Category: News and politics

An Afghan view

Burhanuddin Rabbani was the President of Afghanistan from 1992 – 96.  After the fall of the Taliban regime, he served temporarily as President from Nov to Dec 20, 2011, until the International Conference on Afghanistan in Bonn chose Hamid Karzai for that position. He was assassinated in his home in Kabul on September 20, 2011 by a suicide bomber. One of his sons, Shuja, a former Deputy Director General of the Financial Supervision Department of Da Afghanistan Bank (the central bank of Afghanistan), was in his father’s house at the time of the assassination. He posted the following on his FACEBOOK page today (September 29):

Afghan elections buzz is on full swing. Twitter wars have begun, social media propaganda is on full scale, ethnic cards are being thrown at your face, and I couldn’t be bothered to get involved. I never voted, I don’t intend to vote, but if you believe in democracy, then go ahead and rock your vote and I wish you all the very best!

All I can say to the youth is that if you’re not happy with the choice of the future President of #Afghanistan, remember that not enough of you voted. If the votes are rigged like last time, maybe you should join Anonymous and start a revolution. Or maybe not. Maybe you should just leave the country for dreams of a better life and never return. Some say the next President has to be someone who is given the “stamp of approval” by President Karzai. Remember that President Karzai is not some Godfather. Power was given to him and power can be just as easily taken back from him. Pashtun or Tajik, it doesn’t matter because as a nation, we’ve never really had respect for any of the Presidents or Heads of State so why play the ethnic game?

At times, I really do think we’re in denial about living in two-countries-in-one like the Iraqi Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq. But dare I mention anything on officially separating Afghanistan’s North from the South and drawing official borders and pay whatever price it takes to get ourselves the peace we’re looking for, I’m bound to be labelled a racist, a fascist, a slave of Pakistan, a slave of Iran, a slave of USA, this, that, and everything in-between.

If you want to call me names, go for it. Go ahead and label me. It’s just another label. I’ve lived my whole life hearing all kinds of criticisms thrown at us. From freedom-fighting Mujahidin heroes to warlords and war criminals, I’ve heard it all before. In the end, when you’re done wasting your time and energy, I’ll still be here – just like all the others before me. Afghanistan is a strange country: from the weakest to the strongest of leaders, we’ve never given our leaders the respect they deserve.

If the youth of Afghanistan is waiting for an Afghani Nelson Mandela, guess what? It will never happen. Learn from what you’ve had before, make best use of what you have today, and create your own tomorrow. And when Afghanistan becomes a civilized country, that’s when I’ll decide to return. If not, I’m pretty sure I’m not missing anything and I make no apologies for it.

More on Syria

My high school and college friend, Bill Hulsy, now living in Southern California, offers his analysis of Obama’s justification for attaching Syria:

Dear Friends:

This e-mail will discuss the various flaws in the arguments provided by the Obama Administration for an attack on Syria.  There are seven major flaws in the argument, to wit:  1) the predicate proof is unsatisfactory and unpersuasive, 2) the action is illegal under our law and international law, 3) the Chemical Weapons Convention does not provide a legal basis for this action, 4) the ostensible beneficiaries and cheerleaders of this action are bad actors, 5) this action is a pretext for War with Iran, 6) the United States has no moral standing since we have both used and aided and abetted the use of chemical weapons, and 7) U.S. loss of face is the problem of Obama himself, and a lesser alternative to bad policy.

This proposed action is predicated on alleged use of chemical gas by the government of Syria.  This contention is illogical as the Syrian government was winning the civil war, and the use of chemical agents is an act of desperation.  Much of Syria has been overrun by the rebels and they have captured many munitions and that includes chemical agents.  The Internet is full of pictures and stories showing that the Syrian rebels have chemical agents.  Logic suggests their use of the gas as a “false flag” operation.

The whole post-WWII peace process has been based on the use of the United Nations.  The United Nations Charter was adopted and ratified by the United States in 1945.  It is a treaty and is United States law.  Article 42 provides that force may be used individually or collectively by signators only if approved by the Security Council.  The only exception is the right of “self defense.” which is permitted under Article 51.  There is no special exception for chemical warfare.

