Unless you follow international news closely, you may have missed the tragic recent events in Guinea.  From a September 29 NYT report:

Streets were deserted and shops were shut tight Tuesday in Conakry, Guinea, a day after government troops went on a brutal rampage at an opposition rally, shooting, stabbing, raping and assaulting dozens of men and women in a packed stadium.

Hospitals in the city were full of the wounded from what opponents of the military government here termed a massacre, and human rights groups continued to revise upward the number of dead, saying Tuesday that about 157 people are known to have been killed.  Over a thousand victims had suffered gunshot wounds or other injuries, the groups said.

[A] precise death toll was impossible to ascertain because the army had removed bodies from the stadium where as many as 50,000 had gathered to protest the ruling military junta. . . .Witnesses said women were raped in public by the soldiers and sexually assaulted with their guns; the military fired repeated volleys on unarmed civilians at point-blank range, human rights officials said.

The most brutal soldiers were identified as belonging to the elite, red-beret-wearing presidential guard.

Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara, who took power in a coup d’etat last December after the death of Guinea’s previous dictator, has vehemently denied any responsibility for his soldiers’ brutality.

The government reported 56 dead, saying many persons had been trampled, while human rights advocates have documented at least 150 murders and at least 1,000 injured, substantiated by photographs of countless dead bodies that had been shot.  Many of these photos were provided to various news organizations, including the New York Times.

Numerous reports have emerged describing brutal rapes of women and children, including a cellphone photo, also provided to the New York Times that shows soldiers surrounding a woman on the ground.  Other media reports from the IRIN Africa news service on the “Aftermath of Rape” in Guinea elaborates in explicit terms:

At an 8 October gathering of Guinean women beaten or raped during the recent military attack on demonstrators, all wept as one young woman presented torn clothes soldiers had ripped off of her.

“We all collapsed in tears. It is unspeakably painful what happened here in Guinea,” Aïssata Daffe of the Union des Forces Républicaines political party.

The gathering was part of an ongoing effort by local NGOs and civil society organizations to collect information about the sexual violence during the 28 September military crackdown in order to appeal for assistance and justice.  NGOs are still trying to determine how many women and girls were raped. For now 33 cases have been documented, according to local and international aid agencies.

In response, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement to reporters in Washington, D.C.  saying the “events [in Guinea] cannot be allowed to continue” and that “It was criminality of the greatest degree, and those who committed such acts should not be given any reason to expect that they will escape justice.” Clinton quickly dispatched Deputy Assistant Secretary of State William Fitzgerald, who met Camara yesterday and “us[ed] strong language” in a tense discussion that reportedly lasted for more than two hours.

Fitzgerald urged Camara not to run for re-election (Camara’s decision to run after promising not to is what prompted the peaceful opposition demonstration) and told the President that the events of Sept. 28th were directly tied to him.  Later this month, Patricia N. Moller, currently U.S. Ambassador to Burundi, should arrive in Conakry to serve as the new U.S. Ambassador.  We can only hope that she is able to maintain pressure on Camara.

Most Western diplomats have concluded the violence has undercut any shed of credbility that Camara had once possessed, and do not forsee him continuing as head of the National Council for Democracy and Development (CNDD), the 32 senior and middle ranking military officers (and a few civilians) behind last December’s coup.

Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister of France, announced the suspension of military aid to Guinea, declaring that France could no longer work with Camara and urging intervention by the international community.  France is supporting the initiative by the Commission of the African Union to send President Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso as mediator to address the Guinea crisis, and has encouraged the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the African Union, and the UN Commission on Human Rights to set up an international commission of inquiry.

Yesterday in Abuja, Nigeria, ECOWAS issued a Final Communique on the Guinea situation, stipulating that Guinea take a number of specific actions, including a pledge by Samara and other members of the junta that they would not stand for elections.  The communique itself is written in quite blunt and uncharacteristically direct language, according to a retired State Department official who has worked extensively in West Africa.  The official said that the quantity of strong documentary evidence of the violence was a significant contributing factor to the language — such as saying that “raped men, be treated and released from the hospital” — which is quite unusual and speaks to the chaos and anarchy that must have occurred on the ground.

Amid the disintegration of Guinea society, the junta announced a $7 billion infrastructure mining and oil deal with China.  Guinea has the largest bauxite deposits in the world and is one of the poorest nations in Africa where people live on less than $1 per day.

Stay classy, Hu Jintao.

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The Nobel Committee’s unexpected announcement that President Obama would receive this year’s Peace Prize was an extraordinarily atypical choice.  Not since the Committee awarded the 1971 prize to Willie Brandt, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (in recognition of his Ostpolitik strategy, which sought to engender a rapprochement between East and West Germany but which had not yet borne fruit) had the committee chosen hope over results.  Obama can only hope that the Committee’s optimism proves as prophetic as it did in the case of Brandt.

I would have prefered that the Committee select a human rights activist this year, particularly given the large number of candidates who are more than worthy of the honor.  In addition, Obama’s pragmatic approach to foreign policy has, at least to date, de-emphasized human rights in favor of other (albeit legitimate) goals.  When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said before her first trip to China that human rights would not be on the agenda, it set off alarm bells in the human rights community. Obama’s recent decision not to meet with the Dalai Lama during the latter’s recent trip to the United States didn’t help, nor did the Administration’s recent moves toward ending past Administrations’ policies of isolating Burma.

In each of these cases, pragmatists can make a plausible argument that human rights must take a back seat.  The problem is that when human rights regularly finds itself not only in the back seat but the rear view mirror, those risking their freedom (and sometimes their lives) to bring about peaceful change in their countries might start wondering whether the United States intends to remain their advocate and friend.

So in the spirit of hope — and acknowledging that, in our opinion, Obama will prove himself worthy of the honor here are five individuals/groups who could have benefitted much more than the President:

Saad Ibrahim, a renowned human rights activist and professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo.  Ibrahim is best-known leader of the Egyptian human rights movement and has helped inspire human rights movements throughout the Arab world.  Over the past thirty years, Ibrahim has spent countless months and years in jail. He founded the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, which focuses on democratization and political and social development.  Ibrahim and his colleagues were jailed once again in 2001 on trumped-up charges.  Ibrahim left Egypt in 2007, after serving 10 months of a seven-year sentence, when he obtained a foreign grant to study abroad.  In May 2009, an appeals court overturned his conviction and he returned to Egypt just two weeks before President Obama delivered his ground-breaking speech in Cairo.

Mir-Hussain Moussavi and the Iranian people.  As a candidate for President of the Islamic Republic of Iran during June 2009 elections, Moussavi found himself in the middle of a sudden peaceful uprising dominated by young Iranian voters after official election bodies and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei quickly declared incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner.  What took place in the days and weeks that followed, captured the imagination of the entire world, if not the Iranian government.  Iranians went into the streets by the thousands to protest what appeared to be a rigged election for Ahmadinejad.  Persuaded that change was truly afoot, Moussavi grabbed the reins of leadership by urging daily protests, joining many of them, protected by others who feared he would be arrested.  The protests continued, hundreds have been arrested and jailed.  But when an Iranian police sniper murdered Neda, the protests escalated with crowds chanting her name. (Historically, the Prize has not gone to the deceased.)

Dr. Sima Samar, a physician and women’s human rights activist from Afghanistan, who is the Chairperson of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, and since 2005, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Sudan.  Since the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, Dr. Samar has been working on behalf of the women and children.  After losing her husband when fleeing the Soviets in 1987,  Samar established ten clinics and four hospitals for women and children, as well as schools, serving more than 17,000 students.  She worked in refugee camps for diplaced Afghanis, distributing food aid, information on hygiene, and family planning.  She has been quoted as saying:  “I’ve always been in danger, but I don’t mind.  I believe we will die one day so I said let’s take the risk and help somebody else.”

Morton Tsvangirai, the prime minister of Zimbabwe, entered a sharing power agreement in February 2009 with controversial President Robert Mugabe after fighting against him and his despotic rule for ten years as the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change.  Mugabe’s despotic rule of Zimbabwe has produced a society increasingly in chaos, including a destroyed economy that had such high inflation that one of Tsvangirai’s first acts was replacing the Zimbabwean dollar with the U.S. one.  Only seven days following his election to the prime minister-ship, Tsvangirai’s wife of 31 years and his closest political advisor, Susan Tsvangirai, was killed in a car crash that is believed to have been orchestrated by Mugabe.  Tsvangirai has a tough path to cut for bedraggled Zimbabweans, especially with Mugabe loyalists controlling the attorney general’s office and all security mechanisms.  Yet since he has taken over the reins of government, industrial production jumped to the highest levels in years, evidenced by an economy that grew by 3.7 percent in the past year, according to the World Bank.

Liu Xiabo, Chinese dissident, academic and the co-author of the pro-democracy manifesto Charter 08, which called for expanded freedom of expression and elections in China, has been in prison since December 2008, although not formerly charged.  According to media reports. Liu’s imprisonment appears to be in violation of China’s rule of law which allows for six months in jail without charges, yet when the government was pressed by his legal counsel in June, officials responded that Liu’s case was being properly handled.  It is believed that Liu will eventually be charged with crimes based upon articles he published, but not because of his work on behalf of Charter 08.  Liu is no stranger to China’s prisons, as he was jailed for his participation in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests as well as repeatedly in the 1990s.  Despite this harsh treatment, Liu remains one of China’s most outspoken critics.

I do hope Obama is true to his promise that he will accept the Nobel for all those around the world who walk, march and agitate for justice and will continue to honor these brave souls in words, but also by his deeds.

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When the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced this morning that it was awarding President Barack Obama the Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” Obama became only the third sitting president to receive the honor.  The other two were Woodrow Wilson, who received the honor in 1920 for his futile efforts to establish the League of Nations, and to Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 for his negotiating peace between Russia and Japan.

Only nine months into his administration, Obama apparently won the Prize for his tone in reaching out to Muslims, exemplified in his ground breaking speech delivered in Cairo earlier this year; his urging to the international community to address pressing global problems such as climate change and the reduction of nuclear weapons, when he recently addressed the UN General Assembly.

But those are as much aspirations as achievements; no one can argue that Obama won because of anything he’s done.  In fact, as Charlie noted on Twitter, it would be a mistake to think Obama got it just because he wasn’t Bush (though let’s not kid ourselves — that most definitely was part of Committee’s thinking).  It’s more accurate to say that Obama is being honored for turning the supertanker, so to speak — moving the United States away from the disruptive role it played in world politics and back toward its more traditional role as leader and partner.

Now, as the old saying goes, the proof will be in the pudding.  The pressure on Obama to deliver on Afghanistan, Iraq, Middle East peace, climate change, and nonproliferation has just gotten significantly — perhaps exponentially — greater.  And then there is that sticky issue of human rights, which seems to have taken a back seat to realism in this administration.  More to come on that last point later.

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The second annual Sarajevo Queer Festival, “Just Like Any Other,” ended today after four days of virtual “celebration”–meaning no one walked down Marshal Tito street waving signs and shouting slogans; no one introduced films to throngs of movie fans; no one sang songs or serenaded the crowds because this year, for fear of being violently attacked once again, LGBT Sarajevans celebrated virtually on-line through its website, paying for public education ads that played on national television for one day and by plastering 100 billboards throughout the country.

Last year, in a small effort to celebrate queerness by exhibiting art and screening films, the Sarajevo Queer festival opening was disrupted in violence, attacked by unruly thugs who appeared to be in this Balkan state, fundamentalist Muslim men.  Several LGBT persons attending opening night ended up in the hospital for medical treatment, as police failed to maintain public safety.  A number  of innocent people were beaten because of who they were.  The opening night sadly ended last year’s festival.

