Category: National Security

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History National Security Politics The Opinionsphere

“Hardly Churchillian.”

[digg-reddit-me]I’ve mentioned before that the  contrasting stories of Churchill and Chamberlain in the lead up to the Second World War have become the founding myth of neoconservative foreign policy. Neoconservative foreign policy is based on the counterfactual presumption that if Churchill had been prime minister, Hitler’s rise would have been thwarted. The appeasement of Hitler by Chamberlain thus caused Hitler’s rise in the neoconservative view.

However this myth took root, it is now the framework which neoconservatives use to understand every foreign policy issue: Every threat to America thus becomes Hitler’s Germany, no matter how marginal – from Kim Jong Il’s North Korea to Ahmadinejad’s Iran to Chavez’s Venezuela to Putin’s Russia. There are two possible responses to the rise of these existential threats: appeasement or confrontation. The right thing to do is to project confidence and bellicosity to deter the next Hitler from rising. Every sign of restraint is debasing appeasement; every Democrat then who advises restraint, who seeks to put these threats in perspective thus is portrayed as Chamberlain – from Carter to Clinton to Kerry to Obama. Every leader of this war, of our warrior nation, is compared to Churchill for his resolve and rhetoric. This neoconservative root myth thus leads to a policy of constant belligerence against every possible foe as a homage to a man who was belligerent for a lifetime and memorably right once.*

In a sense it seems, neoconservatives looked with hope to Obama Tuesday night (see especially these responses by Kagan, Kristol, and Gerson), as he promised to escalate the conflict in Afghanistan as they hoped. They hoped he could be their Churchill. Many on the right wing though not all, having been trained to focus most of all on symbology and rhetoric over substance, believed Obama had failed to meet their Churchillian expectations, and so took the comfortable position of assailing him.

Anyone who doubts this story of Churchill’s intransigence is at the core of neoconservative foreign policy can find evidence looking at the right wing responses to Tuesday night’s address:

The National Review‘s lead editorial:

Churchillian it was not.

Rich Lowry:

Is Gen. McChrystal in Kabul regretting that Obama didn’t strike a more Churchillian tone…?

Fred Thompson:

In the first part of his speech he sounded like Winston Churchill.
In the second part of his speech, he sounded like Lady Churchill.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Stanley Baldwin, not Winston Churchill.

Charles Krauthammer on Fox News:

Not exactly the kind of speech you’d hear from Henry V or Churchill.

Matt Lewis:

Hmm. What to say about Obama’s speech… Well, he sure as hell ain’t Winston Churchill.

John Hannah:

Hardly Churchillian.

* I quite admire Churchill – and he was also prescient about the specter of Communism and had a remarkable view of history, as if from a distance. But the single opinion of his that created his out-sized reputation was his steady belligerence against Germany during its rise.

[Image of Winston Churchill not subject to copyright.]

Categories
Barack Obama Health care National Security Politics The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

The Un-American Pledge, Nietzsche (Republican), Islamists, Anti-Statism, Health Care Reform (again), and Abortion Politics

Today, I present to you an early addition of the best reads for the long Thanksgiving weekend…

1. The Un-American Pledge. Michael Lind explains why the Pledge of Allegiance is un-American.

2. Nietzsche was a Republican. The Economist’s Democracy in America discusses Medicare and Nihilism. As it is undeniable that America’s population is aging, and that this accounts for the massive projected deficits in the future, and as everyone also acknowledges that such deficits are unsustainable, something must be done. The health care plans proposed by the Democrats include – along with various experimental measures to restrain health care spending – a Medicare commission “empowered to make decisions that automatically become law unless Congress comes up with equivalent savings” that will reduce spending as much. Republicans and the blandly smiling wise men and women of the pundit class have made it a point of conventional wisdom that Congress won’t be able to push through the cuts, and will find a way to circumvent this mandate. DiA, echoing a point Ezra Klein has been making repeatedly for the past few weeks, challenges those criticizing the plan to come up with something better:

If you don’t think an independent Medicare commission empowered to make decisions that automatically become law unless Congress comes up with equivalent savings will do the trick, then you have a responsibility to suggest something that will. Otherwise you’re just placing a bet that America’s government is going to self-destruct—a tenable argument, certainly, but not very helpful.

