From: Howard Gardner

----- Original Message -----

From: "hgasst"
To:
Sent: Monday, January 31, 2005 10:48 AM
Subject: From Howard Gardner

January 31, 2005
To: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
From: Howard Gardner

Greetings! I appreciated your article on 'Plagiarism and Gonzalezism' and
agree with much of what you said. While the problems described are
scarcely exclusive to Harvard, my university (and other high profile
schools) have a special obligation not to sweep issues of plagiarism under
the rug. I regret the failure of our President and other University
leaders to 'step up to the plate.'

With best wishes.

Howard Gardner
Hobbs Professor of Education and Cognition
Harvard Graduate School of Education
14 Appian Way
Larsen Hall 201
Cambridge, MA 02138
Voice: 617-496-4929
Fax: 617-496-4855
www.howardgardner.com
e-mail: howard@pz.harvard.edu

NOTE REGARDING SPAM FILTER: If you reply to this communication, please be
sure to include the name "Howard Gardner" in the text of your response.
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Re: Plagiarism and Gonzalezism

----- Original Message -----

From: Omohundro@aol.com
To: velvel@mslaw.edu
Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2005 3:29 PM
Subject: Re: Plagiarism and Gonzalezism

Larry,

I'm glad you're onto this huge and quite extensive problem in academe; don't know how much of an impact you can make, but your efforts are far more likely (I believe) to have an impact here than on the conduct of our foreign policy.

During my first year of grad school there was one prof who was well known for taking the seminar papers of his grad students, whether it included his own dissertation students or just the rest of us I can't remember, and using them as chapters in one book or another that he was writing. They were given assigned topics on things that he knew would be useful in whatever he was working on.

But of course he was also known for his affairs with students, at least the more attractive females. He had a pad in Baltimore, while his wife lived in D.C. So it was all very convenient, French I guess you could say.

Of course neither type of behavior is now or was then (1970s) at all uncommon. If anything I suspect sexual harrassment has diminished because the femmes have gotten so uppity and many of them won't stand for it.

I'm not sure that plagiarism is more common today, or just more widely reported. I was tickled that Joe Biden, champion plagiarist in the state of Del, was stuck on the tracks by a derailment and had to miss the inauguration. I hate plagiarists regardless of pol affiliation.

Keep up the good fight--hope to hear your talk at the Athenaeum, unless I'm being interviewed about "Gabe",

Michael Chesson

Re: Lars Erik-Nelson

From HULUGU:

January 27, 2005


larry--

lars erik-nelson was a mildly right of center washington columnist for the new york daily news who, unfortunately, passed away in 2000 from natural causes at the age of 59--he was columbia class of '64--i can imagine what he would think of that institution's support of its islamonazi jew hating mideast affairs department--he was a sensible moderate who came down for left positions in many issue, also-- a very wise man taken from us too early.

regards,

AHV

Re: Plagiarism and Gonzalezism

----- Original Message -----

From: Damato, Anthony A
To: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2005 1:43 PM
Subject: Re: Plagiarism and Gonzalezism

In a market economy, lying becomes a virtue, a "sharp" business practice that will give a competitive edge to the fraudulent and penalize the honest. I suggest that the problems Dean Velvel has with plagiarism in academia stem from the takeover of the academy by business persons. Their "bottom line" view of the university is fostered by having lying, cheating professors who get a big name for themselves on other peoples' backs, so long as they get away with it. The universities, run by these CEO types, surely are not going to create more negative publicity for themselves by punishing the plagiarists. Professors need to retake the academy.

Their biggest problem, I think, is that there will always be one or two of their number who are willing to be co-opted by the business persons running the university. They thus become lackeys for their masters and insulation against their academic colleagues.

[P.S. Larry--I found that your website is so discouraging to anyone who tries to post anything there that I've taken to by-passing it and writing to you directly.]
T.

At 10:51 AM 1/26/2005, you wrote:

January 26, 2005

Re: Plagiarism and Gonzalezism
From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com

Dear Colleagues:

Catalyzed by the Ogletree and Tribe affairs, the print media has of late paid somewhat more attention to plagiarism in academia, i.e., to a form of gross dishonesty in the academic world. Thus, in mid December The Chronicle of Higher Education carried several articles, totaling eleven and one-half pages, on academic plagiarism of one kind and another. To my mind, the major conclusions were these: Plagiarism is widespread in the academic world. Sometimes a work is plagiarized wholesale. Some people seem to have virtually made a career of plagiarism.

Professors often steal the work of graduate students -- sometimes even feel they have a right to do so. Very little is done about plagiarism. Professors who are victimized by it are discouraged from taking action. Students whose work is ripped off by their mentors are in a hopeless position: they cannot take action because they depend on those mentors for the recommendations without which they can have no careers. Academic associations are loathe to act against plagiarists; it is too much effort, and can cost them money. Universities don’t want to act against plagiarists; this can require too much effort and can result in lawsuits, by accused plagiarists, that result in adverse publicity and that are expensive to fight even though the plagiarists most often lose. The consequence of all these prior conclusions is that plagiarism is punished infrequently, is punished lightly when punished at all, and generally is a subject which is not publicly disclosed but instead is just swept under the rug when discovered.This writer has to admit to being thunderstruck by the disclosure in The Chronicle of the extent and non-punishment of plagiarism. For plagiarism is a gross form of dishonesty: it is falsely claiming as your own something that is in fact the work of another. What The Chronicle has revealed -- and, shocked as one is, I know of no reason to doubt its reporting -- is that dishonesty has extensively penetrated to the very heart of the academic enterprise: to the writing of articles and books. One has gotten used to the unfortunate spin, baloney and, as Paul Fussell might put it, advertising-like exaggerations regularly emanating from university administrations, public relations offices, and marketing and admissions departments. All of these are a form of dishonesty: dishonesty by leaving out important facts, dishonesty by leaving out an important but differing side of the story, dishonesty by gross exaggeration. But now dishonesty appears to have penetrated to a core raison d’etre of universities.One occasionally reads various supposed justifications for the dishonesty: "I was writing not for scholars, but (in an accessible way) for the general public" is a favorite one. "I was not writing a peer-reviewed piece," is another.

These are bovine bleatings. In the May/June 2001 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, the executive editor of Commonweal, Paul Baumann, quoted someone named Lars-Erik Nelson as saying that "‘The enemy isn’t liberalism. The enemy isn’t conservatism. The enemy is bullshit.’" That crystallized this blogger’s basic philosophy more concisely, and more pithily, than the writer himself has ever been able to. This enemy is everywhere in today’s America, and the alleged justifications for plagiarism given above are themselves examples of the enemy as defined by Nelson. So what if one was not writing for scholars but for the public, or was not writing for peer review? Regardless of why he or she is writing, the plagiarist is being dishonest, is claiming as his own creation something that was the creation of another.It is interesting, isn’t it, that the academic world often claims a superior morality? Just as interesting to this blogger personally is that, much as he has reviled so many of the academic world’s characteristics in books and articles, he lately finds himself wondering whether the claim to superior morality might conceivably be true on a percentage basis (on sort of a man for man or pound for pound basis) in view of the extent to which the figuratively insane right wing has captured the government of this country and the thinking of its citizens, and has persuaded citizens and country alike to adopt the historically crazed concept of peace through continuous war, peace through destroying cities, and through bombing and shelling civilians, women and children and calling it collateral damage.

But be all this as it may, how can the academic world claim superior morality when its members widely practice, and when it does not punish but instead sweeps under the rug, the gross dishonesty of plagiarism? All of which brings one back to the matter mentioned in the opening phrase of this blog, the Tribe and Ogletree affairs. Tribe admitted his plagiarism and, while Ogletree seems to resist admitting very much, it nonetheless seems plain that he had assistants write parts of a recent book for which he claimed the entire credit. This is a form of plagiarism and, whatever name it goes by, is certainly the dishonest claiming of credit for the work of others. Yet one has no idea whether Harvard has punished Tribe in any way, and the same is true regarding Ogletree even though he says he was punished in some unspecified way.

According to an email sent to one of my colleagues (who had emailed him) by Larry Summers, "The University, as a matter of policy, does not comment on individual reviews of the conduct of faculty members. ("Rest assured, however," Summers’ email added, "that we take these matters very seriously.") So Harvard’s policy, at least according to Summers (or whomever may have written the email for him if he did not write it himself), is not to talk about what, if any, punishment has been or may be assessed against Tribe and Ogletree. And the rest of the university, especially the Dean of the law school, seems to be following suit in regard to Tribe and Ogletree. Whether Summers’ email is itself accurate -- is honest -- is conceivably subject to some question, which is surely ironic when the subject, plagiarism, is a form of dishonesty to begin with. For Harvard commented in December, in a pretty self justifying manner, on the situation of an assistant professor (Ali A. Sultan) who had plagiarized in portions of a grant application, had been investigated by the Harvard School of Public Health, which turned its report over to a federal agency, and ultimately resigned last September after a federal watchdog group issued a condemnation and the Feds assessed a punishment against him. Harvard’s December, 2004 comments were after the fact, but nonetheless were comments relating to an "individual revie[w] of the conduct of [a] faculty membe[r]," which Summers’ email claims Harvard does not do. But with regard to Tribe and Ogletree, Harvard seems to be sweeping the matter under the rug as much as possible (whereas the punishments suffered by Joe Ellis at Mount Holyoke are public knowledge). One is tempted to remark that Larry Summers, having previously shown himself to have a big mouth on more than one occasion, has chosen to remain quiet when he should have spoken out. For Harvard remains the leader, at minimum it is one of the foremost leaders, in American higher education. It sets an example for others.

