Glenn Greenwald observes that we’re hearing a familiar false dilemma from advocates of intervention in Libya—the same one that was trotted out so frequently in the run-up to the war in Iraq: Either you support American military action, or you must be indifferent to the suffering of civilians under Qadaffi. Bracket for a moment the obvious empirical questions about the general efficacy of bombs as reliable means of alleviating suffering. What I find striking is the background assumption that whether the United States military has a role to play here is taken to be a simple function of how much we care about other people’s suffering. One obvious answer is that caring or not caring simply doesn’t come into it: That the function of the U.S. military is to protect the vital interests of the United States, and that it is for this specific purpose that billions of tax dollars are extracted from American citizens, and for which young men and women have volunteered to risk their lives. It is not a general-purpose pool of resources to be drawn on for promoting desirable outcomes around the world.

A parallel argument is quite familiar on the domestic front, however. Pick any morally unattractive outcome or situation, and you will find someone ready to argue that if the federal government plausibly could do something to remedy it, then anyone who denies the federal government should act must simply be indifferent to the problem. My sense is that many more people tend to find this sort of argument convincing in domestic affairs precisely because we seem to have effectively abandoned the conception of the federal government as an entity with clear and defined powers and purposes. We debate whether a particular program will be effective or worth the cost, but over the course of the 20th century, the notion that such debates should be limited to enumerated government functions largely fell out of fashion. Most people—or at least most public intellectuals and policy advocates—now seem to think of Congress as a kind of all-purpose problem solving committee. And I can’t help but suspect that the two are linked. Duties and obligations may be specific, but morality is universal: Other things equal, the suffering of a person in Lebanon counts just as much as that of a person in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Once we abandon the idea of a limited government with defined powers—justified by reference to a narrow set of functions specified in advance—and instead see it as imbued with a general mandate to do good, it’s much harder for a moral cosmopolitan to resist making the scope of that mandate global, at least in principle.

An analogy with private ethics seems instructive. Most people would probably agree that the well-off have some obligation—as a matter of personal morality, if not “social justice”—to use some portion of their wealth to help the less fortunate. But with respect to humanity in general, we generally treat this as an “imperfect duty,” to use Kant’s phrase. That is, someone might well say: “You really are so rich that you ought to be giving a larger percentage of your income to charity.” But as we scarcely expect anyone to contribute to every worthy cause, any dispute here would properly be about what is an adequate total amount to give, and what general priorities that giving should follow. Someone who gives far less than they could easily afford might be charged with “not caring enough about the badly-off” in general, but it would be bizarre to charge someone with indifference to the plight of Steve in Albuquerque if their (otherwise adequate, by whatever standard you accept) charitable giving did not include an earmark to help poor Steve with his medical bills. Steve’s friends and relatives might owe him a specific duty of assistance, but for everyone else, the only legitimate question is whether they’re doing as much as ethics requires on the whole. With that in mind, The New Republic‘s Jonathan Chait seems to me to be rather missing the point in this blog post:

Why intervene in Libya and not elsewhere is a question that needs to be asked. But it’s not a question that needs to be asked to determine the wisdom of intervening in Libya. Should we also spend more money to prevent malaria? Yes, we should. But I see zero reason to believe that not intervening in Libya would lead to an increase in in American assistance to prevent malaria.

Why not intervene in Burma or Yemen or elsewhere? I would say the answer is prudential: for various political, geographic, and military reasons, the United States has the chance to prevent slaughter in Libya at reasonable cost, and does not have the chance to do so in Burma.

But suppose there’s no answer whatsoever. Does it matter? If it were the 1990s, and the Clinton administration were contemplating an expansion of children’s health insurance, would it be important to determine exactly why we’re covering uninsured children but not uninsured adults? No. The question is whether this particular policy intervention is likely to succeed or fail.

Chait is surely right that our failure to intervene in other cases, or to prevent global suffering by other means, doesn’t exactly prove anything about this case. Perhaps those other cases are different, for either practical or moral reasons, or perhaps we simply fail to act in many cases where we ought to. But he’s surely wrong—and I think tellingly wrong—to reject the implicit demand for a general principle to govern those interventions, whether military or otherwise.

Stipulate, purely for the sake of argument, that Americans do have some collective obligation to prevent suffering elsewhere in the world, and that this obligation is properly met, at least in part, via government. (Perhaps because governments are uniquely able to remedy certain kinds of suffering—such as those requiring the mobilization of a military.) Given that we have finite resources, surely the worst possible way to go about this is by making a series of ad hoc judgments about particular cases—the “how much do I care about Steve?” method. The refusal to consider whatever global duty we might have holistically is precisely what leads to irrational allocations—like spending billions to protect civilians and rebel troops in Libya when many more lives would be saved (again, let’s suppose for the sake of argument) by far less costly malaria eradication efforts. Unless there’s an argument that we have some specific or special obligation to people in Libya—and I certainly haven’t seen it—then any claim about our obligation to intervene in this case is, necessarily, just a specific application of some broader principle about our obligation to alleviate global suffering generally. The suggestion that we ought to evaluate this case in a vacuum, then, starts to seem awfully strange, because if we are ever going to intervene for strictly humanitarian reasons (rather than to protect vital security interests), then the standard for when to do so has to be, in part, a function of the aggregate demands whatever standard we pick would place on our limited resources.