There seems to be an ugly trend here:  Violence in Belgrade in 2001 ended gay pride, only to be followed in 2009 with a cancellation by Serbian government officials for fear of violence on Sept. 19, which I posted here last week.  Last year’s festival in Sarajevo also ends in violence, thus producing a “virtual pride” celebration this year.  The situation has improved a bit in Croatia, allowing LGBT people to hold pride celebrations in public void of violence during the last couple of years, an improvement from earlier years.  A dear friend who lives in Sarajevo, “Aida,” for the purposes of this blog, said that Association Q, the LGBT organization that sponsored this year’s festival said that the Association “decided not to make a ‘real’ festival because of the huge violence last year.” She also said that many people are scared now, very frustrated by the events of last year.  Nonetheless, LGBT people in Banja Luka, the Serb entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina have recently formed a new queer organization there too.  This exciting, but surprising development in the heart of macho Serbdom, reflects that Balkan queers are going to come out, despite the obvious threats of violence.

Nonetheless, I am so sad today for all my friends in Sarajevo who truly only want to be able to love without fear.  As Aida told me:  “We can only get together in groups of 5 or 6 to 10 people at a time for coffee.”  Anything more than that would attract negative attention and one could certainly not engage in any public display of affection.  So in solidarity, I am sharing their broken hearts with all of you taken from the art displayed on their website:

Signing off tonight in New York City, sending much love to my fellow Sarajevans.

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It was a very unpleasant weekend for LGBT people in the city of Belgrade, who were “warned” it was too dangerous to participate in the second Belgrade Gay Pride march in less than a decade.  Last Thursday, a French man had his head bashed in by football club hooligans.  Four days later, they went after an Australian man, who allegedly  “looked gay.”

The government was so intimidated by these Serbian skinheads and ultra-nationalists, who have for months have warned on Neo-Nazi websites (like Storm Front — see its Serbian thread) and in Serbian media (according to a Women in Black listserv that was provided to me) that they would do everything possible to prevent the march from happening.

Despite earlier statements to the contrary, Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic pulled the plug on the march early Saturday morning — twenty-four hours before it was supposed to take place — during a meeting with the Belgrade Gay Pride’s organizing committee.

(Translation:  “It is Time for Equality”)

So much for it being time for equality.

It didn’t have to be this way.  President Boris Tadic, who is hell bent on entering the European Union via the Stabilization and Association Process (not withstanding that little problem of outstanding ICTY warrants for fugitives Ratko Mladić and Goran Hadžić) had announced his support for the march last Friday:

The state will do everything to protect people, whatever their national, religious, sexual or political orientation, and no group must resort to threats and violence, or take justice into its own hands and jeopardize the lives of those who think or are different.

And yet ultimately in the end, the state did not do everything it could to support the march. Nice words by Tadic, yet empty and completely unfulfilled.

In the end, a combination of poor planning (by Minister of Interior and Deputy Prime Minister Ivica Dacic, who had promised adequate police protection for the Pride parade as early as August 24) and political spinelessness were enough to doom the event.  Dacic went so far as to suggest that it would be better not to hold the pride parade altogether so as to prevent people from being hurt and property destroyed.  He said the parade had not been banned, but simply postponed.

So much for human rights for all.

But Dadic did not reveal the full story, which is much more unsettling.  The organizers, who had hired security expert Zoran Dragisic to prepare their own security plan in order to maintain order and assist the police in doing their job, were told that if they went ahead with the march without the government’s backing, they would be held responsible for any and all damage done to private and public property.

Comments from another list serve communication by “Ana” tells the full story:

The organisers commissioned a security risk study and worked intensively with the police and other state institutions in order to obtain their support for the purpose of guaranteeing the safety of the Pride participants. The importance of the safety issue cannot be overstated given that in the last month before Pride would have taken place. . .an aggressive hate-speech campaign was launched by. . .the neo-fascist groups Obraz [Honor] and Srpski narodni pokret 1389 [Serb Popular Movement 1389, a reference to the 1389 Battle of Kosovo].

I saw with my own eyes Belgrade covered with graffiti calling for a ban of the Pride [march], the murder of gay people, and the their expulsion from Serbia. “We are waiting for you” and “The streets of Belgrade will be covered with blood, but the Pride will not take place” are two examples of the [graffiti] message,s which [also] called for lynch[ing] of the people taking part in the Pride. So, not only [were] the people who wrote these. . .examples of hate-speech. . .not ready to allow their LGBT fellow-citizens the freedom of love, but they were even actively inciting violence against the LGBT population.”

The Pride committee was right when it said that “The Republic of Serbia has capitulated.  We have not.”

This is the second time in the last eight years that a gay pride march was preempted by right-wing violence. In 2001, a march was disrupted by ultranationalists, many of them in Cetnik berets and beards, who attacked participants.

So much for safety for all.

This time around, ultra-nationalists openly celebrated their victory in stopping the march, gleefully pronouncing the cancellation of the march as “a great victory for normal Serbia.”  The Serbian Orthodox Church also condemned the march, calling it a “Sodom and Gomorrah parade” but did not openly embrace violence.  Nonetheless, march organizers believed that the church’s position could have helped incite violence.

The problem of violent ultranationalism, wrapped in the robes of an militantly reactionary Serbian Orthodox church, is a major problem for the Tadic government. Despite the government’s arrest of thirty-seven ultra-nationalists on Monday for assembling in the center of Belgrade in defiance of a recently passed law banning such gatherings (a law that is somewhat dubious from a civil libertarian standpoint), a much more pervasive problem remains that Serbian politicians and leaders must address head-on:  the deeply embedded criminal legacy that exists in Serbian society as a consequence of the Slobodan Milosevic years.

Milosevic permitted para-military groups to proliferate and act with impunity.  He supported — and often benefited politically from — ultra-nationalists like Vojislav Šešelj (who led the Serbian Radical Party and is now standing trial in the Hague for his alleged war crimes) and the notorious  Željko Ražnatovic, (a.k.a. “Arkan,” who led “Arkan’s Tigers,” known for raping and plundering entire Bosniak villages and who was assassinated by other criminal elements in January 2000).  The culture of hate Milosevic fomented and sustained continues to haunt Serbia to this day.

If Tadic really wants Serbia to join the EU on his watch, he will have to accomplish what no one else has before him has had the political will to do: clean up Serbia’s criminal and violent nationalistic elements once and for all.

Now is the time for Tadic to lead not by word but by deed.  Only genuine and concrete enforcement of human rights for all Serbians — regardless of their sexual orientation — can begin to scrub away the stain that so permeates Serbian society.

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I had hoped to provide some analysis on Iran’s election, but I’m pretty late to the game and there’s already a lot of good commentary out there.  In fact, I think Michael Tomasky hits many of the points I would have made, particularly that what Ahmadinejad (and others running the country) did is tantamount to a coup:

The way the customs and normal practices were broken; the way the results were announced so prematurely; the way the internet and cell-phone capabilities were shut down; the way dissent is being shut down. These are anti-democratic practices to put it mildly, and they are hallmarks of coup-like behavior. In any case “coup” isn’t a legal term and there’s a bit of subjectivity in it.

And as to the results themselves. I mean, honestly, people. A guy who was polling at 39 percent a few days earlier got 64 percent?  Fine, fine, polls may be unreliable, but that is a new definition of unreliable.

Or consider this. According to figures, 11.2 million more Iranians voted this year than in 2005. And Ahmadinejad allegedly received 7.2 million more votes than he did in 2005. That would mean that the incumbent got about 65 percent of all new voters.  Really? In a country with double-digit unemployment, inflation near 25 percent, and the bulk of his populist promises from four years ago not only not delivered on but crashing to failure?

. . .If you’ve managed the economy that badly and the electorate bulges by about 28 percent (roughly speaking, 40 million to 29 million), I don’t care how adept you are at religious demagoguery, you are not getting 65 percent of that 28 percent.  If you can demonstrate to me that anything like this has ever happened anywhere, I will look into it and report back fairly. But I doubt you can. Remember, we’re talking 25 percent inflation.

I would likely have bought it, as would’ve most people, if they’d followed procedures and announced on Sunday morning that Ahmadinejad got 52 or 53 percent. So it’s not that I (and others) don’t imagine he could have won. It’s about the circumstances, and to some extent the highly improbable 64 percent number.

That was my first reaction as well:  64 percent?  Really?  You’d think that authoritarians would have figured out by now that if you’re going to steal an election you should at the very least look credible.

I’d find it interesting to see another number here:  what percentage of the electorate is in Tehran as opposed to other parts of the country?  If Iran is like many countries outside the West, a huge percentage of its population is in its largest city.  This is important for one simple reason:  Mousavi’s strength is primarily in Tehran.  If the population in the outlying regions is larger, then an Ahmadinejad victory is slightly more plausible.

The best way I can make this point is to pass on two photos from The Big Picture blog.  First, a voter in Tehran:

Next, a line of voters in Qom:

I want to be careful not to oversimplify this.  The Big Picture also has photos of a woman in full hijab voting in Iran.  And clearly Ahmadinejad had significant support in Tehran, particularly among older and male voters.   But as Tomasky noted, the notion that 65 percent of those who did not vote in the last election chose Ahmadinejad stretches credulity, particularly given the fact that his campaign never demonstrated any Obama-esque organizational capacity.

As I write this, the situation remains in flux.  Mousavi’s supporters continue to demonstrate, in defiance of a ban and despite beatings over the weekend, and Mousavi himself appeared at a major rally in downtown Tehran.  And Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni has urged an review of reports of irregularities (which may be a tacit recognition of the absurd outcome or may be merely a stalling tactic designed to slow down or stop the street demonstrations).

Over at TPM, Josh Marshall wonders whether Khameni’s call for a review of the results is the first crack:

On the face of it, Khamenei could call for a review and then decide that it all checks out and that’s the end of it. But it’s my experience that that’s not how these things play out. When regimes ride these crises out successfully they almost always do so with a united phalanx. You simply do not grant the premise of the critics. Force, much as we like to think otherwise, is often quite efective. (See Tienanmen [sic] Square.) Once you do, once you legitimize the premise of the protests, which can quickly shift the momentum of the drama, it’s a very slippery slope for the regime.

Perhaps more fundamentally, the people running the regimes aren’t idiots. They know the pattern too. And the decision to break the united front, to get into a discussion of the legitimacy of claims against the regime, usually signals internal dissension that is making that united stance unsustainable. In other words, this sort of development is perhaps not a cause of regime weakness but a symptom.

There’s some merit to his point, but as he himself notes, this might be a pro forma move designed to add further legitimacy to the results.

The other big unknown, of course, is the response of the Obama Administration.  To date, it’s been pretty muted, which some on the right have regarded as an abandonment of Iran’s pro-democratic forces.  But as Spencer Ackerman has noted, the Iranian-American community doesn’t want the Administration to say much right now, recognizing that anything other than a call for respect for human rights would in all likelihood be counterproductive.

UPDATE:  Via Andrew Sullivan, who has done extraordinary work tracking the events in Iran, raw video of today’s demonstration:

Photos:  Qom — AP/Kamran Jebreili; Tehran — REUTERS/Caren Firouz, both via The Big Picture and used under the principle of fair use.

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So it looks like the Uigurs held in Guantanamo are finally going to be released — not to the DC area as originally planned, but to the Pacific Island nation of Palau.  NYT:

The United States has won an agreement to transfer up to 17 Chinese Muslims from the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to Palau, a sparsely populated archipelago in the North Pacific, according to a statement released by Palau to The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The president of Palau, Johnson Toribiong, said his government had “agreed to accommodate the United States of America’s request” to “temporarily resettle” the detainees, members of the Uighur ethnic group, “subject to periodic review.” Palau, the president said, would be “honored and proud” to take them in a “humanitarian gesture.” . . .

Three Obama administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity Tuesday because the negotiations were not yet complete, said it was not certain how many of the Uighurs would be settled in Palau. With barely 20,000 people, Palau, about 500 miles east of the Philippines, is one of the world’s least-populated nations, made up of 8 main islands and 250 smaller ones. . . .

The United States has pledged $200 million in long-term development aid to Palau. But a senior State Department official flatly denied it was a quid pro quo for the detainee deal.

