For the Record

A "morally depraved" judiciary: Arar case dismissed in the U.S.

Greenwald discusses and summarizes:

Yesterday, the Second Circuit -- by a vote of 7-4 --  agreed with the government and dismissed Arar's case in its entirety.  It held that even if the government violated Arar's Constitutional rights as well as statutes banning participation in torture, he still has no right to sue for what was done to him.  Why?  Because "providing a damages remedy against senior officials who implement an extraordinary rendition policy would enmesh the courts ineluctably in an assessment of the validity of the rationale of that policy and its implementation in this particular case, matters that directly affect significant diplomatic and national security concerns" (p. 39).  In other words, government officials are free to do anything they want in the national security context -- even violate the law and purposely cause someone to be tortured -- and courts should honor and defer to their actions by refusing to scrutinize them.

Reflecting the type of people who fill our judiciary, the judges in the majority also invented the most morally depraved bureaucratic requirements for Arar to proceed with his case and then claimed he had failed to meet them.  Arar did not, for instance, have the names of the individuals who detained and abused him at JFK, which the majority said he must have.  As Judge Sack in dissent said of that requirement:  it "means government miscreants may avoid [] liability altogether through the simple expedient of wearing hoods while inflicting injury" (p. 27; emphasis added).

Americans, in particular, should read the rest of Greenwald's excoriating post, including the embedded excerpts from dissenting judges lamenting the death of an independent judiciary and describing Arar's horrific treatment.  What has that country come to?  Oh, and there's also this.

Time to divest from the Israeli occupation

I recently received an email update from Mazin Qumsiyeh:

It is sometimes really hard to even begin to describe our feelings living under brutal Israeli occupation and noting the indifference, complicity, and hypocrisy of so many people in Israel, in America, in Europe and elsewhere. Every day, the Israeli “system” violates dozens of the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Examples just in the past week include imposing a curfew on Jayyus village and terrorizing its population (this after confiscating most of its very rich agricultural lands), kidnapping of over 100 Palestinians in a spat of four days (to add to the 11,000 political prisoners held in Israeli torture cells), denial of right of movement, continued siege on Gaza strip, denial of rights of education, more land confiscation, pillaging a big portion of the humanitarian aid and much more.  If I was to write details of these violations, many readers would stop reading very quickly.  Visitors to this area think that Israel is doing these things “to defend itself” and sometimes may go overboard in “security measures.” Security measure that puts millions under a siege.  This maddening description is like saying the Apartheid White South Africa or Nazi Germany in occupied Poland were acting in self defense and sometimes they went a bit too far. Occupiers and colonizers do not have the right of self defense against the resistance of people who they occupy and colonize.

Indeed.  Forty-two years on, just what does Israel expect?  And how is Palestinian resistance (such as it is) to the illegal and brutal occupation supposed to justify yet more illegal and brutal actions? 

For the sake of both Israelis and Palestinians, the occupation must end.  I agree with Naomi Klein that

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.

On Feb 7, Hampshire College became the first U.S. institution of higher learning to pledge to divest from companies based on their activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. You can write to President Hextor in support of this action here.

UPDATE: Here's a film, 'Closed Zone', by Israeli Yoni Goodman, that brings certain effects of the Gaza blockade to animated life.

The true measure of power

The true measure of power is how much you can get away with, which makes the gangsters running the U.S. effectively all-powerful.

Too little, too late

Jane Smiley has pointed words for all the "conservatives" finally jumping ship.  Just a taste:

