree, there should at least be a military inquiry into why. . . . Massacres committed by infantrymen are subject to courts martial. If soldiers enter a house by the front door and kill civilians inside, then they are hauled before world opinion and condemned. If a dropped bomb enters the same house through the roof and has the same effect, it is dismissed as collateral damage. In Iraq it is not even recorded.

That military strategy is so casual about bomb inaccuracy is largely due to the technological glamour attached to air forces as against ground troops. The latter are always worse equipped and worse protected. Air commanders have long oversold the efficacy of strategic bombing and ignore the degree to which, in counter-insurgency war, such bombardment can be wildly counter-productive. The destruction of non-military targets and the incidental killing of civilians is far more damaging to the cause of victory than friendly-fire casualties that attract so much publicity and inquiry.

In the United States, attitudes toward aerial bombardment were shaped by World War II and the indiscriminate bombing campaign led by General Curtis LeMay. LeMay summed up his own attitude toward war in these words: "I'll tell you what war is about. You've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting."

Until the United States comes to terms with the LeMay legacy, it may be impossible to understand "collateral damage" for what it is: killing the innocent.

Calling on Congress

Two senior fellows at Stanford, Leonard Weiss and Larry Diamond, agree with James Fallows: Congress should act now to prevent the Bush administration from going to war with Iran.

Repenting in Retirement

It was four years ago--February 5, 2003--that then-secretary of state Colin Powell addressed the UN Security Council in an effort to convince a majority of members that the inevitable American attack on Iraq was justified and should be sanctioned by the international community. Now out of office, Powell has begun to contradict many of the claims made by the Bush administration.

James Carroll's column today notes the tendency of former officials like Powell and Vietnam-era secretary of defense Robert McNamara to change their views after retiring. He concludes, "Colin Powell's authority today instructs the critics of the war. Too bad that authority did not prevent it."

Swords

Occasionally, people searching the Internet looking for stuff about swords end up here. Most, no doubt, are disappointed. Now, however, thanks to Ben Young, I can tell you where to find swords.

Take a look at this post on Ben's blog and click through to the video to see an extended interview with one of Saudi Arabia's official executioners. Ben got it exactly right when he called it "morbidly fascinating."

[UPDATE: Kevin Jon Heller at Opinio Juris notes that Morocco is about to become the first Arab country to abolish the death penalty.]

Da Bears

Thanks to a partnership between the NFL and World Vision, somewhere in the developing world people will soon be getting T-shirts and caps proclaiming the Chicago Bears to be the winners of this year's Super Bowl. The New York Times has the story.

Opposing the Next War

Is the Bush administration so reckless that Congress ought to tie the president's hands with respect to Iran? James Fallows, an experienced and sober observer of U.S. foreign policy, thinks so.

"All Governments Lie"

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out."

--I. F. Stone

The Future of Kosovo

Is independence from Serbia a possibility? A UN-sponsored plan says it should be. The BBC has details.

[Via FP Passport.]

Groundhog Day

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released its Fourth Assessment Report. (The Summary for Policymakers is available here [.pdf].) It concludes that there is a 90 percent chance that atmospheric warming over the past fifty years has been caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

Meanwhile, the Guardian reports on one of the more interesting reactions to the new report:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

And then there's the survey, reported here, by the Union of Concerned Scientists indicating that many government scientists have been subjected to political pressure to avoid using the terms "climate change" or "global warming."

On top of it all, ExxonMobil has reported that its annual profit for 2006 was $39.5 billion--up 9 percent from its record-setting 2005 profit. The company's revenues for 2006 were greater than the gross domestic product of Israel, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, or Austria--not to mention about 170 other countries in the world.

By the way, Kevin Drum puts two and two together and suggests that the scientists being offered $10,000 apiece for anti-climate change commentary might want to hold out for more money.

Molly Ivins (1944-2007)

Molly Ivins, one of the great political writers and wits of our time, died today in Austin at the age of 62.

She responded to Pat Buchanan's somber speech about America's "culture war" at the 1992 Republican National Convention by noting that the speech "probably sounded better in the original German." Of the first President Bush she wrote, "Calling George Bush shallow is like calling a dwarf short." When George W. Bush first ran for governor of Texas, Ivins began calling him "Shrub."

Her progressive politics belied her conservative upbringing as the daughter of an oil company executive living in Houston. She offered some thoughts about the origins of her views in the introduction to her first book, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? (The book's title was derived from the line plastered on billboards in Dallas by her employer, the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald, in an effort to defuse--and perhaps capitalize on--an uproar generated when Ivins wrote about a congressman, "If his I.Q. slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day.") Ivins wrote:

I'm supposed to explain myself in this introduction--specifically, how come I came out so strange. Having been properly reared by a right-wing family in East Texas, how'd I turn out this peculiar? I believe all Southern liberals come from the same starting point--race. Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything.

If you grew up white before the civil rights movement anywhere in the South, all grown-ups lied. They'd tell you stuff like, "Don't drink out of the colored fountain, dear, it's dirty." In the white part of town, the white fountain was always covered with chewing gum and the marks of grubby kids' paws, and the colored fountain was always clean. Children can be horribly logical.

The first great political movement to come along in my lifetime was the civil rights movement, and I was for it. The second great question was the war in Vietnam, and I was against it. So they told me I was a double-dyed liberal. I said, "O.K." What did I know? Later on, people took to claiming it meant I was for big government, high taxes, and communism. That's when I learned never to let anyone else define my politics.

I suspect there are a couple of other factors accounting for the odd hitch in my getalong. Being female, for starters. Can't say I've ever come to any particularly cosmic conclusions about gender, but when you start out in a culture that defines your role as standing on the sidelines with pom-poms to cheer while the guys get to play the game, it will raise a few questions in your mind. Another problem is my size. It wasn't that I ever rejected the norms of Southern womanhood. I was just ineligible. I was the Too Tall Jones of my time. I grew up a St. Bernard among greyhounds. It's hard to be cute if you're six feet tall.

