Our Man in Panama

Earlier today, President Obama released his 'long-form birth certificate' on the premise that doing so would enable American political discourse to move on to more important matters. Here is his explanation from the official White House transcript:

We're not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts. We're not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers.

Before we put the 'birther' issue to rest forever, I would like to offer my thoughts on how this rubbish started during the 2008 campaign. You see, one of the two major-party candidates for president had the problem of being born outside the United States. I am speaking, of course, of John McCain, native of Panama.

What's that you say? You did not know that John McCain was born in Panama? I wonder why. Every reference source agrees. According to Wikipedia, for instance, John McCain was born on August 29, 1936 at the Coco Solo Naval Air Station, Panama Canal Zone, where his father, John Sidney McCain Jr., was stationed. I should point out, for what it's worth, that McCain has always refused to release his birth certificate. [Update: McCain did provide his birth certificate in 2008 to the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire in the case of Hollander v. McCain (2008), which challenged his eligibility to serve.]

Although Panama is obviously not part of the U.S., are U.S. military installations abroad in any way, under any statute or provision, 'part' of the U.S.? Is someone born at a U.S. military installation abroad somehow 'in' the U.S.? In a word, no. Let's take a look at the United States Foreign Affairs Manual, Volume 7, §1113, entitled 'NOT INCLUDED IN THE MEANING OF "IN THE UNITED STATES"'. According to paragraph (c)(1),

Despite widespread popular belief, U.S. military installations abroad and U.S. diplomatic or consular facilities abroad are not part of the United States within the meaning of the 14th Amendment. A child born on the premises of such a facility is not born in the United States and does not acquire U.S. citizenship by reason of birth.

Why is it such a problem for a presidential candidate to have been born outside the U.S.? According to Article II of the U.S. Constitution:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

The truth is, no one knows for sure what this clause means. No court has ever ruled on it regarding presidential elections, and legal experts are divided. (See summaries of facts and opinions here and here.) In the absence of clear constitutional or jurisprudential guidance, a president born outside the U.S. could be subject to suspicions of constitutional illegitimacy.

Aside from the obviously racist intent, the point of accusing Obama of being foreign-born in 2008 was to draw attention away from McCain's foreign birth. And it seems to have worked. Far more people have heard the lies about Obama's birthplace than the truth about McCain's. Once Obama won the election, the lie took on a life of its own.

I doubt that Obama's statement and document release today will be the final chapter in the history of the 'birther' conspiracy. But I do believe that the need to draw attention away from McCain's 'birther' problem was the first chapter.

John, do you need a ride to the airport?

Trust me. This will be worth your time.

Click the link and watch all nine minutes of this. Then tell me whether it's over.

the master of deception chastises his bad apprentice

Last week, in a blog comment thread, I noted deep differences in McCain and Palin's style of lying, as opposed to Bush, Cheney, and Rove's, and I predicted that McCain and Palin's lies would ultimately hurt them. Here is part of what I said:

'Bush and Cheney don't lie like McCain and Palin. Bush and Cheney obfuscate, evade, obscure, and so on. Example: they say they don't torture and they get away with it because they redefine the word and Democrats roll over and let them do it. The actions of Bush, Cheney, and Rove can be shown to be lies, but it takes some work. They lied about John Kerry, and he let them.

McCain and Palin are stupid liars. They lie about selling a jet on Ebay or being a friend of special-needs families or opposing the so-called Bridge to Nowhere: all unsophisicated lies and with no veneer of national security as cover.'

(Correction: The above suggestion that Palin is not a friend of special-needs families was based on a misreported story about budget cuts in Alaska to special-needs programs. In fact, she appears to have increased such spending.)

How unsophisticated is McCain's lying? Even Karl Rove, the master of deception, has publicly faulted McCain's lies. Here is the video and the relevant transcript from Rove's appearance on Fox, as provided by Talking Points Memo:

WALLACE: All right, and for fair game, what is McCain doing that goes a step too far?

ROVE: Well, McCain has gone in some of his ads—similarly gone one step too far, and sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100-percent-truth test.

