This has been a uniquely bad week for civil libertarians. The Obama Administration appears to be rushing to dispel any notions that Obama will fight for civil liberties or war crimes investigations. After Eric Holder allegedly assured a senator that there would be no war crimes investigation and seemed to defend Bush policies, Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan, Obama’s Solicitor General nominee, reportedly told a Republican senator that the Administration agreed with Bush that we are “at war” and therefore can hold enemy combatants indefinitely. In the meantime, Obama himself seemed to tie himself in knots when asked about investigating war crimes and leading democrats are again pushing for a symbolic “truth commission.” I discussed these issues in this segment of Countdown this week.
Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) both raised the issue with Kagan. Both supported Bush’s policies. Graham asked Kagan: “Do you believe we are at war?”
“I do, Senator,” Kagan replied.
One would have hoped that a solicitor general nominee would ask if he meant a constitutional war or a policy war. We have declared wars on everything from illiteracy to inflation. However, the framers treated war as a more serious matter that required a declaration (though Congress has effectively gutted that requirement through the use of resolutions). If we are at war, when does it end? Terrorism will continue for centuries. Will we remain at war with war time powers being exercised? Since the Solicitor General is required to apply the law with precision, Kagan’s reply is extremely alarming.
Graham then asked “If our intelligence agencies should capture someone in the Philippines that is suspected of financing Al Qaeda worldwide, would you consider that person part of the battlefield?” “Do you agree with that?”
Kagan replied, “I do” and the marriage with the Bush policies was complete. So much for change. Both Holder and Kagan have now taken such a vow with Senators in order to secure their confirmations. The message appears to be a uniquely English approach to government. We will continue policies and laws that can do great harm to civil liberties, but we will use them in a beneficent way. Your “change” is not that we will get rid of the policies. Your change is that you get us. This “trust us we’re the government” approach to civil liberties was precisely what Madison and other framers rejected. To have a well-respected academic voice such views is a terrible disappointment for civil libertarians, who are being offered a meaningful commission as a type of air kiss toward war crimes.
For the full story, click here.
I’m not certain what’s going on here. Information proving torture is occuring in Gitmo, presented to Obama has been “blanked out”.
“US defence officials are preventing Barack Obama from seeing evidence that a former British resident held in Guantánamo Bay has been tortured, the prisoner’s lawyer said last night, as campaigners and the Foreign Office prepared for the man’s release in as little as a week.
Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal charity Reprieve, which represents Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohamed, sent Obama evidence of what he called “truly mediaeval” abuse but substantial parts were blanked out so the president could not read it.
In the letter to the president [PDF] , Stafford Smith urges him to order the disclosure of the evidence.
Stafford Smith tells Obama he should be aware of the “bizarre reality” of the situation. “You, as commander in chief, are being denied access to material that would help prove that crimes have been committed by US personnel. This decision is being made by the very people who you command.”
It is understood US defence officials might have censored the evidence to protect the president from criminal liability or political embarrassment.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/11/binyam-mohamed-release-torture-letter
More bad news for Dick.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/world/middleeast/12dubai.html?_r=1&ref=business
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-02-11-investigation-poll_N.htm
Mike,
On a geek note, I was never happier than the day I switched to Linux. The only thing I use Windows for now is games. For the technically disinclined, I suggest Ubuntu, for the more techie, any Debian based distribution will do. Linux with Open Office and Firefox is not only more stable than Windows, it’s a hell of a lot faster and every bit as productive. And it’s free. Got to love the free and the functional. I had toyed with Linux many years ago, but I was never happy with the available shells, but the quality of the available interfaces has increased dramatically in the last 3 years. I’ll go so far as to say the Nautilus shell Ubuntu is currently using is pretty. I recently read a comparison between Ubuntu and Windows 7 and Ubuntu still outperformed. For what that’s worth . . .
Bron,
You’re new more reasoned incarnation shows that getting the fact that it isn’t the political position expressed here that causes reaction, but your means of expressing it. This is a community of pretty independent minds and I think “groupthink” is antithetic to most of our beliefs.
