Slow news day today. Lots of sort of important stuff going on, as always, but if you peruse the main pages of the biggest outlets, you find very little that would normally make a front page. And there’s NOTHING out there local. Here’s what I find:
- Senate Passes Financial Reform Bill (NYT) — This is kind of old now — it happened last night — but I didn’t have it in yesterday’s report, and things are sufficiently slow today that I’m glad to have it.
- Drop-side cribs to be banned (WashPost) — “There have been few too many recalls and far too many deaths from defective cribs in recent years,” said Inez Tenenbaum, chairman of the safety commission.
- Judges Rule Against Detainees Held at Afghan Air Base (NYT) — “A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that prisoners being held without trial in Afghanistan by the military have no right to challenge their imprisonment in American civilian courts. The decision, overturning a lower court ruling in the detainees’ favor, was a victory for the Obama administration’s efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for extended periods without judicial oversight.”
- U.S. Spy Chief to Step Down (ABC) — Also a bit old — ABC had it last night — but important.
- Clinton’s Road Toward Punishing Pyongyang Runs Through China (WSJ) — “We cannot allow this attack on South Korea to go unanswered by the international community,” Mrs. Clinton said Friday. “The evidence is overwhelming and condemning. The torpedo that sunk the Cheonan and took the lives of 46 South Korean sailors was fired by a North Korean submarine.”
- Car bomb in central Iraq kills 22 (BBC) — It happened at a market in Iraq’s northern Diyala province.
OK, that ended up being a fairly newsy page. I guess I was mostly reacting to the fact that there wasn’t much actually breaking in the last few hours, and I like these things to be timely …
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In the good old days of warfare conducted by adversaries wearing uniforms and fighting within defined theatres of combat, I suppose it was less likely that one side or another would take a POW who was not an actual combatant or active participant in the battle. Today, of course, things are very different.
I understand the point of view that says we need to have this capability, this flexibility, in order to combat terrorists who wear no obvious uniforms, fight their battles across international borders, and so forth.
Here’s my question? What recourse does a person have if America (or any country) decides that person is a terrorist or an enemy of the state, kidnaps said person from their country of domicile, and holds them indefinitely in a third location, if that person happens NOT to be a terrorist?
Suppose one day Canadian paramilitaries drop into Five Points, kidnap Brad Warthen from Gourmet Shop, spirit him away to an undisclosed location to hold him indefinitely for being a terrorist threat to Canada? Well, Brad knows he’s no terrorist. I know he’s no terrorist. Everybody knows that, except the Canadian government, which insists he is and therefore In this case the only recourse would be the protestations of Brad’s home country, the US. But if Brad lived in a small country with little clout vis-a-vis a big country (like Yemen or Tunisia vs. the US), the protestations would fall on deaf ears.
I just ask these questions. Brad, you may say again I am “reaching,” but the point is that no matter how far-fetched the scenario, if the only guarantee against abuses is the word of an individual sovereign government, that is no safeguard at all. If America claims this right, then Russia may claim this right as well, and China, and any country, from Iran to North Korea.
There must be internationally-agreed-upon standards of conduct; of course there are already (Geneva Conventions) and I believe that limitless detention with no resolution of status for prisoners is not allowed under those conventions. Obama and Graham may claim this as a “victory,” but unless they have a better answer for the ultimate dispensation of these individuals, their victory will be a hollow one.
Let’s see if I can provoke that:
“Death to the Great Satan, Canada!”
Doesn’t sound right, does it? Something like “Mild Discomfort to the Small Emergency Backup Satan!” seems to fit the case better.
I can see the Mounties kicking down my door now: “So, like, put your hands up, eh? We’ll treat you like the terrorist you are, you hoser…”
Good question Phillip. You might ask yourself the same question about the Revolutionary War. American patriots did not wear the traditional uniforms like the British military did. Unless the revolutionaries were carrying a rifle or were in armed groups, the British had no way of knowing who was the enemy and who was not.
But, they knew the guys in red were on their side and if they stopped someone riding along on their horse for questioning, they could be pretty sure they were colonists, but loyal to who? Early profiling?
“Canadian paramilitaries”– I do love the Canadian jokes on 30 Rock–and the Red Green Show.
But: Philip is exactly right. Good hypothetical.
I agree, Phillip. It can’t be a rotten idea when someone else does it (like N. Korea), but perfectly on the up and up when we do it. Rules that only apply to one side are not rules.
