Yesterday I informed you that I will not be active here until the middle of March. I am pleased to announce that there will be contribution to fill the gap, not only while I am gone, but after. I’m pleased to welcome David Ferreira, who will add his own views to this site.
I encourage you, as always, on behalf of both of us, to give us feedback, challenge us, and, if you’d like to share our writings.
I also hope you to use this site to share your own views and comments on affairs and, well, just about everything else you’d like to comment on.
I’ll leave all further introduction of David to him.
The Spanish high court ruled that a case against executives from the Bush administration could proceed, denying a request from a prosecutor to dismiss the claim. There are two ongoing investigations in Spain, and I will let quotes describe the cases. From one;
on April 27, 2009, Judge Baltasar Garzón issued a decision opening a preliminary investigation into what he termed “an authorized and systematic plan of torture and ill-treatment on persons deprived of their freedom without any charge and without the basic rights of any detainee, set out and required by applicable international conventions,” in US detention facilities. This decision related to the alleged torture and abuse of four former Guantánamo detainees: Hamed Abderrahman Ahmed, Ikassrien Lahcen, Jamiel Abdul Latif Al Banna and Omar Deghayes. All four men had previously been the subject of a criminal case in Spain, but were subsequently acquitted because of the use of torture and other forms of serious abuse to which they had been subjected during their detention and interrogations at Guantánamo; Judge Garzón had previously issued the extradition requests for Messrs Al Banna and Deghayes. Mr Ahmed is a Spanish citizen and Mr Ikassrien had been a Spanish resident for more than 13 years. The decision presents six pages of facts related to the torture and abuse the four men suffered including being held in cells made of chicken-wire in intense heat; being subjected to constant loud music, extreme temperatures and bright lights; constant interrogations without counsel; sexual assault; forced nakedness; threats of death; and severe beatings. The preliminary investigation did not name potential defendants, but included “possible material and instigating perpetrators, necessary collaborators and accomplices.” Judge Garzón found that the facts relate to violations under the Spanish Penal Code, the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and the Organic Law of the Judicial Power (Article 23.4).
and from the other;
On March 17, 2009, a criminal complaint was filed against David Addington (former Counsel to, and Chief of Staff for, former Vice President Cheney); Jay S. Bybee (former Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)); Douglas Feith (former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Department of Defense (DOD)); Alberto R. Gonzales (former Counsel to former President George W. Bush, and former Attorney General of the United States); William J. Haynes (former General Counsel, DOD); and John Yoo, (former Deputy Assistant Attorney General, OLC, DOJ), collectively known as the “Bush Six,” in which each was alleged to have participated or aided and abetted the torture and other serious abuse of persons detained at U.S. run-facilities at Guantánamo and other overseas locations. They are alleged to have committed numerous violations of international law, including violations of the Geneva Conventions and Convention Against Torture.
Description of both cases comes from the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed a motion in each case to join the investigation as a party. You can read more about the case, including US involvement, at alternet.
It is rare that I write here without addressing social issues. I have a personal announcement to make.
I will not be active on this blog until the middle of March (oh dear, the Ides of March). I will be flying to New York to spend quality time with my brother, and will be there until Feb 26th until March 2nd. On March 2nd I’m flying to Israel (thank you, Birthright) and will be there until March 13th. I’ll spend a couple days in New York and return on March 15th.
Thank you all for reading and commenting and challenging what I write.
The most frequently used example of research in political science is ‘Trust in Government.” Do people trust the local government? Do people trust the federal government? “Trust in Government” is to political research what “Hello World!” is to building a website, an essential starting block to make sure all further coding comes out correctly. Do you trust your government?
My guess is, we in the United States both do and do not trust our government. We trust our government (I think), not to kill us or torture us, despite a recent suggestion by a no-longer-employed Indiana deputy attorney general that live ammunition be used on Wisconsin protesters (although I encourage you to consider Guantanamo for a moment). We do not trust our government not to pursue legal action against us for expressing an opinion. Glenn Greenwald, of Salon magazine, suggested to readers in March 2010 that WikiLeaks was a website worth supporting, financially or otherwise. In response, several people said they were interested but “expressed a serious fear of doing so: they were worried that donating money to a group so disliked by the government would cause them to be placed on various lists or, worse, incur criminal liability.”
