Academia, Constitutional Law, International, Politics, Society

The Devil’s Fork

Submitted by Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger

With apologies to Archbishop of Canterbury John Morton, I’m offering this version of his famous “fork”:

You’re a young idealist standing for the highest office in the land. Against many odds you’ve offered a candidacy of hope and change to an electorate tired of both war and the prior Administration that got them into those wars. There are rumors of widespread atrocities committed by that Administration in response to a horrific terrorist attack on American soil where thousands of your countrymen died. In your capacity as an US Senator, you’ve been briefed on several of these and you see a pattern developing. You’re a Constitutionalist;  a lawyer; and a principled man, but you recognize the nation faces a real threat of nuclear holocaust at the hands of committed, well-funded terrorists supported and protected by renegade states and even some of our allies. These terrorists have a fanatical zeal and value martyrdom above self-preservation. You believe that if they acquire weapons of mass destruction the question will not be if millions of people will die, but which millions of people will die.

Riding a groundswell of promise and belief in your promises to restore American values, the electorate sends you to the nation’s capitol to change the way things have been done. During the course of the election, it has become clear that the drain on the economy caused by war, corruption, and old-fashioned greed has left the country in dire financial straits.

On January 16th you are briefed by the nation’s intelligence communities. You are told definitively that the intelligence community has engaged in extraordinary measures to fight America’s enemies which you conclude amount to torture, illegal renditions, detaining innocent people, and even Executive Orders approving the killing of persons deemed enemy combatants. You’ve inherited a Gulag within sight of the American coast and during the campaign you’ve vowed to close it. You are told that many senior members of the permanent intelligence community were aware of and approved the illegal measures employed in defense of the country. Losing these people would severely cripple efforts to defend the country as they form a sizable amount of the intelligence community’s  institutional knowledge and memory. You’re also told that these senior intelligence  officers have been promised immunity for their actions by the earlier Administration.

You convene your economic advisors who explain to you that the emergency measures adopted by your predecessor and designed to prop up the failing economy may well work but it will take time,and any shock to the nation could disturb this fragile trust building process. If the stimulus fails, the resulting shock could send the nation and Europe into a full-blown depression crippling the efforts to fight terrorism.

Moderate governments in the Mideast have come to you seeking aid to fight the fundamentalist movements that are fueling terrorist recruitment and sponsorship. They tell you that to continue the fight means more money and intelligence from the US or their efforts will be severely handicapped.

What do you do?

A.  Continue the illegal policies of the past Administration reasoning that this is war and that your primary goal is to defend the nation at all costs. These repugnant policies seemed to have had some effect in curtailing the terrorist threat and your calling off the dogs is a real risk to your viability as a leader if you’re wrong and another deadly attack occurs on US soil. Another successful attack could throw the markets into a death spiral and the recovery might not occur for decades. You continue with the stimulus program and avoid any investigation of earlier illegal acts concluding that any shock to the fragile economy caused by the turmoil will reap more evil than it alleviates. You also avoid any investigation to eliminate the possibility of crippling the intelligence community. You share money and both illegally obtained and legally obtained intelligence with the friendly Arab states.

B. You reason that principle trumps expediency and stop all illegality. You immediately  order investigations into the prior Administration’s handling of the war. You make public the results and bring indictments against wrongdoers. You do so even in the face of prior pledges of immunity reasoning they are void ad initio given our treaty obligations and on principles of international law. You make Herculean efforts to replace the intelligence officers lost to the investigations and you build morale by explaining your policies as being in the nation’s long-term best interest. You do what you can to stabilize the economy but you will not compromise in your efforts to prosecute those who have violated the law. You tell friendly states and Europe you understand their concerns about such a policy but you adhere to the adage that “let justice be done though the heavens fall.”

C. You adopt a middle ground approach reasoning it is best for the country that the economic recovery not be affected by criminal investigations of the American intelligence community and the prior Administration. You believe any move otherwise could lead to a weakening of American strength at the worst time and make that nuclear holocaust against an American city more likely. You change the illegal policies of the prior Administration to stop torture, curtail renditions and if absolutely necessary only to countries that will not use torture. You employ death warrants abroad and only against those your intelligence agencies tell you present a clear and present danger to the US. You fully support friendly states abroad against extremists and provide intelligence to them as well as cash.