Palau is known more for its tropical scenery and scuba diving than for its involvement in international politics. But despite its tiny size, it is diverse, with Philippine and Chinese populations. The Uighurs, some say, could do a lot worse for themselves. “What they will encounter in Palau is paradise,” said Stuart Beck, an American lawyer who is Palau’s permanent United Nations representative. “From the time the first British vessel hit a reef in Palau in 1783, it has welcomed refugees.”

When I saw this, my first reaction was not unlike Beck’s:  they’re going to paradise.  My second reaction was that they’re coming from a nightmare.  And I’m not sure that seven years of enforced (and largely unnecessary) hell was worth it — especially given the fact that they’re being dropped into what is going to feel like the middle of nowhere.  In addition, keep in mind that they’ve been on a semi-tropical island for the past seven years and it hasn’t exactly been beach blanket bingo.

Interestingly, Palau is one of the few countries left that continues to recognize Taiwan instead of the PRC, so this must be doubly galling to the Chinese.  But given the fact that there is a Chinese minority there, it’s not going to be that difficult for the ChiComs to dispatching someone to watch them.

One other thing I haven’t seen anywhere else:  it’s largely forgotten now, but Palau was a member of the “coalition of the willing.”  If I’m not mistaken (I couldn’t find confirmation in a brief review of the intertubes), they got additional development assistance back then as well.

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David Brooks shares my concern over the Administration’s disinclination to embrace stronger rhetoric on democracy promotion:

The big retreat to realism concerns democracy promotion. The Bush administration tried to promote democracy, even at the expense of stability. That proved unworkable.

But many of us hoped that Obama would put a gradual, bottom-up democracy-building initiative at the heart of his approach. This effort would begin with projects to create honest cops and independent judges so local citizens could get justice. It would make space for civic organizations and democratic activists. It would include clear statements so the world understands that the U.S. is not in bed with the tired old Arab autocrats.

There was a democracy-promotion section to the speech, and given the struggle behind it, maybe we should be grateful it was there at all. But it was stilted and abstract — the sort of prose you get after an unresolved internal debate. The president didn’t really champion democratic institutions. He said that governments “should reflect the will of the people” and that citizens should “have a say” in how they are governed.

Obama didn’t describe how a democratic Iraq could influence the region. He seems to have largely given up on democracy promotion in Egypt.

Larry Diamond of Stanford liked the Cairo speech but pointed out that Obama delivered it in a country where an aging dictator is passing power to his son, where the country is crumbling to dust because of autocracy and stagnation. The administration seems to accept this. Meanwhile, as The Washington Post noted, it’s slashing aid to Egypt’s democratic activists.

All true.  I would add, however, that it’s not yet clear whether this is a product of unbalanced staff work, Obama’s personal convictions, or both.  Certainly Obama’s comments to Muslim journalists were a more rigorous assertion of the importance of democracy and human rights.  But I also would note that Obama hasn’t hesitated to rework remarks if he doesn’t like what he’s been given.

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• Obama’s Cairo Presser
• More Thoughts on Obama’s Peace Prize
• Obama’s Speech II: Globalism, Realism, and Democracy
• Where Dipnote Could Actually Be Useful

Yesterday, after his speech, Obama did a presser (h/t Marc Lynch via his Facebook feed) with journalists from Muslim-majority countries (and not just those from the Arab world).  The whole thing is worth reading, but I was particularly struck by the following exchange with an Indonesian journalist:

Q . . .I read your book, “The Audacity of Hope,” and I had a very great hope that you can reach the Muslim community because it seemed to me your understanding of a relationship between faith and politics, especially in black churches is very much — I can imagine someone who is a Hamas or, you know, maybe radical Islamist would probably, if you take away the word “Islam” and change it with, you know, “black Christian,” it’s exactly the same.  Do you feel that way also?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, you know, I think it’s interesting — obviously I’m a person of faith, and as a Christian, but also as somebody who believes very strongly in democracy and human rights and I’m a constitutional law professor, so I have some very strong ideas about how a pluralistic society lives together — these are things that I do spend time thinking about.

What I tried to communicate in the speech and what I believe very strongly is that in an interdependent world like ours, where the world has shrunk and different peoples with different faiths and different ideas are constantly having to coexist, that we have to have a mature faith that says “I believe with all my heart and all my soul in what I believe, but I respect the fact that somebody else believes their beliefs just as strongly.”  And so the only way that we are going to live together, or operate in a political system that can work for everybody is if we have certain rules about how we relate to each other.

I can’t force my religion on you.  I can’t try to organize a majority to discriminate against you because you’re a religious minority.  I can’t simply take what’s in my religious beliefs and say you have to believe and abide by these same things.  Now, that doesn’t mean that I can’t make arguments that are based on my belief and my faith — right?  If I’m a Christian, I believe in the Ten Commandments.  And it says, Thou Shalt Not Kill.  If I’m a politician and I say I’m going to pass a law against murdering somebody, that’s not me practicing my religious faith; that’s me practicing morality that may be based in religious faith, but that’s a universal principle — or at least one that can translate into a principle that people of various faiths can agree on.

I think it’s very important for Islam to wrestle with these issues.  Now, I recognize that not all religious beliefs are going to be exactly the same in how they think about politics.  And so in Islam there’s a debate about sharia and how strict an interpretation or how moderate an interpretation of that should be; or should that be something that is not part of the secular law.  I don’t presume to make that decision for any country or any groups of people.  But I do think that if you start having rules that guarantee other faiths and other groups, or in the case of the United States, people with no faith at all, are somehow forced to abide by somebody else’s faith, I think that is a violation of the spirit of democracy and I think that over the long term, that’s going to breed conflict in some way.  It will lead to some sort of instability and destructiveness in that society.

But, as I said, I think this is a important debate that has to take place inside Islam.  I think in the meantime, the one thing I can say for certain is that people who justify killing other people based on faith are misreading their sacred texts.  And I think they are out of alignment with God.  Now, that’s my belief.  And that, I think, is a debate that I think is settled for the vast majority of Muslims, but we have a very small minority that can be very destructive, and that’s part of what I tried to discuss in my speech.

Obama’s answer reinforces the three themes in his speech that I highlighted in one of my posts yesterday:  pragmatic globalism (”in an interdependent world like ours. . .different peoples with different faiths and different ideas are constantly having to coexist”); hard-headed realism (”the only way that we are going. . .operate in a political system. . .is if we have certain rules about how we relate to each other”); and democracy advocate (”as somebody who believes very strongly in democracy and human rights and I’m a constitutional law professor, so I have some very strong ideas about how a pluralistic society lives together”).

I’m going to assume that you didn’t just go back to read my previous post, so I’ll acknowledge that I’ve dropped the word “cautious” in my description of Obama’s support for human rights and democracy.  That’s because this answer is a far more forceful statement of his belief in the value of these ideals than anything in his speech.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Obama’s answer is his passing reference to debates over sharia law in the Muslim world.  But it also highlights a missed opportunity:  had he used his speech to cite those Islamic scholars who have rejected the fundamentalist interpretations of sharia (including the precise meaning of jihad), it would have reinforced the case those who have rejected extremist interpretations of Islam’s most important texts.

Related posts

• Some Thoughts on Obama’s Speech
• Brooks on Obama’s Speech
• Obama’s Speech II: Globalism, Realism, and Democracy
• More Thoughts on Obama’s Peace Prize
• What’s Missing at DNC: Torture, Guantanamo. . .and Cheney

Apologies if you’re seeing this twice.  I’m having some trouble embedding the video.  If you can’t see it below, go here to watch it.

Via Shanghaist, CNN’s attempt today to report from Tiananmen Square in Beijing:

Related posts

• Wonk’d: How to Cover the Olympics
• What Were You Thinking, Mary Carillo?
• Twenty Years
• The Olympics’ Real Legacy: Greater Repression
• The Nobel Prize: If Obama Hadn’t Won. . .

Given the fact that I’ve spent my career working on human rights, I sometimes assume that others pay/paid as close attention to certain events as I do/did.  I was reminded of that over the past day when four people I respect all admitted they didn’t really remember the Tiananmen Massacre (or were too young to), and that they had only the fuzziest idea of what had happened.

So in that spirit, one more tribute to the courage and heroism of those young activists.  Regardless of whether you remember it vividly or have never seen what happened, please take a few minutes out of your day to watch archival BBC video of the events in Beijing on June 4, 1989, via China Digital Times (warning:  some graphic footage):

Much of what we think of as the “new” China — the dynamic economic powerhouse that is likely to become the world’s most powerful country within a generation — was built on top of the ashes of what happened that night.  No matter what you may think of China’s development — and I would be the first to acknowledge that people in China are far better off than they were twenty years ago and that they have significantly greater freedom to express themselves today — please don’t forget those who died that night, and those who spent years in prison.

Related posts

• Wonk’d: How to Cover the Olympics
• What Were You Thinking, Mary Carillo?
• Twenty Years
• The Olympics’ Real Legacy: Greater Repression
• The Nobel Prize: If Obama Hadn’t Won. . .

My thoughts go out to all those who suffered and died on June 4-5, 1989 as well as those subsequently imprisoned.  To this day, some Tiananmen students remain in jail.

To this day, no one knows the identity or fate of this man.

And today, twenty years later, few in China are even aware of his courageous act.

Photo:  Jeff Widener, Associated Press

Related posts

• Wonk’d: How to Cover the Olympics
• What Were You Thinking, Mary Carillo?
• The Olympics’ Real Legacy: Greater Repression
• The Nobel Prize: If Obama Hadn’t Won. . .
• The Nobel Committee Chickens Out

When I announced two weeks ago that I would not be blogging as much thanks to my new full-time job status, little did I know just how accurate that would be.  I’ve been dealing with a very important and urgent deadline, which has now passed.  Now that I’ve resurfaced, I can go back to posting, albeit with greater irregularity.

As I’m sure you know, Obama is speaking at Cairo University tomorrow, fulfilling a campaign promise to give a major speech in a Muslim-majority country within his first few months of office.  Washington Post:

More than any other president in a generation, Obama enjoys a reservoir of goodwill in the region. His father was Muslim. His outreach in an interview with an Arabic satellite channel, a speech to Turkey’s parliament and an address to Iranians on the Persian New Year have inclined many to listen. Just as important, he is not George W. Bush.

But Obama will still encounter a landscape in which two realities often seem to be at work, shaped by those symbols. There is America’s version of its policy toward Israel and the Palestinians, Iraq and Afghanistan, and Islamist movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah, defined in recent years by the legacy of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. There is another reality, from hardscrabble quarters of Beirut and Cairo to war-wrecked neighborhoods of Baghdad, where distrust of the United States runs so deep that almost anything it pronounces, however eloquent, lacks credibility, imposing a burden on Obama to deliver something far more than the unfulfilled pledges of Bush’s speeches.

Former Bush Speechwriter Michael Gerson suggests that it’s not just about Iraq and Israel:

President Obama is entering a nation and a region where [persecution by the government] is the normal price of political courage. His Cairo University speech will send a large diplomatic signal: Does Obama honor and support such courage, or de-emphasize and dismiss it in the “realist” pursuit of other ends?

One hopes that Obama and his speechwriters have consulted “The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East,” an important new book by Joshua Muravchik. The book profiles seven men and women — six Arab, one Iranian — taking impossible risks in the cause of human rights and self-government. They include a Saudi woman protesting the treatment of women as chattel and an Egyptian publisher trying to bring a free, responsible press to an authoritarian society. Most of these reformers have suffered imprisonment or faced threats to their lives and families.

Many of these dissidents, Muravchik told me in an interview, felt “betrayed” during the last few years of the Bush administration, when the containment of Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process seemed to take precedence over democracy promotion (except in Iraq). Reformers in the region generally greeted Obama’s election with enthusiasm. But Muravchik says dissidents are becoming “disquieted about the administration’s apparent indifference to democracy and human rights abuses.”

