Friday, April 26, 2013
Legislative Amusements
Good government obtains when those who are near are made happy, and those who are far off are attracted.
— Confucious, The Confucian Analects
It doesn’t seem fair. The Italians have a lot more fun doing nothing than do we. And, in addition, they have the Pope and former Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. We have no one like the Pope to take pride in and it’s hard to match Berlusconi. This all came to mind while watching the Italian Parliament try to elect a president and undertake other legislative tasks. Comparisons to the U.S. Congress invited themselves to the viewing.
Like the U.S. Congress, the Italian parliament has proved itself incapable of governing. The most recent election in the United States was in November 2012 whereas the Italian parliament was elected in February 2013. In both countries all legislative parties (like Gaul) are divided into three parts. In the United States the three parts are the Republicans who control the House of Representatives, the Democrats who control the Senate and the Tea Party who more or less control themselves as well as those Republicans with whom they disagree. In Italy the three parts are the center left Democratic Party, the center right People of Liberty party and the Five Star Movement that is led by a comedian, Beppe Grillo.
Some of the leaders of the Italian parties remind one of some of the leaders in Congress. The leader of the center-left party (until a few days ago) was Pier Luigi Bersani whose party has the majority in the lower house but not in the Senate and, is, therefore, unable to do anything without the help of one of the other two parties. He is described in the New York Times as being a “somewhat gloomy” individual, a description that could apply equally well to Senator Mitch McConnell, the dour minority leader in the U.S. Senate. Mr. Grillo, leader of the Five Star Party, is an acknowledged comedian, not unlike any number of the members of the U.S. Congress. The Five Star party received 25 per cent of the February vote entitling its members to 163 of the 945 seats in the parliament. Mr. Grillo showed his sense of humor by causing his party to express its disapproval of the parliament’s failure to appoint committees by conducting a sit in. The only problem was they sat in the very chairs in parliament that they were elected to sit in. At the end of the day’s session they declined to go home and stayed in their seats until midnight reading assorted legal texts. No one much cared.
The U.S. Congress has its share of clowns. One of the biggest is Georgia’s Paul Broun, a physician who sits on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. His words belie his education and make a mockery of the committee on which he sits. In a speech at Liberty Baptist Church in Hartwell, Ga. he reported that: “All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior” He may not be funny but he’s definitely a clown.
Last, but not least, among elected characters, is Sylvio Berlusconi whose closest Congressional counterpart might be former New York Congressman, Anthony Weiner. Mr. Weiner sent pictures of his crotch to assorted women he found on the internet. It cost him his seat but not his ambition. He hopes to be New York City’s next mayor. By Italian standards Mr. Weiner’s conduct is fairly tame. By contrast, while Mr. Berlusconi was premier the world’s newspapers were filled with pictures of comely young women who graced the parties hosted by Mr. Berlusconi and expressed their gratitude by giving him party favors of the sexual kind. He, too, ultimately lost his job as a result.
Both the U.S. Congress and the Italian Parliament are incapable of governing. Congress takes advantage of procedural tricks to block legislation, the appointment of judges, cabinet officers, heads of regulatory commissions and virtually all legislation. Defining majority to mean 60% enables Congress to avoid its constitutionally imposed duties. The Italians model themselves after the U.S. Congress.
In February 2012 they held an election for Parliament in which no party got a clear majority. Thereafter the three parties refused to form alliances with the result that no parliamentary committees were set up and it took more than two months and six ballots for the parliamentarians to agree on a new president. (On April 20, 2012 the deadlock was broken and the 87-year old Girogio Napolitano was elected to a second term, the first Italian president to ever be elected to two terms.)
Commenting on Mr. Napolitano’s re-election, Antonio Polito, a political commentator said%: “Our system is no longer able to produce a stable government. The parliamentary system is broken, and it has not been able to fix itself.” An Italian woman commented: “I am sick and tired of Parliament ignoring the will of the people because of economic reasoning.” Neither of those commentators was speaking of the U.S. Congress. They could have been. As I said at the outset, the Italians are lucky. They have the Pope and Berlusconi. We have no consolation prizes.
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Russian vs. U.S. Human Rights
—Cervantes, Don Quixote de la ManchaThe pot calls the kettle black.
