Ron's View

Whenever I read mainstream news sources (NYT, NPR) these days, I realize that my notion of reality has undergone a major shift in recent years. Either I’ve gone crazy or, after decades of complacency, the scales have fallen from my eyes. I think I know which, but perhaps I’m not in a position to judge.

Here’s the thing. I attended a presentation today about the future of museums, museum best practices, and such, and at one point I realized that I heard something the speaker said in a way that must be at odds with how everyone else in the room heard it. Are they all blind, or am I just mad?

The speaker was talking about the need for museums to engage their communities. Not just outreach, bringing the riches of the museum to the people, but engaging them more deeply. This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense without examples, and she offered a few, such as a program a small museum in a southern state ran that engaged inmates in painting, in parallel with an exhibition.

That’s roughly what the program did. The details don’t matter. What matters is that the speaker spoke about other work engaging museums and prisons, and mentioned how poorly we do in this country with our prison system. She passed over this lightly, not wanting to turn the conversation to the politics of prisons and our failed war on drugs, but she said enough to suggest that this is what she had in mind. First offenders locked away for years because of mandatory sentencing guidelines, drug offenders locked up for life rather than getting treatment and becoming productive contributors to society. States spending funds on ever-growing prison populations rather than on underlying social issues. That sort of thing.

The underlying message: our prisons are failing us. Our legal/justice structure is failing us. Well, yes. Then again, maybe it’s succeeding. This was what I thought, and what sent off the alarm that maybe I’m crazy.

What is the goal of the prison system anyway? Rehabilitation? If so, then yes, the system is a disaster. But we can make sense of it all if we simply re-state the mission of the system. It’s not rehabilitation. It’s increasing the profits of the corporations that build the prisons and, more and more often, run them. State after state is privatizing the prison system.

Let’s see. Oh, here. Here’s Adam Gopnik, reporting on prisons four months ago in The New Yorker:

A growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible.

Who said our prisons are failing?

Then there’s our war on terror. You can see where I’m heading. Failure? All these years and we still can’t shut al Qaeda down? Well, what’s our measure of failure? More money to private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. More money for drones in countries with which we aren’t at war, such as Pakistan and Yemen.

Heck, what about our own country? We’re not at war with ourselves, are we? Yet, drones are our future, with local law enforcement agencies getting into the act. And all those full body scanners at the airports. Do they work? Do we need them? No matter. Companies are making big bucks off them. Michael Chertoff, Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security, is a lobbyist now representing the companies that make the scanners. What’s good for our national security corporations is what’s good for the country.

And education. Yes, our public schools are a failure. We all know that. Everyone says so. The answer? Privatization, of course. We’re going to pay companies to make the schools better.

But perhaps school failure is a success, as it justifies handing public funds to a handful of for-profit companies that have convinced mayors, governors, presidents that they have the answer.

You see? Our prisons aren’t failing. Our national security system isn’t failing. Our schools aren’t failing. They are succeeding. They are ensuring that money flows where it’s meant to.

Crazy, huh?

Don’t agree just yet. I bring you Diane Ravitch, who has an article in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. I may be crazy, but she isn’t. She’s one of the most widely respected voices on public education in this country. Professor at NYU, Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush administration, a member of the National Assessment Governing Board under Clinton and the second Bush.

In her NYR article, Ravitch reviews the recent Council on Foreign Relations report U.S. Education Reform and National Security: Independent Task Force Report, written by, among others, Joel Klein (former head of NYC city schools, now a Murdoch employee) and Condi Rice. The article is not behind the NYR paywall. You can read it without charge, and I urge you to do so. After reading it two nights ago, I was feeling a little more relaxed about my bout of madness.

The beauty of the report is its brilliant interweaving of two great failures: our schools and our national security system. The solution? Shovel money into the usual educational stoves.

I could quote many passages. This one will do:

Statistics are marshaled to prove that our schools are failing, our economy is at risk, our national security is compromised, and everything we prize is about to disappear because of our low-performing public schools. Make no mistake, the task force warns: “Educational failure puts the United States’ future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk.”

