Primer On Rendition

Want to know what "rendition" is? Here you go!

Ask Dr. Rendition!

by hilzoy

Since the publication of the LA Times story about rendition yesterday, I've noticed some confusion about the topic. So Dr. Rendition will try to answer your questions.

Q: What is rendition?

A: Rendition is the act of transferring a person into a different jurisdiction.

Q: "It occurs to me that this more benign definition of rendition as transferring someone to another criminal justice system, used to be called extradition. Can someone explain the difference to me?"

A: Extradition is one form of rendition, as you can see from Lawyers.com's Glossary of Legal Terms, which defines 'Rendition' as "extradition of a fugitive who has fled to another state." Here's a nice example of the term's normal usage from a hundred-year-old case:

"Among the powers of governors of territories of the United States is the authority to demand the rendition of fugitives from justice under 5278 of the Revised Statutes, and we concur with the courts below in the conclusion that the governor of Porto Rico has precisely the same power as that possessed by the governor of any organized territory to issue a requisition for the return of a fugitive criminal."

That was just the first case I found when I looked. There are lots more.

Q: But extraordinary rendition means sending someone off to be tortured, right?

A: No. Extraordinary rendition is rendition outside normal legal frameworks. (Extradition is a form of "ordinary" rendition.) It includes sending people off to countries where we have reason to think that they will be tortured. But it also includes things like catching Osama bin Laden in another country and bringing him to the United States to stand trial. What makes something a case of extraordinary rendition is the way the person is transferred from one jurisdiction to another, not what happens to that person once s/he arrives.

Q: But don't most people who talk about 'rendition' just mean 'sending people off to other countries to be tortured'?

A: Probably. That's the kind of rendition that became famous when Bush was in office. But remember: lawyers are not most people. They use all sorts of words in peculiar ways (besides using words like 'estoppal' that normal people don't use at all.) To them, this is a technical term. They use it accordingly.

Q: So when the LA Times quotes the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch as saying that ""Under limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place" for renditions", he might just mean that he has no objection to legal extradition?

A: He might. Offhand, it seems more likely that he's referring to extraordinary rendition in its technical sense, and saying that it might be OK in some cases. Imagine, for instance, a modified version of Glenn Greenwald's hypothetical: Osama bin Laden is living in a country whose intelligence and police forces we know have been seriously infiltrated by al Qaeda. We have a warrant for his arrest, but we believe that if we asked that country to arrest him, the police would tip him off and he would escape. We also believe that he is planning further attacks. Is it OK to capture him in that other country and bring him to the US to stand trial? If you think not, ask yourself whether there is any attack so awful that, if we had convincing evidence that he was planning it, and convincing evidence that the police force of the country he was in had been compromised, we would be justified in capturing him ourselves.

Capturing bin Laden under these circumstances in order to bring him to trial here is extraordinary rendition. When the Israelis snatched Adolf Eichmann and brought him to stand trial in Jerusalem, that was extraordinary rendition. If you think any such cases could ever be justified, then you agree with the Director of Human Rights Watch that ""Under limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place" for renditions". Obviously, this does not imply that you approve of sending people off to Syria to be tortured. And if you had previously said that the US should "repudiate the use of rendition to torture", saying that it would be OK, under these circumstances, to capture bin Laden and bring him to trial would not constitute a "flip-flop", since this would not be "rendition to torture."

Q: But I thought that the official translation of that Human Rights Watch statement was "all that stuff about the need to end rendition? “Oh, that’s just what we call pillow talk, baby, that’s all.”

A: You were misinformed.

Q: Isn't all this just hairsplitting in a frantic attempt to defend The One from criticism?

A: No. If you think that the difference between extradition and sending someone off to Uzbekistan to be tortured is just semantics, you probably need to work on your reading comprehension skills.

Q: Have you "screeched hysterically over the CIA practice of rendition" "for the last seven years"?

A: No. I can't recall screeching hysterically about rendition even once, let alone for seven whole years.

Q: Do you have "truly disturbing, quasi-sexual “rendition” fantasies" involving Doug Feith?

A: No. *shudders*

Q: Why does Michael Ledeen think you're a guy?

A: No idea. You'll have to ask her.