5. Tyranny is your creation. What we have today is the natural and inevitable outcome of ideas and policies you have promoted for the last generation. [...]  you cannot believe that the ideology of the unregulated free market has created the world we live in today. You are tempted to say: "Mistakes have been made", but in fact, psychologically and sociologically, no mistakes have been made. The unregulated free market has operated to produce a government in its own image. In an unregulated free market, for example, cheating is merely another sort of advantage that, supposedly, market forces might eventually "shake out" of the system. Of course, anyone with common sense understands that cheaters do damage that sometimes cannot be repaired before they are "shaken out", but according to the principles of the unregulated free market, the victims of that sort of damage are just out of luck and the damage that happens to them is just a sort of "culling". It is no accident that our government is full of cheaters--they learned how to profit from cheating when they were working in corporations that were using bribes, perks, and secret connections to cheat their customers of good products, their neighbors of healthy environmental conditions, their workers of workplace safety and decent paychecks. It was only when the corporations began cheating their shareholders that any of you squealed, but you should know from your own experience that the unregulated free market as a "level playing field" was the biggest laugh of the 20th century. No successful company in the history of capitalism has ever favored open competition. When you folks pretended, in the eighties, that you weren't using the ideology of the free market to cover your own manipulations of the playing field to your own advantage, you may have suckered yourselves, and even lots of American workers, but observers of capitalism since Adam Smith could have told you it wasn't going to work.

And then there was the way you used racism and religious intolerance to gain and hold onto power. Nixon was cynical about it--taking the party of Lincoln and reaching out to disaffected southern racists, drumming up a backlash against the Civil Rights movement for the sake of votes, but none of you has been any less vicious. Racism might have died an unlamented death in this country, but you kept it alive with phrases like "welfare queen" and your resistance to affirmative action and taxation for programs to help people in our country with nothing, or very little. You opted not to take the moral high ground and recognize that the whole nation would be better off without racism, but rather to increase class divisions and racial divisions for the sake of your own comfort, pleasure, and profit. You have used religion in exactly the same way. Instead of strongly defending the constitutional separation of church and state, you have encouraged radical fundamentalist sects to believe that they can take power in the US and mold our secular government to their own image, and get rich doing it. The US could have become a moderating force in what seems now to be an inevitable battle among the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions, but you have made that impossible by flattering and empowering our own violent and intolerant Christian right.

You have created an imperium, heedless of the most basic wisdom of the Founding Fathers--that at the very least, no man is competent enough or far-seeing enough to rule imperially. Checks and balances were instituted by Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, and the rest of them not because of some abstract distrust of power, but because they had witnessed the screw-ups and idiocies of unchecked power. You yourselves have demonstrated the failures of unchecked power--in an effort to achieve it, you have repeatedly contravened the expressed wishes of most Americans, who favor a moderate foreign policy, reasonable domestic programs, a goverrnment that works, environmental preservation, women's rights to contraception, abortion, and a level playing field. Somehow you thought you could mold the imperium to reflect your wishes, but guess what--that's what an imperium is--one man rule. If you fear the madness of King George, you have no recourse if you've given up the checks and balances that you inherited and that were meant to protect you.

Your ideas and your policies have promoted selfishness, greed, short-term solutions, bullying, and pain for others. You have looked in the faces of children and denied the existence of a "common good". You have disdained and denied the idea of "altruism". At one time, our bureaucracy was full of people who had gone into government service or scientific research for altruistic reasons--I knew, because I knew some of them. You have driven them out and replaced them with vindictive ignoramuses. You have lied over and over about your motives, for example, making laws that hurt people and calling it "originalist interpretations of the Constitution" (conveniently ignoring the Ninth Amendment). You have increased the powers of corporations at the expense of every other sector in the nation and actively defied any sort of regulation that would require these corporations to treat our world with care and respect. You have made economic growth your deity, and in doing so, you have accelerated the power of the corporations to destroy the atmosphere, the oceans, the ice caps, the rainforests, and the climate. You have produced CEOs in charge of lots of resources and lots of people who have no more sense of reciprocity or connection or responsibility than George W. Bush.

Now you are fleeing him, but it's only because he's got the earmarks of a loser. Your problem is that you don't know why he's losing. You think he's made mistakes. But no. He's losing because the ideas that you taught him and demonstrated for him are bad ideas, self-destructive ideas, and even suicidal ideas. And they are immoral ideas. You should be ashamed of yourselves because not only have your ideas not worked to make the world a better place, they were inhumane and cruel to begin with, and they have served to cultivate and excuse the inhumane and cruel character traits of those who profess them.

