Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Allen Wood, Immanuel Kant, and George W. Bush

Here.

Visiting Professors from Abroad Finding it Harder to Get Into the U.S.

A distinguished academic from the U.K., who has visited a number of times at U.S. institutions, writes:

I'm thinking...of giving up longer visits to the US. Not because I don't enjoy working here. On the contrary. But for various other reasons, not least of which is the Kafkaesque bureaucracy associated with getting a visa and getting through the border and reporting every little thing one does to the feds. The whole nightmare starts with a 15-quid phone call to a rude and sullen call centre operative who handles visa appointments and slaps your wrists for asking questions. Those who live in, say, Glasgow then have to travel 500 miles to sit in the US Embassy in London incommunicado (no phones or laptops allowed, and nowhere to store them if you have the effrontery to have them with you) until someone is good and ready to take all their fingerprints and to look for trivial errors on their numerous repetitive and gratuitously intrusive forms. The cost is astronomical even without all the travel and accommodation costs. Then you never know for sure how long they will hold onto your passport: a distinguished colleague of mine recently had to cancel a long-arranged lecture in another country because the US embassy, which knew of his travel plans, kept his passport for a month AFTER confirming that his US visa had been approved! Europeans have started to refer to US travel, only half-jokingly, as 'going behind the iron curtain'. Actually, this is an insult to the Warsaw Pact countries, several of which had a much lighter touch than today's US. They're now thinking of introducing a rule that you can't buy a plane ticket to the US, even for a quick tourist visit, without advance permission from Uncle Sam! I wouldn't mind any of this if it achieved something, but we all know that it is a competition by US politicians to see who can be the biggest ultra-nationalist bully, preferably by squeezing an arbitrarily-chosen selection of non-Americans until the pips squeak.

In an era when the scholarly community in most areas of philosophy, indeed in most disciplines, is international, this is a quite pernicious development.  Have others encountered problems with getting foreign scholars into the U.S. for extended, visiting/teaching appointments?  Do others overseas share my correspondent's perceptions of the problem?  Non-anonymous comments strongly preferred, as usual, though if I can verify the identity of the commenter from the e-mail address, that will be sufficient (those addresses do not appear on the post).

The 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

I've corresponded with a few friends in other countries about the U.S. Presidential elections for 2008, and thought I'd share a few thoughts here since this is a low news time for philosophy.  (And, no, I am not going to resume political blogging as a matter of course--it really was too time-consuming, and it attracted too many right-wing whack jobs to the blog and my in-box!)  So here's my opinionated, and moderately informed, take:

The good news for humanity, of course, is that the Republicans are in bad shape, and not only because the war criminal and incompetent George Bush has alienated even many Republicans.  The leading contenders for the Republican nomination at the moment are a divorced social liberal from New York City, Rudy Giuliani, and a Mormon, Mitt Romney--both of whom will scare off the regular Protestant extremists the Republicans depend upon, though for different reasons--and a Baptist preacher, Mike Huckabee, who is so out of his depth it would be funny if the fate of the world didn't depend upon it.  The first two are committed authoritarians, the last is such a seemingly congenial reactionary bozo it's hard to know what to make of him.  But the key fact about American elections is that they are winner-take-all affairs, which means it will be the "independents"--those benighted souls who think they stand above sectarian disputes because they can't tell the difference between night and day--who will decide matters.   

The "independents" won't vote for someone who is too clearly identified with one wing of the Republican or Democratic parties:  religious zealots like Huckabee and Romney are in trouble then, but so too is Hillary Clinton, who comes with heavy baggage given her last name (and remember that Bill--who, of course, looks like a saint by comparison to his successor--barely won a majority of the popular vote in 1996).  If the Republicans nominate John McCain (who has managed to conceal his far right credentials fairly well thanks to our suppine press in America) or if the Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton, then this may really be a close race, since independents are more likely to gravitate to McCain and defect from Clinton.  But otherwise, I am hopeful we will see a repeat of 2006, when the party of the imprudently greedy, the war-mongers and the religious zealots was trounced. 

The best bet for the Democrats is obviously John Edwards, who polls better against all the likely Republican candidates than any of the other Democratic contenders--no doubt because he pulls in enough of the "independent" voters.  (He's also a real Southerner, and it has to be observed that the only Democrats to be elected President in the last forty years have been Southerners.)  Hillary Clinton suffers from being a Clinton, as well as having one of the most unappealing public personae of a national politician in recent memory.  Dick Cheney is creepier and scarier, to be sure, but "fake" is the only word that captures the impression Ms. Clinton makes every time she opens her mouth. 

Barack Obama's public positions tend to be a bit embarrassing, but I am told by some of my future colleagues who know him that he is more liberal than he lets on, and that he is aiming, on purpose, for the "mushy middle" of the American polity.  Obama's greatest liability should be obvious:  he's not white, and since de jure apartheid only ended in American forty years ago or so, there must still be 20% of the electorate that is consciously or subconciously racist, or grew up in a racist household, and will be mobilized against the mere prospect of a non-white President.  (Some of those people would likely be voting Republican anyway, but certainly not all.)  And once the Republicans are done with Barack Osama gaffes and smears, they'll lock up the racist (and racially uneasy) vote by calling attention to the Church to which Senator Obama belongs in Chicago.   (We'll know soon enough whether these concerns about racism are well-founded, starting with the Iowa caucuses this week.  Polls, I suspect, are overstating Obama's support, because of the well-known phenomenon that those responding do not want to to seem racist when answering questions.)   I am optimistic that Obama would be a more progressive President than Hillary Clinton (notwithstanding some of his mealy-mouthed rhetoric), but Edwards has taken the most genuinely progressive positions to date and is also surely more electable than either of them.

All that being said, the war criminals currently in Washington have performed so badly, in so many ways, that no matter who the Democrats nominate, they may still be able to prevail.  Of course, a lot can happen in the next ten months that may change that assessment.

UPDATE JANUARY 3:  The good news:  Senator Obama trounced the Democrat's weakest and least progressive contender, Senator Clinton, in the Iowa caucuses this evening, by a margin of 38% to 29%.  The sad news:  Senator Edwards, with 30% of the vote, is finished; given his lack of funds, and his huge investment in Iowa, he needed a resounding victory here to remain a serious contender.  That Senator Obama did so well is also a hopeful sign that the worry about latent racism will not be as much a factor as I had feared; Iowa has a negligible minority population, so for Senator Obama to have prevailed there by such a margin is an encouraging sign.  On the other hand, Iowa is not part of the "old South," and does not have the same history of racism as many states yet to come.  I certainly hope Senator Obama prevails in the remaining primaries, and in November, and that he proves to be as progressive as some of my friends assure me he actually is.

The Fake War on Terror, Part 793

I haven't done one of these in awhile, but this item is worth noting.  Also pertinent is this older piece by George Soros on the damage done by the careless talk about a "war on terror."  Perhaps if everyone just called it the "fake war on terror," it might actually have consequences? 

Forgive this brief foray back into politics...

...but if the Christian Fascist wing of the Republican Party in the U.S. really runs a third-party candidate, then they and the Republicans are doomed.  That would obviously be good news for the world and for humanity, even if the Democrats are reprehensible in their own right.

