What makes a terrorist?

I've just returned from London, where I was covering what some people are calling "the doctors' plot"--the botched terror attacks last week on London's West End and Glasgow's airport. Investigators say the perpetrators were doctors, medical students and other health-care professionals, and among the many worrying concerns such a plot raises, there is a broader question sparked by the diabolical imaginative leap of turning doctors into bombs: What makes a terrorist?

It is a fact of our times that every once in a not-so-long while you will pick up your morning paper, or log on, or tune in to your morning show and discover some atrocity somewhere in the world--young people torn to shreds at a nightclub, a plane blown out of the sky, commuters incinerated in a subway--all done in the name of a viciously distorted understanding of Islam. Most people's first thought on hearing of such bloodthirsty mayhem will be, "Muslim terrorists again." And while that reaction will be wrong on occasion (remember Oklahoma City), and while you may find that it verges on bigotry, you simply cannot deny that most of the time it is an empirical fact of our age that the hunch will be spot-on correct. It will be "Muslim terrorists again."

Why? That's a critical strategic question in the struggle against a barbarism that threatens to define our lives. It's also a very complicated question, but let's focus on one thing that is almost certainly not driving Islamist terrorism and one thing that is.

It's not poverty. Poor people in Muslim societies are not more likely to become terrorists. They are not more vulnerable to the stew of theology, resentment, and fanaticism that forms the mentality of Islamist terror. In fact, the opposite is true--but you wouldn't know this from listening to many politicians and activists.

As David Wessel points out in The Wall Street Journal today(subscription required), President Bush and others are given to fatuous utterances like, "We fight against poverty because hope is an answer to terror." So, if we write a big enough check to fight Third World poverty, we'll defeat terrorism? This is a self-regarding, morally vain and dangerous notion. In most of the world's fifty poorest countries, there is little or no terrorism. It is simply an insult to say that a poor young man in Haiti is a potential terrorist simply because he's poor. As people have demonstrated throughout human history, poverty is not a moral handicap.

Islamist terrorists and their supporters are shown by study after study to be better-off, better-educated, and have better opportunities than most others in their societies. Perhaps the most chilling findings come from the work of forensic psychiatrist and former CIA case officer Marc Sageman, who studied 400 Al Qaeda members and found that "the vast majority--90 percent--came from caring, intact families. Sixty-three percent had gone to college, as compared with the 5-6 percent that's usual for the third world. These are the best and brightest of their societies in many ways." So Al Qaeda and other violent jihadist movements are not best understood in the Marxian discourse of class struggle. The question isn't money. It's identity.

To be a modern person is to be an insecure person. By that I mean insecure in one's identity in relation to others. Rootlessness, anonymity, transience--these are the conditions that make many of us who we are in the modern world. And that in turn makes the construction of our identities--our personalities--an active endeavor, a matter of choice and struggle and reflection. This is the condition of a free mind in a free world--liberated, but in a fundamental sense, alone as our forebears were not.

Because for most of human history, the question "Who am I in this society?" was simply unimaginable. Family, ancestors, clan, tribal networks, geography, faith and ties to the land made one's identity a given--a fact defined extrinsically by seemingly immutable social forces. There is great comfort in this; we are social creatures, and a deep, dense social network can provide a rich sense of identity. But it is a truth of our time that as the world moves rapidly from the country to the city (more than half the human population now lives in cities--a staggering social change in our species), fewer and fewer people will live amid the old certainties, and more and more will experience the dizzying possibilities of life as an individual set adrift in the human sea of the great city.

And they will be insecure in who they are. Not all, perhaps--the poor are insulated, to an extent, by the sheer magnitude of their physical struggle to survive, by their continued reliance on each other and on an older faith that focuses its promises on the next world, and by their isolation. But take a few steps up the social ladder in an immigrant community, or in the sprawling new cities in the Muslim world, and it's a different story. Doctors, engineers, architects and other professionals are in the vanguard of the movement into modernity. They are immersed in a world of transnational practices, standards, collegial networks and ethics that can be corrosive of their old allegiances. They can get lost, especially if they have migrated to the west, with all of our societies' temptations, blasphemies, materialism and skepticism.

So they go home. Not literally--no, they return to a country of the mind, an Islamist fantasyland of certainty, dignity and power. In that world, they know who they are. And they know who we are--infidels whose life of freedom and radical individuality and anonymity confused them for a time, threatened them with annihilation. They will not be annihilated. They have decided they will annihilate us.

