Month: June 2006

Stupid Policy Tricks (And Mean-Spirited Too!)

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by hilzoy From the Washington Post: “A Medicaid rule takes effect tomorrow that will require more than 50 million poor Americans to prove their citizenship or lose their medical benefits or long-term care. Under the rule, intended to curb fraud by illegal immigrants, such proof as a passport or a birth certificate must be offered … Read more

Lee Siegel As Robespierre

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by hilzoy I didn’t comment on Lee Siegel’s claim that the blogosphere is “hard fascism with a Microsoft face”, along with the follow-up post that made it clear that he really did mean to call us all fascists, on the grounds that calling people ‘moron’ or ‘wanker’ constitutes “attempts to autocratically or dictatorially control criticism.” … Read more

Hamdan: The Bigger Picture

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by hilzoy

The more I mull over the Hamdan decision (pdf), the clearer it seems that it’s a mistake to focus exclusively on its implications for the prisoners at Guantanamo. Don’t get me wrong: there are surely innocent people down there, held without contact with the outside world, often in prolonged isolation, whose families and loved ones may not know whether or not they are alive; and every single one of them who has a chance to contest his imprisonment in a fair hearing has gained something of enormous value. It’s just that this isn’t all that’s at stake; and that’s true in both a good and a bad way.

The good news, of course, is that this decision really does seem not just to extend the Geneva Convention’s Article 3 to all detainees, but to demolish the administration’s claim that both the Authorization for the Use of Military Force and Article II of the Constitution give him the right to do whatever he wants, including ignoring existing statutes. I cheered when I read this footnote from the majority opinion:

““Whether or not the President has independent power, absent congressional authorization, to convene military commissions, he may not disregard limitations that Congress has, in proper exercise of its own war powers, placed on his powers.””

Congress does have war powers! The President cannot disregard statutes at will! We live in a Republic, not a dictatorship! It’s a sad commentary on our present circumstances that things like this have to be reaffirmed, but it would, of course, be vastly worse had they been denied. (As they could easily have been had Bush been able to nominate one more Justice, and had Roberts not had to recuse himself.)

However, these points have already been made very well by Glenn Greenwald, Marty Lederman, Jack Balkin, and Karl Blanke. Rather than repeat what they have said more elegantly, and with a lot more knowledge to back it up, I’m going to focus on the bad news, which is: this decision in no way ensures that all, or even most, of the people our government is currently detaining outside the normal legal system will have any rights or recourse whatsoever.

Why is that? One word: Bagram.

“Other military and administration officials said the growing detainee population at Bagram, which rose from about 100 prisoners at the start of 2004 to as many as 600 at times last year, according to military figures, was in part a result of a Bush administration decision to shut off the flow of detainees into Guantánamo after the Supreme Court ruled that those prisoners had some basic due-process rights. The question of whether those same rights apply to detainees in Bagram has not been tested in court.

Until the court ruling, Bagram functioned as a central clearing house for the global fight against terror. Military and intelligence personnel there sifted through captured Afghan rebels and suspected terrorists seized in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, sending the most valuable and dangerous to Guantánamo for extensive interrogation, and generally releasing the rest.

But according to interviews with current and former administration officials, the National Security Council effectively halted the movement of new detainees into Guantánamo at a cabinet-level meeting at the White House on Sept. 14, 2004.

Wary of further angering Guantánamo’s critics, the council authorized a final shipment of 10 detainees eight days later from Bagram, the officials said. But it also indicated that it wanted to review and approve any Defense Department proposals for further transfers. Despite repeated requests from military officials in Afghanistan and one formal recommendation by a Pentagon working group, no such proposals have been considered, officials said.

“Guantánamo was a lightning rod,” said a former senior administration official who participated in the discussions and who, like many of those interviewed, would discuss the matter in detail only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy surrounding it. “For some reason, people did not have a problem with Bagram. It was in Afghanistan.””