My copy of Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? was signed by Ivins. She wrote: "Texans-in-exile. Come home! You know we get to laugh more here--we have more to laugh about. Hang in and keep fightin’ for freedom. And keep laughin’ too. Best wishes--Molly Ivins."

Ivins wasn't just funny; more often than not she was on to something important. In the weeks right after 9/11, Dan Caldwell, Russ Burgos, and I gave a series of lectures at Pepperdine on terrorism. I began one of my lectures with an observation that Ivins had made a week or two earlier in her column: "In 1950, the United States got involved in a war and called it a police action. We are now involved in a police action that we’re calling a war. The semantic confusion is having unfortunate effects on everyone." Slowly, more and more experts have come to the same conclusion that Ivins reached immediately after the declaration of a "war on terror."

In the next-to-last column Ivins wrote, dated January 8, 2007, she promised to make every one of her columns thereafter about the war in Iraq "until we find some way to end it." Sadly, the cancer that was first diagnosed in 1999 took Molly Ivins' life before much progress could be made toward ending the war.

Ivins believed that we all need to take an active part in the political life of our community and our nation. That's why in her final columns she urged "Bubba," the good ol' boy in Texas who'd rather drink beer and watch football than get out and vote, to take matters into his own hands concerning the war. Ivins once wrote, "Politics is not a picture on a wall or a television sitcom that you can decide you don't much care for." It's a sentiment worth remembering from a woman worth remembering.

Crime and No Punishment

James Bamford, author of The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, wonders in a New York Times op-ed today why a judicial determination last summer that President Bush had broken the law by authorizing warrantless surveillance of American citizens has not been accompanied by any enforcement activity:

Laws are broken, the federal government investigates, and the individuals involved--even if they’re presidents--are tried and, if found guilty, punished. That is the way it is supposed to work under our system of government. But not this time.

Last Aug. 17, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the United States District Court in Detroit issued her ruling in the A.C.L.U. case. The president, she wrote, had “undisputedly violated” not only the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, but also statutory law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Enacted by a bipartisan Congress in 1978, the FISA statute was a response to revelations that the National Security Agency had conducted warrantless eavesdropping on Americans. To deter future administrations from similar actions, the law made a violation a felony punishable by a $10,000 fine and five years in prison.

Yet despite this ruling, the Bush Justice Department never opened an F.B.I. investigation, no special prosecutor was named, and there was no talk of impeachment in the Republican-controlled Congress.

The Bush administration has, of course, changed the policy at issue, but Bamford still questions the absence of punishment. An argument by the Bush administration that the case should be thrown out because the issue has been mooted by the new policy is, Bamford contends, "like a bank robber coming into court and arguing that, although he has been sticking up banks for the past half-decade, he has agreed to a temporary halt and therefore he shouldn’t be prosecuted."

The complete essay is here.

The Problem with Neoconservatism

Put simply, the problem with neoconservatism is that it is still with us. The neoconservatives' foreign policy ideas should have been sealed in a very deep grave by now, but they continue to roam the earth like zombies in a bad horror movie.

In today's Guardian, Francis Fukuyama notes that, in spite of the utter failure of the neoconservative plan for Iraq, there are many neocons making the same arguments for an invasion of Iran that were made for an invasion of Iraq five years ago. It is bad enough that so many ostensibly intelligent people have been completely immune to any kind of critical thinking, but even worse is the fact that some still have influence in the Bush administration.

Perhaps, to change the horror movie analogy, we need an exorcism.

Robert F. Drinan, S.J. (1920-2007)

Father Robert Drinan--a tireless defender of human rights, the first Catholic priest to serve as a voting member of Congress, and, at the time of his death, a professor of law at Georgetown University--died on Sunday at the age of 86. The Boston Globe provides a complete obituary while Chris Borgen offers a more personal tribute at Opinio Juris.

Drinan was elected to the House of Representatives from Massachusetts in 1970 on the strength of his opposition to the Vietnam War. During his second term in Congress, in 1973, he filed a resolution of impeachment against President Nixon--not because of the Watergate burglary and coverup that eventually forced Nixon's resignation but because of the bombing of Cambodia in violation of congressionally imposed limits on the war in Southeast Asia.

In 1980, after he was forced to relinquish his seat in the House when Pope John Paul II barred priests from serving in elective office, Drinan returned to teaching, public speaking, and writing, with most of his work focused on human rights.

Drinan's 2001 book, The Mobilization of Shame: A World View of Human Rights, concludes with these words:

The human race has been struggling for centuries to stop injustice and to offer reparations to its victims. There is no one pattern or force that prompts nations to be just. Sometimes it is the voice of the victims that accomplishes such a feat, but more often it is the conscience and moral outrage of nonvictims. Traditionally, they more than any others have championed the rights of those who have been victimized.

Solon, the ancient Athenian jurist, summed up this truth in words that have a striking relevance: "Justice will not come until those who are not hurt feel just as indignant as those who are."

Father Drinan was not a victim, but, to use his own words, he nonetheless "championed the rights of those who have been victimized."

Music as a Response to Terrorism

Music often celebrates the heroic and mourns the tragic in the human experience. Occasionally, what is heroic or tragic is also political. Beethoven's Eroica Symphony (Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major), which originally carried the title Bonaparte, is perhaps the most famous example of concert music celebrating the heroic. (According to an early biographer, Beethoven flew into a rage and removed the title when he heard that Napoleon had proclaimed himself emperor.) Dmitri Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony (Symphony No. 7 in C major), composed during the German siege of Leningrad in World War II, is another excellent example of the celebration of the heroic.

