Henry

The Washington Post cites worries among intelligence officials:

A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard, the third-ranking CIA official at the time of the use of harsh interrogation practices, said that although vigorous oversight is crucial, the public airing of once-classified internal assessments and the prospect of further investigation are damaging the agency. “Morale at the agency is down to minus 50,” he said.

… Krongard, one of the few active or retired CIA officers with direct knowledge of the program willing to voice publicly what many officers are saying privately, said agency personnel now may back away from controversial programs that could place them in personal legal jeopardy should their work be exposed. “The old saying goes, ‘Big operation, big risk; small operation, small risk; no operation, no risk.’ ”

“If you’re not in the intelligence business to be forward-leaning, you might as well not be in it,” Krongard said.

‘Forward-leaning’ in this context being a rather transparent euphemism for being ‘willing to break the laws forbidding torture of captives.’

There is of course a case that relatively low ranking CIA officers should not be prosecuted for torture while the high officials that ordered them to torture, or provided flimsy legal justifications for torture (or perhaps indeed encouraged them to go beyond the guidances provided) get off scot free. But I think that the pragmatic case that these officers should be prosecuted is a stronger one; on two grounds.

First, and most obviously, bringing these cases to trial may lead to the uncovering of new evidence. The most obvious defense open to these officers is that they were indeed only following legally mandated instructions – and it seems at least plausible to me (as a non-lawyer) that a judge will be more likely to allow discovery on potentially exculpatory evidence for these officers than for other potential plaintiffs, such as those who were in fact the victims of this torture. This is of course screwed up – but it is (as best as I can tell) part of the legal culture of this country. This evidence might perhaps (not very likely, given politics – but then I would not have predicted Holder’s decision a month ago) lead to the prosecution of high level officials who were more directly involved in creating the policies in question and possibly encouraging their underlings to go beyond even these policies.

Second, the more cautious that low-ranking CIA officers are about breaking the laws criminalizing torture in future, the better. I want them to be worried that they will be hung out and left to dry by their political masters if they break the law. This will give them a strong rationale to say no, the next time that they are asked to, and at least partially reshape the incentive structure in benign ways. There is something rather obviously fucked up about a political culture in which high ranking officials can make the opposite claim – that we want intelligence officers to be able to break the law by torturing people, and that not giving them this license ‘lowers morale.’ But you would not know that from reading the Washington Post.

Scott has a great short piece at IHE on Gambetta’s book on communication among criminals, which inter alia summarizes Gambetta’s theory of the signalling benefits of incompetence in Italian academia.

Gambetta argues that something similar takes place among the baroni (barons) who oversee the selection committees involved in Italian academic promotions. While some fields are more meritocratic than others, he says, the struggle for advancement involves a great deal of horse trading. “The barons operate on the basis of a pact of reciprocity, which requires a lot of trust, for debts are repaid years later. …The most powerful figures in this system, says Gambetta, tend to be the least intellectually distinguished. … “… and this is what is the most intriguing, they do not try to hide their weakness. One has the impression that they almost flaunt it in personal contacts.” … Gambetta argues that the cheerful incompetence of the baroni is akin to the mafioso’s way of signaling that he can be “trusted” within his narrowly predatory limits.

“Being incompetent and displaying it,” he writes, “conveys the message I will not run away, for I have no strong legs to run anywhere else. In a corrupt academic market, being good at and interested in one’s own research, by contrast, signal a potential for a career independent of corrupt reciprocity…. In the Italian academic world, the kakistocrats are those who best assure others by displaying, through lack of competence and lack of interest in research, that they will comply with the pacts.”