The question of identity does not by a long shot explain what makes a terrorist. There's the issue of why British and European Muslims seem more vulnerable to the terrorist worldview than American Muslims do; I'll take that up in my next post. There's also the question of theology--is there something in Islam itself that has been activated by the pressures of modernity? Perhaps. But for now, I think it's important, as we try to understand things like the "doctors' plot," to refocus our attention from poverty and explore instead the psychological experience--the inner lives--of those who are so determined to kill us. That way lies victory.

July 5, 2007 in Current Affairs | Permalink | User Comments (15) | TrackBack (0)

Imus and Hip-Hop

I'm no expert about rap or hip-hop--far from it. Loved Public Enemy as a young man, still have Missy Elliott's "The Rain" on the iPod. But aside from the purchase of Kanye West's "The College Dropout" a couple of years ago--on a friend's recommendation that it was great (not for me)--my musical tastes run much more toward the propulsive piano stylings of Robert Glasper, the timeless sophistication of Johnny Hodges, the limpid insights of Maria Joao Pires. And, of course, Cheap Trick.

So I'm a fogey. But I live in our common American culture, and thus breathe the atmosphere of young America's delights, distractions and obsessions. You can't avoid them. We worship youth in this country; there is a kind of hidden message coded in all our media that one must know and at least pretend to enjoy that which the young create and enjoy. "Thou shalt be hip," is the first commandment of the culture. But I'm hopeless in that regard--and glad of it. I miss "The Waltons."

I have a 10-year-old daughter, though, and so I simply can't ignore what goes on in popular culture. And that brings me to the debate about Don Imus, his despicable slur against the Rutgers University women's basketball team, and hip-hop music.

A lot of bloggers and others have noted that what Imus said on the air is no different from what many rappers and hip-hoppers have said in their songs. It's true. Go to any popular lyrics site (like this one), type in the terms Imus used or other racist and misogynist slurs, and see for yourself. Look at rap and hip-hop music videos--but make sure your ten-year-old is out of the room. Much of what you will find in this music is a puerile fantasy of male power, frenzied irresponsibility, and the degradation of women. What's so depressing--as columnist Bob Herbert of The New York Times, educator and actor Bill Cosby, the Rev. Eugene Rivers of The Baker House in Boston, and so many others have pointed out for so long--is that this repugnant fantasy has become an ideal of manhood for far too many young Americans--black and white.

So why is Imus fired for what he said, while so many rappers are idolized for using precisely the same language? Is there a double-standard?

Of course there is. And there is no longer any excuse for it.

There are those who tell us that somehow when a young black man says "bitch" or "ho" or uses the "n-word," it's OK. It's all about the context. It's culturally specific. It's art. It's a black thing--I can't understand.

This attitude was captured in a fine story my ABC News colleague Deborah Roberts filed last night for "World News with Charles Gibson." Deborah interviewed Danyel Smith, who tracks hip-hop for Vibe magazine, and who believes, as Deborah put it, that "the gritty world being described in popular rap lyrics is artistic expression, not to be confused with mainstream name-calling."

"I think there's a difference in a black person saying something about another black person," Smith said. "I think the way those words started out, white people were using them against black people in a way that kept them down."

The rapper Snoop Dogg put it a little more pungently:

“It’s a completely different scenario,” he said. "[Rappers] are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We’re talking about ho’s that’s in the ‘hood that ain’t doing sh–, that’s trying to get a n—a for his money. These are two separate things. First of all, we ain’t no old-ass white men that sit up on MSNBC going hard on black girls. We are rappers that have these songs coming from our minds and our souls that are relevant to what we feel. I will not let them mutha—-as say we in the same league as him."

All this is pernicious nonsense. "Horsefeathers," as Grandpa Walton might put it.

Most Americans seem to believe--rightly, in my judgment--that you don't get a pass on civility in this country because you're a black man who raps; that you aren't entitled to call women "ho" or "bitch"--whether they're in "the hood" (an exegesis I simply do not buy from Mr. Dogg) or in my family; that just because you claim that a repugnant slur comes from your "mind and soul" does not give you a license to hurl it at people.

And many Americans ask: How is it that so many parents are supposed to tolerate the bombardment of our daughters with the most degrading imagery and language? Because it's promulgated by black artists? Huh? A white man says stuff like that, and he must be fired--but a black man can degrade women and himself, and it's "art"? Where's the real racism there? Which man is being treated as beneath our shared values and standards?

All of the claims for a "culturally specific" exception to civility seem to me to rest on a myth--the myth that somehow hip-hop culture is the pure self-expression of urban black America. But the facts are otherwise. Ask yourself: Who sells this stuff? Who buys it? If it did not sell, would it get made? An honest appraisal of the hip-hop music and fashion market would see it for what it is--the exploitation of a part of black American culture by mega-billion, white-owned and white-controlled corporations who sell the stuff to millions of suburban teen-age white boys. This isn't folk art. It's business--big business. A few black people get rich from it. The rest, one can argue, get degraded.