Rove does not object to lying per se. What he objects to is bad lying, i.e. lying that makes the liar look bad, which is what McCain has done.

I have been saying it from day one and I will repeat it again: John McCain is too stupid to win this election. He is not pretending to be stupid like George W. Bush, alumnus of Yale and Harvard. McCain is the real thing. His choice of running mate looks to some, in the immediate term, like political genius, but time will soon tell how smart it was to pick someone whose X-ray vision from Alaska to Russia invites ridicule.

I have heard people wonder whether McCain's innumerable contradictory policy statements indicate senility or Alzheimer's. What the question misses is that this man, even in his youth, was never sharp. He contradicts himself because he does not have a head for policy or detail or knowledge in general.

I expect Barack Obama and the liberal 527 groups to come out with a barrage of McCain (and Palin) flip-flop ads showing, with video clips, all the things they were for before they were against—and some that they were later for again. If Obama and company fail to do this, then they will not deserve to win. If they do it, the election will be won in large part on the stupid lies and dull-wittedness of John McCain. Enough is enough.

ready on day 5,865

John McCain assumed office as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives on January 3, 1983. Exactly four years later, he assumed office as a U.S. Senator. If, somehow, he wins the 2008 presidential election, he would be inaugurated on January 20, 2009. I wonder if by then he will have found the time to learn about economics.

Five years after his first presidential campaign, McCain told this to the Wall Street Journal, as quoted in their November 26, 2005 issue:

I’m going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.

Brilliant. A presidential candidate who does not understand economics and says so to the world.

Today McCain gave his first major speech on the current housing crisis, and it is stunningly void of anything but platitudes. From the transcript at McCain's website, this is as specific as McCain gets about banking reform:

'When we commit taxpayer dollars as assistance, it should be accompanied by reforms that ensure that we never face this problem again. Central to those reforms should be transparency and accountability.'

Transparency and accountability? Is that the best he can do? I'd say his education is off to a slow start.

Later today I saw Jack Kemp, a McCain supporter and Bob Dole's running mate in 1996, on MSNBC talking about McCain's speech today. Talking to host Andrea Mitchell, he said of McCain:

'John is a quick study.'

I recognize that most U.S. presidents in my lifetime have not been particularly bright, but, given the economic exigencies of the moment, perhaps we should be unusually vigilant against electing someone who, not only cannot tell Sunni from Shia, but also may not know the difference between fiscal policy and monetary policy.

Reader, I don't know about you, but I think twenty-five years in office is enough time to learn about economic policy. The kindest thing to do for McCain might be to send him back to Arizona so that he can get the education he so sorely needs. In another twenty-five years, he might be ready to run for president.

McCan't tell the difference

One of the bugbears of this blog is American politicians' inability to distinguish between Sunni and Shia. In the past I have criticized Democrat Silvestre Reyes of the House Intelligence Committee and Republican George W. Bush of the White House Unintelligence Committee for either not knowing the difference or conflating the two. I have also written a two-part series (here and here) on the peculiar nature of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a Shia theocracy.

Yesterday, Daily Kos reported that Senator John McCain can't tell the difference either. While in Jordan with Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joseph Lieberman (CfL-CT) at his side, McCain said this:

'We continue to be concerned about Iranian taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back [into Iraq].'

You can watch it yourself at 2:10 of this video, after the advertisement. As anyone who knows the first thing about Islam understands, Sunni al-Qaeda and Shia Iran are utterly incompatible, not least because al-Qaeda sees all Shias as apostates who deserve to be killed.

I expect a conservative Republican to stand for policies that I disagree with, but this revelation of McCain's global ignorance is depressing. This from a man running on a platform of national security and war-mongering. There is really nothing more to say about it other than this: the Republicans are running a foreign-policy idiot in a time of war.

Will American journalists warn the voters of the threat to international security that such ignorance in a potential president poses, or is that a silly question?

torture helps the terrorists win

Torture has been in the news a lot this week. On Tuesday, in an interview with the BBC, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia justified the use of torture to extract information:

BBC: All I’m saying about it, is that it’s a bizarre scenario, because it’s very unlikely that you’re going to have the one person that can give you that information and so if you use that as an excuse to permit torture then perhaps that’s a dangerous thing.

