the human province

The US Supreme Court declined to review the case of two journalists who have refused to testify before a grand jury about who leaked the name of Valerie Plane, an undercover CIA agent and the wife of Joseph Wilson, to Bob Novak. This refusal has resulted in their being held in contempt of court and consequently threatened with up to 18 months in jail. Since civil contempt cases suggest imprisonment in the local jail facilities, the two journalists would be held in the District of Columbia's local jail unless the US Marshall Services or Judge Hogan decide otherwise

Wilson was sent by the Bush administration to investigate a false report that Iraq had been trying to obtain uranium yellowcake from Niger. Well after Wilson reported to the Office of the Vice President that the report was obviously spurious, the White House continued to use the report to justify invading Iraq. As a result, Wilson published an op-ed piece in the Times, taking the White House to task for using demonstrably false accusations to drum up support for war.

Afterwards, in what seems to be politically motivated revenge, someone from the White House leaked the fact that Wilson's wife was a covert CIA agent and had recommended him for the Niger investigation. The only reporter willing to out her was the righteous conservative columnist, Bob Novak. Consequently, there was an investigation into who leaked the information. But strangely enough, instead of ordering Novak to testify, the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has aggressively pursued the testimony of Judith Miller from the New York Times and Mathew Cooper of Time Magazine. The former did research and interviews on the matter but never even wrote an article about it, and the latter penned an article about the leak, after Novak's, in which he questioned the motives behind her outing.

All of the press items about this have focused on journalists' right to protect their sources, and it seems clear that this is an important issue, especially when it comes to a potentially criminal divulgence, which could have put people's lives in danger. However, what I have seen much less of is the question of why these two journalists, who did not divulge Mrs. Plane's identity, are the ones being hounded. Novak has never even been asked to testify in the case, nor has he been threatened with jail time. It seems like a flagrant abuse of power that the only two people who look like they might go to jail in this incident are those who have done nothing wrong.

This is an obvious case of gross injustice, and I'm surprised to see that even the editorial on the issue in today's Times isn't more outraged. At the risk of sounding hackneyed or trite, someone down at Miller's newspaper and Cooper's magazine should be calling out for all of their readers to go to the window, open it, stick their heads out and yell, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Because I'm afraid if Miller and Cooper can't count on their own publications to do it, they can't count on anyone.

As seen this week in the Times, 13 American CIA operatives are wanted in Italy for the kidnapping of the Egyptian cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr. Abu Omar, as he is also known, was walking to his mosque in Milan for noon prayer when he was kidnapped and "rendered" to Egypt.

"Extraordinary rendition" is the term used for handing prisoners, who have usually not been charged with a crime, over to countries such as Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Syria, Uzbekistan, Morocco and Jordan, where they are then interrogated and tortured. The case that brought this practice into the public light was the Syrian born Canadian engineer, Maher Arar, who was wrongfully suspected of links to terrorism and who while changing planes in the US to return home to Canada from a vacation in Tunisia, was detained for thirteen days and then later deported. But not to his home in Canada where his family lives, to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for over a year.

As it turns out, Mr. Maher had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, which is why after a year and pressure from the Canadian government, Syria finally released him. Abu Omar, on the other hand, was under investigation by Italian authorities for suspected ties to al Qaeda. Be that as it may, it is not unheard of for intelligence to be horribly wrong, as was the case for Mr. Maher and Brandon Mayfield, the Oregon lawyer who was falsely accused of the Madrid bombing and detained by American intelligence officers.

But in the end, whether or not Nasr has links to al Qaeda is irrelevant. The important thing is the rule of law, and as one Italian official noted:

Our belief is that terrorist suspects should be investigated through legal channels and brought to a court of law - not kidnapped and spirited away to be tortured in some secret prison.

But that's exactly what happened. Abu Omar was spirited away to be tortured in some secret prison. According to the Corriere della Sera, he was able to briefly contact his family and confirm that he had been tortured before being arrested again by Egyptian authorities. And as the Times reports, despite the Italian warrant for the arrest of the CIA operatives, who may or may not have had the Italian government's blessing to kidnap Abu Omar, they will most likely go unpunished.

So while Vice President Dick Cheney assures us that the government needs to "work through, sort of, the dark side," and that "[a] lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we?re going to be successful. That?s the world these folks operate in. And so it?s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective," Tony Judt makes a very astute observation about the future of American foreign and domestic policy in this week's New York Review of Books:

Historians and pundits who leap aboard the bandwagon of American Empire have forgotten a little too quickly that for an empire to be born, a republic has first to die. In the longer run no country can expect to behave imperially -- brutally, contemptuously, illegally -- abroad while preserving republican values at home.

In today's New York Times, David Brooks illustrates once again that he either doesn't know much about development aid or that he's being disingenuous. He spends his time criticizing Jeffrey Sachs, the American economist from the Earth Institute at Columbia University, chosen to run the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Program.

According to Brooks, people like Sachs don't really understand that real people live in poor countries and think that pouring money into Africa will solve the problem of poverty. On the other hand, according to Brooks, Bush and other conservatives understand that the real causes of poverty are due to the "crooked timber of humanity," such as "corrupt governments, perverse incentives" and "institutions that crush freedom."

As a result, he implies that the US Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) is a more effective answer to world poverty that the UN's MDGs. Nevermind that the MDGs are cross cutting goals, which link almost every aspect, organization and program of the UN system, and nevermind the fact that to say that Sachs doesn't focus on individual Africans would be like saying that a commander in chief doesn't pay enough attention to privates in the army. The fact of the matter is that the MDGs are only the overall framework of a much larger effort which is done on regional, national and local scales, both from the top down and the bottom up. So when the UN's World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) puts out its next World Water Development Report, there will be a chapter entirely devoted to governance and another entirely devoted to local case studies.

Furthermore, Brooks's own newspaper took a look last week at the MCA on the occasion of the resignation of its chief executive, Paul Applegarth, who denies that his resignation had anything to do with complaints by the presidents of Ghana, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger and Botswana, who while visiting the White House, complained that the program's fine print and bureaucracy made it next to impossible for their countries to get any aid. Brooks is right that the MCA pays attention to governance -- so much so in fact, that since its inception in 2002, it has only found two countries worthy of aid: Honduras ($215 million) and Madagascar ($108 million). To be fair, MCA has recently accepted two other countries, Cape Verde and Nicaragua, but neither of these countries has seen any money yet.

So it's hard for me to not agree with Jeffrey Sachs when he says that when over 1 million people are dying every year of malaria (90% of whom are in Africa, and 70% of whom are under the age of 5) a stern lecture on good governance is somehow less important than sending free mosquito nets.

The force exerted by the moral sense of the individual is less effective than social myth would have us believe. Though such prescriptions as "Thou shalt not kill" occupy a pre-eminent place in the moral order, they do not occupy a correspondingly intractable position in human psychic structure. A few changes in newspaper headlines, a call from the draft board, orders from a man with epaulets, and men are led to kill with little difficulty.

- Stanley Milgram
preface to Obedience to Authority


Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he become a monster. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.

- Friedrich Nietzsche
Jenseits von Gut und Böse / Beyond Good and Evil

There has been much debate, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say much argument, about statements that implicitly or explicitly compare American behavior in the "war on terror" with that of the most reprehensible regimes of yesteryear. Accusations of hyperbole and "moral equivalency" have been leveled against those who have taken issue with the indefinite detainment and torture of those who are and those who are not guilty of the crime of terror. Discussion seems to have wandered from whether or not it is correct to detain and torture people who have no recourse to the law on the order of an executive directive to whether or not it is accurate to compare these acts with Soviet gulags.

The basic and most public facts are known. We have read excerpts from the reports illustrated by pictures of hooded figures in orange being beaten, berated, and hooked up with electrical wires. We know the names of some of the dead and those of the less experienced jailors.


An algebra of suffering

First, to address the claims of hyperbole and moral equivalency: State violence, and violence in general, can be discussed in qualitative or quantitative terms. Quantitatively speaking, comparisons to Soviet gulags, which claimed tens of millions of lives, are indeed exaggerated. The number of people murdered and tortured by American forces in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan are much, much smaller.

But is it really wise to judge violence in quantitative terms? Is evil measured by the number of its victims? Let's take an example. Was Stalin or Hitler more evil? Pol Pot or Idi Amin? How many dead Sudanese would it take for the killings to be as evil as those in Rwanda? What weighs more, the sins of Timothy McVeigh or those of John Wayne Gacy?

So while we can all say in effective terms that a million deaths is worse than a hundred, this distinction blurs when the numbers get closer and when we start talking in terms of causes instead of effects, morality instead of consequences.

And so we're left with qualitative distinctions. And qualitatively speaking, the person who murders 10 people is not twice as bad as the person who murders 5. So where does that leave us in terms of moral equivalence? Does that mean, as some have argued, that we're floating around in a virtueless void where anything goes? No, it only means that in moral terms, torturing and murdering one person is as bad as torturing and murdering two. This means that while the number of people killed and tortured in Soviet gulags and in American detainment camps might be very different, the moral mechanisms at play are the same.


Patting ourselves on the back

This brings us to the larger question of whether or not a democratic nation ought to torture and murder those it takes to be its enemies. I addressed this issue last week, when I quoted the Israeli Supreme court:

This is the destiny of a democracy: She does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back.

It seems, however, that some people are not satisfied with that answer. In today's Times, there was a letter to the editor in response to an op-ed piece, entitled Guantánamo's long shadow, in which Anthony Lewis argues that morality is not outweighed by necessity and that the rule of law should reign supreme:

To the Editor:
Anthony Lewis points to the humiliation of prisoners at Guantánamo and declares it a violation of human rights. But what rights do these prisoners have?

They are not criminals - they committed no crime on United States soil. They are not soldiers - they wear no uniform of an established government. But they are enemies of our country, captured on a faraway battlefield.

Since Mr. Lewis wants to discuss rights, let's discuss them. What rights do these non-citizens, non-criminals, non-soldiers have? This is where the concept of human rights turns to ashes.

I can have no rights other than what I can protect myself or have a government protect for me. The prisoners held in Guantánamo are without rights because of their choice to fight without any government's protection. Americans have no reason to protect them.

As our enemies, they are lucky even to be alive.

Bill Decker
San Diego, June 21, 2005

Mr. Decker's expression of magnanimity immediately makes me think of the following similar self accolade given in a very different place at a very different time:

In the period of dictatorship, surrounded on all sides by enemies, we sometimes manifested unnecessary leniency and unnecessary softheartedness.

- Soviet Chief State Prosecutor, N. V. Krylenko
Speech at the Promparty trial quoted in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago

Recently, Senator Durbin has been accused of calling American soldiers nazis and comparing Guantánamo Bay to a gulag, because he spoke out against American torture on the senate floor:

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. ... On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

This is not the first time that Durbin has spoken out against torture, and he had some pretty specific questions during the Gonzales Senate confirmation hearings in January 2005, which you can see or listen to for yourself:

Senator Durbin: "Let's go to specific questions. Can U.S. personnel legally engage in torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment under any circumstances?"

Alberto Gonzales: "Absolutely not. I mean, our policy is that we do not engage in torture."

Senator Durbin: "Good. I'm glad you stated that for the record. Do you believe that there are circumstances where other legal restrictions, like the War Crimes Act, would not apply to U.S. personnel?"

(seven second pause)

Alberto Gonzales: "Sir, I don't believe that that would be the case, but I would like the opportunity to, I don't, I want to be very candid with you, and obviously thorough in my response to that question. Uh. It is sort of a legal conclusion, and I would like to have the opportunity to get back to you on that."

Later, during the same hearing, Durbin asked Gonzales about his memo on the Geneva conventions (video, audio):

Senator Durbin: "In your August memo, you created the possiblity that the President could invoke his authority as Commander In Chief to not only suspend the Geneva Convention, but the application of other laws. Do you stand by that position?"

Alberto Gonzales: "I believe that I said in response to an earlier question that I do believe it is possible, theoretically possible, for the Congress to pass a law that could be viewed as unconstitutional by a President of the United States. And that's not just the position of this President. That's been the position of Presidents on both sides of the aisle. In my judgement, making that kind of conclusion is one that requires a great deal of care and consideration. But if you're asking me if it's theoretically possible that Congress could pass a statute that we view as unconstitutional. I'd have to conceed sir that that's theoretically possible."

Senator Durbin: "Has this president ever invoked that authority as Commander In Chief or otherwise, to conclude that a law was unconstitutional and refuse to comply with it?"

Alberto Gonzales: "I believe that I stated in my June briefing about these memos that the President has not exercised that authority."

Senator Durbin: "But you believe he has that authority. He could ignore a law passed by this Congress, signed by this President or another one, and decide that it is unconstitutional and refuse to comply with that law?"

Alberto Gonzales: "Senator, again, you're asking me, hypothetically, does that authority exist? I guess I would have to say that, hypothetically, that authority may exist. But let me also just say that we certainly understand and recognize the role of the courts in our system of government. We have to deal with some very difficult issues here. Very, very complicated. Sometimes the answers are not so clear. The President's position on this is, ultimately the judges, courts, will make the decision as to whether or not we've drawn the right balance here. And, and, in certain circumstances, the courts have agreed with the Administrations position, and, in certain circumstances, the courts have disagreed, and we will respect those decisions."

Senator Durbin: "Fifty-two years ago, a president named Harry Truman decided to test that premise. Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co Et. Al vs. Sawyer in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said, as you know, President Truman, you're wrong. You don't have the authority to decide whats constitutional - what laws you like and don't like. I'm troubled that you would think, as our incoming Attorney General, that a president can pick and choose the laws that he thinks are constitutional, and ultimately wait for that test in court to decide whether or not he's going to comply with the law."

These are the facts. I'm not even going to address the question of whether or not Durbin "called American troops nazis," because it's clear from his speech that he never did. However, he did obviously compare Guantánamo Bay to a Soviet gulag, as did Irene Khan, the Secretary General of Amnesty International -- which has compiled a number of documents on Guantánamo Bay -- in her forward to its 2005 report:

Despite the near-universal outrage generated by the photographs coming out of Abu Ghraib, and the evidence suggesting that such practices are being applied to other prisoners held by the USA in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere, neither the US administration nor the US Congress has called for a full and independent investigation.

Instead, the US government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to "re-define" torture. It has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques, the practice of holding "ghost detainees" (people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention) and the "rendering" or handing over of prisoners to third countries known to practise torture. The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law. Trials by military commissions have made a mockery of justice and due process.

To my mind, this is a much more interesting question: Are such comparisons helpful? Are they accurate? I will address these questions tomorrow.

This week I saw both Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Wole Soyinka speak. Not surprisingly, Mr. Soyinka proved to be the more interesting of the two. He was there to speak about "post-colonialism," although he didn't seem terribly sold on the term. But all appellation issues aside, he had some interesting things to say about African politics, colonialism, European immigration and integration, the "African diaspora" and reparations.

One interesting thing was his focus on the idea that as far as the Slave trade and reparations for such acts go, Europeans are not the only guilty parties. Not to mention some Africans themselves, the Arabs, presumably pushed by a law of not being allowed to enslave another Muslim, were highly active in the slave trade. (The transsaharan slave route should be as famous as the transatlantic version.) He brought up the fact that some Arab governments and intellectuals thought that the history of Arab slavers should be forgotten, since both Arabs and Black Africans have been victims of European colonization.

Then he brought up Fanon, and his theory that victims often have a psychological tendency to take their frustration out on other victims, because they aren't able to aim that frustration at their actual oppressors, although it's hard to say how convinced he was of this theory.

Personally, I think it's important to keep in mind that there's enough blame for everyone, and that just because Europeans were guilty of enslaving Africans doesn't mean that the Arab slavers were any less guilty. Some Africans have recently fallen into a discourse of victimhood in an attempt to evade responsibility for some very heinous acts. So while we must come to terms with the fact that the Belgians made up the ID cards in Rwanda, the French supplied and trained many of the killers and the US sat back and did nothing, the people who picked up machetes and brutally murdered their neighbors were Rwandans.

In any case, for Soyinka, the first step is recognizing the evils done in the past, and making at the very least an official and symbolic repentance. He even said that these reparations wouldn't have to be monetary: "Give us back the art and cultural artifacts stolen from Africa, and we'll call it quits!"

At first thought, it seems like another gesture might be debt forgiveness and more foreign aid. But the more I think about it, the more I think it's important that the debt be wiped clean more on principled justice than as a magnanimous gesture of self atonement by the rich countries. Many African dictators were given loads of money to build opulent palaces and buy weapons for oppressing their compatriots, so long as they were on the right side of the Cold War divide. So it seems highly unfair that when the peoples of these countries finally manage to rid themselves of their monstrous dictators (often through no help from, or even despite the efforts of, rich countries), that the rich countries who financed their oppression should expect them to pay that money back.

Since I started this site, pretty much all of the entries have been on depressing subjects, things that I think are important, but which are pretty big downers.

Since it's my birthday, however, I'd like to post a couple of more light hearted things.

Here's an oldish but funny article from the odd jobs department over at the The New Yorker about the guy who writes the fortunes in the fortune cookies at most Chinese restaurants in the US. Confucious' cookie spokesman assures us that even the best of 'em suffer from writer's block from time to time.


In other news, the hard-hitting editorialist, Ellen Turlington from the Onion gives us here take on the Darfur crisis.

[L]ately, the main stories in the news seem to be about Deep Throat, the new summer blockbusters, and something about stem cells. Since I'm sure I would have remembered if the U.S. had intervened in some way to stop it, I can only assume that the whole genocide-in-Darfur thing has somehow worked itself out.

And finally, although it's over half a year old, I'm sure that not nearly enough people have read about the harrowing Florida congressional race of candidate Richard Grayson. Here is his diary, which explains the whole process from beginning to end. The whole thing is funny and worth reading. It really gives you a good hard look into what it takes to run for Congress.

Here are a couple of gems from the end of his campaign:

Tuesday, November 2

...I'm handing out homemade leaflets that say, "Get on the Kerry, Edwards, Castor, Grayson Team."

A man refuses to take one but wishes me luck with a capital "F."

Wednesday, November 3

The people have spoken, the subhuman douche bags.

Joseph Lelyveld wrote a very interesting piece on torture for the New York Times Magazine yesterday, entitled Interrogating Ourselves. In it, he discusses intelligence gathering in the "war on terror" and the torture and "highly coercive interrogation" techniques (i.e. "torture lite") that seem to have become commonplace in American anti-terrorism investigations.

He analyses the tough question of whether torture and torture lite work, whether or not they can save lives. He discusses American and Israeli interrogators, the latter seeming to be leaps and bounds ahead in the torture domain, both in terms of efficiency and legal codification. He informs us that American interrogators are deemed "unprofessional" by their Israeli counterparts.

Lelyveld is highly practical and warns the reader of the moral neutrality of such language as "the efficacy of torture." So in the end, the piece hinges on logistics rather than principle. But I can't help but think of the recent judgement passed down by the Israeli Supreme Court, which was about rerouting part of the security wall because it unlawfully made life even more difficult for many Palestinians, but can also be applied to security and the rule of law in general and as they relate to torture:

This is the destiny of a democracy: She does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back.

Chief Justice Barak went on to say, "there is no security without law." And while Lelyveld's piece shows us that these important ideas have not been completely implemented in the interrogation chambers of Shin Bet, that doesn't make the assertion itself any less true. So while I am nothing but critical of the Israeli state, they seem to have gotten it right this time, on paper at least. It's a shame that so far, the US has had neither the foresight nor the wisdom to come to the same conclusions.


Note: for another interesting discussion of torture, see Mark Danner's pieces in the the New York Review of Books, available online for free here and here and his write up of Abu Ghraib here.

Last month I saw Darwin's Nightmare, a documentary film by an Austrian filmmaker about the economy based on the alien Nile Perch , which was introduced into Lake Victoria, and which has had devastating effects on the lake's ecosystem and local food supply. It's a fine documentary that explores first world complicity in a small Tanzanian fishing town's misery. Although there is a striking lack of adolescents shown in the film, we see a gamut of people, from hungry street children and prostitutes to Indian-Tanzanian factory owners and Ukrainian pilots, whose planes alternately bring food aid and arms to Tanzania, but always leave full of fish.

So I was excited to see Sauper's 45 minute film on 100,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees roaming the jungles of the Congo in 1997, Kisangani Diary, especially since the director was going to be there to answer questions after the film. I am sad to say, however, that I was very disappointed. While cinematographically, the film was good, there was a certain lack of context that bothered me. This, coupled with the heavy handedness of filming almost exclusively children, made the film seem somehow slightly dishonest.

The viewer is told that these Hutu Rwandans have been roaming the Congolese jungle since they left Rwanda after the 1994 Tutsi genocide, only to be attacked for being of the "wrong tribe" by numerous forces vying for power, especially Kabila's rebel ADFL soldiers, who were soon to topple Mobutu's kleptocracy. Like in Darwin's Nightmare, there is a striking lack of adolescents and adults in the film; the viewer sees suffering children and little else.

While in Darwin's Nightmare, it's understandable why he left out the adolescents on the street. The film is already fairly complex on a moral level, and it's not clear if seeing hungry teenage boys who might just murder you helps get the bigger picture of what's going on in this part of Tanzania. However, in Kisigani Diary the choice is particularly problematic. We never see the adults, and he never asks them why they are still in the Congo. Given the amount of popular Hutu participation in the 1994 genocide, there is a good chance that among these refugees there are at least some, if not many, murderers. But this is not explored at all by Sauper, and when I asked him after the projection who these people were, if any of them were guilty of genocide, the only response he could give me was he didn't think so, because the génocidaires would have left with their guns to get food.

Nevermind the fact that the Rwandan genocide was largely performed with machetes, hammers, hoes, axes and clubs. Furthermore, given the popular participation of the Hutu population, it is probable that there were more than a few people guilty of genocide among the off screen adults in Sauper's film. Furthermore, Sauper fails to mention that many of the Hutu refugee camps in Zaire were still run by former Rwandan military and militia leaders, the same people who massacred nearly 1 million Tutsis. Neither does he mention that many of these camps launched raids into Rwanda and attempted, with the support of Mobutu, to massacre the Zairean Banyamulenge Tutsis.

So in the end, the viewer sees a group of defenceless starving children, longing to return to Rwanda. The images might be from Darfur or northern Ethiopia. There is no moral complexity or context in which to frame the miserable suffering of these people roaming the jungle while starving to death and being shot at.

In today's New York Times, Brooks tells us about his trip to Namibia (subscription required). While talking about AIDS in southern Africa, he fondly mentions American aid three times, patting the US on the back, talking about the money that the US is "pouring" into AIDS treatment in Africa.

Ironically, just yesterday, an editorial in the Times called "Crumbs for Africa" took Bush to task for finally getting around to spending the insufficient $674 million for needy countries that Congress had already approved.