A good example for Harvard to set would be one showing that dishonesty through outright plagiarism, or through using and claiming assistants’ work as one’s own, is not to be tolerated and will be punished heavily. A bad example is one of silence, of sweeping dishonesty under the rug, and creating the understanding, and the likely well taken suspicion, that dishonesty is being punished lightly if at all. The latter example, the bad example, is the one Harvard is setting. Academia’s claims to moral leadership, whatever merits they may have in other ways, ring hollow in the area of honesty when the brightest star (or one of them) in the academic firmament appears not to be punishing at all, or not to be punishing heavily, serious dishonesty by two of its professors.
* * * * *

Dishonesty, and the enemy as defined by Lars Erik-Nelson, is all around us in this country. It is everywhere. It pervades politics, is rampant in big business, is a way of life in the academy, is practiced on the personal level. After nearly 50 years of adulthood, one is heartily sick of it, one indeed thinks it the fundamental flaw of American society, the tragic flaw, in the Greeks’ sense, that is most likely to bring low a nation that was once the hope of the world, as Jefferson and Lincoln thought it so long ago.The battle of today, Lincoln once wrote, is not for today alone, but for a vast future. This correlated with his view of America as the last best hope of earth. Since 1941 America has indeed played the role of last best hope of earth, sometimes playing it laudably, at other times playing it hypocritically, militaristically and dishonestly. And if there is one thing that is going to sink us, it is dishonest conduct and its often conjoined twin, hypocritical conduct. It is indeed lies and hypocrisy, from WMDs to torture, that are a major lens through which much of the world sees us today (excluding, of course, the Bushian toady who is Prime Minister of Britain).Since much of the world already sees us as liars and hypocrites, it is only the more deplorable that the nominee for Attorney General has to be considered, can only be considered, a liar. Alberto Gonzalez not only repeatedly told Senators at his hearing that America does not use torture, but afterwards he compounded this lie. In written answers to questions propounded by Senators, he repeatedly said that America does not use torture under any circumstances. This repeated statement can only be an intentional, knowing lie, unless Gonzalez has been on the moon for the last year or so. It is well established that the CIA and the military have tortured prisoners, and the latest information to become available is that the deaths of somewhere between 30 and 40 prisoners are being investigated as homicides or suspected homicides. And while Gonzalez claimed, at the hearing and in his answers, that George Bush has directed that torture is not to be used, recently it became established, and Gonzalez even had to admit in his written answers, that Bush’s directive is not applicable to the CIA or some other intelligence operatives. (One is aware that, given the way Washington works, Gonzalez’ answers were almost surely written by some highly educated lackey(s) rather than by Gonzalez himself. But Gonzalez is nevertheless responsible for them: they were submitted as his answers, not the lackey(s), and it is he, not the lackey(s), who is the nominee for Attorney General).So, to this nation’s dire discredit, we are about to get, as Attorney General, a man who is a liar and who has lied about a matter of great concern to America and the world. (One wonders what Lincoln or Jefferson would think about a supposed last best hope of earth that tortures people.) To top it off, lying to Congress is, if memory serves, a crime, so that our top federal law enforcement officer will be not only a liar, but an unindicted criminal. And the Democrats, instead of standing for something, have said they are going to vote for this guy (although a few of them recently have said they may change their minds). Do the Democrats wonder why people think their party isn’t worth a damn? Which brings me to my last point. Gonzalez, like Summers, is from Harvard. (Gonzalez went to law school there.) It would be a bit much to put the blame on Harvard for the rise of the lying society in which we live. Yet Harvard is not wholly free of guilt, either. In my own lifetime, though there was some major league lying in the Eisenhower administration (e.g., regarding the U2), the rise of spin and phony image meistering really got going, in my opinion, with the administration of the famously Harvard trained President, John Kennedy, who used lots of other Harvard men too (e.g., the lying McNamara, a graduate of the Harvard Business School). Harvard was also home to leading proponents of realpolitik (e.g., Kissinger), a philosophy that led to decades of dishonesty and hypocrisy. So Harvard is no shrinking innocent when it comes to America being a nation of dishonesty. As the leader in American academia, or, at minimum, as one of the leaders, it has given us people who seem not to know the meaning of, and to care less about, truth. How much more unfortunate is it, then, and how disappointing, that a great institution like Harvard is now under the "leadership" of someone who, while claiming only to be interested in fostering inquiry into the truth when he said that women are perhaps inherently inferior in math and science, nonetheless does not care enough about restoring honesty (i.e., truth) as the desideratum at Harvard, or in the country, to announce whether two serious cases of plagiarism and dishonesty are being punished at Harvard and, if so, how heavily. One begins to wonder whether perhaps the nation’s foremost or near foremost university would be betteroff with someone less attuned to the dishonest culture of modern American life, especially the culture of Washington, D.C. where he was for awhile a player, and more attuned to the demands of plain honesty.*

Re: Plagiarism and Gonzalezism

January 26, 2005

[[[audio]]]

Re: Plagiarism and Gonzalezism
From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com

Dear Colleagues:

Catalyzed by the Ogletree and Tribe affairs, the print media has of late paid somewhat more attention to plagiarism in academia, i.e., to a form of gross dishonesty in the academic world. Thus, in mid December The Chronicle of Higher Education carried several articles, totaling eleven and one-half pages, on academic plagiarism of one kind and another. To my mind, the major conclusions were these: Plagiarism is widespread in the academic world. Sometimes a work is plagiarized wholesale. Some people seem to have virtually made a career of plagiarism. Professors often steal the work of graduate students -- sometimes even feel they have a right to do so. Very little is done about plagiarism. Professors who are victimized by it are discouraged from taking action. Students whose work is ripped off by their mentors are in a hopeless position: they cannot take action because they depend on those mentors for the recommendations without which they can have no careers. Academic associations are loathe to act against plagiarists; it is too much effort, and can cost them money. Universities don’t want to act against plagiarists; this can require too much effort and can result in lawsuits, by accused plagiarists, that result in adverse publicity and that are expensive to fight even though the plagiarists most often lose. The consequence of all these prior conclusions is that plagiarism is punished infrequently, is punished lightly when punished at all, and generally is a subject which is not publicly disclosed but instead is just swept under the rug when discovered.

This writer has to admit to being thunderstruck by the disclosure in The Chronicle of the extent and non-punishment of plagiarism. For plagiarism is a gross form of dishonesty: it is falsely claiming as your own something that is in fact the work of another. What The Chronicle has revealed -- and, shocked as one is, I know of no reason to doubt its reporting -- is that dishonesty has extensively penetrated to the very heart of the academic enterprise: to the writing of articles and books. One has gotten used to the unfortunate spin, baloney and, as Paul Fussell might put it, advertising-like exaggerations regularly emanating from university administrations, public relations offices, and marketing and admissions departments. All of these are a form of dishonesty: dishonesty by leaving out important facts, dishonesty by leaving out an important but differing side of the story, dishonesty by gross exaggeration. But now dishonesty appears to have penetrated to a core raison d’etre of universities.

One occasionally reads various supposed justifications for the dishonesty: "I was writing not for scholars, but (in an accessible way) for the general public" is a favorite one. "I was not writing a peer-reviewed piece," is another. These are bovine bleatings. In the May/June 2001 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, the executive editor of Commonweal, Paul Baumann, quoted someone named Lars-Erik Nelson as saying that "‘The enemy isn’t liberalism. The enemy isn’t conservatism. The enemy is bullshit.’" That crystallized this blogger’s basic philosophy more concisely, and more pithily, than the writer himself has ever been able to. This enemy is everywhere in today’s America, and the alleged justifications for plagiarism given above are themselves examples of the enemy as defined by Nelson. So what if one was not writing for scholars but for the public, or was not writing for peer review? Regardless of why he or she is writing, the plagiarist is being dishonest, is claiming as his own creation something that was the creation of another.

It is interesting, isn’t it, that the academic world often claims a superior morality? Just as interesting to this blogger personally is that, much as he has reviled so many of the academic world’s characteristics in books and articles, he lately finds himself wondering whether the claim to superior morality might conceivably be true on a percentage basis (on sort of a man for man or pound for pound basis) in view of the extent to which the figuratively insane right wing has captured the government of this country and the thinking of its citizens, and has persuaded citizens and country alike to adopt the historically crazed concept of peace through continuous war, peace through destroying cities, and through bombing and shelling civilians, women and children and calling it collateral damage. But be all this as it may, how can the academic world claim superior morality when its members widely practice, and when it does not punish but instead sweeps under the rug, the gross dishonesty of plagiarism?

All of which brings one back to the matter mentioned in the opening phrase of this blog, the Tribe and Ogletree affairs. Tribe admitted his plagiarism and, while Ogletree seems to resist admitting very much, it nonetheless seems plain that he had assistants write parts of a recent book for which he claimed the entire credit. This is a form of plagiarism and, whatever name it goes by, is certainly the dishonest claiming of credit for the work of others. Yet one has no idea whether Harvard has punished Tribe in any way, and the same is true regarding Ogletree even though he says he was punished in some unspecified way. According to an email sent to one of my colleagues (who had emailed him) by Larry Summers, "The University, as a matter of policy, does not comment on individual reviews of the conduct of faculty members. ("Rest assured, however," Summers’ email added, "that we take these matters very seriously.") So Harvard’s policy, at least according to Summers (or whomever may have written the email for him if he did not write it himself), is not to talk about what, if any, punishment has been or may be assessed against Tribe and Ogletree. And the rest of the university, especially the Dean of the law school, seems to be following suit in regard to Tribe and Ogletree.

Whether Summers’ email is itself accurate -- is honest -- is conceivably subject to some question, which is surely ironic when the subject, plagiarism, is a form of dishonesty to begin with. For Harvard commented in December, in a pretty self justifying manner, on the situation of an assistant professor (Ali A. Sultan) who had plagiarized in portions of a grant application, had been investigated by the Harvard School of Public Health, which turned its report over to a federal agency, and ultimately resigned last September after a federal watchdog group issued a condemnation and the Feds assessed a punishment against him. Harvard’s December, 2004 comments were after the fact, but nonetheless were comments relating to an "individual revie[w] of the conduct of [a] faculty membe[r]," which Summers’ email claims Harvard does not do.
But with regard to Tribe and Ogletree, Harvard seems to be sweeping the matter under the rug as much as possible (whereas the punishments suffered by Joe Ellis at Mount Holyoke are public knowledge). One is tempted to remark that Larry Summers, having previously shown himself to have a big mouth on more than one occasion, has chosen to remain quiet when he should have spoken out. For Harvard remains the leader, at minimum it is one of the foremost leaders, in American higher education. It sets an example for others. A good example for Harvard to set would be one showing that dishonesty through outright plagiarism, or through using and claiming assistants’ work as one’s own, is not to be tolerated and will be punished heavily. A bad example is one of silence, of sweeping dishonesty under the rug, and creating the understanding, and the likely well taken suspicion, that dishonesty is being punished lightly if at all. The latter example, the bad example, is the one Harvard is setting. Academia’s claims to moral leadership, whatever merits they may have in other ways, ring hollow in the area of honesty when the brightest star (or one of them) in the academic firmament appears not to be punishing at all, or not to be punishing heavily, serious dishonesty by two of its professors.
* * * * *

Dishonesty, and the enemy as defined by Lars Erik-Nelson, is all around us in this country. It is everywhere. It pervades politics, is rampant in big business, is a way of life in the academy, is practiced on the personal level. After nearly 50 years of adulthood, one is heartily sick of it, one indeed thinks it the fundamental flaw of American society, the tragic flaw, in the Greeks’ sense, that is most likely to bring low a nation that was once the hope of the world, as Jefferson and Lincoln thought it so long ago.