Where there is a text set to music, the political dimensions of a piece of music can be made more explicit. Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, which employs not only the text of the Latin mass but nine war poems of Wilfred Owen, is a beautiful work--overtly political--that mourns the tragedy of war.

Can music offer a response to terrorism in the post-9/11 world? Two of the foremost American composers have suggested that it can.

Within months of 9/11, the New York Philharmonic commissioned an orchestral work by John Adams. His composition (On the Transmigration of Souls), which incorporated a recording of various voices reading a list of names of victims of the destruction of the World Trade Center and a choral text that included lines taken from handmade flyers left in Manhattan by the families of the missing, was a compelling memorial that one critic compared to Maya Lin's Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.

More recently, Steve Reich's Daniel Variations has been premiered at the Barbican Theatre in London, Carnegie Hall in New York, and Disney Hall in Los Angeles. I was privileged to attend the West Coast premiere at Disney Hall last night.

Daniel Variations was commissioned to honor the memory of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was captured and killed by militants in Pakistan in 2002. It begins with a text spoken by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon (in modern-day Iraq) in the the Book of Daniel: "I saw a dream. Images upon my bed and visions in my head frightened me." It is a vision of terror, but against this awful premonition in the first movement, Reich in the second movement presents a surprisingly powerful affirmation expressed in five simple words spoken by Pearl in the tape made by his executioners: "My name is Daniel Pearl."

The music is an important part of what makes the second movement so powerful, but so is the significance of names. Those whom the Nazis sent to concentration camps during World War II were dehumanized by having their names stripped from them; a number tattooed on each prisoner's arm replaced his or her name. Knowing this, we can understand how the simple recitation of Pearl's name in Daniel Variations can be heard as an assertion of his humanity under circumstances of extreme inhumanity.

Grant Gershon, director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, said in a pre-concert talk about the program that the second movement of Daniel Variations left every performer in tears during the first read-through in rehearsals. Most of those in the audience last night were, it seemed, similarly overwhelmed.

What is perhaps most remarkable about Reich's Daniel Variations is that it celebrates the heroic more than it mourns the tragic. In this respect, it offers a life-affirming response to terrorism.

An Apology for Arar

Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen detained by U.S. authorities at JFK International Airport and sent to Syria for interrogation, has been given a formal apology by Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper and awarded almost $9 million in compensation by the Canadian government.

The government of the United States, on the other hand, has refused to acknowledge that its suspicion of Arar was--or is--unwarranted. The Washington Post reports:

Harper and Arar both criticized the United States for its refusal to accept the exhaustive Canadian inquiry that found Arar was an innocent man. Public resentment in Canada has swelled this week over U.S. officials' insistence that Arar should remain on its "watch list" of potential suspects, as well as the testy comments of U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins, who said Canada had no business questioning who was on the list.

The United States has never acknowledged it made a mistake in the Arar case, which has become one of the most public embarrassments in the U.S. practice of "extraordinary rendition" of suspects to other countries for interrogation and imprisonment. Last week, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) demanded an explanation for the administration's stance. He complained that American officials "knew damn well, if he went to Syria, he'd be tortured. It's beneath the dignity of this country to send somebody to another country to be tortured."

For more on the Arar case see these earlier posts:

• Outsourcing Torture;
• Strong Words;
• Syria: Friend or Foe?;
• More on Maher Arar;
• Arar's Suit; and
• The Sad Case of Maher Arar.

Remembrance

Today is the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. On November 1, 2005, UN General Assembly Resolution 60/7 officially designated January 27, the date on which Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet army in 1945, as a day of remembrance to be observed worldwide. (Resolution 60/7 was the first resolution presented by Israel ever to be adopted by the UNGA.)

For more on the Holocaust, see the web sites of Yad Vashem and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, along with these posts:

• Auschwitz Sixty Years Later and
• If This Is a Man (on the poem of the same title by Primo Levi).

For those in the area who might be interested, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Institute on Law, Religion, and Ethics at the Pepperdine University School of Law will co-sponsor a conference on Genocide and Religion next month (February 11-13). Details are available here.

Commander in Chief

What does it mean to be "commander in chief" under the United States Constitution? Historian Garry Wills contends that this manifestation of executive power, like most others, has been greatly inflated in recent years due to the increasing militarization of the United States.

Blackwater: The Legal Front

In case you're wondering (as I was) what the latest is on the legal front with respect to the wrongful death lawsuit against Blackwater (noted in this post and this one), the answer comes from a story out of Raleigh, North Carolina:

Private security contractor Blackwater USA is seeking $10 million from the attorney representing the estates of four employees killed and mutilated in Iraq, arguing their families breached the security guards' contracts by suing the company for wrongful death.

Blackwater has also asked a federal court to move the dispute into arbitration, having failed so far in its ongoing efforts to have the lawsuit dismissed.

Arbitration is necessary "in order to safeguard both (Blackwater's) own confidential information as well as sensitive information implicating the interest of the United States at war," attorneys for Blackwater Security Consulting, a unit of Moyock-based Blackwater USA, wrote in a petition filed December 20.

Dan Callahan, a California-based attorney representing the families, called the claim "appalling."

"This is a shock-and-awe tactic," Callahan said Friday. Blackwater's attorneys declined to comment.

There's a business model at stake in this litigation--not one that should be encouraged in a democracy.

Blackwater, Again

Jeremy Scahill has an interesting op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times on the significance of Blackwater USA for the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq. He makes a number of points that were discussed here last fall (see October 30, November 5, and November 7), but he also notes that the idea for a Civilian Reserve Corps, which President Bush mentioned in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, was presented (in privatized form) two years ago by Blackwater USA owner Erik Prince.

Scahill writes:

Bush and his political allies are using taxpayer dollars to run an outsourcing laboratory. Iraq is its Frankenstein monster.

