5/29/2011

The New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane has finally weighed in on the paper’s use of the word torture. This has been a matter of personal interest for me since 2008 when this article used the word “torture” without attribution to refer to McCain’s treatment at the Hanoi Hilton. This was unusual—ever since the Bush administration adopted an obscenely narrow definition of torture, newspapers have generally shied away from calling anything torture.

By the fall of last year, a fairly comprehensive search for the word at nytimes.com turned up no other examples of its direct use. Instead, an article about torture of national security detainees might refer to “brutal interrogation practices which many consider torture.” In October of last year, I saw another mention of the word “torture” without attribution, this time in a Reuters article on the Times website, which used the word to describe the past experiences of the Brazilian presidential candidate at the time, Dilma Roussef.

The rule, it seemed, was that if it happened long enough ago or at the hands of foreigners, it was acceptable to call torture torture. I had been meaning to get my hands on a copy of the Times’ style guidelines in the interest of writing a post about the word and more generally about the tortured war-on-terror lexicon the Bush administration has imposed on the country’s discourse. According to Brisbane, The Times generally avoids the word in its reporting on Bush-era abuses, although the paper seems to use the word more liberally in other contexts. The Editorial Board, in contrast, has been vocal in its assertion that practices universally considered torture are, in fact, torture.

Bush should not have been allowed to call into question universally recognized notions of torture. Brisbane makes a suggestion that should have been made years ago:

The Times should use the term “torture” more directly, using it on first reference when the discussion is about — and there’s no other word for it — torture. The debate was never whether Bin Laden was found because of brutal interrogations: it was whether he was found because of torture. More narrowly, the word is appropriate when describing techniques traditionally considered torture, waterboarding being the obvious example. Reasonable fairness can be achieved by adding caveats that acknowledge the Bush camp’s view of its narrow legal definition.

Amen.

What surprises me about the notion that calling out torture compromises the paper’s objectivity is that The Times oftenerrs in the other direction, veering from the objective truth to protect our foreign policy from scrutiny. In February after Raymond Davis, an alleged U.S. embassy employee, shot two Pakistani men in Lahore, the paper went so far as to mislead readers deliberately regarding the gunman’s connection to the CIA. It baffles the mind that a paper that claims to be too concerned with journalistic integrity to call out torture would publish misinformation to cover up facts that could embarrass the government.

Several weeks ago, my brother pointed me to these articles from The Times and The Guardian on recent Wikileaks documents exposing glaring human rights violations at Guantánamo. The articles present an interesting case study in the complacency of American journalism since the run up to the Iraq War, and the contrast between the approaches each newspaper took in exposing misconduct could not have been starker. The Guardian piece calls out torture by name and focuses on the rampant abuses of a prison system unchecked, pointing to dozens of unquestionably innocent civilians who have been detained for years without trial for their questionable intelligence value. The Times mentions these egregious human rights violations only in passing, and even goes so far as to argue that these practices may be appropriate:

The documents can be mined for evidence supporting beliefs across the political spectrum about the relative perils posed by the detainees and whether the government’s system of holding most without trials is justified.

How is it that calling out torture amounts to editorializing, but defending the indefinite detention of civilians without trial does not? On days like this, I feel so much better about myself for circumventing the paywall.

-nabeel

4/24/2011

As a quick follow-up on yesterday’s post, Yglesias gives us this.

The fault lines have moved dramatically over the course of my lifetime. The Left coopted all of the Right’s most palatable ideas under Clinton, turning today’s Democratic party into an extremely broad and almost ungovernable coalition that encompasses both union members and investment bankers. The modern GOP, in turn, has become, loud, incoherent, and intellectually bankrupt.

As a sign of the times, one of the most vocal critics of Republican dogma these days is an adamant free trader who doesn’t have any qualms on principle with regressive taxation. It’s enough to make anybody with a modicum of sense feel like a DFH.

-nabeel

4/23/2011

A long long time ago, I put up a brief post expressing outrage about Harvard professor (and former economic advisor) Greg Mankiw’s tendency to attribute income disparities in the United States to genetics. To illustrate his point at the time, he cited an adoption study in Sweden. I suggested at the time that because the heritability of a trait like income varies massively across countries, a Scandinavian adoption study was just about the dumbest piece of evidence he could use to back his hypothesis. As a follow-up, here’s a recent post by Chris Dillow of the Investors Chronicle illustrating the point.

What frightens me is that Mankiw is actually among the saner voices on the right these days, and many of his ideas are grounded in awful social science with seriously racist implications. I’m surprised he hasn’t faced the same sort of criticism as Larry Summers or at the very least the kind of discussion that Levitt prompted.