In the credit where credit is due dept

[Cross-posted at the Leiter Reports.]

Though I'm generally grumpy about the state of the world, it's good to remember that things have definitely improved along certain dimensions in the last few decades, especially so far as women's access to various opportunities are concerned (with the usual caveats and defeaters, of course, especially concerning race, class, and other factors).  My mother (who started her career as a labor journalist in the mid-70's, at a small paper in NJ) has some telling stories along these lines. 

Apropos of Alito's '72 membership in the anti-coed Concerned Alumni of Princeton... mom went to Princeton on a Woodrow Wilson graduate fellowship in '76 to study economics, just seven years after Princeton admitted women into its undergraduate program.  Evidently Princeton had long been admitting women into its graduate programs (I've been unable to find out just when this occurred), but in any case in her day the continuing supposition in "Princetonian" contexts was that Princetonians were male.

So, for example, her grad studies done, my mother (living in NYC) would take friends or interviewees to the Princeton Club for dinner or a drink.   It was (probably still is) a lush place, which at the time was staffed by a froggery of ancient waiters, who at the end of the meal would shuffle up and ask with decades-old presumption: "Which of you gentlemen have the card?".  At which point my mother, with great satisfaction, would say, "I have the card", and whip it out with great flourish (we're big on flourish in my family).

Speaking of cards, younger readers may not know that just a short while ago women couldn't even get credit.  After my mother and father divorced in '77, my mother (paid as poorly as journalists are usually paid, and with custody of 3 children, etc.) was short on cash.  She had been using an Amex card for years (and had a perfect credit history, had been working, etc.), but the card was primarily in my dad's name; so she called up Amex and requested her own card.  Some time later she got a letter saying, "We're sorry, but we are unable to give you credit at this time".  No explanation.

Conveniently enough, my mother was working for PBS as a writer for a show called Economically Speaking.  So she called Amex back and said "Hi there.  I'm a scriptwriter for PBS and we're interested in doing a story on women and credit; conveniently enough you have just refused me credit.  We'd like to bring down a camera crew and interview you about your reasons for doing so".  (To be sure, the story wasn't actually on the drawing board; but my mother could have made it the case that it was.) The person at the end of the line said: "Let me get right back to you".  One minute later they called to say "Your Amex card is in express mail, you should have it by tomorrow".  Sensing a successful strategy, mama-san did the same thing with MC and Visa.  In each case, she applied for the card, and was flatly turned down (no reason given).  In both cases, she called and suggested that they might like to talk about it on-camera, in reference to a story about women and credit; in both cases, she not only got the card, she got it by overnight mail.

The story continues.  A couple of years pass.  My mom has moved from PBS to US News and World Report, where every month they brought in a speaker for a roundtable discussion with the reporters and editors. One month they bring in the president of Diner's Club.  My mom is the only woman at the table.  The president looks at her and says: do you have a Diner's Club card?  Mom says no.  He says, you really should apply for one -- we need more women with cards.  So she says OK, fills in an application, and  of course gets rejected.  At this point she has had an Amex, MC, and Visa, respectable jobs, and perfect credit, for years.  She calls up the prez, tells him what happened, and expresses her opinion that this would make a great article for US News.  He says: I'm putting you on hold ... Something has gone wrong".  Back in a flash: "There was a horrible mishap.  Your card is in overnight mail".

The sad news is that most women in the late 70's weren't in a position to bring such pressure to bear (and now my mom regrets that she didn't pursue the story, anyway).  But the good news is that at least women don't have to deal with quite as much overt institutionalized sexism in the U.S. as we used to.  See you at Holt Renfrew.

Overvotes and the pathetic underside of the disaster of 2000

Here:

A total of 46,000 uncounted overvotes unambiguously for Gore and 17,000 of them unambiguously for Bush.  If I understand this correctly, this means that Gore won the state not by a few hundred or a thousand votes, but by approximately 30,000 votes.  It wasn't even close.  (Of course, that is without accounting for the butterfly ballot or the African-American non-felons illegally purged from the voter list.)

