Law and politics worldwide, etc. (That description should stick for a while)
I'm leaving this behind. Insane. I scraped at least an inch off my car last night and this morning. Word that classes were cancelled was spread around 9:00 a.m., minutes before my morning American Gov't class.
I'll be at the Midwest PSA meeting in Chicago over the weekend. For more info on our panel, see this link.
Smythe's World links to an LA Times article and agrees that granting posthumous citizenship for soldies killed in action is a good thing. According to the LA Times article, a CA state legislator is pushing for citizenship for all who obtain honorable discharges as well.
This story is really important, because it shows that the demands of wartime can create pressures for the granting of rights and benefits to groups who serve in the military. And I'm not talking about the cynical attempt by the Republicans in the House to link wartime service with the President's tax cut plans (see Chuck Grassley's comments from a recent San Francisco Chronicle article:But Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said, "When those men and women come home from the battlefield, we want to grow the economy so those men and women will have jobs."
Read this article by Jorge Ramos Avalos on the dilemmas facing the American press with respect to coverage of the war in Iraq. Nothing ground-breaking, just basic. Money line: "Debemos decir solo lo que vemos y lo que oímos, y no lo que otros quieren que digamos." The difficulty with this stance, as someone like Chris Hedges will tell you, is that exposure to the sensory data of war tends to punctuate the heroic myths that are necessary to keep war attractive. Journalists have always been involved in the propogation of reasons and justifications for war (and this is why I can barely watch or read anything from CNN of MSNBC right now, to say nothing of other major media sources). But journalism that focuses on what is actually "seen" and "heard" in war will probably end up reporting many horrible things that conflict with official versions of events.
On Monday the Indian Supreme Court acted to preserve the status quo at Ayodhya for now, effectively preventing the ruling BJP from allowing fundamentalist Hindus to begin construction of a temple to Ram on the disputed site. Read the ruling here. Read the Times of India article here (they seem to have resolved the web problems that plagued them a few weeks ago). The ruling BJP was not happy with the court's decision, while the opposition Congress party and the ToI editorial board both expressed some satisfaction. The editorial is particularly interesting for its praise of the Court's avoidance of narrow legalities in favor of the broader political view announced in the ruling: the Court was explicitly concerned with "maintain[ing] communal harmony." The Indian SC is willing to approach its task in a broadly political way. More could be said about this, of course. . .
READ ALSO Dawn's editorial, which has a good, punchy overview of the entire issue. The money lines:Clearly, Mr Vajpayee was ill-advised by the hawks within the party yet again, when he approved the government's decision to move the supreme court. This was done to circumvent an earlier high court order and to pre-empt the imminent final decision by the Allahabad High Court, which would settle the dispute once and for all.
Following the supreme court's decision on Monday, it is now New Delhi's responsibility to rein in the Hindu extremists, who have threatened to go ahead with building the Ram temple at Ayodhya. Over 2,000 lives were lost in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid by Hindu extremists in 1992. New Delhi must do all it can to avert a repeat of the 1992 carnage.
The Dems need you in 2004. Check this out from the latest press release:
WASHINGTON - House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) blamed the sometimes negative tone of the media's war coverage on the “blow dried Napoleons” from the 24-hour news outlets in a speech tonight to the pro-Israel organization, Stand For Israel.
“The president is a man of faith and a man of confidence but it must frustrate him to hear the incessant carping of blow-dried Napoleons, hunkered down in their air conditioned studios night after night on the 24-hour news networks,” DeLay said. “We know that day by day, children awaken, for the first morning of their lives, to God's freedom. This is the meaning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
Read Rick Hasen's thoughts on Monday's Supreme Court decision in the Mississippi redistricting case, Branch v. Smith. The point that he calls attention to is the absence of Bush v. Gore in the Supreme Court's decision despite its presence in the federal court ruling that the SC affirmed. Hasen argues that the relevant argument in Bush v. Gore (that the state court unconstitutionally intruded on the state legislature's prerogatives) has proven unavailable for election lawyers so far, but that they will certainly keep trying.
Jack Balkin posts (no permalink) on David Greenberg's broad brush article in Slate to the effect that organized, public objections to war have been a staple of American political discourse.