Reading between the lines slightly, here’s what I suspect is behind Chait’s rejection of a more holistic approach. (I hate putting words in people’s mouths, and encourage people to read the full post and judge for themselves, but I don’t think I’m stretching very far here.) Politically, we seem to be rather perversely amenable to pursuing putative humanitarian goals when this entails dropping bombs at massive cost—at least in cases that trigger our collective attention for whatever reason—than we are to more prosaic (and less lethal) interventions, even when these save more lives at lower cost. Chait infers—perhaps correctly—that Americans would reject any general, cost/benefit sensitive principle of intervention that could possibly justify action in this instance. Since Chait thinks Americans aren’t sufficiently willing to risk lives and money on behalf of foreigners as a general matter, but will occasionally go along with an insanely expensive intervention in particular stirring cases, he’d rather not have to generalize explicitly, because the ad hoc approach gets us closer to the level of assistance he thinks is morally required than any politically viable neutral rule.

Those of us who cherish the principle of limited government sometimes conflate it with our specific conception of what the limits should be—we have in mind a particular set of functions that government is uniquely qualified to take on, for one reason or another. But implicit in these last few paragraphs, I think, is a distinct and more abstract argument rooted in a particular ideal of democratic deliberation—one that is in theory equally compatible with any number of different views about the proper role and functions of government. We all know that individuals often make quite different choices on a case-by-case basis than when they formulate general rules of action based on a longer view. We routinely make meta-choices designed to prevent ourselves from making micro-choices not conducive to our interests in the aggregate: We throw out the smokes and the sweets in the cupboard, and even install software that keeps us from surfing the Internet when we’re trying to get work done. Faced with a Twinkie or a hilarious YouTube clip, we may predict that we will often make choices that, when they’re all added up, conflict with our other long-term goals. Marketers, by contrast, often try to induce us to make snap decisions or impulse purchases when, in a cool hour of deliberation, we’d conclude their product isn’t the best use of our money.

Following a diet or a budget is one form of choice; so is the impulse buy or the fast food snack. The meta-choice about which kind of choice to make depends on a judgement about which best comports with one’s ideal of rational autonomy given the facts of human psychology. A marketer who hopes to trigger an impulse buy can legitimately say he’s giving consumers what they choose, but there’s a clear sense in which someone acting in accordance with a general rule, formulated with a view to long-term tradeoffs, often chooses in a more deliberative and fully autonomous fashion than someone who does what seems most appealing in each case unfettered by such rules.

Something analogous, I want to suggest, can be said about democratic deliberation. A polity can establish broad and general principles specifying the conditions under which government may or should act, or it can vote on individual policies and programs on a case-by-case basis (with many gradations in between, of course). Both are clearly in some sense “democratic”; the proper balance between them will depend in part on one’s theory about how democratic deliberation confers legitimacy, just as the weight an individual gives to different types of “choices” will turn on a view about the nature of rational autonomy. Limited government is sometimes painted as constraint on democracy—an obstacle to what a majority might favor at a particular time. But political elites, like marketers, understand how the frame and scope of a choice may radically affect what the very same person or polity would choose—and claims by either that only one counts as true “choice” or “democracy” ought to be viewed with due skepticism.

Libya, Limited Government, and Imperfect Duties is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

If you haven’t been following the intrigue around Wikileaks and the security companies hoping to help the government fight it, this stuff is not to be missed. Recommended:

• “How One Man Tracked Down Anonymous—And Paid a Heavy Price,” on Ars Technica.
• “A Disturbing Threat Against One of Our Own,” on Salon.

The latter story links to a document purporting to show that a government contractor called Palantir Technologies suggested unnamed ways that Glenn Greenwald (author of this excellent Cato study) might be made to choose “professional preservation” over his sympathetic reporting about Wikileaks. A later page talks of “proactive strategies” including: “Use social media to profile and identify risky behavior of employees.”

Wikileaks has no employees. I take this to mean that the personal lives of Wikileaks supporters and sympathizers would be used to undercut its public credibility. Because Julian Assange hasn’t done enough…

While we’re on credibility: This may well be Wikileaks’ rehabilitation. Wikileaks erred badly by letting itself and Julian Assange become the story. We’re not having the discussion we should have about U.S. government behavior because of Assange’s self-regard.

But now defenders of the U.S. government are making themselves the story, and they may be looking even worse than Wikileaks and Assange. (N.B.: Palantir has apologized to Greenwald.) That doesn’t mean that we will immediately focus on what Wikileaks has revealed about U.S. government behavior, but it could clear the deck for those conversations to happen.

The concept of “miscalculation” seems more prominent in international affairs and foreign policy than other fields, and it comes to mind here. Wikileaks and its opponents are joined in a negative duel around miscalculation. The side that miscalculates the least will have the upper hand.