Campus Police Torture Student at the University of Florida for Asking Long Question

Did the campus cops at the University of Florida train at Abu Ghraib?  Don't watch this video if you're sensitive to the gratuitous infliction of pain on human beings.  The "statement" by the University President, J. Bernard Machen, that follows is disgraceful:  it's the worst possible example of administrative mealy-mouthness and lack of perspective I've seen in a very long time. 

UPDATE:  The plot thickens!  Though this hardly explains the tasering.  Paul Craig Roberts comments.  So, too, does Ruchira Paul.

Bush Administration's Torture of U.S. Citiziens and Others Finally on Trial (Leiter)

Useful story here from The Guardian; an excerpt:

Something remarkable is going on in a Miami courtroom. The cruel methods US interrogators have used since September 11 to "break" prisoners are finally being put on trial. This was not supposed to happen. The Bush administration's plan was to put José Padilla on trial for allegedly being part of a network linked to international terrorists. But Padilla's lawyers are arguing that he is not fit to stand trial because he has been driven insane by the government.

Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare airport, Padilla, a Brooklyn-born former gang member, was classified as an "enemy combatant" and taken to a navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina. He was kept in a cell 9ft by 7ft, with no natural light, no clock and no calendar. Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and suited in heavy goggles and headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days. He was forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who punctured the extreme sensory deprivation with sensory overload, blasting him with harsh lights and pounding sounds.....

According to his lawyers and two mental health specialists who examined him, Padilla has been so shattered that he lacks the ability to assist in his own defence. He is convinced that his lawyers are "part of a continuing interrogation program" and sees his captors as protectors. In order to prove that "the extended torture visited upon Mr Padilla has left him damaged", his lawyers want to tell the court what happened during those years in the navy brig. The prosecution strenuously objects, maintaining that "Padilla is competent" and that his treatment is irrelevant.

The US district judge Marcia Cooke disagrees. "It's not like Mr Padilla was living in a box. He was at a place. Things happened to him at that place." The judge has ordered several prison employees to testify on Padilla's mental state at the hearings, which began yesterday. They will be asked how a man who is alleged to have engaged in elaborate anti-government plots now acts, in the words of brig staff, "like a piece of furniture".

It's difficult to overstate the significance of these hearings. The techniques used to break Padilla have been standard operating procedure at Guantánamo Bay since the first prisoners arrived five years ago. They wore blackout goggles and sound-blocking headphones and were placed in extended isolation, interrupted by strobe lights and heavy metal music. These same practices have been documented in dozens of cases of "extraordinary rendition" carried out by the CIA, as well as in prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Many have suffered the same symptoms as Padilla. According to James Yee, a former army Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo, there is an entire section of the prison called Delta Block for detainees who have been reduced to a delusional state. "They would respond to me in a childlike voice, talking complete nonsense. Many of them would loudly sing childish songs, repeating the song over and over." All the inmates of Delta Block were on 24-hour suicide watch.

Human Rights Watch has exposed a US-run detention facility near Kabul known as the "prison of darkness" - tiny pitch-black cells, strange blaring sounds. "Plenty lost their minds," one former inmate recalled. "I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors."

These standard mind-breaking techniques have never faced scrutiny in an American court because the prisoners in the jails are foreigners and have been stripped of the right of habeas corpus - a denial that, scandalously, was just upheld by a federal appeals court in Washington DC. There is only one reason Padilla's case is different - he is a US citizen.....

Now that Padilla's mental state is the central issue in the case, the government prosecutors are presented with a problem. The CIA and the military have known since the early 1960s that extreme sensory deprivation and sensory overload cause personality disintegration - that's the whole point.  "The deprivation of stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject's mind of contact with an outer world and thus forcing it in upon itself. At the same time, the calculated provision of stimuli during interrogation tends to make the regressed subject view the interrogator as a father-figure." That comes from Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, a declassified 1963 CIA manual for interrogating "resistant sources".

The manual was based on the findings of the agency's notorious MK-ULTRA programme, which in the 1950s funnelled about $25m to scientists to carry out research into "unusual techniques of interrogation". One of the psychiatrists who received CIA funding was the infamous Ewen Cameron, of Montreal's McGill University. Cameron subjected hundreds of psychiatric patients to large doses of electroshock and total sensory isolation, and drugged them with LSD and PCP. In 1960 Cameron gave a lecture at the Brooks air force base in Texas, in which he stated that sensory deprivation "produces the primary symptoms of schizophrenia".

There is no need to go so far back to prove that the US military knew full well that it was driving Padilla mad. The army's field manual, reissued just last year, states: "Sensory deprivation may result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, depression, and antisocial behaviour" - as well as "significant psychological distress".

If these techniques drove Padilla insane, that means the US government has been deliberately driving hundreds, possibly thousands, of prisoners insane around the world. What is on trial in Florida is not one man's mental state. It is the whole system of US psychological torture.

BBC Reports Plans for U.S. Attack on Iran (Leiter)

Story here; an excerpt:

US contingency plans for air strikes on Iran extend beyond nuclear sites and include most of the country's military infrastructure, the BBC has learned.             

It is understood that any such attack - if ordered - would target Iranian air bases, naval bases, missile facilities and command-and-control centres....

[D]iplomatic sources have told the BBC that as a fallback plan, senior officials at Central Command in Florida have already selected their target sets inside Iran.             

That list includes Iran's uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. Facilities at Isfahan, Arak and Bushehr are also on the target list, the sources say....

 BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the trigger for such an attack reportedly includes any confirmation that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon - which it denies.                               

Alternatively, our correspondent adds, a high-casualty attack on US forces in neighbouring Iraq could also trigger a bombing campaign if it were traced directly back to Tehran.

Long range B2 stealth bombers would drop so-called "bunker-busting" bombs in an effort to penetrate the Natanz site, which is buried some 25m (27 yards) underground....

Earlier this month US officials said they had evidence Iran was providing weapons to Iraqi Shia militias. At the time, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the accusations were "excuses to prolong the stay" of US forces in Iraq.

Middle East analysts have recently voiced their fears of catastrophic consequences for any such US attack on Iran.                   

Britain's previous ambassador to Tehran, Sir Richard Dalton, told the BBC it would backfire badly by probably encouraging the Iranian government to develop a nuclear weapon in the long term.

Last year Iran resumed uranium enrichment - a process that can make fuel for power stations or, if greatly enriched, material for a nuclear bomb.

Tehran insists its programme is for civil use only, but Western countries suspect Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons.                   

The UN Security Council has called on Iran to suspend its enrichment of uranium by 21 February.                   

If it does not, and if the International Atomic Energy Agency confirms this, the resolution says that further economic sanctions will be considered.

These kinds of reports are coming with sufficient frequency in the mainstream media that it appears we may be weeks or merely days away from further criminal acts of aggression by the United States, with potentially catastrophic consequences.  And we are absolutely powerless to do anything about it.  I suppose it is this scary juxtaposition--the machinations of the forces of evil conjoined with our sheer impotence--that leads so many, almost understandably, to prayer.

Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex) on Bush's War-Mongering and the Fake War on Terror (Leiter)

Another strong statement by the one genuine libertarian in the House of Representatives:

Osama bin Laden has expressed sadistic pleasure with our invasion of Iraq and was surprised that we served his interests above and beyond his dreams on how we responded after the 9/11 attacks. His pleasure comes from our policy of folly getting ourselves bogged down in the middle of a religious civil war, 7,000 miles from home that is financially bleeding us to death. Total costs now are reasonably estimated to exceed $2 trillion. His recruitment of Islamic extremists has been greatly enhanced by our occupation of Iraq.

