Here at SLU we have formed a new group, Save Our Constitution, to fight the recent attack on basic civil rights by the Bush administration. Right now we are drafting up promotional material for a teach-in we will have Nov. 3. This is some copy I have generated that I think captures where the group is heading. I’m putting it up here in draft form for comments.
The Bill that Broke the Constitution
On October 18, 2006, George W. Bush signed the Military Commissions Act into law. The bill was described in the media as merely a “controversial” decision about what to do with the detainees in Guantánamo and elsewhere. In fact, it gives the President unprecedented powers and strips ordinary people of the most basic of rights. The right whose death we mourn the most is habeas corpus, a right so basic most people aren’t even aware it has a name, let alone that it can be taken away. Habeas corpus is your right to tell your case to a judge if you have been arrested. Millions of people no longer have this right. They can languish indefinitely in prisons for no reason, dependant entirely on the whim of their captors. And the collapse of basic human rights is not limited to foreigners or people outside America. Under the Military Commissions Act the president and secretary of defense can declare anyone they want, including American citizens, enemy combatants. Once this happens, you have almost no legal protection. Jose Padilla, an American citizen, was declared an enemy combatant, and he was held without charges and tortured for three years. There is nothing preventing this from happening to you.
Torture
We can never forget that real people are suffering horribly at the hands of our government, and no good is coming from it. More and more stories are coming out about people who were arrested on faulty information or no information at all, tortured horribly, and then released without any charges being pressed against them. Muhibullo Adulkarim Umarov a native of Tajikistan, was arrested in Pakistan following a bombing in Karachi, sent to Guantánamo No evidence was ever presented linking him to the bombing which was eventually shown to be the work of a Pakistani, Sohail Akhtar. After two years, someone realized that they had no reason to hold Umarov. He was taken to the office of an American official who told him he was going to be freed, asked him not to blame America, gave him a hug, and sent him on his way.
This can happen because there is no public oversight over who gets arrested, why they are held, or what is done to them. Bounty hunters in Pakistan pick up whoever they can just to get paid. Innocent people are turned over to the new secret police because someone wanted to settle a score or do in a rival. Trial by jury was developed long ago to prevent these abuses, but now we are slipping back into barbarism.
The Politics of Fear
How is this possible? Why have we allowed this to happen? The answer is simple, we have been made to fear. The president and his enablers in congress used the tragedy of September 11 to advance an agenda that had nothing to do with the attacks. This manipulation included inventing the “war on terror” a strange conflict against an undefined enemy for an indefinite period of time. Past leaders facing real armies have told us not to fear. This administration is now telling us to fear, to fear everyone and no one, and to take their word for it when they announce that someone is the enemy. We are in an era where big lies are used to destroy basic rights. The time has come to say “stop.”
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Complete works of Charles Darwin on line
Monday, October 16, 2006
Torture Stories
I'm collecting torture stories for a teach-in to be held in a few weeks. Right now I'm taking notes on a few individuals to decide who to focus on. If anyone stopping by can think of other good names or sources, let me know. The main category of person I am interested in are those who have been...
Held for years, tortured, and then released without charges
Muhibullo Adulkarim Umarov: Native of Tajikstan, traveled to Pakistan to earn money for his family. Arrested by Pakistani police after a bombing that was later shown to be the work of a Pakistani, Sohail Akhtar. No charges were pressed by Pakistan, but the Pakistanis were eager to find evidence that the bomber was a foreigner. Transferred to US control at a time when the US was offering a bounty on any terror suspect. Held at Baghram and Gitmo and subjected to psychological torture. His captors said his frequent movements between Pakistan, Tajikstan and Afghanistan (all countries where he has relatives) were suspicious. Captors demanded that he reveal the location of Osama bin Laden. After two years, it is decided he is completely innocent, and he is released. (wikipedia, Mother Jones)
Maher Arar Syrian born Canadian citizen. Detained by US, based on false information from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Extraordinarily rendered to Syria where he was tortured into a false confession. Cleared of all charges and released. RCMP apologizes. The only concrete piece of evidence ever offered against him is a lease he signed that was witnessed by a friend of his family's who is now also being held in Syria. No explanation as to why the other man is being held, or signing a lease with him as a witness is damning evidence of anything. (maherarar.com, the Canadian government's commission on Arar)
Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul (the Tipoton three) British citizens who travel to Pakistan for a wedding. They then go to Afghanistan to see the effects of US bombing for themselves. (imdb page for the movie about them. BBC story)
Moazzam Begg, Martin Mubanga, Richard Belmar and Feroz Abbasi. Other british citizens: BBC page here. The BBC page refers to five other Gritons who were held at Gitmo and then released without charges. I'll need to get their names later.