Cyber-Intrigue and Miscalculation is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Libertarians often debate whether conservatives or liberals are more friendly to liberty. We often fall back on the idea that conservatives tend to support economic liberties but not civil liberties, while liberals support civil liberties but not economic liberties — though this old bromide hardly accounts for the economic policies of President Bush or the war-on-drugs-and-terror-and-Iraq policies of President Obama.

Score one for the conservatives in the surging outrage over the Transportation Security Administration’s new policy of body scanners and intimate pat-downs. You gotta figure you’ve gone too far in the violation of civil liberties when you’ve lost Rick Santorum, George Will, Kathleen Parker, and Charles Krauthammer. (Gene Healy points out that conservatives are reaping what they sowed.)

Meanwhile, where are the liberals outraged at this government intrusiveness? Where is Paul Krugman? Where is Arianna? Where is Frank Rich? Where is the New Republic? Oh sure, civil libertarians like Glenn Greenwald have criticized TSA excesses. But mainstream liberals have rallied around the Department of Homeland Security and its naked pictures: Dana Milbank channels John (“phantoms of lost liberty”) Ashcroft: “Republicans are providing the comfort [to our enemies]. They are objecting loudly to new airport security measures.” Ruth Marcus: “Don’t touch my junk? Grow up, America.” Eugene Robinson: “Be patient with the TSA.” Amitai Etzioni in the New Republic: “In defense of the ‘virtual strip-search.’” And finally, the editors of the New York Times: ”attacks are purely partisan and ideological.”

Could this just be a matter of viewing everything through a partisan lens? Liberals rally around the DHS of President Obama and Secretary Napolitano, while conservatives criticize it? Maybe. And although Slate refers to the opponents of body-scanning as “paranoid zealots,” that term would certainly seem to apply to apply to Mark Ames and Yasha Levine of the Nation, who stomp their feet, get red in the face, and declare every privacy advocate from John Tyner (“don’t touch my junk”) on to be “astroturf” tools of “Washington Lobbyists and Koch-Funded Libertarians.” (Glenn Greenwald took the article apart line by line.)

Most Americans want to be protected from terrorism and also to avoid unnecessary intrusions on liberty, privacy, and commerce. Security issues can be complex. A case can be made for the TSA’s new procedures. But it’s striking to see how many conservatives think the TSA has gone too far, and how dismissive — even contemptuous — liberals are of rising concerns about liberty and privacy.

Conservatives, Liberals, and the TSA is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Here’s some recent commentary on California’s Prop. 19 ballot initiative:

• Today, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof makes the case against the war on cannabis.  Although there is no mention of Cato, Kristoff mentions the work of our senior fellow, Jeff Miron, and links to our report on the Budgetary Impact of Ending Drug Prohibition.  Kristoff also mentions Portugal’s drug decriminalization policies and links to a Time Magazine article that highlights the Cato report on that subject by Glenn Greenwald.
• Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch make the case that Prop. 19 is the most important item before the voters in this election cycle.  Even more important than whether Barbara Boxer can continue her work in the Senate?  Yes, read the whole thing.  Dan Mitchell has additional thoughts here.
• George Soros is in the news for helping the Prop. 19 effort with a one million dollar contribution.  He explained his reasons for supporting Prop. 19 in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

For additional Cato scholarship on drug policy, go here.

Prop. 19 Roundup is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

That’s the claim the Obama administration made in court. As Glenn Greenwald puts it:

[W]hat’s most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is “state secrets”:  in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are “state secrets,” and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.

Italics in the original. My colleagues Gene Healy and Nat Hentoff have expressed concerns about targeted killings. Charlie Savage wrote a good piece on this that highlights how even the most ardent defenders of executive power may blush at this broad claim of power.

The government’s increasing use of the state secrets doctrine to shield its actions from judicial review has been contentious. Some officials have argued that invoking it in the Awlaki matter, about which so much is already public, would risk a backlash. David Rivkin, a lawyer in the White House of President George H. W. Bush, echoed that concern.

“I’m a huge fan of executive power, but if someone came up to you and said the government wants to target you and you can’t even talk about it in court to try to stop it, that’s too harsh even for me,” he said.

In fairness, Rivkin would defend the administration’s claim of power on other grounds — that targeting is a “political question” for the elected branches of government — but this approach seems to have lost out because it invites the judiciary to determine whether the U.S. is at war in Yemen.

Amending the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed by Congress after 9/11 is long overdue. What groups are we truly at war with, where does the line between war and peace sit, who can we detain and kill, and what process is owed before a citizen may be targeted with lethal force? Questions of war are political in nature, and if we don’t know the answers, it is Congress’ role to step in and provide them.

Targeted Killing of U.S. Citizen a State Secret? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A split panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided, on a 6-5 vote, that a lawsuit filed by extraordinary rendition and torture victims is barred by the State Secrets Privilege. Over a year ago, a three-judge panel ruled that the case should proceed with traditional application of the Privilege — individual pieces of evidence would be excluded based on their secret nature, but other evidence would remain available for litigation.

