Topic: United States

According to Condoleeza Rice, the Bush administration today changed its position on torture, finally determining that the UN Convention against Torture, which bans "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of prisoners, applies even to US personnel even outside of US territory — an interpretation that has been glaringly obvious to everyone else all along.

Let's just hope that we actually adhere to this new public policy. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to discover that while we're now officially swearing off such behavior, it's still going on in secret.

Update: Sadly, it looks like I (and much of the media) jumped the gun on this one. My friend Daniel Kleinfeld posted a couple of clarifying links in the comments, including this one, which explains that Condi's language has been in use by the administration for some time and does nothing to stop or prevent the continued torture of those we have imprisoned without anything resembling due process.

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Topic: United States

Check out this clip from Salon (via Wonkette) of reporters responding to Katrina, including a weepy Geraldo Rivera.

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Topic: United States

The Sunday Times published a thorough article on Katrina that is a must-read. Absolutely devastating, in so many ways — especially the grotesque violence in the Convention Center and Superdome. Yes, I blame the criminals first, but this kind of violence seems endemic in refugee camps the world over when there are not enough resources to go around and not enough law enforcement personnel. That such a situation, reminiscent of reports out of Darfur and Burundi, should have been permitted in the United States is unforgivable.

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Topic: United States

The Katrina disaster has exposed so many jaw-dropping failures and wrongs in our government that I don't see much point in highlighting one or another, but let me direct you to Talking Points Memo, which has been doing an admirable job of keeping up with the revelations. Or, for a snarkier but actually quite informative approach, check out Wonkette.

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Topic: United States

According to the New York Times, "Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated."

Are they serious? That didn't occur to them? What is wrong with these people?

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Topic: United States

"I am absolutely disgusted. After the tsunami our people, even the ones who lost everything, wanted to help the others who were suffering," [said] Sajeewa Chinthaka, 36, as he watched a cricket match in Colombo, Sri Lanka. "I am absolutely disgusted. After the tsunami our people, even the ones who lost everything, wanted to help the others who were suffering," Sajeewa Chinthaka, 36, as he watched a cricket match in Colombo, Sri Lanka. "Not a single tourist caught in the tsunami was mugged. Now with all this happening in the U.S. we can easily see where the civilized part of the world's population is."

This is from a Reuters article on the international reaction to what has been going on in New Orleans.

Sri Lanka was in the midst of a decades-old, deeply acrimonious civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority when they were hit by the tsunami. In the afternath, Sinhalese rescued Tamils and vice versa, while the Sinhalese government negotiated an agreement with the Tamil Tigers to let relief supplies into Tiger-held areas. Granted, the post-tsunami ceasefire has frayed and the agreement on aid distribution never quite worked how it was supposed to. But we're talking about an actual war in a third-world country.

Similarly, the disaster in the Aceh province of Indonesia led separatists and government forces to pause in their fighting to deal with the crisis at hand. That sense of cooperation helped to foster a peace agreement there, and the Indonesian government is now using that agreement as a model for trying to solve a similar conflict in Papua New Guinea.

That America and Americans have responded to the Katrina disaster in such an ugly way is deeply saddening. It brings to mind the grim "helpless giant" era of the 1970s, with gas lines, a failed war abroad, anti-Americanism on the rise and a crumbling economy. But this may be worse.

Our reputation in the world was bad enough before. When we say we want to export American values, people pictured Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and the chaos in Baghdad. Now New Orleans can be added to that list. If we can't manage to instill basic decency in our own people, or protect them in a crisis, what right do we have to preach to others?

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Topic: United States

The disaster in New Orleans began as an act of nature, but it has by now become a gigantic national failure that raises some very serious and troubling questions about our country and its future.

What is wrong with Homeland Security?

Four years after 9/11, one would have expected that the well-funded Department of Homeland Security would have some plans in place for a disaster like the one we've seen. After all, in contemplating what terrorists could do, short of detonating a nuclear device, that would top 9/11 for casualties and visual impact, the simplest thing I could come up with was bursting a dam to flood a populated area. New Orleans, it turns out, would've been a perfect target. Yet it took federal emergency managers days to coordinate their response, and lawlessness and chaos reign, while thousands upon thousands of Americans are left without food, water, sanitation, medical care or the most basic requirements for safety and security.

Meanwhile, buses of refugees have nowhere to go. In four years, you would think that Homeland Security would have drawn up contingency plans for waves of refugees from major urban areas. It appears we have no such plans. Instead, there are pleas for more buses and for places to put people. And New Orleans is a small city, with fewer than half a million residents. A similar disaster in New York, Los Angeles or Houston would leave millions wandering aimlessly about the country.

What is wrong with the people of New Orleans?

A question that has so far been skirted is what the hell is wrong with New Orleanians. A corollary question is whether citizens of other American cities would behave as badly under similar circumstances. My guess is that it depends on whether the city has a vast black underclass that is hopelessly poor, uneducated and alienated. The mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana are publicly furious with the federal government — and rightly so — but the rest of us have a right to be angry with a city and state that have allowed a significant population to become so disaffected that they go Haitian at the first opportunity.

How can armed gangs take over an American city?

One simple answer: guns. There were plenty of gun shops to loot, and the looters are the ones who did so. If a similar disaster were to strike New York, it would be much harder for armed gangs to take over because we don't have nearly so many gun shops. As in Baghdad, so in New Orleans: unsecured arms depots are a recipe for anarchy.

There may still be some diehard libertarians who believe that the power of lawless armed gangs to prevent federal government action in New Orleans is a sign of the health and vigor of our American freedom. Hopefully, most of the militia nuts will recognize that New Orleans is what their philosophy means in practice. Rule of the strong over the weak is not pleasant.

What is happening to America?

After years of shrinking government and a widening gap between rich and poor, Katrina has revealed deep domestic weaknesses. Neglected infrastructure, federal ineffectuality, poverty, poor education, understaffed police forces and many more problems came together to create the disaster now unfolding. The terrifying question is whether New Orleans is an abberation or a harbinger. I would like to believe the former, but I have few grounds for doing so. Mighty empires do fall, and the complete collapse of a major city is certainly not a good sign.

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Topic: United States

The devastating floods in Louisiana and Mississippi are a huge disaster that has caused and will continue to cause enormous human suffering. They are also the biggest breach of homeland security since September 11, 2001. Granted it was nature, not terrorists, that broke our defenses and sent hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing from urban centers. But the chaotic, uncoordinated response to the disaster — which, unlike terrorists, gave ample advance warning — is not encouraging.

Of course, it's possible that the initial complaints of poor coordination are simply panicked and misplaced. We'll have to wait some time to find out just how well or badly authorities handled the crisis. Still, the tens of thousands of refugees trapped in the Superdome do not create an impression of competent emergency management.

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Topic: United States

Respected imam Pat Robertson, speaking from his influential mosque, has issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.

Isn't this exactly the sort of extremist preaching we're always calling on Muslim societies to control? When American soldiers are dying in a war against terrorists motivated by religious extremism, Roberts's call for an act of terrorism is especially obscene.

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Topic: United States

In this week's New Yorker, Peter J. Boyer's profile of the preacher Billy Graham (accompanying slide show here) provides a useful short history of American Protestantism in the 20th century — one that thankfully doesn't mention Barry Goldwater — and draws the frequently overlooked but important distinction between Evangelical Christians and Christian Fundamentalists.

To a lot of left-leaning, non-churchy types, myself included, these terms are largely interchangeable epithets for a poorly understood mass of Americans who believe in creationism, attend megachurches or else miniscule weirdo churches with snakes and speaking in tongues, and buy Tim LaHaye novels. Boyer makes it clear that this perception elides two distinct movements within American Protestantism that have often been in conflict.

Going back to the mid-19th century, there was essentially only what would later be known as fundamentalism: the traditional Protestant belief in the Bible as a literally true description of the world and the sole source of legitimate Christian doctrine. Belief in a six-day creation, a fiery hell and the redemptive power of faith were more or less standard. By the turn of the 20th century, scientific views of our planet's history, and especially Darwinism, coupled with historical approaches to Biblical texts, had begun to erode this set of beliefs. In response, a new theological movement, liberalism, allowed for greater latitude of belief, seeing much of the Bible as allegory and sometimes denying the divinity of Christ. (Saint John the Divine, in Manhattan, was erected as a cathedral for the preaching of this particular Gospel.)

Fundamentalism was a reactionary movement that rejected liberalism and insisted on maintaining the old truths and rejecting the relativism and compromise of the liberals. By the time of the famous Scopes trial, most American Protestants had come to see fundamentalism as ridiculous and backward. It was also fractious. Its devotion to rooting out error meant that fundamentalist sects were constantly splitting off and condemning each other. One sect declared that only the King James translation of the Bible was legitimate. It is this movement that has given us the strange, small churches, especially in the South.

Meanwhile, the liberal theologians took over the mainline Protestant denominations, often to the discomfort of their flocks. A movement called the New Evangelism then arose a kind of middle ground between liberalism and fundamentalism, appealing to people who were unhappy with liberal theology but wished to remain loyal to their denominations and to avoid the absurdities and embarrassments of fundamentalism. It adhered to traditional Protestant beliefs, but made a serious effort to back this belief with rigorous scholarship. It also got involved in social issues, refusing to cede good works to the liberals as the more insular fundamentalists had.

This is the movement to which the relatively tolerant Billy Graham belongs, and it's the movement that has given us megachurches and Christian rock bands, as well as inspiring efforts to help the Sudanese and others. It is much more politically active and powerful than fundamentalism, whose theology it shares to a great extent. With its message of welcome and salvation rather than condemnation and hellfire, Evangelicalism is also responsible for a certain smugness: when you set up the big tent and make the compromises necessary to fill it, you run the risk of telling people what they want to hear. Movements like prosperity theology, which insists that God wants Christian believers to be rich, are products of Evangelicalism. These things tend to upset the fundamentalists, who fiercely opposed the Evangelicals, especially early on.

I don't know to what extent America's Christians are aware of this distinction between fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, or what role it plays in today's political Christianity, but I'm guessing that it still matters considerably. I am more familiar with similar distinctions in Judaism, between the traditionally Orthodox, who are not terribly political and whose numbers remain low, and Chassidic (especially Chabad Lubavitch) Judaism, which proselytizes among Jews and is heavily engaged in Israeli politics. As far as I can tell, Islam also has this dynamic, though I'm not knowledgeable enough to say much on the subject.

Interestingly, both Chassidus and the New Evangelical movement began as efforts to be more tolerant and inclusive, and both movements have over time become known for their extremism and intolerance. What stands out, however, is that unlike intolerant sects of the past, the New Evangelicals and the Chassidim (and the Islamists?) have managed to condemn on a grand scale while still welcoming those whose practice and belief may not yet meet muster. If you roar up to a Chabad House on the back of a Harley on the Sabbath, no one inside will make a fuss about it; instead, they'll welcome you and sing with you and give you reasons to come roaring back next Saturday, allowing your interest and devotion to develop gradually. This combination of ideological rigor and social welcome can be enormously compelling, and it is perhaps the most important development of religious practice in the 20th century.

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