The other important category of person I want to highlight is the
American Citizen who Has Been Tortured.
Jose Padilla: Picked up shortly after 9/11 at O'Hare as a "material witness" to the 9/11 plot. He is declared an enemy combatant, and tortured. After three years, he is finally charged in a civilian court with "conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and maim people overseas." The move to civilian court seems to be aimed at avoiding supreme court scrutiny of his treatment by military courts. (LizardBreath's last post on him. His motion to dismiss the charges against him, wikipedia.)
Held for years, tortured, and then released without charges
Muhibullo Adulkarim Umarov: Native of Tajikstan, traveled to Pakistan to earn money for his family. Arrested by Pakistani police after a bombing that was later shown to be the work of a Pakistani, Sohail Akhtar. No charges were pressed by Pakistan, but the Pakistanis were eager to find evidence that the bomber was a foreigner. Transferred to US control at a time when the US was offering a bounty on any terror suspect. Held at Baghram and Gitmo and subjected to psychological torture. His captors said his frequent movements between Pakistan, Tajikstan and Afghanistan (all countries where he has relatives) were suspicious. Captors demanded that he reveal the location of Osama bin Laden. After two years, it is decided he is completely innocent, and he is released. (wikipedia, Mother Jones)
Maher Arar Syrian born Canadian citizen. Detained by US, based on false information from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Extraordinarily rendered to Syria where he was tortured into a false confession. Cleared of all charges and released. RCMP apologizes. The only concrete piece of evidence ever offered against him is a lease he signed that was witnessed by a friend of his family's who is now also being held in Syria. No explanation as to why the other man is being held, or signing a lease with him as a witness is damning evidence of anything. (maherarar.com, the Canadian government's commission on Arar)
Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul (the Tipoton three) British citizens who travel to Pakistan for a wedding. They then go to Afghanistan to see the effects of US bombing for themselves. (imdb page for the movie about them. BBC story)
Moazzam Begg, Martin Mubanga, Richard Belmar and Feroz Abbasi. Other british citizens: BBC page here. The BBC page refers to five other Gritons who were held at Gitmo and then released without charges. I'll need to get their names later.
The other important category of person I want to highlight is the
American Citizen who Has Been Tortured.
Jose Padilla: Picked up shortly after 9/11 at O'Hare as a "material witness" to the 9/11 plot. He is declared an enemy combatant, and tortured. After three years, he is finally charged in a civilian court with "conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and maim people overseas." The move to civilian court seems to be aimed at avoiding supreme court scrutiny of his treatment by military courts. (LizardBreath's last post on him. His motion to dismiss the charges against him, wikipedia.)
Friday, October 13, 2006
My car is visible from space
Check it out. Somewhere along the line, the good folks at Google saw fit to add detailed satelite photographs of our tiny village of Canton New York to their database. Now, you can see our car on google. This is the image I got when I asked for directions to a meeting I have to go to. Amazing.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Some link collections from Gus DiZerega
Gus has a good list of links discussing the recent Lancet study on deaths caused by the war in Iraq. He also has a good list of links on torture, which I reprinted here earlier.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Welcome to the world Peter Casmir D'Amato
Chris and Grey have a baby! Leave your congratulations here.
Sunday, October 08, 2006
For Veronica Mars
In the Neil Simon movie, Murder by Death, Lionel Twain invites five detectives--obvious parodies of Hercule Poirot, Miss Marples, Charlie Chan, Nick Charles and Sam Spade--to dinner and stages a murder. Twain, who is played by Truman Capote, explains the motives for his plot this way:
You've tricked and fooled your readers for years. You've tortured us all with surprise endings that made no sense. You've introduced characters in the last five pages that were never in the book before. You've withheld clues and information that made it impossible for us to guess who did it. But now, the tables are turned. Millions of angry mystery readers are now getting their revenge. When the world learns I've outsmarted you, they'll be selling your $1.95 books for twelve cents.I think I just don't like the mystery genre. By design, the plot payoff has to be the last thing you'd expect knowing what you know about the characters. This makes developing rich characterization next to impossible. It is also more damaging to the realism of a show than including space ships or vampires. It just bugs me.