 

Unfortunately, we continue to concentrate on the obvious mismanagement of a war promoted by false information and ignore debating the real issue which is: Why are we determined to follow a foreign policy of empire building and pre-emption which is unbecoming of a constitutional republic?...

 

It’s important to recall that the left, in 2003, offered little opposition to the pre-emptive war in Iraq, and many are now not willing to stop it by de-funding it or work to prevent an attack on Iran.

 

The catch-all phrase, “War on Terrorism”, in all honesty, has no more meaning than if one wants to wage a war against criminal gangsterism. It’s deliberately vague and non definable to justify and permit perpetual war anywhere, and under any circumstances. Don’t forget: the Iraqis and Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with any terrorist attack against us including that on 9/11.

 

Special interests and the demented philosophy of conquest have driven most wars throughout history. Rarely has the cause of liberty, as it was in our own revolution, been the driving force. In recent decades our policies have been driven by neo-conservative empire radicalism, profiteering in the military industrial complex, misplaced do-good internationalism, mercantilistic notions regarding the need to control natural resources, and blind loyalty to various governments in the Middle East.

 

For all the misinformation given the American people to justify our invasion, such as our need for national security, enforcing UN resolutions, removing a dictator, establishing a democracy, protecting our oil, the argument has been reduced to this: If we leave now Iraq will be left in a mess-implying the implausible that if we stay it won’t be a mess.

 

Since it could go badly when we leave, that blame must be placed on those who took us there, not on those of us who now insist that Americans no longer need be killed or maimed and that Americans no longer need to kill any more Iraqis. We’ve had enough of both! 

Resorting to a medical analogy, a wrong diagnosis was made at the beginning of the war and the wrong treatment was prescribed. Refusing to reassess our mistakes and insist on just more and more of a failed remedy is destined to kill the patient-in this case the casualties will be our liberties and prosperity here at home and peace abroad.... 

We shouldn’t wait until our financial system is completely ruined and we are forced to change our ways. We should do it as quickly as possible and stop the carnage and financial bleeding that will bring us to our knees and force us to stop that which we should have never started. 

We all know, in time, the war will be de-funded one way or another and the troops will come home. So why not now?

The Coming War with Iran: Count the Democrats In! (Leiter)

A propos our discussion the other day, this item is pertinent and probably sound in its prognosis:

Despite [Senator Barack] Obama's reassurance that he did not support the war from the beginning, along with [former Senator John] Edwards' claims that he's had a change of heart on his past pro-war votes -- neither candidate distinguished their position from the Bush administration when it came to the looming Iran confrontation.

In fact two weeks earlier, while visiting Israel, Edwards laid out his position on Iran quite succinctly:

Let me be clear: Under no circumstances can Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons ... The vast majority of people are concerned about what is going on in Iraq. This will make the American people reticent toward going for Iran. But I think the American people are smart if they are told the truth, and if they trust their president. So Americans can be educated to come along with what needs to be done with Iran.

Hillary Clinton pushed virtually the same bitter line while addressing the annual AIPAC convention held in New York City last week. "U.S. policy must be clear and unequivocal: We cannot, we should not, we must not permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons,'' Clinton told the crowd of Israel supporters. "In dealing with this threat ... no option can be taken off the table.''

Barack Obama has also been upfront about how he would deal with Iran, arguing that he would not rule out the use of force and supports surgical strikes of alleged nuclear sites in the country if diplomacy (read: coercion) fails. To put it bluntly, none of the front running Democrats are opposed to Bush's dubious "war on terror" or his bullying of Iran. They support his aggression in principle but simply believe a Democratic presidency could handle the job more astutely. All put Israel first and none are going to fundamentally alter U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

And so it goes in the one-party state.  It wouldn't matter, of course, if it did not put all of humanity at risk.

Pilger on the Coming War with Iran (Leiter)

An excerpt:

In concert with Israel and Washington's Zionist and fundamentalist Christian lobbies, the Bushites say their "strategy" is to end Iran's nuclear threat. In fact, Iran possesses not a single nuclear weapon nor has it ever threatened to build one; the CIA estimates that, even given the political will, Iran is incapable of  building a nuclear weapon before 2017, at the earliest.

Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations – until gratuitous, punitive measures were added in 2003, at the behest of Washington. No report by the International Atomic Energy Agency has ever cited Iran for diverting its civilian nuclear program to military use. The IAEA has said that for most of the past three years its inspectors have been able to "go anywhere and see anything." They inspected the nuclear installations at Isfahan and Natanz on 10 and 12 January and will return on 2 to 6 February. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed El-Baradei, says that an attack on Iran will have "catastrophic consequences"   and only encourage the regime to become a nuclear power.

Unlike its two nemeses, the US and Israel, Iran has attacked no other countries. It last went to war in 1980 when invaded by Saddam Hussein, who was backed and equipped by the US, which supplied chemical and biological weapons produced at a factory in Maryland. Unlike Israel, the world's fifth military power with thermonuclear weapons aimed at Middle East targets, an unmatched record of defying UN resolutions and the enforcer of the world's longest illegal occupation, Iran has a history of obeying international law and occupies no territory other than its own.

The "threat" from Iran is entirely manufactured, aided and abetted by familiar, compliant media language that refers to Iran's "nuclear ambitions," just as the vocabulary of Saddam's non-existent WMD arsenal became common usage....

The one piece of "solid evidence" is the threat posed by the United States. An American naval buildup in the eastern Mediterranean has begun. This is almost certainly part of what the Pentagon calls CONPLAN 8022, which is the aerial bombing of Iran. In 2004, National Security Presidential Directive 35, entitled Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization, was issued. It is classified, of course, but the presumption has long been that NSPD 35 authorized the stockpiling and deployment of "tactical" nuclear weapons in the Middle East. This does not mean Bush will use them against Iran, but for the first time since the most dangerous years of the cold war, the use of what were then called "limited" nuclear weapons is being openly discussed in Washington. What they are debating is the prospect of other Hiroshimas and of radioactive fallout across the Middle East and Central Asia. Seymour Hersh disclosed in the New Yorker last year that American bombers "have been flying simulated nuclear weapons delivery missions ...since last summer."

The well-informed Arab Times in Kuwait says Bush will attack Iran before the end of April. One of Russia's most senior military strategists, General Leonid Ivashov says the US will use nuclear munitions delivered by Cruise missiles launched in the Mediterranean. "The war in Iraq," he wrote on 24 January, "was just one element in a series of steps in the process of regional destabilization. It was only a phase in getting closer to dealing with Iran and other countries. [When the attack on Iran begins] Israel is sure to come under Iranian missile strikes. Posing as victims, the Israelis will suffer some tolerable damage and then an outraged US will destabilize Iran finally, making it look like a noble mission of retribution . . . Public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian hysteria, leaks, disinformation etcetera . . ."

