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October 31, 2007
Addition By Subtraction
America will be better for her having stopped serving.
Posted by shertaugh at 10:09 AM
October 30, 2007
Andrew Sullivan's Crusade Against HRC
One reason is because I've come to depend on a regular post in which Mr. Sullivan finds some reason to trash Hillary Clinton. It's getting to the point, from all appearances, that Mr. Sullivan is going bonkers over the possibility that she may be the next Defender of the United States. [George Bush has made the constitutional term "President of the United States" in Art. II, Sec. 1 so trite . . . the way he's made the principle that we live under the rule of law so pre-21st century.]
Take Mr. Sullivan's post today called "Clinton and Mukasey". He complains about HRC's "crapola" in refusing, through a spokesman, to say that she'll oppose Mukasey's nomination for Attorney General unless he states clearly he opposes torture by toca (waterboarding).
I'm not saying Mr. Sullivan, if he wasn't so obsessed with Clinton, wouldn't have a point. He would. I agree that she should vote against Mukasey on this ground and because he has advocated a theory of executive power that, as Mr. Sullivan has said in other posts, promotes a presidential protectorate instead of what our Constitution provides.
What I'm saying is that his relentless attention to all things *She-Who-Is-Inevitable*, as Mr. Sullivan likes to call her, makes me wonder just exactly how he would have spoken of President Eisenhower's handling of the Communist Question in America -- particularly red-baiter supreme, Senator Joe McCarthy.
Eisenhower, as I understand history, remained publicly silent about McCarthy's activities -- even when he was attacking the Army. About all Eisenhower ever said came in response to McCarthy's attacks on Edward R. Murrow. Eisenhower, when asked about the attacks, said something like, "I consider Mr. Murrow a friend." But Eisenhower, it is said, worked out of the public's view to defang McCarthy.
I get the clear impression that Eisenhower's tack would not have been good enough for Mr. Sullivan. He would have written that Eisenhower was a no-good, triangulating, self-centered, it's-all-about-me politician lacking the most basic moral compass on the biggest issue of our time.
Eisenhower's good deeds during, as he called it, America's Crusade in Europe notwithstanding.
Posted by shertaugh at 3:16 PM
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 - Any Lessons Here?
In Ch. 3, § 1288 of his Commentaries on the Constitution, Justice Joseph Story described the Alien laws this way:
One (the Alien act) authorized the president to order out of the country such aliens, as he should deem dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States; or should have reasonable grounds to suspect to be concerned in any treasonable, or secret machinations against the government of the United States, under severe penalties for disobedience.
The Alien law -- passed by Congress and signed by the president -- granted what can be fairly said to be robust means for the executive branch to defend the United States against non-citizens suspected of threatening America's safety. Today, these are precisely the kind of powers the Bush administration claims to be *inherent* in Art. II's "defending" clause (otherwise known as the "commander-in-chief clause) and beyond regulation by Congress.
Here is how Justice Story, in 1833, described in Ch. 3, § 1288 of his Commentaries the arguments of those advocating the constitutionality of the Alien laws:
The ground of the advocates, in favour of these laws, was, that they resulted from the right and duty in the government of self-preservation, and the like duty and protection of its functionaries in the proper discharge of their official duties.
Or you might say, "The Constitution is not a suicide pact, and the president is duty-bound to defend the citizens of this country by whatever means he deems necessary."
On the flip side, Justice Story summarized the counter-arguments this way:
The Alien act was denounced, as exercising a power not delegated by the constitution; as uniting legislative and judicial functions, with that of the executive; and by this Union as subverting the general principles of free government, and the particular organization and positive provisions of the constitution
The Alien Enemies Act survived. Its current form is codified in the U.S. Code at 50 U.S.C. §§ 21-24. The Act is limited to aliens from countries at war with the United States. And a good deal of due process and judicial oversight is involved, at least as compared to unlawful enemy combatants.
So in 1798, we had a Congress and president who thought these laws constitutional and opponents who did not. Both groups were men who either helped frame the constitution or were certainly aware of the arguments for and against.
