Ordinary Men?

In January 2007, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. received a donation of a photography album. The album is thought to have belonged to SS-Obersturmfuhrer Karl Hocker. Hocker was the adjutant to Auschwitz commandant, SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Richard Baer. The album is full of smiling pictures of SS officers. I encourage everyone to look at these photos, and think about who these people were. The people in these pictures are largely responsible for thousands and thousands of deaths. What were they smiling about? Were they as Christopher Browning puts it, "ordinary men"?

To check out the album go to : http://www.ushmm.org/research/collections/highlights/auschwitz/

Nine Deaths Reported in Myanmar Crackdown

By SETH MYDANS
Published: September 27, 2007

BANGKOK, Sept. 27 — Government security forces in Myanmar cracked down for a second day today on nationwide protests, firing shots and tear gas and raiding at least two Buddhist monasteries, where they beat and arrested dozens of monks, according to reports from the city of Yangon.

Tear gas hovered above the steps of the Shwedagon Pagoda on Wednesday in Yangon as the riot police broke up demonstrations.

Further casualties were reported, following at least half a dozen deaths on Wednesday.

The Myanmar government told the Japanese Embassy in Yangon that a Japanese national was killed, Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported. Reports indicated he was a photographer. A Japanese Foreign Ministry official told The Associated Press that several other people were found dead after the protests.

The A.P. reported that more shots were fired today at one of several monasteries that were raided early in the day. At the monastery, Ngwe Kyar Yan, one monk said a number of monks were beaten and at least 70 of its 150 monks were arrested. A female lay disciple said several monks were arrested at a second monastery, Moe Guang, which was being guarded, like a number of other monasteries, by a contingent of armed security personnel.

At least four other people “had been shot quite seriously” on Tarami Street, a British diplomat said, according to Reuters.

World leaders have urged the Myanmar government to respond to the protests with restraint.

China — Myanmar’s most important trading partner, investor and strategic ally — on Wednesday blocked a United Nations Security Council resolution to condemn the government crackdown. But a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, said at a news briefing today, “We hope that all parties in the Myanmar issue will maintain restraint and appropriately handle the problems that have currently arisen so they do not become more complicated or expand, and don’t affect Myanmar’s stability and even less affect regional peace and stability.”

Also today, the White House demanded that Myanmar’s military government immediately halt the crackdown.

“The Burmese government should not stand in the way of its people’s desire for freedom,” the White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, said, according to Reuters. “They must stop this violence against peaceful protesters now.”

Security forces have clubbed and tear-gassed protesters, fired shots into the air, or according to an A. P. report today, into a crowd, and arrested hundreds of the monks, who are at the heart of the demonstrations.

Wednesday’s Protests

According to reports, crowds on the streets were larger than on Wednesday, despite the crackdown.

On Wednesday, in a chaotic day of huge demonstrations, shooting, tear gas and running confrontations between protesters and the military, many people were reported injured, and half a dozen were reported to have been killed, most of them by gunshots.

A government announcement said security forces in Yangon, the country’s main city, fired at demonstrators who failed to disperse, killing one man. Foreign news agencies and exile groups reported death tolls ranging from two to eight people.

Despite threats and warnings by the authorities, and despite the beginnings of a violent response, tens of thousands of chanting, cheering protesters flooded the streets, witnesses reported. Monks were in the lead, like religious storm troopers, as one foreign diplomat described the scene.

In response to the violence, the United Nations Security Council called an emergency meeting on Wednesday to discuss the crisis, but China blocked a Council resolution, backed by the United States and European nations, to condemn the government crackdown.

However, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced that the United Nations was “urgently dispatching” a special envoy to Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

A day before, White House officials had expressed hope that Mr. Bush’s announcement of new sanctions directed against the military government’s leaders would intensify pressure on them not to use violence against the protesters.

“The United States is very troubled by the action of the junta against the Burmese people,” Mr. Johndroe, said Wednesday afternoon. “We call on them to show restraint and to move to a peaceful transition to democracy.”

read on

New York Times - Political Games

The Way We Live Now

Political Games

Xing Guangli

By IAN BURUMA

Published: September 23, 2007

China has a poor record in human rights. This has been pointed out by dissidents, activists, journalists, lawyers, labor organizers and even some Western politicians, almost always without any effect. China is too powerful. Business interests prevail. Might next year’s Olympic Games make a difference?

