A military judge at Guantánamo Bay has ruled that the military commissions there do not have jurisdiction over detainees who have not been declared "unlawful enemy combatants." Col. Peter Brownback's ruling halted--at least temporarily--the prosecution of Omar Ahmed Khadr, the Canadian national who was captured in Afghanistan five years ago.
For more on the ruling, see this story in the International Herald Tribune.
The trial of Théoneste Bagosora and three co-defendants on charges of plotting the genocide that decimated Rwanda in 1994 has concluded in Arusha, Tanzania.
Considered "the most important genocide trial" since the adoption of the Genocide Convention in 1948 and designated "Military I" by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the trial spanned 408 trial days over the course of five years and involved 242 witnesses, 1, 584 exhibits, and over 300 written decisions from the bench.
Bagosora, who held a cabinet position in the Rwandan defense ministry at the time of the genocide, took over the armed forces on April 6, 1994, when President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane was shot down. The following morning, Bagosora allegedly ordered existing plans for the genocide to be carried out.
According to the Guardian, Bagosora never presented himself before the tribunal as a very sympathetic character: "Asked to illustrate how a subordinate would carry out an order, he gave the example of assigning someone to kill a member of the courtroom. Asked about a report that he had appeared at roadblocks alongside the death squads, he said it was an insult to a man of his rank."
Verdicts in the "Military I" case and in a number of other recently completed cases are expected later this year.
For more on the trial, see the Guardian story here and the ICTR website here.
Michael Kinsley, writing in today's Washington Post, exposes a number of the inconsistencies in the arguments being made on behalf of continued support for the war in Iraq. Here's a sample:
There was a time, circa 1999, when Republicans considered it the height of naivete, irresponsibility and indifference to the fate of American soldiers to commit any troops to action in a foreign country without what used to be called an "exit strategy." That was when the president was a Democrat. Now it is considered the height of naivete, irresponsibility and indifference to the fate of American soldiers to suggest the possibility of any exit strategy short of triumph. If you do, you are betraying the troops. And no one sees actual triumph in the cards, so there is no exit strategy.
After noting the Wall Street Journal's suggestion that Democrats use the power of the purse if they really want to end the war--and pointing out that the same Wall Street Journal applauded the Reagan Administration's illegal efforts to get around congressionally imposed funding restrictions in the Iran-Contra affair--Kinsley parses the argument that Bush, being democratically elected, has a certain democratic legitimacy for his policy of going to war in Iraq:
Of course, the president is elected, and in that sense he is acting as proxy for the citizens when he decides to take our country into a war. Right? Well, not quite. Let's leave aside the voting anomalies of the 2000 election. When this president first ran for national office, he campaigned on a platform of criticizing his predecessor for engaging in military action (in Kosovo and Somalia) without an exit strategy. He mocked the notion of trying to establish democracy in distant lands. He denounced the use of American soldiers for "nation-building." In 2000, if you were looking for a way to express your disapproval of the policies and prejudices that later got us into Iraq, your obvious answer would have been to vote for George W. Bush.
Read Kinsley's essay. It's an important contribution to the current debate.
In today's Guardian, a British private security contractor writes about what it's like to work on a security detail in Baghdad.
The anonymous contractor, who describes the firm he works for as "basically a taxi service with guns," is part of a team that protects individuals moving through Iraq to various reconstruction projects.
After detailing his daily routine and telling what he makes (about £90,000 [$175,000], tax free, for eight months of work), he writes,
I will probably bin [trash] it fairly soon. I think the writing is on the wall for Baghdad. I think it is about to go ballistic. The Baghdad security plan is not going to work. Other people will no doubt stay because they want the money but I think there comes a time when you need to ask, is this sustainable?
You can find the entire account here.
Andrew J. Bacevich, professor of international politics at Boston University and author of The New American Militarism, one of the best books on foreign policy I've read in the last several of years, lost his son, 1st Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich, in a suicide bomb attack in Iraq on May 13. This past Sunday, Professor Bacevich wrote about that loss and about the war he has long opposed. His essay contains an important message for both Democrats and Republicans.
Read it here.
"I am the man with the toughest job in the world."
So said John Ukec Lueth Ukec, the Sudanese ambassador to the United States, toward the end of an hour-long diatribe at the National Press Club in Washington, D. C. today.
Apparently the ambassador, whom the Washington Post's Dana Milbank is calling "Khartoum Karl" in homage to Iraqi propagandist "Baghdad Bob," doesn't think the difficulty of his job has anything to do with the policies of the government he represents: "See how many people are dying in Darfur: None."
