Main
War and other inhumanities Archives
Where does he go to get his years back?
[Jon Henke]
Mistakes happen, particularly in war, but this was not a mistake. It was policy. Or the lack of policy.
At the age of 19, Murat Kurnaz vanished into America's shadow prison system in the war on terror. He was from Germany, traveling in Pakistan, and was picked up three months after 9/11. But there seemed to be ample evidence that Kurnaz was an innocent man with no connection to terrorism. The FBI thought so, U.S. intelligence thought so, and German intelligence agreed. But once he was picked up, Kurnaz found himself in a prison system that required no evidence and answered to no one.
[...]
[Kurnaz' lawyer, Baher Azmy] dug into the case and found that the military seemed to have invented some of the charges. Military prosecutors said one of Kurnaz’s friends was a suicide bomber, but the friend turned up alive and well in Germany. [...] But far worse than the false charges was the secret government file that Azmy uncovered.
Six months after Kurnaz reached Guantanamo, U.S. military intelligence had written, "criminal investigation task force has no definite link [or] evidence of detainee having an association with al Qaeda or making any specific threat toward the U.S."
At the same time, German intelligence agents wrote their government, saying, "USA considers Murat Kurnaz’s innocence to be proven. He is to be released in approximately six to eight weeks." But Azmy says Kurnaz was kept at Guantanamo Bay for three and a half years after this memo was written in 2002.
They kept him, Kurnaz says, by inventing new charges. In a makeshift courthouse, Kurnaz claims that a military judge charged that Kurnaz had been picked up near Osama bin Laden's hideout in Afghanistan while fighting for the Taliban. Ironic, since it was the U.S. that flew him to Afghanistan to begin with.
If charges won't be filed against him, when will charges be filed against the person or people who caused or allowed this to occur? As Alex Knapp writes, this was "a citizen of one of our most valued allies [who] was tortured, denied counsel for three years, and kept in inhumane conditions, this despite the fact that shortly after he was detained his innocence was already determined. Not that it would have been justified to treat a guilty man this way, either. Due process is one of the cornerstones of America’s founding principles — one that is degrading every year."
Let's predict the Zimbabwe news cycle
[Daniel Drezner]
There are multiple reports that Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe has suffered a crushing defeat during this weekend's presidential election. Apparently, a 100,000% annual inflation rate and employment of around 25% of the adult population is not a vote-getter.
These same news stories also say that the government is holding off on reporting the results, suggesting that Mugabe may try to jerry-rig the results to maintain his grip on power.
I don't know what Mugabe will do, but I do know that one of two things will happen:
Continue reading "Let's predict the Zimbabwe news cycle" »
Osama Bin Laden declares war on Pakistan
Osama Bin Laden is starting to remind me of my college boyfriend, whose brooding anger at the white male bourgeois power structure quickly disintegrated into anger at the non-Scott power structure. Since this was, as you can imagine, quite large, it often led to do things that weren't, strictly speaking, a very good idea. I didn't need behavioral economics to tell me that people don't always act in their rational self-interest.
Now Osama has declared war on the government of Pervez Musharraf in the run up to the elections. This would make sense if Pakistan had any sort of reputation for being the sort of stable and open representative democracy whose government could be ousted by grand emotional proclamations. But it seems rather mad in the current circumstances.
Pakistan has been, at best, a fickle ally of the United States, though it's hard to know how much to blame Musharraf for this; he isn't actually in control of the bits of his government that seem to be helping Al-Qaeda in the tribal areas. But why would Osama do this? Previously, he had a fairly stable arrangement; Musharraf couldn't root him out of the tribal areas for various military and political reasons, and Osama couldn't bring on the Caliphate just yet. But last time I looked, the Caliphate didn't seem terribly imminent. Meanwhile, he has just given Pervez Musharraf and any waverers in his government a much stronger incentive to find Osama and his merry band of cave-dwelling madmen.
This is the kind of overreach that has caused every government that has ever offered him shelter to ultimately kick him out, except for Afghanistan, which didn't have much of a government. Even so, he went and found another government to kick him out. And where will he go this time? He's running out of lawless quasi-states to hide in.
Did Mussolini make the budgets run on time?
I'm watching Bush address the nation on the state of Iraq. He just cited the passage of a budget as one of the major signs of improvement in Iraq. To be sure, I understand that nearly all politicians believe that government expenditures are the acme of human achievement. Nonetheless, this seems like a rather low bar.
What's the secret?
Amy Zegart, who is guest-blogging for Volokh, asks Why Haven't We Been Attacked Since 9/11?:
Just because we haven't experienced tragedy does not prove we are doing things right. This is causality 101, and it's something we drum into UCLA MPP students in their first year. Causal connections have to be examined, not assumed, or you'll get into trouble.
My 92 year-old grandmother, whom I love dearly, still drives a car in Miami. Incredibly, she's had no accidents since 9/11. But I'd never conclude that her driving acumen is responsible for her traffic record, or that she's become a better driver over the past 6 years.
The "we haven't been attacked" argument suffers from the same logical weaknesses. Why haven't we seen another 9/11 since 9/11? A million possible reasons. Many it's al Qaeda's long planning cycles. Maybe it's the disruption of al Qaeda Central in Afghanistan. Maybe it's sheer dumb luck. Maybe it's those ziploc bags at the airport. But the most dangerous explanation is the one that works backwards, inferring causes from outcomes and suggesting success when there may be none.
Who knows, perhaps it is that our security folks have really Gotten Serious and are catching all sorts of terrorists. But it seems to me that the more likely explanation is this: we don't have as many Muslims as Europe, and these days, we're letting in a lot fewer than we used to. And the Muslims we do have are, by and large, much better integrated than those in Europe.
I'm very fond of America's policy towards immigrants, which is to say, we don't have one. No one will try to force you to assimilate, but no one's going to help you keep from assimilating either. This policy of benign neglect considerably alleviates both sorts of Muslim/Christian tension found in Europe: the populations that have been positively encouraged not to see themselves as part of the larger culture, and the populations that feel their traditions are under attack. Obviously, it's not as if America is some sort of perfect paradise where no Muslim kid ever feels either excluded, or forced to assimilate. But the sharp group-on-group rage never seems to have gotten a foothold here. And of course, America in general has much more experience assimilating strangers than Europe.
But our Muslim population isn't just less estranged; it's also smaller. Most of the Arabs and immigrants from the Indian subcontinent are Christian, Hindu, or Sikh. Since only a tiny fraction of a fraction are going to be willing to aid terrorists, much less participate in terrorist acts, Al Qaeda may simply not have the numbers it needs to conduct effective operations. And of course, it's easier to sneak into Europe from the Middle East or Asia than it is to sneak into the US. Europe is a softer target, so it's not surprising that Al Qaeda has put its focus there, as well, of course, as on Iraq.
Then, the other possibility is that we're about to be attacked, and that we haven't been so far merely because These Things Take Time. Given that I live in one of the two main targets, I hope that's not the case.
Casualty of the truth
I posted yesterday on the seasonality of casualty trends. An anonymous research professor argues that these are military casualties, and that the civilian casualties show no such trend:
It's not crazy to wonder if the reduction in civilian deaths associated with the troop surge reflects nothing more than a seasonal trend (which is what Drum is concerned about). Iraq Coalition Casualty Count has numbers dating back to March of 2005. Thus, we have civilian casualty counts for the summers of 2005, 2006 and 2007. If their numbers are reliable (and I have repeatedly shown that they are), and if they show that civilian casualties tend to decrease in the summer months compared to the preceding months, then one should take heed of Drum's bottom line:
Bottom line: you should be skeptical of any claims about reductions in violence unless they take seasonality into account. So far, though, I haven't seen any credible claims of reduced violence that even mention seasonality, let alone adjust for it. That should tell you something.
I completely agree. If casualties always drop in the summer, and if they drop by an amount that is roughly proportional to the amount that they have decreased during the troop surge, then one would have to conclude that the surge has not had an appreciable effect on casualties.
On the other hand, if civilian casualties (unlike military casualties) typically increase in the summer, and if they have decreased only in the summer of 2007 (i.e., during the troop surge), then one would have to conclude that the effectiveness of the troop surge is even greater than it appears to be (if, that is, you follow Drum's suggestion). Let's inquire into the matter because we have the data, and we've had it for a long time.
Mad Ireland hurt you into fundraising . . .
Last night at dinner, I was asked a question: why do Irish-Americans still care so much about Northern Ireland? Why do people two or more generations removed from Ireland still give money to the IRA?
My family never has given money to the IRA--in fact, we may be the only Irish Americans who donate to the SDLP. Nonetheless, I offered an opinion.
For Americans, I said, the Troubles never ended. Their families never experienced building their own, Irish state; they never lived in an Ireland that wasn't ruled by the British. And so the last thing they had of Ireland was the terrible memories of whatever forced them to leave. And in many cases, the memories were terrible; I have met people who had relatives killed at Croke Park or were otherwise terribly victimised by the Black and Tans. Their other memories were of being terribly poor--a friend's grandmother actually grew up cooking on an open fire that vented through a hole in the ceiling--and rightly or wrongly, they blamed the British for this.
Moreover, the ones who stayed on the coasts, in Boston and New York and Philadelphia, felt herded into ghettoes by Protestants only marginally less bigoted than the ones they'd left behind in Ireland. I'm not sure that my friends who have rechristened themselves progressives understand just how much of that movement was an explicit revulsion against Catholic immigrants, and the political power and structures that they had built.
My great-grandfather's generation was economically, politically, and socially quite constrained by this discrimination; my father's generation experienced it regularly; and even I occasionally stumble into its echos. The St. Patrick's Day party I attended in the Main Line, where the expert eye of the fifty-something hostess immediately picked me out as the only Irish person present, and introduced me to the guests accordingly. Or the seventy-something woman at a hotel I worked at who rechristened me "Millie" after some Irish maid they'd had in the twenties, and when her companion corrected her, grandly declared (I swear, I'm not making this up) that "The Irish don't care about things like that." Obviously, I do not feel that my life has been in any way affected, much less blighted, by anti-Irish discrimination. But when I run into things like that, I think I can understand how I would feel, if that sort of thing were a feature of my everday life, rather than a thrillingly anachronistic hint of a forgotten past.
All of this is true, but I think it is too kind. There is another reason that Irish Americans give to Gerry Adams and his merry band of Marxist maniacs, which is that it is all very far away. Irish Americans can, at relatively cheap monetary cost, purchase social status, solidarity, and the exciting feeling of striking a blow for Ireland! They suffer not one whit from the cycle of violence that they help sustain.
|
|
| 