Skip to next paragraph

Enlarge This Image

Although President Bush has decided to attend the Games and give them his imprimatur, activists have scored a notable success. Mia Farrow managed to embarrass the Chinese government, as well as Steven Spielberg, a consultant for the opening ceremony, by suggesting that Chinese subsidies to the Sudanese government are contributing to the mass killings in Darfur. The phrase “Genocide Olympics,” used by Farrow in The Wall Street Journal, was particularly upsetting to the Chinese. Spielberg quickly told them that genocide was bad. And just as swiftly the Chinese government endorsed a United Nations decision to send peacekeepers to Darfur.

Could similar pressures help to improve China’s domestic conditions too? There are reasons to doubt it. After all, organizers of international sporting events and authoritarian politicians have at least one thing in common: They would like us to believe that sports and politics don’t mix. This is particularly true when it comes to the Olympic Games. Instead of politics, or as a kind of substitute for politics, officials of the Chinese Communist Party and of the International Olympic Committee like to trumpet high-minded slogans about peace and international brotherhood.

In fact, they always did. Two traditions dovetail very nicely in Beijing. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a kind of noble Boy Scout, invented the modern Games in 1894, partly because he felt that the French, after their defeat in the war against Prussia, needed a tonic to restore their virility. Like most aristocrats of his time, Coubertin was not a great fan of democratic politics. He preferred pageants, marches, jamborees, mass spectacles, world fairs and sporting contests as a way to foster healthy patriotism as well as international peace and friendship. Politics of the democratic kind was regarded by sporting aristocrats like the good baron as divisive and a threat to peace and order.

Long before the Communists took power, or indeed the arrival of Coubertin’s Games, Chinese authorities used uplifting slogans to promote obedience and unity. They, too, were morbidly afraid of disorder, and hence of too much freedom for the common people. What has changed is that traditional Confucianist slogans have been replaced by modern Communist or nationalist ones. Moral exhortations, like “Serve the People,” as well as official movements to strengthen the nation under the Communist Party, are what pass for political participation in China.

In the real world, of course, sports is often highly political. All politicians, even democratic ones, like to boost their own credentials by covering themselves in the glory of national sporting heroes. But fascist and Communist regimes, true heirs of the 19th-century love of mass spectacle and pageantry, have been especially keen to use Olympic gold to mobilize popular enthusiasm and gain international prestige. Winning medals was one of the few things East Germany, say, used to be better at than most democracies.

So China and the Olympics were actually made for each other. There may not be much left of the ideological aspects of communism, but mass mobilization and control are still very much Chinese specialities. We can trust Beijing to build the greatest stadiums and widest boulevards, as well as staging the best, biggest, most disciplined spectacles. So keen are the Chinese to control every detail of their Games that meteorologists are even experimenting with ways to control the weather by launching chemical missiles into rain clouds that might spoil the proceedings.

Neither the Chinese government nor the I.O.C. would like such delicate issues as human rights, or Tibetan and Taiwanese independence, or indeed anything that might disturb the order of the Games to get mixed up with sports. In 2001, the I.O.C. made an evaluation of the candidate cities to stage the games. The report went into great detail about weather conditions, infrastructure, finance and so on, but human rights is not even mentioned as a possible issue.

This, as I said, is in the spirit of Baron de Coubertin as much as of the government of China. The question is whether the organizers will get away with it. For the first time, thousands of reporters from all over the world will be able to look around the People’s Republic and take notes. No doubt, some reporters will write articles about dissidents being arrested, people being kicked out of their homes to make way for the stadiums and wider boulevards, and the fact that Chinese citizens who complain risk being locked up. These are indeed important issues, more pertinent perhaps than China’s policies in the Sudan. But will it do any good? Will Beijing care?

Probably not. What Beijing cares about most is not what foreigners write in their papers, but what Chinese say or do inside China. And that will be kept firmly under control. Foreign articles or broadcasts may be censored in China. Foreign reporters won’t be arrested for what they write, but their Chinese assistants might well be. Beijing also cares deeply about the Games themselves. They want them to go off perfectly, so that China will be admired as a modern, powerful, disciplined country that cares about peace, friendship, etc. And since almost everyone involved in the Games — the sports fans, the I.O.C., the foreign dignitaries and perhaps Steven Spielberg, too — want the same, that is most likely what Beijing will get.

Ian Buruma, a professor at Bard College, is the author of “Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels From Los Angeles to Beijing.”

This article highlights some important issues about using the international focus of the games to bring about reform in China. What leveraging power does the international community really have? For one thing, China does seem to care about what the international community thinks -- the Spielberg example illustrates that if people do bring enough attention to an issue, China will address the problem.

The real challenge may lay in finding clear evidence of human rights abuses. China could actually increase repressive policies to keep dissidents underground while the international community is present. Although there is much optimism about 2008 as a chance for reform in China, it could actually serve to make the situation worse. Real investigative journalism can deliver the truth on China's human rights reform and how the Olympics have affected the status quo.

