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Oxford—My Mind to Me A Kingdom Is

Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of a Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling (1528)

My mind to me a kingdom is;

Such perfect joy therein I find

That it excels all other bliss

That world affords or grows by kind.

Though much I want which most men have,

Yet still my mind forbids to crave.

No princely pomp, no wealthy store,

No force to win the victory,

No wily wit to salve a sore,

No shape to feed each gazing eye;

To none of these I yield as thrall.

For why my mind doth serve for all.

I see how plenty suffers oft,

How hasty climbers soon do fall;

I see that those that are aloft

Mishap doth threaten most of all;

They get with toil, they keep with fear.

Such cares my mind could never bear.

Content I live, this is my stay;

I seek no more than may suffice;

I press to bear no haughty sway;

Look what I lack my mind supplies;

Lo, thus I triumph like a king,

Content with that my mind doth bring.

Some have too much, yet still do crave;

I little have, and seek no more.

They are but poor, though much they have,

And I am rich with little store.

They poor, I rich; they beg, I give;

They lack, I leave; they pine, I live.

I laugh not at another’s loss;

I grudge not at another’s gain;

No worldly waves my mind can toss;

My state at one doth still remain.

I fear no foe, nor fawning friend;

I loathe not life, nor dread my end.

Some weigh their pleasure by their lust,

Their wisdom by their rage of will,

Their treasure is their only trust;

And cloaked craft their store of skill.

But all the pleasure that I find

Is to maintain a quiet mind.

My wealth is health and perfect ease;

My conscience clear my chief defense;

I neither seek by bribes to please,

Nor by deceit to breed offense.

Thus do I live, thus will I die.

Would all did so as well as I!

–Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, My Mind to Me A Kingdom Is (ca. 1585) first published (in modified form) in William Byrd, Psalms, Sonnets, and Songs of Sadness and Piety (1588).

This poem is one of the true masterpieces of the Elizabethan era, understandable on many levels: as a sanctuary of conscience, as a statement of Calvinist precepts, as a dissertation on contentment, as a praise of the powers of imagination and invention. William Byrd’s setting of the Oxford poem is one of the finest English art songs of the Elizabethan era. A number of excellent recordings exist, but there is as yet nothing posted to YouTube. Of the recordings, the performance of the inimitable Emma Kirkby, on this Fretwork CD is surely the best. Listen to William Byrd’s Fantasia No. 2 a 6 in G Minor:

Smith—The Perfection of Human Nature

Thomas Gainsborough, The Morning Walk (Mr & Mrs William Hallett)(1785)

The insolence and brutality of anger, in the same manner, when we indulge its fury without check or restraint, is, of all objects, the most detestable. But we admire that noble and generous resentment which governs its pursuit of the greatest injuries, not by the rage which they are apt to excite in the breast of the sufferer, but by the indignation which they naturally call forth in that of the impartial spectator; which allows no word, no gesture, to escape it beyond what this more equitable sentiment would dictate; which never, even in thought, attempts any greater vengeance, nor desires to inflict any greater punishment, than what every indifferent person would rejoice to see executed.

And hence it is, that to feel much for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature; and can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their whole grace and propriety. As to love our neighbour as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity, so it is the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbour, or what comes to the same thing, as our neighbour is capable of loving us.

–Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments pt i, ch i (1759).

Listen to George Frederick Handel’s Anthem for the Foundling Hospital, “Blessed Are They That Considereth the Poor” (1749), a work composed for performance at a concert, performed in May of that year, to support London’s Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted young Children. The event raised some £350, an enormous sum in that day, largely because of Handel’s personal support. It marked one of a series of events over the course of Handel’s long careers in which he suspended his work for profit to support charitable works, particularly schools and orphanages.

An Ethics Meltdown at the Justice Department

USA Today offers an extraordinary multi-part study of prosecutorial misconduct at the Department of Justice over the last decade, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The stories generally show prosecutors out to support the political agendas of their bosses. They also indicate a systematic evasion of the requirements of prosecutorial ethics and a collapse of ethics training and enforcement within the Justice Department, where an ethos of “victory at all costs” now controls.

USA TODAY spent six months examining federal prosecutors’ work, reviewing legal databases, department records and tens of thousands of pages of court filings. Although the true extent of misconduct by prosecutors will likely never be known, the assessment is the most complete yet of the scope and impact of those violations. USA TODAY found a pattern of “serious, glaring misconduct,” said Pace University law professor Bennett Gershman, an expert on misconduct by prosecutors. “It’s systemic now, and … the system is not able to control this type of behavior. There is no accountability.” He and Alexander Bunin, the chief federal public defender in Albany, N.Y., called the newspaper’s findings “the tip of the iceberg” because many more cases are tainted by misconduct than are found. In many cases, misconduct is exposed only because of vigilant scrutiny by defense attorneys and judges.

The study quotes former U.S. attorney general Dick Thornburgh, who headed the Justice Department in the first Bush Administration and who was harshly critical of the collapse of ethics standards in the second Bush Administration. Thornburgh surveys the record of the past decade and states that “No civilized society should countenance such conduct or systems that failed to prevent it.”

What does Thornburgh mean by “systems that failed?” The focus of his ire is plainly a culture within the Justice Department that promotes abuse and fails to deal with abuse when it is publicly exposed. Despite his promises to clean the situation up, Eric Holder has done nothing other than arrange some ethics training courses. The Department steadily resists disciplinary action against prosecutors who misbehave and attempts to block public exposure of their misconduct through congressional probes with claims of prosecutorial immunity. Holder refuses even to take questions on the subject at public events (as occurred just this week at an event marking the fiftieth anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird in Alabama). The U.S. attorney who is perhaps the worst single Bush-era offender remains in her position as Republican senators block efforts to appoint a replacement, and the Justice Department continues to stonewall an investigation into some of the most serious cases of abuse. In recent testimony before the House, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine has acknowledged (PDF) the damage these disclosures have done both to the Department’s morale and to its reputation. Fine’s own office has revealed significant evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, particularly in political cases. Moreover, his reports often show how even his internal team is often blocked from getting to the bottom of abuse stories.

The USA Today study includes a database reviewing 201 cases, interviews with some of the Justice Department’s innocent victims, and summaries of some of the searing criticisms of prosecutors run amok from federal judges. What it covers is only a tiny fraction of the systematic abuses that scar the administration of justice in this country. Still, the USA Today effort is substantial and impressive, and clearly puts the publication in Pulitzer territory.

