Mike's Blog

As scary as the thought of being plucked from my apartment and taken off to Syria is, an upside of Bush foreign policy includes promotion of democratic initiatives overseas. This includes the firm stand taken regarding Ukraine's election fraud - dealing a blow to Russian meddling in its neighbors' politics. This includes the Afghanistan & Iraqi elections, with Iraqi representatives soon to draft a national constitution. And now that the Syrian-influenced government of Lebanon has quit following the horror of Harari's assassination, there is a distinct opportunity for democratic reform with Israel's northern neighbor. And indications are Mubarak may open Egypt to reform, ending his pharaoh-like rule... we could also mention Kygyzstan elections.

Back to point, it can be said that in our quest to make the world more free, the immediate cost has been to make ourselves temporarily less free (e.g. the Patriot Act). As for "extraordinary rendition," this is indeed bad. While the US is certainly culpable, more of your ire should be directed towards the country actually doing the torturing. You've found the latest trend in outsourcing.

Mike,

Glad both you and the comments are up and running. Would you be shocked to find out I disagree with you on a number of points? On the other hand, I think this is a serious issue (which I'll circle back around to). Here we go:

1. The Bob Herbert article is not all that great. Better articles were written the same week in The New Yorker, Newsweek, and MSNBC. Better both in that they are more accurate and more detailed.
2. A serious answer to Herbert's question: Obviously we do have a conscience or we wouldn't bother with deporting them to countries that torture, no? The question presumes, as you seem to also, that there is an equivalence between torturing someone and deporting them to a country that does so. Cam picks up on this when he questions why you are not outraged at Syria for torturing its citizens.
3. To push Cam's point, perhaps beyond where he would go with it, Bush has undertaken an effort that has already freed over 50 million people from dictatorial societies where torture was the norm. He is continuing to work on others including Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. It is OK to condemn them for toture even if that places you and Bush in agreement.
4. As a technical matter Mr. Arar was not a victim of extraordinary rendition. He was a victim of deportation. extraordinary rendition is when we abduct someone in one foreign country and bring him back to the US or send him to a third country.
5. As a point of fact, Syria is his homeland. His wife's family is from Tunisia, not his. It seems nitpicky but it isn't as your claim makes it appear we went out of our way to send him to a torture loving country rather than sending him back to his homeland (which is what we do when we deport someone).
6. Herbert's article insinuates that we abducted Mr. Arar from Canada and sent him to Syria. In fact, the Canadians gave us information about him and suggested he be placed on the no fly list. He was detained by customs officials at Kennedy airport in NY. He was not abducted from Canada.
7. Mr. Arar also had Canadian citizenship. Canada not only did not fight his deportation, they gave us the information that led to his arrest.
Points 4-7 change the complexion of the thing from "horrendous miscarriage of justice" to "mistaken deportation". Having said that, I think there are two serious questions to be dealt with, one for each of us.

For my side of the aisle there is the question of whether deportation without due process is acceptable. For your side there is the question of whether deportation to a country that engages in torture is automatically off limits.

I think Cam's "to make the world more free we are temporarily less free" line falls a little short for my tastes. First, I am not temporarily less free as it is highly unlikely I'll be profiled as a potential terrorist. How about: to make the world more free Americans of middle eastern descent are temporarily less free? Gotta be honest: I don't love it. But a small part of me asks: why, exactly, did Syria torture him? Do they simply torture everyone who is deported to Syria? Am I supposed to believe that we whispered to Syria that we would like him tortured? Why? If he didn't have direct, important information, why would we even care what Syria did with him?

I think the answer Hastert's office gave to the reasonable question is asinine. But what if the true answer is: because liberals have made it increasingly difficult to detain POWs, and this guy has information that we absolutely do not want appearing in an open court?

P.S. I look forward to your pointing out that President Clinton was the one who authorized the form of extraordinary rendition to which you object.

In response to Max’s points, following the same number scheme.