Greenberg is attacking the claim made by some (especially but not exclusively on the right) that dissenters should shut up once the shooting starts. In addition to the reasons he cites, from the long-term benefits of peace and anti-war movements to the contribution of demonstrations to ending the war in Vietnam (and Greenberg claims that the demonstrators reflected, rather than produced, the troops' sense that war was futile and wrong), one point needs to be underlined very strongly, thus: There is no effective mechanism for controlling presidential power other than vocal, public dissent. Courts are not going to get involved in the process of challenging presidential power to use force unless Congress acts (see Doe v. Bush, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and El Shifa Pharmaceuticals v. U.S., for example). Congress is not going to act unless there is strong public opposition to the president, because members of Congress respond primarily to public opinion. In addition, presidents are likely to be constrained primarily by public opinion, as Ruth Wedgwood noted with respect to the El Shifa Pharmaceutical strike:The public critique of the Sudan decision provides a powerful incentive to be careful. It also presents the strongest political, as well as ethical argument, for careful decisions about proportionality.
(Wedgwood, Responding to Terrorism: The Strikes Against bin Laden, 24 Yale J. Int'l L. 559, 573-574)
Public opinion is the only real check on presidential power, either because it creates conditions that should lead presidents to be cautious, or because members of congress primarily respond to public opinion. There may be an argument that this particular exercise of presidential power is a good thing (I'm not so sure), but once you enter that argument, you're entering the realm of substantive evaluation of policies rather than the propriety of public dissent itself.
Remember that pharmaceutical company in the Sudan that Clinton blew up in August, 1998? (See also the article in FAIR) The one where the evidence of a connection to chemical weapons production was really, really shaky, at best?
If you'd like to refresh your memory, read the opinion from the Court of Federal Claims, issued on March 14th, in El-Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries v. U.S. You can also just read the summary at GELPI's Takings Snapshots if you want a quick read; the latest Snapshot isn't on line yet, but you can get on their e-mail list and probably get a back issue as well.
Judge Baskir's opinion is a good read. Here's the court gearing up to dismiss the government's claim that that the case should be dismissed on jurisdictional grounds: ‘Why, sir,’ said the lawyer, ‘if the persecution were tortious, and if it happened at sea, or even on fresh water or reasonably damp land, the Admiralty court would no doubt have cognizance.’ ‘Pray, sir,’ said Stephen, ‘just how damp would the land have to be?’ ‘Oh, pretty damp, pretty damp, I believe. The judge’s patent gives him power to deal with matters in, upon, or by the sea, or public streams, or freshwater ports, rivers, nooks and places between the ebb and flow of the tide, and upon the shores and banks adjacent – all tolerably humid.’ PATRICK O’BRIAN, THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD 51 (1984). Reluctant as we are to take this definition from English strangers at sea, the Government’s claims for admiralty jurisdiction are equally expansive.The Defendant’s motion raises the question: Just what does determine whether one should be in a court of Admiralty jurisdiction? In one of Patrick O’Brian’s famous tales of the sea in the early 19th Century, the question was put to an attorney, and the following discourse ensued:
Aside from proving that reading cases can be fun, this case is important because it shows another way in which courts are deferential during wartime. The court states unambiguously that "the Takings Clause does not apply to the destruction of property during combat operations" (21). In addition, the court states that it must be deferential regarding presidential determinations of what "constitutes an enemy target" for purposes of the exercise of military power.
The owners of the plant are thus subject to the whims of the political process if they want compensation. The court's opinion notes that there was a bill introduced in Congress that would have expressly asked the courts to determine if there should be compensation here, but the bill failed; absent congressional action on this front, the court views its role as very limited in these circumstances.
Courts are not likely to see themselves as great places to resolve these sorts of issues. This makes sense in terms of the court's desire to preserve its own authority. But the owners are still out $50 million, so it's cold comfort to them to hear that the case essentially turns on what U.S. courts believe that they can prudently accomplish. If there were a public outcry that put heavy political pressure on congress or the president to provide some kind of compensation, maybe the owners could have a shot at recovering some of their losses. That's not particularly likely in the current environment, to say the least. Who's going to take up this particular cause right now?
The broader lesson seems to be: don't invest in companies in countries that are on the State Department's watch list.
As a side note: In terms of case names, this opinion references a pretty cool one: Thirty Hogsheads of Sugar v. Boyle, 13 U.S. 191 (1815). I'm definintely putting that case on my reading list!