Perhaps the most salutary thing that could come out of the Imus story is a revolution--a revolution by girls and women, black and white, by their dads and brothers and husbands and friends--a revolution against the utter misogyny that permeates so much of our mass-market, money-driven popular culture. It wouldn't be hip. But it would be hope.

April 13, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (151) | TrackBack (0)

Don't Feel Too Sorry for the Dukies

Mike Nifong, the North Carolina prosecutor who pursued a case of rape and kidnapping against three Duke University lacrosse players, has been found to have been reckless and deceitful in the discharge of his duties according to the state's attorney general. He abused the power the people of Durham granted him. Based on the public record of what he did in this case, he may well be properly disbarred.

The accuser in this case has been shown to be either a vicious liar or a troubled fantasist.

The three young men who she accused are truly innocent of the charges brought against them according to the North Carolina Attorney General and the investigation led by his office.

But perhaps the outpouring of sympathy for Reade Seligman, Collin Finnerty and David Evans is just a bit misplaced. They got special treatment in the justice system--both negative and positive. The conduct of the lacrosse team of which they were members was not admirable on the night of the incident, to say the least. And there are so many other victims of prosecutorial misconduct in this country who never get the high-priced legal representation and the high-profile, high-minded vindication that it strikes me as just a bit unseemly to heap praise and sympathy on these particular men.

So as we rightly cover the vindication of these young men and focus on the genuine ordeal they have endured, let us also remember a few other things:

They were part of a team that collected $800 to purchase the time of two strippers.

Their team specifically requested at least one white stripper.

During the incident, racial epithets were hurled at the strippers.

Colin Finnerty was charged with assault in Washington, DC, in 2005.

The young men were able to retain a battery of top-flight attorneys, investigators and media strategists.

As students of Duke University or other elite institutions, these young men will get on with their privileged lives. There is a very large cushion under them--the one that softens the blows of life for most of those who go to Duke or similar places, and have connections through family, friends and school to all kinds of prospects for success. They are very differently situated in life from, say, the young women of the Rutgers University women's basketball team.

And, MOST IMPORTANT, there are many, many cases of prosecutorial misconduct across our country every year.  The media covers few, if any, of these cases. Most of the victims in these cases are poor or minority Americans--or both. I would hate to say the color of their skin is one reason journalists do not focus on these victims of injustices perpetrated by police and prosecutors, but I am afraid if we ask ourselves the question honestly, we would likely find that it is. Look for a moment at what James Giles endured: 

I hope we all keep him and others in mind, as we cover the celebrated exoneration of well-heeled, well-connected, well-publicized young men whose conduct, while not illegal, was not entirely admirable, either. They aren't heroes. They aren't boys. They are young men who were victimized by a reckless prosecutor--and had the resources the fight him off.

April 12, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (3075) | TrackBack (0)

Sen. McCain: The Preview

We spent the day with Sen. John McCain as he campaigned in New Hampshire today. We'll have a full report on Nightline on Monday, but the Senator had some interesting thoughts to share:

ON FUNDRAISING:

Sen. McCain admitted that he would fall short of fundraising expectations in advance of the March 31st deadline. He stated his campaign started later than others and, as a result, they have been trying to make up ground. However, Sen. McCain denied having any trouble raising money.

ON GONZALES

Sen. McCain weighed in on the US attorney's controversy, stating his concern about Attorney General Gonzales' role in the firings and emphasized the need for the Attorney General to appear before Congress and explain what he knew and when he knew it, but did not call for his resignation.

ON WALTER REED

Sen. McCain expressed that he was personally embarrassed and ashamed by the Walter Reed scandal. Having visited Walter Reed frequently, the Senator believes he should have noticed the apparent problems.

ON HIS CHARACTER

Finally, Sen. McCain also expressed "aggravation" at comments regarding his character and allegations that he has somehow changed since running for President in 2000.

March 25, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (79) | TrackBack (0)

Why is Hollywood So Liberal?