The battle of today, Lincoln once wrote, is not for today alone, but for a vast future. This correlated with his view of America as the last best hope of earth. Since 1941 America has indeed played the role of last best hope of earth, sometimes playing it laudably, at other times playing it hypocritically, militaristically and dishonestly. And if there is one thing that is going to sink us, it is dishonest conduct and its often conjoined twin, hypocritical conduct. It is indeed lies and hypocrisy, from WMDs to torture, that are a major lens through which much of the world sees us today (excluding, of course, the Bushian toady who is Prime Minister of Britain).
Since much of the world already sees us as liars and hypocrites, it is only the more deplorable that the nominee for Attorney General has to be considered, can only be considered, a liar.
Alberto Gonzalez not only repeatedly told Senators at his hearing that America does not use torture, but afterwards he compounded this lie. In written answers to questions propounded by Senators, he repeatedly said that America does not use torture under any circumstances. This repeated statement can only be an intentional, knowing lie, unless Gonzalez has been on the moon for the last year or so. It is well established that the CIA and the military have tortured prisoners, and the latest information to become available is that the deaths of somewhere between 30 and 40 prisoners are being investigated as homicides or suspected homicides. And while Gonzalez claimed, at the hearing and in his answers, that George Bush has directed that torture is not to be used, recently it became established, and Gonzalez even had to admit in his written answers, that Bush’s directive is not applicable to the CIA or some other intelligence operatives. (One is aware that, given the way Washington works, Gonzalez’ answers were almost surely written by some highly educated lackey(s) rather than by Gonzalez himself. But Gonzalez is nevertheless responsible for them: they were submitted as his answers, not the lackey(s), and it is he, not the lackey(s), who is the nominee for Attorney General).

So, to this nation’s dire discredit, we are about to get, as Attorney General, a man who is a liar and who has lied about a matter of great concern to America and the world. (One wonders what Lincoln or Jefferson would think about a supposed last best hope of earth that tortures people.) To top it off, lying to Congress is, if memory serves, a crime, so that our top federal law enforcement officer will be not only a liar, but an unindicted criminal. And the Democrats, instead of standing for something, have said they are going to vote for this guy (although a few of them recently have said they may change their minds). Do the Democrats wonder why people think their party isn’t worth a damn?

Which brings me to my last point. Gonzalez, like Summers, is from Harvard. (Gonzalez went to law school there.) It would be a bit much to put the blame on Harvard for the rise of the lying society in which we live. Yet Harvard is not wholly free of guilt, either. In my own lifetime, though there was some major league lying in the Eisenhower administration (e.g., regarding the U2), the rise of spin and phony image meistering really got going, in my opinion, with the administration of the famously Harvard trained President, John Kennedy, who used lots of other Harvard men too (e.g., the lying McNamara, a graduate of the Harvard Business School).

Harvard was also home to leading proponents of realpolitik (e.g., Kissinger), a philosophy that led to decades of dishonesty and hypocrisy. So Harvard is no shrinking innocent when it comes to America being a nation of dishonesty. As the leader in American academia, or, at minimum, as one of the leaders, it has given us people who seem not to know the meaning of, and to care less about, truth. How much more unfortunate is it, then, and how disappointing, that a great institution like Harvard is now under the "leadership" of someone who, while claiming only to be interested in fostering inquiry into the truth when he said that women are perhaps inherently inferior in math and science, nonetheless does not care enough about restoring honesty (i.e., truth) as the desideratum at Harvard, or in the country, to announce whether two serious cases of plagiarism and dishonesty are being punished at Harvard and, if so, how heavily. One begins to wonder whether perhaps the nation’s foremost or near foremost university would be betteroff with someone less attuned to the dishonest culture of modern American life, especially the culture of Washington, D.C. where he was for awhile a player, and more attuned to the demands of plain honesty.*

*This posting represents the personal views of Lawrence R. Velvel. If you wish to respond to this email/blog, please email your response to me at velvel@mslaw.edu. Your response may be posted on the blog if you have no objection; please tell me if you do object.

Re: A Nuremberg Lesson

----- Original Message -----

From: Horton, Scott (x2820)
To: 'Dean Lawrence R. Velvel'
Sent: Friday, January 21, 2005 2:15 PM
Subject: RE:

Dear Dean Velvel, Since this evolved, in a sense, from an email I sent you, I thought you might want to see it:

The Los Angeles Times
COMMENTARY
A Nuremberg Lesson
Torture scandal began far above 'rotten apples.'
By Scott Horton

Horton is a New York attorney and a lecturer in international humanitarian law at Columbia University. January 20, 2005

"This so-called ill treatment and torture in detention centers, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by the prisoners who were freed … were not, as some assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual prison guards, their deputies, and men who laid violent hands on the detainees."

Most people who hear this quote today assume it was uttered by a senior officer of the Bush administration. Instead, it comes from one of history's greatest mass murderers, Rudolf Hoess, the SS commandant at Auschwitz. Such a confusion demonstrates the depth of the United States' moral dilemma in its treatment of detainees in the war on terror. In past weeks, we have been treated to a show trial of sorts at Ft. Hood, Texas, starring Cpl. Charles Graner and other low-ranking military figures. The Graner court-martial and the upcoming trial of Pfc. Lynndie England are being hyped as proof of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's explanation for the Abu Ghraib prison tortures: A few "rotten apples" — not U.S. policy or those who created it — are to blame.

Graner entered a "Nuremberg defense" — arguing that he was acting on orders of his superiors. This defense was rejected in Ft. Hood as it was in Nuremberg 60 years ago, when Nazi war criminals were found guilty of crimes against humanity. A misled American public can choose to see in the Graner verdict the proof of the "rotten apples" theory and of the notion that Graner and the others acted on their own initiative. But what it should see is a larger Nuremberg lesson: Those who craft immoral policy deserve the harshest punishment. Consider the memorandum written by Alberto Gonzales — then the president's attorney, now his nominee for attorney general. He wrote that the Geneva Convention was "obsolete" when it came to the war on terror. Gonzales reasoned that our adversaries were not parties to the convention and that the Geneva concept was ill suited to anti-terrorist warfare.

In 1941, General-Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the head of Hitler's Wehrmacht, mustered identical arguments against recognizing the Geneva rights of Soviet soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front. Keitel even called Geneva "obsolete," a remark noted by U.S. prosecutors at Nuremberg, who cited it as an aggravating circumstance in seeking, and obtaining, the death penalty. Keitel was executed in 1946. Keitel's remarks were made in response to a valiant memorandum prepared by German military lawyers who argued that the interests of Germany's soldiers, and the interests of morale and good order, would be served by adhering to the Geneva treaty.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, echoing the opinions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and U.S. military lawyers, sent Gonzales a letter that hit the same notes. Rumsfeld and the White House would have us believe that there is no connection between policy documents exploring torture and evasion of the Geneva Convention and the misconduct on the ground in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan — misconduct that has produced at least 30 deaths in detention associated with "extreme" interrogation techniques.

But the Nuremberg tradition contradicts such a contention. At Nuremberg, U.S. prosecutors held German officials accountable for the consequences of their policy decisions without offering proof that these decisions were implemented with the knowledge of the policymakers. The existence of the policies and evidence that the conduct contemplated in them occurred was taken as proof enough. There is no doubt that individuals like Graner and England should be held to account. But where is justice — and where are the principles the U.S. proudly advanced at Nuremberg — if those in the administration and the military who seem most culpable for the tragedy not only escape punishment but in some cases are slated for promotion?

Next week, the world will commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz. A memorial prayer for the death camp victims will be read at the United Nations. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer will attend to acknowledge that the depravities at Auschwitz were not the work of a few "rotten apples" but the responsibility of a nation. Such a courageous assumption of responsibility should provide a model for the United States, which can still act to salvage its tradition and its honor.

Scott Horton
1133 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036-6710
Tel: +1 212 336 2820 Fax: +1 212 336 2246 Mobile: +1 917 216 2319
email: shorton@pbwt.com

-----Original Message-----

From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel [mailto:velvel@mslaw.edu]
Sent: Friday, January 21, 2005 1:38 PM
To: Undisclosed-Recipient
Subject:

January 21, 2005

Dear Colleagues:

The attached email on the use of history to shed light on the present was received from Professor Tony D’Amato of Northwestern University Law School. A brief response to the email follows it.

Response to Mr. Ellis:

President Bush's legacy is not at all what you or George Washington think it will be. Bush intends to establish permanent American military bases and airports in Iraq. These will not only project American power throughout the Middle East, but will also influence who will buy oil from the Iraqis and Kurds and at what prices. Bush has no interest in saving the Iraqis or removing violence from their country or even in declaring our victory there. Clinton's way of "brokering" the Israel-Palestine standoff was to offer enormous monetary bribes to both sides. Bush will do it much cheaper and more effectively; he'll simply rattle his military arm in Iraq and let the two sides figure out their own way out of their territorial dispute.

As much as I agree with each and every well-chosen reason Dean Velvel gives for bringing historical knowledge to bear upon current events, it has to be what I would call strategic historical knowledge. I think Niall Ferguson has it exactly right: a historian must inquire into the value of the things that people didn't do, and also the things they decided not to do, instead of just reporting the things they did. To focus on the latter, as nearly every historian does, is to adopt a seductive view of history as cause-and-effect, that is, everything that the historian reports as having happened becomes the cause of everything that the historian reports as having happened next.

This gives us at best an extraordinarily distorted one-dimensional linear view of a rich three-dimensional past. Indeed, to repeat one of my pet peeves, it is the reason why history is today so undervalued in the academy. Historians have painted themselves into a historiographical corner that forbids them to look at the past the way past historical players viewed it stragetically day by day, and instead view the past as a coherent narrative that can only be changed at the peril of losing an appointment in a history department by infuriating a tenured historian who has a vested interest in preserving his or her definitive account of the past.