Saturday, October 07, 2006
The competition for the NCAEFA
The North Country Academy for the Excruciatingly Fine Arts has some serious competition in Singapore. (which is also where I got the Nietzsche Family Circus link)
New Research Statement
I'm getting ready for the job market, updating my CV and research portfolio. Below is a new research statement, reflecting my new publications and plans. So if any of the teeming multitudes who arrives here via a search for "Monkey orgasm" have a job to offer me, check this out and give me a call. The full portfolio and new CV are on the sidebar
Research Statement
My research is in environmental and medical ethics. These interests are not really distinct. Both areas are places where the philosophy of science intersects with practical, and often the same set of epistemic norms and ethical values are at stake in each. Indeed one of my main interests is in tracing issues as they cross from the human world of medical ethics to the nonhuman world of environmental ethics. Right now I have two published papers about genetic engineering, a topic that comes up in both medical and environmental contexts. The first paper, published in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal makes a direct comparison between the environmental and the medical arena, arguing that the difference in levels of caution we exercise regarding genetic engineering in these two areas is unjustified. The second paper, forthcoming in the volume Ethical issues is the Life Sciences, argues that in the case of agricultural genetic engineering, the real motivation is not attitudes toward caution at all, but attitudes toward economic liberty.
My thinking about environmental ethics has led me to publish some in environmental aesthetics. My first work there was an article for Philosophy and the Contemporary World on efforts to place environmental ethics on the foundation of environmental aesthetics. Here too, there is an analogy between the human and nonhuman world, because I argue for the superficiality of the aesthetics of the environment using an analogy to the aesthetics of human beings. This paper led to a book review in Environmental Ethics of models of the appreciation of natural environments, and now an essay which has been conditionally accepted to Environmental Values, which adds a new model to the discussion of nature appreciation, drawn from Buddhist thinking, which I label the Theregāthā model.
My immediate plans are to make the alterations to the paper on the Theragāthā model that have been requested by the publishers before they accept the paper. After that I want to return to the issue of genetic enhancement. I just reviewed a recent book by law professor Maxwell Mehlman which advocated an elaborate, draconian regime to enforce regulation on human genetic enhancement. I plan to expand the review, which appeared in Metapsychology Online, into a full defense of the right to genetic enhancement. My argument would come largely from the right to control of your body and doctor patient confidentiality, with additional support coming from an examination of just how intrusive any attempt to regulate one’s genes would be. I hope to get this piece into a top rank journal like Ethics or The Journal of Philosophy.
In the longer term, I hope to keep my efforts in environmental ethics focused on agricultural ethics and resource management. The debate over the moral status of wild nature, while it has produced much of theoretical interest, has proven to be largely irrelevant to the most important environmental issues. Global climate change, for instance, is clearly the most pressing issue of the day, but all that can be said about it from the standpoint of wild nature is that there can be no more wild nature. I do see more hope for the discussion of moral status in medical ethics, and I actually believe that theoretical work can be illuminating here. The stem cell debate has shown dire need for understanding how conflicting ideas about moral status should affect public policy. Here again, I think it would be nice to look at human issues in the context of the nonhuman. What we need, and what I hope to contribute to developing, is a theory of moral status that uses a unified system of standards to judge humans at all stages of life, animals, plants, ecosystems, nations, and even hypothetical entities like intelligent computers or space aliens.
Research Statement
My research is in environmental and medical ethics. These interests are not really distinct. Both areas are places where the philosophy of science intersects with practical, and often the same set of epistemic norms and ethical values are at stake in each. Indeed one of my main interests is in tracing issues as they cross from the human world of medical ethics to the nonhuman world of environmental ethics. Right now I have two published papers about genetic engineering, a topic that comes up in both medical and environmental contexts. The first paper, published in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal makes a direct comparison between the environmental and the medical arena, arguing that the difference in levels of caution we exercise regarding genetic engineering in these two areas is unjustified. The second paper, forthcoming in the volume Ethical issues is the Life Sciences, argues that in the case of agricultural genetic engineering, the real motivation is not attitudes toward caution at all, but attitudes toward economic liberty.
My thinking about environmental ethics has led me to publish some in environmental aesthetics. My first work there was an article for Philosophy and the Contemporary World on efforts to place environmental ethics on the foundation of environmental aesthetics. Here too, there is an analogy between the human and nonhuman world, because I argue for the superficiality of the aesthetics of the environment using an analogy to the aesthetics of human beings. This paper led to a book review in Environmental Ethics of models of the appreciation of natural environments, and now an essay which has been conditionally accepted to Environmental Values, which adds a new model to the discussion of nature appreciation, drawn from Buddhist thinking, which I label the Theregāthā model.
My immediate plans are to make the alterations to the paper on the Theragāthā model that have been requested by the publishers before they accept the paper. After that I want to return to the issue of genetic enhancement. I just reviewed a recent book by law professor Maxwell Mehlman which advocated an elaborate, draconian regime to enforce regulation on human genetic enhancement. I plan to expand the review, which appeared in Metapsychology Online, into a full defense of the right to genetic enhancement. My argument would come largely from the right to control of your body and doctor patient confidentiality, with additional support coming from an examination of just how intrusive any attempt to regulate one’s genes would be. I hope to get this piece into a top rank journal like Ethics or The Journal of Philosophy.