SCALIA: Seems to me you have to say, as unlikely as that is, it would be absurd to say that you can’t stick something under the fingernails, smack them in the face. It would be absurd to say that you couldn’t do that. And once you acknowledge that, we’re into a different game. How close does the threat have to be and how severe can an infliction of pain be? There are no easy answers involved, in either direction, but I certainly know you can’t come in smugly and with great self-satisfaction and say, “Oh, this is torture and therefore it’s no good.” You would not apply that in some real-life situations. It may not be a ticking bomb in Los Angeles, but it may be: “Where is this group that we know is plotting this painful action against the United States? Where are they? What are they currently planning?”

Then yesterday, the U.S. Senate passed H.R. 2082, the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, by a vote of 51-45. What does that have to do with torture? See sec. 327 of the bill:

'SEC. 327. LIMITATION ON INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES.
(a) LIMITATION.—No individual in the custody or under the effective control of an element of the intelligence community or instrumentality thereof, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by the United States Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations.
(b) INSTRUMENTALITY DEFINED.—In this section, the term ‘‘instrumentality’’, with respect to an element of the intelligence community, means a contractor or subcontractor at any tier of the element of the intelligence community.'

Simply put, the bill would outlaw torture techniques like waterboarding. Former torture victim and current flip-flopper John McCain voted against it.

Arguments against terrorism usually depend on considerations like moral high ground, the Geneva Conventions, the treatment of U.S. troops when captured by others, and, in a word, law. The pro-torture argument depends on the need to gather life-saving information as speedily as possible, hence the trope of the ticking timebomb. And really, what can one say to that? That respect for the rule of law is more important than saving lives? That the ticking timebomb is a foolish rhetorical figure?

While those may be winning arguments among reasonable people, these are not reasonable times. This is an age of hysteria, when appeals to law and reason carry little weight in many quarters. With that in mind, I propose a new argument against torture, one that addresses the ticking timebomb question head on, to wit: Is torture likely to help us find the ticking timebomb before we are blown to kingdom come?

This is not a question of law or constitutionality but, rather, a question of criminological reliability. No other basis for opposing torture has any chance of convincing people who have no regard for law. So let us ask then, does torture make us safer by yielding time-sensitive, reliable information or not?

I would not presume to answer this question myself, not being an experienced torturer and all. Let us turn then not to apologists for torture like, say, Alan Dershowitz, but rather to an actual U.S. military interrogator and see what he thinks of torture-generated information.

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties held a hearing on November 8, 2007 with just such a witness. The occasion's formal title was Oversight Hearing on Torture and the Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment of Detainees: The Effectiveness and Consequences of “Enhanced” Interrogation, and the star witness was

Steven Kleinman
Colonel, USAFR
Intelligence & National Security Specialist
Senior Intelligence Officer/Military Interrogator.

Suspiciously, the hearing transcript is still not available via Lexis-Nexis, but the House Judiciary Committee's website has a pdf of Kleinman's written statement to the Committee.

According to Kleinman, torture actually compromises interrogations:

'As the parties argue the legal and moral implications of using coercive methods to extract information that, according to the scenario, would save thousands of lives, there is an erroneous pre-supposition both sides seem too willing to accept: that coercion is ultimately an effective means of obtaining reliable intelligence information.

This conclusion is, in my professional opinion, unequivocally false.' [Italics his.]

How can he say such a thing? What experience does he have?

'Before addressing the concept of what has been described as “enhanced” interrogation methods, I believe it might be useful to present a brief summation of what over twenty years of operational experience has taught me about interrogation, both what it is and, perhaps more importantly, what it is not.'

Twenty years' experience is great, Captain America, but what about the ticking timebomb? Don't we need to extract the information by any means necessary? What about subjecting detainees to stressful situations until they can't take it anymore?