There can be little doubt that the craven Democrats in our one-party state (who have already acquiesced in the escalation of the Iraq war) will strongly support a military action against Iran, especially if Iran attacks Israel in response to a U.S. (or Israeli) air assault on alleged nuclear targets.  It is all similar to scenarios we have contemplated before.  In Iraq, Bush has relied on back-door draft policies to staff the war of aggression and the resulting occupation, but an Iran-Israel conflict would, presumably, provide the pretext for the inevitable conscription of new troops, or at least conscription of personnel for non-combat "support" functions (thus freeing up combat forces), as was hinted at in the State of the Union address, when Bush said:

[O]ne of the first steps we can take together [in the fake "war on terror'] is to add to the ranks of our military so that the American Armed Forces are ready for all the challenges ahead.  Tonight I ask the Congress to authorize an increase in the size of our active Army and Marine Corps by 92,000 in the next five years.   A second task we can take on together is to design and establish a volunteer Civilian Reserve Corps. Such a corps would function much like our military reserve.  It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them.  It would give people across America who do not wear the uniform a chance to serve in the defining struggle of our time.

The Coming War with Iran, continued (Leiter)

Sometimes government spokesmen inadvertently tell the truth.  From an interview on National Public Radio this morning with Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns:

[T]he larger point is this: Iran is seeking a position of dominance in the Middle East. It's very clear. Iran has a regional agenda, which is very much at odds with that of the United States.

Presumably, it is at odds with the U.S. agenda of "dominance of the Middle East."  No doubt it is.

The Coming War with Iran, Yet Again (Leiter)

Even the mainstream media has been picking up the war-mongering signals from Bush & his bestiary of madmen.  This transcript in Russian of remarks by Bush, I am told, is even clearer.  I would be grateful if someone who reads Russian could post a translation (at least of the key parts) in the comments.

UPDATE:  Ira Lindsay's translation in the comments section makes clear that the really belligerent remarks here are entirely the work of the right-wing site hosting the transcript.

ANOTHER:  New Virginia Senator Jim Webb, for one, is worried about this issue.  (Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)

AND ONE MORE:  Is this the new "Gulf of Tonkin" pretext for war?

Annals of the One-Party State, Part 302 (Leiter)

Here is the new Democratic majority leader in the House of Representatives:

Iran with nuclear weapons is unacceptable, new House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told The Jerusalem Post hours after entering the party leadership position.

The Maryland Democrat said the view is shared by his party, rejecting assertions that the Democrats would be weaker than the Republicans on Iran.

He also said that the use of force against Teheran remained an option.

So much for the November elections.  The position of the new Democratic "leadership" is equally spineless (or is it simply craven?) on Iraq.

Arendt Reconsidered (Leiter)

This is an interesting and what seems to me appropriately critical assessment of Hannah Arendt and the currently booming academic Arendt industry by political theorist Corey Robin from Brooklyn College and the City University of New York; an excerpt:

Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the centenary of Arendt’s birth should have devolved into a recitation of the familiar. Once a week, it seems, some pundit will trot out her theory of totalitarianism, dutifully extending it, as her followers did during the Cold War, to America’s enemies: al-Qaida, Saddam, Iran. Arendt’s academic chorus continues to swell, sounding the most elusive notes of her least political texts while ignoring her prescient remarks about Zionism and imperialism....

The lodestone of the Arendt industry is The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951 and...[d]ivided into three parts – ‘Anti-Semitism’, ‘Imperialism’ and ‘Totalitarianism’....

This last section is the least representative – and, as historians of Nazism and Stalinism have pointed out, least instructive – part of the book. But it has always attracted the most attention....

Arendt saw totalitarianism as the product of mass society, which arose from the breakdown of classes and nation-states. Neither a political grouping nor a social stratum, the mass denoted a pathological orientation of the self. Arendt claimed that its members had no interests, no concern for their ‘wellbeing’ or survival, no beliefs, community or identity. What they had was an anxiety brought on by loneliness, ‘the experience of not belonging to the world’, and a desire to subsume themselves in any organisation that would extinguish their ‘individual identity permanently’. With their insistence on absolute loyalty and unconditional obedience, totalitarian movements filled this need: they fastened mass man with a ‘band of iron’, providing him and his fellows with a sense of structure and belonging....

The purpose of totalitarianism, in short, was not political: it did not fulfil the requirements of rule; it served no constituency or belief; it had no utility. Its sole function was to create a fictitious world where anxious men could feel at home, even at the cost of their own lives....

Arendt’s account dissolves conflicts of power, interest and ideas in a bath of psychological analysis, allowing her readers to evade difficult questions of politics and economics.do not exist).....We can ignore the distribution of power: in mass society, there is only a desert of anomie. We can disregard statements of grievance: they only conceal a deeper vein of psychic discontent. Strangest of all, we needn’t worry about moral responsibility: terror makes everyone – from Hitler to the Jews, Stalin to the kulaks – an automaton, incapable of judgment or being judged.

During the Cold War, Arendt’s text allowed intellectuals and officials to avoid any reckoning with the politics of Communism and its appeal. Today, it offers a similar detour. ‘If one could pierce the cloak of mystery that shrouds al-Qaida, Hamas or Islamic Jihad,’ Power writes in her introduction,

one might well find some of the qualities Arendt associated with totalitarian movements: ‘supreme disregard for immediate consequences rather than ruthlessness; rootlessness and neglect of national interests rather than nationalism; contempt for utilitarian motives rather than unconsidered pursuit of self-interest; “idealism”, i.e. their unwavering faith in an ideological fictitious world, rather than lust for power’.

Power makes the occasional nod to American policies in the Middle East and to terrorism’s local causes, but she cannot resist the psychological thrust of Arendt’s analysis: ‘Arendt wrote of German and Soviet selfless devotion to the idealised collective, but what greater testament to such selflessness can there be than martyrdom of the kind that thousands of young Muslim men and women are queuing up to undertake today?’....

[A]s virtually every intelligence analysis has shown, Islamist radicals are driven by hostility to the state of Israel and repressive Arab regimes, US patronage of Israel and those regimes, and, in Europe, discrimination against Muslims and support for US policies in the Middle East....The Islamists’ grievances are local and specific. They are not the flotsam and jetsam of mass society or a globalised world; they come from and return to mosques, schools, parties and close-knit neighbourhoods. Suicide bombing is primarily a response to foreign occupation, and terrorism is, as it always has been, the weapon of choice for people with little power or no mass base....

By the Cold War’s end, Arendt’s account of totalitarianism had been so trashed by historians that Irving Howe was forced to defend her as essentially a writer of fiction, whose gifts for ‘metaphysical insight’ enabled her to see the truth that lay beneath or beyond the verifiable facts. ‘To grasp the inner meaning of totalitarianism,’ Howe wrote in 1991, ‘you must yield, yourself, a little imaginatively.’ That fiction is again in vogue, but where once it was passed back and forth between intellectuals and officials, today it appeals primarily to the belligerati, who ignore the more informed analyses of  [intelligence agencies].

If Arendt matters today, it is because of her writings on imperialism, Zionism and careerism....

The rest of Professor Robin's essay discusses these contributions.

 

I wonder what readers better-versed with Arend't work than I think about Professor Robin's assessment?

Brown Shirts in Waiting, Part 37 (Leiter)

Remarkable story here (via www.atopian.org):

When radio host Jerry Klein suggested that all Muslims in the United States should be identified with a crescent-shape tattoo or a distinctive arm band, the phone lines jammed instantly.

The first caller to the station in Washington said that Klein must be "off his rocker." The second congratulated him and added: "Not only do you tattoo them in the middle of their forehead but you ship them out of this country ... they are here to kill us."

Another said that tattoos, armbands and other identifying markers such as crescent marks on driver's licenses, passports and birth certificates did not go far enough. "What good is identifying them?" he asked. "You have to set up encampments like during World War Two with the Japanese and Germans."

