Lazy Anti-Germanism

When I was in Germany, a young German man on a train turned to me and said, "You know, Americans tend to have a stereotype of Germans as humorless and angry and yelling. Like we're Nazis. And, you know, this is true of my grandparents. They are like Nazis. But we, we are not like Nazis. We have a sense of humor. So when you get to Hollywood, please make a new stereotype for Germans."

I think of that when I see headlines like the one Yglesias went with here.

(Update: Anti-Hellenism is hatred of the Greeks. Greeks are not Germans. I'm disappointed in my late-night self for getting this confused.)

Rules of Engagement IV: Israel + United Nations

Just two quick final word: note that in the last story from the last segment, border agents used deadly force on a young boy because he was throwing stones. That's not an unfamiliar story, although the usual background is in Israel. It brought to mind (obviously) the recent shootings of protesters on the aid boat.

I mentioned this to my father, after hearing the story, and he mentioned that Israel didn't used to shoot people with bullets. He said, "At some point in the last ten years, they simply stopped. They just started using bullets. Nobody talks about it, I don't know exactly when the decision was made."

That's toward the extreme of loose rules of engagement.

Of course, the other extreme is the United Nations' rules of engagement in Rwanda, which allegedly required them to be shot at and hit more than once before they could return fire. In the end, they were forced to surrender because they lacked any ability to return fire.

(UPDATE: I forgot Andrew Sullivan's reminder to Israel about the lessons of using live fire in a crowd control situation: Bloody Sunday. We, of course, have Kent State -- or if you really want to reach back, the Boston Massacre, which was also stones-versus-guns).

Rules of Engagement III: Tasering Has Some Downsides

More on Rules of Engagement. Last month, two simultaneous news stories grabbed my eyes within a week of each other. Here's the first one:

SAN DIEGO — A man who died after being shot with a Taser stun gun Friday night by federal border officers had lived in the U.S. for 27 years, had five children and worked in construction, his wife said.

(...)

Hernandez Rojas, a Mexican national, was declared brain-dead Saturday at a Chula Vista hospital, according to the county Medical Examiner’s Office. He suffered heart failure Monday and was taken off life support then, San Diego police said.

(...)

After their arrest in the mountains, Hernandez Rojas and his brother were transported to a Border Patrol station for processing, Collins said, then to the border turnstile at San Ysidro to be returned to Mexico. As agents were unloading him from a van and taking off his handcuffs, “he started fighting with the Border Patrol agents,” who used batons to try to subdue him, Collins said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers were called for help. A customs agent shot Hernandez Rojas him in the back with a Taser, and he stopped breathing shortly afterward, Collins said. He was found to have two darts from the stun gun in his back.

Firstly, I couldn't find any non-local news that documents this, which is tragic. Secondly, I can't find the KPBS account that disclosed that:

1. There were twenty agents present when Rojas was tasered,
2. He was put to the ground, handcuffed, and then dragged away out of sight of the camera before the tasering happened.

Apropos of this story, by the way, is the Oscar Grant trial, about the man who was shot to death by a police officer who claims he meant to pull out a taser. Here's Julianne Hing on the rules of engagement issue related to both stories:

If the jury buys the theory that Mehserle intended to pull only his Taser on Grant, does that mean he was within the law when he shot an unarmed man?

That's a tougher legal question than it is a moral one. Because what jurors have also learned during this trial is that police officers have total discretion as to what tool they need to subdue suspects. Moreover, they are allowed to use any kind of force that corresponds to the level of threat they perceive they're under.

So it's difficult to prove cops have been guilty of excessive force and intentional abuse; the only defense a cop needs is that he or she fears life-threatening danger. Mehserle says he feared such danger that night.

If that's the level of ease with which police officers can draw their gun -- and the ease with which they can defend themselves, there will be more use of excessive force, both by accident and deliberately.

And what do you get at the end of it? Well, let's see the second story:

U.S. authorities said Tuesday a border patrol agent was defending himself and colleagues when he fatally shot a 15-year-old boy as officers came under a barrage of big stones while trying to detain illegal immigrants on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande.

From the NPR story:

"It is a deadly force encounter," Bonner said. "One that justifies the use of deadly force."

Rules of Engagement II: Torture, and Stanley McCrystal

The Iraq torture travesty seems practically like history now, seeing as little action appears to be taken. Unsurprisingly, though, revelations as to what really went on will continue to be made. Recently, for instance, this came out:

Bush-era CIA medical personnel conducted experiments on detainees in CIA custody to provide legal cover for torture as well as to justify and shape future torture techniques, a just-released report from the Physicians for Human Rights alleges.

"The CIA appears to have broken all accepted legal and ethical standards put in place since the Second World War to protect prisoners from being the subjects of experimentation," said Frank Donaghue, the CEO of PHR, a nonprofit organization of health professionals.

This is not a new thing in our history. I just completed a report on the history of torture in the CIA and the Department of Defense from World War Two forward, and the first thing I found was almost immediately after World War Two, when the OSS (the CIA's precursor), initiated a project called Project ARTICHOKE which became the CIA's PROJECT MK-ULTRA. MK-ULTRA was a top-secret research program that basically tried to understand what could and couldn't be done to the human mind.

Reading through MK-ULTRA's files (declassified in the 1970s once FOIA was passed), it is clear that the CIA suffered from a lethal combination of an unsupervised budget and lack of transparency. They could do anything, and they had as much money as they needed to do it -- their budget for Fiscal Year 1953 was 587,000,000, which for a brand new intelligence agency is a pretty gigantic sum. MK-ULTRA began by looking at ESP and brainwashing -- for instance, they actually demonstrated that they could hypnotize little girls to perform complex tasks and then forget about it afterwards. That's right, they used little girls as their test subjects. But by 1950, the focus of MK-ULTRA became chemical manipulations, and the search for the truth serum (the holy grail of intelligence).

MK-ULTRA thought that LSD was a promising chemical, and it drew a lot of their focus in terms of testing. This earned them their shout-out in the movie The Men Who Stare At Goats, but it also led them to perform medical testing without the permission or knowledge of their subjects -- which, under the UN Convention on Torture qualifies as torture. At one point, a civillian researcher with the program began to have doubts (or so his family alleges). He was found dead, having jumped out of a window -- and the head of the CIA had been testing LSD on him without his knowledge or consent. Gerald Ford's administration formally apologized to the family of the researcher (leading to some fascinating memos within the Department of Defense between folks including Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who apparently has a long history of involvement with cleaning up after torture).

Testing of torture procedures shouldn't come as any surprise to people. As soon as you communicate to your armed forces that the Geneva Conventions are "quaint" and "obsolete" (the Hummel figurines of international treaties), it is pretty clear that you are going to be torturing, and once you open the door to torturing -- well, you have to be scientific about it, you can't just do things at random, you have to figure out what works.

When the torture regime surfaced, however, the Bad Apples excuse surfaced, as it would. Nobody was ordered to torture, nobody was trained to torture; it just "happened."

Investigating the details of what happened, however, it is quite clear that nobody needed to be trained or ordered: there was a deliberate atmosphere amenable to torture created. And it was created through the rules of engagement: the prisoners were handed over to Military Police (who normally do not have custody of POWs), and the Military Police were told to "soften" them. No tools were given, nor were the MPs trained for this sort of work. And then everyone closed their eyes.

Furthermore, the existence of contractors, who operate outside of the formal rules of engagement, further create an atmosphere of "who really cares?" MPs could simply leave the detainees alone with the contractors, and we still don't know what went on when the detainees were in their care.

And all of this, by the way, is crucially linked to General Stanley McCrystal. McCrystal's men when he was in charge of the Special Forces were linked to torture of their own, and part of McCrystal's cachet was that he was part of the Bush Administration's heavy-pain neocons. As you can see, he's clearly of their ilk, as it turns out he kind of hates everybody. And what was the first thing General Petraeus announced after he took over that he was going to retool the rules of engagement.

And this is not a side concern -- this is actually the core of counter-insurgency. The rules of engagement are how you minimize the recruitment of future enemies, beyond simply their effectiveness and morality on the battlefield. While McCrystal was in charge, shootings of Afghans at military checkpoints rose -- presumably, this is what Petraeus is going to fix, and this is part of the reason Afghanistan has been souring of late (amongst a lot of other reasons, admittedly).

The rules of engagement need to be put square at the heart of our national debate about the future of Afghanistan.

Rules of Engagement I: International Scale

(Update: I've expanded on this since then: Pt.s II, III, IV, V, VI. Followed up: here.)

Rules of Engagement are an under-examined but crucial aspect of a civilization. Every human being has the capacity for violence and destruction, but as societies we have slowly crafted a series of rules as to when we consider it acceptable to use that violence. A man beating another man to take his cell phone is banned by law; a man fighting off an attacker is presented.

Usually, if you ask the question "Am I allowed to use force?" the answer is usually no. For the average civillian, questions of force and violence are simple, because we have removed most of the need for force and vested it in a number of uniformed force officials: police, agents, and soldiers. But having vested broader powers of force into police, agents, and soldiers means that those classes of individuals have a more complex relationship to force.

These rules of engagement range from the rules that govern the individual's conduct, to a weak set of international laws that govern when nations can go to war. They are a protection primarily to civillians (who need protection since their right to force is much more circumscribed), and furthermore to the practioners of force (who need protection since they are uniquely targetted).

When we come across instances of unsanctioned violence, we have a tendency to examine the individuals who perpetrated the violence -- their motivations and failures in judgment. We sometimes neglect, however, to examine the rules of engagement around them to question whether the rules were clear and correct. For some of instances of violence, obviously, responsibility does end with the individual -- Charles Manson (to pick an arbitrary example) bears absolutely all of the responsibility of his actions. Lately, however, I've spotted a handful of examples where I feel like we missed opportunities to discuss our rules of engagement.

Take, for instance, the international scale. The strongest limits on the use of power by a particular nation are the Geneva Conventions and Protocols. The Geneva Conventions and Protocols govern what can or can't be done by a military power over those who are wounded, captured, shipwrecked, or civillian in a time of war. These protocols are actually enforcable in the International Criminal Court of Justice, although the US does not recognize their enforcement jurisdiction. This is one of the strongest attempts to enforce Just War theory.

Just war theory puts forward a number of stipulations as to limitations on war, both Jus ad bello (criteria for war) and Jus in bello (behavior in war). Jus in bello has a number of restrictions on it, but there are very few restrictions on the Jus ad bello principles:

• Just cause: The reason for going to war needs to be just and cannot therefore be solely for recapturing things taken or punishing people who have done wrong; innocent life must be in imminent danger and intervention must be to protect life. A contemporary view of just cause was expressed in 1993 when the US Catholic Conference said: "Force may be used only to correct a grave, public evil, i.e., aggression or massive violation of the basic human rights of whole populations."
• Legitimate authority: Only duly constituted public authorities may wage war.
• Probability of success: Arms may not be used in a futile cause or in a case where disproportionate measures are required to achieve success;
• Last resort: Force may be used only after all peaceful and viable alternatives have been seriously tried and exhausted or are clearly not practical. It may be clear that the other side is using negotiations as a delaying tactic and will not make meaningful concessions.
• Proportionality: The anticipated benefits of waging a war must be proportionate to its expected evils or harms. This principle is also known as the principle of macro-proportionality, so as to distinguish it from the ''jus in bello'' principle of proportionality.

I have removed "Comparative Justice" because is demands that one side suffer more than the other; attempts to apply that could very much trend toward Genocide. I've also removed Right Intention because I think it is redundant with Just Cause.

So my question is, what restrictions (theoretically) internationally exist on the American President to determine when he goes to war? The focus on the American President because he is the official within the government who is tasked with the ability to wage war -- he is the police and the military personified. When it comes to these restrictions a separate debate is the effectiveness of these restrictions, how they work in practice.

Officially, we only have a direct restriction on the President to enforce one of the Jus ad bello principles. The War Powers Act, by limiting the ability of the President to deploy troops without a mandate from Congress, theoretically posits that the President derives his authority to wage war from Congress; that's the "legitimate authority" established by the Constitution. Unfortunately, by attempting to legally separate "police actions" from "war," the President's use of force becomes unencumbered by those restrictions. The emphasis should not be on the terminology: it should be on the force itself.

In the future, I think it is pretty clear that eventually, we will come up with a formal way to constrain the President's war powers along the lines of Just War theory in a way that doesn't simply rely on voters punishing the President (which historically is almost never the case -- apologies to Lyndon Johnson). We have a lot more robust attention to the President's conduct in war than the President's conduct in deciding on war. Eventually, we'll make it the case that when the President initiates an unjust war, it is not just bad judgment or a personal failing, but rather a crime.

Update: Cleaned up some formatting because I'm relinking to it.

Global Government III

Wolfgang Munchnau is right. Only a closer union can save the euro. In the longer term, it will be necessary to put in place a permanent fiscal arrangement through which the central euro zone authorities distribute funds to be used by member nations. Ideally this should be in the hands of the equivalent to a national treasury responsible to an elected body of representatives—in this case, the European Parliament.

-- Marshall Auerback, fund manager, essentially proving Michelle Bachmann right.

Lazy Sound Design

(You may notice that I'm responding to somewhat old things... today is my monthly "clean out your backlog" day.)

This post from Fragments about lazy sound design:

With the advancements in technology for theater, there is no reason as to why a theater that claims to produce professional quality productions can’t do more with their sound design than placing some music on a CD and transferring that music to a computer. Programs like qLab and Audacity are free; at the very least, sound designers should be playing with these programs to see if it works for them.

I vividly recall talking to a tech student a few years ago (when I was still two years into college), and I said, "I honestly don't know what the point is of sound designers in small productions. Every sound designer I've met basically puts some songs onto their iPod and plugs it into the sound system."

Even in more professional productions I'd been in, I'd never seen a show and gone, "Oh dude, that sound designer really made a difference to the show." I'd felt that about lighting designers, set designers, composers, and of course directors, but I'd never felt that about sound designers.

Then I worked with Kate Marvin, who sound-designed our production of Hamlet.

The thing that struck me the most first was that she attended every rehearsal. This is not something which I've observed in a lot of designers in general -- she watched every rehearsals, and was trying different sounds on her laptop each rehearsal. She had some simple mixing equipment, and at any given time she could be trying out two different sounds at once.

Secondly, she had an incredibly reservoir of music. When she used a recognizable song, it was because she wanted to -- otherwise, she could bring together a vast soundscape of music that was from every genre possible. Our Hamlet soundtrack included some opera, some blue-grass, some indie-rock, and a Cyndi Lauper song. There, in fact, was barely a single moment of silence in the sound.

Because she was there from day one, and was so close to our director and his vision for the show, the sound was inseparable from the production. And that's really the goal, the thing that so much sound design fails to do -- to really become part of the show, rather than the dressing.

And on top of that she had the best work ethic of any designer I'd ever worked with.

Anyways, partly this is a missive on what sound designers are capable of, and part of this is a missive on what Kate is capable of.