Why did the overvotes overwhelmingly favor Gore?  Dehaven-Smith points out that they were overwhelmingly African Americans, and offers the following interpretation:

 

One of the things I found that hadn't been reported anywhere is, if you look at where those votes occurred, they were in predominantly black precincts. And (when you look at) the history of black voting in Florida, these are people that have been disenfranchised, intimidated. In the history of the early 20th century, black votes would be thrown out on technicalities, like they would use an X instead of a check mark.
So you can understand why African Americans would be so careful, checking off Gore's name on the list of candidates and also writing Gore's name in the space for write-in votes. But because of the way the vote-counting machines work, this had the opposite effect: the machines threw out their ballots.

This could be the most heartbreaking thing about Florida 2000: African-American voters, who were used to getting screwed out of their votes, took measures to be absolutely sure that their votes counted -- and as a result got screwed out of their votes.

But at least we can say to everyone: Not only did Gore win Florida and thus the election, but it wasn't even close.

Emergency petition for Stanley Tookie Williams

From Phil Gasper in re the impending execution of Stanley Tookie Williams:

The Campaign to End the Death Penalty and other supporters of Stan are circulating a petition calling on the Justice Department to intervene and take immediate action against Stan's pending execution.  Activists will deliver the petition at an emergency demonstration for Stan at 4:30 pm at the U.S. Justice Department, 950 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. If you would like to sign, email [email protected], or contact David Thurston at 646-382-4181--AS SOON AS POSSIBLE

UPDATE: Insatiable bloodlust against African-American men, in particular, who accounted for almost 1/3 of executions in 2004 though they account for just 1/16 of the population, ruled.  RIP:

"I always ask the question: Can a black man in America receive justice? I can say to you or anybody else that the answer is absolutely no. There’s a myriad of things that bring me to this conclusion — prosecutorial misconduct, the biased selection of juries, the issues of informants, the exclusion of exculpatory evidence, illegal interrogation of witnesses. It’s commonplace."

Unleashing stupidity and bigotry

U.S. nutjobs have really been out in full force in past weeks.  Pat Robertson followed up his call for the assassination of socialist President of Venezuala Hugo Chavez with his illuminating take on the real cause of Hurricane Katrina... namely, God's displeasure at the Emmy Awards lineup:

Hollywood – Pat Robertson on Sunday said that Hurricane Katrina was God’s way of expressing its anger at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for its selection of Ellen Degeneres to host this year’s Emmy Awards. “By choosing an avowed lesbian for this national event, these Hollywood elites have clearly invited God’s wrath,” Robertson said on “The 700 Club” on Sunday. “Is it any surprise that the Almighty chose to strike at Miss Degeneres’ hometown?”

You might think that this cause-effect relationship is strained.  Couldn't the real source of God's displeasure been that "Desperate Housewives" lost out to "Everybody Loves Raymond"?  In fact Robertson has an inductive argument for his claim:

Robertson also noted that the last time Degeneres hosted the Emmys, in 2001, the September 11 terrorism attacks took place shortly before the ceremony.

“This is the second time in a row that God has invoked a disaster shortly before lesbian Ellen Degeneres hosted the Emmy Awards,” Robertson explained to his approximately one million viewers. “America is waiting for her to apologize for the death and destruction that her sexual deviance has brought onto this great nation.”

Ellen, it's time for you to cop to -- your lesbianism is destroying the world! 

[UPDATE: Oops, the Robertson stuff about Degeneres -- not about Chavez, unfortunately -- was an urban legend.  Thanks to John Eden for setting me straight.   The rest of the nutjobbery to follow is legitimate, again unfortunately.]

Of course, we can laugh off Robertson's remarks since he's clearly insane, and besides he has hardly any influence whatsoever.  A bit more worrisome is that Alabama State Senator Hank Erwin agrees with the spirit of Robertson's remarks:

Erwin: Well, I think, if you look at what‘s going on, this whole region has always known that, with the church, that New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are known for sin. And if you go to a church and you read your Bible, you are always told avoid sin and that there‘s judgment for sin. ... And I just think that, in my analysis—and I can‘t speak for everybody, but I believe that, if you look at the factors, that you had a city that was known for sin—the signature of New Orleans is the French Quarter, Bourbon Street.  It is known for sin.