At the end of the one-hour show, rich with arguments on why visual identification of "the threat in our midst" would alleviate the public's fears, Klein revealed that he had staged a hoax. It drew out reactions that are not uncommon in post-9/11 America.

"I can't believe any of you are sick enough to have agreed for one second with anything I said," he told his audience on the AM station 630 WMAL (http://www.wmal.com/), which covers Washington, Northern Virginia and Maryland

"For me to suggest to tattoo marks on people's bodies, have them wear armbands, put a crescent moon on their driver's license on their passport or birth certificate is disgusting. It's beyond disgusting.

"Because basically what you just did was show me how the German people allowed what happened to the Jews to happen ... We need to separate them, we need to tattoo their arms, we need to make them wear the yellow Star of David, we need to put them in concentration camps, we basically just need to kill them all because they are dangerous."

The show aired on November 26, the Sunday after the Thanksgiving holiday, and Klein said in an interview afterwards he had been surprised by the response.

"The switchboard went from empty to totally jammed within minutes," said Klein. "There were plenty of callers angry with me, but there were plenty who agreed...."

Those in agreement are not a fringe minority: A Gallup poll this summer of more than 1,000 Americans showed that 39 percent were in favor of requiring Muslims in the United States, including American citizens, to carry special identification.

Roughly a quarter of those polled said they would not want to live next door to a Muslim and a third thought that Muslims in the United States sympathized with al Qaeda, the extremist group behind the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington....

The "A" Word (Leiter)

"Authoritarianism," that is, and Jack Balkin (Yale Law School) explains why it is warranted with respect to the conduct of the Bush Administration.

Former Federal Judge Sarokin Takes Up Blogging (Leiter)

Judge Sarokin's first post expresses appropriate indignation at the lawless and brutalizing treatment of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, by the United States government.  Meanwhile, commenters at the right-wing Volokh site confirm, once again, the basic law of the blogosphere:  no position, no matter how reasonable or humane, is beyond the reach of ridicule by know-nothings.

UPDATE:  Judge Sarokin's second post on "Outsourcing Torture" is a good one too.

Do We Live in a Democracy or Dictatorship? (Leiter)

My colleague Sanford Levinson comments on the question here.

Finally, a Clear Explanation of Why One Should Vote for Democrats... (Leiter)

...here.

Martial Law? (Leiter)

Michael Froomkin (Law, Miami) comments on recent developments.

The Technology of Election Fraud (Leiter)

An informative essay here by a mathematician.  (Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)

"The Beginning of the End of America" (Leiter)

Another strong television commentary by Keith Olbermann.

More on the Military Dictatorship Act of 2006

"We are now officially living in a dictatorship."

"The New Enabling Act."

All of which reminds me, sadly, of this post from more than two years ago.

Our Nominal Democracy and Its End (Leiter)

It is obviously not news to honest observers that the United States has only had a nominal democracy for quite some time--through much of its history because of legal disenfranchisement of tens of millions, but in more recent decades in virtue of the system of legalized bribery that drives the electoral and legislative processes; unbridled gerrymandering by both parties which ensures that representatives choose their voters rather than voters choosing their representatives in one of the two branches of Congress; and a winner-take-all system which results in the two viable parties differing only on details, rarely on matters of substantive importance to the welfare of human beings here or abroad. 

Against the background of this sorry democratic farce, there were some of the trappings we associate with democratic and free societies--for example, a moderately independent judiciary and periodic legal protection--sometimes at the margins sometimes at the center--of dissent and disagreement.  More recently, the independence of the judiciary has been under attack, as we have had occasion to note before, but, to the best of our current knowledge, we have not yet had a resurgence of the "secret police" pursuing political dissidents, as we did during the J. Edgar Hoover era and, more recently, during the Kennedy Administration, when that great "liberal" Robert Kennedy used the Attorney General's office, and the FBI, for unrestrained political persecution. 

So the record had been mixed, even before Bush & his bestiary of madmen, but describing the U.S. as a nominally democratic society seemed to make some sense.  Yet even that status officially ended last week.  The legislation known as "the Military Commissions Act of 2006" (usefully described by Professor Balkin here)--approved by what might be called, euphemistically, "the supine Congress" and which is sure to be signed by the alleged President (on orders from the actual President, Dick Cheney)--is the stuff of totalitarian societies, pure and simple.  (As Stephen Griffin (Law, Tulane) observes, the law should really be called the "Military Dictatorship Act," because that is what it actually is, all the bullshit to one side.  Or as philosopher Matt Burstein wrote to me:  "these fuckers read Kafka and Orwell as a god-damned manual, not as a critique!")

The full fascist impact of this legislation won't be felt immediately, of course, but its contours are so clear as to admit of no whitewashing:  the Dear Leader, i.e., the executive, now has the right to disappear anyone, without having to answer to any other branch of government, except, perhaps, officials who serve at the pleasure of the executive.  Hitler and Stalin and Mao had versions of this power; so, too, now does George W. Bush.  If there is a pertinent difference, it is that the public culture in the U.S., at least currently, is still mildly resistant to capacious exercise of this power, at least against the proverbial "white folks" and other right-thinking and right-looking Americans.

Bill Edmundson has already touched on aspects of these developments, as has Jessica Wilson, but let us quote some other observers.  Bruce Ackerman (Law, Yale) sent me the following piece he wrote for the Los Angeles Times on September 28, 2006:

BURIED IN THE complex Senate compromise on detainee treatment is a real shocker, reaching far beyond the legal struggles about foreign terrorist suspects in the Guantanamo Bay fortress. The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.

This dangerous compromise not only authorizes the president to seize and hold terrorists who have fought against our troops "during an armed conflict," it also allows him to seize anybody who has "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States." This grants the president enormous power over citizens and legal residents. They can be designated as enemy combatants if they have contributed money to a Middle Eastern charity, and they can be held indefinitely in a military prison.

Not to worry, say the bill's defenders. The president can't detain somebody who has given money innocently, just those who contributed to terrorists on purpose.

But other provisions of the bill call even this limitation into question. What is worse, if the federal courts support the president's initial detention decision, ordinary Americans would be required to defend themselves before a military tribunal without the constitutional guarantees provided in criminal trials.

Legal residents who aren't citizens are treated even more harshly. The bill entirely cuts off their access to federal habeas corpus, leaving them at the mercy of the president's suspicions.

(The respects in which the Military Dictatorship Act of 2006 does apply to citizens as well is usefully described, once again by Professor Balkin, here.)

Attorney Marty Lederman, one of our most experienced and knowledgeable practitioners in this area:

The most striking thing about the bill--perhaps more than all of its substantive provisions--is that in case after case (e.g., defining "unlawful enemy combatants"; deciding whether commissions must abide by statutory standards; defining less-than-"grave" breaches of Common Article 3; deciding what process detainees will receive in lieu of habeas; etc.) it would (i) delegate virtually unbridled discretion to the Executive; and (ii) then attempt to foreclose any meaningful judicial review of the President's decisions (no matter how far those decisions might stray from remaining legal limits, such as treaty obligations), and purport to eliminate any precedential effect of other legal authorities that might cabin the Executive's discretion (e.g., international interpretations of Geneva; prior court decisions concerning the courts-martial system).

In other words, the principal theme and effect of this legislation is to systematically abdicate and destroy existing legislative and judicial checks and balances.