Thousands Join Monks in Protests

By SETH MYDANS
Published: September 25, 2007
From: The New York Times

BANGKOK, Sept. 24 —Myanmar’s military junta issued its first warning today after a month of widening antigovernment demonstrations, saying it was prepared to crack down on the Buddhist monks who are at the heart of the protests.

Buddhist leaders spoke against Myanmar’s military rulers Sunday in Yangon, the largest city. About 10,000 monks attended.

Speaking on state television, the brigadier general who is the junta’s religious affairs minister told senior Buddhist clerics to rein in the tens of thousands of monks who have marched through several cities in recent days.

If not, said the minister, Brig. Gen. Thura Myint Maung, unspecified action would be taken against the monks “according to the law.”

He said the protesting monks had been instigated by the junta’s domestic and foreign enemies, the same accusation that had been brought previously against members of the political opposition.

Any action against the monks would be extremely risky for the government because of the reverence in which they are held in this devoutly Buddhist nation.

The warning came at the end of a day when protesters filled the streets in greater numbers than ever pushing their confrontation with the military government toward an unpredictable and possibly dangerous outcome.

In the main city, Yangon, the Buddhist monks who have led the protests for the past week were outnumbered by civilians, including prominent political dissidents and well-known cultural figures.

A crowd estimated by the Associated Press as high as 100,000 set out in the morning from the gold-spired Shwedagon Pagoda and marched unopposed in separate columns through the city.

Other protests were reported in Mandalay, Sittwe and Bago. Monks and their supporters have marched in other cities as well in recent days.

Until now, the government has remained silent and mostly out of out of sight, giving over the streets to the protesters with virtually no uniformed security presence in evidence.

For all the energy and jubilation of the crowds, the country formerly known as Burma seemed to be holding its breath. As the demonstrations expanded from political dissidents a month ago to Buddhist monks last week to the broad public, the government’s options seemed to be narrowing.

The demonstrations proceeded under the shadow of the last major nationwide convulsion, in 1988, when even larger pro-democracy protests were crushed by the military at the cost of some 3,000 lives.

“We are in uncharted territory,” said the British ambassador to Myanmar, Mark Canning, speaking by telephone from Yangon after observing the crowds today.

These demonstrations seem to be steadily picking up momentum,” he said.

“They are widely spread geographically. They are quite well organized, they are stimulated by genuine economic hardship and they are being done in a peaceful but very effective fashion.”

The government may have been hoping that the demonstrations would simply run out of steam. But their rapid growth and the pent-up grievances that are driving them make that seem unlikely. With each day, the growing size of the crowd seems to attract even more participants.

Another possibility is the opening of some form of compromise or dialogue between the government and its opponents. But that is an option the country’s military rulers have never embraced.

Instead, they have jailed their political opponents, held the pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest and rejected the demands of the country’s marginalized ethnic minorities.

And when the challenges against them have seemed threatening, they have used force, as in 1988 or in 2003, when the government unleashed a band of thugs to attack Aung San Suu Kyi when her popularity seemed to be getting out of hand.

Along with the heady energy of mass demonstrations, Myanmar was alive with rumors of an impending military crackdown. Exile groups with contacts inside the country have been reporting troop movements and warnings to hospitals to prepare for large numbers of casualties.

But analysts said a number of factors that were not present in 1988 might be constraining the government today.

The first is that the world is watching. Since 1988, Myanmar has become the focus of international condemnation for its abuses of human and political rights and its treatment of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been held under house arrest for 12 of the past 18 years.

The country has become an embarrassment to its nine partners in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a regional political and economic organization, some of whose meetings have been boycotted by the United States because of the inclusion of Myanmar. Using economic and political leverage, that association has been increasingly open in calling for reform in Myanmar.

The most significant constraint on Myanmar’s behavior may be its giant neighbor China, which has supported it with aid and commercial ties, undermining economic sanctions imposed by Western nations.

“China wants stability here, and the way things are going is not really consistent with that,” said a Western diplomat reached by telephone in Myanmar.

Chinese businesses have invested heavily in Myanmar, which is also a major source of raw materials — particulary oil and gas — and a potential link to seaports on the Andaman Sea.

China has said repeatedly that Myanmar’s troubles are its own internal affair and last year it blocked an American move to place Myanmar’s violations of human rights on the agenda of the United Nations Security Council. But it has recently taken small public steps to press for democratic reform in Myanmar.

In June it arranged a highly unusual meeting in Beijing between representatives of Myanmar and the United States at which the Americans pressed for the release of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi.

