Thursday, February 24, 2005

Re: A Times Editorial Musters The Courage To Assail Torture

I disagree with you that Berkeley Law School should fire Professor John Yoo. He is a tenured professor and should not be fired for speaking or writing what he thinks. It is quite clear that he thinks torture of enemies is justified if they have information that you need to wipe out their friends and bases. It is true, as you say, that Professor Yoo tries to rationalize his conclusion that torture is illegal. Nevertheless, his basic position, in favor of the fine art of torture, is in my opinion sincere, and he should not be penalized when he gets back to the academic world for having expressed himself in a government setting.

But I also disagree with you on your contention that Professor Yoo has merely been "adroit at thinking up arguments and engaging in so-called legal analysis, in this case arguments and analysis in favor of immorality," or that he can "think up legal reasons to justify the evil" that his client wishes to commit. In my view, Professor Yoo was not being in the least bit creative. As the legal adviser William H. Taft of the Dept. of State made clear in his memo to Professor Yoo, the argument in favor of torture was advanced by the Department of Justice only because the relevant treaty provisions, obligations, norms, and US statutes, were SYSTEMATICALLY OMITTED from the analysis. Professor Yoo, and Albert Gonzales for the White House as well, selectively omitted the clearest norms and precedents that established beyond doubt that the torture carried on by the government of the United States was illegal under our treaty obligations.

Surely, anyone can write a memorandum in favor of torture if it omits the overwhelming weight of the precedents and statutes making torture illegal. It doesn't take creativity to do so. It only takes a willingness to violate the law profession's Code of Ethics that requires a lawyer not to intentionally misstate the law. At worst, Professor Yoo violated the Code of Ethics. At best, he was so woefully ignorant of international law that he should never have purported to write a memorandum about it. If I were the dean at Berkeley, I would use my discretion to make sure that he does not teach courses in international law, at least not until he demonstrates a minimum competence in that field.

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




To: velvel@mslaw.edu
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2005 2:04 AM
Subject: Check out 2001 Memo Reveals Push for Broader Presidential Powers - Empire? -

2001 Memo Reveals Push for Broader Presidential Powers - Empire? - Global Policy Forum oy-- now larry don't take this the wrong way but... read the last paragraph in this link--your position is disingenuous, overbroad and taken out of its historical context in relation to the Yoo memo- it was drafted immediately in the aftermath of 9/11 when i had cap patrols flying over my apartment for a month because 3000 of my fellow citizens had been murdered 3 miles from my home by islamic fanatics--even deputy white house counsel flanagan said the memos didn't form the basis of presidential action --your incessant failure to understand this amoral enemy who would slit your kufr throat in a nano second without qualm manifests your bds--bush derangement syndrome--not to mention your misapprehending elemental concepts of 4G warfare in your and the nyslimes attempt to crush the political will of those who are protecting us--assymetrical warfare is propaganda warfare above all--they can't win on the ground but can win by demoralization--coercive interrogation is not torture--the admittedly unlawful and stupid sex humiliation games of abu gharab [which have been appropriately punished] are not hand severing--wall hanging--tongue cutting--or the electro-testicle mambo--why aren't you pissed at the mujahjadeen beheaders, arab fascist thugs and the muslim supremacists who are your enemy--its like denial and displacement--i don't get it and respectfully it appears either do you--but i love you anyway and forgive you your misjudgements--btw hello-- y'all lost the election--the middle east is going through a world historical democratic change due to the muscular proactive bush doctrine--i suggest getting on the right side of history for a change--you'll feel better.

regards [Initials Omitted]

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Re: A Times Editorial Musters The Courage To Assail Torture

February 23, 2005

Re: A Times Editorial Musters The Courage To Assail Torture.
From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com

Dear Colleagues:

Glory be, it appears that the editorial page of at least one newspaper -- The New York Times, no less -- has mustered the courage to assail the torture which the Executive has illegally been perpetrating. Perhaps Bob Herbert will no longer have to be alone on The Times (except for Maureen Dowd) in blasting the torture and its progenitors (which he does with some frequency, thank goodness).

In its lead editorial on February 19th, The Times began by blasting the immoral John Yoo -- one of the two major authors of the leading torture memos, along with now-federal judge (can you believe it?) Jay Bybee. Yoo, of course, is a guy whom the University of California Law School happily took back and has kept on its faculty even after his complete lack of morality and decency came to light. Yoo recently said the debate on torture is over because the public held a referendum on it in the November election. The Times called his view "bizarre," and said "It’s hard to know what is most outrageous about those comments -- that Mr. Yoo actually believes Americans voted for torturing prisoners or that an official who was at the heart of this appalling mess feels secure enough to say that."

Notwithstanding Yoo’s obvious immorality and indecency (and the apparent objections to him of some students), Berkeley will doubtlessly keep Yoo instead of firing him as it should. After all, he was a clerk for Rehnquist -- wouldn’t you know it -- and has held a prestigious position in the Department of Justice. To law schools that think of themselves as "elite," as Berkeley does bigtime, these kinds of credentials are far more important than human decency. Moreover, they will surely tell you, he is a great scholar -- meaning that he is adroit at thinking up arguments and engaging in so-called legal analysis, in this case arguments and analysis in favor of immorality. And, they will say, he was merely fulfilling his putative "responsibility" to represent his client. Notwithstanding all this, perhaps God will forgive me for thinking that elitism is often evil, and will again forgive me for feeling that, since any decent lawyer can always think up arguments and "legal analysis" on either side of any issue, or on three or four sides of it, my respect goes not to the lawyer who will represent his client by thinking up legal reasons to purportedly justify evil, but who will tell her client, "Yes, I can think up legal reasons to justify the evil you wish to commit, but on moral grounds I refuse to do so. If you want a lawyer who will justify evil for you, get another lawyer." If memory serves, it was Henry Stimson, a man of enormous prominence in his day, who once said that half his practice consisted of telling clients that they should not do one damn fool thing or another. (Or maybe it was his equally prominent predecessor Elihu Root.)

After leveling Yoo, The Times’ editorial said that "The White House has done everything it can to bury" the issue of torture, and "still drags its feet on public disclosure, stonewalls Congressional requests for documents and suppresses the results of internal investigations." It also said that the issue remains "urgent," that we have engaged in rendition (as we indeed have, extensively), and that the whole business should be the subject of "an investigation by an independent, bipartisan commission with subpoena power."

But to my mind the two most striking things it said, two things which bear the deepest on this nation, are these: First, The Times’ editorial said that the administration is claiming "that the president has an imperial right to sweep aside the law and authorize whatever he wants," and that some proposed statutes risk endorsing the idea that he can "declare himself above the law." It just cannot be overemphasized that the Yoo/Bybee/administration theory that the President, as commander in chief, can override the law is a nearly sure fire recipe for tyranny. It was one of the reasons for the Declaration of Independence, is as dangerous now as it was then, is put forth almost whenever there is a national crisis, and if not smacked down hard now, as before, and if instead allowed to become the prevailing view, can prove one day to be a one way road to tyranny in the United States. It can easily lead one day to the end of democracy as we know it, especially since it was the theory of tyrants like George III and Adolf Hitler, and it truly is not too much to say that it puts our democracy at serious risk. It is the single worst part of the whole torture business, even worse than the torture itself, as horrible as that was.