Attorney Glenn Greenwald:

Issues of torture to the side (a grotesque qualification, I know), we are legalizing tyranny in the United States. Period. Primary responsibility for this fact lies with the authoritarian Bush administration and its sickeningly submissive loyalists in Congress. That is true enough. But there is no point in trying to obscure the fact that it's happening with the cowardly collusion of the Senate Democratic leadership, which quite likely could have stopped this travesty via filibuster if it chose to (it certainly could have tried).

And herewith Senator Feingold of Wisconsin, one of the minority who voted against fascism:

[T]his legislation would permit an individual to be convicted on the basis of coerced    testimony and hearsay, would not allow full judicial review of the conviction, and yet would allow someone convicted under these rules to be put to death.  That is simply unacceptable.  We would not stand for another country to try our citizens under those  rules, and we should not stand for our own government to do so, either.
      
Not only that, this legislation would deny detainees at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere-people who have been held for years but have not been tried or even charged with any crime-the ability to challenge their detention in court.  Among its many flaws, this is the most troubling-that the legislation seeks to suspend the Great Writ of habeas corpus....
      
Habeas corpus is a fundamental recognition that in America, the government does not have the power to detain people indefinitely and arbitrarily.  And that in America, the courts must have the power to review the legality of executive detention decisions....
      
As a group of retired judges wrote to Congress, habeas corpus "safeguards the most hallowed judicial role in our constitutional democracy--ensuring that no man is imprisoned unlawfully."
      
This bill would fundamentally alter that historical equation. Faced with an executive branch that has detained hundreds of people without trial for years now, it would eliminate the right of habeas corpus.
      
Under this legislation, some individuals, at the designation of the executive branch alone, could be picked up, even in the United States, and held indefinitely without trial and without any access whatsoever to the courts.  They would not be able to call upon the laws of our great nation to challenge their detention because they would have been put outside the reach of the law.         

That is unacceptable, and it almost surely violates our Constitution.  But that determination will take years of protracted litigation....
      
Some have suggested that terrorists who take up arms against this country should not be allowed to challenge their detention in court.  But that argument is circular--the writ of habeas allows those who might be mistakenly detained to challenge their detention in court, before a neutral decision-maker.  The alternative is to allow people to be detained indefinitely with no ability to argue that they are not, in fact, enemy combatants. Unless any of my colleagues can say with absolute certainty that everyone detained as an enemy combatant was correctly detained--and there is ample evidence to suggest that is not the case--then we should make sure that people can't simply be locked up forever, without court review, based on someone slapping a "terrorist" label on them.
      
There is another reason why we must not deprive detainees of habeas corpus, and that is the fact that the American system of government is supposed to set an example for the world, as a beacon of democracy.  And this provision will only serve to harm others' perception of our system of government.
      
A group of retired diplomats sent a very moving letter explaining their concerns about this habeas-stripping provision.  Here is what they said:  "To proclaim democratic government to the rest of the world as the supreme form of government at the very   moment we eliminate the most important avenue of relief from arbitrary governmental detention will not serve our interests in the larger world...."
      
They have reservations not because they sympathize with suspected terrorists.  Not because they are soft on national security.  Not because they don't understand the threat we face.  No.  They, and we in the Senate who support the Specter amendment, are concerned about this provision because we care about the      Constitution, because we care about the image that American presents to the world as we fight the terrorists.  Because we know that the writ of habeas corpus provides one of the most significant protections of human freedom against arbitrary government action ever created.  If we sacrifice it here, we will head down a road that history will judge harshly and our descendants will regret....      

I am also very concerned about the definition of unlawful enemy combatant that is included in this legislation, and about the corresponding issue of the jurisdiction of the military commissions.
      
This legislation has been justified as necessary to allow our government to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other dangerous men recently transferred to Guantanamo Bay.  Yet if you look at the fine print of this legislation, it becomes clear that it is much, much broader than that.  It would permit trial by military commission not just for those accused of serious terrorist crimes, but also individuals, including legal permanent residents of this country, who are alleged to have "purposefully and materially supported hostilities" against the United States or its allies.
      
This is extremely broad, and key terms go undefined.  And by including hostilities not only against the United States but also against its allies, the bill allows the U.S. to hold and try by military commission individuals who have never engaged, directly or indirectly, in any action against the United States.
      
Not only that, but the bill would also define as an unlawful enemy combatant subject to trial by military commission, anyone who "has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense."  This essentially grants a blank check to the executive branch to decide entirely on its own who can be tried by military commission.
      
If we are going to establish military commissions outside of our traditional military and civilian justice systems, at a minimum we should explicitly limit their application to the worst of the worst, those who pose a serious threat to our country.  We       shouldn't leave it up to just one branch of government to make these incredibly important decisions....
      
Even more disturbing is that the bill appears to permit individuals to be convicted, and even sentenced to death, on the basis of coerced testimony.  According to the legislation, statements obtained through cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, as long as it was obtained prior to December 2005 when the McCain amendment       become law, would apparently be admissible in many instances in these military commissions.
      
Now, it is true that the bill would require the commission to find these statements have sufficient reliability and probative value.  But why would we go down this road of trying to convict people based on statements obtained through cruel, inhuman, or       degrading interrogation techniques?  Either we are a nation that stands against this type of cruelty and for the rule of law, or we are not.  We can't have it both ways.
      
The idea that coerced statements can be used as long as they were obtained long enough ago is appalling.  It seems to assume that there was a lack of clarity in the law prior to December 2005.  In fact, there was great clarity, until this Administration       decided to invent a narrow definition of torture that had never been used or accepted anywhere in the civilized world.  The McCain amendment was needed to get this Administration to return to the law.  It was a repudiation of the legal theories of the infamous Bybee memo, which the Administration even said it was withdrawing       once it was publicly revealed.  Its enactment should not now be used as a dividing point before which evidence obtained through cruel and inhuman treatment can be used in court.
      
At times of great adversity, the strength of a nation's convictions is tested and its true character revealed.  If we sacrifice or qualify our principles in the face of the tremendous challenge we face from terrorists who want to destroy America, we will be making a terrible mistake.  If we cloak cruel or degrading interrogations done in the name of American safety with euphemisms like "alternative techniques," if we create arbitrary dates for when differing degrees of morality will apply, we will have betrayed our principles and ourselves....
      
In closing let me do something I don't do very often--and that is quote John Ashcroft.  According to the New York Times, at a private meeting of high-level officials in 2003 about the military commission structure, then-Attorney General Ashcroft said:  "Timothy McVeigh was one of the worst killers in U.S. history.  But at least we had fair procedures for him."  How sad that this Congress would seek to pass legislation about which the same cannot be said.

Columnist Molly Ivins--right here in good 'ole Austin, Texas--cuts to the chase:

Fellow citizens, this bill throws out legal and moral restraints as the president deems it necessary—these are fundamental principles of basic decency, as well as law.

I’d like those supporting this evil bill to spare me one affliction: Do not, please, pretend to be shocked by the consequences of this legislation. And do not pretend to be shocked when the world begins comparing us to the Nazis.

