“Out Loud”

You Know You Need an Espresso When…

You make yourself a glass of hot water because you’re too out of it to remember to put the espresso in the espresso machine. 

On “Black Sites” and Reason Giving

The Washington Post has a story today that you do not want to miss.   The story is about a "guest" who was held in a CIA "black site" prison and then released after two years.    The spokesman for the CIA had this to say.

renditions "are a key, lawful tool in the fight against terror, and
have helped save lives by taking terrorists off the street. They are
conducted with care, they are closely reviewed, and they have produced
valuable intelligence that has allowed the United States and other
nations to foil terrorist plots."

Does this comment withstand any sensible standard of reason-giving?  The cynical response is to dismiss it and say, of course it’s not, it’s meant to be a sound bite, repeated by every member of the administration. 

Even so, the attempts by Presidential Administrations to influence public thought through nightmarish Lipmann-esque techniques can be responded to, and must be responded to, by those who support and believe in public reason. 

So, let us ask some questions of this public reason that has been provided to us by the powers-that-be:

1.  Who is reviewing these renditions and how closely?
2.  What those who are reviewing it, if there are any, the right people to be reviewing it?
3.  In what way does the system of review justify itself in regards to some form of public accountability?
4.  The CIA has a history of engaging in mass-disappeared moments where the people involved have not been carefully selected or monitored in the past… on what grounds should we somehow assume that the standard behavior of the agency is different?
5.  If it’s so obvious that these people held in black sites are terrorists, what is so harmful about giving them their due-process rights?
6.  Why is there no record of the US detaining these people, or that the sites where they were detained ever existed?  Are we really supposed to believe it’s a security threat to say we have prisons "somewhere in Europe", or "somewhere in Afghanistan?"  To me, that doesn’t seem to narrow it down much.  Further, if this is so dangerous, why was it so publicly available that Zacarias Moussaoui was being detained in Alexandria, Virginia for the months leading up to his trial? 
7.  Why, if he never gave up any information, did Mr. Jabour go from being tortured to getting small rewards, to being released?  Why would the administration call him a "bad guy" and let him walk the streets a free man today?

I think that it is time that people who care about democracy acknowledge that while the administration and those who are persuaded by their arguments do have some form of reasons, these reasons do not have the depth to stand up to close scrutiny.  We need to publicly share these reasons and not simply give a sound-bite response to a sound-bite answer.  We, as the public are in this together against our government.  I have little doubt that the political party of a Presidential administration will have little  impact on deterring a President from giving into the urge to abuse the secrecy protections we seem to be extending Presidential policy.  One needs only to look at the smokescreen that Clinton administration through up in regards to the Rwandan genocide to see that every administration has an interest in distorting public reason when it inconveniences them.  Since the rest of us, regardless of our political views, happen to make up the public in question in public reasoning, we all have a collective interest in preserving it. 

Seymour Hersh on CNN

E nell’amore non so più sperare

Political secrecy clearly runs contrary to democratic politics.  In the abstract, this seems obvious.  One cannot have public decision-making and public secrets simultaneously and expect a highly functional democracy.  In reality, there is the obvious need for some secrecy in order to prevent our enemies from knowing certain things.  The masking of when and where the D-Day invasion was going to take place seems an uncontroversial example of such practical concerns.  The decision to build the atomic bomb strikes me as more controversial.  The many actions done without seeking to consult or even inform the American public on topics like the wireless surveillance program, the "black sites" in Europe, flying prisoners to nations that torture and handing them over to authorities, that have been undertaken by this administration seem blatantly across the line of being reasonable positions for a democratic nation to be engaged in. 

When I say democracy,  I mean it as short hand for a government whose aim it is to simulate the achievement of the general public interest.  This means some form of, as Stephen Macedo quoted Lincoln yesterday at Vanderbilt, "government of the people, by the people, for the people."  This definition of democracy, in my view, necessarily implies republican institutions and the standard batch of liberal rights protections, cultural values, and political equality necessary to maintain such institutions.  Political secrecy is bad for democracy when we either have the wrong kinds of political secrecy or an excessive amount of the right kinds of political secrecy to meaningfully link up the major decisions on which our public good depends with either meaningful knowledge to support and possibly influence such decisions or the relevant authority to make sure that we know when our institutions act on such matters, in what way they are acting, and who we can hold accountable for such actions. 

With all of this said, consider now the article written in The New Yorker by Seymour Hersh.   If what Hersh is reporting is accurate,  it is worth considering the almost unfathomable decisions that the White House has taken.  One should, I would suggest, find both the process by which the White House is deciding these things and the content of what they are deciding to be enormously troubling.   The process, if Hersh is correct, is so troubling that John Negroponte decided to accept a demotion within the White House to avoid being involved with the operations in question.  The content of the decisions is equally as startling.  The idea that we are engaged in funding Sunni extremist groups in order to attack and disrupt the Shiite world is a playing with fire in a way that we have good historical reason to be very fearful of.  Of course, until Mr. Hersh’s article came out, we did not know about such attempts by our government, and so we could not think about it one way or the other.  There are some secrets about what our government does that, it is probably best I don’t know, but it would be reasonable to expect that I would approve of them.  These secrets, if true, our reasons that I feel as a reasonable citizen that it is in my interest to know about them and I most decidedly do not approve.   I fear that if this story is true that we are being pushed to the precipice of an awful conflict, and we may have been committed to it without our knowledge or consent… this greatly reduces the chance that we are doing the right thing or that we are doing it for the right reasons.   

