http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/opinion/17mukasey-questions.html?th&emc=th
Op-Ed Contributors
Questions of Justice
Published: October 17, 2007
Michael B. Mukasey, President Bush's nominee for attorney general, appears
today before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Op-Ed page asked four legal
experts to pose the questions they would like to hear Judge Mukasey answer.
The questioner's names are below the questions.
1. Griffin Bell, attorney general under Jimmy Carter, once wrote of the
"tension between the attorney general's duty to define the legal limits of
executive action in a neutral manner and the president's desire to receive
legal advice that helps him do what he wants." How will you manage this
tension?
2. You wrote recently that proposals for a national security court to
incapacitate terrorists through preventive detention rather than criminal
trials "deserve careful scrutiny by the public, and particularly by the U.S.
Congress." Do you support the creation of such a court? What class of
terrorists should be subject to preventive detention, and for how long?
Should alleged terrorists be given the right to counsel and the right to
compel witnesses?
3. In 2002 the Department of Justice opined, "Any effort by Congress to
regulate the interrogations of battlefield combatants would violate the
Constitution's sole vesting of the commander-in-chief authority in the
president." Do you agree with this statement? How do you define the scope of
the president's exclusive military powers?
4. Many of the top jobs in the Justice Department are vacant as a result of
retirements or Senate refusals to confirm nominees. How does this affect the
Justice Department's ability to carry out its mission of upholding the rule
of law? Are these vacancies the fault of the president or the Senate? How do
you plan to address the problem?
- JACK L. GOLDSMITH, a Harvard law professor and the author of "The Terror
Presidency," was an assistant attorney general from 2003 to 2004.
1. You held in Padilla v. Rumsfeld that the president has the authority to
detain Americans arrested in the United States as "enemy combatants" in the
"war on terrorism." What is an "enemy combatant," and from what legal source
do you derive your definition of that term? How long do you believe such
individuals may constitutionally be held without criminal trial? Do agree
with the Justice Department lawyer who told a federal judge that a little
old lady who sent a check to an orphanage in Afghanistan that turned out to
have ties to Al Qaeda could be detained as an "enemy combatant"?
2. Do you believe the president is legally obliged to comply with federal
statutes if he thinks compliance in a particular instance would harm
national security? What about the Geneva Conventions and other treaties
ratified by the Senate?
- JENNY S. MARTINEZ, a Stanford law professor, represented Jose Padilla
before the Supreme Court in 2004.
Priorities in law enforcement and particular conceptions of controversial
legal issues - affirmative action, severity and leniency in criminal
prosecution and sentencing, antitrust policies, civil rights enforcement -
have always been part of a president's project for the nation. And yet the
public expects and the rule of law demands impartiality in law enforcement.
So the attorney general cannot be independent of the president who appointed
him, as are judges or the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, but neither
must he be a political operative pushing the president's advantage at every
turn. How would you balance these conflicting demands?
- CHARLES FRIED, a Harvard law professor, was the United States solicitor
general from 1985 to 1989.
1. Secret laws are inconsistent with democratic self-government. What steps
will you take to ensure that members of Congress and the public can obtain
secret opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel that explain the executive
branch's views about the legal limits of interrogation practices and
surveillance programs? Will you ensure that members of Congress have at
least as much knowledge about our surveillance practices as employees of
privately owned telecommunications companies?
2. When, if ever, should the government prosecute journalists or other
citizens for publishing classified information leaked to them about
government activities of questionable legality?
3. Proposals for reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act include
requirements for auditing surveillance programs and reporting the results to
Congress - including how many Americans have had their conversations
recorded and preserved. Do you believe this violates the president's
constitutional powers?
4. What steps will you take to bring back career lawyers who have been
shoved aside or who have resigned in disgust from the Justice Department?
What steps will you take to ensure that hiring practices at the Justice
Department are based on professional quality and not ideological purity?
- JACK M. BALKIN, a Yale law professor, blogs at Balkinization.
***
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lisa Lubow" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2007 12:36 AM
Dear friends,
"It Didn't Start With Iraq," by journalist and university professor Robert
Jensen, provides a useful review of "War Made Easy," the compelling new
documentary being shown this Friday in Glendale. The Jensen review -- with
Jensen's insightful commentary on the role of media propaganda in fueling
U.S. military interventions since World War II -- is reprinted below, along
with specifics on Friday's event (sponsored by the Glendale Peace Vigil).
Don't miss this chance to preview a great film for your own future programs.
Hope to see you in Glendale!
Lisa
===
IT DIDN'T START WITH IRAQ
A REVIEW OF THE FILM, "WAR MADE EASY"
by ROBERT JENSEN (University of Texas, Austin)
When George Bush began trying to justify the occupation of Iraq by
invoking the "lessons" of Vietnam, I had the urge to send him a copy of the
new documentary "War Made Easy" featuring Norman Solomon. That's hardly
surprising -- no doubt we've all had the occasional desire to try to educate
our president.
Then as I read and listened to the responses from mainstream pundits
-- most of whom missed the real insights to be gained by analyzing the U.S.
invasion of Southeast Asia and the relevance of that history to our invasion
and occupation of Iraq -- I realized a whole lot of allegedly smart people
need to see the film.
But the real mark of the film's value is that everyone -- even those
of us who think of ourselves as well-informed with a critical framework --
can learn much from Solomon's analysis in the film and his book by the same
name. At a time when it's more crucial than ever to understand the
post-World War II era in which the United States became a permanent warfare
state, Solomon's film and book hone in on one of the key features of that
project: the propaganda aimed at us in the United States is as important to
that military- industrial project as the guns trained on people in the Third
World.
