Do the right thing

What do we owe the Iraqis who have risked their lives serving as interpreters for the U.S. military?

Here’s Sebastian Holsclaw at Obsidian Wings:

When we withdraw, it seems there are no plans to give asylum to the Iraqis who have helped us. [...] It would be an incredibly stupid policy to just let those people loose to be the first hunted down and killed by both sides of the likely civil war aftermath. Even if for some reason we didn’t feel some sort of moral responsibility to them (which to be clear we should) it makes good practical sense. We’ve done all sorts of damage to any reputation for military competence, but that doesn’t mean we should go out of our way to show that if you directly help us, we are likely to abandon you to an ugly death when we leave.

And the British perspective from Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber:

Iraqi interpreters used by the British Army and CPA South have already been hunted down by death squads. [...] There really is no way of keeping these people safe while they are in Iraq, and they need to be kept safe. Quite apart from what one would call a “debt of honour” (the phrase is somewhat pompous, but accurately describes the situation), it never makes sense to get a reputation for abandoning one’s friends. Therefore, the Iraqi staff used by the British in Iraq need to be given asylum in the UK, along with their families.

This is not the current policy of the UK. The Home Office has simply suggested that Iraqis put at risk by their work for the British “register with the appropriate UN refugee agency”, joining the mountain of 2 million-plus refugees….

The title of this post is taken from the Spike Lee film of the same name. It’s often hard to figure out the right thing to do, and good intentions don’t protect you from unintended consequences. But evidence is overwhelming that Iraqis who have worked for the U.S. are and will continue to be singled out and slaughtered.

The U.S. has admitted a bare 133 Iraqi refugees so far this year. That’s not even close to the 7,000 that our government already promised to admit, let alone the thousands more who have worked for us. While there are no good reasons for the delay, one thing is guaranteed to end it: Public pressure. Talk to your friends, write to your local paper, and call your Congressperson.

(If you think this is premature, take a look at Gary Farber’s timeline of how fast the situation deteriorated in the last three and a half weeks of the Vietnam War. And while you’re at it, read his most recent post on this topic.)

No one person should have this much power

I wrote earlier about a judge in Pakistan who was standing up for the rule of law. Today he was reinstated:

Pakistan’s Supreme Court today reinstated the country’s Chief Justice unconditionally in a blow to the Pakistan President, General Pervez Musharraf, who had suspended him.

The historic ruling – the first a Pakistan court has ever made against a military ruler – comes after four months of unrest in Pakistan since Iftikhar Chaudhry’s suspension on allegations of misconduct and corruption.

Judge Chaudhry refused to quit, despite pressure from the president and his intelligence chiefs, and became a symbol of resistance to General Musharraf, lionised by supporters in rallies round the country.

In contrast, today the White House made a stunning declaration that our president has supreme rights over Congress.

Mark J. Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University who has written a book on executive-privilege issues, called the administration’s stance “astonishing.”

“That’s a breathtakingly broad view of the president’s role in this system of separation of powers,” Rozell said. “What this statement is saying is the president’s claim of executive privilege trumps all.”

No one person should have this much power. The founders of our country knew that no president could ever be so perfect that he (or she) should have the rights of a king. But the current president is making wilder and wilder claims about the power to which he is entitled.

Let’s go back to Pakistan, a nation with which we have had profound differences:

“The president has said the judgement of the Supreme Court will be honoured, respected, and adhered to,” said retired Major General Rashid Qureshi, the president’s spokesman.

There’s a critical difference to note: The White House claims are being made anonymously. That means that our president isn’t quite sure enough to stand up and say in public that he has the right to overrule Congress like this. Letting his staff speak to the Washington Post is a way of testing to see if Americans will swallow this outrageous claim.

If you agree that nobody should have this much power, call your senators. Or better yet, write them.