Conditions at Bagram are worse than at Guantanamo:

“From the accounts of former detainees, military officials and soldiers who served there, a picture emerges of a place that is in many ways rougher and more bleak than its counterpart in Cuba. Men are held by the dozen in large wire cages, the detainees and military sources said, sleeping on the floor on foam mats and, until about a year ago, often using plastic buckets for latrines. Before recent renovations, they rarely saw daylight except for brief visits to a small exercise yard.

“Bagram was never meant to be a long-term facility, and now it’s a long-term facility without the money or resources,” said one Defense Department official who has toured the detention center. Comparing the prison with Guantánamo, the official added, “Anyone who has been to Bagram would tell you it’s worse.””

(Things have improved recently, though: “Corrals surrounded by stacked razor wire that had served as general-population cells gave way to less-forbidding wire pens that generally hold no more than 15 detainees, military officials said.”

When wire pens holding fifteen people count as an improvement, something has gone badly wrong.)

Moreover, while many of the prisoners at Guantanamo have lawyers, those at Bagram don’t:

“But some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as two or three years. And unlike those at Guantánamo, they have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as “enemy combatants,” military officials said.

Privately, some administration officials acknowledge that the situation at Bagram has increasingly come to resemble the legal void that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June 2004 affirming the right of prisoners at Guantánamo to challenge their detention in United States courts.

While Guantánamo offers carefully scripted tours for members of Congress and journalists, Bagram has operated in rigorous secrecy since it opened in 2002. It bars outside visitors except for the International Red Cross and refuses to make public the names of those held there. The prison may not be photographed, even from a distance.”

Moreover:

“The most basic complaint of those released was that they had been wrongly detained in the first place. In many cases, former prisoners said they had been denounced by village enemies or arrested by the local police after demanding bribes they could not pay. (…)

As at Guantánamo, the military has instituted procedures at Bagram intended to ensure that the detainees are in fact enemy combatants. Yet the review boards at Bagram give fewer rights to the prisoners than those used in Cuba, which have been criticized by human rights officials as kangaroo courts. (…)

Reviews are conducted after 90 days and at least annually thereafter, but detainees are not informed of the accusations against them, have no advocate and cannot appear before the board, officials said. “The detainee is not involved at all,” one official familiar with the process said.”*

Bagram is scheduled to be shut down within about a year. Most of the detainees will be turned over to the Afghan government, but some may end up in the new high-security prison our government is building near Kabul.

***

As I read the Hamdan decision, it does require that the protections of Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions be extended to all detainees, including these. However, there doesn’t seem to be any way at all for this requirement to be enforced. It’s not just that it’s unclear either that Hamdan allows for an individual cause of action based on the Geneva Conventions, or that the arguments the court made in Rasul would apply to detainees held in Afghanistan. The more serious problem is: if no one other than the ICRC, which has a policy of strict confidentiality, is allowed to visit this facility; if the names of detainees are not released; if no one outside the government has any clue what’s going on there, or to whom, then how on earth can anyone try to enforce the law there? How could the detainees get lawyers? And how could those lawyers possibly represent them adequately without being allowed to meet them, learn about the conditions in which they’re being kept or the justification for keeping them there, and so on?

(I’d be interested in any lawyers’ take on this. How would one bring the law to bear in a situation like this if the government was determined to prevent it?)

In my more cynical moments, I interpret Bush’s claim that he wants to close Guantanamo down not as the expression of an idle wish, but in light of these facts. The Supreme Court, he might say, thinks we made a mistake in not treating detainees at Guantanamo in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. I think we made a mistake in allowing people access to those detainees. We corrected that mistake two years ago; we do have to figure out what to do with the detainees who are still at Guantanamo, but going forward, the Supreme Court won’t be bothering us anymore. Because we have created a real legal black hole, from which no light escapes.

And if it turns out that the administration did slip up by allowing one tiny piece of information to slip out — specifically, the name and location of their new Guantanamo — and this somehow allows the courts to extend legal protections to the detainees there, I predict a sudden increase in the populations of the black sites, about which not even that much is known.

