Ethics Newsline®

“Barbed-wire barricades surround the residence, and all phone lines are cut. Even the water connection to my residence has been periodically turned off. I am being persuaded to resign and to forego my office, which is what I am not prepared to do…. There can be no democracy without an independent judiciary, and there can be no independent judge in Pakistan until the action of Nov. 3 is reversed. Whatever the will of some desperate men, the struggle of the valiant lawyers and civil society of Pakistan will bear fruit. They are not giving up.”

– From an open letter released last week by Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the former chief justice of Pakistan, who was removed from office and placed under virtual house arrest by Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf shortly before a supreme court ruling that was expected to find it illegal for Musharraf to continue running the country. Musharraf imposed a state of emergency, suspended the constitution, shut down the nation’s private TV stations, and jailed several justices and lawyers of the supreme court, sparking a groundswell of anger and discontent that continues to simmer, according to the New York Times.

Source: New York Times, Jan. 31.

For more information, see: Text of Chaudhry’s open letter, via the New York Times — Related Newsline story, Dec. 3, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Nov. 5, 2007.

“Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene — currently a vivid yet informal metaphor of global environmental change — as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalization by international discussion.”

– A scientific team led by Jan Zalasiewicz, writing in the February issue of GSA Today, the magazine of the Geological Society of America. Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams of the University of Leicester and colleagues at the Geological Society of London argue that human activity has sufficiently altered the environment that the Holocene era has ended and a new era, the Anthropocene has begun — an idea “first suggested in 2000 by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen” that has gained added momentum lately, according to LiveScience.

Source: LiveScience, Jan. 27.

For more information, see: GSA Today article, “Are we now living in the Anthropocene?” abstract and full text.

“I’m not sure what was said on that. I could tell you today, though, that we have no evidence and we have no way of showing that any email at all are missing.”

– White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, responding to questions last week about a newly released report that found “473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices,” reports the Washington Post. The 2005 internal study of White House electronic communications renewed attention to the controversy surrounding White House recordkeeping. The dispute centers on questions about “whether the Bush administration has complied with long-standing statutory requirements to preserve official White House records — including those reflecting potentially sensitive policy discussions — for history and in case of any future legal demands,” notes the Post.

Source: Washington Post, Jan. 18.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, June 25, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 19, 2007.

“We thank the attorneys general for a thoughtful and constructive conversation on Internet safety. This is an industrywide challenge, and we must all work together to create a safer Internet.”

– MySpace chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam in a written statement announcing an initiative to make the popular social networking safer for children who could be targets of online sexual predators. The move follows negotiations between the company and officials from 49 states, reports the Washington Post.

Source: Washington Post, Jan. 14.

For more information, see: Related Newsline Commentary, Dec. 3, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Dec. 3, 2007 — Related Newsline Commentary, July 10, 2006.

“After that day, people looked at us a little different. There was a palpable feeling…. We knew that something monumental had happened, that we were in deep water. And we felt like we weren’t getting anything done. We were going up and coming down, but they weren’t listening to a darn thing we were saying…. We sent many memos up the chain of command. I thought it was a huge issue. The coalition knew about it, but … nothing was ever done. I felt it was completely ignored. I mean, how many of these incidents does it take before you’re finally aware?”

– Matthew Degn, a U.S. army veteran, civilian contractor, and senior policy adviser to Iraq’s Interior Ministry, talking to the Washington Post about the effect of the Sep. 16 killing of Iraqi civilians by guards from the private U.S. security firm Blackwater. According to Degn and others who spoke to the Post, the U.S. government “disregarded numerous warnings over the past two years about the risks of using Blackwater Worldwide and other private security firms in Iraq, expanding their presence even after a series of shooting incidents showed that the firms were operating with little regulation or oversight, according to government officials, private security firms and documents.”

Source: Washington Post, Dec. 24, 2007.

“To a spectator it would look like torture. And torture is wrong.”

– John Gannon, a former CIA. deputy director, talking to the New York Times about the content of terrorist interrogation videotapes destroyed by the CIA. In a Sunday piece, the Times chronicles the shift in political and legal considerations that prompted both the decision to tape the interrogations as well as the later decision to destroy them after waterboarding began.

Source: New York Times, Dec. 30.

“This is a day of progress for us and for the millions of people across our nation and around the globe who reject the death penalty as a moral or practical response to the grievous, even heinous, crime of murder.”

– New Jersey governor Jon Corzine, speaking on Monday after signing into a law a measure abolishing the death penalty in his state. The Washington Post notes that New Jersey’s action makes it “the first state in more than four decades to reject capital punishment.”

Source: Washington Post, Dec. 17.

“The commission did formally request material of this kind from all relevant agencies, and the commission was assured that we had received all the material responsive to our request. No tapes were acknowledged or turned over, nor was the commission provided with any transcript prepared from recordings.”

– Philip Zelikow, who served as executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and later as a senior counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, talking to the New York Times about the recent revelation that the CIA destroyed hundred of hours of taped interrogations in contravention of the advice of White House and Justice Department lawyers. Both the Justice Department and the CIA’s inspector general have launched a preliminary inquiry into the tapes’ destruction, which took place in 2005, but was only publicly revealed last week after pressure from the Times.

“There is an unrealistic or even impractical obsession with your form of democracy, human rights, and civil liberties, which you have taken centuries to acquire and which you expect us to adopt in a few years, in a few months. We want democracy; I am for democracy. We want human rights, we want civil liberties, but we will do it our way, as we understand our society, our environment, better than anyone in the West.”

– Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, speaking last week to an audience that included Western diplomats after being sworn in as the country’s civilian president

“The nearly 8 percent rise in the number of hate crimes is obviously of concern, but the truth is that the FBI’s data severely undercount the number of hate crimes each year.”

– Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which studies hate crimes, talking to the Associated Press about the jump last year in reported hate crimes over the year before. FBI statistics indicate that at least “9,000 offenses were committed because of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or physical or mental disability last year,” reports the Washington Post.

“At present there does not exist any strong evidence that any abstinence program delays the initiation of sex, hastens the return to abstinence, or reduces the number of sexual partners” among teenagers.

– Text from a new study from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, a nonpartisan group that analyzed research into teens’ sexual behavior. Unlike abstinence-only programs, comprehensive programs supporting both abstinence and contraception “were having ‘positive outcomes’ including teenagers ‘delaying the initiation of sex, reducing the frequency of sex, reducing the number of sexual partners and increasing condom or contraceptive use,’ ” according to the report.

“You people are really nuts. There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.”

– Iowa waitress Anita Esterday, talking to a reporter about the press ruckus over whether Hillary Clinton’s campaign had left a tip after eating at the Maid-Rite diner where Esterday works

“If you don’t have television, you don’t have crowds.”

“It’s hard to make arguments that the bulk of what is being provided by the U.S. is very effective for counter-terrorism operations. A lot of the military assistance has been much more useful for a potential war with India.”

“We have so many examples like this of people on relevant committees receiving these contributions from people who are under their jurisdictions. It’s sad to say, but it is pretty much business as usual in Washington. And it shows why so many Americans just shake their heads over the way Washington works.”

– Meredith McGehee, policy director for the Campaign Legal Center, talking to the New York Times about phone company contributions to senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.V.), one of the primary supporters of retroactive immunity for phone companies that have cooperated with the Bush administration in possibly illegal surveillance of their customers.

The Times, covering figures first reported by Wired, notes that from 2002 through 2006, Sen. Rockefeller received only $4,050 from AT&T and Verizon. But between only last March and June — as lawsuits against the companies were being threatened or filed — that figure skyrocketed to $42,850. A spokeswoman for Sen. Rockefeller dismissed as “patently false” the suggestion that he would “make policy decisions based on campaign contributions.”

McGehee says that even if the companies’ donations have not influenced Rockefeller, they — and the myriad like them — leave the door open to doubt in the public’s mind, creating conflicts of interest that “corrode public confidence.”

“I like to compare the U.S. to the European settlers of the past century. The European settler said, ‘I am coming to liberate, to develop, to modernize.’ But after a while he stumbled upon realities and facts that he did not know before and that could not be ignored. This is what is happening to the U.S. today, hence the change in its policies, from an ideological agenda to a pragmatic one. They are looking to protect themselves and their interests.”

– Sateh Noureddine, a columnist at As-Safir, a pro-Syrian newspaper in Lebanon, talking to the New York Times in a piece examining the criticism that the United States ignores human rights abuses in Egypt due to the country’s strategic value as a political ally

“If we hire people and direct them to perform activities that are direct participation in hostilities, then at least by the Guantánamo standard, that is a war crime.”

– Michael N. Schmitt, a former Air Force lawyer and a professor of international law at the Naval War College, talking to the Los Angeles Times about mounting questions into whether independent security contractors hired by the U.S. government could be considered unlawful combatants when they engage in offensive operations instead of the strictly defensive behavior authorized by law.

“Howard can fire you. It would affect your ability to get another job.”

– Excerpt from a letter detailing alleged threats made by aides to State Department inspector general Howard Krongard against special investigators asked to cooperate with a congressional probe into alleged wrongdoing by Krongard’s office. Special agent Ronald Militana told McClatchy Newspapers that the quoted threat, detailed in a letter drafted by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), is accurate.

Krongard and his office are accused of a wide range of abuses, including threatening employees like Militana and impeding “investigations into alleged arms smuggling by employees of the private security firm Blackwater and into faulty construction of the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad,” notes McClatchy. Krongard said his office is cooperating.

“For over 200 years, this nation has adhered to the rule of law — with unparalleled success. A shift to a nation based on extraconstitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill advised.”

– U.S. judge Anne Aiken of Federal District Court in Portland, Oregon, ruling last week that “crucial parts of the USA Patriot Act were not constitutional because they allowed federal surveillance and searches of Americans without demonstrating probable cause,” reports the New York Times. Leaving in place the Patriot Act’s allowances for government surveillance would usurp the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, Aiken ruled. The government is “asking this court to, in essence, amend the Bill of Rights, by giving it an interpretation that would deprive it of any real meaning.”

“It is particularly disturbing that while so many of our military personnel are fighting and dying in Iraq, a few have apparently taken the opportunity to unlawfully enrich themselves. Their greed is unconscionable….”

– Charles Beardall, chief criminal investigator for the Pentagon inspector general, in a statement discussing ongoing criminal proceedings against military officers accused of corruption and graft in procurement contracts. The New York Times reports that military contracts worth $6 billion are being investigated by the Pentagon. “The inquiries have resulted in charges against at least 29 civilians and soldiers, more than 75 other criminal investigations and the suicides of at least two officers,” notes the paper.

“Many men and women of the church, bishops as well, have come to agree with my way of looking at the reality of the church’s role. We have much to be sorry for.”

– Argentine priest Rev. Rubén Capitanio, speaking last week to a panel of three judges weighing the fate of Rev. Christian von Wernich, a former police chaplain accused of complicity in the country’s “Dirty War.” Capitanio is among a growing group of people both inside and outside the Roman Catholic Church who say the church needs to answer for its role in abetting the crimes of the military junta that seized power from 1976 until 1983, suppressing dissent by killing and “disappearing” between 10,000 and 30,000 people. Father von Wernich is accused of “involvement in seven murders and 42 cases of kidnapping and torture,” reports the New York Times.