07.31.07
Posted in Snark and Snarkier at 6:40 pm by steve
Daniel Pipes warned us:
Muslims appear growingly aware that the terroristic ways of Osama bin Laden offer a less successful path to realizing the Islamist goals of imposing the Shari’a and creating a caliphate do than the political, lawful ways of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s newly-triumphantly reelected prime minister. Whereas terrorism stimulates its own antibodies and offers no plausible path to power, working through the system is proving successful in such diverse places as Egypt, the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon, Iraq, and Bangladesh and The West.
Translation: Moslems are realizing that the ways of Bin Laden are less successful in achieving a Shari’a caliphate than democratic means. It’s no longer necessary to be quite so fearful of terrorists. No. But be afraid of democracy!!! Be very afraid.
Never mind that in this case Turkey was a Islam state for a millennium before it became a secular state about a century ago. And Turkey’s Moslems have no reason to be less fundamental than, say, Israel’s Jews or South Carolina’s Baptists.
This is a popular theme among the National Review crowd. In their narrative the IslamoDemocratiFacistas first move into nations inhabited by nice white folks. Then they reproduce faster but fail to assimilate. Then it happens: you go to sleep one night in Paris or Antwerp or Zurich and you wake up in Sarajevo or Teheran or Isfahan. (Read Clair Berlinski’s Menace in Europe and Mark Shteyn’s America Alone). “But,” the agument continues, “somehow, if Dubya just reads all my e-mail and pays independent contractors huge amounts of money to make airline travel onerous enough for anyone who disagrees with his political agenda, none of this can happen. Instead it will be 1950 and we can wake up happily to the comforting sounds or Joseph McCarthy’s inquisition on the radio.”
Duck and cover.
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Great comments at Sadly, No!
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Posted in Social at 10:46 am by steve
The Party, The Member, and the Undecided Voter
It is the undecided who wield the most power in any closely contended vote. This is true of votes held on the Senate floor. And it is true of general elections. The people who are in a position to wring the most special concessions from the process are the undecided in a very close vote.
They ask for special considerations, and the side most able to deliver tends to get the vote. It is, of course, risky as a general strategy; for if a person or a group consistently plays this role they may end up having little influence in the formulation of policy. They are not seen as being part of “the team.” A person or party who behaves “unreasonably” may win a phyrric victory but be shunned later on. Or if the inducements grow too large, others may switch sides before an undecided voter commits, and he might lose the game. But nothwithstanding its very real limitations, there are advantages, sometimes, to waiting to commit to a side.
In an election or in a vote in the Legislature some portion of people vote as a block because of loyalty to a party or group. Understanding exactly what creates and enforces this kind of loyalty is far beyond the scope of our work here. But we will talk later about the nature of what properly ought to inform loyalty choices and what ought not do so. In the mean time we will assume that party loyalty is theoretically possible. And we will assume that because it exists it can be exploited by parties and by non-partisans alike.
We will talk here about a “wedge” issue. In its normal usage, this term refers to an issue that is used devisively by one party to split a block of voters from the other party. The overarching idea, the metaphorical image of division, is so powerful that we use it here to mean any issue that produces two cohesive groups whose voters are strongly committed to those groups on the basis of their point of view on the issue and are generally unresponsive to other issues. It may produce a third group that is more responsive to other issues.
A thought experiment here would be useful. Imagine a world with an odd number of voters who all voted in every election. Now, imagine a wedge issue that evenly divided the population (2n+1) into two groups A and B each with n voters. The remaining one voter would be undecided. Imagine, too, that regardless of any other issues, the 2n decided voters choose alliances on the basis of a singe wedge issue. In such a case winning an election would be reduced to convincing a single voter to vote for one’s own side. If the undecided voter chooses A, then A wins. If he chooses B, B wins.
If the vote in question is on the Senate floor, the undecided voter may understand the importance of his vote, and he will negotiate for a number of special considerations. At first this seems like a very powerful position. After all, it is usually the case that winning a vote, whether it is a bill in Congress or it is an election confers on the winner some things of value - often of great value. And when that is the case, the undecided voter is in a position to realize some material portion of that gain.
At least two factors limit this effect. One factor is lack of knowledge. The other is the fact that it is rare that every single person in groups A and B is committed in such a way that additional inducements could not change their votes.
In elections, the undecided voter is not in a position to communicate his special requirements to candidates and parties. And he is not in a position to negotiate. Not explicitly. One reason is because he may be oblivious to his position or to the advantages it might provide. Lack of knowledge of his negotiating position makes the undecided voter unmotivated to explicitly negotiate for a better deal. But even if he did know, he would have difficulty conveying his position. Lack of a method of communication makes it impossible for him to convey his requirements with any degree of specificity. So in practical terms, it is difficult for him to make specific demands on either group A or B. That said, campaigns that fail to make the attempt to win the undecided voter with some sort of special inducements might risk losing him to the other side. Similarly, if the kinds of inducements that might lure the undecided voter were to do the same for voters only loosely committed to the other side, one would get an even bigger advantage.
If the voter understands his position of power and if he is in a position to communicate his special interests, he will be likely to demand a premium to choose one position over another. And the two parties in question may engage in a bidding war to attract the undecided voter, in effect, taking things away from other parties to give to him.
Imagine two parties A and B. Imagine n people choose to vote for each party A, and B on the basis of a wedge issue and in the absence of any other considerations. Now imagine that party A, in order to win the election decides to induce the undecided voter to vote for party A by tempting him with a consideration of some value v. Now, if the undecided voter is willing to commit to party A for v, then that’s the end of the story. But what if the uncommitted voter wants more, say v+i? Party A will be inclined to promise more. How much more? Maybe much more.
Or maybe not. Suppose that there exists a person in party B who will switch his vote for a consideration of v. Now if the undecided voter insists on v+i, party A will simply offer the person in party B an amount v to change sides. In this situation, then, the undecided voter - for the sake of trying to gain i loses v by pressing the game too far. The threat of this happening tends to keep the demands of the undecided voter or group “reasonable.”
This analysis suggests both why Groups demand and try to enforce loyalty. It makes the costs of maintenance for Group A lower if it costs an opposing Group B more to poach members from A than it does the opposite.
Now, let us imagine a world inhabited by two political parties. Imagine that there exists a singe wedge issue or a set of very closely related wedge issues that reliably produces 40 percent of the vote for each party. In such a case, the undecided 20 percent of the population plays the role of the undecided voter. Let us suppose further that wedge issues are defined in such a way as to have absolutely no bearing on public welfare. In such a game, if public welfare ever does enter the election in any sense, the issues of public welfare are decided by 20 percent of the voting population.
What can we say about issues of public welfare in such cases? They would likely go unaddressed in political discourse. And they would likely go either unaddressed or they would not be very carefully addressed in matters of legislation. The best news is that it would be the non-partisans who would have the most influence over the matter. If non-partisans were completely unaffected by the wedge issue that assigns people to parties A and B then the non-wedge issue that is of concern to an unaffiliated voter will influence his choice in an election.
Now, if the state of affairs is generally good, then by definition not many serious issues enter public policy discourse: for the purpose of government, in general, is to resolve issues that rip at the fabric of society. In such an environment, if people cleave to a party on the basis of a wedge issue the consequences are not ruinous to public policy; the behavior is not very costly. Elections might be won or lost on the basis of how non-partisans vote on one, two, or perhaps three relatively important but not completely crucial issues. A population can knock off policy problems one or two per election season. And maybe things will not get too far out of hand.
But if society approaches a point at which a significant number of serious problems need to be dealt with. And if the boundaries of class memberships of the people with the complaints do not naturally fall along the boundaries of established parties, then such a system becomes almost completely inept at addressing policy issues that need addressing.
In both cases the form in question is democracy. And in both cases it is ill-equipped to deal broadly with the a large number of social problems. It’s just that in cases where things are going swimmingly, this unsuitability is not a great impediment.
One can call such a state of affairs representative democracy; but it is seriously flawed in comparison to the conception of democracy found in Rousseau’s The Social Contract. In the Social Contract, Rousseau worried about parties. In his own opinion, a population made up of people with a broad range of problems and interests and living under different social and geographic conditions would have a broad set of individual interests. To the extent that a person could express his own interest in an election, elections could be quite valuable. But he disliked parties.
Here’s why: Imagine that people live in cities, suburbs, and rural areas. And they play different social roles. Some are rich, others poor, some are influencial, others friendless, some are young, some are old, some are healthy, some have health problems, some are married, some own property, some are serious, others frivolous. The issues of concern for the old, rural, healthy might be quite different from the issues of concern of the suburban middle classes. Using the above categories one might identify hundreds of groups in these major areas of concern. To hope that any single party can properly adjudicate and represent the interests of one group over the other is to hope too much.
So Rousseau was worried that a large portion of a person’s unique interests would be subjugated to the will of the group, and therefore would not be adequately represented by the party. The founders of the United States worried about the same thing. They purposefully avoided any talk of parties. They hoped to avoid parties. But they found that parties were inevitable. People who had strong and durable sensibilities about a number of core issues found it useful to associate and bind their interests together in order that they be represented. Parties also offered hope of more power. One group could cooperate with other groups that had non-conflicting interests. And so long as the cooperation lasted both groups could have their interests put forward by the party. This is the way party politics is assumed to work. This is the way it would work in a rational world without divisive wedge issues.
But it does not always work that way. And when it does not, people abandon their parties and seek power playing the game of the undecided voter.
There has been a trend for much of the last half century toward less party loyalty. One measure, perhaps, is the length of time a party holds the White House. Another measure, perhaps, is the portion of time during which the Legislature and the White House are aligned with the same party. Another measure might be the portion of voters who register without party affiliation. Since 2000 alone, voter registration in 26 battleground states has increased primarily through increases in registration of non-affiliated voters, an average of 2.4 percent vs .8 percent for Democrats and .9 percent for Republicans. The same source shows a monotonic increase in unaffiliated voters from 1960 to 2004. In 1960 the percentage was less than 2 percent. In 2004 it was over 20 percent.
This suggests that fewer people rely strictly on one party to express their interests. One might argue that this is because voters are more canny and they understand that they can negotiate better deals with parties from a position of being unaffiliated than they can as party loyalists. Or one might argue that it is because parties do an ever worse job representing the interests of their members. A third possibility is that the number of issues of national importance that ought to be addressed by parties but is not being addressed is growing. There is surely some truth to each of these propositions. These three views may be three expressions of a common theme, one of an increasing perception by voters that parties fail to represent their interests. Voters perceive that America’s parties are actually failing to deliver what voters reasonably expect them to.
Parties under-deliver for many reasons. But our analysis of the wedge issue suggests that if wedge issues demand too much loyalty, the onus on the party to deliver on other issues is removed. The party exists with loyal membership not by advocating for good and legitimate policy initiatives or by defending existing policies, but by simple exploitation of a wedge issue.
When politicians discover issues that command a great deal of loyalty, it is possible to reserve huge blocks of voters with single issues. One can make an argument that this makes for bad politics when the wedge issues are legitimate policy issues that have huge and meaningful consequences. When, however, these single issues have nothing at all to do with government policy or with allocation of resources or with the traditional concerns of government - ones that normally require an outlay of resources - parties can command loyalty on the cheap. Wedge issues, therefore, are ideally suited for the purpose of gaining votes without addressing costly policy issues. In short, they cheat voters. All voters.
Legitimate Issues vs Illegitimate Issues
The purpose of government, if one is to believe Jefferson, is to ensure “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In the tradition of British liberalism this means that a person has the liberty to behave as he pleases until such behavior infringes on the life, liberty, or happiness* or another. Because it is impossible for individuals in society to enforce such ideals, government is charged with the duty. And the legitimate goal of government is to protect these properties of existence well. Policy is judged in terms of this.
What are the characteristics of legitimate policy issues and what are the characteristics of illegitimate policy issues. Legitimate policy:
Common Good - it imagines that there exists within society some common good. It seeks to expand that common good while minimizing the cost of doing so. Some common goods include security in various forms, economic prosperity, healthy and pleasing environmental conditions.
Decrease Disutility - it seeks to minimize disutility. It seeks to eliminate sources of extreme dissatisfaction.
Not Overly Burdensome - it is minimally intrusive on peoples’ rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A legitimate policy will achieve its claimed end by methods that minimize burdensome or negative effects.
Appeal to Sense of Fairness - it seeks to negate the effects of unscrupulous behavior or of unfair advantages that one group might gain over another in political or economic terms.
Not De-Facto Biased - it does not implicitly or explicitly prefer one group over another on the basis of inherited or cultural factors. Where it prefers one group to an other on the basis of age it does so uniformly and with a compelling basis: a minimum voting age, a minimum group pension age, and so on.
Do Not Enforce an Arbitrary Moral Viewpoint - Moral ideas may be developed within the context of religious thought; but they all derive from a cultural rule which may be expressed as the Golden Rule “Treat others as you would be treated.” or as Kant’s Categorical Imperative or as Gauthier’s three cooperative rules. Moral reasoning is built up by applying widely held commonly held cultural values to the general rule of cooperation. Where cultures are heterogenous in their values, there will necessarily be conflicting expressions of “moral” values. And the specifics of the moral reasoning will have to be negotiated in light of the fundamental principle of cooperation and any legitimate cultural values.
For example, sobriety has been an issue of cultural concern to a particular segment of the population. And in the early twentieth century, idealists hoped to create a perfect society by eliminating impediments to sobriety. The consumption of alcohol was banned with a Constitutional Ammendment that banned the consumption of alcohol. This led to a huge wave of organized crime. And some have argued that it led to worse behavior because many people moved from drinking beer and wine to drinking spirits which were easier to smuggle - in terms of bang for the buck. It was a disaster. Fortunately people came to their senses and prohibition was reversed not many decades later.
The “moral” of the story: “you cannot legislate morality.” When a large portion of any population believes a practice is an acceptable practice, then it is unreasonable and destructive to try to get them to change.
The reasonong that led to prohibition was a confusion about how to view two previous policy initiatives: the abolishion of slavery, and the practice of universal sufferage allowing women to vote. While it is certainly correct that “moral” ideals were expressed in choosing these policies, the compelling logic for them was strictly utilitarian; it lay in the real purpose of government. These initiatevs addressed a real flaw in the fabric of democracy itself; they limit the expressive ability of elections by limiting who can vote in them.
The necessary result is a society whose laws systematically repress groups on the basis of race or gender. This part is morally wrong. And it rightly ought to cause people to support these policy initiatives. But what makes these initiatives different from prohibition is that disenfranchisement concentrates political power and necessarily degrades the legitimate expressive power of democracy. The truly insidious problem with schemes of selective enfranchisement is that there is a general tendency for them to grow more selective. And in the end one is left with a tiny fraction of the population making laws whose clear purpose is to sustain their own political and economic power at the expense of a much larger populace. And it is precisely to avoid this end that we resort to the messy process of democracy in the first place. Laws that target specific groups within a nation whose membership is an accident of nature and by virtue of that accident make them ineligible to vote are laws that undermine democracy itself.
Legislation aimed at fixing society’s “moral” flaws actually have the opposite effect. Instead of expanding the political expressive power of individuals they infringe upon individual liberties. And in the case of prohibition and certain drug laws they do so in artificial, arbitrary, and overly destructive way.
The Perfect Wedge Issue
For the period of time that I have been a voting adult, there has been one wedge issue that has actually been a fair approximation of this perfect wedge issue: abortion. It would be interesting to get the real numbers, but my guess is that between 30 and 40 percent of voters vote Republican because of abortion. And between 30 and 40 percent of voters vote Democratic because of abortion. My guess is that this will continue so long as the issue is considered by candidates and media to be a legitimate point of policy contention.
If this is true, then between 60 and 80 percent of voters in any election have committed to a side before they have weighed the issues. And if the candidate for whom they vote represents their own interests in any other sphere it is merely a matter of accident. This can work in the short term, because in the short term it is unlikely that candidates and parties have figured out how to game the system and take advantage of pre-committed voters. But in the medium and longer terms, it is almost inevitable that the voters who commit too eagerly will be exploited by their own parties and by the groups whose true interests those parties represent. In the case of abortion, the game has been going on at least since the mid 1970’s and the rise of the “moral majority,” a group of fundamentalist Christians that have permanently allied themselves with the Republican party.
Something like 20 percent of Americans are self-identified fundamentalists. Between 1980 and 2006 it was axiomatic that fundamentalists would flock to the polls and reflexively vote for Republican candidates because the party was “anti-abortion.” Similarly, it was true that in many states a significant number of people, especially women would vote for a Democratic candidate because such candidates have been almost uniformly “pro choice.”
It is almost impossible to determine to what extent abortion itself was the sole issue that commanded party fealty, because there is a high correlation between individuals who have particular views about abortion and other qualities that relate to party affiliation:
|
Republican** |
Democratic |
| Geography |
Rural |
Urban |
| Education |
Technical or Low Level |
Higher, More Liberal Education |
| Work |
Minimal or Unspecialized Training |
Specialized Training |
| Religion |
New World Protestant / Fundamentalist |
Catholic, Jewish, Lutheran /Not Fundamentalist |
| Loyalty |
To Groups: Race, Religion, Nation |
To Ideals |
| Abortion |
Prohibit |
Leave as Choice of Conscience |
| Guns |
Right to Bear is Inalienable |
Cause Urban Violence & Should be Banned |
The table illustrates that the two policy issues that align almost perfectly with other distinguishing factors are issues involving guns and abortion. ( We note in passing how Reagan’s frontal attacks on all arts including the liberal kind was aimed at permanently disabling or else fundamentally changing the nature of the Democratic party.) What it suggests is that to the extent that one can command party loyalty by speaking about guns and abortion, one can avoid talking about every legitimate issue of public policy - most of which are more pressing.
I suggest that a significant portion of the Republican office-holders who have arrived in Washington since 1990 have exploited illegitimate wedge issues in order to avoid talking about legitimate issues of public policy.
The game does not work quite so well for Democrats as it has for Republicans. One reason is that Democrats are more diverse. They have a lot of different and conflicting policy interests. Democrats also tend to be more liberally educated and this makes them naturally less easily manipulated by appeals to any group identity. In the Democratic party intra-party conversations, therefore, necessarily involve negotiating these interests. And since Democrats are less loyal, these negotiations are more essential to party life. For Republicans, membership is less fluid. Loyalty is more axiomatic. The Republican leadership needs to give the 80 percent of its members who are poor nothing. Nothing but threats that if they are not elected, the issues of abortion and guns will go the wrong way and the country will go down the drain.
If one were to wave a magic wand and take away the issues of guns and abortion, then people would have to find some other basis for alignment. And their campaigns might then have more connection with real policy issues.
The death of Jerry Fallwell and the outing of Ted Haggard recently have together precipitated a process that moves the nation a tiny bit in that direction. A Newsweek cover story almost a year ago covered the issue of evangelicals. Evangelicals are Protestants who tend to be lumped together with fundamentalists because on many political issues they are the same. In fact, it would be reasonable either to view evangelicals as being a subset of fundamentalists or to imagine that they share a large number of individuals in common. The article suggested that in midwestern and southern states evangelicals may account of close to 30 percent of the voting population.
It also suggested that evangelicals saw environmentalism as being an important issue. They see the earth as being God’s creation. And they see man as having a responsibility to care for that creation. Environmental damage in this case, represents a kind of degeneracy, a kind of evil. According to the article there are a lot of evangelicals who now believe that this issue is more important as an issue of policy than is abortion. And therefore, evangelicals are re-aligning to vote for candidates with responsible environmental platforms.
If half the evangelicals in red states chose candidates on the basis of environmental responsibility rather than on the basis of traditional wedge issues, races in states like Missouri, Nebraska, Louisiana, and Florida, and Georgia might look quite a bit different. Even Kansas might look differetn. Meanwhile, Texas’ Libertarian component is growing increasingly disconcerted with Bush Republicanism. And the Iraq war serves as a reminder of how manipulative the Republicans have been, how nationalism in the service of no identifiable goal is wind-blown dust.
The old wedge issues are becoming less able to deliver the voter on the cheap. It appears that days when the wedge issues of guns and abortion can usurp intelligent debate on legitimate policy issues may be numbered. Now, if we can only get from here to where such a state of affairs would take us without the normal amount of kicking and screamng that normally accompanies the exorcism of demons.
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*Libertarians will rightly object here that the government has nothing to do with the enforcement of happiness. But that Jefferson meant “property rights.” Of course the enforcement of property rights is an important component of happiness. And of course Jeffereson did mean to refer to the enforcement of property rights when he refers to the pursuit of happiness. But Jefferson lived at a time whe extreme discontent with government actually threatened the breakdown of society. He understood that what caused extreme discontent from time to time caused violence. And he understood that it was not always an issue of property that threw society into such a state. Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” suggests that there exists a body of conditions that make individuals individually unhappy, and that these conditions may be shared broadly within a population, and that regardless of their nature it is incumbent upon good government to address these sources of discontent. One might call it antidisutilitarian. The government does not make people happy. But it does actively seek to remove sources of dissatisfaction. And it is generally true that people happy in their government in relationship to how effectively it removes sources of disutility.
** Republicans are best described in terms of two socio-economic groups. One is very rich and very capitalistic. The other tends to be poor and rural or poor, urban, and unusually ambitious. The generalizations in this chart refer to the rural folks who will make up much more than half of the people who vote Republican as a habit. And as a broad generalization it will be wrong in a huge number of specific respects.
AFTERWORD: This essay was started a day after visiting Alan Keyes Renew America site. When I read Keyes’ own articles I thought I heard the voice of a person interested in returning the US to rule of law and to government that was responsive to the people. When I read the articles of others I thought I heard a rather substantial amount of the standard tribal drum-beating from the radical right. There was a lot of stuff in there about “dead babies” and guns and terr’ists with dark skins who want to use guns to destroy our babies. And it all seemed unbelievably manipulative. I was struck with the idea that to the extent that the site discussed legitimate issues ( and sometimes it did ) in constructive ways ( and sometimes they were - though rarely through the entirety of any single piece) the site had some useful things to say. But its reliance on illegitimate wedge issues in order to manipulate its target audience stole from it any political legitimacy it otherwise might have had. And that seemed to me like a great loss in terms of good political dialogue.
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07.30.07
Posted in Social at 3:35 pm by steve
Spencer Ackerman and Paul Keil at TPM Muckraker do an excellent job analyzing the nuances of the Gonzo’s recent testimony. They put together a detailed and convincing argument for the existence of a domestic spying program that the President has not yet admitted to. The comments are equally as thought-provoking.
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Posted in Social at 5:29 am by steve
If one is articulate and well connected one can make a fortune shilling for the military- industrial complex. This realization is the foundation of the neocon religion. So it is little surprise that to the neocon, a permanent war is the most sensible of national policies; it is certainly the most lucrative. Any candidate for national office who fails to advocate the same party line must be castigated, humiliated, destroyed. It’s a bread and butter issue.
It is, therefore, no surprise that Charles Krauhammer sets out to do just this in a recent hatchet piece on Obama. The piece is about a response Obama gave to a question about meeting with leaders of nations that within the National Review audience, certainly, and throughout most of the rest of the general public would probably be seen as a kind of rogues gallery of bad guys. The list included leaders of Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba.
Responded Obama “I would.”
Now at this point there are two interpretive issues. One is the issue of precisely what “I would” might mean. And the other issue is why one would answer “I would.” Krauthammer points out that Hillary, in contrast, was a little more guarded, a little more cagey. She said “not in my first year.” and went on to “tick off reasons that any graduate student would tick off: You don’t want to be used for propaganda. You first need to know their intentions.”
Of course these are good ideas. And it is reasonable to fault Obama for expressing too much eagerness to meet with leaders with whom the US has disagreements. But there is a sense in which Krauthammer’s argument here is about image over substance. Behaving in an aloof, regal way may preserve certain kinds of political capital; but it also wastes time and risks not getting things done. The power of the presidency may be augmented by a certain kind of reserve; but it is dramatically undercut by a kind of Nixonian fortress mentality. Or by the bizarre Bush practice of popping out once a year to shake hands with a long line of foreign leaders in a facile ritual that actually serves to diminish the stature of those he visits. When an American President is only slightly more welcome that the plague, the kind of image management that Krauthammer seems to be referring to is hardly exemplary. Obama is proposing a different approach.
One can fault Obama for not parsing the question and seeing its risks. But there is a sense in which this kind of almost paranoid obsession with image and message even at the cost of good policy is precisely the kind of behavior to which Obama’s candidacy represents a challenge. Were he the master of the guarded, image-correct, politicly sly answer, he would be a Hillary me-too.
Instead, Obama is trying to rescue democratic politics from a kind of in-bred cynicism that is borne of a media obsessed with image over substance. What Obama means by “I would” might mean precisely what Hillary said. Or it might mean a kind of openness to dialogue that Hillary will not have. Either way, however, Obama’s method will amount to a repudiation of the one now in practice which manages unprecedented results at driving friends away and making instant enemies of potential allies.
Obama is signalling an end to the paradigm of the use of force or the threat of force as the first and final resort in the exercise of foreign policy. It is this paradigm that has lost America all her friends. And the fact that this has happened in a short six years demonstrates how powerfully destructive the Bush “shoot first, negotiate later” paradigm of national policy really is.
Krauthammer, in his rejection of Obama’s response., is implicitly arguing that the Bush method of engagement is the preferred method. While it is easy to agree with him that when it comes time for President Obama to execute his foreign policy agenda we can hope he is just a little more cagey than he seemed to be in answering this question, we find Krauthammer’s use of the term “war-time president” positively chilling. With it he is presuming that the Iraq war stretches interminably into the future, possibly through the term of the next president. And one wonders whether Krauthammer is in a position to know this better than Obama. And whether it might still be the case once Obama is elected.
Krauthammer is also buying into the idea that there is something “special” about war-time presidents. That maybe they have special powers. Perhaps they can walk on water. Or turn water into wine. Or perhaps they can flout the law and behave as little tyrants without fear of retribution from the Legislature. Perhaps the limitations on power prescribed by the Constitution somehow do not apply to war-time presidents. Perhaps they can send Americans off to labor camps in Siberia for publicly advocating the end of an unjust and unproductive war. Perhaps they can do this without judicial interference because they are “war-time” presidents.
Krauthammer might object. I hope he does. But if he wishes not to be understood in precisely this way by the people who might be capable of reading his column but are disinclined to do so because they disagree with his point of view, he would choose not to push the “wartime president” meme. My bet is that those people simply don’t count in his world. Pretending they do gives them voices and that undermines the whole game.
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Posted in Uncategorized, Social at 2:40 am by steve
When you are a control freak and most of the things once in your grasp have spun hopelessly out of control and are no longer even in your reach, you control what you can.
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07.28.07
Posted in Snark and Snarkier at 5:32 am by steve
It starts with a choice:
smoking mirrors or the real firestorm.
Are we all understood? Comprende? Gazpacho? No? Hint: it has to do with “what’s brewing.” Never brewed a smoking mirror or a firestorm?
Perhaps this will help:
to put a little testing water between the hideous sandwiched proposal of a third-world nation, let’s look at some of the downers associated with this type of so-called union.
Where to start? A “sandwiched proposal of a third-world nation.” Got me. “A little testing water.” Still clueless. “Downers.” Hmm the last time I was reading about those, it was in the context of being tested for BSE, mad cow disease.
More clues, perhaps.
I’ll buy that baloney, at least for now
We seem to be on the right track. After all, baloney might connect somehow with that sandwich thing we just heard about. It’s an essay about baloney sandwiches and mad cows smoking mirrors, I guess. I have never seen a cow smoking a mirror; but I guess that explains the rarity of the affliction.
What’s this talk of union? I thought the guys who make baloney did so in states where slave labor was still the standard?
Oh, wait. I seem to have hacked away the operative phrase: “North American Union.” That’s what it’s all about. All of it. Capiche? Still a little hazy? Hmm. maybe the mad cow thing was not germane to the interpretation after all?
Perhaps its more helpful to consider what all this has to do with the topography of the pavement at the bottom of the Grand Canyon:
Considering that the trade deficit in America is already deeper than the Grand Canyon — who is really going to prosper? Our leaders are so bumfuzzled and baffled they are leading us down so many dark alleys, it will be a miracle if we see daylight again.
Except how is it that dark alleys keep one from seeing daylight? Dark alleys are not quite so dark in the daylight, no? Even blind alleys don’t actually prevent sunrise. Then there is the question of how many dark alleys one can march down at once. Surely there is a physical limit. I guess if I were to march down too many at once I wouldn’t see daylight; but it would not have much to do with the darkness of the alleys per se. Would it?
I can answer the first question, though. It depends. But it’s a good question. And I am quite certain that anything more definitive must have something to do with the Grand Canyon and the darkness of alleys. And with making a clear distinction between baffled and bumfuzzled.
Still, there must be something more. Perhaps it has to do with criminal justice:
Canada and Mexico have abolished the death penalty, refusing to impose it on the most horrendous crimes.
Good point; but I wonder, how does one appropriately punish a crime? Does one incarcerate a parking violation? How much time does a stolen watch serve? It takes a very peculiar state of mind to imagine how this would work or how it might help. And what would the appeal process look like?
By reading further I learn this has something to do with something more fundamentalist, namely the
enormous problem with the diversity of religion and other cultures trying to interfere with the Judea-Christians’ practice of “freedom of religion.”
Yes. Now it is all beginning to be clear. The cows are taking a break and the mirrors seem not nearly so enshrouded in haze. If all those Hindus and Moslems and damn Atheists would just stop interfering with our Judeo-Christian practice of “freedom of religion” we could all get on with the Inquisition in a quiet, orderly manner characteristic of a serious, free society.
Then we can concentrate on the real business of governing:
Boy, how convenient it will be to secretly transfer nuclear bombs, shoulder missiles, and everything else associated with warfare in mack trucks.
A little jest, surely: since when are nuclear bombs used for “warfare in Mack trucks”? Wouldn’t it ruin the effect? And could “shoulder missiles” be a reference to “shoulder launched missiles?” Here again, the same reservation applies.
Has the truck company in question somehow been demoted? Or was the punctuation a matter of economy. I wonder what a capital M goes for these days? There can hardly be any question that it is imported from China. Everything else is. Even liquidity.
Due to our stupidity, China enjoyed a $ 26 billion dollar surplus last month, while our trade deficit in the last month was probably triple that amount with the supposedly “most favored” nation in the world.
By considering the incremental cost of capitalization of the letter m, at least one writer is scrupulously avoiding the needless expansion of the trade deficit.
If, however, one cannot afford a capital M, then a gramatically correct sentence is out of the question. And one that clearly communicates an idea must be very expensive indeed. An essay composed almost entirely of such sentences is priceless.
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Special thanks to Sadly, No for finding this gem. Comments there are priceless, too.
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Posted in Social at 2:39 am by steve
Only minutes of life remain for a person unable to breathe. No state incites within a sensible person a stronger sense of panic, alarm, fear, and desperation. It is for this reason that waterboarding works. And it is for this reason that it is classified as torture. Oxygen is the material that makes possible every metabolic process for the body. In its absence death is imminent.
In his book “Worse than Watergate” John Dean argues that factual information is to democracy what air is to the human body. Information leads to informed consent. And informed consent powers rational action. But persistent lack of information or persistent disinformation undermines this process. Metaphorically, it crushes the windpipe. The body democratic politic has just moments to live.
The power of information is a notion with which the Bush administration is fully acquainted. Dubya, when he vacated the office of the Governor in Texas, knowing full well that Texas law required all documents created by his administration to be archived by the state and made available to the public, instead had them palletized, shrink-wrapped, and shipped to the George H.W. Bush Presidential library where they were sequestered and sealed against public inspection. The state sued and won. And the records were eventually released.
We might presume that there were some things that Bush wanted to hide. And it is possible that during the period of time they spent privately sequestered, they could have been purged of any potentially damaging information. But the issue is not so much what was or was not hidden. The issue was the attempt to hide. It was an open and illegal attempt to conceal records about the way the governor governed.
Since his arrival in Washington in 2001 Bush has proven extraordinarily canny, guarded and closed about all sorts of information. But the administration has been especially adept at parlaying the events of 9/11 into a need for ever more secrecy. It has been some years ago since the story surfaced, but academics who frequented the National Archive found that sources that they had been using for years were disappearing. When they inquired, they learned that great bodies of documentation that has been public for decades were being reclassified by the Bush administration. One such body was CIA intelligence reports about China during the Korean war. Academics raised a stink, and some of the items in question were, once again, declassified.
The problem is that secrecy and lack of transparency tempt malfeasance. And in Washinton DC no temptation goes completely unfulfilled. Where there is lack of transparency there will be malfeasance. It is axiomatic.
Assuming the good guys win, there will be plenty of people in the near future talking about secrecy and transparency. One of them is Senator Leahy who is pushing legislation to streamline the process of granting freedom of information requests.
But I think we need to ask ourselves whether the whole system of discretionary secrecy is appropriate. Right now the president has full authority to classify and declassify information. And there is some indication that issues that clearly have nothing to do with national security or “state secrets” get treated as such because it is convenient to the president. What is being hidden by such ploys is a legitimate area of great concern.
This is not a necessary state of affairs. The goals of secrecy can be clearly described. And any document’s status can clearly be defined in terms of how it relates to these secrecy goals and principles. Thus, a small number of principles could be established in law for the secrecy of information. Here are some general areas to consider.
- Weapons. When new weapon systems are developed, they convey special abilities on their creators. And there is a national strategic interest in preventing the propagation of these capabilities. The useful life of a new weapon - that is, its special advantage over similar weapons created in other nations - is limited. It varies by weapon. But for most weapons that do not cause mass-destruction, incremental advantages rarely last more than seven to ten years. So it would be reasonable to argue that secrecy of documents such as blueprints, schematics, and other construction drawings might automatically last ten or fifteen years from their creation date. The sale of weapons to strategic allies might start a seven year clock for disclosure. The sale of weapons to other entities would signal the de facto declassification of all construction details that could be gleaned by expert examination of the object in question.
Weapons of mass destruction might have longer statutory lives.
- Intelligence Gathering. It is reasonable to make certain items of intelligence secret until such time as the secrecy is compromised or the information is irrellevant. For example, encryption keys. Or the identities of certain intelligence assets. On very rare occasions intelligence gathered by such assets will be enough to allow them to be identified. And in such cases, it may be reasonable to have those parts of the information they gather that would compromise their positions remain classified.
Intelligence programs, for the most part, require full disclosure. Many of the problems we have today stem from a lack of accountability of programs and program directors. To the extent that al Qaeda is an organization that derives its operational funds from the trading of narcotics and arms, the problem may be traced back to relationships between US arms suppliers and al Qaeda operatives during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. It was then that they learned the business. And if we are fighting the war in Afghanistan because they are terrorists and as terrorists they do bad things, then we need to understand how those bad things are potentiated by the tricks of the trade our intelligence system taught them. By some accounts it was the CIA who taught al Qaeda the tricks of car-bombing. If, on the other hand, we are fighting the war in Afghanistan because al Qaeda is an arms/narcotics trading entity that outcompetes established CIA black-ops in these areas, we need to understand these things as well.
For a tiny handful of programs, perthaps, one might reasonably argue that while a program is active its methods might be secret. But that under no circumstance will a program outlive seven years. If the same intelligence objective remains, the program in quesiton either is de facto a failure. Or it needs to be reformulated, replanned, reinitiated to account for new realities. But even here, programs need to be described publicly in terms of their goals and they need to be assessed at the end of their terms against those goals. It is only the means during the active life of the program that may be classified.
- Military Operations. When it is clear that the details of troop movements, movements of arms, munitions, and other materials might endanger troops in their execution of an ongoing military campaign, such details rightly ought to be classified. When this is not the case, they rightly ought not to be classified. And all operational details of past campaigns need to be open. At the end of the day, full accounting of all operational funds needs to be made - regardless of whether the operations are carried out by private contractors or by the military. In fact, since the the consequences of malfeasance are gernally lower for contractors, the level of accountability needs to be considerably higher than it is for standard military operations.
- Presidential Advice. To the extent that presidents seek advice from personal advisors on how to most effectively carry out their Constitutional charge to execute law, it is reasonable that such advice be treated as being beyond the reach of the public.
But the presidency is a public post. It is a public trust. And if the office behaves in a way that raises questions about the legality or the ethical appropriateness of actions or advice it must be willing to defend that action before Congress. In other words, the notion of Executive Privilege is meaninful only insofar as it refers to a courteousy Congress rightly extends to the Executive so long as the Executive behaves in a manner that is in no way suggestive of behaving illegally, unetically, or in bad faith. But once these conditions are broken, at least in the areas of the breach, the notion of Executive Privilege rightly dissolves away. And the Executive is fully accountable to Congress for its actions. Congress is the entity charged with the duty of keeping the acts of the Executive legal. And the Executive has no Constitutional authority to interfere with that process. To imagine otherwise is to make a mockery of any common-sense interpretation of separation of powers.
