Hey, great idea
Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: "Michael Hayden has a cunning plan for the CIA: “I would emphasize getting it right more often.” That’s so crazy it just might work. Makes you wonder why no one has ever thought of it before."

"I would emphasize simply getting it right more often." Jeebus. I guess it's lucky he'll only be in charge of some piddling, insignificant government agency.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:03:00 PM -- |    

 
Lexington, Virginia protest
The big demonstrations in New York City, DC, or San Francisco can be impressive, but if you think about it, the little ones in so-called "Red" America can take more dedication and guts. Here's a story about one in Lexington, Virginia -- home of the Virginia Military Institute -- reported by the Roanoke Times' Beth Jones:

By 11 a.m. Tuesday about 100 peace activists had gathered on the Veterans Memorial Bridge over the Maury River to protest the policies of U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in town to speak at Virginia Military Institute's graduation.

The crowd protested everything from the Iraq war to the Bush administration's intelligence programs by carrying signs blaring slogans such as 'How many lives per gallon?' and 'Don't spy on me.' Organizers asked protesters not to make comments on VMI or its cadets.

Many in the "blogosphere" will recognize the name of one of the organizers:

Most of the Lexington activists know someone connected to the school, said Nell Lancaster, who helped organize the event and whose father taught at the school.

'That's part of growing up in a small community,' she said. 'It's harder to see people as 'the other.'

If you want to see Nell ("A Lovely Promise"), check out the Roanoke Times' photo gallery while it's available, she's in the 6th photo. I think I'm entitled to say I influenced her choice of attire. posted by Thomas Nephew at 2:25:00 AM -- |    

 
Lawmakers investigate journalist surveillance
In Germany, that is.

German lawmakers are looking into allegations that the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) intelligence agency put German journalists under surveillance to find out who was leaking information to them. News of the scandal broke last week, when the Munich daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported on the findings of Gerhard Schäfer, a special investigator commissioned by -- imagine this -- a parliamentary oversight committee:

As Süddeutsche Zeitung [SZ] has learned, Schäfer's investigations show that the BND did not only shadow individual journalists. The agency also used journalists against targeted colleagues to learn about the topics they were working on. [...]

Judge Schäfer described the practices, according to SZ's information, as "disproportionate" and "clearly illegal" and spoke of flagrant "interference in the freedom of the press."

The tactics are all too similar to those of the notorious East German Stasi, which is estimated to have had around one in every fifty East Germans on its payroll, spying on the rest.

So far, so bad. But while Siegfried Kauder, the chairman of the oversight committee (PKG: Parlementarischer Kontroll Gremium) was none too pleased that word of the secret report reached the press, the decision was apparently made to make the best of the situation and release the full report next week.

Adding to the "Alice in Wonderland" quality of the story for Americans now sadly accustomed to so much less, the newsweekly SPIEGEL reports that the "BND informant affair" will be on the agenda of the German parliament's Interior Committee by the end of May. Moreover, a BND spokesman said no harm would be done to BND by releasing the Schaefer report -- contradicting Kauder, who had argued against the release. And BND chief Ernst Uhrlau told German TV network ARD: "We conclude that the methods used in the past don't belong to the core business of the BND, and also don't belong to the legal tools of the agency, as we see them."

SPIEGEL's Matthias Gebauer warns that the report hasn't made it out the government's door yet, and Die Zeit's Martin Klingst points out that the story has revealed that too many reporters are too willing to make unethical deals with the intelligence agencies they cover.

But viewed from this side of the Atlantic, this seems on the whole to be a democratic success story: a secretive agency is caught out in questionable activity; an actual parliamentary investigation results -- and one that features vigorous efforts by opposition party members, who are not iced out of meaningful oversight roles; an independent, active press helps the public learn of the broad outlines of the resulting report; intelligence officials appear to agree that keeping that report secret serves no good purpose; followup legislative oversight hearings are scheduled.

Would that my own country's institutions could do as well.


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UPDATE, 5/18: The plot thickens -- SPIEGEL's Matthias Gebauer reports that at least one of the alleged targets of BND surveillance says he'll go to court to stop the PKG's release of the Schaefer report. In addition to privacy concerns, some worry that they will be miscast as stool pigeons for their own conversations with the BND. While Schaefer is meeting with all the targets, it's not clear whether they will have a binding say in what is and is not released.
UPDATE, 5/21: SPIEGEL's"mgb" (Gebauer?) reports that the target involved, Erich Schmidt-Eenboom, now supports the full release of the report after seeing it -- and disputes an SZ claim that he was an informant himself.
UPDATE, 5/25: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports a Berlin court has ruled that personal information in the report about FOCUS editor Josef Hufelschulte -- one of the reporters being surveilled, not one of the informants -- can't be published.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:31:00 AM -- |    

 
The Neuhaus code
Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute this weekend, Karl Rove, wearing his "policy wonk" hat, did a little name-dropping to show how widely read he was. Joking that he had to decide which of his "children" -- that is, American Enterprise Institute books -- to give up on his wife's orders, he said:

But I still have my copy of the essay by Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Novak called "To Empower People."