It seems to me that the Act's opponents, more knowledgeable than we about the original meaning of Art. II of the Constitution, would certainly have opposed Adam's unilateral assertion of congressionally unauthorized power to do what the Act otherwise allowed. It seems less clear, however, whether Adams himself, or the federalist Congress in 1798, would have taken that view.
What we do know, at least, on the subject of enemy aliens -- with the Constitution less than 10 years old -- is that the Congress found it *necessary and proper* to pass laws in order to authorize the president to act. And Adams made no claim of inherent executive power in response.
Posted by shertaugh at 12:01 PM
October 26, 2007
Waterboarding the Jews -- No Problem for Rudy?
During the trials of the Spanish Inquisition, waterboarding -- or toca -- was one of three key methods of wringing the truth from the defendants. Typically, those defendants were those suspected of Judaism and Protestantism.
So, my question to Rudy -- and the GOP -- is this: Was it okay to waterboard the Jews to secure their confession during the Inquisition? With confession in hand, of course, the Inquisition -- approved by the Pope (does that make it okay?) -- would pronounce sentence . . . such as burning at the stake, for example.
Want to know the kind of people who ran the Inquisition? Oh, Rudy . . .
Posted by shertaugh at 4:49 PM
October 25, 2007
Are the Indy's Endorsements Heartless or Worthless? It's One or the Other.
While his advocacy for gifted children is admirable, as their needs shouldn't be overlooked, when voting, he hasn't always kept all children in mind. His rigorous job as a physician scientist at Durham's veterans' hospital also has prevented him from attending many forums and activities beyond his basic board duties.It is the second of these reasons I'd like to call your attention to. (The comments of Tracy Burger and "edosan" on the Indy endorsement page refute the first of the reasons.)
In February of 2006, midway through Mike's first term on the Board, his wife and daughter were run over by a car while selling Girl Scout cookies outside a grocery store. Both -- especially Mike's wife -- sustained very serious injuries that ended up requiring lengthy convalescence and therapy. Most people would have resigned from the School Board in such a situation. Mike hung in there and honored his commitment to the district's children.
The Indy now faults Mike for missing some forums and events outside his regular school board duties. This raises two possibilities: One is that the Independent Weekly is displaying an Ann-Coulter-esque level of heartlessness, in which it owes Mike Kelley an apology. The other is that the newspaper somehow did not even know about the tragedy involving Mike's family -- something that everybody in town who follows the school board knew about. If that's the case, then the Indy has revealed that it did not do the most basic of research before issuing its school board endorsements, and should confess to voters that they're worthless and retract them before election day.
It's one or the other. Which will it be, Indy?
Posted by Eric at 7:41 AM
October 23, 2007
Revising McCarthyism?
Posted by Eric at 11:56 PM
Funding the Mid-East Wars -- "Let's Make A Deal"
At present, federal tax revenues do not cover federal outlays, which include armored vehicles and Blackwater "security" guards (whose employer gets 3 times the amount per man it costs to maintain a U.S. soldier -- another brilliant stroke of fiscal genius by this administration).
Okay, so how do Americans pay for the war? Credit, of course. International investors hold more than 50% of our outstanding Treasury bonds and notes. Japan is number 1, China is number 2.
My advice to the President. Forget Congress. Go straight to the Far East and cut a deal for direct financing with China and Japan. That would eliminate the Wall Street middle men and any other marginal borrowing costs.
Plus, it would let the President use not only his charm, but also the quantitative lessons on international finance learned during his Harvard MBA days.
Best of all, because the President would be side-stepping Congress in his all-encompassing role as Defender of the Homeland, the constitutional requirement that Congress appropriate money wouldn't even apply. Clearly, the fact that the Democrat[ ] Congress is trying to be involved in how the war is financed directly impacts how the President, as commander in chief, can wage the war. That interferes with the President's inherent Art. II power to decide all things war related.
It's a slam dunk all the way around.
Posted by shertaugh at 2:19 PM
October 21, 2007
Is Bill Maher's Audience A Greek Chorus?
