The View from Seymour

An unpersuasive attack on Naomi Klein

I always like a good knockdown drag-out ideological fight, and I thought we would get one from Jonathan Chait's Dead Left. It's an attack on The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein's 2007 critique of the applied economics of Milton Friedman.

Since her book came out last fall, I've been tracking it via Google. Most of the mentions of it have been positive, and the attacks have been predictable—brief dismissals, mostly from people making their livings from right-wing think tanks. Sure, they may be right, but they didn't take Klein seriously enough to go after her facts and conclusions.

Now, almost a year later, the right blogosphere has suddenly fizzed with praise of Jonathan Chait's piece. I was eager to see it, and sadly disappointed when I did.

Klein may be totally wrong, but she at least offers us the sources she consulted—page after page. She makes strong claims, and tries to present strong evidence. If we don't believe her, we're free to go to her sources and see where she went wrong.

Chait, alas, can't be bothered with that kind of tedious scholarly debate. He prefers to patronize her, blessed as he is with a large vocabulary and a hypertrophied sense of sarcasm.

He also resorts to Bushian personal attacks: "Her grandfather was a Marxist fired by Disney for trying to organize animators."

But so what? My uncle was one of Disney's animators at the time, and went on to a long career with Disney thanks to his refusal to go out on strike. My uncle's politics have no more bearing on mine than Klein's grandfather's have on hers.

So much to my disappointment, Jonathan Chait's supposed dismantling of The Shock Doctrine doesn't even scratch her thesis, let alone demolish it.

This is too bad. When a very bright person like Chait can't do better than this, the implication is that no one else can either...and that his adversary has a stronger case than he would like to admit.

More on Omar Khadr

I was surprised and delighted to get a long comment to my previous post. Granted, it's just a copy of a post from a website, Muslims Against Sharia, but it raises important points that deserve discussion:

As soon as the Gitmo interrogation tape of Omar Khadr hit the Internet, the blogosphere was flooded with demands to repatriate him to Canada. This wave is reminiscent of a Soviet campaign to free Luis Corvalán from the "fascist regime" of Augusto Pinochet thirty five years ago. The scenario is strikingly similar. A "victim" held by "fascist regimes" this time run by Bush and Harper, and a public outcry for justice. Except for the fact that Luis Corvalán didn't kill anyone and didn't fight for a terrorist group that wants to impose Sharia.

This is an example of argument by analogy plus begging the question. Whatever the merits of the Corvalán case, it doesn't sound very close to Khadr's. If anyone's using terms like "fascist regimes," they're idle appeals to emotion that don't relate to the current case. Even fascist regimes, after all, sometimes catch real crooks.

Whether Omar Khadr killed anyone, under what circumstances, and for what purpose, are precisely the issues to be determined in a court of law.

The "repatriate Khadr" crowd describes him as "a child", "a kid", "a boy", and even "a torture victim", with no facts to substantiate the torture claims notwithstanding. They complain about Khadr being mistreated, again, without anything to back up their claims. Some of them are outraged about "child abuse." And they all scream for justice.

In 2002, Omar Khadr from all reports was about 15 or 16. In my understanding of international law, that makes him a child soldier, if indeed he was bearing arms. As a child soldier he simply does not fall into the same class as an adult combatant.

Recent reports of "frequent flier treatment" indicate he was subjected to sleep deprivation for some weeks. Muslims Against Sharia may not see this as torture; others certainly do. What evidence we have for torture has been obtained only by persistent efforts in the courts, and much more evidence may turn up.

They want justice? OK, let's talk about JUSTICE. What about justice for Sgt. First Class Christopher J. Speer, who was (according to an eyewitness) murdered by this "child"? What about justice for Tabitha Speer, who is a widow because of this "kid"? What about justice for Taryn and Tanner Speer, who are left without a father by this "a boy"? And what about all those Afghani civilians and NATO troops who are a little bit safer because this "torture victim" is behind bars? How many of these "repatriate Khadr" hypocrites concern themselves with justice for real victims? In literally hundreds of posts, we couldn't find a single one.

The eyewitness's testimony needs to be presented in court, with an opportunity for the defence to cross-examine and to present other evidence. Again, that's what a trial is all about: testing the validity of serious allegations.

While the harm done to the Speer family is tragic, we still do not know if Khadr did that harm, and it would be no justice to the Speers if the wrong person were convicted.

One would ask, what is the reason for this idiocy? The answer is simple. Ignorance. Complete and utter ignorance. Let's forget for a second that Omar Khadr killed Christopher Speer. Let's forget that Khadr's father was an al Qaeda financier. Let's forget that Khadr's family is known for it being al Qaeda sympathizers. Let's just remember what this "child" was fighting for in Afghanistan.

I am keenly aware of my own ignorance of the facts of the case, which is why I would like to see Omar Khadr tried in a legitimate Canadian court. Again, we don't know for a certainty that Omar Khadr killed anyone. We don't know if a child soldier can be held to an adult level of responsibility; perhaps he can, under international law. After all, some teenagers are raised to adult court if their crimes are serious.