Tony D'Amato


January 21, 2005

Dear Tony:

If I correctly understand one of your major points, you are saying that, in using history to shed light on current problems, one should consider not only what was done historically, but also what was not done, i.e., alternative roads in the wood not taken. This is called counterfactual history, of course. While historians tend to abhor it, I see nothing wrong with considering roads not taken as well as roads taken. So, if I correctly grasp your point, I agree with it.

I would, however, make an additional point. Counterfactuals can be a more reliable guide, one would think, if the counterfactual situation were also factual and successful at some other time or place, and if the course followed instead of the counterfactual one led to bad results. I may have made that sound complicated, but it is actually quite simple. (Geniuses make the complicated simple. I make the simple complicated.)

Here is a readily understandable example of what I mean. For the first few years of the Civil War in the east, Union generals time and again gave battle, lost, and retreated behind the Rappahannock for a few months, gave battle, lost, and retreated behind the Rappahannock again for a few months. Suppose one argues that the Union would likely have been successful earlier if a general had instead given continuous battle -- i.e., had maintained continuous contact with Lee’s army and never stopped fighting it until the rebels had no more men or resources. (Lincoln seemed to believe that something like this was the path to victory for the Union -- after one of the great early battles that ended in a defeat for the Union he said something to the effect that, if there were a battle like that every week, the Confederacy would soon be out of men. And continuous contact between opposing forces was, of course, the way of fighting in the world wars of the 20th century.)

The argument that the Union would have been successful earlier if there had been continuous contact is based on the counterfactual hypothesis of nonstop battle. In this example, the course actually taken early in the war -- intermittent fighting instead of continuous fighting -- produced bad results. The counterfactual situation -- continuous contact and continuous fighting -- was followed later, under Grant, and it produced good results -- it led to the destruction of Lee’s army and the defeat of the Confederacy. That continuous contact succeeded later lends strength to the argument that the course not taken earlier would have been successful if it had been taken earlier.

(I recognize that possibly cutting against this is another fact -- that the Union generals in the east, prior to Grant, suffered from varying degrees of incompetency. Yet, had a general who was a fighter actually done what Lincoln wanted -- had a general who was a fighter grabbed on to Lee’s army to incessantly "chew and choke" (as Lincoln later put it) until the end, it is reasonable to think that Lee and the Confederacy would have been finished off earlier due to much faster attrition. In any event, my point is not that success at another time or place proves the validity of a counterfactual, but only that it makes the counterfactual stronger.)

Sincerely yours,

Larry

Re: Professor D'Amato's Response to Mr. Ellis

January 21, 2005

Dear Colleagues:

The attached email on the use of history to shed light on the present was received from Professor Tony D’Amato of Northwestern University Law School. A brief response to the email follows it.

Response to Mr. Ellis:

President Bush's legacy is not at all what you or George Washington think it will be. Bush intends to establish permanent American military bases and airports in Iraq. These will not only project American power throughout the Middle East, but will also influence who will buy oil from the Iraqis and Kurds and at what prices. Bush has no interest in saving the Iraqis or removing violence from their country or even in declaring our victory there. Clinton's way of "brokering" the Israel-Palestine standoff was to offer enormous monetary bribes to both sides. Bush will do it much cheaper and more effectively; he'll simply rattle his military arm in Iraq and let the two sides figure out their own way out of their territorial dispute.

As much as I agree with each and every well-chosen reason Dean Velvel gives for bringing historical knowledge to bear upon current events, it has to be what I would call strategic historical knowledge. I think Niall Ferguson has it exactly right: a historian must inquire into the value of the things that people didn't do, and also the things they decided not to do, instead of just reporting the things they did. To focus on the latter, as nearly every historian does, is to adopt a seductive view of history as cause-and-effect, that is, everything that the historian reports as having happened becomes the cause of everything that the historian reports as having happened next. This gives us at best an extraordinarily distorted one-dimensional linear view of a rich three-dimensional past.

Indeed, to repeat one of my pet peeves, it is the reason why history is today so undervalued in the academy. Historians have painted themselves into a historiographical corner that forbids them to look at the past the way past historical players viewed it stragetically day by day, and instead view the past as a coherent narrative that can only be changed at the peril of losing an appointment in a history department by infuriating a tenured historian who has a vested interest in preserving his or her definitive account of the past.

Tony D'Amato


January 21, 2005

Dear Tony:

If I correctly understand one of your major points, you are saying that, in using history to shed light on current problems, one should consider not only what was done historically, but also what was not done, i.e., alternative roads in the wood not taken. This is called counterfactual history, of course. While historians tend to abhor it, I see nothing wrong with considering roads not taken as well as roads taken. So, if I correctly grasp your point, I agree with it.

I would, however, make an additional point. Counterfactuals can be a more reliable guide, one would think, if the counterfactual situation were also factual and successful at some other time or place, and if the course followed instead of the counterfactual one led to bad results. I may have made that sound complicated, but it is actually quite simple. (Geniuses make the complicated simple. I make the simple complicated.)

Here is a readily understandable example of what I mean. For the first few years of the Civil War in the east, Union generals time and again gave battle, lost, and retreated behind the Rappahannock for a few months, gave battle, lost, and retreated behind the Rappahannock again for a few months. Suppose one argues that the Union would likely have been successful earlier if a general had instead given continuous battle -- i.e., had maintained continuous contact with Lee’s army and never stopped fighting it until the rebels had no more men or resources. (Lincoln seemed to believe that something like this was the path to victory for the Union -- after one of the great early battles that ended in a defeat for the Union he said something to the effect that, if there were a battle like that every week, the Confederacy would soon be out of men. And continuous contact between opposing forces was, of course, the way of fighting in the world wars of the 20th century.)

The argument that the Union would have been successful earlier if there had been continuous contact is based on the counterfactual hypothesis of nonstop battle. In this example, the course actually taken early in the war -- intermittent fighting instead of continuous fighting -- produced bad results. The counterfactual situation -- continuous contact and continuous fighting -- was followed later, under Grant, and it produced good results -- it led to the destruction of Lee’s army and the defeat of the Confederacy. That continuous contact succeeded later lends strength to the argument that the course not taken earlier would have been successful if it had been taken earlier.

(I recognize that possibly cutting against this is another fact -- that the Union generals in the east, prior to Grant, suffered from varying degrees of incompetency. Yet, had a general who was a fighter actually done what Lincoln wanted -- had a general who was a fighter grabbed on to Lee’s army to incessantly "chew and choke" (as Lincoln later put it) until the end, it is reasonable to think that Lee and the Confederacy would have been finished off earlier due to much faster attrition. In any event, my point is not that success at another time or place proves the validity of a counterfactual, but only that it makes the counterfactual stronger.)

Sincerely yours,

Larry

Re: Joseph Ellis And Bringing Knowledge Of The Past To Bear Upon The Present

January 20, 2005

[[[audio]]]

Re: Joseph Ellis And Bringing Knowledge Of The Past To Bear Upon The Present
From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com

Dear Colleagues:

I should start out by saying, in the interest of full disclosure, that I am prejudiced in favor of Joe Ellis. This is true notwithstanding the incomprehensible actions which led to a scandal a few years ago, and for which he has paid a price. Wholly aside from the quality of his books, there are several personal reasons for my favoritism. About four years ago Ellis was willing to be the first author to appear on our school’s one hour long, book review television program called Books of Our Times. (Now there are 55 authors who have appeared.) More recently he made gratifying comments about a book this blogger wrote. This year he will appear again on Books of Our Times to discuss his newest book, a biography of George Washington called His Excellency. And he has always been a real gentleman to deal with. So, with the reader keeping the writer’s favorable prejudice in mind, this blogger wishes to discuss (favorably, of course) an op-ed column that Ellis recently wrote for the Los Angeles Times and that appeared in The Boston Globe as well.

Frankly speaking, I assume -- I don’t know this, but am assuming it -- that the column got into the papers in the same way that the book and newspaper industries normally work together. That is to say, to flog sales publicists at big name publishers ask big name newspapers to carry a column by a big name author relating to the subject of a new book the author wrote. Because the publisher and the author are big names, the big name newspaper agrees. This typical arrangement is symptomatic of the symbiotic elephantiasis which exists everywhere in this nation and is ruining the country: It is typical of the fact that, in every walk of life, only the huge in size, huge in money, huge in reputation, and/or huge in connections can really get anywhere.
This fact, incidentally, is one of the reasons for the rise of the poor man’s printing press called The Internet, which gives a small opening to people who are otherwise shut out regardless of competence -- just as, conversely, others are insiders regardless of competence.

Be all this as it may, Ellis’ recent column (which is attached) exemplifies something that historians ought to do but are generally unwilling to do. In his column Ellis draws on his historical knowledge to discuss the current political situation. He brings the lens of history to bear on the present. This writer does not necessarily agree with everything Ellis says in bringing history to bear -- for example, unlike Ellis, this blogger thinks that thoroughgoing reform of the Internal Revenue Code could be "the stuff of a great legacy." The point, however, is that Ellis focuses historical learning on the present in order to make better sense of the present and in order to put it in a longer term perspective.

History, of course, is not necessarily prologue. It is equally true that people argue about what history shows (so that history has been called "argument without end"). Yet history does reveal patterns of thought, action and results, and shows that certain courses of action are likely to be fraught with difficulties and disasters because they usually or always have produced them in the past. As has lately begun to be recognized by a few, people run their daily lives on the basis of expectations that are informed by their own personal histories -- people avoid modes of conduct which have historically led them to personal failures in the past, and continue modes that have been successful. This is called intelligence, while people who continue modes of action that have regularly led to bad personal outcomes are regarded as lacking self awareness. It is not mere anthropomorphism to say that what is true at the personal level can be true at the societal level too, i.e., historically some courses of action generally seem to work better than others. If this were not so, why do we as a nation generally consider capitalism to be economically superior to communism? Why do we consider freedom to be more conducive to human happiness and progress than dictatorship?

When you think about it, the point being made here is pretty simple, even simple minded. Yet people try to resist it, or almost consciously remain ignorant of it, because it can be in opposition to courses of action they desire society to take. Examples of resistance and/or ignorance abound. To take but one sharp-stick-in-the-eye example, during the Viet Nam War, there was little if any discussion-- if memory serves there was no discussion until 1970 -- of one of the most pertinent parallels in American history, the Philippine Insurrection. That event was pretty much lost to our history because of the jingoistic writing of our history that had prevailed since inception. And certainly the government and the right wing, had they known about the Philippine mess, would have wanted no focus on it because such focus would have pointed to the possibility of the horrors which in fact occurred in Viet Nam. Better, therefore, to ignore the Philippine Insurrection.

