Answers about Iran's Nuclear Ambitions

The following are a few important segments of a fantastic NPR, Talk of the Nation radio program.

The reformist side has, for quite some time now, been supportive of improving relations with the United States, but they were sidelined after the political turmoil that occurred in 2009 and 2010. More recently, President Ahmadinejad has emerged as someone who has suggested that Iran would benefit from an improvement in relations with the United States, but he's been blocked by the supreme leader's camp.

SHUSTER: That's right. The Iranians have known to - have been known to discount their oil in the past in order to make sure that they have buyers for it. It's interesting, though, that a few weeks ago, the Chinese premier was in the Persian Gulf meeting with leaders of various Gulf states, obviously, to talk about the situation - the tense situation in the Gulf and the supply of oil. He went to Saudi Arabia and meet with other smaller Gulf Arab states, and he did not visit Tehran. And it was - it's believed that the discussions held, particularly with Saudi Arabia, were about whether Saudi Arabia could supply more oil to China in the event that there's some kind of an embargo imposed - serious embargo on Iran. Very interesting development, I thought.
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The North Koreas certainly saw their acquiring of a nuclear weapon as a deterrent against attack, either from the United States or from South Korea or both. That example may be what's functioning in the minds of some Iranian leaders, if they are considering - and there are some who have said that they would like to see Iran acquire a bomb, not all but some. That might be the calculus that they are figuring in order to deter attack by the United States.


CONAN: There is talk of kicking Iran out of a program called SWIFT, which is based in Europe and which channels all of the financial transactions, pretty much, on the world market. It would pretty much cut off Iran's ability to export oil.


CONAN: Now the arrival of U.N. inspectors from the IAEA, International Atomic Energy Agency, in Tehran, this is part of a series of inspections. So far, Iran has not shown them what they want to see. 

CONAN: There's also the letter that was sent to the P5-plus-1, that's the group of the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany. This is the group that's been negotiating with Iran on and off on its nuclear program; talks founded, what, I guess about a year ago.

SHUSTER: That's right.

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-SHUSTER: I don't think that President Obama is against direct talks with Iran. He came into office in 2009 advocating diplomatic engagement with Iran. It turned out that it was difficult. The Iranians don't always cooperate in the ways that the U.S. negotiators would like.

Hillary Clinton, secretary of the state, at the same time essentially imposed preconditions for talks with the Iranians that included a suspension of their uranium enrichment activities, which is in a number of U.N. Security Council resolutions. And there came a point when it seemed fruitless to pursue that notion sometime in 2009, 2010.

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CONAN: And this is an idea to restart those talks and apparently, according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, without preconditions.

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SHUSTER: That's right, and this seems to be an effort on the part of what you might consider to be the more open-minded faction in Iran, probably led by a current moderate who is foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, and there does seem to be some remote chance that this time around there could be some negotiations that could take place between Iran and the Europeans and the United States.

CONAN: And more talk of that just this past weekend in Israel, as senior officials from the U.S. and Britain were there, they say, to advise Israel: Please don't, or at least wait. Let's give sanctions a chance.

Yesterday, both Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and British Foreign Secretary William Hague warned Israel not to attack Iran, to give harsh international sanctions more time.

SHUSTER: I'm not sure. It's - I think it's quite clear that the Obama administration has no stomach for military action against Iran. The British don't, either.

We've seen, in the last six months, a complete collapse of the Iranian currency, which has made it very difficult for ordinary Iranians to travel, ordinary businessmen in Iran to borrow foreign currency to use to finance their imports. Things are quite difficult in Iran economically right now, perhaps more so than in many recent years.

So this is having some - it is having some kind of an effect.

SHUSTER: It's difficult to predict, and your question requires a prediction. But it's important to note that in less than two weeks, there will be a parliamentary election. It'll be the first important election nationwide since the disputed presidential election in 2009.

And it's unclear really what this is for. The authorities, the clerical authorities have already crossed off the ballot hundreds of more - let's say more reformist-oriented candidates. The formal opposition is not taking part because they felt that the 2009 presidential election was stolen from them, and they won't take part.

Iranian leaders even on the conservative side have always boasted that Iran is a democracy and always put great store in elections, even if they didn't like the outcome of elections. I think now there'll be a lot of - there'll be a lot of attention paid to the turnout and whether the Iranian public is willing to go back to the polls given all that's happened since the presidential election in 2009.

And there is talk of extra-constitutional actions that could take place. It's not a far-fetched scenario, but at this point, there's no concrete signs that something like that is going to take place. It certainly looks like the parliamentary elections will come off.

And what's also interesting about them is they pit two conservative camps against one another, one supporting the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and one supporting President Ahmadinejad. And Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have had some really rough times in the last couple of years.

SHUSTER: Yeah, that's right. It's - this has been a constant theme in Iranian politics for all these years. And what's interesting is that in the last 10, there's been a kind of competition that's emerged among different political factions in Iran, focused on who might get the credit for improving relations with the United States.