Tony Blair, as host of the G-8 annual meeting, has been trying to get rich countries to double overall aid for Africa over the next 10 years. He has been doing a pretty good job getting that commitment from European nations, but Washington will have none of it. The US, along with European nations, pledged to raise its non-military foreign aid to 0.7% of annual income, but unlike the UK, Germany and France, which have all announced plans to meet this goal and countries like the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway, which have already surpassed the .07% goal, Washington currently has no plan of action for keeping this promise. The US actually gives a lower income percentage than any industrialized country in the world. Portugal, for example, is more than twice as generous as the US.

While most Americans believe that the US gives nearly a quarter of its income away to needy countries, it actually spends only 0.16%, less than 2 cents for every $100. For example, even with Bush"s new "generous" Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the US proposes to spend only $2 billion annually on AIDS relief. This is less than half of the amount that it is expected to spend based on its economy. Compare that to the $300 billion and counting spent on the war in Iraq and the $140 billion in corporate tax cuts last year, and one can see where American priorities really are.

But it gets worse. Not only is the US amazingly stingy, but under Bush, foreign aid is tied to conservative ideology and unilateral, thus diverting aid from multilateral organizations like UNAIDS, which represent the most effective way of distributing international aid. Brooks calls these concerns "nonsense" that is "irrelevant on the ground."

Stephen Lewis, the UN secretary-general's special envoy for AIDS in Africa and Dr. Paul Zeitz, the executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance would beg to differ.

Add to that, the Bush administration's focus on religious ideology over science (e.g. supporting abstinence only programs while cutting off funding to programs that promote condom use), and it's not surprising that Uganda's AIDS rate, which had decreased dramatically in the last ten years, seems to be flattening off and perhaps even going back up.

During a trip to that same nation in 2003, Bush stated, "We are a great nation, we're a wealthy nation. We have a responsibility to help a neighbor in need, a brother and sister in crisis." Given the facts, it's somehow difficult to have much faith in such a magnanimous statement.

Now for the other aspect of the letter that really bothers me, that "People have been in Africa for thousands of years - & look at their progress during those years. Tribal still!" The OED defines tribalism as follows:

a. The condition of existing as a separate tribe or tribes; tribal system, organization, or relations.
b. Loyalty to a particular tribe or group of which one is a member.

While I'm the first to insist that people should vote for ideas instead of ethnicities, tribes or religions, I think we should beware of throwing stones from our glass abode. It only takes a quick look at the 2004 elections to see the effect that religion as a political tool had on the American political discourse. Does that make Americans tribalistic? Maybe, but one shouldn?t forget that in the U.S. religion is used for a political end. Remember the Catholic bishops who refused communion to pro-choice catholic politicians? What about the political rallies held in Protestant churches all over the nation?

Likewise, ethnicity and religion are being used for political goals in Africa. I'm sure the reader from Oregon would not seriously reduce American politics as sectarian, so why should he so quickly reduce African politics as tribal? Probably because he doesn't know any better, and the American media certainly isn't helping him.

Furthermore, these "age-old ethnic hatreds" - as they're often described by a press that is either incapable or unwilling to understand the nuances of African cultures and politics - were in many cases created (or at least fueled) by Europeans in order to divide and conquer through indirect colonial rule. In the case of Rwanda, Belgian and, to a lesser extent, German colonizers forced the racist biblical idea of "white negros" or "Hamites" (the cursed son of Noah) onto Rwandan society. The distinction was not linguistic, hereditary, geographical or even fixed; Tutsis and Hutus spoke the same language, frequently intermarried, lived together, and changing from one group to another was not unheard of. As a matter of fact, we still don't really understand the complex social order of pre-colonial Rwanda. An interesting fact is that there seems to have been no "ethnic" violence between Hutus and Tutsis before European colonization.

Still, Europeans, bewildered by a complex political system in the middle of "primitive" black Africa, created the idea that the Tutsi were superior to the Hutu and Twa and then ruled Rwanda and Burundi through the former. These are some of the roots of the violence in central Africa, and we would do well to remember that Western Europe and North America are not very far removed from this same sort of violence - WWII and Segregation, respectively*.

Since western colonization is far from blameless in this violence, we have an obligation to try to help clean it up. And if that isn't enough, the U.S. should look at the despots, such as Mobutu in Zaire, whom the they supported during the cold war. These are all reasons why the U.S. should 'care' about Africa. And if moral responsibility isn't enough for the reader from Oregon, the fact that the third world has been making its grievances known with car bombs lately should be.


*However, it is important to not see Africa as just a hapless child influenced by a superior Europe as some Africans have taken to doing in order to absolve themselves from the guilt of murder. The Belgians did not dismember their neighbors with machetes, Rwandans did.

Last week in the Times, Kristof penned a criticism (free subscription required) of the Bush administration's handling of the Darfur genocide in response to a letter by a reader from Eugene, Oregon. The letter reads as follows:

Why should the U.S. 'care' for the rest of the world? The U.S. should take care of its own.

People have been in Africa for thousands of years - & look at their progress during those years. Tribal still!

It's way past time for liberal twits to stop pushing the U.S. into or to try to make every wrong in the world our responsibility.

This little missive has so many points to address that I'll have to get to each of them in different posts. But first of all, besides the moral and practical responsibilities that Kristof mentions in his piece, the U.S. has a legal responsibility to intervene.

In July 2004, the US Congress unanimously declared the violence in Darfur a genocide. Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, signed by the US in 1948 and ratified in 1988, states that all contracting parties agree to "undertake to prevent and to punish" the crime of genocide.

Unless we as a nation start living up to our practical, moral and legal responsibilities to prevent genocide, the phrase "never again" will remain a platitude that we speak on the anniversaries of genocides we did nothing to stop.

From time to time there are really important stories that for one reason or another don't get the media attention that they ought to. Recently, the secret Downing Street memo's near lack of coverage in the America press comes to mind. However, while that story certainly deserves to be covered, there is another story that has had very little coverage in the states.

Thomas Lang at CJR Daily has written a good little piece about CNN's 25th anniversary, in which he talks about their coverage of Rwanda in 1994 and their current coverage (or lack thereof) of the genocide taking place in Darfur, Sudan.

Lang is right. With the exception of Kristof from the New York Times, no one seems to be interested in this story. Lang quotes a survey from the International Crisis Group and Zogby International, which states:

Some 84% of respondents said the U.S. should not tolerate an extremist
government committing such attacks, and should use its military assets, short of
inserting U.S. combat troops on the ground to protect civilians, to help bring
them to a halt. There would appear to be much greater public backing for America
to play a leadership role in stemming this catastrophe than has been the
conventional wisdom in Washington. This includes 81% who supported tough
sanctions on Sudanese leaders who control the militias, 80% who backed
establishing a no-fly zone over Darfur, and 91% who said the U.S. should
cooperate with the International Criminal Court to help bring to justice those
accused of crimes against humanity.

These numbers speak well for Americans. They show that it's possible to overlook racism and apathy in order to muster the popular push for the "political will" that we were told made Washington decide to abandon 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus to their bloody fate at the hands of machete wielding murderers. I find it particularly interesting that 91% of those polled were in favor of backing the ICC in order to bring the Sudanese génocidaires to justice, since the US stance has so far been the complete opposite.

What is needed, it seems, is more coverage - especially on television - so that the American public and their representatives are forced to see the killings in Darfur while they're trying to eat their Sunday night supper. Lang thinks that CNN et al. should get their priorities straight and that there's no excuse for not covering this disaster. I couldn't agree more.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury:

This blog is a quiet bottled letter. In it, I want to discuss ideas, politics, literature, film and genocide, among other things. I want to give myself a space where I can work out some of the ideas that keep me awake at night. I hope that others will find this site interesting or helpful, but even if it's but an exercise in vanity, staring at my own reflection in ones and zeros, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. What's important for me is to get some of these things off my chest and, in theory at least, into a public forum.

The US Supreme Court declined to review the case of two journalists who have refused to testify before a grand jury about who leaked the name of Valerie Plane, an undercover CIA agent and the wife of Joseph Wilson, to Bob Novak. This refusal has resulted in their being held in contempt of court and consequently threatened with up to 18 months in jail. Since civil contempt cases suggest imprisonment in the local jail facilities, the two journalists would be held in the District of Columbia's local jail unless the US Marshall Services or Judge Hogan decide otherwise

Wilson was sent by the Bush administration to investigate a false report that Iraq had been trying to obtain uranium yellowcake from Niger. Well after Wilson reported to the Office of the Vice President that the report was obviously spurious, the White House continued to use the report to justify invading Iraq. As a result, Wilson published an op-ed piece in the Times, taking the White House to task for using demonstrably false accusations to drum up support for war.

Afterwards, in what seems to be politically motivated revenge, someone from the White House leaked the fact that Wilson's wife was a covert CIA agent and had recommended him for the Niger investigation. The only reporter willing to out her was the righteous conservative columnist, Bob Novak. Consequently, there was an investigation into who leaked the information. But strangely enough, instead of ordering Novak to testify, the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has aggressively pursued the testimony of Judith Miller from the New York Times and Mathew Cooper of Time Magazine. The former did research and interviews on the matter but never even wrote an article about it, and the latter penned an article about the leak, after Novak's, in which he questioned the motives behind her outing.

All of the press items about this have focused on journalists' right to protect their sources, and it seems clear that this is an important issue, especially when it comes to a potentially criminal divulgence, which could have put people's lives in danger. However, what I have seen much less of is the question of why these two journalists, who did not divulge Mrs. Plane's identity, are the ones being hounded. Novak has never even been asked to testify in the case, nor has he been threatened with jail time. It seems like a flagrant abuse of power that the only two people who look like they might go to jail in this incident are those who have done nothing wrong.

This is an obvious case of gross injustice, and I'm surprised to see that even the editorial on the issue in today's Times isn't more outraged. At the risk of sounding hackneyed or trite, someone down at Miller's newspaper and Cooper's magazine should be calling out for all of their readers to go to the window, open it, stick their heads out and yell, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Because I'm afraid if Miller and Cooper can't count on their own publications to do it, they can't count on anyone.

As seen this week in the Times, 13 American CIA operatives are wanted in Italy for the kidnapping of the Egyptian cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr. Abu Omar, as he is also known, was walking to his mosque in Milan for noon prayer when he was kidnapped and "rendered" to Egypt.

"Extraordinary rendition" is the term used for handing prisoners, who have usually not been charged with a crime, over to countries such as Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Syria, Uzbekistan, Morocco and Jordan, where they are then interrogated and tortured. The case that brought this practice into the public light was the Syrian born Canadian engineer, Maher Arar, who was wrongfully suspected of links to terrorism and who while changing planes in the US to return home to Canada from a vacation in Tunisia, was detained for thirteen days and then later deported. But not to his home in Canada where his family lives, to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for over a year.

As it turns out, Mr. Maher had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, which is why after a year and pressure from the Canadian government, Syria finally released him. Abu Omar, on the other hand, was under investigation by Italian authorities for suspected ties to al Qaeda. Be that as it may, it is not unheard of for intelligence to be horribly wrong, as was the case for Mr. Maher and Brandon Mayfield, the Oregon lawyer who was falsely accused of the Madrid bombing and detained by American intelligence officers.

But in the end, whether or not Nasr has links to al Qaeda is irrelevant. The important thing is the rule of law, and as one Italian official noted:

Our belief is that terrorist suspects should be investigated through legal channels and brought to a court of law - not kidnapped and spirited away to be tortured in some secret prison.

But that's exactly what happened. Abu Omar was spirited away to be tortured in some secret prison. According to the Corriere della Sera, he was able to briefly contact his family and confirm that he had been tortured before being arrested again by Egyptian authorities. And as the Times reports, despite the Italian warrant for the arrest of the CIA operatives, who may or may not have had the Italian government's blessing to kidnap Abu Omar, they will most likely go unpunished.

So while Vice President Dick Cheney assures us that the government needs to "work through, sort of, the dark side," and that "[a] lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we?re going to be successful. That?s the world these folks operate in. And so it?s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective," Tony Judt makes a very astute observation about the future of American foreign and domestic policy in this week's New York Review of Books:

Historians and pundits who leap aboard the bandwagon of American Empire have forgotten a little too quickly that for an empire to be born, a republic has first to die. In the longer run no country can expect to behave imperially -- brutally, contemptuously, illegally -- abroad while preserving republican values at home.

In today's New York Times, David Brooks illustrates once again that he either doesn't know much about development aid or that he's being disingenuous. He spends his time criticizing Jeffrey Sachs, the American economist from the Earth Institute at Columbia University, chosen to run the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Program.

According to Brooks, people like Sachs don't really understand that real people live in poor countries and think that pouring money into Africa will solve the problem of poverty. On the other hand, according to Brooks, Bush and other conservatives understand that the real causes of poverty are due to the "crooked timber of humanity," such as "corrupt governments, perverse incentives" and "institutions that crush freedom."

As a result, he implies that the US Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) is a more effective answer to world poverty that the UN's MDGs. Nevermind that the MDGs are cross cutting goals, which link almost every aspect, organization and program of the UN system, and nevermind the fact that to say that Sachs doesn't focus on individual Africans would be like saying that a commander in chief doesn't pay enough attention to privates in the army. The fact of the matter is that the MDGs are only the overall framework of a much larger effort which is done on regional, national and local scales, both from the top down and the bottom up. So when the UN's World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) puts out its next World Water Development Report, there will be a chapter entirely devoted to governance and another entirely devoted to local case studies.

Furthermore, Brooks's own newspaper took a look last week at the MCA on the occasion of the resignation of its chief executive, Paul Applegarth, who denies that his resignation had anything to do with complaints by the presidents of Ghana, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger and Botswana, who while visiting the White House, complained that the program's fine print and bureaucracy made it next to impossible for their countries to get any aid. Brooks is right that the MCA pays attention to governance -- so much so in fact, that since its inception in 2002, it has only found two countries worthy of aid: Honduras ($215 million) and Madagascar ($108 million). To be fair, MCA has recently accepted two other countries, Cape Verde and Nicaragua, but neither of these countries has seen any money yet.

So it's hard for me to not agree with Jeffrey Sachs when he says that when over 1 million people are dying every year of malaria (90% of whom are in Africa, and 70% of whom are under the age of 5) a stern lecture on good governance is somehow less important than sending free mosquito nets.

The force exerted by the moral sense of the individual is less effective than social myth would have us believe. Though such prescriptions as "Thou shalt not kill" occupy a pre-eminent place in the moral order, they do not occupy a correspondingly intractable position in human psychic structure. A few changes in newspaper headlines, a call from the draft board, orders from a man with epaulets, and men are led to kill with little difficulty.

- Stanley Milgram
preface to Obedience to Authority


Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he become a monster. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.

- Friedrich Nietzsche
Jenseits von Gut und Böse / Beyond Good and Evil

There has been much debate, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say much argument, about statements that implicitly or explicitly compare American behavior in the "war on terror" with that of the most reprehensible regimes of yesteryear. Accusations of hyperbole and "moral equivalency" have been leveled against those who have taken issue with the indefinite detainment and torture of those who are and those who are not guilty of the crime of terror. Discussion seems to have wandered from whether or not it is correct to detain and torture people who have no recourse to the law on the order of an executive directive to whether or not it is accurate to compare these acts with Soviet gulags.

The basic and most public facts are known. We have read excerpts from the reports illustrated by pictures of hooded figures in orange being beaten, berated, and hooked up with electrical wires. We know the names of some of the dead and those of the less experienced jailors.


An algebra of suffering

First, to address the claims of hyperbole and moral equivalency: State violence, and violence in general, can be discussed in qualitative or quantitative terms. Quantitatively speaking, comparisons to Soviet gulags, which claimed tens of millions of lives, are indeed exaggerated. The number of people murdered and tortured by American forces in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan are much, much smaller.

But is it really wise to judge violence in quantitative terms? Is evil measured by the number of its victims? Let's take an example. Was Stalin or Hitler more evil? Pol Pot or Idi Amin? How many dead Sudanese would it take for the killings to be as evil as those in Rwanda? What weighs more, the sins of Timothy McVeigh or those of John Wayne Gacy?

So while we can all say in effective terms that a million deaths is worse than a hundred, this distinction blurs when the numbers get closer and when we start talking in terms of causes instead of effects, morality instead of consequences.

And so we're left with qualitative distinctions. And qualitatively speaking, the person who murders 10 people is not twice as bad as the person who murders 5. So where does that leave us in terms of moral equivalence? Does that mean, as some have argued, that we're floating around in a virtueless void where anything goes? No, it only means that in moral terms, torturing and murdering one person is as bad as torturing and murdering two. This means that while the number of people killed and tortured in Soviet gulags and in American detainment camps might be very different, the moral mechanisms at play are the same.


Patting ourselves on the back

This brings us to the larger question of whether or not a democratic nation ought to torture and murder those it takes to be its enemies. I addressed this issue last week, when I quoted the Israeli Supreme court:

This is the destiny of a democracy: She does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back.

It seems, however, that some people are not satisfied with that answer. In today's Times, there was a letter to the editor in response to an op-ed piece, entitled Guantánamo's long shadow, in which Anthony Lewis argues that morality is not outweighed by necessity and that the rule of law should reign supreme:

To the Editor:
Anthony Lewis points to the humiliation of prisoners at Guantánamo and declares it a violation of human rights. But what rights do these prisoners have?

They are not criminals - they committed no crime on United States soil. They are not soldiers - they wear no uniform of an established government. But they are enemies of our country, captured on a faraway battlefield.

Since Mr. Lewis wants to discuss rights, let's discuss them. What rights do these non-citizens, non-criminals, non-soldiers have? This is where the concept of human rights turns to ashes.

I can have no rights other than what I can protect myself or have a government protect for me. The prisoners held in Guantánamo are without rights because of their choice to fight without any government's protection. Americans have no reason to protect them.

As our enemies, they are lucky even to be alive.

Bill Decker
San Diego, June 21, 2005

Mr. Decker's expression of magnanimity immediately makes me think of the following similar self accolade given in a very different place at a very different time:

In the period of dictatorship, surrounded on all sides by enemies, we sometimes manifested unnecessary leniency and unnecessary softheartedness.

- Soviet Chief State Prosecutor, N. V. Krylenko
Speech at the Promparty trial quoted in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago

Recently, Senator Durbin has been accused of calling American soldiers nazis and comparing Guantánamo Bay to a gulag, because he spoke out against American torture on the senate floor:

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. ... On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

This is not the first time that Durbin has spoken out against torture, and he had some pretty specific questions during the Gonzales Senate confirmation hearings in January 2005, which you can see or listen to for yourself:

Senator Durbin: "Let's go to specific questions. Can U.S. personnel legally engage in torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment under any circumstances?"

Alberto Gonzales: "Absolutely not. I mean, our policy is that we do not engage in torture."

Senator Durbin: "Good. I'm glad you stated that for the record. Do you believe that there are circumstances where other legal restrictions, like the War Crimes Act, would not apply to U.S. personnel?"

(seven second pause)

Alberto Gonzales: "Sir, I don't believe that that would be the case, but I would like the opportunity to, I don't, I want to be very candid with you, and obviously thorough in my response to that question. Uh. It is sort of a legal conclusion, and I would like to have the opportunity to get back to you on that."

Later, during the same hearing, Durbin asked Gonzales about his memo on the Geneva conventions (video, audio):

Senator Durbin: "In your August memo, you created the possiblity that the President could invoke his authority as Commander In Chief to not only suspend the Geneva Convention, but the application of other laws. Do you stand by that position?"

Alberto Gonzales: "I believe that I said in response to an earlier question that I do believe it is possible, theoretically possible, for the Congress to pass a law that could be viewed as unconstitutional by a President of the United States. And that's not just the position of this President. That's been the position of Presidents on both sides of the aisle. In my judgement, making that kind of conclusion is one that requires a great deal of care and consideration. But if you're asking me if it's theoretically possible that Congress could pass a statute that we view as unconstitutional. I'd have to conceed sir that that's theoretically possible."

Senator Durbin: "Has this president ever invoked that authority as Commander In Chief or otherwise, to conclude that a law was unconstitutional and refuse to comply with it?"

Alberto Gonzales: "I believe that I stated in my June briefing about these memos that the President has not exercised that authority."

Senator Durbin: "But you believe he has that authority. He could ignore a law passed by this Congress, signed by this President or another one, and decide that it is unconstitutional and refuse to comply with that law?"

Alberto Gonzales: "Senator, again, you're asking me, hypothetically, does that authority exist? I guess I would have to say that, hypothetically, that authority may exist. But let me also just say that we certainly understand and recognize the role of the courts in our system of government. We have to deal with some very difficult issues here. Very, very complicated. Sometimes the answers are not so clear. The President's position on this is, ultimately the judges, courts, will make the decision as to whether or not we've drawn the right balance here. And, and, in certain circumstances, the courts have agreed with the Administrations position, and, in certain circumstances, the courts have disagreed, and we will respect those decisions."

Senator Durbin: "Fifty-two years ago, a president named Harry Truman decided to test that premise. Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co Et. Al vs. Sawyer in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said, as you know, President Truman, you're wrong. You don't have the authority to decide whats constitutional - what laws you like and don't like. I'm troubled that you would think, as our incoming Attorney General, that a president can pick and choose the laws that he thinks are constitutional, and ultimately wait for that test in court to decide whether or not he's going to comply with the law."

These are the facts. I'm not even going to address the question of whether or not Durbin "called American troops nazis," because it's clear from his speech that he never did. However, he did obviously compare Guantánamo Bay to a Soviet gulag, as did Irene Khan, the Secretary General of Amnesty International -- which has compiled a number of documents on Guantánamo Bay -- in her forward to its 2005 report:

Despite the near-universal outrage generated by the photographs coming out of Abu Ghraib, and the evidence suggesting that such practices are being applied to other prisoners held by the USA in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere, neither the US administration nor the US Congress has called for a full and independent investigation.

Instead, the US government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to "re-define" torture. It has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques, the practice of holding "ghost detainees" (people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention) and the "rendering" or handing over of prisoners to third countries known to practise torture. The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law. Trials by military commissions have made a mockery of justice and due process.

To my mind, this is a much more interesting question: Are such comparisons helpful? Are they accurate? I will address these questions tomorrow.

This week I saw both Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Wole Soyinka speak. Not surprisingly, Mr. Soyinka proved to be the more interesting of the two. He was there to speak about "post-colonialism," although he didn't seem terribly sold on the term. But all appellation issues aside, he had some interesting things to say about African politics, colonialism, European immigration and integration, the "African diaspora" and reparations.

One interesting thing was his focus on the idea that as far as the Slave trade and reparations for such acts go, Europeans are not the only guilty parties. Not to mention some Africans themselves, the Arabs, presumably pushed by a law of not being allowed to enslave another Muslim, were highly active in the slave trade. (The transsaharan slave route should be as famous as the transatlantic version.) He brought up the fact that some Arab governments and intellectuals thought that the history of Arab slavers should be forgotten, since both Arabs and Black Africans have been victims of European colonization.