3. Learning from former islamists. Everyone else seemed to recommend this article a few weeks ago when it came out, but I just got to it recently myself. Johann Hari interviewed a number of former islamists who have recently renounced islamism and have begun to fight for their version of a “secular Islam” in Great Britain. He portrays this group as a vanguard. One of the islamists, Maajid Nawaz was a recruiter for an islamist group in Egypt for a time. Nawaz’s description of factors affecting recruitment seems to coincide with both intelligence agencies’ and liberals’ judgments, and to contradict the right-wing understanding:

“Everyone hated the [unelected] government [of Hosni Mubarak], and the US for backing it,” he says. But there was an inhibiting sympathy for the victims of 9/11 – until the Bush administration began to respond with Guantanamo Bay and bombs. “That made it much easier. After that, I could persuade people a lot faster.”

Eventually, Nawaz was imprisoned in Egypt. He was abandoned by the islamist group that he was working for. The only forces protecting him, as a British citizen, were forces he considered “colonial” and corrupt:

“I was just amazed,” Maajid says. “We’d always seen Amnesty as the soft power tools of colonialism. So, when Amnesty, despite knowing that we hated them, adopted us, I felt – maybe these democratic values aren’t always hypocritical. Maybe some people take them seriously … it was the beginning of my serious doubts.”

4. Anti-Statism: As American as Apple Pie. John P. Judis of The New Republic delves into the undercurrent of anti-statism in the American psyche.

5. Getting depressed about the public option. Timothy Noah depressed me more than anyone else with his ruminations on the public option.

6. Feeling better about health care reform. These pieces by Ron Brownstein and Andrew Sullivan though have made me feel much better about health care reform in general. Brownstein’s piece is especially helpful in looking at the various cost-cutting measures in the bill, and has a rather optimistic take. President Obama has apparently made that post “required reading” among White House staff. I’ll be following these posts up at a later date.

7. Abortion politics. The New Yorker had an extraordinary interview about abortion politics with Jon Shields. Shields seems to be, himself, pro-choice, but he seems to have reached an understanding of abortion as an issue which contradicts the propagandistic rhetoric that passes for most liberal commentary on abortion, which presents its opponents as being mainly concerned with keeping women in their place.

[Photo by road fun licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Economics Financial Crisis National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Media The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Dueling Op-Eds

Last Friday saw two sets of dueling op-eds on the opinion pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times.

At the Post, Charles Krauthammer, professional pundit, accuses the Obama administration of aiding Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in giving “voice” to the “propaganda of the deed” that was September 11. Krauthammer accepts no justification offered and launches one after another attack on the very idea of trying KSM, and most of all, on the Obama administration for bringing him to trial. Reading Krauthammer, it is difficult to understand why Attorney General Holder made the decision he did. It seems unfathomable and downright un-American.

Elsewhere in the section, two former top Bush Justice Department officials – Jack Goldsmith and James Comey – make the case that Attorney General Holder’s decision was reasonable, though there may be reason to disagree with it. They go through some of the advantages of the Attorney General’s decision, and conclude:

The wisdom of that difficult judgment will be determined by future events. But Holder’s critics do not help their case by understating the criminal justice system’s capacities, overstating the military system’s virtues and bumper-stickering a reasonable decision.

Over at the New York Times, David Brooks and Paul Krugman have a more evenly balanced argument over Timothy Geithner.

Brooks’s conclusion was that Geither’s intervention was effective:

On the other hand, you would also have to say that Geithner, like many top members of the Obama economic team, is extremely context-sensitive. He’s less defined by any preset political doctrine than by the situation he happens to find himself in…In the administration’s first big test, that sort of pragmatism paid off.

Krugman though concludes Geither is part of the problem, and even if he got the short-term economics right, the political situation won’t allow for any significant course corrections because the initial steps were so against the popular mood:

Throughout the financial crisis key officials — most notably Timothy Geithner, who was president of the New York Fed in 2008 and is now Treasury secretary — have shied away from doing anything that might rattle Wall Street. And the bitter paradox is that this play-it-safe approach has ended up undermining prospects for economic recovery.

It’s interesting to see such jousting on the same op-ed page. As opposing sides make their case, one can often learn more than from reading mere news.

Categories
Criticism National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

The Emotional Logic of Trying KSM in Federal Court

[digg-reddit-me]This is the response of a friend of mine on her Facebook page to the news that Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and 4 other detainees were going to be tried in federal court in New York.