Already, private contractors constitute the second-largest "force" in Iraq. At last count, there were about 100,000 contractors in Iraq, of which 48,000 work as private soldiers, according to a Government Accountability Office report. These soldiers have operated with almost no oversight or effective legal constraints and are an undeclared expansion of the scope of the occupation. Many of these contractors make up to $1,000 a day, far more than active-duty soldiers. What's more, these forces are politically expedient, as contractor deaths go uncounted in the official toll.

Scahill's new book, Blackwater: The Rise of the Most Powerful Mercenary Firm in the World, is due out at the end of March.

Zap 'Em

The development of non-lethal weapons is a serious matter, but it's hard not to laugh when thinking about where the inspiration for these latest designs might have come from.

First, there's a microwave device that zaps bad guys 500 yards away. It doesn't cook them--that, to state the obvious, would make it a lethal weapon--but it does make them feel hot under the collar. Not angry hot under the collar, but "I feel an overwhelming desire to go jump in the nearest lake" hot under the collar.

Second, there's a spray-on equivalent of the banana peel. The "polymer ice," according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is supposed to "degrade the ability of our adversaries to chase us." It's suitable for use on streets, sidewalks, stairs, and dance floors in any country where plaintiffs' attorneys are in short supply.

Coming soon: automated ear-twisters.

[Via Foreign Policy Passport.]

Senator Hagel on "The Plan"

Today the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a non-binding resolution opposing President Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq. All eleven Democrats on the SFRC were joined by one Republican--Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska--in support of the resolution.

Although Senator Hagel was the only Republican to vote for the resolution, most openly expressed doubts about the President's conduct of the war during the debate.

Senator Hagel, however, took off the gloves. He said, "I don't think we've ever had a coherent strategy. In fact, I would even challenge the administration today to show us the plan that the president talked about the other night. There is no plan. . . . There is no strategy. This is a ping-pong game with American lives."

[Via Talking Points Memo.]

US-CAP

Ten American corporations--including Alcoa, Caterpillar, DuPont, General Electric, Pacific Gas & Electric--and four major environmental organizations announced on Monday the formation of the United States Climate Action Partnership (US-CAP). Gee offers more details here. For the new web site of the Climate Action Partnership, go here.

Last night in his State of the Union address, President Bush belatedly recognized the need for action on energy conservation and climate change, but his proposals were extraordinarily modest and avoided altogether some of the most effective regulatory changes that could be adopted.

Enriched Uranium To Go

Two cases of attempted smuggling of enriched uranium in the Republic of Georgia that are reported in tomorrow's New York Times have underscored the difficulty of accounting for--and securing--all the fissile material available in Russia and the former Soviet republics at the end of the Cold War. According to the Times, both in 2003 and in 2006, individuals with ties to Russian middlemen were arrested in Georgia while attempting to sell small quantities of uranium. The 100 grams of uranium seized in the January 2006 case, a sample apparently intended to seal a larger deal, was enriched to almost 90 percent U-235. In larger quantities--six to eight kilograms--U-235 at that level of enrichment could be used to make a nuclear weapon.

As Dan Caldwell and I note in Seeking Security in an Insecure World (p. 70), there is enough fissile material worldwide to produce over 100,000 nuclear bombs. A number of states--India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, and Iran--are producing more even now. In the former Soviet Union, fissile material is often inadequately secured. Accounting systems are often in such disarray that the theft of stored fissile material can go unnoticed. Corruption among scientists, military officers, and government officials exacerbates the problem. While the United States has helped Russia to "blend down" large quantities of its highly enriched uranium and to secure even more, the two Georgian cases suggest that much more needs to be done.

The 9/11 Commission gave the government of the United States low marks--a "D," to be exact--in the area of preparation for nuclear terrorism. Given the news out of Georgia, it may be difficult to make the case for a higher grade.

Children in China

Beth Nonte Russell describes some of the effects of China's one-child policy in an op-ed in tomorrow's New York Times. As economist Amartya Sen first noted over a decade ago, one of the effects is a large number--60 million by 2010--of "missing" girls. Russell writes,

And what happened to these girls? According to the International Planned Parenthood Federation (a term that takes on a whole new meaning when referring to China), there are about seven million abortions in China per year, 70 percent of which are estimated to be of females. That adds up to around five million per year, or 50 million by the end of the decade; so where are the other 10 million girls? If even 10 percent end up in orphanages . . . well, you do the math.

Although many girls in China end up in orphanages, the U.S. Department of State reports that Americans adopted only 6,493 Chinese children last year, down from 7,906 the year before.

Why aren't there more adoptions? Russell blames new Chinese government policies designed to make adoption difficult.

Under the new Chinese adoption guidelines, the international adoption celebrity Angelina Jolie could not adopt from China (she’s not married, and alas, she and Brad have more than two divorces between them, which is a no-no); nor could the actress Meg Ryan (again, not married). Another person who is not eligible is yours truly. My husband is over 50, so I would have to trade him in, marry again, wait the required five years (another new rule) before beginning the adoption process, and by that time I would be sneaking up on 50 myself.

It is comforting to know that Madonna is still eligible, at least until she turns 50, gets fat (the new regulations call for a body mass index of less than 40), gets divorced or goes broke (anyone with a net worth of under $80,000 is excluded).

Meanwhile, Chinese authorities are predicting "confusion in the social order" as more and more young males face the reality that there are simply not enough women to meet the demand in the marriage market.

