Last week I spoke at my alma mater’s Class Day ceremony, which at Columbia College serves as the central event for seniors, even though Columbia University, of which it’s a part, conducts the formal commencement and awarding of degrees on the next day. I won’t reprise my speech since I’m reluctant to promote a contribution to a genre of public speaking that many people equate with sedatives. (It is available on Harpers.org.) As my fellow Columbia graduate Tom Vinciguerra wrote in Newsday, “The days of memorable, even historic, end-of-academic-year speeches are long gone,” replaced mainly by “throwaway sentiments equally trite and hortatory—e.g., ‘seize the day,’ ‘don’t forget to give back,’ ‘dare to be different.’ ” [MORE . . .]

This week has been full of illuminating disclosures concerning the American criminal-justice system. Last Monday, a Columbia Law School project showed convincingly that Carlos DeLuna, executed for homicide by the state of Texas in 1989, was innocent of the crime; the project also showed who actually committed the crime. The revelation was shocking in part because DeLuna’s name had never figured among the dozen or more prisoners executed by Texas whose guilt has been vigorously and publicly contested; even his own lawyers seemed to have assumed his guilt.

Four days later, news broke in the case of Cameron Todd Willingham—executed by Texas in 2004 for murders, dubbed the “Texas witch trials,” that involved bizarre allegations of occultism related to the defendant’s love of heavy-metal music—when a state district-court judge reviewing the case concluded that Texas had wrongfully convicted and executed Willingham. The judge, who cited “overwhelming, credible and reliable evidence” presented at a hearing in October 2010, prepared an order of posthumous exoneration, but its issuance was effectively blocked by a state appellate court, which criticized the continued exploration of the Willingham case. [MORE . . .]

"WHAT THOUGH I AM OBLIGATED TO DANCE A BEAR."

President Barack Obama hosted a G8 summit at Camp David and a NATO summit in Chicago. At the G8 gathering, leaders stayed up late chatting, debated policy while exercising on treadmills, and sang “Happy Birthday” to Japanese prime minister Yoshihiko Noda around a chocolate birthday cake. “Camp David has just got a special atmosphere to it,” said one of Obama’s economic advisers.^[1] Thousands of people, including scores of veterans and hundreds of felt-cap-wearing nurses calling for a “Robin Hood tax” on Wall Street, protested in Chicago. “The military handed out cheap tokens like this to soldiers and servicemembers to fill the void where their conscience used to be,” said U.S. Army veteran Greg Miller, who threw away his Global War on Terrorism and National Defense medals from a stage. Nearly 50 other veterans discarded their medals, Anonymous hacked the websites of the Chicago Police Department and the City of Chicago, 45 protesters were arrested, and three men were charged with conspiring to commit terrorism for allegedly plotting to firebomb Obama’s campaign headquarters and Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s house.^{[2][3][4][5][6][7][8]} At The Hague, the genocide trial of former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic was suspended indefinitely, and in Yemen, a suicide bomber killed 96 soldiers on parade following a week in which government forces killed dozens of Al Qaeda fighters in the country’s south.^[9][10][11] Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only man convicted of the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am passenger flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, died at 60 in Libya.^[12] Iran hanged a man it claimed was an Israeli Mossad agent responsible for the assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist, and Turkey declared that a European bee-eater with larger-than-usual nostrils discovered in Gaziantep Province was not, as locals initially suspected, an Israeli spy.^[13][14] Sixteen hundred Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails ended their month-long hunger strike, and Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, who escaped from prison in April and then reached a deal with authorities that allowed him to leave the country, arrived in the United States to begin studies at New York University.^[15][16] A Spotsylvania County, Virginia, woman was stabbed by a man whose forehead was tattooed “Cogito ergo Sum.”^[17] [MORE . . .]

William Schabas

A successfully completed prosecution in the International Criminal Court, new demands for investigations into atrocities in Syria, ongoing issues surrounding crimes committed by American officials during the Bush-era “war on terror”—international criminal-law issues are steadily topical. Canadian scholar William Schabas, now a professor at Middlesex University in London, is one of the world’s leading writers and speakers on the subject. I put six questions to him about his new book, Unimaginable Atrocities: Justice, Politics, and Rights at the War Crimes Tribunals. [MORE . . .]

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 . . .]