The reformist side has, for quite some time now, been supportive of improving relations with the United States, but they were sidelined after the political turmoil that occurred in 2009 and 2010. More recently, President Ahmadinejad has emerged as someone who has suggested that Iran would benefit from an improvement in relations with the United States, but he's been blocked by the supreme leader's camp.

And it's been argued, I think effectively, that the supreme leader needs the notion of an enemy in the United States in order to maintain his hold on power in Iran, that if the United States were to be removed as the so-called Great Satan, that might remove one of the bulwarks of the Islamic revolution in Iran and raise questions about the future.

On the Shiite crescent, I think it - we heard a great deal of fear expressed about a growing Shiite crescent after the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the coming to power in Baghdad of a Shiite-led government that had friends in Tehran.

Things are so unpredictable in the Middle East, and now with more than a year of the Arab spring and this ongoing, very bloody confrontation in Syria, it looks less and less like Iran can maintain any kind of a regional control or even influence in politics, whether it seeks to ally with the Shiite in Baghdad or the Hezbollah in southern Lebanon or the Shiite protestors in Bahrain.

Iran seems set to lose its only real ally in the Arab world, the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, and it seems that the Iranian leadership is floundering as far as making the claim that it continues to be the - to lead the Muslim world in the Middle East.

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JOHN: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I was interested in knowing, is there any evidence at all that Iran wants or intends to have a program for nuclear weapons?

SHUSTER: That's - that sounds like a simple question to answer and it's not. It's a very complex question. And what's true is that Iran has been - has had a complex nuclear program - program of nuclear activities for more than 20 years. And it's fairly well known that before 2003, the Iranians actually had a full-pledged nuclear weapons program. It had started during the war with Iraq in the 1980s.

But after the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the discovery of components of this nuclear weapons program, the Iranians shut it down, and there's seems to be - the conclusion that the U.S. intelligence community came to and the International Atomic Energy Agency, that in 2003 it was shut down. The question - the questions risen since 2003 is to whether they've restarted components of this nuclear weapon program, and that's what the senior delegation from IAEA is trying to find out about in Tehran today and tomorrow. And they've been trying to find out answers to some of their tougher questions for quite a number of years.

So - and there was a recent report from the International Atomic Energy Agency back in November that said - that essentially said, we have a lot of questions because there's a lot of evidence that components that could only be understood to be for a nuclear weapon have been undertaken in Iran in recent years. But the IAEA and the U.S. intelligence community have stopped short of saying that Iran has restarted a full-pledge nuclear weapons program so that...

JOHN: Sorry for that being been undertaken.

SHUSTER: Well, there are some evidence that there are experiments that had involved elements of a nuclear weapon that - elements of a nuclear program that could only be applied for nuclear weapon. Like, for instance, the senior delegation wants to visit a place called Parchin, which is a military base not far from Tehran where there were explosives tests in the past, and there were some kind of an encasement where high explosives were used. The IAEA believes this has something to do with the design of a nuclear weapon. They want to go and they want to see this place, and they want to talk to engineers and scientists who are involved in this place. The Iranians won't let them - haven't let them in the past and are likely to resist allowing them to see this place right now. But there is evidence and there are questions about whether these involved experiments that could only be applied to nuclear weapon technology.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an Amer... by Erik Larson

Very interesting part of the book is when New York Jews, joined by American League of Labor, have a mock trial, and condemn Hitler.    Hitler and the Nazis do everything they can to stop the trial, and think FDR can order people not to do things.

Later in the same chapter, everyone wants FDR to openly, instead of the heavy diplomatic efforts, condemn Germany's treatment of Jews.    They are too worried though, how it will look when Hitler points out that in America we were lynching blacks and treating them very poorly.    Some Jewish groups also worry that to anger Hitler, would only increase his attacks on Jews, ( this was in 1934).     America was also worried about Germany reneging on big debts they owed us.

Arab Spring Failure or Success

Fareed

Netanyahu seems to endorse the Syrian regime's approach to political protest. During the uprising in Egypt, he wanted the U.S. to stubbornly cling to Hosni Mubarak--who had cooperated with Israel on mutual security issues--as millions of Egyptians gathered in public squares across the country to demand democracy. But leaving that aside, the evidence for Netanyahu's pessimism now is that parties advocating an Islamic approach to politics have won pluralities in Egypt's first post-Mubarak elections. None of these parties have abrogated civil liberties or persecuted minorities or limited women's rights. Each party has promised to abide by constitutional processes. This may all be a ruse, and they may prove less liberal over time--some surely will--but there is little current evidence from which to draw the sweeping conclusions that Netanyahu did.

In fact, the growth of democracy in the Middle East is under substantial threat, but not from Islamic democrats. The threat arises from the lingering authoritarian impulse of those in power--from ruling political parties and from the military. Obsessed with political Islam, we are ignoring the real danger on the ground. 

Consider Egypt. While Netanyahu is fretting about Islamic parliamentarians, the Egyptian military has been busily consolidating its control. A few weeks ago, the government raided the offices of 10 civic organizations whose only mission is to promote democracy, the rule of law and civil rights. It accused a few of these groups, such as Freedom House and the International Republican Institute, of receiving funds from the U.S.

