aiding the terrorists

Another point worth making on the whole Quran mess is that this kind of behavior actually harms our ability to prevent terrorism. Since 9/11, Americans have been fortunate to not experience another terrorist attack within our borders. That has been in no small part due to the loyalty of American Muslims and their refusal to buy into the claims of religious extremists. Unlike Britain and Spain, which suffered attacks from home-grown terrorist cells, and France, which struggled with riots by a largely Muslim underclass in Paris suburbs, American Muslims have on the whole taken pride in both their religion and their country.

Just look at the justifications given by the chairwoman of the group distributing the Qurans:

Seirafi-Pour said yesterday that one reason the decision was made to distribute the Quran was to give lawmakers accurate information.

“I still hope to go to the offices and shake their hands and tell them about all the projects and programs we do,” she said.

She said some members of her council also are members of an FBI-sponsored outreach program to “build bridges” between law enforcement and the Muslim community.

“We are in constant communication with FBI agents and police departments in Edmond, Oklahoma City and Norman,” she said. “They have requested our assistance in different programs and we have been willing to go and share our culture with them.”

Hopefully most Americans will follow better angels than Rep. Duncan and recognize that both Christian charity and American freedom call for being respectful of diverse cultures. Hopefully the American Muslim community will not let the actions of a few ignorant politicians turn them against the United States. But if not, Rep. Duncan and those like him will have weakened our country and aided the terrorists.

Photo by Flickr user Al-Fassam used under a Creative Commons license.

truth in politics

I agree with Meredith that the Quran incident in the Oklahoma legislature is revolting. However, I wouldn’t call it political pandering. Rep. Rex Duncan and his ilk seem to be genuine bigots.

Sigh.

From TPM Muckraker:

This summer the House Judiciary Committee launched an effort to collect tips from would-be whistleblowers in the Justice Department. The U.S. attorney firings scandal had shown that much was amiss in the Department, and with the danger of retaliation very real, the committee had set up a form on the committee’s website for people to blow the whistle privately about abuses there. Although the panel said it would not accept anonymous tips, it assured those who came forward that their identity would be held in the “strictest confidence.”

But in an email sent out today, the committee inadvertently sent the email addresses of all the would-be whistleblowers to everyone who had written in to the tipline. The committee email was sent to tipsters who had used the website form, including presumably whistleblowers themselves, and all of the recipients of the email were accidentally included in the “to:” field — instead of concealing those addresses with a so-called blind carbon copy or “bcc:”.

hating our freedom

On the day of the September 11 attacks, Egyptian national Abdallah Higazy was staying in a hotel across the street from the World Trade Center. He was evacuated along with the rest of the guests, leaving most of his belongings behind. When he returned a few days later to retrieve his stuff, he was met by FBI agents.

Hotel employees had reported finding a radio made for communicating with airplanes in his room safe, so the FBI arrested Higazy and questioned him. At first, he denied ever having seen the radio. That is, until the FBI agents threatened to have Higazy’s family tortured by Egyptian secret police if he didn’t confess. Seeing that he was in trouble regardless, but that confession was the only way to protect his family, he told the FBI it was his radio.

Three days later, a pilot showed up at the same hotel to claim his belongings and reported that his radio was missing. It turned out that the radio had been found on a table in the room, not the safe, and the pilot and Higazy had never met each other. All of the charges against Higazy were dismissed, and he was set free.

All of this is publicly known because it is contained in a judge’s opinion ruling that Higazy has the right to sue the FBI agents for damages. It briefly appeared on the Web site of the United States Court of Appeals in Manhattan, where a blogger on legal issues found it. Then it was taken down without warning, and the next day a new version appeared, with one difference. The parts about how the FBI had extracted Higazy’s confession were redacted.

The redacted section included this:

Higazy alleges that during the polygraph, Templeton told him that he should cooperate, and explained that if Higazy did not cooperate, the FBI would make his brother “live in scrutiny” and would “make sure that Egyptian security gives [his] family hell.” Templeton later admitted that he knew how the Egyptian security forces operated: “that they had a security service, that their laws are different than ours, that they are probably allowed to do things in that country where they don’t advise people of their rights, they don’t – yeah, probably about torture, sure.”Higazy later said, “I knew that I couldn’t prove my innocence, and I knew that my family was in danger.” He explained that “[t]he only thing that went through my head was oh, my God, I am screwed and my family’s in danger. If I say this device is mine, I’m screwed and my family is going to be safe. If I say this device is not mine, I’m screwed and my family’s in danger. And Agent Templeton made it quite clear that cooperate had to mean saying something else other than this device is not mine.”

Higazy explained why he feared for his family:

The Egyptian government has very little tolerance for anybody who is —they’re suspicious of being a terrorist. To give you an idea, Saddam’s security force—as they later on were called his henchmen—a lot of them learned their methods and techniques in Egypt; torture, rape, some stuff would be even too sick to . . . . My father is 67. My mother is 61. I have a brother who developed arthritis at 19. He still has it today. When the word ‘torture’ comes at least for my brother, I mean, all they have to do is really just press on one of these knuckles. I couldn’t imagine them doing anything to my sister.

Fortunately, a few people had downloaded the original, and someone e-mailed it to the blogger. Soon after putting it online, he was contacted by a court clerk asking him to take it down because it was classified, but he refused.

What does this tell us?

First of all, if the pilot hadn’t shown up to correct the FBI’s mistake, Higazy would today very likely still be detained or worse, deported to Egypt and tortured. The debate about torture usually centers on whether it is permissible to torture terrorists, but that is not what we are talking about. Defending our government’s practice of torture, or of sending people to other countries to be tortured, is to defend the torture of innocent men and women.

And that’s not just an unfortunate byproduct of a torturing policy. In the long history of torture, extracting false confessions from innocent people is the primary reason it has been used. Think Spanish Inquisition. Think Soviet show trials. If someone is guilty, you find evidence of that guilt. If there’s no evidence, you use torture to create some.

For that same reason, if a confession is achieved through torture or the threat of torture, there is no way to tell if it is genuine. So it is not only useless, but directly harmful to our ability to prevent terrorism or have a rational foreign policy. Anyone who doubts the problem of relying on false information hasn’t been paying attention to how we ended up in Iraq in the first place.

The second lesson is in the FBI’s reaction. Instead of realizing their mistake and being thankful that it didn’t turn out much worse in this instance, they tried to cover it up. For a second time, pure luck intervened to get the truth out.

That tells us it is very likely that many people out there have been less lucky. Many people have been or are today being tortured or detained indefinitely, based on false information gathered in similar ways.

Torture is presented in public debate as a choice between safety and freedom. That is not the choice.

If an innocent person can be tortured or sent to be tortured by our own government, none of us is safe, and none of us is free.

Photo by Flickr user sandeep thukral used under a Creative Commons license.

interfaith dialogue of the day, part VI

Check out this nifty animated map tracing the spread of the world’s major religions over the past 5,000 years.

biofuels… and beyond

Today’s Our View tries to push back on the biofuels hype, but for all the wrong reasons. Oklahoma’s annual biofuels conference has its share of over-optimistic claims by energy and agriculture companies just looking to make money. They play up the benefits and downplay drawbacks of whatever pet technology has the spotlight at that moment. But just because any one technology may not be a cure all, that doesn’t mean biofuels won’t be a important part of where we get energy.

A claim in the Our View is that while switchgrass doesn’t directly compete with food like corn-based ethanol, it will indirectly do so because of farmers switching what they produce. But one reason switchgrass is so touted is that it will grow on poor soils unsuited for other crops. If grown mixed with other beneficial plants and rotated with nitrogen fixing crops such as legumes, it can be produced with a minimum of fertilizer and pesticides. All of these involve changes in many common farming practices, but that is the reason for a conference: to bring together the researchers, businesspeople, farmers, and politicians who all need to combine their efforts towards this goal.

The Our View’s description of the supply and demand of food production also greatly oversimplifies the picture. The biggest single factor on corn prices in the United States today is an absurd system of farm tariffs and subsidies. Big agriculture hasn’t been left to the whims of supply and demand in a long time, and if we didn’t provide unfair protection against crops from the developing world (like we insist they do with our designer drugs and Hollywood movies), then we would have plenty of cheap food for everyone and provide a boost to poor economies around the world.

Biofuels are part of the same dynamic. Brazil, the biggest producer of ethanol from sugarcane, can’t even find a market for its biofuels because of tariffs in the United States and European Union.

I don’t want to get too far into the biofuels weeds here. It’s obviously a very complicated subject. But it comes down to this: biofuels are one part of an overall strategy that will also include solar, wind, and possibly nuclear power sources, much improved energy conservation and efficiency, improvements in mass transit and denser living patterns, and so on and so forth. In that sense, it’s pointless to criticize one part among many for not answering all of our problems.

It’s not a magic bullet. But it’s a piece of the puzzle.

Photo by Flickr user bamakodaker used under a Creative Commons license.

sympathy for Larry Craig

Andrew Sullivan, who knows firsthand the difficulty of being a conservative homosexual in public life, pens a powerful statement on Larry Craig:

He grew up in a different time, and a different place, where even the possibility of being gay was inconceivable. I don’t think he even thinks of himself as gay, or has any idea what being gay might actually mean. I think he thinks of his sexual orientation as a “lifestyle” (to use that hideous term Lauer kept referring to) that can be overcome the way one overcomes smoking or poor eating or sexual compulsion. And he constructed an identity in opposition to this “lifestyle” early, out of pain and defensiveness and terrible fear. He is now wedded to this life he created – more than to his wife, which is why she was kept in the dark for two months after the arrest, as he went through the terror of feeling caught finally in his own contradiction. He cannot break free of it at this point without psychic collapse. And so, even though it becomes absurd to everyone around them, the Craigs keep going. They have no choice, apart from total breakdown.

National Coming Out Day was last week, but it’s valuable to look at the flip side of coming out as well; the psychological toll on so many people hiding their identity not just from society, but from themselves.

Since Craig’s arrest became public, he’s become a national punch line and a poster boy for the hypocrisy of gay rights opponents. But hypocrisy is thrown around far too often as a cheap political attack. A good policy is a good policy, no matter whether the actions of the those supporting it match up. Fighting global warming isn’t less important because Al Gore has a big house, and respecting Craig’s difficult struggle with sexual orientation isn’t less important because he’s voted to restrict gay rights.

crazy and dangerous

I hinted at this before, but here is a video really laying it out. If your analysis of the last 7 years is that George W. Bush hasn’t started enough wars in the Middle East, then Rudy’s your man. If, on the other hand, you believe that dividing our friends and uniting our enemies by launching a crusade against all Islam may not be the best strategy, please help spread the word: Rudy Giuliani is crazy and dangerous.

heartbreaking

There’s nothing I can write here today that would be a better use of your time than Tiara’s article. Go read it.

an undoing world

Photo by Flickr user .ash used under a Creative Commons license.

Meredith has religion covered today, so I guess I have to do a post on foreign affairs.

If we are betting on what will be the most significant long-term consequence of the Iraq War, my money is on the refugee crisis. I posted earlier on threats facing Christian communities in Iraq.

Now Laura Gibbs sends in this fascinating article on the plight of the Mandeans. Before the war, Iraq was home to the only Mandean community left in the modern world. Practitioners of a 2,000 year old religious tradition closely related to Christianity, the Mandeans did not have an easy time under Saddam Hussein. The dictator infamously drained the vast marshes where they made their homes after the first Gulf War.

But in the post-Saddam era, they have faced an even greater disaster:

When American forces invaded in 2003, there were probably 60,000 Mandeans in Iraq; today, fewer than 5,000 remain. Like millions of other Iraqis, those who managed to escape have become refugees, primarily in Syria and Jordan, with smaller numbers in Australia, Indonesia, Sweden and Yemen.

Syria and Jordan have become home to more than just Mandeans. Human Rights First reports that Jordan is now home to approximately 750,000 refugees, who make up more than 10 percent (!!!!!) of the total population. HRF provide more troubling statistics — the estimated number of Iraqi refugees in Jordan who are school-age children is 200,000-250,000; the estimated number enrolled in school is 20,000.

Syria is home to more than 1 million refugees, by some estimates 2 million. And more are arriving every day. Both nations are being stretched to limit taking care of this uprooted, desperate population.

But the United States is doing its part to to assist this population that we are in no small part responsible for, right? Not quite. Again from the article on the Mandeans:

Of the mere 500 Iraqi refugees who were allowed into the United States from April 2003 to April 2007, only a few were Mandeans. And despite the Bush administration’s commitment to let in 7,000 refugees in the fiscal year that ended last month, fewer than 2,000, including just three Iraqi Mandean families, entered the country.

Compared to the magnitude of the problem, the U.S. effort is nonexistent.

We’ve seen this before. In Uganda, Rwanda, and the Congo, successive civil wars led to a refugee crisis that exacerbated tensions in all three countries. The result was a horrific tragedy now seen rightly as a modern day genocide.

Or take an example even closer to Iraq: Palestinian refugees since the 1948 War have been at the center of conflicts in Israel and every nation that it borders. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to inflame Muslim sentiments against the West throughout the Middle East and the world.

We have a moral obligation to help these people and a practical interest in preventing another uprooted population from further destabilizing a volatile region. But so far we seem determined not to learn from history.