It's right that a host would throw out any disruptive audience member regardless of the nature of the disruption. But I found one interesting moment in Maher's reaction that complicates things a bit. It was when Maher exasperatedly said, "'Audience' comes from the Latin word meaning 'to listen.'" A funny line at a tense moment, to be sure. It showed Maher's skill as an entertainer that he was able to be funny at a moment like that while still asserting control over his show.
But it did get me thinking about the audience in these sorts of shows -- shows that mix political opinion with comedy, like Jon Stewart's and Steven Colbert's. On these shows (unlike, say a sitcom with a live studio audience) the role of the audience is not merely "to listen." The audience is instead a character on these shows -- and the shows' directors and stars very much use them that way. These audiences audibly react -- often in quite predictable ways -- to the political opinions that the show and its guests present. The audiences boo and hiss jokes and opinions of which they disapprove (which are very often jokes and opinions advancing a perspective friendly to the policies of the current Administration) and react with glee and approval to the sauciest of the jokes and opinions with which they agree (which are very often jokes and opinions critical of the policies of the current Administration). Sometimes when the audience is being tough on a guest, the guest will either respond to the audience, or turn to the host and criticize it. At times the audience and the guest will get into a short back-and-forth.
My point here does not depend on the particular political alignment of the audience; it is instead that the audience on these shows really is a character -- not just a group of "listeners."
Does this fact make the audience a public forum, or make it appropriate for individual audience members to speak? No, it doesn't. But it does suggest that something more complex is going on on these shows than their hosts might have us believe -- something that places the disruptive 9/11 Truthers in at least a slightly different context than might first appear.
(cross-posted from Prawfsblawg)
Posted by Eric at 1:26 PM
October 18, 2007
"American Inquisition": A Portrait of a "Disloyal" American
Before talking a bit about what happened after the Joint Board fell apart, which I'll do later today, I thought it might be useful to make this abstract system a bit more real by illustrating its impact on a real person's life.
Consider the case of Harry Iba.
He was born to Japanese immigrant parents in Los Angeles in 1915. His family was Buddhist. He did not hold dual citizenship -- just American -- and he never traveled to Japan as a child. His one trip to Japan was at age 22 in 1937, when he went on a sightseeing trip there with a number of boys in a judo club.
Unlike many Japanese Americans, Harry Iba never attended a Japanese language after-school program, and described his spoken Japanese as only "fair." He graduated from high school in Los Angeles in 1934 and went to work in the family nursery business. By 1943, he was incarcerated at the Amache Relocation Center in eastern Colorado with his parents. One older brother was in the U.S. Army and another was in medical school in Boston.
Harry Iba subscribed to the Los Angeles Times, the Examiner, Reader's Digest, Time, Life, Sunset, and Popular Mechanics. He liked to play football, ping-pong, and outdoor sports. He collected camellia plants.
On the loyalty questionnaire he filled out at Amache, he answered "yes" to the two key questions: he was willing to "forswear allegiance to the Emperor of Japan" and to "serve in the U.S. armed forces on combat duty wherever ordered."
A number of white Americans, including his lawyer and a former landlord, wrote glowing letters of reference about his loyalty.
He reported on his loyalty questionnaire that he had no accounts in foreign banks, but a search of bank records revealed that his parents had set up three accounts -- one in his name, one jointly in his and his mother's names, and one as a trust account with his mother as trustee -- in amounts totaling about $3500.
At its meeting on August 19, 1943, over the dissent of the representative from the civilian War Relocation Authority, the Japanese American Joint Board made an adverse finding on Harry Iba's loyalty and recommended his indefinite detention.
Posted by Eric at 9:15 AM
October 17, 2007
"American Inquisition": Buddhists Lose One Point; Christians Gain Two
With data in hand, the government next confronted the problem of processing
it. This task initially fell to a loyalty tribunal that the War
Department created specifically for this purpose: the Japanese American
Joint Board ("JAJB").