The goal of that propaganda is to get people to believe a claim that
is contradicted by all of history and contemporary experience: the objective
of the United States in its military interventions around the world has been
not to expand and deepen economic domination (which has been the goal of
all other empires) but to bring peace, freedom, and democracy to the world.
U.S. officials are not the first in world history to assert such noble
motives for such inhuman policies (just ask the Brits), but never has that
claim been made so relentlessly, with so much help from allegedly
independent journalists.
"War becomes perpetual when it's used as a rationale for peace,"
Solomon says in the film, and then goes on to provide ample evidence of how
the justification for perpetual war has been manufactured, packaged, and
sold. If it weren't such serious business, the producers' collection of
sound bites from presidents -- Democrats and Republicans alike, all mouthing
some version of "We Seek Peace" -- would be comical. From Korea through
every conflict up to Iraq, the rhetoric is remarkable similar, as are the
real aims and the deadly consequences of the policy.
Solomon's target is not just the politicians, however, but the
journalists who become the vehicle for selling that story. His work reminds
us that even when journalists seem to be reporting critically about failed
war policies, they almost always implicitly endorse U.S. officials'
underlying claim about the desire for peace and democracy.
While the film covers all the conflicts in the post-WWII period, it is
the Vietnam/Iraq parallels that are most chilling. One of the most crucial
to remember -- in defiance of the distorted revisionist history that
suggests the U.S. public lost its will to support the Vietnam War because of
relentlessly critical news coverage -- is that journalists were largely
supportive of the war in the early years. Not until the failures on the
battlefield were too obvious to ignore did the media coverage abandon the
administrations' propaganda line.
The producers of this film have used archival footage brilliantly, and
one of the most illustrative clips is of Walter Cronkite in 1965 climbing
into a B-57 to go along on a bombing run. In the breathless fashion typical
of so much war reporting, Cronkite extols the virtue of the airplane and the
thrill of the mission. Viewers see him get off the plane and say to the
officer he's about to interview, "Well, colonel, it's a great way to go to
war."
After the Tet Offensive in 1968 Cronkite would declare the war "mired
in stalemate," and so he's remembered as a critic of the war. But like most
of the press corps he first was enthusiastic about U.S. power, and even in
that famous 1968 broadcast he didn't challenge the basic propaganda story
about the so-called Communist threat.
That segment also reminds us that journalists have long expressed a
giddy, almost childlike, fascination with the increasingly high-tech weapons
with which these wars have been fought. Journalists, it seems, are always
suckers for machines that go fast and blow things up. Solomon suggests that
there's "a kind of idolatry there. Some might see it as a worship of the
gods of metal." This technology fetish reached unimaginably sick levels in
the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the news media flooded us with high-tech
graphics and retired military officers offering commentary.
Solomon reminds us that for all the talk about precision weapons, the
percentage of deaths that are civilians has climbed steadily from 10 percent
in World War I to almost 90 percent in Iraq. He describes how "an
acculturated callousness" to the effects of massive bombardment has built up
in our society, facilitated to a large extent by journalists who are more
likely to focus on how a weapon works than what it does to victims. One of
the film's most poignant scenes comes when images of those victims are shown
over the voice of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld waxing
eloquent about the unprecedented humanitarianism of this "precision"
bombing.
But back to Vietnam and Bush's bizarre analogy, in which he suggested
that the United States' mistake was not invading another country to block a
popular leftist government that had been on the verge of winning a fair
election. No, it turns out that our mistake was leaving an immoral and
unwinnable war too soon.
When I asked Solomon last week for his reaction to Bush's comparison,
he pointed out that Bush was invoking a familiar "stab-in-the-back theme" to
assert that a lack of resolve at home undermined the military effort, to
bolster the idea that with continued support, "this time the USA can, and
must, see the war through to its appropriately triumphant conclusion." But
the possibility of such a victory in Iraq is about as likely as it was in
Vietnam, in large part because each war was morally bankrupt from the start.
It was the same game during the Vietnam War, Solomon said, pointing to
news footage from War Made Easy of a network TV announcer saying,
"Appealing for public support for his peace policy, Mr. Nixon said, 'The
enemy cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans,' he
said, 'can do that.'"
Perhaps we have not really been defeated and humiliated by either the
enemy or ourselves, but by leaders who have created this warfare state and
journalists who have helped sell it to the public. War Made Easy is a useful
tool for progressive educators and activists who want to redefine peace and
end a state of perpetual war. ***
***************************************
A GLENDALE PEACE VIGIL FILM FORUM:
"WAR MADE EASY:
HOW PRESIDENTS AND PUNDITS
KEEP SPINNING US TO DEATH"
Narrated by actor/activist SEAN PENN
Featuring media critic NORMAN SOLOMON
WHEN: Friday, October 19, 2007; Doors Open 7pm
WHERE: Glendale Central Library, 222. E. Harvard Street, Glendale, CA 91205
DONATIONS WELCOME. No one turned away for lack of funds
EVENT INCLUDES:
· Film Plus Audience Discussion!
· Refreshments! Books, Films, T-Shirts for Sale!
· Information from Community Groups!
· Costume Contest! Prizes ($10 cash, books, films, etc) in each Category:
Best Anti-War Costume, Scariest Political Costume,
Funniest Political Costume, Most Thought-Provoking Costume,
Best Presentation In Costume Parade.
Costumes optional, street clothes OK!
INFORMATION: Call 818-662-0412
SPONSOR: The Glendale Peace Vigil (gathering Fridays, 5-7pm, Brand&Broadway)
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