Our Century: A Dialogue with Helmut Schmidt and Fritz Stern (IV)

With the kind permission of C.H. Beck Verlag, former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and Columbia University historian Fritz Stern, I am pleased to present here the fourth and last in a series of excerpts from the bestselling book Unser Jahrhundert—Ein Gespräch, in an original English translation.

health care and think tanks

schmidt: I have become sick in America. I have become sick in Japan. I even had an experience in England. You’ll get the best care in Germany! That would be the case for the great bulk of people.

stern: On the other hand you have to acknowledge that in the most serious cases involving surgery and the brain, American medicine–

schmidt: The pinnacle of American medicine is at the same time the best in the world, no doubt about that, more than half the medical research and innovation is due to the Americans. There is no doubt about that, but what benefit does it bring the ordinary man in the sick bed?

stern: But to come back to my point: the technological and scientific progress has made medicine less human than it was before.

schmidt: And it results in people living longer. Modern medicine, contemporary working conditions in factories and offices, modern hygiene, clean water and unadulterated foods, modern nourishment, all of these things work together to create a society that ages. People live longer and in the last five years of their sickness, they require more medical assistance than in the preceding 75 years, in which they were only sick from time to time. That means that the costs associated with the provision of medical care will rise, not simply in absolute numbers, but also in proportion to the net national product. That is unavoidable.

stern: I have told my wife that I’ll dispense with my last year. Especially in view of the cost and the pain. But this plan isn’t so easy to implement.

schmidt: As regards the health care reform proposals in America, I see a great deal of resistance to Obama.

stern: It will doubtless lead to a heavy conflict within society and will be a major battle for Obama.

schmidt: The initiative failed once already under Clinton.

stern: Correct. To a large extent perhaps because of Hillary’s mistakes. There is a strong opposition on the grounds that we have always managed it alone, we do not need the state. The smaller the state is, the better. On the other hand, it is completely clear that as regards medical conditions, we live in an unjust state. That has actually been completely clear since the time of the New Deal, and attempts to change the situation have been made ever since. The last attempt was made by the Clinton Administration. The strong forces of opposition focus on one hand around a group of doctors who are strongly opposed to state control–they speak immediately of “socialized medicine” as if it were the worst thing there was–and on the other hand on the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance sector. Both have an exceptionally powerful lobby.

schmidt: Yes, but also in the political world. There are certainly a large number of conservatives in Congress for whom all of this simply goes too far.

stern: Absolutely, yes. They all cry: this brings dependency -

schmidt: Freedom is imperiled -

stern: Freedom is imperiled and it leads to socialism. Without really having much of an idea of what socialism is, of course. Most people would support health care reform, but they have yet to be mobilized. This is exactly what the administration is attempting at this moment. With respect to health care reform I, probably like ten million other Americans, receive emails: Fritz, we need your help. Contact your congressman and your senator and tell them how important this matter is to you. It was always in the power of the American president to turn directly to the people and ask their support for a specific policy. But the capability to instantly send a personalized message to ten million people, that is something new.

stern: In America the quality of the think tanks has somewhat declined recently. One example that you know well is the Council on Foreign Relations, whose influence has receded, justifiably, because the quality of its work is not the same as it was before. It was a bastion of foreign policy education, but no longer.

schmidt: And at the same time a bastion of the East Coast elites.

stern: Absolutely.

schmidt: Discussion of practical politics by experts who are not subordinate to the laws of politics is an urgently needed support for any political leadership. In one area we in Germany have a surplus of advisory institutions: that is economic policy. In this area we have too many institutes that assume their own importance.

stern: And they partly reflect the interests of their funders.

schmidt: These economic research institutes—one in Munich, one in Berlin, one in Kiel, one in Hamburg, and I don’t know all the others—constantly present us with economic prognoses. Every year the council of economic advisors delivers us a six or seven hundred page thick report. That includes three doctoral dissertations and a half a postdoctoral work, all worked out by a large staff. To belong to this staff is a wonderful educational experience; but all of this is superfluous and terribly presumptuous. All these people have no sense that in a democracy, we operate on the basis of majorities -

stern: And that politicians must also reach decisions -

schmidt: Yes, even when they know nothing.—We have to stop. Fritz, at the end of these three days can you think of a particular wish you might have?

stern: Yes, I wish that the difference between communism and social democracy were more clearly defined in the consciousness of the Western world, that is, that the right-wingers were not left to define the difference by saying the two are more or less the same thing and an established failure.

schmidt: I agree with you. But it will not be so easy to accomplish. Look at the current conditions of the German Social Democrats.

stern: I only said that it’s my wish.

schmidt: I share your wish. I don’t have the sense that we’ve worked through our agenda, but I can’t say what we’ve missed. Fritz, one thing occurs to me. I wanted to ask you who wrote these lines: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep…”

stern: That is by Robert Frost, a great American poet of the twentieth century.

schmidt: Robert Frost, right, it’s wonderful. “And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.”

Eileen Nearne and the Times Torture Policy

In today’s New York Times, John Burns has a top-notch obituary for Eileen Nearne, a woman who served as a British spy in Nazi-occupied France during World War II. Nearne was “an insistently private woman who loved cats and revealed almost nothing about her past,” so that her own neighbors in Torquay had no idea they were living next to a person who could have been, and should be, a legend. Burns’s recounting of her life is marvelous, and it merits being read and circulated. But I paused over a couple of lines:

As she related in postwar debriefings, documented in Britain’s National Archives, the Gestapo tortured her — beating her, stripping her naked, then submerging her repeatedly in a bath of ice-cold water until she began to black out from lack of oxygen. Yet they failed to force her to yield the secrets they sought: her real identity, the names of others working with her in the resistance and the assignments given to her by London. At the time, she was 23.

As Andrew Sullivan notes, these lines must have escaped Bill Keller’s blue pencil, because they can’t be squared with existing Times policy on the word “torture.” Here’s how those lines might read, if they were brought into conformity with Mr. Keller’s policies:

As she related in postwar debriefings, documented in Britain’s National Archives, the Gestapo subjected her to enhanced interrogation techniques, sometimes referred to as “torture” by critics of the German government. She was beaten, stripped naked, and then submerged repeatedly in a bath of ice-cold water until she began to black out from lack of oxygen.

No techniques were used on Ms. Nearne that were not also applied with authority of the Bush Administration to prisoners in the “War on Terror.”

Otunbayeva, Obama to Discuss Fuel Contracts

The Washington Post scores an interview with Kyrgyz President Roza Otunbayeva in New York. Notwithstanding the immense range of problems facing her country, including unrest in the south, discussion of the U.S. government aviation fuel contracts takes center stage. Otunbayeva’s government has resuscitated the state fuel supply agency, and she wants it to receive the potentially massive fuel supply award.

Otunbayeva, who will meet with Obama on Friday, said she would be “very unhappy” if the Defense Department presses ahead with the process and awards a new contract. In a statement, the Pentagon said that it was “open to exploring” the idea of supplying fuel through a state-owned enterprise. “The U.S. priority is to ensure a secure, reliable and uninterrupted supply of fuel to the Transit Center,” the statement said.

In the meantime, the Defense Department is said to be in the final stages of decision-making about the aviation fuel contracts involving Kyrgyzstan, which (including fuel that passed to Afghanistan) may have amounted to some $3.2 billion just in the period from 2005 forward. Red Star and Mina Corp., which have held these contracts up to this point, are widely expected to get the Pentagon’s award. They also appear to be the target of the Kyrgyz government’s ire, what Otunbayeva referred to in her interview as “the absolutely dark corner” of Pentagon contracting.

Kyrgyzstan has also shaken up its team investigating the government contracts and their relationship with deposed dictator Kurmanbek Bakiyev. Kubatbek Baibolov, formerly the minister of the interior, has now been appointed procurator general. In an interview, Baibolov insisted that uncovering the connections between the Bakiyev family enterprise and the Manas aviation fuel supply arrangements was a priority for the nation’s law-enforcement agencies. Kyrgyz authorities have requested U.S. assistance in apprehending a list of persons they believe were involved as intermediaries for the Bakiyevs in connection with aviation fuel deals.