Monday Cartoon Fun: Greedy Bastard Edition

The Stimulus Debate: Here It Comes

From Bob Reich:

The Real Fight Starts After the Stimulus is Enacted

The real stimulus debate hasn't even started yet. Congress will pass President Obama's stimulus package in the next two weeks, more or less as he wants it. The House has already done its part, and the Senate appears likely to follow suit. But when the economy starts to turn up again, perhaps as early as next year, the president will have the real tough decisions to make. He'll have to choose which spending will continue -- or whether any of it will continue at all.

Sixteen years ago, Bill Clinton came to Washington with his own ambitious plans to reverse widening inequality, rebuild the nation's crumbling infrastructure, create an efficient and affordable health-care system and address the growing environmental crisis. But because of raging budget deficits and a towering national debt, he was unable to accomplish most of this. As his secretary of labor, I shared his frustration. Alan Greenspan, then Federal Reserve chairman, and most of Wall Street warned that the nation couldn't afford the risk of runaway inflation.

Some aspects of Obama's stimulus package look eerily familiar to me, although the price tag is far higher than Clinton ever dared imagine. Yet today, economic advisers across the political spectrum support Obama's plan. A few weeks ago, Martin Feldstein, Ronald Reagan's chief economist, told Congress that the stimulus should be $800 billion. (Although he apparently has quibbles with exactly how that sum will be spent, he's not taking issue with the total amount.)

The biggest difference between Clinton's original agenda and the public investments Obama is proposing is that Clinton came to office as the U.S. economy was emerging from a recession; Obama is facing the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Even fiscal conservatives concede that when consumers stop buying and businesses stop investing, as they are now, the government must step in as the buyer and lender of last resort.

But the moment the economy appears to be on the mend, conservatives such as Feldstein will want the government to cut spending. In their view, this is the only way to get the economy fully back on track. But others believe that it is precisely the track we were on that got us into this mess in the first place.

Those who support the stimulus as a desperate measure to arrest the downward plunge in the business cycle might be called cyclists. Others, including me, see the stimulus as the first step toward addressing deep structural flaws in the economy. We are the structuralists. These two camps are united behind the current stimulus, but may not be for long. Cyclists blame the current crisis on a speculative bubble that threw the economy's self-regulating mechanisms out of whack. They say that we can avoid future downturns if the Fed pops bubbles earlier by raising interest rates when speculation heats up.

But structuralists see it very differently. The bursting of the housing bubble caused the current crisis, but the underlying problem began much earlier -- in the late 1970s, when median U.S. incomes began to stall. Because wages got hit then by the double-whammy of global competition and new technologies, the typical American family was able to maintain its living standard only if women went into the workforce in larger numbers, and later, only if everyone worked longer hours.

When even these coping mechanisms were exhausted, families went into debt -- a strategy that was viable as long as home values continued to rise. But when the housing bubble burst, families were no longer able to easily refinance and take out home-equity loans. The result: Americans no longer have the money to keep consuming. When you consider that consumers make up 70 percent of the economy, the magnitude of the problem becomes apparent.

What happened to the money? According to researchers Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, since the late 1970s, a greater and greater share of national income has gone to people at the top of the earnings ladder. As late as 1976, the richest 1 percent of the country took home about 9 percent of the total national income. By 2006, they were pocketing more than 20 percent. But the rich don't spend as much of their income as the middle class and the poor do -- after all, being rich means that you already have most of what you need. That's why the concentration of income at the top can lead to a big shortfall in overall demand and send the economy into a tailspin. (It's not coincidental that 1928 was the last time that the top 1 percent took home more than 20 percent of the nation's income.)

Other structural problems are growing as well. One is climate change and our dependence on oil. Another is the United States' growing reliance on foreign capital, mostly from China, Japan and the Middle East. Neither is sustainable.

Meanwhile, our broken health-care system drains more of our dollars yet delivers less care. When President Clinton tried to tackle health care in 1994, it represented 14 percent of our GDP, and 38 million Americans were uninsured. Now, the nation spends 16 percent of its GDP on health, and about 44 million of us are uninsured. Most cyclists acknowledge these problems, but they tend to think of them as separate from the current crisis -- issues to be tackled after the economy has recovered, and then only to the extent that we can afford to do so.