The other critical point in the editorial was its reason for saying there must be an independent commission. Let me quote again: "But that task [of fully learning what happened] is now way beyond the purview of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which held important hearings on prisoner abuse. Republican Congressional leaders have made it painfully clear that they will not hold a real investigation. And no probe by the executive branch can be credible because the stain of prisoner abuse spreads so far. The Justice Department can’t do it; Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was part of the problem." The Times’ lack of confidence in the Republican Congress and administration is all too well taken. The Republicans will not do the job because, due to the torture, leading members of the administration right up to and including George Bush are involved in serious crimes, crimes far worse than those Nixon ever committed. If the truth were to come out they probably would (and should) all be impeached -- or would have to resign -- they might (and should) go to jail, and the vast victories of the Republican Party in 2000 and 2004 would almost surely be erased in the next election. There simply can be no legitimate question about the complicity in serious crimes of the top echelons of the present administration (and one can be reasonably confident that history is unlikely to find any legitimate question about the matter since history will be written, after investigation, by people with no current political axe to grind).

So there is no way that investigations controlled by Republicans will yield anything even approximating the real truth. This blogger, moreover would go further than The Times. The Times says there should be an "independent, bipartisan commission." (Emphasis added.) This writer would say that all politicians from either party should be kept off a commission, and so should every one of their lawyer cronies and political hangers-on. Politicians and their hangers-on of all stripes have too much to lose from the truth, regardless of their party, because the truth is likely to indict the political class regardless of party. (There are, for example, Democrats at the top of Congressional committees on security and intelligence, you know. The torture occurred on their watch too, nor did Congressional Democrats in general inquire about what was going on.) What we need is an independent commission of capable and honest non political men and women to investigate this horrid mess and to develop the truth on behalf of the people of this country, without regard to any concern for the selfish interests of its largely dishonest political class.*

*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.

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Re: Lying Accessories To Torture

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

From: E. James Perullo
To: 'Dean Lawrence R. Velvel'
Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 9:08 AM
Subject: RE: Lying accessories to torture

Dean,

This is sickening. But what is one guy with multiple family and personal obligations to do about it? I want to do something - the only thing that I can think of is writing to my elected officials and expect nothing more than a form-letter response - if any.

-Jim Perullo-978 681 0800 x43

From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel [mailto:velvel@mslaw.edu]
Sent: Monday, February 14, 2005 10:02 AM
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;
Subject: Lying accessories to torture

February 14, 2005

Re: Lying Accessories To Torture
From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com

Dear Colleagues:

An article entitled Outsourcing Torture, by Jane Mayer, appears in the February 14th issue of The New Yorker. It was posted on-line on February 7th. The first sentence of the article says, "On January 27th, President Bush, in an interview with the Times, assured the world that ‘torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture.’" (This sentence comports with a later statement by the Times on February 13th, in an article on a potential Congressional investigation of torture by the CIA, that "President Bush and his top aides have said repeatedly that the United States does not torture prisoners and does not hand them over to countries that torture them.")

Assuming that Ms. Mayer’s first sentence is accurate, much of the rest of her lengthy article shows that Bush was lying again when he said we do not turn over people to countries that will torture them. Ms. Mayer discusses in excruciating detail the American modus operandi of kidnappings and abduction for the purpose of secretly flying people to, and turning them over to, nations that will torture them to try to elicit information that we seek. Hers is probably the longest article to date on this subject. (The New Yorker, after all, is not known for short articles.) The story is horrifying. It is only the worse because some (many?) of the people who are tortured appear to be innocent. The story is, moreover, about what America is not supposed to be.

Bob Herbert of The Times got it right when he discussed Mayer’s article in a February 11th column in The Times, and asked, "How in the world did we become a country in which gays’ getting married is considered an abomination, but torture is O.K.?" Herbert later continued, "Any government that commits, condones, promotes or fosters torture is a malignant force in the world. And those who refuse to raise their voices against something as clearly evil as torture are enablers, if not collaborators."

You know, there can be little doubt that lots of foreigners, and not a few Americans, consider this country to now be, as Herbert put it, "a malignant force in the world," a force that not only tortures, but kills tens or scores of thousands -- or in Viet Nam hundreds of thousands or millions -- and calls it collateral damage. And whether those who do not speak out against the torture "are enablers, if not collaborators," is a pretty question indeed. It is cut from the same cloth as the question of whether individual Germans bear responsibility for Germany’s war guilt and the holocaust. And, maybe even more to the point, when it comes to Americans in positions of power such as federal legislators, federal judges, high ranking military officers, and the powerful mainstream print and electronic media, the question of responsibility is cut from the same cloth as the issue of what responsibility is borne by Germans who were in positions of power, such as the military and judges.

Yet one does not hear the obvious. One does not hear, from legislators or the mainstream media, for example, calls for the impeachment of Bush and company, and for subsequent criminal trials of them. One does not hear this even though they are plainly guilty of crimes due to their knowledge of, and their tacit or express approval of, torture done by Americans, and at minimum are accessories to or aiders and abetters of torture done by other countries to which we have delivered people for the precise purpose of torture.

Not to mention, of course, that Bush deliberately lies about torture to the American people.*

*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: Does Howard Dean’s Ascension Mean Anything?

February 16, 2005
Re: Does Howard Dean’s Ascension Mean Anything?
From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com

Dear Colleagues:

I was recently talking to someone who agreed with me about a subject I’ve never heard mentioned elsewhere. To wit: what was the big deal about Howard Dean’s scream? To anyone who has ever played or followed certain sports, even at a sandlot level, Dean’s scream was not a big deal. We’ve heard it a hundred or a thousand times before.

If you want to learn of a real scream, a scream of a type you’ve probably never heard much less encountered, you should read Amos Oz’s description in A Tale Of Love And Darkness of the shout that went up from a large crowd of Jews who were all listening to a lone radio in a Jerusalem street sometime after midnight on November 30, 1947 (Jerusalem time), when the radio announcer, speaking from the General Assembly of the United Nations, said that the vote just taken on the partition of Palestine into two states, one being the resurrected State of Israel after 1900 years, was "Thirty-three for. Thirteen against. Ten abstentions and one country absent from the vote. The resolution is approved." Then, says Oz, the announcer’s voice was "swallowed up in a roar" in the hall, "and after a couple more seconds of shock and disbelief, of lips parted as though in thirst and eyes wide open, our faraway street on the edge of [his neighborhood] in northern Jerusalem also roared all at once in a first terrifying shout that tore through the darkness and the building and trees, piercing itself, not a shout of joy, nothing like the shouts of spectators in sports grounds or excited rioting crowds, perhaps more like a scream of horror and bewilderment, a cataclysmic shout, a shout that could shift rocks, that could freeze your blood, as though all the dead who had ever died here and all those still to die had received a brief window to shout, and the next moment the scream of horror was replaced by roars of joy and a medley of hoarse cries, and ‘The Jewish People Lives’ and somebody trying to sing Hatikvah and women shrieking and clapping . . . ."

Now that’s a scream. What Howard Dean did was a big fat nothing by comparison. What he did many of us have heard many times. So why the big deal about it?

Well, the big deal occurred because other Democratic candidates and the mainstream media simply would not allow Howard Dean to become the nominee, and therefore propagandized the country into thinking Dean’s scream was some sort of disqualifying shortcoming of personality or intellect. What other candidates and the media said, or propagandized, was a lie, but it worked. Now, however, Dean has become Chairman of the Democratic Party, so soon after he was said to be vastly deficient.

It brings to mind an episode which I believe I remember correctly. If memory serves (please inform me if it doesn’t), in 1900 the Republican Party bosses, the bosses of a party that was thoroughly corrupt and that ran a corrupt government, made Theodore Roosevelt Vice President because bosses thought it essential to get this reformer out of New York. Then McKinley got assassinated and boss Mark Hanna lamented, "Now look. That damned cowboy is in the White House." Now the "screamer," who thereby supposedly showed some kind of character defect -- now the only candidate who had the guts to accurately say at the time of Saddam’s capture that this was pretty much irrelevant and who was vilified for this correct view -- is the Chairman of the Democratic Party. ("Now look. That damned screamer is Chairman," so to speak.)

What can Dean’s ascension to the chairmanship mean? This blogger does not pretend to know. One can make guesses at possibilities, however. Maybe Dean’s ascension means, as one gathers Dean likes to say, that the Democratic party will go back to what it is said to once have been: a party that fights for the common man. Or maybe it means that this will happen because the Democrats now understand that Bush and his leading colleagues and some of his leading henchmen in Congress are truly bad human beings in crucial ways and, now understanding the character of their political enemies, Democrats have imbibed a deep draught of the courage needed to assail and fight the deficient human beings who widely populate the administration. Or maybe it does not mean a sea change among Democrats, but only a small change in how they act. Who knows? Politicians being what they are, one is reluctant to hope too much.

This blogger’s own views on what is needed substantively have been expressed here before, as has the idea that current attitudes may be so hopelessly entrenched that what is needed may not occur unless a third party arises -- something that Dean himself may one day discover, as Theodore Roosevelt did in 1912. What is needed, as said here in mid 2004, is "a reversion to the prior cultural values of honesty, competence, hard work, fulfilling one’s responsibilities, concern for others, modesty. Correlatively, there must be revulsion against lying, spinning, cheating, bragging, celebrifying, not caring about others, not performing one’s duties, and letting the phonies, the non-competents and the lazy get ahead by using the now prevailing cultural values." There must be rejection of the political right’s, the Bushian, "supposed ‘values’ such as unrestricted personal economic selfishness, unregulated devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism, imposing our views on the rest of the world by use of economic and/or military force, and imposing fundamentalist religious views and practices on other citizens by the force of laws and social pressure."

In terms of specific current problems, I suppose the needed cultural reversion might well lead to some of the following views, although in some cases there has to be much more discussion before one can really know what should be done:
• Probably there needs to be changes made in the social security system, but Bush’s claim of a crisis and his complicated plans for change seem more than a little fraudulent in a variety of ways.
• There must be a change in the federal income tax system, which is currently a morally and intellectually corrupt system that favors the very rich and harms everyone else.
• Governmental violation of the laws -- such as laws against torture -- and big business violators of law -- i.e., the large scale frauds and crooks of our economic system -- should have the book thrown at them.
• We should get out of Iraq.
• In all probability, many more doctors and "lesser" medical personnel should be trained as one means of improving healthcare and lessening its costs via competition. This could mean confronting the AMA.
• The idea of high standards of competence must be reintroduced into the academic world as a means of solving our serious educational problems, and people who want to work hard to meet those standards should be given needed assistance.
• Election laws must be changed so that intelligent, committed newcomers can have a decent shot at winning office, instead of our system being an incumbent’s dream.
• New federal judges should be people who possess and have shown some compassion.
Maybe Howard Dean will plump for such policies or other positions called progressive. If he does, maybe he might even succeed. Who knows? But at least one blogger thinks you can be pretty sure that, without a change in prevailing values, and without some form of progressive policies flowing from that change, we are going to continue to be in big (read Bushian) trouble.*

*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.

Monday, February 14, 2005

Re: Lying Accessories To Torture

February 14, 2005

Re: Lying Accessories To Torture
From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com

Dear Colleagues:

An article entitled Outsourcing Torture, by Jane Mayer, appears in the February 14th issue of The New Yorker. It was posted on-line on February 7th. The first sentence of the article says, "On January 27th, President Bush, in an interview with the Times, assured the world that ‘torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture.’" (This sentence comports with a later statement by the Times on February 13th, in an article on a potential Congressional investigation of torture by the CIA, that "President Bush and his top aides have said repeatedly that the United States does not torture prisoners and does not hand them over to countries that torture them.")

Assuming that Ms. Mayer’s first sentence is accurate, much of the rest of her lengthy article shows that Bush was lying again when he said we do not turn over people to countries that will torture them. Ms. Mayer discusses in excruciating detail the American modus operandi of kidnappings and abduction for the purpose of secretly flying people to, and turning them over to, nations that will torture them to try to elicit information that we seek. Hers is probably the longest article to date on this subject. (The New Yorker, after all, is not known for short articles.) The story is horrifying. It is only the worse because some (many?) of the people who are tortured appear to be innocent. The story is, moreover, about what America is not supposed to be.

Bob Herbert of The Times got it right when he discussed Mayer’s article in a February 11th column in The Times, and asked, "How in the world did we become a country in which gays’ getting married is considered an abomination, but torture is O.K.?" Herbert later continued, "Any government that commits, condones, promotes or fosters torture is a malignant force in the world. And those who refuse to raise their voices against something as clearly evil as torture are enablers, if not collaborators."

You know, there can be little doubt that lots of foreigners, and not a few Americans, consider this country to now be, as Herbert put it, "a malignant force in the world," a force that not only tortures, but kills tens or scores of thousands -- or in Viet Nam hundreds of thousands or millions -- and calls it collateral damage. And whether those who do not speak out against the torture "are enablers, if not collaborators," is a pretty question indeed. It is cut from the same cloth as the question of whether individual Germans bear responsibility for Germany’s war guilt and the holocaust. And, maybe even more to the point, when it comes to Americans in positions of power such as federal legislators, federal judges, high ranking military officers, and the powerful mainstream print and electronic media, the question of responsibility is cut from the same cloth as the issue of what responsibility is borne by Germans who were in positions of power, such as the military and judges.

Yet one does not hear the obvious. One does not hear, from legislators or the mainstream media, for example, calls for the impeachment of Bush and company, and for subsequent criminal trials of them. One does not hear this even though they are plainly guilty of crimes due to their knowledge of, and their tacit or express approval of, torture done by Americans, and at minimum are accessories to or aiders and abetters of torture done by other countries to which we have delivered people for the precise purpose of torture.

Not to mention, of course, that Bush deliberately lies about torture to the American people.*

*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.

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Re: Robert Shiller Puts Blame On The Educational World

February 9, 2005

Re: Robert Shiller Puts Blame On The Educational World For The Lack Of Business Ethics.
From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com

Dear Colleagues:

In a posting of January 26th entitled Plagiarism and Gonzalezism, this blogger said that Harvard, having trained so many of our dishonest leaders, must bear part of the blame for the dishonesty which pervades the country like the 1918 flu. This is the kind of position with which one expects to find little or no agreement.

To my surprise, on February 8th The Times carried an op-ed column by Robert Shiller, the famous Yale economics professor, which takes a notably similar position. Speaking about the widespread lack of ethics in the business world, Shiller blames this on the kind of education received today in the "modern business curriculum." Dishonesty, of which this blogger wrote, is a species of the currently prevailing lack of ethics in business (and elsewhere). So the point made by this blogger is not so different from the point made by Shiller. Both of us blame educational institutions -- at least in part -- for bad conduct that we observe in the world.
Having been surprised -- and delighted -- to read Shiller’s view, I have appended his column to this posting.*

*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.


February 8, 2005

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
How Wall Street Learns to Look the Other Way
By ROBERT J. SHILLER
New Haven--THE New York Stock Exchange's report on the pay package given to its former chairman, Dick Grasso, made clear the excessiveness of the compensation and the ineffectiveness of the safety controls that failed to stop it. What the report didn't provide, however, was an answer to an obvious question: Why did nobody on the exchange's board look at that astronomical sum and feel some personal responsibility to find out what was happening?I can't read minds, but I think it's fair to say that to some extent the players in this drama - as well as those in the ones now being played out in courtrooms and starring former executives of Tyco, WorldCom and HealthSouth- have been shaped by the broader business culture they have worked in for so long. And, as with any situation in which we are puzzled by how a group of people can think in a seemingly odd way, it helps to look back to how they were educated.

Education molds not just individuals but also common assumptions and conventional wisdom. And when it comes to the business world, our universities - and especially their graduate business schools -are powerful shapers of the culture. That said, the view of the world that one gets in a modern business curriculum can lead to an ethical disconnect. The courses often encourage a view of human nature that does not inspire high-mindedness. Consider financial theory, the cornerstone of modern business education. The mathematical theory that has developed over the decades has proved extremely valuable in general. But when it comes to individuals, the theory runs into some problems. In effect, it portrays people as nothing more than"maximizers" of their own "expected utility." This means that people are expected to be totally selfish, constantly calculating their own advantage, with no thought of others. If the premise is that everyone would steal the silverware if he knew he could get away with it, and if we spend the entire semester developing the implications of this assumption, then it is hard to know where to begin to talk about ethics.

At the notorious Aug. 7, 2003, board meeting in which Mr. Grasso was given the right to pocket $139.5 million, questions of whether the compensation was too high were aired but got nowhere. Maybe it is not too surprising that they were ignored: executive compensation has been soaring in recent years, and to people today, it may well seem that these increases must be entirely the result of respectable "market forces." Modern business education often encourages excessive respect for anything that can be considered a result of the free market. For example, the leading corporate finance textbook, "Principles of Corporate Finance" by Richard A. Brealey and Stewart C. Myers, lists the efficient markets theory ("security prices accurately reflect available information and respond rapidly to new information as soon as it becomes available") as one of the seven most important ideas in finance. The other six are even less personal, models of perfect markets that only mathematicians can fully appreciate.

It should not be surprising that those who were trained by books like these would not consider the possibility that there could be a bubble in executive compensation. The book does not have anything kind to say about regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the regulatory agency that strives to make sure that we can trust the securities we buy. The commission is rarely mentioned, and then only as a source of a few bothersome rules that must be followed, without giving any clue as to the reasons for the rules. (It is worth noting that it was the commission that asked the stock exchange's board to disclose Mr. Grasso's pay package; otherwise, the controversy might never have come to light.) Yes, some business school curriculums have been improving over the years. Many schools now offer a course in business ethics, and some even try to integrate business ethics into their other courses. But nowhere is ethics seen as a centerpiece or even integral part of the curriculum. And even when business students do take an ethics course, the theoretical framework of the core courses tends to be so devoid of moral content that the discussions of ethics must seem like a side order of some overcooked vegetable.

I like to assign my finance students "Take On the Street," an account by Arthur Levitt of his efforts, as chairman of the S.E.C. in the 1990's, to clean up the sleazy side of Wall Street. I wish more professors assigned it. But most of my colleagues tell me they do not have time for it; too many formulas to cover. Ultimately, the problem at the university level is a tendency toward overspecialization. Each professor gains expertise in a certain kind of research skill; that is how subject matter is defined. The specialty of financial theory has largely come to be defined by skills manipulating a narrow class of mathematical models of purely selfish behavior.

Business ethics is just another academic specialty, and can seem as remote as microbiology to those studying financial theory. Whatever happens with Mr. Grasso - and with Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco and the other avatars of corporate misconduct in the headlines these days - we should be reminded that ethical behavior for many business people must involve overcoming their learned biases. Perhaps these scandals would be a little less likely, and the rationalizations for them a little less tenable, if more of us professors integrated business education into a broader historical and psychological context. Would our students really fail to understand the economic models if we treated the subject matter not as an arcane specialty, but as part of a larger liberal arts education? Robert J. Shiller, the author of "Irrational Exuberance," has taught Economics 252, Financial Markets, at Yale College since 1985.


Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Re: Is Michael Chertoff Lying? Might He Be A Supreme Court Nominee?

February 8, 2005

Re: Is Michael Chertoff Lying? Might He Be A Supreme Court Nominee?
From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com

Dear Colleagues:

Let us give credit to the Senate Democrats when it is due. They started out saying they would vote for Alberto Gonzalez for Attorney General. But after he lied and prevaricated about torture in his appearance before the Judiciary Committee, all eight of the Democrats on the Committee ultimately voted against him, and so did 35 of 41 Democrats who were present for the full Senate vote on his nomination. So the Democrats showed that at least sometimes they are capable of doing the right thing. At least it was the right thing if one believes that a lying torture monger should not be the Attorney General of the United States. Of course, it wasn’t the right thing if one doesn’t care much about this, as the Senate Republicans didn’t, and if one was more interested in doing what the President of one’s party wanted, as the Republicans were.
Having voted against Gonzalez, the Democrats have precluded an argument that otherwise would have been made against their opposition to him should he be nominated for the Supreme Court. Now Bush and company will not be able to say, "You voted for him for the critical post of Attorney General, knowing of his role with regard to torture, so you should not be opposing him now because of that role."

Which brings us to a new case, that of Michael Chertoff, the nominee for Director of Homeland Security, who is sure to be approved by the Senate. Chertoff’s case is a little odd. As shall be discussed here, he appears almost certainly to have participated in the torture mongering and to have approved in certain instances of the horrible torture called waterboarding. He also may have extensively prevaricated or lied outright about this participation in his recent appearance before Congress. On the other hand, he also seems to have opposed certain forms of torture and, aside from torture, to have taken positions on detainees that were at odds with the Bush administration. It also seems to this writer that, for reasons that will be discussed below, he is a possible, perhaps even a likely, Bush Administration stealth candidate for the Supreme Court. This possibility makes it even more important to get to the bottom of his participation regarding torture and of the extent, if any, to which he lied or prevaricated before Congress.

That Chertoff had anything at all to do with torture was unknown publicly until a front page New York Times article of January 29th. That article made points that are listed below, with occasional obvious interpolations by this blogger:
• Unnamed current former administration officials (apparently three senior intelligence officials) disclosed that Chertoff advised the CIA on whether specific forms of coercive interrogation would be crimes under the anti-torture law. This advice was given because of requests from the CIA on several occasions. (The CIA, as long known, was worried that its people might be prosecuted for their actions.) Chertoff advised that waterboarding could be used in certain circumstances. (Waterboarding is, of course, a truly horrible torture.) Somewhat contradictorily, I would say, Chertoff and other DOJ officials seriously objected to other practices as being banned by the law against torture, including death threats against family members and, apparently, threats to the detainee himself of imminent death. The details of the practices remain classified. (There are, we know, a few torture memoranda which have not been released publicly, e.g., the so-called second Bybee memorandum, briefly discussed below.) But Chertoff, though rejecting certain practices like the use of mind altering drugs, nonetheless permitted others and "left the door open to the use of a different set of far harsher techniques."
• According to The Times’ description of what its sources say, Chertoff was thus "directly involved" in discussions "evaluating the legality" of various interrogation techniques, and "advis[ed] the agency whether its employees could go ahead with proposed interrogation methods without fear of prosecution." And "while the criminal division did not explicitly approve any requests by the agency, it did discuss what conditions could protect agency personnel from prosecution." (The meaning of this somewhat contradictory position is a little uncertain. Possibly it means -- as so-called "informal advice" from other government bodies means -- that the agency is not saying whether particular methods are desirable or not, but only whether they will cause perpetrators to be prosecuted.)
• When giving advice, the Criminal Division used the definition of torture contained in the now infamous Bybee memorandum of August 2002. There was a later Bybee memorandum (the so-called "second Bybee memorandum") which discussed specific interrogation practices, but it remains classified. Chertoff was consulted with regard to this later memorandum.
• The CIA went "‘to extraordinary lengths . . . to obtain a clear answer from the Justice Department about which interrogation techniques were permissible and which were not in their questioning of Abu Zubaydah and other important detainees.’" "Nothing that was done was not explicitly authorized,’a former senior intelligence [official] said."
• The White House, in a manner of speaking, denies all. It says Chertoff "did not approve interrogation techniques as head of the criminal division," and had no role in the second Bybee memorandum. (Since all White Houses lie and prevaricate, and this one has joined the Johnson, Nixon and Clinton White Houses as the champion liars and prevaricators since the end of World War II, I regard its denial as being like Sam Goldwyn’s classic description of an oral promise: it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on.)
• When he was still head of the Criminal Division, Chertoff advocated civilian trials before military tribunals. After becoming a judge he advocated debate in order to determine the reasons and the permissible length of time for which enemy combatants can be detained and what if any right they may have to judicial review.

Chertoff’s testimony before Congress on February 2nd had little in common with what was reported in The Times a few days earlier. His answers to the torture mongering came in response to questions by Senators Levin and Lieberman. Lieberman appears, at least in a black and white transcript, to have been most interested not in getting to the truth, but in helping Chertoff. Levin appears to have been interested in the truth, but seems to have lacked the allotted time and the skills to develop the truth.

When he was before the Senate Committee, Chertoff admitted he had had conversations about interrogation techniques with lawyers from outside the Department of Justice. But he refused to say what agency or agencies they were from, claiming that disclosing this might betray a confidence that he must honor. This is pretty strange, since it has now been known for a long time that the CIA sought advice and The Times specifically mentioned the CIA’s request in the article on Chertoff. Nor does Chertoff have any attorney/client privilege since he was acting as a prosecutor talking to potential defendants, nor did he claim the oft fraudulent executive privilege. So the obvious question is, who was he trying to protect, and why, when he refused to say what agencies he had had conversations with? Did he also have discussions with, and was he protecting, the Department of Defense, for example, especially people from Rumsfeld’s office? (Rumsfeld seems to have favored torture, or at least very aggressive methods.) Senators, however, did not press him on who he spoke with, but instead allowed him, without objection, to refuse to disclose the agencies he had spoken with.

With obvious reluctance, Chertoff was forced to concede that specific techniques of interrogation -- which plainly must include specific methods of torture -- were discussed with him. But he declined to say what they were, claiming it is difficult to know what was discussed at the time as opposed to what he has since read about in the press. In other words, this fellow who is bright enough to have been a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, a clerk for Second Circuit Judge Murray Gurfein, and a clerk for Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, wants us to believe that he does not remember whether a shocking technique like waterboarding was discussed with him? Or whether threats of imminent death were discussed with him? Forgive me for thinking that a claim from someone this bright of not knowing whether things like this were discussed with him meets Lars-Erik Nelson’s definition of the enemy. As readers of this blog may remember, Nelson said, "The enemy isn’t liberalism. The enemy isn’t conservatism. The enemy is bullshit."

So once again a question arises of who is Chertoff trying to protect by means of bovine defecation, and why do they need protection? Is it only himself, or are there others?
On the merits, so to speak, Chertoff refused to say what advice he had given with regard to specific interrogation techniques. In this connection he in effect had a mantra. It can be described as follows: "I was asked for practical advice on how the anti- torture statute might apply. Whatever techniques were mentioned to me in this regard, my answers were always the same. I always said I cannot evaluate, and give advance approval regarding, a set of hypothetical facts. But if you are nervous about something, you’d better take a close look at the statute and be sure you are doing the right thing. Intent is always crucial to a prosecutor: in determining whether to prosecute, a prosecutor always looks to see if behavior was honest, diligent and in good faith." Chertoff also said he was not consulted with regard to the second Bybee memo.

Chertoff’s mantra is worlds apart from what was said in The Times article. They can’t both be right. One is wrong, someone -- either Chertoff or the senior officials who spoke to The Times -- is lying. The senior officials say waterboarding and other specific techniques were discussed and the CIA was assured that in certain circumstances waterboarding would not result in prosecution. Chertoff, on the other hand, who allegedly can’t remember what specific techniques were discussed, claims never to have said that any specific techniques would not result in prosecution, but instead to always have said people should be very careful if something seems close to the line, and that intent is crucial. The senior officials say Chertoff was consulted on the second Bybee memo, which dealt with specific techniques of torture and is still classified, but Chertoff, on the other hand, says he was not consulted with regard to this memo. As I say, someone is lying (unless The Times got the senior officials’ statements all wrong, which somehow seems the least likely possibility in a situation like this).

If someone is lying, my candidate for most likely possibility is Chertoff. The reason is that, even aside from his desire to be approved by the Senate and the fact that approval of waterboarding could be a real problem in this regard, a number of his statements do not have the ring of truth. In addition to his not-very-believable claim of not remembering whether things like waterboarding were discussed, his mantra about not being able to give advice in advance on the basis of hypotheticals, and focusing solely on intent, honesty and good faith instead, rings false for several reasons. Prosecutorial and other agencies often give advance advice on the basis of hypothetical situations that are brought to them for that very purpose. Some agencies even encourage people to bring situations to them for this purpose. And, if Chertoff refused to opine on specific interrogation practices, if all he would ever say is be careful and intent is crucial, why did the CIA people (or whomever) come back to him for advice on multiple occasions? What would have been the use after one or two tries?

Nor is there any sense in Chertoff’s claim that all he did is tell the CIA or others that intent and good faith make all the difference. Waterboarding has been described here previously. As the description shows, it is torture plain and simple. It can be done with allegedly the best of intent, and it still is torture. One can call it a hypothetical situation if one wants, but it remains torture. It is therefore illegal under the anti-torture statute. Intent, good faith and honesty simply cannot enter into it or torture has no meaning. To say that, if there is good intent, then waterboarding is not torture is like saying that, if there is good intent, then ripping out fingernails or applying electroshock to the testicles are not torture. This is not something that can be evaded by claims of waterboarding supposedly being a hypothetical situation -- which it of course was not. So Chertoff’s statements in this regard have the ring of Lars-Erik Nelson’s enemy.

Even though Chertoff’s claimed focus on intent rings false, there is one (perhaps somewhat complex) circumstance that could, if true, explain why this bovine defecation is being put forth by Chertoff now. It is a little noticed but crucial aspect of the infamous Bybee memo -- little points that are crucial are often overlooked in the media -- that it said that torture was not torture if engaged in with an objective other than to inflict pain, e.g., with the objective of obtaining information rather than to inflict pain. (Pain is "only" the necessary byproduct of obtaining the information, you see.) Under this definition, torture would almost never be illegal, because it almost always is engaged in with the objective of obtaining information, with pain being only the means that produce the end result. Also the late December 2004 memorandum which people universally speak of as supposedly retracting the Bybee memo did not completely do that. Instead it has a huge loophole big enough to drive a truck through: it has a sneaky footnote under which it does not retract certain other torture memo, which are still classified.

The second Bybee memo is one of those, I gather. So what it all may come down to is this: By saying now that he focused on intent, which almost certainly must be a major factor in the second Bybee memo, as in the first, Chertoff is preserving the "nonprosecutability" of people who relied on the second Bybee memo as authority to engage in torture with impunity because they were desperately seeking vital information from prisoners.

There is yet one other reason why Chertoff’s statements to Congress ring false. Two other people who were involved with the torture mongering -- Jay Bybee and William Haynes -- have been rewarded by federal appellate judgeships. Chertoff too received this reward (and now has been again rewarded by another nomination). Was Chertoff, unlike Bybee and Haynes, rewarded because, or even though, he refused to do what the Administration wanted, refused to say that interrogation practices like waterboarding were legal, and refused to provide the assurance of safety desired by the CIA? It’s possible but not likely. Of course, one may retort that, even according to the unnamed senior officials, he refused to say that threats of imminent death were permissible. Even so, from everything one reads, waterboarding was the big noise from Winnetka (to make a bad pun relating to Rummy’s hometown), i.e., waterboarding was the tactic the CIA really wanted to use, maybe even was desperate to use, as it had been used by the French in Algeria and by the Argentinians and Uruguayans.

So, for various reasons, it seems to me that Chertoff’s testimony rings false. His testimony sounds to me like an example of one of the recently ever-increasing banes of our existence for the last 50 years or so: the use of their intellects, by people of high level, even brilliant, or even genius level abilities, to further dishonest ends, perverse ends, often evil ends. This may yet result in ruination of our country, and God knows it made things worse when it existed in the bureaucracy or among politicos in the times of Johnson, Nixon and Clinton. But whether it is Chertoff who is not telling the truth, or unnamed senior officials who are not telling the truth, it is plain that somebody is not telling the truth.

It is, as said, important to get to the bottom of all this, because Chertoff has the earmarks of a stealth Bush Administration candidate for the Supreme Court. Sure, he seems to have advocated the use of military tribunals instead of civilian courts to try detainees, and sure he has said we have to debate what to do with the detainees. But it is obvious the Bushies see something in him that they like very much. Bush is not in the habit of nominating opponents for the federal courts of appeal, let alone to be Director of Homeland Security. And from Bush’s standpoint, Chertoff has a desirable profile for nomination to the high court in one or two years if he keeps his skirts clean as Director of Homeland Security, a profile that will shout for Senatorial approval. As said, he is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law school, a former clerk to Judge Gurfein of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and a former clerk to Judge Brennan on the Supreme court (Brennan’s liberalism will make Chertoff even harder to oppose). He has been a partner in a major law firm, was head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice during a critical period, is presently a federal court of appeals judge, and a year or two from now will have been the Director of Homeland Security. Can you draw up a better profile from the standpoint of George Bush? Does anyone think all this has escaped Karl Rove? If it occurred to an unknown, non-political law dean in northern Massachusetts, it is not bloody likely to have escaped the crafty Rowe. Not for nothing is he a political evil genius.

So, if the Democrats do not raise more questions now about what Chertoff really did with regard to the torture mongering, and if they vote for him even though those questions have been neither raised nor answered, they are likely to be confronted in a year or two with a Supreme Court nominee who has a tremendous paper record and with regard to whom the Republicans will say, "You voted for him for the Court of Appeals, and you voted for him for Director of Homeland Security despite the claim that he had been involved in the discussions on torture. You therefore should not be refusing to vote now for a candidate with such excellent credentials because of discussions which did not dissuade you from voting for him in the past for a position as crucial as Director of Homeland Security." The Democrats are going to be faced, that is, with exactly the same kind of argument they would have been faced with in regard to Gonzalez had they not ultimately decided to do the right thing and vote against Gonzalez.

Of course, as with Gonzalez as well, perhaps more information on what Chertoff did with regard to torture will leak out in the next year or so. This is a pretty uncertain read, however, on which to base a refusal by Democrats to do the right thing now.*

*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.

Monday, February 07, 2005

Re: A Response to Your Reply of January 21

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

From: "Damato, Anthony A"
To: "Dean Lawrence R. Velvel"
Sent: Friday, February 04, 2005 7:17 PM
Subject: A Reponse to Your Reply of January 21


I like your civil war example. When I talk about "strategic choices" made in history, it is close to the "counterfactual history" that you mention, but maybe not exactly the same. Counterfactual history answers the question "what would have happened if they had taken the Y road instead of the X road?" Strategic history answers the question: "why did the decision-makers at the time choose the X road, and what facts and projections about the Y road did they negligently fail to take into account?"

On the strategic view, your question was whether Lincoln was right in wanting a chewing-up campaign. Let us look at the parameters. On Lincoln's side is the fact that the North had many more men of fighting age than the South, and hence in a one-for-one campaign of attrition the North clearly would win. Moreover, a one-for-one attrition could mean fewer casualties in the long run because of the shortening of the war period. What mistake did Lincoln make? I suspect that he overlooked the fact that the Southern armies were much better trained and battle-equipped man-for-man than the Northern armies.

The early battles may have taught the Northern generals this very lesson: that the North loses 2 or 3 of its best soldiers for every 1 the South loses. (One would have to exclude support personnel, engineers, etc., which may be more evenly divided in any given battle. Field generals would intuit this figure, but political leaders might not.) If this is true, then Lincoln's recipe would have lost the war for the North. Now I, knowing little about the Civil War (but anxious to learn!), would have to say that a historian would have to painfully assess the realities of the situation as it appeared to Lincoln and his generals early in the war. What can some historical assessment show us? What were the merits as they appeared in 1862 about Lincoln's generals' strategy of retreat rather than continuous fighting? On the view of the generals, the industrial capacity of the North, which far overwhelmed the South in terms of producing guns and munitions and wagons, would over time prevail. Thus in 1862, no matter how bad the military prospects may have appeared, in two or three years the North would win the war on account of its productive strength. Thus, from the generals' calculation, winning the war was a "sure thing" if we prolong it for a few years. Again from their viewpoint, Lincoln was too much of a gambler: he wanted a quicker victory by continuous fighting, but by pitting Northern soldiers against the
better-trained Southern soldiers, he also risked a quick defeat in the entire war.

These speculations bring to mind those of Admiral Yamamoto who devised the plan to attack Pearl Harbor. In presenting his plan to the Japanese war councils, he said that he was putting it forward as strictly conditioned on peace terms being put offered to the Americans no later than
six months after the Pearl Harbor attack (if it was successful). He told his colleagues that he had been to the United States, had seen its vast, slumbering industrial capacity, and he concluded that there was absolutely no way Japan could win a war against the United States that extended for more than a year.

His strategic vision was exactly right. If Japan had knocked off Pearl Harbor under Yamamoto's plan and sued for peace six months later, the prospect of peace in the Pacific might been attractive to Roosevelt who was worried about stopping Hitler in Europe. Sure FDR's peace terms against Japan would have been onerous (Yamamoto may have underestimated this point), but at least the terms would be a lot better than those offered to Japan in the fall of 1941 before the Pearl Harbor attack. Of course, as we know, irrationality set in. The Japanese military was so intoxicated by their victory at Pearl Harbor that they convinced themselves that they would win the entire war, and forgot about the "slumbering giant" in the Western Hemisphere. Yet it was ultimately America's 10-to-1 ratio over Japan in industrialization that won the war (even leaving the atomic bomb out of it).

I realize that these parallels are not exact, but I offer them in the spirit of your astute comment that a historical counterfactual is not much good unless it is supported by some other analogous historical incident that evidences its validity.

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




Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Re: Odd Days, Executive Branch Criminals, And The Wide Road To War

February 1, 2005

[[[audio]]]

Re: Odd Days, Executive Branch Criminals, And The Wide Road To War
From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com

Dear Colleagues:

We live in odd times. At least they seem odd to those in their 60s who suffer from the conceit that in their youth they were inculcated with some of the more admirable views of the 1950s and early 1960s. In those days, honesty, competence, hard work, modesty and, increasingly, concern for others were celebrated. The idea that we would have a President and Cabinet members who were criminals, and a Department of Justice which did everything it could to abet the crimes, was unthinkable. To be sure, there were those with bad ideas in those days, southern racists and militarists prominent among them. But I daresay that ever-increasing opinion went the other way.

But today we have a president, cabinet officers, subcabinet officers, government lawyers, judges, and cabinet nominees who beyond dispute are guilty of crimes because they knew of, welcomed in the hope it would extract information, and unsuccessfully tried to immunize torture, torture which apparently even went to the point of approximately two to three dozen deaths in captivity. Of course, that these people are guilty of crimes is not something that the mainstream press is yet willing to say. It lacks the courage, especially as to Bush himself. Nor are the Democrats willing yet to say it, much less bring impeachment proceedings against this crowd of criminals, since it would not at this point be good politics -- Bush just won the election, after all, which for at least some time in the future will immunize this twice accidental president against being brought to book. Nonetheless, to use phraseology that was a favorite of a conservative, Bob Bork, despite the current weak knees of the press and the Democrats, "there is no legitimate argument" that Bush and company are not guilty of crimes. It was, indeed, the fear that its people were engaging in crimes that initially led the CIA to request the preposterous and now (only) partially abandoned legal opinions authorizing torture despite American laws against it.

One remembers the days -- only about seven or eight months ago -- when it was possible to still hope that the mess at Abu Ghraib was confined to sex and to Abu Ghraib itself. But more and more came out, is still coming out, and is likely to continue coming out about what we are doing and who authorized it. The latest revelation is that Michael Chertoff, who was first made a federal court of appeals judge and now has been nominated to be the Director of Homeland Security, was deeply involved in torture mongering when he was head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice. The CIA asked Chertoff if specific techniques of torture would subject its operatives to possible prosecution. One of the techniques which Chertoff approved as legal in certain instances was waterboarding. Waterboarding? Waterboarding is not torture? There may be other methods of torture as devastating, but it is hard to imagine one that is more devastating.

Waterboarding has been described in a new book by Mark Danner called Torture And Truth. Actually, all that one needs to know, in order to understand what it is, is that it was used by France in Algeria, and by governments in Latin America, e.g., in Argentina and Uruguay. There seem to be two versions of it. In the French version the prisoner is laid on his or her stomach on a flat board, with the head extending over the end of the board. Under the head is a basin of liquid: filthy water, water mixed with urine, or other delights. The board is then tilted so that the prisoner’s head is dipped into the liquid, which soon covers his mouth and nose and the prisoner understandably believes he is being drowned. The Latin American version uses a table and an oil drum filled with water. When the table is "appropriately" lifted, the head is submerged in water and the person believes he is being drowned. Waterboarding induces immense fear because, to quote from Danner’s book, "as a Uruguayan army interrogator put it, ‘There is something more terrifying than pain, and that is the inability to breathe.’" Yet waterboarding is not torture? Boy, if Chertoff’s judgment is that this is not torture, I sure wouldn’t want Judge Michael Chertoff of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals opining on any law case I’m involved with.

Chertoff was the third government torture-criminal to be rewarded by nomination to a federal appeals court. Jay Bybee and William Haynes (whose appointment has been held up by Senate Democrats) are the other two. Chertoff now is also the second torture-criminal to be nominated for a Cabinet level position, with Gonzalez being the other one. It is to the credit of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee that, after first lauding Gonzalez as a poor boy who made good and saying they would vote for him, they changed their minds and voted against him. But he passed the Judiciary Committee by a 10 to 8 straight party line vote (and will pass the full Senate too). The straight party line vote for him in the Judiciary Committee numbered, of course, Arlen Specter, the three-dollar-bill Philadelphia phony, the pretend liberal or pretend moderate who is desperate to stay in his reactionary party’s good graces so that he may remain Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Since he voted for an architect of our pro-torture policy, one is driven to the conclusion that Specter, a Jew, must never have heard of the holocaust or of the physical and mental torture perpetrated by the Nazis (not to mention Joseph Stalin). Oh well, anything for political position, I guess.

As this is being written, what if anything the Democrats will do about Chertoff is anyone’s guess. But think of it -- if he is approved by the Senate, we will have as Director of Homeland Security, with all the incredible power of that position when it comes to interfering in citizens’ lives, a man of such impeccable integrity that he sanctioned gross torture. One can hardly be faulted for wondering whether anyone will be safe if Chertoff thinks, or someone persuades him to think, that some criminal governmental action or other is necessary to protect the nation. Break-ins, incommunicado detentions for months or years on end, beatings -- why not? They all will assist in making the nation safer, won’t they?

One can imagine that, from the standpoint of people like Bush, Cheney, Addington, Rumsfeld, Cambone, etc., and from the standpoint of their right wing supporters, we should affirmatively want as Director of Homeland Security a guy like Chertoff who gave a pass to waterboarding. No wonder the torture mongers are rewarded by federal judgeships and cabinet positions, or, with the help of major universities like Harvard and Berkeley, with prestigious law school professorships.

Since the Democrats, in the current state of matters, are not likely to do anything with regard to Chertoff, Gonzalez, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc., is there any hope of anything being done in the foreseeable future (or ever)? Probably not. But if there is any hope, it most likely lies with media like The New York Times and The Washington Post (and with their reporters who specialize in these matters), with individual writers or columnists like Mark Danner, Sy Hersh, Bob Herbert and Maureen Dowd, and with a handful of lawyers like Scott Horton. Though this blogger – I think rightly -- regularly takes the media to task for inadequacies, it is also true that the organizations and people I have just named have been doing a fine job of exposing what has gone on with regard to torture, and in keeping on the pressure. If this continues to be done without surcease, it is not impossible that within a year or so it may become as clear to the rest of the country as it already is to a few that culpability for serious criminal conduct runs all the way up to Bush and Cheney. Their criminal conduct is far worse than anything the impeached Bill Clinton ever did, bummy character that he is, and is just as bad or worse as anything the resigned-one-step-ahead-of-the-posse Nixon ever did. (Nixon’s crimes never killed anybody, although his policies killed hundreds of thousands or millions.) Nixon and Clinton were far more popular at given times than the second Bush ever has been, and there was a time when the thought of impeachment of either of them seemed as farfetched as does the impeachment of Bush and company now. Yet look what ultimately happened to them.
* * * * *

So the current scene, with criminals in office or advancing to higher office, is odd to someone raised in the culture of the ’50s and early ’60s. But the scene is not just odd; it is also tragic. We are faced today with a situation in Iraq which looks to have no end. Bush, of course, has trumpeted the recent elections there, because there was a relatively high turnout. But this election and Bush’s trumpeting of it no more mark the end than (as Frank Rich recently said) did the American takeover of Baghdad on April 9, 2003, Bush’s announcement that major combat operations were over on May 1, 2003, the capture of Saddam Hussein on December 14, 2003 (over a year ago), or the (partial) handover of sovereignty on June 28, 2004. There are still religious and tribal feuds, there are still insurgents, there is still growing hatred for the occupiers, and so on.

Female American soldiers are being placed closer to male combat troops because we lack sufficient forces. The army, its director of operations recently said, is still operating on the assumption that there will be more than 100,000 American troops in Iraq until at least the end of 2006, two years from now. And Bush keeps saying he will stay the course. People have a habit, you know, of not taking Bush at his word (e.g., like thinking after the election that he might sack Rumsfeld although he often said he wanted Rumsfeld to stay). Well, not to take Bush at his word is a serious mistake. He may be an intellectual midget. He may have prepared for the presidency by being a serial failure in business. He may brag that he doesn’t read and that he ignores details -- disasters both. But he does intend to do what he says he’s going to do when it comes to fighting wars.

And now, just to make matters even worse on the international front, we have learned that the Pentagon has used and is increasing its capability to secretly use special operations forces all over the world. In particular, it may use them in Iran, a country which much of the rest of the world is already deeply afraid we will attack, so that there will be another war. (Is it purely fortuitous that a shallow, John Wayneist, war-flick-in-print-type-book, a sort of shoot-’em-up in print that glorifies the army’s special forces and that was written by a reporter who was at times embedded with them and who had the army’s cooperation, has just been published?)
In the midst of all this, surprisingly enough, there is the beginning of a small movement, including some conservatives, to get out of Iraq. Some House Democrats have submitted a sense of congress resolution calling for withdrawal; the submitters had the guts to take the position, anathematized by conservatives since Nixon and Agnew, that if you really want to support our troops, the best way to do so is to get them out of a country where roughly 1,400 have been killed and over 10,000 have been wounded. Marty Meehan, a House Democrat, has called for phased withdrawal. Former Secretary of State Baker has spoken of the need to draw down our troops. Max Boot, who as far as I know has never heard a shot fired in anger nor heard of an American war he didn’t like, and who strongly favored the invasion of Iraq, has said that, although we are not yet quite in a Viet Nam-type situation of "‘suffering a lot of casualties with no obvious gain,’" still "‘you can certainly see a building sense of frustration about whether we’re making progress.’" Boot’s comments are symptomatic of the fact that even supporters of the war are beginning to see it as potentially another Viet Nam (which is very ironic, since it was Bush the Second’s father who was so proud after the first Gulf War that we had "licked the Vietnam syndrome").

Those who want to see us get out of Iraq, especially Democrats, and who might even want to take action in Congress to accomplish this, are laboring under a terrible handicap, however. It is one that was never even thought about until years and years into the Viet Nam War, because until Viet Nam the relative authority of the President and Congress to decide on war had not been much considered. As part of doing extensive work on the question of the constitutionality of that war, it is probably fair to say that this blogger did more than anyone else to figure out the problem then, yet the problem is so simple and so obvious that it was and remains embarrassing to him to have taken years to figure it out. "How stupid can one be?" is the bothersome thought in this regard.

The problem in mind is this: once Congress has authorized war, or once the President has taken us into war without Congressional authorization, because of the presidential veto power it takes a two-thirds vote in each house of Congress to get us out. A simple majority in each house cannot do it. So it is easy to get into a war but hard to get out of one. As was noted near the end of the Viet Nam War by a federal trial court judge whose decision against war was immediately reversed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, only one-third plus one in either House of Congress can keep us in an existing war because it only takes one-third plus one in either House to uphold a veto of a bill that would get us out. This is not even to mention other political complications, which shall be discussed below.

Unhappily, there is no question that Congress has authorized war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran or anywhere else that Bush and his right wing crackers may decide to go to war. The Congressional law specifically authorizing force in Iraq said that "The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces . . . as he deems to be necessary and appropriate in order to -- (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq." The Congressional resolution authorizing the war in Afghanistan is far broader and far worse: it authorizes war anywhere and everywhere the President wants. It says that "the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons." Plainly, all the President has to do to launch a congressionally authorized war against Iran, Syria, any other country, or any person or organization, is to "determine" that the desired enemy in some way helped or harbored the September 11th terrorists and war will help forestall future attacks against us. To make such a determination is no trick at all for an Executive that already has "determined" that Iraq had WMDs, that Iraq helped the September 11th terrorists, that Iran and Syria aided or harbored them, or, in other language-and-fact-distorting findings, that gross torture is not torture at all.

The truth of the matter, although the mainstream press clearly does not yet have the guts to say it, is that September 11th was not a disaster to George Bush. It was a godsend to him. This is an unusual and to many people infuriating thing to say, but it is just as obviously true. Bush was a guy who until September 11th didn’t have a clue. Like his daddy, he was not big on the "vision thing." But along came September 11th and he suddenly found that he could be the President who not only made the world safe for democracy (again), but who spread democracy all over the world in the process of saving America from Islamic fundamentalists. Now that was a vision; and George the Second embraced it. And an obsequious Congress played along by enacting a broad scale resolution authorizing him to make war anywhere, everywhere and forever so long as he performed the easy trick of determining that the enemy of choice in some way aided or harbored the terrorists of 9/11. That this resolution, as said, authorizes war forever is merely underlined by the constant statements by Bush and his crowd that the war against terrorists is a war without end (and by their intent to hold captives for tens or scores of years if necessary).

Can Congress do this? -- can it give the president its constitutional power to determine whether we shall fight a war, and allow him to exercise its power into the indefinite future? Although the very idea would make the founders turn over in their graves, the answer today, unhappily, is yes. Congress now can do this. Until the 1930's there was a constitutional doctrine which would have prevented it, the so-called (non) delegation of powers doctrine. Under that doctrine Congress could not delegate away its powers to the Executive Branch or to administrative agencies. But in the 1930's, due to the New Deal, this changed. Now Congress can totally delegate away its decisionmaking power, and, in the field of war, that is what it has done since the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964 -- forty years ago.

So Democrats in Congress who may wish to put an end to the Iraqi or any other war are faced with the fact that Congress has authorized such wars (so long as the President performs the easy trick of relating the intended enemy to 9/11). And the authorization, once made, cannot as a practical matter be rescinded. If the President’s party controls Congress, as during Nam and as true now, the Congressional Committee chairs and leaders will not let a war-ending bill get out of committee. If it somehow got out of committee, the controlling party’s Congressional troops will be marshaled against it on the floor. If it were somehow to pass Congress, the president will veto it. He will veto it even if it is part of a more general and important law, such as a military appropriations bill, because he knows that Congress will have to reenact the military appropriations bill, sans its war-ending clause. (We can’t have a military that has no money, after all.) He will similarly veto it, if it comes in the form of a bill saying no funds can be used to fight a particular war or against a particular enemy. And once he vetoes it his veto will stand if as few as one-third plus one member of either House refuse to override it. Moreover, the threat of veto is not some merely lawyerish hypothetical. It was done by Nixon in the last part of the Viet Nam War, and, in order to override his veto and at long last get us out of that war, Congress had to agree to allow the war to continue for awhile. Does anyone really doubt that, like Nixon, Bush would veto a bill that puts an end to his military adventures? Anyone who doubts it has not been watching or listening to George Bush for the last few years.

So the chances for success of those who would like to see an end to the war in Iraq are slim indeed. Though it is hard to fathom, to really grasp, that that war and/or new wars may continue for years, one look at Viet Nam shows that wars, once entered or authorized, can continue endlessly if backed by a determined President. By 1965 or 1966 there were lots of people who wanted to see an end to American participation in the Viet Nam War. But that war, backed by two presidents, did not end for America until 1973, seven to eight years later, and was secretly expanded to neighboring countries (Laos and Cambodia), just as the present Iraq war may be expanded to (and already may have been secretly expanded to) neighboring countries like Syria and Iran. And when necessary, our war in Indo China was financed by monies secretly transferred from other accounts by the Executive (as the Bush Administration may also have done already in regard to Iran, though one cannot yet know).

What can be done to avert the horrid possibility of long lasting, expanding war - - a possibility that seems all too plausible under true believer George and his various henchmen in DOD and elsewhere -- does not readily spring to mind. Continued exposure by the press of iniquitous conduct by Bush and his administration, pressure of one type and another from foreign governments who find Bushian America a major threat to peace, pressure from Democrats and others who want peace to break out, and, withal, bringing the pot to a boil that promises a major defeat for the Republicans in 2008 would seem to be the only, and all too slow, candidates to cure the situation. There is an old Russian proverb, relating to the massive deaths in war, that says it is a wide road that leads to war, but only a narrow path home again. The same idea is true relative to the general problem of getting into and out of war. It is easy to get into war. The carelessness and stupidity of our presidents and congresses have definitively proven that since at least 1964. But getting out of war is another and much harder matter entirely. And as has been regularly shown, it is not a matter that presidents and congresses usually even think about, and certainly do not think hard about, when taking the wide road to war.*