… but his spirit seems to have inspired a courtroom drama in Madrid the past few weeks. Baltasar Garzón—the crusading investigative judge who once sought the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, probed crimes against humanity in Central America, exposed massive corruption in public-works projects in Spain, and tried to open the lid on the mass killings of the Franco era—was himself placed in the dock, accused of misuse of his judicial powers. In the end little was left to chance in the rush to destroy him, an effort that brought into alignment the many powerful figures he had offended: the now-governing conservative Partido Popular, which was richly embarrassed by the corruption disclosures of the Garzón-led Gürtel investigation; the United States government, which was angered by his pursuit of a torture investigation focusing on Guantánamo and was openly working for his removal; the heirs of the Franco era, who were whipped into a state of hysteria about the prospect of an investigation into the mass murders of that era.

Even Spain’s leftists and liberals seemed uneasy with the quixotic and sometimes politically tin-eared jurist. Only a ragtag group of human-rights advocates and bar associations from around the Hispanic world stood with Garzón, remembering how he had stood with them against the atrocity crimes of dictatorships, which the polite and the powerful preferred simply to ignore. Now Garzón stands convicted of abuse of power, in comically politicized proceedings that he is not permitted to appeal. [MORE . . .]

Dear Readers,

The February 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine is with subscribers, for whom it is also available online, and it will be on newsstands for another few weeks yet. We’ve posted a number of pieces related to features in the issue since it came out. A summary is below, along with a few web links related to the issue. [MORE . . .]

Ambassador David Scheffer steered America’s engagement with the concept of war-crimes accountability throughout the Clinton years, and has been one of the nation’s leading observers and commentators on the subject since then. He has now published a major work, All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals, that chronicles America’s pursuit of war criminals during the Nineties and offers clear insights into the issues these efforts raised for future generations. I put six questions to Scheffer about his book:

1. In the Wall Street Journal, torture-memo author John Yoo argues that you “fail to understand” that the humanitarian challenges of our age demand the robust use of military force, and that international tribunals “will do little to stop the killing.” As a defendant in pending litigation in Spain, Yoo has pressing personal reasons to oppose the concept of universal jurisdiction, but aside from that, how do you respond to his critique? [MORE . . .]

The New York Times reports:

Egypt’s military-led government said Sunday that it would put 19 Americans and two dozen others on trial in a politically charged criminal investigation into the foreign financing of nonprofit groups that has shaken the 30-year alliance between the United States and Egypt.

The decision raises tensions between the two allies to a new peak at a decisive moment in Egypt’s political transition after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak a year ago. Angry protesters are battling security forces in the streets of the capital and other major cities. The economy is in urgent need of billions of dollars in foreign aid. And the military rulers are in the final stages of negotiations with the Islamists who dominate the new Parliament over the terms of a transfer of power that could set the country’s course for decades.

The criminal prosecution is a rebuke to Washington in the face of increasingly stern warnings to Egypt’s ruling generals from President Obama, cabinet officials and senior Congressional leaders that it could jeopardize $1.55 billion in expected American aid this year, including $1.3 billion for the military. But for Washington, revoking the aid would risk severing the tie that for three decades has bound the United States, Egypt and Israel in an uneasy alliance that is the cornerstone of the American-backed regional order.

[MORE . . .]