They should be, in the Middle East and elsewhere. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has bluntly admitted that concern about Chinese human rights abuses “can’t interfere with the global economic crisis” — meaning we can’t afford to offend dictators who buy our bonds. The administration talks of reviewing sanctions on Burma’s junta. And Egypt’s ambassador to the United States enthuses that America has stopped making “human rights, democracy and religious and general freedoms” conditions for better relations.

In this environment, the message of Obama’s Cairo speech will be amplified. His Middle East advisers have probably urged him to focus (as they always do) on Israeli-Palestinian peace — the “real” concern of the region — instead of discredited democratic idealism. In fact, this sort of realism both reflects and strengthens the strategy that Middle Eastern dictators have pursued for decades — the strategy of heaping attention on Israel and the Palestinians to draw attention away from their own oppression and economic failure. There is no reason Obama cannot emphasize both a two-state solution and the need for responsible and representative states across the Middle East.

It is also likely that Obama has been counseled to avoid the “d” word — “democracy” — in his Cairo remarks. Middle East experts sometimes contend that promoting “justice” and “good governance” is more culturally sensitive than employing such Westernized concepts as “democracy” and “freedom.” The argument is common — and uninformed. “Justice,” in this context, implies human rights as the gift of a wise emir or enlightened dictator. But, as Nour and others have discovered, such gifts can be withdrawn on a whim. The next founders in the Middle East are not merely begging for more rights from autocrats; they are seeking freedom from autocracy. They want more than for tyrants to open the door of reform a crack; they want to open the door themselves.

Any presidential speech abroad has multiple audiences. One of them, in this case, is the Egyptian government, whose cooperation is needed on issues that range from proliferation to peace. But another audience will be dissidents and reformers in Egypt and beyond. And a president who does not speak boldly for their political rights — their democratic rights — has little useful to say to them.

I don’t often agree with Gerson, or with prominent neoconservative and Iraq war defender Joshua Muravchik (though I am interested in reading the latter’s new book), but I think they get it about right here.

The sad reality is that, as both Gerson and Muravchik acknowledge, the Bush Administration failed to live up to its promises on democracy and human rights, particularly in Egypt.  What they fail to acknowledge is that the war in Iraq was a major factor not only in weaking Bush’s commitment to promoting democracy elsewhere, but also in discrediting broader U.S. efforts to promote democratic governance and human rights.

That said, we are more than four months into an Obama Administration, and as of today, not one of the key democracy and human rights positions is occupied by someone the President appointed.  It’s not entirely the Administration’s fault:  Samantha Power is at the NSC, but she’s currently on maternity leave, and troglo-conservatives in the Senate are holding up Harold Koh’s nomination to be legal advisor.  But other key posts — most notably the position of Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor — remain vacant.  The reality is that neither Obama or Hillary currently have anyone who can argue that human rights and democracy should be given prominent attention in Obama’s speech.

I continue to believe, perhaps naively, that statements by Hillary about human rights not playing as central a role in U.S. foreign policy as in past Administrations reflects not her opinion as much as a tilt in favor of those in the Department of State who do not like to talk about democracy and human rights (which, for those unfamiliar with the Department, means those line officers whose main responsibility is maintaining good relations with the country in question).   And I will reserve final judgment about the Administration’s human rights policies until Power, Koh, and others are in a position to balance those who suggest that promoting human rights and democracy is neither convenient nor realistic.

It’s also worth noting that, according to rumors I’ve heard, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo has pushed State and USAID to cut back their funding of democracy- and human rights-oriented projects, particularly those that have earned the disfavor of the Mubarak regime.

About a year ago, I was asked by Freedom House to go to Cairo to give a speech to a group of younger democracy activists, including some of those who had used Facebook to organize a general strike against the Mubarak regime.  Most were determined to continue their work to open up Egyptian civil society and promote democratic reform, but some were discouraged by constant government harassment.  In fact, when the government found out about the meeting at which I was scheduled to speak, they prevented it from happening.  So I spent most of the next few days talking to the activists, going to their offices, and learning more about their work.

It was, needless to say, inspiring.  I hope that the President meets with these folks, and that he acknowledges their courageous work.  Somehow, however — particularly given the fact that one of the programs to be cut is Freedom House’s efforts to help these young activists — I doubt that he will.

Here’s hoping I’m wrong.

Related posts

• Transition Watch: Anger in the Ranks
• The Panic over Political Appointments
• The Human Rights Secretary of State?
• The Fake Controversy over Samantha Power
• Team of Stupid

This is Lt. Daniel Choi, a 2003 graduate of West Point and a veteran of the Iraq war. From his bio:

Choi serves in the Army National Guard as an infantry platoon leader, a job that allows him to lead soldiers on the ground level and fully utilize his combat training and experience. While at West Point, he majored in Arabic Language and Environmental Engineering and volunteered as a leader in the Cadet Chapel Choir and the Officers’ Christian Fellowship. Choi is pursing graduate studies at Harvard University and resides in Orange County, California.

Choi by all accounts is a fine officer respected by his men.  He could have had a distinguished career in the Army.  There’s only one problem, at least as far as the Army is concerned:  he told the truth.  He told the Army that he is gay.  Under existing law, that is enough to get him discharged.

Here’s what Choi himself wrote in a letter to President Obama:

I have learned many lessons in the ten years since I first raised my right hand at the United States Military Academy at West Point and committed to fighting for my country. The lessons of courage, integrity, honesty and selfless service are some of the most important.

At West Point, I recited the Cadet Prayer every Sunday. It taught us to “choose the harder right over the easier wrong” and to “never be content with a half truth when the whole can be won.” The Cadet Honor Code demanded truthfulness and honesty. It imposed a zero-tolerance policy against deception, or hiding behind comfort.  Following the Honor Code never bowed to comfortable timing or popularity. Honor and integrity are 24-hour values. That is why I refuse to lie about my identity.

I have personally served for a decade under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: an immoral law and policy that forces American soldiers to deceive and lie about their sexual orientation. Worse, it forces others to tolerate deception and lying. These values are completely opposed to anything I learned at West Point. Deception and lies poison a unit and cripple a fighting force. . . .

I refuse to lie to my commanders. I refuse to lie to my peers. I refuse to lie to my subordinates. I demand honesty and courage from my soldiers. They should demand the same from me. . . .

The Department of the Army sent a letter discharging me on April 23rd. I will not lie to you; the letter is a slap in the face. It is a slap in the face to me. It is a slap in the face to my soldiers, peers and leaders who have demonstrated that an infantry unit can be professional enough to accept diversity, to accept capable leaders, to accept skilled soldiers.

My subordinates know I’m gay. They don’t care. They are professional.

Further, they are respectable infantrymen who work as a team. Many told me that they respect me even more because I trusted them enough to let them know the truth. Trust is the foundation of unit cohesion.

After I publicly announced that I am gay, I reported for training and led rifle marksmanship. I ordered hundreds of soldiers to fire live rounds and qualify on their weapons. I qualified on my own weapon. I showered after training and slept in an open bay with 40 other infantrymen. I cannot understand the claim that I “negatively affected good order and discipline in the New York Army National Guard.” I refuse to accept this statement as true.

The problem here is, of course, the law colloquially known as Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.  The Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines are obligated to remove soldiers who publicly acknowledge that they are gay.   President Obama can’t change the law — only Congress can do that.  But Daniel Choi cannot wait for Congress.  So what is possible?

Suspending enforcement (h/t).

The President has the authority to issue an executive order halting the operation of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Under 10 U.S.C. § 12305 (”Authority of the President to Suspend Certain Laws Relating to Promotion, Retirement, and Separation”), Congress grants the President authority to suspend the separation of military members during any period of national emergency in which members of a reserve component are serving involuntarily on active duty.

It’s a simple step that would give Congress the time it needs to reverse the policy.

But when Congress reverses it — and I think they will, given the fact that an overwhelming majority of Americans favor it (as do many in the military) — that is not the end of the fight.  There’s one more important step.

President Obama make sure that those (including Daniel Choi) whose honor and integrity were impugned have the opportunity to clear their names.  That means taking administrative measures that will allow those discharged in the past as a result of DADT to a) be reconsidered for an honorable discharge and b) be given the opportunity to re-enlist.

Related posts

• Jack Bauer, White Courtesy Phone Please
• Closing Guantanamo: Only The End of the Beginning
• Verbatim: The Guantanamo E.O.
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You gotta love House Republicans.  Why appeal to reason when you can go straight to scare tactics?

Sheesh, all that’s missing is Jack Bauer.

What the GOP seems to be suggesting is FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR  FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR.

But that’s just a guess.

Set aside, if you can, the action movie soundtrack and the slick production values.

Set aside — as hard as it may be — that the night vision video of U.S. troops kicking down doors is in all likelihood from Iraq, which as even (most) Republicans now admit, had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.

Set aside the questions you may want to ask in return, like “How does torturing people make us safer?”  Or “How did Abu Ghraib make us safer?”  Or, even better, “How did invading Iraq make us safer?”

Instead, ask the GOP just one question.

Where’s Osama?

Why is it that you can’t show him in the video?

Oh wait, that’s right.  You got busy in Iraq and forgot to catch him.

Heckuva job there, GOP.

One other thing:  the Democrats have an answer to this stupid, stupid fear-mongering:  as many Republicans, including John McCain and Robert Gates, have acknowledged, closing Guantanamo makes us safer because it eliminates one of al Qaeda’s most effective recruiting tools.

But don’t take my word for it.  Just listen to that notorious terrorist sympathizer Richard Clarke:

This video and the recent Republican attacks on Guantanamo are more desperate attempts from a demoralized party to politicize national security and the safety of the American people. But what is more disturbing is their brazen use of imagery and the memory of 9/11 to score political points. Thousands of Americans tragically died that day, and for the GOP to think it can win elections by denigrating their memory is disgraceful.

The difference between these Republican videos and the very terrorist propaganda that seeks to damage our society is negligible. Each attempt to stoke the embers of fear in order to disrupt American life.  Just as al Qaeda videos should be viewed as misguided rants from a small group of marginalized radicals, so too should these Republican videos be equally dismissed.  As opposed to what the GOP thinks, the American people are not that naïve.

(h/t)

Related posts

• Closing Guantanamo: Only The End of the Beginning
• The New Executive Orders: Guantanamo, Torture, Detainees
• Uighurs to Palau
• Torture: Something Old, Something New
• The First Executive Order. . . ?

I’ve spent a good part of the past twenty-four hours mulling over the torture memos.

I want to start by giving props to the always brilliant (and observant) Hilzoy, who like many others noted a particularly horrific section of the 2002 Bybee-Yoo memo:

Hilzoy then notes the following passage in George Orwell’s 1984:

“You asked me once,” said O’Brien, “What was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”

“In your case,” said O’Brien, “the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.”

The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O’Brien was standing. Winston could not see what the thing was.

“The worst thing in the world,” said O’Brien, “varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.”

He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats.

There are no words for how appalling it is that our government — our government — approved the use of techniques that not only replicate those used by the world’s worst dictatorships, but also freinvented the worst nightmare that George Orwell, our poet-laureate of totalitarianism, could possibly imagine.  As one commenter on Hilzoy’s post noted, “Some people read 1984 and think of it as a warning.  For others, it is a training manual.”

I am reminded of what Hannah Arendt said about the bureaucracy of torture in her classic Eichmann in Jerusalem:  A Report on the Banality of Evil (emphasis original):

[W]hen I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at at [Eichmann's] trial. . . Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all.  And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post.  He merely. . .never realized what he was doing. . . . He was not stupid.  It was sheer thoughtlessness. . . .

We had heard the protestations of the defense the Eichmann was after all only a “tiny cog” in the machinery of the FInal Solution, and of the prosecution, which believed it had discoverd in Eichmann the actual motor. . . .  In its judgment, the court naturally conceded that such a crime could be committed only by a giant bureaucracy using the resources of a government.  But insofar as it remains a crime — and that, of course, is the premise for a trial — all the cogs in the machinery, no matter how insignificant, are in court forthwith transformed back into perpetrators, that is to say, into human beings.

