Massive indebtedness changes a person, maybe even more than a college education does, and it’s reasonable to suspect that the politicos who have allowed the tuition disaster to take its course know this. To saddle young people with enormous, inescapable debt—total student debt is now more than one trillion dollars—is ultimately to transform them into profit­-maximizing machines. I mean, working as a schoolteacher or an editorial assistant at a publishing house isn’t going to help you chip away at that forty grand you owe. You can’t get out of it by bankruptcy, either. And our political leaders, lost in a fantasy of punitive individualism, certainly won’t propose the bailout measures they could take to rescue the young from the crushing burden. [MORE . . .]

British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, appearing in character as Admiral General Haffaz Aladeen to promote his new film, The Dictator, has been working in lines about the double standards of American human rights assessments. “What in Wadiya you call genocide,” he says, referring to the dictator’s fictitious Arab homeland, “in Texas you call the justice system.” Texas criminal justice may not amount to genocide, but it does misfire with alarming frequency, and claims innocent lives in the process.

Since 1982, when Texas resumed judicial killings following a moratorium during the Sixties, the state has executed 482 people—four times the number of the next most aggressive state. Moreover, amid the rough-and-tumble of Texas’s right-leaning political culture, a candidate’s willingness to authorize large numbers of judicial killings and his distaste for clemency and pardon reviews has become a sine qua non for holding the state’s governorship—which has in turn become an important launching pad for G.O.P. presidential candidates, particularly since Texas is the most populous predictably Republican state. [MORE . . .]

ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer continues her examination of the federal pardons process with a piece, excerpted in Monday’s Washington Post, that contrasts two pardon candidates. Both cases are the sort of victimless drug offenses that clog the federal detentions system. One involves a star athlete with no prior criminal record, and a prosecutor’s office and judge who favored immediate commutation of the sentence. The athlete was present at a drug sale, and he introduced the parties to one another, for which he received a gratuity from the dealer. Though such offenses are theoretically prosecutable, this very rarely happens.

This pardon candidate is black; he was sentenced to three lifetime terms in prison. The other candidate is on his fourth conviction for drug trafficking, this time as a major meth dealer. He refused to cooperate with prosecutors, who strongly opposed his release. But he had the backing of politically connected family and friends, including some well-positioned Republican office holders. Moreover, he was white. Both files landed on the desk of President George W. Bush on the same day, December 23, 2008. Can you guess which request he granted? That would be the politically connected white man, Reed Raymond Prior. The black man, Clarence Aaron, a former linebacker at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had his request rejected. [MORE . . .]

There was a time when I harbored ambitions of becoming president—to fulfill the dream shared by so many young Americans—so that I might leave my mark on history, bring peace where there was war, free the unjustly imprisoned, outmaneuver the leaders of other great nations, bask in the admiration and affection of my fellow citizens, and have my pick of college and university commencement venues. [MORE . . .]

One day after North Carolina approved a state-constitution amendment banning same-sex marriages, and three days after Vice President Joe Biden claimed he was “absolutely comfortable” with gay marriage, Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to announce that he believes gay couples should be able to wed. During an interview on ABC News, the president, who has long described his views on same-sex marriage as “evolving,” said he had “concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” He added that a progressive stance on marriage equity was important for reaching younger voters. “They are much more comfortable with it,” he said.^[1][2][3] Newsweek declared Obama the first gay president, Betty White endorsed Obama’s reelection bid, and George Clooney hosted a $40,000-a-seat celebrity fundraiser for the campaign on his personal basketball court. “We raised a lot of money because everybody loves George,” said the president. “They like me; they love him. And rightfully so.”^[4][5][6] A crowd of 34,000 at evangelical Liberty University cheered presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney when he reiterated his definition of marriage as “a relationship between one man and one woman.” “There is no greater force for good in the nation,” Romney told the audience, “than Christian conscience in action.”^[7][8] High school friends of Romney’s recalled a 1965 incident in which they attacked a boy they presumed to be gay and held him down while Romney cut his hair. “It was a hack job,” said one witness.^[9][10] Vidal Sassoon, inventor of the five-point cut and the Kwan bob, died at 84; children’s-book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak died at 83; an autopsy revealed that “Painter of Light” Thomas Kinkade died of an alcohol and Valium overdose; and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said he was “dead wrong” last month when he dismissed concerns about trading by his bank, which disclosed a loss of $2 billion in botched trades over the past six weeks, as a “tempest in a teapot.” “We made a terrible, egregious mistake,” Dimon said. ‘‘There’s almost no excuse for it.”^{[11][12][13][14][15]} [MORE . . .]

One of the lasting challenges to America’s federal judiciary will be addressing American complicity in the tortures and disappearances of the past ten years. Two recent appeals-court decisions show us how judicial panels are tackling these issues: by shielding federal officials and their contractors from liability, and even by glorifying the fruits of their dark arts. In the process, legal prohibitions on torture are being destroyed through secrecy and legal sleight of hand, and our justice system is being distorted and undermined.

Last week, the Ninth Circuit reversed a district-court decision allowing a suit against torture-memo author John Yoo to go forward. The suit had been brought on behalf of José Padilla by his mother, who argued that Padilla was tortured while in U.S. custody as a result of Yoo’s advice—a claim that seems pretty much unassailable, and that had to be accepted as true for purposes of the preliminary rulings. In a decision that has left international-law scholars dumbstruck, the Ninth Circuit granted Yoo immunity, concluding that the law surrounding torture was so muddled when he dispensed his advice that he should be given the benefit of the doubt. The best authority the judges could muster for this outlandish perspective was a European Court of Human Rights decision from 1978, which found that a series of grim techniques used by Britain against Irish internees was not torture—rather it was “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” [MORE . . .]