The Chemical Weapons Convention was adopted in 1993.  Syria is not a signatory.  That convention has no enforcement mechanism.  Hence, there is no right to wage war or commit acts of war (such as proposed) pursuant to some “norm” of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

The rebels in Syria are Sunni jihadis.  These are the same people who attacked the United States on 9/11.  Syria is a secular, not a religious state.  The Christians (numbering 2 million souls) make up 10% of the population.  The government protects the interests of the minorities in Syria of which the Christians are one.  The Sunni jihadis want to commit a sectarian cleansing, driving the Syrian Christians into Lebanon.  For a look at what a Sunni jihadi victory would look like, from a religious point of view, see what happened to the Christian community in Iraq after the Iraq War.

This attack is nothing but a pretext for a War with Iran.  This attack will provoke counter-measures by Syria’s allies.  Either an agent of Iran (or one of our agents operating in Iran) will fire a missile at a U.S. ship or tanker and, then, immediately we will attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and the war will be on.  Israel will attack Hezbolla in Lebanon, reactively or pre-emptively,  Russia will cut off oil supplies to Europe.  United States assets all over Arabia and the Moslem world will be at risk.  I believe that is the real reason for the attack on Syria–to promote war with Iran.  It is the American Way.

Not only does the United States have no legal standing for this attack, but, also it has no moral standing to attack Syria.  We used Agent Orange in Vietnam, which was a chemical agent.  We used phosphorus in Fallouja, and we aided and abetted Iraq in its use of gas in warfare in its war with Iran.  We provided the intelligence for where the gas was to be placed to devastate the Iranians where they were massing troops.

It is said that America will lose face if Congress does not approve an attack.  Well, even if that is true, the fault will be Obama’s since lacked any legal or moral power to draw “red lines” regarding the conduct and internal affairs of independent states.  The alternative to the “loss of face” is much worse.  Mr. Obama styles himself a Constitutional Scholar.  He should have known better.

William S. Hulsy
Attorney at Law

Syria and the Red Line

On August 21, 2013, a chemical weapons attack killed 1,429 men, women and children on the outskirts of Damascus. President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry attribute the horrifying attack to the Assad government. The Geneva Protocol of 1925, the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, and the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993 forbid the use of chemical weapons. The use of force to punish violators of the ban may be authorized by the UN Security Council. The United States is not unilaterally authorized under international law to do so.

President Obama continues to surprise me. Despite over a 100,000 casualties in Syria’s two-year plus civil war, he has wisely resisted direct involvement in a conflict that the U.S. has no obvious self-interest in. We have no real control over the unfolding events and outcome of the struggle underway there. Unfortunately, there is no plausible outcome that serves our interest in peace and democracy in the region much less in having a friendly regime. There is no obvious successor to Assad’s regime, though radical Islamism (al Qaeda) forces seem to currently dominate the anti-government forces. Edward Luttwak argues in a NY Times op-ed that a stalemate is the least bad of bad options. “In-Syria America Loses if Either Side Wins”

Obama then foolishly drew a red line against the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons. It now seems very likely that Assad has crossed it in a big way. If the U.S. does not act decisively it will lose credibility and its red lines will become meaningless. If it acts, as Obama has suggested, in a limited, “surgical” manner that does not tip the balance of Syria’s civil war, will it have “taught” Assad a lesson that will detour him from using chemical weapons in the future? More likely it will affirm U.S. powerlessness in the area. And what about the inevitable collateral damage even if our rockets hit their intended targets and Syria’s unpredictable countermeasures? In a statement released September 1, the International Crisis Group stated that: “To precisely gauge in advance the impact of a U.S. military attack, regardless of its scope and of efforts to carefully calibrate it, by definition is a fool’s errand…. Consequences almost certainly will be unpredictable.” “Syria Statement”

In a letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee last month, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated that: “As we weigh our options, we should be able to conclude with some confidence that use of force will move us toward the intended outcome. Once we take action, we should be prepared for what comes next. Deeper involvement is hard to avoid.” More recently he added that: “Simply the application of force rarely produces and, in fact, maybe never produce the outcome we seek.” According to Daniel Byman of Brookings Institute “A limited bombing campaign against Syria’s chemical weapons infrastructure is likely to produce the worst of all worlds: raising expectations and further involving the United States in the Syrian civil war without significantly altering the balance of forces on the ground.” “Syria Crisis-Military Action”