Egypt's military has used the traditional tools of authoritarian regimes to retain power--arrests, torture, military trials and scaremongering. In Iraq, six years after the country's first free elections, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is using more unusual methods to cement his grip on the country. He has ordered the arrests of leading politicians--including his own Vice President (who comes from another sect and political party)--centralized the army and intelligence services and inserted his own party, the Dawa, into most of the major organs of government. Many Iraqis believe that Maliki refused to cut a deal with Washington so that American troops would have to leave Iraq and leave him unconstrained.

The most complex case is Turkey, where the former head of the military, General Ilker Basbug--one of 60 officers accused of a conspiracy to topple the democratically elected government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan--was arrested last week. These arrests are cited as one more piece of evidence that Turkey is turning away from its secular roots and toward Islamic fundamentalism.

Prime Minister Erdogan speaks in blunt ways and is a populist. But he has done nothing--no changes in laws or practices--to warrant the charge that he is dismantling secularism. In fact, Erdogan's government has passed more economic and political reforms than any other Turkish government in history. It has made unprecedented concessions to Turkey's Kurdish minority. In its quest to secure European Union membership for Turkey, Erdogan's AK Party has passed hundreds of pieces of legislation over the past several decades to make Turkey's political system conform to the guidelines set out by the Brussels bureaucrats. And by the way, the Turkish military has, over the years, planned and executed four coups against elected governments, so it is not inconceivable that it had been planning a fifth.

If there is a worry regarding Turkey, it is not about political Islam but about the autocratic tendencies of a wildly popular politician. Turkey has a highly authoritarian legal system, a legacy of its military era. (A human rights group notes that about half the nation's prisoners have never been charged with crimes.) And Erdogan, having won his third thumping electoral victory, has used this system to harass opponents, including politicians, journalists and generals.

In other words, the danger in the Middle East is not that Islam corrupts but that power corrupts. A more open and democratic system is no panacea, but it will begin to create a more normal, modern politics for the region, one that will allow for populism and demagoguery but also provide greater accountability, transfers of power and media oversight. And that will move the Middle East forward, not back. 

Assassinating American Citizens?

http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2011/03/anwar_al_awlakis_ema.php

CONAN: This is an editorial from The Daily Beast by Richard Miniter: For the first time since the days of Abraham Lincoln, an American president has ordered the killing of a U.S. citizen, far from any battlefield or courtroom. And like Abraham Lincoln, Obama has saved the Constitution and the country by defending it against a nihilistic and narrow reading of the Constitution that would prevent the country from protecting itself.

Awlaki was an imminent threat to the lives of Americans and our allies. Based on Awlaki's links to two 9/11 hijackers, to the leadership of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and to jihad in America, there's no doubt he posed a continuing and urgent threat. As evidence accumulated of Awlaki's links to Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, and Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab, the so-called underpants bomber, who planned to down a Detroit-based jet on Christmas day, and to the Times Square bomber, these developments only confirmed Obama's view that Awlaki was a clear and present danger.

The government of Yemen was not going to arrest him. And unlike bin Laden - excuse me, just a turning a page here. Unlike bin Laden, he moved constantly, meaning the Special Forces team would be going into a location they knew little about. And while Awlaki's protectors were numerous, hardened and well-trained, these those two factors increased the odds of a deadly failure, nor was there any reliable way to lure Awlaki to a place where he might easily be captured. The president was left with two hard options: ignore Awlaki or kill him in a way that minimizes civilian and American casualties.

http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_Rhetoric%20and%20Reality_Lynch.pdf

Abroad and at home,

the U.S. goal must be to dispel al Qaeda’s narrative

that the United States is at war with Islam and

to prevent extremist voices from again hijacking

America’s relationship with the Muslim world.

The spate of recent terrorist incidents should not

lead the United States to jettison what has been

working and bring back “Global War on Terror”

rhetoric and practice that only serves to strengthen

al Qaeda’s hand. The Obama administration is on

the right track, but much remains to be done to

translate strategic commitments into operational

practice and bureaucratic reality.

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The

National Security Strategy rightly warns of the need

to "resist fear and overreaction" in the face of terrorist

attacks and provocations.    The administration

should resist, and push back hard against, public

demands to respond to domestic threats by taking

actions that would alienate American Muslims and

threaten civil liberties; an example would be Senator

Joseph Lieberman’s suggested legislation to strip

suspected terrorists of their American citizenship.110

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As terrorism analyst Evan Kohlmann puts it: “It

is increasingly second- and third-tier extremist social

networking forums managed by unaffiliated fringe

activists – many of them offering dedicated Englishlanguage

chat rooms – that appear to play pivotal roles

in the indoctrination and radicalization of some of

today's most notorious aspiring terrorists."107 The role

of English-speaking Internet jihadists such as Anwar

al-Awlaki feeds the fears that domestic radicalization is

a coherent new al Qaeda strategy to flood the American

homeland with a variety of plots from diverse individuals.