The magic number is 18. That is the number each country has selected to express its disapproval of the actions of the other. Vladimir Putin said of the United States’ action: “This, of course, poisons our relationship with the United States.” What he’s talking about is the infamous case of Sergei Magnitsky and the United States’ response to his imprisonment and death.
Sergei Magnitsky was a Russian accountant and auditor who, while working at the Moscow law firm of Firestone Duncan, was investigating an alleged $230 million tax fraud in Russia that implicated tax officials and police officers. In response to his investigation Sergei was arrested in November 2008 because of allegations that he himself had colluded with a client of the firm to commit tax fraud. Under Russian law he could be held for one year without facing trial and on November 16, 2009, eight days short of one year, he died in prison. Reports suggest that during his incarceration he was placed in increasingly small spaces of confinement, denied medical care and denied contact with family members. Suffering from untreated pancreitis he ultimately died because of acute heart failure and toxic shock. The United States Congress was outraged by Mr. Magnitsky’s treatment.
On June 12, 2012, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed what was called in part the “Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012” and on December 14, 2012, it was signed by President Obama. It had nothing to do with the rule of law as it pertained to the prisoners indefinitely detained in Guantanamo, the torturing of prisoners in U.S. custody, nor did it have anything to do with the fact that Mr. Magnitsky was held in prison for 8 days less than one year without being brought to trial. Its stated purpose was simply to punish 18 Russian officials the Congress thought were responsible for Mr. Magnitsky’s treatment. It prohibited them from entering the United States and froze their banking assets within the United States.
In response to the Magnitsky act, Russia took a number of steps, the most recent of which was to ban 18 Americans from entering Russia. Those banned by the Russians include Americans the Russians believe were involved in human rights violations and others who have violated the “human rights and freedoms of Russian citizens abroad” by prosecuting those citizens. The Russians are supported in their belief that the United States was involved in human rights violations by the Constitution Project Study% that was released on April 16, 2013.
In the Study’s opening statement it says “[T]he most important or notable finding of this panel is that it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture. . . . [T]his conclusion is grounded in a thorough and detailed examination of what constitutes torture in many contexts, notable, historical and legal.” ” Two people included in the Russian ban are John Yoo who was a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice who drafted memoranda justifying torture. Another is David Addington, legal counsel and chief of staff to then vice-president, Dick Cheney. He, too, supported enhanced interrogation techniques that the Study concluded were torture. The Russians may have thought those people were as bad as Mr. Magnitsky’s handlers. They may also have thought that keeping Mr. Magnitsky in jail for less than a year was much less worse than what the U.S. has done to prisoners at Guantanamo. If they thought that, they were right.
On April 15, 2013 an op-ed piece written by Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a Guantanamo detainee, was published in the New York Times describing his treatment. Like Mr. Magnitsky, Samir has been neither charged with a crime nor tried. Unlike Mr. Magnitsky, he was not entitled to be released after being imprisoned for one year. He has been at Guantanamo for 11 years and 3 months and there is no end in sight. Unlike Mr. Magnitsky he has not been refused appropriate medical care. Indeed, on March 15, 2013 he was in the prison hospital because he was ill. Prior to being admitted to the hospital and up to the present, he was on a hunger strike. The hospital personnel did not think that a hunger strike was good for him. In response to his refusal to eat while in the hospital “eight military police officers in riot gear, burst in. They tied my hands and feet to the bed. They forcibly inserted an IV into my hand. I spent 26 hours in this state, tied to the bed. During this time I was not permitted to go to the toilet. They inserted a catheter, which was painful, degrading and unnecessary. I was not even permitted to pray. . . . I am still being force-fed. Two times a day they tie me to a chair in my cell. My arms, legs and head are strapped down. I never know when they will come. . . . ”
The Russians do not understand that by torturing people and detaining people indefinitely our government believes it is doing good things because it is protecting the world from bad things except, of course, the bad things it is doing. If the Russians find that hard to understand, they are not alone.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
The Republic of N.R.A.
The National Rifle Association says, “Guns don’t kill people. People do.” But I think the gun helps.
