A few quiet little murders
I can only imagine the pride with which University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, must peruse the front pages of our national newspapers, now that he can read on a regular basis about the wholesale adoption of one half of his splendid plan to “quietly kill radical mullahs and Iranian atomic scientists.”
It is of course an open question of whether and to what extent the U.S. government is involved in this series of murders:
A former senior intelligence official involved in efforts to thwart Iran’s nuclear program told ABC News that assassinations of top Iranian scientists were usually assumed to be the work of Israel, but that the Israelis would never confirm or admit responsibility.
“Every time we ask,” said the official, “they just smile and say, ‘We have no idea what you are talking about.’ ”
The U.S., for its part, has officially denied any involvement in the deaths of Iranian scientists. A White House spokesman called the accusations “absurd” after Mohammadi’s death. The CIA is known, however, to have recruited scientists as spies.
In 2007, after Iranian General Ali-Reza Asgari went missing in Turkey, the Iranian government said the intelligence official had been kidnapped by Mossad. The Israeli and Western media said he had defected, and was busy providing information on Iran’s nuclear program.
Two years later, award-winning Iranian nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri disappeared while on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He later resurfaced in the United States after defecting to the CIA in return for a large sum of money, according to people briefed on the operation by intelligence officials. A spokesperson for the CIA declined official comment.
Still, it’s rare for a legal academic to see his policy recommendations adopted so wholeheartedly, either by his own government or by a client state.
I have little to add to what Glenn Greenwald has to say about this, but I do want to address a related issue, which is the extent to which academic freedom does or ought to insulate academics from any professional consequences for their actions, in cases where those actions include things like enthusiastically recommending the murder of members of a very small group of specific individuals, especially in a case in which those murders then in fact take place, or playing a key role in bringing about, in flagrant violation of both domestic and international law, a formal system by which the U.S. government repeatedly tortured, under color of law, various prisoners in its custody.
Back when Prof. Reynolds so enthusiastically (and, in turns out in retrospect, quite successfully) first advocated murdering certain specific people, I asked whether one might want to inquire into whether advocating murder — not in some abstract, theoretical way, but in a very individualized, concrete, and one might even say personal manner — was an act that was absolutely protected by considerations of academic freedom. This wasn’t a rhetorical question: the matter genuinely interested me then, and, for obvious reasons, interests me even more so today.
When Prof. John Yoo returned to his academic sinecure after playing his part in transforming the United States government into an enthusiastic practitioner of the various arts involved in torturing captive and helpless human beings, I asked a similar question:
Now Yoo is now back at UC Berkeley, where he taught before joining the Bush administration. He is molding the minds of the next generation of lawyers. The school has no plans to do any inquiry of its own into Yoo’s behavior, or even to modify the professor’s teaching schedule, other than to keep the time and location of Yoo’s classes off the school’s Web site, in order to discourage protesters.
Yoo’s continuing and apparently permanent position on the faculty of one of the nation’s leading law schools does have some significant educational value for his students. For one thing, I am reliably informed that, when he’s not busy arguing that the president has the legal authority to massacre villages and crush the testicles of children, Professor Yoo teaches a very fine class in civil procedure.
In retrospect, I’m sorry I ever raised any questions regarding the potential limits of academic freedom in these cases. Such questions are, under the circumstances, a distraction. We live in a country where law professors advocate torturing and murdering people (unfortunately we have now sunk to a depth where it’s necessary to note that torture and murder remain crimes even when they’re committed by U.S. government officials in the course of performing their official duties), people are then duly tortured and murdered per their official and unofficial recommendations, and there are no subsequent legal or even professional consequences to anyone involved in any aspect of these proceedings. This illustrates the extent to which, in America today, even the most atrocious crimes are simply not crimes at all if they are committed by sufficiently important people:
If you’re a person of high social status and have good enough political connections, nothing will happen to you even if you commit the most serious crimes. This applies even more obviously to Yoo’s former White House employers, but the fact that it’s impossible in this country to levy even the mildest professional sanctions against a mere law professor illustrates the absurdity of imagining it might be possible to ever actually prosecute the likes of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
Nixon redux.