Then he brought up Fanon, and his theory that victims often have a psychological tendency to take their frustration out on other victims, because they aren't able to aim that frustration at their actual oppressors, although it's hard to say how convinced he was of this theory.

Personally, I think it's important to keep in mind that there's enough blame for everyone, and that just because Europeans were guilty of enslaving Africans doesn't mean that the Arab slavers were any less guilty. Some Africans have recently fallen into a discourse of victimhood in an attempt to evade responsibility for some very heinous acts. So while we must come to terms with the fact that the Belgians made up the ID cards in Rwanda, the French supplied and trained many of the killers and the US sat back and did nothing, the people who picked up machetes and brutally murdered their neighbors were Rwandans.

In any case, for Soyinka, the first step is recognizing the evils done in the past, and making at the very least an official and symbolic repentance. He even said that these reparations wouldn't have to be monetary: "Give us back the art and cultural artifacts stolen from Africa, and we'll call it quits!"

At first thought, it seems like another gesture might be debt forgiveness and more foreign aid. But the more I think about it, the more I think it's important that the debt be wiped clean more on principled justice than as a magnanimous gesture of self atonement by the rich countries. Many African dictators were given loads of money to build opulent palaces and buy weapons for oppressing their compatriots, so long as they were on the right side of the Cold War divide. So it seems highly unfair that when the peoples of these countries finally manage to rid themselves of their monstrous dictators (often through no help from, or even despite the efforts of, rich countries), that the rich countries who financed their oppression should expect them to pay that money back.

Since I started this site, pretty much all of the entries have been on depressing subjects, things that I think are important, but which are pretty big downers.

Since it's my birthday, however, I'd like to post a couple of more light hearted things.

Here's an oldish but funny article from the odd jobs department over at the The New Yorker about the guy who writes the fortunes in the fortune cookies at most Chinese restaurants in the US. Confucious' cookie spokesman assures us that even the best of 'em suffer from writer's block from time to time.


In other news, the hard-hitting editorialist, Ellen Turlington from the Onion gives us here take on the Darfur crisis.

[L]ately, the main stories in the news seem to be about Deep Throat, the new summer blockbusters, and something about stem cells. Since I'm sure I would have remembered if the U.S. had intervened in some way to stop it, I can only assume that the whole genocide-in-Darfur thing has somehow worked itself out.

And finally, although it's over half a year old, I'm sure that not nearly enough people have read about the harrowing Florida congressional race of candidate Richard Grayson. Here is his diary, which explains the whole process from beginning to end. The whole thing is funny and worth reading. It really gives you a good hard look into what it takes to run for Congress.

Here are a couple of gems from the end of his campaign:

Tuesday, November 2

...I'm handing out homemade leaflets that say, "Get on the Kerry, Edwards, Castor, Grayson Team."

A man refuses to take one but wishes me luck with a capital "F."

Wednesday, November 3

The people have spoken, the subhuman douche bags.

Joseph Lelyveld wrote a very interesting piece on torture for the New York Times Magazine yesterday, entitled Interrogating Ourselves. In it, he discusses intelligence gathering in the "war on terror" and the torture and "highly coercive interrogation" techniques (i.e. "torture lite") that seem to have become commonplace in American anti-terrorism investigations.

He analyses the tough question of whether torture and torture lite work, whether or not they can save lives. He discusses American and Israeli interrogators, the latter seeming to be leaps and bounds ahead in the torture domain, both in terms of efficiency and legal codification. He informs us that American interrogators are deemed "unprofessional" by their Israeli counterparts.

Lelyveld is highly practical and warns the reader of the moral neutrality of such language as "the efficacy of torture." So in the end, the piece hinges on logistics rather than principle. But I can't help but think of the recent judgement passed down by the Israeli Supreme Court, which was about rerouting part of the security wall because it unlawfully made life even more difficult for many Palestinians, but can also be applied to security and the rule of law in general and as they relate to torture:

This is the destiny of a democracy: She does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back.

Chief Justice Barak went on to say, "there is no security without law." And while Lelyveld's piece shows us that these important ideas have not been completely implemented in the interrogation chambers of Shin Bet, that doesn't make the assertion itself any less true. So while I am nothing but critical of the Israeli state, they seem to have gotten it right this time, on paper at least. It's a shame that so far, the US has had neither the foresight nor the wisdom to come to the same conclusions.


Note: for another interesting discussion of torture, see Mark Danner's pieces in the the New York Review of Books, available online for free here and here and his write up of Abu Ghraib here.

Last month I saw Darwin's Nightmare, a documentary film by an Austrian filmmaker about the economy based on the alien Nile Perch , which was introduced into Lake Victoria, and which has had devastating effects on the lake's ecosystem and local food supply. It's a fine documentary that explores first world complicity in a small Tanzanian fishing town's misery. Although there is a striking lack of adolescents shown in the film, we see a gamut of people, from hungry street children and prostitutes to Indian-Tanzanian factory owners and Ukrainian pilots, whose planes alternately bring food aid and arms to Tanzania, but always leave full of fish.

So I was excited to see Sauper's 45 minute film on 100,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees roaming the jungles of the Congo in 1997, Kisangani Diary, especially since the director was going to be there to answer questions after the film. I am sad to say, however, that I was very disappointed. While cinematographically, the film was good, there was a certain lack of context that bothered me. This, coupled with the heavy handedness of filming almost exclusively children, made the film seem somehow slightly dishonest.

The viewer is told that these Hutu Rwandans have been roaming the Congolese jungle since they left Rwanda after the 1994 Tutsi genocide, only to be attacked for being of the "wrong tribe" by numerous forces vying for power, especially Kabila's rebel ADFL soldiers, who were soon to topple Mobutu's kleptocracy. Like in Darwin's Nightmare, there is a striking lack of adolescents and adults in the film; the viewer sees suffering children and little else.

While in Darwin's Nightmare, it's understandable why he left out the adolescents on the street. The film is already fairly complex on a moral level, and it's not clear if seeing hungry teenage boys who might just murder you helps get the bigger picture of what's going on in this part of Tanzania. However, in Kisigani Diary the choice is particularly problematic. We never see the adults, and he never asks them why they are still in the Congo. Given the amount of popular Hutu participation in the 1994 genocide, there is a good chance that among these refugees there are at least some, if not many, murderers. But this is not explored at all by Sauper, and when I asked him after the projection who these people were, if any of them were guilty of genocide, the only response he could give me was he didn't think so, because the génocidaires would have left with their guns to get food.

Nevermind the fact that the Rwandan genocide was largely performed with machetes, hammers, hoes, axes and clubs. Furthermore, given the popular participation of the Hutu population, it is probable that there were more than a few people guilty of genocide among the off screen adults in Sauper's film. Furthermore, Sauper fails to mention that many of the Hutu refugee camps in Zaire were still run by former Rwandan military and militia leaders, the same people who massacred nearly 1 million Tutsis. Neither does he mention that many of these camps launched raids into Rwanda and attempted, with the support of Mobutu, to massacre the Zairean Banyamulenge Tutsis.

So in the end, the viewer sees a group of defenceless starving children, longing to return to Rwanda. The images might be from Darfur or northern Ethiopia. There is no moral complexity or context in which to frame the miserable suffering of these people roaming the jungle while starving to death and being shot at.

In today's New York Times, Brooks tells us about his trip to Namibia (subscription required). While talking about AIDS in southern Africa, he fondly mentions American aid three times, patting the US on the back, talking about the money that the US is "pouring" into AIDS treatment in Africa.

Ironically, just yesterday, an editorial in the Times called "Crumbs for Africa" took Bush to task for finally getting around to spending the insufficient $674 million for needy countries that Congress had already approved.

Tony Blair, as host of the G-8 annual meeting, has been trying to get rich countries to double overall aid for Africa over the next 10 years. He has been doing a pretty good job getting that commitment from European nations, but Washington will have none of it. The US, along with European nations, pledged to raise its non-military foreign aid to 0.7% of annual income, but unlike the UK, Germany and France, which have all announced plans to meet this goal and countries like the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway, which have already surpassed the .07% goal, Washington currently has no plan of action for keeping this promise. The US actually gives a lower income percentage than any industrialized country in the world. Portugal, for example, is more than twice as generous as the US.

While most Americans believe that the US gives nearly a quarter of its income away to needy countries, it actually spends only 0.16%, less than 2 cents for every $100. For example, even with Bush"s new "generous" Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the US proposes to spend only $2 billion annually on AIDS relief. This is less than half of the amount that it is expected to spend based on its economy. Compare that to the $300 billion and counting spent on the war in Iraq and the $140 billion in corporate tax cuts last year, and one can see where American priorities really are.

But it gets worse. Not only is the US amazingly stingy, but under Bush, foreign aid is tied to conservative ideology and unilateral, thus diverting aid from multilateral organizations like UNAIDS, which represent the most effective way of distributing international aid. Brooks calls these concerns "nonsense" that is "irrelevant on the ground."

Stephen Lewis, the UN secretary-general's special envoy for AIDS in Africa and Dr. Paul Zeitz, the executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance would beg to differ.

Add to that, the Bush administration's focus on religious ideology over science (e.g. supporting abstinence only programs while cutting off funding to programs that promote condom use), and it's not surprising that Uganda's AIDS rate, which had decreased dramatically in the last ten years, seems to be flattening off and perhaps even going back up.

During a trip to that same nation in 2003, Bush stated, "We are a great nation, we're a wealthy nation. We have a responsibility to help a neighbor in need, a brother and sister in crisis." Given the facts, it's somehow difficult to have much faith in such a magnanimous statement.

Now for the other aspect of the letter that really bothers me, that "People have been in Africa for thousands of years - & look at their progress during those years. Tribal still!" The OED defines tribalism as follows:

a. The condition of existing as a separate tribe or tribes; tribal system, organization, or relations.
b. Loyalty to a particular tribe or group of which one is a member.

While I'm the first to insist that people should vote for ideas instead of ethnicities, tribes or religions, I think we should beware of throwing stones from our glass abode. It only takes a quick look at the 2004 elections to see the effect that religion as a political tool had on the American political discourse. Does that make Americans tribalistic? Maybe, but one shouldn?t forget that in the U.S. religion is used for a political end. Remember the Catholic bishops who refused communion to pro-choice catholic politicians? What about the political rallies held in Protestant churches all over the nation?

Likewise, ethnicity and religion are being used for political goals in Africa. I'm sure the reader from Oregon would not seriously reduce American politics as sectarian, so why should he so quickly reduce African politics as tribal? Probably because he doesn't know any better, and the American media certainly isn't helping him.

Furthermore, these "age-old ethnic hatreds" - as they're often described by a press that is either incapable or unwilling to understand the nuances of African cultures and politics - were in many cases created (or at least fueled) by Europeans in order to divide and conquer through indirect colonial rule. In the case of Rwanda, Belgian and, to a lesser extent, German colonizers forced the racist biblical idea of "white negros" or "Hamites" (the cursed son of Noah) onto Rwandan society. The distinction was not linguistic, hereditary, geographical or even fixed; Tutsis and Hutus spoke the same language, frequently intermarried, lived together, and changing from one group to another was not unheard of. As a matter of fact, we still don't really understand the complex social order of pre-colonial Rwanda. An interesting fact is that there seems to have been no "ethnic" violence between Hutus and Tutsis before European colonization.

Still, Europeans, bewildered by a complex political system in the middle of "primitive" black Africa, created the idea that the Tutsi were superior to the Hutu and Twa and then ruled Rwanda and Burundi through the former. These are some of the roots of the violence in central Africa, and we would do well to remember that Western Europe and North America are not very far removed from this same sort of violence - WWII and Segregation, respectively*.

Since western colonization is far from blameless in this violence, we have an obligation to try to help clean it up. And if that isn't enough, the U.S. should look at the despots, such as Mobutu in Zaire, whom the they supported during the cold war. These are all reasons why the U.S. should 'care' about Africa. And if moral responsibility isn't enough for the reader from Oregon, the fact that the third world has been making its grievances known with car bombs lately should be.


*However, it is important to not see Africa as just a hapless child influenced by a superior Europe as some Africans have taken to doing in order to absolve themselves from the guilt of murder. The Belgians did not dismember their neighbors with machetes, Rwandans did.

Last week in the Times, Kristof penned a criticism (free subscription required) of the Bush administration's handling of the Darfur genocide in response to a letter by a reader from Eugene, Oregon. The letter reads as follows:

Why should the U.S. 'care' for the rest of the world? The U.S. should take care of its own.

People have been in Africa for thousands of years - & look at their progress during those years. Tribal still!

It's way past time for liberal twits to stop pushing the U.S. into or to try to make every wrong in the world our responsibility.

This little missive has so many points to address that I'll have to get to each of them in different posts. But first of all, besides the moral and practical responsibilities that Kristof mentions in his piece, the U.S. has a legal responsibility to intervene.

In July 2004, the US Congress unanimously declared the violence in Darfur a genocide. Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, signed by the US in 1948 and ratified in 1988, states that all contracting parties agree to "undertake to prevent and to punish" the crime of genocide.

Unless we as a nation start living up to our practical, moral and legal responsibilities to prevent genocide, the phrase "never again" will remain a platitude that we speak on the anniversaries of genocides we did nothing to stop.

From time to time there are really important stories that for one reason or another don't get the media attention that they ought to. Recently, the secret Downing Street memo's near lack of coverage in the America press comes to mind. However, while that story certainly deserves to be covered, there is another story that has had very little coverage in the states.

Thomas Lang at CJR Daily has written a good little piece about CNN's 25th anniversary, in which he talks about their coverage of Rwanda in 1994 and their current coverage (or lack thereof) of the genocide taking place in Darfur, Sudan.

Lang is right. With the exception of Kristof from the New York Times, no one seems to be interested in this story. Lang quotes a survey from the International Crisis Group and Zogby International, which states:

Some 84% of respondents said the U.S. should not tolerate an extremist
government committing such attacks, and should use its military assets, short of
inserting U.S. combat troops on the ground to protect civilians, to help bring
them to a halt. There would appear to be much greater public backing for America
to play a leadership role in stemming this catastrophe than has been the
conventional wisdom in Washington. This includes 81% who supported tough
sanctions on Sudanese leaders who control the militias, 80% who backed
establishing a no-fly zone over Darfur, and 91% who said the U.S. should
cooperate with the International Criminal Court to help bring to justice those
accused of crimes against humanity.

These numbers speak well for Americans. They show that it's possible to overlook racism and apathy in order to muster the popular push for the "political will" that we were told made Washington decide to abandon 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus to their bloody fate at the hands of machete wielding murderers. I find it particularly interesting that 91% of those polled were in favor of backing the ICC in order to bring the Sudanese génocidaires to justice, since the US stance has so far been the complete opposite.

What is needed, it seems, is more coverage - especially on television - so that the American public and their representatives are forced to see the killings in Darfur while they're trying to eat their Sunday night supper. Lang thinks that CNN et al. should get their priorities straight and that there's no excuse for not covering this disaster. I couldn't agree more.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury:

This blog is a quiet bottled letter. In it, I want to discuss ideas, politics, literature, film and genocide, among other things. I want to give myself a space where I can work out some of the ideas that keep me awake at night. I hope that others will find this site interesting or helpful, but even if it's but an exercise in vanity, staring at my own reflection in ones and zeros, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. What's important for me is to get some of these things off my chest and, in theory at least, into a public forum.

The US Supreme Court declined to review the case of two journalists who have refused to testify before a grand jury about who leaked the name of Valerie Plane, an undercover CIA agent and the wife of Joseph Wilson, to Bob Novak. This refusal has resulted in their being held in contempt of court and consequently threatened with up to 18 months in jail. Since civil contempt cases suggest imprisonment in the local jail facilities, the two journalists would be held in the District of Columbia's local jail unless the US Marshall Services or Judge Hogan decide otherwise

Wilson was sent by the Bush administration to investigate a false report that Iraq had been trying to obtain uranium yellowcake from Niger. Well after Wilson reported to the Office of the Vice President that the report was obviously spurious, the White House continued to use the report to justify invading Iraq. As a result, Wilson published an op-ed piece in the Times, taking the White House to task for using demonstrably false accusations to drum up support for war.

Afterwards, in what seems to be politically motivated revenge, someone from the White House leaked the fact that Wilson's wife was a covert CIA agent and had recommended him for the Niger investigation. The only reporter willing to out her was the righteous conservative columnist, Bob Novak. Consequently, there was an investigation into who leaked the information. But strangely enough, instead of ordering Novak to testify, the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has aggressively pursued the testimony of Judith Miller from the New York Times and Mathew Cooper of Time Magazine. The former did research and interviews on the matter but never even wrote an article about it, and the latter penned an article about the leak, after Novak's, in which he questioned the motives behind her outing.

All of the press items about this have focused on journalists' right to protect their sources, and it seems clear that this is an important issue, especially when it comes to a potentially criminal divulgence, which could have put people's lives in danger. However, what I have seen much less of is the question of why these two journalists, who did not divulge Mrs. Plane's identity, are the ones being hounded. Novak has never even been asked to testify in the case, nor has he been threatened with jail time. It seems like a flagrant abuse of power that the only two people who look like they might go to jail in this incident are those who have done nothing wrong.

This is an obvious case of gross injustice, and I'm surprised to see that even the editorial on the issue in today's Times isn't more outraged. At the risk of sounding hackneyed or trite, someone down at Miller's newspaper and Cooper's magazine should be calling out for all of their readers to go to the window, open it, stick their heads out and yell, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Because I'm afraid if Miller and Cooper can't count on their own publications to do it, they can't count on anyone.

As seen this week in the Times, 13 American CIA operatives are wanted in Italy for the kidnapping of the Egyptian cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr. Abu Omar, as he is also known, was walking to his mosque in Milan for noon prayer when he was kidnapped and "rendered" to Egypt.

"Extraordinary rendition" is the term used for handing prisoners, who have usually not been charged with a crime, over to countries such as Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Syria, Uzbekistan, Morocco and Jordan, where they are then interrogated and tortured. The case that brought this practice into the public light was the Syrian born Canadian engineer, Maher Arar, who was wrongfully suspected of links to terrorism and who while changing planes in the US to return home to Canada from a vacation in Tunisia, was detained for thirteen days and then later deported. But not to his home in Canada where his family lives, to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for over a year.

As it turns out, Mr. Maher had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, which is why after a year and pressure from the Canadian government, Syria finally released him. Abu Omar, on the other hand, was under investigation by Italian authorities for suspected ties to al Qaeda. Be that as it may, it is not unheard of for intelligence to be horribly wrong, as was the case for Mr. Maher and Brandon Mayfield, the Oregon lawyer who was falsely accused of the Madrid bombing and detained by American intelligence officers.

But in the end, whether or not Nasr has links to al Qaeda is irrelevant. The important thing is the rule of law, and as one Italian official noted:

Our belief is that terrorist suspects should be investigated through legal channels and brought to a court of law - not kidnapped and spirited away to be tortured in some secret prison.

But that's exactly what happened. Abu Omar was spirited away to be tortured in some secret prison. According to the Corriere della Sera, he was able to briefly contact his family and confirm that he had been tortured before being arrested again by Egyptian authorities. And as the Times reports, despite the Italian warrant for the arrest of the CIA operatives, who may or may not have had the Italian government's blessing to kidnap Abu Omar, they will most likely go unpunished.

So while Vice President Dick Cheney assures us that the government needs to "work through, sort of, the dark side," and that "[a] lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we?re going to be successful. That?s the world these folks operate in. And so it?s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective," Tony Judt makes a very astute observation about the future of American foreign and domestic policy in this week's New York Review of Books:

Historians and pundits who leap aboard the bandwagon of American Empire have forgotten a little too quickly that for an empire to be born, a republic has first to die. In the longer run no country can expect to behave imperially -- brutally, contemptuously, illegally -- abroad while preserving republican values at home.

In today's New York Times, David Brooks illustrates once again that he either doesn't know much about development aid or that he's being disingenuous. He spends his time criticizing Jeffrey Sachs, the American economist from the Earth Institute at Columbia University, chosen to run the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Program.

According to Brooks, people like Sachs don't really understand that real people live in poor countries and think that pouring money into Africa will solve the problem of poverty. On the other hand, according to Brooks, Bush and other conservatives understand that the real causes of poverty are due to the "crooked timber of humanity," such as "corrupt governments, perverse incentives" and "institutions that crush freedom."

As a result, he implies that the US Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) is a more effective answer to world poverty that the UN's MDGs. Nevermind that the MDGs are cross cutting goals, which link almost every aspect, organization and program of the UN system, and nevermind the fact that to say that Sachs doesn't focus on individual Africans would be like saying that a commander in chief doesn't pay enough attention to privates in the army. The fact of the matter is that the MDGs are only the overall framework of a much larger effort which is done on regional, national and local scales, both from the top down and the bottom up. So when the UN's World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) puts out its next World Water Development Report, there will be a chapter entirely devoted to governance and another entirely devoted to local case studies.

Furthermore, Brooks's own newspaper took a look last week at the MCA on the occasion of the resignation of its chief executive, Paul Applegarth, who denies that his resignation had anything to do with complaints by the presidents of Ghana, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger and Botswana, who while visiting the White House, complained that the program's fine print and bureaucracy made it next to impossible for their countries to get any aid. Brooks is right that the MCA pays attention to governance -- so much so in fact, that since its inception in 2002, it has only found two countries worthy of aid: Honduras ($215 million) and Madagascar ($108 million). To be fair, MCA has recently accepted two other countries, Cape Verde and Nicaragua, but neither of these countries has seen any money yet.

So it's hard for me to not agree with Jeffrey Sachs when he says that when over 1 million people are dying every year of malaria (90% of whom are in Africa, and 70% of whom are under the age of 5) a stern lecture on good governance is somehow less important than sending free mosquito nets.

The force exerted by the moral sense of the individual is less effective than social myth would have us believe. Though such prescriptions as "Thou shalt not kill" occupy a pre-eminent place in the moral order, they do not occupy a correspondingly intractable position in human psychic structure. A few changes in newspaper headlines, a call from the draft board, orders from a man with epaulets, and men are led to kill with little difficulty.

- Stanley Milgram
preface to Obedience to Authority


Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he become a monster. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.

- Friedrich Nietzsche
Jenseits von Gut und Böse / Beyond Good and Evil

There has been much debate, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say much argument, about statements that implicitly or explicitly compare American behavior in the "war on terror" with that of the most reprehensible regimes of yesteryear. Accusations of hyperbole and "moral equivalency" have been leveled against those who have taken issue with the indefinite detainment and torture of those who are and those who are not guilty of the crime of terror. Discussion seems to have wandered from whether or not it is correct to detain and torture people who have no recourse to the law on the order of an executive directive to whether or not it is accurate to compare these acts with Soviet gulags.

The basic and most public facts are known. We have read excerpts from the reports illustrated by pictures of hooded figures in orange being beaten, berated, and hooked up with electrical wires. We know the names of some of the dead and those of the less experienced jailors.