Robert Chesney has some thoughtful commentary on how the current state of the law deals with rule of law versus individual justice concerns. By any measure this is, as Glenn Greenwald notes, a broad victory for the government and further evidence of continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations’ approaches to terrorism.

Obama Administration Wins in State Secrets Case is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In the years since September 11, 2001, the secret digital surveillance state has grown enormously. Given heightened security measures, heightened anxiety, and cheaper-than-ever data collection and storage, such growth was perhaps inevitable.

But what are the proper limits on the secret collection of information? Where do our constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties stand in this new era? Do the federal government’s increased powers of surveillance even accomplish the security tasks at hand?

Constitutional lawyer and columnist Glenn Greenwald argues in this month’s Cato Unbound that the digital surveillance state is out of control. It’s also failed to deliver on its promises of greater security. Rather than helping to find the needle in the haystack, we have only made the haystack bigger.

Commenting on Greenwald’s essay will be Professor John Eastman, of Chapman University Law School; Paul Rosenzweig, now of the Heritage Foundation and formerly Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy in the Department of Homeland Security; and the Cato Institute’s own Julian Sanchez, a prolific journalist on the interface of technology and civil liberties. Please stop by through the rest of this month for a discussion of one of our country’s most pressing issues in both civil liberties and national security.

Cato Unbound: The Digital Surveillance State is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A confession: For all my innumerable policy disagreements with Barack Obama, on election night 2008, I found myself cheering with the rest of the throng on U Street. I fully expected to be appalled by much of his agenda — but I had also spent years covering the Bush administration’s relentless arrogation of power to the executive in the name of the War on Terror, its glib invocation of “national security” to squelch the least gesture toward transparency or accountability, its easy contempt for civil liberties and the rule of law. However fitfully, I thought, we could finally hope to see that appalling legacy reversed. And that seemed worth celebrating even if little else about the declared Obama agenda was.

As you might guess, I had a lot of disappointment coming — and not just with Obama.  There were, of course, principled civil libertarians on the left, like Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald and Firedoglake‘s Marcy Wheeler who kept banging the drum with undiminished fury. But many progressives seemed prepared to assume that Bush’s War-on-Terror policies would be out the door close on the heels of their author — conspicuously muting their outrage even as the reasons for it persisted. Meanwhile, the right — disappointingly if not entirely surprisingly — managed to fuse a penchant for breathless Stalin analogies with an attitude toward expansive surveillance powers and arbitrary detention authority that ranged from indifference to endorsement.

So it’s a little encouraging to see evidence over the last few weeks that burgeoning progressive disenchantment with Obama along a number of dimensions seems to be bringing these issues back into sharper focus. In a recent interview in Der Spiegel, Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame (described by the paper as a “lefty icon”) blasted Obama for “continuing the worst of the Bush administration in terms of civil liberties.” ACLU director Anthony Romero declared himself “disgusted” with the president, and Kevin Drum of Mother Jones catalogued a slew of reasons to agree with that appraisal. The real test of an issue’s salience, however, is whether it makes The Daily Show, and so perhaps the most significant bellwether is Jon Stewart’s decision to devote an unusually long and blistering segment to Obama’s failure to live up to his rhetoric on civil liberties and executive power:

Democrats have spent most of the past decade playing defense against “soft on national security” attacks from the right, on the assumption — borne out thus far — that the base wasn’t going to punish them for folding on civil liberties issues. But while many progressive complaints now being aired are themselves the product of an unrealistic view of presidential puissance, this really is one sphere where the president has enormous latitude to unilaterally affect policy. It’s therefore also a set of issues where scant progress can’t easily be blamed on Republican obstructionism.

During the Bush era, we saw the brief emergence of a small but hardy left-right “strange bedfellows” coalition opposed to the FISA Amendments Act. Now I find myself wondering: If progressive grumblings on this front continue and grow louder, will the Tea Party movement that’s sprung up in the intervening years realize that their own rhetoric logically commits them to the same position? And if they do, will civil libertarians on the left be open to resurrecting that odd alliance?

Obama, Civil Liberties, & the Left is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Apologies in advance for the epic-length post.

There’s been a fair bit of wailing and garment-rending about war on the op-ed pages.  In addition to the cloying and tiresome Mark Helprin piece to which David links below, E.J. Dionne, Glenn Greenwald, and Fred Hiatt have all touched on the subject in recent days.  One common theme is the idea that Americans are insulated from the costs and benefits of war, and that this is a problem.

To their credit, some of the writers offer proposals for redressing matters: Helprin suggests American citizens should force congressional declarations of war characterized by “extraordinary, penetrating debate” in order to ensure that decisions to go to war have been “ratified unambiguously by the American people through their constitutional and republican institutions.”  (Do we also owe the troops good decisions?)  Further, citizens must recognize that it is “unacceptable” to “starve the means to fight” in order to defray the costs of war.  “If the general population  must do with less, so be it, for the problem is only imagined.”

What planet does Helprin live on?  The ways in which citizens and legislators behave when it comes to war are shaped by the incentives each group faces.  Helprin — and the other writers — should try to think about those incentives if they actually care about solving these problems.