The ambassador has apparently been in Washington long enough to learn a trick from another propagandist named Karl: When the truth won't work, blame the Democrats. His explanation for President Bush's decision to impose new economic sanction's on Sudan? Pressure from Democrats in Congress. "The Democrats do not want Bush to go through with the success he has made in Sudan."
So what exactly is going on in Darfur? According to Khartoum Karl, the situation there bears some resemblance to the range wars in the Old West: "The farmers are being squeezed by the herders, just like you had here in the 18-something, when the cowboys were fighting . . . with the farmers over land for grazing."
Grasping at straws--or at least a bottle of Coke--Khartoum Karl issued a threat that was unprecedented in the history of diplomacy: He threatened to bring Coca Cola to its knees by cutting off Sudan's exports of gum arabic, a key ingredient in soft drinks. I'd like to say there was an audible gasp from the reporters in the room, but it was probably just the sound of the Coke bottle being opened.
Read Milbank's account of Ambassador Ukec's performance. He subjects it to the ridicule it deserves.
[Update: Milbank has video here.]
Educing Information is the title of a new report commissioned by the Defense Department's Intelligence Science Board. The report argues, in the words of the New York Times story on the report, that "the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable."
The report--along with a recent speech by Philip Zelikow (available here as a .pdf file), former adviser to Secretary of State Rice, that harshly criticized some CIA and Defense Department interrogation methods--comes at an important time. The Times story continues:
The Bush administration is nearing completion of a long-delayed executive order that will set new rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. The order is expected to ban the harshest techniques used in the past, including the simulated drowning tactic known as waterboarding, but to authorize some methods that go beyond those allowed in the military by the Army Field Manual.
President Bush has insisted that those secret "enhanced" techniques are crucial, and he is far from alone. The notion that turning up pressure and pain on a prisoner will produce valuable intelligence is a staple of popular culture from the television series "24" to the recent Republican presidential debate, where some candidates tried to outdo one another in vowing to get tough on captured terrorists. A 2005 Harvard study supported the selective use of "highly coercive" techniques.
Three years after the Abu Ghraib photos revealed to the world the serious problems with American interrogation methods--problems that have risen to the level of torture in many instances--the Bush Administration still can't get it right. Nor can the American citizens who continue to applaud politicians promising even more in the way of "harsh interrogations."
James Carroll, in a column published yesterday in the Boston Globe, reflects on the meaning of another Memorial Day with the nation at war in Iraq:
"If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted," the Vietnam novelist Tim O'Brien wrote, "or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie." O'Brien says that the hallmarks of truth, when it comes to war stories, are obscenity and evil. "You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you."
Such dark notes are struck by the chroniclers of every war, going back to Homer, but they seem especially apt when those being mourned have fallen in a war that, even before its end, has already shown itself to have been mistaken from its first trumpet.
Carroll concludes, "The proper memorial to the war in Iraq is its immediate end."
"This may be a victory for the Blackwater legal team but it is a defeat for the principle of transparency. This means that the shadow army will slip even further into the shadows."
--Eugene Fidell, President of the National Institute of Military Justice, commenting on a federal judge's decision to end the lawsuit against Blackwater Security Consulting by moving the case into arbitration [via Reuters]
With Pirates of the Caribbean returning to the big screen today, it might be a good time to see what's happening in the world of modern-day maritime piracy. (There was a time when the modifier "maritime" would have been considered redundant, but video, audio, and software piracy have become so common that many people now think of those crimes first--or at least they did before Johnny Depp came along and put a face on the old-fashioned form.)
Fortunately for those of us interested in such things, statistics compiled by the International Maritime Organization give us a pretty good look at what modern-day Jack Sparrows are doing on the high seas. Last month, the IMO published its annual Reports on Acts of Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships (available here as a .pdf file). Here are a few bits of data gleaned from the Reports:
The Independent (London) reports today on President Teodoro Obiang's corruption and brutality (including his reputation for cannibalism).
Little Teodoro's place in Malibu gets a mention, along with the role of major oil companies in facilitating the Obiang family's exploitation of Equatorial Guinea's wealth:
When he wants to travel, the president has a choice of six personal planes, the most recent of which has a king-size bed and a bathroom with gold-plated taps. Destinations include the mansion in Maryland or the holiday home in Cape Town. Meanwhile his son, Teodorin, has managed to build an impressive fleet of Lamborghinis, Ferraris and Bentleys, despite claiming to earn an official salary of only £30,000 a year. Many are in Paris, where he lives in a luxury hotel.
And if Paris or Cape Town become too dull, Little Teodoro, as some in Equatorial Guinea call him (although possibly not to his face), can always retire to his $35m Malibu mansion, where his neighbours include Britney Spears and Mel Gibson.