Speaking about fear of government, the State Department’s immediate reaction to the multiple leaks by WikiLeaks was to declare that anyone (generally young) who wrote about or commented on the issues of WikiLeaks would be automatically not considered for a State Department job. I, of course, fear that if I ever did want any federal job, simply commenting on WikiLeaks here, much less expressing an opinion, is enough to discredit me in the government’s eyes.
If you thought about the absurdity of people’s reaction to Greenwald, he had the same reaction. WikiLeaks, at least at the time, had never been charged with a crime, and any cry of terrorist organization was just a cry. Any donations to an organization not considered criminal, Greenwald points out, cannot be held against people. The point, though, is not about law or legality. The point is that “most of those expressing these concerns were perfectly rational, smart, well-informed American citizens. And yet they were petrified that merely donating money to a non-violent political and journalistic group whose goals they supported would subject them to invasive government scrutiny or, worse, turn them into criminals.” More importantly, “a government can guarantee all the political liberties in the world on paper (free speech, free assembly, freedom of association), but if it succeeds in frightening the citizenry out of exercising those rights, they become meaningless.”
Let me repeat that, because it gets lost in long paragraphs. “A government can guarantee all the political liberties in the world on paper (free speech, free assembly, freedom of association), but if it succeeds in frightening the citizenry out of exercising those rights, they become meaningless.” Glen Greenwald said that; I don’t disagree, do you? Do you trust your government?
To return to an earlier point, I believe we do not fear our government. We can protest, talk, and change our elected officials. A brave man just came back from Libya, Afghanistan and Iran – he planned his trip before large protests occurred – and reminded us that
we can all use the tools of modern technology to communicate with people without censorship. If you want to publicly protest something in America, you can do that too, and the government will even send out police to protect both you and any demonstrators who oppose your views.
True, but do we do that, will we do that, if we fear government? On a federal level involving our national security state Greenwald wrote (a month after the already-mentioned article),
At some point, the dogmatic emphasis on limited state power, not trusting the Federal Government, and individual liberties — all staples of right-wing political propaganda, especially Tea Party sloganeering — has to conflict with things like oversight-free federal domestic surveillance, limitless government detention powers, and impenetrable secrecy (to say nothing of exploiting state power to advance culture war aims).
However, it is not only Greenwald that writes about trust of government secrecy in government. I cited and summarized an article by Bill Moyers recently, but I did not include this comment about the government.
“It’s always a fight to find out what the government doesn’t want us to know. The official obsession with secrecy is all the more disturbing today because the war on terrorism is a war without limits, without a visible enemy or decisive encounters. We don’t know where the clandestine war is going on or how much it’s costing and whether it’s in the least effective. Even in Afghanistan, most of what we know comes from official, usually military, sources.”
I do not usually fear my government, and I do not usually trust my government. I belong to the dangerous and endangered class of people that says what I think about government when I disagree and do so in a public place. When I read things like this, “anyone connected to WikiLeaks — even American citizens — are now routinely detained at the airport and have their property seized, their laptops and cellphones taken and searched and retained without a shred of judicial oversight or due process,” I tend to fear my government. That, of course, is the point. As a final thought from Greenwald, and this is exactly the point, “political liberties are meaningless if they’re conditioned on obeisance to political power or if citizens are frightened out of exercising them in any way that matters.”
In a few days Israel’s Knesset will vote on a bill. That, in itself, is not news. The bill, however, is not standard, although I suppose it falls under the classic definition of the role of the state: health, welfare, morals. It “would establish two parliamentary commissions of inquiry to probe human rights groups and other non-governmental organizations perceived as leftist, anti-Israel, or pro-Palestinian.”