While Otunbayeva promises transparency and an end to corruption, it’s far from clear that simply substituting a state company for private companies would put an end to the current dilemma. The question hovering over the entire fuel supply question is whether the Pentagon is using the payment stream from fuel sales to buy the cooperation of key local government players. Most attention has been drawn to Kyrgyzstan because of the disclosures that followed the revolution there in the spring. But similar issues exist in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, for instance.

In a report from June 2008, NBC investigative reporter Aram Roston found a similar pattern in the Pentagon’s fuel supply deals in Jordan. In that case,

the American military structured the deal, [so that] only a company with the blessing of the Jordanian government could win the contract. A bidder was required to have a Jordanian government “Letter of Authorization,” and only IOTC received such a letter.

The award went to the company that got the Jordanian Government’s letter, but which was far from the low bidder. A lawsuit in Florida ensued by a member of the Jordanian royal family who demands a commission for having brokered the government’s blessing.

Otunbayeva, however, insists that the Kyrgyz proposal will be fully transparent and carefully monitored—unlike the current arrangements, which remain enshrouded in extraordinary secrecy. She also argues that the fewer links present in the chain, the less opportunity will exist for corruption. Although Kyrgyzstan ranks high on Transparency International’s corruption index, it also has a robust civil society sector, which helps explain why it has to date been far easier to learn details of the Pentagon’s Kyrgyzstan dealings inside Kyrgyzstan than in Washington, where transparency is often invoked but rarely practiced.

When Obama and Otunbayeva meet on Friday, the aviation contracts will certainly figure near the top of their agenda. And the Pentagon’s commitment to oppose corruption and support transparency in contracting will be put to a severe test.

The FBI vs. Greenpeace

Did the FBI launch a surveillance program targeting anti-war groups and environmental activists during the Bush era? Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine has issued a report looking into that question. While he puts the blandest possible read on what he discovers, the results are troubling just the same. The Los Angeles Times’s Richard Serrano reports:

FBI agents improperly opened investigations into Greenpeace and several other domestic advocacy groups after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and put the names of some of their members on terrorist watch lists based on evidence that turned out to be “factually weak,” the Justice Department said Monday. However, the internal review by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine did not conclude that the FBI purposely targeted the groups or their members, as many civil liberties advocates had charged, after antiwar rallies and other protests were held during the administration of President George W. Bush. But Fine said the FBI tactics appeared “troubling” in singling out some of the domestic groups for investigations that lasted up to five years, and were extended “without adequate basis.” He also questioned why the FBI continued to maintain investigative files against the groups.

“In several cases there was little indication of any possible federal crimes,” Fine said. “In some cases, the FBI classified some investigations relating to nonviolent civil disobedience under its ‘acts of terrorism’ classification.” In addition to the environmental group Greenpeace, the FBI investigated People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, and the antiwar groups Catholic Worker and Thomas Merton Center.

These reports fit into an old pattern. The FBI has a long history of being deployed abusively against organizations critical of the administration in Washington, particularly anti-war activists and pacifist church groups. Fine’s report is, as usual, balanced and very careful. He concludes that he came up with no evidence to suggest that suppression of free speech rights was on the FBI’s agenda, and that conclusion is warranted by the report as a whole. On the other hand, Fine focuses sharply on the on-the-ground work, and he’s skipped over considerable evidence pointing to something more systematic and directed from the top.

In the years right after 9/11, Bush Administration Justice Department officials used the phrase “environmental terrorists” to refer to radical environmental organizations like the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front—which were in fact linked to some spectacular acts of vandalism and arson. An effort was made to portray environmentalists as a community that included dangerous domestic terrorists. At this time, Representative George Nethercutt of Washington introduced his Agroterrorism Prevention Bill, which exploited the meme and tried to rope violent environmental activists into the same legal standards applied to terrorists. It may very well be that the FBI was deployed in an effort to develop an evidence base to support this political rhetoric. It’s unsurprising that it came up empty-handed. Greenpeace, while aggressive and innovative in its advocacy techniques, is far removed from organizations like ALF and ELF. In the meantime, the effort to label environmental activists as “ecoterrorists” has lost whatever political momentum it once had. But the FBI surveillance of Greenpeace may show how easily Washington can use law-enforcement resources for a dubious political campaign designed to isolate and target groups with a different perspective.

Obama and the Khadr Case

How did an ambiguous case against a child soldier from Canada that seems to frame the United States in the worst possible light wind up as the center stage opener for the resumed military commission proceedings in Guantánamo? It reveals that Obama has not only failed to implement his own policies with respect to “War on Terror” prisoners but has also put the whole thing on autopilot. I explore the Khadr case and what to make of it in the Clason lecture delivered at Western New England School of Law today. My prepared remarks can be examined here. (PDF)

Secrets in Plain Sight

Scott Shane compares an unredacted copy of Anthony Shaffer’s new book, Operation Dark Heart, with a heavily blacked-out copy approved for release by the Pentagon. Just what has the Pentagon so riled up?

The National Security Agency, headquarters for the government’s eavesdroppers and code breakers, has been located at Fort Meade, Md., for half a century. Its nickname, the Fort, has been familiar for decades to neighbors and government workers alike. Yet that nickname is one of hundreds of supposed secrets Pentagon reviewers blacked out in the new, censored edition of an intelligence officer’s Afghan war memoir. The Defense Department is buying and destroying the entire uncensored first printing of “Operation Dark Heart,” by Anthony Shaffer, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, in the name of protecting national security.

Another supposed secret removed from the second printing: the location of the Central Intelligence Agency’s training facility — Camp Peary, Va., a fact discoverable from Wikipedia. And the name and abbreviation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, routinely mentioned in news articles. And the fact that Sigint means “signals intelligence.” Not only did the Pentagon black out Colonel Shaffer’s cover name in Afghanistan, Chris Stryker, it deleted the source of his pseudonym: the name of John Wayne’s character in the 1949 movie “The Sands of Iwo Jima.”

Has the cult of secrecy really gotten that out of control? Or is this all just part of an effort to block a book that promises sharp criticism of some costly blunders? In any event, the Pentagon is only drawing attention to what it wants to edit away. Colonel Shaffer nails why: “the Defense Department redactions enhance the reader’s understanding by drawing attention to the flawed results created by a disorganized and heavy handed military intelligence bureaucracy.” Indeed, one begins to marvel at the unfortunate use of the word “intelligence” in this context.

Hafiz—The River of Wine

Master of the Divan of Hafiz Manuscript (1560), The Dancers Entertain Muhammad Qulî Qûtb Shâh

O Beloved, upon this river of wine, launch our boat-shaped cup,

And into this river throw those weeping with envy, too.

Winebringer, throw a cask of wine into my boat,

For without that–for forty days and nights on the open sea–

I will die of thirst.

I am lost in this city and can no longer find the Winehouse door.

Please help me to find that street again where Love resides.

Bring me a cup of wine that is dark red and smells like musk.

Don’t bring me that expensive brand that tastes like money

and smells like lust.

Even though I am drunk and worthless, be kind to me,

And on this dark heart shine the light of Your smile.

If it’s sun at midnight that you desire, throw the veil from

The face of the rose, and you will have all the light you need.