Syria’s use of chemical weapons without consequences could render their prohibition toothless. However, not only is the US not legally authorized to police world agreements, it can’t afford to go into another war and still remain economically and militarily strong. Given Russian and Chinese opposition, the UN Security Council will not authorize the use of force. A U.S. attack on Syria would violate international law every bit as much as Syria’s apparent use of chemical weapons has. That does not mean that nothing can be done within the framework of the law in reaction to the use of chemical weapons. If we continue to disregard international law, why would we expect others to abide by it? Globalization, which has dramatically reduced poverty around the world, would suffer. We would be left to police the world by military force (and how has that been working for us?) until we burned ourselves out.

In his rose garden address to the nation Saturday the President said that: “I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets….  And I’m prepared to give that order.” His surprise, however, was his promise to seek Congress’s authorization, something he had not considered necessary for Libya. “But having made my decision as Commander-in-Chief based on what I am convinced is our national security interests,… I will seek authorization for the use of force from the American people’s representatives in Congress.” Regrettably he did not seem to seek this authorization as a legal requirement of the constitution but rather as a pragmatic way to build public support. What ever his reason the step is welcomed.

Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith reviewed the legal arguments over the President’s war powers in a recent New York Times article: “What Happened to the Rule of Law?”  The Obama administration has pushed Presidential authority further than any previous administration. A return to the rule of law, domestically and internationally, is America’s best chance of survival in a dramatically changing world.

Congress should say no to Obama’s request for an illegal and unpromising attack on Syria. But we can thank him for asking.

Liberty and the Overly Prescriptive State

Few things reveal a person’s views on liberty more than their attitude toward the right of others to say or do things they disagree with. The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States protects our right of free speech and assembly, later interpreted to include the right of association. “The NSA Unravels a Civil Rights Era Win”/2013/08/29/ None of these rights is absolute (yelling fire in a theater, etc), but where we as a society draw the line has a great deal to do with how successfully our diverse citizens will live together in harmony and freedom.

The latest example of the imposition of the state into what should be private issues of belief is California’s ban on health practitioners “offering psychotherapy aimed a making gay youth straight.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco ruled that the law does not violate the free speech rights of licensed counselors and patients seeking treatment.” “US Court Upholds First in Nation Law Banning Gay to Straight Therapy for Minors”/2013/08/29/

Conversion therapy is a scientifically documented scam, but if its practitioners believe in it, it is not a deliberate fraud (maybe they do and many they don’t). We are freer, and live in greater harmony the more we allow people to pursue and experiment with their own beliefs. This includes things the rest of us might think are silly. Such freedom, when exercised within a strong set of moral values, also tends to move society more quickly to a more virtuous level. The caveat is that in allowing people to live according to their own creed, they must do no real harm to others.  Even the “doing no harm to others” standard is subject to discussion and can moved a bit this way or that – toward more freedom or less. In the case of the California law against conversion therapy, the law was aimed at protecting minors from harm inflicted by such therapy and we have rightly been quicker to protect minors than others. In short, drawing an appropriate line between private rights and state intervention is a serious and not particularly easy undertaking.

Those of you who are lucky enough to be Facebook friends of Jonathan Rauch, author of “Denial” and currently a contributing editor of the National Journal and The Atlantic, and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institute, have access to a very thoughtful discussion of the freedom of conscience, association and speech and equal protection of the law. In comments to one of Jonathan’s postings, Charlotte Allen, Tom Palmer, and Walter Olson, Walt Becker (a pseudonym), David Dalton and others explore the interface between the freedom of association and equal protection of the law in the context of same sex marriage. In such discussions it is critical for those of us who defend the importance and morality of liberty to clearly distinguish what we individually believe is right and good from what is or should be allowed under the law. The law should allow people to make their own stupid mistakes.

In reaction to slavery and Jim Crow laws, which legally discriminated against blacks, America has gone well beyond repealing such legislation and has adopted a range of anti-discrimination laws limiting the ability of “public” businesses to choose their employees and customers. These anti-discrimination laws are now increasingly being extended to GLBTs (Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals and Transgenders). Personal beliefs and preferences, whether we agree with or respect them or not, thus confront state interference in our personal choices and behavior. Doctors, who do not believe in abortion, are required to perform them. Companies whose owners do not believe in contraception are forced to provide health insurance and condoms to employees wanting them. A New Mexico photographer and baker are sued for refusing to provide their services to a same-sex wedding ceremony.