More on Malibu's Dictator-in-Residence

This week's issue of LA Weekly, which hits the streets tomorrow, has an excellent story on the purchase of a $35 million estate in Malibu by the son of Equatorial Guinea's dictator. Diana Ljungaeus has dug much more deeply into the story than either Melissa Giaimo or I did back in November. (Ms. Giaimo wrote a very interesting front-page story for Pepperdine's newspaper, The Graphic, and I made some observations in a post titled "Welcome to the Neighborhood.") In addition to providing new details about the purchase and about the Obiang family, Ljungaeus's story discusses the failure of Malibuites, who are ordinarily quick to become involved in important political issues, to express any opinions about the dictator (or, to be more precise, the dictator-in-waiting) living just down the street.

In the interest of full disclosure--and to entice some of you to actually click on the link or pick up a copy of LA Weekly--I should point out that I'm quoted in the story. There's more: A photograph--of me. (Thank you, Diana Ljungaeus and Rena Kosnett.)

Freedom Stagnation

Freedom in the World 2007, the new edition of the annual report by Freedom House, was released today. The press release accompanying the report notes that the survey "found that the percentage of countries designated as Free has remained flat for nearly a decade and suggests that a 'freedom stagnation' may be developing."

Among its more specific findings, the survey indicates that

the number of countries judged by Freedom in the World as Free in 2006 stood at 90, representing 47 percent of the global population. Fifty-eight countries qualified as Partly Free, with 30 percent of the world’s population. The survey finds that 45 countries are Not Free, representing 23 percent of the world’s inhabitants. About one-half of those living in Not Free conditions inhabit one country: China.

Freedom in the World 2007 also states that in 2006 there were 123 electoral democracies in the world, the same number as the year before.

Civil Rights and Human Rights

The Allies' triumph over Fascism in World War II was, in large measure, a victory over claims of racial superiority or inferiority. Oppressed peoples everywhere took note and began to press claims for freedom and equality.

Those who organized the postwar international order paid attention to these claims. The Charter of the United Nations listed among the purposes of the organization fostering international cooperation "in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion" (Art. 1). Racial equality was clearly an idea whose time had come, but America's war against German and Japanese racism was fought not by blacks and whites standing shoulder to shoulder but by black units and white units, separate and unequal even as they fought a war against racism.

Cognizant of the inconsistency between America's support for human rights abroad and its segregationist policies at home, President Truman in 1946 appointed a Committee on Civil Rights to offer a way forward for the United States. A report issued by the Committee in 1948 noted the problems inherent in trying to exert moral leadership in the world while failing to address civil rights problems in the United States:

Our position in the post-war world is so vital to the future that our smallest actions have far-reaching effects. . . . We cannot escape the fact that our civil rights record has been an issue in world politics. The world’s press and radio are full of it. . . . Those with competing philosophies have stressed--and are shamelessly distorting--our shortcomings. . . . They have tried to prove our democracy an empty fraud, and our nation a consistent oppressor of underprivileged people. This may seem ludicrous to Americans, but it is sufficiently important to worry our friends. The United States is not so strong, the final triumph of the democratic ideal is not so inevitable that we can ignore what the world thinks of us or our record.

Truman issued an executive order calling for the integration of the United States military, a small first step. At the United Nations, Eleanor Roosevelt brought the work of the UN Commission on Human Rights to a successful conclusion in the matter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was approved, without dissent, by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948. The UDHR declared, in Article 2, that "everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status."

These were small steps, but to those opposed to civil rights they served as a call to arms. In the aftermath of Truman's reliance on the UN Charter rather than a congressional declaration of war as the legal authority for military intervention in Korea, both isolationists and segregationists (two groups with considerable overlapping membership) rallied around the Bricker Amendment, which (in various guises) was intended to prevent the president's treaty-making power from being used to alter the fundamental norms of the American constitutional system, including the nature of the relationship between states and the federal government. In essence, isolationists supported the Bricker Amendment in order to prevent the United States from becoming further involved in multilateral institutions and segregationists supported it in order to prevent international human rights law from advancing the civil rights movement. To block the Bricker Amendment in the Senate, President Eisenhower was forced to end U.S. involvement in negotiations toward an International Bill of Human Rights.

In essence, opposition to civil rights in the Senate had the ancillary effect of ending American leadership of the international human rights movement. To this day, the United States has still not recovered its position of leadership where human rights are concerned.

Addressing the MANPADS Threat

The threat to civil aviation from small shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, or MANPADS (man-portable air defense systems) has long been a source of concern. (I commented on it here in November 2004.) At Los Angeles International Airport today, Northrop Grumman unveiled a defensive system called "Guardian" that critics contend is too expensive to be affordable to the struggling airline industry and wrong-headed in its approach.

The system, mounted on a FedEx MD-10 cargo plane for an eighteen-month trial, employs directed infrared countermeasures (DIRCM) designed to disable the tracking mechanisms of anti-aircraft missiles. Originally developed for the military, the technology has been adapted by Northrop Grumman for use on commercial airplanes.

In addition to the cost of deploying the system (roughly $11 billion across the industry according to a study conducted by Rand in 2005), critics argue that Guardian represents a deviation from what ought to be the primary focus on surveillance. John Meenan, the executive director of the Air Transport Association, put it this way: "Isn't a surveillance program around airports better? Shouldn't we be doing more to go after the archer rather than trying to catch the arrows?" Meenan noted that there are other threats to commercial aviation such as rocket-propelled grenades that would not be addressed by the Guardian system.

The U.S. military currently uses a system called "Nemesis," based on the same technology as the Guardian system, on a variety of fixed-wing and rotary aircraft.

"Creatively Maladjusted"

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

[Via SojoMail (from Sojourners).]

Growing a Little Wiser

Take three minutes and listen to this commentary by conservative columnist Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News.

[Via Matthew Gross, who provides text (and a broken link).]

On to Iran?

