Terry Welch, who is serving as an Army public affairs specialist in Afghanistan, has a very reasonable request. He says that what Afghan children want, more than anything, are pens. Pens are cheap. Below the fold is his letter, including a link to OfficeMax and his address.
Given the current revelations from Abu Ghraib, it is worth remembering that a major reason for the USA’s attempts to undermine the International Criminal Court was that making American troops accountable would impede them in the War on Terror. I personally don’t have much time for the Hague tribunal; I think that the US opposition to it on grounds of national sovereignty were valid and I don’t like unaccountable international institutions. But hell … isn’t it just a bit ironic that the US Army managed to achieve what nobody thought was possible (a successful war with minimal civilian casualties) and then fouled up on the kind of “war crimes” that nobody ever so much as imagined that the US Army would commit?
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Not that there’s much hope left, but have they simply given up on trying to win “hearts and minds” in the region? Is now really the best time for this?
Mr. Bush issued an executive order banning virtually all American exports, except for food and medicine, and barring flights between Syria and the United States, except during emergencies.
And it seems that it is mostly hearts and minds that will be affected:
In the near term, the action is largely symbolic, since trade with Syria, at about $300 million a year, is insubstantial and Syrian airlines do not fly to the United States. Moreover, the trade ban does not preclude investment, though American firms like ConocoPhillips and Chevron, which currently do business in Syria, will be required to turn to foreign suppliers to service their operations there, a State Department spokesman said.
I guess here’s the real target:
Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Miami Republican who was an original sponsor of the Syria Accountability Act, expressed satisfaction with the president’s announcement.
“He went beyond what was asked of him,” she said.
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Just a quick note to the fairly large proportion of our readers who also run weblogs. The photographs of Iraqi prisoners being humiliated and tortured are important historical documents, but the faces of those being victimised are not particularly important details. Nothing important is lost by linking to a version of the photographs in which the victims’ anonymity is preserved rather than one in which they are clearly identifiable. While some of the torture victims were extremely nasty people, many weren’t (apparently, many of them had been picked up simply by mistake), and in any case it is not good form to condemn the practice of humiliating prisoners while simultaneously disseminating pictures which increase the humiliation.
The genie is out of the bottle, obviously (thanks to quite scandalous insensitivity on the part of the world’s newspaper), but we can at least show willing ourselves. This will be doubly important, obviously, if and when the currently “secret” (and apparently much more distressing for the victims) photographs become public.
Update: When I rather loftily said above that “nothing is lost by linking to version of the photographs in which the victims’ anonymity is preserved”, I assumed that I’d be able to find such versions pretty easily, but apparently not. I’ve tried all sorts of search terms, but can’t find a single instance of publication of the photos in which anyone bothered to blur the faces. Christ. Did literally nobody stop to think about this last week? Last time I take a holiday.
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In response to the exposure of widespread torture prisoners in Iraq (on all sides) and elsewhere, it’s inevitable that the “ticking bomb” problem should be raised.
‘You hold a terrorist who knows the location of a defusable bomb which, if exploded, will kill x million people. Do you have the right to torture him/her to find the bomb?’
Various answers to this question have been offered, none of which seem entirely satisfactory.
Instead of offering an answer to this question, I’m going to look at a question that follows immediately, but doesn’t seem to have been asked. Suppose that someone has used torture to extract information from a prisoner in the belief (factually correct or not and morally sustainable or not) that doing so was justified by a “ticking bomb” situation. What should they do next?
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When some good is arbitrarily granted to one group of people but denied to another group of people, there are two ways of implementing fairness. The first is to remove the arbitrariness by granting it to both groups. The second is simply to deny it to both groups. The latter course is especially appealing when you think that the value of the good is, in fact, highly dubious, or when you think that it involves unwarranted interference in people’s lives.
Why, then, in the debate about gay marriage is the first strategy the only one that people are debating? My colleague, Claudia Card, a renowned lesbian philosopher, published a paper over a decade ago arguing against gay marriage — on the grounds that no-one should be married, because marriage is not a good thing. At the time I was more bemused than persuaded by the argument, and now that I have revisited the paper and the issue I think that she is wrong. But I am surprised that her basic stand has received so little attention in the debate, at least among thoughtful people who are not completely caught up in the politics of the issue. (Alex Cockburn has a column which expresses this view, but I’ve not seen it much in any more mainstream place).
Here’s why:
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In a famous letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson “set out the problem of intergenerational sovereignty”:http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~bnjohns/jeff.html :it is as unjust for the dead to impose their laws on the living as it is for one country to impose its laws on another. In both cases, those subject to the laws are being obliged to obey legislation that they had no hand in formulating and have limited opportunity to repeal. As Jefferson points out, later generations may be burdened in all kinds of similar ways by earlier ones. So, for example, they may be held liable for the borrowing of their ancestors. But why should they be any more responsible for the repayment of such debts that the inhabitants of one country are for the repayment of the debts of another?
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(I’m going to start with the punchline, in case you don’t click through: please consider signing the DCCC petition asking for Rumsfeld’s dismissal).
I recently saw a post on a conservative blog asking whether liberal bloggers were going to accept Rumsfeld’s apology. I know the answer to this one: It Doesn’t Matter. The Administration doesn’t have to worry about us. They need to worry about what they’re doing to minimize the firestorm raging among Iraqis and Muslims. The pictures could hardly have been scripted better to alientate and inflame the people that we’d like to have on our side. Dealing with this terrible stain is of incalculable importance right now.
Donald Rumsfeld has said that he accepts reponsibility, and there are a lot of people arguing that Rumsfeld should resign, not all from the left. Daniel Drezner says that he should resign, in part, because of his poor record of handling postwar Iraq. (So does Dwight Merideth, among others.) The Economist says that he should go, in part, because of his arrogant refusal to allow prisoners to be held to the Geneva Convention, or any standards or oversight at all, created a culture that led to Abu Ghraib. The Army Times says that he should resign because of the appallingly poor handling of the reports of prisoner abuse by his office. Jane Galt thinks that only real accountability can help repair the damage. Jacob Levy says that getting rid of Rumsfeld would be an acknowledgement of past error that would improve the Administration’s credibility. George Will points out that there are no indispensable men, and gently points out that Rumsfeld’s greatest contribution to the War on Terror at this point may be to cease to be the official most identified with it. I very strongly agree.
(UPDATE: William F. Buckley, too.)
What if, instead, the President and Vice-President decided to tell the world that we owe Rumsfeld a “debt of gratitude”, that Rumsfeld is “the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had”, and that people should “get off his back.” What effect would that have?
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I’m currently trapped in deepest Derbyshire, where very few people seem to have heard of the internet and the news is dominated by the recent death of the “Duke of Devonshire”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/derbyshire/3699595.stm. But I just caught this great opening paragraph from the “Seattle Times”:http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001925335_rumsfeld11.html which is worth repeating:
bq. President Bush extended Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a full-throated endorsement yesterday for a “superb job,” then went into Rumsfeld’s Pentagon office for his first private glimpse of Iraqi prisoner-abuse pictures never seen in public.
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I’ve been meaning for a long time to collect my thoughts about US interest rates, and where they are and should be going. As is often the case, I’m largely in agreement with Paul Krugman, at least as far as long-term rates are concerned. On the other hand, I’m a bit more hawkish in relation to short-term rates than Brad DeLong, with whom I agree on a lot of things.
I’m planning on reworking this piece as I have new thoughts, and in response to comments. so please treat it as a work in progress.
Warning: long and boring (but maybe scary) post over the fold.
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Is it just me, or are the increasingly implausible encomiums of Rumsfeld coming out of the Bush administration starting to sound a little Manchurian Candidate-esque?
George Bush: Mr. Secretary, thank you for your hospitality, and thank you for your leadership. You are courageously leading our nation in the war against terror. You’re doing a superb job. You are a strong Secretary of Defense, and our nation owes you a debt of gratitude.
Dick Cheney: As a former secretary of defense, I think Donald Rumsfeld is the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had.
Bennett Marco: Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.
Maybe someone should ask the president if he’d like to pass the time by playing a little solitaire, just to see what happens.
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Via Edward at Obsidian Wings, I see that the state of Virginia has been busy digging a trench to the 19th century.
The Virginia General Assembly… passed with veto-proof majorities a jaw-dropping bill that bans not only civil unions but any “partnership contract or other arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage.” And it declares “void in all respects” and “unenforceable” in the commonwealth any such arrangement made in another state.
In other words, not only is any public affirmation of gay relationships banned but even private legal arrangements between two people who love each other are prohibited. The bill’s broad language would preclude contracts to share assets or provide for medical powers of attorney, and though its sponsors deny they intend to do so, it would seem to ban even certain contractual business relationships undertaken by people who happen to be of the same gender.
One of the arguments against gay marriage is that gays don’t need it. They can get the rights of married people by making their own contractual arrangements. That’s not exactly true- some rights, such as immigration rights, cannot be obtained by contract
The legislators who passed this bill are wasting their words. A protestor in
http://www.blackeyedgirl.com/nazis.jpg
I started blogging two years ago as an extension of/complement to my mailing list, which had been running since December, 2001. It’s funny that in that first post I describe blogging as “an online forum usually with one main author/contributor” and now here I am on a group blog. I did not see the benefits of the latter until I joined CT, which has been a delight, so thanks!
I wish I knew who were the first few dozen readers of “Eszter’s Blog” so I could express my appreciation to them. (Perhaps they are still with me in which case saying thank you here should work.:-) Those visits encouraged me to keep going and make this exciting and interesting – albeit at times quite frustrating – activity part of my daily routine. Writing blog entries has definitely pushed me to think about certain issues and ideas in the sort of detail that an occasional random thought would not require of me. It has also helped me meet some wonderful people. Thank you!
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It’s Dylan-goes-electric time over at AndrewSullivan.com:
The question I have asked myself in the wake of Abu Ghraib is simply the following: if I knew before the war what I know now, would I still have supported it? I cannot deny that the terrible mismanagement of the post-war – something that no reasonable person can now ignore – has, perhaps fatally, wrecked the mission. But does it make the case for war in retrospect invalid? My tentative answer – and this is a blog, written day by day and hour by hour, not a carefully collected summary of my views – is yes, I still would have supported the war. But only just. And whether the “just” turns into a “no” depends on how we deal with the huge challenge now in front of us….
The one anti-war argument that, in retrospect, I did not take seriously enough was a simple one. It was that this war was noble and defensible but that this administration was simply too incompetent and arrogant to carry it out effectively. I dismissed this as facile Bush-bashing at the time. I was wrong.….
By refusing to hold anyone accountable, the president has also shown he is not really in control. We are at war; and our war leaders have given the enemy their biggest propaganda coup imaginable, while refusing to acknowledge their own palpable errors and misjudgments. They have, alas, scant credibility left and must be called to account. Shock has now led – and should lead – to anger. And those of us who support the war should, in many ways, be angrier than those who opposed it.
(emphasis added) He ends with a call to win, I should point out. Nonetheless, when this Administration has lost Sully, they’ve done very badly indeed. More to come.
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What kind of America-hating lefty would seize on an isolated incident like this?
Three weeks ago in Highland Park, Texas, Mrs Dolly Kelton was arrested and handcuffed for failing to pay a traffic ticket after her car was stopped for having an expired registration. I doubt that Mrs Kelton was a threat to the safety of the arresting officer. She is 97 years old.
then follow up with this ?
We handcuff her… because some Western societies, and America in particular, use these procedures as a way of softening up the accused by humiliation and to underline the power of the authorities.
What kind of slippery-slope argument do you think is going to follow?
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