A Really Bad Tackle…

We all know that there are moments when "the beautiful game" gets ugly.  And I don’t mean when one decides to watch Charlton vs. Sheffield or when Columbus plays Real Salt Lake.  I mean reprehensible.  Football has problems with race, with hooliganism, political violence, nationalism, etc.  It also has sportsmanship issues.  A couple years ago, DC United’s Hristo Stoichkov tackled a college player at American University in an exhibition match.  Tackled is being generous.  From all accounts, he set out to seriously hurt this young man and, by all accounts, he succeeded.   Now the young man is suing Stoichkov and DC United.  This is a very interesting case, on the level of the two NHL acts of violence that ended in court.  Can it really be brushed aside as "part of the game" that a veteran professional  player should be able to "make a rough tackle" in such an instance?  The very fact that Stoichkov to this day seems to mischaracterize what happened on the field seems to already suggest that the answer is no.  Again, without knowing the particulars of the case with any degree of legal certainty, it seems to me that there was almost incontrovertible intent to do harm, and that this intent manifested itself in serious injury…  Perhaps even in an MLS game, this might not be lawsuit worthy, but it seems to me that in a practice match, a professional athlete owes an amateur footballer that he will not use his size, skill, and abilities in ways that put the amateur intentionally in harms way.  There are rough tackles, there are dirty tackles, and there are legally negligent tackles… if the third party accounts of the Stoichkov tackle are true, this tackle falls into the third category. 

If you sports fans are worried that the legal implications will lead MLS teams to stop training wit college teams for fear of lawsuit, a quick rejoinder.  If you cannot guarantee that your employees will not break the legs of teenagers into several pieces because they didn’t agree with a call by the match official, than you probably should not be playing at all.  While this would practically end Pablo Mastroeni’s career, this is a standard I can live with.  Because this would also probably end Pablo Mastroeni’s career, this is a standard we can all celebrate. 

Palo Alto

In the City of the Future, it is difficult to CONCENTRATE

Meet the bus

Meet the wife

Everybody’s happy-
Everyone is made for life

In the City of the Future, it is difficult to FIND A SPACE

I’m to busy to SEE YOU

You’re to busy to WAIT

But I’m ok.
How are you?

Thanks for asking, thanks for asking

Deliberative Democracy is a Liberalism…

Perhaps this is obvious, but when we think of deliberative democracy, it is perhaps more useful to think of it primarily as a liberalism rather than a "democratic theory."  It is not ever, to my knowledge, talked about expressly in these terms, but many deliberativists are Rawlsian "Political Liberals," and it seems to me that what deliberative democracy is really asking for, is a very strict set of public self restraints, what I mean by this, is that it aims to convince us to recognize the legitimacy of restraints that force us to make decisions through processes of public reason – and they have a variety of pretty good arguments for this claim – some democratic and some liberal.  Nevertheless, the goal at the end of this seems to be some form of self-restraint on behalf of some as-of-yet unformed majority on some public policy decision to agree in advance that they will restrain themselves from making unreasonable decisions – which many forms of procedural democracy seem to be entirely unconcerned about.  Is it fair to say that procedural democrats want the restraints that are desirable in liberal society as a result of neutral procedures, whereas deliberative democrats believe that important liberal self-restraints are prior to democratic participation?  I think the answer is yes if we define proceduralists as Joseph Shumpeter, but the answer is no if we think of someone like Montesquieu as a procedural liberal. 

War Crimes, a Hypothetical

This hypo seems a little weird, but stay with me:

Suppose you had driven to some place to pick up a friend, and on the way in, you drive past a man in a parked car, drinking, muttering to himself, and you didn’t look to hard, but you were pretty sure he was carrying a gun. 

Imagine, upon entering the place, you came across someone who claimed there was a man outside waiting to kill them.  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you drive a big van with tinted windows and you parked right in front of the entrance so that you could easily drive out with the person without recurring any reasonable risk of harm to yourself, since the drunken gunman would not see his intended victim pile into the van.     Furthermore, the only reason the gunmen hasn’t made his move is because he is waiting until there is no one else in the building… he is essentially waiting for his friend to clear out so that he can commit his crime.   

Now imagine, you reach a decision here.  You will take your friend, go home, and leave this person in the building, even though you have good reason to believe once you leave this other person will be killed.  You drive away, on your way out, you here gunshots, you don’t turn around and go back. 

This strikes me as a pretty obvious case of criminal negligence, to the point where the example sounds really stupid.

Now, compare this to what Belgian soldiers and media personnel did when they were sent into Rwanda on the third day of the genocide to rescue Belgian citizens only. 

The Belgian soldiers drove directly past a gang of interhamwe holding machetes and other weapons and waiting just outside the hospital grounds.  Upon pulling up to the camp, the Tutsis trapped inside came running up to the soldiers and the media asking them for help, asking to be taken away so that they would not be killed.  The Belgian troops promptly grabbed every white person in the hospital, posted guards in front of the Tutsi crowd to keep them where they were, and then drove off the grounds and kept going even after shots were heard. 

Someone explain to me how no one involved in the rescue operation is responsible for the deaths of those people… especially when in any analogous domestic situation in any Western liberal democracy, one could be looking at several years in jail for taking equivalent action. 

Historic Win (I recommend turning the sound off)

The first ever away win in Central America in MLS history. The first two goals are ridiculous coming from players who have only been training for two weeks. Congrats to MLS for a respectable loss (dear match official, in America, we generally do not find it within either the spirit or the letter of the rules to send someone off for simulating a foul when they are bleeding from the head) and a huge win, the odds that both MLS sides will make the semifinals look pretty decent. We could end up with a mini Superliga tournament right here with Pachuca, Chivas Guadalajara, Houston Dynamo, and DC United.