On Wednesday evening shortly after the President's speech, a professor and keen observer of military affairs (sometimes the two are not mutually exclusive) from another university e-mailed to say, "You heard it here first. . . . Watch in coming weeks for 'disrupting networks' in Iran to be (very thin) cover for initiating hostilities against Iran, rather like 'disrupting sanctuaries' was in Cambodia." Now, from today's Boston Globe, there's this:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refused yesterday to rule out cross-border US military action against Iran, a day after President Bush pledged in a major speech to "seek out and destroy" Iranian and Syrian networks providing weapons and training to anti-American forces in Iraq.

My colleague is not the only one worried about the Cambodia precedent, according to the Globe story:

Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, compared the idea of pursuing Iranian networks to the secret 1970 expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia.

"Some of us remember 1970, Madame Secretary, and that was Cambodia, and when our government lied to the American people and said we didn't cross the border going into Cambodia. In fact we did," he said. "So, Madame Secretary, when you set in motion the kind of policy that the president is talking about here, it's very, very dangerous."

It's time for the checks and balances in our constitutional system to start working.

Terrorists on Your Desk

Does your 2007 desk calendar have photos of terrorists wanted by the United States Government? If not, you obviously don't have Counterterrorism 2007, a desk calendar published by the National Counterterrorism Center. But, not to worry. You can download the calendar here in this 15 MB .pdf file.

[Via Duck of Minerva.]

A Voice from Guantanamo

The Los Angeles Times today published excerpts of letters from Jumah al-Dossari, who has been imprisoned in Guantanamo since 2002. He describes being subjected to sleep deprivation, loud music, extreme cold, and threats to the life of his daughter.

In one letter, al-Dossari wrote,

If I die, please remember that there was a human being named Jumah at Guantanamo whose beliefs, dignity and humanity were abused. Please remember that there are hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo suffering the same misfortune. They have not been charged with any crimes. They have not been accused of taking any action against the United States.

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees at Guantanamo. It is a day that has been marked by protests all over the world.

The Good Shepherd

The Good Shepherd, which tells the story of the CIA from its origins in the early days of World War II (as the OSS) to the Bay of Pigs invasion, opened while I was in Europe and so I don't know much about the initial critical response. But because Eric Roth, who wrote the screenplay, has been telling me about the film for well over a year, I went to see it as soon as I could after my return to the U.S.

First of all, The Good Shepherd is a very thoughtful--and thought-provoking--film that is well worth seeing. But don't expect to fall in love with any of the characters (even though they are played by a star-studded cast) and don't expect to leave the theater feeling good. The story is one of idealism surrendered and virtue corroded by the burdens of secrecy. It is, in fact, painful to witness Edward Wilson--the main character, played by Matt Damon--try to deal with the tension between the moral demands of his job with the Agency and his personal moral responsibilities.

It is an open question whether the tenuous ethical position that Wilson holds at the end of The Good Shepherd is a consequence of his own failings or an inevitable result of his circumstances, but in either case the outcome is very problematic for those who would like to believe that those who make foreign policy can be successful without selling their souls.

Back in Business

My travel break, running from December 13 to January 1, merged into a second break during which I've been trying to catch up on things left undone during the travel break. It is long past time, though, to return to the blog. So, to those of you who are regular readers, thanks for your patience. Now that I've broken the ice with this post, I expect to have something to say (or at least something to link) almost daily for the foreseeable future.

My travels, for those who might be curious, took me (and my parents and my sons) to Italy, France, Monaco, Andorra, Spain, and Portugal by car. The route took us (more or less) from Milan to Monte Carlo, Avignon, Andorra la Vella, Montserrat, Zaragoza, Bilbao, Santiago de Compostela, Porto, Lisbon, Madrid, Aix-en-Provence, Florence, and back to Milan. We covered over 6,000 kilometers in just over two weeks, but most of the driving was done in relatively short daily stretches of 300 kilometers or so. All in all, it was a great trip.

Incidentally, if you left a comment during my absence, it was held up by design. I've now published most of the comments that I found when I returned and will get to the others soon.

Holiday Break

I'll be taking a break from blogging in order to travel and unwind. Please stop back by around the first of the year.

Merry Christmas!

Ten Favorites

Before I take a break from blogging--and from just about everything else--for the holidays, I thought I might post a list of my favorite books from this past year. Just to be clear, not all of the books on this list were published in 2006. They just happened to be among the books I read over the course of the past twelve months.

1. James Carroll, House of War
2. George Packer, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq
3. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism
4. Chris Hedges, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
5. Moisés Naím, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy
6. Philippe Sands, Lawless World
7. Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism
8. Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine
9. Richard T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By
10. Stephen Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy

There's not a lot of pleasure reading on this list. Two books that ranked high in my "just for fun" category were a brief and very readable work by historian Paul Johnson, The Renaissance, and a trip back to Charlottesville via the words of Garry Wills, Mr. Jefferson's University.

I think I'll need to work a little more fiction into my reading diet in 2007.

Parking and Corruption

The New York Times Magazine today published its "Ideas" issue--a fascinating compendium of studies and cultural observations from the past year. An interesting entry in this issue reviewed a study published during the summer by two economists, Raymond Fisman of Columbia and Edward Miguel of UC-Berkeley.

Fisman and Miguel decided to see if there was a correlation between the behavior of diplomats at the United Nations in New York and the level of corruption in the countries they represent. More specifically, they asked whether diplomats from countries ranking high on indices of official corruption were more likely to exploit their diplomatic immunity by parking illegally on New York's crowded streets. Here's an extended excerpt of the Magazine's summary:

The two scholars studied parking tickets that were racked up in Manhattan by diplomats from 146 countries who were posted to the United Nations. In a situation in which every diplomat essentially received an invitation to be corrupt, diplomats from nations with "clean" governments said, "No, thanks."