—Eddie Izzard, British Comedian
April 2, 2013 was a great day for those in favor of the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty. It was last considered (but not approved) at the United Nations in July 2012, one week after the Aurora, Colorado movie theater mass murder. It did not get approval because, among other countries, both the United States and Russia wanted more time to study the treaty. Their concerns satisfied, on April 2, 2013 it was approved by 154 votes in the General Assembly. The United States supported its approval and Russia abstained.
The object of the treaty is to: “Establish the highest possible common international standards for regulating or improving the regulation of the international trade in conventional arms “ and to “prevent and eradicate the illicit trade in conventional arms. . . .” The treaty applies to conventional arms within the following categories: battle tanks, armored combat vehicles, large-calibre artillery systems, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, warships, missiles and missile launchers and small arms and light weapons.
Only four countries voted against the treaty. They were The Islamic Republic of Iran, The Syrian Arab Republic, The Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea and The Republic of N.R.A. (The Republic of N.R.A. is not technically a country but it has complete control over what decisions are made by the U.S. government when it considers matters pertaining to guns and for those purposes it can be considered a country.)
North Korea has recently been in the news because of assorted comments made by that country’s “dear respected Marshal” or “the greatest ever commander” Kim Jong-un, and N.R.A. has recently been in the news because of comments made by its chief executive officer, Wayne LaPierre.
While visiting the Wonae Islet Defense Detachment Mr. Kim told the troops: “A guy who is fond of playing with fire is bound to perish in flames, all the enemies quite often playing with fire in the sensitive hot spot should be thrown into a cauldron once I issue an order. Once an order is issued, you should break the waists of the crazy enemies, totally cut their windpipes and thus clearly show them what a real war is like.”: Mr. LaPierre has suggested we’d all be better off if every school in the country had armed guards, a suggestion that would require hundreds of thousands of armed guards and cost billions of dollars.
The four countries that opposed the approval of the treaty on April 2 had different reasons for their opposition. Syria objected to the lack of a ban on weapon sales to “terrorist armed groups and to non-state actors” referring, of course, to those opposing Bashar al-Assad’s government. Iran argued that the treaty was “hugely susceptible to politicization and discrimination.” North Korea, Syria, and Iran, all agreed that the part of the treaty that requires an arms exporter to determine whether arms being exported to a country could be used to: “commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law [or]. . . human rights law” would be used to block their purchases of weapons. Those three countries fear potential exporters would think that they violate humanitarian and human rights law even though the leaders of those countries know that’s untrue. The N.R.A. was not concerned with the part of the treaty dealing with tanks and warships. Its concern is with the language referring to small arms and light weapons.
Discussing the treaty in 2012, N.R.A. president, David Keene, said: “Where people don’t get what they want through Congress they say: ‘Let’s go to the United Nations and try and end-run the Congress, end-run the Constitution, end-run the state legislatures and the federal courts. And that’s what the Obama administration is doing with the Arms Trade Treaty at the U.N. . . .’” He might have added that it’s also an end-run around the N.R.A. Mr. Keene made those comments even though the preamble to the treaty specifically reaffirms “the sovereign right of any State to regulate and control conventional arms exclusively within its territory pursuant to its own legal or constitutional system” and, in addition, recites that it is: “Mindful of the legitimate trade and lawful ownership, and use of certain conventional arms for recreational, cultural, historical, and sporting activities, where such trade, ownership and use are permitted or protected by law.”
Thomas Countryman is Assistant Secretary of State. Unlike Messrs. LaPierre and Keene he has read the treaty. Speaking at the 2012 conference on the treaty he observed: “[T]his treaty will regulate only the international trade in arms. Any attempt to include provisions in the treaty that would interfere with each state’s sovereign control over the domestic possession, use, or movement of arms is clearly outside the scope of our mandate.”
The treaty will go into effect 90 days after 50 member states approve it. Only those signing on to it will be bound by it. For the U.S. to be bound the treaty must be ratified by the United States Senate, a body controlled by the N.R.A. Until the N.R.A. approves, Senate ratification of the treaty will not take place. People wondering when that may occur should contact either David Keene or Wayne LaPierre at N.R.A. headquarters. They can be reached at 1-877-NRA-2000.