108 Maj. Nidal Hassan, the Ft. Hood shooter, was

connected to Awlaki, with evidence of considerable

contact over the Internet. A generation is emerging

of influential English-language recruiters for jihadist

groups, such as Awlaki from AQAP, Adam Gadahn for

AQC and Omar Hammami for Shabaab. This evolution

of the jihadist movement online should be carefully

monitored, though its significance should not be

exaggerated.

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There are some areas where al Qaeda has not yet

been able to establish a presence where one might

be expected, including Palestine, Syria, Lebanon,

several of the small Gulf states, Egypt, Turkey, Iran

and much of Southeast Asia. Its inability to gain a

foothold might be explained by the strength and

counterterrorism efforts of those states, by the

presence of a strong competing Islamist movement

or by a tacit or explicit modus vivendi. Al

Qaeda has a long-standing desire for a presence

in the Palestinian arena, for instance, but thus far

Hamas has prevented al Qaeda-like salafi-jihadist

organizations from establishing themselves in

areas under its control. Al Qaeda and salafi-jihadist

figures have engaged in an escalating war of words

with the Palestinian Islamist movement, slamming

Hamas for restraining attacks against Israel

and participating in democratic elections under

Israeli occupation. The weakening of Hamas – or

its “taming” through acceptance of a two-state

solution and pragmatic governance – may actually

improve al Qaeda's chances of obtaining its muchdesired

foothold in Gaza.98

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89 An American-backed Ethiopian

military campaign ousted the relatively moderate

Islamist Transitional Federal Government in 2007,

creating renewed chaos that opened the door to

the more radical al-Shabab movement. Although

al-Shabab is not officially affiliated with al Qaeda, it

reportedly has received training and support from

them.90

What Does the NDAA really do?

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BEN WITTES

http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/12/ndaa-faq-a-guide-for-the-perplexed/

some highlights

Section 1022 purports not merely to authorize but to require military custody for a subset of those who are subject to detention under Section 1021. In particular, it requires that the military hold “a covered person” pending disposition under the law of war if that person is “a member of, or part of, al-Qaeda or an associated force that acts in coordination with or pursuant to the direction of al-Qaeda” and is participating in an attack against the United States or its coalition partners. The president is allowed to waive this requirement for national security reasons. The provision exempts U.S. citizens entirely, and it applies to lawful permanent resident aliens for conduct within the United States to whatever extent the Constitution permits. It requires the administration to promulgate procedures to make sure its requirements do not interfere with basic law enforcement functions in counterterrorism cases. And it insists that “Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect the existing criminal enforcement and national security authorities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or any other domestic law enforcement agency with regard to a covered person, regardless whether such covered person is held in military custody.”

Does the NDAA expand the government’s detention authority?

Nope. Under current law, the Obama administration claims the authority to detain:

persons that the President determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, and persons who harbored those responsible for those attacks. The President also has the authority to detain persons who were part of, or substantially supported, Taliban or al-Qaida forces or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act, or has directly supported hostilities, in aid of such enemy armed forces.

They are almost verbatim the same. The NDAA is really a codification in statute of the existing authority the administration claims. It puts Congress’s stamp of approval behind that claim for the first time, and that’s no small thing. But it does not–notwithstanding the widespread belief to the contrary–expand it. Nobody who is not subject to detention today will become so when the NDAA goes into effect.

Does the NDAA authorize the indefinite detention of citizens?

No, though it does not foreclose the possibility either. Congress ultimately included language in the NDAA expressly designed to leave this question untouched–that is, governed by pre-existing law, which as we explain below is unsettled on this question.

Does it mandate military detention of terrorist suspects?

Not really, though both supporters and critics seem quite sure that it does.

Is there anything in the NDAA about which human rights groups and civil libertarians ought to be pleased?

Yes, actually, there is.  Section 1024 of the bill, as we’ve noted, requires that people subject to long-term military detention in circumstances not already subject to habeas corpus review–think the Detention Facility in Parwan, Afghanistan–henceforth shall have the right to a military lawyer and a proceeding before a military judge in order to contest the government’s factual basis for believing them to be subject to detention.  This is an extraordinary and novel development.  Detainees in Afghanistan currently have access to the Detainee Review Board process, which as described in this article already provide a relatively robust screening mechanism, particularly compared to years past.  The DRB process does not include lawyers and judges, however, and human rights advocacy groups have criticized them on this ground.  Requiring lawyers and judges to staff out the screening process is a pretty remarkable shift in the direction of accomodating those concerns.

What’s more, while human rights groups have decried the codification of detention authority, the codification does preclude certain interpretations of the AUMF that human rights groups hated. For example, while the difference between the D.C. Circuit’s embrace of the “purposefully and materially support” standard and the administration’s language seems pretty slight, the D.C. Circuit language did–which the NDAA now jettisons–keep critics up at night. And the D.C. Circuit famously flirted in one case with the notion that international law does not inform or limit detention authority under the AUMF–a position that the explicit references to the “law of war” in the NDAA seems to reject.

In short, the bill is a mixed bag–almost no matter what vantage point one examines it from.

Quote of the Day

aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem

"Remember to keep a clear head in difficult times."