Anita sends me a link to this story about the odyssey of Tadpole Pete and Sassy, a toddler and pug duo who disappeared from home north of El Dorado Arkansas and wandered around for about 20 hours before being found by police. Picture this scene:
Deputies got a break Tuesday morning when a truck driver told them he had seen a dog and child cross U.S. 167 in front of his truck the afternoon before."I blew my horn at this little, curly tailed dog. He ran across," driver Kenny Hamilton said. "Then this little boy ran across the road after him, right there in front of me."
The next day he told deputies about the boy-and-dog pair when he realized they were the objects of a massive air-and-ground search that had so far turned up nothing.
"We refocused the search and got the tracking dogs going the other way," Jones said, and the boy was found about two hours later.
Kathimerini writes that Greek prime minister Costas Simitis is happily pursuing a "median path" on Iraq. It's not particularly clear what constitutes the middle path, however: something like not being publicly allied with the French and German positions on the one hand or the British, Spanish, Italian (etc.) position on the other. Read also this wire story. See also this editorial in Katherimini. Greece is in an odd position because it is worried about U.S. influence in Turkey and thus might be considered pretty happy about U.S.-Turkish splits on Iraq, but the official government response has been muted.
As a side note, I'll never forget a story one of my ancient Greek teachers at Davidson told me about U.S. aid for Turkey: he's a Greek Cypriot, and while an undergrad in the U.S. he went home one summer to find himself in the army, fighting against Turks and Turkish Cypriots, and watching as U.S.-built fighter planes bombed and strafed his army's positions. At the end of the fighting he came back to the states and finished his degree and has been here ever since, but I remember him saying that the combination of the war experiences and the memories of the fighter planes left him feeling estranged from his classmates as well as from the U.S. to some degree.
I get sad thinking about this story but can't really articulate why.
If you speak German and don't already know about this service from the good folks at Die Zeit, you should check it out. I've signed up for their newsletter and now get a daily e-mail with a description of the major European and U.S. newspaper stories on Iraq, with links. They also link to Salon and New Yorker stories.
The Berliner Zeitung notes that the German bicycle maker Reise and Mueller has decided to boycott U.S. producers of bicycle parts and accessories because of the war in Iraq. Around 10% of the company's parts come from the U.S.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer notes similar boycotts of Coca-Cola and Marlboros, among other items, throughout Europe.
On the other side of the world, Indian groups have called for boycotts of Coke and Pepsi (see this article in Rediff.com).
In South Africa, according to this article, anti-war groups have also called for boycotts of American goods and are suggesting that stores that hold to the boycott should advertise this fact with signs in their windows that read, "This... store opposes US military aggression."
See also the WaPo story here.
Well, what's fair is fair, I guess.
The headlines say it all: War ousts sex, music in web searches, and The lazy person's exercise plan ("Vacuum more often, change the sheets more often, mop the floor more often. These get your heart pumping, which means they are excellent calorie burners.")
Read this article in Dawn about reaction to the war on Iraq. See also this Asia Times online article.
Read this article from www.journalism.co.uk. The french site is available here, at least until some yahoo calling him-her-itself "Patriot" decides to go after the French as well.
Try it yourself: http://english.aljazeera.net, or http://www.aljazeera.net. What's the problem here? There has been a concerted effort to keep this web site offline (see my earlier post here, with links); if it's private individuals acting on their own capacity, it's regrettable but not surprising. Any bets on whether or not this is partly a government hacking effort? I wonder. . .
NOTE: Read the USA Today article here, the ZDNet article here, and the Daily Times (Pakistan) article here.
People who think that they're doing anyone a service by going after news web sites are just plain ridiculous. And counterproductive. Imagine if the Fox News website were down for a week and replaced by graphics written in arabic script and, say, the flag of the Taliban regime. What good would that do anyone, except to rankle a bunch of people who are already rankled?
UPDATE (3:00p.m.): The arabic page is up and running at al jazeera, but not the english page.
Just added a link to the Community Rights Counsel on the sidebar. If you're interested in takings and land use issues, these folks are good people to keep an eye on. And if you're a local community leader facing a threat of a extended litigation battle on takings issues, they're good people to contact for help.