If I die, don’t let them bury me in a dusty grave;

Take my corpse to the Winehouse and throw me into a cask of wine!

Hafiz, if you have had enough of this world and all its violence,

Then take up the cup, and from the inside let this liquid love make peace.

–Khwāja Šamsu d-Dīn Muḥammad Hāfiz-e Šīrāzī (خواجه شمس‌الدین محمد حافظ شیرازی), Ghazal No. 377 (ca. 1370)(T.R. Crowe transl., Drunk on the Wine of the Beloved: 100 Poems of Hafiz, reproduced with kind permission of the translator.)

Hawthorne—The Celestial Railroad

Thomas Hart Benton, The People of Chilmark (1920)

At the end of the valley, as John Bunyan mentions, is a cavern, where, in his days, dwelt two cruel giants, Pope and Pagan, who had strown the ground about their residence with the bones of slaughtered pilgrims. These vile old troglodytes are no longer there; but into their deserted cave another terrible giant has thrust himself, and makes it his business to seize upon honest travellers and fatten them for his table with plentiful meals of smoke, mist, moonshine, raw potatoes, and sawdust. He is a German by birth, and is called Giant Transcendentalist; but as to his form, his features, his substance, and his nature generally, it is the chief peculiarity of this huge miscreant that neither he for himself, nor anybody for him, has ever been able to describe them. As we rushed by the cavern’s mouth we caught a hasty glimpse of him, looking somewhat like an ill-proportioned figure, but considerably more like a heap of fog and duskiness. He shouted after us, but in so strange a phraseology that we knew not what he meant, nor whether to be encouraged or affrighted.

–Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Celestial Railroad” (1843) in the Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, pp. 1070-1082 (1937).

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Celestial Railroad” can easily be read in a quick sitting and is a first-class parody. Moreover, Hawthorne is sufficiently clever in going about his task that he lampoons just about everybody and leaves a certain degree of doubt about exactly where he stands. Those who know Hawthorne’s works from high school or college associate him with the stern Puritanism that underlies (and is critiqued in) The Scarlet Letter, but they may also know his flirtations with Transcendentalism and Renaissance humanism apparent in works like The Marble Faun. This story stands astride these two tendencies in his writing. At the first level, he is parodying the classic work of Puritan literature, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. This he does brilliantly. It’s clear that he, like many of the intellectual leaders of New England in the early nineteenth century, finds the Puritan approach to religion a bit tired and ill-attuned to the modern world. They examine a number of alternatives–German idealism, especially Transcendentalism, Catholicism, and even faith in science. The mature Hawthorne exhibits fascination for German philosophy and for the Catholic faith and particularly the culture in Italy that it has helped to shape, but in this short story they receive a back of the hand. The strongest contempt is reserved for blind faith in science. That takes the form of the celestial railroad itself–together with its promise to whisk its passengers to the Celestial City without the trials and ordeals that Bunyan faced on his pilgrimage. This faith is misplaced, Hawthorne tells us–the railroad offers an amusing ride, but it never pulls into the end station. Hawthorne plainly has more sympathy for the stout-hearted faith of Bunyan’s hero. But he also sees that the Puritan model foments intolerance and has a latent hostility to science that holds its people back. These shortcomings must be overcome, just as the essential truth of the pilgrim’s tale is preserved.

Listen to Charles Ives’s “The Celestial Railroad, a Phantasy for Solo Piano” (1925) in a performance by Alan Mandel. From a program note by Thomas M. Brodhead about the work:

The Celestial Railroad (which he titled “Phantasy” on one manuscript) is a musical depiction of the short story “The Celestial Railroad” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In Hawthorne’s tale (which is a satirical take on Bunyan’s book The Pilgrim’s Progress), a man falls asleep and dreams of a fantastic train that speeds its passengers in nineteenth-century comfort to the Celestial City. Befriended by “Mr. Smooth-it-away,” the narrator boards the train with others just before it springs into motion. The train passes many horrible sights, makes stops at temptation-filled towns such as Vanity Fair, and finally comes to rest at Beulah Land on the river Jordan. Here, one faintly hears solemn hymns across the river. Everyone leaves the train to take a ferry toward the Celestial City. Once the boat is in motion, however, the narrator discovers that “Mr. Smooth-it-away” is no longer with him but back on the shore, having reverted to his true demonic form. The narrator realizes that all has been a hoax and flings himself into the water in hope of escape. The shock of the impact wakes him, and the comic nightmare comes to a close. In the finale of Ives’s Celestial Railroad, the composer lends the ending a hometown twist: The man awakens to the sound of Fourth of July celebrations at Concord, Massachusetts. As quickly as he is jolted awake by the high spirits of the town marching band, the music recedes, and the marchers evaporate in the distance.

The Obama Administration and the War on Terror: Public Event in Springfield, Mass.

On Monday, September 20, I will be delivering a talk in the Clason lecture series at Western New England School of Law, in Springfield, Massachusetts. The event will be at noon in the Commons of the Blake Law Center and is open to the public. My topic is “The Obama Administration and the War on Terror—Continuity or Change You Can Believe In?” I’ll be focusing on the resumption of the trials before the Military Commissions in Guantánamo, and particularly the decision to pursue the case of Omar Khadr. More information is available here.

A Failing Grade for Contractor Oversight

Presidential candidate Barack Obama stated, (PDF) “We cannot win a fight for hearts and minds when we outsource critical missions to unaccountable contractors.” But there is little evidence of material change on this issue from President Obama. Human Rights First grades Washington’s response, three years after the horrendous incidents at Nisoor Square, in which 17 unarmed civilians were killed and 24 wounded by Blackwater employees returning from a State Department security detail. There is shamefully little to report on the plus side.

The paper (PDF) notes:

Now, the United States’ reliance on private security contractors in zones of armed conflict is increasing as is the urgent need for effective contractor oversight and accountability. Private contractors continue to outnumber U.S. military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and both the surge in Afghanistan and the drawdown in Iraq require additional support from private security and other contractors. It is estimated that up to 50,000 contractors will be required to support the Afghan surge and, with the military drawdown in Iraq, the Department of State plans to more than double the number of private security contractors it employs from 2,700 to 7,000. As Iraq and eventually Afghanistan move from military to civilian control and private contractors replace military forces there, the so-called jurisdictional gap over non-Defense contractors widens. If we learned anything from Nisoor Square it is that oversight and accountability gaps must be filled prior to increasing our private contractor force in conflict zones.

It concludes that Washington has done little to bring the situation under control, and much of what it has done has been undermined by federal courts eager to find ways for contractors to avoid liability for violent acts, including torture and murder of innocent civilians. It presses for greater criminal law oversight and a clearer delineation of jurisdiction by passage of the Civilian Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (CEJA) of 2010.

Dan Froomkin offers a useful discussion of the report and its recommendations here.

Black Ops for Hire

The black ops department of Blackwater (now Xe Services) specializes in the sorts of operations we normally associate with the CIA’s clandestine service and the Pentagon’s JSOC. Their principal clients may indeed be the CIA and JSOC, but it appears that increasingly they peddle their services to choice corporate clientele. Jeremy Scahill reports at The Nation:

Over the past several years, entities closely linked to the private security firm Blackwater have provided intelligence, training and security services to US and foreign governments as well as several multinational corporations, including Monsanto, Chevron, the Walt Disney Company, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and banking giants Deutsche Bank and Barclays, according to documents obtained by The Nation. Blackwater’s work for corporations and government agencies was contracted using two companies owned by Blackwater’s owner and founder, Erik Prince: Total Intelligence Solutions and the Terrorism Research Center (TRC). Prince is listed as the chairman of both companies in internal company documents, which show how the web of companies functions as a highly coordinated operation. Officials from Total Intelligence, TRC and Blackwater (which now calls itself Xe Services) did not respond to numerous requests for comment for this article.