In the longer term, I hope to keep my efforts in environmental ethics focused on agricultural ethics and resource management. The debate over the moral status of wild nature, while it has produced much of theoretical interest, has proven to be largely irrelevant to the most important environmental issues. Global climate change, for instance, is clearly the most pressing issue of the day, but all that can be said about it from the standpoint of wild nature is that there can be no more wild nature. I do see more hope for the discussion of moral status in medical ethics, and I actually believe that theoretical work can be illuminating here. The stem cell debate has shown dire need for understanding how conflicting ideas about moral status should affect public policy. Here again, I think it would be nice to look at human issues in the context of the nonhuman. What we need, and what I hope to contribute to developing, is a theory of moral status that uses a unified system of standards to judge humans at all stages of life, animals, plants, ecosystems, nations, and even hypothetical entities like intelligent computers or space aliens.
Friday, October 06, 2006
Nietzsche Family Circus
The cartoon generator is here.
I'm really impressed by how often the aphorism and the picture actually work together.
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Schonberg on your newly restricted rights
From the SLU listserv comes this comment by Prof. Karl Schonberg. Karl looks closely at the language of the law and its consequences for the rights of US citizens.
Under this law, civilian U.S. citizens can potentially be tried before military courts. Some of the language in this law refers only to “aliens,” but the definition of “unlawful enemy combatants” does not. Section 3(948a)(1)(A) states that “the term `unlawful enemy combatant' means… a person who has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States…” Section 3(948d)(c) specifies that the President or Secretary of Defense will choose tribunals to determine who is an unlawful enemy combatant, and the findings of these tribunals will be "dispositive for purposes of jurisdiction for trial by military commission." On this issue see also Yale law/political science professor Bruce Ackerman's essay in the L.A. Times. Military commissions can assign sentences up to and including death (3(948d)(d)).
In these military courts not all of the protections guaranteed to U.S. citizens under the Constitution will apply. For example:
Evidence seized without a warrant will be admissible: “Evidence shall not be excluded from trial by military commission on the grounds that the evidence was not seized pursuant to a search warrant or other authorization” (3(949a)(2)(B)).
Evidence gained through coercion will sometimes be admissible: “A statement of the accused that is otherwise admissible shall not be excluded from trial by military commission on grounds of alleged coercion or compulsory self-incrimination…” (3(949a)(C)).
Hearsay evidence will sometimes be admissible: “…hearsay evidence not otherwise admissible under the rules of evidence applicable in trial by general courts-martial may be admitted in a trial by military commission…” (3(949a)(b)(2)(E)(i)).
Military judges are also given wide latitude in deciding, among other things, what evidence defendants will be able to see (3(949d)(f)), and whether there will be public access to trials (3(949d)(2)).
Rules governing defense counsel’s right to bring witnesses and evidence are to be “provided in regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Defense” (3(949j)(a)). The Secretary of Defense and Attorney General also have the power to determine “pretrial, trial, and post-trial procedures, including elements and modes of proof…” (3(949a)(a)).
Non-U.S. citizens, including legal residents, may be jailed indefinitely without charge: “7(e)(1) No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus [or any other action, 7(e)(2)] led by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States [as an enemy combatant].”
The president will decide when and how the Geneva Conventions apply, if at all: “ …the President has the authority for the United States to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions…” (6(a)(3)A).
To say that I find this language troubling would be a vast understatement. I will be at the meeting next week to discuss these issues and our response to them.
Blog upgrade
Well, I upgraded to the new version of blogger right away, even though it is still in beta, because (1) I really really wanted labels and (2) I'm an early adopter.
I've decided not to reinstall Haloscan comments, mostly so that I can use word verification. Also, with the old Blogger comments visible, everyone can now see that the first comment on this blog was from everyone's blog crush, Bitch, Ph.D. If I can find a way to selectively reopen the halo threads for earlier posts I will.
Added: I was going to justify the time I spent today fussing with the new template by signing up for adsense and actually making money from the blog. But adsense is no longer there. Does anyone know what is up, or have any comments/experience with adsense?
I've decided not to reinstall Haloscan comments, mostly so that I can use word verification. Also, with the old Blogger comments visible, everyone can now see that the first comment on this blog was from everyone's blog crush, Bitch, Ph.D. If I can find a way to selectively reopen the halo threads for earlier posts I will.
Added: I was going to justify the time I spent today fussing with the new template by signing up for adsense and actually making money from the blog. But adsense is no longer there. Does anyone know what is up, or have any comments/experience with adsense?
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