The study began with the observation that, until late 2002, there was essentially zero enforcement of parking rules where diplomats were concerned. Diplomats were ticketed, but few if any cars were towed, and no one demanded payment. Using public records stretching back to 1997, Fisman and Miguel identified which diplomats had delinquent tickets, and how many --150,000 in all, representing more than $18 million in fines.

If incentives trumped culture, you would suppose that diplomats from every nation would cheat. But in fact, attachés from Canada, Ireland, Scandinavian nations and Japan evidently drove around the block till they found a spot. (Diplomats with few or no unpaid tickets also tended to get few tickets, period.) The worst offenders, meanwhile, came from Kuwait (246 unpaid tickets per diplomat), Egypt, Chad, Sudan, Bulgaria, Mozambique, Albania, Angola and Senegal. This behavior correlated strongly with the scores of diplomats' home countries on a measure of public corruption compiled by World Bank researchers.

I'm hoping to conduct a similar study of the correlates of students who park illegally in the faculty lot at Pepperdine next semester.

Human Rights Day 2006

Augusto Pinochet has died--on Human Rights Day.

Pinochet, who ruled Chile for seventeen years after ousting democratically elected president Salvador Allende, voiced the aspirations of authoritarian dictators everywhere when he said, "Not a leaf moves in this country if I'm not moving it."

Killer Smog

With smoke from brush fires clouding the skies over much of southeastern Australia, it's worth recalling the Great Smog of 1952. It was on December 9, 1952, that the Great Smog finally lifted in London. An educational site maintained by the Met Office in London states:

The smoke-laden fog that shrouded the capital from Friday 5 December to Tuesday 9 December 1952 brought premature death to thousands and inconvenience to millions. An estimated 4,000 people died because of it, and cattle at Smithfield, were, the press reported, asphyxiated. Road, rail and air transport were almost brought to a standstill and a performance at the Sadler's Wells Theatre had to be suspended when fog in the auditorium made conditions intolerable for the audience and performers.

The spike in deaths due to the Great Smog was noticed only three weeks later when official mortality figures were published. The awareness that several thousand people had died for reasons directly related to air pollution, however, made a difference in public policy. Eric Nagourney of the New York Times writes,

The Great Smog is considered a turning point in environmental history. Although there had been other episodes where air pollution was held responsible for a spike in deaths--notably in the Meuse Valley in Belgium in 1930, and in Donora, Pa., in 1948--the numbers were much lower than those in London. In the aftermath, British officials passed laws banning the emission of black smoke and requiring industry to switch to cleaner-burning fuels.

These laws gradually produced dramatic reductions in some of the more unhealthy components of London's famous fog.

Trouble in Iran

If Iran has a special prosecutor, he may be needed to investigate President Ahmadinejad soon. According to this story from the Guardian earlier this week, Ahmadinejad watched females dancing during the opening ceremonies of the Asian Games in Doha, Qatar last Friday. Conservative religious leaders in Iran are not happy.

Blood Diamonds

Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly, and Djimon Hounsou, opens on Friday. Pepperdine student Christina Tippitt, who has seen an advance screening, recommends the film enthusiastically.

Back on September 18, Amnesty International sponsored a National Day of Action on Conflict Diamonds during which AI members conducted surveys in 246 diamond retailers in eighteen states. Here are some of the results from that survey:

• Only 27% of shops were able assure us that they had a policy on conflict diamonds.
• 30% of the shops that said they had a policy were unable to produce a hard copy of or explain it.
• Only 13% of shops provided warranties to their customers as a standard practice.
• 37% of the shops we visited claimed to be aware of the conflict diamonds issue. But 54% of them reported an inaccurate definition of the crisis.
• Only 28% of the shops were aware of the Kimberley Process.
• 29% of those who were aware of the Kimberley Process had only a minimal or limited understanding of it.
• When asked whether consumers inquired about conflict diamonds, 83% of respondents answered rarely or never.
• 110 shops refused outright to take the survey.

If you have a chance to see the movie, come on back here and leave a comment about it.

Million Dollar Trials

According to the Miami Herald, the Pentagon has proposed diverting $75 to $125 million dollars in already appropriated military construction funds to Guantanamo for a courtroom complex where military commissions would conduct trials for 75 to 80 of the 430 or so remaining prisoners at the base. I could be wrong, but that appears to come to roughly $1 million per trial.

Even some Republican members of Congress are asking questions.

[Via Kevin Drum.]

Good Questions

Someone in the White House press corps raised some very good questions at yesterday's press briefing:

*****

Q I have a question about the Rumsfeld memo. At the time when he was saying to the President, in this memo, that things aren't working in Iraq, the President was saying two things publicly: One, that we're winning in Iraq, absolutely; and he was also lashing Democrats, saying that criticism was not a plan for Iraq, and that we -- the administration -- have a plan for victory in Iraq. So why wasn't the President leveling with the American people?

MR. SNOW: Actually, at the time that this came --

Q Why wasn't he saying publicly what top members of this administration who were running the war were saying privately?

MR. SNOW: Well, there are a couple of things. First, at that very time, he was actually saying, things are not getting well enough fast enough. That was a formulation he was using at the time. If you take a look at the Rumsfeld memo that was printed in The New York Times, what you end up having is what the President I think has made it clear that he wants, which are people thinking creatively and exhaustively about ways of getting better results in Iraq.

And this is not -- other than at the very beginning, he says, clearly U.S. forces -- it's not working well enough or fast enough, what they're doing. That is a phrase that the President had adopted and had been using. And I don't know whether it comes from Secretary Rumsfeld or from the President. And then you have a list of options.

So I don't think you've got a case where the President was saying one thing and advisors were saying another. What the President was saying is that you've got a sovereign government with the government of Prime Minister Maliki that is pursuing what it needs to pursue, but obviously needs to be doing so more effectively and more rapidly. And that would include security. It would include reconciliation. It would include economic measures. It would include things like the hydrocarbon law. So certainly we weren't trying to wrap it up into a neat little bundle, because it's a very complex situation.