It seems reasonable that all documents and conversations can be judged in terms of whether they relate to any of these areas, and if so, how. This judgment could then be used to classify documents according to statutory guidelines with scheduled dates of full disclosure. Such a plan would make the arbitrary classification of information that the executive now enjoys a thing of the past. It would bring a level of transparency to public policy formulation and decision-making that has been absent perhaps since WWII.
But most of all, it would make it much more difficult for tyrants to crush democracy by choking off the flow of information. In such a world we might all breathe easier.
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07.27.07
Posted in Social at 2:29 am by steve
A war is a public act. In a democracy, it is presumed to be an expression of the will of the public. And all acts committed and all consequences of the effort are rightly subject to public scrutiny; for this is the only way the public can properly assess the consequences of its acts. This is the only way a public can make the distinctions about when it is best to use military force and when it is best to eschew it.
In Washington DC there is a black granite wall many hundreds of feet long. Into its black, shiny surface is etched the names of some 50,000 Americans who lost their lives in the Vietnam war. The monument is meant to honor these men for their bravery. But it also serves to remind us that the use of military force always comes with a cost. The cost is personal. And it is tragic.
In Iraq, today, Americans risk their lives as they did in Vietnam thirty years ago. Fewer serve and body armor has helped to preserve the lives of many soldiers struck by bullets, but body armor doesn’t cover everything; and it is of no use against IED’s. over 3500 Americans have died. And as Americans engage more, working to curb Shia and Sunni violence by working in the neighborhoods where this occurs, the mortality rate goes up. People keep dying.
The war has caused upwards of a million fatalities in Iraq. That amounts to 4% of the population. In America, four percent of the population would be 12 million people. So the costs to Iraq are pretty high.Americans, mostly oblivious to the cost of the war to Iraqis, have lost interest in the Iraq war.
Americans, once, were a sensible group of people. And once, one might have been able to argue that there was a strategic value in securing Iraq. But who is to make that argument now? The people who sold the war did so on the basis of two big lies: That Saddam was a personal threat to the west, and that Iraq had some connection with 9/11. Both were utterly untrue. And both were compelling. But the fact that nothing about the premise for the war in Iraq was so, means that the trust between the advocates for the war and the American public was broken. And that poisoned the endeavor; it precluded any hope of making the rational argument for the occupation. This is how we do policy in the west today. And it bodes ill for the hope of good policy.
I personally argued that it was morally wrong to invade Iraq. And I argued that it was bad policy. I argued it could only end badly. There are not many decisions in public policy in which moral action and policy self-interest are perfectly aligned. But this was one of them. And in both cases the conclusion was not to invade. But I also agreed with Colin Powell’s warning “You break it; you buy it,” an idea suggesting that if one invaded Iraq, one was stuck there until the place became a functioning state. This argument for acting responsibly was set out by Powell, I believe, to discourage a war.
We invaded, nevertheless. Americans had been whipped into a frenzy of fear and loathing by a manipulative political order and by a slavish and uncritical press. Nationalism ran rampant. And it ran down any semblance of common sense. It was the jingoist, the rabid fundamentalists, the, people who believed that America was inherently good and right and holy - no matter how evil and wrong and depraved might be her public acts - that ran roughshod over the people who worried that the invasion was ill-advised. It was the people who voted for Bush, the people who had sons in the armed forces who stood at the front of the line, shouted loudest, waved the flags highest. And it was also the people with interests in arms and oil.
Early on the invasion seemed a success. But a plan for occupation was conspicuously absent. And there was no plan for withdrawal. Predictably, violence escalated. The minority Sunni who were being cast out of power objected violently. And the majority Shia who were opportunists saw hope for a level of hegemony never previously imagined. And they fought for that vision. Conditions spiralled downward because the only durable institutions were these two; and therefore only these two had the capacity to command ultimate allegiance.
Things have gotten pretty bad in Iraq. It is impossible to know if things are getting better or worse. The people who started the war have claimed perpetually that things were getting better; and they have always gotten worse. And as time has worn on and as conditions have deteriorated, Iraqis have lost patience with the Americans.
If Americans stay in Iraq for the benefit of Iraqis they must do so with at least a grudging acceptance on the part of Iraqis that Americans improve the situation by some measure. And that is simply not the case. Iraqis, by a large majority want Americans to leave. Their problems are their own; they will deal with them. This is what most Iraqis believe today. Contrary to what the neocons believe and contrary to the broad practice of the Bush administration it is rarely true that perception is reality; but in this case, if seventy or eighty percent of Iraqis are convinced that the problems in Iraq cannot begin to go away while America occupies the state, it is probably so. In short, it’s time for Americans to go.
At some point Iraqis will have to take charge of their own destiny.
Either as an accidental result of the process of cobbling together a government or as a purposeful one, the current Iraqi government is extremely weak. It rests on essentially no functional support institutions. And until it has functional support institutions working on its behalf who are actually more loyal to a national cause than to the cause of any faction, it cannot succeed. Building such institutions could take a decade or a generation or more. And there is no guarantee of success. Meanwhile, Moslems in surrounding nations: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey will grow ever more irritated at the occupation of moslem soil by “infidels.” The American occupation of Iraq will become another nucleation point around which the vapor of Moslem discontent nucleates to form the raindrops of terrorist action.
What precipitates this article seems far afield. It is an argument over tee-shirts.
An Austin Texas artist, Vincent Green, is being prosecuted for breaking a rather new and odious Texas law. Green created the artwork for a tee-shirt with the slogan “Bush Lied, They Died.” The tee shirt also lists the names of soldiers who died in Iraq. The law requires any publication that uses the names of dead soldiers to first get the approval of that soldier’s family.The artist, and the tee-shirt vendor who sells the shirts failed to do this. And they are being prosecuted under the new Texas law.
They are, of course being defended by the ACLU. And this is being treated - as it should be - as a first ammendment case. But it is a very special kind of first ammendment case. What makes it special is that this is precisely the kind of speech the first ammendment was meant to protect - speech with a political nature. No speech is more political than speech about nationalism, about war, about truth in politics, about abuses of power, about politicians lying to the press and manipulating political discourse. The tee-shirt is about precisely these issues.
There is a sense in which the tee-shirts are manipulative. From the point of view of a nation and its national interests, one does not quit a war only because it produces casualties - injuries, fatalities, mental disruption. These are givens for a war. The names alone and the human misery they represent, alone, do not argue for the cessation of the action in Iraq. So if, for instance, the shirt said “Bush Legacy” and listed the names: the shirt would be a little less convincing. Part of the shirt’s power is its reminder that the premise for the war two great lies.
But no matter how a list of dead soldiers’ names might be used in any public medium, the fact remains that their deaths must be a matter of public record. And that public record must be subject to use in public arguments reasonable or rhetorical. To do otherwise is to tempt rulers to abuse their powers with even greater regularity; to solve badly by force whan can be solved more equitably and more permanently by negotiation.
I sympathize with families who believed once and maybe still do believe that their children served for and died for a noble cause. There can be honor even in dying for a dishonorable cause, just as there can be honor in declining to serve in such a cause. So no matter what we might say or think about the war itself, it is possible to think highly of those who served honorably.
It is natural that parents will find pain in acknowledging the loss. But serving one’s country as a soldier does have its risks. And blindly supporting a nationalistic, gung-ho, jingoistic president who is happy enough to create wars simply as political tools and patronage projects has its price.
These tee shirts perfectly capture this idea. And that is where the pain lies. The shirts rightly remind some parents of their own culpability in the death of their own children. The Texas law is a law of forgetting. It is a law of denying the truth. It is a law that ultimately dishonors the truly honorable acts of soldiers now in the armed forces. And it dishonors those who died believing that they were defending something good and right and noble in the ideals upon which this nation was built and for which it ostensibly stands. In short, it dishonors most whom it ought to honor. The price paid by these parents for their support of a bad policy was woefully excessive; but as painful as they are, these shirts might help remind others who still have sons and daughters to lose to the conflict of the hazards of jingoistic excess.
Many of us will find it difficult to have too much sympathy for the Texans who promoted Bush, supported his war, and continue to support a war that put the lives of their own neighbors’ sons and daughters at risk. This is the world of their creation. This is the consequence of their choice. For them - if pain is the only way that they can confront the nature of their ideas, the consequences of their actions, sad as it might be - it is necessary.
The intended consequence of free speech is that we face facts and learn from them something true. And with that in learning we are made whole. These tees are not simply to be grudgingly tolerated. No. They need to be worn into the halls of power daily until we have understood how we got here; what it is in ourselves that must change. For Bush is a product of our own culture and his acts are our own.
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07.24.07
Posted in Social at 6:25 am by steve
In 2001 Fred Alford published Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power. It was a review of what whistleblowers do, why they do it, and the consequences of their actions. A review of the book at JSTOR tells us:
As a nation we ought to be grateful for the courage of unsung heroes who have sacrificed much to protect society. We owe a great debt of gratitude to whistleblowers who have saved us from toxins.. in streams, faulty consumer products, .. Unfortunately most of the people who blow the whistle on organizational misconduct are never thanked, nor do they ever feel like heroes. As a general rule, the only ones who are ever punished when serious instances of wrongdoing are uncovered, are the ones who reveal them. This book by Alford serves a valuable purpose in the battle against unfair treatment of whistleblowers.
Alford’s book is nearly prophetic. It predicts the fates of dozens of people within the Bush administration who did not simply go along to get along.
A case in point is Jesselyn Radack. She graduated from Brown and completed Law School at Yale. For seven years she worked for the Department of Justice, earning high praise and healthy bonuses.
Then in late 2001 the US invaded Afghanistan and captured the one American known to have joined the Taliban, John Walker Lindh. Radack was on duty serving as legal advisor in the Justice Department’s Professional Responsibility Advisory Office. The office advised DOJ lawyers on ethical standards and means in the conduct of investigations and the prosecution of criminal cases. On December 7th John DePue, a DOJ prosecuting attorney called. He wanted advice on the interrogation of John Walker Lindh. DePue advised Radack that Lindh’s father had hired a lawyer; he wanted to know about the legal questions around interrogating Lindh in the absence of a lawyer.
Radack advised Pue that there would be specific risks to such an investigation. And offered some advice in how to work around the problems. The weekend came and went and during that time the FBI had interviewed Lindh, evidently ignoring all of the advice Radack had provided. DePeu called back, asking for more advice.
In January 2002, John Ashcroft announced publicly that “The subject has a right to choose his own lawyer, and to our knowledge he has not” done so. Radack interprets this as a lie.
It may well be one; but in all the accounts of the incident, nobody tells us whether Lindh openly rejects cousel chosen by his family. If Lindh is unaware that his family has paid for his legal cousel, Radack is completely correct that Ashcroft has misrepresented Lindh’s situation. If, however, Lindh is of an age to make a determination for himself about counsel and if he knew about and rejected his family’s choice of lawyers, Ashcroft’s statement might be correct. The carefully worded statement comes close to being true even in the former case, though it is misleading in such a case.
Three weeks later, Lindh was indicted, and Ashcroft again asserted that Lindh’s rights were “scrupulously honored.” Radack, believed otherwise.
So far, the case has only slightly more than expected level of institutional deceipt. But in March things started to get weird. Radack had recently had a terrible performance review - not at the scheduled time and without reference to what she had done wrong. The prosecutor in the Lindh case called Radack and in the course of their conversation tolde her he had both her emails to to dePeu. But Radack recalled having sent over a dozen. She looked for them on her computer. But they were gone. She looked for them in her paper files. But they were gone. She called technical support and the deleted e-mails were restored.
She copies them. Sends them to her supervisor who had, for a few months been trying to get her to leave. And resigns.
That would be the end of the story, and we would never hear about Jesselyn Radack were it not that after hearing the DOJ repeatedly claimed in the news that it never had any idea that Lindh had legal representation when they interrogated him. She decided to set the record straight and sent her e-mails off to Newsweek.
Disclosure of those e-mails embarrassed the DOJ and it sent people to hound her, opening a very aggressive “criminal investigation” about her behavior at a new place of employment. It got her fired. The purpose complete, the charges were dropped. But not before the DOJ had also attempted to get her disbarred in the State of Maryland. It took almost four years for things to blow over; today Jesselyn Radack teaches ethics and law.
But she does not fly. She claims that since her whistleblower act she has flown 19 times. And each of those times she has been hounded or harrassed in some manner by airport security personnel. The pressure exerted by these interviews has taken its toll. One of the more priceless pieces is her account of her run-in with airport security on a trip in which she took a breast pump and bottles to store breast milk while she was away from her newborn for a few days.
During the several years in which she was not employed as a lawyer, Radack wrote articles of one sort or another. Many deal with legal issues that were raised in the wake of 9/11. For instance, here she asks what constitutes “enemy combattant?” and argues that it’s mostly an excuse for holding a person without charges. And here she talks about Gonzales’ role in advocating illegal torture, arguing that a lawyer who advises his client to break international law is not a good choice for attorney general.
At about the time Radack was writing these pieces, Laurie Abraham, editor at large for Elle took on the Jesselyn Radack story. It appeared in Mother Jones as Anatomy of a Whistleblower. In it she portrays Radack as a kind of serial whistleblower. She tells of how Radack went to her high school administration about problems with her home life and how she went to the Brown administration to work on problems of on-campus sexual harrassment. And she talks about Alford’s idea about why whistleblowers do it “narcissim moralized.”
Alford clearly does not see this as pathological behavior: he is interested in the relationship between the whistleblower and the institution and their relationships to society. Abraham, however, evidently does. She tells us to “ask yourself this question: Assuming you’re convinced that Radack was convinced she’d witnessed a serious wrong, would you hire her? SO FAR, NO ONE HAS.” The implication, of course, is that Radack was just asking for it.
Abraham completes her dissection of Radack by quoting from her bat-mitzvah.”I hope that I will always be able to make the right decisions about my actions.” Comparing her to a wide-eyed thirteen year old Abraham suggests that Radack is still confused about happy endings. And implies that it’s time for her to grow up.
Radack has the profile of an ideologue. She sees problems other people do not see. And she believes that morally right action is called for in difficult circumstances. Is it possible that her “clear moral vision” might sometimes cloud her judgment? Maybe so. But Radack was not punished for minor lapses of judgment - for failing to see the distinction between counsel selected by oneself and counsel selected on one’s behalf by another party, for example. She was punished for setting the record straight. She was punished for speaking the truth to power. She was punished for being a whistleblower.
What Alford sees but Abraham almost purposefully fails to acknowledge is that there is a public function to the process of whistleblowing. Whistleblowers are, by definintion, individuals who answer to a higher calling than that of the institution they work for. The moral authority at work here is both fragile and essential to an interdependent and free society: whistleblowers understand this. Sometimes they have hidden agendas. Sometimes they simply understand that institutions that persist in acting unethically are doomed to failure. Either way, whistleblowers serve a vital corrective function.
Although her argument is nuanced and subtle, Abraham leads us in the opposite direction: trying to get us to see whistleblowing as anti-social, pathological; trying to get us to see Radack as an ill-formed person and to subtly undermine Radack’s reputation and her message. Her work shares aspects of some other M$M workers with regard to whistleblowing (see Keefe on Tice below.)
Whistleblowing it turns out, is growing quite popular. This news story lists fifty federal whistleblowers.* It is an announcement for a special whistleblowers’ convention in April 2005 at which Radack was a speaker. The announcement suggests that the annual rate of federal whistleblowers registering complaints has been about 50 percent higher than it was before 2001.
Here are three more popular whistleblowers that share a number of qualities with Radack. One is that they have lost their jobs. Another is that their work sheds light on some aspect of 9/11 and its aftermath. A third is that they have had to deal with threats to their personal safety and attacks on their reputations.
1) Colleen Rowley was an FBI special agent on Massaoui’s case. Her report Memo to FBI Director Meuller clearly suggests that the FBI HQ obstructed the investigation of the case until the morning of 9/11. If one believes in the good faith of the higher eschelon at the FBI, the behavior it is inexplicable. No amount of incompetence can quite explain how HQ managed to ignore the 70+ times Harry Samit warns HQ of Massaoui’s potential danger. Even HQ’s objections strike one as not very inspired brush-offs. For instance they refuse to issue a warrant based on French intelligence that Massaoui intends to commit a crime in the US arguing “how many Zacharias Masssaoui’s are there in France?” Nobody knew. But Rowley’s office did find only one in the Paris telephone directory. That was not enough to lead to a search warrant for Massaoui’s computer. That only came through on 9/11.
The questions Rowley’s letter raised were quickly drowned out by the BusCheney noise machine. And her carreer wth the FBI was finished.
2) Sibel Edmonds. In 2004 Attorney General Ashcroft, invoking state secrets, classified her place of birth, date of birth, and mother tongue. This, in effect, makes it impossible for her to produce these documents for any legal purpose without breaking the law. And since she is a highly skilled translator who knows one or more middle-eastern languages, she cannot use her resume to get seek employment.
Her unlawful termination lawsuit went unheard in both a lower court and a federal appeals court. It was dismissed neither on the basis of evidence or on the basis of law, but on the basis of “state secrets.” A good time line of her case is found here.
3) Russ Tice In this story at Slate, Patrick Keefe in mid-2005 worried that Tice’s upcoming Congressional testimony might be in the vein of earlier whistleblowers in the intelligence community - giving the impression of people who have come unhinged. But Tice has been to a number of hearings and evidently he is being taken seriously. He testified before a grand jury on July 26, 2006 “This latest action by the government is designed only for one purpose: to ensure that people who witness criminal action being committed by the government are intimidated into remaining silent.”
If we fail to make a safe place in society for the Jesselyn Radacks, the Colleen Rowleys the Sibel Edmonds and the Russ Tices of this world, we will end up with a very corrupt and cynical society. It will be one in which government officials routinely parlay their positions of power into personal gain, dealing in narcotics, arms, and influence. It will be one in which power and corruption are synonymous. That is the very definition of a failed state.
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* Not that it could possibly get lost…
1. Anderson, Mick, Former Senior Advisor for Policy, DOJ,
2. Bittler, Thomas, Training Coordinator, TSA-DHS,
3. Carman, John, Former Senior Inspector, U.S. Customs,
4. Carson, Joe, Nuclear Safety Engineer, DOE
5. Chambers, Theresa, Former National Park Service Police Chief,
6. Costello, Edward J. Jr., Former Special Agent, Counterintelligence, FBI,
7. Cole, John M., Former Veteran Intelligence Operations Specialist, FBI,
8. Coleman, Marsha Adebeyo, Senior Policy Analyst, EPA,
9. Conrad, David “Mark�, Retired Agent in Charge, Internal Affairs, U.S.
Customs,
10. Cruse, Larry, Army Intelligence Analyst, DOD,
11. Czarkowski, Carol, Navy-DOD,
12. Dew, Rosemary, Veteran Supervisory Special Agent, Counterterrorism, FBI
13. Dzakovic, Bogdan, Former Red Team Leader, FAA,
14. Edmonds, Sibel, Former Language Specialist, FBI
15. Ellsberg, Dan, Former Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of
Defense (ISA), DOD,
16. Elson, Steve, Veteran Agent, FAA,
17. Fogg, Matthew F., Chief Deputy US Marshal, (INA),
18. Foley, Theresa, Special Agent, FBI,
19. Forbes, David, Aviation, Logistics and Govt. Security Analysts, Boyd
Forbes, Inc.,
20. German, Mike, Former Special Agent, Counterterrorism, FBI,
21. Goodman, Melvin A., Former Senior Analyst/ Division Manager, CIA; Senior
Fellow at the Center for International Policy,
22. Graf, Mark, Former Security Supervisor & Derivative Classifier, DOE,
23. Graham, Gilbert, Veteran Special Agent, Counterintelligence, FBI
24. Jenkins, Steve, Intelligence Analyst, NGIC, US Army
25. Johnson, Manny, Former Supervisory Special Agent, Counterterrorism, FBI
26. Kleiman, Diane, Former Special Agent, US Customs,
27. Kwiatkowski, Karen U., Lt. Col. USAF (ret.), Veteran Policy Analyst-DOD,
28. Larkin, Lynne A., Former Operations Officer, CIA,
29. Lewis, Linda, Current Emergency Program Specialist (WMD), FSIS- USDA
30. Lau, Lok, Former Special Agent, Counterintelligence, FBI
31. MacMichael, David, Former Senior Estimates Officer, CIA,
32. McGovern, Raymond L., Former Analyst, CIA,
33. Nunn, Sandy, Former Special Agent, US Customs,
34. Pahle, Theodore J., Senior Intelligence Officer (Ret), DIA,
35. Radack Jesselyn, Former Counsel, DOJ,
36. Rowley, Coleen, Retired Special Agent and Former Division Counsel, FBI,
37. Sarshar, Behrooz, Retired Language Specialist, FBI,
38. Spaulding, Kerry, Veteran Agent, FAA
39. Sullivan, Brian F., Special Agent, Risk Program Management Specialist,
FAA,
40. Tice, Russ, Senior Intelligence Analyst & Action Officer, NSA,
41. Tortorich, Larry J., Retired Naval Officer, US Navy & Dept. of Homeland
Security/TSA,
42. Turner, Jane, Veteran Special Agent, FBI,
43. Vincent, John, Veteran Special agent, Counterterrorism, FBI
44. Walp, Glenn, PhD, Former Office Leader of the Office of Security
Inquiries, Los Alamos National Lab, DOE,
45. Wehrly, Dot, Veteran Special Agent (Current), FBI,
46. Whitehurst, Dr. Fred, (Retired) Supervisory Special Agent/Laboratory
Forensic Examiner, FBI,
47. Woo, Robert, Former Special Agent, Counterintelligence, FBI,
48. Wright, Ann, Col. US Army (ret.); and Former Foreign Service officer
49. Wright, Robert, Veteran Special agent, Counterterrorism, FBI
50. Zipoli, Matthew J., Former Special Response Team (SRT) Officer, DOE,
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07.23.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:08 am by steve
Redacted
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