The JAJB was a tribunal with voting representatives from one civilian agency
(the War Relocation Authority, which ran the "relocation centers"
where Japanese Americans were detained) and a number of military units,
including the Provost Marshal General's Office ("PMGO") (which was
responsible for industrial security). The FBI was to have been a voting
member as well, but J. Edgar Hoover pulled his representative out after just a
few weeks.
If you have ever been on, say, an admissions committee or a hiring committee, you will quickly recognize the problem that the JAJB faced. It had tens of thousands of loyalty files to review, but it lacked the time and manpower carefully to review each file. So it did what admissions and hiring committees do in these situations: it tried to come up with a template that would allow it to process the files without having to review each one.
The first idea was a point system. Bureaucrats in the PMGO would go
through individual files – especially the loyalty questionnaires that the
internees had filled out – and assign positive and negative point values to the
answers, producing a net loyalty score for each file.
So, for example, a Japanese American who was a Christian got a plus-2; a
Japanese American who was a Buddhist got a minus-1. If he was "an
instructor in Japanese hobbies or sports" such as judo, he got a minus-2;
if he was "an instructor in [an] American sport or hobby," he got a
plus-2. For each Japanese-American periodical he received, he got a
minus-1. If he'd never traveled to Japan, he got a plus-1. One trip
to Japan earned him a minus-1. Two trips to Japan got him a minus-3.
More than three years in a Japanese-language after-school program in the
United States got him a minus-3. And so
on.
You get the idea.
For reasons that the archival record does not disclose, the JAJB ditched the point system after a while and shifted instead to a system that looked for particular patterns of factors and then broke the files into three large groups – a "white" group that merited an automatic stamp of loyalty, a "black" group that merited an automatic stamp of disloyalty, and a "brown" or "tan" group that required case-by-case scrutiny of files. (Yes, that's right: the color between "black" and "white" was not "gray" but "brown.")
Using this system, the JAJB processed files for well over a year.
It ended up condemning more than one in every four American citizens of Japanese ancestry as disloyal.
This was not, however, the final word on Japanese Americans' loyalties in World War II. The JAJB was so wracked by conflict between its civilian member, the War Relocation Authority, and its military members, that its authority quickly slipped away. By the end of 1943, as a practical matter, the constituent agencies on the JAJB were quietly making their own loyalty judgments and disregarding the conclusions of the JAJB.
More on that later, or tomorrow.
Posted by Eric at 3:18 PM
"Wait, Honey, The Lens Cap's Still On."
It has also now led to a country song by Martina McBride:
In these times in which we liveOK, fair enough, but here's where things get a little freaky for my tastes. Read this account of how former Senator Santorum broke the news to his daughter that her on-camera tears had made their way into a Martina McBride song:
Where the worst of what we live
Is laid out for all the world on the front page
And the sound of someone's heartbreak
Is a soundbite at the news break
With a close shot of the tears rollin' down their face
Santorum found out about the song through Joe Lessen, a registered lobbyist for America’s Health Insurance Plans who is married to an aide to former Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.). The Lessens know Satcher and Santorum, with the latter two meeting years ago at an event for Frist’s political action committee."He asked his oldest daughter to get the video camera?" Maybe someday young Sarah Maria will be glad that her father was so intent on capturing the peaks and valleys of her emotional life on film.Word eventually filtered to Sarah Maria, a big McBride fan.
Santorum sat her down at the kitchen table. He asked his oldest daughter to get the video camera. And he told Sarah Maria.
“She started crying again,” Santorum said.
Or maybe it'll just make good footage for a campaign commercial when daddy runs for governor in 2010.
Posted by Eric at 1:42 PM
October 16, 2007
You Gotta Love Solove
Check it out.
Posted by Eric at 1:49 PM
"American Inquisition": How The Government Got What It Thought Was "The Goods" On Japanese Americans
Having decided to sift, the government then confronted an enormous logistical problem: how to investigate and pass judgment on the more than 40,000 adult U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry who were languishing in the so-called "relocation centers" where they were detained?