But structuralists like myself don't believe that the economy can fully recover unless these underlying problems are addressed. Without policies that put the nation on the path to higher median incomes, higher productivity, renewable energy and a more accessible and efficient health-care system, we'll face deeper and more prolonged recessions, followed by ever more anemic upturns. Bill Clinton's inability to do enough about these problems in the 1990s, followed by George W. Bush's negligent disregard of them, allowed them to grow to the point where any major triggering event can cause a vicious downward spiral.

As early as next year, the business cycle may hit bottom and begin climbing. At that point, cyclists and structuralists will want two different things -- and which side the president chooses will be, as Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute puts it, the "central drama" of the Obama administration. The president recently sought to placate the cyclists by promising to focus on controlling the future costs of Social Security and Medicare. Perhaps Obama has in mind a "grand bargain" that would allow him to continue his structural agenda after the business cycle turns upward in return for limiting spending for those two giant entitlement programs.

Let's hope he has something more in mind, something more fundamental: a debate about public investment and sustainable growth. For structuralists, the size of the federal debt itself is irrelevant. Debt has to be considered in proportion to the economy as a whole. According to government projections, the national debt will exceed half the nation's gross domestic product by the end of this year -- not including the stimulus package. That's certainly high, but not close to a record. The debt was far more than 100 percent of GDP at the end of World War II. That mammoth debt, not incidentally, put Americans back to work, financed industrial production, underwrote a new generation of science and technology and created a wave of demand for consumer goods when the war ended. In short, it got the economy on a new and faster track, thereby allowing the United States to pay down the debt and ushering the country into a new era of widely shared prosperity.

Even a high ratio of debt to GDP isn't especially worrisome if much of that debt comes from investments that put the economy on a path toward solid growth. One recent study from Columbia Teachers College, for example, shows that cutting high school dropout rates in half would generate $45 billion in new tax revenues and savings on expenses such as welfare and incarceration.

We cannot assume, however, that gains from these sorts of public investments will grow the economy enough to reduce the relative size of future debt. We must consider the tax code's structure as well. Should marginal taxes be raised on the most affluent? That could help finance what must be done to put the economy on a sustainable growth path.

But I don't think that our new president should wade into this debate right away. He has his hands full. He needs to implement the stimulus package and reverse the downturn. Bill Clinton had to choose sides almost right away -- and had little choice but to cave in to the cyclists and forfeit most of his long-term economic agenda. The severity of the current crisis gives Obama more time.

But he will need to open the larger debate sooner rather than later. This downturn is revealing the U.S. economy's underlying flaws. Once the business cycle turns up, the public and its representatives may be less inclined to tackle the things that truly drag us down. Clinton was, after all, reelected in 1996 on the wave of a cyclical upturn in the economy. But the structural problems that he failed to address -- widening inequality, sagging median incomes, a broken health-care system, crumbling infrastructure and global warming -- are that much larger now, making the current crisis all the worse.

How To Talk To Non-Skeptics

skeptic etiquette

In the face of my very scientifically brilliant co-bloggers, this post might seem ridonkulously dumb, but this problem has been weighing heavy on my mind, and I'm trying to work it out.

My neighbors and I once shared a community garden in Los Feliz. It was a small space in the back of our building that had once been filled with trash, broken furniture, and decades of rotting cigarette filters.

We decided to pool our resources and plant a garden. We salvaged some drawers from a broken bureau and grabbed some wine boxes from the local liquor store to repurpose as makeshift planters. Over time, we refinished a picnic table, purchased a barbecue grill, and ran electricity out to the patio and hung Christmas lights along the ivy on the back wall so we could actually see each other after sunset.

Normally, my friends are the product of a shared common ground in ideals, beliefs, and hair care products. Neighbor-friends are solely the product of shared geography, and they are therefore more likely to shock the shit out of me with firmly held ideas and beliefs that I find bizarre, and sometimes physically harmful.

For example, there was the time I woke to find a dirty hippie standing in the hall outside my apartment door with a cooler full of raw bison liver, promising to cure my neighbor’s Lyme Disease, naturally. Enraged, I glared at the crunchy bastard as he took her last $70 as she melted against the wall in exhaustion, having given up her antibiotics due to a weird distrust of “western medicine.” Eventually, she tried exorcism (to which my only reply was, “Uh, don’t you have to be Catholic for that?” because seriously, what else can you say?), but that didn’t work any better than the mystical healing meat.