Happy Independence Day

This seemed like the best way to celebrate:

More photos of me looking bewildered after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

“He’s my president, and I hope he does a good job”

Transcript and video of Keith Olbermann’s sharp and righteous July 4th commentary on the pardon of Scooter Libby.

When President Nixon ordered the firing of the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” on October 20th, 1973, Mr. Cox initially responded tersely, and ominously:

“Whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men, is now for Congress, and ultimately, the American people.”

President Nixon did not understand how he had crystallized the issue of Watergate for the American people.

It had been about the obscure meaning behind an attempt to break in to a rival party’s headquarters; and the labyrinthine effort to cover-up that break-in and the related crimes.

But in one night, Nixon transformed it.

Watergate — instantaneously — became a simpler issue: a President overruling the inexorable march of the law. Of insisting — in a way that resonated viscerally with millions who had not previously understood — that he was the law.

Not the Constitution.

Not the Congress.

Not the Courts.

Just him.

Just – Mr. Bush – as you did, yesterday.

Brings to mind the unmatchable Representative Barbara Jordan during the Watergate hearings:

Earlier today, we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, “We, the people.” It is a very eloquent beginning. But when the document was completed on the seventeenth of September 1787 I was not included in that “We, the people.” I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation and court decision I have finally been included in “We, the people.”

Today, I am an inquisitor; I believe hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemnness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.

Transcript. It’s even better if you listen to her uniquely majestic voice.

The beautiful words that describe America

Katherine has an extraordinary post that spells out how the soaring idealism of the United States can be tethered by the concrete review of our failures. But unlike other folks, she doesn’t see this as a reason to give up on the beautiful words. Even when they seem to be co-opted by people whose actions make a mockery of their own rhetoric.

Those glittering abstract nouns aren’t sufficient, but they can be damn useful. They aren’t accurate descriptions of this country right now, and probably they never have been, but a lot of Americans are sincerely attached to them. And sometimes, when presented with a stark contradiction between the bedtime stories we learned about this country as children, and concrete effects of our actions, we will choose to make the bedtime story true rather than give it up entirely.

It’s not an easy thing to do, but it sometimes works. It’s worked a number of times in this country’s history.

It’s almost Independence Day. Go read something that will make you proud to be an American.

Too good not to post

One of the better policy initiatives I’ve seen in recent months:

Steve Ahlenius, president of the McAllen Chamber of Commerce, sent out an e-mail to 140 media outlets nationwide Tuesday morning with the subject line: “McAllen, Texas calls for wall around Washington D.C.”

“We feel the need to protect ourselves from bad legislation, bad ideas and a waste of tax money,” Ahlenius wrote.

“A wall around their homes and businesses will give the legislators and Washington bureaucrats a better understanding of what kind of message this action will send.

“Let’s see if they decide to climb over it, tunnel under it, or walk over it.”

Link to complete article (Found via Cato @ Liberty).

Where’s the outrage?

I don’t know how long this has been around, but I just stumbled upon it recently. The market-liberals^[1] at the Cato Institute have compiled an interactive map of botched police raids. It appears to be both well-researched and thorough, and shows that the scourge of police invasions on innocents and nonviolent offenders is not limited to the years under the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, Cato’s ideological brethren over at Reason have this video interview with Regina Kelly, who was wrongly arrested and jailed based upon a “tip” from a police informant. Ms. Kelly tells harrowing tale.

1. This is, I believe, the label they prefer. For an interesting read, check out How to Label Cato, where they explain why they shouldn’t be called a good number of other things.↩

Caught in limbo

What do you do after you have rounded up “enemy combatants” from around the world, imprisoned them for a few years, and then determined that they are, in fact, not terrorists at all?

What do you do if returning them to their “home” countries would most likely lead to their torture or even execution?

The New York Times today has a fascinating look behind the scenes of this whole nightmare:

The men, Muslims from western China’s Uighur ethnic minority, were freed from their confinement in Cuba after they were found to pose no threat to the United States. They have now lived for more than a year in a squalid government refugee center on the grubby outskirts of Tirana, guarded by armed policemen.