Failure of Radical Islam

The Return of the Old Middle East

How to Win at Balance-of-Power Politics
F. Gregory Gause III
March 12, 2009

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/64844/f-gregory-gause-iii/the-return-of-the-old-middle-east

After the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini hoped that the Islamic Revolution would spread beyond Iran's borders. He had some luck in Lebanon -- where Iran created Hezbollah after the Israeli invasion of 1982 -- and elsewhere. But Khomeini's revolution had limited appeal, and ultimately, no Arab government fell to a sister revolution. Saddam, who played an important role in checking Iran's power, learned a similar lesson during the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. He combined Arab nationalism with Islamism to try to create instability in Arab states that had joined the coalition against him. He failed.

Gitmo and Nuremberg

Talk of the Nation  [ Excerpts]

In Justice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11, and the Trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, William Shawcross

http://www.wbur.org/npr/145046986/nuremberg-tribunals-and-justice-and-the-enemy

"Nonetheless, there were restrictions on ... those defendants' rights. And in all the debate about Guantanamo and military justice in the United States today, I think it's worth making the point that any Nazi in the dark at Nuremberg who was suddenly transported by time machine to Guantanamo would be astonished at the privileges and the access to human rights lawyers and the amazing efforts that were made on his behalf by ... the defense lawyers in Guantanamo. None of that existed in Nuremberg.

"It was a fair trial, but the defense lawyers were all Nazi lawyers who were seconded by the occupying authorities, the British and the Americans and the Russians and the French. But the law has gone a long ways since then. And the Guantanamo defendants, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the others, will have much, much more chance of their day in court than the Nazis did."

 In the case of these trials in Guantanamo, I think the important thing to stress, again, is that anyone convicted in Guantanamo in a military tribunal, where, you're absolutely right, the defense lawyers and the judges are military men, anyone convicted there will still have the right of appeal through the federal criminal civil process. So I think that is a great safeguard.
Also, I think one should point out that in all the military trials that have taken place so far since 9/11, the defense lawyers assigned to the terrorists on trial, or the alleged terrorists on trial, have all been extremely diligent on behalf of their clients. They have not been craven. They have not been saying, I won't get promoted if I do my job properly.
On the contrary, the Supreme Court judgments that were reached against the government in the middle part of the last decade after 9/11, were all forced - taken all the way to the court, if you like, by military defense lawyers.

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"The important thing about the military courts now is that anyone convicted in a military court in Guantanamo will have the right of appeal right up to the Supreme Court. So he has basically the same rights of appeal as anyone convicted in a federal court. So that, I think, is a vastly important safeguard. In Nuremberg, there were no rights of appeal whatsoever. The judgment of the tribunal was final.

"One should point out that in Nuremberg, of the 22 people who were on trial, I think it was 14 were sentenced to death, six or seven were given long imprisonments, and two or three were released. So justice, I think, was done fairly in Nuremberg, and I'm sure it'll be done here the same.

And in all the debate about Guantanamo and military justice in the United States today, I think it's worth making the point that any Nazi in the dark at Nuremberg who was suddenly transported by time machine to Guantanamo would be astonished at the privileges and the access to human rights lawyers and the amazing efforts that were made on his behalf by the military defendants – the defense lawyers in Guantanamo. None of that existed in Nuremberg.

And the chief American prosecutor - Robert Jackson's successor, if you like - is a remarkable American officer, General Mark Martins, who until recently has been administering the law of - the rule of law campaign in Afghanistan, trying to bring law through Afghan judges and prosecutors and defenders to Afghanistan – to villages in Afghanistan throughout the area controlled by the United States.
And he's a very fine man. And he's now been appointed chief prosecutor, as I say, direct successor to Justice Robert Jackson. It's a remarkable position to be in.
And I heard, actually, a lecture he gave in New York last week - last night - in which he spoke very eloquently to the New York Bar Association about the way in which justice will be done and be seen to be done in Guantanamo. And I think that he's a very fine prosecutor and that one can have confidence that in his hands the prosecutions will be carried out both robustly and judiciously and fairly.

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"Justice delayed is often said to be justice denied. And it has been a very long time, too long a time ... And part of it is because of the way in which the first military courts set up by the Bush administration were overturned by the Supreme Court in the famous case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ...

"And then when Obama came into office, he originally said we will have no military commissions, no military trials whatsoever. And ... throughout his time as senator and ... campaigning for the presidency, he had condemned much of the Bush administration's policies during the war on terror, including the use of military tribunals.

"Now, however, [Obama] has come to the same position as President Bush on most of these issues and [has been] forced to accept the reality of military commissions in some cases — not in all. Most of the terrorist cases will probably still be carried out in federal courts, but there will be some cases, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, which the administration has decided — rightly, I think — should be conducted in military commissions."