Andrew Gelman and John Sides have a very good piece at the Boston Review on the reasons why journalists and pundits got so much about the 2008 presidential election wrong, with responses by Rick Perlstein, Mark Schmitt and others. In their response to the response, John and Andrew say:

Will these efforts get political scientists invited to Joe Scarborough’s kaffeeklatsch? Probably not. The media ecology fetishizes novelty in reporting and certainty in commentary. And yet the academic study of elections shows that what is certain is almost never new, and what is new is almost never certain. We might only bore Fox & Friends with our scholarly qualifications and caveats, or simply look foolish trying to present our research in soundbites. [click to continue…]

Felix Salmon yesterday on the economics of tattoos:

Drewbie left me a comment this morning talking about people interviewing for jobs and not getting them, just because they had visible tattoos. I can well believe it. But at the same time, precisely because of this discrimination, I tend to both expect and receive much better service from people with visible tattoos. … Businesses with tattooed employees are signalling to me that they have better service, and as a result I’m more likely to try them out.

By coincidence, I’m reading Diego Gambetta’s new book, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate (Powells, Amazon, B&N), which has a lot to say about signalling via tattoos and other forms of visible self-mutilation. Gambetta argues that criminals often cover themselves with tattoos precisely because they ruin the criminals’ prospects to go straight; they allow the criminals to signal “that defection would be not so much unprofitable as impossible.”

Self-binding can also take the form of self-branding as found, for instance, in South African prisons:

Erefaan’s face is covered in tattoos. “Spit on my grave” is tattooed across his forehead; “I hate you, Mum” etched on his left cheek. The tattoos are an expression of loyalty. The men cut the emblems of their allegiance into their skin. The Number [the name of the hierarchical system in Pollsmoor prison] demands not only that you pledge your oath verbally, but that you are marked, indelibly, for life. Facial tattoos are the ultimate abandonment of all hope for a life outside.

Neal Stephenson, in Snow Crash, proposed an America in which the collapse of government led communities to brand criminals faces’ with brief descriptions of their criminal tendencies, so that others in different communities would know to give them wide berth. Gambetta’s logic suggests that branding, whether voluntary or involuntary, could sometimes be in the criminal’s self interest – it serves as a costly signal of type. More generally, I’m enjoying the book a lot – the best bit so far is Gambetta’s lovely theory of incompetence as a signalling mechanism in Italian academia. Recommended.

Two book reviews I’ve done on netroots related stuff that may be of interest to CT readers.

First, a review for The American Prospect of Eric Boehlert’s and Matthew Kerbel’s books on the netroots.

But the netroots’ discomfiture isn’t mere pique. Nor is it simple anger that Obama has broken his promises to roll back the security state that developed over the previous eight years, although this is surely important. The real worry for the netroots is that Obama is undermining their particular blend of online politics. He has taken the parts of netroots politics that he likes (online organizing and fundraising), while dumping the parts that he doesn’t (a strongly confrontational politics and emphasis on bottom-up decision making). There isn’t much room for the netroots and vigorous online partisanship in Obama’s plans for the future of the Democratic Party.

I think I would modify this a bit now, given the interesting stuff happening around pressure to keep the public option in healthcare reform, but would still stick by my fundamental claim about the basic tensions between the administration and netroots and their allies.

Second, a piece for Times Higher Education on Matt Hindman’s book on digital democracy.

As his book title suggests, Hindman puts paid to some of the most pernicious myths of democracy and the internet. Lazy libertarian arguments that the internet was going to create radically empowered individuals, an “army of Davids” that would topple government and so-called “mainstream media” with a few well-aimed missiles are simply unsustainable. So, too, are some of the hazier left-wing claims about how the internet would foster “extreme democracy”. The internet is creating new forms of social organisation, but they have their own kinds of hierarchy. And in many cases the old hierarchies are co-opting the new ones. In the US, traditional media and think-tanks are hiring prominent bloggers. Few major bloggers are still independent, and those who are, are mostly trying to create their own miniature media empires. Still, stupid claims for the democratic benefits of technological pixie dust may be too tempting a target. Hindman’s focus on the bad arguments of internet evangelists leads him to make some over-reaching claims of his own.