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Hamdan: Clearing Up A Few Points

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by hilzoy

When I read the majority opinion in Hamdan (pdf), I thought to myself: I can see, right now, that one part of this decision can be taken out of context and made to sound ridiculous, even though when you actually read the decision, it isn’t. And lo! Andrew McCarthy at The Corner makes the very point I had anticipated, in addition to another so stupid it didn’t even occur to me. I’m just going to go through these points — plus one more about the Detainee Treatment Act — for the benefit of those of you who don’t want to read the entire 185 pages of legal reasoning for yourselves, so that you can put these objections in context.

The unanticipated point is that if the Supreme Court rules that al Qaeda detainees have Geneva protections, then “the Supreme Court will have dictated that we now have a treaty with al Qaeda”. Wrong. Al Qaeda is not a signatory to the Geneva Conventions. In signing and ratifying those Conventions, we did not enter into a treaty with them. What we did was: to enter into a treaty that governs our conduct with respect not only to soldiers of countries that have signed and ratified the Geneva Conventions, but also with regard to other people. That does not mean that we have “a treaty with those people”, any more than the fact that the fact that members of the Kiwanis Club have Geneva protections means that each of the 71 state parties (pdf) to the Geneva Conventions has a treaty with the Kiwanis Club. To say that it does mean this is just dumb.

The point I expected concerns the Court’s reasons for holding that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to al Qaeda detainees. (It’s called ‘Common Article 3’ because it is Article 3 in all four Geneva Conventions; see, for instance, here.) Article 3 reads as follows:

“Art. 3. In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:

(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.
To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons: (a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; (b) taking of hostages; (c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment; (d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

(2) The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.

An impartial humanitarian body, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, may offer its services to the Parties to the conflict.

The Parties to the conflict should further endeavour to bring into force, by means of special agreements, all or part of the other provisions of the present Convention.

The application of the preceding provisions shall not affect the legal status of the Parties to the conflict.”

The point I expected was: but this only applies to “armed conflict not of an international character”. Our fight against al Qaeda is obviously of an international character! They attacked us here; we attacked them in Afghanistan; how much more “international” can you get?

What follows is an attempt to explain and gloss the Court’s reasoning, as I understand it. I think I agree with it, though I’d feel more confident if i knew more about the history of the Geneva Conventions. However, my point here is not to convince anyone that it’s right, but just to make it clear that it’s not the silly point that the objection above makes it sound like.

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Hamdan

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by hilzoy The Supreme Court has found that the military tribunals set up by the administration to try enemy combatants held at Guantanamo and elsewhere are illegal: “The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees. The ruling, a rebuke to the administration … Read more

Who Elects These People?

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by hilzoy

Now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their country; and if you happen to be from the US, you could do a lot worse than sending a campaign contribution to Joe Sestak. He’s running against Curt Weldon, who is, in my completely unprofessional opinion, just the sort of lunatic we do not need in Congress. Many of you have probably seen the story about Rep. Curt Weldon’s attempt to discover WMD in Iraq as a campaign stunt (h/t TPMMuckraker):

“A caravan of jeeps and heavy equipment crawls across the Iraqi desert, headed for a secret location on the banks of the Euphrates River.
Their mission: to dig 25 feet down into the riverbed and unearth concrete bunkers filled with chemical weapons produced by Saddam Hussein’s regime and hidden before the outbreak of the Iraq war in 2003.

And who’s that, dressed in a safari jacket and a pith helmet, supervising the dig?

None other than our own U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon (R., Pa.), leading a secret mission to unearth the Holy Grail of the war: the weapons of mass destruction that have eluded every other U.S. search team since our troops invaded three years ago.

Does this sound incredible – or ludicrous? Not to Dave Gaubatz.
Gaubatz said that Weldon intended just such an expedition over the Memorial Day weekend, until Gaubatz put the kibosh on it. (…)

Gaubatz said he first contacted Weldon and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R., Mich.), head of the House Intelligence Committee, to share his info and get them to prod the Defense Department and intelligence agencies to do the WMD searches in the locales.

Instead, Gaubatz said, Weldon latched onto the idea as a “personal political venture” and discussed a Hoekstra-Weldon trip to Iraq, under the guise of visiting the troops, that would detour to Nasiriyah.