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SHAWCROSS: Well, that's not quite correct. What happened, there was a trial of a man called Ghailani who was implicated in the terrible bombings - the al-Qaida bombings of U.S. embassies in east Africa in 1998. And his trial took place last year in Manhattan. And he had been harshly interrogated.
And the judge - Judge Kaplan - in the case, said all the fruits of the poisonous tree - by which he meant the information that had come out as a result of his harsh interrogation - will not allowed in this case. And it was not allowed.
And nonetheless, he was, even in a federal court, convicted. In the case of - he wasn't convicted of mass murder, as he should've been, I believe, but he was convicted of destroying government buildings, which wasn't very satisfactory, has to be said, to the families of the victims.
Nonetheless, it was a conviction and the judge gave him the maximum sentence, quite rightly, as a result of it. in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, General Martins has made clear that he was, as we all know, he was subjected to enhanced interrogation...


SHAWCROSS: I think that the civilian courts have shown themselves to be able to deal with most of these cases now. And it has been difficult. There's - one of the cases that I quoted just now, Gailani, it was nearly lost. That government's case was nearly lost because one recalcitrant juror held out. He was called, you know, the famous phrase from movies and everything else, of a rogue juror. And one juror on that - in that jury wanted to find him, Gailani, not guilty on every charge.
And in the end, the compromise was that he was not - he was found not guilty of murdering several hundred people - mostly Africans it has to be said, not American citizens - who were killed in the bomb blasts in Kenya and Tanzania, but found guilty only of blowing up government - damaging government buildings, which is a bit of an absurd situation. And I think in the military court, he probably - though one doesn't know this - had been found guilty of the real crime that he was involved in, which was mass murder.

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COLIN: Good morning. My concern with the commissions, no matter who the judges are, is that they are still judges, particularly military judges, who are career officers, whose incentives probably are not going to be inclined towards a finding of innocence or not guilty.
This is a problem with legitimacy that seems to be the same problem that the British government had with prosecuting IRA terrorists in the 1980s, that the suspects did not have the right to a jury trial. Are we really going to have a perception of legitimacy to the whole proceedings if detainees do not have the same right to a jury trial that U.S. citizens enjoy?
CONAN: In Northern Ireland, Williams Shawcross, the concern was that juries would be intimidated by the Irish Republican Army, among others, and thus the special courts that were set up there. But they did, indeed, come in for considerable criticism.
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SHAWCROSS:  You're absolutely right to bring it up, because these eight Nazi saboteurs, all of whom who'd lived in the United States in the 1930s and then gone back to Germany. And two of them were American citizens. They were landed by submarine on the coast of Long Island and Florida in 1942, and they were rounded up pretty quickly. Two of them actually surrendered and gave information on the others. But Roosevelt was absolutely furious and demanded a military commission and basically demanded execution.
He said to his attorney general, Francis Biddle, he said I want one thing clearly understood, Francis. I won't give them up. I won't hand them over to any U.S. marshal aimed with a writ of habeas corpus. Understand?
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SHAWCROSS: Well, that's a difficult question. I'm not a great admirer of Noam Chomsky. I think his anti-Americanism is frankly grotesque. I have a very different view. I think the United States, despite as you say the support that we give you and we, the British, and all of Western Europe and all of the whole democratic world give to regimes like the Saudi regime because we are dependent upon oil, I, nonetheless, I think the United States has done immense good in the world in the last century.
Indeed, in 1945, you could say that the U.S. Army was the greatest human rights organization that the world had ever seen. It did release millions of people from tyranny and slavery. And I think that the U.S. Army continues to do that, and millions of people all over the world since 1945 have been freed by the U.S. Army and the blood and treasure spilt by Americans. And I think it's a tribute, which is not adequately and often enough pay to the United States.
It's very fashionable in the rest of the world to criticize America for its mistakes, which, of course, have been made and there were mistakes made following 9/11. But - there's no question about that. But there is no greater guarantee of peace and progress in the world than the United States, in my view.

NDAA Obama and Anthony Romero

President Obama's action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Needless to say, Romero is a fool.






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The following are some notes I highlighted from an article at opinionjuris

The Bad

Funds for Gitmo to close are gone.

Even so, enactment of section 1022, ambiguous and potentially toothless though it may be, is not without costs. 


The Good


It is also worth emphasizing, however, that the Obama Administration, civil liberties and human rights organizations, and some members of Congress worked tirelessly and quite effectively to improve the final bill dramatically from the versions the Senate and (especially) the House had earlier passed. Because of those efforts, Subtitle D of the NDAA is not nearly as problematic as many critics have suggested.  Indeed, the final bill actually contains a handful of provisions that improve upon current law, and one—which will be our focus here—that helps to resolve an important interpretive debate about whether the Executive’s detention authority under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) should be informed and limited by the laws of war.


What is more, those robust efforts to improve the legislation resulted in several provisions that will be distinct improvements vis-a-vis the status quo.
     - being able to send Gitmo people home

The king of the mountains

The king of the mountains, a photo by Ellinas_n* on Flickr.

Keystone XL

"Rerouting the pipeline "represents a very substantial step forward," said Nebraska Farmers Union president John Hansen. "[But] from our standpoint, where we represent all landowners, we've sort of traded one set of landowners for another."


http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20111121/nebraska-legislature-keystone-xl-pipeline-bills-sandhills-transcanada-speaker-flood

Failing American Schools?

A few things I noted from the web.