I'm out in L.A. doing an Oscar story. Yesterday, I spent some time with the young actor Ryan Gosling, who's the dark-horse contender for the Best Actor award this year, up against some stiff competition--Forrest Whitaker, Peter O'Toole, Leonardo DiCaprio, etc. (in fact, Gosling's such a long shot, he's betting against himself.) Gosling got the nomination for his intense, disturbing portrayal of a crackhead schoolteacher in Half Nelson.  He struck me as a very thoughtful, warm guy--not at all the prima donna type. And he seems to be struggling to craft a career that balances the industrial-strength glamour of Hollywood (he made all the girls swoon in the weeper The Notebook) with his own personal ambitions to make smaller, independent, more "difficult" movies. He's definitely a young actor to watch.

But the talk of the town out here is the dust-up among Hollywood's big political donors. When mogul and onetime FOB David Geffen called the Clintons liars (Geffen is now backing Senator Barack Obama), it set off fireworks across the country (Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign demanded that Obama cut off all ties to Geffen), and here in L.A. One reason: Hollywood money is a crucial factor for any Democrat who seriously wants to be president. You simply cannot get the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party--and you cannot win the White House as a Democrat--without the money-raising muscle of Hollywood. So the stakes are very high in this early skirmish between Clinton and Obama.

The whole incident demonstrates that fact once again, and it also reminds us how liberal Hollywood is. A conservative Democrat or a Republican is simply not going to find anywhere near as much money out here as a liberal--a "real" liberal. Why is that? Why is Hollywood so liberal?

First off, I'm not taking any political position here. It may be a great thing, it may be not so great, that Hollywood is a bastion of liberalism. Some people like it, some don't. That's not what I'm after here. Second, I'm not talking about the actors themselves. Artists in our culture, most of them anyway, have long been on the more progressive side of our politics. Perhaps it has something to do with the kind of work they do, perhaps with the fashions of the artistic community, perhaps because as artists they have a different experience of the world. Dunno.

No, I'm wondering about the moguls. Geffen, Katzenberg, Spielberg, Reiner, Lear, Saban--the big-money moguls are power players in the Democratic Party, and they lean unmistakably left. That has not always been the case in Hollywood. Once upon a time, the men (and they were all men) who ran Hollywood leaned unmistakably right. Louis B. Mayer was chairman of California's Republican Party for years. Irving Thalberg led the effort to defeat progressive Democrat Upton Sinclair when he ran for California governor in 1934 on a platform of ending poverty in the state. Daryl Zanuck was a staunch Cold Warrior who, like many moguls, helped enforce the notorious blacklisting of actors, writers, directors and others who might have had some association with communism. And Walt Disney was a deeply anti-union, anti-communist social conservative.

So what's going on today? What happened? I'm wondering if the real reason the big-money players in Hollywood have become so liberal is that it's good for their business.

Sex sells. Always has, always will. If you put a pretty woman, scantily clad, in front of a pile of radial tires, you will sell more radial tires. There's probably some algorithm for it. And once Hollywood was able to shake off the shackles of the "Hays code" the opportunities to make more by showing more and doing more in the bedroom on screen were simply irresistible.

The cash Niagara of more explicit, more sexually liberated movies has had a political consequence, it seems to me. Imagine, for a moment: If social conservatives had their way and American culture was remade in the manner they advocate--Hollywood would take a beating. Movies would change--they'd be less sexually suggestive, less "transgressive" of middle-class morality, less likely to champion lifestyles at odds with "traditional values." (They also might be a lot more boring--but that's beside the point.) And the big moguls would make less money--a lot less. (Artists would certainly and rightly rebel against the constraints on their freedom to imagine and depict the world--but I'm not talking about artists. I'm talking about businessmen and businesswomen.) So: Sex sells. And that shapes Hollywood's politics.

But I wonder if there's another factor (and I admit I'm going even farther out on a limb here). Hollywood is now one of the biggest transnational, mega-corporate industries in the world. The interests of the people who make a pile of money from Hollywood movies are intimately bound up with the culture of international business. And that culture increasingly treats nations and their parochial interests as obstacles to progress, to the natural order of The Deal. As Samuel Huntington and others have provocatively suggested, the way "transnational elites" see the world--and see their interests in the world--is often at odds with the way many of their fellow citizens see the world. Here's how Huntington famously (or infamously) put it:

“America's business, professional, intellectual, and academic elites... [have] attitudes and behaviors [that] contrast with the overwhelming patriotism and nationalistic identification with their country of the American public. . . . They abandon commitment to their nation and their fellow citizens and argue the moral superiority of identifying with humanity at large.”

It's what some on the left call "community without nation"--the notion that national loyalty and all it entails can be superseded by a broader allegiance to the abstract goals of trade, of human rights, global environmental stewardship, and a more egalitarian distribution of the world's resources.