If the defendant excuses himself on the ground that he acted not as a man but as a mere functionary whose functions could just as easily have been carried out by anyone else, it is as if a criminal pointed to the statistics on crime — which set forth that so-and-so many crimes per day are committed in such-and-such a place. . . and declared that he not only did what was statistically expected, that it was mere accident that he did it and not somebody else, since after all somebody had to do it.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that those responsible for implementing the policies outlined in these memos are Nazis or Soviets or their contemporary equivalents.  Despite the fevered imaginations of the far right (re Obama) and far left (re Bush), we remain a democracy in which citizens still enjoy considerable rights.

But to suggest that those who designed and implemented this policy should not be held responsible involves pretending that individuals — – human beings — played no role in the machinery of torture.  That includes not only those who came up with the idea, but also those who developed the legal justification for it, those responsible for doing it, and — no matter how reprehensible these individuals’ crimes may be — those whose who were victims of it.

Taking — and demanding — responsibility is, after all, one of the fundamental tenets of every religious belief system.   Those responsible for allowing this to happen must be held accountable.  Yes, history will judge.  But so should our legal system.

The question here is not what kind of society we are but rather what kind of society we aspire to be.  Although we have often failed to live up to the vision of the founders, we always have believed that the better angels of our nature, to use Lincoln’s phrase, would overcome our darkest impulses.

In the end, however, our better angels cannot triumph if we do not acknowledge our mistakes.  For that to happen, we must accept our own responsibility.  Each and every one of us (by which I mean each and every American citizen) must recognize that we did not prevent the Bush Administration from implementing these practices.  And even when we found out, we did nothing — or did not do enough — to stop it.

So in the end, who is responsible?  Who is accountable?

I am.

You are.

All of us are.

We have met the torturer, and he is us.

Related posts

• Torture: Something Old, Something New
• Thought of the Day: AIG and Torture
• The Torture Memos: The Two John McCains
• The New Executive Orders: Guantanamo, Torture, Detainees
• SERE-ing the Conscience

. . .via the ACLU, in PDF format.

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Scott Horton over at the Daily Beast reports that Spanish prosecutors are undertaking an investigation that may lead to the criminal indictment of six Bush Administration officials:  Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, William Haynes, and Douglas Feith.  Horton:

The six defendants. . .are accused of having given the green light to the torture and mistreatment of prisoners held in U.S. detention in “the war on terror.” The case arises in the context of a pending proceeding before the court involving terrorism charges against five Spaniards formerly held at Guantánamo.  A group of human-rights lawyers originally filed a criminal complaint asking the court to look at the possibility of charges against the six American lawyers. Baltasar Garzón Real, the investigating judge, accepted the complaint and referred it to Spanish prosecutors for a view as to whether they would accept the case and press it forward.  “The evidence provided was more than sufficient to justify a more comprehensive investigation,” one of the lawyers associated with the prosecution stated. . . .

The Spanish prosecutors advised the Americans that they would suspend their investigation if at any point the United States were to undertake an investigation of its own into these matters. They pressed to know whether any such investigation was pending. These inquiries met with no answer from the U.S. side.

Oh boy.  This is not good news for the Obama Administration.

Let me be clear here.  I want to see these guys investigated, and if the evidence is there (which I believe it is), they should be prosecuted.  I’d like nothing better than for Patrick Fitzgerald to convene a grand jury, conduct an investigation, and throw the book at Addington, Yoo, and the rest.  In fact, I’d encourage them to move beyond the Spanish list to include Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Tenet, and a few others.

Furthermore, as Hilzoy points out, the United States is a party to the Convention on Torture, which obligates the United States to prosecute those accused of committing torture.  None of the existing U.S. reservations or understandings excludes the possibility of the U.S. prosecuting its own citizens for torture — in large part because no one in their right mind ever imagined that torture would become U.S. policy.  Oh, and one other thing:  torture is also against the law here in the United States, so even if the CAT didn’t apply, the Obama Administration would still be obligated to enforce existing law.

So throw the book at them.

But please, let’s make sure it’s an American one.

I don’t think it advances American interests, human rights, or international justice for this investigation to go forward.  If the Obama Administration is smart, it will send a very strong signal that this is a bad idea, that it is looking at options, and that the decision as to whether to prosecute Bush Administration officials is one that the U.S. criminal justice system — and not a Spanish court — should pursue.

There are several reasons I feel this way.

The first is the principle of complementarity, which since the International Criminal Court treaty entered into force, is international law.  From the Rome Treaty:

[The] International Criminal Court. . .shall be complementary to national criminal jurisdictions. . . . [T]he Court shall determine that a case is inadmissible where. . .the case is being investigated or prosecuted by a State which has jurisdiction over it, unless the State is unwilling or unable genuinely to carry out the investigation or prosecution. . .

To be clear, this is a Spanish Court, not the ICC, and in fairness to the Spanish, they’ve made clear that they’ll step aside should the U.S. indicate an interest in pursing these guys.  But the bottom line is that it’s not an active prosecution that is the baseline; it’s whether a state is unwilling or unable to prosecute.

This is a fundamentally different situation than other cases, such as the one involving the late and unlamented former dictator of Chile, Augusto Pinochet, who was prosecuted by the same Spanish court now investigating Bush Administration officials.  Pinochet’s indictment came after repeated efforts to pursue cases in Chilean courts failed.  In fact, it was only after Pinochet avoided prosecution and returned to Chile that Chilean officials were much more vigorous in their efforts to investigate and prosecute him for a variety of offenses.

Second, existing U.S. law reserves the right of the United States to prosecute American citizens accused of torture.  Title 18, Part I, Chapter 113C, Section 2841A(b) of the U.S. Criminal Code states that

There is [U.S.] jurisdiction over [allegations of torture] if—

(1) the alleged offender is a national of the United States; or

(2) the alleged offender is present in the United States, irrespective of the nationality of the victim or alleged offender.

Both conditions apply to Addington et. al.  Therefore the Spanish court should cede jurisdiction.

Third and perhaps most importantly, from a political perspective, this is an incredibly stupid thing to do to a new Administration that does not even have all its top legal experts in place.  It puts the Obama Administration in a no-win situation, where it must either reject the Spanish effort to prosecute U.S. citizens accused of torture or allow a prosecution that will make its domestic and international agendas much more difficult.

If the Administration does the former, it will embolden human rights abusers the world over, who will argue that the United States is unwilling to go after its own violators.  If it does the latter, it will embolden its domestic critics, who already are on the warpath about the judicial philosophies of several of its nominees.

Neither of those outcomes bring those responsible for designing the Bush-era policies any closer to justice.  In fact, both would decrease significantly the chance that any serious effort to investigate the allegations and indict those responsible might happen someday.

The best course of action here is for the Spanish to announce that they are postponing their investigation in order to give the U.S. government the opportunity to examine whether evidence exists to pursue its own prosecution.  At the same time, the Obama Administration should get behind the Patrick Leahy proposal for a commission modeled after the one that investigated U.S. decisionmaking leading up to 9/11 — not to forestall a prosecution but rather to find out whether there is enough information to pursue one.

There’s an old saying that justice delayed is justice denied.  That’s true in most cases, but not all.  Sometimes moving too quickly — or in the wrong venue — will harm a prosecution, not help it.  The Spanish should keep this in mind as they decide their next step.  And the Obama Administration needs to recognize that it no longer can pretend that ending the Bush Administration’s torture policies is not the same thing as investigating (and prosecuting) those responsible for them.

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When I read Marc Ambinder’s report of Obama’s meeting today with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, the following passage stuck out:

At a briefing with reporters this morning, senior administration officials seemed to go out of their way to define the content of the developing Obama-Medvevev relationship as being workmanlike, rather than personal. ”Out strategy was not to make the goal of the meetings to establish some buddy relationship,” an SAO said. “The goal is to advance our interests. Having dialogue is a means…. but the goal is not to have a personal relationship.”

Now take a look at what Obama said in his joint appearance with Gordon Brown at the White House last month:

Well, first of all, the special relationship between the United States and Great Britain is one that is not just important to me, it’s important to the American people. And it is sustained by a common language, a common culture; our legal system is directly inherited from the English system; our system of government reflects many of these same values. So — and by the way, that’s also where my mother’s side of my family came from.

So I think this notion that somehow there is any lessening of that special relationship is misguided. Great Britain is one of our closest, strongest allies and there is a link, a bond there that will not break. And I think that’s true not only on the economic front, but also on issues of common security.

At the time, much of the British press — and a not inconsiderable portion of the MSM in the States — hyperventilated over what Obama’s supposed “snub” of the Brits.  No State Dinner!  He returned the Churchill statue!  He gave the PM DVDs as a gift!  OMG the Special Relationship is no longer special!  In contrast, Obama’s meeting with Brown this morning was low-key, restrained and focused on the the challenges facing the G-20 — as it should be.

Next, take a look at part of the President’s statement on his Administration’s strategy for Afghanistan-Pakistan:

The future of Afghanistan is inextricably linked to the future of its neighbor, Pakistan.  In the nearly eight years since 9/11, al Qaeda and its extremist allies have moved across the border to the remote areas of the Pakistani frontier.  This almost certainly includes al Qaeda’s leadership:  Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.  They have used this mountainous terrain as a safe haven to hide, to train terrorists, to communicate with followers, to plot attacks, and to send fighters to support the insurgency in Afghanistan.  For the American people, this border region has become the most dangerous place in the world.

The object is to defeat al Qaeda, not get bin Laden.  Similarly, the Administration has made it clear (albeit informally) that it no longer will refer to the conflict with al Qaeda as the “Global War on Terror.”

So what do these stories and statements have in common?  For Obama, foreign policy is not a frat party.  Brown is not his “staunch friend.” Medvedev is neither a “soul” mate or “troublesome and unhelpful.” ; and Osama bin Laden is not an “evil-doer.”

Unlike his predecessor, who personalized everything, Obama is keeping his distance, regardless of whether he is dealing with a friend, competitor, or enemy.  He is pursing a businesslike approach to foreign policy, focusing on country-to-country relations, not private relationships.

That is pretty much a textbook example of realism.  He views relationships as a function of American interests, and acts accordingly.  The downside of this approach is that some issues, such as human rights, are less likely to impress the President as priorities simple because it’s the right thing to do.  He still may (or may not) champion human rights, but he’ll do so because it is in America’s best interest.

Obama has to walk a pretty fine line on his current trip.  He must demonstrate leadership without looking like the United States still has the ability — or the credibility — to define the agenda.  He must demonstrate to other world leaders that he can push his ideas forcefully without trying to cram them down their throat.  He must demonstrate a willingness to compromise without looking weak.

If he pulls all of that off, it might be because he didn’t try to treat everyone as his pal.  It’s a pretty sensible approach, and it mirrors his “no drama” persona.

It’s going to be a fascinating few days.

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News out of Sri Lanka today, via the BBC:

The Sri Lankan government has attacked what it calls a “vicious coalition” of aid and humanitarian agencies for their actions over the country’s civil war.  The defence ministry said those “pretending to be humanitarian and aid agencies” were prolonging the conflict “to secure their income”. . . .

The defence ministry website said the “vicious coalition” that had “been pretending to be humanitarian agencies, aid agencies, free media, civil rights movements, etc, have made the continued bloodshed on Sri Lankan soil a lucrative business for them.”  It said the goal was “to ensure that the [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's] war would never end at any cost.”

The ministry accused the Care International group of being part of the “abominable conspiracy.”  Care last week reported that a local worker was killed by shellfire in a government-designated “no-fire” zone. The ministry said “very reliable sources” indicated the man was “a hardcore LTTE cadre.”

I detest the LTTE, which is arguably the worst terrorist organization in the world, responsible for refining and popularizing suicide bombing.  But to suggest that international relief agencies are somehow LTTE sympathizers because they’re helping  those caught in a war zone is patently absurd.