Equal treatment in the law was put aside for Affirmative Action giving preference to blacks in some cases on what was meant to be a temporary basis until the damage of earlier negative discrimination could be reversed. The Supreme Court has now started to roll back such preferences. In the above Facebook debate, Charlotte, who has trouble accepting marriage equality for same-sex couples, takes a more libertarian position on other areas of state imposed morality when she says “Why can’t we give people the freedom to set the parameters of their own commercial transactions?” The optimal balance shifts over time and I doubt that we have it anyway.

The government, which is often a lagging reflection of public sentiment, has been one of the last to extend equal treatment to same sex couples. Pure profit motive led corporate American to move ahead several decades ago to extend “marriage” benefits to employee partners of whatever sex. They did so in order to attract the best employees without regard to their color, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation. Discrimination has an economic cost.

No church should be required to marry anyone they don’t want to or don’t believe would be consistent with their beliefs. Allowing same-sex couples to receive a marriage license and the legal benefits that come with it from the State, which is surely required by the principle of equal protection of the law, does not and should not obligate any church to do so. I think that the treatment of the Boy Scouts of American set the right example.  As a private club the law allowed them to exclude gay boys from membership if they wanted to. However, evolving social understanding and attitudes and deeper reflection by Boy Scout leaders are slowly leading the Boy Scouts to change this policy. Getting the balance right will never be easy, but I prefer to error on the side of personal freedom rather than government dictated morality.

Turning a corner on the invasion of privacy?

In a small step to improve transparency, the U.S. government has released a two-year-old opinion by its secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court revealing that “the National Security Agency unlawfully gathered tens of thousands of e-mails and other electronic communications between Americans” The Washington Post, Aug 22, 2013. Perhaps it was pushed to preempt Edward Snowden from doing so before it did. But it was also in response to a year old Freedom of Information lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“It’s unfortunate it took a year of litigation and the most significant leak in American history to finally get them to release this opinion,” said foundation staff attorney Mark Rumold, “but I’m happy that the administration is beginning to take this debate seriously.”

In the October 3, 2011, opinion, John D. Bates, then the surveillance court’s chief judge, wrote: “The court is troubled that the government’s revelations regarding NSA’s acquisition of Internet transactions mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program…. NSA’s knowing acquisition of tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications through its upstream collection is a cause of concern for the court.” Bates also noted that the court’s authorization of the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone-call records was “premised on a flawed depiction of how the NSA” uses the data. “This misperception by the FISC existed from the inception of its authorized collection in May 2006, buttressed by repeated inaccurate statements made in the government’s submissions, and despite a government-devised and court-mandated oversight regime.”

That is a mouth full and it is encouraging that the government has finally shared the court’s opinion with the public. It is in sharp contrast with the disclaimers of any wrong doing it was issuing a few weeks ago.

Abuse of Power

If I had more energy, I would gather together all of the recent ways in which the Obama administration has abused presidential authority and lied to us. That would make reading this blog worthwhile. I apologize. I just returned from a very enjoyable week with my two children and six of my grand children. The seventh grandchild, Bryce Davidson, left for college the day before I arrived. The week included all four opera’s of Wagner’s Ring der Nibelungen. So, as all dialogs seem to begin these days, I will just let loose my diatribe at the latest two disturbing atrocities of Big Brother.

We have enemies who wish us harm. We need the best information possible on their plans to harm us. But the technical ability of our government (of any government) to spy on our enemies and thus potentially on each of us (especially those the administration doesn’t like) is also dangerous. Checks and balances and clear limits are needed on the government’s use of these powers. President Obama increasingly demonstrates a lack of interest in limiting his actions to the law. For one of many examples, read my blog on his refusal to call the military coup in Egypt by its obvious real name because he doesn’t like the legal consequences of doing so: https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2013/07/30/the-egyptian-coup/

When Edward Snowden first leaked a number of NSA documents reveling that the National Security Agency (NSA) was illegally collecting massive amounts of data on American citizens, the government fought back by claiming that 50 some odd potential attacks on America had been prevented by such information, thus justifying “stretching” the law. Deeper scrutiny revealed that at most one instance of such data might have materially helped (along with other information) prevent such an attack. Many would say that one instance is enough to justify any risk of government abuse of its access to private information on Americans. But many of us are not comfortable with Big Brothers potential use of such powers.