Prof. RAVITCH: Actually, it wasn't popular at all. It had a very small box office. It was immensely popular amongst very, very wealthy Wall Street hedge fund managers and the elites of this country. The elites tried to whip it up. NBC gave it a week of programming. Oprah gave it two shows. The president invited the children in the film to the White House. But all this PR - which, by the way, was underwritten by the Gates Foundation - was not enough to make it popular at the box office.

 The public schools that do terribly are the schools where there is high poverty.

 And we have to address not just the schools, which are - I am totally opposed to the status quo. The status quo was the one that was created 10 years ago by the No Child Left Behind legislation, and this has turned schools into testing factories. And teachers know this is wrong; educators know it's wrong.

Prof. RAVITCH:  First of all, the tests are not designed to be measures of teacher quality. They are measures of whether students have learned. Sometimes, that's the fault of the teacher, and sometimes it's the fault of the student, and sometimes, it's the - you can say it's because the student is homeless, the student is hungry, the student has bad eyesight. I mean, there are all kinds of issues that get involved in how students perform on standardized tests.

It's also the case that the standardized tests are really very bad measures. And I know that Secretary Duncan's put out a lot of - like $350 million to say we need better tests. But in the meanwhile, we're using the same, crummy test, and we're using them to close schools. There are schools being closed across America based on test scores.

What we should be doing is helping those schools and making them better because public schools are not - they're not shopping malls. They're not shoe stores. They're public facilities. And many of them have long and wonderful histories, and we should do everything possible to make our public schools the best they can be.

There's - we have 20 percent and more of our children living in poverty, which is, frankly, in the modern world, is a disgrace. The film "Waiting for Superman" compared the U.S. to Finland, which is a great comparison. Finland does no standardized testing at all of its students. They just rely on having the best possible teachers and pay them well, and give them respect. But they don't have poverty. The kids in Finland are -less than 3 percent of them are in poverty.

Prof. RAVITCH: We really don't have a lot of bad teachers. I think that everybody forgets that it's not the job of the union to hire teachers or to evaluate teachers or to remove teachers. It's their job to make sure that teachers have due-process rights - that when somebody says they're a bad teacher, that they're entitled to have a hearing. That only seems fair. And if they're bad teachers, then the people who want to get rid of them have to produce the documentation.

Lots of people have been fired. And this is true in right-to-work states. They've been fired because somebody doesn't like them. The person who's the principal just doesn't just like them. If we had wonderful, experienced people as principals, we would not have any bad teachers at all because they would be counseled out.

In fact, I would suggest that what your listener needs to know is that 50 percent of the people who enter teaching leave within five years. We have actually something like a revolving door in teaching because teachers don't get the respect; they don't get the pay; and they don't get the working conditions that make it feel like a good profession.

What's preventing innovation are two things: One is the No Child Left Behind legislation, which says you will be judged by test scores and if your scores don't go up every year, you may have your school penalized and eventually, your school may be closed; all the teachers may be fired; the principal may be fired. And this is causing school districts and teachers to cut the amount of time available for the arts and science and history and geography - everything except standardized testing and reading and math. What we - what I believe firmly is that any school that does this is cutting away good education.

KELLY: So how should we measure teacher performance?

Prof. RAVITCH: You know what? Can I tell you, a good school is a school that has a balanced curriculum, where the teachers are dedicated, where there's strong leadership, where there's an experienced person who's - an experienced teacher who's the principal, who can go into the classroom and give the teachers help if they need it, and make sure that all of the teachers are good teachers, and that they have the support and mentoring that they need to get better.

And all the children have access to the arts and history and science, and everything that we would want in a great school. And the measurement is totally unimportant. I think the measurement is what's driving education into the gutter these days.

High-stakes testing warps everything. It warps - it even warps the test, because we now have districts that are so focused on the testing that they're not teaching children anything other than how to take tests. And we're also seeing cheating.

Chater chain in california, admitted that they were giving kids the answers to the test, and they just renewed their charter-despite the fat that they had been systematically cheating.

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http://www.schoolsmatter.info/

American students from well-funded schools who come from middle-class families outscore students in nearly all other countries on international tests. 

Our average scores are not spectacular because the US has the highest percentage of children in poverty of all industrialized countries (over 20%; in contrast, high-scoring Finland has less than 4%).

 Our first step should be to protect children from the damaging effects of poverty: better nutrition (Susan Ohanian suggests the motto "No Child Left Unfed"), excellent health care for all children, and universal access to reading material. The best teaching in the world is useless when students are hungry, sick, and have little or nothing to read.

Stephen Krashen

 Just a few countries, not so in reading and science, strong evidence for effect of poverty, other factors, percentage or absolute numbers?

A look at the full report, available at the Education Next website, suggests that these researchers looked hard to find evidence of a STEM crisis, and kept looking until they found a statistic that seemed to show it.

The math gap is caused by just a few very high-scoring countries– Taiwan with 28%, Hong Kong with 24% and Korea with 23% of students at the advanced level. Without these countries, US children with at least one parent with a college education do pretty well. 

Our highest scoring state, Massachusetts, has 17% of its students at the advanced level, making it 5^th in the world, not counting the three exceptionally high scorers.