It was military agencies that took the lead on gathering intelligence on Japanese Americans, and there was one thing that these agencies were quite convinced they could not do -- ask the Japanese Americans themselves, or people who knew them. "Because of the inscrutability of the Japanese, their reticence, clannishness and other Oriental traits" said the officer training investigators, "[Japanese Americans] very rarely take white people into their confidence. The result of the foregoing is that references, neighbors, employers and acquaintances are not considered as good a source of information in the Japanese case as in the average case."
What's more, military investigators were instructed that "it is hard, very hard, for a citizen born of Japanese parents in this country, particularly on the West Coast, to feel loyal to the United States of America," whereas it was "easy for him to feel that he is at heart Japanese and not American even though he has never seen Japan."
The investigation of Japanese American loyalty went in two principal directions. On the West Coast, investigators in the Western Defense Command pored over Japanese American newspapers, looking for articles naming people who'd been involved before the war in Japanese business and cultural associations, Buddhist churches, Shinto temples, judo clubs, and the like, and who had made donations to Japanese causes. They also mined the seized records of West Coast branches of Japanese banks, listing every person who held a certificate of deposit in yen.
And in the camps themselves, military teams required all internees to fill out a four-page questionnaire that covered educational background, work experience, reading habits, religion, Japanese language abilities, hobbies, and the like. The questionnaires also asked the American citizens whether they were willing to "forswear" allegiance to the Emperor of Japan (an allegiance they had never sworn in the first place) and whether they were willing to serve on combat duty in the U.S. armed forces "wherever ordered."
This was the raw data -- in rare cases supplemented with sketchy information from the FBI or Naval Intelligence -- that the government used to decide which Japanese Americans were "loyal" and which "disloyal."
But it was only raw data; the government then faced the problem of how to collate and process the data efficiently in more than 40,000 individual cases. More on that later, or tomorrow.
Posted by Eric at 9:13 AM
October 14, 2007
"American Inquisition": A New Study of the Inner Workings of the Japanese American Internment
I ground the book in extensive new archival research in the records of the civilian and military agencies that passed judgment on the loyalties of American citizens of Japanese ancestry. As historian Roger Daniels says, the book presents a new story of "bad news from the good war."
I'll be blogging about the book's claims here over the next several days. Today, I'll start things off by offering a very brief account of how the federal government ended up in the business of passing judgment on the loyalty of more than 40,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry between 1943 and 1945.
If you've read Snow Falling on Cedars or seen The War, or have read or taught Korematsu v. United States, you know that a presumption of disloyalty forced the entire Japanese population of the West Coast – citizens and aliens alike – out of their homes and behind barbed wire in the late winter of 1942. The presumption was racial. "The Japanese race is an enemy race," said General John DeWitt of the Western Defense Command in explaining his decision to evict just the population of Japanese ancestry. "It was impossible to establish the identity of the loyal and the disloyal with any degree of safety. It was not there was insufficient time in which to make such a determination; it was simply a matter of facing the realities that a positive determination could not be made, that an exact separation of the 'sheep from the goats' was unfeasible."
Within a year, a set of pressures from both inside and outside the camps forced the government to reverse its position and try to separate the "sheep from the goats."
The pressures were complex. On the one hand, there were strong pressures to free some of the internees. Western farmers needed internees released to work their fields. The War Relocation Authority ("WRA"), which ran the camps, wanted to begin "relocating" internees into jobs in towns and cities across the central and eastern United States. And the military wanted to trawl the camps for volunteers into the segregated unit that would become the fabled 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
On the other hand, there were strong pressures to push some of the internees deeper into incarceration. The War Relocation Authority was running ten small cities and needed a mechanism for forcing those it viewed as "troublemakers" into segregation. The WRA was also setting up a courtroom defense to the pending habeas corpus case of Ex parte Endo, which challenged the detention of Japanese Americans, and needed evidence of disloyalty to bolster its legal theory supporting the detention program. In addition, occasional news articles in the national press alleging that the WRA was "coddling" the internees led to public demands for a crackdown. Finally, those within the military who had insisted at the outset that there was no way to tell a loyal from a disloyal Japanese American lobbied hard against release of internees and for the segregation of many internees into something approaching lockdown.