I wonder: If American foreign policy, or environmental policy, or even our religious culture "offends" people around the world, does that harm Hollywood's business interests? And if it does, might the risk to the movie business's bottom line account for some of the reason Hollywood moguls lean left? Is the Republican Party bad for business out here?

And please let me emphasize: I am trying to provoke a discussion, not take a position here. I may be a liberal; I may be a conservative. No matter here. I'm just trying to "push back" a little.

And I invite you to "push back," too.

February 22, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (269) | TrackBack (0)

I Stand Corrected

I'd like to offer my sincere thanks to all of you who pointed out significant factual errors in the posting, "Is Giuliani 'White' Enough?", including:

The Republican Party has nominated a Catholic for national office--William Miller in 1964; the Republicans nominated Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas--who was nearly half Native American--for vice president in 1928; Earl Warren--nominated by the GOP for vice president in 1948--was the son of Norwegian and Swedish immigrants; John Kerry is not an Irish Catholic.

These are obvious errors, easily checked, and I apologize for my sloppiness.

The point of the piece was to poke a little fun at the whole "Is-Barack-Obama-Black-Enough?" discussion by turning it on its head a bit and pointing out that "whiteness," like "blackness" in America, is not a biological given but a social construct. I also sought to explore the challenge I believe Rudolph Giuliani's candidacy represents for today's Republican Party. As Ken Mehlman and many other GOP leaders have acknowledged, the Republicans must attract more non-white voters in an increasingly diverse America in order to be successful. One only has to look at election results to see the evidence of this challenge. And I wondered whether Giuliani's politics--a distinctly urban mixture of tough-mindedness, pragmatism, and palpable ease with "the roiling racial and social diversity of the big city"--presented a specific and fascinating challenge to today's GOP. It was an effort at provocation--marred badly by those factual errors.

I really do appreciate the "pushback." I'm learning a great deal from all of you. And I thank you.

Keep 'em coming.

February 19, 2007 in Correction | Permalink | User Comments (16) | TrackBack (0)

Is Giuliani "White" Enough?

There's a lot of talk these days about Senator Barack Obama's racial identity: "Is Obama black enough?" The question has become a kind of shorthand for a national discussion of the Illinois senator's mixed-race, international background and what it might mean for him as a presidential candidate. It plunges us into our oldest dilemma--the social construction of race and its meanings in the American polity. Who counts as "black"--whether measured by the old, ugly concept of "one drop of blood" or the new, indeterminate notion of authenticity of experience--is an issue it seems we've never been able to escape. And until our country achieves true racial justice, equality and harmony, I suppose it will always be with us. Race still matters so much in America. That might sound depressing--and it is in many ways--but it's better to talk about it--to open up our preconceptions and labels and misunderstandings to a searching examination and a freewheeling discussion--than to sweep it all under the rug as somehow too intimate, too painful, too troubling, too rude to raise in a presidential campaign.  Sunshine is the best disinfectant, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis liked to say. Obama himself has clearly thought deeply about these matters, and the excitement surrounding his candidacy stems in part from what he has to say about us as a multi-racial nation with a history scarred--and ennobled--by our struggle over racial difference, power and justice. His remarkable autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, is a deeply moving contribution to this discussion. But I'd like to flip the question about Obama in a way, just to see what we might come up with here. So, instead of asking, "Is Obama black enough?" how about asking, "Is Rudolph Giuliani white enough?" Huh? Well, just as "blackness" is an identity we invent and impose on each other (a "socially constructed concept," as they say), so is "whiteness." And "whiteness"--or the "lack" of it--might also have important political ramifications. Rudolph William Louis Giuliani III is a proud Italian-American; both his mom and his dad were immigrants. He was mayor of New York City--perhaps the world's greatest experiment in diversity. And he's running for president in the Republican Party, a party that even former chairman Ken Mehlman has acknowledged faces genuine problems reaching out to non-whites. In 2000, George W. Bush won 62 percent of white males--and lost the popular vote. Bush won 60 percent of the white male vote in 2004--and just 50.7 percent of the overall vote. As any GOP strategist will tell you privately, the Republican Party has become too dependent on white male voters. So what does this have to do with Giuliani? He's a white guy, right? Well, yes and no. Who counts as white in America has been a fluid concept in our history, and Italians have only recently--and perhaps incompletely in some quarters--been admitted to the racial club. It was just 85 years ago, in 1922, in the fascinating case of Rollins v. Alabama, that a black man named Jim Rollins was tried and convicted for "miscegenation"--the crime of having sex with a white woman. On appeal, Rollins' conviction was overturned because the woman in question, Ms. Edith LaBue, was a Sicilian immigrant, a fact that the court held could "in no sense be taken as conclusive that she was therefore a white woman." (Anyone who's read William Faulkner's novels will recognize the Alabama court's unease about calling a Sicilian woman white.) Italians--like Irish, Jews, Poles, Greeks and now Hispanics and others--have struggled in our history to achieve "whiteness." It's not a given--not a fixed characteristic. It's always been a designation granted to a group by the dominant culture. But that's a done deal for Italian-Americans, long ago. They're white--now. But the question for Giuliani is whether there is some shadow, some echo of the old attitudes in how some voters might approach his candidacy. Giuliani is at odds with Republican base voters on several major issues: abortion, gay rights, gun control, immigration. His positions on these matters--combined with his background--confront Republicans with a distinctly "urban" candidate--an ethnic son of immigrants at ease with the roiling racial and social diversity of the big city that many GOP voters see as a threat to their notion of America. This is a party, after all, that has nominated precisely one ethnic immigrant candidate for national office in its history--Greek-American Spiro Agnew (the Roosevelts and Eisenhowers had been in America for centuries). Republicans have never nominated a Catholic for national office. Democrats have a different record--Irish-Americans Al Smith, John Kennedy and John Kerry; Polish-American Edmund Muskie; Norwegian-American Walter Mondale; Italian-American Geraldine Ferraro; Greek-American Michael Dukakis; Jewish-American Joseph Lieberman. Look at a map of the 2004 election results, county by county. What you see is a nation divided by diversity. Rudy Giuliani's candidacy challenges that division, and raises the question: Is he white enough? So the Giuliani candidacy might tell us something about today's Republican Party. And about America.