1. More or less agree. I think this is a good column, but I read the article in the New Yorker, which is better. Did not read the other two. I picked this column partially because it’s easier to digest.
2. I’m unclear on this one. Deportation, and the hassle it involves, is somehow evidence of conscious? Also, what’s with the implication that I’m not outraged when Syria tortures its own citizens? Of course I’m outraged. I’m also aware that however little the US government thinks of my opinion (that of one of its citizens), a foreign government will think even less of it (that of a non-citizen). But aside from that, do you really want to start drawing parallels between the two countries? If that’s the case, should that start to tell you something? Also, I see little difference in having the US government torture people, or having another country torture people on behalf of the US government. What’s the difference between me assaulting someone, and me paying for a third-party to assault someone? Practically no difference.
3. Your third point is delusional. Bush is responsible for the freedom of 50 million huh? No, he’s not. It’s not at all clear that the chaos in violence in Iraq now is a better state of affairs than the pre-war dictatorship. For people living outside of Hussein’s control during the pre-war period, i.e. most of Iraq, life is often substantially worse. Afghanistan is a hole, just like it was. Neither of these societies are “free.” More to the point, though, and Cam this goes to you too, what the hell does any of this have to do with torturing Arar?
4. Are you consulting your handbook on extraordinary rendition? Does the state department have a glossary of terms on its website? Better, let’s use your definitions. “[E]xtraordinary rendition is when we abduct someone in one foreign country and bring him back to the US or send him to a third country.” Arar is a Canadian citizen, abducted in route back to a foreign country (Canada) and sent to a third country (Syria). Fits the definition pretty well.
5. No, his home country is Canada. He’s a citizen of that country, period. In fact, Arar requested that he be deported to Canada, knowing full well what awaited him in Syria. He was detained with a Canadian passport in his possession. His request was refused. Do you think the US flipped a coin in making a determination, or do you think the US wanted to send this guy to a country it knew would take the gloves off?
6. Yes, he was not abducted from Canada, he was abducted on his way back to Canada. Yes, the Canadian government is culpable in this disaster. I’m not contesting either of these points.
7. See my reply to #6.

I’ll get to Cam next, but you’re right: you, he, and I are not any less free. Americans of Middle Eastern descent, or South Asian descent, etc are less free. It’s big of us to sacrifice they’re rights, isn’t it? Makes you wonder why some people are not grateful for the “freedom” the US supposedly brings. I don’t see this as a temporary measure at all, however, since the current push is to make laws like the Patriot Act extend longer and further, not the reverse. The Justice Department has claimed “state-secrets” privilege in refusing to hear a lawsuit brought by Arar, so I guess we’ll never know what caused the detention in the first place. Do I believe the US government tells Syria to torture guys like Arar, guys “suspected” of some nefarious activity or other? You’re damn right I believe that! No formal orders or anything like that needed, it’s understood, and it’s a crime.

POW? What POWs? None of these guys have been given POW status as a result of the Bush administration. “Liberals” have made it harder, huh? I wish. When American citizens (Jose Padilla) sit in jails for three years without charges, and the government operates an extra-legal gulag in Guantanamo and claims its operations there are accountable to no-one, when the Justice Department pulls some nonsense “enemy-combatant” ruling out of its ass as an excuse to avoid judicial review, yes – some open court proceedings are exactly what are needed. And cases like Arar’s are the reason we have open court proceedings in the first place. If the Justice Department doesn’t like it, it has nobody to blame but itself.

In reply to your P.S. – extraordinary rendition is a disaster and Clinton should be ashamed of himself for authorizing it. There’s a real argument to be made, advanced by Alan Dershowitz of all people, among others, that torture should be legalized only because it’s done anyway, and legalization would allow for regulation, oversight, accountability, etc. I think that was part of the idea behind giving the green light to E.R., but the real implications would be more torture, more frequently, “regulated” or not. And the unregulated kind would just continue.

Cam,

My reply to you is going to be shorter, only because a lot of responses are incorporated in my reply to Max. You shouldn’t take offense though, or fell slighted in mistakenly thinking that I find your opinions any less wrongheaded than his.

Your Ukraine analysis is a joke. The United States funded and trained the opposition during the election. The US government sent out it’s A-Team to campaign for the opposition (McCain, Lugar, Albright, Wes Clark, Kissinger, George “Old Balls” Bush, Rumsfeld). The US paid for the exit polls that were so readily cited as evidence of fraud. (Note: interesting how citing exit polls as evidence of fraud during the most recent U.S. election was met with derision, even though there were serious mistakes, flaws, and fraud. Why is fraud treated like something so far-fetched rather than the pedestrian, predictable exercise it is?) Don’t talk to me about “Russian meddling” without bringing some of this up.

Let’s also not pretend that the US is interested in democracy per se, but in the victory of its preferred candidate. In the past eighteen months the US has helped orchestrate a successful coup in Haiti, and a failed one in Venezuela. Also, sending Henry Kissinger to promote “democracy” is like sending Ronald McDonald to promote healthy eating habits.

Harari’s assassination. That’s bad, but I had never heard of the guy until he was killed. Neither had you. Now, Iraq and George Bush are somehow responsible for anything good that happens in any Middle Eastern country? That’s convenient. Kygystan? That’s a joke right? By all means, talk about it.

Yes, Syria deserves my ire too, but I don’t pay taxes to the Syrian government and don’t vote in its elections. My ire is better directed at the government that, in theory, is supposed to serve the interests of its citizens.

Mike,

Thanks for the thougtful and sizable reply. We've had this discussion before: seems like a lot of work to be sitting in the comments rather than getting its own post.