These pressures may have come from different places and pushed in different directions, but they shared one thing: a focus on "loyalty" and "disloyalty" as the deciding factor. All of the decisions about freedom and confinement would turn on an evaluation of the "loyalty" or "disloyalty" of the interned American citizens.
Later, or perhaps tomorrow, I'll continue this sorry tale with a quick look at how the government went about gathering the information on which it would rely for its loyalty inquests.
Questions? Comments? Please drop me a line.
Posted by Eric at 9:02 PM
October 7, 2007
How, If At All, Should We Honor Our "Complex" Ancestors?
He served from 1901 to 1905 and is credited with the construction of hundreds of new public schools in the state.
So revered a figure is he that his statue stands in the U.S. Capitol and residence halls at Duke University, UNC, and East Carolina University bear his name.
So do many public elementary and secondary schools in the state.
But the Aycock story is not so simple. Charles B. Aycock was also a ferocious white supremacist and a leader within North Carolina's Democratic Party at a time when the party was wresting political control of parts of North Carolina from fusionist/integrationist forces -- by violence and coup d'état. He was celebrated as one of the most articulate advocates of white supremacy of his day.
Aycock later presented himself as a moderating figure within the North Carolina Democratic Party -- someone who saw that the racial terror it (and he) had unleashed might go "too far." And he liked to brag that his education reforms benefited blacks and whites alike. As he said in a 1904 speech,
"My position has brought satisfaction and even happiness to many humble homes in North Carolina, and the Negro, whose political control I have fought with so much earnestness, has turned to me with gratitude for my support of his right to a public school education."
Go back for a moment and read the biography of Aycock that appears on the U.S. Capitol site. Or check out the biography that accompanies the Aycock Dormitory's page at East Carolina University. You’ll find nothing about Aycock’s white supremacist views, his work to suppress blacks’ political rights, his affiliation with the feared Red Shirts, or his fiery rhetoric that helped trigger the violent overthrow of a North Carolina city’s elected government.
A Democratic candidate for governor has asked the party to strip Aycock's name from its annual Vance-Aycock fundraising dinner.
What do you think? Should the party strip Aycock's name from the event? Use the annual dinner as a moment to tell party members a bit about the party's past in general and Aycock in particular? Something else? Leave a comment.
(cross-posted from Prawfsblawg.)
Posted by Eric at 9:06 PM
Finally! A Solution to the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict!
Why did we not think of this before?! Why stop with waking people up from seven-year comas? If you can do that, solving the problems of the Middle East should be a snap.
This time ... everything is easy.
Posted by Eric at 2:33 PM
October 5, 2007
Flock of Seagulls Must Be On Tour, I Guess.
Well, it turns out they do!
On October 22, two members of The Fixx and a member each of Squeeze, The Alarm, and the Stray Cats will play a concert at Mt. Everest Base Camp to raise money to fight cancer in Nepal.
Posted by Eric at 7:10 PM
October 3, 2007
Paging Ann Althouse...
"Thompson, 41, says she met her future husband at a Nashville supermarket on July 4, 1996, a few years before she moved to Washington. To hear her tell it, the then-U.S. senator from Tennessee was standing in line with a can of beanie weenies and half a premade tuna fish sandwich."
Kind of eclipses the Clintons' onion rings and carrot sticks, doncha think?
(cross-posted from Prawfsblawg, where I am guest-blogging this month).
Posted by Eric at 8:40 PM
October 1, 2007
Might He Also Have Mentioned The Governator?
JUSTICE SOUTER: [G]oing back to my question, do you know any people who go around saying, well, you know, I really prefer the Democrats; I'm a Republican myself? I mean, that doesn't happen.MR. MCKENNA: Well, the example of Senator Lieberman comes to mind, where he said I really prefer the Democrats and I'm running as an independent.
(Laughter)
JUSTICE SOUTER: There's always one.
Posted by Eric at 10:25 PM