Russia and China vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Syria for its campaign to suppress dissent and backing an Arab League plan for Bashar al-Assad to step down as Syrian leader. The vote came as the Assad regime was launching a major offensive on the city of Homs, whose residents were under mortar attack over the weekend and into Monday morning. “A couple members of this council remain steadfast in their willingness to sell out the Syrian people and shield a craven tyrant,” said the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov argued that the resolution placed too little emphasis on the “armed extremists” attempting to unseat Assad, and characterized Western reactions as “somewhere on the verge of hysteria.” “People are in a state of panic,” said one Homs resident. “They are screaming, ‘May God help us’ or ‘Where are the Arabs?’” In Damascus, one of the Syrian cities previously least affected by civil strife, residents were stockpiling food and water and enduring rolling blackouts. “Nobody is comfortable anymore,” said one socialite, adding that she had curtailed her weekly visits to the nail salon. “And I paint my nails black when I come, just like the situation.”^{1 2 3 4 5} At least 70 people died in a riot at a soccer stadium in Port Said, Egypt, and in Moscow, tens of thousands of activists rallied in Bolotnaya Square to oppose Vladimir Putin’s presidential candidacy, while tens of thousands of Putin supporters rallied at Poklonnaya Gora, calling the antigovernment activists “Orange trash” and “Bolotnaya snot.” Putin’s detractors, some of them dressed as condoms, turned out in spite of below-freezing temperatures. “We are not revolutionaries in mink coats!” shouted one speaker. “I am!” replied a woman in a mink coat. “We are a snowball,” said an interior decorator, “and we are rolling.”^{6 7 8} [MORE . . .]

Obama chose Osawatomie because it was there that Theodore Roosevelt took his first step toward abandoning the Republican Party to run as a Progressive, supposedly to battle the powers that had captured the G.O.P. and Washington. Obama, eager to portray himself as a fighter for today’s middle class, carefully draped Roosevelt’s mantle over his own shoulders. Roosevelt, he said, had “busted up monopolies, forcing those companies to compete.” Then, striking his own brave stance against Goliath, Obama boomed, “Today, they still must.” [MORE . . .]

A Christian martyr.

Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich released their most recent tax returns. Romney’s showed that he made $21.6 million in 2010, paid taxes at a rate of 14 percent, and gave $4 million to the Mormon church over two years. Gingrich’s return showed that he earned $3.1 million last year and may have cheated on his taxes. ^{1 2 3 4} President Barack Obama made increasing the tax rate on the super-rich a theme of his State of the Union address, saying, “Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary,” whom experts calculated earns between $200,000 and $500,000 a year.⁵ A Wall Street Journal reporter compared the practice, begun in 2011, of having Republicans and Democrats sit next to each other during the State of the Union to date rape, and a Chrysler 300C once leased by President Obama was listed on eBay with a starting bid of $1 million. “It’s all about the money for me,” said the car’s owner, a self-described Reagan conservative. ^{6 7} The Republican candidates faced off in their nineteenth primary debate, and former presidential candidate Herman Cain, jailed former congressman Duke Cunningham, and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin threw their support behind Gingrich. “Both party machines... are trying to crucify Newt Gingrich for bucking the tide,” explained Palin. “Rage against the machine, vote for Newt. Annoy a liberal, vote Newt.”^{8 9 10 11} PETA was offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the person who killed an Arkansas Democratic campaign manager’s cat and left it on his doorstep with the word “liberal” written across its body, and a penguin named Paula defecated in the chamber of the Kentucky Senate.^{12 13} [MORE . . .]

I recently learned about a revolutionist pamphlet published last year in Spain called La Carta de los Comunes. It begins with an intriguing conceit. Set in 2033 in a magical-realist Madrid, it tells of a population whose bodies became physically hunched over in submission to a wealthy few. At last, with their livelihoods nearly eviscerated, the people rise up and take over their city. They resurrect the medieval notion of the commons, creating a domain of shared resources apart from the market and bureaucratic oversight. They learn to stand upright again. The pamphlet then presents a Magna Carta for their new society. [MORE . . .]

Harper’s has been reporting on monopoly capitalism almost since the magazine’s founding in 1850, criticizing the system whenever it appeared to be concentrating too much power in the hands of a greedy few, and sometimes spurring change. Our first significant piece on the subject was a two-part essay by Richard T. Ely on railway trusts, which ran in 1886. (Subscribers can read part one here, and part two here.) “I propose to show in these articles,” Ely wrote, “that our abominable no-system of railways has brought the American people to a condition of one-sided dependence upon corporations, which too often renders our nominal freedom illusory.” The following year, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, which created the Interstate Commerce Commission and placed it in charge of railway regulation, in turn paving the way for the landmark Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. [MORE . . .]