One might make an analogous point regarding Iraq. To believe in the possibility of true success there -- true success as opposed to failure papered over by bovine-defecation-rhetoric from the administration -- one pretty much has to ignore the lessons of the Philippines, of Viet Nam, and even of our own American Revolution, where a ragtag army checked what was far and away the world’s most powerful military force, and for several years did so without foreign intervention. (Foreign intervention came only belatedly in the form of the French, who are now reviled by the conservatives and the war mongers of America. One might say, in contradiction to Pershing, "Lafayette, we are leaving you.")

But, of course, those who desired to invade Iraq, and to do so with an army vastly insufficient to post-invasion purposes, did not want to know about, and did not care about, history. They were and are in the grip of the same ignorant disease which seizes each new generation in the stock market when there is a big bubble, and which was the stuff of boyish fantasy in Faulkners’ Intruder In The Dust: This time it will be different. This time there supposedly are new and different factors of technology, power, or economy. This time basic human factors which deeply affected the past will not exist or will be inconsequential. This time actions that led to disasters in previous generations will lead instead to success.

The idea that this time we shall succeed where history says we are likely to fail is assisted by another factor -- one which history again tells us is always present. I speak of overselling people. People are not eager to accept changes or to believe a new course of action will produce a much better situation. Therefore, to gain the needed acceptance or belief, politicians always oversell the expected beneficial results of a new course of action which they favor, and oversell as well the dire consequences of not following their proposed action. As Paul Fussell says, the pols talk like advertising men. If we entered World War I, it would be the war to make the world safe for democracy and the war to end all wars. Munich would create "peace in our time." We had to fight in Viet Nam to stop rampant communism. Otherwise we would have to fight the Commies in San Francisco. Putting an end to discrimination, or implementing affirmative action, will result in equal education for all. Fighting Gulf War II will turn the Middle East into one big democracy. Not fighting it will give free rein to terrorists. Social security is in a major crisis and must be replaced by private accounts. By making these exaggerated kinds of advertising-like statements, and by repeating them often enough, politicians gain the support they need for their proposed actions even though a more dispassionate and objective analysis of historical analogies (and other factors) would warn people against believing the exaggerated.

To help avoid the preposterous "this time it will be different" syndrome, and to puncture the false, advertising-like overselling which helps lead to it, historians ought to set forth the historical analogies for the public and ought to explain what the analogies tell us is more or less likely. Naturally, historians will disagree among themselves. But such disagreement is no reason not to raise the quality of our decisionmaking by giving us pertinent historical information. It is a little hard to believe, for example, that people would have been quite so eager to embrace the Bushian bull about Iraq -- would have been quite so willing to embrace the claimed presence of WMDs, or the claim that democratic change would occur all over the Middle East, or the claim of only a short war -- if historians had reminded us of pertinent analogies. Would people have been so quick to accept the correctness of claims of WMDs in Iraq if historians had reminded us that America had almost certainly, or sometimes had definitely, been mistaken about other casus bellis such as the Spanish supposedly blowing up the Maine and attacks on U.S. destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf? Would people have been so quick to accept the possibility of a short, quick overwhelmingly successful war if historians had reminded us of what happened in the Philippines after the quick and complete victory over Spain, had reminded us that both sides had expected only a short war in our own Civil War, had reminded us of how long the Viet Namese had been prepared to hold out through guerrilla warfare and did hold out even though we won all or nearly all the set-piece battles, had reminded us of what happened to Napoleon in Spain, had reminded us of the fear near the end of the Civil War of endless years of guerrilla warfare even though the Confederate armies were smashed, had reminded us of the French experience in Algeria (not to mention in Nam)?

But historians don’t like to bring their knowledge of history to bear on the present. There seem to be two reasons. One is that historians are historians because they love history -- not the present, but history. So they are reluctant to talk about, and sometimes feel they don’t even know all that much about, the present. The other reason is that they fear that they will trim their historical views to suit their inclinations about the present if they discuss the latter in terms of the former. This is not an insensible fear. One saw it exemplified when lots of liberal historians signed onto ads that used alleged law and history to attempt to impeach the impeachment of Bill Clinton, when in reality lots, perhaps most, of the signers knew little or nothing about the law or history of impeachment and the ads were in significant respects wrong.
Yet, while it may be true that there will be historians whose comments will merely reflect partisan desires, there will be others who will make efforts at more dispassionate analysis. And there will, as well, be historians on both sides of an issue. Victor Davis Hanson lives, after all. So does John Keegan. When all things are considered (pace NPR), if historians were to bring their knowledge of the past to bear on the present, it is far more likely that we would get a larger base of high class information to use in making decisions than that we would get only a prejudiced, one-sided view of matters.

So far, however, historians, as said, have generally not done this. So Joe Ellis’ column lies far more in the realm of trail blazing than in the realm of the conventional. He should be applauded for blazing the trail, however, regardless of whether or not one agrees with his substantive views, or partially agrees with them, and regardless of whether or not the column is the result of the prevalent societal elephantiasis and the relationships this engenders. Applauding him, one hopes that other historians would follow his example. One suspects we would have fewer debacles if they did.*
_______________
This posting represents the personal views of Lawrence R. Velvel. If you wish to respond to this email/blog, please email your response to me at velvel@mslaw.edu. Your response may be posted on the blog if you have no objection; please tell me if you do object.


JOSEPH J. ELLIS
Wisdom from the other George W.
By Joseph J. Ellis January 8, 2005
WHEN F. SCOTT Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in American life, he was not thinking of the American presidency. But the dominant historical pattern reinforces Fitzgerald's point. Second terms are seldom as successful as first, often disappointing, sometimes disastrous. Most recently they have been defined by scandal (i.e. Watergate, Irangate, Monica Lewinsky).
The core reason for this problematic pattern might be called the duck-and-chickens syndrome. A second-term president is a lame duck with only a limited time to exercise executive power and with reduced authority to maintain discipline within the party. And the chickens come home to roost during a second term when unresolved problems from the first term evolve into major crises. For President Bush the two large chickens are Iraq and the deficit. The potential for sensational scandals also looms in the case of the Halliburton contract, the disarray in the CIA, and Tom DeLay's shenanigans. All this bodes ill for Bush.
Pundits inside the Beltway have been offering their up-close wisdom to Bush since the election. I don't live inside the Beltway; I have been living for the last four years in the 18th century, writing a biography of George Washington. So mine is a more far-away version of advice. Here is the conceit: What would the first George W. urge upon the current George W. in order to avoid the second-term syndrome?
First, the Iraq insurgency. Washington led a successful insurgency against the dominant military and economic power in the world. He shaped his winning strategy around the recognition that the British occupation faced insurmountable obstacles if the bulk of the population resented its presence. In part because of our own anti-imperial origins as a nation, the United States is ill equipped to replace the British Empire as the presiding imperial presence in the Middle East for the next 50 years. Iraq is likely to become an open wound that bleeds all over Bush's second term as long as our troops remain the face of the occupation.
Sometime after the Iraq elections this month, and before the US congressional elections in 2006, we need to declare victory in Iraq and withdraw, perhaps leaving a residual force in northern Iraq to protect the Kurds. Our removal of Saddam Hussein has given Iraqis the opportunity to reinvent their quasi-country, but that will take decades, and the struggle must be theirs to win or lose.
Second, the terrorist threat. As commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, then as president, Washington faced primal threats to American survival as a nation. The threat posed by Islamic fundamentalism is a secondary rather than a primal threat, meaning that it places lives and lifestyles at risk, but not the survival of the nation itself. Washington would regard our current reaction to 9/11 as excessive. We faced more mortal threats to our national security in his own time and afterward (the American Revolution, the Civil War and the Cold War qualify).
Against terrorism, confidence rather than fear is the proper posture, in great part because of the institutions Washington and his generation bequeathed to us. The Islamic fundamentalists believe that Allah is on their side. But history is on ours.
Third, the legacy issue. First terms are about reelection, second terms are about legacy. Washington's legacy was established in his farewell address in 1796. It made two points: First, that America's future as an independent nation lay to the west rather than across the Atlantic in Europe; second, that American foreign policy should be governed by interest rather than ideals.
Bush's proposed domestic agenda -- the reform of the tax code and privatization of Social Security -- is not the stuff of a great legacy. It is also likely to run afoul of congressional factions ingenious at administering death by a thousand cuts.
There are really only two prospective executive initiatives capable of taking Bush to legacy land. The first is a bold scientific program -- on the scale of the Manhattan Project or the space initiative of the Kennedy administration -- designed to make the United States energy independent within the next decade. The second is a concerted effort to resolve the Palestinian issue by brokering a deal with the Israelis and the post-Arafat Palestinian Authority. Both efforts have greater potential to change the toxic chemistry of the current Middle East than any enduring US military presence in the region.
These are my own translations of Washington's wisdom. We cannot fly the great man himself in from the 18th century. And even if we could, he would not know about weapons of mass destruction, Medicare, or even Iraq. But if I have him right, he can still speak to us across the ages, and President Bush (or should it be Karl Rove?) might benefit from listening.
Joseph J. Ellis, author of "His Excellency," a biography of George Washington, wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.

Dear Dean Luddite

January 19, 2005

Dear Colleagues:

I received the enclosed email from the enormously-accomplished Alan Rothenberg in response to my comments on (non)use of computers.

Re use of computers:

Dear Dean Luddite,

A further reason not to use computers: When my friend, the President of FIFA, Sepp Blatter(also of our DoDo Bird vintage) shocked me by starting to send emails, I asked him if he utilized any other feature of the computer. He replied, "Absolutely not. I am advised that after the age of 30 a person starts to lose brain cells and I don’t want to devote any of my diminishing supply of brain cells for functions I find marginal at best."

