Two good links from Randy Paul at Beautiful Horizons:

Q&A about the torture memo

There was recently an intelligent bit debate about Amnesty International between Chris (also here), Jacob Levy at the Volokh Conspiracy, and Eve Garard at Normblog. Randy confronts some other anti-Amnesty points that aren’t quite up to snuff.

Two good links from Randy Paul at Beautiful Horizons:

Q&A about the torture memo

There was recently an intelligent bit debate about Amnesty International between Chris (also here), Jacob Levy at the Volokh Conspiracy, and Eve Garard at Normblog. Randy confronts some other anti-Amnesty points that aren’t quite up to snuff.

As most readers will know, it has recently come to the attention of the world that lawyers in the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel have prepared a memo arguing that torture can be authorized by the President. The argument, as I understand it, is that when the President believes that he is operating in his capacity as Commander in Chief, he has unlimited power, which cannot be constrained by the Legislature. It goes so far as to say that authority to set aside the laws is “inherent in the president.”

Michael Froomkin’s analysis of the torture memo is an invaluable example of the best of blogging. (Also see Jim Henley, Eric Muller, von from Obsidian Wings, among others.)

On pages 22-23 the Walker Working Group Report sets out a view of an unlimited Presidential power to do anything he wants with “enemy combatants”. The bill of rights is nowhere mentioned. There is no principle suggested which limits this purported authority to non-citizens, or to the battlefield. Under this reasoning, it would be perfectly proper to grab any one of us and torture us if the President determined that the war effort required it. I cannot exaggerate how pernicious this argument is, and how incompatible it is with a free society. The Constitution does not make the President a King. This memo does.

Via TalkLeft, I see that Sen. Dick Durbin has introduced:

an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill to reaffirm US commitment to the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, and the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, and to affirm unequivocally the prohibition against torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

TalkLeft has a good deal of information about this, including a sample letter of support for this amendment which can be adapted and forwarded to your representatives in Congress. Here’s a good resource for contacting them. Please do this.

One last point, in which I get a little emotional.

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Via Eugene Volokh,[1] I came to this Boston Globe piece by Jeff Jacoby, who complains that the term “partial birth abortion”, when used in news stories, is normally surrounded by scare quotes, with the explanation that this term is used by opponents of legal abortion, but disputed by supporters. Jacoby complains about liberal bias here and says, among other things “when reporting on the same-sex marriage controversy, they should observe that “what critics call ‘homophobia’ — a term promoted by gay and lesbian activists — is not recognized by medical authorities”

As far as I can recall, I’ve never seen the word “homophobia” used in a news story in a major newspaper, other than in quotes, usually direct, but occasionally indirect (“activist X is concerned about homophobia”) Certainly I’ve never seen it used as if it referred to a recognised medical condition analogous to, say, claustrophobia. I looked in Google News and the recent uses I could find were all either in direct or indirect quotes, opinion pieces (including reprints of Jacoby!) or in publications such as Gay Times and Alternet, which don’t claim to be unbiased. Can anyone point to examples that would support Jacoby?

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Endless playing with the “BBC score predictor”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/score_predictor/default.stm has me anticipating an England–France final with England beating Italy in the semis and France having knocked out the Dutch. But, of course, whatever happens in the real world, it won’t be that. The Dutch are the big mystery, of course, they always screw up in the end (and with Clarence Seedorf threatening to quit if he’s not played in his favourite position, it looks like business as usual). Group C looks the hardest to call: neck and neck between the Swedes and the Danes to avoid relegation [I meant non-qualification, of course]. And I expect the Germans to get just one point, a miserable goalless draw with Latvia. And the final victors? Like everyone else I can’t see beyond France.

[Update: my hot betting tip is Fernando Morientes for top scorer at 20/1]

On this sacred day of democracy, two old posts of mine putting forward the case for not taking part in this complete farrago. I would add two points in the context of the current UK elections:

1) Given the large-scale use of postal ballots, the “electoral bezzle” (the proportion of the turnout which consists of fictional characters who are the result of electoral fraud) is probably much larger this time than in previous elections.

2) As the FT points out today, the list system used in the European elections means that there are substantial numbers of political hacks and placemen who will get elected no matter what, making it even more pointless to bother voting.

Don’t encourage them.

Another positive-negative rights-liberties post. Probably you’ve had enough of that, so I’ll tuck it away discreetly.

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I swear I had this post ready before “all”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001996.html “this”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001991.html “stuff”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001987.html about positive and negative rights. My appetite for that kind of thing isn’t terribly high, except as an opportunity to think up slogans like “Libertarianism is the Socialism of “Lawyers”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/if_wishes_were_.html.” But a few months ago “I made a passing comment”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001414.html that “Libertarianism has always seemed to me to depend for its realization on features of the social structure that it officially repuditates.” There’s probably a nice theory to be built about how this is true of _all_ programmatic ideologies for social reorganization. For now, “Peter Levine”:http://www.peterlevine.ws/mt/ sketches “some sociological ideas about Libertarianism in particular”:http://www.peterlevine.ws/mt/archives/2004_06_06.html#000378.

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Much good discussion – from our own Henry and Chris, for example – in the wake of Eugene Volokh’s critique of Steve Bainbridge’s TCS piece in praise of negative rights.

It seems to me clear that Eugene is quite correct in the points he makes. But I am left scratching my head, nonetheless, because I teach J.S. Mill and Isaiah Berlin every semester – for two semester’s now. So I think I’ve got my head tolerably wrapped around the whole negative vs. positive liberty thing. (I mean, they sort of turn into each other if you squint, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an important distinction to grapple with.) But it would never occur to me to talk about negative vs. positive rights. That seems to me like argle-bargle. But apparently there are grown-ups who talk this way, even write academic papers this way? (I guess these are the hazards of teaching intro political philosophy without being a specialist and actually reading the scholarly literature. I get blindsided by stuff other people are familiar with. But still. What’s this about, eh? If I’m totally wrong about everything that follows, someone take me to school, please.)

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In his typically up-to-date fashion, Steve Harley devoted last night’s Sounds of the Seventies to Cat Stevens. He doesn’t say whether he’s a CT reader, but now I am starting to have suspicions. Go there and listen.

I can never resist a challenge. So when Normblog passed on the folowing put-up-or-shut-up from John Keegan:

If those who show themselves so eager to denounce the American President and the British Prime Minister feel strongly enough on the issue, please will they explain their reasons for wishing that Saddam Hussein should still be in power in Baghdad.

I couldn’t resist putting up, even at the cost of perhaps repeating myself

(ahem)

I wish Saddam Hussein was still in power in Baghdad because if this were the case, then about 3,000 Iraqis would have been murdered by his regime and would be dead, the roughly 10,000 Iraqis we killed ourselves would still be alive, and we would most likely be well on our way to formulating a credible, sensible, properly resourced plan for getting rid of him and handling the aftermath.

In other words, this was not a “humanitarian intervention”, in the sense which Human Rights Watch uses the term, and it is entirely defensible to maintain principled opposition to the war without having to be painted as an apologist for mass graves. Norm has his own, somewhat more inclusive standard for what constitutes a humanitarian intervention, which I intend to write something about soon. But I simply don’t believe that this issue is anything like as cut and dried as the Keegan quote suggests; if one is using a standard which makes Saddamites of Human Rights Watch, then one is using a wrong standard.

Euro elections tomorrow, and I, for one, am still at a loss for what to do. Here in the UK’s south-west constituency (bizarrely including Gibraltar!) we have full slates of candidates from all three main parties plus the fascist BNP, the Greens, the “Countryside Party”, UKIP, and RESPECT (the unprincipled alliance of Gorgeous George Galloway, the Socialist Workers Party and the Muslim Association of Britain). I’m definitely not going for any of the fringe parties, nor for the Tories, so it is down to Labour or the Lib Dems. I usually have no time for the Lib Dems, but I’m tempted this time. I’m tempted because Blair has clearly reached his sell-by date, and I think that’s largely independent of how history will judge him. Time for a swift and painless transition to Gordon Brown as party leader, and a bad Euro result may do the trick.

“Eve Garrard has responded”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/06/amnesty_revisit.html to “my post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001962.html suggesting that she had misunderstood some recent statements by Amnesty International. I should like to note, for the record, that my post didn’t amount to an endorsement of the claim that I took Amnesty to be making, namely, that the current attack on principles of human rights is the worst for the last fifty years. Nevertheless, I have some bones to pick with Eve’s latest. The scope of the claim that Eve attributes to Amnesty varies somewhat through her piece. Sometimes Eve seems to be suggesting that Amnesty is restricting blame to America or to the liberal democracies. There may indeed by statements by Amnesty officials with this character, but the “most relevant report”:http://web.amnesty.org/report2004/hragenda-1-eng does refer explicitly to “governments around the world” and explicitly mentions a number of countries not best described as “liberal democracies” (Russia, China, Yemen, to name but three). Additionally, Eve singles out the Patriot Act as being at the centre of any charge that human rights principles are being undermined. No doubt it forms part of any such case, but I’d have thought that such matters as the legal limbo of Guantanamo, the export of a detainee for torture by Syria, and the recent legal advice on the admissibility of torture and the (non) applicability of the Geneva conventions, make up a significant part of the picture. Finally — and I’m picking nits now — Eve writes that “the idea that the force of an argument should be materially altered by an (allegedly) misplaced comma is … delightful and charming.” It may be, but my complaint focused not on the _force_ of the argument but on its _meaning_ , and it is pretty commonplace that commas can and do alter the meaning of sentences: “Eats, Shoots & Leaves”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1592400876/junius-20 .

The debate going on between “Eugene Volokh and others”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_06_07.shtml#1086708760 is worth checking out (as “Henry”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001987.html notes), though some of the background assumptions are pretty odd, to my way of thinking. [1] But sticking to the central issue of positive and negative rights, the discussing sent me scurrying to look at Allen Buchanan’s seminal paper “Justice and Charity”:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0014-1704%28198704%2997%3A3%3C558%3AJAC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A (accessible if you’ve got JSTOR, otherwise, tough). In a small section of the paper, dealing with positive and negative rights, Buchanan points out that — as in this debate — those seeking to argue that all rights are negative attempt to show (or at least claim) that any positive rights will lead to “unacceptably frequent and severe disruptions of individuals’ activities as rational planners or to intrusions that are intuitively unjust.” But, as Buchanan argues, that’s a pretty implausible move to make.

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