Month: January 2007

A legal reader writes:

The Gonzales statements on habeas during that hearing started me on a slow burn. On one level, he is engaged in Dickensian lawyering. He didn’t say a thing that couldn’t be backed up. Indeed, on a very technical level, looking at every word he uttered, his statements about the Rasul case (this is the case they talk about without naming) are arguably more accurate than Specter’s – the technical holding, from a stare decisis perspective – does not rest on constitutional norms. 

But go back and look at Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address: he says very clearly that habeas is one of the basic premises of our entire system of government; that it’s a fundamental right that shores up all the others. Elsewhere he identifies habeas as one of the "four pillars" of our constitutional system. You’re not going to convince me that the Founding Fathers didn’t view habeas as "grandfathered" into the US system – that’s simply obvious. So why are we now being subjected to this Stalinist historical revisionism? Why does the Attorney General of the United States make comments like this in such a public forum? He would only make them because he needs them for cover, i.e., because he has advocated and implemented a consistent policy of violating habeas corpus rights that rests on each of these niggling distinctions. Which is why one should stop scrutinizing the footnotes of law review articles and be worried.

This also reveals a fundamental Gonzales deceit. We shouldn’t forget that back in the first weeks after 9/11 when concerns were being raised about tactics, he held up habeas corpus very prominently.  Don’t worry about overreaching, he said, anything we do will be subject to habeas corpus challenge. From his Nov. 30, 2001 op ed in the NYT:

"anyone arrested, detained or tried in the United States by a military commission will be able to challenge the lawfulness of the commission’s jurisdiction through a habeas corpus proceeding in a federal court." 

He repeated this in a series of interviews and public appearances, always the same thing: don’t worry, habeas will provide the cure. (Of course, the weasels over at DOJ will say this applies to the empty set, they will say no one is "arrested, detained or tried in the United States," since all those proceedings will be in Cuba!)

Gonzales is a liar and a torture-apologist. He is also attorney-general.

It was a highlight of the Senate Judiciary Hearings on detainee policies last week. Senator Leahy rightly dragged the legal lickspittle Gonzales over the coals. The rage in Leahy’s voice is completely justified: the idea that the U.S. sent a terror suspect to Syria for interrogation, and didn’t expect him to be tortured, is preposterous. Gonzales, Bush and Ashcroft were comfortable with that because they are comfortable with torture. There’s not a freedom Gonzales wouldn’t undermine, not a right he wouldn’t qualify, if his political patrons asked him to. Listen to the section of the hearings related to the rendition of Canadian Maher Arar, a man tortured by a vile regime at the behest of the United States. Listen and get angry again. Anger is necessary. Extreme anger is necessary. Don’t get numb. Get mad.

I mentioned Kubrick’s "Dawn of Man" in the post below. Here it is:

"[The novel] is an exercise of make-believe that, like yoga or a religious festival, breaks down barriers of space and time and extends our sympathies, so that we are able to empathise with other lives and sorrows. It teaches compassion, the ability to ‘feel with’ others. And, like mythology, an important novel is transformative … If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world," – Karen Armstrong, "A Short History of Myth."

My next reply to Sam Harris will appear tomorrow, on my Sabbath.

I was a skeptic at first. We got the 46 inch LCD TV for Christmas but I was utterly indifferent to High Definition. It sounded like a snow-job to me. But Aaron insisted, so we got the new box and set up the new connection. Within seconds, I was hooked. Not since Gillette’s Mach 3 and the iPod have I been as impressed with a new technology. You think it will look better – but not that much better. The best way I can express this is: It is as if they took the lens off the camera.

If you’re into sports, it’s a must (I’m not). My own guilty pleasure is the Discovery Channel, National Geographic television, and other nature shows. I loved them before HDTV; but now they’re astonishing. The clarity that allows you to see nature as if you were there, in your own living room, is a window onto the entire world. I watched a broadcast from the Space Station, to take a simple example. I’ve seen plenty of TV from space before, but always as if through a blizzard or a fuzzy lens. The image always made space seem somewhere else entirely, a different dimension, unlike anything on earth. but HDTV changes all that. To see someone floating without gravity as if they were in front of you creates a whole new perspective on what space travel is actually like. It makes it real – for the first time in human history. If I were NASA, I’d do nothing but get HD images from space to the American public. It would reignite enthusiasm for space exploration.

But my favorite is a Discovery On Demand channel, which has a series called "Sunrise Earth." Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Put down the bong. But you need no bong to be entranced by the simplicity of the series. It takes the highest quality video cameras around the world and captures 50-minute scenes of the dawn in a variety of spots on this water-planet. There is no narration; no music; just natural sounds. Here’s one review:

When seen in vivid, crystal-clear HDTV, the effect is hypnotic. Few viewers will fail to have an impulse to immediately book a flight to join the fun. After watching last night’s program on the Cadillac Mountains at the Acadia National Park in Maine, I quickly checked my work schedule for vacation dates. When seen in high-def, the burnt orange skies lingering over the Maine mountains was enough to make me forget, well, nearly everything.

Again, like Kubrick’s "Dawn of Man," Sunrise Earth lets the high-def pictures do the talking. There is no narrator getting in the way; only an occasional graphic reveals the location and the time of day. It’s a powerful technique. By eliminating the human altogether, Sunrise Earth makes you feel like what you’re seeing could be what you would have seen hundreds of years ago. It’s nature unplugged.

I’ve become obsessed with three so far: the town square in a Cambodian village with a Buddhist temple, as the monks chant in a new day; an Icelandic waterfall; and the foothills of a Turkish mountain range, dotted with Roman ruins. However stressed your day, this devastatingly simple project soothes the soul. It’s a video version of the Dish’s Views From your Window, a reminder that however grim things look, the earth turns, the sun rises, and nature endures.

(Photo: David Conover, series director and photographer, on the River Li.)

Not so much. My bet: he knows things we don’t yet know.

Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 5 pm.

Words to live by:

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure.’"

It’s H. L. Mencken. My version:

"The defining characteristic of the conservative is that he knows what he doesn’t know… The first thing to say is that this philosophy is not warmed-over relativism or nihilism. While the fundamentalist knows the truth, the nihilist believes it is an illusion, that nothing is true, and everything is valid. The conservative differs from both. While not denying that the truth exists, the conservative is content to say merely that his grasp on it is always provisional. He may be wrong. He begins with the assumption that the human mind is fallible, that it can delude itself, make mistakes, or see only so far ahead. And this, the conservative avers, is what it means to be human."

For a full treatment of the political and theological consequences of this, see "The Conservative Soul."

A debate from 1969, in two parts, with themes directly relevant to today. Below is the first. Here is the link to the second. There used to be television like this; and people used to watch it. Now, at least, it’s online.