Three quick, but important points:

1. Re: my point three and your response to 3: No way. You are the delusional one here. Afghanistan was dominated by a fascist theocracy. A real fascist theocracy, mind you, not the kind envisioned by frothing at the mouth leftists when President Bush mentions God. A "women get the burkha, the cane, and no education" land. Did they magically turn into an inclusive, tolerant, pluralistic democracy with the wave of a wand? Of course not. But in the real world we tend to see things like removing fascist theocrats and replacing them with free and fair elections to be a huge step towards freedom.

Same story in Iraq but replace dictator for theocrat. Yes, there are serious problems and disruptions. But to suggest that they were better off then is to condemn them to a life with the boot stamping on their faces, forever (to use an Orwell image). Yeah, maybe life wasn't so bad for those kurds that Saddam wasn't able to gas or those marsh arabs his death squads missed.

This seems to go back to one of the first debates you and I had: call your shots, Mike. If President Bush had said two years ago that we would invade Iraq, defeat their army, depose Saddam, and hold free elections while losing fewer than 2,000 American soldiers and 20,000 Iraqi civilians you would have called bullshit. In fact, it was only three months ago that democrats were pressing Bush to pull back from the Jan 30th election deadline as an unrealistic deadline that would lead to chaos. Bush called Afghanstan (a country that England and the USSR at the heights of their power both failed to conquer), he called Iraq, he called the idea of democracy in the middle east (which is no small feat), he called the idea that democratizing Iraq would pressure other arab countries (and Iran) to do likewise, he called the idea of isolating Arafat instead of feteing him. Surprise: Saudi Arabia holds municipal elections, Egypt is considering doing likewise, the palistinians hold a reasonable election, Libya hands over its nascent nuclear program, Syria appears set to leave Lebanon, and Afghanistan and Iraq hold their first ever free and fair democratic elections.

Maybe you are right that there are a lot of people whose lives are worse off today, but I submit that this is true in any revolution. We tend to judge revoultions not on those small term, individual disruptions but on the overall large scale ends.

Second, while I agree with you in general about our meddling in other countries elections, it seems to me there is a substantive difference between "We sent dignitaries over there to plump for our guy" and "we sent former KGB over there to rig the election and assasinate the opposition". On the exit polls: be serious. The Ukrainian exit polls were off by something like 20%. Ours were off by less than 2% and were clearly systematically biased (with Virginia, for instance, reporting over 60% female voters). Back to calling your shots, serious pollsters were questioning the exit polls in real time as there were clear problems. When you are on live national TV during an election and you are calling bullshit on the exit polling service, you have to be pretty damn sure what you are doing. A subsequent analysis of the exit polls by the polling firm admitted that there were systematic problems due to hiring young and inexperienced folk to do their exit polling and that, surprise, these problems systematically lead to overreporting for democrats (oversampling of younger voters and women, for example). Obviously, on the far left citing the exit polls still has resonance and on the far right it would be mocked. I think you'll find, however, that in the disinterested world of the pollsters, the exit polls were a fiasco.

Finally, on the issue of enemy combatants. This is not some nonsense we pulled out of our ass. The supreme court ruled on enemy combatants back in 1942. We have standard policies in place to deal with POWs. There are two tougher cases, though. How do you deal with a citizen of your own country who engages in acts of war against you and how do you deal with an enemy who refuses to follow geneva conventions (doesn't wear uniforms, aren't assigned rank, shoot at medics, etc.). Enemy combatant was the name we gave to people we captured who are not POWs by virtue of the fact that they aren't covered by the geneva convention. The supreme court held that these enemy combatants can be detained for the duration of the war. They also held that they can face military rather than civilian tribunals. It is actually a simple matter of settled law. As a practical point, it is silly to engage in an act of war against a country and then expect the country to continue to grant full citizenship privledges to you.

The idea that a POW/enemy combatant camp should be subject to the whims of federal judges is absurd. Period. Jose Padilla, by the way, is not his name. He converted to Islam and changed his name (too lazy to look it up). I cannot think of another case where people refuse to call someone by their chosen name. Just an aside.

And as a final note on detaining prisoners: liberals ought to be careful about throwing the word "gulag" around. After all, they spent the better part of 50 years denying the gulag system and denouncing those like Solzhenitsyn who spoke out about it. Solzhanitsyn was actually booed out of venues on college campuses and spat at. Much like today, it was more important to liberals to deny conservatives a victory than it was to recognize reality. Gulags typically did not offer special diets and prayer mats. And there was the slave labor aspect to them. Oh yeah, and the part about how typically there was no crime committed prior to being sent to one. You know, small details like that.

On the whole it reminds me that like your comments about the war, liberals were consistantly finding fault with the US during the cold war too, all the way up until the day they decided to change sides and declare "we won". Judging by the papers the past week (even The Guardian wondered if something good is happening in the middle east), liberals might be coming close to their "we won" moment.