Why, for example, has the U.S. Congress, since its last declaration of war (against Romania during World War II), insisted on “delegating” the prerogative to go to war to the Executive in spite of its clear obligation under the U.S. Constitution?  Because it’s in their interests to do so.  In this way, Congresspeople can position themselves to take credit when wars go well but blame the Executive when they go badly.  The requirement that Congress declare war was designed in part to force the hand of the legislator, to put him on the record, in an effort to localize the costs and benefits of wars on those launching them.  But then Congress ingeniously figured out that it could shirk this responsibility by delegating authority up to the Executive, at which point it could claim credit for victories and point fingers after defeats.  (Recall the Democratic legislators who absurdly claimed of the Iraq war resolution that they didn’t think President Bush actually intended to use the congressional resolution to take the country to war…)

And what about the voters?  Greenwald writes that

One significant cause of America’s indifference to the wars we are waging is that those wars have virtually no effect on the overwhelming majority of Americans (at least no recognized effect), while they impose a huge cost on a tiny sliver of the population:  those who fight the wars and their families.

Rational choice theory has taken a beating in the wake of the financial meltdown, but it would be dumb to throw its central insights.  Helprin, Hiatt, Dionne, et al, should think about the views of a notional Rational Voter.  Why should he or she care enough about America’s wars to do something about them?

I care about U.S. foreign policy a lot, and I think it’s deeply mistaken and destructive.  But even I would have a hard time telling most utility-maximizing Americans why they should care enough about our military spending and our wars — rather than other political issues — to mobilize their elected officials to do something about them.  As the Beloved Founder of one of America’s most vital institutions has been known to remark, the U.S. tax code “treats us like so many gerbils. Do this and you’ll get some sugar water. Do that and you’ll get an electric shock.”

And it turns out people really like sugar water and hate electric shocks!  If you want a voter to respond, either zap him or give him a coke.  (Politicians seem to prefer the latter, as do voters.)  For most voters, the implications of the wars are neither refreshing and delicious nor directly painful.  Given this, how could war and peace possibly become as salient as other policies that directly impact people’s lives on a daily basis?  Unemployed?  Have a mortgage?  Taxes too high?  Poised to collect Social Security or Medicare?  Employed in or consuming health care or financial services?  Can the intellectuals above get their rhetoric cranked up high enough that they can make people put aside these sorts of direct material concerns in order to carry on a sustained and probing debate about foreign wars?

As this discussion demonstrates, the problem for non-interventionists is how to get voters to care enough about America’s crazy foreign policy to stop it.  Keep in mind that it’s unlikely that material constraints will force us to rein in our ambitions any time soon.  America is blessed by geography and an economy that seems impossible to defeat, despite our rulers’ best efforts.  Given the unlikelihood of severe costs like conquest or bankruptcy, in all likelihood the American Goliath will keep lumbering along.  And the pundits will keep carping.

War and the Intellectuals is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Two smart guys on opposite sides of the political spectrum have sound points about the treatment of suspected Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.  First, Orin Kerr points out that investigators have some flexibility in determining when and whether to read Miranda rights.  In this case, they refrained initially and questioned Shahzad for a while under the public safety exception. And despite the apparent belief of the perpetually terrorized that Miranda warnings are some kind of magical incantation that causes the cone of silence to descend upon blabbermouths, they determined that he would probably continue cooperating even after being Mirandized. But as Kerr points out, they could have proceeded sans Miranda had that seemed necessary—provided they were willing to waive the ability to introduce Shahzad’s confession at trial. Given that there appears to be plenty of other evidence against him, that might well have been a viable option.

Either way, this surely seems like the kind of judgment call best left to the investigators on the scene, not Monday morning quarterbacks in Congress like Rep. Peter King (R-NY) who gave us this priceless reaction:

“Did they Mirandize him? I know he’s an American citizen but still,” King said.

Putting aside that nauseating “but still,” does King really imagine that he possesses some deep insight into the pernicious effect of Miranda warnings that the agents on the ground lacked? Again, Shahzad is apparently still cooperating—maybe they knew what they were doing.

From Steve Benen, meanwhile, we have one of many posts around the blogosphere pointing out the incoherence of a cowardly proposal mooted by Joe Lieberman (I-CT) that would revoke the citizenship of Americans who join foreign terror groups.  The blindingly obvious question: By what process do we determine that a suspected member of a foreign terror group is really a member of a foreign terror group?   As Glenn Greenwald writes, there’s not much point to having a Bill of Rights if the government gets to revoke those rights at its whim. But no, Lieberman wants to assure us that suspects would have a right to challenge the revocation of their citizenship in a court—a civilian court, one hopes. Except giving material support to a foreign terror groups is, in fact, a crime.  If there’s enough evidence to persuade a court of law that someone is a member of such a group—congratulations, there’s enough evidence to convict them in the civilian system as well! It’s heartening that there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of support for this odious proposal, but depressing that a sitting senator would treat the rights of citizenship so lightly for the sake of a vapid, strutting display of “toughness.”