To make matters worse, the U.S.’s attempts to find safe countries to place former Guantanamo detainees have been thwarted by the Chinese government:

American diplomats said they had contacted governments from Angola to Switzerland to Australia. Increasingly, though, they have seen the shadows of their Chinese counterparts.

“The Chinese keep coming in behind us and scaring different countries with whom they have financial or trade relationships,” said one administration official, who insisted on anonymity in discussing diplomatic issues.

It’s become almost a truism that China’s global influence will continue to expand rapidly for the foreseeable future. The U.S. has caused untold suffering and destruction under the Bush administration, but those who cheer on the U.S.’s declining role on the world stage ought to take a good, hard look at who’s most likely to fill the power vacuum.

Important stuff said by other people

First, and most significantly, the U.S. government is disappearing people. (Report.) As if this slide towards totalitarianism wasn’t disturbing enough, two of them appear to be children:

In September 2002, Yusuf al-Khalid (then nine years old) and Abed al-Khalid (then seven years old) were reportedly apprehended by Pakistani security forces during an attempted capture of their father, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Extensive citation at Obsidian Wings, along with this analysis:

The evidence that our government held Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s sons is not conclusive, and I do not mean to suggest that it is. Still, if you had told me, six years ago, that I would find myself seriously entertaining the possibility that my own government had detained children [...] I would have thought you were insane. Disappearing people of any age, without charges or trial or anything, is what two-bit dictators do; not what we do. But disappearing children, not seventeen year olds about whom one might have interesting debates about when exactly childhood ends but seven- and nine-year olds — that’s so far across the line that it would have been unimaginable to me. And the fact, if it is one, that they are supposedly “handled with kid gloves” and “given the best of care” does not begin to make up for this. Detention is not “the best of care” for anyone. It is certainly not “the best of care” for a young child.

Second, from Pandagon, a fantasy response on an explosive issue. I’d be very interested in any politican brave enough to say something like this:

“Abortion is not fun for any woman, which is why we’d like to keep them rare. I would also like to keep heart surgery rare, if I can help it. But just as we’ll never wipe out heart disease completely, we will never wipe out unplanned pregnancy completely, because women are human and sometimes they have circumstances outside of their direct control. I support prevention in health care. We can reduce the number of abortions and number of heart surgeries by helping Americans have better access to prevention. In the case of abortion, the best prevention is contraception and comprehensive sex education. I’d like to empower women to have the fullest range of options available so they can make the best decision for themselves.”

And finally, a rare example of a judge losing his temper in a stinging footnote to a ruling in the Lewis Libby case. What is most interesting to me is who the judge thought his audience was. I don’t read legal cases as a rule. Do judges write these sorts of insults as a shout-out to their clerks or buddies?

Do they do it as a wink and nod to say “Yeah, I have to rule this way on procedural grounds, but don’t worry, I’m not buying their baloney”? Or is there a more substantive purpose, a way of putting yourself on the record so that there is no later misunderstanding about your allegiances?

(Yes, it’s an annoying PDF, but it’s one paragraph. Click through and read it already.)

Via How Appealing.

(Folks, as most of you have probably figured out, I’m not Nicholas. He’s kindly given me posting privileges, and I’m going to do my best to avoid becoming the kudzu of his blog.)

Say it again

I’ve done more thinking about torture in the last six years than I ever imagined would be necessary. One of the few consolations of today’s awful landscape is hearing a respected person use clear, simple words to show how wrong it is.

This is from hilzoy.

I would have thought that anyone who was thinking about endorsing torture would first stop and think very, very carefully about whether it is actually effective. […]

Arguing about torture without asking this question is like arguing about whether you must, absolutely must, eat your children to keep yourself from starving to death without first checking to see whether you have any other food available.

It’s the best 532 words you’ll read this week.