Q But doesn't it strike you that at the same time that you and others in this administration were accusing the likes of John Murtha of cutting and running by suggesting redeployment of forces to the periphery of Iraq or to nearby Kuwait, that the Secretary of Defense is suggesting similar options?

MR. SNOW: What Mr. Murtha had suggested was -- he was never quite that specific, and I think I'd let him speak for himself, but I believe when he came on "Meet the Press," he was talking about redeploying to Okinawa. What you have in here is a description of possibly having forces --

Q But that's not the -- he talked about redeploying to Kuwait. You say you don't want to talk more, but you're not talking accurately.

MR. SNOW: No, here's what he says, is, "You can withdraw forces from vulnerable positions -- cities, patrolling, et cetera -- and move forces to a quick reaction force status operating from within Iraq and Kuwait." Now, it is one of many options that are described here. What it means is the administration is trying to take a look at every suggestion, as I think would be incumbent.

Q Wait a second. You're not really answering the question. You're trying to parse what Murtha's position was.

MR. SNOW: No, I'm not --

Q Wait a second, let me just finish.

MR. SNOW: Okay.

Q Isn't it striking that this administration was accusing the likes of John Murtha and other Democrats who suggested course correction, including phased withdrawal, of cutting and running --

MR. SNOW: No, let me --

Q -- at the same time that the Defense Secretary was suggesting just the same option?

MR. SNOW: No.

Q You don't see hypocrisy there?

MR. SNOW: No, because you're talking about apples and oranges. If you take a look at --

Q Really?

Hit the Road, John

John Bolton has finally resigned. And President Bush has finally accepted the fact that Bolton was never going to be confirmed by the Senate.

Commenting on Bolton's departure, Kofi Annan spoke, well, diplomatically: "As a representative of the U.S. government he pressed ahead with the instructions that he had been given, and tried to work as effectively as he could with the other ambassadors."

The faintest of praise.

For more, see the Bolton Watch, which just might be able to hang it up now.

Spying and Social Learning

Anyone interested in recent developments in intelligence-gathering (and, even more to the point, intelligence-sharing) must read this article by Clive Thompson published in the New York Times Magazine yesterday. While no brief excerpt can capture the full range of points made in the article, these paragraphs describing an idea presented by Calvin Andrus, chief technology officer of the CIA's Center for Mission Innovation, suggest one of the ways that social learning can be (and, in fact, has been) developed within the intelligence community:

Andrus argued that the real power of the Internet comes from the boom in self-publishing: everyday people surging online to impart their thoughts and views. He was particularly intrigued by Wikipedia, the "reader-authored" encyclopedia, where anyone can edit an entry or create a new one without seeking permission from Wikipedia's owners. This open-door policy, as Andrus noted, allows Wikipedia to cover new subjects quickly. The day of the London terrorist bombings, Andrus visited Wikipedia and noticed that barely minutes after the attacks, someone had posted a page describing them. Over the next hour, other contributors--some physically in London, with access to on-the-spot details--began adding more information and correcting inaccurate news reports. "You could just sit there and hit refresh, refresh, refresh, and get a sort of ticker-tape experience," Andrus told me. What most impressed Andrus was Wikipedia's self-governing nature. No central editor decreed what subjects would be covered. Individuals simply wrote pages on subjects that interested them--and then like-minded readers would add new facts or fix errors. Blogs, Andrus noted, had the same effect: they leveraged the wisdom of the crowd. When a blogger finds an interesting tidbit of news, he posts a link to it, along with a bit of commentary. Then other bloggers find that link and, if they agree it's an interesting news item, post their own links pointing to it. This produces a cascade effect. Whatever the first blogger pointed toward can quickly amass so many links pointing in its direction that it rockets to worldwide notoriety in a matter of hours.

Spies, Andrus theorized, could take advantage of these rapid, self-organizing effects. If analysts and agents were encouraged to post personal blogs and wikis on Intelink--linking to their favorite analyst reports or the news bulletins they considered important--then mob intelligence would take over. In the traditional cold-war spy bureaucracy, an analyst's report lived or died by the whims of the hierarchy. If he was in the right place on the totem pole, his report on Soviet missiles could be pushed up higher; if a supervisor chose to ignore it, the report essentially vanished. Blogs and wikis, in contrast, work democratically. Pieces of intel would receive attention merely because other analysts found them interesting. This grass-roots process, Andrus argued, suited the modern intelligence challenge of sifting through thousands of disparate clues: if a fact or observation struck a chord with enough analysts, it would snowball into popularity, no matter what their supervisors thought.

There's much more in the article, including an extensive discussion of some of the problems that wiki- and blog-related information-sharing pose in an organization in which the need to share information (in order to "connect the dots" when trying to unravel complex plots) must be balanced against the need to keep secrets.

Litvinenko

Today's New York Times traces the strange saga of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko from his investigation of a 1994 attempt on the life of Boris Berezovsky to his death by radiation poisoning last week in a London hospital. It's the stuff of spy novels and TV movies.

Port Calls in Mongolia

Most of the world's dry land would have to be covered by rising seas before Mongolia could come close to having an ocean port. (The country's lowest altitude is 532 meters above sea level.) But Mongolia's position astride some of the world's highest mountains is no barrier to registering ships.

Since 2004, the Mongolian flag has been numbered among the world's flags of convenience for ship owners. There's even a photo of a ship with Mongolian registry at Coming Anarchy.

World AIDS Day, 2006

Today is World AIDS Day. To learn a little about the history of AIDS and about its impact in the world, take a look at this interactive feature on the website of the Toronto Globe and Mail.