Brad,
You may want to do a follow-up or a little investigation into a protest that took place at the home of Greg Baer, deputy general counsel for corporate law at Bank of America. It happened last Sunday but nothing was reported from what I can find. Except for a friendly representative from Huffpo, the press was not there. If Tea Party members had gone to someone’s private residence and protested, it would have made the news 24/7.
Approximately 500 people from SEIU went to his home in 14 school buses to protest and later, went to another home in the neighborhood. Baer’s son was home alone when the thugs showed up. Oddly enough, Baer was a high official in the Clinton administration and a loyal Democrat.
BofA is the SEIU’s bank of choice and SEIU owes BofA over $4 million in interests and fees. But, the real question is this – why protest BofA when the bank has been out of the subprime business since 2001?
This little inconvenience may not be of interest to many, but it does show just how radical FOO or Friends of Obama are taking things today. What’s next? Will FOOs take buses en masse’ to Arizona to protest their immigration law which the current and past Bush administration lacked the balls to enforce? Wait, that has already happened. Al Sharpton, the coiffured one has already descended on Arizona.
It is getting out of hand and you may disagree, but some of the incidents not reported smack of anarchy. It is strange how some things in this administration are given a free hand and encouraged by Obama. “If they bring a knife, you bring a gun.” Wow, a surefire way of encouraging civilized discourse.
Karen, Kathryn… sigh… I hate to say anything this dismissive, but that “moral equivalency” argument — golly, imagine if the roles were reversed, and other countries interfered with the U.S., etc. — is one of the most tired, trite, and silly propositions that my liberal, anti-war friends come up with. It’s not profound; it’s ridiculous.
And the fact that y’all think it’s a good point simply delineates the yawning cognitive divide between us, and discourages me in the same way that I got discouraged at that Sarah Palin/Nikki Haley thing. When I despair of communicating with people, I just don’t know what to do. Because communicating IS what I do…
And Bart, what’s the SEIU?
… OK, I looked it up. And I found lots of references to the incident you mention, including this from CNN.
Sounds like SEIU sort of embodies much of what I dislike about unions. Worse, it contains public employees. And I don’t believe public employees should be allowed to belong to unions. Once we allow that, no shenanigans that they get up to will surprise me.
By the way, I’d like to take issue with an assumption at the beginning of that piece linked above:
Count me out. Public demonstrations leave me cold most of the time. From the Tea Party to this SEIU nonsense. From the rock-throwing that triggered the Boston Massacre to students taking over the administration building in the 60s. Almost from the instant anyone decides to be a part of such street theater, they leave reason behind. Such mob expressions of self-righteousness are seldom justified. And even when they are, the cause is dragged down by the expression.
There are rare exceptions, such as Joe Riley’s march from Charleston to get the flag down. And I think some of the King-inspired, nonviolent civil rights marches were redeemed by the fact that they provided righteous, courageous witness to a huge, historic injustice.
But for the most part, they turn me off.
Let me make sure I’ve got this straight, Brad. It’s ok for the US to invade other countries, to deny civil rights to whomever we think we should, to torture people if ‘necessary,’ but it’s morally wrong for other countries to do so. And this is because we are morally better than they are? No. Such a position is as ethically and morally wrong. Only a completely outlaw nation takes such a stance. It makes the Geneva convention, and any other treaty for that matter, ultimately useless. Perhaps you think that good and evil are a matter of social conven”tion, and therefore easily changeable, but I don’t. We may have a hard time discerning what is “good” and what is “evil,” but human misperception doesn’t change their reality.
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May 24, 2010 at 10:12 am
Karen, Kathryn… sigh… I hate to say anything this dismissive, but that “moral equivalency” argument — golly, imagine if the roles were reversed, and other countries interfered with the U.S., etc. — is one of the most tired, trite, and silly propositions that my liberal, anti-war friends come up with. It’s not profound; it’s ridiculous.”
Ever so sorry to be so tiresome. No need to call names, though.
I do believe plenty of philosophers believe things like “a just society is one where it doesn’t matter where (to whom) you are born.”
But I guess I’m just too silly and trite not to see that Amurrica is always right. My country, right or wrong, eh?
“Ridiculous.” Wow, that’s a principled, well-argued stand.
I guess I’m too cognitively challenged to understand why something is okay when we do it, but not when they do it.