One of the most incendiary details in the documents is that Blackwater, through Total Intelligence, sought to become the “intel arm” of Monsanto, offering to provide operatives to infiltrate activist groups organizing against the multinational biotech firm.

Governmental recipients of intelligence services and counterterrorism training from Prince’s companies include the Kingdom of Jordan, the Canadian military and the Netherlands police, as well as several US military bases, including Fort Bragg, home of the elite Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and Fort Huachuca, where military interrogators are trained, according to the documents. In addition, Blackwater worked through the companies for the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the US European Command.

All corporate majors today have acute security concerns—for the safety of their personnel, particularly executives, the movement of products, and their commercial operations. They also have a strong desire to know more about their competition and business partners, to help them avoid undesirable combinations and measure the risks in transactions they pursue. But the real question lurking in the background is, are the black ops vendors cross-selling services? Do the corporate clients expect to reap the benefit of U.S. government intelligence to which the contractor has access? That possibility is another reason that policy-makers in Washington should be cautious about using private companies in sensitive matters. The fact that such services could be cross-sold points to an acute failure of government oversight.

Reconsidering Nietzsche–Six Questions for Julian Young

Julian Young is a well-known scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy. I put six questions to him about his new book, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography.

1. Most books that address Nietzsche’s life and writings discuss his difficult relationship with Richard Wagner, but your book deals more systematically than others do with Nietzsche’s ideas about music, and the book’s website even includes a series of pieces composed by Nietzsche. How did Nietzsche’s ideas about music affect his philosophy?

Julian Young

“Without music life would be an error” is a great T-shirt slogan, but its meaning is far from obvious. Here is how Nietzsche glosses his aphorism in a letter from 1888, the last year of his sanity:

Music … frees me from myself, it sobers me up from myself, as though I survey the scene from a great distance … It is very strange. It is as though I had bathed in some natural element. Life without music is simply an error, exhausting, an exile.

Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, dedicated to Richard Wagner, is constructed around the duality between the “Apollonian” and the “Dionysian.” Apollo stands for intellect, reason, control, form, boundary-drawing and thus individuality. Dionysus stands for the opposites of these; for intuition, sensuality, feeling, abandon, formlessness, for the overcoming of individuality, absorption into the collective. Crucially, Apollo stands for language and Dionysus for music. What, therefore, music does is to–as we indeed say–”take one out of oneself.” Music transports us from the Apollonian realm of individuals to which our everyday self belongs and into the Dionysian unity. Music is mystical.

Since the human essence is the will to live–or for Nietzsche, the “will to power”–the worst thing that can happen to us is death. Death is our greatest fear, so that without some way of stilling it we cannot flourish. This is why musical mysticism is important. In transcending the everyday ego we are delivered from “the anxiety brought by time and death.” Through absorption into what Tristan und Isolde calls the “waves of the All,” we receive the promise and experience of immortality.

Later on, Nietzsche realized that not all music is Dionysian. Much classical music, based as it is on the geometrical forms of dance and march, is firmly rooted in the Apollonian. Yet as the 1888 letter indicates, he never abandoned the musical “antidote” to death. Without music, life would be anxiety and then extinction. Without music, life would be an “exile” from the realm of immortality.

Nietzsche wrote not for lecture halls but to convert his contemporaries to an new way of living in a post-death-of-God world. This is why he believed that, without music, not only life but also philosophy would be an “error.” He ‘”thirsted” after a “master composer” who could “learn my thoughts from me and hereafter speak them in his language.” Only thus, he believed, could he “penetrate into people’s ears and hearts.” Like today’s filmmakers, Nietzsche learned from Wagner that words combined with music have a power to move our feelings–and thus our lives–that words alone can never achieve. Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Mahler’s Third Symphony would thus have received, I believe, Nietzsche’s enthusiastic approval.

2. Nietzsche wrote that a “deadly insult” had come between himself and Wagner. You suggest that you’ve learned what it was.

Wagner had long disapproved of Nietzsche’s close friendships with men–love he held could only exist between the sexes–and by 1877 he was offended by the developing anti-Wagnerian tenor of Nietzsche’s thought. To Nietzsche’s doctor he wrote that the cause of the patient’s many health problems–which included near blindness–was “unnatural debauchery, with indications of pederasty.” His former disciple was, in other words, (a) incipiently gay and (b) going blind because he masturbated. Somehow Nietzsche learned not only of the existence of the letter but of its the exact wording. That was the “deadly insult.”

3. In a review of your book, reformed neoconservative Francis Fukuyama chides you for writing repeatedly about global warming in the context of Nietzsche’s thought. He seems to feel that this discussion is frivolous. How do you react to this critique?

Well, as you say, Fukuyama has seen the error of his ways. So he’s not a global warming skeptic. What he really didn’t like, I suspect, is that at one point–in attempting to motivate Nietzsche’s view of democracy as an inferior form of government together with his call for world government–I suggested that global warming is a problem democratic states might find very difficult to solve. No one is more religiously devoted to an idea than a recent convert from the opposition. The thought that there might be problems too big for democracies to solve is a place, it seems, that Fukuyama just doesn’t want to visit. Nonetheless I appreciated his review. It made me think about things I hadn’t thought about before.

4. It’s conventional to portray Nietzsche as a nihilist who rejects religion as a sort of fraud, but you argue that religion was essential to his vision for a new society. Where do you see his embrace of a new religion, and what exactly does this religion look like?

Émile Durkheim defines religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices… which unite in one single moral community, called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” Originally, this is how Wagner thought about religion. What had preserved ancient Athens as a flourishing community had been Greek tragedy, the original Gesamtkunstwerk, or collective artwork. Tragedy was “collective” not only because it collected together the individual arts–music, words, acting, dance, scene-painting–but also because it gathered the entire community. The tragic festival, like the medieval mass, was a sacred occasion on which the community was gathered into a clarifying affirmation of its fundamental ethos–that which made it the community it was. In his earlier, “optimistic” days, Wagner’s own music dramas, and more specifically the Bayreuth festival, were intended to be the rebirth of Greek tragedy, a rebirth that would rescue Western modernity from its desolate, fragmented condition.

With his 1854 conversion to Schopenhauer’s “pessimism,” Wagner gave up on community, on indeed the world in general. “Redemption” became a matter of post-mortem ascension to a supernatural “beyond.” Art and religion–Wagner saw no light between the two–now became, as Nietzsche puts it, the “will to death.”

After a decade of confusion, in about 1880 Nietzsche finally became clear that what he endorsed in Wagner was the early philosophy of the Gesamtkunstwerk, and what he hated was the turn to Schopenhauerian “life-denial,” which he considered an apostasy. We must, he wrote, “become better Wagnerians than Wagner,” explaining that “In the end, it was the aged Wagner against whom I had to protect myself.” Thus, immediately after announcing the “death of [the Christian] God,” The Gay Science calls for the creation of new “festivals” and says that the only art that matters is the “art of festivals.”