The problem started when Gerald R. Ford didn’t want America to enjoy seeing Nixon get his full comeuppance.
He wanted the country to look forward, not backward.
(Also too – LBJ and Vietnam got a pass. So, maybe THAT’S when this all started. But, Nixon couldn’t go after LBJ because he loved using the Vietnam War to get elected and reelected).
And when he pardoned Nixon, that meant that Carter couldn’t go after the thug.
And Bush I pardoned all of the Iran-Contra conspirators, which meant that Clinton couldn’t go after them, him, or Reagan. And the MSM was told, just when the poo-poo was about to hit the ventilator, that the story was too confusing for the little “we the people” to understand, so, why bother? And so they didn’t.
And all of that led up to Bush and Cheney, upping-the-ante some more. Rather dramatically.
After 2006, the House and Senate should have done more to the Bush/Cheney War Crimes Conglomerate – or, anything at all, really.
But they took a pass. And so did Obama, when he came to office.
They, too, it seems, wanted the country to look forward, not backward.
What Nixon did was fairly negligible compared to Iran-Contra.
And what Bush/Cheney did, was to build upon Iran-Contra, and add a few tricks of their own, from up their sleeves.
And in the middle of all those real crimes, DC got all righteous and indignant over a President getting a blowjob from an intern – and the House impeached him, before the Senate came to its senses and nixed going full-bore.
So, if Obama HAD decided to do something, the Republicans would have squealed that this was all retribution for what happened to Clinton. The MSM would have gone along for the ride – because they always do, when the Republicans are the ones doing the driving.
And the result will be that the next Republican President will pretty much literally be allowed to crush the testicles of his opponents and enemies children – as long as he can use the pretext of “National Security.”
Democrats, uhm, not so much…
I don’t know if Carter would have gone after Nixon or if Clnton would have gone after the Iran-Contra goons. Of course, while I know Jimmy had lust in his heart, I don’t know many other contents thereof, so maybe he would have.
Nixon redux.
Now now…I’m sure the current President would put a stop to this if his hands weren’t tied by…various hand-tying things.
Put a stop to what?
I’m sure that we can take the word of the Iranian government on this. After all, they are always 100% truthful about cause and effect. And the Israelis never, ever would do anything like this. And the linked article is totally full of proof that this is the responsibility of the US government.
Who needs evidence to blame Obama, when free-form speculation is so much more satisfying?
There was one man sent to the scaffold, however, who was acquitted on this first and paramount charge. His name was Julius Streicher, a Nazi party member since 1921. The judges at the Nuremberg tribunal found: “There is no evidence that he was ever within Hitler’s inner circle of advisers, nor during his career was he closely connected with the formulation of policies that led to war…”
Rather, Streicher was convicted for promoting aggressive war and atrocities against the Jews in his newspapers—the vile anti-Semitic weekly Der Stürmer, and later a daily, Fränkische Tageszeitung.
The court found that this propaganda for war and genocide made the newspaper publisher more culpable than many of those defendants who were more directly involved in the workings of the Nazi regime. The historic crimes of that regime, the tribunal found, could never have been carried out without the preparatory work he and others like him did in warping the public consciousness of the German people with a relentless barrage of anti-Semitic and militarist propaganda. As the prosecution stated at Nuremberg: “Without him the Kaltenbrunners, the Himmlers, the General Stroops would have had nobody to carry out their orders.”
http://wsws.org/articles/2003/mar2003/stre-m25.shtml
I wonder if Murdoch, Aisles, and Rush know about this?
Ailes. Oooops!
I don’t understand the point of this paragraph:
Why use the word “however”? I certainly hope we are not murdering their scientists, and I also hope we are recruiting as many of them as spies as we can.
___________________________________
On a different note:
I think you could even question whether it is a violation of law. Haven’t we prosecuted people for advocating racial violence? Forget governments for a moment. Suppose a wealthy private citizen read Reynolds posts, and hired a hit man to kill Iranian scientists. There’s a reason the anti-abortion whackos are circumspect about the way they present their hit-lists of abortion providers. To actually call for their murder would be a crime.