Sri Lanka is not the first government to attack CARE and other groups for such work.  Earlier this month Sudan expelled thirteen international relief agencies working in Darfur (including CARE, Oxfam, and Save the Children) in response to the International Criminal Court’s issuing of an arrest warrant for President Omar al Bashir.  And in the past few days, Eritrea — which has recently expressed solidarity with Sudan, even hosting Bashir after the warrant was issued — has started kicking out aid groups in apparent solidarity with its new friend.  And back in the 1990s, Sudan did something similar at the height of its war against the SPLA.

On one level, this looks like a major bucket of stupid.  Aid agencies are, after all, there not to take sides but to help those caught in the crossfire.  But no one really should be surprised.  If people already are condemning you for the way you’re treating civilian populations, you really have nothing to lose by kicking out those trying to help, especially if those people happen to reside in areas controlled by rebels.

As is usually the case, governments justify their actions by cloaking them in high-minded rhetoric.  In this case, Sudan and others have claimed that humanitarian relief is the latest version of colonialsim (a neo-neocolonialism?), and that aid agencies are merely a tools of the U.S.-European colonial-military-globalist hegemon.  Some on the left in the United States, most notably Noam Chomsky and David Rieff, have offered an intellectual framework to support this perspective.  Rieff for example, has suggested that most humanitarian groups are often “subcontractors to the war efforts of various NATO powers.”

Such views are not merely absurd but insulting.  CARE, Oxfam, Save the Children, and numerous other groups do extraordinary work.  They’re not trying to advance anyone’s agenda, nor are they interested in taking sides. In fact, they’d like nothing more than to make themselves unnecessary.

The Obama Administration should move quickly to express support for their work.  Appointing a new USAID Administrator certainly would be a good start, giving the US a voice on development issues.  The Administration also should support the efforts of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to define any move by a government to deliberately deny civilians the ability to survive as a war crime.

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Last night, President Obama formally nominated my old friend Harold Hongju Koh to be the Legal Advisor at State.  It’s a great choice. I had the honor and privilege of serving as Harold’s chief of staff during his tenure as Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.  It was most challenging, exciting, and enjoyable job I’ve ever had — as I once said to Harold, it was the most fun I ever had being miserable.

Harold has an extraordinary legal mind, and he is absolutely devoted to the cause of human rights.  If confirmed, he will play a central role in the inter-agency efforts to deconstruct the Bush Administration’s torture and detention regime.  Here’s something Harold wrote earlier this year that gives a sense of where he is coming from:

Eight years ago, as the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, I testified to a United Nations committee in Geneva that the United States is “unalterably committed to a world without torture.” I continued: “Torture is prohibited by law throughout the United States. It is categorically denounced as a matter of policy and as a tool of state authority. In every instance, torture is a criminal offense. No official of the government—federal, state, or local, civilian or military—is authorized to commit or to instruct anyone else to commit torture. Nor may any official condone or tolerate torture in any form. No exceptional circumstances may be invoked as a justification for torture.”

That unequivocal statement was not asserted casually—it had been previously agreed to by dozens of government officials. None of us dreamed that within a decade, our government would openly practice torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, and that many Americans would defend the policy. . . .

As a professor of law, I was therefore sickened by the Justice Department’s August 2002 “torture opinion,” which concluded that U.S. officials can order the torture of suspected terrorists with impunity. I have worked in both Democratic and Republican administrations, including as an attorney in the office of the Justice Department that drafted that opinion. I understand the tremendous pressures that government lawyers labor under. Nevertheless, I considered this opinion to be a disgrace, not only to that office, but to the entire legal profession.. . .

The administration withdrew the memo in 2004, and has since retreated from some of its most extreme legal assertions. However, despite these gestures, it has still not backed down from the claim that torture in the shadows must remain an essential part of our antiterrorism policies. The Bush administration still argues that Congress has no power to regulate interrogation procedures, that past acts of waterboarding were legal, and that lawyers who object to the use of waterboarding are engaged in unpatriotic “lawfare.” . . .

America is a country founded on human rights. Human rights define who we are as a nation and as a people. A ban against official cruelty is one of our most sacred values. If we condone it, we gain nothing, and lose our identity.

It would be a mistake, however, to infer that he’s only interested in human rights.  I’ve rarely met anyone who has such an encyclopedic grasp of legal issues (keeping in mind I’m not a lawyer).  My favorite example of this is the first time he met my wife Molly, who is a reporter focusing on a section of the U.S. tax code known as transfer pricing.  Much to her delight, he immediately engaged her in a conversation about it.

Perhaps as important as his legal skills is the fact that he is both relentless and fearless.  When he led DRL, he helped make it a player in the building, in part because he never hesitated to stick to first principles, in part because he learned the game quickly and played it as well as anyone I’ve ever seen, and in part because he never allowed his determination to trump his decency.

At the risk of gushing (more), he is one of the most honorable and decent people I’ve ever known. Congratulations to Harold — and to Hillary for making such a fine choice.

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I’m pretty outraged by the AIG bonuses, and I hope that the Obama Administration can do something to stop them.

But I sure wish that people were as outraged about the Bush Administration’s war crimes as they are about the AIG bonuses/bailout.  As WaPo noted in a surprisingly good editorial this morning, we need a truth commission and we need it now:

THE ALLEGATIONS are familiar, yet some of the details are sickeningly new. Senior al-Qaeda prisoners held in secret CIA prisons were made to stand for days in painful positions and deprived of solid food for just as long. Interrogators wrapped suspects in plastic, doused them with cold water and slammed them headlong into walls. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was allegedly shackled with his arms above his head for days at a time, leaving lasting scars.

The allegations were made to the International Red Cross by the prisoners after they were transferred to the Guantanamo Bay prison in 2006. The allegations are reportedly contained in an unreleased report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which labeled the treatment as torture. The report was obtained by writer Mark Danner, who quoted extensively from it in an article published this week by the New York Review of Books and in an op-ed column in the New York Times.

We do not know whether all the allegations are true. But according to Mr. Danner, the ICRC separately interviewed detainees who independently provided similar accounts of harsh treatment. It has already been confirmed that the Bush administration subjected three high-level terrorism suspects to waterboarding, the ancient practice of simulated drowning that has long been considered torture. And the judgment of the Red Cross is very important: The agency’s unique status as a monitor of prisons around the world is based on its professionalism and impartiality. If it has accused the United States of torture, the charge — which could indelibly stain the nation’s global reputation — must be taken seriously.

Prosecutions would be even better.

If you think about it, the AIG scandal and the Bush Administration’s torture and detention policies are both products a laissez-faire, do-anything Administration uninterested in legal niceties.

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A few years ago, my family gathered for my mother’s 85th birthday.   It was a nice get together — my brother, sister, and I don’t have the chance to be in the same zip code very often.  But as is the case with most siblings, we have our differences.  My sister and I tend to be much more progressive and my brother is quite conservative — and an incredibly devout Catholic.

I have no problem with that, though I strongly disagree with him on most (but not all) issues.  But during this particular get-together, we somehow got into a discussion of the Catholic church and World War II.  I had just read Hitler’s Pope, John Cornwell’s history of Pope Pius XII’s relationship with Nazi Germany, and suggested that that Pope had not necessarily acquitted himself well.  To say my brother vehemently disagreed was an understatement.  I’m guessing that, to this day, he would argue that I don’t know what I’m talking about, and to this day, I continue to believe he is in denial about the dark side of Catholic history.

Unfortunately, he’s not the only one.  Pope Benedict isn’t so good either.

Just to be clear, the Catholic Church has, over the past several decades, played an important role in promoting human rights — it has, particularly under the leadership of Pope John Paul II, who may have done more to end authoritarian rule in Eastern Europe than any other individual.  The Church has, since Vatican II, had a series of popes willing to speak out on behalf of the poor and the dispossed, those victimized by dictatorial rule and those suffering from the horrors of war.

But if it would be incorrect to paint the Church as a negative influence on world events, it would be as profoundly mistaken to suggest that it has been only a force for good.  In some ways, the Vatican continues to reflect the premodern outlook that dominated Church thinking up until the Second Vatican Council — an outlook that brought the world the Inquisition, the blood libel, and complicity in the Spanish and Portugeuse “conquests” of the new world.

The Church’s more recent actions certainly don’t rise to that level of iniquity, but they haven’t exactly reflected an interest in the universality of human rights.  At the UN and other international fora, the Vatican has allied itself with fundamentalist Muslim countries in opposing equality for gays and lesbians, sensible approaches to birth control, and other basic human rights. And the continued drive to make Pius XII a saint has generated considerable outrage among Jewish groups.

In that context, the Vatican’s failure to vet Richard Williamson, the excommunicated Holocaust-denying Bishop, is not a surprise.  The Vatican simply does not understand that its tortured past does not incline those outside the Churge to assume that its intentions are for the best.  In fact, I think it’s fair to say: They. Just. Don’t. Get. It.

I sincerely believe that Benedict did not know about Williamson’s track record, and that his decision was the product of bad advice, not bad intentions.  But I also believe that Benedict was determined to bring the Lefebvre ultra-ultraconservatives back into the fold, and that he wasn’t really interested in the details.

Keep in mind that Lefebvre and his followers argue that the Church lost its way as a result of Vatican II (a view that Benedict does not entirely dispute), so much so that they continue to insist on celebrating the Mass in Latin.  They want to return the Church to its premodern roots — they are quite literally more Catholic than the pope.

To its credit, the Vatican is now demanding a full recantation from Williamson:

The Vatican said on Friday that an apology by a traditionalist bishop who denied the Holocaust fell short of meeting the Holy See’s demand for a full and public recanting of his position.

British Bishop Richard Williamson, whose comments in January caused a worldwide uproar among Jews and Catholics, on Thursday issued a statement in which he said: “To all souls that took honest scandal from what I said, before God I apologize.”

But chief Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said Williamson’s statement “does not seem to respect the conditions” set forth by the Vatican on February 4, when it ordered Williamson to “in an absolutely unequivocal and public way distance himself from his positions” regarding the Holocaust.

But I still have to wonder why they’re even trying.  Why doesn’t Benedict just come out and say, “Enough already — we’re not going to bring Willilamson back.  He’s still excommunicated, but now it’s for more than just a few minor violations of canon law.  And I want to apologize to all those who have been hurt by our mistaken attempt to return him into the fold.  We are saddened and chastened by our mistakes.”  Instead, the Church keeps saying to Williamson, “Just say the words and everything will be okay.”

I’m sorry, Your Holiness, but it won’t be okay.  Even if Williamson were to recant, the reality is that he will have done so only to get back in your good graces.  And what happens when, sometime down the road, he says equally outrageous things?  What will you do then?

And why in the world would you want to have anyone in the Church who once denied the Holocaust?  When does outrage outweigh forgiveness?  When does the denial historical memory take precedent over the recognition  theological common ground?

Williamson is not merely a sinner.  He’s a relativist (something the current Pope has roundly and repeatedly condemned when it comes from the left) and a scoundrel.  And to paraphrase the Pope’s spiritual Father, he knows exactly what he is doing.

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Here are Clinton and Stewart’s remarks in full from yesterday’s briefing on the release of the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices:

Hillary’s answer (albeit indirectly) to the criticism of her statement on the U.S.-China dialogue:

I am looking for results.  I am looking for changes that actually improve the lives of the greatest numbers of people.  Hopefully over time, we will be judged by the success of these efforts. . . .  Some of our work will be conducted through official meetings and dialogues.  That’s important to advancing our cause.

But I believe, strongly, that we must rely on more than one approach as we strive to overcome tyranny and subjugation that weakens the human spirit, limits human possibility, and undermines human progress.  We will make this a global effort, that reaches beyond governments alone.

That’s a pretty good answer to those who question her earlier statement:  stop focusing on form and start focusing on outcomes.  Having been in more than one meeting (including some on the U.S.-China “dialogue” on human rights), I can tell you that a tremendous amount of time is spent arguing over things like who will sit where.  There’s something to be said for a results-focused human rights policy, particularly if it involves significant additional funding of (and outspoken support for) frontline human rights activists.