Nietzsche’s mature view is thus that community cannot exist without being gathered and preserved by a Gesamtkunstwerk. There cannot be genuine community without (in the broadest possible sense of the term) a “church.” And community is important, for only if there exists a community to which we feel we are, in our own way, as we say, “making a contribution” can we live meaningful, flourishing lives. As to the content of a communal religion–as to what would play the exemplary role played in Christianity by its saints and martyrs–he has no view. That content may vary widely depending on the cultural tradition of the community concerned. Nietzsche’s only stipulation is that the sacred figures in any healthy religion must be, like the Greek gods, glorifications of human potential rather than, like the Christian gods, anti-human ideals. The new religious festival will celebrate rather than condemn sexuality, will be a festival of life rather than death.

Durkheim’s definition of religion is one-sided. As Schopenhauer points out, no religion has achieved “world” status without a doctrine of immortality, without some kind of “solution” to the problem of death. Great religions have a public aspect that consists in the creation of Durkheim’s “moral community,” but they also have a private aspect that addresses the individual in the solitude of his confrontation with death. As I indicated in responding to your first question, Nietzsche’s private god is Dionysus: overcoming fear of death is a matter of inhabiting the perspective in which the everyday self shows up as just “a poor wave in the necessary wave-play of becoming,” a mere ripple in the great ocean of causes and effects which, from this perspective, constitutes one’s self. This might sound like Wagnerian life-denial, but it is actually the opposite: not the yearning for absorption into the Dionysian, but the prophylactic against allowing its inevitability darkening one’s Apollonian life.

5. “A little garden, figs, little cheeses, three or four good friends, these were the sensuous pleasures of Epicurus,” you quote Nietzsche. How did this affect his vision of health and happiness?

The aim of Epicurus’ philosophy was happiness. Specifically it was about achieving happiness whatever happens, happiness in the face of an uncertain, usually hostile, fate. Since suffering is caused by a dissonance between desire and reality, and since we can usually do little about the latter, Epicurus’ advice is to reduce one’s desires as much as possible, particularly those that are uncertain of satisfaction, such as the desire for power and influence.

Nietzsche’s health reached its nadir in 1879, forcing him to abandon his Basel professorship. Since bodily sickness is a paradigm of the hostile fate Epicureanism was designed to raise one above, it is unsurprising that his affection for Epicurus reached its peak during that year. We find him advocating self-control, the reduction of desire, and withdrawal into the world of thought, a realm in which, despite his bodily ‘torture’, he could still experience pleasure, the joy of intellectual adventuring.

By the time he had completed Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883 to 1885, Nietzsche’s health had somewhat improved and he had made two important discoveries. First, that the “will to power”–or “growth”–constituted the human essence. And second, the paradox of happiness. “What does happiness matter to me!,” exclaims Zarathustra, “I have long ceased to strive after happiness, I am striving after my work.” To which his animals reply, “But Zarathustra, are you not lying in a sky-blue lake of happiness?”, forcing him to admit that he indeed is. Nietzsche’s point is that aiming directly at happiness is a bad strategy, since true happiness is a byproduct of aiming at something else, of passionate commitment to a meaningful goal. (This is surely correct: Jefferson’s remark about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” has mislead Americans for hundreds of years.) Given these twin discoveries, a farewell to Epicurus became inevitable. We can no more abandon the will to power/growth–the life of “victories” and, of course, defeats–than we can abandon the will to live. And the possibility of happiness lies, not in following a philosophy aimed at happiness, but in forgetting about happiness and directing one’s will to growth in a meaningful direction. This is why, in 1888, Nietzsche describes Epicurus (together with Jesus) as a “décadent.”

6. You treat postmodern readings of Nietzsche with some deference in your book, but you seem cautious about embracing them yourself. You form the conclusion that Nietzsche is a “plural realist.” What do you mean by that and how is it different from the postmodern interpretation?

I would actually describe myself as treating postmodernist readings with “restraint” rather than “deference.” Postmodernism has its origins in Kant’s observation that all experience is interpretation, that all experience is filtered through the particular structures of the human mind. To this, taking its lead from both Hegel and Nietzsche, postmodernism adds that the filters in question vary from language to language, culture to culture, angle of interest to angle of interest. And so, it concludes, since there are many equally good interpretations of the world, no single one can be picked as the uniquely correct interpretation. From this it follows, so it is claimed, that there can be no particular character that reality has, since to assign it any such character would be arbitrarily to privilege one interpretation over all the others. And if there is no particular character that reality has, then the very idea of “reality” makes no sense. The concept must be abandoned; there is nothing but interpretations.

We “plural realists”–Nietzsche, Hubert Dreyfus (who coined the term), and myself–agree that there are many equally valid interpretations of reality, that there is no uniquely correct interpretation. But from this it does not follow that there is no way reality is, since an equally possible inference is that there are many ways it is. And in fact it is pretty obvious that there indeed are many ways that reality is. Consider a rolling, Provençal landscape. To the property developer it shows up as “valuable real estate,” to the wine grower as a “unique terroir,” to the mining engineer as a “bauxite deposit,” to the cyclist as an “impediment and challenge,” and to the fundamental physicist as “quanta of energy.” We do not have to choose between these interpretations because, quite evidently, they are all true. Each interpretation truly describes reality from, in Nietzsche’s word, the “perspective” of a particular interest. Some interpretations of course we will want to reject as false. That we do, as it were, democratically. If someone claims that the landscape is a papier mâché construction on an alien film-set we will reject that on the grounds of its discordance with the coherent picture built up by all the interpretations we accept as true.

Operation Silence Shaffer

A fascinating new chapter in the story of the intelligence community’s obsessive secrecy is the Pentagon’s duel with St Martin’s Press over Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer’s book, Operation Dark Heart. Chris McGreal gives a run-down in The Guardian:

The US defence department is scrambling to dispose of what threatens to be a highly embarrassing exposé by the former intelligence officer of secret operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and of how the US military top brass missed the opportunity to win the war against the Taliban. The department of defence is in talks with St Martin’s Press to purchase the entire first print run on the grounds of national security. The publisher is content to sell the books but the two sides are in a grinding dispute over what should appear in a censored version and when it should be released.

Now St Martin’s Press says it will put the partly redacted manuscript on sale next week whether or not the defence department likes it—and there doesn’t appear much the authorities can do. The army had cleared the book by Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer, about “black ops” in the Afghan war when he was based at Bagram in 2003, for publication after relatively minor changes. But when the intelligence services and defence department officials saw it they were alarmed.

This account leaves a key player in the shadows. JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, has become a power unto itself within the Pentagon. In essence, Shaffer’s book went through the regular review and clearance process, was approved for publication, and then JSOC had a temper tantrum. The thrust of their objection was simple: “Our people don’t talk about JSOC operations, period.” In their view, special forces officers are subject to a code of silence. This view would seem to clash with the U.S. Constitution, and the notion of a duty to be silent also seems odd in a Pentagon headed by Robert Gates, who built his Washington comeback on a tell-all bestseller, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story.