In answering your queries I think Mespo and Buddha did yeoman work and there is no need for me to expand upon their well-covered territory. Mespo’s comments were especially important because few realize how Adam Smith has been de-contextualized in the service of the greedy and the ignorant. I will respond though to some other questions you raised that have not been fully covered, or directly addressed to me:
“The market is morally neutral. I would trust the combined judgement of 300,000,000 million people making personal decisions about resource allocation over a group of 1000 highly trained PhD’s in economics”
I agree a theoretical free market would be morally neutral, but such a market does not and will not exist. The reason is simple and doesn’t take economic theory to divine. The nature of running a business is to keep increasing market share. Microsoft is a good example. They have an overwhelming market share in OS and used that to parlay that into other software contexts. At one point Wordperfect for instance, was a far superior word processor than was MSWord, then Microsoft’s marketshare and built-in incompatibility issues basically destroyed Wordperfect. The same was true with Lotus 123 and MSExcel. Windows is a clunky, error ridden OS, when compared to Apple, Linux, etc. and yet most people, myself included, are forced to use Windows simply because of its’ market ubiquity.
I use that only to make my point that a truly free market cannot exist because the nature of business won’t let it. By the same token businesses left to their own devices will conspire together to set prices above market value to maximize profit. See gas prices/OPEC as an easy example. So contrary to popular mythology the market is not about 300,000,000 making decisions, it is about rigging the game to increase profits. By the way I’m not even saying this tendency is immoral because I wouldn’t expect the CEO of a corporation to act differently, since she/he would be fired otherwise. As for highly trained PhD’s in economics I would have little faith in them. Economics is an art not a science, perhaps somewhere years down the line it will become a science, but right now it’s a bunch of viewpoints influenced by political persuasion and personal economic interests.
“Any company that breaks laws should be punished to the fullest extent possible. And I believe the profit motive is the best thing to keep companies honest. Government regulation dosent seem to do a very good job and lends itself to corruption. I think the evidence of the last few months is example enough.”
Government regulation actually had been fairly effective from the
FDR era until Ronnie came into the White House. The profit motive as I explained above doesn’t keep companies honest. It is by nature amoral, apolitical and owes no loyalty to national boundaries. A business must simply maintain or increase market share and maintain or increase profit. If it can do so by moving its’ manufacturing base from the US to China for instance, where the work force is basically slave labor, it will do so. This is despite how well the American workers have performed for them because the bottom line is the only determinant.
“And quite frankly I dont understand the objectiion to objectivist thought, the left has more in common with it than the right does. Mostly in the area of civil liberties. Objectivits are for personal freedom but not to the point of anarchy.’
You are correct when it comes to civil liberties there is common ground between objectivists and civil libertarians. However, a belief in civil liberties is not a left wing or right wing belief.
FFLEO is not a man of the Left wing and he believes in civil liberties, as does Ron Paul and Bob Barr (their abortion stands notwithstanding. My contention though is that under objectivism civil liberties will mean little. Sure we’ll be able to have sex and get high, but what about the other stuff. Rand is ridiculous because she postulates that the people who rise to the top of such a system will be people like John Galt, Ragnar Deneskjold and finally Dagny Taggart. She believes in the purity of the marketplace, whereas as I’ve delineated above I believe that is rather childish mythology when one looks at the facts.
In an Ayn Rand world manufacturers would strive to produce the best products, workers could individually negotiate their salaries based solely on their abilities and people would live and let live.
This won’t happen. Rand fails to take into account the irrational human ego and that is a fatal flaw. Most people who strive for power have a need driven by ego (really a shorthand expression that takes tomes to expand upon), greed and sexuality. In an objectivist world these people would quickly kill Rand’s heroes and take power with arms and terror. As time went on they would expand into a hereditary aristocracy and a new feudal age would begin. History proves this to us over and over again. Rand’s heroes, who she conveniently/unrealistically paints as super people would lose out because their “I’m for me alone philosophy” would lose out to a ruthless leader(s)philosophy of “Follow me, I’m strong…or I’ll kill you” philosophy. Rand postulates a human race/society that doesn’t yet exist and may never come to pass.
Someone wise but unknown, Al Lottman, said many years ago on a radio program while debating Objectivists:”Government exists to keep the guy with the gun from pointing it at me and taking everything I have.” Objectivism carried out to its’ logical extent can’t do that. Now one could argue that in an objectivist society you and your friends could get their own guns and therefore provide your own protection. The truth I learned on my violent schoolyard many years ago is that no matter how tough you are there is always someone tougher. In objectivist society the toughest sociopaths win and John Galt gets shot from behind by a follower who thinks he should be the leader.