An algebra of suffering

First, to address the claims of hyperbole and moral equivalency: State violence, and violence in general, can be discussed in qualitative or quantitative terms. Quantitatively speaking, comparisons to Soviet gulags, which claimed tens of millions of lives, are indeed exaggerated. The number of people murdered and tortured by American forces in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan are much, much smaller.

But is it really wise to judge violence in quantitative terms? Is evil measured by the number of its victims? Let's take an example. Was Stalin or Hitler more evil? Pol Pot or Idi Amin? How many dead Sudanese would it take for the killings to be as evil as those in Rwanda? What weighs more, the sins of Timothy McVeigh or those of John Wayne Gacy?

So while we can all say in effective terms that a million deaths is worse than a hundred, this distinction blurs when the numbers get closer and when we start talking in terms of causes instead of effects, morality instead of consequences.

And so we're left with qualitative distinctions. And qualitatively speaking, the person who murders 10 people is not twice as bad as the person who murders 5. So where does that leave us in terms of moral equivalence? Does that mean, as some have argued, that we're floating around in a virtueless void where anything goes? No, it only means that in moral terms, torturing and murdering one person is as bad as torturing and murdering two. This means that while the number of people killed and tortured in Soviet gulags and in American detainment camps might be very different, the moral mechanisms at play are the same.


Patting ourselves on the back

This brings us to the larger question of whether or not a democratic nation ought to torture and murder those it takes to be its enemies. I addressed this issue last week, when I quoted the Israeli Supreme court:

This is the destiny of a democracy: She does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back.

It seems, however, that some people are not satisfied with that answer. In today's Times, there was a letter to the editor in response to an op-ed piece, entitled Guantánamo's long shadow, in which Anthony Lewis argues that morality is not outweighed by necessity and that the rule of law should reign supreme:

To the Editor:
Anthony Lewis points to the humiliation of prisoners at Guantánamo and declares it a violation of human rights. But what rights do these prisoners have?

They are not criminals - they committed no crime on United States soil. They are not soldiers - they wear no uniform of an established government. But they are enemies of our country, captured on a faraway battlefield.

Since Mr. Lewis wants to discuss rights, let's discuss them. What rights do these non-citizens, non-criminals, non-soldiers have? This is where the concept of human rights turns to ashes.

I can have no rights other than what I can protect myself or have a government protect for me. The prisoners held in Guantánamo are without rights because of their choice to fight without any government's protection. Americans have no reason to protect them.

As our enemies, they are lucky even to be alive.

Bill Decker
San Diego, June 21, 2005

Mr. Decker's expression of magnanimity immediately makes me think of the following similar self accolade given in a very different place at a very different time:

In the period of dictatorship, surrounded on all sides by enemies, we sometimes manifested unnecessary leniency and unnecessary softheartedness.

- Soviet Chief State Prosecutor, N. V. Krylenko
Speech at the Promparty trial quoted in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago

Recently, Senator Durbin has been accused of calling American soldiers nazis and comparing Guantánamo Bay to a gulag, because he spoke out against American torture on the senate floor:

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. ... On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

This is not the first time that Durbin has spoken out against torture, and he had some pretty specific questions during the Gonzales Senate confirmation hearings in January 2005, which you can see or listen to for yourself:

Senator Durbin: "Let's go to specific questions. Can U.S. personnel legally engage in torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment under any circumstances?"

Alberto Gonzales: "Absolutely not. I mean, our policy is that we do not engage in torture."

Senator Durbin: "Good. I'm glad you stated that for the record. Do you believe that there are circumstances where other legal restrictions, like the War Crimes Act, would not apply to U.S. personnel?"

(seven second pause)

Alberto Gonzales: "Sir, I don't believe that that would be the case, but I would like the opportunity to, I don't, I want to be very candid with you, and obviously thorough in my response to that question. Uh. It is sort of a legal conclusion, and I would like to have the opportunity to get back to you on that."

Later, during the same hearing, Durbin asked Gonzales about his memo on the Geneva conventions (video, audio):

Senator Durbin: "In your August memo, you created the possiblity that the President could invoke his authority as Commander In Chief to not only suspend the Geneva Convention, but the application of other laws. Do you stand by that position?"

Alberto Gonzales: "I believe that I said in response to an earlier question that I do believe it is possible, theoretically possible, for the Congress to pass a law that could be viewed as unconstitutional by a President of the United States. And that's not just the position of this President. That's been the position of Presidents on both sides of the aisle. In my judgement, making that kind of conclusion is one that requires a great deal of care and consideration. But if you're asking me if it's theoretically possible that Congress could pass a statute that we view as unconstitutional. I'd have to conceed sir that that's theoretically possible."

Senator Durbin: "Has this president ever invoked that authority as Commander In Chief or otherwise, to conclude that a law was unconstitutional and refuse to comply with it?"

Alberto Gonzales: "I believe that I stated in my June briefing about these memos that the President has not exercised that authority."

Senator Durbin: "But you believe he has that authority. He could ignore a law passed by this Congress, signed by this President or another one, and decide that it is unconstitutional and refuse to comply with that law?"

Alberto Gonzales: "Senator, again, you're asking me, hypothetically, does that authority exist? I guess I would have to say that, hypothetically, that authority may exist. But let me also just say that we certainly understand and recognize the role of the courts in our system of government. We have to deal with some very difficult issues here. Very, very complicated. Sometimes the answers are not so clear. The President's position on this is, ultimately the judges, courts, will make the decision as to whether or not we've drawn the right balance here. And, and, in certain circumstances, the courts have agreed with the Administrations position, and, in certain circumstances, the courts have disagreed, and we will respect those decisions."

Senator Durbin: "Fifty-two years ago, a president named Harry Truman decided to test that premise. Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co Et. Al vs. Sawyer in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said, as you know, President Truman, you're wrong. You don't have the authority to decide whats constitutional - what laws you like and don't like. I'm troubled that you would think, as our incoming Attorney General, that a president can pick and choose the laws that he thinks are constitutional, and ultimately wait for that test in court to decide whether or not he's going to comply with the law."

These are the facts. I'm not even going to address the question of whether or not Durbin "called American troops nazis," because it's clear from his speech that he never did. However, he did obviously compare Guantánamo Bay to a Soviet gulag, as did Irene Khan, the Secretary General of Amnesty International -- which has compiled a number of documents on Guantánamo Bay -- in her forward to its 2005 report:

Despite the near-universal outrage generated by the photographs coming out of Abu Ghraib, and the evidence suggesting that such practices are being applied to other prisoners held by the USA in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere, neither the US administration nor the US Congress has called for a full and independent investigation.

Instead, the US government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to "re-define" torture. It has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques, the practice of holding "ghost detainees" (people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention) and the "rendering" or handing over of prisoners to third countries known to practise torture. The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law. Trials by military commissions have made a mockery of justice and due process.

To my mind, this is a much more interesting question: Are such comparisons helpful? Are they accurate? I will address these questions tomorrow.

This week I saw both Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Wole Soyinka speak. Not surprisingly, Mr. Soyinka proved to be the more interesting of the two. He was there to speak about "post-colonialism," although he didn't seem terribly sold on the term. But all appellation issues aside, he had some interesting things to say about African politics, colonialism, European immigration and integration, the "African diaspora" and reparations.

One interesting thing was his focus on the idea that as far as the Slave trade and reparations for such acts go, Europeans are not the only guilty parties. Not to mention some Africans themselves, the Arabs, presumably pushed by a law of not being allowed to enslave another Muslim, were highly active in the slave trade. (The transsaharan slave route should be as famous as the transatlantic version.) He brought up the fact that some Arab governments and intellectuals thought that the history of Arab slavers should be forgotten, since both Arabs and Black Africans have been victims of European colonization.

Then he brought up Fanon, and his theory that victims often have a psychological tendency to take their frustration out on other victims, because they aren't able to aim that frustration at their actual oppressors, although it's hard to say how convinced he was of this theory.

Personally, I think it's important to keep in mind that there's enough blame for everyone, and that just because Europeans were guilty of enslaving Africans doesn't mean that the Arab slavers were any less guilty. Some Africans have recently fallen into a discourse of victimhood in an attempt to evade responsibility for some very heinous acts. So while we must come to terms with the fact that the Belgians made up the ID cards in Rwanda, the French supplied and trained many of the killers and the US sat back and did nothing, the people who picked up machetes and brutally murdered their neighbors were Rwandans.

In any case, for Soyinka, the first step is recognizing the evils done in the past, and making at the very least an official and symbolic repentance. He even said that these reparations wouldn't have to be monetary: "Give us back the art and cultural artifacts stolen from Africa, and we'll call it quits!"

At first thought, it seems like another gesture might be debt forgiveness and more foreign aid. But the more I think about it, the more I think it's important that the debt be wiped clean more on principled justice than as a magnanimous gesture of self atonement by the rich countries. Many African dictators were given loads of money to build opulent palaces and buy weapons for oppressing their compatriots, so long as they were on the right side of the Cold War divide. So it seems highly unfair that when the peoples of these countries finally manage to rid themselves of their monstrous dictators (often through no help from, or even despite the efforts of, rich countries), that the rich countries who financed their oppression should expect them to pay that money back.

Since I started this site, pretty much all of the entries have been on depressing subjects, things that I think are important, but which are pretty big downers.

Since it's my birthday, however, I'd like to post a couple of more light hearted things.

Here's an oldish but funny article from the odd jobs department over at the The New Yorker about the guy who writes the fortunes in the fortune cookies at most Chinese restaurants in the US. Confucious' cookie spokesman assures us that even the best of 'em suffer from writer's block from time to time.


In other news, the hard-hitting editorialist, Ellen Turlington from the Onion gives us here take on the Darfur crisis.

[L]ately, the main stories in the news seem to be about Deep Throat, the new summer blockbusters, and something about stem cells. Since I'm sure I would have remembered if the U.S. had intervened in some way to stop it, I can only assume that the whole genocide-in-Darfur thing has somehow worked itself out.

And finally, although it's over half a year old, I'm sure that not nearly enough people have read about the harrowing Florida congressional race of candidate Richard Grayson. Here is his diary, which explains the whole process from beginning to end. The whole thing is funny and worth reading. It really gives you a good hard look into what it takes to run for Congress.

Here are a couple of gems from the end of his campaign:

Tuesday, November 2

...I'm handing out homemade leaflets that say, "Get on the Kerry, Edwards, Castor, Grayson Team."

A man refuses to take one but wishes me luck with a capital "F."

Wednesday, November 3

The people have spoken, the subhuman douche bags.

Joseph Lelyveld wrote a very interesting piece on torture for the New York Times Magazine yesterday, entitled Interrogating Ourselves. In it, he discusses intelligence gathering in the "war on terror" and the torture and "highly coercive interrogation" techniques (i.e. "torture lite") that seem to have become commonplace in American anti-terrorism investigations.

He analyses the tough question of whether torture and torture lite work, whether or not they can save lives. He discusses American and Israeli interrogators, the latter seeming to be leaps and bounds ahead in the torture domain, both in terms of efficiency and legal codification. He informs us that American interrogators are deemed "unprofessional" by their Israeli counterparts.

Lelyveld is highly practical and warns the reader of the moral neutrality of such language as "the efficacy of torture." So in the end, the piece hinges on logistics rather than principle. But I can't help but think of the recent judgement passed down by the Israeli Supreme Court, which was about rerouting part of the security wall because it unlawfully made life even more difficult for many Palestinians, but can also be applied to security and the rule of law in general and as they relate to torture:

This is the destiny of a democracy: She does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back.

Chief Justice Barak went on to say, "there is no security without law." And while Lelyveld's piece shows us that these important ideas have not been completely implemented in the interrogation chambers of Shin Bet, that doesn't make the assertion itself any less true. So while I am nothing but critical of the Israeli state, they seem to have gotten it right this time, on paper at least. It's a shame that so far, the US has had neither the foresight nor the wisdom to come to the same conclusions.


Note: for another interesting discussion of torture, see Mark Danner's pieces in the the New York Review of Books, available online for free here and here and his write up of Abu Ghraib here.

Last month I saw Darwin's Nightmare, a documentary film by an Austrian filmmaker about the economy based on the alien Nile Perch , which was introduced into Lake Victoria, and which has had devastating effects on the lake's ecosystem and local food supply. It's a fine documentary that explores first world complicity in a small Tanzanian fishing town's misery. Although there is a striking lack of adolescents shown in the film, we see a gamut of people, from hungry street children and prostitutes to Indian-Tanzanian factory owners and Ukrainian pilots, whose planes alternately bring food aid and arms to Tanzania, but always leave full of fish.

So I was excited to see Sauper's 45 minute film on 100,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees roaming the jungles of the Congo in 1997, Kisangani Diary, especially since the director was going to be there to answer questions after the film. I am sad to say, however, that I was very disappointed. While cinematographically, the film was good, there was a certain lack of context that bothered me. This, coupled with the heavy handedness of filming almost exclusively children, made the film seem somehow slightly dishonest.

The viewer is told that these Hutu Rwandans have been roaming the Congolese jungle since they left Rwanda after the 1994 Tutsi genocide, only to be attacked for being of the "wrong tribe" by numerous forces vying for power, especially Kabila's rebel ADFL soldiers, who were soon to topple Mobutu's kleptocracy. Like in Darwin's Nightmare, there is a striking lack of adolescents and adults in the film; the viewer sees suffering children and little else.

While in Darwin's Nightmare, it's understandable why he left out the adolescents on the street. The film is already fairly complex on a moral level, and it's not clear if seeing hungry teenage boys who might just murder you helps get the bigger picture of what's going on in this part of Tanzania. However, in Kisigani Diary the choice is particularly problematic. We never see the adults, and he never asks them why they are still in the Congo. Given the amount of popular Hutu participation in the 1994 genocide, there is a good chance that among these refugees there are at least some, if not many, murderers. But this is not explored at all by Sauper, and when I asked him after the projection who these people were, if any of them were guilty of genocide, the only response he could give me was he didn't think so, because the génocidaires would have left with their guns to get food.

Nevermind the fact that the Rwandan genocide was largely performed with machetes, hammers, hoes, axes and clubs. Furthermore, given the popular participation of the Hutu population, it is probable that there were more than a few people guilty of genocide among the off screen adults in Sauper's film. Furthermore, Sauper fails to mention that many of the Hutu refugee camps in Zaire were still run by former Rwandan military and militia leaders, the same people who massacred nearly 1 million Tutsis. Neither does he mention that many of these camps launched raids into Rwanda and attempted, with the support of Mobutu, to massacre the Zairean Banyamulenge Tutsis.

So in the end, the viewer sees a group of defenceless starving children, longing to return to Rwanda. The images might be from Darfur or northern Ethiopia. There is no moral complexity or context in which to frame the miserable suffering of these people roaming the jungle while starving to death and being shot at.

In today's New York Times, Brooks tells us about his trip to Namibia (subscription required). While talking about AIDS in southern Africa, he fondly mentions American aid three times, patting the US on the back, talking about the money that the US is "pouring" into AIDS treatment in Africa.

Ironically, just yesterday, an editorial in the Times called "Crumbs for Africa" took Bush to task for finally getting around to spending the insufficient $674 million for needy countries that Congress had already approved.

Tony Blair, as host of the G-8 annual meeting, has been trying to get rich countries to double overall aid for Africa over the next 10 years. He has been doing a pretty good job getting that commitment from European nations, but Washington will have none of it. The US, along with European nations, pledged to raise its non-military foreign aid to 0.7% of annual income, but unlike the UK, Germany and France, which have all announced plans to meet this goal and countries like the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway, which have already surpassed the .07% goal, Washington currently has no plan of action for keeping this promise. The US actually gives a lower income percentage than any industrialized country in the world. Portugal, for example, is more than twice as generous as the US.

While most Americans believe that the US gives nearly a quarter of its income away to needy countries, it actually spends only 0.16%, less than 2 cents for every $100. For example, even with Bush"s new "generous" Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the US proposes to spend only $2 billion annually on AIDS relief. This is less than half of the amount that it is expected to spend based on its economy. Compare that to the $300 billion and counting spent on the war in Iraq and the $140 billion in corporate tax cuts last year, and one can see where American priorities really are.

But it gets worse. Not only is the US amazingly stingy, but under Bush, foreign aid is tied to conservative ideology and unilateral, thus diverting aid from multilateral organizations like UNAIDS, which represent the most effective way of distributing international aid. Brooks calls these concerns "nonsense" that is "irrelevant on the ground."

Stephen Lewis, the UN secretary-general's special envoy for AIDS in Africa and Dr. Paul Zeitz, the executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance would beg to differ.

Add to that, the Bush administration's focus on religious ideology over science (e.g. supporting abstinence only programs while cutting off funding to programs that promote condom use), and it's not surprising that Uganda's AIDS rate, which had decreased dramatically in the last ten years, seems to be flattening off and perhaps even going back up.

During a trip to that same nation in 2003, Bush stated, "We are a great nation, we're a wealthy nation. We have a responsibility to help a neighbor in need, a brother and sister in crisis." Given the facts, it's somehow difficult to have much faith in such a magnanimous statement.

Now for the other aspect of the letter that really bothers me, that "People have been in Africa for thousands of years - & look at their progress during those years. Tribal still!" The OED defines tribalism as follows:

a. The condition of existing as a separate tribe or tribes; tribal system, organization, or relations.
b. Loyalty to a particular tribe or group of which one is a member.

While I'm the first to insist that people should vote for ideas instead of ethnicities, tribes or religions, I think we should beware of throwing stones from our glass abode. It only takes a quick look at the 2004 elections to see the effect that religion as a political tool had on the American political discourse. Does that make Americans tribalistic? Maybe, but one shouldn?t forget that in the U.S. religion is used for a political end. Remember the Catholic bishops who refused communion to pro-choice catholic politicians? What about the political rallies held in Protestant churches all over the nation?

Likewise, ethnicity and religion are being used for political goals in Africa. I'm sure the reader from Oregon would not seriously reduce American politics as sectarian, so why should he so quickly reduce African politics as tribal? Probably because he doesn't know any better, and the American media certainly isn't helping him.

Furthermore, these "age-old ethnic hatreds" - as they're often described by a press that is either incapable or unwilling to understand the nuances of African cultures and politics - were in many cases created (or at least fueled) by Europeans in order to divide and conquer through indirect colonial rule. In the case of Rwanda, Belgian and, to a lesser extent, German colonizers forced the racist biblical idea of "white negros" or "Hamites" (the cursed son of Noah) onto Rwandan society. The distinction was not linguistic, hereditary, geographical or even fixed; Tutsis and Hutus spoke the same language, frequently intermarried, lived together, and changing from one group to another was not unheard of. As a matter of fact, we still don't really understand the complex social order of pre-colonial Rwanda. An interesting fact is that there seems to have been no "ethnic" violence between Hutus and Tutsis before European colonization.

Still, Europeans, bewildered by a complex political system in the middle of "primitive" black Africa, created the idea that the Tutsi were superior to the Hutu and Twa and then ruled Rwanda and Burundi through the former. These are some of the roots of the violence in central Africa, and we would do well to remember that Western Europe and North America are not very far removed from this same sort of violence - WWII and Segregation, respectively*.

Since western colonization is far from blameless in this violence, we have an obligation to try to help clean it up. And if that isn't enough, the U.S. should look at the despots, such as Mobutu in Zaire, whom the they supported during the cold war. These are all reasons why the U.S. should 'care' about Africa. And if moral responsibility isn't enough for the reader from Oregon, the fact that the third world has been making its grievances known with car bombs lately should be.


*However, it is important to not see Africa as just a hapless child influenced by a superior Europe as some Africans have taken to doing in order to absolve themselves from the guilt of murder. The Belgians did not dismember their neighbors with machetes, Rwandans did.

Last week in the Times, Kristof penned a criticism (free subscription required) of the Bush administration's handling of the Darfur genocide in response to a letter by a reader from Eugene, Oregon. The letter reads as follows:

Why should the U.S. 'care' for the rest of the world? The U.S. should take care of its own.

People have been in Africa for thousands of years - & look at their progress during those years. Tribal still!

It's way past time for liberal twits to stop pushing the U.S. into or to try to make every wrong in the world our responsibility.

This little missive has so many points to address that I'll have to get to each of them in different posts. But first of all, besides the moral and practical responsibilities that Kristof mentions in his piece, the U.S. has a legal responsibility to intervene.

In July 2004, the US Congress unanimously declared the violence in Darfur a genocide. Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, signed by the US in 1948 and ratified in 1988, states that all contracting parties agree to "undertake to prevent and to punish" the crime of genocide.

Unless we as a nation start living up to our practical, moral and legal responsibilities to prevent genocide, the phrase "never again" will remain a platitude that we speak on the anniversaries of genocides we did nothing to stop.

From time to time there are really important stories that for one reason or another don't get the media attention that they ought to. Recently, the secret Downing Street memo's near lack of coverage in the America press comes to mind. However, while that story certainly deserves to be covered, there is another story that has had very little coverage in the states.

Thomas Lang at CJR Daily has written a good little piece about CNN's 25th anniversary, in which he talks about their coverage of Rwanda in 1994 and their current coverage (or lack thereof) of the genocide taking place in Darfur, Sudan.

Lang is right. With the exception of Kristof from the New York Times, no one seems to be interested in this story. Lang quotes a survey from the International Crisis Group and Zogby International, which states:

Some 84% of respondents said the U.S. should not tolerate an extremist
government committing such attacks, and should use its military assets, short of
inserting U.S. combat troops on the ground to protect civilians, to help bring
them to a halt. There would appear to be much greater public backing for America
to play a leadership role in stemming this catastrophe than has been the
conventional wisdom in Washington. This includes 81% who supported tough
sanctions on Sudanese leaders who control the militias, 80% who backed
establishing a no-fly zone over Darfur, and 91% who said the U.S. should
cooperate with the International Criminal Court to help bring to justice those
accused of crimes against humanity.

These numbers speak well for Americans. They show that it's possible to overlook racism and apathy in order to muster the popular push for the "political will" that we were told made Washington decide to abandon 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus to their bloody fate at the hands of machete wielding murderers. I find it particularly interesting that 91% of those polled were in favor of backing the ICC in order to bring the Sudanese génocidaires to justice, since the US stance has so far been the complete opposite.

What is needed, it seems, is more coverage - especially on television - so that the American public and their representatives are forced to see the killings in Darfur while they're trying to eat their Sunday night supper. Lang thinks that CNN et al. should get their priorities straight and that there's no excuse for not covering this disaster. I couldn't agree more.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury:

This blog is a quiet bottled letter. In it, I want to discuss ideas, politics, literature, film and genocide, among other things. I want to give myself a space where I can work out some of the ideas that keep me awake at night. I hope that others will find this site interesting or helpful, but even if it's but an exercise in vanity, staring at my own reflection in ones and zeros, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. What's important for me is to get some of these things off my chest and, in theory at least, into a public forum.