For starters it is difficult to know the truth of the potential benefits and risks of NSA and other government agencies’ spying activities. The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, later admitted that he had lied to Congress when he testified that the NSA doesn’t collect data on “millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”

When asked what it would take for Congress to hold James Clapper accountable for lying to Congress, Congressman Dennis Kucinich told Cullen Hoback, the director of the documentary on data privacy “Terms and Conditions May Apply:”

Well, you know it’s illegal to lie to Congress, but everyone lies to Congress. As soon as they raise their right hand, watch out! Clapper should be held responsible, but he won’t be, because that’s the condition we’re in right now. In a just world, Snowden, we’d be having ticker tape parades for him. But that’s not what’s going to happen.

President Obama and security officials then attempted to reassure us that they only overstepped the limits of the law a few times. Then last week Snowden released another round of damning documents. As reported in The Washington Post an NSA internal audit and other secret documents provided by Snowden showed the agency “has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008.”

A few true believers in Leviathan have suggested that no one—no innocent person—has been harmed or abused by these NSA violations of the law. Step forward David Maranda, the Brazilian partner of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist through whom Snowden has been providing leaked documents to the British news paper, The Guardian. Changing planes in London’s Heathrow airport on his way from Berlin (on assignment for The Guardian with regard to Edward Snowden) to his home in Rio de Janeiro, Mr. Maranda was detained for nine hours of interrogation under the British Terrorism Act of 2000. According to Neil Wallis, former executive editor, News of the World: “This is an appalling, blatant breach of press freedom.” U.S. officials acknowledged that they were aware of Mr. Maranda’s detention but claimed that they had not requested it. Right! We believe every thing our government tells us. Right?

How far do the abuses of power by the Obama administration have to go before we become concerned enough to put a stop to them?

Are We Becoming A Nation of Cowards?

“No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

James Madison, April 20, 1795

Osama Bin Laden’s vendetta against the United States grew out of his anger over our stationing American troops in his home country of Saudi Arabia. Imagine for a moment what might be his most cost efficient weapons for hurting the U.S.  What might give him the biggest bang for the buck? Shutting 19 American Embassies and related diplomatic facilities in the Middle East for at least a week on the basis of intercepted communications between al-Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri in Pakistan and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, who heads the al-Qaeda franchise in the Arabian peninsula, would be high on the list. Such reactions to intel, which could well be a deliberate planted by clever Arabs, must have the ghost of Bin Laden laughing hysterically (if it is possible to imagine Bin Laden laughing at all).

I still carry in my travel bag a nail clipper missing the little nail file that a Miami airport guard broke off as a potentially dangerous carry on weapon not too long after 9/11. It has taken 12 years for our government (the Orwellian named Department of Homeland Security) to figure out a way for me to board planes without taking out my computer and taking off my belt and shoes. At least the perpetual alert status of code Orange has been dropped.

These are minor inconveniences compared to the cost and danger of the billions and billions of dollars spent by NSA and others to invade our privacy (for our own good, of course) in order to better search for needles in hay stacks that might detect plots to harm us (such as the Boston marathon bombings—Upps). We are assured that these data will never be searched by a rogue bureaucrat looking for dirt on political enemies. We are reassured because our political leaders never lie to us.  For example, when National Intelligence director James Clapper informed a Senate Intelligence Committee last March that the government was not “wittingly” collecting information on millions of Americans, he later justified the lie by saying that it was the least dishonest statement he was comfortable making.