The assassinations are terrible. But the Greenwald post you linked to is undermined, per usual, by Greenwald’s obsession with tarring progressive bloggers as moral monsters.
As evidenced by his badly reasoned, uncharitable response to Scott on the Paul issue a few days ago, his mindset has evolved to a point of stridency where he is incapable of grasping the content of what people are saying when they disagree with him on certain matters (happily, not all matters). And he finds it irresistible to trace their opposing view to hypocrisy and depravity, even in cases when, as with the Paul vs. Obama debate, his view is manifestly the ill-considered and foolish one.
In the current post, Greenwald’s long paragraph querying what Scott or Lindsay Bernstein or Kevin Drum must think about the assassinations–with its tacit implication that their Obama-love keeps them from giving a shit–was utterly pointless. And yet, sadly, it seems to have been the post’s primary motivation. This kind of devolution is common enough in blogging, but it is particularly depressing to see it in Greenwald, who can be so unbelievably good on his core topics.
This. The tell that Glenn has basically stopped caring about anything other than exacting swift bloggy vengeance on those who he feels have wronged him is that, presented with strong circumstantial evidence that either the US, government, its number one client state (although you could argue about which one is the real client in that relationship), or both, are engaged in an active program to murder private citizens who’ve made no threats against any other nation, in a country with which no declared state of war exists, what Glenn thinks is “most remarkable” (his words!) is that Some People on the Internet don’t seem to be manifesting enough righteous outrage about what’s happening. In reality, that fact, assuming it is a fact, isn’t in the same area code as the “most remarkable” thing about all of this.
The shame is that if you could eliminate his self-indulgent dickishness there’s usually a good article remaining.
The most important things to remember, regardless of whatever terrible thing is happening – Barack Obama is gleefully perpetrating unspeakable evil, and liberal bloggers are hypocrites for ardently supporting him in it.
While you may be willing to condemn a thousand acts by Obama, if you aren’t willing to condemn him for things he hasn’t done, you’re a hopeless, deluded hypocritical Obamabot.
Obama does, in fact, kill a lot of innocent people. Not as many as a Republican president probably would, but a fair amount.
Every Glenn Greenwald piece is about the moral superiority of Glenn Greenwald – as demonstrated by his pathological need to begin his posts with preemptive denunciations of the moral monsters who reveal themselves as the scum of the earth for disagreeing with him. Any other topic that finds its way into the post is merely evidence for his thesis.
I hear ya, Joe, but I wouldn’t go quite that far. Or maybe I’d just say it wasn’t ever thus.
What I used to admire about Greenwald was that he was good at conveying the cost to non-American innocent lives of the War on Terror. It’s always valuable to have people focusing on the human cost of our foreign-policy adventurism. That’s clear whatever one’s foreign-policy persuasion might be.
It’s sad to see that concern sublimated to less fruitful preoccupations, such as proving that Scott is a wanker.
Jeffrey Goldberg has some good questions about these assassinations.
I like this bit:
If so, it is also true that some combination of Israel, The United States, and Glen Greenwald’s personal ninja hit team are committing these assassinations. This makes Greenwald the world’s biggest hypocrite. He’s involved in murdering Iranian scientists while writing articles condemning their murder and berating others for not condemning them.
Evidence? Logic? Ethics? Those only hinder fools. Greenwald is fighting the good fight (or possibly murdering Iranian scientists).
[...] when I reflect on it, was a real mistake on my part. After all, five years ago I was involved in a very public and nasty exchange with Glenn Reynolds, when he merely advocated doing something [...]
[...] Paul Campos on why that’s so: We live in a country where law professors advocate torturing and murdering people, people are then duly tortured and murdered per their official and unofficial recommendations, and there are absolutely no consequences to anyone involved in any aspect of these proceedings. This illustrates the extent to which, in America today, even the most atrocious crimes are simply not crimes at all if they are committed by sufficiently important people … [...]
Incidentally, Hillary Clinton is denying any US involvement in assassinations. Of course, that’s just what she’d do if we were assassinating people….
even to modify [Joh Yoo's] teaching schedule,
My understanding is that Boalt modified it to have him teach required courses, to make it harder for students to boycott his classes.
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