I *knew* I shouldn't have had that extra drink at the 1999 New Orleans American Philosophical Association meeting!! 

Meanwhile, let's take another couple of steps into Ripley's Believe it or Not.  Bill Bennett, who was Reagan's Secretary of Education (this gives you an indication of his preferred "let them eat cake" education policy), made the following interesting claim about how racial genocide would do wonders for the U.S. crime rate:

BENNETT: [...]I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. ...

Bill, let me tell you how we could decrease the crime rate in the U.S.   Let's take all the obscenely rich predominately white male corporate and political Machiavellis who spend their lives  stealing the nation's resources from everyone but themselves and their extended family of cronies, and put them on a desert island Far, Far Away.  Then not only will we instantly rid ourselves of all the outrageous criminal activity that you guys engage in (and usually get away with), but after we redistribute all your stolen assets to schools, communities, and essential social services, I guarantee you that crimes that, unlike your sorts of crime, are born of desperation and ignorance, will decrease, too. Maybe shipping the likes of you off to a desert island would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but our crime rate would go down.

And now, for our latest entry into the What the Hell!!!??  sweepstakes, Boeing Co. brings you the following announcement:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Boeing Co. apologized on Friday for a mistakenly published advertisement for its V-22 Osprey aircraft showing troops dropping onto the roof of a mosque in what appears to be a simulated battle scene.

The ad, coming amid rising concern among Muslims over U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, prompted immediate complaints from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which demanded the withdrawal of the campaign.

But Boeing, which created the ad with partner Bell Helicopter, said publication was a "clerical error" by the National Journal, which ran the ad on September 24.

"We consider the ad offensive, regret its publication and apologize to those who like us are dismayed with its contents," said Mary Foerster, vice president at Boeing's defense unit, in a statement.

The ad "did not proceed through normal channels," Boeing said, and despite asking for it to be withdrawn and destroyed, was published in error.

Whatever with the "abnormal" channels that let the ad slip through and be published. What "normal" channels allowed Boeing and Bell Helicopter to make this obscene ad in the first place?

The ad shows troops rappelling down from an Osprey craft to the domed roof of a building labeled "Muhammad Mosque" in Arabic as smoke billows from a burned-out car nearby.

"It descends from the heavens. Ironically it unleashes hell," says the ad...

I'm sure that the approximately 1 billion Muslims would find such an attack on their place of worship wonderfully ironic.

[T]he V-22 tiltrotor aircraft -- which takes off and lands like a helicopter but can fly like a plane [...] delivers Special Forces to insertion points never thought possible," says the text of the ad.

A spokesman for CAIR said on Friday the group welcomed the companies' swift response, but would press the issue of how such an ad came to be created. [...] The ad "clearly portrays special forces assaulting a mosque, a structure dedicated to civilian worship purposes," said CAIR executive director Nihad Awad, in a letter to the two companies. "This gives the impression that 'the insertion points never thought possible' are Islamic places of worship."

Bell said it regretted any concern provoked by the ad, and it was looking into its "creative processes" to prevent a repeat.

Stay tuned for more unbelievable idiocy, sponsored by the U.S. and its white Christian corporate affiliates.

Democrats: stop betraying black people

First of all, because it's the right thing to do, and second of all, for cold calculating political reasons:

Americans haven’t embraced the GOP agenda, but they have rejected Democrats in favor of leaders who are more resolute. The electorate has done so despite polls showing that voters usually agree with liberals. The Democratic Party is out of power because people think it is weak, and nothing projects weakness quite like betraying your friends. Contrary evidence notwithstanding, congressional Democrats persist in believing that it is tactically shrewd to treat their supporters like shit. Putting aside the immorality of the approach, it is a strategy that neither motivates the faithful nor inspires others to join the cause, and that has left the party in a decades-long down trend.

-- Benj

America doesn't care about black people

part n.