Once there, Gaubatz said, the congressmen planned to persuade the U.S. military commander to lend them the equipment and men to go digging by the Euphrates for the cache Gaubatz believed to be there.

He said that Weldon made it clear he didn’t want word leaked to the Pentagon, to intelligence officials, or to Democratic congressmen.

As Gaubatz told me: “They even worked out how it would go. If there was nothing there, nothing would be said. If the site had been [scavenged], nothing would be said. But, if it was still there, they would bring the press corps out.” (…)

“It was treated as an election issue that would get votes,” he said. “I’ve never been involved in politics, so it was a very big eye-opener to me.” (…)

After the meeting, he said, he called a reporter at the Washington Times and alerted her of the plan. In turn, he said, she called Weldon’s office to get confirmation. That inquiry, Gaubatz said, scuttled the project.”

Curt Weldon is really a piece of work. In fact, it’s amazing how many stories that I had filed away under ‘Congresspeople being bizarre as usual’ turned out to be stories about Weldon. For starters…

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Once Upon A Time…

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by hilzoy Sometime in the next few days, I plan to see An Inconvenient Truth. (Finally, the various friends I want to see it with will all be both in town and free.) In preparation, I present the following inspiring story: Once upon a time, there was a looming environmental catastrophe. When a few scientists … Read more

Rawls Made Easy As Easy As I Can Make Him

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by hilzoy

As both a background to Sebastian’s post on Rawls and a justification of my own views, here’s a short version of Rawls’ arguments on justice. In what follows, I’ll indicate, at some points, which texts I’m drawing on; I’ll refer to A Theory of Justice as TJ, and Political Liberalism as PL.

The Basics: The basic question Rawls sets out to answer is (not coincidentally) one I raised in a previous post, namely: given several different ways of structuring the basic institutions of society (or, as I said in my posts, the rules of the game), how do we decide which is just? Note a few points: (1) He is talking about the rules of the game, not ad hoc interventions. (2) He limits his inquiry to justice within a society, and assumes that the society in question exists in conditions of “moderate scarcity”, meaning that “natural and other resources are not so abundant that schemes of cooperation become superfluous, nor are conditions so harsh that fruitful ventures must inevitably break down” (TJ 127.)

His answer is, basically: a just system is one that would be chosen by people in what he calls the ‘Original Position’. (Trust me: all the off-color jokes involving this phrase have already been made.) In the Original Position, people know all sorts of general facts about the world, including not just science but also economics. However, they do not know any particular facts about themselves: their race, their gender, their specific views about what kind of life they want to lead, their religion and values, and so forth. They do know, however, that they have some view about what sort of life they want to lead; they just don’t know which it is.

They are also assumed to be fully rational, and mutually disinterested. ‘Mutual disinterest’ means that while, for all they know, they may care about all sorts of other people in real life, in the Original Position they are concerned to maximize their own good. Note that the better off I am in real life, the more I can do to help others, so making this assumption in the Original Position enhances my ability to be generous in the real world, if I want.

So the basic idea is: we decide what principles we should use to assess the rules of our society as if we didn’t know who we would be, or even which kind of person we would be — born rich or born poor; black, white, Asian, Native American, or whatever; Catholic, Muslim, atheist, Jain, or an adherent of some other religion; smart or not so smart; male or female; and so on. What we would choose under those conditions determines what rules are just.

According to Rawls, under these conditions people would choose the following principles as criteria by which to assess social institutions:

I. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all.

II. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.

(These are generally referred to as ‘the two principles’.)

So: why does Rawls say these things? I’ll consider first his argument for the Original Position, and then his argument for the two principles.