The vote has not yet happened; I cannot answer whether two Israeli-Arabic representatives in the Knesset will choose to go to the Arab League summit happening at the same time as this vote, nor can I describe whether six Jewish Israelis who were invited will choose to be at the J Street summit, a first-time event promoting Israeli-Palestinian peace, in Washington D.C. All eight of those representatives are opponents of the bill.
I can say with certainty, because they said so themselves, that several conservative members of the Knesset oppose the bill. Conservatives have a majority in the Knesset, 65 of 120 seats, but nine members of Netanyahu’s coalition (remember that there are several parties which form a coalition) have announced they will not vote for the bill.
More will be revealed.
I have been patient in reacting to the peaceful but serious battle over the future of unions, which began in Wisconsin. I have yet to write a detailed account of that conflict. (I notice I am using words like ‘conflict’ and ‘battle;’ even peaceful protests can become ‘contests’ and ‘battles’ and ‘conflicts.’ These words imply strong disagreement.) I will not spend time summarizing here what the governor has done except what I find necessary in this narrative.
The media, who did some work correctly, found quickly that the issue was larger than a deficit in the state budget. While there appears to be some doubt about whether Wisconsin began the year with a budget surplus, the issues at stake are the same:
Walker has introduced a bill that would strip public employees across the board — from teachers to snowplow drivers — of their right to collectively bargain for sick leave, vacation, even the hours they work. But absolutely nothing would change for local police, fire departments and the State Patrol.
Why try to destroy a union for public employees in this way? John Kenneth Galbraith did some classic work on the balance of power between economic entities: ‘countervailing power.’ Rather than lots of small corporations competing, the competition is between a few large companies and economic powers, including organized labor (unions), retailers and producers. For Galbraith, “the American economy was made up of large organizations, and to function properly, there had to be a system of checks and balances,” and unions are (yes, present tense) a central element, along with producers and retailers and distributors. The government’s role is not to represent workers, according to Galbraith, but to mediate the conflict between all sides. The voice for workers is, guess what, unions. The voice for public employees is, surprise, a union for public employees.
What should be the role of the government in resolving the competing interests in Wisconsin, and other states that have adopted the same pursuits? Let’s turn briefly to the Founding Fathers, and in particular Federalist 51 (Proper Checks and Balances Between Different Departments):
Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit. In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger.
I can infer from Galbraith’s work that checks and balances exist not only between the executive, legislature, and judiciary, but also between competing economic interests. We have seen what happens when there are no checks and balances on a federal government: the government doesn’t work. All sorts of laws get passed because there is no faction that can oppose the law with legislative force. So, what should the role of government be? Shouldn’t it be to preserve the economic checks and balances? Let me return to the question why try to destroy public unions. Forget that it’s being done this way, or that way, or any other way. The reason to destroy a public union is to minimize the power of the unions.
Workers rights has been a common theme in the past week. In fact, since January 25th, when Egyptians gathered for a planned march against their government, there has been a common theme. Workers rights. When I say workers, I refer to everyone: employed, unemployed, public sector, private sector. That’s what they wanted in Tunisia, weeks before January 25th. That’s what they wanted in Egypt. That’s what they want in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, and every other place that’s been in the news. And that’s what they want in Madison, Wisconsin. Workers rights.
There’s been a history of protests in the United States. If I were to start listing all of them, researching all of them, I would never – never – finish writing this. I don’t need to tell you about protests during of the founding of our country, or the ones in the first hundred years of our country. I’ll save that for a history lesson. But workers rights. Workers rights have been an issue for well over a century in our country.
For some cases involving workers rights, see Hammer v. Dagenhart (which ruled that the federal government could not regulate child labor), which was overruled by United States v. Darby Lumber (“the conclusion is inescapable that Hammer v. Dagenhart was a departure from the principles which have prevailed in the interpretation of the Commerce Clause”). Or, you may want to see Gibbons v. Ogden, a classic case, from which I derive the understanding that “commerce, undoubtedly, is traffic, but it is something more: it is intercourse.” Which means to me, that the commerce, the policies, the intercourse of Egypt, Iran, and Madison, Wisconsin, matter to me as if they were my own commerce.