She’s okay, now. Back on the antibiotics, and thriving. But if I see the hippie and his cooler of magic meat ever again, I’m going to punch him in the throat and drown him in disinfectant. Jerk. But aside from the rare-meat life-threatening stuff, most of my magic/god/meat-cure social problems are etiquette-based.

What exactly is the polite response when someone at a dinner party asks, “What’s your sign? I bet you’re a Taurus!”

The last time this question came up was at birthday celebration with my neighbors, at the bottom of the third bottle of wine at a tapas bar.

After listening thoughtfully to my dinner companions each explain how they were like their signs, it was my turn to answer.

I said, “You do realize that Jupiter and some random stars have no effect at all on you, right? I mean, why is it that you’re protected from the magical personality rays of the constellations when you’re buried a few inches deep in flesh and fat, but the second you come screaming out of your mom, the magical personality rays pierce through the brick, mortar, insulation, tile, and electrical wiring of to the third floor maternity ward of the hospital in which you have emerged to touch you with the magical essence of “Taurus,” you stubborn little baby bull!”

I am a bummer at parties.

No one was any more skeptical of astrology, and I ended up looking like the big jerk I actually am. So I’m trying to develop a personal etiquette code for situations such as this.

I consulted Jillian Venters of Gothic Charm School to help me with a skeptic’s etiquette plan, and presented her with my current options:

Question: What’s your sign? I bet you’re a Taurus!

Response Options:

1. AWKWARD AND POLITE: “Aries, I guess. I don’t believe in astrology, so, um, how ‘bout those Mets?”
2. SNARKY AND SATISFYING: “What’s your religion? I bet you’re an Episcopalian!”
3. ITCHING FOR AN UGLY END TO DINNER: “You know that astrology is horseshit, right? What are you, a moron?”
4. OMG U R SO WEIRD: (I make up my own “sign,” stringing together random celestial objects) “I’m a Boötesian, with Pleiades rising. I am so totally fucked this week because Haumea is in retrograde. Stupid Kuiper Belt. I wish they had never discovered it.”

“Personally, I'd got with a combination of 1, 2, and 4, because I'm wacky that way,” says Jilli. “I have friends who believe LOTS of things I don't, and ... I guess I try to honor other people's crazy and quirks the way I'd like them to honor mine. So I'd probably say, ‘I don't believe in astrology’, and if they pushed the subject I'd counter with, ‘Look, I really don't believe in it, and nothing you say is going to change my mind. Let's not talk about it.’”

“Of course, knowing me, I'd probably go on to talk about it, and try and get them to explain to me WHY they believe. Because, y'know, people are freaky and interesting, even if I privately think some of their beliefs are whackaloon.” Jillian’s point here is a good one. People really ARE freaky and interesting, and I’d hate to pass up an opportunity to do my own personal sociological study on freakiness. Perhaps I can apply for some sort of research grant.

Both the Lady of the Manners and I ended up agreeing that option #4 was the best, not for any particular etiquette reason, but because it’s weirdly zany and charming. Sometimes it’s best to answer Crazy Talk with more Crazy Talk. The key is to sound sincere. There’s a thin line between cleverly ironic and smarmy assholishness.

But it isn’t just astrology where I find myself on the edge of turning an otherwise pleasant conversation into prison riot. A friend I genuinely care about once spent $700 on astral-projection classes.

It’s not just astrology conversations where I feel awkward and left out.

One of my neighbors joined me for a drink one night and launched into an excited explanation of astral-projection. She had spent close to a grand on classes and had her first out-of-body experience. I have no poker face. None. It’s not that she didn’t have the money for such things, she makes plenty of dough and could just have easily spent it on new shoes without hurting her savings account. But she wanted to talk about this revelation, and my response was, “Sweetie, you had a hallucination. You paid a ridiculous sum of money to have a hallucination. You can get a bag of ‘shrooms for a tenth of what you just spent, and had enough cash left over to buy new shoes, too!”

This devolved into an argument on the “science” of astral-projection, and she swore that she has read many studies on how it is a fact, A FACT, that one’s mind can ski on out of one’s body and, I dunno, look up ladies’ skirts on the escalator at the mall.

The end result was that I promised to eat the full contents of my cat’s litter box if any of these “studies” could be repeated in an independent laboratory. Gah. I hope that never happens. I’m really lazy about cleaning the litter box.