Citizen Shahzad is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Glenn Greenwald takes a look at the prospect of Obama nominating Cass Sunstein to the Supreme Court.  Whereas Randy Barnett has championed a “presumption of liberty” whenever a constitutional controversy is unclear, Sunstein seems to champion a “presumption for the state.”

More on Sunstein here.

Justice Sunstein? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Free speech isn’t exactly free in Canada, and even Glenn Greenwald and Mark Steyn agree on this point. When conservative commentator Ann Coulter (who can be uncivil, but shouldn’t be muzzled by the state for it) tried to give a speech at the University of Ottawa, she was warned by the political correctness police not to hurt anyone’s feelings:

I would, however, like to inform you, or perhaps remind you, that our domestic laws, both provincial and federal, delineate freedom of expression (or “free speech”) in a manner that is somewhat different than the approach taken in the United States. I therefore encourage you to educate yourself, if need be, as to what is acceptable in Canada and to do so before your planned visit here.

You will realize that Canadian law puts reasonable limits on the freedom of expression. For example, promoting hatred against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges. Outside of the criminal realm, Canadian defamation laws also limit freedom of expression and may differ somewhat from those to which you are accustomed. I therefore ask you, while you are a guest on our campus, to weigh your words with respect and civility in mind. . . .

So much for inalienable rights.

Steyn highlights the view of the lead investigator of Canada’s “Human Rights” Commission: “Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value.”

I would offer a rebuke, but Ezra Levant has done it better than I ever could. Crank your volume up, sit back, and enjoy:

Free Speech in Canada is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Elizabeth Gilbert, the bestselling author of the memoir Eat, Pray, Love, is back with a new book, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage. In her earlier book Gilbert reflected on her broken marriage, her travels around the world “looking for joy and God and love and the meaning of life,” and her determination never to marry again. In the new book we learn that she surprised herself by meeting a man worth settling down with, a Brazilian living in Indonesia. So they became a couple and settled near Philadelphia, with Jose Nunes regularly leaving the country to renew his visitor’s visa.

But then came a legal shock:

She was in the early stages of research for that book when Nunes was detained, after a visa-renewing jaunt out of the country, by Homeland Security Department officials at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. Popping in and out of the country as he’d been doing was not legal, Nunes was told, and if he wanted to stay permanently they would have to marry.

Gilbert didn’t want to marry. She and Nunes spent 10 months traveling in Asia. But then, reading about marriage, writing about her aversion to marriage, getting closer to her new partner, she decided to marry. And so they did. And they lived happily ever after in the New Jersey suburbs.

A happy ending all around. As long as you’re heterosexual. Because, of course, if you’re gay, the U.S. government will tell you that your life partner from Brazil may be allowed to visit the United States, but he won’t be allowed to stay. And guess what? He could stay if you were married, but you can’t get married. Catch-22. And even though you could now marry in some foreign countries and some American states and the District of Columbia, the Defense of Marriage Act still prevents the federal government — including its immigration enforcers — from recognizing valid marriages between same-sex partners.

Is this just a theoretical complaint? As a matter of fact, not at all. At least two well-known writers have recently faced exactly the same situation Gilbert did: a Brazilian life partner who couldn’t live in the United States. Glenn Greenwald, a blogger, author of bestselling books, and author of a Cato Institute study on drug reform in Portugal, has written about his own situation and that of others. Like Greenwald, Chris Crain, former editor of the Washington Blade, has also moved to Brazil to be with his partner.

Carolyn See, reviewing Gilbert’s book in the Washington Post, wrote, “The U.S. government, like a stern father, proposed a shotgun marriage of sorts: If you want to be with him in this country, this Brazilian we don’t know all that much about, you’ll have to marry him.” A shotgun marriage, sort of. But at least the government gave Gilbert a choice. It just told Greenwald and Crain no.

This unfairness could be solved, of course, if the government would have the good sense to listen to Cato chairman Bob Levy, who wrote last week in the New York Daily News on “the moral and constitutional case for gay marriage.” And it may be solved by the lawsuit seeking to overturn California’s Proposition 8 that is being spearheaded by liberal lawyer David Boies and conservative lawyer Ted Olson, writes Newsweek’s cover story this week, “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage.” Until then: eat, pray, love, marry — as long as you’re heterosexual.

Eat, Pray, Love, Marry–as Long as You’re Heterosexual is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

1) Commandant of the Marine Corps announces part of justification for sending more troops to Afghanistan: “where we have gone, goodness follows.”  Pat Lang is displeased.

2) Glenn Greenwald observes that in Foreign Policy magazine’s survey of leading public intellectuals who write about foreign policy, the United States is tied with Somalia and Iran for second place in the category “Most Dangerous Country in the World.”

3) Afghanistan is an ideologically cross-cutting issue.  Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) praises Cato’s Afghanistan study on Fox News’ On the Record, saying

…I’m against any further taxes to pay for this war. But I think it has to be pointed out, this isn’t a left-right issue. I mean, here’s the Cato Institute, hardly a left-wing organization, wrote a piece called “Escaping the Graveyard of Empires,” and they have a plan, and I’ve met with them, that gets us out of Afghanistan, with advisers and a new approach to intelligence and also a new drug policy.