February 16, 2007 in Politics | Permalink | User Comments (82) | TrackBack (0)

Reparations for GTMO?

Should the government of the United States pay reparations to those men who were falsely imprisoned for years at the American detention facility at Guantanamo Bay?

It's a serious question.

This week, President Bush signed an executive order providing for trial by military commission of three detainees who have been singled out to face something that may--or may not--be due process. Court battles lie ahead. The other men--more than 400 of them, locked in the cells and cages behind the wire at GTMO--remain in legal limbo, labeled "enemy combatants," a terminological innovation designed to deny them the protections of either prisoners of war or of common criminals. BUT--what if we are wrong about some of these men? What if, in the shock and trauma following 9/11, we ended up seizing people who were not in fact terrorists, who did not in fact do or mean us harm, and hauled them around the world, interrogated/tortured them, cut them off from their families, and incarcerated them without trial for years? What would we owe them?

First, no matter how you feel about what the United States has done at Guantanamo Bay--whether you feel it's a justified and lawful wartime measure or a disgrace on the nation--most of us would agree on a couple of big principles: Our country should not imprison the innocent. And when our country makes a mistake--when we break faith with our commitment to the rule of law--we are a great enough country to admit it, and make amends.

Second, we have to stipulate something, as the lawyers say: We have no idea how many innocents might have been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. That's because the procedures for determining who the prisoners in our custody are and what--if anything--they have done are deeply flawed, most legal scholars agree. Detainees have been denied access to much of the evidence against them, including the identity of their accusers; they have no right to legal representation; evidence derived from coercive interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo--including techniques amounting to torture under international standards--is allowed to be considered; and hearsay is admitted.

Now, it is true that President Bush, Vice President Cheney and officials at the prison all claim that there are "no innocent" men in the cells at Guantanamo, that they are all "bad people" who were all "picked up on the battlefield," "dangerous," "the worst of the worst."

Those claims are false. By the government's own admission, 38 of the 558 prisoners--7 percent--who have been held at Guantanamo are "no longer enemy combatants." The US government is gradually releasing them. If they were so "dangerous," truly "the worst of the worst," would we really just let them go? The potential fraud of this designation was noted--with a hint of outrage--by US District Judge James Robertson in 2005: "The government's use of the Kafka-esque term 'no longer enemy combatants' deliberately begs the question of whether these petitioners ever were enemy combatants." In other words, they may well be innocent.

That's not all. Administration officials--from the president on down--have constantly claimed all the men at Guantanamo were "picked up on the battlefield." This is also demonstrably false. According to the military's own determinations--as researched and analyzed by Seton Hall University Professor Mark Denbaux and his son John Denbaux in a thorough report--55 percent of those held at Guantanamo did not commit any hostile acts against US or coalition forces; 40 percent have no definitive connection with al Qaeda; 18 percent have no definitive connection with either al Qaeda or the Taliban; and only 5 percent of the detainees were actually captured by US forces. Most of the rest were sold to us by bounty hunters in Pakistan. The "worst of the worst?" Read those statistics again--the military's own official findings on the men they are holding in those cells--and ask yourself, again: If some of these men are indeed innocent, what do we owe them?