According to US investigators, much of the wealth was funnelled from American oil majors to Obiang's family through a once-prestigious US bank, Riggs. A Senate inquiry found that $700m had been deposited with Riggs, and that the oil companies were fully aware that the money was going to Obiang's private bank accounts. In one case, $450,000 in rental fees for office space was paid to a 14-year-old relative of Obiang.
Is this guy really only the tenth worst dictator in the world?
A federal judge in North Carolina last week ordered the wrongful death lawsuit pending against Blackwater into binding arbitration.
After appealing unsuccessfully all the way to the Supreme Court, Blackwater now appears to have found another way to derail what promised to be a landmark lawsuit brought by the families of four security contractors killed in a convoy ambush in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004.
This week, on orders of a federal judge, the dispute is scheduled to be taken up out of court by a three-man panel of arbitrators.
By steering the case into arbitration, Blackwater has shifted a legal showdown over issues of battlefield accountability and presidential authority into a non judicial arena where the proceedings occur behind closed doors and the outcome is confidential.
One of the three arbitrators is William Webster, a Reagan-era director of the FBI and CIA with personal and business ties to several Blackwater lawyers.
See the full story here.
Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.
--James Bryce
The New York Times reports today that at least 146 private contractors died in Iraq during the first quarter of 2007. The total death toll for contractors in Iraq is now at least 917; another 12,000 have been injured or wounded.
According to the Times, this is the first time that specific figures--based on claims filed with the Labor Department and on interviews with insurers and others--have been reported. Private military firms (PMFs) are, of course, not eager to talk about employee casualties. As the Times notes, "Companies that have lost workers in Iraq were generally unresponsive to questions about the numbers of deaths and the circumstances that led to casualties."
The extent of the U.S. military's dependence on PMFs in Iraq is staggering:
Nearly 300 companies from the United States and around the world supply workers who are a shadow force in Iraq almost as large as the uniformed military. About 126,000 men and women working for contractors serve alongside about 150,000 American troops, the Pentagon has reported. Never before has the United States gone to war with so many civilians on the battlefield doing jobs--armed guards, military trainers, translators, interrogators, cooks and maintenance workers--once done only by those in uniform.
In the Persian Gulf war of 1991, for example, only 9,200 contractors--mostly operating advanced weapons systems--served alongside 540,000 military personnel. But at the end of the cold war, Congress and the Pentagon were eager to seize on the so-called peace dividend and drastically scale back the standing Army. The Bush administration expanded the outsourcing strategy to unprecedented levels after the invasion of Iraq.
Rep. John P. Murtha (D-PA), chairman of the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, has announced that he will schedule hearings on the use of PMFs this fall. Meanwhile, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and Rep. David Price (D-NC) (a former Duke University political science professor) have introduced legislation to require the government to provide information on private contractors in Iraq. (The House passed their legislation in the form of an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act on Wednesday.) At present, "unless there is something specifically stated in the contract about accounting for personnel, there is no requirement for the U.S. government to track these numbers," as military spokesman Lt. Col. Joseph M. Yoswa notes.
Blackwater is suing a former employee for allegedly passing trade secrets to a startup private security firm based in Northern Virginia. More interesting than the late-night police raid in which a computer and some papers were seized from the defendant's home in Virginia Beach is this excerpt from a deposition related to the case in which Blackwater executive vice president William Matthews is being questioned about a former Blackwater employee:
Q: Okay. And what was Mr. Mullis' position when he became an employee for Blackwater?
A: He was the program manager for I think OGA programs.
Q: And OGA programs stands for what?
A: Other government agency.
Q: What does that include?
A: I don't know, or if I do know, it's classified.
Q: Okay. So was he working on classified, without giving me the content of any classified information, was Mr. Mullis working on classified projects at that time?
A: I don't know, or if I do know, it's classified.
Q: I've got to know which is which, I think. Do you not know or is it classified?
A: I don't know, or if I do know, it's classified.
Q: Okay. If that's your answer, we'll see where it goes. Okay. What were Mr. Mullis' duties and responsibilities as program manager for the OGA programs?
A: He would have overall responsibility and oversight for anything in his purview.
Q: And what was in his purview?
A: I don't know, or if I do know, it's classified.
Unbelievable.
It's time for Congress to assert control over private military firms. Blackwater's executives appear to believe that the normal rules don't apply to them.
Historian Robert Dallek describes the parallels between Iraq and Vietnam in this astute essay in the Washington Post. Here's a brief sample:
Like Johnson and Nixon, President Bush is hoping that adding troops will turn a civil war around, is relying on local, U.S.-trained forces to stave off defeat, and is worried that failure will undermine America's international credibility. Bush also disdains antiwar voices and is determined to prove them wrong in the long view of history. But unlike Johnson and Nixon, he doesn't seem to realize that his war is lost. Instead of learning from his predecessors, Bush seems to be replicating their mistakes.
It's time to check in on the Obiang family again.
A recent article by Joshua Kurlantzik in Mother Jones on the use of American public relations firms by dictators reports that Equatorial Guinea has been paying the high-powered Washington lobbying firm of Cassidy & Associates at least $120,000 per month since 2004 to improve its image in the United States. A brief look at available Department of Justice reports on foreign agent registrations suggestts that Kurlantzik has understated Equatorial Guinea's spending on PR--at least for 2005.
Over the course of six months in 2005, Equatorial Guinea paid C/R International, L.L.C. $154,469.37, Cassidy & Associates, Inc. $1,020,000.00, Farragut Advisors (E.G.), LLC, $57,735.00, JWI, L.L.C. $22,500, and Sidley Austin LLP $139,577.27, for a grand total of $1,394,281.64, or $232,380.27 per month. (Department of Justice Foreign Agents Registration Act records are not up to date on the Department's website, perhaps due to a congressional mandate that will result in a searchable online database soon.) There were foreign governments that spent more than Equatorial Guinea did on lobbying and PR services (for example, Saudi Arabia more than quadrupled Equatorial Guinea's spending), but not many.
Has the spending paid off? Perhaps. President Teodoro Obiang was warmly welcomed to Washington by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in April 2006. More importantly, the Bush Administration continues to ignore its own anti-kleptocracy initiative and to encourage American investment in Equatorial Guinea's oil and natural gas industry.
Incidentally, the Cassidy & Associates website claims the company helps "foreign governments to design and implement comprehensive campaigns to ensure successful relations with the U.S. government." Indeed. Like Los Angeles realtors, Washington lobbyists don't mind doing business with dictators.
It may be time for me to watch Thank You for Smoking again so I can hear Nick Naylor say, "My job requires a certain . . . moral flexibility."
What if Ann Coulter, the mistress of hate-filled invective, carried with her whatever credibility comes from being the minister of a suburban mega-church?
Jerry Falwell, founder of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia and of the Moral Majority, died yesterday in his office at Liberty University. In death as in life, Falwell was a polarizing figure. In fact, I've read comments that can only be described as "fighting words" from pacifists who have felt compelled to respond to the news of Falwell's death.
But why is Falwell's passing being noted here--on an IR blog?
I could point to Falwell's support for the repressive right-wing government in El Salvador during the 1980s or his opposition to sanctions against the South African apartheid regime. I could also point to his noxious comments in the aftermath of 9/11. Instead, I want to focus on his attitude toward women and its impact on U.S. human rights policy.
Let's start with an instructive contrast: Two Southern Baptists--Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Carter--came to prominence in the United States at about the same time. The two men differed on almost everything--including women's rights.
President Carter supported the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. His administration signed the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). He appointed more women and minorities to federal courts than all of the presidents who preceded him combined.
Falwell, on the other hand, was a misogynist.
In 1989, Falwell said,
I listen to feminists and all these radical gals. . . . These women just need a man in the house. That's all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate men; that's their problem.
Truly a Coulter-esque comment.
Falwell was a consistent opponent of equal rights for women. Key Republican leaders, including Senator Jesse Helms, later the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, were encouraged by the support they received from Falwell's Moral Majority to steadfastly oppose ratification of CEDAW.
It would be a gross over-simplification to say that Falwell was responsible for the failure--right down to the present day--of the United States to ratify CEDAW, but religiously based opposition to feminism in all its forms (including the very basic form of support for gender equality) is part of what he has left us. James Dobson and Focus on the Family (along with its political arm, the Family Research Council) carry Falwell's misogynistic mantle today. Falwell may no longer have the ear of Republican senators and presidents, but Dobson does and he follow's Falwell's script.
It will be difficult for the United States to reclaim a position of leadership on human rights until CEDAW and the Convention on the Rights of the Child are ratified. And it will be difficult for that to happen until the Christian Right understands that Falwell and his successors have been wrong about women's rights.
Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, testified before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense on Thursday. The text of his remarks is available here.
In his testimony, Scahill noted that private contractors in Iraq sometimes make in a month what an active-duty soldier makes in year. This, of course, creates resentment and envy. It also creates an incentive for experienced military professionals to leave the armed forces of the United States in order to go to work for private contractors. Scahill stated, "There is slang in Iraq now for this jump. It is called 'Going Blackwater.' To put it bluntly, these private forces create a system where national duty is outbid by profits."
Read the entire statement.
"Great leadership often involves putting aside self-doubt, bucking conventional wisdom, and listening only to an inner voice that tells you the right thing to do. That is the essence of strong character. The problem is that bad leadership can also flow from these same characteristics: steely determination can become stubbornness; the willingness to flout conventional wisdom can amount to a lack of common sense; the inner voice can become delusional."
--Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 60-61
Visitors were temporarily cleared out of Tienanmen Square in Beijing today after a vandal threw a burning object at the oversized portrait of Mao Zedong that adorns the Forbidden City. An unemployed man from the Xinjiang region was detained by police.
A Chinese journalist who threw paint-filled eggs at the portrait during the 1989 Tienanmen Square protest was imprisoned for over sixteen years and was mentally ill when released last year.
For more, see the Reuters story here.
Tony Blair is returning to the place where he announced his campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party in 1994 to announce that he is stepping down. Before ceding his post as prime minister, Blair is expected to push for international agreements on climate change and aid to Africa.
The Guardian has more here.
There is no reason good cannot triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the Mafia.
--Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), A Man Without a Country
Foreign Policy has asked twenty-one experts to suggest one thing that would make the world a better place. In response, Joseph S. Nye, Jr. addresses anti-Americanism, Jeffrey D. Sachs considers global poverty, and Lt. Gen. William E. Odom takes on nuclear proliferation--to name just a seventh of the experts and their issues.
See the complete collection here.
The Japanese Diet approved legislation on April 27 that will pave the way for Japan to join the International Criminal Court. Final accession to the Rome Statute is expected in October.
Barring an earlier entrant, Japan will become the 105th state to join the ICC. It will also become the largest financial contributor to the Court with a share of the ICC's budget that is expected to be approximately 16 percent.
For more on Japan's accession, see this Amnesty International press release, this Reuters news story, and two posts--here and here--by Kevin Jon Heller at Opinio Juris. The ICC's web site is located here.
This, on the front page of today's Washington Post, is disturbing:
More than one-third of U.S. soldiers in Iraq surveyed by the Army said they believe torture should be allowed if it helps gather important information about insurgents, the Pentagon disclosed yesterday. Four in 10 said they approve of such illegal abuse if it would save the life of a fellow soldier.
In addition, about two-thirds of Marines and half the Army troops surveyed said they would not report a team member for mistreating a civilian or for destroying civilian property unnecessarily. "Less than half of Soldiers and Marines believed that non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect," the Army report stated.
The Post reports that the Army has responded by changing its training to place more emphasis on battlefield ethics.
[Update: A redacted version of the report is available here.]
This week the House Intelligence Committee provided a dramatic illustration of the difference between what Dan Caldwell and I called the "new paradigm" and the "traditional paradigm" in security studies as Democrats and Republicans clashed over whether the American intelligence community should be asked to assess the security implications of climate change.
Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), who led the majority in approving a requirement for a formal National Intelligence Estimate on environmental impacts on security, said, "Climate change can have a serious impact on military operations and exacerbate global tensions." In contrast, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) stated, "Our government should not commit expensive spy satellites and human intelligence sources to target something as undefined as the environment."
What do those who work in the intelligence community think? According to CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano, "The intelligence community has for a long time studied the impact that environmental factors--things like scarce resources and natural disasters--can have on global security. Those are real issues."
Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague and a leading expert on the security implications of disease, published an excellent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times yesterday on the Bush Administration's preference for sexual abstinence programs in its anti-HIV/AIDS program funding. The entire essay is worth reading, but here is the conclusion for those wanting the bottom line only:
Designing foreign policy to stamp out sexual activity among consenting adults is a fool's errand and a waste of taxpayers' money. When it comes to AIDS policy, we should stop pushing a moral idea about the circumstances in which sex should occur and instead push what works: condoms, clean needles, sex education and making sure that women have equal power to say no, or yes, to sex.
After all, we know we can slow the spread of HIV and maybe even stop it. We'll never end extramarital sex, prostitution or even "escort services." Just ask the "D.C. Madam" and her clients.
Read the whole thing here.
Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that's not true. Some smaller countries are neutral.
--Robert Orben
This Los Angeles Times editorial today urges both the White House and Congress to take the steps necessary to end Guantanamo's long-running status as a "legal black hole." The Times particularly urges Congress to pass the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007, a bill co-sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA).
It's time.
The "Mission Accomplished" banner that provided the backdrop for President Bush's remarks aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln four years ago today is what most people usually remember of that Karl Rove-inspired photo op. It is an image that epitomizes the hubris and miscalculation of the Bush Administration. But some of the President's words on May 1, 2003, are also worth recalling on this anniversary:
Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.
If only that were true.
President Bush took advantage of the opportunity to repeat one of the war's false pretenses:
The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We've removed an ally of al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding.
According to the 9/11 Commission Report (see page 66), there was "no evidence" that contacts between Iraqi officials and representatives of al Qaeda "ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence," the Commission continued, "indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States." Since the "liberation of Iraq," that country has become what Afghanistan was in the 1980s--a training ground for terrorists.
In most respects, President Bush and his advisers were clearly "at sea"--and even adrift--"off the coast of San Diego," as the transcript of the speech notes. But on one important point President Bush's words were prophetic: "Americans, following a battle, want nothing more than to return home."
Today's New York Times "Week in Review" includes an important story on child soldiers by Jeffrey Gettleman. Here's the introduction:
In the early 1980s, in the lowlands of Mozambique, a new technology of warfare emerged that would sweep across Africa and soon the rest of the world: the child soldier.
Rebel commanders had constructed a four-foot tall killing machine that cut its way through village after village and nearly overran the government. Its trail was smoking huts and sawed off ears.
The Mozambicans learned that children were the perfect weapon: easily manipulated, intensely loyal, fearless and, most important, in endless supply.
Today, human rights groups say, there are 300,000 child soldiers worldwide. And experts say the problem is deepening as the nature of conflict itself changes--especially in Africa.
Here, in one country after another, conflicts have morphed from idea- or cause-driven struggles to warlord-led drives whose essential goal is plunder. Because those new rebel movements are motivated and financed by crime, popular support becomes irrelevant. Those in control don't care about hearts and minds. They see the local population as prey.
The result is that few adults want to have anything to do with them, and manipulating and abducting children becomes the best way to sustain the organized banditry.
Read the complete story here.
Two months before the 2004 presidential election, I noted in this post that approximately 4,700,000 Americans would be ineligible to vote because of state restrictions on voting by convicted felons. The disenfranchisement of felons, which is a matter of state rather than federal law, has been most common in the South where it is a legacy of the Jim Crow era. It is generally viewed as a violations of international human rights law.
Yesterday, Florida's clemency board voted to allow most of the state's 950,000 disenfranchised ex-felons to regain their right to vote. The decision, pushed by Republican governor Charlie Crist, leaves only Virginia and Kentucky on the list of states with lifetime bans on voting by ex-felons.
Before the vote, Gov. Crist said, "This is Holy Week, a week that is all about forgiveness. Restoring civil rights is the right thing to do."
Amen.
Why is the issue of the Japanese military's use of "comfort women" roiling Asian politics over sixty years after World War II ended? Foreign Policy gets answers from Columbia University's Gerald Curtis in this installment of "Seven Questions."
I haven't had time to check the stats, but I suspect March 2007 was the lightest month ever for posting on Swords into Plowshares. Rather than make excuses, I'll simply announce my return and promise to do at least a little better in April.
Thanks for checking in.
James Carroll offers a critique of all types of fundamentalism in this column published yesterday in the Boston Globe.
After defining fundamentalism and noting its troublesome effects, Carroll considers his own faith's version of the tendency. Noting Pope Benedict's recent "Apostolic Exhortation" and its assertion that certain values are "not negotiable," Carroll writes that "culture consists precisely in negotiation of values, and change in how values are understood is part of life. Moral reasoning is not mere obedience, but lively interaction among principles, situations, and the 'human limitations' referred to in the 1993 Vatican statement," which condemned religious fundamentalism.
Consider some of the values that good people might consider "not negotiable." Consider opposition to abortion or the defense of marriage as an exclusively heterosexual union. Or consider the promotion of democracy or of free-market economic principles. Consider support for human rights or opposition to all forms of war.
Steadfast defense of a principle without regard to circumstances--"mere obedience"--is easy. It absolves the one engaged in such a defense of the need to think about contexts or consequences. On the other hand, recognizing that values may come into conflict or that ends and means are both important--engaging, that is, in "moral reasoning"--is more difficult because it entails responsibility. It forbids the excuse that is so common among those who do evil without even realizing it: "I was just following orders."
If you've ever wanted to create your own utopian state (or maybe a dystopia is more your style), you can do it online here.
(Someone please let me know if it's worth messing around with. I don't have time to try it right now.)
[Thanks to Chelsea McCollum for the tip.]
Joseph Cirincione makes a compelling case that the Bush Administration handled intelligence on North Korea's nuclear weapons program with the same disregard for inconvenient facts that it displayed with respect to Iraq. He writes:
What once appeared the exception now seems the rule. Officials in U.S. President George W. Bush’s administration are gingerly walking back from claims that North Korea was secretly building a factory to enrich uranium for dozens of atomic bombs. The intelligence, officials now say, was not as solid as they originally trumpeted. It does not seem that the North Korean program is as large or as advanced as claimed or that the country's leaders are as set on building weapons as officials depicted.
If this sounds familiar, it should. The original claims came during the same period officials were hyping stories of Iraq's weapons. Once again, the claims involve aluminum tubes. Once again, there was cherry-picking and exaggeration of intelligence. Once again, the policy shaped the intelligence, with enormous national security costs. The story of Iraq is well known; that unnecessary war has cost thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and an immeasurable loss of legitimacy. This time, the administration's decision to tear up a successful agreement--using a dubious intelligence "finding" as an excuse--propelled the tiny, isolated country to subsequently build and test nuclear weapons, threatening to trigger a new wave of proliferation.
This is just the introduction; Cirincione provides many specifics in the paragraphs that follow.
The charge of cherry-picking intelligence on the subject of North Korea's nuclear weapons program adds a new dimension to the consensus expressed by proliferation experts at a recent conference hosted by the Burkle Center for International Relations at UCLA: The Bush Administration has failed miserably in its handling of North Korea.
Consider this an advisory rather than an endorsement:
From the U.K. comes a board game based on the "war on terror." Seriously.
[Thanks to Kevin Iga for the tip.]
Today is International Women's Day, a day that commemorates a number of significant events in history that occurred in March, including several associated with the labor movement in the United States. (For example, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which over 140 female workers were killed, occurred on March 25, 1911.) In honor of International Women's Day, I've decided to describe briefly the contributions of one woman associated with the American labor movement, Mary Harris Jones (1830-1930).
One of the most important labor advocates in American history, "Mother Jones" began as an organizer for the Chicago chapter of the Knights of Labor in 1871 soon after losing all her possessions in the Great Chicago Fire. (Just four years earlier, Jones had lost her husband and four young children in a yellow fever epidemic in Tennessee.) From 1871 until the end of her life almost sixty years later, Jones was a part of every significant strike in the United States.
Jones was especially concerned with conditions in which coal miners were forced to worked. In fact, her work with the United Mine Workers earned her the nickname "the Miners' Angel." In 1898, Jones founded the Social Democratic Party. Seven years later, she helped to established the Industrial Workers of the World.
Jones liked to tell audiences, "I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser." She was indeed a hell-raiser, but she raised hell on behalf of those who were victims of economic exploitation.
Happy Texas Independence Day to Texans and those who wish they were. (That latter category has no doubt decreased in number over the past six years, but, anyway . . .)
Here, for your historical enlightenment and reading pleasure is the Texas Declaration of Independence, signed on March 2, 1836.
"It is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts."
--Aung San Suu Kyi
From 1937, when Japan invaded Manchuria, to the end of the Pacific War in 1945, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 women were forced into prostitution by the Japanese Imperial Army. So-called "comfort houses" were established throughout Asia, from Sakhalin Island to the Dutch East Indies and beyond. Wherever the Japanese military went, "comfort women" were "recruited" to serve the sexual desires of soldiers. Toward the end of the war, when most Japanese forces were withdrawn to the home islands, even Japanese women were forced to become military base prostitutes.
In 1993, not long after official documents detailing the Japanese military's role in procuring "comfort women" were unearthed, Japan issued a formal apology to the women involved and established a victims' compensation fund supported by private donations. Today, however, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe began to reverse his nation's progress toward the acceptance of responsibility for the terrible crimes perpetrated against tens of thousands of women. Abe said, "The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion."
Signs of the Japanese shift in policy were on display last month as government ministers reacted negatively to hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives on Japanese sex slavery during World War II. The nationalist tendencies of the Abe government seem destined to harm relations with Japan's East Asian neighbors and the United States as well.
[Note: Last week, Dan Caldwell and I wrote the essay below for publication in Pepperdine's campus newspaper, the Graphic, as a response to two presentations (with essentially the same content) on campus by Dinesh D'Souza. The editor of the Graphic chose not to publish the essay in the paper, so we offer it here instead. As needed, the essay has been updated to reflected the passage of a week since its intended publication.]
Two weeks ago, a court in Germany sentenced Ernst Zundel to five years in prison for his contributions to a web site that denies the Holocaust ever occurred. Here in the United States, the First Amendment would have protected the ignorant and offensive things Zundel has written. In fact, it did protect them for the two years that Zundel lived in Tennessee.
Although it was not always the case, the United States today places a higher value on freedom of speech than any other country in the world according to comparative law scholars. Because Americans recognize the importance of the free exchange of ideas in a democracy, our courts commonly give wide latitude to political speech. And we support that as a fundamental right guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Some of our national confidence in the value of free speech comes directly from Thomas Jefferson. In his first inaugural address, Jefferson said, "Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."
We raise this point because Dinesh D'Souza, author of a recently published book with an ignorant and offensive premise, spoke on campus last week. In fact, his appearances at the School of Law and Seaver College one week ago were specifically designed to promote his book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.
D'Souza argues, in his own words, that "the cultural left in the country is responsible for causing 9/11." The "cultural left" is not everybody in the Democratic Party, but it includes an awful lot of people (almost all of them Democrats) who have a commonality that only D'Souza seems capable of intuiting. He specifically attacks, among others, President Jimmy Carter, Senator Robert Byrd, Senator Hillary Clinton, philanthropist George Soros, and journalist Bill Moyers.
D'Souza's false thesis, which is elaborated throughout the book, is ignorant and offensive enough, but there are others that are equally ludicrous. For example, we learn in chapter six that the cultural left was also responsible for the Abu Ghraib scandal. D'Souza writes, after pretending that Charles Graner and Lynndie England were the only soldiers involved in the torture and degradation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, "For many Muslims, Abu Ghraib demonstrated the casualness with which married Americans have affairs, walk out on their spouses, and produce children without bothering to take responsibility for the care of their offspring." Really?
Sadly, there's much more like this. Really.
The Jeffersonian--and, in fact, the quintessentially American--response to obnoxious views like the ones D'Souza is currently peddling is not censorship but reason. This, it seems to us, is where scholars have not only the right but the obligation to speak.
So, let us be among those to confront falsehoods with truth and reason. D'Souza's opinions about liberals, as with most prejudices, bear little relationship to reality.
He attributes motives and desires to liberals for which there is no evidence, thereby defaming many good people. He treats political differences, including those born of opposition to preventive war or to torture, as evidence of moral depravity. He engages, very freely, in ad hominem attacks.
He purports to know the mind of Osama bin Laden, but his conclusions are at odds with both expert analyses and many of bin Laden's own statements.
D'Souza's views about his fellow Americans are deeply offensive--and even libelous, according to a recent op-ed by his fellow neoconservative and Hoover Institution colleague Victor Davis Hanson. He has, sadly, abandoned even the pretense of civility. We say "sadly" because it is civility that allows those who disagree nevertheless to engage in conversation, as often occurs, thankfully, on this campus.
While we're willing to be among the first to challenge D'Souza's false and malicious ideas, we certainly hope we're not the last. On the contrary, we would like to know exactly what those who brought D'Souza to Pepperdine and gave him a platform to present his offensive beliefs think of his view that liberals--people like us--are responsible for 9/11 and for the Abu Ghraib scandal.
One of the most important philosophers of political conservatism, Edmund Burke, wrote, "It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph." Offended by D'Souza's false and malicious claims, we choose to speak out. What about others?
[Update (3/1/07): The Graphic has now posted this piece online here.]
According to this story in the New York Times last week, the history department at Middlebury College has decided to prohibit students from using Wikipedia as a source for research papers submitted in history classes. Welcome to the club.
As I've noted before, Wikipedia is a remarkable web phenomenon. It has much to recommend it, especially for those who need a quick, online source of information to serve as a starting point for research. In this respect, it's like other encyclopedias. But there are problems with using any encyclopedia as a source for a research paper in college.
Professor Thomas Beyer of the Russian department at Middlebury could be speaking for me and most of my colleagues with whom I've discussed student research when he said, "I guess I am not terribly impressed by anyone citing an encyclopedia as a reference point, but I am not against using it as a starting point."
Students, take note.
In spite of an impressive recycling program, Santa Monica still contributes to one of the largest landfills in the world--the Puente Hills Landfill 35 miles east of LA.
[Via Foreign Policy Passport.]
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
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.
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.]
"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
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.
Ben Young has a post about "vulture funds" that is well worth reading, especially for those concerned about debt relief for developing countries.
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.
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.
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.]
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.
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.
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.
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.]
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.
"Every act of love is an act of peace, no matter how small."
--Mother Teresa
[Via Sojourners.]
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.
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.
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.
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.
. . . 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.
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.
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."
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.]
"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out."
--I. F. Stone
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.