D.  Your Choice.

Now, the tough part: Defend your choice — and no changing facts that you don’t like in our “hypothetical situation.”

~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger

223 thoughts on “The Devil’s Fork”

  4. Mike S.,

    How are you doing…But if you’ve nothing to say…ok..I understand….

  5. As I wrote last night I would choose “C” with certain caveats and in the following remarks I trust people can see my reasons, even if they don’t agree with them. While ideally I would say choose option “B”, as being the correct most principled course, I believe in the current climate that option is not realistic. I think that many may have missed what I see as Mark’s underlying ideas in setting up this thought problem. Tom ended his comment above with this statement:

    “As a result, you’ll be assassinated by the CIA before your term is through.”

    He echoed the thoughts I was having as I read Mark’s post. Many of us here have recognized for years that this is a country that has long not abided by the vision of our Founding Fathers. These were highly, extraordinary men in not only the massive intellects/knowledge, but in the courage they had risking their lives and their loved ones lives in revolting against the most powerful empire in their world. In the dazzling flourishes of their ideas, we very often lose sight of the personal courage that they displayed in their endeavor.

    To return to Mark’s premises, before you decide which option, I would urge you to decide it from the perspective of it actually being you, not some hypothetical young President having to make this decision. We know and can surmise from the history of the last 80 years that taking principled political actions can result in death, disaster or an early retirement

    FDR had at least one coup plot and one possible attempted assassination. The coup involved Prescott Bush, curiously. There was an assassination attempt of Harry Truman. JFK, did not follow the recommendations of his Joint Chiefs and others to add US military support to the CIA organized “Bay of Pigs” operations. JFK fired CIA Director Allen Dulles for the planing of that operation. Dulles incidentally had close ties to the Bush family. JFK also over ruled the “Hawks” in his administration who wanted to invade Cuba at the time of the missile crisis. From the “Hawks” perspective this was almost treason. At the time of JFK’s assassination, it’s been rumored that he was going to end the involvement in Viet Nam, which started out as a CIA operation under Dulles in the 50’s. The Warren Commission investigation was incidentally headed up by Allen Dulles.

    RFK and MLK were powerful men who were questioning not only Viet Nam, but also the Country’s power structure, only to be cut down by putative “lone gunmen”, with whiffs occasionally surfacing of some powerful agency interceding. George Wallace was crippled by an assassination attempt as he ran for President in 1972, after running on a third party in 1968. The possibility of another Third Party run would have divided the voters Nixon had picked up via his Southern Strategy in his 1968 win. In 1972 powerful Congressman Hale Bogg’s plane went missing in Alaska and was never found. Bogg’s had been a dissenting member of the Warren Commission and had been continuing his investigations into JFK’s death.

    In 1978 Senator Frank Church led his committee to investigate illegal CIA activity and the assassinations. The committees determinations cast doubt on CIA operations, leading to restraining laws being passed and called the investigations into the 60’s political assassinations into question. Church was defeated in 1980 by 1% of the vote, after a National Conservative PAC poured huge sums into the Idaho Republican campaign. George H.W. Bush was head of the CIA at the end of the Ford administration to deal with the loss of morale brought about by the Church Committees findings.

    Ronald Reagan was almost killed in an assassination attempt in 1981 and had that happened George H.W. Bush would have succeeded to the Presidency, and so it goes, the rest of the sorry, recent history is current to most posting here so I’ll forgo it save for Senator Bob Graham, from Florida.
    As chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Graham opposed Iraq War II, because he felt it diverted from getting the real terrorists. He wrote a book about his opposition, but mysteriously chose not to run again for the Senate in 2004.