In the end, however, the final judgment on Hillary’s record as a human rights advocate will be, as she herself says, not what she says but rather the success of her tenure.  We can only hope that it turns out as well as she promises in these remarks.

Still, it’s too bad that her statement yesterday got absolutely zero coverage in either the MSM or the blogs.  Hate to say it, but that’s not a surprise — controversy always plays better than positive statements.  It’s also no coincidence that Hillary left the briefing without taking any questions, but it’s important to know why — not because she was ducking the China issue (though she may have been), but because this is the way it’s always done with the human rights report (and other reports as well):  the Secretary comes in, makes a strong statement in support, and then leaves as the Assistant Secretary makes a statement and answers questions.

I was surprised that so few questions concerned Hillary’s statement last week — only the first two questions.  Then again, most of the press in that room are international media who focus on particular countries — hence the relative parochialism of the questions. (Also, few if any of the reporters there actually bothered to read all or part of the report.)

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According to WaPo’s Al Kamen, Mike Posner, who for many years has served first as Executive Director and now President of Human Rights First (which used to be known as the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights), will be the next Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

If true, this would be great news.  Here are some excerpts from the bio currently up at HRF (where he’s still listed as President).

Michael Posner, President of Human Rights First, has been at the forefront of the international human rights movement for nearly 30 years. As its Executive Director he helped the organization earn a reputation for leadership in the areas of refugee protection, advancing a rights-based approach to national security, challenging crimes against humanity, and combating discrimination. . . .In January 2006, Michael stepped down as Executive Director to become the President of Human Rights First. In this new position, he will focus more on public outreach, writing, and public advocacy, to advance the organization’s core mission. . . .

In 1980, Michael played a key role in proposing and campaigning for the first U.S. law providing for political asylum, which became part of the Refugee Act of 1980. Human Rights First runs the largest program providing volunteer legal representation to asylum seekers in the U.S., representing more than 1,000 clients from more than 80 countries. . . . Michael proposed, drafted, and campaigned for the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA) – a U.S. federal statute that was designed to give victims of the most serious human rights crimes anywhere in the world a remedy in U.S. courts. The TVPA was adopted by Congress and signed into law in 1992. . . .

Michael has also been a prominent voice in support of fair, decent, and humane working conditions in factories throughout the global supply chain. As a member of the White House Apparel Industry Partnership Task Force, he helped found the Fair Labor Association (FLA), an organization that brings together corporations, local leaders, universities, and NGOs to promote corporate accountability for working conditions in the apparel industry. He continues to sit on the FLA’s Board.

In 2004, Human Rights First launched its End Torture Now Campaign, a public education and advocacy effort that challenges the framework of U.S. policy and practice that allows coercive interrogation techniques and unlimited, secret detention of those in U.S. custody in violation of U.S. and international law. As part of the campaign, Human Rights First led the advocacy efforts in support of the McCain Amendment which bans U.S. soldiers and officials from engaging in cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. Human Rights First organized a group of retired admirals and generals to speak out publicly on this issue. The McCain Amendment won broad congressional support and was signed into law in December 2005.

Clearly he has the chops for the job.  I’ve known Mike for a number of years, and he’s both a great guy and one of the smartest human rights lawyers out there.  He’s built HRF into a powerhouse that now rivals Amnesty and Human Rights Watch.  Its focus on results rather than criticism has made it particularly effective.  Here, for example, is a video they released recently in response to Dick Cheney’s suggestion that Guantanamo should not be closed:

HRF also was responsible for organizing the flag officers who called on Obama to close Guantanamo — those were the folks standing behind Obama when he signed the order.

So is Kamen’s report true?  I don’t know — I’ve had a number of people email to ask, but none of my sources have yet confirmed it.  As regular readers of my blog know, I had reported that Posner was a finalist.  And there are two developments I’ve heard/noticed that I find interesting.  The first is that the HRF DC staff were called to NY this morning for an all-staff meeting.  The initial word was that it was about layoffs (which is certainly a possibility given the collapse of the JEHT Foundation, one of the largest donors to the human rights community and a victim of the Madoff scandal).  But it also could have been an announcement that Mike is leaving.  Then again, it could have been both.

The second is that a perusal of recent HRF statements on USG policy show that HRF executive director Elisa Massimino, rather than Posner, has been speaking for the organization.  Just yesterday, HRF put out a statement on the new Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, and Posner is not quoted.  Two weeks ago, HRF sent a letter (pdf) to Secretary Clinton on China and Indonesia that was signed by Massimino.  These doesn’t necessarily mean anything — Massimino, after all, is now the day-to-day CEO — but it also is possible that Mike has recused himself from such statements.

So what will this mean for human rights?  There is considerable speculation that Hillary’s recent statement on the U.S.-China human rights dialogue (which, by the way, prevented neither a strongly critical Country Report nor a sharp Chinese response), combined with reports that DRL will be kicked out of main State (not to mention out of the inner sanctum known as the seventh floor), mean that human rights won’t be a priority.

It’s too early to say whether that’s true.  But as I’ve noted before, Hillary’s Kinsley gaffe represents a moment of candor, not a change in policy.  I also would note that Posner’s reported appointment, in conjunction with two other reported appointments — Harold Hongju Koh as Hillary’s Legal Advisor and Eric Schwartz as Assistant Secretary for Population, Refugees, and Migration — means that State will have three prominent human rights advocates rather than just one.  That should strengthen Posner’s hand, and help ensure that human rights remains a priority.

Image:  Human Rights First

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You can find the whole thing here.

An excerpt from the introduction:

As we publish these reports, the Department of State remains mindful of both domestic and international scrutiny of the United States’ record. As President Obama recently made clear, “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

We do not consider views about our performance voiced by others in the international community–whether by other governments or nongovernmental actors–to be interference in our internal affairs, nor should other governments regard expressions about their performance as such. We and all other sovereign nations have international obligations to respect the universal human rights and freedoms of our citizens, and it is the responsibility of others to speak out when they believe those obligations are not being fulfilled.

The U.S. government will continue to hear and reply forthrightly to concerns about our own practices. We will continue to submit reports to international bodies in accordance with our obligations under various human rights treaties to which we are a party. United States laws, policies, and practices have evolved considerably in recent years, and will continue to do so. For example, on January 22, 2009, President Obama signed three executive orders to close the detention facilities at Guantanamo and review U.S. government policies on detention and interrogation.

In other words, stick with us — we’re trying to change here.

Here’s what the introduction says about China (this is just a summary — the full China report can be found here):

The government of China’s human rights record remained poor and worsened in some areas. The government continued to limit citizens’ privacy rights and tightly controlled freedom of speech, the press (including the Internet), assembly, movement, and association. Authorities committed extrajudicial killings and torture, coerced confessions of prisoners, and used forced labor. In addition, the Chinese government increased detention and harassment of dissidents, petitioners, human rights defenders, and defense lawyers.Local and international NGOs continued to face intense scrutiny and restrictions.

China’s human rights record worsened in some areas, including severe cultural and religious repression of ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and Tibet. Abuses peaked around high-profile events, such as the Olympic Games and the unrest in Tibet. At the end of the year, the government harassed signatories of Charter ‘08 who called for respect for universal human rights and reform and arrested writer Liu Xiaobo for his participation in the drafting of the Charter. In October, the government made permanent temporary Olympic Games-related regulations granting foreign journalists greater freedoms.

Largely critical, though that last sentence sounds tacked-on — as if the China Desk said, “hey, we need to say something nice!”

Still waiting on transcript of the briefing.

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Three recent articles got me thinking about the realities of U.S. foreign policy in an era of a contracting economy and growing government debt.

First, a story from today’s NYT:

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the countries of Eastern Europe have emerged as critical allies of the United States in the region, embracing American-style capitalism and borrowing heavily from Western European banks to finance their rise.

Now the bill is coming due.

The development boom that turned Poland, Hungary and other former Soviet satellites into some of Europe’s hottest markets is on the verge of going bust, raising worrisome new risks for the global financial system that may ricochet back to the United States. . . .

Add to that a new worry: International finance officials fret that the worst regional economic crisis since the Berlin Wall came down could set off a contagion among the region’s currencies, with echoes of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. Then, emerging markets like Thailand borrowed in foreign currencies to fuel growth, but suddenly owed more than they could afford to pay back once their own currencies lost value.

Next, the lead editorial in today’s WaPo:

Clinton says she was only “stating the obvious” when she played down the importance of U.S. pressure on China about human rights issues during a visit there over the weekend. In fact, her comments understated the significance of what a secretary of state says about such matters, and how those statements might affect the lives of people fighting for freedom of expression, religious rights and other basic liberties in countries such as China. . . .

Ms. Clinton’s suggestion that U.S. advocacy for human rights might “interfere” with cooperation on other issues is equally misguided. Over many years China has proved ready to work with the United States on issues where it sees an interest in doing so, regardless of disputes over human rights. Playing down those concerns won’t change Beijing’s stance on North Korea or increase its willingness to reduce carbon emissions.

Finally, yesterday’s WSJ:

U.S. officials are scrambling to assert that the Obama administration hasn’t softened U.S. policy toward Venezuela, where President Hugo Chávez recently won a controversial referendum allowing him to run for office as many times as he wants.

Last week, acting State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid surprised some observers when he said that Venezuela’s election “was held consistent with democratic principles,” though he also mentioned some “troubling reports of intimidation of opponents.” . . .

U.S. officials say they continue to be very concerned about Venezuela, one of the leading suppliers of oil to the U.S.  “The state of health of democracy in Venezuela is not very good,” said a State Department official, adding that the U.S. also continued to be concerned that Venezuela’s continuing support for Colombia’s drug-funded communist guerrillas is undermining democracy in the region. “There’s no change in policy,” he added.

So what do these three stories have in common?  The United States is increasingly unable to project its power abroad.  That may come as no surprise, but consider this:  traditionally, there are three ways the U.S. influences the world — military might, economic prosperity, and soft power (or “smart power,” to use Hillary’s term).

For the first time since the end of the Second World War, all three are in decline.  The military is tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan; the economy is in the midst of a severe recession — one whose contagion continues to spread; and, thanks to the Bush Administration, the United States is more often viewed as part of the problem than it is the solution.

Yes, the election of President Obama has helped a little.  But no matter how effective Obama may be in terms of moral suasion, he can’t prevent — at least in the short term — the dramatic erosion of the American position around the world.

Unlike the Asian Financial Crisis back in the 1990s, we don’t have the ability to step in to save Eastern Europe’s crashing economies — we have to spend every dime we have to save our own.  We can’t raise human rights with China because we need their continued investment as well as their support on issues such as climate change and North Korea.  And we can’t isolate Chavez or even tell him to bugger off because we need Venezuela’s oil.

Let me be clear.  I’ve spent most of my career working on human rights and democracy issues.  I would hate to see Eastern Europe return to its days as a Russian plaything with predominantly authoritarian governments.  I’d like nothing more than for the U.S. to finda a peaceful way to end Chavez’s increasingly dictatorial rule.   And I was not at all happy with Hillary’s Kinsley gaffe.

But I’m not at all surprised about any of these developments. We no longer have the ability — and, I’m sure some would argue, the will — to have an impact on any of these developments.

For what it’s worth, the Post is correct in saying that we need to find a way to aid and support the nascent human rights movement in China — whose activists face constant harassment, house arrest, and often imprisonment.  In that context, Hillary’s words were particularly problematic.  But the reality is, at least for now, they also were accurate.

All of this points to the biggest difference between Obama’s foreign policy and that of his predecessor:  Bush pretended that the U.S. still enjoyed overwhelming power in the world, and thus could ignore what others thought.  In contrast, Obama realizes that the U.S. no longer can solve the world’s problems on its own and thus is making hard choices about what we can and cannot do.  Given a choice between pragmatism and idealism, pragmatism will have to win out, at least over the short run.

This may not be a welcome development, but it is the reality of where we are as a nation and as an actor on the world stage.

Welcome to the new realism.  It’s no longer about projecting power only when necessary.  It’s now about conserving power so as to influence a world increasingly untethered from American influence.

Related posts

• The Human Rights Secretary of State?
• Systems Theory and U.S. Foreign Policy: Obama’s Trip to Europe
• Some Thoughts on Obama’s Speech
• Mike Posner to DRL?
• India-Pakistan: China, Obama,and the Specter of 1914

A few short hits today, as I try to catch up on the news.

Let’s start with word last week that Obama plans to appoint Samantha Power to serve as Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs in the National Security Council.  To no one’s surprise, the MSM focused not on her abilities or scholarship, but on “monstergate,” the moment last year when Power’s criticism of Hillary went a little over the top.

That’s too bad, because Power brings an impressive resume to an important job.  The Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs, no matter what the usually brilliant Charlie over at Abu Muqawama may believe, is a crucial job, particularly in an administration dedicated to reversing the Bush Administration’s disastrous unilateralism.  Power will oversee a portfolio that includes not only U.S.-UN relations, but also human rights, democracy, humanitarian relief, peacekeeping, and refugees.  It’s a big job, as demonstrated by the fact that past Administrations have appointed similarly senior people (Mort Halperin, Eric Schwartz, and Elliott Abrams — who, no matter how despicable you may find him, was a key player during his time at NSC).

I have a passing acquaintance with Power — she served on (and contributed to) the foreign policy team I co-directed for the Kerry campaign — but I don’t know her well.  She is, by any measurement, an impressive and important thinker, and deserves to be taken much more seriously than the gossipy coverage she’s gotten over the past year.  Her most recent books are A Problem from Hell, which is a history of U.S. policy toward genocide (and which won the Pulitzer Prize)  and Chasing the Flame, which is a biography of Sergio Vielo de Mello, who died in the bombing of the UN compound in Iraq.  She has headed the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard and has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker.

Power is one of the few academics out there who can bring experience working on both the U.S.-U.N. relations and U.S. human rights policy.  Most importantly of all, she’s close to Obama, having served as one of his earliest foreign policy advisors.  In fact, her decision to take a leave of absence from Harvard to work in Obama’s Senate office was for me an early sign that he was thinking beyond the Senate.

You can count on her to play an important role in reversing Bush-era policies, from Guantanamo to torture to Boltonist views of the U.N.

Much of the press coverage has breathlessly suggested that Power will have “close contact and potential travel with Clinton.”  Uh, no.  In all fairness to Power, her new position is not that high up the food chain.  Hillary will deal with James Jones, Power’s boss’s boss, not Power.  Her counterparts at State will be the Assistant Secretaries for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL); Population, Refugees and Migration; and International Organization Affairs.  She’ll also liaise with USAID and those sections of State and DOD that work on peacekeeping issues.  She may be in meetings with Clinton, and may from time to time brief her.  But even if Power is on the plane, she’s likely to be one of many, not one-on-one with Clinton.

And speaking of DRL, Power’s appointment to the NSC takes out of the running the most obvious candidate to lead my old bureau.  From what I hear, there are currently three serious candidates, two from the human rights community and one from a think tank.  No word on when one of them will get the nod.

Related posts

• Transition Watch: Anger in the Ranks
• The Other Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
• The Human Rights Secretary of State?
• The Fake Controversy over Samantha Power
• Some Thoughts on Obama’s Speech

One Obama Administration appointment that has not received much attention either in the blogosphere or the mainstream media (the exceptions being the always excellent and perceptive Spencer Ackerman and Carolyn O’Hara over at Passport) is the appointment of Jeh Johnson to serve as General Counsel at the Department of Defense.

This is a great choice, and not just because Johnson brings first-rate legal credentials and a distinguished track-record on civil rights issues.  More importantly, he previous experience in the Pentagon, having served during the Clinton Administration as General Counsel to the Department of the Air Force.

Why is this position so important?  Two words:  William Haynes.  For those unfamiliar with Haynes, you only need to know two things:  1) he was General Counsel at DOD during the Bush Administration; 2) he was a key ally of David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, and John Yoo successful efforts to legalize torture, and indefinite detention.

In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer identifies Haynes as one of the five architects of Bush and Cheney’s torture, detention, and rendition policies (the others were Gonzales, Addington, Yoo, and CIA General Counsel Timothy Flanigan).  He is the individual who told Alberto Mora (the Navy General Counsel who objected to the nascent torture policies) that the White House had decided to move forward with its interogation plans.

And perhaps most importantly, he drafted and/or signed the decision memos recommending that Donald Rumsfeld approve “enhanced” interrogation techniques.  He therefore could be described as the engineer, if not the architect, who made both Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib possible.

As I noted back in September, Haynes is one of twelve Bush Administration officials whom should be prosecuted for war crimes.

Obama’s choice of Jeh Johnson represents as important a break with past policy as his choice of Dawn Johnsen to serve as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel at Justice (and, for that matter, his selection of David Barron and Marty Lederman as her principal deputies).  Johnsen is to Yoo as Johnson is to Haynes (although technically speaking, Yoo was the deputy chief of OLC, his relationship with Addington gave him greater authority and access than his bosses).  Like her near-namesake at DOD, Johnsen has a distinguished track record, including a stint during the Clinton Administration as deputy chief of OLC.  In a recent law review article, she described the Bushies’ torture policies as illegal.

Obama has now named hard-headed realists — individuals who recognize the damage caused by the Bush Administration’s torture regime and see the solution as returning the U.S. government to its core values — to the very positions that, under Bush, were largely responsible for creating the tortured legal justifications for torture.

Johnson and Johnsen both will play a central role in dismantling Guantanamo-centered detention regime, per Obama’s executive orders of January 22nd, which establishes an inter-agency working group to facilitate the closure of all such detention facilities and evaluate what to do with the remaining detainees.  Although the orders name Cabinet-level officials to the committee, most of the work is likely to be done, in the words of the orders “their designates.”  That probably means that J & J will be players in making the orders more than symbolic acts.

Related posts

• Prosecuting Those Responsible for War Crimes
• Ambassador for All War Crimes except Our Own
• What’s Missing at DNC: Torture, Guantanamo. . .and Cheney
• The New Executive Orders: Guantanamo, Torture, Detainees
• Powell, Obama, and Torture

When I was at the State Department, I had the opportunity to work closely with a terrific group of foreign service officers who were memberw of Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies, who were fighting to get recognition for same sex spouses.

Although benefits were a big part of what they were fighting for, an equally important issue was how their spouses were treated overseas.  The reality is that unlike a number of European countries, American gay and lesbian spouses do not enjoy the same status overseas as their heterosexual colleagues.  That means, among other things, that they do not have the rights, privileges, and protection that other spouses do.  As former Ambassador Michael Guest put it back in 2007 when he resigned from the foreign service over the treatment of his partner, the foreign service (and by extension the U.S. Government) forced him to choose

between obligations to my partner, who is my family, and service to my country,” which he called “a shame for this institution and our country.

Back when I was in the Clinton Administration, gay spouses did not have even the most basic rights and privileges.  To its credit, the Bush Administration changed some of the rules — permitting partners/spouses to attend security and other introductory seminars — but not much more.

Yesterday, GLIFAA released to the press a copy of a letter sent last week to incoming Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton:

We, the undersigned and representing the diversity of the foreign affairs agencies. . .are troubled that our families are not all treated equally and with the same respect.  We are concerned that access to the federal health care insurance program is denied to same-sex partners of employees serving in Third World countries with substandard medical care.

We question the logic of leaving same-sex partners to fend for themselves during an emergency evacuation of a high danger post. We are embarrassed when the Department will reimburse a variety of moving expenses, including the cost of transporting a pet, when an employee is assigned overseas, but will not do the same for a same-sex partner.

We are saddened that individual and community safety are put at risk because full language instruction is not available to same-sex partners. We are uncomfortable that same-sex partners receive less compensation and fewer benefits for performing exactly the same job inside the mission as an opposite-sex spouse, that is, when same-sex partners are given a chance to work.

An order from your office designating same-sex partners as Eligible Family Members (EFMs) could remedy many of the inequalities that these families face. Other remedies will require coordination between the Executive and Legislative branches.

Madam Secretary, we believe that no colleague of ours is a second-class colleague, and no colleague’s family is a second-class family. Given your commitment to protecting the safety and promoting the welfare of all Foreign Service families, we ask for your full consideration of our concerns and we hope that a dialogue aimed at ending this unequal treatment can be started.

This is what I mean by the other don’t ask don’t tell.  It’s not as discriminatory as what happens in the military:  gays and lesbians no longer are drummed out of the foreign service as a result of their sexual orientation.  But they are asked to pretend that they are not second-class citizens.

To put it another way, they’re being told “don’t tell us we’re not treating you fairly and we won’t ask why that’s a problem.”

That’s ridiculous, and shameful.  As the GLIFAA letter notes, there’s a simple solution here:  designate partners as Eligible Family Members, which would “give” them the rights and privileges (and protection) enjoyed by all other family members. (Of course the notion that the government has the ability to “give” fundamental human rights to people is, in itself, offensive, but we’ll set that aside for the moment.)

You want to know how ridiculous this is?  If a foreign service officer is married to the love of her life, and her spouse brings into the marriage a daughter, and the foreign service officer adopts that daughter, the daughter is an Eligible Family Member, but her own birth mother is not.

During Hillary’s confirmation hearing, Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) asked her about this issue:

FEINGOLD:  What would you do as secretary of state to address these concerns? Will you support changes to existing personnel policy in order to ensure that LGBT staff at State and USAID receive equal benefits and support?

CLINTON: Senator, this issue was brought to my attention during the transition. I’ve asked to have more briefing on it because I think that we should take a hard look at the existing policy. As I understand it, but don’t hold me to it because I don’t have the full briefing material, but my understanding is other nations have moved to extend that partnership benefit. And we will come back to you to inform you of decisions we make going forward.

This is both good news and bad news.  It’s good news because Secretary Clinton demonstrated a willingness to “take a hard look” at the issue.  It’s bad news because she did not promise to change policy.  That is a politicians’ caution — perhaps understandable given her husband’s experiences — but this isn’t 1992.  Public attitudes about and understanding of these issues has changed significantly:  although there remains no consensus on marriage, most Americans support both civil unions and partner benefits.

So why didn’t Clinton commit?  I can only speculate.  First, the federal bureaucracy may be hesitant to allow State to take the lead on this.  I think that’s ridiculous — given the fact that one part of the government (the military) already has a separate discriminatory policy, I don’t see why another part of the government having a separate progressive policy should be a problem.

Second, some folks at State may nervous about “granting” full rights and privileges to same sex spouses because they’re afraid of how some countries — particularly the Vatican, most African states, and Muslim-majority states — may react.  You could call it the Anglican church precedent:  rock the boat and you create problems.  That’s a fallacy, of course — it hasn’t been the case for other countries that have given same-sex spouses full rights and benefits — and it’s allowing diplomacy to mask discrimination.

Lest you think that these are a minor issues, remember this:  until the Clinton Administration, one of the questions on the security clearance questionnaire was whether you had ever engaged in “homosexual activity.”  Some very talented people over the years have been excluded from the foreign service or drummed out simply because they were gay. Don’t forget that the red hunts of the 1950s were also used to fire gay foreign service officers because they were viewed as somehow more “susceptible” to recruitment.

But even after that terrible practice stopped, diplomatic security found other ways to make the lives of gays and lesbians miserable.  I’ll never forget a meeting I had during my time at State when a foreign service officer told how diplomatic security gave him a choice:  forget about a foreign service career or out himself to his parents, who did not know he was gay.  Another was actually outed to his parents by diplomatic security.

Here’s hoping that Secretary Clinton does the right thing, and does it quickly.

Then we can turn to the bigger problem in that other agency.

Related posts

• The Human Rights Secretary of State?
• Upstairs Downstairs
• Transition Watch: Mona Sutphen
• The Panic over Political Appointments
• The Bottleneck at State