Huh? Who are those guys? And why would Rove spend time -- in what might be one of his last appearances as an unindicted senior White House staffer -- all but leading off with their names in an address that was supposedly about his and Bush's policy choices?

The book itself reportedly argues that family, churches, and civic associations play a crucial role in American life. Of course that's not a controversial or far-fetched argument, but it is one that can be parlayed into far-fetched policy initiatives and political alliances. Last year an article by Garry Wills (Papal Sin; Lincoln at Gettysburg) in the New York Review of Books ("Fringe Government," 10/06/2005, online subscribers only) caught my eye. In it he argues that these two men

...are situated at the contact points between the similar ruling systems of the Vatican and the White House, along with overlapping financial support systems.*

The article provides capsule biographies, and its arguments will presumably be central to Wills' next book, Bush's Fringe Government, to be published in October. Michael Novak's career followed a complicated, but ever more conservative Catholic trail from Stanford "hippie prof" against the Viet Nam War to criticizing US bishops for their 1984 pastoral letter on poverty in America to a 1994 Templeton Award for advancement of religion.

Neuhaus, a Lutheran pastor who converted to Catholicism, is the founding editor of First Things. Wills describes his outlook as "advocating the reinjection of religion into politics," and rates him as the most politically influential of the group. Wills writes that Karl Rove "singled out Neuhaus as a helpful adviser even before Mr. Bush became president" and cites a TIME magazine article reporting that Bush, speaking to journalists from religious publications, said "Father Richard [...] helps me articulate these religious things."

The TIME article continues that a "senior Administration official" confirms Neuhaus has "'a fair amount of under-the-radar influence' on such policies as abortion, stem-cell research, cloning and the defense-of-marriage amendment."

You might not expect a Catholic to show up in a TIME Magazine list of "The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America," but then you don't know the evangelical movement any more. Neuhaus is well known among evangelicals for co-sponsoring and co-authoring Evangelicals and Catholics Together** with Chuck Colson (yes, that Chuck Colson) in 1994. The document arguably papered over doctrinal differences in favor of making ecumenical common cause -- but not just to proclaim the Gospel:

All other tasks and responsibilities of the church are derived from and directed toward the mission of the Gospel. Christians individually and the church corporately also have a responsibility for the right ordering of civil society.

Which right ordering the document has quite a bit to say about, in a long prose torrent unmarred by paragraph structure. Proceeding from discovering unspecified religious assertions ("truths") supposedly motivating the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, to naming religious freedom as the "source and shield of all human freedoms," the outburst proceeds inevitably and at great length to opposing abortion, the "culture of death," and"'tolerance' requiring the promotion of moral equivalence between the normative and the deviant."*** The call to arms becomes a bit defensive, though, and temporarily abandons the "we hold these truths" approach:

We reject the notion that this constitutes a partisan "religious agenda" in American politics. Rather, this is a set of directions oriented to the common good and discussable on the basis of public reason.

That approach was soon abandoned in favor of more fiery rhetoric, though. In his introduction to a 1996 First Things symposium, "The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics," Neuhaus wrote,

The question here explored, in full awareness of its far-reaching consequences, is whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.

The event triggering that reflection was not the failure to protect American cities, or a misbegotten war, or of a president's failure to abide by the rule of law, but a Ninth Circuit court decision on doctor-assisted suicide -- and of Neuhaus and his allies inability to stop it. Perhaps not so surprisingly, there's a common thread with his own anti-Viet Nam war days, when he wrote, "A cultural revolution, certainly. A non-violent revolution, perhaps. An armed overthrow of the existing order, it may be necessary. Revolution for the hell of it or revolution for a new world, but revolution, Yes."**** There's a new diagnosis of the root problem, of course, and though Neuhaus still aims at something like revolution, it is to be a sneaky one. As Wills writes,

The illegitimacy Neuhaus and others attack is not just an aberration of the courts, or of the federal government more generally. The problem is a Godless culture, one that accepts wholesale murder in the form of abortion. The new religious right does not claim to be speaking for a moral majority. It knows it is a minority -- in fact it asks for protection of believers as a matter of minority rights.