Some hip-hoppers started comparing Bush's America to the Nazis and fascists some time ago; but what are we to say to them now?  That we only have one concentration camp in operation?  (At least one that we actually know about!)  That the dictatorial powers granted the executive are not race-specific?  All this seems to be true.  But it misses the actual point, as Molly Ivins, like everyone else who is awake, surely knows.  In free and democratic societies, my right and your right to remain outside the state's detention centers does not depend solely on the judgment of the state's executive.  It really is that simple. And the legislation passed last week eviscerates that right fully.  All that stands between us and the worst tyrannies in human history are the non-legal norms of the background public culture and the possibility that the courts may at some point strike down portions of this legislation.  How long these forces may provide protection from tyranny is hard to predict.  But in a genuinely democratic society, with robust commitment to the rule of law, we shouldn't have to engage in this guessing-game.

So the fake "war on terror" has now laid the foundation for a genuine totalitarian tyranny in the United States.   We are now fully on the path of what my colleague Kate Litvak aptly called "Stalinist creep-up": 

It's the return of 'troikas' -- detentions without court warrants, interrogations without assistance of counsel, trials by puppet courts, all the while the currently unincarcerated crowd believes that this could only happen to criminals.

The Democrats have largely been craven in their cowardice on these issues, but to the extent there is resistance, it is coming from them.  If they do not prevail decisively in the November elections, then I see little chance that democracy will be restored to the United States.

A decisive moment? (Leiter)

Jack Balkin (Law, Yale) thinks so:

In the next few weeks, if not days, there will be votes on two very important bills. One bill would legalize the President's NSA domestic surveillance program and insulate it from judicial review. The other would ratify the President's views on military commissions, restrict the ability of defendants to see the evidence used to convict them, limit the Geneva Conventions' protections against prisoner mistreatment and outrages to human dignity, and eliminate the use of habeas corpus and the ability of an independent judiciary to inquire into the legality of the detention and treatment (or mistreatment) of human beings held at Guantanamo Bay.

I can't remember a time when two pieces of legislation were on the verge of passage that would so radically alter Americans' sense of our country--and its principles-- for the worse.

What is at stake in these two bills is whether we want the President to be free from judicial oversight and accountability; whether we want to maintain a system of secret trials with secret evidence; whether we want to announce publicly that our forces are not bound by the minimum requirements of human decency found in Common Article III of the Geneva Conventions. In their own way, each of these three issues revolves around our fidelity to the rule of law, and the meaning of America as a land where the rule of law is respected.

Our President-- with his prevarications and euphemisms, like "alternative sets of procedures"-- has been unwilling to speak the truth about what he has done in the past and what he wishes to keep doing in the future. He wants to be free of Congressional and judicial oversight when he spies on people in the United States. He wants to hold, imprison, and detain people without letting them know the evidence used to condemn and convict them. He wants to let the CIA and other operatives continue to use abusive and inhumane interrogation methods. And he wants to make sure that those who have engaged in torture and inhumane treatment are never brought to justice or held responsible for their crimes-- including especially those who authorized these terrible practices.

In short, this President wants legislation that will confirm that he is a law unto himself.

What have we come to, as a nation, when our President demands these things and expect us to follow him meekly? He seeks to maximize his power by maximizing our fear. Will we let him?.

It is bad enough that the whole "war on terror" is a fake from top to bottom; so, strictly, were the "war on drugs" and the "war on poverty."  But no one in those latter cases made extraordinary claims of executive power on the basis of the abuse of a metaphor.

The Real Story about Eason Jordan the Bloggers Missed

ORIGINALLY POSTED MARCH 1, 2005

=====================================

Details here:

Speaking at an off-the-record panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 27, CNN chief executive Eason Jordan apparently suggested that U.S. forces in Iraq had intentionally targeted journalists. When challenged by members of the audience, including Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), Jordan backtracked, saying that he did not believe that such attacks were deliberate U.S. government policy.

By most accounts Jordan's assertions were wavering and ambiguous.  Not so for the resulting howl from conservative bloggers. Twenty-two days later, under pressure from critics across the political spectrum, Jordan resigned.

Major news outlets jumped for the tried-and-true storyline: public figure makes outrageous statements and is taken down by persistent bloggers. The pajamahadeen, still triumphant from having toppled Dan Rather, had claimed another scalp.

Even Jordan's defenders went out of their way to attack his statements. Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, who voiced concerns that a "cyber-mob" mentality might chill journalistic free speech, made it a point to call Jordan's comments "manna to Islamist recruiters" and "stupid, even indefensible."

But what's truly indefensible is the American media's failure to examine the substance of Jordan's claims, however clumsily articulated. If they did, they might be surprised.

To be sure, many made superficial attempts. A typical example appears in conservative columnist Cathy Young's Feb. 14 Boston Globe op-ed, "Sliming American Troops." Young, pointing out that Jordan also cited an "uncorroborated tale" of an Al-Jazeera journalist tortured at Abu Ghraib prison, dismisses Jordan's accusations between parentheses:

"All this suggests that intentional targeting of journalists as journalists was likely a part of Jordan's claim. (No such charge has ever been made by any journalists' organization, though disturbing questions have been raised about negligence in the U.S. military's shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad in April 2003 in which two journalists were killed.)" (emphasis added)

No such charge? On April 8, Reporters Without Borders issued a press release headlined "Reporters Without Borders accuses U.S. military of deliberately firing at journalists." That Young missed this item from a global media rights group, released the very same day as the Palestine Hotel attacks that she goes on to mention, shows just how blind she is to facts that lay outside the orthodox narrative.

Young is one of the few columnists to make any connection between Jordan's comments and the shelling of the Palestine Hotel, which killed two journalists, José Couso of the Spanish network Telecinco and Reuters cameraman Taras Protsiuk, and wounded three others.

A film of the incident, shot by the French TV station France 3, shows that U.S. troops were not under any fire at the time, and that the tank crew took a few minutes to adjust its gun before opening fire on the hotel, which was home to more than 200 journalists and media assistants at the time.

Following a Pentagon investigation in which the U.S. military completely exonerated itself, the International Federation of Journalists denounced the "cynical whitewashing of a horrifying and avoidable tragedy...."

As for the "uncorroborated tale" of torture? According to those who witnessed the remarks at Davos, Jordan discussed the case of an Al-Jazeera reporter who had been taken to Abu Ghraib prison, where he was forced to eat his own shoes and mocked as "Al-Jazeera boy."

The only reporter from a major paper to look into this tale was the New York Sun's Roderick Boyd, who did so in a display of astonishingly lazy reporting. Boyd writes:

"A man who said he was a producer with Al-Jazeera at the network's headquarters in Doha, Qatar, said he was unaware of any such incident, 'although we have had problems with American troops in and out of Iraq.' The Al-Jazeera producer refused to give his name."

Had Boyd bothered to enter the words "Al-Jazeera boy" into Google or Lexis-Nexis, he would have found a March 11, 2004, story in the Nation, a May 2, 2004, story in the London Observer, and an account from Reporters Without Borders, each of which details the seven-week detention and torture at Abu Ghraib of 33-year-old Al-Jazeera cameraman Salah Hassan.

But Boyd didn't bother. He was happy enough to settle for the anonymous source who told him what he wanted to hear. His "evidence" that the incident never happened has been reprinted throughout the blogosphere, including the influential conservative blog, Instapundit.

The reporter forced by U.S. troops to eat his own shoe was actually a different person: veteran Reuters cameraman Salem Ureibi. On Jan. 2, 2004, U.S. soldiers arrested Ureibi, Falluja stringer Ahmed Mohammed Hussein al-Badrani and driver Sattar Jabar al-Badrani in Falluja as they were filming the site of a helicopter crash. The three men were held for 72 hours, during which they were beaten, stripped and threatened with rape.