That is a very incomplete sketch of labor history in the United States. The point is, workers have made some progress (from which comes the word ‘progressive‘). We – with lots of help from Madison, have developed collective bargaining, minimum wage, a five day work week, and helping out the person next to you (‘socialism’). These ideas aren’t perfect. They’re changeable. But they’re not things to get rid of, which is a lesson Scott Walker and his ilk have yet to learn. Workers rights.
I get the feeling that the old guard is a little bit slow catching on to the indescribable feeling of a people united, since in their hurry to create divisiveness they have forgotten that feeling.
As is my habit, I was reading through the news. I came upon an interesting article that explains a lot.
What will bring people here out into the streets? There has been a great deal of hand-wringing over failure to take to the streets, lamentations of our non-revolution….
Some say: Why should people here take to the streets? We have democracy, don’t we? Free press, free consumption, a flourishing free market. People aren’t going hungry, Facebook and Twitter are open to everyone.
Am I talking about America? Actually, this article is about Israel. And the article explains why people aren’t out in the streets:
But the truth is that it is difficult to expect the Israeli public to take to the streets, because in fact it has too many things to protest….continued occupation, the recurrent wars, depriving workers’ rights, diminishing health and welfare services, increasing and aggravating societal gaps of all kinds, and – in more recent years – eroding democratic rights and personal freedoms, and growing government corruption.
The difference I see between this critique of Israel, and any critique of America, is the word ‘occupation, and the difference between the word ‘Israeli’ or ‘American’.
Of course, there have been protests in America. There is a leaderless, invisible, and expanding revolution in America against banks and corporations by people (for people, as well). Why? Consider this story that headlined today: Foreclosed: but never missed a payment. Not an accident, and not as infrequent as we’d all like to hope. And there have been other protests in America. Once we were brave enough to protest a war we didn’t believe in, which began March 2003. Ten of hundreds of thousands of us, all across America and the world. What happened? From a plaintiff and legal worker in a case in Chicago,
A class action lawsuit, Vodak v. City of Chicago, was filed after the incident, which I have been involved in as both a plaintiff and a legal worker. The suit is on behalf of the approximately 550 people who were falsely arrested, some spending two days in jail, along with 300 others who were detained on the street for over an hour and a half and forced to discard their signs and anti-war materials. After years of litigation, on the eve of trial Virginia Kendall, the federal judge presiding over the case, ruled in favor of the City of Chicago and determined that the police had the right to arrest the protesters because we did not have a permit. That decision was appealed to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals where it was argued this past October, during which one of the judges stated, “It sounds like a police state, if a large crowd of peaceful people can all just be swept up and arrested by the police.” At the time of this writing, the class members and attorneys await the Appeals Court’s decision, which will determine whether the case can proceed.
Government discouraging rebellion. I think this says it best, about America, Israel, or any other place with or without protests and revolts at the moment (see, for a short list of current protests, South Africa, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and Iran.
Israel’s politicians fail to recognize the public’s exhaustion and collective depression, its desire for peace, quiet and equality, and don’t understand that this is the real danger to our existence, security and character. That is because this exhaustion and desire for quiet have led to the yearning for a “strong leader.”
The truth is that we’re all yearning for a revolution. We watch with frustration all of those other people who have succeeded in making a change – not just tried, but succeeded – and we want the same. We, too, want to shape our lives, we also want something exciting and positive to happen to us, something awesome and inspiring – and most of all something that gives hope. Boy, do we need hope.
What are the essentials of democracy? Is it the right to bear arms? Some think so. Is it an implied division between church and state? Some think so. Is it the right of freedom of the press? Some think so… But what good does that do us with reports such as Joe Keohane’s in the Boston Globe that “research at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in new stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs.” The research found that actually “we often base our opinions on our beliefs … and rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept”. Freedom of the press? What happens when the press is partisan?