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On Rawls

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by Sebastian– Hilzoy’s recent post on liberals and libertarianism (which attracted surprisingly few comments when compared to the other posts in the series) reminded me of something I wanted to talk about.  Since she specifically didn’t want to deal with it in that post I thought I would bring it to another thread rather than … Read more

Shameless plug

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by Katherine There’s a book coming out tomorrow that I’m recommending to more or less everyone I know: Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power, by Joseph Margulies. I haven’t read the finished product yet, but I was a volunteer research & editorial assistant for this project, so I read drafts of the manuscript more … Read more

Open Thread

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by hilzoy If you haven’t already seen a photo of the world’s cutest baby, go to it — and, again, congratulations to rilkefan and Mrs. R, as well as to the rilkekind for making his way to the outside world. I just accepted an offer on my old house, which is very good news, though … Read more

More On Lieberman

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by hilzoy From a friend from Connecticut with some experience in low-level party politics, a very perceptive person whose judgment I trust: “In 1980, when I was 20 years old, my parents bought me a three-piece suit. I didn’t have too many occasions to wear a suit, so when I arranged an interview with the … Read more

Thanks, Congress!

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by hilzoy Brad DeLong is right: whoever is responsible for this should be voted out of office immediately: “THE first thing to understand about the hybrid tax credit is that it was never really intended to reduce oil imports from the Middle East or slow the effects of global warming. The credit was created to … Read more

Filing Cabinets

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by hilzoy This story is a few days old, but worth thinking about nonetheless: “United States Special Operations troops employed a set of harsh, unauthorized interrogation techniques against detainees in Iraq during a four-month period in early 2004, long after approval for their use was rescinded, according to a Pentagon inquiry released Friday. (…) Despite … Read more

One Percent

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by hilzoy I ordered my copy of Ron Suskind’s One Percent Doctrine last night; and now that I’m done with my last post, I can write about some of the reviews it has gotten. (And yes, of course: Gary got there first.) Consider this passage from the NYT: “This book augments the portrait of Mr. … Read more

Libertarians And Democrats: Part 3

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by hilzoy

This is the third part of my response to Mona’s post on Libertarians and Democrats at QandO. (First part here; second part here.) As I said before, I am not an expert on libertarianism. I will try to depict it accurately, but I have not done a huge amount of research on the foundations of libertarianism before writing this. If I misrepresent libertarianism, it’s unintentional, and I hope people will correct me.

In Part 2, I argued that justice requires a set of rules governing (among other things) property, rather than ad hoc interventions to create some preferred outcome, that property is a social construct, and that no specific set of rules governing property constitutes a presumptively legitimate baseline, deviations from which require a special justification. All sets of rules are on a par, including the set that defines unrestricted property rights.

In this post, I want (finally!) to get to the question: which set of rules is just? And how does my answer to this question differ from libertarians’? I’m going to get there by deferring the question of justifying my claims; I’ve decided that if I don’t cut to the chase, I may never get to the end of this. (Short version: Rawls.) But first, a few short notes.

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Words Fail Me

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by hilzoy And since they do, I have no choice but to cash in on any credibility I may have earned on this blog and issue a direct order: If you are somewhere where it won’t be a problem for you to burst out laughing, or say “Oh. My. God.” loudly, or scream, watch Connie … Read more

Please, Joe Lieberman, Don’t Throw Us In That Briar Patch!

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by hilzoy

Every so often columnists for major newspapers decide to let someone else use them to make a point or send a message. On Sunday, David Broder placed his column at the service of Joe Lieberman, so that Lieberman could threaten to run as an independent:

“Lieberman insists he can win the primary. But he has another option. Connecticut law says that he could run as an independent, but he would have to file 7,500 signatures the day after the primary.

He says he knows of no effort to gather signatures now. But he also says, “I want to put my whole record before the whole voting population of Connecticut” — clearly implying an independent run if he loses to Lamont in August.

Thus, a possibility John Bailey could not have imagined: A former Democratic vice presidential candidate, a three-term senator, a former state Senate majority leader and state attorney general forced to run as an independent.

“I know I’m taking a position that is not popular within the party,” Lieberman said, “but that is a challenge for the party — whether it will accept diversity of opinion or is on a kind of crusade or jihad of its own to have everybody toe the line. No successful political party has ever done that.””

This is a column that might as well end with the words: “I’m Joe Lieberman, and I approved this message.” And a pretty repellent message it is.

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Pathetic Attempt

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It is a pathetic attempt at judging when you can’t tell the difference between the art and the stand (Hat Tip Abiola at Foreign Dispatches): Britain’s Royal Academy of Art put a block of slate on display, topped by a small piece of wood, in the mistaken belief it was a work of art. The … Read more

Bravo Bush!

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by hilzoy Credit where credit is due: it’s really great that President Bush has designated an area the size of Montana as a national monument. This isn’t just important for the area itself; studies show that protected areas in oceans help to rejuvenate fish stocks in surrounding areas as well. And even though this bit … Read more

My Kind Of Kid

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by hilzoy Via AmericaBlog, the story of a kid who chose, as the theme for his third birthday party, The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer: “Henry clearly enjoys watching the program. When the anchor came on screen, he burst into a huge smile and yelled out, “Jim!” Henry later noticed a change in the theme orchestration … Read more

Dishonoring Our Country

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by hilzoy UPDATE: The Albanian Government has now stated that it is not considering deporting the Uighurs. Thanks to Mark, in comments, for the tip. –END UPDATE From the Toronto Star (h/t Katherine): “Five ethnic Uighurs from northwest China suffered through four years in Guantanamo Bay only to be dumped by the U.S. in one … Read more

Libertarians And Democrats: Part 2

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by hilzoy

This is the second part of my response to Mona’s post on Libertarians and Democrats at QandO. (First part here.) As before, the following caveats apply:

(1) I am not an expert on libertarianism. I will try to depict it accurately, but I have not done a huge amount of research on the foundations of libertarianism before writing this. If I misrepresent libertarianism, it’s unintentional, and I hope people will correct me. (2) In this post, contrary to my usual practice, I will use ‘Democrats’ and ‘Republicans’ to refer not to all registered members of those parties, but to those who presently hold power within them. Mona’s post is, after all, about which party to support, and this presumably depends a lot more on the nature and views of the people in power than on whether, e.g., some members of a given party are reasonable and nice.

In this post, I want to lay out some fundamental points about justice and property rights. This will involve noting one point at which libertarians might, but do not have to, disagree with me. In my next post (and yes, this post does keep splitting apart), I will get to what I take to be the main difference, to which this is all background.

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Libertarians And The Democratic Party: Part 1

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by hilzoy

A few days ago, Mona wrote a guest post at QandO, arguing that libertarians should think seriously about supporting Democrats rather than Republicans. I agree. At present, Democrats are much better on the rule of law and the protection of individual liberty. (There is some argument about this in the comments to Mona’s piece, but I can’t imagine how anyone could think that the Democrats are in the same league as the Bush administration, which has, after all, asserted that it has the right to detain US citizens indefinitely without charges or counsel.) It has been decades since Republicans could claim to be the party of small government with a straight face. Democrats are a lot closer to libertarians on social issues like abortion, gay marriage, and drug laws; in comments, someone adduced smoking bans as an instance of Democrats legislating morality, but it’s surely relevant that smoking bans only really got going once there was evidence that secondhand smoke is harmful — that is, once smoking ceased to be solely a matter of individual choice.

However, I can’t really see that presenting arguments on this will really advance the discussion, both because, as a Democrat, I am obviously open to charges of bias, and also because I’d risk telling libertarians things they already know.

Instead, I thought I’d try to locate the differences between libertarianism and my version of liberalism, since liberalism-sub-hilzoy actually has a lot in common with libertarianism, at least as far as its underlying arguments go. But it also has one major difference, which I thought might be worth talking about. However, en route to writing about that major difference, I got drawn into other matters; and so I will talk about that major difference in a subsequent post. For now, I will state two caveats, and then focus on a few other things that are also important.

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Doomed To Disappointment

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by hilzoy I was looking at the BBC News home page a few days ago, and glanced at some of the World Cup coverage. I think it’s wonderful that the US made it, and I hope they do well, but what really captivated me was the discovery that tiny Togo had qualified. I am a … Read more

Worth Noting

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by von I’LL LEAVE IT to Hilzoy to address the details (if she wishes), but I do want to point out an interesting ethical wrinkle in the embryonic stem cell debate (H/T Daniel Drezner).  Amanda Schaffer’s article in the New York Times seems to provide a decent lay of the land: A philosopher in Britain … Read more

Coal in the Fitzmas Stocking

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by Charles The rest of the blogosphere is talking about it, so why not here.  The way it usually works is that authorities determine if a crime has been committed, then they investigate.  Not so in the strange twilight world of Plame, where the threatened indictments are not for outing a CIA agent, but for … Read more

Piecing Together Haditha

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by Charles

In an attempt to get up to speed on Haditha, I looked through a number of links to find out what witnesses said and to offer some commentary. Unlike John Murtha, I haven’t judged those Marines guilty because I’d rather wait until the NCIS finishes its investigation. But in the meantime, the following is what I was able to dredge up. It still clocks in at over 9,000 words but there’s still a lot we don’t know.

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Peter Beinart And Getting It Right

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by hilzoy

One of the many articles I wanted to write about while I was moving, but didn’t, was a question and answer session between Kevin Drum and Peter Beinart, which contained the following exchange:

KD: I went back and re-read some of your old columns from 2002 and 2003, and at various times before the Iraq war, you argued, among other things, that containment was no longer an option, that a war with Iraq wouldn’t detract from the broader war with Al Qaeda, that anti-Americanism would probably die away once we’d won, that preventive war was a good idea now that we didn’t have to worry about retaliation from the Soviet Union, and that you didn’t realize that the Bush administration was populated by ideological hacks. In the book, you go on to admit that you were wrong about WMD and wrong about the need for international legitimacy. That’s a hell of a lot to be wrong about, isn’t it? Especially since plenty of people were pointing out all these things at the time? (…)

KD: The obvious question, then, is with a track record like that why should anyone listen to you now?

PB: Anything one writes deserves to be judged by itself. The Democratic Party nominated someone in 2004 who had been flat wrong in his opposition to the Gulf War in 1991, I think most people would acknowledge that. Many people who were very prominent figures in the Democratic foreign policy debate and the Democratic Party in general–most of the people who were there at that time in 1991 were wrong about that. The vast majority of the party was wrong, and yet it still seems to me that we have things to learn from people like Sam Nunn or John Kerry. If you were to go from the Gulf War through Kosovo and Iraq, you would find that a large number of people in every facet of the liberal Democratic universe were wrong, on at least one of those wars. Very, very few people were right about all three of them. The people who were–and I think Al Gore is in this category–deserve a significant amount of credit, but the truth of the matter is, if you were looking for an untainted record, you would find very few people. (Emphasis added.)

This is just one more piece of evidence that Peter Beinart and I do not hang out with the same kinds of people. He (and other opinion writers) seem to find it obvious that almost no one whose opinions were worth taking seriously was right on all three wars. Among the people I know, however, that’s not true: almost everyone I know whose opinions on policy I take at all seriously was right on all three; and so was I.

This is not because I and mine are right all the time. We aren’t — along with many people I know, I was very wrong on welfare reform, for instance. But we were right on these three wars. And I think, contra Beinart, that the reason for this is that being right on all three just wasn’t all that hard, given certain basic principles. So I’ve decided to set out, for his future use, the principles that enabled me to make these three calls correctly.

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Incidents of Manipulative Self-Injurious Behavior Culminating in Acts of Asymmetric Warfare

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by Katherine We have learned, in the past few years, that "battlefield" now means "entire earth"; that treatment that is "abusive and degrading" can still be "humane"; that "enemy combatants" can include little old ladies from Switzerland who give to the wrong charity; and that most "hanging incidents" are examples of "manipulative self-injurious behavior" rather … Read more

The HPV Vaccine And The Christian Right

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by hilzoy Yesterday the HPV vaccine was approved by the FDA. It is 100% effective against two strains of the Human Papilloma Virus that are responsible for 70% of cervical cancer cases, and two more that are responsible for 90% of cases of genital warts. (It hasn’t been approved yet for use in men and … Read more

Koss-riffic!

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by von IS IT JUST ME, or does it seem that every third attendee at YearlyKos is writing for a conservative blog? This is the most-infiltrated event since Rick Solomon and Paris Hilton made the whoopee. (Ed McMahon says, Heeyyy-Oh.) Oh, look, and here’s an open thread.  Have at it.