Wills' central thesis follows a few paragraphs later:

This presents a difficult problem. How do you govern an apostate nation? When the entire culture is corrupted, the country can only be morally governed in spite of itself. A collection of aggrieved minorities must seize the levers of power in every way possible. One must govern not from a broad consensual center, but from activist fringes of morality. That has, in fact been Karl Rove's strategy. He cultivates the extreme groups that are out of step with the broad consensus of the nation, since they supply the hard workers in primaries and general elections.

(Emphasis added.) One telling example of "the fringe calling the tune" was Bush flying back to DC to sign the Schiavo intervention bill, despite upwards of 80% of Americans opposing such interference in the Schiavo couple's affairs. In the key political quote of Wills' article, Grover Norquist explains to the New Yorker's John Cassidy how to cobble together an extremist coalition:

If you want the votes of people who are [simultaneously] good on guns, good on taxes, and good on faith issues, that is a very small intersection of voters. But if you say, Give me the votes of anybody who agrees with you on any of these issues, that is a much bigger section of the population..... And if you add more things, like property rights and home-schooling, you can do even better.

As long as members of each particular group decide not to care about the rest of the agenda, of course. That's why I thought Amy Sullivan, whatever her rhetorical failings may be, was on the right track in highlighting efforts to peel away small numbers of faith-motivated political votes on issues like poverty or the environment. "Evangelicals and Catholics Together" is a nice, cuddly thing as far as agreeing to get along about baptism, saints, and whatnot. It is a less nice thing as a vehicle for a monolithic, partisan religious political agenda -- especially when it disingenuously denies that's what it is -- and it needs to be opposed from within and without if that's the real goal.

The hardball religious right has proven it can do far more than just force Bush to cut short a vacation at Crawford -- it has played an arguably decisive role in this country's last presidential election. In an April 2005 article for Salon ("Holy Warriors"), Sidney Blumenthal wrote,

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger sent a letter to the U.S. bishops, pronouncing that those Catholics who were pro-choice on abortion were committing a "grave sin" and must be denied Communion. He pointedly mentioned "the case of a Catholic politician consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws" -- an obvious reference to John Kerry, the Democratic candidate and a Roman Catholic. If such a Catholic politician sought Communion, Ratzinger wrote, priests must be ordered to "refuse to distribute it." Any Catholic who voted for this "Catholic politician," he continued, "would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion." During the closing weeks of the campaign, a pastoral letter was read from pulpits in Catholic churches repeating the ominous suggestion of excommunication. Voting for the Democrat was nothing less than consorting with the forces of Satan, collaboration with "evil."

Blumenthal points out that Bush's support among Catholics grew by 6 points from 2000 to 2004; without this growth, Kerry would have won the election.

Wills recalls that Neuhaus applauded Archbishop Raymond Burke's call in particular before the 2004 election to withhold communion from politicians like John Kerry who voted for legalized abortion, and rebuked D.C. Cardinal McCarrick who, in Neuhaus' view, subverted then-Cardinal Ratzinger's communication from the Vatican on the subject. (As Neuhaus predicted, McCarrick's star within the Catholic church has since dimmed, and he retired recently.)

Rove's shout-out to Neuhaus and Novak may be nothing more than a quick nod to the AEI publications department. But it is more likely yet another example of dog-whistle politics: signals to the faithful few, at a pitch out of hearing for the rest of us -- the Godless, the apparently-not-Godful-enoughs, and over the last many years, at any rate, the strangely powerless.



=====
* Wills also lists George Weigel and Joseph Fessio along with Neuhaus and Novak as having had close ties to both the last pope and the current one, and the Bush administration; of the four, he discusses Neuhaus at greatest length.
** Followed by "ECT"s II, III, and IV through 2003.
*** Other familiar notes of the culture wars are struck here as well, if not for the first time, then among the most widely heard: "multiculturalism means affirming all cultures but our own"; "While the crisis of the family in America is by no means limited to the poor or to the underclass, heightened attention must be paid those who have become, as a result of well-intended but misguided statist policies, virtual wards of the government."
**** Richard J. Neuhaus, "The Thorough Revolutionary," in Peter L. Berger and Richard J. Neuhaus, Movement and Revolution (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), p. 127; cited in a "Right Web" Neuhaus profile.
EDIT, 5/17: "wife's orders" sentence rewritten to make sense.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:30:00 PM -- |