When I heard the news, my first response was different: “Good. Finally we’re starting to deal with this mess,” the mess being the uncertain state of detainees and whether along with the many unresolved issues stemming from September 11. There was a kind of satisfaction – that we would finally be making progress, that decisions were being made, that the limbo that has been in place since September 11 would finally be resolved.

But I hadn’t anticipated the emotion it would stir up in many others, who reacted with a kind of visceral disgust. Most of the various reasons used to justify this disgust are manageable issues: the disclosure of classified information; the use of the trial as a platform for Al Qaeda propaganda; the security threat to New York City; the possibility of an acquittal; and whether terrorism should be treated as a crime or an act of war.

I don’t see any of these reasons as explaining the visceral reaction. They are the rational explanations we reach for after we reach our decision, rather than what compels us to come to the decision.

It is my opinion – and I want to make that clear as I am merely speculating as to what other people believe – that this issue has been such an emotional one because a trial of KSM would represent a kind of emotional closure to the trauma of September 11. Thus, the stakes are high. For 8 years, the Bush administration seemed unwilling or unable to move beyond the trauma of that day. They created an ad hoc legal structure to deal with terrorism that was often parallel and inferior to what was already in place. Surely compromised in their panic, they authorized the brutal torture of many guilty men and some innocent. Without in depth knowledge of the organization or the area of the world in which it operated, they simply decided to use their most valuable resource: money; they offered bounties to militias for each person they brought in, without any consistent way of evaluating whether these people brought in were guilty of anything or were knowledgeable about anything relevant. They were unwilling to let any person who had been captured free, on the chance that they might be wrong, and so held innocents as prisoners for years. In this climate of fear, a hunch of an investigator was enough to hold a man prisoner for years without any evidence and without any trial and without any accountability. While the Bush administration gradually scaled back the worst abuses, often due to court or rarely, Congressional, intervention, it never repudiated the precedents it set in the panic, precedents that if invoked would create an authoritarian executive.

This is what bothered most of the liberals, what they feared. They saw in Bush’s immediate response an understandable panic, but in the precedents he set by refusing to repudiate the measures he took, the seeds of the destruction of our republic.

On the other hand, what I believe underlies right wingers’ (and others’) defense of these precedents is a lack of faith in America’s system of justice. This lack of faith is evidenced by the right wing characterization of our courts as “liberal” or ‘left-wing” despite the fact that a sizable majority of judges have been appointed by Republican presidents. It is evidenced by the caricature of our criminal justice system and our tort system that the right wing promotes – a caricature in which hard-working, innocent corporations are persecuted by greedy trial lawyers and criminals are set free on technicalities. (See Footnote.) Those who already distrusted our justice system found in September 11 further proof of this – as they blamed our courts for releasing information to Al Qaeda, for letting terrorists free, and for undermining investigations into terrorism. An alternative justice system was created within the military to deal with those suspected of terrorism, one in which initially, suspects had few rights – whether to call witnesses in their defense, to question their accusers, to be presumed innocent, to see evidence held against them, or even to be released if despite all of this, they were found innocent. Not surprisingly, this unjust system caused a number of the military’s judge advocates and prosecutors (including the Chief Prosecutor) to resign in protest. Some of the worst flaws in this military commission system have been fixed, as courts and Congress intervened – but the system has been delegitimized in the view of much of the world. Most defenders of this system of military commissions opposed the fixes at the time as well.

This is where we stand today. There is an emotional logic to the decision and to the responses that informs the debate far more than the mere facts and policy issues.

The purpose of terrorism is to undermine the legitimacy of the state. The rule of law and our justice system is at the core of what makes a state legitimate, what allows a state to gain the informed consent of the governed. By creating an alternative justice system to deal with terrorism, we – to put the matter in the strongest terms – preemptively give up one of the core foundations of the state’s legitimacy. This only makes sense if our justice system itself is fundamentally corrupt and/or illegitimate, or if terrorism in some way invalidates it.

Trying Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in an open trial in federal court in a system with well-known precedents and rules demonstrates that the 3 successful attacks on September 11 failed to bring down our justice system along with the towers. He will be tried; given the evidence against him, he will almost certainly be found guilty; and then he will be executed. (Though I oppose the death penalty, but there are exceptions to every rule.) That will be the sternest measure of justice we can give him on earth. After that, we must trust to powers beyond our own to mete out the appropriate suffering.