Comments or criticisms welcome on either or both …

We’re happy to announce that Conor Foley will be guestblogging with us for a little while. Conor is an occasional commenter here at CT, and has extensive experience in working both for NGOs (Amnesty International, Liberty) and international organizations (the United Nations) on aid and human rights issues. He also has a strong and provocative take on the politics of human rights, best set out in his (in my opinion, excellent) recent book The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War (Amazon, Powells, B&N). As Michael Williams describes the book:

Throughout the 1990s, the idea of humanitarian intervention rapidly gained in popularity in a world where the balance of power was suddenly no more. … Foley contends, … correctly, that this has set dangerous precedents. First of all, what right and responsibility do these various NGOs have in naming a conflict “genocide” or a “humanitarian disaster”? … here is also the issue of the role humanitarians play in actual conflicts. … Finally and perhaps most importantly, there is the issue of humanitarianism and legitimacy. Has humanitarianism become a way to legitimise and justify our interventions in the affairs of other states for ulterior motives?

Conor has interesting opinions on a whole variety of other topics. We’re happy to have him with us.

Below find the final contributions to the seminar on George Scialabba’s What Are Intellectuals Good For? ( buy from Barnes and Noble – preferred option since it often runs reviews by George, Scott and others, and is actively recommending the book in its excellent review section, Powells, Amazon) over the next few days. We’re really happy to have George with us – he is a frequent CT commenter, and, more importantly, one of the great public intellectuals of our time. A lot of the discussion will focus on the question of what role, if any, public intellectuals should play in modern culture.

The seminar is made publicly available under a Creative Commons license (see the PDF for details). All posts in the seminar are here. Those who prefer to read the seminar as a PDF can find it here. Those who want to play with the TeX file can find it here. Those who prefer to work in Markdown can find it here.

The non-CT authors:

Russell Jacoby is professor of history at UCLA. He is the author of numerous books, most relevantly including The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (Powells, Amazon), and updated in his article, Big Brains, Small Impact (available for free until very recently at the _Chronicle of Higher Education)

Aaron Swartz was one of the founders of Reddit, helped write the simple markup language Markdown (which has been used to format this seminar) and is involved in sundry other causes and activities in the area where information technology and politics intersect.

Rich Yeselson is a research coordinator in the Strategic Organizing Center of the labor federation, Change to Win, and the Zelig of the American intellectual left.

I’ve been reading George’s essays for years, but it is only when one reads a large number of them together that one really sees the interconnections. His interests are diverse. Borges, in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,’ notes that the critics of Tlön

often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works – the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say – attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres…

George, when he dedicates the book to Chomsky, Rorty and Lasch, may seem to be doing something similar as an exercise in self-definition – what philosophy on earth might possibly unite these three? The careful reader will at least be able to discern the outlines of an answer to this question when she finishes reading this book. While this answer is not as much an abstract philosophy, as a carefully elaborated set of political and critical judgments, which are both attractive and useful. George’s lens upon the world reveals relationships that would otherwise remain occulted.

One of the themes running through these essays is the proper role of the the public intellectual. George would like public intellectuals to have two features – a grounding in literary culture and a real connection to political debate. As he notes, however, these two requirements are difficult to reconcile with each other in the modern world. This dilemma is described most clearly in one of the earlier essays in the book, “The Sealed Envelope”

From the Shorter Oxford (old edition),

Corsned – in Old English law, the morsel of trial, a piece of bread consecrated by exorcism ( panis conjuratus ) which an accused person was required to swallow as a trial of his guilt or innocence.

Consider this an open thread for the nomination of other words similarly obscure in usage and unusual in meaning that you’ve come across.

Jennifer Rubin at Commentary leans on the mad research skillz of “Michael Rubin at National Review to slur Presidential Medal honoree Mary Robinson for being an anti-Semite. Or something.

As Michael Rubin pointed out in this 2002 column, in her capacity as president of Ireland, she also happily provided millions of dollars of support to the PLO, which were used in terror attacks:

During the last four years of Robinson’s tenure, the European Union donated large sums of money to the Palestinian Authority. Ireland even held the presidency of the European Union for the second half of 1996. During this time, Arafat siphoned large amounts of European aid money away to pay for terror. Robinson can plead ignorance, but documents seized during the recent Israeli incursion into the West Bank revealed that the Palestinian Authority spent approximately $9 million of European Union aid money each month on the salaries of those organizing terror attacks against civilians. While European officials like Robinson looked the other way, the Palestinian Authority regularly converted millions of dollars of aid money into shekels at rates about 20 percent below normal, allowing the Palestinian chairman to divert millions of dollars worth of aid into his personal slush fund.

The original (Michael) Rubin column implies that Mary Robinson should be charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for this.

I mean seriously. Don’t they have factcheckers at Commentary and National Review? Don’t they even have an intern who could skim the Wikipedia article on the President of Ireland ?

The presidency is largely a ceremonial office, but the President does exercise certain limited powers with absolute discretion.

The Rubins (are they related?) should be advised that none of these powers touch on foreign policy, European Union policy making etc (the President isn’t even allowed to leave the country without the government’s permission). I know that neither the National Review or Commentary is in the business of informing its readers. But I would have thought that they needed to maintain at least a minimal degree of contact with reality for their propaganda to be effective. I seem to be wrong.

I’ve been thinking for the last ten minutes about how to start this post in a polite and reasoned way, and coming up with nothing very much. So, here goes with the bluntness. Charles Rowley’s article (behind paywall), ‘The curious citation practices of Avner Greif:
Janet Landa comes to grief’ in the new issue of Public Choice is one of the sorriest hack-jobs that I’ve ever had the misfortune to read in an academic journal. The fundamental claim:

The commentary will establish that Avner Grief, by his curious citation practices, has failed to cite seminal papers by Janet Landa who pioneered in an important field of nonmarket decision-making—the economics of trust, which itself is part of the economics of identity—and that, by so doing, he now is inappropriately recognized among mainstream economists as the pioneer in the field of trust networks and informal enforcement of contracts.

is not supported, the insinuations are offensive, and the standards of argument are situated somewhere in that narrow region where the slipshod, the haphazard and the positively eccentric intersect.
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I’m not writing about the debates over health insurance (as, indeed, I am not writing about most policy debates), because I simply don’t think I’m informed enough to say anything very useful about the pros and cons of the specific options under discussion. Still, this by Alex Tabarrok struck me as a bit odd. [click to continue…]

Brandon del Pozo is a captain in the NYPD (now working for Internal Affairs on internal police corruption cases, but with plenty of experience as a beat cop in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and as a police instructor too). He is also a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at CUNY. He has sent us a post with a different perspective on police discretion and the Gates arrest than that of my last post. We are publishing his post in the interests of furthering serious debate. Brandon asked me to make it emphatically clear that all views expressed here are purely personal, and that he is not acting as a spokesperson for the NYPD in any way. His post is below.

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From my own experience and what I have learned about the incident, I highly doubt that I would have ordered the arrest of Professor Gates for any charge. I do, however, think that based on his actions as alleged by Sergeant Crowley, his arrest was somewhat plausible within the universe of possible outcomes to the incident. That still does not mean that the cops in question weren’t acting “stupidly,” as President Obama suggested. It is possible to do a lawful thing that is stupid, and that is why officers have discretion in many cases. While it can be misused, discretion is there to prevent them from stupidly enforcing the letter of the law. That the arrest was unwise and imprudent has also been made clear by how quickly the charges were dropped and the apologies issued by the government of Cambridge.

On the other hand, I do feel that Professor Gates seems to have acted inappropriately. There was no good reason for him to converse belligerently with the responding officer from his first words, or accuse him of racism, or refuse to answer basic questions directly related to the scope of the officer’s legitimate investigation. Of course, Gates also had the prerogative to say nothing at all, but this is different from saying nothing constructive, and instead issuing verbal abuse. This is not how people should relate to police officers as officials who are ostensibly trying to ensure public safety, but at least as importantly it is not how people should relate to other people in their community whose behavior they haven’t had the chance to independently assess. Police officers are expected to bear much greater burdens than the average citizen in this regard due to the nature of their job, but the limits on these burdens acknowledge their core personhood.
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One source that may possibly help illuminate the controversy over Skip Gates’ arrest is Peter Moskos’ book, Cop in the Hood (Powells, Amazon). Moskos, a sociologist, spent a year as a beat officer in Baltimore. While police practice in the US varies substantially from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, some aspects are (I suspect) reasonably general, including the use by police officers of their zone of discretion to try to expand their authority beyond that which they are theoretically supposed to exercise. Moskos (p. 117-118):

A nonviolent domestic dispute serves as another example of using the law to gain extralegal authority. A woman calls police because she is sick of her baby’s father coming home and being rowdy after a night of drinking. An officer wants the drunken man to spend the night elsewhere. The girlfriend is not afraid of the man. Though the officer believes this argument will continue and perhaps turn violent, there is no cause for arrest. Police may not order a person from his or her home. But an officer can request to talk to the man outside his house. At this point the officer might say, “If you don’t take a walk, I’m going to lock you up.’ The man, though within his rights to quietly reenter his house and say goodnight to the police, is more likely to obey the officer’s request or engage the police in a loud and drunken late-night debate. The man may protest loudly that the officer has no reason to lock him up. If a crowd gathers or lights in neighboring buildings turn on, he may be arrested for disorderly conduct.

Moskos is in general in favor of police having a fair amount of discretion (he seems to believe that much basic policing work would be impossible without it) – I’m not going to get into that broad set of arguments, since I don’t know enough to say anything useful. But it is easy to see how this discretion can be abused in ways that work out nicely for the cops (most of the time), but not so nicely for their targets. Moskos’ discussion of this particular technique of generating arrests has some similarities with the actions described in the police report of Gates’ arrest.

When Gates asked me a third time for my name, I explained to him that I had provided it at his request two separate times. Gates continued to yell at me. I told Gates that I was leaving his residence and that if he had any other questions regarding the matter, I would speak with him outside his residence. As I began walking through the foyer toward the front door, I could hear Gates again demanding my name. I again told Gates that I would speak with him outside. My reason for wanting to leave the residence was that Gates was yelling very loud and the acoustics of the kitchen and foyer were making it difficult for me to transmit pertinent information to ECC or other responding units.

When I left the residence, I noted that there were several Cambridge and Harvard University police officers assembled on the sidewalk in front of the residence. Additionally, the caller, Ms. Walen and at least seven unidentified passers-by were looking in the direction of Gates, who had followed me outside the residence. As I descended the stairs to the sidewalk, Gates continued to yell at me, accusing me of racial bias and continued to tell me that I had not heard the last of him. Due to the tumultuous manner Gates had exhibited in his residence as well as his continued tumultuous behavior outside the residence, in view of the public, I warned Gates that he was becoming disorderly. Gates ignored my warning and continued to yell, which drew the attention both of the police officers and citizens, who appeared surprised and alarmed by Gates’ outburst. For a second time I warned Gates to calm down while I withdrew my department issued handcuffs from their carrying case. Gates again ignored my warning and continued to yell at me. It was at this time that I informed Gates that he was under arrest. I then stepped up the stairs, onto the porch and attempted to place handcuffs on Gates. Gates initially resisted my attempt to handcuff him, yelling that he was “disabled” and would fall without his cane.

Now, I should emphasize that I have no personal reason whatsoever to doubt that Crowley’s account of the arrest is accurate – it may very well be that the acoustics were such that communication was difficult indoors. I am not acquainted with the physical specifics of the building where Gates lives. It is, however, notable that Moskos’ Baltimore police officer both (a) uses a verbal invitation to induce the targeted individual to leave the building, and (b) then uses the attention of bystanders to generate a charge of disorderly conduct. Whether these resemblances are purely accidental or not (in the absence of more facts, you could generate arguments either way), I leave to the imagination of the reader.

Update: All charges against Gates have now been dropped.