Once again, I turned to Jilli for an appropriate response to, “I just spent a grand on an astral projection class and had my first out-of-body experience!”

“Yeah, I guess congratulations would be in order,” says Jilli. “And then probably an attempt to change the subject, because if you don't, the person will probably gush enthusiastically at you all about the astral projection class, and then you're stuck with nodding a lot and biting your tongue.”

Jilli’s advice is different if the friend in question is actually going into debt on such things:
“Sit down with them privately and say ‘Look, I understand you're seeking something, but I am worried about you being duped out of money and self-esteem that you shouldn't lose’. Try to explain why you're concerned, and maybe give them suggestions of other ways they can seek out answers without dropping huge amounts of cash? Most public libraries have a pretty good metaphysical/occult/New Age/spooky-pants section, and I would *strongly* encourage someone to investigate all of that before spending huge amounts of money for someone to hand enlightenment to them.”

Disclaimer: I’m not talking about when someone you love has just spent their retirement savings on a handful of magic beans. That sort of thing isn’t about etiquette, it’s about intervention. People who drain their bank accounts trying to attain access to magic have a problem akin to gambling, and I’m not equating random frivolous trips to a palm reader with taking out a second mortgage to gain “clarity” at the Scientology center on Sunset.

My neighbor Michelle is one of my most favorite people. She brings me soup when I am sick, feeds my cat when I am out of town, and is otherwise a wonderful friend.

She’s also ridiculously superstitious and quickly falls prey to any scam that promises to cleanse her body of toxins or clarify her soul. I steer her away from things like Kinoki Foot Pads and The Secret, and she cuts my hair for free.

Michelle is convinced a ghost is turning the lights on and off in her kitchen. Michelle sees ghosts and troubled spirits in every electrical problem and broken radio.

I once told her that the sun will eventually go all red giant and scorch all evidence of humanity off the planet, and what will the ghosts do then? Haunt the ashes? Won’t that be really lame for the ghosts?

She laughs at me, and I laugh at her, and then we start making supper out in the community garden, tossing fresh asparagus in lemon juice and garlic.

“But dude! An OLD LADY DIED in that apartment!” she exclaims.

“DUDE! Something like SEVENTY BILLION PEOPLE died since the dawn of humanity. An OLD LADY DIED EVERYWHERE!” I holler.

Then we laugh again. I’m never going to convince her that her ghost is crappy wiring, and she’s never going to convince me that the dead return to life just to fuck with the ambient lighting schemes of aging hipsters like us.

These differences in beliefs don’t matter to me, really. Not in the grand scheme of a friendship with someone who comforts me when I’m going bananas, and genuinely cares for me.

Michelle is my only wacky-belief friend who has ever asked why I don’t believe in god, astral-projection, ghosts, or kinoki foot pads, and it is one of the many reasons why I love her.

Sometimes I think Michelle needs to believe in the supernatural, because she doesn’t really know how much there actually IS of the natural world to be dazzled by. No faith is required, just your own two eyes to see and hands to feel.

I told her that the universe is wonderful enough on its own. Space, stars, planets, black holes, galaxies, suns. The fact that out of all the elemental soup, people like us have evolved to walk and talk and create art, music, white wine, patent leather stacked mary jane shoes, Cocoa Puffs cereal, truck nutz, chocolate chip cookies, surf boards, and the Neiman Marcus cosmetics department is AMAZING. All by itself. Saying, “god did it” is heartbreaking. It pisses on the sheer wonderousness of it all, you know? I don’t need more.

The universe doesn’t need to be imbued with the mystical to make it “more” special. It’s like salting a pot of soup in someone else’s kitchen without permission. It’s awfully presumptuous, and, well, more than a little rude.

h/t Bad Astronomy

Rock On, Claire McCaskill

From HuffPo:

Sen. Claire McCaskill has delivered a sharp threat to the wallets of corporate executives who took large compensation packages even as their companies accepted government bailout funds. Things, she warned, are going to change.

"I've been mad for a while," said the Missouri Democrat. "When we passed the initial half of the TARP money, [there were] rumors about bonuses, the fact that too many of these guys were holding onto the jobs even though they were running these companies into the ground. Reality didn't seem to be the order of the day."