In 1988, the United States Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed the "Civil Liberties Act of 1988," which formally apologized to the more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans interned during World War II and provided for symbolic compensation of $20,000 per person. The law's purpose was to "acknowledge the fundamental injustice" of what our country had done. In signing the bill, President Reagan said, "What's most important in this bill has less to do with property than with honor. For here, we admit a wrong."

Honor. For millions in this country and around the world, what has happened at Guantanamo Bay has stained the nation's honor. President Bush himself has acknowledged that the prison has become a symbol of injustice, dismaying our friends and inspiring our enemies. The new Democratic Congress is considering cutting off funding for the prison at Guantanamo Bay, forcing the administration to shut it down. Perhaps the Congress should go further--establishing an independent commission to review claims of innocence from those men already released from GTMO, and, if the panel concludes there have been wrongful imprisonments, providing for an American apology and compensation. That would say a lot about our country. It might remind people what's at the heart of our democracy--an ideal of justice, the commitment to truth. And that would surely inspire our friends and dismay our enemies.

Sometimes, as Ronald Reagan knew, the honorable thing to do is admit you've done wrong. And--honorably--seek forgiveness.

What do you think?

February 15, 2007 in War | Permalink | User Comments (20) | TrackBack (0)

Pelosi's plane

"We're Article One."

That's what former Speaker of the House Jim Wright liked to say. Wright was talking about the place of Congress in the Constitution: It comes first in the document, right after the preamble. Jim Wright, who was not a bashful man, believed placement was prerogative in constitutional law; Congress came first because the Framers saw it as primus inter pares, as the first among the co-equal branches, the main driver of our national experiment in representative democracy simply because it was closest to the people. Wright was right; that's a standard scholarly reading of the document, as well.

Jim Wright's institutional claims come to mind in the wake of the ridiculous flap over what kind of government plane the current Speaker of the House should be able to fly. By now, you surely know the story (or should, if you've been following my ABC colleague Jake Tapper's excellent coverage of it): Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California is now the leading constitutional officer of Congress--i.e., she's Speaker. Second in the line of succession to the presidency. She's a Democrat. She's a woman. She's a liberal. Her predecessor was Rep. Denny Hastert of Illinois. He's a Republican. He's a man. He's a conservative.

After the 9/11 attacks, Speaker Hastert was, for security reasons, given "shuttle service" by Pelosi military transport to and from his congressional district in Illinois. This year, citing the same security concerns, the Sergeant at Arms of the House of Representatives asked the Department of Defense to provide a plane that could get Speaker Pelosi to and from her district in California--which would require a bigger and costlier plane than Hastert used.

What did the Bush administration do? Leak the story--to The Washington Times, a kind of house organ for conservatives in the capital. And sit back and watch the flap.

This is hardly bipartisan comity between the branches of our government. Moreover, it seems downright disrespectful. Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker. Deal with it. If security requires the constitutional officer of Congress to fly military transport to and from her district, then fly her. The Sergeant at Arms requested "non-stop flights, unless such an aircraft is unavailable." Seems eminently reasonable. BUT--and here's complaint (or perhaps the fake complaint, given how much GOP lawmakers have used military transport over the past several years)--it will cost more. Perhaps a few million dollars a year more.

The federal budget will soon exceed $2.9 trillion. The "burn rate" of the war in Iraq is more than $8 billion a month. $12 billion in cash vanished into thin air in Iraq. The Capitol Visitors Center is $335 million over budget. And Congress is Article I.

Do the math.

February 8, 2007 in Politics | Permalink | User Comments (67) | TrackBack (0)

Hate Speech: A response

Thanks to all who have weighed in on the issue of John Edwards' "blogmaster" Amanda Marcotte. All voices and views are welcome here. The whole point of "Pushback" is to provoke a discussion, to take a look at the news and start talking about it. And that, of course, is the hope of the blogosphere--a place where hard facts, sharp opinions, original insights and roiling passions combine to deepen and extend our national debate. With any luck, it'll make us all smarter and better citizens. So: I truly appreciate all who have pushed back at me here.

Let's continue.

First, a lot of you have objected to my suggestion that some of what Marcotte has written "might well be construed as hate speech." Here's what I hope is a representative sampling of some of those objections:

Posted by: Karen | Feb 7, 2007 1:20:57 PM: "The title of this post is absolutely ridiculous. None of those posts are hate speech. But nice attempt at silencing free speech, Mr. Moran."