-nabeel

4/13/2011

Fashionably late, as always… I think the conversation about Libya, particularly on the left, is in dire need of a massive sanity injection. To be sure, there are many reasons to be weary of foreign intervention. The United States’ human rights record is abysmal, and we have a phenomenally destructive habit of pursuing superficial short-term goals at the expense of even our own strategic interests. We make a hobby out of propping up dictators, we destroy democratic movements we don’t like, and we pursue policies so odious that large swaths of the world’s population are inclined to support just about anybody who stands up to us. To top it off, even our casual and long-forgotten bombing campaigns have at times led to dozens of thousands of deaths.

Additionally, Libya presents a unique set of challenges. By some measures, the country has been governed by one of the most brutal and longest standing tyrants in modern history. In a nation with factionalism and large oil repositories, one can only imagine the sort of power vacuum that four decades of Qaddafi will leave behind in his wake, and it is easy to imagine a scenario in which the United States would seek to tilt the outcome in its favor. As always, the threat of civilian casualties looms large, particularly in urban warfare. Most importantly, it isn’t clear that a no-fly zone and aerial missile attacks will sufficiently handicap Qaddafi’s forces to give the opposition a fighting chance.

While these are all fair objections, much of the left-wing criticism of our latest campaign in Libya has gone far beyond the realm of the reasonable, venturing at times into delusion. I’d like to address three of these arguments, starting with the silliest:

1.        The Libyan rebels could have done it without us.

No, they couldn’t. Qaddafi isn’t Mubarak and he’s not Ben Ali. I might be more sympathetic to this sort of wishful thinking if I’d seen a sliver of data or evidence. Thus far, all the arguments I’ve seen have done nothing but draw analogies to Tunisia and Egypt. Needless to say, they’re NOT the same.

2.        The United States is being hypocritical by fighting for democracy in Libya when it has supported despots and neglected democracy uprisings elsewhere.

This argument has always been and will always be vacuously true no matter what we do. If we hadn’t intervened, an analogous argument could have just as easily been made for intervention. One might then have asked, “How could the United States stand idly by and watch Libyans get massacred after having intervened in Kuwait and the Balkans?” Our foreign policy has been anything but consistent, and it’s silly to suggest that either course of action would leave us immune to allegations of hypocrisy. In fact, at this point, there’s a precedent for just about anything, and there’s very little we can do in the foreign policy arena without being legitimately labeled hypocrites. That’s what happens when your politics are as interventionist, volatile, and schizophrenic as ours. Let’s agree from now on that the hypocrisy ship has sailed—we can get a lot further evaluating each foreign policy initiative on its own merits than trying to pigeonhole it into some sort of consistent macroscopic doctrine that hasn’t existed in decades. If critics think we should have intervened in Cote d’Ivoire or Yemen, fine. Let’s have that conversation separately.

3.       This is just Iraq 2.0.

This argument warrants the most scrutiny both because it’s been a rallying cry and because it’s an extremely destructive analogy. First, there’s an enormous difference between creating a war where peace previously existed (as in Iraq) and entering an ongoing war to change its outcome. The Iraq War caused, at the very least, one hundred thousand civilian casualties who we had absolutely no reason to believe would have perished otherwise. Qaddafi, on the other hand, was actively killing people when the intervention began. Thousands of them.

Second, Iraq wouldn’t have happened had it not been for 9/11. At the time, we felt threatened and insecure in what we suddenly perceived to be a hostile world, so a majority of the American populace thought it might be a good idea to bomb people we don’t like to smithereens, lest they should ever imagine we (the United States, its Gulf allies, Israel….) are vulnerable. It was a mix of misplaced bellicosity, mistaken identity, and general hatred of people with Muslim names. The fact that Saddam Hussein was a very, very bad man only arose as an ex post facto consideration.

Our intervention in Libya, on the other hand, was clearly motivated by humanitarian concerns. One could reasonably argue that the campaign is misguided, but it’s clear that a) we wouldn’t have bombed Libya had Qaddafi not been actively killing civilians, b) Qaddafi poses no less a threat to our superficial interests than whatever party we imagine might succeed him, and c) there is a strong humanitarian prerogative to do something to stop this massacre and create incentives for other dictators not to adopt Qaddafi’s tactics. Moreover, I’m not even sure we’re any more capable of influencing the choice of Qaddafi’s successor with a few NATO missile strikes than we would have been otherwise. One could make an argument that this intervention is ineffective by design, but unlike in Iraq, the motives here are clear and indisputably humanitarian.

An enormous distinction should also be made between airstrikes and a ground invasion. The difference in human casualties and in injury to national pride is huge. Please, let’s not lose sight of magnitude. Finally, numerous parties, including many Libyan voices and the Arab League, have called for NATO intervention. To conflate a coalition of concerned global citizens with the rogue actions of an aggrieved global bully is not only logically absurd; it paints all interventions in one brush, obscuring the degree of hubris and the scale of devastation that characterized the decision to invade Iraq.

There are vast swaths of the left that have come to see any United States foreign policy as a power-hungry grab by an evil superpower. All evidence suggests that this intervention fits that model very poorly. While normally a degree of skepticism toward any U.S. intervention is warranted, elements of the left seem to have descended into reflexive disgust at just about anything the U.S. does. This sort of intellectual laziness—the inability to distinguish between an uninvited invasion and a humanitarian intervention—does a giant disservice to worthy left-wing causes like opposition to the Iraq War.

Personally, I’m glad we did it. I hope it works. If this doesn’t, I hope we can explore other minimally invasive tactics to support the rebellion and deter massacres of peaceful rebel movements elsewhere. Regardless, it’s clear to me that whatever the risks of airstrikes, we cannot in good conscience leave unarmed citizens at the mercy of a megalomaniac who is killing them by the thousands.

-nabeel

4/10/2011

I’m conflicted about the Times has put up a paywall. On one hand, I’m all for supporting good content, and I can appreciate the news industry’s woes; on the other, as those who’ve followed my tirades against the RIAA already know, I think it’s a wonderful thing that we live in an era when so much content is available for free. I’ve blogged before about possible long-term solutions to the industry’s woes, and I’m encouraged by what looks like the beginning of a nonprofit journalism movement.

On a personal note, I haven’t decided yet on my own long-term approach to the paywall, but for now, I’m circumventing. I may decide to subscribe in the future, but if anybody is interested, they left about a dozen enormous backdoors wide open. See these two links for more information:

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-get-around-new-york-times-paywall-2011-3

http://starblogger.net/6-ways-to-bypass-new-york-times-paywall.html

-nabeel

3/16/2011

The recent wave of pro-democracy movements should give us reason to pause and rethink our approach to foreign policy. It’s not enough that we walked away from our support for Ben Ali and Mubarak at the very moment when it became clear that they were fighting a losing battle. Instead, we need to reexamine the entire framework that has led the United States pathologically to endorse criminal regimes from Apartheid South Africa to Latin America.

For decades, we supported any dictator who could convince us that his alternative was socialist, Islamist, or otherwise unpredictable or hostile to American interests. And in most cases, we were easily convinced. Placing a significantly higher premium on stability than human rights, we simply weren’t prepared to leave our interests to chance when we could hire local megalomaniacs to enforce them.

Our single-minded focus on what we perceive to be American interests—trade, access to commodities, drug enforcement, etc.—has come at the expense of human rights. Even left-wing critics of the Iraq War have disproportionately focused on its costs to the United States: on the deficits, the dead soldiers, and the tarnished reputation of a trigger-happy superpower. While these objections are certainly valid, it concerns me that the much larger cost to Iraqi civilians is often an afterthought.

Similarly, when a younger and wiser McCain spoke out against Bush-era torture, he was primarily concerned that torture would endanger captured U.S. troops and harm our reputation abroad. Many have objected to Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, the drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, and our willingness to assassinate an American citizen without trial on national security grounds. The only (marginally) palatable critique of our unwavering support for Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza blockade is that it may provoke backlash against American soldiers abroad. This narrow definition of American interests not only threatens our credibility and moral authority; in the long run, it’s also bad for America.

There are two unfortunate consequences of this approach to foreign policy:

1. It creates dangerous incentives for any population with grievances that wants America’s attention.

We have sent a message to despots that we’ll support them if they make our concerns their concerns. Perhaps more importantly, we have sent a message to the world that if any faction wants our attention, it needs to make its problems our problems. If we can’t frame their plight in terms of our self-interest, we’re likely to ignore it. I worry that groups otherwise disinclined to attack American interests might hear that message all too clearly. By placing our narrowly defined and often shortsighted interests above questions of human rights, we have effectively made it desirable for oppressed groups, in a desperate cry for attention, to inflict financial or human losses upon us. The influential political scientist Robert Pape argues that in some cases, this is already happening in the form of suicide terrorism.

2. In many cases, this mindset can justify a degree of government secrecy that strains our democracy.

This foreign policy framework creates poor incentives not only for foreign entities but for our own government. The reaction of the Bush administration to human rights blunders, from torture and extraordinary rendition to the Iraq War, has been to wage an information war complete with a well-funded propaganda machine and a policy of de facto censorship. This policy is entirely consistent with the notion that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with embarrassing policies except that they embarrass us and provoke a potentially dangerous backlash. If we take issue with the public disclosure of these abhorrent practices and not with the practices themselves, then we risk delving deeper into policies of secrecy and sedition, at the expense of openness and transparency in our democracy.

I hope that the new wave of revolutions can not only help wean us off the habit of supporting unsavory regimes but inspire us to change the paradigm in which our foreign policy has operated for far too long. At some point, we need to reconsider the assumption, central to our national self-image, that pursuing our self-interest, narrowly defined, is good for the world. Our government has the right and the obligation to defend its safety and security, but our foreign policy myopia accomplishes neither. We simply can’t afford to live in a world where the oppressed have an incentive to hold our security interests hostage. Nor can we sustain an open democracy when the government pursues policies too embarrassing to publish. Our current approach to foreign policy not only compromises our moral authority; ironically, it’s exposes us to great risk.

-nabeel

2/23/2011

There was something comforting about Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Mike Mullen’s appearance on the Daily Show, a sense that the United States wouldn’t let Egypt descend into war. Since Sadat, the United States’ policy toward Egypt has been characterized by an urge to buy stability and peace with Israel at great cost to the US foreign policy budget and to Egyptians’ freedoms. Egyptian protesters managed to hold stability hostage for just long enough to compel the US to turn on its longtime friend Mubarak. The choice for the State Department was no longer between stability and the unknown but between the certainty of destabilizing violence and the possibility of a peaceful transition to democracy, and the State Department used its leverage to push for the latter. The violence of pro-government forces was at once infuriating and heartbreaking, but the checkmate was imminent.

No such assurances exist in Libya, whose sociopathic dictator of 42 years has unleashed mercenaries with fighter jets on the masses. Nobody has the kind of leverage over Libya that we had over Egypt, and the casualties are terrifying with no end in sight. I don’t know how long it’ll take NATO, the Arab Union, or the African Union to act, but the situation is dire, and each passing day produces an unconscionable death toll.

As the spirit of revolution spreads, I wanted to link to a few articles about contagion effects throughout the African continent that have gone underreported. In Cameroon, Gabon, Zimbabwe, Djibouti, Ivory Coast, and Mauritania, protesters have taken to the streets.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/02/201122164254698620.html -Al-Jazeera English gives an overview.

http://africasacountry.com/2011/02/23/where-does-africa-end-and-the-middle-east-begin/ -Sophia Azeb of Africa Is a Country on why despots all over Africa should be trembling right now.

-nabeel

2/11/2011

I’ve scoured the web in search of a video, a song, a photo, a clip—anything to capture the sense of euphoria at having shed decades of hopelessness. None does this moment justice. Hours after Mubarak’s resignation, the masses, cheering, dancing, and running triumphantly through the streets, still tell Al-Jazeera they’re at a loss for words.

In an age when eighteen days can overturn thirty years of dictatorship, a few hours seems like a lifetime. In his guest columns at nytimes.com, Egyptian law professor Amir Shalakany has made repeated references to the Post-Mubarak time zone. Sure enough, three-week-old notions of time are unrecognizable today. Last night, it only took fifteen minutes of suspense before #reasonsmubarakislate became a trending topic on Twitter. A fifteen-minute delay would have never registered in Mubarak’s Egypt.

In Egypt it’s easy for time to seem static. In the streets of Cairo, donkey-pulled carts coexist with 1960s Fiats and the shiny new Benzes of well-connected business moguls. Hotels, restaurants, and working class neighborhoods seamlessly engulf the stretch of desert surrounding the Great Pyramids of Giza. It’s no wonder Mubarak’s three decades in power reminded so many of a Pharaonic dynasty.

But the past two months have deposed two North African dictators (three if we count Omar Suleiman) and produced more headlines than the past thirty years. When the future inspires dreams of freedom and promises unprecedented opportunities, time starts to carry a revolutionary significance.

Eighty million times mabruk. Elections are months away, and their outcome is anybody’s guess. A long road lies ahead, and nobody can tell how long the goodwill will last among the Egyptian masses. We are caught between the promise of the unknown and the indelible memory of thirty years of tyranny—the last three weeks of which gave us three hundred casualties.

But for now, Egypt, go nuts. Eighteen days is a long time to camp out in a town square. Eighteen days is a long time to remain glued to Al-Jazeera. I have never been prouder to be an Egyptian—in truth, I’m not sure I’ve ever been prouder at all.

-nabeel