“Objectivits are for personal freedom but not to the point of anarchy”
Nice thought but ultimately futile. Who controls the forces that keep anarchy at bay? The police/military. Who do they report to and how easily can the leaders be bought off? Still comes down to the most powerful, richest and heavily armed get to run things and objectivism makes their path to power much easier than any other system.
“Maybe highways, you can make an argument for private toll roads especially the major interstates. Why cant you have private companies/organizations providing the sterling mark, why does it have to be government?”
Check out the feudal history of toll roads. They are monopolies that can raise prices and enforce their own law at will. If you’ve got commerce that moves by truck the toll road operator then has control over that commerce. Build a competing toll road and the two toll road operators collaborate to maintain the same stranglehold, while raising prices even further to maintain their profit.
Private companies are more easily bought off and co-opted. Look up the history of money and banking to see where private minters devaluated content to raise profits. Consumer’s Report can be bought off, or its’ means of distribution strangled so their judgments don’t reach the public. Private entities making judgments about the workings of other private entities doesn’t work. See the current financial crisis where the news has come out that the supposed independent bond rating companies cooked their ratings to satisfy the Investment Banks/Hedge funds they were rating. Standard and Poors, etc. were not immune to undue influence and neither is Consumer Reports.
Bob,
I think it comes down to war against a state of mind, specifically ego worship and sociopathy.
But don’t get me wrong.
But I’m all for a war on those pesky gerunds. DAMN YOU STRUNK & WHITE! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!
The problem is the person. Her name is Kagan. She is another Israel first scumbag just like her kinsmen Robert Kagan. Of course she agrees with the Bush admin. There is NO change coming with these people in positions of power.
Just for clarity’s sake,
Are we at war with a gerund form of a verb or a state of mind?
mountainaires,
Nice quote. Well played.
“like myself can’t anticipate”
Bron,
The mob proper won’t care about the Constitution. They’ll only care about revenge. It will be up to people like me and the regulars to pick up the pieces. It’s not a job I’m unwilling to do, but it is most certainly not the preferred outcome. It will be a bloody and painful mess. That is exactly what I wish to avoid by punishing the guilty now. Systems that are complex and dynamic behave strangely when error is introduced. First, there are flutters of instability, isolated error, but as error compounds, instability accelerates.
You can see this error compounding already in the global financial markets data. Eventually you reach a point of “singularity” (to borrow the sociologists term) – an event of system wide impact from which there is no return. A critical error. The result of such an event is either systemic collapse or the fundamental nature of the system changes as it seeks to regain equilibrium. The Neocon’s desired “changes” in this case would be essentially be the same as the collapse of liberal democracy and the Constitution – the net result is the same, systemic collapse. This is what defines them at their core as the enemy within. The critical weakness in Neocon thinking is that they will be able to “enforce” their changes and hold power to “define the new system” (guess who they want on top?) when history shows us, with examples as “mundane” as the tainted peanut butter by the way, of why fascism always fails.
It is pure ego, and hence pure evil, to think that there is something special about Neocons that will allow them to succeed at a model that is as, if not more so, historically proven as invalid as pure communism turned out to be. It is this arrogance and ego worship that is their true Achilles’ heel. They cannot see the throats they are cutting are their own, blinded by dreams of unlimited power and avarice that are just ego induced delusion. But you are essentially correct that when the singularity happens it won’t look like traditional revolutions past. That’s why I described it in terms of Anarchy Plus. It’s going to be something the Neocons and indeed the “Jeffersonian Constitutionalist Liberal small D Democrats” like myself can anticipate the actual form of yet in high resolution detail for a simple reason – instability is by definition largely unpredictable in specific in detail. We won’t know the shape of this until it’s too late to take specific remedial action. You can see it coming, you can trace the root causes, but you are reduced to a certain amount of supposition about outcome until events start to unfold and then it may be too late. Uncertainty is by definition not 100% predictable, you can make projections of likely outcomes, but that is cold comfort. That is why I seek to undo instability before it arises. As bad an outcome as fascism is, uncertainty is even worse. Will We the People be able to pick up the pieces? Or is true anarchy going to result? Will the Union fractionate? None of that changes that uncertainty and instability is the only outcome guaranteed by the Neocon’s naked ambitions because their “dream” was dead at the gate – founded upon their ego and inability to learn from humanity’s past mistakes as evidenced by their adoption of the proven failed model of fascism. An idea built on a faulty foundation, their eventual doom is CERTAIN. The flip side of that coin is that although their doom is certain, We the People’s success in repairing the damage the Neocons do self-destructing is not. Because the extent and level of that damage at singularity is still unpredictable. If the Union fractionates, it’s game over. It is self-evident that the avoidance of instability is the best course to avoid disaster. As they teach in Aikido, “The best way to avoid trouble is not to be there when it starts.” The best way to avoid trouble at this point is to restore the rule of law, incarcerate the guilty and seize their assets as reparations to attain what Learned Hand called “the shadow of justice”.