Bill Moyers, commenting on this study to History Makers, a journalistic organization dedicated to factual broadcasting, said,
‘”No wonder many people still believe Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, as his birth certificate shows; or that he is a Muslim, when in fact he is a Christian; or that he is a socialist when day by day he shows an eager solicitude for corporate capitalism. In a Harris survey last spring, 67 percent of Republicans said Obama is a socialist; 57 percent believed him to be a Muslim; 45 percent refused to believe he was born in America; and 24 percent said he ‘may be the antichrist.'”
Ah well, we believe what we want to believe. As Dumbledore said so well, “we see what we want to see.” However, if the ‘right’ sees only what it wants to see, so does the ‘left’; and so do I.
From Moyers again:
Disinformation is not unique to the right, of course….[What about the] airtight case proving that the Bush administration conspired to bring about the attacks on the World Trade Center? …’the [9/11] truthers’ threw out all the evidence of al-Qaeda’s involvement, from contemporaneous calls from hijack victims on the planes to confessions from al-Qaeda leaders both in and out of captivity that they had indeed done it.
Much as I would like to believe these 9/11 ‘truthers,’ at the same time I discredit the ‘birthers’ and ‘truthers’ claiming all sorts of obviously false things about Obama. I, of course, like others, see the partisan world I want to see, while disregarding views that do not help me, and also approach political means with my own biases. What’s my point? Moyers continues not with further rumors and might-or-might-not-be’s, but with reminding his colleagues of Orwell’s 1984. “Control of the present rests on obliteration of the past,” is the inference Moyers makes.
The bureaucrats in the Ministry of Truth destroy the records of the past and publish new versions. These in turn are superseded by yet more revisions. Why? Because people without memory are at the mercy of the powers that be; there is nothing against which to measure what they are told today. History is obliterated.
First of all, that sounds oddly like an authoritarian (perhaps fascist or Communist – Communist as the USSR was, and not was Communism was meant to be) state. Second of all, that sounds oddly like America, especially some news organizations. There are not three, as Cleanth Brooks argued, but four enemies of democracy (says Moyers):
The poet Czeslaw Milosz identified another enemy of democracy when, upon accepting the Noble Prize for Literature, he said ‘Our planet that gets smaller every year, with its fantastic proliferation of mass media, is witnessing a process that escapes definition, characterized by a refusal to remember.’ Memory is crucial to democracy; historical amnesia, its nemesis.
As a brief aside, I have a degree in political science. I have no trouble memorizing facts and figures, no trouble developing hypotheses and seeing the world as it is (or, rather, of course, as I wish to see it). However, I devour an immense amount of information every day, and I too frequently forget somewhat important events, and do not see others coming (for example, the revolutions and lengths of revolutions currently hitting the Middle East). It is too easy to forget.
Here’s an example of what we forget, of what history hides from us. Bill Moyers
spent more than a year working on another PBS documentary called “Trade Secrets,” a two-hour investigative special based on revelations – found in the industry’s own archives – that big chemical companies had deliberately withheld from workers and consumers damaging information about toxic chemicals in their products. These internal industry documents are a fact. They exist. They are not a matter of opinion or point of view. They state what the companies knew, when they knew it and what they did with what they knew (namely to deep-six it) at peril to those who worked with and consumed the potentially lethal products.
The revelations portrayed deep and pervasive corruption in a major American industry and raised critical policy implications about the safety of living under a regulatory system manipulated by the industry itself. If the public and government regulators had known what the industry knew about the health risks of its products when the industry knew it, America’s laws and regulations governing chemical manufacturing would have been far more protective of human health. But the industry didn’t want us to know. That’s what the documents revealed and that was the story the industry fought to keep us from telling.
But the task that Moyers pursues, that one that in his words, have “never required him to grow up and get a day job,” is an essential task. He is preventing collective memory loss. After all,
that’s what keeps us going, isn’t it? The knowledge that all the bias and ignorance notwithstanding, facts still matter to critical thinking, that if we respect and honor, even revere them, they just might help us right the ship of state before it rams the iceberg.”
The Dole Blog 