Nor does it matter who or what Khadr's father was; he is beyond the reach of any court. And it doesn't matter what his mother, sister or brother think.

The most frustrating part of this whole case is that by subverting the normal course of justice, the US government has made it highly unlikely that Omar Khadr can be justly treated at all. Any conviction in a military court would be suspect. If he were returned to Canada, his treatment over the past six years, and the manner by which information was obtained from him, would taint the evidence.

From what I've read on the Muslims Against Sharia site, it has some interesting views. I'm no fan of sharia law, but as an atheist I'm no fan of any religiously inspired means of imposing conformity on people. The site is well designed and well written, but oddly anonymous; it seems to be based in Nebraska, and runs a pretty good news blog on Islamic-political issues.

But it also relies on some pretty clumsy propaganda techniques, as mentioned above, which is a shame. I would expect a moderate group to make moderate arguments, rather than relying on logical fallacies and appeals to emotion.

In this connection, it's worth linking to the recent story in The Globe and Mail: Conservative Christian is Omar Khadr's last line of defence.

I thank the people at Muslims Against Sharia for their comment.

What's happened to Canada?

Never mind the video clips of Omar Khadr, or the cheerful lying offered by the Conservatives about his case. Consider the responses to the story in The Globe and Mail: Omar Khadr: The interrogation.

A depressing number of them are delighted with the way this young man has been treated for the past six years, while they've been getting on with their lives.

It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that a charge is not automatically true just because it's been made. The whole purpose of a trial, after all, is to determine the truth of a charge made against a person. Until the trial is held and a verdict delivered, the charge is just words.

Nor does it matter whether we personally admire or hate the persons making the charge. The trial, not the accuser, determines the truth.

Omar Khadr had the bad luck to be born into a politically unpopular family. He had more bad luck in being involved in a firefight in Afghanistan, and maybe his worst luck was to survive that firefight.

Under international law as I understand it, he was a child soldier and therefore not responsible for his actions, however awful they may have been. (And we still don't know just what those actions were, because he hasn't been tried for them.)

If he had killed someone in Canada, and then been subjected to even a few months of the treatment he has reportedly received in Guantanamo, any Canadian judge would have acquitted him on the basis of deeply tainted evidence. Hell, even his name would have been withheld from the public under the Young Offenders Act.

Nonetheless, many Canadians—including our prime minister and his government—are perfectly content to let him suffer in Cuba rather than come home to face the trial that any other Canadian could expect.

I wish I knew what's happened to us, that so many Canadians should get such a sadistic thrill out of the brutalization of a fellow-Canadian for six long years.

US court rules that torturing Arar was OK

A really distressing report in The Globe and Mail: Lawyer: Arar decision opens door to torture. Excerpt:

A United States appeals court decision upholding the dismissal of a lawsuit from Canadian Maher Arar essentially enables the U.S. government to send foreigners to be tortured, a lawyer with a human rights group representing Arar said Monday.

“It means that the U.S. can do to anyone what they did to Maher,” said Maria LaHood, a senior attorney with the U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights.

“They can do it to anyone, to any foreign citizen, and use the immigration process as a guise, basically, to send someone to be tortured.”

Mr. Arar was labelled a member of al-Qaeda when he switched planes at New York's Kennedy Airport in 2002 as he returned to Canada from vacation.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in New York ruled Monday that Mr. Arar's claims that it was a violation of due process to send him to Syria could not be heard in federal court. The court concluded that adjudicating the claims would interfere with sensitive matters of foreign policy and national security.

Uproar over a dead journalist

The American media and blogs are beside themselves about the sudden death yesterday of Tim Russert. A few bloggers like John Cole have been less than brokenhearted, and others have criticized them for their callousness.

I very rarely watch American TV, least of all for its political coverage, so I didn't have an opinion one way or the other about Mr. Russert.

But I do find it striking that the response to the death of one very successful journalist, at the top of his game, should be so strong. We certainly don't react that way when we read about the journalists killed in 2007 for the crime of trying to do their jobs.

Joe McCarthy is alive and well and living in the blogosphere (updated)

Quite a flap at Little Green Footballs and other right-wing US sites: At the Official Obama Site: 'How the Jewish Lobby Works'. Excerpt:

Here’s yet another disgusting antisemitic page at the official Barack Obama campaign web site, by a group calling itself “Socialists for Obama.” This group of Jew-haters has apparently been at his site since April, and there are numerous comments from Obama supporters that are indistinguishable from the hate speech you’ll find at neo-Nazi sites: Barack Obama : : Change We Can Believe In | Socialists for Obama: How the jewish lobby works.

There’s something deeply wrong with a presidential candidate who attracts so many of these hateful psychotics. Read the comments; you just won’t believe what is allowed to be posted at Barack Obama’s web site.

The page in question came down very fast, but not before several bloggers had grabbed screenshots and vented their wrath.