Meanwhile, the liberal Center for American Progress has produced a statement on Afghanistan that offers some empty rhetoric about an exit strategy but contains no actual plan–or even a call for a plan–for exiting.  Instead, their proposal for when to leave is limited to calling for a multinational effort that merely will “have all Afghan forces in the lead within four years, or the 12-year mark of our engagement.”  CAP is also offering a pretend plan to cut the Pentagon budget, urging Obama to spend more than $600 billion on defense for each of the next several years.

A Few Foreign Policy Items is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Glenn Greenwald has a good post about Arrar v. Ashcroft, an appeals court ruling that came down the other day.  Here’s an excerpt:

Maher Arar is both a Canadian and Syrian citizen of Syrian descent.  A telecommunications engineer and graduate of Montreal’s McGill University, he has lived in Canada since he’s 17 years old.  In 2002, he was returning home to Canada from vacation when, on a stopover at JFK Airport, he was (a) detained by U.S. officials, (b) accused of being a Terrorist, (c) held for two weeks incommunicado and without access to counsel while he was abusively interrogated, and then (d) was “rendered” – despite his pleas that he would be tortured — to Syria, to be interrogated and tortured.  He remained in Syria for the next 10 months under the most brutal and inhumane conditions imaginable, where he was repeatedly tortured.  Everyone acknowledges that Arar was never involved with Terrorism and was guilty of nothing.  I’ve appended to the end of this post the graphic description from a dissenting judge of what was done to Arar while in American custody and then in Syria.

Read the whole thing.   Also, the ACLU has put together a short film about the experiences of some prisoners released from Guantanamo.

Greenwald on the Arrar Ruling is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

George Will’s latest column takes a look a drug policy and the views of the new drug czar, Gil Kerlikowski.  Notably, Will mentions Portugal’s experience with decriminalization of all drugs since 2001 and says Kerlikowski is aware of the Portuguese policy as well.  Cato published a report on Portugal’s drug policy in April and the author, Glenn Greenwald, discussed his findings at a Cato policy forum here.  George Will’s shifting views on drug policy (toward liberalization) reflect the shifting views of other conservative pundits and the public more generally.

Will appeared on ABC on Sunday, and discussed his views on drug policy. Watch:

For more Cato work on drug policy, go here, here, and here.

George Will and Drug Decriminalization is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Department of Justice is changing its long-standing policy of ignoring state laws that allow marijuana use for medicinal purposes. This federalism question played out several years ago in the Supreme Court in the Raich case; Cato’s amicus brief is available here.

Cato hosted Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project in March, and you can view the event here. Glenn Greenwald wrote an influential study for Cato on the successful decriminalization of drugs in Portugal. Greenwald notes that he gets more invitations to speak on the subject now than he did when it was published.

A good first step. Fourteen states permit medical marijuana dispensaries; I suspect more are on the way now that this hurdle has been cleared.

Good News on Medical Marijuana is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Here’s your weekly round up of bloggers who are writing about Cato research, analysis and commentary:

• United Liberty editor Jason Pye discusses Cato’s new site, DownsizingGovernment.org.
• Scott Hinrichs quotes Cato senior fellow Tom Palmer in a post on the relationship between governments and the people.
• Below the Beltway‘s Doug Mataconis and Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent post Cato’s new video on the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.
• At the Real Clear World Compass Blog, Greg Scoblete quotes Justin Logan on Afghanistan.
• Harry Waisbren of Get Fisa Right and Salon’s Glenn Greenwald discuss Julian Sanchez’s video on Fox’s coverage of the Patriot Act.
• Heritage’s Gerrit Lansing interviews David Goldhill during a Cato Hill Briefing, “How American Health Care Killed My Father.“

Click here to let us know if you’re blogging about Cato.

Who’s Blogging about Cato is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Worse choices have been made than Barack Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize.

There was Woodrow Wilson in 1919, an award that rates as one of history’s more grotesque international jokes. Wilson promised to keep us out of war and promptly got us into it, meanwhile laying the ideological and geopolitical foundations for 90 years of war-nationalism, war-liberalism, and war-socialism. To say nothing of saddling us with the terrible idea of world government. Among those who weren’t Nazis or communists, Wilson may have done more than any other individual to promote human suffering in the last hundred years.

So yes, there have been worse choices. (Next to Wilson, I’d have to give Al Gore and Yasser Arafat both honorable mentions. We could go on, of course.) But still, Barack Obama? Seriously? I doubt the committee has any idea how badly their choice will be mocked in the United States.

Over here, the prize will be a disappointment to the anti-war left, the anti-war right, and, of course, the pro-war right. The only contingent I can see taking pride in it over here is the establishment left, which hasn’t had much time lately for substantive work on peace, but which is always happy to make speeches and receive awards. Sometimes, the American image abroad is just that important.

Rather than piling on in what is sure to be a bipartisan laugh-fest, let’s think about what Barack Obama actually could have done for world peace. And weep.

Like Wilson, Obama ran a campaign promising peace and the international rule of law. Politically, peace is a winning message, and the advocates of peace would do well to remember this. Decade after decade, American voters are willing to give peace a chance.