Taiwan, first in math, is near the bottom of all countries in percent of students scoring in the top group in reading, and loses to all states in the US except Mississippi, and this is based on ALL American students in a state, not just those with a college-educated parent. Massachusetts would rank fourth in the world, nearly tying for third. And other states would rank highly too, again, counting ALL students.

Fifteen US states (again, all students) have a higher percentage of top science students than Korea (third in math) does.

The authors did not discuss studies that considered social class and poverty levels, and concluded that American children attending low poverty schools score very well. Bracey (2009) concluded that on the PIRLS reading test, American children attending low poverty schools (25% or less) outscored the top scoring country, Sweden. Bracey also pointed out that "if the students in schools with 24-49.9% poverty constituted a nation, it would rank fourth among the 35 participating nations" (p. 155). Payne and Biddle (1999) reported that when we consider only middle-class children who attend well-funded schools, our math scores are near the top of the world.

Tienken (2010) cites studies showing that a myriad of additional factors operate that artificially depress American students' scores on international tests, including the fact that the US tests nearly all students. 

Some other countries are selective – on TIMSS, this includes Russia (only native speakers of Russian), Israel (only native speakers of Hebrew), Switzerland (only highest performing regions, 16/26 cantons), Spain (excluded Cataluna), and Italy (excluded high-poverty regions). I don't know if this is true of PISA.

Finally, absolute numbers are more relevant than percentages. 

Tienken points out that the US had 25% of world's top science achievers on PISA, 2009. China had one percent.

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American students are doing well in science and math. American children in low-poverty schools outscore students in nearly all other countries on international science/math tests. Overall scores are unspectacular because over 20% of our children live in poverty, the highest percentage among all industrialized countries.

The US produces more top science students than other countries: On the 2006 PISA math and science tests, 60,000 American students scored in the top category, compared to 34,000 Japanese students. 

American students are already taking lots of math and science, more than the economy needs: For example, in 2007, 30% of college-bound high-school seniors had taken calculus, but only 5% of new openings require a math/science background.

There is no shortage of science/technology experts in the US: There are three qualified applications for each science/tech opening. 

Also, the US contributed 63% of the top 1% most-cited science/tech publications in 2004 and according to the World Economic Forum the US ranks second out of 133 countries in "quality of scientific research institutions."

Stephen Krashen

And my teachers union president has gone even to the governor and suggested that

if charter schools are truly innovative, they should be a draft and not a cream of the crop

selection.

If teachers unions were to be

blamed for failing schools, then we would assume that schools in less unionized states

would outperform schools in more densely unionized states. So you'd assume that places

like Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, who have relatively few unionized teachers would

do much, much better. But that's not the case. The states with the most densely

unionized teachers, Massachusetts, New York, Maryland; they do the best. And the

countries with the most densely unionized populations: Finland, Japan, they do the best.

So what do we learn from that? What we know is that there are problems like Mr.

Rosenkranz said. There are problems we have to solve. One of which is poverty. States

like Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi; they have and had been plagued by tremendous

poverty. We have to compete with poverty. That's what public education is and that is

what the search we have for, that's what our search is, to find what works. So you felt, I

hope tonight we can move from scapegoating to solutions, to problem solving. And I

would argue to all of you that having a strong union, someone in an entity that will look

at what it's done right and what it's done wrong, and solve things and change things, is the

way to go. So what works? What can we learn from places like Maryland,

Massachusetts, New York State, Finland, and Japan? This is what we can learn. This is

what works. What works in places where we don't as Terry Moe will probably argue,

where we don't have niche markets, where we can't marketize our schools, where we

Randi Weingarten:

Well, given that the United Federation of Teachers under my watch, started two charter

schools in Eastern York, it’s totally and completely untrue. What we want to do is we

want charters to be held to the same accountability standards including the ones that we

started, as any other school and what the evidence has been in New York, like the

evidence around the country, is that charter schools instead of, as Diane Ravitch said,

should take more of the most at-risk kids are actually taking fewer special needs kids and

fewer kids with limited English proficiency. So we’ve open to, we think charters could

be a great incubator for instructional practice and could be a great incubator for labor

relations practice. But Terry, I don’t want New York to be as much as an evidentiary

zone as Washington D.C. seems to be, which means let’s look at the Credo story which

were done with a pro-charter advocate. What they said was, where 17 percent of the

charters are better than public schools, 34 percent are worse, and the rest are the same.

The idea is to actually find what works, make it sustainable and make it replicable.

That’s what we’re trying to do and that’s what I’m trying to do.

Randi Weingarten:

What we wanted to do, what we wanted to do was actually the New York City and State

Union were in favor of lifting the cap and in favor of creating a level playing field to

make sure that all kids could equally get into all schools. And if you recall, New York

State became one of the finalists for Race to the Top so obviously whatever happened in

the state legislature didn’t disqualify us from Race to the Top. The bottom line is, we

need schools -- all schools: charter, public, private to be places where parents want to

send their kids and where educators want to work. That’s the bottom line. How do we

help all kids, not just some kids, but all kids.