As far as I could tell, not one of them expressed a suspicion that this was some kind of hack of the Obama site—a black-propaganda stunt by Obama's enemies. (Michelle Malkin did say it might be a "spoof.") They really wanted to believe that "hateful psychotics" are Obama's kind of people, and that he's therefore responsible for their hateful psychoses.

This takes me back to my boyhood and the glory days of Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, when guilt by association cost a lot of people (including some good and decent politicians) their careers.

This sad reversion to a toxic past is clearly just getting started. By autumn, the lies and smears will reach tsunami levels. After all, what else have hateful psychotics got to oppose their enemies with?

Update: It didn't take Comments from Left Field very long to track down the real source of the post: a creepy little anti-semitic site that just pasted some of its crap into mybarackobama.com.

US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships

Via The Guardian: US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships. Excerpt:

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.

The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.

Brownback is taken off the Khadr case

Via The Globe and Mail: Khadr trial judge relieved of duties. Excerpt:

The military judge in the Omar Khadr trial in Guantanamo Bay has been relieved of his duties, a move that Mr. Khadr's defence counsel implied is a result of the judge siding with the defence on a number of evidence-disclosure issues in the controversial military tribunal case.

In a brief e-mail message circulated Thursday afternoon, Military Commissions chief judge, Colonel Ralph Kohlmann, announced that Colonel Peter Brownback, who has served until now as the judge in the Khadr case, is to be replaced by another colonel, Patrick Parrish.

Defence officials in Washington told The Globe and Mail that Col. Brownback had been planning to retire. However, it was not clear why the judge would retire in the middle of an ongoing military tribunal case.

Col. Brownback initially came out of retirement in 2004 to oversee some of the military tribunal proceedings in Guantanamo Bay. Recently, he had shown considerable frustration at the prosecution in the Khadr case, headed by Major Jeff Groharing, for delays in disclosing evidence to the defence.

Mr. Khadr's U.S. military defence lawyer, Lieutenant Commander Bill Kuebler, said the sudden change of judge comes after a recent commission hearing in which Col. Brownback “threatened to suspend proceedings in the case of Omar Khadr if prosecutors continued to withhold key evidence from Omar's lawyers.”

LCdr. Kuebler added that Col. Brownback said at the time that he had been “badgered and beaten and bruised by Major Groharing since the seventh of November, to set a trial date.”

This is one of those cases, like that of Dreyfus, that makes "military justice" an oxymoron.

But bear in mind that all the officers involved are, as members of the Judge Advocate General corps, trained lawyers. That so many of them are evidently willing to go along with a slow-motion lynching is a sorry reflection on their education.

That the Canadian government has gone along with this treatment of a citizen reflects even more poorly on Mr. Harper and his caucus.

More on McClellan

You could develop a serious schadenfreude problem by surfing the blogs today, what with the spasms on the right and the expectorations on the left. The righties, knowing no other way to respond, have gone straight to smearing the traitor McClellan, and of course what could smear him more than charging that he's defected to the left?

The left, however, has heaped even more obloquy on him than the right, as John Cole has documented at Balloon Juice.

And why not? This guy, after all, took good money to lie to his fellow-Americans and the rest of the world, the better to kill Americans and Iraqis in an illegal war. I've got an Iraq-vet nephew who came home with PTSD. Why should I embrace this repentant schmuck?

And the worst that the right can really bring against McClellan is that he's a hypocrite. Enabling and advocating the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people is negligible. After all, that's what the American right has done for six miserable years, and they're nowhere near ready to confront their responsibility for it.

But hypocrisy...now, there's a real crime.

The McClellan Flap

Quite a fuss in the media and blogosphere about the publication of Scott McClellan's book about his experience as George Bush's press secretary. You can get an overview at Memeorandum, at least for a day or two.

The left blogs are a bit varied in their responses: Ho-hum, we already knew this; so much for the "liberal media" myth; why'd he wait so long to blab?

The right blogs are more consistent in simply attacking McClellan. Ed Morrissey is typical: Heckuva job, Scotty: McClellan writes a book. Excerpt:

Expect all sides to redefine McClellan in order to either boost or reduce his credibility.

To the Right, McClellan will have been the worst press secretary of modern times, and to the Left a man of extraordinary ability chased out of his job by Bush’s minions. The truth will be somewhere in the middle. When he left office, most people on both sides considered him a mediocrity at best.

His status as favored punching bag for the hard Left can best be captured in the Keith Olbermann farewell McClellan received as he exited in April 2006. It will be particularly amusing to watch this fringe try to rehabilitate McClellan now.

That seems to me an accurate assessment of the right's reaction and a serious misunderstanding of the left's. Of course the guy was a jerk; it was and is an administration of jerks. Why try to rehabilitate him?

It's striking that the right condemns McClellan for being disloyal, not for being inaccurate. If he's lying, that ought to be fairly easy to document. If he's not lying, at least on some crucial issues, then the right would have to admit it was duped from the start.

So far, no one on the right seems to have examined that thought.