'Excessive stress, insufficient sleep, poor nutrition, and other environmental influences can result in substantial memory deficits. This is manifested not only as gaps in memory—that is, difficulty in recalling specific events—but also in unintended fabrication. What this suggests is that after exposure to the various environmental stressors, the source will be more likely to report some combination of real and imagined facts, believing sincerely that both are true, but ultimately being sincerely wrong on many counts. From an intelligence collection perspective, this is exceptionally problematic.'

But can't an experienced interrogator tell the difference? Here, in the absence of the hearing transcript, let us turn to one of the few news items to cover the hearing, from Talking Points Memo:

'But if a detainee has his hands tied, or if a detainee shivers because a room is chilled, then "I don't know whether he's shivering because the room is cold or because my questions are penetrating," Kleinman said. That degree of abuse "takes away a lot of my tools."'

According to one of the nation's most senior military interrogators, a man whose patriotism and intelligence are amply evidenced throughout his statement, torture actually makes it harder to get useful information out of detainees. It takes away the interrogators' tools, as he put it.

Why do Antonin Scalia and John McCain, to say nothing of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, want to take away our interrogators’ tools and tie their professional hands behind their backs? How can they claim to love America when they are cleearly helping the terrorists conceal information from interrogators? Are they more interested in torturing detainees than in protecting American citizens?

I think there's only one possible conclusion to draw from these considerations: George W. Bush and the other advocates of torture want the terrorists to win. Why else would they take away our interrogators' tools and help the terrorists conceal what they know? If the pro-torture people want to continue to plead on the terrorists' behalf, I think it's our obligation to tell the world whose side they're really on.

you can have him, we don't want him

Prediction: if John McCain becomes the Republican nominee for president, his running mate will be Senator Joseph Lieberman (CfL-CT). I have been saying this privately since last year, but today's report in the News-Times of Connecticut that Lieberman will 'quite possibly' attend the Republican convention suggests that he is already laying the groundwork.

It would suit McCain's empty 'maverick' brand to choose a running mate from the other party—if by 'other party' one means the Connecticut for Lieberman Party. To people who don't follow politics closely, it would probably look like a bold move to bring the two parties together and overcome the partisan rancor that supposedly accounts for government dysfunction. How strongly could conservatives object to a running mate as hawkish as Dick Cheney and as committed to the culture wars as Pat Robertson? And he would certainly add votes from Connecticut South, also known as Florida.

For Lieberman it would be a return whence he came. It's worth recalling the circumstances of his election to the Senate in 1988. Lowell Wiecker, the Republican incumbent, was a true maverick. Here is the first paragraph from the New York Times's coverage of the campaign for September 30, 1988:

'At a Free South Africa conference here last weekend, a crowd of liberals applauded the arrival of the senior Senator from Connecticut, Lowell P. Weicker Jr. They nodded when the rambunctious Republican from Greenwich reminded them that he was the first, and so far the only, Senator to be arrested at an anti-apartheid demonstration.'

The headline was 'Foe Slowed by Weicker's 2-Party Appeal'. Foe indeed.

It is hard to see how an anti-abortion, anti-gay, pro-war candidate like McCain can claim the mantle of maverick. A sitting Republican Senator arrested for civil disobedience outside the South African Embassy? Now that's what I call a maverick.

Lieberman squeaked by with a margin of victory of 7,000 votes out of almost 1.3 million cast (NYT, November 9, 1988), or 49.7% to 49.0%, and the endorsements of William F. Buckley and other Republicans who found him more conservative than their own party's candidate. And Republicans did the same thing to re-elect Lieberman in 2006 after he lost the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont.

Whatever happens, the Democrats will surely pick up more seats in the Senate this year, at least six say I, and won't need the CfL Senator from Connecticut to caucus with them anymore.

One last point: earlier tonight I was watching Christopher Dodd, Connecticut's Democratic Senator, on C-SPAN2 filibustering against retroactive telecom immunity on the Senate floor. Dodd's father was a prosecutor at Nuremberg, and Dodd fils, invoking his father's legacy, has taken a hard line against abuses of power by the Bush administration. That doesn't make him a maverick, but in an age of wanton abuse of power and equally wanton cowardice by the opposition party, it does make him a hero. I'll take the hero over the maverick anytime.