The equation is simple. In sector after sector of our political economy, there are still many sellers: many of us. But every day, there are fewer buyers: fewer of them. Hence, they enjoy more and more liberty to dictate terms—or simply to dictate. [MORE . . .]

An American cattleman.

Francesco Schettino, captain of the Costa Concordia cruise liner whose capsizing off the Italian island of Giglio killed at least 15 people, was revealed to have deviated from the ship’s authorized route in order to salute a former captain who lived on the island. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera released an audio recording in which Schettino, speaking to the Coast Guard from a lifeboat, defied commands to return to the ship and direct the evacuation of passengers. “Listen Schettino, you saved yourself from the sea,” says the Coast Guard captain, “but I am going to... I am going to make you pay for this. Go on board, dick!” Schettino later claimed he had not intended to abandon ship but had tripped and fallen into a lifeboat and was unable to climb back aboard. Press reports noted that after coming ashore, he took a taxi to a hotel, where he asked the manager for an espresso and a pair of dry socks. A group of Swiss survivors recalled that Céline Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” the theme song from the movie Titanic, was playing in the dining room when the Costa Concordia hit the rocks.^{1 2 3 4 5 6 7} The Iowa G.O.P. admitted that it had misplaced the January 3rd caucus results from eight precincts, and that a new tally showed Rick Santorum had won, not Mitt Romney, as was previously reported.⁸ Newt Gingrich defeated Romney in Saturday’s primary in South Carolina, despite allegations from Gingrich’s ex-wife that he had asked her for an open marriage in order to continue seeing his mistress, who is now his wife.⁹ Rick Perry dropped out of the race and endorsed Gingrich, joining him in attacking Romney for inconsistencies in his stance on abortion. “You’re pro-abortion and then you change over to pro-life in your 50s?” asked Perry.^{10 11} Rick Santorum’s wife, a pro-life activist, was discovered to have had a six-year relationship with an abortion doctor and obstetrician 41 years her senior, who also delivered her, before marrying Santorum.¹² A Ron Paul hot-air balloon was deflated after causing a four-mile traffic jam on a South Carolina highway.¹³ [MORE . . .]

In 2001, I went to live in a section of Lima called San Juan de Lurigancho. In the imaginary map all Limeños have of their city, this district is indistinguishable from the two notorious prisons that lie within its borders. One of these is Castro Castro, a maximum-security facility holding most of those convicted of terrorism; the other is the district’s namesake, known simply as Lurigancho, a hellish complex originally built for 2,000 inmates, but now home to nearly four times that number. It is, by some estimates, the most overcrowded penitentiary in South America. [MORE . . .]

Michael Hastings’s Polk Award–winning Rolling Stone article, “The Runaway General,” brought the career of General Stanley McChrystal, America’s commander in Afghanistan, to an abrupt end. Now Hastings has developed the material from that article, and the storm that broke in its wake, into an equally explosive book, The Operators, which includes a merciless examination of relations between major media and the American military establishment. I put six questions to Hastings about his book and his experiences as a war correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan:

1. Your book presents a Barack Obama who behaves uncomfortably and perhaps too deferentially around his generals, but who is also the first president since Harry S. Truman to have sacked a theater commander during wartime—and moreover, who did it twice (first, General David McKiernan, then McChrystal). How do you reconcile these observations? [MORE . . .]

In the outpouring of accolades that followed the death of Christopher Hitchens, I confess I joined in, trying my best to claim some of his journalistic legacy. Because the obituaries failed to mention his service as the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine, of which I am the publisher, or that his landmark book The Trial of Henry Kissinger originated as two long pieces in the magazine, I boasted of his relationship with Harper’s on our website. [MORE . . .]