    My argument is obvious. It takes a very brave person to stand up to the power of the MI Complex and the Elite, as a politician in this country. While it is easy for us to say someone should risk their life and possibly family in carrying out their elected duties, how many of us really would under that pressure. I unashamedly say that I wouldn’t. This is not to say that I haven’t taken more than a few dangerous political stands in my lifetime, but only my job was threatened, not myself or my family. Some here I think expect more from our politicians, than we would be willing to give if we were in their position. One might answer that by saying then they shouldn’t have ru in the first place. Nevertheless, the readership here is in the main very sophisticated and they already understand that ego plays as much a role in running for office, as does ideals, or even greed for that matter. I only see a few political people who seem to have the courage of the Founding Fathers today and they aren’t/wouldn’t/couldn’t run for President.

    So let’s return to this hypothetical young President, with ego to match, who wins election. The real secrets of foreign policy are closely held and perhaps not even Senators know them. The interrelationship of the Intelligence community, military and the private MI Complex Corporations remain hidden in the deep background of “Top Secret” and “off the record”. You are told of a nuclear threat, which both you and I might discount (I don’t believe it at all), but you’ve got the safety of 350 million people on your hands and these are the experts in the field, so do you really take the chance that what your gut tells you is true. I don’t think so. You try to rein them in and try to discover the “real facts” but you’re locked into a security bubble and truthfully are at work every waking hour, being fed information which is not necessarily reliable. Maybe even you are straight out told that if you persist in following your gut you and your young family might have an accident. With these caveats, if I was him I choose Plan C and try to do the best I could to protect people from the worst of the 1%’s agenda. Maybe you are braver than I am, but I know you are not more idealistic. However, my idealism is tempered by the horrid facts of reality and I’m not putting my life on the line unless I’ve got a 50/50 shot at success. I don’t think this young President has those “good” odds.

    My take on what’s really going on is why earlier I offered that post on Saul Alinsky. He was an uncompromising idealist, who nevertheless was willing to compromise based on the realities of the situation. His way offers us a path out of this national disgrace, that can compete with the scenarios I’ve just spun, with no direct information of my own, of course.

  6. What a great clip, ekeyra. Thanks for posting it…

    “Also considering that you are 8 times more likely to be killed by a cop than a terrorist Id suggest using our vast national resources to stopping them first. Seeing as how they are the bigger, more immediate threat to personal safety.”

    Yep. Agreed.

  7. Also considering that you are 8 times more likely to be killed by a cop than a terrorist Id suggest using our vast national resources to stopping them first. Seeing as how they are the bigger, more immediate threat to personal safety.

  9. Primum Non Nocere (@DrNescio),

    Do you have more than 2 links in your comment?

    (On occasion, I’ve had problems with more than one.)

  11. How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the ‘1 Percent’

    by George Lakey

    January 29, 2012

    http://www.alternet.org/story/153929/how_swedes_and_norwegians_broke_the_power_of_the_%E2%80%981_percent%E2%80%99?page=entire

    Scandinavian workers realized that, electoral “democracy” was stacked against them, so nonviolent direct action was needed to exert the power for change.

    Excerpt:

    “While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.

    Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.””

  12. I’ll pick B. I believe it is always best to do the right thing. I also believe our government could have brought indictments against wrongdoers AND worked on the stimulus program and dealt with the national/world economic problems at the same time.

  14. “Frankly”
    You don’t think he is a conman ? If you don’t get a life !

  15. I think we’ve gotten plan A, whereas some believe we got plan C.
    But this was making our choice. So I’ll choose B.
    Reason: Any real change (and this is the only one, but without Ron Paul), has some chance of another outcome. The others have none.

  17. Ya the choices are a pretty stretched narrative, Obama has shown little principle that I have seen. Exactly what is different about his foreign policy? Terrorists want America out of the middle east, period. The policies today are what lead to further acts of violence, but only one man speaks of this truth…I think we know who he is.

    “What would we say if China had a bases in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting! We need to look at foreign policy from how we would feel if it happened to us”
    Ron Paul

  20. mespo,

    All’s we hast to know….we can learn from the holy man with the book….we don’t need no skool of higher learnin..

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