So McCaskill took to the Senate floor on Friday to put an end to the surrealism. In a bill that came to the surprise of reporters, her colleagues, and the White House alike -- there was no coordination with the Obama administration, she said -- the Missouri Democrat called for compensation for employees of bailout recipients to be capped at $400,000 a year. [Emphasis mine]

"They don't get it," McCaskill said on the floor. "These people are idiots. You can't use taxpayer money to pay out $18-billion in bonuses... What planet are these people on?"

An Atheist's Response To Sully And His Religious Ilk

Flying Spaghetti Monsters, Ctd

A reader writes:

Your philosophy student reader's email did a wonderful job of finding three ways to say the same simple point: Christianity is more than an infatuation with God as Deity. I think most atheists understand and accept this and a moment's time exploring the writings of even the spittle-flecked atheist agitators shows that they understand that life still presents significant questions, both moral and existential, that religions claim to answer.

Your previous reader letter raised a similar point concerning the seeming lack of positive propositions from atheist thinkers, but the philosophy student goes a step further and insinuates that perhaps "real atheism" is close to impossible unless one can otherwise justify all of one's existential beliefs without God.

Both of these readers, I think, conflate atheism with too much else. Atheism is a simple proposition: Sufficient, convincing evidence for existence of the Supreme Being(s) is lacking and claims that rely on the existence of God for their validity are therefore false. Atheism is not the idea that morality does not and cannot exist, it is simply the idea that God does not exist. To use your previous reader's metaphor: Atheists claim we all actually live in the same country, but that our country is not God's country even though most people believe that's where they live.

And indeed, were atheists ever to "win" their argument, people would have to decide how to guide their conduct in the world without taking it for granted that certain things were deemed impermissible by the highest Authority in existence. These aren't easy questions to answer and, to my mind, the naked fact that God does or does not exist, does little to help us with their answers. There are reasons to follow certain moral principles that are founded on more than God's directives and lessons and stories that constitute so much of religious teachings bear this out. Atheist thought does, in fact, grapple with these issues as well... but it's somewhat difficult getting religious people to devote lots of time to atheist study.

Your two previous reader letters started by implying that atheists haven't yet earned a place in the discussion and finished by insinuating that it might be impossible for atheists to have anything to say once they get there. The problem is that they seem to expect to find people who identify themselves as "Atheist Philosophers" when in fact they should be looking for thinkers who happen not to believe in God. It may surprise them to learn, despite the Dawkins and Harrises of the world, that many atheists wake up in the morning without deciding how they can disprove God's existence today. Many people who don't believe in God have spent alot of time thinking about how to life a satisfying and proper life.

To put it another way: Just as religion is not an infatuation with God, atheism is not an infatuation with Nothing. The long and significant history of non-theistic philosophy and moral theory is full of the very positive arguments and metaphysical justifications your readers say they want. May I suggest a little Hume to start? Some Bentham or John Stuart Mill? Nietzsche (but always with a grain of salt). Ayn Rand - but only as a case study in how non-theistic theories can still be dogmatic.

I love this response; too many religious poeple think we atheists are rabid. We are not; we are simply not believers. Relax, Sully.

Friday Cartoon Fun: Stimulus Edition

Friday Cartoon Depression

Don't Blame The Teachers!

James Rogers, chancellor of Nevada state's University, refuses to blame educators; he blames us--the public, parents, taxpayers.

Root Canal

If it's not one thing, it's another. I have lived through cancer, spinal cord injuries, suicides, custody battles, negative performance reviews (all unfair, of course), and chemotherapy. In the next week or so, I will be getting a root canal. In the meantime, my tooth, or rather, my face hurts (it's killing you, I know). Vicodin at work is a bad idea. Ibuprofen at work is ok, but too weak.

I'll post again when I need the Vicodin. That should be funny.

Update: I took the Vicodin. Feel fine....

Obama Talks To Arab TV

I find this astonishingly cool; our President talks to Arab TV, and mentions his Muslim connection. America seems like we are on the verge of becoming a bit more worldly!

PRESIDENT OBAMA:Now, my job is to communicate the fact that the United States has a stake in the well-being of the Muslim world, that the language we use has to be a language of respect. I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries.

AL ARABIYA:The largest one.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: The largest one, Indonesia. And so what I want to communicate is the fact that in all my travels throughout the Muslim world, what I've come to understand is that regardless of your faith – and America is a country of Muslims, Jews, Christians, non-believers – regardless of your faith, people all have certain common hopes and common dreams.