Footnote: There are examples which demonstrate this caricature, and which refute it, and there are common sense reforms which could reduce the instances of abuse of the system.

Categories
Criticism National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Deconstructing the Right Wing Appropriation of the Term “Appeasement”

[digg-reddit-me]I’ve tried hard to find something to respect about Victor Davis Hanson – as he takes himself seriously, and is taken seriously, including by people whom I take seriously – but for the most part, his pieces are just less hysterical attempts to push right wing memes. Only in a world of Sean Hannitys, Glenn Becks, Sarah Palins, Jonah Goldbergs, Kathryn Lopezes, Michelle Malins, and Ann Coulters, is he a moderate.

But he has an interesting post over at The Corner, making a good point in defense of George W. Bush (though in the service of a meme that so many of these independent, individualistic conservatives promote in a synchronized fashion: that Obama should stop blaming George W. Bush for what he inherited.) Hanson points out that Bush inherited some bad “stuff” from Bill Clinton – including a mild recession, simmering issues with Iraq and the Middle East, and Osama bin Laden on the loose – and left some improved areas to Barack Obama – including an Iraq much improved from its chaos earlier in Bush’s term, relationships with Europe much improved from earlier in Bush’s term, a Libya that had given up its nuclear program, and a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon.  Obama inherited a more challenging set of issues than Bush though: Two wars, the worst economic conditions in 80 years, a deficit doubled in 8 years and having grown so large it threatens America’s fiscal solvency, America at its lowest standing in the world community in a generation, Osama Bin Laden still at large, an Iranian regime strengthened and emboldened as America took away every check on its power, etcetera, etcetera.

But even while making this valid point, Hanson resorts to propagandic measures – none of which actively undermine the point he is trying to make – but all of which together demonstrate that he is merely attempting to write propaganda rather than engage with the issues. He only cites those facts that prove his point, ignores the large amount of contradictory evidence, and makes a number of questionable assertions. (Is Kim Jong Il really on better terms with Obama than Bush? Ahmadinejad? Putin – into whose eyes Bush looked and got “a sense of his soul“?)

But perhaps most telling, is his use of the buzzword, “appease.” To quote George Orwell in his “Politics and the English Language,” propagandists organize their thoughts as collections of  “phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.” Rather than choose words based on their meaning, they instead choose those which best serve their ideology. For example, Orwell, writes that some words, “now [have] no meaning except in so far as [they] signify[…] ‘something not desirable.’ ” He uses word “Fascism” as an example of this – and the word “democracy” as an example of a word that is used to mean merely “something good.” Hanson’s writing doesn’t always have that prefabricated henhouse feel – as some writers do (Kathryn Lopez, I’m looking at you!) – but he does misuse language in the manner Orwell discussed.

The most glaring issue is his use of a single word. Hanson writes:

George W. Bush inherited…a pattern of appeasing radical Islam after its serial attacks (on the World Trade Center, the Khobar Towers, U.S. embassies, and the U.S.S. Cole). [my emphasis]

Think about the use of the word “appease” in this context. The word means “to make peace with” often by “acceding to demands or granting concessions.” Bill Clinton’s response to these attacks – prosecuting the perpetrators, bombing locations we believed were related to Al Qaeda, and attempting to assassinate Osama bin Laden – doesn’t fit into what anyone would call “making peace with” or “acceding” to any demands. The word “appease” then was chosen not because of its meaning, but because of its place in Hanson’s ideology. The word “appease” – as used by right wingers – has evolved from its literal definition. They use it to call forth comparisons to the single historical moment that has defined neoconservative thinking: Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler at Munich. Chamberlain famously did seek to appease Hitler, offering him Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia in return for peace. And just as famously, it did not work.

Right wingers now though seem to see every national security issue as a binary choice between Appeasement and Confrontation. Obama wants to try terrorists in federal court instead of military commissions? Appeasement. Democrats oppose sending a surge of troops into Iraq? Appeasement. Iran wants to negotiate peace with the United States? If we even talk to them, it’s Appeasement, so we must choose Confrontation and ignore them. Only if every national security decision is seen as a binary choice between Appeasement and Confrontation does the disastrous first term decisions by Bush make sense. Orwell warned that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Language is corrupted in order to “defend the indefensible” and to “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Thus, words such as “appease” are now used by right wingers to distract and obfuscate from the history that was and to suggest an enhanced and alternate view of the history that proves them correct.

