Category Archives: politics

giving kangaroos a bad name

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Bush era military commissions were constituted for the express purpose of ensuring convictions. It was an axiom of Bush era “justice” that there was no such thing as an alleged terrorist. As one commentator on NPR noted yesterday or the day before, if you determine that you want to convict somebody of a crime and rig up a court in which to do so, you’ve given kangaroos a bad name. But apparently that’s the reason for the Obama administration’s revival of the Bush era military commissions, according to stories in this morning’s New York Times and Washington Post.

According to Post writers Michael D. Shear and Peter Finn:

Inside the administration, the debate over the military commissions was rigorous, with Obama eventually siding with the generals and other military officials who feared that bringing some detainees before regular courts would present enormous legal hurdles and could risk acquittals.

Of course any honest litigation risks acquittal of the accused. In this case it would appear that legitimate trials of the thirteen or so alleged terrorists for whom Obama is reviving the military commissions would be jeopardized by the fact that these detainees were not given Miranda warnings by the FBI lawyers who re-interviewed them and obtained confessions to replace earlier statements obtained under torture.

The whole thing stinks, but it seems likely that the military considers these thirteen to be guilty and dangerous. It also seems likely that Obama considers that he has made a least of evils choice in a situation that offered him no good. The rest is spin, particularly the administration claim of consistency for a policy choice that clearly violates Obama campaign promises. I’m thinking the spin is aimed less at ACLU and other liberal criticism, which it appears to counter, than at the fulminations of Richard Cheney and Obama’s obdurate Republican opponents in the congress. According to Robert Gibbs:

The president has been consistent in his views on this issue and been consistent on what was lacking in order to ensure justice, in order to ensure protection, and most of all to ensure that this process goes forward with and doesn’t see repeated legal stalls in going through the court system.

This is ethical doublespeak that would do credit to Karl Rove. How can the military commissions “ensure justice” when they have been expressly constituted, and now revived, in order to ensure convictions, or in Gibbs’s words, “to ensure that this process goes forward with and doesn’t see repeated legal stalls in going through the court system”? Still, it may clarify the policy intention.

The depredations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon weakened the presidency itself, just as George Bush did during his eight years of overstepping and criminal conduct in office. But I think Jimmy Carter may have been mistaken when he more or less embraced a weakened presidency. I’ve always been of the opinion that it was the Iran hostage crisis that brought Carter down.

I can understand why Obama doesn’t want to uncover and expose the crimes and misdemeanors of his predecesor. I can even understand some limited continuation of Bush era policies when undoing them would cause harm in itself. The country doesn’t need another Watergate. However, in trying to appear tough on national defense Obama risks appearing pusillanimous in the face of right-wing criticism. That prospect bothers me a lot.

And there’s one other thing. Will the government seek the death penalty against any defendants tried by military commissions? It’s a very disturbing thought that we might put to death persons whom we have already tortured and incarcerated without trial for many years. It’s even more disturbing that we might do such a thing on the basis of determinations made by kangaroo courts.

yet once more . . .

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Yesterday the Supreme Court began yet another debate about race, this time about whether a test for promotion that favors white candidates may legitimately be used by the Hartford, Connecticut, fire department. White candidates who were denied promotion on the basis of the test had sued, claiming discrimination (i. e. that they were refused promotion because of their race). No black fire fighters passed the Hartford promotion test–it’s not an unfamiliar situation. St. Louis Fire Chief, Sherman George, was fired by Mayor Francis Slay in a similar case.

In the case before the Supreme Court, the arguments quickly took shape around the clichés of the affirmative action debate. Here’s what Robert Barnes reports in The Washington Post as plaintiff’s attorney Gregory S. Coleman’s presentation of the heart of the plaintiff’s case:

Racial classifications are inherently pernicious and, if not checked, lead as they did in New Haven to regrettable and socially destructive racial politics, [Coleman] told the court. He said New Haven officials scuttled the promotions not because they found fault with the test, which they had commissioned from a private company, but because the results caused a political uproar.

The court is sensitive to the perception among some whites that affirmative action programs are unfair to them and seems set to endorse the proposition that racially discriminatory outcomes do not establish a basis for municipalities to reject test results such as the ones at issue in Hartford.

Barnes reports that at one point in the questioning yesterday, Justice Roberts “asked Deputy Solicitor General Edwin S. Kneedler whether he could ‘assure me that the government’s position would be the same’ if the results had been reversed — if black applicants had scored well and no whites were eligible for advancement.” Apparently Justice Roberts did not find Kneedler’s affirmative answer satisfactory, and he is right; though his initial question is wrong and wrong headed.

White racism remains entrenched in American life from top to bottom, the institutional racism of white privilege. It may be that affirmative action programs have done all they can do to change this situation and that what remains must be left to hope and good will as our society evolves. But if the court rules as it seems set to rule and endorses institutional racism, that will be a serious setback to the almost century-old effort to redress racial injustice through the courts, to the legacy of James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. DuBois, and Thurgood Marshall.

As Barnes puts it:

[These] arguments come as the court has grown more skeptical of [race based] policies, and in the wake of the election of the nation’s first black president, who has urged a new conversation about the effects of past discrimination and the future of race relations.

It will be a truly mournful thing if one consequence of the election of Barack Obama turns out to be an endorsement of white privilege by the United States Supreme Court.

puerile supremes guffaw about strip search

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I am amazed and very seriously troubled by the language and tenor of arguments at the United States Supreme Court in the case of Safford Unified School District v. Redding. I am also outraged at the tone of the reporting of this language by New York Times writer Adam Liptak.