Brad, it’s not a question of moral equivalency. No one is suggesting that the US is behaving in a way equivalent to Iran or North Korea. The reason for these examples (or more benign ones, like Canada, or Europe) is because, when you imagine the perspective of other people in the world, the natural question arises:
On what basis does the United States claim privileges for itself that it is unwilling to grant to other nations in the world, even ones it might consider friendly or benign?
You would rather dismiss questions like this as “silly” rather than engaging them intellectually, which is disappointing, because you certainly have the eloquence to do so.
You speak of American “exceptionalism.” But that exceptionalism is self-defined by us. Can the planet, can mankind function in the long run with one nation essentially saying that, in the crunch, we are the final arbiters because we are “exceptional?”
The cognitive divide, and I don’t know, maybe it’s the religious or military angle for you, is that you seem to view anybody in the world who is not American as somehow not entitled to quite the same fundamental human rights as an American. If that’s just a religious belief or something like that, I guess that is just a gulf we can’t bridge. Still, I’d be very interested to hear your arguments and justification for it.
In other news, Nikki Haley is done. She’s got a Sanford problem. She should quit the race now.
Sigh again…
Just to knock down a few of these straw men… Kathryn, I didn’t call anyone names; I denigrated an argument.
Karen, no, you don’t have it straight because no one argued that “It’s ok for the US to invade other countries, to deny civil rights to whomever we think we should, to torture people if ‘necessary,’ but it’s morally wrong for other countries to do so. And this is because we are morally better than they are?”
Nor do I, Phillip, “view anybody in the world who is not American as somehow not entitled to quite the same fundamental human rights as an American.”
If I understood you correctly, you invited me (as though I actually were incapable of imagining the plight of a Yemeni spirited to Gitmo) Canadian troops grabbing me from a Five Points haunt and taking me somewhere and holding me incommunicado on suspicion of being a terrorist.
And you did so as a way of helping me — poor, thoughtless, jingoistic creature that I am — understand the issues involved with detainees held in Afghanistan.
This sort of comparison invites us to believe that the circumstances and justification for these real-life detentions were morally, legally, ethically the same as me sitting minding my own business drinking coffee in Five Points. You in no way posited that I was doing ANYTHING that could conceivably be construed as implicating me even distantly or indirectly in any sort of terrorist activity — or anyone who looked like me or spoke like me or held political views similar to mine or associated with people answering any such descriptions.
Such an analogy invites us to believe that these detainees were nabbed just as randomly, with just as little justification or cause for suspicion. Or am I missing something in what you’re trying to suggest? Because if you’re NOT suggesting an equivalence there, then I can’t imagine what your point was.
This is a strain I encounter constantly in antiwar and related arguments. This “we invaded an inoffensive country without a ghost of justification, and it’s exactly the same as if someone invaded the US of A stuff, because the government of this country is no better than Saddam Hussein” stuff is beyond bankrupt.
And it IS ridiculous.
But to argue about it is to revisit all of the arguments that have been made here and on my old blog over and over and over again. I have written so many thousands of words on these subjects, and they have all been like throwing pebbles at a brick wall.
And that saddens me. I respect y’all and would like to be able to have a meeting of the minds on these subjects. But as I said before, we just end up in a place that in terms of frustration is every bit as depressing as the realization that nothing I could say to the folks at that Palin/Haley rally would have persuaded them of what was wrong about that event.
I hate it when I run up against a wall like that.
My perception (and I expect Brad will vehemently disagree with me) is that Brad thinks that because America feels really, really bad when it does awful things, it makes us better than other countries. Genocide of Native Americans, slavery, internment of Japanese during WWII, dropping nuclear bombs on Japan, dropping napalm on Vietnam, My Lai, Abu Ghraib, Colin Powell’s presentation to the U.N. to justify invading Iraq, Gitmo… the ends justify the means and the intent is always to uphold truth, justice, and the American way.
Here’s what I believe: I believe that people who wish to persuade me of their position instead insult me when they presume to try to explain to me, in painfully simplistic terms, how the world is more complicated than they believe that I think it is.
This seems to be a theme on the blog today, which bled over to popular culture in a separate post. The reason I become offended by such morally simplistic, pretentious pap as “Dances With Wolves” is that it presumes to teach us about moral complexity, and in doing so is painfully one-dimensional.