Despite its alarmist rhetoric, the report is not a worthy successor to the long line of jeremiads that it joins. Unlike A Nation at Risk [published in 1983], which was widely quoted as a call to action, this report is a plodding exercise in groupthink among mostly like-minded task force members. Its leaden prose contains not a single sparkling phrase for the editorial writers. The only flashes of original thinking appear in the dissents to the report.

What marks this report as different from its predecessors, however, is its profound indifference to the role of public education in a democratic society, and its certainty that private organizations will succeed where the public schools have failed. Previous hand-wringing reports sought to improve public schooling; this one suggests that public schools themselves are the problem, and the sooner they are handed over to private operators, the sooner we will see widespread innovation and improved academic achievement.

Ravitch’s skewering of the report is worth reading in full.

With that, I rest my case. I’m not mad after all. Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? Let me out of here!

Gheorghe Alexianu, Romanian governor of region including Odessa during World War II, at far right

[From Charles King's post at The Wilson Quarterly]

I wrote last Sunday about the book I was reading, Charles King’s Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams. I finished it yesterday morning. Still awaiting me when I wrote the post were chapters on Odessan life in the final years under the tsar, during World War I and the revolution, the first two decades of the Soviet Union and Stalin, and the Romanian occupation from 1941 to 1944.

Once Germany broke the German-Soviet Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1941 and invaded the Soviet Union, it invited Axis ally Romania to head into the regions to Romania’s northeast along the Black Sea. King’s chapter on the Romanian occupation, Romanian anti-Semitism, and the removal of Jews from Odessa is the climax of the book. A horrific tale, as one would imagine, but a fascinating one as well. Also of interest are subsequent chapters on Odessa in the postwar Soviet Union, Odessa as part of post-Soviet Ukraine, and the rich Odessan-infused community in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

I had an unexpected sense of familiarity when I read a passage in the chapter on the Romanian years. King first explains that

Odessans began denouncing each other almost as soon as the Romanian cavalry trotted down a deserted and sandbagged Richilieu Street. … The demand to unmask hidden Bolsheviks before they could stage further terrorist attacks was greater than ever, and the supply of Odessans eager to avoid suspicion themselves probably spiked as well. After all, it was hard to have survived the 1930s without embracing to some degree the Soviet system, and in the topsy-turvy world of war and occupation, every virtue conjured from necessity was now a vice waiting to be revealed. It really was like stepping through the looking glass.

This leads into a story of two men’s dueling denunciations, after which we come upon the following passage:

For plenty of Odessans, the way to demonstrate a healthy sense of civic duty was by stepping up and being of use in the maintenance of law and order, the discovery of underground Soviet agents, and especially the exposure of hidden Jews.

Alexianu’s administration saw all Jewish Odessans, at least in theory, as Soviet agents. … the search for hidden Jews was not simply a matter of what would now be called ethnic cleansing. It was also, from the perspective of the occupier and many of the occupied, a matter of security.

By no means do I wish to compare early twenty-first century America to Odessa under the Romanians, but really, is this familiar or what? Just replace Jewish Odessans with Muslim Americans and Soviet agents with Al Qaeda agents. Yes, this is an enormous stretch, but still. What is one to make of our airport security theater apparatus? Of our data collection? And so on.

Just yesterday I read an article about the aldermen in Brookfield, Wisconsin, just outside Milwaukee, approving construction of a mosque. I know I should focus on this positive news — it was approved — but I couldn’t get the following portion of the report out of my mind:

Brookfield resident Beverly Kuntzsch told aldermen she was concerned about public safety. She said the New York Police Department surveyed 100 mosques nationwide in 2007 and found substantial ties to terrorism and “Jihad.”

“How will you monitor the literature or the preaching/teaching of violence that’s going on in the mosques?” Kuntzsch asked.

We’re not wartime Odessa, or anything remotely like it. But the security apparatus grows. It’s big business, for one thing, with bipartisan government support.

Where are we headed?

———

By the way, Charles King’s post at The Wilson Quarterly a year ago, from which the photo at the top is taken, is short and provides a good overview of what his book is about. See also Timothy Snyder’s review, which King’s post links to, again at The Wilson Quarterly. (Snyder is the Yale historian whose book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin I read, and wrote about, a few months ago.)

[Tom Tomorrow, May 7, 2012 at Daily Kos]

Yesterday, at CNN’s blog, prominent mainstream journalist and commentator Fareed Zakaria did what mainstream journalists so rarely do: speak truth about our ever growing national security state:

While we will leave the battlefields of the greater Middle East, we are firmly committed to the war on terror at home. What do I mean by that? Well, look at the expansion of federal bureaucracies to tackle this war.

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for the intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet – the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. The largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs is now the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.

The rise of this national security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touch every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. Some 30,000 people, for example, are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications within the United States.

In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is, of course, a war without end.
So we continue to stand in absurd airport lines. We continue to turn down the visa applications of hundreds of thousands of tourists, businessmen, artists and performers who simply want to visit America and spend money here, and become ambassadors of good will for this country. We continue to treat even those visitors who arrive with visas as hostile aliens – checking, searching and deporting people at will. We continue to place new procedures and rules to monitor everything that comes in and out of the country, making doing business in America less attractive and more burdensome than in most Western countries.

We don’t look like people who have won a war. We look like scared, fearful, losers.

I become increasingly convinced that President Obama’s greatest long-term impact on our country is his legitimation of policies on war, surveillance, and privacy that once seemed the aberrant acts of a rogue administration. Rather than winding them down as he disengaged from Iraq and Afghanistan, he has woven them into the fabric of our government.

At least he exercises his powers wisely and with discretion.

2012 electoral votes by state

The NYT has put up an interactive 2012 electoral map at their website today. When you follow the link (and you should), you will start with a map displaying each state as a square with size proportional to its number of electoral votes and placed roughly in its proper geographic location. The squares are colored in five shades: dark blue (solid Obama), light blue (leaning Obama), yellow (tossup), pink (leaning Romney), and red (solid Romney).

One can quibble with the assignments, and they will change in the months to come, but it’s just a starting point. Below the map are paragraphs for the tossup and leaning states explaining their situation. The nine tossup states include five to the east — Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and Florida — and five to the west — Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado, and Nevada.

The fun starts when you click on the Next button. A large circle appears for Obama, another for Romney. The states themselves turn into into circles, again proportioned based on electoral votes. Those solid for or leaning toward Obama move into his circle. Similarly for Romney. And the tossups pile up between the Obama/Romney circles.

But here’s the cool part. You can then use your mouse to drag any of the state circles wherever you wish — to Obama or Romney or in-between. Each of the three regions has a running total of electoral votes — those for Obama or Romney or undecided. As you move the state circles around, the totals immediately update.

From the starting point, then, you can move the undecideds to one side or the other. Or if you think a state listed as leaning one way may go the other way, you can drag it that other way. By hitting the Next button, you run in sequence through some scenarios the NYT offers. For instance, there are scenarios in which the states align Democratic or Republican according to what they did in the 2008 and 2004 elections (but with the current electoral vote count for each state, not the vote counts in effect at the time).

In the opening position, with those 9 tossup states unassigned, Obama has 217 electoral votes, Romney has 206, and 115 are up for grabs. To win, Obama or Romney needs 270 votes. If both end up with 269, the election is thrown into the House of Representatives.

Before I realized that the NYT offered those starter scenarios, I began to move states around myself. In 2008, Obama won both Virginia and North Carolina, but the NYT lists NC as leaning Romney and Virginia as a tossup. I figured I’d move Virginia over with NC to Romney’s side. Florida too. I know the mountain state demographics are changing, but maybe for now it’s best to move Colorado and Nevada over to Romney too. I did that. Iowa? Who knows? I gave it to Romney.

I don’t see Obama losing Pennsylvania. Ohio is the ultimate battleground state, but I decided to have it join neighboring Pennsylvania in the Obama circle. That left Wisconsin and New Hampshire. I didn’t struggle too long before moving Wisconsin to Obama. But what about New Hampshire? I have no idea. Romney does have that giant home on Lake Winnipesaukee. Do they view him as one of their own? Or maybe they’re sick of him. I gave it to Obama.

What do you know? Dead heat. 269-269. I wasn’t aiming for that. It just happened.

Later I discovered those starter scenarios, the last one of which also yields a dead heat, but by a different route. It gives Obama Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as I did, and gives Romney Florida, Iowa, and Nevada. But whereas I gave Obama Ohio and New Hampshire, the NYT scenario moves them over to Romney, and whereas I gave Romney Virginia and Colorado, it gives them to Obama. Thus, in this scenario, Romney wins both Florida and Ohio, yet still fails to win the election. I find my dead heat more plausible than theirs.

Give it a try. Remember, you can move any state, not just the tossups. It quickly becomes apparent that Obama needs a handful of key states from among the ones he won in 2008, the same ones so hotly contested by Bush and Kerry/Gore in 2004/2000. However incompetent a candidate Romney turns out to be, however much the economy improves between now and November, if it does at all, you’ll appreciate that we are likely to be in for another close election.

I received my new issue of The New York Review of Books yesterday. The previous issue had come while we were away. In getting caught up on other fronts (including writing a series of posts on our time in North Carolina), I had failed to get far in that old issue. Fortunately, last night Joel mentioned that it contained an interesting article about Eisenhower, and this morning I read it first thing. I recommend it highly. (Alas, it’s behind the NYR paywall.) The article is a review by Thomas Powers of two recent books: Eisenhower: The White House Years, by Jim Newton, and Eisenhower in War and Peace, by Jean Edward Smith.

Whenever I think of Eisenhower, I recall the single most boring book I ever read, his memoirs. Looking him up in Amazon, I see that it must have been The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956, from 1965, although I don’t recall that it only covered Eisenhower’s first term. What I remember is a frightfully thick paperback. And I remember learning about several events from my infancy and toddlerhood that I hadn’t read treatments of before, such as the end of the Korean War, the McCarthy hearings, and the Suez crisis. This wasn’t the place to learn the basics, which I would only make sense of years later. I don’t entirely remember what made the book so tedious. For that, I would need to have a new look.

In any case, back to the biographies and Powers’ review. Early on, Powers describes how Eisenhower acquired

a learned understanding, firmer than that of perhaps any other president, of the nature of the power wielded by nations—that thing, described by Thucydides, which explains why “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Eisenhower himself would never have described what he knew in language so plain, but it is what marks the mind of the man who emerges from two new biographies.

… The education of Dwight David Eisenhower began with books—the tales of Hannibal and Caesar he loved as a child, the deeper study under [General] Fox Conner—but more important was his experience of war, which came late.

Powers continues with an overview of Eisenhower’s World War II experience and its lessons, a survey of Eisenhower’s handling of assorted international crises, and a concluding passage that captures Eisenhower’s greatness:

Eisenhower’s special gift was not for practice of the traditional military arts but for sensing the inertia of war—why it is so difficult to back away from threats of force, once issued, and almost impossible after shooting starts.

Respect for the danger of this inertia, deep enough to make a difference, seems to come only from direct personal experience. Even President Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who had lived long enough to know better, thought armies could apply useful pressure. “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about,” she said once, “if we can’t use it?”

Eisenhower was surrounded by people who believed roughly the same thing, but he had learned respect for modern war as an all-or-nothing game. During his eight years in the White House he never seemed to get the big things wrong, but in the decades that have followed horrible examples abound. For all their differences, American presidents since Eisenhower seem to share an abiding temptation—they can’t let peace alone. They wish to look bold; defiance makes them pugnacious; and the military leaders promise quick victories with little pain.

We may imagine Eisenhower’s response, if he had been sitting in the room when Kennedy’s advisers told him they planned to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government by invading Cuba with a thousand men, or when they told him later to send a few thousand American soldiers to stave off defeat in Vietnam—but not too many, and as “advisers” only. Would Eisenhower have told Lyndon Johnson, oh yes, certainly, send hundreds of thousands of soldiers to do what Kennedy’s few could not? Would he have encouraged Johnson to help the Air Force pick bombing targets in North Vietnam? Would he have advised George W. Bush that seizure of Kabul and dispersion of the Taliban into the mountains were victory enough in Afghanistan? Would he have backed the urging of Cheney and Rumsfeld to send an army to invade Iraq, but not too big an army? What would Eisenhower say now about Iran?

The successors of Robert Taft share the dead senator’s views on cutting federal spending and celebrating the Christian religion, as well as his sullen dislike of such measures as Social Security, but (save Ron Paul) they are full of appetite for threatening Iran with America’s superb military. Mitt Romney was briefly in his youth a member of the Boy Scouts, but his time in uniform ended there. He avoided the Vietnam War through student deferments and thirty months as a Mormon missionary in France. But Romney supports tough action to back up tough talk on Iran, and once suggested that continued Iranian defiance on nuclear matters would merit a sharp rap “in the nature of blockade or a bombardment or surgical strikes of one kind or another.”

Hearing this, Eisenhower might have asked himself: Where do you begin?

I am, of course, no fan of Mitt Romney. Eisenhower surely would have much to teach him. But I have no illusion that Obama (or Hillary Clinton) is much better. Indeed, Romney’s dishonest attacks on Obama’s foreign policy notwithstanding, the essentials of their war strategies are likely to differ little, whichever is elected. We search in vain for a new Eisenhower, a voice of wisdom and maturity who can change our direction.

Change We Can Believe In: Bug Splat

I’ve written what may seem to be more than my share of posts on US drone warfare, including one a week ago. Then again, can there be too many? Here we are, waging undeclared war around the world, killing people without warrant based on the argument that they are on the battlefield (this being an easy argument to make when you claim that the whole world is a battlefield). We can thank the Bush administration for this claim, but Obama and his enablers in the Justice Department have eagerly stuck by it. Obama won’t release full details on drone warfare or its legal justification on the grounds that that would jeopardize our security. So we continue down the path of lawlessness, making it the norm and ensuring that our security is indeed jeopardized. Some change!

But I’m no expert. For more, Michael Hastings’ article The Rise of the Killer Drones: How America Goes to War in Secret in the current Rolling Stone is essential reading. Here’s a passage from early in the article:

During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the military conducted only a handful of drone missions. Today, the Pentagon deploys a fleet of 19,000 drones, relying on them for classified missions that once belonged exclusively to Special Forces units or covert operatives on the ground. American drones have been sent to spy on or kill targets in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia and Libya. Drones routinely patrol the Mexican border, and they provided aerial surveillance over Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. In his first three years, Obama has unleashed 268 covert drone strikes, five times the total George W. Bush ordered during his eight years in office. All told, drones have been used to kill more than 3,000 people designated as terrorists, including at least four U.S. citizens. In the process, according to human rights groups, they have also claimed the lives of more than 800 civilians. Obama’s drone program, in fact, amounts to the largest unmanned aerial offensive ever conducted in military history; never have so few killed so many by remote control.

And another:

For a new generation of young guns, the experience of piloting a drone is not unlike the video games they grew up on. Unlike traditional pilots, who physically fly their payloads to a target, drone operators kill at the touch of a button, without ever leaving their base – a remove that only serves to further desensitize the taking of human life. (The military slang for a man killed by a drone strike is “bug splat,” since viewing the body through a grainy-green video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed.) As drone pilot Lt. Col. Matt Martin recounts in his book Predator, operating a drone is “almost like playing the computer game Civilization” – something straight out of “a sci-fi novel.” After one mission, in which he navigated a drone to target a technical college being occupied by insurgents in Iraq, Martin felt “electrified” and “adrenalized,” exulting that “we had shot the technical college full of holes, destroying large portions of it and killing only God knew how many people.”

Only later did the reality of what he had done sink in. “I had yet to realize the horror,” Martin recalls.

This is the warfare that Obama has embraced.

To celebrate ten years of blogging, Atrios has been writing a series of posts at Eschaton on the top ten wankers of the decade. It culminated today, the anniversary day, with his selection of the winner. If you haven’t been following along, I recommend some remedial reading.

You can start with this morning’s review, a list of the nine runners up with links to his posts about them. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from his comments last Wednesday on 8th runner up Richard Cohen, the Washington Post columnist. The excerpt will give you an idea of Atrios’s perspective and the criteria for making the list.

Cohen’s had a long career, wearing one of the “liberal” hats at the Washington Post. It’s a bit sad, thinking about it, as occasionally the “good” Cohen makes an appearance and gets something really really right, but all of that is washed away by decades of the kind of wankery that can only come from lifetime employees of Fox on 15th. And when bad Richard makes an appearance, he’s really, really bad. Monsters walk among us bad.

As for the big test of the decade – just how awesome do you think the Iraq war will be! – Cohen failed miserably. He was bested by the fools, the Frenchmen, and of course the dirty fucking hippies.

From 2/6/03.

It is time once again to quote my favorite philosopher — Tevye, the lead character from “Fiddler on the Roof.” It was his habit to weigh his options by saying, “On the one hand, ” and then, “On the other hand,” until he confronted a situation where there was no other hand. This is where Colin Powell brought us all yesterday.

The evidence he presented to the United Nations — some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail — had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool — or possibly a Frenchman — could conclude otherwise.

I’ll quote also from Atrios’s post about 3rd runner up Joe Klein of Time.

He’s a fairly typical Democrat who hates Democrats, liberal who hates liberals, the real problem with the Democrats being unions, hippies, people who hate the military, people who vote for Democrats, the Democrats they vote for. The usual.

He spent years being America’s Concern Troll when it came to Iraq. He opposed the war except, you know, he didn’t really bother to tell anybody. He wasn’t all that much of a fan of how things were playing out, but the real problem, of course, were the Democrats who were trying to kill off all of our troops by cutting off funding.

And the winner is? Well, who else? Tom Friedman, come on down.

Friedman possesses all of the qualities that make a pundit truly wankerific. He fetishizes a false “centrism” which is basically whatever Tom Friedman likes, imagining the Friedman agenda is both incredibly popular in the country and lacking any support from our current politicians, when in fact the opposite is usually true. Washington worships at the altar of the agenda of false centrism, and people often hate it. Problems abroad, even ones which really have nothing to do with us, should be solved by war, and problems at home should be solved by increasing the suffering of poor and middle class people. Even though one political party is pretty much implementing, or trying to implement, 99.999999% of the Friedman agenda, what we really need is a third party catering precisely to this silent majority of Friedmanites.

If you’re still not sure why Friedman is a fraud, review the video above from May 29, 2003, with Friedman’s famous “suck on this” explanation of why we needed to go to war in Iraq. What an arrogant SOB!

Yet he continues to rake in the big bucks: mega-bestselling books, highly paid speaking appearances, TV, the column. If ever an emperor had no clothes, it’s him.

Anyway, read Atrios.

Abdulrahman al-Awlaki

Our “secret” drone war in Yemen is a continuing puzzle, and worse. Last October, I wrote about the drone killing the week before of Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver in 1995. I followed up two months ago with the report of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism on drone killings of civilians in Pakistan and a month ago regarding Attorney General Holder’s defense of drone killings of US citizens, as reported by Charlie Savage in the NYT, “if officials deem them to be operational leaders of Al Qaeda who are planning attacks on the United States and if capturing them alive is not feasible.”

I am returning to the subject in this post in order to draw your attention to Michelle Shephard’s piece in the Toronto Star yesterday (hat tip: emptywheel) on Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. It is essential reading.

At one point, Shephard recalls Leon Panetta’s statement about drones in 2009, when he was the CIA director, that “these operations have been very effective because they have been very precise in terms of the targeting and it involved a minimum of collateral damage.” Shephard’s reporting adds to the evidence that Abdulrahman was not an operational leader of Al Qaeda planning attacks on the US who could not be captured alive. In fact, he was by all evidence just a kid.

His grandfather, Nasser al Awlaki, a Fulbright scholar, former agricultural minister and prominent figure in Yemen, said Abdulrahman had nothing to do with his father since he had gone into hiding in 2009.

Nasser al Awlaki has never apologized for his son’s radical views, but said he had also worked hard to insulate his grandchildren from the controversy. He attempted, he said, to give them a “normal life.”

…

It later emerged, but was not widely reported, that the strike did not kill its purported target, AQAP’s media chief, Egyptian Ibrahim al Bana.

The U.S. administration has refused comment.

It is unclear whether Abdulrahman was the target or if the U.S. had bad information and was going after Bana, or someone else. Either way, Awlaki said he wants answers.

So do the student demonstrators who forced former president Ali Abdullah Saleh from power, many of whom knew Abdulrahman. They carried posters in Change Square with his picture last year and the words: “The Assassination of Childhood.”

“We just don’t know why they did that,” Awlaki said of the U.S. strike. “Is it because Abdulrahman was there? It’s very possible, but I cannot claim with certainty what happened. Is it a blunder on their side?

“They cannot claim he’s collateral damage.”

Drones and U.S. directed missions have killed hundreds in Yemen in the past four years, some hitting AQAP targets, many more striking civilians.

The Obama administration, of course, continues to refuse comment. National security and all that.

The killing of Abdulrahman, his father and American citizen Samir Khan, the editor of AQAP’s English-language online magazine who was also killed in the September strike, offers an opportunity to challenge the drone program in American courts. The American Civil Liberties Union has led this fight for information, but has had little success.

“When we file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation, the CIA’s response is that the drone program is a state secret, that confirming its existence would jeopardize national security,” said ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer.

“And yet,” noted Jaffer, “The CIA, or administration more generally, routinely discloses information to the public, to the press, that is meant to make people feel comfortable, that the program is closely supervised, effective, necessary.”

The law doesn’t apply when it comes to our never-ending wars, especially our secret wars.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

Today’s quote comes from Daniel Larison, in a blog post at The American Conservative. Writing about the Romney-Santorum race in light of Romney’s primary victories yesterday in Wisconsin, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, Larison observes that the

GOP is not facing a choice between dramatically different directions. If the party did nominate Santorum, it would be an endorsement of a Bush-era big-government warmonger, and when it nominates Romney it will be an endorsement of someone who essentially accepts the entire Bush-era agenda (except for immigration policy) and wants to repeat it. The most meaningful difference between them is that one is an ideologue and the other is a liar. More Republicans seem to prefer the liar.

Perfect.

Four weeks ago, I wrote a post that I soon came to regret, the one titled We Are All Snobs Now. This was my response to Rick Santorum’s widely publicized remark calling President Obama a snob for wanting to provide the opportunity for everyone to go to college. My regret came from the realization that I had been manipulated. Santorum set the bait; I swallowed it. What’s the point of allowing such hypocritical pandering to get the better of me?

Last Tuesday, Charles Simic provided what amounts to a more considered reply, in the post Age of Ignorance at the New York Review of Books. Simic is a member in good standing of Snob Central: poet, poetry editor, professor, MacArthur Fellow, Pulitzer Prize recipient, US Poet Laureate. At the same time, he personifies all that a politician of Santorum’s ilk would extol as the greatness of the United States — growing up in the Yugoslavia of WWII and its aftermath, leaving communism behind for the US, achieving great success in his adopted land and language. Perhaps this gives Simic credibility.

Let’s dip into Simic’s post for a taste of what’s on his mind.

Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It’s no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people are the nation’s most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesn’t look to me as if we do. The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit.

An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country. Most of our politicians and their political advisers and lobbyists would find themselves unemployed, and so would the gasbags who pass themselves off as our opinion makers. Luckily for them, nothing so catastrophic, even though perfectly well-deserved and widely-welcome, has a remote chance of occurring any time soon. For starters, there’s more money to be made from the ignorant than the enlightened, and deceiving Americans is one of the few growing home industries we still have in this country. A truly educated populace would be bad, both for politicians and for business.

[snip]

If this lack of knowledge is the result of the years of dumbing down of high school curriculum and of families that don’t talk to their children about the past, there’s another more pernicious kind of ignorance we confront today. It is the product of years of ideological and political polarization and the deliberate effort by the most fanatical and intolerant parties in that conflict to manufacture more ignorance by lying about many aspects of our history and even our recent past. I recall being stunned some years back when I read that a majority of Americans told pollsters that Saddam Hussein was behind September 11 terrorist attacks. It struck me as a propaganda feat unsurpassed by the worst authoritarian regimes of the past—many of which had to resort to labor camps and firing squads to force their people to believe some untruth, without comparable success.

… Where else on earth would a president who rescued big banks from bankruptcy with taxpayers’ money and allowed the rest of us to lose $12 trillion in investment, retirement, and home values be called a socialist?

[snip]

What we have in this country is the rebellion of dull minds against the intellect. That’s why they love politicians who rail against teachers indoctrinating children against their parents’ values and resent the ones who show ability to think seriously and independently.

I think Simic may have Santorum in mind at the end there.

What a snob!