Otherwise, it’s going to get really ugly before the Neocons eventually fail at the game of Empire like every other attempt throughout history. But fail they will.
Turley is absolutely right. Obama said that no one was above the law, yet he wanted to apply that standard only going forward. I am sorry, Mr. President, but any time alleged crimes are being discussed, they have already happened. By your own statement, the only time someone is eligible to held to account is when they are caught in the act. Everything else that we are talking about has happened in the past. That is, except for what your own administration is planning for the future. But, of course, I am sure you will not be very willing to investigate, either. It seems apparent that the application of “enemy combatant” status will be applied to people at the discretion of the president. But why shouldn’t it be? It was written into law by congress and signed into law by Bush. This goes to the very heart of why simply changing presidents was never, and will never be an answer to a lawless U.S. government. This president will simply assume the powers that were achieved for the executive branch by the previous president.
Ah, Mr. mann, it’s always so nice to hear from the ragged remnants of the Republican base, the base of the base if you will. You predicted the present state of affairs all along, didn’t you? After all, you display the astonishing prescience of those blessed with that special combination of ignorance, racism and a somewhat tenuous grasp of both reality and the English language. Well done!
Sell out mutt Obama is a fake just like all blacks who decried the bogus racism for ages but once they get their foot in the door of power using race they do a 180 switch and join the elite typical of all the black failed regimes worldwide and in American citiies or towns.
Idiot Bush had everyone in tears about Congo Rices terrible upbringing in the south among the racist yet then this bitch hit the ground running and lying her ass off aqbout everything and showed no residual effects of this tramatic childhood experience.
Its the same everywhere. Blacks have said nothing about the sell out flip flops of Obama in everything and the ending the war in Iraq or Afghan or even recent Gaza holocaust. Why? Just like Howard Stern proved in Harlem before the election using McCains platform as their messiah Obamas platform while interviewing blacks who agreed with everything in reverse proving their have no grasp of any issues and are only after power for themselves.
Obama is a sell out and nothing but Chicago slickster corrupt politician who will get worse as time goes and it really dosent matter because his OJ voters will back their messiah regardless of anything he does since he is the mutt messiah and is to be trusted always and works in mysterious ways ..
BHO is a brilliant Populist, a brilliant fake… All one needs to do is count the times he has violated his own words regarding ‘Change We Can believe In’… And it’s only three weeks into the game. Yes, I got conned too, but gave my money to Ron Paul!
JH
Buddha:
I have spent the entire night thinking about your civil war and I get on the blog and Mountaires has pretty much sumed up the conclusion I came to. Once you are involved in a civil war, I think we can call that a constitutional crisis, how is the rule of law restored? Can it actually ever be restored at that point? Who is to say that once it is restored, it will be the same document with the same guarantee of rights and the same limitations on government?
I personally do not believe a mob of have nots is going to give too much thought to constitutional restoration (I know, your theory is the haves havent either). Hopefully this catharsis will take place within the proper bounds of government. So I think I finally see what you are talking about.
I am now not so sure that Jefferson was right about his “Tree of Liberty”. He assumes men such as himself and Madison would be holding the shovel for that bit of gardening. From your point of view it will be the have nots and you are probably right.
So those are my concerns and questions.
Sir Thomas More: What would you do? Cut … through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? … [D]o you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!