http://harpers.org/rss/index.xml A Harper's Magazine Weblog en-us Copyright Harper's Magazine Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:44:33 -0400 http://www.harpers.org/media/image/Harpers_305x100.gif http://harpers.org http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006040 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006040 Scott Horton Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:40:06 -0400 I discuss the CIA’s use of drones, the legal and policy issues, and the points of friction between the CIA and the Defense Department in an interview today at GQ. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006039 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006039 Scott Horton Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:38:48 -0400 I discuss an Italian court’s recent conviction of 23 American officials on kidnapping and assault charges stemming from a 2003 extraordinary rendition operation with DemocracyNow’s Amy Goodman and the Italian prosecutor, Armando Spataro, below: . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006031 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006031 Scott Horton Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:04:00 -0400 An Italian court hearing criminal charges against 26 American officials and a smaller group of Italians arising out of a CIA extraordinary rendition has ruled today. The case relates to the CIA’s snatching of a Muslim cleric known as Abu Omar off the streets of Milan in 2003. He was whisked off to Egypt, where he was tortured before being released. Italian prosecutors noted that the American action botched a prosecution they had prepared against Abu Omar for participation in a terrorist conspiracy. Here’s a summary of the court’s decision from Reuters: . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006030 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006030 Scott Horton Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:29:53 -0400 From the apex of the national security apparatus, he arranged for the torture of alleged terrorists and their sympathizers, and for the “disappearance” of hundreds and perhaps thousands of others. He then assumed office as president and began a rearguard struggle to defend state actors from liability for these acts. His lawyers spun doctrines of immunity, and believed that legal protections like statutes of limitations and wide grants of amnesty would block any efforts at accountability. For good measure, they sorted carefully through state records, destroying documents that might inculpate senior government figures. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006029 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006029 Scott Horton Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:53:29 -0400 Today, political bloviators of all shapes and sizes will rush to explain the dramatic, nation-rattling and long-term consequences of elections in which a tiny fraction of the voters turned out, mostly driven by local issues. But the elections team at the Daily Show beats them to it, giving the definitive interpretation (before the votes were tallied, of course): . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006024 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006024 Scott Horton Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:57:55 -0400 “When the history of this distinguished court is written, today’s majority decision will be viewed with dismay,” writes Guido Calabresi, the former Yale Law dean and a man widely viewed as the most illustrious living member of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. He is lodging his dissent in a 7-4 decision of the en banc court concluding that a Canadian software engineer named Maher Arar has no right to sue government officials. What has Calabresi so worked up? . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006019 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006019 Scott Horton Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:09:11 -0400 What sort of privacy do you expect when you send an email? As Americans increasingly rely on the Internet for communication, Justice Department lawyers increasingly argue that Americans have no right to privacy there—notwithstanding repeated congressional efforts to bolster these rights. A recent case out of Oregon shows how the privacy expectation associated with emails and other Internet communications is being frittered away. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006017 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006017 Scott Horton Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:50:23 -0400 In the prosecution that led to the conviction of former Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald famously spoke of a “cloud over the vice president.” His remarks suggested that, while no charges had been pressed against Cheney, the vice president was considered an unindicted co-conspirator in a scheme to out covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. When, after a long struggle to protect Cheney from “embarrassment,” the Justice Department complied with a court order to disclose the FBI agents’ notes of the interview that Fitzgerald conducted with Cheney in 2004, the reason for these comments became clear. The cloud over Dick Cheney seems to be more of a fog bank engulfing him, however, and the fog is of Cheney’s making. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006018 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006018 Scott Horton Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:20:10 -0400 In the 2008 presidential campaign, both Barack Obama and Joe Biden criticized the Bush Administration’s historically unprecedented invocation of state security concerns to block lawsuits challenging the legality of its surveillance. They promised new procedures that would “tighten up” the “problem” of overreaching claims of secrecy. In time, the Justice Department instituted a new review policy, setting internal standards, requiring a high-level internal review, and promising to present a packet for in camera review by the judge involved who would make the final call. That sounded good, and the suggestion that the government would abide by a judge’s review was more accommodating than the posture Bush-era attorneys general assumed—insisting that judges shouldn’t be in this business at all, since only officers of the executive branch had a good feel for such matters. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90005837 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90005837 Sun, 01 Nov 2009 07:29:05 -0400 Ved, que sobre una cumbre De aquel anfitëatro cavernoso. Del sol de ocaso á la encendida lumbre Descubre alzado un pálido Coloso, Que eran los Pirinéos Basa humilde á sus miembros gigantëos. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90006008 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90006008 Sat, 31 Oct 2009 07:11:58 -0400 ἀλλ’, ἦν δ’ ἐγώ, ποτὲ ἀκούσας τι πιστεύω τούτῳ: ὡς ἄρα Λεόντιος ὁ Ἀγλα ωνος ἀνιὼν ἐκ Πειραιῶς ὑπὸ τὸ βόρειον τεῖχος ἐκτός, αἰσθόμενος νεκροὺς παρὰ τῷ δημίῳ κειμένους, ἅμα μὲν ἰδεῖν ἐπιθυμοῖ, ἅμα δὲ αὖ δυσχεραίνοι καὶ ἀποτρέποι ἑαυτόν, καὶ τέως μὲν μάχοιτό τε καὶ παρακαλύπτοιτο, κρατούμενος δ’ οὖν ὑπὸ τῆς ἐπιθυμίας, διελκύσας τοὺς ὀφθαλμούς, προσδραμὼν πρὸς τοὺς νεκρούς, “ἰδοὺ ὑμῖν,” ἔφη, “ὦ κακοδαίμονες, ἐμπλήσθητε τοῦ καλοῦ θεάματος.” . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90006011 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90006011 Scott Horton Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:36:54 -0400 When a critical assessment of the Bush-era “War on Terror” is undertaken, a vital chapter will focus on U.S. relations with Pakistan. President Bush labeled the nation “a major non-NATO ally” in order to qualify it for military programs. He then lavished Pervez Musharraf’s dictatorship with billions in aid designed to beef up its ability to engage the Taliban and Al Qaeda, only to see most of this money diverted into secret military programs designed to address Pakistani security qualms about India. Future historians may well conclude that the Bush team were played for patsies by Pakistan’s military, with Interservice Intelligence (ISI) in the lead. There is increasingly solid evidence that the ISI consciously thwarted the United States–facilitating the escape of key Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership figures from Afghanistan and sheltering them in Pakistan’s rugged Northwest Frontier Province. In their place, Pakistani authorities streamed hundreds of perfectly innocent people into American hands, filling the special detention center that Bush built at Guantánamo with chaff rather than the leadership figures the Americans were seeking. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90006010 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90006010 Scott Horton Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:01:23 -0400 White House communications director Anita Dunn recently claimed that Fox News was “more a wing of the Republican Party.” “They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine,” Dunn continued. “But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.” Fox News president and G.O.P. heavyweight Roger Ailes must have sensed an opening. Fox instantly proceeded to pick a food fight over the remarks, and network news broadcasters rushed to Fox’s defense. Now a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll suggests that the public may well see things the way Dunn does: . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005999 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005999 Scott Horton Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:05:38 -0400 When the New York Times disclosed yesterday that Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s black sheep brother, Ahmed Wali, was on the payroll of the CIA, Congressional leaders were quick to note that this was the first they had learned of the agency’s relationship with a man widely thought to be at the center of Afghan drug smuggling operations, and they demanded a briefing. And House intelligence committee member Jan Schakowsky was also quick to make note of what seemed to her an increasingly familiar pattern: Congressional leaders learn about CIA operations from the press. Their complaints to the agency meet with a familiar retort, Schakowsky said: “We’ve been meaning to brief you about that…” . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005987 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005987 Scott Horton Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:10:20 -0400 As a war correspondent, Mark Danner knows few equals. He writes with a literary flair, and he has an abiding focus on the plight of civilians rather than the strategies of generals. He brought us the death squads of El Salvador, the civil strife of Haiti, and the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia, and he took us on an extensive tour of Iraq’s infamous prison, Abu Ghraib. His work moves seamlessly from the war theater to the work of policy formation and implementation. I put six questions to Danner about his new book, Stripping Bare the Body, in which he surveys American efforts at nation-building from the last twenty-five years. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005996 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005996 Scott Horton Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:07:27 -0400 When he was seeking reelection in 2006, Joe Lieberman campaigned as a supporter of healthcare reform and expressed his support for “universal healthcare.” When the rubber hit the road, however, Lieberman emerged as a frontline warrior for the healthcare industry in its efforts to block reform. Yesterday, he not only noted his opposition to the very modest public option contained in the legislation that Majority Leader Harry Reid put forward, he also stated that he would cross the aisles to support a Republican filibuster. Should we be surprised? No. Lieberman has long been one of the industry’s favorite players on the hill, accepting more than $1 million in campaign contributions from the insurance industry and more than $600,000 from pharmaceuticals and related healthcare-products companies. But his ties run deeper than that. His wife Hadassah previously worked for two lobbying firms, Hill & Knowlton and APCO, handling matters for their healthcare and pharmaceuticals clients. Throughout the 2006 campaign, Lieberman pointedly refused to discuss the scope of his wife’s engagement for the healthcare industry or even the specific clients for whom she was working. But there seems to have been plenty of opportunity for synergy with Lieberman’s work in Congress. Joe Conason noted: . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005991 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005991 Scott Horton Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:19:54 -0400 Judgment on Guantánamo: Why the Seton Hall Studies Exposed the Ugly Truth, and How to Wind It Up . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005992 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005992 Scott Horton Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:37:12 -0400 Last fall Anita Alvarez was elected to a tough slot. As state’s attorney for Cook County, she took the helm of one of the nation’s foremost prosecutorial teams, and also a crew whose performance over the last couple of decades has inspired a crisis of confidence. In Chicago, claims of torture and mistreatment of prisoners have been rampant, and slowly and steadily documented. Similarly, it seems that prosecutors and police, who have amassed enviable conviction statistics, got there by gaming the system. In case after case, the evidence has shown that innocent people were arrested and railroaded through the court system. The mountain of wrongly procured convictions ultimately led an Illinois governor with a reputation as a law-and-order Republican to impose a moratorium on the death penalty. “We have now freed more people than we have put to death under our system,” said Governor George Ryan in a 2001 interview with CNN. “There is a flaw in the system, without question, and it needs to be studied.” . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005986 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005986 Scott Horton Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:00:24 -0400 Abdullah Khadr is the brother of Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was seized at the age of 15 following a firefight in an Afghanistani village near Tora Bora and spirited away to Guantánamo. Omar’s case has stirred international controversy about the conditions and treatment of child prisoners by the United States, and U.S. authorities long sought Abdullah to help make their case against his brother, among other things. The CIA tracked Abdullah down and paid the Pakistani Interservice Intelligence (ISI) $500,000 for his capture and surrender to an undisclosed third-country detention site (potentially Guantánamo), but both the Canadian and Pakistani authorities balked at this. Instead, Abdullah got a trip home to Canada. Everyone apparently wanted to charge Abdullah, but no one seems to have had any evidence—until suddenly Abdullah began to confess. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005978 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005978 Scott Horton Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:30:10 -0400 In 1980, Chingiz Aitmatov dedicated his essential novel, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (И дольше века длится день), to his father, whom he barely remembered. In this moving and powerful work, he presents a core theme: the dangers a society faces when it forgets its past, being subject instead to a counterfeit narrative designed to suit some political purpose. Such a society, Aitmatov argues, faces a bleak future. Battling the Soviet censors at every step, Aitmatov was presenting a critical view of the legacy of Soviet rule in Central Asia and his native Kyrgyzstan. But the novel shows how heavily the fate of his father hung over Aitmatov. A leading intellectual and advocate of nationalist ideas, though not an overt opponent of the Communists, Törökul Aitmatov had been arrested, transported to Moscow, and charged with “bourgeois nationalist” tendencies in 1937, when Chingiz was nine years old. The family was informed that he had been sentenced to prison camp “without right of correspondence,” meaning his family had no right to know of his whereabouts or seek to communicate with him. They feared the worst, but they had no way of knowing. The lack of certainty about his fate was a torment. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005980 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005980 Scott Horton Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:02:13 -0400 A few days back I took a look at a new organization launched by Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol called Keep America Safe. They claim it is designed to put the Obama Administration on the defensive about national security issues, and they promise to run ads against Democrats in marginal districts. But turning to Keep America Safe’s advocacy page, we find an absolute obsession with one issue: a criminal probe into the origins of the torture program by the Justice Department. The whole Keep America Safe campaign is geared to making the point that the torture program and other Cheney-authored measures that probably crossed the threshold into criminal conduct were perfectly legitimate policy alternatives. Keep America Safe seems largely dedicated to keeping Cheney out of jail. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005945 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005945 Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:10:01 -0400 O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stainèd With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit Beneath my shady roof; there thou may’st rest, And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe, And all the daughters of the year shall dance! Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005097 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005097 Sat, 24 Oct 2009 05:04:13 -0400 Neque enim ita mihi mea placent, ut no perpendam, quid alii de illis iudicaturi sint. Et quamuis sciam, hominis philosophi cogitationes esse remotas a iudicio uulgi, propterea quod illius studium sit veritatem omnibus in rebus, quatenus id a Deo rationi humane permissum est, inquirere, tamen alienas prorsus a rectitudine opiniones fugiendas censeo. Itaque cumecum ipse cogitatem, quam absurdum existimaturi essent illi, qui multorum seculorum iudiciis hanc opinione confirmatam norut, quod terra immobilis in medio coeli, tan quam centrum illius posita sit, si ego contra assererem terram moueri, diu mecum haesi, an meos comentrios in eius motus demonstrationem conscriptos in lucem darem… . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005965 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005965 Scott Horton Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:25:41 -0400 Jane Mayer’s “The Predator War” in the current New Yorker (abstract here) is a must-read addressing an essential issue. I see the major question as simple: have our accountability and oversight mechanisms kept track with technological developments? The answer seems equally clear: no. Secrecy is a major reason for this failure. Congressional lethargy is another. In the sixties and seventies, Congressional heavyweights kept meticulous track of command-and-control systems relating to the use of the nation’s latest military hardware. Protocols were insisted upon and carefully scrutinized in congressional hearings. Legal principles of accountability—particularly the notion of civilian control over the use of weapons of mass destruction—were a matter of rigorous oversight. Over the last twenty years, this legacy–pursued with equal zeal by Democrats and Republicans–seems moribund. In a sense, the current attitudes bear witness to the growing irrelevance of Congress and the diminished role of legal accountability. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005967 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005967 Scott Horton Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:54:18 -0400 Earlier this month, in a courtroom in Savannah, Georgia, attorneys for former Georgia senate majority leader Charles Walker took on the prosecution. There was already some evidence that Walker was the target in a politically-motivated hit job, Nathan Dershowitz argued. The judge hearing the matter acknowledged that politically-directed prosecutions were a fact of life dating back to the early days of the Republic, but he bore down on the quality and sufficiency of Walker’s evidence, which rested largely on newspaper accounts. Prosecutors disparaged this as a “CNN case” and insisted that the court disregard newspaper reports entirely. I report on the hearing and the broader implications of the case in this feature for the Huffington Post. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005954 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005954 Scott Horton Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:20:28 -0400 It’s a new Georgetown cocktail-party game: name the single stupidest piece to run in Fred Hiatt’s opinion pages this week. So many to choose from. After a week of colossal idiocies—for instance, running an editorial arguing that the Nobel Peace Prize should have gone to a martyr of the Green Revolution in Iran, when the terms of the prize require the recipient to be alive—Gawker asks the obvious question: . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005940 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005940 Scott Horton Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:46:37 -0400 The long-awaited publication of C.G. Jung’s Red Book is causing ripples in the world of psychology. Notwithstanding its enormous folio size and its hefty price tag, the book is already in its third printing. I put six questions to leading Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani, Philemon Professor of Jung History at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, who took the lead in editing the book and translated it from German, together with Mark Kyburz and John Peck. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005949 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005949 Scott Horton Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:05:02 -0400 Britain’s High Court issued a decision on Friday directing that classified information shared by the CIA with British intelligence services concerning the torture and mistreatment of a former Guantánamo prisoner be made public. The case involves a 31-year-old Ethiopian, Binyam Mohamed, who was seized and held in the CIA’s extraordinary renditions program in Pakistan and Morocco before his transfer to the prison at Guantánamo. He was charged with conspiracy, with the charges apparently resting on statements by Abu Zubaydah, a prisoner now acknowledged to have been tortured by U.S. government officials. In October 2008, the Bush Administration withdrew the charges against Binyam Mohamed and started the process leading to his repatriation to Britain. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005848 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005848 Sun, 18 Oct 2009 06:22:08 -0400 שוב מעשה בנכרי אחד שבא לפני שמאי, אמר לו: גיירני על מנת שתלמדני כל התורה כולה כשאני עומד על רגל אחת. דחפו באמת הבנין שבידו. בא לפני הלל, גייריה. אמר לו: דעלך סני לחברך לא תעביד—זו היא כל התורה כולה, ואידך—פירושה הוא, זיל גמור. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005938 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005938 Sat, 17 Oct 2009 06:39:37 -0400 ה שְׁחוֹרָה אֲנִי וְנָאוָה, בְּנוֹת יְרוּשָׁלִָם; כְּאָהֳלֵי קֵדָר, כִּירִיעוֹת שְׁלֹמֹה. ו אַל-תִּרְאוּנִי שֶׁאֲנִי שְׁחַרְחֹרֶת, שֶׁשְּׁזָפַתְנִי הַשָּׁמֶשׁ; בְּנֵי אִמִּי נִחֲרוּ-בִי, שָׂמֻנִי נֹטֵרָה אֶת-הַכְּרָמִים–כַּרְמִי שֶׁלִּי, לֹא נָטָרְתִּי. . . .