The story was reported by Reuters, the Associated Press, Editor and Publisher, the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Raleigh News Observer, the Xinhua news service and many other outlets....

It was not the tales of abuse, however, that most appalled Jordan's critics—such stories are no longer shocking even to casual followers of the news—but the notion that the U.S. military would deliberately target media outlets in Iraq in order to silence them. In the early days of the invasion, they did just that.

In the hours before dawn on March 26, 2003, precision guided bombs struck the headquarters of Iraq's state-run television station, which had days earlier broadcast images of dead and captured American soldiers, in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

But the Geneva Conventions also prohibit targeting civilian buildings, unless they offer "definite military advantage." Media organizations and human rights groups were outraged.

"The bombing of a television station, simply because it is being used for the purposes of propaganda, cannot be condoned," read a press release from Amnesty International, which called the strike a "possible war crime."

"Once again," said Aidan White, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, "we see military and political commanders from the democratic world targeting a television network simply because they don't like the message it gives out...."

The next time some self-congratulatory, right-wing empty suit with a blog starts blathering about how the blogosphere challenges traditional media, send them this link.  As usual, the right-wing blogosphere missed the real story.

Is the United States Still a Democracy? (Leiter)

Not really is what my colleague Sandy Levinson effectively concludes.

Reflections on the Five Years Since 9/11 (Leiter)

The other Brian Leiter has posted some purely personal recollections about that day whose fifth anniversary we mark today.  Here I want to comment on the political and psychological ramifications of that event.  It is not unknown for traumatic events to cause people to lose their bearings, and what is true at the individual level may also be true at the cultural and social level as well.  We have seen many instances of individuals, some of genuine ability and talent, who essentially "cracked up" after 9/11, people like Norman Geras and Christopher Hitchens, who started spouting moral nonsense and wish-fulfilling delusions of a kind that their former, unshattered selves would have diagnosed accordingly.   

But of far more consequence is the extent to which the United States (which is, after all, the world's most powerful and dangerous nation) has become, in its public culture, completely unmoored from reality. Things that do not (indeed, in some cases, can not) exist--a "war on terror," a "global Islamic jihad," and so on--are now the stuff of ordinary parlance, as though they refer to actual events, movements, and ideas.  But as I wrote on an earlier occasion during America's descent into madness:

The central delusion that has gripped the American right since 9/11 is...the idea that every terrorist incident is related to every other one, that the grievances of Chechen separatists have something to do with the grievances of Palestinian suicide bombers which have something to do with Sunni resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq which has something to do with the murderous delusions of religious fundamentalists actually beholden to Osama bin Laden.  But these events have almost nothing to do with each other (as we have had occasion to remark previously), except that they serve the propaganda purposes of a decadent and amoral empire. One really can't repeat this often enough:  there is no "war on terror," not only because you can't wage war on a technique, but because there is no single agent of terrorism motivated by a unitary set of concerns.  The whole "war on terror" is a fraud, and anyone who speaks of such a fake war should be laughed out of serious society.  If America had not lost its collective mind after 9/11, there would now be only an international criminal manhunt for bin Laden and other perpetrators of crimes against civilians in New York and London and Madrid (etc.).

To be sure, craven villains and war criminals like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have exploited the events of 9/11 for calculated ends that we have understood ever since Marx observed that  "The modern state is merely the executive committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."  Whatever soco-economic and psychological factors explain why these particular individuals no longer feel the normative force of "the Golden Rule," they shed relatively little light on the condition of the public culture.  The crucial question of our time--not just in America, alas, since America could destroy the world--is how the United States can be restored to the league of civilized, post-Enlightenment nations, where epistemic and rational norms still play a role in public affairs.

The single best commentary on the horrific events of 9/11 remains, of course, that of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Aghanistan (RAWA), a group whose members have a particularly vivid appreciation of what it means to be victimized by fundamentalist psychopaths.  But their essentially humane and cosmopolitan appeal has been almost totally eclipsed by the need in the U.S. to downplay (for obvious reasons) the role of religious fundamentalism in the events of 9/11 in favor of very different bogeymen.  The descent into public madness began in earnest with the run-up to the war of aggression against Iraq, the first make-believe enemy to be constructed out of the ashes of 9/11.  As I wrote back in 2004:

Less than nine months after fundamentalist religious zealots inflicted mass casualties on the civilian population of the United States, and only about six months after the U.S. toppled the regime that harbored them, a country of no consequence or relevance to the safety of the United States--a country hated by the fundamentalist religious zealots for its secular ideology and its Western treatment of women, a country with a devastated economy and crippled military, a country that the U.S. and Britain regularly bombed (since it didn't even have sovereign control over all its own terriroty), a nation half of whose population were children, a country which the US outspent on military might 400 to 1--this country was suddenly declared the most pressing threat to the U.S. and world peace.

In an American version of Ionesco's Rhinoceros--the brilliant, "theater of the absurd" rendering of the mass insanity that beset Germany in the 1930s--the American population was progressively whipped in to war frenzy through a series of lies, more or less brazen, to the point that, while no one in their right mind in the summer of 2001 would have described Iraq as a security threat to the U.S., by the late fall of 2002, a large portion of the U.S. population actually believed that. (It's worth noting that the lies, and the cover-up that followed them, were heavily abetted by the blogosphere, despite its self-important, but simply self-serving, claims to be a force for accuracy in news coverage.)

Despite the breathtaking propaganda campaign--the most frightening in the United States during my lifetime--significant portions of the U.S. population remained opposed to the lunatic belligerence of the current Administration; they were joined, of course, by the vast majority of the world's population, though in a signal victory for democracy, their voice was ignored by numerous "democratic" governments, who quickly joined the Administration's "Coalition of the Billing."

Now that the Iraq bogeyman has been so completely discredited, new forces of darkness are needed, and so we have "Islamic jihad" or "Islamic fascism," forces that, in their latest incarnation, now portend a new World War, we are told.  You see, the far right in America has largely tired of the specter of the man in the cave toppling the U.S. government (to be sure, not all the know-nothings have), and has opted for a new paranoid scenario in which third-rate military powers (who happen to sit upon and be proximate to large oil reserves) present the new "threat" to the American way of life.  This article (linked, of course, by InstaIgnorance) is typical of the new insanity.  It begins:

Why is America waiting to be attacked by Iran?

Alas, we can proceed no further.  For this is literally the first sentence of this opinion piece, and it is not meant as a weird joke.  It would only be slightly weirder if it read:  "Why is America waiting to be attacked by Martians?"  Or:  "Why is American waiting to be attacked by smurfs?"  Iran--a country that has not attacked any of its neighbors since the late 18th-century; which the US outspends on military personnel and hardware 50 to 1; and which barely has the military capacity to defend itself against Israel, is going to attack the U.S.?  With what?   Spitballs?   Mean words?

Some on the right who are still not wholly unhinged from reality have greeted these kinds of claims with the derisive response they warrant:

If Iran is really out to conquer the region, it would need tanks, lots and lots of tanks, plus air cover, since tank armadas are dead ducks in the open desert. So, is Iran building up its tank fleet and air force preparatory to its upcoming blitzkriegs? Here's what the Center for Strategic and International Studies says about Iran:

"Most of Iran's military equipment is aging or second rate and much of it is worn. Iran lost some 50-60% of its land order of battle in the climatic battles of the Iran-Iraq War, and it has never