Gregory Johnsen, an expert on Yemen at Princeton, recently noted the unrealistic and dangerous expectations of the American public (at least as our government sees or would like to see them):“Unfortunately the way we in the US have talked about the terror threat as a society AQAP [Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] doesn’t have to be particularly good or even successful to constitute a serious threat.  As a society we in the US seem to have a zero-tolerance approach to terrorism instead of weighing its risks against other potential threats.  In such an environment any threat from AQAP could be considered serious.” (reported by Foreign Policy Magazine)

I am not one to see conspiracies everywhere, but this latest scare is a nice distraction for recent revelations of potentially dangerous and at a minimum wastefully expensive government over reaches in the name of keeping us safe (Snowden’s NSA and other revelations). This mornings Washington Post has two op-ed pieces on this subject that you should read. The first by Eugene Robinson, “The New Al-Qaeda Menace” /2013/08/05/, is correct in my view. The second (just below it) by Juan Zarate and Thomas Sanderson,  “Adapting to Terrorism 2.0”,  is down right scary. George Orwell’s big brother could not have made the case better for bigger and more intrusive government for our own good. Are they deliberately trying to destroy our liberties or are they over zealot fools. Probably the latter.

Over the centuries our young men and ladies have risked and often lost their lives to keep us free. How ironic that in the name of keeping us secure our liberties are being increasingly eroded and threatened. It is worth reading a more extensive excerpt from James Madison’s prescient April 20, 1795 “Political Observations” quoted above:

“Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

“War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

“In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.

“The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manner and of morals, engendered in both.

“No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

“War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will, which is to direct it.

“In war, the public treasuries are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them.

“In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.

“The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.”

–James Madison, from “Political Observations,” April 20, 1795 in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, Volume IV, page 491.

The Egyptian Coup

Ousted Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi had been a miserable leader. He broke many promises starting with the Muslim Brotherhood’s promise not to run a candidate for President just yet and to lead an inclusive government. He forced through a new constitution without proper consultation or broad support, and failed to address Egypt’s many economy and political problems. He deserved to be replaced, but doing so by military coup seriously harms Egypt and the entire Middle East in several ways. The failure of the Obama administration to acknowledge the act as a coup deprives the English language of any meaning.

Obviously it is a set back for democracy. Morsi’s growing opposition should have organized to defeat him in the next election. Given his miserable performance it shouldn’t have been difficult. That would have strengthened democracy rather than weakened it.  One coup begets another until a leader can coop the military.

The more serious harm is to the social and political conditions needed for diverse people (Muslims, Christians, secularists, Jews) to live peacefully together. What, pray tell, do the secularists and military think the Brotherhood and their supporters will do after being removed from their elected positions and arrested? Go sulk in the Old Cataract in Aswan (of which I have very fond memories)? There is a high probability that they will resort to violence. As the Army kills more and more demonstrating Morsi supporters, the prospects of an insurgency increase rapidly, as occurred in Iraq and so many other places.

It has already started. In Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula: “The rapid thud of machine-gun fire and the explosions of rocket-propelled grenades have begun to shatter the silence of the desert days and nights here with startling regularity, as militants assault the military and police forces stationed across this volatile territory that borders Israel and the Gaza Strip.” (The Washington Post, July 29, 2013, page 1) Hundreds have already been kill by the military or insurgents and the violence is growing rapidly. How could it be otherwise?

And it is spreading. Tunis has been the most promising model of transition to democracy. Following the assassination of two opposition leaders in Tunis, mass demonstrations have escalated into terrorist attacks that killed eight Tunisian solders Monday. President Moncef Marzouki, Tunisia’s moderate Islamist president, stated in a television address that “In all countries of the world, when the state faces a terrorist attack people come together. But I don’t see anything like that happening in Tunisia. All we see is divisions and chaos.”

U.S. law requires the administration to cut off aid to governments that came to power by coups. This is clearly the case in Egypt and aid should be immediately suspended. For decades U.S. aid to Egypt has ranged between 1.5 and 2 billion dollars per year, over 80% of which is to the military. Congress would surely quickly suspend this provision for Egypt but should attach conditions for any resumption of aid. These conditions should call for restraint on the part of the military, free and open public debate, quick elections, and broad participation in the redrafting of the constitution.

The already troubled Arab Spring has had a series set back.

Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman Tragedy Update

Over a year ago I expressed confidence that our judicial process and public good will would clarify the facts of the tragic shooting death of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman:  https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2012/04/01/the-trayvan-martin-tragedy/. Indeed, after carefully listening to and weighing the evidence presented to it the six women jury rendered its unanimous verdict a week ago that Zimmerman had lawfully, but no less tragically, shot and killed Martin in self-defense and was therefore not guilty of the charges against him. At the time a year ago, the failure of local Florida law enforcement officials to arrest Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, seemed to me and many others a potentially racially tinged judgment. I supported the call for his arrest. Once all of the obtainable facts had been presented and evaluated by the Jury that earlier decision turned out to be a sound professional judgment by the police. But I still think it was desirable to go through the process of this trial.

I did not follow the trial closely but have no reason to question the judgment of the jury. The utterly disgraceful misreporting and doctoring of the conversation between Zimmerman and the 911 dispatcher aired by NBC made it seem that Zimmerman might be racist in his reaction to Martin (a claim no one made during the trial because there is apparently no basis for it) tarnishing the professionalism of at least NBC. https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/the-trayvon-martin-tragedy-continues/.  Sadly the press has continued to reproduce the young, handsome picture of Martin and the thuggish picture of Zimmerman long after more neutral pictures became available.

The slanted reporting of the press is nothing, however, compared to the highly inappropriate statements from our increasingly discredited Attorney General, who suggested that the federal government was investigation the possibility of trying Zimmerman for civil rights violations for which no evidence was introduced in the just finished trail. But my heart stopped when President Obama chimed in that “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.” How could the President of the United States join the cheap political babbling of Attorney General Holder? And thus I started this blog.

This is an example of how fragments out of context can be totally misleading. The President’s full statement yesterday, when he joined the White House press briefing unannounced, was quite the opposite of my impression from the news headline. President Obama has disappointed me on many things (promoting bigger government generally, higher taxes, expanding snooping on Americans, drone assassinations of Americans without trial, and poor leadership in general), but I have always found him an honest and thoughtful commenter on race issues. His statements yesterday were no exception. Zimmerman’s trial produced no evidence of racism in anything that happened that tragic night in Florida, but the President rightly noted that each of us carries impressions (“priors”), often from personal experience, that frame our views of the world and events and that it is better that we acknowledge them and open ourselves to an examination of the role they play in our everyday judgments. This was exactly the point I was trying to make a year ago, though Obama said it better. The President is right on this issue and an excessive political correctness has stifled this discussion for too long.

Government Surveillance and the Right to Privacy

We will be discussing Edward Snowden and his revelations for some time (I hope).  His observations are worth serious thought. As quoted in the Washington Post by Barton Gellman “Man who leaked NSA secrets steps forward” /2013/06/09  ‘“I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.” The steady expansion of surveillance powers, he wrote, is “such a direct threat to democratic governance that I have risked my life and family for it….” “We managed to survive greater threats in our history . . . than a few disorganized terrorist groups and rogue states without resorting to these sorts of programs,” he wrote. “It is not that I do not value intelligence, but that I oppose . . . omniscient, automatic, mass surveillance. . . . That seems to me a greater threat to the institutions of free society than missed intelligence reports, and unworthy of the costs…”  “Analysts (and government in general) aren’t bad guys, and they don’t want to think of themselves as such,” he replied. But he said they labored under a false premise that “if a surveillance program produces information of value, it legitimizes it. . . . In one step, we’ve managed to justify the operation of the Panopticon” — an 18th-century design by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham for comprehensive surveillance of a prison population.”’

It is not generally acceptable for individuals to decide whether it is OK to violate a law we don’t like (though we all do it all the time), but there can be circumstances that are sufficiently serious that our conscience may dictate that we must.  Snowden made that determination and is prepared to accept the consequences. The courts will determine what those are. In my opinion his motives are above question.

I hope, however, as does Snowden, that the public discussion will focus on the issue of the proper balance between government’s desire to protect us from harm and invading our privacy, a favorite tool of totalitarian regimes, rather than on whether Snowden was justified in breaching his confidentiality commitment or not. The very nature of government is that of a slippery slope toward ever larger activities and powers. These risks, of course. were very well-known by our founding fathers who did their best to introduce limits and checks and balances on government power.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, called PRISM “deeply concerning,” stating that: “Unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of a democratic society. I call on all Web users to demand better legal protection and due process safeguards for the privacy of their online communications, including their right to be informed when someone requests or stores their data. A store of this information about each person is a huge liability: Whom would you trust to decide when to access it, or even to keep it secure?”

Contrary to his promises, President Obama has not reversed the dangerous excesses of the eternal War on Terror and other political abuses promoted by Bush/Chaney. Examples are the IRS anti-tea party abuses, and the administration’s frightening attack on the press: “The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press.” govt-obtains-wide-ap-phone-records-probe. But these pale compared to Obama’s expansion of our secret, undeclared wars in Somalia and Yemen and elsewhere in the form of assassinations of “bad guys.”

The most deeply disturbing of these was the assassination of Anwar al Awlaki, an American citizen who had lost faith in the intentions behind the American government’s attacks on Muslims around the world. Anwar, an initially moderate Muslim Imam,frequently interviewed by the American press following 9/11, ultimately became sharply critical of U.S. behavior and moved from Falls Church Va. back to his native Yemen to rejoin his parents. U.S. authorities came to believe that his blogs and sermons were influencing others to take violent acts against Americans. President Obama authorized his death without formal charges and without any convincing evidence of crimes other than the exercise of his free speech, which had become embarrassingly critical (and is not yet a crime). Our government claimed that he had become an al Qaeda leader but presented no evidence of any connection at all.

The day Awlaki’s death was announced  (September 30, 2011) syndicated columnist Glenn Greenwald stated: “Remember that there was great controversy that George Bush asserted the power simply to detain American citizens without due process or simply to eavesdrop on their conversation without warrant. Here you have something much more severe. Not eavesdropping on American citizens, not detaining them without due process, but killing them without due process.” Former Bush CIA director Michael Hayden stated: “We needed a court order to eavesdrop on [Awlaki], but we didn’t need a court order to kill him. Isn’t that something?” (Both of these quotes are taken from Jeremy Scahill’s shocking book “Dirty Wars; The World is a Battlefield”)

If you are not alarmed by our President ordering the death of Americans without due process, you will surely be sicken that our secretive special forces killed Awlaki’s 16 year old son Abdulrahman two weeks later. The government has never explained whether his death was another of their many accidents or had been deliberate and if so why. He was also an American, born in Denver Colorado on August 26, 1995 (https://www.facebook.com/abdulrahman.14.10.2011). Soon thereafter Robert Gibbs, Obama’s former White House press secretary, was asked: ‘“It’s an American citizen that is being targeted without due process of law, without trial. And, he’s underage. He’s a minor,” reporter Sierra Adamson told Gibbs. Gibbs shot back: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children. I don’t think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.”’ (Dirty Wars)  Gibbs should be publicly whipped (if we did that sort of thing) or at least banished from polite society. How disgusting.

I am proud of the principles of individual dignity and rights upon which my country is based. I am proud of what many of my countrymen have accomplished and contributed to the world. I am tired of being ashamed of many of the self-destructive things my government has increasingly been doing in the misguided name of my security.  Why do you think Muslims in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere wish to attack the United States rather than (or in addition to) fighting each other for one reason or another? Because many of them have been killed or injured by our global campaign of assassinations and/or outright wars, which they see as an American attack on Islam. They are fighting to defend themselves just as we would (or say that we are). We need to leave them alone. They will have no interest in attacking us if we stay out of their homelands.

I am hoping the current revelations of some of our government’s abuses of its powers and our liberties will bring them to an end.  It is, as I have noted so many times before, the nature of government to want to grow in scope and power. As we all know, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. The pendulum of potentially coercive government power has swung too far in the false name of defending our safety against foreign (and now domestic) enemies. I hope that the current revelations will shock us into sending the pendulum back the other way.

Several weeks ago, on Memorial Day, my friend Lou Cordia sent the following from President Reagan’s Memorial Day Proclamation for May 25, 1981 as a reminder of what we properly aspire to:

Over one hundred years ago, Memorial Day was established to commemorate those who died in the defense of our national ideals. Our ideals of freedom, justice, and equal rights for all have been challenged many times since then, and thousands of Americans have given their lives in many parts of the world to secure those same ideals and insure for their children a lasting peace. Their sacrifice demands that we, the living, continue to promote the cause of peace and the ideals for which they so valiantly gave of themselves.

Today, the United States stands as a beacon of liberty and democratic strength before the community of nations. We are resolved to stand firm against those who would destroy the freedoms we cherish. We are determined to achieve an enduring peace — a peace with liberty and with honor. This determination, this resolve, is the highest tribute we can pay to the many who have fallen in the service of our Nation.