Obama promised to withdraw from Iraq and to close the illegal Guantanamo Bay prison camp. He promised to end the Bush-era detention and rendition policies that have tarnished America’s reputation abroad and weakened trust among nations.

Americans embraced those promises, which are fully consistent with the ideals of the Nobel Peace Prize. The prize, recall, is awarded “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Ending wars, treating prisoners of war humanely, and ensuring international criminal suspects’ due process of law are exactly the sorts of things that the peace prize was designed for. They’re just what you’d expect a laureate to do.

But once in office, Obama didn’t deliver. The promises disappeared, replaced by vigorous defenses of virtually every presidential power that the Bush administration invented for itself, including not only those that subvert domestic civil liberties, but also those that threaten the international rule of law.

And the withdrawal from Iraq? Delayed and partial. The latest word — received just as the peace prize was announced — is that it’s “complicated.” Sort of like a bad Facebook relationship.

Our other war, in Afghanistan, continues to escalate, even as its strategic goals seem further and further removed. As Cato author Glenn Greenwald notes, U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan continue to kill and maim the innocent, with very little to show in the way of stabilizing the country or defeating international terrorism. Withdrawal from Afghanistan is both possible and desirable, as my colleagues Malou Innocent and Ted Galen Carpenter argue. Yet our latest Nobel laureate doesn’t see peace as an option here either.

How sad. Not to sound bitter or anything, but when does the Cato Institute get a peace prize?

Peace? The Promise of Peace? Eh, Close Enough is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Glenn Greenwald uncovers a very interesting sentence in Les Gelb’s Democracy essay [.pdf] on the Iraq war and the media:

Les Gelb on Charlie Rose

My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.

I had to read that two or three times to unpack all that’s going on in there.  The question obviously being begged is where does the disposition, and where do the incentives “to support wars to retain political and professional credibility” come from?

Consider: There are two groups of people, the Foreign Policy Community (FPC) in Washington and New York, centered around the national-security bureaucracy and think tanks that produce orthodox foreign policy hands like Brookings, AEI, and CFR.  There is a second group of people, international relations academics.  The two groups have, in most cases, similar training (PhDs from top schools) and in the course of obtaining such training have been exposed to many of the same theories and topics.

Yet the two groups have been wildly at variance in terms of their views on important public policy issues.  Take the Iraq war, for example.  As anyone who was in Washington at the time knows, the FPC was extremely fond of the idea of invading Iraq.  To oppose it was to marginalize oneself for years.  Indeed, those who promoted the disastrous adventure have prospered, while those who (bravely or stupidly, depending on your point of view) opposed it remain huddled in the chilly, dusty alcoves of popular debate.

In the academy, meanwhile, there was hardly any debate over Iraq–almost 80 percent of IR academics opposed the war. [.pdf] To the extent academics did enter the public debate on the issue, it was to pay for an advertisement in the New York Times warning against the war. [.pdf] The only academics who spoke out in favor of the war (to my knowledge, anyway) were IR liberals like Anne-Marie Slaughter, who sought policy positions in Washington.  (Slaughter, of course, was rewarded with a spot as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, while to my knowledge none of the academic opponents of the war have gained Washington policy jobs.)

So what is going on here?  Why is there such a profound disconnect between the two groups that look so similar on paper?  The first, most obvious answer is that the academy tends to be more liberal (in the domestic political sense), so academics tend to have more peacenik-y views.  The problem with that argument is that the domestic-political liberals in the FPC supported the war just as strongly as their conservative brethren, which means that domestic political views don’t work as a determinant of support for war.

My sense is that the giant national-security bureaucracy in Washington that has emerged over the last 65 years has shaped incentives in a manner such that it is next-to-impossible to “get ahead” by advocating for restraint.  Put differently, restraint isn’t in anybody’s interest except the country’s, and there’s nobody in Washington representing broad national interests as opposed to their own parochial ones.  Every neoconservative or liberal imperialist in DC has someone’s interests behind them.  The Don Quixotes like myself and my colleagues here, by contrast, want to cut the defense budget, slow the opportunities for rent-seeking among contractors, etc, etc, etc.  As Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot once derisively referred to us, we’re just “four or five people in a phone booth.”  But we were right about Iraq, which is more than Gigot can say for himself.

For the legions of IR journal editors who are reading this post, I am completing an article draft examining this idea in more detail.  But for now you can cast an eye on a Steve Walt blog post that makes an argument very similar to my own:

…America’s role in the world today is shaped by two imbalances of power, not just one. The first is the gap between U.S. capabilities and everyone else’s, a situation that has some desirable features (especially for us) but one that also encourages the United States to do too much and allows others to do either too little or too many of the wrong things. The second imbalance is between organized interests whose core mission is constantly pushing the U.S. government to do more and in more places, and the far-weaker groups who think we might be better off showing a bit more restraint.

I’m open to different theories on this matter, but I think we should agree that at the very least, it’s an interesting puzzle.

The International Relations Academy and the Beltway “Foreign Policy Community”–Why the Disconnect? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog