Tag: glenn greenwald

Greenwald on the Arrar Ruling

By
Tim Lynch

Glenn Greenwald has a good post about Arrar v. Ashcroft, an appeals court ruling that came down the other day.  Here’s an excerpt:

Maher Arar is both a Canadian and Syrian citizen of Syrian descent.  A telecommunications engineer and graduate of Montreal’s McGill University, he has lived in Canada since he’s 17 years old.  In 2002, he was returning home to Canada from vacation when, on a stopover at JFK Airport, he was (a) detained by U.S. officials, (b) accused of being a Terrorist, (c) held for two weeks incommunicado and without access to counsel while he was abusively interrogated, and then (d) was “rendered” – despite his pleas that he would be tortured – to Syria, to be interrogated and tortured.  He remained in Syria for the next 10 months under the most brutal and inhumane conditions imaginable, where he was repeatedly tortured.  Everyone acknowledges that Arar was never involved with Terrorism and was guilty of nothing.  I’ve appended to the end of this post the graphic description from a dissenting judge of what was done to Arar while in American custody and then in Syria.

Read the whole thing.   Also, the ACLU has put together a short film about the experiences of some prisoners released from Guantanamo.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, General, Law and Civil Liberties

George Will and Drug Decriminalization

By
Tim Lynch

George Will’s latest column takes a look a drug policy and the views of the new drug czar, Gil Kerlikowski.  Notably, Will mentions Portugal’s experience with decriminalization of all drugs since 2001 and says Kerlikowski is aware of the Portuguese policy as well.  Cato published a report on Portugal’s drug policy in April and the author, Glenn Greenwald, discussed his findings at a Cato policy forum here.  George Will’s shifting views on drug policy (toward liberalization) reflect the shifting views of other conservative pundits and the public more generally.

Will appeared on ABC on Sunday, and discussed his views on drug policy. Watch:

For more Cato work on drug policy, go here, here, and here.

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties

Good News on Medical Marijuana

By
David Rittgers

The Department of Justice is changing its long-standing policy of ignoring state laws that allow marijuana use for medicinal purposes. This federalism question played out several years ago in the Supreme Court in the Raich case; Cato’s amicus brief is available here.

Cato hosted Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project in March, and you can view the event here. Glenn Greenwald wrote an influential study for Cato on the successful decriminalization of drugs in Portugal. Greenwald notes that he gets more invitations to speak on the subject now than he did when it was published.

A good first step. Fourteen states permit medical marijuana dispensaries; I suspect more are on the way now that this hurdle has been cleared.

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties

Who’s Blogging about Cato

Here’s your weekly round up of bloggers who are writing about Cato research, analysis and commentary:

cmoody [at] cato [dot] org (Click here) to let us know if you’re blogging about Cato.

Topics: 
Cato Publications, General

Peace? The Promise of Peace? Eh, Close Enough

By
Jason Kuznicki

Worse choices have been made than Barack Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize.

There was Woodrow Wilson in 1919, an award that rates as one of history’s more grotesque international jokes. Wilson promised to keep us out of war and promptly got us into it, meanwhile laying the ideological and geopolitical foundations for 90 years of war-nationalism, war-liberalism, and war-socialism. To say nothing of saddling us with the terrible idea of world government. Among those who weren’t Nazis or communists, Wilson may have done more than any other individual to promote human suffering in the last hundred years.

So yes, there have been worse choices. (Next to Wilson, I’d have to give Al Gore and Yasser Arafat both honorable mentions. We could go on, of course.) But still, Barack Obama? Seriously? I doubt the committee has any idea how badly their choice will be mocked in the United States.

Over here, the prize will be a disappointment to the anti-war left, the anti-war right, and, of course, the pro-war right. The only contingent I can see taking pride in it over here is the establishment left, which hasn’t had much time lately for substantive work on peace, but which is always happy to make speeches and receive awards. Sometimes, the American image abroad is just that important.

Rather than piling on in what is sure to be a bipartisan laugh-fest, let’s think about what Barack Obama actually could have done for world peace. And weep.

Like Wilson, Obama ran a campaign promising peace and the international rule of law. Politically, peace is a winning message, and the advocates of peace would do well to remember this. Decade after decade, American voters are willing to give peace a chance.

Obama promised to withdraw from Iraq and to close the illegal Guantanamo Bay prison camp. He promised to end the Bush-era detention and rendition policies that have tarnished America’s reputation abroad and weakened trust among nations.

Americans embraced those promises, which are fully consistent with the ideals of the Nobel Peace Prize. The prize, recall, is awarded “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Ending wars, treating prisoners of war humanely, and ensuring international criminal suspects’ due process of law are exactly the sorts of things that the peace prize was designed for. They’re just what you’d expect a laureate to do.

But once in office, Obama didn’t deliver. The promises disappeared, replaced by vigorous defenses of virtually every presidential power that the Bush administration invented for itself, including not only those that subvert domestic civil liberties, but also those that threaten the international rule of law.

And the withdrawal from Iraq? Delayed and partial. The latest word — received just as the peace prize was announced — is that it’s “complicated.” Sort of like a bad Facebook relationship.

Our other war, in Afghanistan, continues to escalate, even as its strategic goals seem further and further removed. As Cato author Glenn Greenwald notes, U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan continue to kill and maim the innocent, with very little to show in the way of stabilizing the country or defeating international terrorism. Withdrawal from Afghanistan is both possible and desirable, as my colleagues Malou Innocent and Ted Galen Carpenter argue. Yet our latest Nobel laureate doesn’t see peace as an option here either.

How sad. Not to sound bitter or anything, but when does the Cato Institute get a peace prize?

Topics: 
Cato Publications, Foreign Policy and National Security, Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

The International Relations Academy and the Beltway “Foreign Policy Community”—Why the Disconnect?

By
Justin Logan

Glenn Greenwald uncovers a very interesting sentence in Les Gelb’s Democracy essay [.pdf] on the Iraq war and the media:

gelbLes Gelb on Charlie Rose

My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.

I had to read that two or three times to unpack all that’s going on in there.  The question obviously being begged is where does the disposition, and where do the incentives “to support wars to retain political and professional credibility” come from?

Consider: There are two groups of people, the Foreign Policy Community (FPC) in Washington and New York, centered around the national-security bureaucracy and think tanks that produce orthodox foreign policy hands like Brookings, AEI, and CFR.  There is a second group of people, international relations academics.  The two groups have, in most cases, similar training (PhDs from top schools) and in the course of obtaining such training have been exposed to many of the same theories and topics.

Yet the two groups have been wildly at variance in terms of their views on important public policy issues.  Take the Iraq war, for example.  As anyone who was in Washington at the time knows, the FPC was extremely fond of the idea of invading Iraq.  To oppose it was to marginalize oneself for years.  Indeed, those who promoted the disastrous adventure have prospered, while those who (bravely or stupidly, depending on your point of view) opposed it remain huddled in the chilly, dusty alcoves of popular debate.

In the academy, meanwhile, there was hardly any debate over Iraq–almost 80 percent of IR academics opposed the war. [.pdf] To the extent academics did enter the public debate on the issue, it was to pay for an advertisement in the New York Times warning against the war. [.pdf] The only academics who spoke out in favor of the war (to my knowledge, anyway) were IR liberals like Anne-Marie Slaughter, who sought policy positions in Washington.  (Slaughter, of course, was rewarded with a spot as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, while to my knowledge none of the academic opponents of the war have gained Washington policy jobs.)

So what is going on here?  Why is there such a profound disconnect between the two groups that look so similar on paper?  The first, most obvious answer is that the academy tends to be more liberal (in the domestic political sense), so academics tend to have more peacenik-y views.  The problem with that argument is that the domestic-political liberals in the FPC supported the war just as strongly as their conservative brethren, which means that domestic political views don’t work as a determinant of support for war.

My sense is that the giant national-security bureaucracy in Washington that has emerged over the last 65 years has shaped incentives in a manner such that it is next-to-impossible to “get ahead” by advocating for restraint.  Put differently, restraint isn’t in anybody’s interest except the country’s, and there’s nobody in Washington representing broad national interests as opposed to their own parochial ones.  Every neoconservative or liberal imperialist in DC has someone’s interests behind them.  The Don Quixotes like myself and my colleagues here, by contrast, want to cut the defense budget, slow the opportunities for rent-seeking among contractors, etc, etc, etc.  As Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot once derisively referred to us, we’re just “four or five people in a phone booth.”  But we were right about Iraq, which is more than Gigot can say for himself.

For the legions of IR journal editors who are reading this post, I am completing an article draft examining this idea in more detail.  But for now you can cast an eye on a Steve Walt blog post that makes an argument very similar to my own:

…America’s role in the world today is shaped by two imbalances of power, not just one. The first is the gap between U.S. capabilities and everyone else’s, a situation that has some desirable features (especially for us) but one that also encourages the United States to do too much and allows others to do either too little or too many of the wrong things. The second imbalance is between organized interests whose core mission is constantly pushing the U.S. government to do more and in more places, and the far-weaker groups who think we might be better off showing a bit more restraint.

I’m open to different theories on this matter, but I think we should agree that at the very least, it’s an interesting puzzle.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

Don’t Leave Room for Desert

By
Julian Sanchez

Duncan “Atrios” Black sums up and amplifies on a much longer post by Salon’s Glenn Greenwald as follows:

Just adding on to Glenn’s post, much opposition to the government actually doing anything decent for people comes from the idea that the government is going to take my tax money and give it to people who don’t deserve it. The problem is that for decades the Dems have tried to get around this by making sure policies and programs were relatively small and incremental, everything targeted and means tested. But doing that effectively confirmed the critics’ point. The big (giant) government programs which are most popular are the ones which are universal - Social Security and Medicare - and other less controversial government programs, like highway spending, are also perceived to benefit people across the board.

There’s a couple of interesting things going on here that seem worth unpacking.  The first is actually a legitimate point about how valid arguments against various kinds of redistribution tend, with unsettling ease, to shade into unsavory demonization of the folks on the receiving end of the transfer. Suppose someone suggests that the government should, either by regulation or direct subsidy, ensure that the indigent are provided with health care or that insolvent homeowners are protected from foreclosure. Now, there are a few types of objections people might raise. There’s an argument from efficiency and incentives: To the extent that the risks associated with individual financial or lifestyle choices are borne by the public, there’s a familiar problem of “moral hazard” reducing incentives for prudence. And there’s an argument from property and autonomy, to the effect that even if people ought to help others in need, each person is entitled to decide whether and how to do so without compulsion. Neither of these implies any blanket judgment about the folks who find themselves in need of aid. The first argument does suggest that redistributive policy will make it rational for people to take more risks at the margin, but it does not follow from either that people who are having trouble meeting their mortgage payments, or people who get sick and cannot afford care, are bad or foolish or irresponsible or otherwise deserving of their fate. And it is a good thing for these arguments that no such conclusion follows, because it’s clearly not true.

Yet in popular political rhetoric, it’s disturbingly easy to find just such a leap being made. Think of Rick Santelli’s jeremiad against “losers” under foreclosure getting bailed out by government. Is it just that people are inherently spiteful or unkind? In fact, the tendency to assume that people who are badly off must deserve it may be a result of what social psychologists call the Just World Hypothesis. In brief, faced with evidence that the world is often arbitrary and unfair, and that bad things often happen to good people, many of us prefer to preserve our faith in a basically fair and benevolent universe by assuming that the badly off must somehow deserve their fates—which is a stronger and (I think) rather morally uglier proposition than the more plausible notion that people are often significantly responsible for their fates.

There are at least three reasons to take some care to avoid this implication, given how easily human beings fall into it. The first is just that it’s an ugly and callous attitude to have toward people who will often deserve our compassion whether or not they ought to receive government aid. The second is that people will readily—and sometimes intentionally—misconstrue an argument about incentives as an argument about the moral worthiness or personal virtue of the proposed recipients, which does not make for a particularly fruitful conversation. Finally, there’s a paradoxically quite authoritarian implicit premise lurking behind this sort of argument—to wit, that it’s the job of the government  to determine who is or is not morally deserving of its largess, and that the central question is whether this or that particular class of prospective recipients qualifies. That’s a frame people across the spectrum ought to be uncomfortable with.

As Atrios points out, strategic response to this on the part of progressives has been to embed what are essentially welfare programs within an elaborate—and functionally, if not politically, superfluous—superstructure of universal social insurance. My colleague Will Wilkinson has pressed this point cogently in the context of Social Security. The rationale for the program is ultimately that we hope it will prevent people from being mired in poverty in old age. There is no sane reason, on this rationale, for cutting Bill Gates a check when he reaches the age of eligibility—but we do it this way because progressives believe, perhaps correctly, that a means-tested aid program for the indigent elderly would be more politically vulnerable to cuts. Which, I think, underscores the perverse effect of thinking in terms of the desert of the recipients, since there’s no actually-valid argument on which a universal need-blind benefit makes more sense than a narrow means-tested one. So one more reason to eschew desert-centered political discourse: It gives rise to policy that’s less intelligent whether your underlying commitments are progressive or libertarian.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Health Care, Political Philosophy

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