And my job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives. My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect. But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there's no reason why we can't restore that. And that I think is going to be an important task.

But ultimately, people are going to judge me not by my words but by my actions and my administration's actions. And I think that what you will see over the next several years is that I'm not going to agree with everything that some Muslim leader may say, or what's on a television station in the Arab world - but I think that what you'll see is somebody who is listening, who is respectful, and who is trying to promote the interests not just of the United States, but also ordinary people who right now are suffering from poverty and a lack of opportunity. I want to make sure that I'm speaking to them, as well.

Some Advice For Obama

From McSweeney's:

Sunday Cartoon Fun: 007 Edition

There Will Be Trials

Sully said there would be Obama; and so it was. He now is saying there will be war crimes trials. Just sit tight. I happen to agree with Sully's hope. Though, it's just hope.

Parsing Obama

The executive orders are so far very subtle but very smart. Scott Horton's analysis is the most telling. Some will be disappointed that Obama is not about to condemn the out-going war crimes of Bush, Cheney et al. in ringing terms. But the election did that. And as the era of the dark side recedes a little, my sense of the looming reality is as follows. The men who ordered a man tied to a chair, doused in water, and chilled to hypothermia so intense he had to be rushed to emergency medical care, the men who presided over at least two dozen and at most a hundred prisoners tortured to death, the men who ordered an American servicewoman to smear fake menstrual blood over a Muslim's face in order to win a war against Jihadism, the men who ordered innocents stripped naked, sexually abused, terrified by dogs, or cast into darkness with no possibility of a future, and did all this in the name of the Constitution of the United States, the men who gave the signal in wartime that there were no limits to what could be done to prisoners of war and reaped a whirlwind of abuse and torture that will haunt American servicemembers for decades: these men will earn the judgment of history. It will be brutal.

We will need some formal and comprehensive record of all that happened, and the Congress will surely begin to move on that (and they should not exempt their own members from scrutiny either). And as specific allegations of torture emerge, the Justice Department will have no option but to prosecute. To ignore such charges is itself a dereliction of constitutional duty.

In the last two weeks, two very important things have happened that make that especially hard to avoid. The Bush administration's chief prosecutor at Gitmo, Susan Crawford, has herself conceded that torture did indeed take place in that camp, and specifically against Qahtani, the prisoner whose torture was personally monitored by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, and whose torture log is in the public domain. An attorney general presented with clear evidence of torture engaged in by public officials has no choice but to prosecute - or to make a mockery of his office. It is absurd to ignore the men who have primary responsibility for the crime.

The second big thing is that the perpetrators of war crimes are no longer in power. I predict that as fear of administrative reprisal ebbs, more and more whistle-blowers will come forward with evidence of what was done under Bush and Cheney, in defiance of domestic and international law. That Bush and Cheney got hacks to write absurd legal memos saying that, in Bush's own words, "whatever we wanted to do" was legal will mean nothing. Yoo and Bybee are the kind of useful, amoral sycophants and apparatchiks that always emerge and flourish in lawless states eager to put up a facade of legalism to defend their power-grabs.

I do not believe in a witch-hunt in the CIA, whose many hard-working officers deserve support not censure. I do believe in holding responsible those high elected officials who broke the law and violated the Constitution in authorizing war crimes. It should take as much time as needed for a thorough accounting; it should be meticulously fair; it should be geared solely to ensure that the rule of law is no longer in question; and that only those truly responsible at the top of the chain of command are held liable. But if we do not hold these men to account, the precedent they set is alarming.

They have, after all, argued that the executive branch can do anything to anyone to defend the nation's security as defined and measured by that executive branch itself. They have argued that that power is permanent and not restricted to a discrete length of time. They have declared the Constitution to be entirely subject to the executive's will, checked only by a four year "moment of accountability". And they are unrepentant - even boastful of their actions. We cannot leave that precedent in place. Why? I know no better popular expression of the case than that made by Robert Bolt in this imagined conversation between Thomas More and the John Yoo of his day, William Roper:

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

Yes, I give prisoners of war, even the demons of al Qaeda, the benefit of the law. For my own safety's sake. And ours'.

Sunday Cartoon Fun: Best Of Luck Edition

Update: