Author Archives: Peter Levine

people who flop at Oxford

Reading Ingrid Rowland’s very enjoyable and insightful biography of Giordano Bruno, a parallel occurred to me:

In 1583, in mortal danger from the Inquisition, a European exile comes to Oxford University in search of a professorship. He has wild and evocative ideas, writes brilliantly, but has not organized his thought into a consecutive or comprehensible system. He is equally adept at fiction, poetry, philosophy, and magic. He disdains the mainstream mode of philosophy (Arisoteleanism) and refuses to use the standard method of analysis (syllogistic logic). He hates the vulgar crowd but has egalitarian and libertarian theoretical ideas. English dons seem to him provincial, naive, and ill-mannered; he dispenses backhanded compliments about their distinguished academic garb while privately noting that they know more about beer than true philosophy. They find him laughable–passionate, irascible, nonsensical, and almost impossible to understand because he insists on pronouncing Latin like Italian. (Whereas they pronounce it like Elizabethan English.)

In 1934, a young philosopher comes to Oxford in search of a teaching job and a refuge from Nazi Germany. He has radical but somewhat inchoate ideas. He largely shuns the logical positivism and empiricism that are mainstream at Oxford and dabbles in phenomenology, music, sociology, and other disciplines. He writes beautifully and allusively but also elusively. He is a Marxist with very refined aesthetic principles. Oxford academics find him “a bit of a comic figure” (A.J Ayer), partly on account of his “anxiety.” He finds them naive. “It is quite impossible to convey my real philosophical interests to the English, and I have to reduce my work to a childish level.”

Giordano Bruno, Theodor Adorno: two guys who got “job talks” at Oxford that never panned out.

kids in the economic recovery plan

I’m getting lots of email from activists who’ve heard that programs they favor are in the House stimulus package. I cannot confirm any of this, but supposedly there is money for community service programs: $200 million for AmeriCorps and funds for YouthBuild and Community Service Employment for Older Americans. I’m for that. My new article entitled “The Case for Service” is online as a pdf.

I have also seen reports of very substantial increases in funds for children, including $14 billion for school construction and $13 billion for Title I education (aimed at high-poverty schools). Most interesting for those of us in the education-reform-and-innovation business: $1 billion for “21st century classrooms,” $300 million for Job Corps, and $300 million for teacher quality.

against impunity

(Tampa airport) The rule of law means that individuals may not be prosecuted unless they have violated specific laws. Of course, when they do violate such laws, they should be punished. The people who most need to be punished are those with power, above all those who wield public power secretly.

It’s important that officials in the national security apparatus react to any illegal proposal with immediate resistance. They must think, “We can’t do that–it’s against the law.” There’s a widespread view that to expect such scruples is naive. In popular fiction, presidents and CIA agents casually break laws all the time. But I actually believe that respect for the law (perhaps tinged by fear of the law) is very widespread in the intelligence and military worlds. We saw it when numerous officials balked at illegal acts in the Bush years.

Yet there is reason to believe that certain high Bush appointees violated laws. One example was the deliberate authorization of domestic wiretaps in violation of the FISA law. Regardless of whether that law is good, the president’s men had no right to ignore it. Another obvious set of cases involved torture. No court has proven that officials like Donald Rumsfeld violated US laws by authorizing torture–but that charge is believable enough to be investigated. The Senate Armed Services Committee says, for instance, that Rumsfeld directly caused detainee abuse at Guatanamo; and Susan J. Crawford has concluded that some of that abuse constituted “torture.” That amounts to a claim that Rumsfeld committed a serious crime.

All the political considerations argue against an investigation by the executive branch under President Obama. The public has never shown much concern about the mistreatment of foreign prisoners. Most people define “torture” very stringently. I think voters are mad about the war, but invading Iraq was legal under US law. I don’t think they are mad about the abuse of people like Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged 20th hijacker. In general, prosecuting the previous administration looks vindictive. And investigating the intelligence agencies could make them into very formidable enemies of the new president.

These political considerations should count. President Obama will have difficult tasks to accomplish in the essential interests of the nation, including deep economic reform during wartime. He cannot win many battles at once; he must choose. Not to address a given issue isn’t a failure–it can be an essential tactical choice.

On the other hand, we cannot tolerate a culture of impunity. If high officials are basically known to have broken the law, and nothing is done about it, the rule of law suffers. Impunity is common around the world. To the extent we have avoided it, that is one of our great strengths.

I think I would prefer to see investigations proceed without much connection to the new administration. Civil lawsuits would be great if they have any chance of succeeding (although I suspect they are impossible in national security cases). Congressional investigations are welcome as long as Congress manages to get its other work done as well. We might be lucky if federal attorneys chose to bring cases in their own districts. And I suppose the Obama Administration could launch a slow, deliberate, “Truth Commission”-style process that would take a couple of years to get near the senior Bush people. That way, the economic agenda would have succeeded or failed by the time there were any high-profile hearings.

should lying to the public be a crime?

This is an argument from my side of the aisle, so to speak, that really upsets me. (Frank Rich, Dec. 13):

    Blagojevich’s alleged crimes pale next to the larger scandals of Washington and Wall Street. Yet those who promoted and condoned the twin national catastrophes of reckless war in Iraq and reckless gambling in our markets have largely escaped the accountability that now seems to await the Chicago punk nabbed by the United States attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald.

    The Republican partisans cheering Fitzgerald’s prosecution of a Democrat have forgotten his other red-letter case in this decade, his conviction of Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. Libby was far bigger prey. He was part of the White House Iraq Group, the task force of propagandists that sold an entire war to America on false pretenses. Because Libby was caught lying to a grand jury and federal prosecutors as well as to the public, he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. But President Bush commuted the sentence before he served a day.

It is not against the law to lie to the public or to start a war on false pretenses. Because those acts are not illegal, Libby was not charged with them. He was not investigated for lying to the public; no evidence to that effect was ever put before a jury. No one examined him to see whether his assertions were (a) false and (b) knowingly so. He could not defend himself in court against an accusation of deliberately misleading the American people, because no such accusation was made. If, as Frank Rich apparently wishes, Libby was convicted because he lied to the public about a war, that was a flagrant violation of the rule of law, one of whose fundamental principles is nullum crimen et nulla poena sine lege (“no crime and no punishment without a law”).

Having gotten that off my chest, I’d like to raise a more theoretical question: Would it make any sense to create a criminal law against lying to the public? The elements of this crime would have to include intent and serious consequences. In other words, it would be a defense to say that you didn’t know your information was wrong; and it would be a defense to say that your lie was inconsequential. The law could govern any public utterance, or only certain contexts, such as formal speeches given by high officials. We already have perjury laws that apply to sworn testimony; these would be broadened. Another precedent is the Oregon law that says that candidates’ personal statements in state voter guides must be true. Former Congressman Wes Cooley was convicted of falsely claiming that he had served in the Special Forces.

In favor of this reform: Lying is wrong. It can cause serious harm to other people. Lying by public officials can undermine the public’s sovereignty by giving citizens false information to use in making judgments. Although it can be challenging to prove intent, that is certainly possible in some circumstances, as we know from perjury trials.

Against: There could be a chilling effect on free speech, because people who participate in heated debates do occasionally stray from the truth. It would be bad to suppress such debates altogether. Also, criminalizing lying would shift power from the legislative and executive branches to the judiciary, which might therefore become even more “political.” The reform might reduce the public’s sense that we are responsible for scrutinizing our government’s statements and actions and punishing bad behavior at the ballot box.

Finally, it would distort the political debate if there were frequent, high-stakes battles over whether individuals had knowingly lied about specific facts. Often a specific prevarication is not nearly as important as someone’s bad values and priorities. For instance, the Bush Administration very publicly and openly denigrated the importance of foreigners’ human rights and chose an aggressive and bellicose strategy. These were not lies; they were public choices that unfortunately happened to be quite popular.