[Image in the public domain.]

Categories
Criticism Politics Videos War on Drugs

McCaffrey Caught In Another Lie

[digg-reddit-me]Tim Lynch from Cato@Liberty appeared on CNN with former drug czar Barry McCaffrey and was outraged at the blatant lies he told. Lynch points to two specific lies:

  • that it is a “fantasy” with “zero truth” that “the Drug Enforcement Administration or any other federal law enforcement ever threatened care-givers or individual patients” regarding medicinal marijuana; and
  • that it was “nonsense” that the DEA was “going to threaten doctors simply for discussing the pros and cons of using marijuana with their patients” until the Ninth Circuit held that such a restriction was unconstitutional.

Of course, McCaffrey is no stranger to eliding the truth. I posted a video a while back pointing out another whopper McCaffrey told – this time to an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations:

De facto legalized? Yet McCaffrey himself attacked those politicians who suggested even allowances for medicinal marijuana:

After California passed a compassionate use initiative in 1996, McCaffrey warned doctors in the state that their privileges to prescribe narcotics would be stripped by the DEA if they prescribed or recommended marijuana use. In July 1998, as part of the anti-pot campaign, the drug czar claimed that Holland, a country with liberal drug laws, had a murder rate double that of the United States. In fact, although robberies have increased in the Netherlands since pot was made widely available in the late 1980s, the country’s murder rate is scarcely a quarter of the U.S. rate. McCaffrey never corrected himself. When Gary Johnson, New Mexico’s maverick Republican governor, spoke in favor of decriminalization, McCaffrey flew out to the state and claimed that Johnson had said “heroin is good.” [my emphasis]

If we are to believe his comments now, he apparently secretly did not oppose legalization while he was drug czar – as I reported earlier, he said at the same event as the above:

QUESTIONER: …[W]hy not just legalize drugs?

Former Drug Czar, General BARRY MCCAFFREY (retired): …[S]ince I’m not in public life, [I can say] I actually don’t care.  I care about 6th graders through 12th graders.  If you’re 40 years old, and you’re living in Oregon, and you have 12 giant pot plants in the back of your log cabin, knock yourself out.

Yet despite the fact that he claims marijuana is de facto legalized and that he secretly didn’t care if it was legalized, under his leadership as drug czar continuing through his successor’s term, arrests for mere marijuana possession went way up [pdf] – and not just for large amounts as he suggests here. Yet arrests related to marijuana surpassed that of both heroin and cocaine in McCaffrey’s first year as drug czar – and almost matched that of all non-marijuana-related drug offenses.

According to a study by Ryan S King and Marc Mauer [pdf], “Marijuana arrests increased by 113% between 1990 and 2002, while overall arrests decreased by 3%” – and the bulk of these arrests (over 50%) were of small users.

Under Barry McCaffrey, the War on Drugs became the War on Marijuana – yet he claims marijuana was de facto legalized; Barry McCaffrey himself personally attacked politicians who supported medical marijuana laws, supervised an agency that deliberately went after people following state laws allowing medicinal marijuana, and threatened any doctor who mentioned to a patient that marijuana might help him or her with prosecution – yet any recitation of these facts documented at the time and afterwards, he refers to as “fantasy” and “nonsense.”

On top of it all, he now claims to have not even opposed the legalization of marijuana as he supervised the War on Marijuana.

Categories
Barack Obama Foreign Policy National Security

Karzai gave in because he knew Obama was serious while Bush had not been

[digg-reddit-me]Recent events in Afghanistan seem to have given Obama pause – and with good reason.

If there is an evolving Obama doctrine underlying the administration’s foreign policy, it is a focus on the consent of the governed and civil society. (I consider this a marked step forward from the “Democracy!!” approach by the Bush White House.) On top of this, counterinsurgency doctrine holds that we must have a partner seen by the local population to be legitimate in order to succeed in containing insurgent forces.

The massive electoral fraud in the recent Afghan elections then undermined both the core principle the Obama administration has put forward in its foreign policy and any chance of military success using a counterinsurgency strategy. Restoring the legitimacy of the Afghan government thus has been one of the major goals of the Obama administration in the past month as they attempted to salvage the situation. The obvious solution was for Karzai to allow some of the many millions of votes for him that were clearly the result of fraud to be thrown out thus ensuring a runoff between the top two contenders for the presidency.

Though it would seem to be in Karzai’s own interest to be seen as legitimate as well as America’s, he apparently did not see it the same way – and believed American forces would protect him and ensure he remained in power even if he blatantly stole the election.

It thus took significant efforts by the Obama administration to push him to act in both his own and America’s interests.

According to Ahmed Rashid, prominent Afghani author and reporter, writing for the New York Review of Books blog there were two main factors that pushed Karzai to finally consent to “enduring” a runoff election:

  1. He finally became convinced that Obama was serious about not sending in more soldiers to secure the country – as he realized Obama was less concerned about “looking tough” in the eyes of the world and more interested in making sure American soldiers were fighting a winnable war for American interests and was willing to cut Karzai loose if that turned out to be in America’s interest. (Karzai apparently believed Bush would commit to supporting him no matter what, as Bush had a “chummy,” mentor-mentee type relationship with the Afghan leader. Obama deliberately kept his distance to keep the focus on America’s interest in the region.)
  2. Karzai, as a vain man, did not appreciate dealing with anyone who had ever publicly said a critical word about him; thus the administration used officials who had previously criticized him to ramp up the pressure while three of the few people in Washington who never had (John Kerry, Rahm Emanuel, and Karl Eikenberry) were tasked with cajoling him into complying.

It seems quite silly that despite American and Afghan interests coinciding on this, it took so much attention to the vanities of a corrupt leader in order to persuade him to act in his own and his main sponsor’s interests. Despite elaborate theories about how history works, to get things done, to implement a larger agenda, you need to pay attention to petty personal details.

On such petty-ness, the fate of the world apparently too often turns.

[Image by KarlMarx licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
The War on Terrorism

What Do the Taliban, Hannah Montana, and the Beatles Have in Common?

[digg-reddit-me]I thought the most fascinating – and disconcerting – part of David Rohde’s recent installment in the story of his captivity were the references to American pop culture. For example, he writes:

My Taliban guards slept beneath bedspreads manufactured by a Pakistani textile company and emblazoned with characters from the American television show “Hannah Montana” and the movie “Spider-Man.” My blanket was a pink Barbie comforter.

That surreal image though has nothing on the one he gives in closing – as he describes the Taliban pushing him to sing one of my favorite songs with him, their captive:

“She loves you — yeah, yeah, yeah,” we sang, with Kalashnikovs lying on the floor around us.

Somehow these images bring home for me the idea that we lived in a radically interconnected world.

Categories
Criticism Law National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Former Bush Attorney General: American Justice System Led to September 11

[digg-reddit-me]I already commented on this Mukasey piece – but I wanted to follow up and make clear why this piece from a well-respected “conservative” demonstrates how far the conservative movement, the right wing, and the Republican Party have fallen. First, it’s important to note Mukasey’s position under Bush – as the chief proponent and custodian of our justice system. Second, one should remember that he was long considered a moderate in the party.

Yet Mukasey literally blames September 11 on American values, on the American justice system:

[W]e put our vaunted civilian justice system on display in these [previous terrorism] cases…

In return, we got the 9/11 attacks and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents….

Or, as the subhead put it:

We tried the first World Trade Center bombers in civilian courts. In return we got 9/11 and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents.

This is not a conservative approach to the issue. It is a radical one. The accumulated wisdom of our forerunners is thrown out the window in the favor of a shiny, new and “improved” justice system. And even worse the barratuve being built is clearly unhinged from reality. Its only purpose seems to be the same as Cheney’s – to preemptively politicize the aftermath of the next attack. Reading his argument analytically, it’s hard to see how he reaches the conclusion he does regarding the American justice system. The list of deficiencies are all manageable – perhaps with some tweaks – within our legal system. Perhaps they suggest we should try a system of national security courts. But Mukasey concludes instead that they necessitate throwing out our values and the institutions which represent the accumulated wisdom of our democracy.

This leap comes from the narrative. The rationale Mukasey offers is deeper than any of the actual facts he cites – and is emotional rather than logical. For him, September 11 happened because our justice system doesn’t work against terrorism. It is an argument parallel to Cheney’s – that September 11 happened because we were weak – and as a result of this mindset, Cheney set out demonstrating our strength by bullying other nations, withdrawing from treaties, avoiding multilateral institutions, invading Iraq, avoiding the Middle East peace processes, refusing to talk to our adversaries, labeling them evil. But in each case, despite the emotional “logic,” the narrative itself is unhinged from reality.

The fact that a “moderate” in the Republican Party has been so radicalized demonstrates how far from common sense the right wing movement has fallen.

[Image not subject to copyright.]

Categories
Criticism Law National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

The Fallacies of Mukasey

[digg-reddit-me]Michael Mukasey’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal yesterday continues to demonstrate the collapse of common sense in the Republican Party. His thesis is that “civilian courts are no place to try terrorists.” His main supporting argument – and the subheadline – suggests that there is a direct link between trying terrorists in a criminal proceeding and September 11. He doesn’t explain the link anywhere in the piece – but as the subhead says:

We tried the first World Trade Center bombers in civilian courts. In return we got 9/11 and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents.

Mukasey himself concludes his piece:

Nevertheless, critics of Guantanamo seem to believe that if we put our vaunted civilian justice system on display in these cases, then we will reap benefits in the coin of world opinion, and perhaps even in that part of the world that wishes us ill. Of course, we did just that after the first World Trade Center bombing, after the plot to blow up airliners over the Pacific, and after the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

In return, we got the 9/11 attacks and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents. True, this won us a great deal of goodwill abroad—people around the globe lined up for blocks outside our embassies to sign the condolence books. That is the kind of goodwill we can do without. [my emphasis]

The “if…then…” relationship between these two is tenuous – and if you read the piece, you notice that Mukasey does not try to make it. And his laziness is evident elsewhere as he tries to attack Attorney General Eric Holder’s contention that a certain group of terrorists was prosecuted successfully on the grounds that (a) they were not executed because a jury member lied about his willingness to impose the death penalty; and (b) because one prisoner attacked a guard and injured him seriously.

The bulk of his piece does not attempt to further the narrative about how American justice leads to terrorist attacks on America – it instead raises a number of other issues, which have often been gone over. There is some legitimacy to this critique – so I do not mean to dismiss it outright. Phillip Bobbitt and some other legal scholars on the left have used it to make the case for “National Security Courts” which would solely deal with issues of terrorism and national security threats. Mukasey though uses them to make the more radical argument that our justice system itself is incapable of dealing with the threat – and so he proposes a kind of preemptive surrender of values.

These are the basic issues he raises:

  • Trying terrorists would require extra security for judges, jurors, prosecutors, etcetera.
  • This extra security (and additional caseload) would further burden an overloaded system.
  • The court itself would become a target.
  • Trying terrorists in a court would encourage litigation of national security issues.
  • If terrorists are convicted and put into the general prison population, they would be able to try to recruit converts to jihad.
  • Those suspected terrorists held by George W. Bush weren’t treated consistently with American standards of justice – and due to various reasons, we cannot make any case against many of them.
  • Part of our justice system involves the full disclosure of evidence to the defendants; this would allow information to leak, including possibly about intelligence means and methods.

Only the last two are legitimate issues that are difficult to deal with. The first five all have relatively easy solutions if we decide that our American justice system is capable of handling the threat from terrorism. We will provide the extra security. We will hire more judges and prosecutors and get the necessary resources to handle the additional caseload – getting this done would be as much a priority as having enough troops to accomplish a mission in Iraq. We would house terrorists separately from the general prison population – and I haven’t seen anyone suggest otherwise. (Though it’s worth noting that the example Mukasey gives is of a man who was radicalized in prison without being housed with terrorists.)

The issue of what to do with the prisoners George W. Bush was responsible for is a thorny one. Bush and Mukasey left the situation unresolved, and however it is resolved, it will prove politically and legally hazardous. But Obama seems to be approaching this situation pragmatically – and avoiding letting a desire for consistency to constrain him. This is the overall right approach, though the details could obviously be resolved poorly.

Regarding the last issue, Mukasy raises a very salient point – one which a National Security Court would resolve. This issue was also raised with respect to the War on Drugs and efforts to prosecute organized crime, and in each case, a new court with a new justice system was proposed. But our justice system proved able to handle these issues after early setbacks. Perhaps a new court is needed here, as our adversarial system can work to the advantage of organized groups opposing it. This is an issue to be debated – and a serious one. I would tend to believe that our courts – perhaps with some extra rules or procedures designed to mitigate the downsides – can handle these cases.

[Image by threecee licensed under Creative Commons.]