Let’s take Hiroshima. Let’s take it in its entirety. Let’s read John Hersey and wallow in the moral horror of the event. Then let’s lay on some other layers. Let’s talk about how much more horrible the firebombing of Tokyo was five months before, or the same thing done to Dresden. Horrible events that cannot be justified by the simplistic, “Well, it was payback for Pearl Harbor.” If it was, it was at the very least disproportional.
Then let’s examine in detail the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Let’s think for a moment about the single factor that made the Pacific War so much more horrible for the Marine combatant than anything his Army counterparts experienced in Europe. Not the malaria or jungle rot. The fact that we were fighting a nation of suicide bombers, a nation that had succeeded in brainwashing a generation with a perverted version of the bushido code that exceeded anything Hitler accomplished with the Hitler Youth. Examine the way this horror got even more extreme the closer we got to Japan itself. Let’s contemplate what it would mean to extrapolate that experience on Iwo Jima against 22,000 Japanese (each of whom fully understood that his assignment was to die, and to take 10 Americans with him), and expand it to the millions on the main Japanese islands. And then contemplate which would have been the greater horror to visit upon the Japanese people: Two atom bombs, plus the firebombing; or a full-scale invasion with millions of deaths, fought foot by foot across that land. And no, we can’t know that’s what an invasion would have been like; we can only suppose, based on Iwo and Okinawa.
And then let’s think about the fact that either course would have been horrible. But one thing is clear: Condemning the dropping of the bombs as CLEARLY indefensible is itself an indefensible position.
The world is simply more complicated than that, and the moral choices in war more ambiguous.
Brad, you are right about one things here. I will NEVER, EVER, be convinced that invading Iraq was the right thing to do. Simply put, without all the excess word baggage, the threat was not sufficient to justify the enormous cost in blood and treasure. That issue really is pretty black and white.
The atom bombs are a bit more complex but I at least can see the other side in that argument. Was there not some middle option before incenerating thousands of civilians? Why not drop the first bomb on a sparsely populated military base first as a demonstration instead of a large city? We still could have dropped the second bomb and eventually more if necessary. Come to think of it dropping the first bomb the way we did was pretty indefensible.
Brad, I apologize if I insulted you. But “trite, silly” is a little dismissive, too.
Without beating this into the ground, and while respectfully accepting your points, let me just quickly address your “different circumstances” argument in the Bagram/Gitmo vs. “Warthen in 5 Points” scenario.
I chose that scenario of course to be deliberately funny and far-fetched…the point is not that we don’t have plausible reason to think a certain Yemeni might be a terrorist, etc: the question is if the justification is only provided by the country taking the prisoner from anywhere in the world, then we must take the word of that country that they have plausible reason. So you say you did nothing to raise Canadian suspicions, but it’s your word against a sovereign power.
The “moral, legal, ethical” justifications in the “real” cases vs. the hypothetical ones are still justifications ONLY within the framework of the country doing the worldwide capturing of individuals. Without a strong international legal framework for dealing with these cases, we could see a world where countries are going all over the world, plucking individuals from everywhere, in the name of THEIR national security.
All I wanted to do with my little story was to ask what recourse somebody has who is NOT a terrorist, under international law. Whether the only assurance that we don’t ever cause people who are NOT terrorists to just disappear permanently is that our government assures us that we wouldn’t ever do such a thing.
The problem Brad, is not that I’m comparing, per se, any one country to another. What I’m trying to get at, is that some actions when done by a government without restriction are dangerous because governnment is so very strong. That, as I’m sure you understand, is why certain rights such as the right to be told the charges against you, the right to be able challenge your accuser, and the right to a speedy trial and a trial by peers are essential. Government is a strong power, but it is, in fact, a power exercised in each case by individuals. These individuals may not be so noble, or so disinterested in the outcome as one might hope. That’s why people need to decide in advance that there are certain things that governments should not do without restraint, because that extreme power can be misused too easily. To use Phillip’s example: You are sitting there doing nothing wrong. But someone who had been trying to plant a bomb was arrested in Canada. That guy talks freely, implicating others. Those folks are arrested. One of those guys, maybe, is roughed up a bit (let’s not say tortured) in an effort to get more info from him. Maybe he’s tossing out any names that come to him in an effort to avoid more torture. Maybe he really is a first class rotter who would just as soon do as much as he can to mess up relations between us and Canada, or to simply distract the Canadians and make them use up time and materials chasing down false leads. At any rate, he’s read your blog, seen you name on a paper, or knows you in some other way, and implicates you. And here they come. If you have rights, you’re going to have a way of defending yourself from these charges, and even if arrested, will be able to extricate yourself. You won’t be able to, however, if no one tells you what the charges are (You know what you’ve done!), if you can’t respond to your accuser (who?), and are simply stuck away in a back room without being brought before judge or jury (Warthen? Never heard of him). I contend that if we refuse these rights to any, we run the risk of being denied them ourselves. I also contend that any country or government that sees itself as “too good” to commit wrong is dangerously headed in the direction of becoming a rogue state.
Right. The ends justify the means. Like I said. Better to drop a couple bombs on thousands of innocent people than risk losing our soldiers in a ground war.
Bud, I’ve often wondered why we didn’t drop the bomb over a harbor in clear view of land, or say on Mt. Fuji or something — where the force of it could be seen by the enemy, and perhaps understood.
But by that time in the war, we had unfortunately become inured to dropping bombs on civilians, and I suppose no one even seriously considered that. And if they DID consider it, I’m guessing that after Iwo Jima and Okinawa, US leader thought the Japanese would not be cowed by such a bloodless demonstration. They probably assumed that nothing short of a demonstration that we CAN and WILL obliterate Japan unless you surrender would have worked, against such a suicidally determined enemy.
I’m intrigued by the fact that Japan surrendered even in the face of that, since everything about their doctrine held that death was far preferable to surrender. I need to read more about that, and maybe I’ll come to more of an understanding.
And yeah, Doug, I think the calculation on the home front was about the anticipated million American deaths. But what I was suggesting above is that there is a real no-win calculation to be made even if you only care about what happens to the Japanese population — especially after what we saw on Okinawa. I find the argument that an invasion would have killed far more persuasive.
As for the rest… there are so many points to be made.
Phillip, thank you for making a case for the Canadians; I hate to think of them grabbing me willy-nilly. But the scenario still seems terribly unlikely. And do you see the main reason why I’m so dismissive of such arguments? That I find it insulting to my intelligence that you think you have to concoct something so far-fetched in order to drag my stubborn, inflexible mind to a place where I can imagine the plight of the detainee?
Beyond that, I do find it utterly incredible that U.S. authorities or Canadian authorities make a practice of detaining anyone without a damned good reason. They may be wrong; their case may not hold up. They may make mistakes, and yes, in certain rare cases a bad apple could rise up who imprisons Yemenis or whatever because he doesn’t like “ragheads.” But in our system, that would most decidedly not be the norm, because we DO have the traditions and institutions of a liberal democracy, and we have different expectations based in a belief in inalienable rights for ALL people, not just for Westerners. But we are fighting against people who have no such values, who will do everything they can to exploit our liberal values to their advantage, and there is NO moral equivalence there. The fact that we might make a mistake in grabbing the wrong guy sometimes does not put us on any kind of moral plane with someone who deliberately targets civilians BECAUSE they are civilians.
Finally, back to Bud — the issue is NEVER black and white when the United States goes to war. Not even in 1941, when it was pretty damned close to being. There is always complexity in war.
Oh, and Karen: Why does torture have to be involved? Why does the subject have to be tortured to wrongly implicate me? As I think you acknowledge, he doesn’t have to be to pass disinformation. (Which, if y’all will forgive me, reminds me of a funny Stephen Wright line in “Canadian Bacon.” He plays one of a group of regular Americans, believing we are at war with Canada, capture a Mountie and tie him up. When the Mountie says “What’s all this aboot?” Wright threatens him with torture: “We have ways of making you say the letter O.”)
But I really appreciate that you see my point about the difficulties posed by Hiroshima. That gives me hope, and tells me that dialogue is not pointless.
All I said was “maybe roughed up a bit.” Maybe it’s just someone who intensely dislikes you. In that case, perhaps, he can add extra bits of realistic data.
“But in our system, that would most decidedly not be the norm, because we DO have the traditions and institutions of a liberal democracy, and we have different expectations based in a belief in inalienable rights for ALL people, not just for Westerners.”
What you are proposing is that we undo those ‘inalienable rights for ALL people’. I agree that terrorists are not good guys. I just think that if we are going to retain the right to think that we are the ‘good guys’ then we have to continue to act like good guys. Yes, our government can make mistakes, and there can be bad eggs. It’s only our protective laws that give those who are caught up in these instances any chance for redress, or at least extrication. Without those protective laws, well, you could disappear into Canada and never be seen again.
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