This is the case of Savana Redding, who was strip searched by school officials in Safford, Arizona, looking for an ibuprofen pill and acting on a “tip” from another student. Redding was 13 and in the eighth grade at the time. Both male and female school officials participated in the search, which found no ibuprofen or any other “controlled substance.”

Here is Liptak’s lead:

The United States Supreme Court spent an hour on Tuesday debating what middle school students are apt to put in their underwear and what should be done about it.

After that it’s all downhill. Liptak reports with apparent relish comments from the justices which are vulgar, voyeuristic, and offensive. Apparently, even Redding’s attorney participated in the verbal undressing of his client, commenting at one point that “there’s a certain ick factor to this.”

At another point, compounding the “ick factor,” Justice Breyer offered the following profundity:

In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day, . . . We changed for gym, O.K.? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear.

After which, according to Liptak, “The courtroom rocked with laughter, and the justice grew a little flustered at having apparently misspoken.”

According to Liptak, “While Supreme Court arguments can often be bone-dry exercises in statutory exegesis and doctrinal refinement, Tuesday’s session was grounded in vivid facts: school snitches, drugs, underwear and body cavities.” At one point, Justice Roberts exclaimed, “The issue here covers the brassiere as well, which doesn’t seem as outlandish as the underpants.” Later, Justice Scalia, with his usual profound confidence, asserted:

You search in the student’s pack, you search the student’s outer garments, and you have a reasonable suspicion that the student has drugs. . . . Don’t you have, after conducting all these other searches, a reasonable suspicion that she has drugs in her underpants . . . ? You’ve searched everywhere else. . . . By God, the drugs must be in her underpants.

This might be funny, if it weren’t so awful. And nowhere in this discourse, not from the attorney for the plaintiff, nor from the federal attorneys arguing as friends of the court, nor from the justices (except for Justice Ginsburg), nor from the reporter, is there any recognition of the obscenity of the violation of this young woman’s privacy, her body, and her person by mindless school officials mindlessly enforcing a mindless zero-tolerance policy.

I’m surprised that Liptak didn’t report Justice Ginsburg’s remarks critical of the strip search, as several bloggers have done. Indeed, Liptak seems eager to join in the boys’ club atmosphere he describes. One blogger notes that

After [Justice] Breyer wondered aloud just “how bad” the search really was, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg interrupted energetically to underscore how bad it was. She said Redding and another student in the case weren’t just told to strip to their underwear. “They were asked to shake their bras out, to stretch the top of their pants and shake that out.”

The same blogger remarks ruefully that “Ginsburg has said more than once that she feels lonely on the Court as the only woman;” and adds that “this must have been one moment when that loneliness was acute.”

According to Liptak, the court’s mood was summed up when Justice Souter remarked as follows, “My thought process, . . . is I would rather have the kid embarrassed by a strip search, if we can’t find anything short of that, than to have some other kids dead because the stuff is distributed at lunchtime and things go awry.” Begging the court and the reporter’s pardon, the insensitivity of this remark is worse than appalling, it is a dishonest appeal to a false choice, and worse still: it is an off-the-rack cliché. It reflects nobody’s actual thinking. It is intellectual junk.

And apparently no thought on anybody’s part, either, that the events at issue occurred in a school, or any concern about what such scenarios teach. Here’s what they teach — that the people who have the power in life can do anything they want to you, and you have no recourse. They teach that to young vulnerable teenagers. I’m glad Savana Redding is fighting back. I hope she wins. I would have no objection to a little jail time for the school officials who molested her.

But if the language of the majority of the justices here noted is an indication of the seriousness with which this case will be adjudicated, I don’t have much hope.

worldlessness

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My beloved and I were in London in 2004 as the Abu Ghraib scandal was breaking in the news. I remember buying a copy of The Guardian at the desk of our little Bloomsbury hotel and reading the first European accounts I saw of abuses there. I also remember two conversations about my country’s Iraq adventure: one with a British woman, somewhat more elderly than I am, at breakfast one morning; and another with a French couple we shared a table with for dinner one evening at an outdoor café. Both conversations made me uneasy.

As I listened to these chance acquaintances explain that they still liked Americans even though they had serious reservations about the American government and its actions, I entertained the possibility, for the first time in my life, of being a stateless person, a person without a country. For a moment I shared something with refugees from totalitarian oppression. I experienced something similar in conversation with a Dutch couple in Berlin just a couple of years ago. They wept as they spoke of Franklin Roosevelt, but about my country’s present affairs they could only shake their heads and look away.

As an American I like to think of myself as a citizen of the whole world. I expect, wherever I travel, to be met as a potential friend and not as an enemy by those whom I encounter. I consider that the cultural, linguistic, and historical differences that cast us as foreigners to one another are embedded in the world that grows up around us, as Hannah Arendt puts it, that forms “in the interspaces between men in all their variety.”

Arendt speaks of refugees and refugee groups — persons who live in a diaspora — as worldless. In the well-known essay on Lessing that opens Men in Dark Times, she argues that among refugee groups social cohesiveness expresses itself in that fraternity so praised by the romantics, a kind of absolute solidarity as little tolerant of difference as its totalitarian oppressors. On the other hand, in the world of politics social cohesivness expresses itself as friendship.

For these, and many other reaons, it’s particularly gratifying to me that my new president is making the sort of entrance upon the world stage that he is making this week. Just as he has revivified public discourse in the United States and freed it from domination by the true believing, so he seems to be engaging the great world as a statesman, as a world leader who seeks the good of all rather than the perpetuation of American hegemony.

–worldless no more; it’s a fine thing.