If America’s national-security mavens had to identify their biggest worry on a world map, odds are that the pin would land within a hundred miles of Islamabad. Once hailed as America’s most vital non-NATO ally, and the recipient of more than $10 billion in aid since 2001, Pakistan is now emerging as a nightmare. It may be home to the world’s fastest-growing nuclear stockpile, and it is certainly the most worrisome source of nuclear proliferation over the past decade. Its security forces have a mysteriously cozy relationship with scheduled terrorist forces, such as Lashkar-e Taiba, which launched a series of attacks on Mumbai in November 2008, killing or injuring at least 472 people. And it is a state in abject collapse—unable to convince its citizens to pay taxes, to provide basic utilities to its people, to keep order, or to provide for essential defense. Significantly, Pakistan is also a nation filled with rage against the United States—a dangerous enemy in the making. How could this happen in a country that could barely stand up without massive U.S. assistance?

Ali Chishti grapples with the demonization of the United States in Pakistan in a piece in Lahore’s Friday Times: [MORE . . .]

An American mastiff.

Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, Walid bin Attash, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh were arraigned before a military tribunal at Camp Justice in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for orchestrating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Six of the victims’ families, who had won the right to attend the hearing in a lottery, watched from behind soundproof glass as the accused protested the conditions of their confinement by refusing to enter pleas and answer questions posed to them by the judge. The defendants also insisted that the entire charge sheet be read out, though prosecutors stopped short of reciting the names of all 2,976 people killed on 9/11. Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the attacks, disrupted the proceedings with a prayer session; another defendant stripped to show scars he said had been inflicted by Guantánamo guards; and two others quietly read The Economist magazine. “Why is this so hard?” asked the judge.^{[1][2][3][4][5]} An explosion killed six people outside a Kabul housing complex on the first anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death, hours after President Barack Obama visited the city to sign a troop-drawdown pact with the Afghan government.^[6] Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, rebuked Obama for politicizing the bin Laden assassination. “Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order,” Romney said at a campaign event.^[7] Newly released documents obtained during the raid on bin Laden’s compound included critiques of Fox News as “lacking neutrality” and MSNBC as “good and neutral” until it fired Keith Olbermann and “Octavia Nasser the Lebanese,” a plan to rebrand Al Qaeda with a new name, and details of a plot to assassinate Obama. “Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make Biden take over the presidency,” wrote bin Laden. “Biden is totally unprepared for that post.”^[8][9][10] An American citizen was found guilty of plotting a suicide attack on the New York City subway system.^[11] One World Trade Center became the city’s tallest building.^[12] [MORE . . .]

The last tower to stand at Cabrini-Green, a fifteen-story high-rise known by its address, 1230 N. Burling Street, was opened in 1962 and torn down in 2011. There were 134 families living there at its peak occupancy, then fewer than fifty, and, for a short time before its demolition last year, only the household of Annie Ricks, her children bouncing balls in their top-floor unit, blaring music, with no neighbors around to object. On the Cabrini-Green Facebook page, former residents reconnect, posting competing memories of the movies that were projected onto 1230 Burling’s façade, the unlicensed candy store that was operated out of a first-floor apartment, or the slick jackets they wore as members of the Junior Police Explorers. [MORE . . .]

Ian Bremmer

The world is quickly being reshaped, writes political economist Ian Bremmer. America established itself as the paramount power following the collapse of Communism, but the emerging system is one in which no nation or group of nations stands out as its leader. What will this mean for the global economy and for conflict in the near future? In Every Nation for Itself, Bremmer looks at the world forming now and sees glimmers of hope, but a somber future. I put six questions to him about his new book. [MORE . . .]

Daniel Chong, an engineering student at the University of California at San Diego, went to a 4/20 party thrown by some friends. He got stoned, fell asleep, and was still present the following morning when agents of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration stormed the house. Although it was clear that Chong had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, the DEA threw him into a cell. Then they forgot about him, leaving him without food or water for four days:

Mr. Chong was left alone in the 5-by-10-foot holding cell, with no food, no sink and no toilet—only a blanket. He said he could hear footsteps as agents walked by, other cell doors opening and toilets flushing. He kicked the door, screaming for water. But no one came. After the first two days, Mr. Chong said, he began to hallucinate, imagining “little Japanese cartoon characters telling me what to do.” He clawed at the walls, convinced that they contained messages about where to find water.

Three times he drank his own urine. The only sustenance he had, he said, was a packet of white powder that he found wrapped in the blanket, which turned out to be methamphetamine. On the fourth day, he said, the lights in the cell went out. Eventually, his hands still cuffed behind his back, he broke his eyeglasses with his teeth, as he contemplated killing himself. On his arm, he tried to carve a message: “Sorry Mom.” He also swallowed a piece of the glass, which cut his esophagus.

[MORE . . .]

Why did Jose Rodriguez, the former head of the CIA’s clandestine service, destroy ninety-two tapes of interrogation sessions in which terrorism suspects were subjected to waterboarding and other torture techniques? On Sunday, Lesley Stahl put the question to him on 60 Minutes, and he provided an answer:

rodriguez: To protect the people who worked for me and who were at those black sites and whose faces were shown on the tape.

stahl: Protect them from what?

rodriguez: Protect them from Al Qaeda ever getting their hands on these tapes and using them to go after them and their families.

[MORE . . .]