It happened again last week: More top Democrats urged Sen. John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, to join John Kerry’s campaign as Democratic candidate for vice president. McCain insists he’s not interested. But the drumbeat continues. Why? Consider his latest book.

In the aftermath of 9/11, an astute editor asked McCain to write a book on courage. It was a time when many Americans were afraid to fly or enter tall buildings. Yet it was a time when television showed vivid images of firefighters and police officers rushing into burning buildings as the public rushed out. Clearly the question of courage was in the air. And who better to write about it than a decorated Vietnam hero who had spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war?

So with his longtime administrative assistant Mark Salter (with whom the senator already has written two books), McCain got down to work. But the wheels of the New York publishing gods grind slowly. Only last month did the book finally appear. Now, I suspect, most readers of Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life won’t be thinking about the Twin Towers. They’ll be thinking about Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, about Washington’s response to it, and about the need for courageous leadership in public affairs.

This book is silent on Iraq. But it sends out some telling signals that remind us why McCain remains such a popular figure in the nation’s political pantheon.

First, it’s a humble book. No model of personal meekness, McCain can be brusque and irascible. But he never claims any special privilege in the realm of courage. This isn’t a book about his own wartime experiences, but about the courage of others. Like other books of its sort — John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage (1956) and the Scottish novelist Compton McKenzie’s On Moral Courage (1962) — this text is studded with engaging set-piece stories of noteworthy heroes. Some are public figures, like longtime political activist Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar and former Alabama freedom marcher John Lewis, now a congressman from Georgia. Others earned fame in their day, like Hungarian Zionist and World War II resistance fighter Hannah Senesh and the nineteenth-century Navajo tribal leader Chief Manuelito. Not surprisingly, given McCain’s background, several of his examples feature decorated military heroes. Before all of these, McCain professes unqualified admiration. And while he puzzles at times over the line between bravery and foolhardiness, he searches honestly for the key to courage.

Second, this is not a scholastic book. Neither footnoted nor indexed, and divided into chapters without numbers or titles, it claims simply to be, as he says, “a manual of courage” designed to “encourage people to find the fortitude to get on with their lives.” Readable and probing, it’s the kind of book you’d expect from an intelligent non-specialist mind fulfilling the congressional mandate to raise questions about policy and practice. McCain does, however, have a point of view. He worries that courage is in danger of being “defined down” by including under its rubric all sorts of attributes (like fortitude and discipline) that he feels don’t quite rise to that height. While the point is a good one — what term will we reserve for the 9/11 rescuers if we use “courage” for everyday experiences? — the events at Abu Ghraib ought to make us wonder whether courage needs a more rather than less expansive ambit. How else can we instill courage in military personnel, even when all they’re doing is routine, boring work like looking after prisoners? How do we train them to say no, to disobey bad orders, to blow the whistle? Don’t we start by saying, “This, too, takes genuine courage”?

Third, unlike so many books emanating from the Beltway, there is no subtext here of a defense of McCain’s own profession as a politician. Having surveyed the courage displayed under enemy fire and in times of intense fear, he writes that by contrast “I don’t really need much courage for the challenges most frequently encountered in a political career. Political courage in our consensual political system is seldom all that courageous.” Sadly enough, he may simply be recording an observable phenomenon — leading the reader to wonder whether politics does need to become more courageous.

This last point cuts to the core of an unresolved challenge McCain faces in writing this book. Throughout, he returns to words rich with ethical resonance — like conscience, moral, honor, and duty — to explain how courage works. On several occasions, he explicitly considers the topic of moral courage. Yet he never quite sorts out its relation to physical courage. At times he notes that moral courage trumps physical courage — that it is “the enforcing virtue, the one that makes all the others possible.” Elsewhere, however, he insists that the two are really much the same.

But then, this book never set out to carry a lot of conceptual freight. It is, in his own description, “a small book.” Inspirational, sensible, candid, it makes its largest point simply by appearing. That a sitting senator in 2004 should take the trouble to publish a book on a classical virtue — and that the market should receive it with such interest — reminds us how much the public longs for leaders who think about, and lead with, moral values. No wonder Democrats want him on their ticket.

©2004 Institute for Global Ethics

“As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war. The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians. In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”

– White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez, in a written memo to President Bush on January 25, 2002, endorsing a plan to ignore portions of the Geneva Conventions when interrogating captured members of the Taliban or al Qaeda. The policy was adopted by Bush, whose use of sweeping executive powers to designate captured fighters as “enemy combatants” without the protection of traditional laws, has prompted legal challenges currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. The newly revealed memo, quoted in Newsweek, has raised the question of “whether the Bush administration set up a legal foundation that opened the door for the mistreatment” of Iraqi prisoners now making headlines, according to the Associated Press. (“The Roots of Torture,” Newsweek, May 24; “Abuse Scandal Focuses on Bush Foundation,” AP, May 17)

WASHINGTON
As the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. forces continues to dominate headlines, the military announced that the first court-martial to address the situation would take place this week.

Army Spc. Jeremy Sivits, who took some of the photos now circulating widely, is scheduled to face a military tribunal on Wednesday in Baghdad. Among other charges, he is accused of dereliction of duty for failing to stop the abuse.

While Sivits faces up to a year in prison and various other penalties, stiffer sentences may await six other soldiers charged with more serious crimes, reported the New York Times.

Sivit’s trial, which will be open to the media, was not the only news last week to spark scrutiny and continued debate over the ethics of the military and those involved. Among the developments:

• The International Committee of the Red Cross released its confidential report into the abuse, chronicling its findings from 29 visits to 14 detention sites before the end of October 2003. Contradicting some testimony by U.S. officials, the Red Cross said it told the government of serious abuse long before the government took action. “We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts,” Red Cross operations director Pierre Kraehenbuel told the Associated Press. “There was a pattern and a system.”
• While the Red Cross was not involved in the abuse, some observers last week questioned whether the organization should have done more to publicize its confidential findings and stop the abuse earlier. The Red Cross, noted the Washington Post, is allowed access to monitor detention facilities under an agreement that calls on it to keep its findings private and work for change through official channels rather than public pressure.
• The Post also reported that eight military legal officers, uncomfortable with U.S. rules for interrogations in Iraq, appealed last year to a high-ranking representative of the New York State Bar Association for help in trying to get the Pentagon to change its practices. The military lawyers “said this was a disaster waiting to happen and that they felt shut out” of the rules-drafting process, Scott Horton, then head of the bar association’s committee on international law, told the Post. Some of those U.S. interrogation rules now appear to violate the Geneva Conventions on humane treatment of prisoners, according to the Post report.
• A U.S. Army general under investigation for making speeches implying that the war on terrorism is a religious battle against Satan was among those briefing the Pentagon on how to interrogate Iraqi prisoners. The involvement of Lt. Gen. William Boykin, whose evangelical Christian beliefs and pronouncements last October sparked a controversy and a pending investigation, could heighten tensions by implying that the abuse was sanctioned as part of a cultural battle with Muslims, reported the Reuters news agency. The fact that Boykin, who was not sanctioned for his remarks, was apparently involved in planning the interrogation “creates a climate in which … the perpetrators believe they’re carrying out the policies of those above them, whether those policies are explicit or not,” Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American Islamic Relations, told Reuters.
• Following an alarming number of alleged sexual assaults by U.S. military personnel against their colleagues in the Middle East, the Defense Department last week released a report calling for immediate reform. The report, ordered in February after more than 100 allegation of sexual assault and misconduct over the past 18 months, proposes immediate awareness training for servicemembers and an advisory council on sexual assault, reported the New York Times.
• The Daily Mirror tabloid in Britain last week fired its editor, Piers Morgan, and issued an apology for publishing faked photos of British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. Despite mounting criticism that the photos were bogus, Morgan continued to stand by the images, which have been condemned for wrongly imperiling British soldiers serving in Iraq. The tabloid’s board last week broke ranks with the editor, firing him and publishing an apology. While the board said the photographs were published “in good faith,” it said “there is now sufficient evidence to suggest that these pictures are fakes and that the Daily Mirror has been the subject of a calculated and malicious hoax,” reported Reuters.

LONDON
After many years of tackling prejudice with separate agencies and efforts, the United Kingdom last week announced that it was changing course, unveiling plans to put all of its anti-bias agencies under a single roof at a new Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR).

The plan would unify the United Kingdom’s multiple government offices tasked with combating bias based on gender, race, age, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, reported the Financial Times.

As British society has awakened to different forms of bias, the government has kept pace by forming new agencies — a somewhat piecemeal approach that should be better coordinated, ministers decided.

The new CEHR will bring together three current watchdog agencies: the Commission for Racial Equality, the Disability Rights Commission, and the Equal Opportunities Commission.

“Every one of us should have the chance to fulfill our potential, live with respect and dignity, and not face the fear of prejudice, discrimination, and hate,” Secretary of State for Trade and Industry Patricia Hewitt said last week, pledging to fight discrimination in society and the workplace.

“As individuals, our identities are diverse and complex. People don’t define themselves as just a woman or black or gay, and neither should our equality organizations,” she added. “The CEHR will bring together knowledge and experience to overcome and challenge all types of discrimination.”

While the move was widely welcomed, some cautioned that without bolstered powers of enforcement and a concerted effort to stay sharp and vigilant, a mere agglomeration could weaken current oversight, according to the BBC.

SAN FRANCISCO
Popular U.S. clothing retailer Gap Inc. last week released a report aimed at gauging its factories’ compliance with ethics standards, winning praise for its candor in admitting that there are problems.

After two years of pushing by labor-rights and anti-sweatshop groups, Gap, which also operates the Old Navy and Banana Republic chains, undertook the massive effort of inventorying practices at roughly 3,000 overseas factories spread throughout more than 50 countries.

Although about 90 percent of factories failed to meet company standards upon initial inspection, Gap said that many facilities were able to make improvements, reported the San Jose Mercury News.

Still, the company conceded, “few factories, if any, are in full compliance all of the time.”

Problems cited in the 44-page report include improper storage of hazardous materials, machinery without sufficient safety devices, inadequate first aid, anti-union activities, discrimination, and underage workers.

Gap said it closed down 136 factories last year due to severe or repeated violations, with China and Southeast Asia accounting for the highest number of closures at 42 each, reported the Reuters news agency.

Gap chief executive Paul Pressler last week helped release the report, urging other clothing firms to join in a common effort to set uniform standards for foreign factories, noted the Mercury News.

“We feel strongly that commerce and social responsibility don’t have to be at odds,” Pressler said.

Conrad MacKerron of the As You Sow Foundation, which had been pushing for the Gap to audit its factories, welcomed last week’s report as an important step for the garment industry.

“If Gap can do its report without damage to its supply chain, we intend to now go ask their competitors, ‘Why can’t you also report so we can compare their performance to your performance?’” MacKerron told the Mercury News.

NEW YORK
Citigroup, the world’s biggest financial services firm, agreed last week to pay $2.65 billion to settle a series of class-action suits accusing the firm of misleading investors into buying WorldCom stock before 2002.

The settlement ends a number of suits alleging that Citigroup and its analysts, including star Jack Grubman, touted WorldCom stock even though its own private analyses noted that the stock was a bad buy.

Under the weight of massive accounting irregularities, WorldCom filed for the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history in July 2002.

Citigroup, its Salomon Smith Barney division, and other finance firms are wrestling with lawsuits and investigations into whether they allowed their desire to win lucrative banking contracts with powerful companies to color their brokerage advice, according to a report from the Associated Press.

Last week, Citigroup denied any wrongdoing, but agreed nevertheless to pay $2.65 billion in order “to put an unfortunate chapter behind us,” according to chief executive Charles Prince.

While Citigroup refused to concede any violation in the WorldCom case, New York State Comptroller Alan Helvesi split no hairs in denouncing the firm in a brief filed last month, noted the New York Times.

“Grubman fraudulently manipulated the underlying financial analyses he used to value WorldCom stock to maintain falsely inflated target prices for the stock and justify a ‘buy’ rating,” Helvesi wrote. “[P]roviding accurate stock ratings conflicted with Salomon’s paramount goal of securing investment banking business, and not giving true and accurate information to investors.”

Citigroup also said it has set aside $6.7 billion for potential claims stemming from its involvement with Enron Corp. and to pay for settlements involving other inquiries and irregularities, noted the AP.

HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania
Martin Grass, the former head of Rite Aid Corp., the nation’s third-largest pharmacy chain, agreed last week to a stiffer plea deal that could put him behind bars for as long as 10 years for overseeing a massive fraud.

Last week’s plea replaces a previous deal rejected by U.S. District Judge Sylvia Rambo as too lenient on Grass, whose criminal activities, according to prosecutors, ultimately pushed Rite Aid to restate earnings by $1.6 million in July 2000.

Grass, the son of Rite Aid’s founder, agreed to plead guilty to two conspiracy counts of fraud and obstruction of justice, to pay a $500,000 fine, and to forfeit $3 million, reported the Reuters news agency.

Grass is one of a handful of Rite Aid executives to face criminal charges related to the late 1990s fraud, when, prosecutors contend, they used a series of schemes to fatten their own pay and make side deals hidden from shareholders and the company.

Former vice chairman and general counsel Franklin Brown was convicted last October of a range of crimes, including witness tampering and obstruction of justice. He faces up to 65 years in prison and $2.5 million in fines, reported Reuters.

Grass’s final sentence will likely be handed down in the next few weeks by Rambo.

NEW YORK
U.S. pharmaceutical superpower Pfizer last week agreed to pay $430 million in criminal and civil penalties for pushing doctors to prescribe one of its drugs for “off-label” uses.

The deal centers on the company’s lucrative drug Neurontin, which was approved in 1993 by the U.S. government for treating only epileptic seizures, reported the Agence France-Presse.

In 1996, a whistle-blower alleged that Pfizer was plying doctors with incentives, paying physicians to put their names on endorsements authored by the company, and disguising lavish trips as “consulting” conferences.

The goal of these marketing activities was single-minded: getting doctors to prescribe Neurontin for problems other than epilepsy, alleged Dr. David Franklin, who used to work for the firm.

That practice is illegal, according to the New York Times. While doctors are free to prescribe any approved drug for any medical condition, drug companies are legally barred from pushing them toward such “off-label” uses.

“This illegal and fraudulent promotion scheme corrupted the information process relied upon by doctors in their medical decision making, thereby putting patients at risk,” U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan said last week.

Pfizer, which bought Neurontin manufacturer Warner-Lambert in 2000, agreed last week to plead guilty to two violations of U.S. law and pay a $240 million criminal fine.

Another $170 million in penalties will be paid for civil violations and to states. Dr. Franklin, who first tipped off the government, will take home more than $24 million under federal whistle-blower statutes, noted the Times.

“This is a standard industry practice,” Franklin alleged in an interview with the Associated Press. “Hopefully, real change will happen now, and this will be the start of something and not the end.”

Off-label uses account for more than 90 percent of Neurontin’s sales, yielding revenues of $2.7 billion last year alone, according to figures cited by the Times.

WASHINGTON
Corruption and kickbacks have siphoned off as much as $130 billion in World Bank funds earmarked for development projects since 1946, a U.S. Senate hearing was told last week.

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) cited experts’ estimates that between $26 billion and $130 billion have been lost to fraud and corruption, instead of meeting the needs of poor nations, reported the Reuters news agency.

“In its starkest terms, corruption has cost the lives of uncounted individuals contending with poverty and disease,” Lugar said last week.

If misused funds from other multilateral development banks are included in the tally, the figure rises to about $200 billion, according to researchers such as Northwestern University associate professor Jeffrey Winters.

“The lion’s share of the theft of development funds occurs in the implementation of projects and the use of loan funds by client governments,” Winters told the hearing last week in Washington.

While the news is bad for the World Bank, which rejected the estimates as having “no basis in fact,” the organization won praise for president James Wolfensohn’s recent push to stamp out corruption, noted Reuters.

While World Bank rules prevented staff from testifying publicly at last week’s hearing, the institution’s Web site details some of its efforts, including a 180-strong roster of entities blacklisted from contracts due to past corruption.

Last week’s hearing — the first public accounting of fraud being examined by an ongoing Senate investigation — called for greater scrutiny and auditing of World Bank and others’ projects.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

OTTAWA
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have charged a retired public servant, Chuck Guité, and the president of an advertising firm, Jean Brault, with six fraud-related charges concerning a plan to promote certain Canadian programs and controversial firearms legislation.

The charges carry a potential sentence of 60 years in jail for each accused.

Included in the charges are allegations that Mr. Guité, who ran the federal government’s promotional sponsorship program, awarded bogus or inflated contracts worth just under $1.4 million to Mr. Brault’s company, Groupaction Marketing, which had developed close ties to the governing Liberal Party.

The auditor general of Canada, Sheila Fraser, recently handed down a damning report alleging that payments of nearly $72 million to advertising firms close to the Liberal Party produced little or no value and that most of the government’s contracting rules for these sponsorship contracts were broken by the sponsorship program branch headed by Mr. Guité.

The RCMP has indicated that these latest charges are one facet of their ongoing investigation into the sponsorship scandal.

The main Opposition Conservative Party is questioning the timing of the charges given the probability of an imminent election call by Prime Minister Paul Martin, who has assured Canadians that he wants to get to the bottom of the scandal and ensure that all those responsible are held accountable.

LONDON
Britain’s private schools were warned last week to open their doors wider to their underprivileged neighbors or face the loss of their charitable status and its lucrative bottom-line benefits.

The warning came at a conference at Brighton College last week, where a range of speakers counseled private schools on impending changes stemming from the nation’s new Charity Act, reported the BBC.

Those changes include higher standards for maintaining a private school’s charitable status, which will depend increasingly on the school’s ability to show that it is providing a benefit to the wider public.

The BBC notes that some schools already are working to meet local needs by opening their sports facilities, tech centers, or after-school programs to community members who cannot afford to attend as students.

“We want to build upon what is already happening; there are a whole raft of ways of doing this,” Sir Cyril Taylor, chairman of the Specialist Schools Trust, told the BBC. “Everybody should be concerned if there are children in underperforming schools. It’s everybody’s responsibility to help change that.”

Sir Cyril and others called for improved collaboration between private schools and their public counterparts and communities. “We want to see an inclusive education sector,” he added.

Brighton College head Anthony Seldon echoed that sentiment, calling for a “new age of cooperation.”

BRASILIA, Brazil
Faced with mounting criticisms for abridging freedom of the press, the Brazilian government last week grudgingly retracted its expulsion of a New York Times reporter whose article angered the country’s president.

Larry Rohter, the Rio de Janeiro bureau chief for the Times, wrote in a May 9 article that Brazilians “have begun wondering if their president’s predilection for strong drink is affecting his performance in office.”

His article, “Brazilian Leader’s Tippling Becomes National Concern,” was a rehash of public rumors that relied largely on quotes from critics of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, reported the Associated Press.

While the Times continued to back the article as accurate, the Brazilian government denounced it as “libelous, injurious, and false,” revoking Rohter’s visa and giving him eight days to leave the country.

While public sentiment was strongly behind the government at first, mounting concern over whether President da Silva had overreacted and abrogated press freedoms soon turned the tide, according to the Times.

As the week wore on, a growing number of politicians, labor groups, and press associations condemned Rohter’s expulsion as a violation of the authoritarian and abusive practices that once reigned in Brazil.

“We do not understand how a democratic government that had many of its leaders persecuted and censured can take such an authoritarian decision,” the Foreign Correspondents Association of São Paulo wrote in an open letter, “especially since it was the foreign press during the years of military regime that was responsible for attracting international attention to denunciations of the dictatorship.”

“It’s a political mistake. The government … went from victim to villain,” Sen. Jefferson Peres of the Democratic Workers’ Party told the AP. “The article was badly done but that doesn’t justify the government’s decision which is authoritarian.”

After da Silva’s administration refused to back down, Brazil’s Supreme Court intervened on Thursday, blocking Rohter’s expulsion and giving the government 72 hours to explain why its expulsion is constitutional, noted the AP.

Friday night, the government reversed course and dropped its efforts to expel Rohter after receiving a letter from his lawyers saying that Rohter regretted any “embarrassment” caused by the article, reported the Times.

From CareerBuilder.com:

“Forty-three percent of workers recently surveyed by CareerBuilder.com reported they do not feel valued by their employers. Dissatisfaction with management techniques is a main contributing factor, with four-in-ten stating their corporate leaders play favorites and nearly one-in-four reporting their direct supervisors do not take time to help them develop or improve….

“‘Effective management has a direct impact on employee satisfaction, which in turn has a direct impact on business performance,’ said Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources for CareerBuilder.com. ‘Workers who feel appreciated and supported by their organizations are more likely to perform at a higher level and stay with the employer long-term. With nearly one-in-four workers reporting they feel like just another number to their organizations, employers will need to revisit their retention strategies to keep their top performers in place and bottom line intact.’

“An employee’s experience with management begins with the direct supervisor. Today’s workers are voicing concerns with their supervisor’s ability to lead, with 42 percent stating they can do their supervisor’s job better. Part of their criticism is attributed to the amount of individual attention given to employees as well as perceptions of character. Twenty-four percent say their supervisor does not take time to review job concerns and 22 percent say their supervisor is not trustworthy.

“Beyond the direct supervisor is the employee’s experience with senior management.

“Forty-seven percent of workers state their corporate leaders do not lead by example. Workers also report feeling distanced from senior management, with 32 percent reporting that corporate leaders do not keep staff informed of company objectives and initiatives.

“‘Employees can often feel removed from their corporate leaders, especially in larger organizations with tiers of management,’ continued Haefner. ‘If employees don’t feel connected to and inspired by senior management, they are less likely to ‘follow the leader’ and take a personal stake in company goals. Thirty-seven percent of workers today say they don’t feel motivated by their corporate leaders.’…”

“A nation may lose its liberties in a day and not miss them in a century.”

– Baron de Montesquieu (French jurist and philosopher, whose work inspired the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1689-1755)