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Wednesday, May 14, 2008
One Chinese family suffers; no translation necessary An NPR team followed a couple of parents back to the rubble of their apartment building in Dujiangyan, and reported it inDujiangyan Parents' Search for Child: With some bodies now found, the military was called in. Soon, about three dozen military police arrived in green camouflage fatigues and black rubber boots but with no supplies or equipment. Mrs. Fu and Mr. Wang ran out to buy them cotton gloves and white cotton face masks. Other neighbors brought shovels. Friends brought out a white sheet and told Mrs. Fu they hoped her son and his grandparents would be found alive but just in case, they would tear this sheet into pieces so they could cover the victims' faces.Just heard this on NPR. No happy ending here, or for thousands of other Chinese families: At 4:40 in the afternoon, a worker came out and said, "we've found a child." The parents went limp. "Was he about two, wearing a striped shirt?" the mother cried. The worker nodded. The parents, along with aunts and uncles, sobbed and clutched each other tight. The mother cried out to the worker through her tears one last desperate appeal, "Did you call out to him? Maybe he had just fainted."You didn't need a word of Chinese to know what the parents were crying when the bodies of their boy and his grandparents were finally found. I have a bad feeling there will be far more than the reported 15,000 dead estimated so far. More NPR coverage of the China earthquake at Chengdu Diary. posted by Thomas Nephew at 5:38:00 PM -- |  
 Monday, May 12, 2008
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Department of followups: obliteration, Altstoetter, UPDATE: Zimbabwe An occasional review of further developments in stuff I've written about before. A disreputable American (presidential) candidate has said that if Iran attacks Israel, she will obliterate Iran if she is the president. I tell the American people, it is a shame for them that their presidents are servants of Israel without any willpower.What the "slap" would be is left to our imaginations, but Americans are now presumably in the collateral damage crosshairs if Iran chooses to retaliate for any American military action. A corollary to "violence begets violence" is "reckless, foolish talk begets reckless, foolish talk." The bottom line, in my view, is that as reprehensible as Yoo’s opinions were –- and they were indeed reprehensible -– the case provides far less support for prosecuting him than most scholars assume.The key difficulty, Heller believes, is that none of the Altstoetter defendants merely gave legal advice; rather, all were also part of the Nazi legal machinery denying habeas corpus to prisoners and issuing verdicts. Heller asserts that the NMT (Nuremberg Military Tribunal) arguably convicted all the defendants for their deeds rather than their legal advice: ... the mode of participation they use to convict a defendant -– ordering, aiding and abetting, joint criminal enterprise, etc. -– and often even fail to identify which of the defendant’s acts discussed in the judgment they consider criminal. [...]Related posts at "Balkinization" include Marty Lederman's setup for Heller, "What, if Anything, Does the Nuremberg Precedent Tell Us About the Criminal Culpability of Government Lawyers?," acknowledging the potential relevance of Altstoetter, and "What's the Relevance of Altstoetter, Anyway?" following Heller's piece which reiterates Lederman's skepticism about the propriety of Altstoetter-based criminal charges against Yoo et al for their "aspirational" readings of U.S. and international law, rather than an inquiry into whether constitutional obligations were breached.** However, Lederman also acknowledges Scott Horton's comment about Heller's post. There's much more in Horton's comment, but one part makes a point I made in "Practice to Deceive" -- that the way in which the advice and directives were concealed argues for knowledge that said advice was criminal in nature: Philippe Sands's key finding -- if there is just one -- is that the bottom up narrative that the Administration puts forward surrounding the introduction of torture techniques is a sham. He follows the story to its roots, and he finds that it is, to the contrary, a "top down" story, with a number of lawyers engaging in an elaborate scheme to cover it up with the paper trail that starts with the Diane Beaver memoranda. Key to this unraveling is the story of the senior lawyers' trip to GTMO at the launch of the process, a trip about which Haynes repeatedly lied. Now it's possible to explain this from a PR angle focused on domestic politics, which undoubtedly was a major focus of the White House throughout, but a prosecutor could just as well make the case that this shows recognition and belief that the scheme was essentially criminal (or presented substantial likelihood of criminal culpability) and thus needed to be concealed. But Nell Lancaster ("A Lovely Promise") points to a recent article at Sokwanele *** alerting readers that the government of Malawi may be the weak link in the chain of refusals to allow the ship to offload its deadly cargo. As the Sokawanele author Hope puts it, the case is important because (a) political violence in Zimbabwe continues, (b) the case has proven to be something people outside Zimbabwe can get involved in, and (c)... it is also forcing countries in the region to ‘nail their colours to the mast’, so to speak. In the open glare of the public eye, this story shows us which nations are concerned for the safety of the Zimbabwean people, and which ones are more concerned with the loyalty to the Zanu PF regime.The Malawi embassy in Washington, D.C. can be contacted at (202) 721-0274. Embassy e-mail addresses I've found include embassy@malawi.com.tw (Taiwan) and mwiun@undp.org (UN); several others are listed here. ===== * Clinton's remarks to Chris Cuomo (emphases added): "whatever stage of development they might be in their nuclear weapons program, in the next 10 years during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them." Like him or not, Khatami is justified to consider this, on careful consideration, as a (reckless) threat of nuclear retaliation by Clinton for a nonnuclear attack -- even if, in a subsequent interview with Keith Olbermann, she conditions a U.S. nuclear response on an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel. In another interview with Andrea Schaefer, she claimed "facts on the ground have changed" since October 2007 (before the release of an NIE denying an active Iranian nuclear weapons program was underway) -- and considered the notion of Iranian theocrat undeterrability plausible enough to repeat without qualification on national TV. ** Lederman thus at least implicitly concedes the possibility and potential propriety of impeachment proceedings against Yoo (and possibly the president) by Congress. As may or may not be well known, one of the consequences of a conviction for an impeachable act is that the convicted person may not hold federal office again. Both impeachment and conviction are thus useful and possible after that person has held federal office. *** The word means "Enough is Enough"; the site chronicles Mugabe's repression and democratic resistance to it in Zimbabwe. NOTES: (1) Khatami remark link is to a Real News Network video clip, transcript, and translation of Khatami's remarks. (2) Nell has an earlier post about the An Yue Jiang here.
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