Posted by: Seth | Feb 6, 2007 8:07:57 PM: "This is hardly hate speech. It may be raw and not my style, but it doesn't fall within the parameters of hate speech. Perhaps you're thinking of Limbaugh, Colter and Savage? They are the real experts on hate speech in commercial blog/radio show America today."

Posted by: Mark | Feb 7, 2007 2:51:36 PM: "Apparenlty Terry Moran has never read Blogs before, because if he had, he would realize that these remarks are hardly "hate speech", espeically when considering the lovely langugage Malkin, Coulter, and Limbaugh use on a daily basis."

A couple of points. First, it seems to me that trashing the sacred beliefs of another person in sexually explicit or scatological terms for the purpose of wounding and delegitimizing the other person could fairly be construed as hateful. The gutter is always the comfortable resort of haters. That's why white supremacists use the word "n*****" and slander all black men by portraying them as sexually predatory beasts; that's why antisemites repeat the blood libel. For another disgusting example of this kind of discourse, check out what "James" wrote about Islam in response to my post on Edwards and Marcotte (at 2:40:24 PM EDT); pure hatred, in my view.

There are all kinds of ways to dispute what another person says or believes. Sometimes, giving offense is a great way to make a point, to get heard, to break through the unspoken oppression of certain views. But to seek to obliterate the legitimacy of another person's faith or other allegiances--and wound them in the process with the vilest terminology--isn't debate. It's rhetorical gangsterism.

There are plenty of examples of this tactic across the airwaves, the Internet and campaigns these days. A lot of what Ann Coulter has said could certainly be construed as hate speech; Rep. Rahm Emanuel and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee raised the issue in the last election, demanding that Republicans "denounce Ann Coulter's hate speech." When the Catholic League's Bill Donahue declares, ""Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular," that could be construed as hateful (and stupid). Rush Limbaugh comparing liberals to cockroaches could be construed as classic eliminationist rhetoric, used by haters for centuries to avoid real debate against their opponents, delegitimizing and dehumanizing those who disagree with them. The list goes on--on both the right and the left.

Now, it's a free country. Rush Limbaugh can spew all the hatred he wants. So can Ann Coulter, Amanda Marcotte, or me. But political leaders are different. In order for a government of compromise, consensus and common sacrifice to work, we expect our leaders to disavow hate, to conduct our public business in a manner respectful of all our citizens, consistent with our best traditions. Hate breaks down the sinews of the body politic and sets us against each other as enemies to be defeated. This is fatal to a diverse, democratic republic. Lincoln, as usual, said it best: "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection." And so it seems fair to me that we ask politicians who embrace those who spew what might be construed as hatred whether they endorse or disavow it. That goes for Vice President Cheney--who is a regular guest on Limbaugh's program--or for John Edwards, who has hired Amanda Marcotte. This isn't about censorship. It's about leadership.

Second, there's the issue of the blogoshpere itself. A lot of people have told me that what Marcotte and others (liberal and conservative) are writing is just par for the course out there. Blogs, I'm told, are different. They're new--they're edgy--they're breaking the boundaries of old-fogey media and ushering in a new era of public discourse. I buy a lot of that. But speech is still speech. And hate is still hate. If you call a black man a "n*****" on a blog, it's just as offensive as shouting it in his face. It seems to me that bloggers (and those who post comments on them) sometimes forget this; the lack of a flesh-and-blood interlocutor and the anonymity the internet offers unleash the rhetorical beast in us. Rage, vituperation, insult, slur, infantile taunting--you see a lot of that on many blogs. That, I am told, is just the rough-and-tumble world of bloggers, having at each other and everyone else with raw gusto, just like those old pamphleteers to whom they are so often compared. OK, fine, whatever. But you don't get a pass from the tenets of basic decency in civil discourse just because you blog.

Third, my bro. Many of you have noted that I am the brother of Rick Moran, who writes the Right Wing Nuthouse blog, and you have concluded that I am somehow in cahoots with Rick, or share his view of the world. For the record, I had no idea Rick was writing about this subject when I posted yesterday. But far more important: I love my brother something fierce. I am very proud of him. We do not agree on many, many things (as decades of uncomfortably loud dinner table disagreements have demonstrated). In no way do I endorse anything he writes; that's not for me to do here. But I will never disavow him. I will always defend him as an honorable man. And I really don't care what anyone says about it. He is my brother.

Finally, can we all lighten up a little? In that spirit, try this little piece of internet genius: http://roxik.com/pictaps/. Have fun.

February 7, 2007 in Politics | Permalink | User Comments (124) | TrackBack (0)