According to an individual involved in negotiations between St Martin’s and the Pentagon, the publishers plan to have the book in bookstores around the country within a fortnight. St Martin’s is proposing to black out all passages about which the Pentagon raised questions—a process that of course reveals the Pentagon’s concerns to the reader. The Pentagon has replied that it would then insist on striking whole paragraphs, even where most of the text raises no questions of sensitivity. The publisher and author believe that many of the questions raised at this late stage have no bona fide basis, and they will insist on review of claims and subsequent disclosure if their challenge is sustained. This mirrors the process following Matthew Alexander’s book How to Break a Terrorist, where extensive censorship efforts by the Pentagon also failed when put to the test before a classifications review board.

Throughout the war on terror, JSOC has succeeded in keeping the wraps on its black ops in a way the CIA has not. That’s a key reason why Colonel Shaffer’s book is so eagerly anticipated. Nothing sells a book like an effort to suppress it. The Pentagon’s belated and ham-handed efforts to silence Colonel Shaffer’s book may be a blessing in disguise for St Martin’s Press.

State Secrecy and Official Criminality

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals split down the middle in finding (PDF) that the Justice Department was entitled to halt a civil lawsuit between private parties because of the threat that the suit would expose state secrets. By the margin of a single vote, it reversed the decision of a panel of the same court (PDF) holding that the doctrine could only be applied to individual pieces of evidence, not to entire lawsuits.

The case, Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, involved claims by an individual that he was seized and then tortured in a proxy arrangement directed by the CIA. Jeppesen Dataplan was directly involved, restraining and transporting the victims with knowledge that they would be tortured; that knowledge is exhibited, for example, in briefings to the company’s employees. These facts were established beyond any reasonable doubt without the need to turn to classified information. Indeed, one of the most respected courts in the English-speaking world—the Court of Appeal in London–had already viewed the formidable evidence and demanded a criminal investigation, now pending. The British court concluded, just as the Ninth Circuit was legally obligated to do, that state-secrecy claims could not be used to block discovery of evidence of crimes. Under the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which adopts the position that the U.S. Justice Department took in 1946, the crime of disappearance connected to torture is a crime against humanity, with no statute of limitations and no defense of superior orders applicable.

The Holder Justice Department would have us believe that it is protecting state secrets essential to our security. That posture is risible, and half of the court saw through it. The dilemma faced by the Justice Department was rather that evidence presented in the suit would likely be used in the future (not in the United States, obviously) to prosecute those who participated in the extraordinary renditions process. Twenty-three U.S. agents have already been convicted for their role in a rendition in Milan. Prosecutors in Spain have issued arrest warrants for a further 13 U.S. agents involved in a botched rendition case that touched on Spanish soil. Prosecutors in Germany have opened a criminal investigation into the use of Ramstein AFB in connection with torture and illegal kidnappings. Prosecutors in Poland are pursuing a similar matter. And Prime Minister David Cameron was recently forced to brief President Obama on his decision to direct a formal inquiry which could lead to prosecutions tied directly to the subject matter of the Mohamed case. This is the remarkable background to the case decided by the Ninth Circuit, and remarkably not a single word about this appears anywhere in the opinion—or even in most of the press accounts about it.

Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have called the Department on its acts of constitutional treachery. From the West Coast:

The decision to short-circuit the trial process is more than a misreading of the law; it’s an egregious miscarriage of justice. That’s obvious from a perusal of the plaintiffs’ complaint. One said that while he was imprisoned in Egypt, electrodes were attached to his earlobes, nipples and genitals. A second, held in Morocco, said he was beaten, denied food and threatened with sexual torture and castration. A third claimed that his Moroccan captors broke his bones and cut him with a scalpel all over his body, and poured hot, stinging liquid into his open wounds.

From New York:

The state secrets doctrine is so blinding and powerful that it should be invoked only when the most grave national security matters are at stake — nuclear weapons details, for example, or the identity of covert agents. It should not be used to defend against allegations that if true, as the dissenting judges wrote, would be “gross violations of the norms of international law.” All too often in the past, the judges pointed out, secrecy privileges have been used to avoid embarrassing the government, not to protect real secrets. In this case, the embarrassment and the shame to America’s reputation are already too well known.

The majority opinion is so thoroughly unconvincing that the court makes a pathetic plea to other branches of the government to do what is properly its function: fixing the claims of torture victims and awarding them damages.

By signing the Convention Against Torture, the United States made an unequivocal commitment to the international community to compensate those who are tortured by its agents. The Ninth Circuit has made a liar out of Uncle Sam and a mockery of its duty to uphold the law proscribing torture.

Lawfare!

I’m in Cleveland, speaking at Case Western Reserve Law School’s conference on Lawfare on Friday and Saturday. The event is open to the public from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday and 9 a.m. to noon on Saturday, and is being held at the Law School. It can also be viewed by simulcast here. Further program information can be found here. I’ll be in the debate section at 10 a.m., in which Charlie Dunlap and Paul Williams argue for the lawfare concept, while Leila Sadat and I argue against, with Daniel Moultrop of WCPN (NPR in Cleveland) moderating.

The Torturer’s Reward

So what has become of those whose involvement in torture was so troubling that even a government inspector general recommended a criminal investigation? While investigations proceed apace overseas, Special Prosecutor John Durham is apparently still considering whether the facts warrant a real one in the United States. Durham has now spent more than a year trying to make this “threshold” determination, something that prosecutors frequently do in an afternoon. In the meantime, the Obama Administration’s position seems to be that the accused should be rewarded for their dubious services with lucrative training contracts. Adam Goldman of the Associated Press reports:

A former CIA officer accused of revving an electric drill near the head of an imprisoned terror suspect has returned to U.S. intelligence as a contractor, training CIA operatives after leaving the agency, The Associated Press has learned. The CIA officer wielded the bitless drill and an unloaded handgun—unauthorized interrogation techniques—to menace suspected USS Cole bombing plotter Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri inside a secret CIA prison in Poland in late 2002 and early 2003, according to several former intelligence officials and a review by the CIA’s inspector general. Adding details to the public portions of the review, the former officials identified the officer as Albert, 60, a former FBI agent of Egyptian descent who worked as a bureau translator in New York before joining the CIA. The former officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because many details of the incident remain classified.

The desire to conceal the identities of the CIA agents has more to do with the fact that they face prosecution–not in the United States, but in Poland, on whose soil the crimes were committed. Indeed, the Polish National Prosecutor’s office would very much like to know the exact identity and whereabouts of “Albert,” his supervisor “Mike,” and other CIA personnel involved. The CIA black site where the torture incidents occurred is located at Stare Kiejkuty, in northeastern Poland, and information secured by Polish investigators suggests that at least 20 persons were flown on extraordinary rendition flights into Szymansy Airport to be transferred there. While the U.S. Justice Department equivocates on the criminality of the conduct involved (no doubt largely because much of it was explicitly blessed by senior Justice Department officials who would be implicated in any criminal case brought), Polish prosecutors show no hesitation in calling the activities at the prison serious crimes. Polish authorities say they are receiving no cooperation from the United States in their probe.

The Wall Street Journal cites reports in Gazeta Wyborcza that Polish prosecutors are now focusing their case on a theory that former President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, Prime Minister Leszek Miller, and interior ministers Zbigniew Siemiątkowski and Krzysztof Janik knew of and authorized the CIA operations and thus assumed legal responsibility for the crimes. A story to the same effect appeared in the Polish national daily Rzeczpospolita (an English summary is here). Charges of this sort could only be brought in Poland’s State Tribunal, a special court created to handle cases of a political nature, and it would require authorization of a special vote of the Sejm, Poland’s parliament, where the center-left faction that backed Kwaśniewski and Miller could be expected to attempt to block the effort. The prosecution of the CIA operatives involved in the underlying crimes would not require such special approvals, but the Polish prosecutors would have to take custody of those against whom the charges are brought. The cooperation of American officials is essential here and not forthcoming.

America’s Corruption Policy in Central Asia in Flux

A series of recent reports highlighting conflict between the United States and local governments in Central Asia over the corruption issue has apparently led to a change in policy by the United States. At the Pentagon, at least, battling corruption is no longer viewed as a priority for U.S. operations in the region. Greg Jaffe reports for the Washington Post:

Military officials in the region have concluded that the Taliban’s insurgency is the most pressing threat to stability in some areas and that a sweeping effort to drive out corruption could create chaos and a governance vacuum that the Taliban could exploit. “There are areas where you need strong leadership, and some of those leaders are not entirely pure,” said a senior defense official. “But they can help us be more effective in going after the primary threat, which is the Taliban.”

The issue of corruption in Afghanistan has taken on renewed urgency in recent weeks with the arrest of a senior aide to President Hamid Karzai and new questions about Kabul’s commitment to fighting graft. Senior Obama administration officials have repeatedly emphasized the need to root out graft in Afghanistan and have deployed teams of FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration agents to assemble corruption cases. The United States has spent about $50 billion to promote reconstruction in Afghanistan since 2001.

Significantly, this change apparently has direct application to the Defense Department’s procurement policies:

Recently, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Afghanistan, asked a group of senior officers to study more closely how U.S. reconstruction and logistics contracts are awarded. He also said he planned to publish contracting rules that would help ensure that U.S. spending practices weren’t fueling discontent by excluding influential groups and driving them to support the Taliban insurgency. Such a move would be welcomed by President Karzai, who has argued that foreign money is fueling corruption. Gates also has said that the United States must do more to ensure that its contracting practices aren’t fueling corruption.

In the “Week in Review” section of the Sunday New York Times, Dexter Filkins offered an extended take on the same story. Afghanistan has plenty of honest figures, Filkins reports, but they just don’t seem to advance against their dishonest, bribe-taking competition. He cites the case of

Fazel Ahmad Faqiryar, who last month took the politically risky course of trying to prosecute senior members of Mr. Karzai’s government. Two weeks ago, Mr. Faqiryar was fired from his job as deputy attorney general — on the order, it appears, of Mr. Karzai himself.

President Karzai, like many in Afghanistan, apparently doesn’t believe that the American anticorruption campaign is very serious. And there’s good reason for the skepticism. For one thing, it seems that every major U.S. anticorruption investigation launched in the Central Asian region seems to run, sooner or later, smack into American-sponsored corruption.

Since 2001, one of the unquestioned premises of American and NATO policy has been that ordinary Afghans don’t view public corruption in quite the same way that Americans and others do in the West. Diplomats, military officers and senior officials flying in from Washington often say privately that while public graft is pernicious, there is no point in trying to abolish it — and that trying to do so could destroy the very government the West has helped to build. The Central Intelligence Agency has carried that line of argument even further, putting on its payroll some of the most disputable members of Mr. Karzai’s government.

Didn’t Filkins mean to say “disreputable”? Matthew Yglesias puts an interesting gloss on Filkins’s commentary:

a more generous view of the pro-corruption position would be this. From 2002-2008, the war in Afghanistan was an “economy of force” mission. People were given a certain level of resources and told to do the best they could. And improving governance in poorly governed societies is difficult to do. So the calculation was made that given limited resources, simply taking advantage of Afghan officials’ proclivity for corruption by bribing them seemed like a cost-effective alternative to a more ambitious undertaking with higher costs and an uncertain outcome.

This is a key point. There is little basis to question the use of corrupt tools in a combat setting—exploiting human foibles is an effective and time-honored tactic. It can secure vital intelligence and can save lives and treasure. But when the nature of the operation changes from conventional warfare to a counterinsurgency operation in which building the credibility and legitimacy of the new state are key strategic objectives, then this approach may be counterproductive. So the test for the U.S. military now is simple enough—are they serious about helping to establish a legitimate government in Kabul? And what is their attitude, similarly, towards the neighbor regimes that have aligned themselves with the United States in its effort?

One key test will be the award of aviation fuel contracts through the facility at Manas. Since 2002, those contracts, which amount to well over $2 billion, have been held by a highly secretive company run by figures who recently left U.S. government service and who have curiously tight ties both to the Pentagon and to the local governments of the host countries. During my recent visit to Kyrgyzstan, I found reporters from the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and several other publications were carefully following this contractor’s footsteps and examining its curious and meticulously obscured connections to those in power. So I expect we’ll be reading more about this shortly. The Manas aviation fuel contracts were put up for rebid, and an award should be announced imminently. How the Pentagon awards the new contracts may be extremely revealing of its tolerance—or even appetite—for corruption.

Lying for One’s Country

Diplomacy, according to Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, is the “patriotic art of lying for one’s country.” A fine example of this comes from the U.S. Department of State’s Report to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in Conjunction with the Universal Periodic Review (PDF), submitted at the end of August:

Thus, the United States prohibits torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment of persons in the custody or control of the U.S. Government, regardless of their nationality or physical location. It takes vigilant action to prevent such conduct and to hold those who commit acts of official cruelty accountable for their wrongful acts. The United States is a party to the Convention Against Torture, and U.S. law prohibits torture at both the federal and state levels. On June 26, 2010, on the anniversary of adoption of the Convention Against Torture, President Obama issued a statement unequivocally reaffirming U.S. support for its principles, and committing the United States to continue to cooperate in international efforts to eradicate torture.

A corrected report, with the text necessary to make an honest man out of Uncle Sam added in italics, would read something like this:

Thus, the United States prohibits torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment of persons in the custody or control of the U.S. Government, regardless of their nationality or physical location, except when the President, exercising his commander-in-chief powers under the Constitution deems it to be in the national security interest of the United States to use torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading techniques—in which case they will be used, although the United States will deny this fact, and when confronted with physical evidence thereof, it will claim that acts of torture or official cruelty constitute the work of rotten apples, lacking government authority. The United States takes vigilant action to prevent such conduct and to hold those who commit acts of official cruelty accountable for their wrongful acts, except when the President, taking the advice of his political advisors, concludes that it would be contrary to his political interests to do so—in which event the official policy of the Government is to “look forward, not back,” and the Attorney General and other law enforcement officials will be prohibited from taking the necessary steps to investigate or prosecute acts of torture and official cruelty. The United States is a party to the Convention Against Torture, and U.S. law prohibits torture at both the federal and state levels, with the exceptions noted above. On June 26, 2010, on the anniversary of adoption of the Convention Against Torture, President Obama issued a statement conditionally reaffirming U.S. support for its principles, and committing the United States to continue to cooperate in international efforts to eradicate torture. The President’s statement, must, however, be understood as prospective only, and the commitment to investigate and prosecute prior offenses must be understood as subject to the exceptions noted above.