January 19, 2005

Re: Article On Alberto Gonzalez by R. Jeffrey Smith And
Dan Eggen Of The Washington Post
From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com

Dear Colleagues:

Two Washington Post reporters, R. Jeffrey Smith and Dan Eggen, have been doing superior work in regard to Alberto Gonzalez. A lengthy, fact filled article by them appears in The Post’s National Weekly Edition of January 10-16, 2005. Because Gonzalez is the nominee for Attorney General, I thought it important to post Smith and Eggen’s piece even though it is lengthy. It is attached.*


washingtonpost.com

Gonzales Helped Set the Course for Detainees Justice Nominee's Hearings Likely to Focus on Interrogation Policies By R. Jeffrey Smith and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, January 5, 2005; Page A01

In March 2002, U.S. elation at the capture of al Qaeda operations chief Abu Zubaida was turning to frustration as he refused to bend to CIA interrogation. But the agency's officers, determined to wring more from Abu Zubaida through threatening interrogations, worried about being charged with violating domestic and international proscriptions on torture. They asked for a legal review -- the first ever by the government -- of how much pain and suffering a U.S. intelligence officer could inflict on a prisoner without violating a 1994 law that imposes severe penalties, including life imprisonment and execution, on convicted torturers. The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel took up the task, and at least twice during the drafting, top administration officials were briefed on the results.

White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales chaired the meetings on this issue, which included detailed descriptions of interrogation techniques such as"waterboarding," a tactic intended to make detainees feel as if they are drowning. He raised no objections and, without consulting military and State Department experts in the laws of torture and war, approved an August 2002 memo that gave CIA interrogators the legal blessings they sought. Gonzales, working closely with a small group of conservative legal officials at the White House, the Justice Department and the Defense Department -- and overseeing deliberations that generally excluded potential dissenters --helped chart other legal paths in the handling and imprisonment of suspected terrorists and the applicability of international conventions to U.S. military and law enforcement activities.

His former colleagues say that throughout this period, Gonzales -- a confidant of George W. Bush's from Texas and the president's nominee to be the next attorney general -- often repeated a phrase used by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to spur tougher anti-terrorism policies: "Are we being forward-leaning enough?" But one of the mysteries that surround Gonzales is the extent to which these new legal approaches are his own handiwork rather than the work of others, particularly Vice President Cheney's influential legal counsel, David S. Addington.

Gonzales's involvement in the crafting of the torture memo, and his work on two presidential orders on detainee policy that provoked controversy or judicial censure during Bush's first term, are expected to take center stage at Senate Judiciary Committee hearings tomorrow on Gonzales's nomination to become attorney general. The outlines of Gonzales's actions are known, but new details emerged in interviews with colleagues and other officials, some of whom spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they were involved in confidential government policy deliberations.

On at least two of the most controversial policies endorsed by Gonzales, officials familiar with the events say the impetus for action came from Addington -- another reflection of Cheney's outsize influence with the president and the rest of the government. Addington, universally described as outspokenly conservative, interviewed candidates for appointment as Gonzales's deputy, spoke at Gonzales's morning meetings and, in at least one instance, drafted an early version of a legal memorandum circulated to other departments in Gonzales's name, several sources said. Conceding that such ghostwriting might seem irregular, even though Gonzales was aware of it, one former White House official said it was simply "evidence of the closeness of the relationship" between the two men. But another official familiar with the administration's legal policymaking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because such deliberations are supposed to be confidential, said that Gonzales often acquiesced in policymaking by others.

This might not be the best quality for an official nominated to be attorney general, the nation's top law enforcement job, the administration official said. He added that he thinks Gonzales learned from mistakes during Bush's first term. Supporters of Gonzales depict him as a more pragmatic successor to John D. Ashcroft, and a cautious lawyer who carefully weighs competing points of view while pressing for aggressive anti-terrorism efforts. His critics have expressed alarm at what they regard as his record of excluding dissenting points of view in the development of legal policies that fail to hold up under broader scrutiny and give short shrift to human rights. His nomination has, in short, become another battleground for the debate over whether the administration has acted prudently to forestall another terrorist attack or overreached by legally sanctioning rights abuses.

One thing is clear: Gonzales, 49, enjoys Bush's trust. He has worked directly with the former Texas governor for more than nine years, advising him on sensitive foreign policy and defense matters that rarely -- if ever-- fell within the purview of previous White House counsels. For example, when the Justice Department formally repudiated the legal reasoning of the August 2002 interrogation memo last week in another document that Gonzales reviewed, it was overturning a policy with consequences that Gonzales heard discussed in intimate detail -- to the point of learning what the physiological reactions of detainees might be to the suffering the CIA wanted to inflict, those involved in the deliberations said. The White House said Gonzales and Addington, a former Reagan aide and Pentagon counsel, were unavailable to be interviewed for this article. But asked to comment on whether Gonzales acquiesced too easily on legal policies pushed by others, spokesman Brian Besanceney responded that Gonzales had "served with distinction and with the highest professional standards as alawyer" in private practice, state government and the White House, and he "will continue to do so as attorney general."

A Success Story
Bush has told people that he was attracted by Gonzales's rags-to-riches lifestory. A Texas native and the son of Mexican immigrants, Gonzales served for two years in the Air Force before graduating from Rice University and Harvard Law School. He met Bush during his 1994 gubernatorial campaign, while Gonzales was a partner at the politically connected Houston law firm Vinson & Elkins. Upon election, Bush appointed him as his personal counsel, later as Texas secretary of state and eventually as a justice on the Texas Supreme Court. Within weeks of the 2000 presidential election, Bush tapped Gonzales to be his White House counsel, and Gonzales set about creating what officials there proudly described as one of the most ideologically aligned counsel's offices in years.

Bringing only one associate to Washington from Texas, Gonzales forged his staff instead from a tightknit group of Washington-based former clerks to Supreme Court or appellate judges, all of whom had worked on at least one of three touchstones of the conservative movement: the Whitewater and Monica S. Lewinsky inquiries of former president Bill Clinton, the Bush-Cheney election campaign, and the Florida vote-counting dispute. "It was an office of like-minded" lawyers and "strong personalities," said Bradford A. Berenson, a criminal defense lawyer appointed as one of eight associate counsels in Gonzales's office. "There was not a shrinking violet in the bunch."

"Federalist Society regulars" is the way another former associate counsel, H. Christopher Bartolomucci, described the Gonzales staff and its ideological allies elsewhere in the government, such as Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes II. All were adherents to the theory that the Constitution gives the president considerably more authority than the Congress and the judiciary. One of the clearest examples of this ambition was Gonzales's long-running and ultimately futile battle with the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Gonzales's office, acting as the liaison between the White House and the 10-member bipartisan panel, repeatedly resisted commission demands for access to presidential documents and officials such as national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, prompting angry and public disputes. Gonzales is "a good lawyer and a nice guy, and maybe he was a decent judge for a year, but he didn't bring a lot of political judgment or strategic judgment to their dealings with the commission," a senior commission official said. "He hurt the White House politically by antagonizing the commissioners . . . and all of it for no good reason. In the end, the stuff all came out."Each morning, Gonzales convened round tables at which his staff -- as well as Addington -- related their legal conundrums. Gonzales was "not a domineering personality . . . and he gave us a chance to speak our minds," said Helgi C. Walker, a former clerk for Clarence Thomas who was an associate counsel from 2001 to 2003.

"There was often a lively debate, but at the end it was not clear where Gonzales was," another former colleague said. A second former colleague recalls that in interagency meetings, Gonzales sat in the back and was "unassuming, pleasant and quiet." So discreet was Gonzales about his opinions that one official who worked closely with him for a year said "he never made an impression on me." But Berenson says Gonzales was hardly pushed around by officials who thought they had a monopoly on wisdom. "I didn't have the sense that he was whipping his horses or that they were dragging him along behind them," he said, adding that Gonzales was "neither the tool of an aggressive staff nor the quarterback of a reluctant team."

Current and former White House officials interviewed for this article listed only a few episodes in which Gonzales forcefully pressed a position at odds with ideological conservatives. None was in the terrorism field. Walker said she is aware of criticism that Gonzales "should have been saying 'I believe this or that' " about some of the provocative issues presented to him. "He did not see his job as being about him" but about advocating Bush's interests, she explained. "The judge is not consumed with his own importance, unlike some others in Washington."

Detainee Policy
Unlike many of his predecessors since the Reagan era, Gonzales lacked much experience in federal law and national security matters. So when the Pentagon worried about how to handle expected al Qaeda detainees in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks and the Oct. 7 U.S. attack on Afghanistan, Gonzales organized an interagency group to take up the matter under the State Department's war crimes adviser, Pierre-Richard Prosper. Former attorney general William P. Barr suggested to Gonzales's staff early on that those captured on the battlefield go before military tribunals instead of civil courts. But Ashcroft and Michael Chertoff, his deputy for the criminal division, both adamantly opposed the plan, along with military lawyers at the Pentagon. The result was that the process moved slowly. Addington was the first to suggest that the issue be taken away from the Prosper group and that a presidential order be drafted authorizing the tribunals that he, Gonzales and Timothy E. Flanigan, then a principal deputy to Gonzales, supported. It was intended for circulation among a much smaller group of like-minded officials.

Berenson, Flanigan and Addington helped write the draft, and on Nov. 6, 2001, Gonzales's office secured an opinion from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel that the contemplated military tribunals would be legal. That office, historically the government's principal internal domestic law adviser, was also staffed by advocates of expansive executive powers; it had told the White House in a classified memo five weeks earlier that the president's authority to wage preemptive war against suspected terrorists was virtually unlimited, partly because proving criminal responsibility for terrorist acts was so difficult.

After a final discussion with Cheney, Bush signed the order authorizing military tribunals on Nov. 13, 2001, while standing up, as he was on his way out of the White House to his Texas ranch for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. It provided for the military trial of anyone suspected of belonging to al Qaeda or conspiring to conduct or assist acts of terrorism; conviction would come from a two-thirds vote of the tribunal members, who would adjudicate fact and law and decide what evidence was admissible. Decisions could not be appealed. Cut out in the final decision making were military lawyers, the State Department and Chertoff, as well as Rice, her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, and Rice's legal adviser, John Bellinger. "I don't think Gonzales felt he was acting precipitously, but he realized people would be surprised," Flanigan said. It amounted to a decision that the president could act without "the entire staff's blessing. As it turned out, they [National Security Council officials] just weren't involved in the process."Berenson, who left the White House for private practice in 2003, said "there were such strong shared assumptions at the time [that]we had a powerful sense of mission." He attributes the haste to worry about another terrorist attack. But David Bowker, then a State Department lawyer excluded from the process and now in private practice, called the order premature and politically unwise. "The right thing to do would have been an open process inside the government," he said.

The tribunals were halted by U.S. District Judge James Robertson, who ruled on Nov. 24, 2004, that detainees' rights are guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions -- which the administration had argued were irrelevant.

Rebellion at State
Four weeks after Bush's executive order, a similarly limited deliberation provoked more determined rebellion at the State Department and among military lawyers and officers. The issue was whether al Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan should be accorded the Geneva Conventions' human rights protections. Gonzales, after reviewing a legal brief from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, advised Bush verbally on Jan. 18, 2002, that he had authority to exempt the detainees from such protections. Bush agreed, reversing a decades-old policy aimed in part at ensuring equal treatment for U.S. military detainees around the world. Rumsfeld issued an order the next day to commanders that detainees would receive such protections only "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity." Secretary of State Colin L. Powell -- whose legal adviser, William H. Taft IV, had vigorously tried to block the decision -- then met twice with Bush to convince him that the decision would be a public relations debacle and would undermine U.S. military prohibitions on detainee abuse.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, backed Powell, as did the leaders of the U.S. Central Command who were pursuing the war. The task of summarizing the competing points of view in a draft letter to the president was seized initially by Addington. A memo he wrote and signed with Gonzales's name -- and knowledge -- was circulated to various departments, several sources said. A version of this draft, dated Jan. 25, 2002, was subsequently leaked. It included the eye-catching assertion that a "new paradigm" of a war on terrorism "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners." In early February 2002, Gonzales reviewed the issue once more with Bush, who reaffirmed his initial decision regarding his legal authority but chose not to invoke it immediately for Taliban members. Flanigan said that Gonzales still disagreed with Powell but "viewed his role as trying to help the president accommodate the views of State."

Thirty months later, a Defense Department panel chaired by James R. Schlesinger concluded that the president's resulting Feb. 7 executive order played a key role in the Central Command's creation of interrogation policies for the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. A former senior military lawyer, who was involved in the deliberations but spoke on the condition of anonymity, complained that Gonzales's counsel's office had ignored the language and history of the conventions, treating the question "as if they wanted to look at the rules to see how to justify what they wanted to do." "It was not an open and honest discussion," the lawyer said.

For Gonzales's aides, however, the experience only reinforced a concern that the State Department and the military legal community should not be trusted with information about such policymaking. State "saw its mission as representing the interests of the rest of the world to the president, instead of the president's interests to the world," one aide said.

The Debate Over Torture
This schism created additional problems when Gonzales approved in August 2002 -- after limited consultation -- an Office of Legal Counsel memo suggesting various stratagems that officials could use to defend themselves against criminal prosecution for torture. Drafted at the request of the CIA, which sought legal blessing for aggressive interrogation methods for Abu Zubaida and other al Qaeda detainees, the memo contended that only physically punishing acts "of an extreme nature" would be prosecutable. It also said that those committing torture with express presidential authority or without the intent to commit harm were probably immune from prosecution. The memo was signed by Jay S. Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal appellate judge, but written with significant input from Yoo's office.

During the drafting of the memo, Yoo briefed Gonzales several times on its contents. He also briefed Ashcroft, Bellinger, Addington, Haynes and the CIA's acting general counsel, John A. Rizzo, several officials said. At least one of the meetings during this period included a detailed description of the interrogation methods the CIA wanted to use, such as open-handed slapping, the threat of live burial and "waterboarding" -- a procedure that involves strapping a detainee to a board, raising the feet above the head, wrapping the face and nose in a wet towel, and dripping water onto the head. Tested repeatedly on U.S. military personnel as part of interrogation resistance training, the technique proved to produce an unbearable sensation of drowning.

State Department officials and military lawyers were intentionally excluded from these deliberations, officials said. Gonzales and his staff had no reservations about the legal draft or the proposed interrogation methods and did not suggest major changes during the editing of Yoo's memo, two officials involved in the deliberations said. The memo defined torture in extreme terms, said the president had inherent powers to allow it and gave the CIA permission to do what it wished.

Seven months later, its conclusions were cited approvingly in a Defense Department memo that spelled out the Pentagon's policy for "exceptional interrogations"of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. When the text was leaked to the public last summer, it attracted scorn from military lawyers and human rights experts worldwide. Nigel Rodley, a British lawyer who served as the special U.N. rapporteur on torture and inhumane treatment from 1993 to 2001, remarked that its underlying doctrine "sounds like the discredited legal theories used by Latin American countries" to justify repression. After two weeks of damaging publicity, Gonzales distanced himself, Bush and other senior officials from its language, calling the conclusions "unnecessary, over-broad discussions" of abstract legal theories ignored by policymakers. Another six months passed before the Office of Legal Counsel, under new direction, repudiated its reasoning publicly, one week before Gonzales's confirmation hearing.

C 2005 The Washington Post Company

Re: Tony D’Amato’s Views On Hitler’s Plot To Kidnap The Pope And On Pius XII’s Silence On The Destruction Of The Jews

January 18, 2005

Re: Tony D’Amato’s Views On Hitler’s Plot To Kidnap The Pope And On Pius XII’s Silence On The Destruction Of The Jews.
From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel

VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com
Dear Colleagues:

Over the weekend I received an email from Tony D’Amato, a brilliant Northwestern University professor of international law who has multiple interests and talents. (E.g., he is a fine pianist, and he discovered Grease when it was in a small Chicago theater and helped bring it to Broadway.) Tony’s email related to the question of whether Hitler hatched and tried to carry out a plot to kidnap Pope Pius XII, and to the conduct of the Pope.

One of the points Tony makes is that, had Pius publicly denounced the destruction of the Jews that was occurring before his eyes, instead of remaining silent, this "might have triggered a revolutionary change in the war," and in allied war aims, by deeply affecting public opinion in the United States and Britain. The question Tony is raising is, as he points out, deeply pertinent to the current drive to canonize Pius XII, who, of course, did not denounce the Nazis’ actions.
Tony’s views are attached. I would add one fillip. Just as the Pope did not speak out because he hoped his silence would help Catholics (or at least such is my understanding), so too The New York Times, owned by a Jewish family, did not speak out, and buried pertinent news in small articles in the inside of the paper, because it did not want to be perceived as a Jewish newspaper in a society where there was a lot of antisemitism. So the Pope was silent, The Times was silent, and many others were silent too. One is moved to say that, as life has so often taught me (and as has therefore been said in recent books), you can depend upon most people to do the wrong thing most of the time.*


*This posting represents the personal views of Lawrence R. Velvel. If you wish to respond to this email/blog, please email your response to me at velvel@mslaw.edu. Your response may be posted on the blog if you have no objection; please tell me if you do object.

By the end of 1942, it was clear to any rational observer that Hitler had lost the war. His attack on Russia failed to secure the oil fields, and his strategically absurd battle for Stalingrad ended in stalemate and chaos. Among the rational observers I refer to were most of the German generals. For example, when leading German generals in 1943 and 1944 approached Churchill through their intermediaries for assistance in assassinating Hitler, Churchill hemmed and hawed and ended up giving them no help, money, or support. Churchill knew that, by then, Hitler had become the Allies' secret weapon for defeating Germany. For the same reason that the German generals wanted to get rid of Hitler, Churchill wanted to keep him in power. Thus it is not surprising that Hitler's plan to kidnap the pope fell on deaf ears. A great many of his orders were falling on deaf ears in the last two or three years of the war.

*I'm not even sure I believe the stories below about the plans to kidnap the pope. To do so might be to turn a third of the German populace against Hitler. And even an increasingly insane Hitler would certainly not have wanted to risk such a thing. (His biggest fear, arising out of his "study" and experiences of World War I, was to lose the homeland support of the German citizenry.) Skeptic as I am, I wonder whether General Wolff wasn't just making up all of this pope kidnapping stuff to position himself better at the end of a losing cause. There is no doubt in my mind, after reading several recent books on the subject, that Pius XII was indifferent to the fate of the Jews. It is not that he was pro-Nazi, he was pro-Catholics in Germany, and he believed that the German Catholics would be relatively well off under Hitler. While it is true that the Italian people took greater risks than any other people in Europe in harboring Jews in their homes during the war years (the Danes were also admirable in doing the same thing, but the personal risk to the Italians was greater due to Mussolini), I haven't seen any evidence that the Pope or his priests encouraged Italian citizens in their humanitarian efforts.

My own conclusion is that the pope's silence on the holocaust question was not the slightest bit compensated by the "private" efforts the Vatican took to help Jews during the war. I do not mean to denigrate the latter; they were helpful. But Pius XII was sitting silently with huge moral authority. If he had called attention to the "final solution"as it unfolded before his eyes, he might have triggered a revolutionary change in the war. At the time, neither Roosevelt, Churchill, nor Stalin had any real interest in human rights; they were only interested in winning militarily.

The one thing that could have turned Roosevelt and Churchill around would have been a public denunciation by the Pope of the murder of Jews in Europe, because speaking out would have reverberated among the American and British populace. Both FDR and Winnie were ultra-sensitive about carrying along their domestic public opinion, and I'm sure they would have re-defined their war aims if the "final solution" had made headlines in the domestic press. What would have happened if the pope had spoken out is, as FDR himself characterized counterfactual conjectures, an "iffy" question. But that doesn't mean we are not entitled to speculate about it. In my judgment, the pope's failure to speak out during World War II ranks right up there with the Inquisition and the False Popes in the history of Catholicism. To make a saint of this character is just another attempt by the Vatican to prettify the ugly facts of the world.

Tony D'Amato
http://anthonydamato.law.northwestern.edu/

*I can't resist passing this story on to you--apologies if you've heard it. It is the last week of April 1945, and Hitler is shivering in his bunker. The walls are reverberating with the incessant bombardment above ground. An adjutant bursts into Hitler's study and says, "Mein Fuehrer! The Americans are invading Berlin from the south, the French from the north, the British from the west, and the Russians from the east. What shall we do?" Hitler says, "That tears it! From now on, no more 'Mister nice guy'."

At 10:21 PM 1/15/2005, you wrote: Mr. Britt would seem to have an expansive definition of religion.

Ewen Allison: "Hitler 'ordered pope kidnapped' But leading German general refused to obey order, newspaper says."

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) -- Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler gave one of his generals a direct order to kidnap Pope Pius XII during World War II but the officer did not obey, Italy's leading Roman Catholic newspaper reported. Avvenire, which is owned by the Italian Conference of Roman Catholic bishops, said new details of the plot had emerged in documents presented to the Vatican in favor of putting the controversial wartime Pontiff on the road to sainthood. Elements of alleged plots to abduct the pope during Germany's occupation of Italy have already emerged in the past from some historians, but Avvenire's full-page report said its details were new. Avvenire said Hitler feared the pope would be an obstacle to his plans for global domination and because the dictator wanted to eventually abolish Christianity and impose National Socialism as a sort of new global religion.

The newspaper said a plot that was code named Operation Rabat had originally been planned for 1943 but was not carried out that year for unspecified reasons. It said that in 1944, shortly before the Germans retreated from Rome, SS General Karl Friedrich Otto Wolff, a senior occupation officer in Italy, had been ordered by Hitler to kidnap the pope. According to the newspaper, Wolff returned to Rome from his meeting with Hitler in Germany and arranged for a secret meeting with the pope. Wolff went to the Vatican in civilian clothes at night with the help of a priest. The newspaper said Wolff told the pope of Hitler's orders and assured him he had no intention of carrying them out himself, but warned the pontiff to be careful "because the situation (in Rome) was confused and full of risks." Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had already fallen and set up a German-backed puppet regime in northern Italy. The German occupation of Rome was in its dying days. Allied forces were advancing on the capital, which they liberated on June 5, 1944.

As a test of Wolff's good faith, Pope Pius asked for him to free two Italian resistance leaders who had been condemned to death. Wolff arranged for them to be released, the paper said. Road to sainthood--Avvenire said the details of the plot are in testimony Wolff gave before he died in Germany to Church officials accumulating evidence to back efforts to have Pius eventually made a saint. But the reports of Hitler's contempt for Pius have contrasted with other versions by historians and authors who have depicted Pius as being pro-German and have accused him of intentionally turning a blind eye to the Holocaust.

The Vatican's procedures to put Pius on the road to sainthood have not been slowed or shelved despite concerns from Jews, and they will enter a new phase in March when Vatican historians will begin discussing many volumes of documentation. The Vatican maintains that Pius did not speak out more strongly because he feared it would worsen the fate of Catholics and Jews, and that he worked behind the scenes to save Jews. Pius's pontificate has been one of the trickiest problems in post-war Catholic-Jewish relations. In 1998, there was widespread Jewish discontent with a Vatican document called "We Remember, a Reflection on the Shoah," which effectively absolved Pius of accusations that he facilitated the Holocaust by remaining silent. But the current pontiff, Pope John Paul, has strongly defended Pius and once called him "a great pope."


January 18, 2005
Re: Alan Dershowitz and Computers
From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com

Dear Colleagues:

If they were to know (and now they may), some people might find it odd that a blog is written by someone who does not even know how to turn on a computer, by someone who has successfully resisted such knowledge. In fact colleagues and family members are constantly urging me to learn to use a computer. Inability to operate the technology, however, does not stop one from recognizing that the Internet is a huge advance in human communication, or from using the technology via others who do know how to operate it.

Last Sunday a special education edition of The Times carried three interviews on what the paper thought the oddball phenomenon of people on campus who do not use a computer. One of the interviews was with Alan Dershowitz, who says he does not even know how to type but has just finished his 23rd book. The interview is attached because much of what Dershowitz says is true of this blogger as well, particularly his points about lack of time, lack of need, inputting by others, and never having learned to type. (He and I, being almost the same age, are part of what must be the last generation of men who did not learn this now invaluable skill.)

To be in company with Dershowitz regarding inability to use a computer is to be in not bad company. I also notice, incidentally, that every so often the papers will carry a story about some leader of business or industry, usually about our age, who likewise hasn’t learned to use a computer -- like Dershowitz or myself, those men too are among the last of the dodo birds.

Dershowitz did not mention two additional reasons I hold for not using a computer. One is this: I fear the truth of something my friends and family say to me as a reason for learning to use "the machine" (as my immigrant relatives used to call automobiles). One is told that the Internet will grip his attention endlessly because it is filled with fascinating information which is either linked or easily locatable. Exactly. It will seize one and take up too much time, a phenomenon which, one reads, afflicts untold numbers of people who spend (endless) hours every day in front of computers.

One can’t do everything -- what we have here is a mundane example, but an example nevertheless, of the need to make choices. It is that need which caused one to stop reading dictionaries when young to avoid being sucked in endlessly, and, when older, to stop watching almost all television (except Michigan football games, Patriot championship games, and some BookTV) in order, Gerschenkron-like, to have time to read books. It may sound bizarre to say so, but such choices are, in a way, akin to some people’s choice to stop drinking because drinking is ruining their ability to do other things.

The other reason is perhaps a little oddball, and is nonutilitarian too. It is the sheer physical/aesthetic pleasure of watching handwritten words appear on a page. The same pleasure has never arisen from, say, watching words appear on a screen as one dictates to a secretary who is using a computer -- excuse me, is using a word processor. Nor do I remember reading or hearing someone say the opposite, albeit perhaps people do feel the opposite but don’t speak or write about it very much.

For those of you who are good enough to send messages to this blogger now and then, let me say that you need have no fear. Those messages are all read by one of two means. They are all printed out in hard copy for me, so many are read that way. And, to lessen my technological out-of-itness just a little bit by participating to some extent in email, this writer has obtained, and reads lots of email messages on, a Blackberry. But, not knowing how to type, nothing is transmitted on the Blackberry. Things come in on it, but nothing goes out on it. What the blogger needs, I guess, is half a blackberry.

(That things come in but nothing goes out reminds me of a completely unrelated story about Oak Ridge, the major built-from-scratch facility in Tennessee where work was done on uranium during World War II. After the bomb was dropped, people who lived in the Oak Ridge area were asked whether they ever wondered what was going on there. One answer was, well, yes, it did seem kind of odd that stuff constantly was being taken into Oak Ridge but nothing ever seemed to come out of there.)

In any event, one is grateful to Dershowitz for sticking up for us Luddites, retrograde dodos that we may be. One is also grateful to him for explaining to the technologically sophisticated -- who simply cannot believe, credit or sympathize with our backwardness, who revile it and try to get us to change -- some of the reasons why we resolutely set our face against progress and continue to do things the old way.*


*This posting represents the personal views of Lawrence R. Velvel. If you wish to respond to this email/blog, please email your response to me at velvel@mslaw.edu. Your response may be posted on the blog if you have no objection; please tell me if you do object.

New York Times (NY)Copyright ©) 2005 The New York Times. All rights reserved.

January 16, 2005 Section: 4ABLACKBOARD: TECHNOLOGY;

Profs Who Don't (Won't) E-Mail

Abby Ellin--
COLLEGES have long been a hotbed of computer activity. After all, the first general-purpose computer, Eniac, was invented on a campus (University ofPennsylvania, 1946). Today, if you want to talk to your professors, e-mail them. Yet even on campus there are some who shun technology. We asked for an explanation. ALAN DERSHOWITZ, professor of law, Harvard (below): "I love innovation, and I'm even writing something about the way in which the Internet affects First Amendment law. But I can't even turn on a computer. A Luddite is the term. I'm a klutz. I went on eBay. I was trying to buy some old-fashioned Jewish postcards and bought a book by mistake. My wife banned me; she was afraid I'd lose all our money. Partly it's a question of not having the time to learn something new, and I don't need it. I just finished my 23rd book. I write everything by hand and somebody inputs it. I grew up in a Jewish sexist family where only the girls learned to type. My mother typed all my homework assigments."

January 18, 2005

Dear Colleagues:

The attached essay on the meaning and misuse of words like "war" and "force" has been received from Professor Daniel C. Maguire of Marquette University.

Lawrence R. Velvel
VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com

WAR Daniel C. Maguire, Marquette University, 414 961 0139

When a single word becomes a lie....Words are like people: marry one and you get all the relatives in the bargain. The problem is words are promiscuous and also polygamous, and so you get more and more relatives and in-laws to deal with. What this means is that words are mutants. They can take on new meanings. Eventually they can become so loaded with deception that they can no longer be used innocently. To say the word is to be so steeped in lies that to use the word makes you a liar.

Take "war" for example. Since ancient times the word has been spotted as a mischievous misnomer: Desertum faciunt et bellum appellant ...they create a wasteland, but they call it "war." In modern times Peter Ustinov put it this way: "Terrorism is the war of the poor; war is the terrorism of the rich." Putting the violence of war and violence of terrorism together represents a candor that is not welcome.

The word war in modern times has become a lie. It says something that is not true. It can't be used truthfully. "War" has been made to seem rational, productive, noble, inevitable, the path of honor, "an extension of statecraft by other means." War is now so transformed into respectability that we use it in all sorts of innocent and lovely contexts: "the war on poverty," "the war on cancer," "the war on illiteracy," etc.

War is good and reasonable and we need lots of it. What really helped all this to happen was the venerable "just war theory." Putting the word "war" alongside the word "just" helped to baptize war, making it seem rational and good. There are some words that have finally become accepted as denoting an evil: torture, slavery, rape. War is not in their company. The reality it covers is sneakily hidden from view since "war" is no longer descriptive of the mayhem and slaughter we are wreaking when we "go to war." If the "just war theory" were called the "justifiable slaughter theory" or "the justifiable violence theory," it would at least be honest. Maybe the slaughter and the human and ecological destruction and violence we are contemplating are justifiable, but at least we would be honest in admitting what it is we are justifying.

Military strategists, and ethicists embedded with them, drape an even thicker tissue of lies around military violence. They like to call it "the use of force." That sugar-coats it handsomely. "Force," after all is nice. A forceful personality, a forceful argument--these can be quite non-violent. But an atomic bomb hitting Hiroshima or Nagasaki or the leveling of Fallujah in Iraq or of settlements in Palestine needs a more honest word than "force." "Force" is a malicious euphemism, as is war. Maybe the horror that "war" fails to honestly describe can be justified. Or, more likely, maybe the horror it euphemizes is simply the pit we fall into by avoiding the tedious unglamourous work of peace-making and justice-building.

Maybe some slaughter to prevent greater slaughter might have been necessary in 1994 in Rwanda because there was no international interest in supporting the peace and reform efforts in Rwanda in the years preceding that. But don't bring on deceits like "use of force"or "meeting the just war criteria" to dignify an unconscionable failure to do the advance work of peace and to disguise the total embarrassment of statecraft that state-sponsored violence is.

Professor Daniel C. Maguire (Marquette University)
2823 N. Summit Avenue
Milwaukee WI 53211
tel. 414 961 0139fax 414 961 2150