The US Supreme Court declined to review the case of two journalists who have refused to testify before a grand jury about who leaked the name of Valerie Plane, an undercover CIA agent and the wife of Joseph Wilson, to Bob Novak. This refusal has resulted in their being held in contempt of court and consequently threatened with up to 18 months in jail. Since civil contempt cases suggest imprisonment in the local jail facilities, the two journalists would be held in the District of Columbia's local jail unless the US Marshall Services or Judge Hogan decide otherwise

Wilson was sent by the Bush administration to investigate a false report that Iraq had been trying to obtain uranium yellowcake from Niger. Well after Wilson reported to the Office of the Vice President that the report was obviously spurious, the White House continued to use the report to justify invading Iraq. As a result, Wilson published an op-ed piece in the Times, taking the White House to task for using demonstrably false accusations to drum up support for war.

Afterwards, in what seems to be politically motivated revenge, someone from the White House leaked the fact that Wilson's wife was a covert CIA agent and had recommended him for the Niger investigation. The only reporter willing to out her was the righteous conservative columnist, Bob Novak. Consequently, there was an investigation into who leaked the information. But strangely enough, instead of ordering Novak to testify, the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has aggressively pursued the testimony of Judith Miller from the New York Times and Mathew Cooper of Time Magazine. The former did research and interviews on the matter but never even wrote an article about it, and the latter penned an article about the leak, after Novak's, in which he questioned the motives behind her outing.

All of the press items about this have focused on journalists' right to protect their sources, and it seems clear that this is an important issue, especially when it comes to a potentially criminal divulgence, which could have put people's lives in danger. However, what I have seen much less of is the question of why these two journalists, who did not divulge Mrs. Plane's identity, are the ones being hounded. Novak has never even been asked to testify in the case, nor has he been threatened with jail time. It seems like a flagrant abuse of power that the only two people who look like they might go to jail in this incident are those who have done nothing wrong.

This is an obvious case of gross injustice, and I'm surprised to see that even the editorial on the issue in today's Times isn't more outraged. At the risk of sounding hackneyed or trite, someone down at Miller's newspaper and Cooper's magazine should be calling out for all of their readers to go to the window, open it, stick their heads out and yell, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Because I'm afraid if Miller and Cooper can't count on their own publications to do it, they can't count on anyone.

As seen this week in the Times, 13 American CIA operatives are wanted in Italy for the kidnapping of the Egyptian cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr. Abu Omar, as he is also known, was walking to his mosque in Milan for noon prayer when he was kidnapped and "rendered" to Egypt.

"Extraordinary rendition" is the term used for handing prisoners, who have usually not been charged with a crime, over to countries such as Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Syria, Uzbekistan, Morocco and Jordan, where they are then interrogated and tortured. The case that brought this practice into the public light was the Syrian born Canadian engineer, Maher Arar, who was wrongfully suspected of links to terrorism and who while changing planes in the US to return home to Canada from a vacation in Tunisia, was detained for thirteen days and then later deported. But not to his home in Canada where his family lives, to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for over a year.

As it turns out, Mr. Maher had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, which is why after a year and pressure from the Canadian government, Syria finally released him. Abu Omar, on the other hand, was under investigation by Italian authorities for suspected ties to al Qaeda. Be that as it may, it is not unheard of for intelligence to be horribly wrong, as was the case for Mr. Maher and Brandon Mayfield, the Oregon lawyer who was falsely accused of the Madrid bombing and detained by American intelligence officers.

But in the end, whether or not Nasr has links to al Qaeda is irrelevant. The important thing is the rule of law, and as one Italian official noted:

Our belief is that terrorist suspects should be investigated through legal channels and brought to a court of law - not kidnapped and spirited away to be tortured in some secret prison.

But that's exactly what happened. Abu Omar was spirited away to be tortured in some secret prison. According to the Corriere della Sera, he was able to briefly contact his family and confirm that he had been tortured before being arrested again by Egyptian authorities. And as the Times reports, despite the Italian warrant for the arrest of the CIA operatives, who may or may not have had the Italian government's blessing to kidnap Abu Omar, they will most likely go unpunished.

So while Vice President Dick Cheney assures us that the government needs to "work through, sort of, the dark side," and that "[a] lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we?re going to be successful. That?s the world these folks operate in. And so it?s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective," Tony Judt makes a very astute observation about the future of American foreign and domestic policy in this week's New York Review of Books:

Historians and pundits who leap aboard the bandwagon of American Empire have forgotten a little too quickly that for an empire to be born, a republic has first to die. In the longer run no country can expect to behave imperially -- brutally, contemptuously, illegally -- abroad while preserving republican values at home.

In today's New York Times, David Brooks illustrates once again that he either doesn't know much about development aid or that he's being disingenuous. He spends his time criticizing Jeffrey Sachs, the American economist from the Earth Institute at Columbia University, chosen to run the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Program.

According to Brooks, people like Sachs don't really understand that real people live in poor countries and think that pouring money into Africa will solve the problem of poverty. On the other hand, according to Brooks, Bush and other conservatives understand that the real causes of poverty are due to the "crooked timber of humanity," such as "corrupt governments, perverse incentives" and "institutions that crush freedom."

As a result, he implies that the US Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) is a more effective answer to world poverty that the UN's MDGs. Nevermind that the MDGs are cross cutting goals, which link almost every aspect, organization and program of the UN system, and nevermind the fact that to say that Sachs doesn't focus on individual Africans would be like saying that a commander in chief doesn't pay enough attention to privates in the army. The fact of the matter is that the MDGs are only the overall framework of a much larger effort which is done on regional, national and local scales, both from the top down and the bottom up. So when the UN's World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) puts out its next World Water Development Report, there will be a chapter entirely devoted to governance and another entirely devoted to local case studies.

Furthermore, Brooks's own newspaper took a look last week at the MCA on the occasion of the resignation of its chief executive, Paul Applegarth, who denies that his resignation had anything to do with complaints by the presidents of Ghana, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger and Botswana, who while visiting the White House, complained that the program's fine print and bureaucracy made it next to impossible for their countries to get any aid. Brooks is right that the MCA pays attention to governance -- so much so in fact, that since its inception in 2002, it has only found two countries worthy of aid: Honduras ($215 million) and Madagascar ($108 million). To be fair, MCA has recently accepted two other countries, Cape Verde and Nicaragua, but neither of these countries has seen any money yet.

So it's hard for me to not agree with Jeffrey Sachs when he says that when over 1 million people are dying every year of malaria (90% of whom are in Africa, and 70% of whom are under the age of 5) a stern lecture on good governance is somehow less important than sending free mosquito nets.

The force exerted by the moral sense of the individual is less effective than social myth would have us believe. Though such prescriptions as "Thou shalt not kill" occupy a pre-eminent place in the moral order, they do not occupy a correspondingly intractable position in human psychic structure. A few changes in newspaper headlines, a call from the draft board, orders from a man with epaulets, and men are led to kill with little difficulty.

- Stanley Milgram
preface to Obedience to Authority


Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he become a monster. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.

- Friedrich Nietzsche
Jenseits von Gut und Böse / Beyond Good and Evil

There has been much debate, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say much argument, about statements that implicitly or explicitly compare American behavior in the "war on terror" with that of the most reprehensible regimes of yesteryear. Accusations of hyperbole and "moral equivalency" have been leveled against those who have taken issue with the indefinite detainment and torture of those who are and those who are not guilty of the crime of terror. Discussion seems to have wandered from whether or not it is correct to detain and torture people who have no recourse to the law on the order of an executive directive to whether or not it is accurate to compare these acts with Soviet gulags.

The basic and most public facts are known. We have read excerpts from the reports illustrated by pictures of hooded figures in orange being beaten, berated, and hooked up with electrical wires. We know the names of some of the dead and those of the less experienced jailors.


An algebra of suffering

First, to address the claims of hyperbole and moral equivalency: State violence, and violence in general, can be discussed in qualitative or quantitative terms. Quantitatively speaking, comparisons to Soviet gulags, which claimed tens of millions of lives, are indeed exaggerated. The number of people murdered and tortured by American forces in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan are much, much smaller.

But is it really wise to judge violence in quantitative terms? Is evil measured by the number of its victims? Let's take an example. Was Stalin or Hitler more evil? Pol Pot or Idi Amin? How many dead Sudanese would it take for the killings to be as evil as those in Rwanda? What weighs more, the sins of Timothy McVeigh or those of John Wayne Gacy?

So while we can all say in effective terms that a million deaths is worse than a hundred, this distinction blurs when the numbers get closer and when we start talking in terms of causes instead of effects, morality instead of consequences.

And so we're left with qualitative distinctions. And qualitatively speaking, the person who murders 10 people is not twice as bad as the person who murders 5. So where does that leave us in terms of moral equivalence? Does that mean, as some have argued, that we're floating around in a virtueless void where anything goes? No, it only means that in moral terms, torturing and murdering one person is as bad as torturing and murdering two. This means that while the number of people killed and tortured in Soviet gulags and in American detainment camps might be very different, the moral mechanisms at play are the same.


Patting ourselves on the back

This brings us to the larger question of whether or not a democratic nation ought to torture and murder those it takes to be its enemies. I addressed this issue last week, when I quoted the Israeli Supreme court:

This is the destiny of a democracy: She does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back.

It seems, however, that some people are not satisfied with that answer. In today's Times, there was a letter to the editor in response to an op-ed piece, entitled Guantánamo's long shadow, in which Anthony Lewis argues that morality is not outweighed by necessity and that the rule of law should reign supreme:

To the Editor:
Anthony Lewis points to the humiliation of prisoners at Guantánamo and declares it a violation of human rights. But what rights do these prisoners have?

They are not criminals - they committed no crime on United States soil. They are not soldiers - they wear no uniform of an established government. But they are enemies of our country, captured on a faraway battlefield.

Since Mr. Lewis wants to discuss rights, let's discuss them. What rights do these non-citizens, non-criminals, non-soldiers have? This is where the concept of human rights turns to ashes.

I can have no rights other than what I can protect myself or have a government protect for me. The prisoners held in Guantánamo are without rights because of their choice to fight without any government's protection. Americans have no reason to protect them.

As our enemies, they are lucky even to be alive.

Bill Decker
San Diego, June 21, 2005

Mr. Decker's expression of magnanimity immediately makes me think of the following similar self accolade given in a very different place at a very different time:

In the period of dictatorship, surrounded on all sides by enemies, we sometimes manifested unnecessary leniency and unnecessary softheartedness.

- Soviet Chief State Prosecutor, N. V. Krylenko
Speech at the Promparty trial quoted in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago

Recently, Senator Durbin has been accused of calling American soldiers nazis and comparing Guantánamo Bay to a gulag, because he spoke out against American torture on the senate floor:

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. ... On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

This is not the first time that Durbin has spoken out against torture, and he had some pretty specific questions during the Gonzales Senate confirmation hearings in January 2005, which you can see or listen to for yourself:

Senator Durbin: "Let's go to specific questions. Can U.S. personnel legally engage in torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment under any circumstances?"

Alberto Gonzales: "Absolutely not. I mean, our policy is that we do not engage in torture."

Senator Durbin: "Good. I'm glad you stated that for the record. Do you believe that there are circumstances where other legal restrictions, like the War Crimes Act, would not apply to U.S. personnel?"

(seven second pause)

Alberto Gonzales: "Sir, I don't believe that that would be the case, but I would like the opportunity to, I don't, I want to be very candid with you, and obviously thorough in my response to that question. Uh. It is sort of a legal conclusion, and I would like to have the opportunity to get back to you on that."

Later, during the same hearing, Durbin asked Gonzales about his memo on the Geneva conventions (video, audio):

Senator Durbin: "In your August memo, you created the possiblity that the President could invoke his authority as Commander In Chief to not only suspend the Geneva Convention, but the application of other laws. Do you stand by that position?"

Alberto Gonzales: "I believe that I said in response to an earlier question that I do believe it is possible, theoretically possible, for the Congress to pass a law that could be viewed as unconstitutional by a President of the United States. And that's not just the position of this President. That's been the position of Presidents on both sides of the aisle. In my judgement, making that kind of conclusion is one that requires a great deal of care and consideration. But if you're asking me if it's theoretically possible that Congress could pass a statute that we view as unconstitutional. I'd have to conceed sir that that's theoretically possible."

Senator Durbin: "Has this president ever invoked that authority as Commander In Chief or otherwise, to conclude that a law was unconstitutional and refuse to comply with it?"

Alberto Gonzales: "I believe that I stated in my June briefing about these memos that the President has not exercised that authority."

Senator Durbin: "But you believe he has that authority. He could ignore a law passed by this Congress, signed by this President or another one, and decide that it is unconstitutional and refuse to comply with that law?"

Alberto Gonzales: "Senator, again, you're asking me, hypothetically, does that authority exist? I guess I would have to say that, hypothetically, that authority may exist. But let me also just say that we certainly understand and recognize the role of the courts in our system of government. We have to deal with some very difficult issues here. Very, very complicated. Sometimes the answers are not so clear. The President's position on this is, ultimately the judges, courts, will make the decision as to whether or not we've drawn the right balance here. And, and, in certain circumstances, the courts have agreed with the Administrations position, and, in certain circumstances, the courts have disagreed, and we will respect those decisions."

Senator Durbin: "Fifty-two years ago, a president named Harry Truman decided to test that premise. Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co Et. Al vs. Sawyer in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said, as you know, President Truman, you're wrong. You don't have the authority to decide whats constitutional - what laws you like and don't like. I'm troubled that you would think, as our incoming Attorney General, that a president can pick and choose the laws that he thinks are constitutional, and ultimately wait for that test in court to decide whether or not he's going to comply with the law."

These are the facts. I'm not even going to address the question of whether or not Durbin "called American troops nazis," because it's clear from his speech that he never did. However, he did obviously compare Guantánamo Bay to a Soviet gulag, as did Irene Khan, the Secretary General of Amnesty International -- which has compiled a number of documents on Guantánamo Bay -- in her forward to its 2005 report:

Despite the near-universal outrage generated by the photographs coming out of Abu Ghraib, and the evidence suggesting that such practices are being applied to other prisoners held by the USA in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere, neither the US administration nor the US Congress has called for a full and independent investigation.

Instead, the US government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to "re-define" torture. It has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques, the practice of holding "ghost detainees" (people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention) and the "rendering" or handing over of prisoners to third countries known to practise torture. The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law. Trials by military commissions have made a mockery of justice and due process.

To my mind, this is a much more interesting question: Are such comparisons helpful? Are they accurate? I will address these questions tomorrow.

This week I saw both Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Wole Soyinka speak. Not surprisingly, Mr. Soyinka proved to be the more interesting of the two. He was there to speak about "post-colonialism," although he didn't seem terribly sold on the term. But all appellation issues aside, he had some interesting things to say about African politics, colonialism, European immigration and integration, the "African diaspora" and reparations.

One interesting thing was his focus on the idea that as far as the Slave trade and reparations for such acts go, Europeans are not the only guilty parties. Not to mention some Africans themselves, the Arabs, presumably pushed by a law of not being allowed to enslave another Muslim, were highly active in the slave trade. (The transsaharan slave route should be as famous as the transatlantic version.) He brought up the fact that some Arab governments and intellectuals thought that the history of Arab slavers should be forgotten, since both Arabs and Black Africans have been victims of European colonization.

Then he brought up Fanon, and his theory that victims often have a psychological tendency to take their frustration out on other victims, because they aren't able to aim that frustration at their actual oppressors, although it's hard to say how convinced he was of this theory.

Personally, I think it's important to keep in mind that there's enough blame for everyone, and that just because Europeans were guilty of enslaving Africans doesn't mean that the Arab slavers were any less guilty. Some Africans have recently fallen into a discourse of victimhood in an attempt to evade responsibility for some very heinous acts. So while we must come to terms with the fact that the Belgians made up the ID cards in Rwanda, the French supplied and trained many of the killers and the US sat back and did nothing, the people who picked up machetes and brutally murdered their neighbors were Rwandans.

In any case, for Soyinka, the first step is recognizing the evils done in the past, and making at the very least an official and symbolic repentance. He even said that these reparations wouldn't have to be monetary: "Give us back the art and cultural artifacts stolen from Africa, and we'll call it quits!"

At first thought, it seems like another gesture might be debt forgiveness and more foreign aid. But the more I think about it, the more I think it's important that the debt be wiped clean more on principled justice than as a magnanimous gesture of self atonement by the rich countries. Many African dictators were given loads of money to build opulent palaces and buy weapons for oppressing their compatriots, so long as they were on the right side of the Cold War divide. So it seems highly unfair that when the peoples of these countries finally manage to rid themselves of their monstrous dictators (often through no help from, or even despite the efforts of, rich countries), that the rich countries who financed their oppression should expect them to pay that money back.

Since I started this site, pretty much all of the entries have been on depressing subjects, things that I think are important, but which are pretty big downers.

Since it's my birthday, however, I'd like to post a couple of more light hearted things.

Here's an oldish but funny article from the odd jobs department over at the The New Yorker about the guy who writes the fortunes in the fortune cookies at most Chinese restaurants in the US. Confucious' cookie spokesman assures us that even the best of 'em suffer from writer's block from time to time.


In other news, the hard-hitting editorialist, Ellen Turlington from the Onion gives us here take on the Darfur crisis.

[L]ately, the main stories in the news seem to be about Deep Throat, the new summer blockbusters, and something about stem cells. Since I'm sure I would have remembered if the U.S. had intervened in some way to stop it, I can only assume that the whole genocide-in-Darfur thing has somehow worked itself out.

And finally, although it's over half a year old, I'm sure that not nearly enough people have read about the harrowing Florida congressional race of candidate Richard Grayson. Here is his diary, which explains the whole process from beginning to end. The whole thing is funny and worth reading. It really gives you a good hard look into what it takes to run for Congress.

Here are a couple of gems from the end of his campaign:

Tuesday, November 2

...I'm handing out homemade leaflets that say, "Get on the Kerry, Edwards, Castor, Grayson Team."

A man refuses to take one but wishes me luck with a capital "F."

Wednesday, November 3

The people have spoken, the subhuman douche bags.

Joseph Lelyveld wrote a very interesting piece on torture for the New York Times Magazine yesterday, entitled Interrogating Ourselves. In it, he discusses intelligence gathering in the "war on terror" and the torture and "highly coercive interrogation" techniques (i.e. "torture lite") that seem to have become commonplace in American anti-terrorism investigations.

He analyses the tough question of whether torture and torture lite work, whether or not they can save lives. He discusses American and Israeli interrogators, the latter seeming to be leaps and bounds ahead in the torture domain, both in terms of efficiency and legal codification. He informs us that American interrogators are deemed "unprofessional" by their Israeli counterparts.

Lelyveld is highly practical and warns the reader of the moral neutrality of such language as "the efficacy of torture." So in the end, the piece hinges on logistics rather than principle. But I can't help but think of the recent judgement passed down by the Israeli Supreme Court, which was about rerouting part of the security wall because it unlawfully made life even more difficult for many Palestinians, but can also be applied to security and the rule of law in general and as they relate to torture:

This is the destiny of a democracy: She does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back.

Chief Justice Barak went on to say, "there is no security without law." And while Lelyveld's piece shows us that these important ideas have not been completely implemented in the interrogation chambers of Shin Bet, that doesn't make the assertion itself any less true. So while I am nothing but critical of the Israeli state, they seem to have gotten it right this time, on paper at least. It's a shame that so far, the US has had neither the foresight nor the wisdom to come to the same conclusions.


Note: for another interesting discussion of torture, see Mark Danner's pieces in the the New York Review of Books, available online for free here and here and his write up of Abu Ghraib here.

Last month I saw Darwin's Nightmare, a documentary film by an Austrian filmmaker about the economy based on the alien Nile Perch , which was introduced into Lake Victoria, and which has had devastating effects on the lake's ecosystem and local food supply. It's a fine documentary that explores first world complicity in a small Tanzanian fishing town's misery. Although there is a striking lack of adolescents shown in the film, we see a gamut of people, from hungry street children and prostitutes to Indian-Tanzanian factory owners and Ukrainian pilots, whose planes alternately bring food aid and arms to Tanzania, but always leave full of fish.

So I was excited to see Sauper's 45 minute film on 100,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees roaming the jungles of the Congo in 1997, Kisangani Diary, especially since the director was going to be there to answer questions after the film. I am sad to say, however, that I was very disappointed. While cinematographically, the film was good, there was a certain lack of context that bothered me. This, coupled with the heavy handedness of filming almost exclusively children, made the film seem somehow slightly dishonest.

The viewer is told that these Hutu Rwandans have been roaming the Congolese jungle since they left Rwanda after the 1994 Tutsi genocide, only to be attacked for being of the "wrong tribe" by numerous forces vying for power, especially Kabila's rebel ADFL soldiers, who were soon to topple Mobutu's kleptocracy. Like in Darwin's Nightmare, there is a striking lack of adolescents and adults in the film; the viewer sees suffering children and little else.

While in Darwin's Nightmare, it's understandable why he left out the adolescents on the street. The film is already fairly complex on a moral level, and it's not clear if seeing hungry teenage boys who might just murder you helps get the bigger picture of what's going on in this part of Tanzania. However, in Kisigani Diary the choice is particularly problematic. We never see the adults, and he never asks them why they are still in the Congo. Given the amount of popular Hutu participation in the 1994 genocide, there is a good chance that among these refugees there are at least some, if not many, murderers. But this is not explored at all by Sauper, and when I asked him after the projection who these people were, if any of them were guilty of genocide, the only response he could give me was he didn't think so, because the génocidaires would have left with their guns to get food.

Nevermind the fact that the Rwandan genocide was largely performed with machetes, hammers, hoes, axes and clubs. Furthermore, given the popular participation of the Hutu population, it is probable that there were more than a few people guilty of genocide among the off screen adults in Sauper's film. Furthermore, Sauper fails to mention that many of the Hutu refugee camps in Zaire were still run by former Rwandan military and militia leaders, the same people who massacred nearly 1 million Tutsis. Neither does he mention that many of these camps launched raids into Rwanda and attempted, with the support of Mobutu, to massacre the Zairean Banyamulenge Tutsis.

So in the end, the viewer sees a group of defenceless starving children, longing to return to Rwanda. The images might be from Darfur or northern Ethiopia. There is no moral complexity or context in which to frame the miserable suffering of these people roaming the jungle while starving to death and being shot at.

In today's New York Times, Brooks tells us about his trip to Namibia (subscription required). While talking about AIDS in southern Africa, he fondly mentions American aid three times, patting the US on the back, talking about the money that the US is "pouring" into AIDS treatment in Africa.

Ironically, just yesterday, an editorial in the Times called "Crumbs for Africa" took Bush to task for finally getting around to spending the insufficient $674 million for needy countries that Congress had already approved.

Tony Blair, as host of the G-8 annual meeting, has been trying to get rich countries to double overall aid for Africa over the next 10 years. He has been doing a pretty good job getting that commitment from European nations, but Washington will have none of it. The US, along with European nations, pledged to raise its non-military foreign aid to 0.7% of annual income, but unlike the UK, Germany and France, which have all announced plans to meet this goal and countries like the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway, which have already surpassed the .07% goal, Washington currently has no plan of action for keeping this promise. The US actually gives a lower income percentage than any industrialized country in the world. Portugal, for example, is more than twice as generous as the US.

While most Americans believe that the US gives nearly a quarter of its income away to needy countries, it actually spends only 0.16%, less than 2 cents for every $100. For example, even with Bush"s new "generous" Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the US proposes to spend only $2 billion annually on AIDS relief. This is less than half of the amount that it is expected to spend based on its economy. Compare that to the $300 billion and counting spent on the war in Iraq and the $140 billion in corporate tax cuts last year, and one can see where American priorities really are.

But it gets worse. Not only is the US amazingly stingy, but under Bush, foreign aid is tied to conservative ideology and unilateral, thus diverting aid from multilateral organizations like UNAIDS, which represent the most effective way of distributing international aid. Brooks calls these concerns "nonsense" that is "irrelevant on the ground."

Stephen Lewis, the UN secretary-general's special envoy for AIDS in Africa and Dr. Paul Zeitz, the executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance would beg to differ.

Add to that, the Bush administration's focus on religious ideology over science (e.g. supporting abstinence only programs while cutting off funding to programs that promote condom use), and it's not surprising that Uganda's AIDS rate, which had decreased dramatically in the last ten years, seems to be flattening off and perhaps even going back up.

During a trip to that same nation in 2003, Bush stated, "We are a great nation, we're a wealthy nation. We have a responsibility to help a neighbor in need, a brother and sister in crisis." Given the facts, it's somehow difficult to have much faith in such a magnanimous statement.

Now for the other aspect of the letter that really bothers me, that "People have been in Africa for thousands of years - & look at their progress during those years. Tribal still!" The OED defines tribalism as follows:

a. The condition of existing as a separate tribe or tribes; tribal system, organization, or relations.
b. Loyalty to a particular tribe or group of which one is a member.

While I'm the first to insist that people should vote for ideas instead of ethnicities, tribes or religions, I think we should beware of throwing stones from our glass abode. It only takes a quick look at the 2004 elections to see the effect that religion as a political tool had on the American political discourse. Does that make Americans tribalistic? Maybe, but one shouldn?t forget that in the U.S. religion is used for a political end. Remember the Catholic bishops who refused communion to pro-choice catholic politicians? What about the political rallies held in Protestant churches all over the nation?

Likewise, ethnicity and religion are being used for political goals in Africa. I'm sure the reader from Oregon would not seriously reduce American politics as sectarian, so why should he so quickly reduce African politics as tribal? Probably because he doesn't know any better, and the American media certainly isn't helping him.

Furthermore, these "age-old ethnic hatreds" - as they're often described by a press that is either incapable or unwilling to understand the nuances of African cultures and politics - were in many cases created (or at least fueled) by Europeans in order to divide and conquer through indirect colonial rule. In the case of Rwanda, Belgian and, to a lesser extent, German colonizers forced the racist biblical idea of "white negros" or "Hamites" (the cursed son of Noah) onto Rwandan society. The distinction was not linguistic, hereditary, geographical or even fixed; Tutsis and Hutus spoke the same language, frequently intermarried, lived together, and changing from one group to another was not unheard of. As a matter of fact, we still don't really understand the complex social order of pre-colonial Rwanda. An interesting fact is that there seems to have been no "ethnic" violence between Hutus and Tutsis before European colonization.

Still, Europeans, bewildered by a complex political system in the middle of "primitive" black Africa, created the idea that the Tutsi were superior to the Hutu and Twa and then ruled Rwanda and Burundi through the former. These are some of the roots of the violence in central Africa, and we would do well to remember that Western Europe and North America are not very far removed from this same sort of violence - WWII and Segregation, respectively*.

Since western colonization is far from blameless in this violence, we have an obligation to try to help clean it up. And if that isn't enough, the U.S. should look at the despots, such as Mobutu in Zaire, whom the they supported during the cold war. These are all reasons why the U.S. should 'care' about Africa. And if moral responsibility isn't enough for the reader from Oregon, the fact that the third world has been making its grievances known with car bombs lately should be.


*However, it is important to not see Africa as just a hapless child influenced by a superior Europe as some Africans have taken to doing in order to absolve themselves from the guilt of murder. The Belgians did not dismember their neighbors with machetes, Rwandans did.

Last week in the Times, Kristof penned a criticism (free subscription required) of the Bush administration's handling of the Darfur genocide in response to a letter by a reader from Eugene, Oregon. The letter reads as follows:

Why should the U.S. 'care' for the rest of the world? The U.S. should take care of its own.

People have been in Africa for thousands of years - & look at their progress during those years. Tribal still!

It's way past time for liberal twits to stop pushing the U.S. into or to try to make every wrong in the world our responsibility.

This little missive has so many points to address that I'll have to get to each of them in different posts. But first of all, besides the moral and practical responsibilities that Kristof mentions in his piece, the U.S. has a legal responsibility to intervene.

In July 2004, the US Congress unanimously declared the violence in Darfur a genocide. Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, signed by the US in 1948 and ratified in 1988, states that all contracting parties agree to "undertake to prevent and to punish" the crime of genocide.

Unless we as a nation start living up to our practical, moral and legal responsibilities to prevent genocide, the phrase "never again" will remain a platitude that we speak on the anniversaries of genocides we did nothing to stop.

From time to time there are really important stories that for one reason or another don't get the media attention that they ought to. Recently, the secret Downing Street memo's near lack of coverage in the America press comes to mind. However, while that story certainly deserves to be covered, there is another story that has had very little coverage in the states.

Thomas Lang at CJR Daily has written a good little piece about CNN's 25th anniversary, in which he talks about their coverage of Rwanda in 1994 and their current coverage (or lack thereof) of the genocide taking place in Darfur, Sudan.

Lang is right. With the exception of Kristof from the New York Times, no one seems to be interested in this story. Lang quotes a survey from the International Crisis Group and Zogby International, which states:

Some 84% of respondents said the U.S. should not tolerate an extremist
government committing such attacks, and should use its military assets, short of
inserting U.S. combat troops on the ground to protect civilians, to help bring
them to a halt. There would appear to be much greater public backing for America
to play a leadership role in stemming this catastrophe than has been the
conventional wisdom in Washington. This includes 81% who supported tough
sanctions on Sudanese leaders who control the militias, 80% who backed
establishing a no-fly zone over Darfur, and 91% who said the U.S. should
cooperate with the International Criminal Court to help bring to justice those
accused of crimes against humanity.

These numbers speak well for Americans. They show that it's possible to overlook racism and apathy in order to muster the popular push for the "political will" that we were told made Washington decide to abandon 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus to their bloody fate at the hands of machete wielding murderers. I find it particularly interesting that 91% of those polled were in favor of backing the ICC in order to bring the Sudanese génocidaires to justice, since the US stance has so far been the complete opposite.

What is needed, it seems, is more coverage - especially on television - so that the American public and their representatives are forced to see the killings in Darfur while they're trying to eat their Sunday night supper. Lang thinks that CNN et al. should get their priorities straight and that there's no excuse for not covering this disaster. I couldn't agree more.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury:

This blog is a quiet bottled letter. In it, I want to discuss ideas, politics, literature, film and genocide, among other things. I want to give myself a space where I can work out some of the ideas that keep me awake at night. I hope that others will find this site interesting or helpful, but even if it's but an exercise in vanity, staring at my own reflection in ones and zeros, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. What's important for me is to get some of these things off my chest and, in theory at least, into a public forum.

The US Supreme Court declined to review the case of two journalists who have refused to testify before a grand jury about who leaked the name of Valerie Plane, an undercover CIA agent and the wife of Joseph Wilson, to Bob Novak. This refusal has resulted in their being held in contempt of court and consequently threatened with up to 18 months in jail. Since civil contempt cases suggest imprisonment in the local jail facilities, the two journalists would be held in the District of Columbia's local jail unless the US Marshall Services or Judge Hogan decide otherwise

Wilson was sent by the Bush administration to investigate a false report that Iraq had been trying to obtain uranium yellowcake from Niger. Well after Wilson reported to the Office of the Vice President that the report was obviously spurious, the White House continued to use the report to justify invading Iraq. As a result, Wilson published an op-ed piece in the Times, taking the White House to task for using demonstrably false accusations to drum up support for war.

Afterwards, in what seems to be politically motivated revenge, someone from the White House leaked the fact that Wilson's wife was a covert CIA agent and had recommended him for the Niger investigation. The only reporter willing to out her was the righteous conservative columnist, Bob Novak. Consequently, there was an investigation into who leaked the information. But strangely enough, instead of ordering Novak to testify, the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has aggressively pursued the testimony of Judith Miller from the New York Times and Mathew Cooper of Time Magazine. The former did research and interviews on the matter but never even wrote an article about it, and the latter penned an article about the leak, after Novak's, in which he questioned the motives behind her outing.

All of the press items about this have focused on journalists' right to protect their sources, and it seems clear that this is an important issue, especially when it comes to a potentially criminal divulgence, which could have put people's lives in danger. However, what I have seen much less of is the question of why these two journalists, who did not divulge Mrs. Plane's identity, are the ones being hounded. Novak has never even been asked to testify in the case, nor has he been threatened with jail time. It seems like a flagrant abuse of power that the only two people who look like they might go to jail in this incident are those who have done nothing wrong.

This is an obvious case of gross injustice, and I'm surprised to see that even the editorial on the issue in today's Times isn't more outraged. At the risk of sounding hackneyed or trite, someone down at Miller's newspaper and Cooper's magazine should be calling out for all of their readers to go to the window, open it, stick their heads out and yell, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Because I'm afraid if Miller and Cooper can't count on their own publications to do it, they can't count on anyone.

As seen this week in the Times, 13 American CIA operatives are wanted in Italy for the kidnapping of the Egyptian cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr. Abu Omar, as he is also known, was walking to his mosque in Milan for noon prayer when he was kidnapped and "rendered" to Egypt.

"Extraordinary rendition" is the term used for handing prisoners, who have usually not been charged with a crime, over to countries such as Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Syria, Uzbekistan, Morocco and Jordan, where they are then interrogated and tortured. The case that brought this practice into the public light was the Syrian born Canadian engineer, Maher Arar, who was wrongfully suspected of links to terrorism and who while changing planes in the US to return home to Canada from a vacation in Tunisia, was detained for thirteen days and then later deported. But not to his home in Canada where his family lives, to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for over a year.

As it turns out, Mr. Maher had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, which is why after a year and pressure from the Canadian government, Syria finally released him. Abu Omar, on the other hand, was under investigation by Italian authorities for suspected ties to al Qaeda. Be that as it may, it is not unheard of for intelligence to be horribly wrong, as was the case for Mr. Maher and Brandon Mayfield, the Oregon lawyer who was falsely accused of the Madrid bombing and detained by American intelligence officers.

But in the end, whether or not Nasr has links to al Qaeda is irrelevant. The important thing is the rule of law, and as one Italian official noted:

Our belief is that terrorist suspects should be investigated through legal channels and brought to a court of law - not kidnapped and spirited away to be tortured in some secret prison.

But that's exactly what happened. Abu Omar was spirited away to be tortured in some secret prison. According to the Corriere della Sera, he was able to briefly contact his family and confirm that he had been tortured before being arrested again by Egyptian authorities. And as the Times reports, despite the Italian warrant for the arrest of the CIA operatives, who may or may not have had the Italian government's blessing to kidnap Abu Omar, they will most likely go unpunished.

So while Vice President Dick Cheney assures us that the government needs to "work through, sort of, the dark side," and that "[a] lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we?re going to be successful. That?s the world these folks operate in. And so it?s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective," Tony Judt makes a very astute observation about the future of American foreign and domestic policy in this week's New York Review of Books:

Historians and pundits who leap aboard the bandwagon of American Empire have forgotten a little too quickly that for an empire to be born, a republic has first to die. In the longer run no country can expect to behave imperially -- brutally, contemptuously, illegally -- abroad while preserving republican values at home.

In today's New York Times, David Brooks illustrates once again that he either doesn't know much about development aid or that he's being disingenuous. He spends his time criticizing Jeffrey Sachs, the American economist from the Earth Institute at Columbia University, chosen to run the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Program.

According to Brooks, people like Sachs don't really understand that real people live in poor countries and think that pouring money into Africa will solve the problem of poverty. On the other hand, according to Brooks, Bush and other conservatives understand that the real causes of poverty are due to the "crooked timber of humanity," such as "corrupt governments, perverse incentives" and "institutions that crush freedom."

As a result, he implies that the US Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) is a more effective answer to world poverty that the UN's MDGs. Nevermind that the MDGs are cross cutting goals, which link almost every aspect, organization and program of the UN system, and nevermind the fact that to say that Sachs doesn't focus on individual Africans would be like saying that a commander in chief doesn't pay enough attention to privates in the army. The fact of the matter is that the MDGs are only the overall framework of a much larger effort which is done on regional, national and local scales, both from the top down and the bottom up. So when the UN's World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) puts out its next World Water Development Report, there will be a chapter entirely devoted to governance and another entirely devoted to local case studies.

Furthermore, Brooks's own newspaper took a look last week at the MCA on the occasion of the resignation of its chief executive, Paul Applegarth, who denies that his resignation had anything to do with complaints by the presidents of Ghana, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger and Botswana, who while visiting the White House, complained that the program's fine print and bureaucracy made it next to impossible for their countries to get any aid. Brooks is right that the MCA pays attention to governance -- so much so in fact, that since its inception in 2002, it has only found two countries worthy of aid: Honduras ($215 million) and Madagascar ($108 million). To be fair, MCA has recently accepted two other countries, Cape Verde and Nicaragua, but neither of these countries has seen any money yet.

So it's hard for me to not agree with Jeffrey Sachs when he says that when over 1 million people are dying every year of malaria (90% of whom are in Africa, and 70% of whom are under the age of 5) a stern lecture on good governance is somehow less important than sending free mosquito nets.

The force exerted by the moral sense of the individual is less effective than social myth would have us believe. Though such prescriptions as "Thou shalt not kill" occupy a pre-eminent place in the moral order, they do not occupy a correspondingly intractable position in human psychic structure. A few changes in newspaper headlines, a call from the draft board, orders from a man with epaulets, and men are led to kill with little difficulty.

- Stanley Milgram
preface to Obedience to Authority


Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he become a monster. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.

- Friedrich Nietzsche
Jenseits von Gut und Böse / Beyond Good and Evil

There has been much debate, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say much argument, about statements that implicitly or explicitly compare American behavior in the "war on terror" with that of the most reprehensible regimes of yesteryear. Accusations of hyperbole and "moral equivalency" have been leveled against those who have taken issue with the indefinite detainment and torture of those who are and those who are not guilty of the crime of terror. Discussion seems to have wandered from whether or not it is correct to detain and torture people who have no recourse to the law on the order of an executive directive to whether or not it is accurate to compare these acts with Soviet gulags.

The basic and most public facts are known. We have read excerpts from the reports illustrated by pictures of hooded figures in orange being beaten, berated, and hooked up with electrical wires. We know the names of some of the dead and those of the less experienced jailors.


An algebra of suffering

First, to address the claims of hyperbole and moral equivalency: State violence, and violence in general, can be discussed in qualitative or quantitative terms. Quantitatively speaking, comparisons to Soviet gulags, which claimed tens of millions of lives, are indeed exaggerated. The number of people murdered and tortured by American forces in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan are much, much smaller.

But is it really wise to judge violence in quantitative terms? Is evil measured by the number of its victims? Let's take an example. Was Stalin or Hitler more evil? Pol Pot or Idi Amin? How many dead Sudanese would it take for the killings to be as evil as those in Rwanda? What weighs more, the sins of Timothy McVeigh or those of John Wayne Gacy?

So while we can all say in effective terms that a million deaths is worse than a hundred, this distinction blurs when the numbers get closer and when we start talking in terms of causes instead of effects, morality instead of consequences.

And so we're left with qualitative distinctions. And qualitatively speaking, the person who murders 10 people is not twice as bad as the person who murders 5. So where does that leave us in terms of moral equivalence? Does that mean, as some have argued, that we're floating around in a virtueless void where anything goes? No, it only means that in moral terms, torturing and murdering one person is as bad as torturing and murdering two. This means that while the number of people killed and tortured in Soviet gulags and in American detainment camps might be very different, the moral mechanisms at play are the same.


Patting ourselves on the back

This brings us to the larger question of whether or not a democratic nation ought to torture and murder those it takes to be its enemies. I addressed this issue last week, when I quoted the Israeli Supreme court:

This is the destiny of a democracy: She does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back.

It seems, however, that some people are not satisfied with that answer. In today's Times, there was a letter to the editor in response to an op-ed piece, entitled Guantánamo's long shadow, in which Anthony Lewis argues that morality is not outweighed by necessity and that the rule of law should reign supreme:

To the Editor:
Anthony Lewis points to the humiliation of prisoners at Guantánamo and declares it a violation of human rights. But what rights do these prisoners have?

They are not criminals - they committed no crime on United States soil. They are not soldiers - they wear no uniform of an established government. But they are enemies of our country, captured on a faraway battlefield.

Since Mr. Lewis wants to discuss rights, let's discuss them. What rights do these non-citizens, non-criminals, non-soldiers have? This is where the concept of human rights turns to ashes.

I can have no rights other than what I can protect myself or have a government protect for me. The prisoners held in Guantánamo are without rights because of their choice to fight without any government's protection. Americans have no reason to protect them.

As our enemies, they are lucky even to be alive.

Bill Decker
San Diego, June 21, 2005

Mr. Decker's expression of magnanimity immediately makes me think of the following similar self accolade given in a very different place at a very different time:

In the period of dictatorship, surrounded on all sides by enemies, we sometimes manifested unnecessary leniency and unnecessary softheartedness.

- Soviet Chief State Prosecutor, N. V. Krylenko
Speech at the Promparty trial quoted in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago

Recently, Senator Durbin has been accused of calling American soldiers nazis and comparing Guantánamo Bay to a gulag, because he spoke out against American torture on the senate floor:

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. ... On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

This is not the first time that Durbin has spoken out against torture, and he had some pretty specific questions during the Gonzales Senate confirmation hearings in January 2005, which you can see or listen to for yourself:

Senator Durbin: "Let's go to specific questions. Can U.S. personnel legally engage in torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment under any circumstances?"

Alberto Gonzales: "Absolutely not. I mean, our policy is that we do not engage in torture."

Senator Durbin: "Good. I'm glad you stated that for the record. Do you believe that there are circumstances where other legal restrictions, like the War Crimes Act, would not apply to U.S. personnel?"

(seven second pause)

Alberto Gonzales: "Sir, I don't believe that that would be the case, but I would like the opportunity to, I don't, I want to be very candid with you, and obviously thorough in my response to that question. Uh. It is sort of a legal conclusion, and I would like to have the opportunity to get back to you on that."

Later, during the same hearing, Durbin asked Gonzales about his memo on the Geneva conventions (video, audio):

Senator Durbin: "In your August memo, you created the possiblity that the President could invoke his authority as Commander In Chief to not only suspend the Geneva Convention, but the application of other laws. Do you stand by that position?"

Alberto Gonzales: "I believe that I said in response to an earlier question that I do believe it is possible, theoretically possible, for the Congress to pass a law that could be viewed as unconstitutional by a President of the United States. And that's not just the position of this President. That's been the position of Presidents on both sides of the aisle. In my judgement, making that kind of conclusion is one that requires a great deal of care and consideration. But if you're asking me if it's theoretically possible that Congress could pass a statute that we view as unconstitutional. I'd have to conceed sir that that's theoretically possible."

Senator Durbin: "Has this president ever invoked that authority as Commander In Chief or otherwise, to conclude that a law was unconstitutional and refuse to comply with it?"

Alberto Gonzales: "I believe that I stated in my June briefing about these memos that the President has not exercised that authority."

Senator Durbin: "But you believe he has that authority. He could ignore a law passed by this Congress, signed by this President or another one, and decide that it is unconstitutional and refuse to comply with that law?"

Alberto Gonzales: "Senator, again, you're asking me, hypothetically, does that authority exist? I guess I would have to say that, hypothetically, that authority may exist. But let me also just say that we certainly understand and recognize the role of the courts in our system of government. We have to deal with some very difficult issues here. Very, very complicated. Sometimes the answers are not so clear. The President's position on this is, ultimately the judges, courts, will make the decision as to whether or not we've drawn the right balance here. And, and, in certain circumstances, the courts have agreed with the Administrations position, and, in certain circumstances, the courts have disagreed, and we will respect those decisions."

Senator Durbin: "Fifty-two years ago, a president named Harry Truman decided to test that premise. Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co Et. Al vs. Sawyer in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said, as you know, President Truman, you're wrong. You don't have the authority to decide whats constitutional - what laws you like and don't like. I'm troubled that you would think, as our incoming Attorney General, that a president can pick and choose the laws that he thinks are constitutional, and ultimately wait for that test in court to decide whether or not he's going to comply with the law."

These are the facts. I'm not even going to address the question of whether or not Durbin "called American troops nazis," because it's clear from his speech that he never did. However, he did obviously compare Guantánamo Bay to a Soviet gulag, as did Irene Khan, the Secretary General of Amnesty International -- which has compiled a number of documents on Guantánamo Bay -- in her forward to its 2005 report:

Despite the near-universal outrage generated by the photographs coming out of Abu Ghraib, and the evidence suggesting that such practices are being applied to other prisoners held by the USA in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere, neither the US administration nor the US Congress has called for a full and independent investigation.

Instead, the US government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to "re-define" torture. It has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques, the practice of holding "ghost detainees" (people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention) and the "rendering" or handing over of prisoners to third countries known to practise torture. The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law. Trials by military commissions have made a mockery of justice and due process.

To my mind, this is a much more interesting question: Are such comparisons helpful? Are they accurate? I will address these questions tomorrow.

This week I saw both Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Wole Soyinka speak. Not surprisingly, Mr. Soyinka proved to be the more interesting of the two. He was there to speak about "post-colonialism," although he didn't seem terribly sold on the term. But all appellation issues aside, he had some interesting things to say about African politics, colonialism, European immigration and integration, the "African diaspora" and reparations.

One interesting thing was his focus on the idea that as far as the Slave trade and reparations for such acts go, Europeans are not the only guilty parties. Not to mention some Africans themselves, the Arabs, presumably pushed by a law of not being allowed to enslave another Muslim, were highly active in the slave trade. (The transsaharan slave route should be as famous as the transatlantic version.) He brought up the fact that some Arab governments and intellectuals thought that the history of Arab slavers should be forgotten, since both Arabs and Black Africans have been victims of European colonization.

Then he brought up Fanon, and his theory that victims often have a psychological tendency to take their frustration out on other victims, because they aren't able to aim that frustration at their actual oppressors, although it's hard to say how convinced he was of this theory.

Personally, I think it's important to keep in mind that there's enough blame for everyone, and that just because Europeans were guilty of enslaving Africans doesn't mean that the Arab slavers were any less guilty. Some Africans have recently fallen into a discourse of victimhood in an attempt to evade responsibility for some very heinous acts. So while we must come to terms with the fact that the Belgians made up the ID cards in Rwanda, the French supplied and trained many of the killers and the US sat back and did nothing, the people who picked up machetes and brutally murdered their neighbors were Rwandans.

In any case, for Soyinka, the first step is recognizing the evils done in the past, and making at the very least an official and symbolic repentance. He even said that these reparations wouldn't have to be monetary: "Give us back the art and cultural artifacts stolen from Africa, and we'll call it quits!"

At first thought, it seems like another gesture might be debt forgiveness and more foreign aid. But the more I think about it, the more I think it's important that the debt be wiped clean more on principled justice than as a magnanimous gesture of self atonement by the rich countries. Many African dictators were given loads of money to build opulent palaces and buy weapons for oppressing their compatriots, so long as they were on the right side of the Cold War divide. So it seems highly unfair that when the peoples of these countries finally manage to rid themselves of their monstrous dictators (often through no help from, or even despite the efforts of, rich countries), that the rich countries who financed their oppression should expect them to pay that money back.

Since I started this site, pretty much all of the entries have been on depressing subjects, things that I think are important, but which are pretty big downers.

Since it's my birthday, however, I'd like to post a couple of more light hearted things.

Here's an oldish but funny article from the odd jobs department over at the The New Yorker about the guy who writes the fortunes in the fortune cookies at most Chinese restaurants in the US. Confucious' cookie spokesman assures us that even the best of 'em suffer from writer's block from time to time.


In other news, the hard-hitting editorialist, Ellen Turlington from the Onion gives us here take on the Darfur crisis.

[L]ately, the main stories in the news seem to be about Deep Throat, the new summer blockbusters, and something about stem cells. Since I'm sure I would have remembered if the U.S. had intervened in some way to stop it, I can only assume that the whole genocide-in-Darfur thing has somehow worked itself out.

And finally, although it's over half a year old, I'm sure that not nearly enough people have read about the harrowing Florida congressional race of candidate Richard Grayson. Here is his diary, which explains the whole process from beginning to end. The whole thing is funny and worth reading. It really gives you a good hard look into what it takes to run for Congress.

Here are a couple of gems from the end of his campaign:

Tuesday, November 2

...I'm handing out homemade leaflets that say, "Get on the Kerry, Edwards, Castor, Grayson Team."

A man refuses to take one but wishes me luck with a capital "F."

Wednesday, November 3

The people have spoken, the subhuman douche bags.

Joseph Lelyveld wrote a very interesting piece on torture for the New York Times Magazine yesterday, entitled Interrogating Ourselves. In it, he discusses intelligence gathering in the "war on terror" and the torture and "highly coercive interrogation" techniques (i.e. "torture lite") that seem to have become commonplace in American anti-terrorism investigations.

He analyses the tough question of whether torture and torture lite work, whether or not they can save lives. He discusses American and Israeli interrogators, the latter seeming to be leaps and bounds ahead in the torture domain, both in terms of efficiency and legal codification. He informs us that American interrogators are deemed "unprofessional" by their Israeli counterparts.

Lelyveld is highly practical and warns the reader of the moral neutrality of such language as "the efficacy of torture." So in the end, the piece hinges on logistics rather than principle. But I can't help but think of the recent judgement passed down by the Israeli Supreme Court, which was about rerouting part of the security wall because it unlawfully made life even more difficult for many Palestinians, but can also be applied to security and the rule of law in general and as they relate to torture:

This is the destiny of a democracy: She does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back.

Chief Justice Barak went on to say, "there is no security without law." And while Lelyveld's piece shows us that these important ideas have not been completely implemented in the interrogation chambers of Shin Bet, that doesn't make the assertion itself any less true. So while I am nothing but critical of the Israeli state, they seem to have gotten it right this time, on paper at least. It's a shame that so far, the US has had neither the foresight nor the wisdom to come to the same conclusions.


Note: for another interesting discussion of torture, see Mark Danner's pieces in the the New York Review of Books, available online for free here and here and his write up of Abu Ghraib here.

Last month I saw Darwin's Nightmare, a documentary film by an Austrian filmmaker about the economy based on the alien Nile Perch , which was introduced into Lake Victoria, and which has had devastating effects on the lake's ecosystem and local food supply. It's a fine documentary that explores first world complicity in a small Tanzanian fishing town's misery. Although there is a striking lack of adolescents shown in the film, we see a gamut of people, from hungry street children and prostitutes to Indian-Tanzanian factory owners and Ukrainian pilots, whose planes alternately bring food aid and arms to Tanzania, but always leave full of fish.

So I was excited to see Sauper's 45 minute film on 100,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees roaming the jungles of the Congo in 1997, Kisangani Diary, especially since the director was going to be there to answer questions after the film. I am sad to say, however, that I was very disappointed. While cinematographically, the film was good, there was a certain lack of context that bothered me. This, coupled with the heavy handedness of filming almost exclusively children, made the film seem somehow slightly dishonest.

The viewer is told that these Hutu Rwandans have been roaming the Congolese jungle since they left Rwanda after the 1994 Tutsi genocide, only to be attacked for being of the "wrong tribe" by numerous forces vying for power, especially Kabila's rebel ADFL soldiers, who were soon to topple Mobutu's kleptocracy. Like in Darwin's Nightmare, there is a striking lack of adolescents and adults in the film; the viewer sees suffering children and little else.

While in Darwin's Nightmare, it's understandable why he left out the adolescents on the street. The film is already fairly complex on a moral level, and it's not clear if seeing hungry teenage boys who might just murder you helps get the bigger picture of what's going on in this part of Tanzania. However, in Kisigani Diary the choice is particularly problematic. We never see the adults, and he never asks them why they are still in the Congo. Given the amount of popular Hutu participation in the 1994 genocide, there is a good chance that among these refugees there are at least some, if not many, murderers. But this is not explored at all by Sauper, and when I asked him after the projection who these people were, if any of them were guilty of genocide, the only response he could give me was he didn't think so, because the génocidaires would have left with their guns to get food.

Nevermind the fact that the Rwandan genocide was largely performed with machetes, hammers, hoes, axes and clubs. Furthermore, given the popular participation of the Hutu population, it is probable that there were more than a few people guilty of genocide among the off screen adults in Sauper's film. Furthermore, Sauper fails to mention that many of the Hutu refugee camps in Zaire were still run by former Rwandan military and militia leaders, the same people who massacred nearly 1 million Tutsis. Neither does he mention that many of these camps launched raids into Rwanda and attempted, with the support of Mobutu, to massacre the Zairean Banyamulenge Tutsis.

So in the end, the viewer sees a group of defenceless starving children, longing to return to Rwanda. The images might be from Darfur or northern Ethiopia. There is no moral complexity or context in which to frame the miserable suffering of these people roaming the jungle while starving to death and being shot at.

In today's New York Times, Brooks tells us about his trip to Namibia (subscription required). While talking about AIDS in southern Africa, he fondly mentions American aid three times, patting the US on the back, talking about the money that the US is "pouring" into AIDS treatment in Africa.

Ironically, just yesterday, an editorial in the Times called "Crumbs for Africa" took Bush to task for finally getting around to spending the insufficient $674 million for needy countries that Congress had already approved.

Tony Blair, as host of the G-8 annual meeting, has been trying to get rich countries to double overall aid for Africa over the next 10 years. He has been doing a pretty good job getting that commitment from European nations, but Washington will have none of it. The US, along with European nations, pledged to raise its non-military foreign aid to 0.7% of annual income, but unlike the UK, Germany and France, which have all announced plans to meet this goal and countries like the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway, which have already surpassed the .07% goal, Washington currently has no plan of action for keeping this promise. The US actually gives a lower income percentage than any industrialized country in the world. Portugal, for example, is more than twice as generous as the US.

While most Americans believe that the US gives nearly a quarter of its income away to needy countries, it actually spends only 0.16%, less than 2 cents for every $100. For example, even with Bush"s new "generous" Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the US proposes to spend only $2 billion annually on AIDS relief. This is less than half of the amount that it is expected to spend based on its economy. Compare that to the $300 billion and counting spent on the war in Iraq and the $140 billion in corporate tax cuts last year, and one can see where American priorities really are.

But it gets worse. Not only is the US amazingly stingy, but under Bush, foreign aid is tied to conservative ideology and unilateral, thus diverting aid from multilateral organizations like UNAIDS, which represent the most effective way of distributing international aid. Brooks calls these concerns "nonsense" that is "irrelevant on the ground."

Stephen Lewis, the UN secretary-general's special envoy for AIDS in Africa and Dr. Paul Zeitz, the executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance would beg to differ.

Add to that, the Bush administration's focus on religious ideology over science (e.g. supporting abstinence only programs while cutting off funding to programs that promote condom use), and it's not surprising that Uganda's AIDS rate, which had decreased dramatically in the last ten years, seems to be flattening off and perhaps even going back up.

During a trip to that same nation in 2003, Bush stated, "We are a great nation, we're a wealthy nation. We have a responsibility to help a neighbor in need, a brother and sister in crisis." Given the facts, it's somehow difficult to have much faith in such a magnanimous statement.

Now for the other aspect of the letter that really bothers me, that "People have been in Africa for thousands of years - & look at their progress during those years. Tribal still!" The OED defines tribalism as follows:

a. The condition of existing as a separate tribe or tribes; tribal system, organization, or relations.
b. Loyalty to a particular tribe or group of which one is a member.

While I'm the first to insist that people should vote for ideas instead of ethnicities, tribes or religions, I think we should beware of throwing stones from our glass abode. It only takes a quick look at the 2004 elections to see the effect that religion as a political tool had on the American political discourse. Does that make Americans tribalistic? Maybe, but one shouldn?t forget that in the U.S. religion is used for a political end. Remember the Catholic bishops who refused communion to pro-choice catholic politicians? What about the political rallies held in Protestant churches all over the nation?

Likewise, ethnicity and religion are being used for political goals in Africa. I'm sure the reader from Oregon would not seriously reduce American politics as sectarian, so why should he so quickly reduce African politics as tribal? Probably because he doesn't know any better, and the American media certainly isn't helping him.

Furthermore, these "age-old ethnic hatreds" - as they're often described by a press that is either incapable or unwilling to understand the nuances of African cultures and politics - were in many cases created (or at least fueled) by Europeans in order to divide and conquer through indirect colonial rule. In the case of Rwanda, Belgian and, to a lesser extent, German colonizers forced the racist biblical idea of "white negros" or "Hamites" (the cursed son of Noah) onto Rwandan society. The distinction was not linguistic, hereditary, geographical or even fixed; Tutsis and Hutus spoke the same language, frequently intermarried, lived together, and changing from one group to another was not unheard of. As a matter of fact, we still don't really understand the complex social order of pre-colonial Rwanda. An interesting fact is that there seems to have been no "ethnic" violence between Hutus and Tutsis before European colonization.

Still, Europeans, bewildered by a complex political system in the middle of "primitive" black Africa, created the idea that the Tutsi were superior to the Hutu and Twa and then ruled Rwanda and Burundi through the former. These are some of the roots of the violence in central Africa, and we would do well to remember that Western Europe and North America are not very far removed from this same sort of violence - WWII and Segregation, respectively*.

Since western colonization is far from blameless in this violence, we have an obligation to try to help clean it up. And if that isn't enough, the U.S. should look at the despots, such as Mobutu in Zaire, whom the they supported during the cold war. These are all reasons why the U.S. should 'care' about Africa. And if moral responsibility isn't enough for the reader from Oregon, the fact that the third world has been making its grievances known with car bombs lately should be.


*However, it is important to not see Africa as just a hapless child influenced by a superior Europe as some Africans have taken to doing in order to absolve themselves from the guilt of murder. The Belgians did not dismember their neighbors with machetes, Rwandans did.

Last week in the Times, Kristof penned a criticism (free subscription required) of the Bush administration's handling of the Darfur genocide in response to a letter by a reader from Eugene, Oregon. The letter reads as follows:

Why should the U.S. 'care' for the rest of the world? The U.S. should take care of its own.

People have been in Africa for thousands of years - & look at their progress during those years. Tribal still!

It's way past time for liberal twits to stop pushing the U.S. into or to try to make every wrong in the world our responsibility.

This little missive has so many points to address that I'll have to get to each of them in different posts. But first of all, besides the moral and practical responsibilities that Kristof mentions in his piece, the U.S. has a legal responsibility to intervene.

In July 2004, the US Congress unanimously declared the violence in Darfur a genocide. Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, signed by the US in 1948 and ratified in 1988, states that all contracting parties agree to "undertake to prevent and to punish" the crime of genocide.

Unless we as a nation start living up to our practical, moral and legal responsibilities to prevent genocide, the phrase "never again" will remain a platitude that we speak on the anniversaries of genocides we did nothing to stop.

From time to time there are really important stories that for one reason or another don't get the media attention that they ought to. Recently, the secret Downing Street memo's near lack of coverage in the America press comes to mind. However, while that story certainly deserves to be covered, there is another story that has had very little coverage in the states.

Thomas Lang at CJR Daily has written a good little piece about CNN's 25th anniversary, in which he talks about their coverage of Rwanda in 1994 and their current coverage (or lack thereof) of the genocide taking place in Darfur, Sudan.

Lang is right. With the exception of Kristof from the New York Times, no one seems to be interested in this story. Lang quotes a survey from the International Crisis Group and Zogby International, which states:

Some 84% of respondents said the U.S. should not tolerate an extremist
government committing such attacks, and should use its military assets, short of
inserting U.S. combat troops on the ground to protect civilians, to help bring
them to a halt. There would appear to be much greater public backing for America
to play a leadership role in stemming this catastrophe than has been the
conventional wisdom in Washington. This includes 81% who supported tough
sanctions on Sudanese leaders who control the militias, 80% who backed
establishing a no-fly zone over Darfur, and 91% who said the U.S. should
cooperate with the International Criminal Court to help bring to justice those
accused of crimes against humanity.

These numbers speak well for Americans. They show that it's possible to overlook racism and apathy in order to muster the popular push for the "political will" that we were told made Washington decide to abandon 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus to their bloody fate at the hands of machete wielding murderers. I find it particularly interesting that 91% of those polled were in favor of backing the ICC in order to bring the Sudanese génocidaires to justice, since the US stance has so far been the complete opposite.

What is needed, it seems, is more coverage - especially on television - so that the American public and their representatives are forced to see the killings in Darfur while they're trying to eat their Sunday night supper. Lang thinks that CNN et al. should get their priorities straight and that there's no excuse for not covering this disaster. I couldn't agree more.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury:

This blog is a quiet bottled letter. In it, I want to discuss ideas, politics, literature, film and genocide, among other things. I want to give myself a space where I can work out some of the ideas that keep me awake at night. I hope that others will find this site interesting or helpful, but even if it's but an exercise in vanity, staring at my own reflection in ones and zeros, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. What's important for me is to get some of these things off my chest and, in theory at least, into a public forum.

The US Supreme Court declined to review the case of two journalists who have refused to testify before a grand jury about who leaked the name of Valerie Plane, an undercover CIA agent and the wife of Joseph Wilson, to Bob Novak. This refusal has resulted in their being held in contempt of court and consequently threatened with up to 18 months in jail. Since civil contempt cases suggest imprisonment in the local jail facilities, the two journalists would be held in the District of Columbia's local jail unless the US Marshall Services or Judge Hogan decide otherwise

Wilson was sent by the Bush administration to investigate a false report that Iraq had been trying to obtain uranium yellowcake from Niger. Well after Wilson reported to the Office of the Vice President that the report was obviously spurious, the White House continued to use the report to justify invading Iraq. As a result, Wilson published an op-ed piece in the Times, taking the White House to task for using demonstrably false accusations to drum up support for war.

Afterwards, in what seems to be politically motivated revenge, someone from the White House leaked the fact that Wilson's wife was a covert CIA agent and had recommended him for the Niger investigation. The only reporter willing to out her was the righteous conservative columnist, Bob Novak. Consequently, there was an investigation into who leaked the information. But strangely enough, instead of ordering Novak to testify, the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has aggressively pursued the testimony of Judith Miller from the New York Times and Mathew Cooper of Time Magazine. The former did research and interviews on the matter but never even wrote an article about it, and the latter penned an article about the leak, after Novak's, in which he questioned the motives behind her outing.

All of the press items about this have focused on journalists' right to protect their sources, and it seems clear that this is an important issue, especially when it comes to a potentially criminal divulgence, which could have put people's lives in danger. However, what I have seen much less of is the question of why these two journalists, who did not divulge Mrs. Plane's identity, are the ones being hounded. Novak has never even been asked to testify in the case, nor has he been threatened with jail time. It seems like a flagrant abuse of power that the only two people who look like they might go to jail in this incident are those who have done nothing wrong.

This is an obvious case of gross injustice, and I'm surprised to see that even the editorial on the issue in today's Times isn't more outraged. At the risk of sounding hackneyed or trite, someone down at Miller's newspaper and Cooper's magazine should be calling out for all of their readers to go to the window, open it, stick their heads out and yell, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Because I'm afraid if Miller and Cooper can't count on their own publications to do it, they can't count on anyone.

As seen this week in the Times, 13 American CIA operatives are wanted in Italy for the kidnapping of the Egyptian cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr. Abu Omar, as he is also known, was walking to his mosque in Milan for noon prayer when he was kidnapped and "rendered" to Egypt.

"Extraordinary rendition" is the term used for handing prisoners, who have usually not been charged with a crime, over to countries such as Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Syria, Uzbekistan, Morocco and Jordan, where they are then interrogated and tortured. The case that brought this practice into the public light was the Syrian born Canadian engineer, Maher Arar, who was wrongfully suspected of links to terrorism and who while changing planes in the US to return home to Canada from a vacation in Tunisia, was detained for thirteen days and then later deported. But not to his home in Canada where his family lives, to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for over a year.

As it turns out, Mr. Maher had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, which is why after a year and pressure from the Canadian government, Syria finally released him. Abu Omar, on the other hand, was under investigation by Italian authorities for suspected ties to al Qaeda. Be that as it may, it is not unheard of for intelligence to be horribly wrong, as was the case for Mr. Maher and Brandon Mayfield, the Oregon lawyer who was falsely accused of the Madrid bombing and detained by American intelligence officers.

But in the end, whether or not Nasr has links to al Qaeda is irrelevant. The important thing is the rule of law, and as one Italian official noted:

Our belief is that terrorist suspects should be investigated through legal channels and brought to a court of law - not kidnapped and spirited away to be tortured in some secret prison.

But that's exactly what happened. Abu Omar was spirited away to be tortured in some secret prison. According to the Corriere della Sera, he was able to briefly contact his family and confirm that he had been tortured before being arrested again by Egyptian authorities. And as the Times reports, despite the Italian warrant for the arrest of the CIA operatives, who may or may not have had the Italian government's blessing to kidnap Abu Omar, they will most likely go unpunished.

So while Vice President Dick Cheney assures us that the government needs to "work through, sort of, the dark side," and that "[a] lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we?re going to be successful. That?s the world these folks operate in. And so it?s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective," Tony Judt makes a very astute observation about the future of American foreign and domestic policy in this week's New York Review of Books:

Historians and pundits who leap aboard the bandwagon of American Empire have forgotten a little too quickly that for an empire to be born, a republic has first to die. In the longer run no country can expect to behave imperially -- brutally, contemptuously, illegally -- abroad while preserving republican values at home.

In today's New York Times, David Brooks illustrates once again that he either doesn't know much about development aid or that he's being disingenuous. He spends his time criticizing Jeffrey Sachs, the American economist from the Earth Institute at Columbia University, chosen to run the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Program.

According to Brooks, people like Sachs don't really understand that real people live in poor countries and think that pouring money into Africa will solve the problem of poverty. On the other hand, according to Brooks, Bush and other conservatives understand that the real causes of poverty are due to the "crooked timber of humanity," such as "corrupt governments, perverse incentives" and "institutions that crush freedom."

As a result, he implies that the US Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) is a more effective answer to world poverty that the UN's MDGs. Nevermind that the MDGs are cross cutting goals, which link almost every aspect, organization and program of the UN system, and nevermind the fact that to say that Sachs doesn't focus on individual Africans would be like saying that a commander in chief doesn't pay enough attention to privates in the army. The fact of the matter is that the MDGs are only the overall framework of a much larger effort which is done on regional, national and local scales, both from the top down and the bottom up. So when the UN's World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) puts out its next World Water Development Report, there will be a chapter entirely devoted to governance and another entirely devoted to local case studies.

Furthermore, Brooks's own newspaper took a look last week at the MCA on the occasion of the resignation of its chief executive, Paul Applegarth, who denies that his resignation had anything to do with complaints by the presidents of Ghana, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger and Botswana, who while visiting the White House, complained that the program's fine print and bureaucracy made it next to impossible for their countries to get any aid. Brooks is right that the MCA pays attention to governance -- so much so in fact, that since its inception in 2002, it has only found two countries worthy of aid: Honduras ($215 million) and Madagascar ($108 million). To be fair, MCA has recently accepted two other countries, Cape Verde and Nicaragua, but neither of these countries has seen any money yet.

So it's hard for me to not agree with Jeffrey Sachs when he says that when over 1 million people are dying every year of malaria (90% of whom are in Africa, and 70% of whom are under the age of 5) a stern lecture on good governance is somehow less important than sending free mosquito nets.

The force exerted by the moral sense of the individual is less effective than social myth would have us believe. Though such prescriptions as "Thou shalt not kill" occupy a pre-eminent place in the moral order, they do not occupy a correspondingly intractable position in human psychic structure. A few changes in newspaper headlines, a call from the draft board, orders from a man with epaulets, and men are led to kill with little difficulty.

- Stanley Milgram
preface to Obedience to Authority


Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he become a monster. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.

- Friedrich Nietzsche
Jenseits von Gut und Böse / Beyond Good and Evil

There has been much debate, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say much argument, about statements that implicitly or explicitly compare American behavior in the "war on terror" with that of the most reprehensible regimes of yesteryear. Accusations of hyperbole and "moral equivalency" have been leveled against those who have taken issue with the indefinite detainment and torture of those who are and those who are not guilty of the crime of terror. Discussion seems to have wandered from whether or not it is correct to detain and torture people who have no recourse to the law on the order of an executive directive to whether or not it is accurate to compare these acts with Soviet gulags.

The basic and most public facts are known. We have read excerpts from the reports illustrated by pictures of hooded figures in orange being beaten, berated, and hooked up with electrical wires. We know the names of some of the dead and those of the less experienced jailors.


An algebra of suffering

First, to address the claims of hyperbole and moral equivalency: State violence, and violence in general, can be discussed in qualitative or quantitative terms. Quantitatively speaking, comparisons to Soviet gulags, which claimed tens of millions of lives, are indeed exaggerated. The number of people murdered and tortured by American forces in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan are much, much smaller.

But is it really wise to judge violence in quantitative terms? Is evil measured by the number of its victims? Let's take an example. Was Stalin or Hitler more evil? Pol Pot or Idi Amin? How many dead Sudanese would it take for the killings to be as evil as those in Rwanda? What weighs more, the sins of Timothy McVeigh or those of John Wayne Gacy?

So while we can all say in effective terms that a million deaths is worse than a hundred, this distinction blurs when the numbers get closer and when we start talking in terms of causes instead of effects, morality instead of consequences.

And so we're left with qualitative distinctions. And qualitatively speaking, the person who murders 10 people is not twice as bad as the person who murders 5. So where does that leave us in terms of moral equivalence? Does that mean, as some have argued, that we're floating around in a virtueless void where anything goes? No, it only means that in moral terms, torturing and murdering one person is as bad as torturing and murdering two. This means that while the number of people killed and tortured in Soviet gulags and in American detainment camps might be very different, the moral mechanisms at play are the same.


Patting ourselves on the back

This brings us to the larger question of whether or not a democratic nation ought to torture and murder those it takes to be its enemies. I addressed this issue last week, when I quoted the Israeli Supreme court:

This is the destiny of a democracy: She does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back.

It seems, however, that some people are not satisfied with that answer. In today's Times, there was a letter to the editor in response to an op-ed piece, entitled Guantánamo's long shadow, in which Anthony Lewis argues that morality is not outweighed by necessity and that the rule of law should reign supreme:

To the Editor:
Anthony Lewis points to the humiliation of prisoners at Guantánamo and declares it a violation of human rights. But what rights do these prisoners have?

They are not criminals - they committed no crime on United States soil. They are not soldiers - they wear no uniform of an established government. But they are enemies of our country, captured on a faraway battlefield.

Since Mr. Lewis wants to discuss rights, let's discuss them. What rights do these non-citizens, non-criminals, non-soldiers have? This is where the concept of human rights turns to ashes.

I can have no rights other than what I can protect myself or have a government protect for me. The prisoners held in Guantánamo are without rights because of their choice to fight without any government's protection. Americans have no reason to protect them.

As our enemies, they are lucky even to be alive.

Bill Decker
San Diego, June 21, 2005

Mr. Decker's expression of magnanimity immediately makes me think of the following similar self accolade given in a very different place at a very different time:

In the period of dictatorship, surrounded on all sides by enemies, we sometimes manifested unnecessary leniency and unnecessary softheartedness.

- Soviet Chief State Prosecutor, N. V. Krylenko
Speech at the Promparty trial quoted in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago

Recently, Senator Durbin has been accused of calling American soldiers nazis and comparing Guantánamo Bay to a gulag, because he spoke out against American torture on the senate floor:

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. ... On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

This is not the first time that Durbin has spoken out against torture, and he had some pretty specific questions during the Gonzales Senate confirmation hearings in January 2005, which you can see or listen to for yourself:

Senator Durbin: "Let's go to specific questions. Can U.S. personnel legally engage in torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment under any circumstances?"

Alberto Gonzales: "Absolutely not. I mean, our policy is that we do not engage in torture."

Senator Durbin: "Good. I'm glad you stated that for the record. Do you believe that there are circumstances where other legal restrictions, like the War Crimes Act, would not apply to U.S. personnel?"

(seven second pause)

Alberto Gonzales: "Sir, I don't believe that that would be the case, but I would like the opportunity to, I don't, I want to be very candid with you, and obviously thorough in my response to that question. Uh. It is sort of a legal conclusion, and I would like to have the opportunity to get back to you on that."

Later, during the same hearing, Durbin asked Gonzales about his memo on the Geneva conventions (video, audio):

Senator Durbin: "In your August memo, you created the possiblity that the President could invoke his authority as Commander In Chief to not only suspend the Geneva Convention, but the application of other laws. Do you stand by that position?"

Alberto Gonzales: "I believe that I said in response to an earlier question that I do believe it is possible, theoretically possible, for the Congress to pass a law that could be viewed as unconstitutional by a President of the United States. And that's not just the position of this President. That's been the position of Presidents on both sides of the aisle. In my judgement, making that kind of conclusion is one that requires a great deal of care and consideration. But if you're asking me if it's theoretically possible that Congress could pass a statute that we view as unconstitutional. I'd have to conceed sir that that's theoretically possible."

Senator Durbin: "Has this president ever invoked that authority as Commander In Chief or otherwise, to conclude that a law was unconstitutional and refuse to comply with it?"

Alberto Gonzales: "I believe that I stated in my June briefing about these memos that the President has not exercised that authority."

Senator Durbin: "But you believe he has that authority. He could ignore a law passed by this Congress, signed by this President or another one, and decide that it is unconstitutional and refuse to comply with that law?"

Alberto Gonzales: "Senator, again, you're asking me, hypothetically, does that authority exist? I guess I would have to say that, hypothetically, that authority may exist. But let me also just say that we certainly understand and recognize the role of the courts in our system of government. We have to deal with some very difficult issues here. Very, very complicated. Sometimes the answers are not so clear. The President's position on this is, ultimately the judges, courts, will make the decision as to whether or not we've drawn the right balance here. And, and, in certain circumstances, the courts have agreed with the Administrations position, and, in certain circumstances, the courts have disagreed, and we will respect those decisions."

Senator Durbin: "Fifty-two years ago, a president named Harry Truman decided to test that premise. Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co Et. Al vs. Sawyer in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said, as you know, President Truman, you're wrong. You don't have the authority to decide whats constitutional - what laws you like and don't like. I'm troubled that you would think, as our incoming Attorney General, that a president can pick and choose the laws that he thinks are constitutional, and ultimately wait for that test in court to decide whether or not he's going to comply with the law."

These are the facts. I'm not even going to address the question of whether or not Durbin "called American troops nazis," because it's clear from his speech that he never did. However, he did obviously compare Guantánamo Bay to a Soviet gulag, as did Irene Khan, the Secretary General of Amnesty International -- which has compiled a number of documents on Guantánamo Bay -- in her forward to its 2005 report:

Despite the near-universal outrage generated by the photographs coming out of Abu Ghraib, and the evidence suggesting that such practices are being applied to other prisoners held by the USA in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere, neither the US administration nor the US Congress has called for a full and independent investigation.

Instead, the US government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to "re-define" torture. It has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques, the practice of holding "ghost detainees" (people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention) and the "rendering" or handing over of prisoners to third countries known to practise torture. The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law. Trials by military commissions have made a mockery of justice and due process.

To my mind, this is a much more interesting question: Are such comparisons helpful? Are they accurate? I will address these questions tomorrow.

This week I saw both Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Wole Soyinka speak. Not surprisingly, Mr. Soyinka proved to be the more interesting of the two. He was there to speak about "post-colonialism," although he didn't seem terribly sold on the term. But all appellation issues aside, he had some interesting things to say about African politics, colonialism, European immigration and integration, the "African diaspora" and reparations.

One interesting thing was his focus on the idea that as far as the Slave trade and reparations for such acts go, Europeans are not the only guilty parties. Not to mention some Africans themselves, the Arabs, presumably pushed by a law of not being allowed to enslave another Muslim, were highly active in the slave trade. (The transsaharan slave route should be as famous as the transatlantic version.) He brought up the fact that some Arab governments and intellectuals thought that the history of Arab slavers should be forgotten, since both Arabs and Black Africans have been victims of European colonization.

Then he brought up Fanon, and his theory that victims often have a psychological tendency to take their frustration out on other victims, because they aren't able to aim that frustration at their actual oppressors, although it's hard to say how convinced he was of this theory.

Personally, I think it's important to keep in mind that there's enough blame for everyone, and that just because Europeans were guilty of enslaving Africans doesn't mean that the Arab slavers were any less guilty. Some Africans have recently fallen into a discourse of victimhood in an attempt to evade responsibility for some very heinous acts. So while we must come to terms with the fact that the Belgians made up the ID cards in Rwanda, the French supplied and trained many of the killers and the US sat back and did nothing, the people who picked up machetes and brutally murdered their neighbors were Rwandans.

In any case, for Soyinka, the first step is recognizing the evils done in the past, and making at the very least an official and symbolic repentance. He even said that these reparations wouldn't have to be monetary: "Give us back the art and cultural artifacts stolen from Africa, and we'll call it quits!"

At first thought, it seems like another gesture might be debt forgiveness and more foreign aid. But the more I think about it, the more I think it's important that the debt be wiped clean more on principled justice than as a magnanimous gesture of self atonement by the rich countries. Many African dictators were given loads of money to build opulent palaces and buy weapons for oppressing their compatriots, so long as they were on the right side of the Cold War divide. So it seems highly unfair that when the peoples of these countries finally manage to rid themselves of their monstrous dictators (often through no help from, or even despite the efforts of, rich countries), that the rich countries who financed their oppression should expect them to pay that money back.

Since I started this site, pretty much all of the entries have been on depressing subjects, things that I think are important, but which are pretty big downers.

Since it's my birthday, however, I'd like to post a couple of more light hearted things.

Here's an oldish but funny article from the odd jobs department over at the The New Yorker about the guy who writes the fortunes in the fortune cookies at most Chinese restaurants in the US. Confucious' cookie spokesman assures us that even the best of 'em suffer from writer's block from time to time.


In other news, the hard-hitting editorialist, Ellen Turlington from the Onion gives us here take on the Darfur crisis.

[L]ately, the main stories in the news seem to be about Deep Throat, the new summer blockbusters, and something about stem cells. Since I'm sure I would have remembered if the U.S. had intervened in some way to stop it, I can only assume that the whole genocide-in-Darfur thing has somehow worked itself out.

And finally, although it's over half a year old, I'm sure that not nearly enough people have read about the harrowing Florida congressional race of candidate Richard Grayson. Here is his diary, which explains the whole process from beginning to end. The whole thing is funny and worth reading. It really gives you a good hard look into what it takes to run for Congress.

Here are a couple of gems from the end of his campaign:

Tuesday, November 2

...I'm handing out homemade leaflets that say, "Get on the Kerry, Edwards, Castor, Grayson Team."

A man refuses to take one but wishes me luck with a capital "F."

Wednesday, November 3

The people have spoken, the subhuman douche bags.

Joseph Lelyveld wrote a very interesting piece on torture for the New York Times Magazine yesterday, entitled Interrogating Ourselves. In it, he discusses intelligence gathering in the "war on terror" and the torture and "highly coercive interrogation" techniques (i.e. "torture lite") that seem to have become commonplace in American anti-terrorism investigations.

He analyses the tough question of whether torture and torture lite work, whether or not they can save lives. He discusses American and Israeli interrogators, the latter seeming to be leaps and bounds ahead in the torture domain, both in terms of efficiency and legal codification. He informs us that American interrogators are deemed "unprofessional" by their Israeli counterparts.

Lelyveld is highly practical and warns the reader of the moral neutrality of such language as "the efficacy of torture." So in the end, the piece hinges on logistics rather than principle. But I can't help but think of the recent judgement passed down by the Israeli Supreme Court, which was about rerouting part of the security wall because it unlawfully made life even more difficult for many Palestinians, but can also be applied to security and the rule of law in general and as they relate to torture:

This is the destiny of a democracy: She does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back.

Chief Justice Barak went on to say, "there is no security without law." And while Lelyveld's piece shows us that these important ideas have not been completely implemented in the interrogation chambers of Shin Bet, that doesn't make the assertion itself any less true. So while I am nothing but critical of the Israeli state, they seem to have gotten it right this time, on paper at least. It's a shame that so far, the US has had neither the foresight nor the wisdom to come to the same conclusions.


Note: for another interesting discussion of torture, see Mark Danner's pieces in the the New York Review of Books, available online for free here and here and his write up of Abu Ghraib here.

Last month I saw Darwin's Nightmare, a documentary film by an Austrian filmmaker about the economy based on the alien Nile Perch , which was introduced into Lake Victoria, and which has had devastating effects on the lake's ecosystem and local food supply. It's a fine documentary that explores first world complicity in a small Tanzanian fishing town's misery. Although there is a striking lack of adolescents shown in the film, we see a gamut of people, from hungry street children and prostitutes to Indian-Tanzanian factory owners and Ukrainian pilots, whose planes alternately bring food aid and arms to Tanzania, but always leave full of fish.

So I was excited to see Sauper's 45 minute film on 100,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees roaming the jungles of the Congo in 1997, Kisangani Diary, especially since the director was going to be there to answer questions after the film. I am sad to say, however, that I was very disappointed. While cinematographically, the film was good, there was a certain lack of context that bothered me. This, coupled with the heavy handedness of filming almost exclusively children, made the film seem somehow slightly dishonest.

The viewer is told that these Hutu Rwandans have been roaming the Congolese jungle since they left Rwanda after the 1994 Tutsi genocide, only to be attacked for being of the "wrong tribe" by numerous forces vying for power, especially Kabila's rebel ADFL soldiers, who were soon to topple Mobutu's kleptocracy. Like in Darwin's Nightmare, there is a striking lack of adolescents and adults in the film; the viewer sees suffering children and little else.

While in Darwin's Nightmare, it's understandable why he left out the adolescents on the street. The film is already fairly complex on a moral level, and it's not clear if seeing hungry teenage boys who might just murder you helps get the bigger picture of what's going on in this part of Tanzania. However, in Kisigani Diary the choice is particularly problematic. We never see the adults, and he never asks them why they are still in the Congo. Given the amount of popular Hutu participation in the 1994 genocide, there is a good chance that among these refugees there are at least some, if not many, murderers. But this is not explored at all by Sauper, and when I asked him after the projection who these people were, if any of them were guilty of genocide, the only response he could give me was he didn't think so, because the génocidaires would have left with their guns to get food.

Nevermind the fact that the Rwandan genocide was largely performed with machetes, hammers, hoes, axes and clubs. Furthermore, given the popular participation of the Hutu population, it is probable that there were more than a few people guilty of genocide among the off screen adults in Sauper's film. Furthermore, Sauper fails to mention that many of the Hutu refugee camps in Zaire were still run by former Rwandan military and militia leaders, the same people who massacred nearly 1 million Tutsis. Neither does he mention that many of these camps launched raids into Rwanda and attempted, with the support of Mobutu, to massacre the Zairean Banyamulenge Tutsis.

So in the end, the viewer sees a group of defenceless starving children, longing to return to Rwanda. The images might be from Darfur or northern Ethiopia. There is no moral complexity or context in which to frame the miserable suffering of these people roaming the jungle while starving to death and being shot at.

In today's New York Times, Brooks tells us about his trip to Namibia (subscription required). While talking about AIDS in southern Africa, he fondly mentions American aid three times, patting the US on the back, talking about the money that the US is "pouring" into AIDS treatment in Africa.

Ironically, just yesterday, an editorial in the Times called "Crumbs for Africa" took Bush to task for finally getting around to spending the insufficient $674 million for needy countries that Congress had already approved.

Tony Blair, as host of the G-8 annual meeting, has been trying to get rich countries to double overall aid for Africa over the next 10 years. He has been doing a pretty good job getting that commitment from European nations, but Washington will have none of it. The US, along with European nations, pledged to raise its non-military foreign aid to 0.7% of annual income, but unlike the UK, Germany and France, which have all announced plans to meet this goal and countries like the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway, which have already surpassed the .07% goal, Washington currently has no plan of action for keeping this promise. The US actually gives a lower income percentage than any industrialized country in the world. Portugal, for example, is more than twice as generous as the US.

While most Americans believe that the US gives nearly a quarter of its income away to needy countries, it actually spends only 0.16%, less than 2 cents for every $100. For example, even with Bush"s new "generous" Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the US proposes to spend only $2 billion annually on AIDS relief. This is less than half of the amount that it is expected to spend based on its economy. Compare that to the $300 billion and counting spent on the war in Iraq and the $140 billion in corporate tax cuts last year, and one can see where American priorities really are.

But it gets worse. Not only is the US amazingly stingy, but under Bush, foreign aid is tied to conservative ideology and unilateral, thus diverting aid from multilateral organizations like UNAIDS, which represent the most effective way of distributing international aid. Brooks calls these concerns "nonsense" that is "irrelevant on the ground."

Stephen Lewis, the UN secretary-general's special envoy for AIDS in Africa and Dr. Paul Zeitz, the executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance would beg to differ.

Add to that, the Bush administration's focus on religious ideology over science (e.g. supporting abstinence only programs while cutting off funding to programs that promote condom use), and it's not surprising that Uganda's AIDS rate, which had decreased dramatically in the last ten years, seems to be flattening off and perhaps even going back up.

During a trip to that same nation in 2003, Bush stated, "We are a great nation, we're a wealthy nation. We have a responsibility to help a neighbor in need, a brother and sister in crisis." Given the facts, it's somehow difficult to have much faith in such a magnanimous statement.

Now for the other aspect of the letter that really bothers me, that "People have been in Africa for thousands of years - & look at their progress during those years. Tribal still!" The OED defines tribalism as follows:

a. The condition of existing as a separate tribe or tribes; tribal system, organization, or relations.
b. Loyalty to a particular tribe or group of which one is a member.

While I'm the first to insist that people should vote for ideas instead of ethnicities, tribes or religions, I think we should beware of throwing stones from our glass abode. It only takes a quick look at the 2004 elections to see the effect that religion as a political tool had on the American political discourse. Does that make Americans tribalistic? Maybe, but one shouldn?t forget that in the U.S. religion is used for a political end. Remember the Catholic bishops who refused communion to pro-choice catholic politicians? What about the political rallies held in Protestant churches all over the nation?

Likewise, ethnicity and religion are being used for political goals in Africa. I'm sure the reader from Oregon would not seriously reduce American politics as sectarian, so why should he so quickly reduce African politics as tribal? Probably because he doesn't know any better, and the American media certainly isn't helping him.

Furthermore, these "age-old ethnic hatreds" - as they're often described by a press that is either incapable or unwilling to understand the nuances of African cultures and politics - were in many cases created (or at least fueled) by Europeans in order to divide and conquer through indirect colonial rule. In the case of Rwanda, Belgian and, to a lesser extent, German colonizers forced the racist biblical idea of "white negros" or "Hamites" (the cursed son of Noah) onto Rwandan society. The distinction was not linguistic, hereditary, geographical or even fixed; Tutsis and Hutus spoke the same language, frequently intermarried, lived together, and changing from one group to another was not unheard of. As a matter of fact, we still don't really understand the complex social order of pre-colonial Rwanda. An interesting fact is that there seems to have been no "ethnic" violence between Hutus and Tutsis before European colonization.

Still, Europeans, bewildered by a complex political system in the middle of "primitive" black Africa, created the idea that the Tutsi were superior to the Hutu and Twa and then ruled Rwanda and Burundi through the former. These are some of the roots of the violence in central Africa, and we would do well to remember that Western Europe and North America are not very far removed from this same sort of violence - WWII and Segregation, respectively*.

Since western colonization is far from blameless in this violence, we have an obligation to try to help clean it up. And if that isn't enough, the U.S. should look at the despots, such as Mobutu in Zaire, whom the they supported during the cold war. These are all reasons why the U.S. should 'care' about Africa. And if moral responsibility isn't enough for the reader from Oregon, the fact that the third world has been making its grievances known with car bombs lately should be.


*However, it is important to not see Africa as just a hapless child influenced by a superior Europe as some Africans have taken to doing in order to absolve themselves from the guilt of murder. The Belgians did not dismember their neighbors with machetes, Rwandans did.

Last week in the Times, Kristof penned a criticism (free subscription required) of the Bush administration's handling of the Darfur genocide in response to a letter by a reader from Eugene, Oregon. The letter reads as follows:

Why should the U.S. 'care' for the rest of the world? The U.S. should take care of its own.

People have been in Africa for thousands of years - & look at their progress during those years. Tribal still!

It's way past time for liberal twits to stop pushing the U.S. into or to try to make every wrong in the world our responsibility.

This little missive has so many points to address that I'll have to get to each of them in different posts. But first of all, besides the moral and practical responsibilities that Kristof mentions in his piece, the U.S. has a legal responsibility to intervene.

In July 2004, the US Congress unanimously declared the violence in Darfur a genocide. Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, signed by the US in 1948 and ratified in 1988, states that all contracting parties agree to "undertake to prevent and to punish" the crime of genocide.

Unless we as a nation start living up to our practical, moral and legal responsibilities to prevent genocide, the phrase "never again" will remain a platitude that we speak on the anniversaries of genocides we did nothing to stop.

From time to time there are really important stories that for one reason or another don't get the media attention that they ought to. Recently, the secret Downing Street memo's near lack of coverage in the America press comes to mind. However, while that story certainly deserves to be covered, there is another story that has had very little coverage in the states.

Thomas Lang at CJR Daily has written a good little piece about CNN's 25th anniversary, in which he talks about their coverage of Rwanda in 1994 and their current coverage (or lack thereof) of the genocide taking place in Darfur, Sudan.

Lang is right. With the exception of Kristof from the New York Times, no one seems to be interested in this story. Lang quotes a survey from the International Crisis Group and Zogby International, which states:

Some 84% of respondents said the U.S. should not tolerate an extremist
government committing such attacks, and should use its military assets, short of
inserting U.S. combat troops on the ground to protect civilians, to help bring
them to a halt. There would appear to be much greater public backing for America
to play a leadership role in stemming this catastrophe than has been the
conventional wisdom in Washington. This includes 81% who supported tough
sanctions on Sudanese leaders who control the militias, 80% who backed
establishing a no-fly zone over Darfur, and 91% who said the U.S. should
cooperate with the International Criminal Court to help bring to justice those
accused of crimes against humanity.

These numbers speak well for Americans. They show that it's possible to overlook racism and apathy in order to muster the popular push for the "political will" that we were told made Washington decide to abandon 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus to their bloody fate at the hands of machete wielding murderers. I find it particularly interesting that 91% of those polled were in favor of backing the ICC in order to bring the Sudanese génocidaires to justice, since the US stance has so far been the complete opposite.

What is needed, it seems, is more coverage - especially on television - so that the American public and their representatives are forced to see the killings in Darfur while they're trying to eat their Sunday night supper. Lang thinks that CNN et al. should get their priorities straight and that there's no excuse for not covering this disaster. I couldn't agree more.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury:

This blog is a quiet bottled letter. In it, I want to discuss ideas, politics, literature, film and genocide, among other things. I want to give myself a space where I can work out some of the ideas that keep me awake at night. I hope that others will find this site interesting or helpful, but even if it's but an exercise in vanity, staring at my own reflection in ones and zeros, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. What's important for me is to get some of these things off my chest and, in theory at least, into a public forum.