Earlier this month, as the demonstrations continued in Myanmar, a senior Chinese diplomat, Tang Jiaxuan, told the visiting Myanmar foreign minister, Nyan Win, that “China wholeheartedly hopes that Myanmar will push forward a democracy procss that is appropriate for the country.”

But with its population rising up against it in the strongest challenge of the past two decades, some analysts said, it might be too late to urge the generals to be calm.

“At this point I think all bets are off and the Chinese will have no real influence on what they do,” said Dave Mathieson, an expert on Myanmar with the international rights group Human Rights Watch.

In the Shadow of Horror, SS Guardians Frolic

by Neil A. Lewis

Published: September 19, 2007
In The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 — Last December, Rebecca Erbelding, a young archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, opened a letter from a former United States Army intelligence officer who said he wanted to donate photographs of Auschwitz he had found more than 60 years ago in Germany.

Ms. Erbelding was intrigued: Although Auschwitz may be the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, there are only a small number of known photos of the place before its liberation in 1945. Some time the next month, the museum received a package containing 16 cardboard pages, with photos pasted on both sides, and their significance quickly became apparent.

As Ms. Erbelding and other archivists reviewed the album, they realized they had a scrapbook of sorts of the lives of Auschwitz’s senior SS officers that was maintained by Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the camp commandant. Rather than showing the men performing their death camp duties, the photos depicted, among other things, a horde of SS men singing cheerily to the accompaniment of an accordionist, Höcker lighting the camp’s Christmas tree, a cadre of young SS women frolicking and officers relaxing, some with tunics shed, for a smoking break.

In all there are 116 pictures, beginning with a photo from June 21, 1944, of Höcker and the commandant of the camp, Richard Baer, both in full SS regalia. The album also contains eight photos of Josef Mengele, the camp doctor notorious for participating in the selections of arriving prisoners and bizarre and cruel medical experiments. These are the first authenticated pictures of Mengele at Auschwitz, officials at the Holocaust museum said.

The photos provide a stunning counterpoint to what up until now has been the only major source of preliberation Auschwitz photos, the so-called Auschwitz Album, a compilation of pictures taken by SS photographers in the spring of 1944 and discovered by a survivor in another camp. Those photos depict the arrival at the camp of a transport of Hungarian Jews, who at the time made up the last remaining sizable Jewish community in Europe. The Auschwitz Album, owned by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum, depicts the railside selection process at Birkenau, the area where trains arrived at the camp, as SS men herded new prisoners into lines.

The comparisons between the albums are both poignant and obvious, as they juxtapose the comfortable daily lives of the guards with the horrific reality within the camp, where thousands were starving and 1.1 million died.

For example, one of the Höcker pictures, shot on July 22, 1944, shows a group of cheerful young women who worked as SS communications specialists eating bowls of fresh blueberries. One turns her bowl upside down and makes a mock frown because she has finished her portion.

On that day, said Judith Cohen, a historian at the Holocaust museum in Washington, 150 new prisoners arrived at the Birkenau site. Of that group, 21 men and 12 women were selected for work, the rest transported immediately to the gas chambers.

Those killings were part of the final frenetic efforts of the Nazis to eliminate the Jews of Europe and others deemed undesirable as the war neared its end. That summer the crematoriums broke down from overuse and some bodies had to be burned in open pits. A separate but small group of known preliberation photos were taken clandestinely of those burnings.

Auschwitz was abandoned and evacuated on Jan. 18, 1945, and liberated by Soviet forces on Jan. 27. Many of the Höcker photos were taken at Solahütte, an Alpine-style recreation lodge the SS used on the far reaches of the camp complex alongside the Sola River.

Though they as yet have no plans to exhibit the Höcker album photos, curators at the Holocaust Memorial Museum have created an online display of them on the museum’s Web site (ushmm.org) that will be available this week. In many cases they have contrasted the Höcker images with those from the Auschwitz Album. In one, SS women alight from a bus at Solahütte for a day of recreation; meanwhile, in a picture from the Auschwitz Album taken at about the same time, haggard and travel-weary women and children get off a cattle car at the camp.

Museum curators have avoided describing the album as something like “monsters at play” or “killers at their leisure.” Ms. Cohen said the photos were instructive in that they showed the murderers were, in some sense, people who also behaved as ordinary human beings. “In their self-image, they were good men, good comrades, even civilized,” she said.

Sarah J. Bloomfield, the museum’s director, said she believed that other undiscovered caches of photos or documents concerning the Holocaust existed in attics and might soon be lost to history.

The donor, who had asked to remain anonymous, was in his 90s when he contacted the museum, and he died this summer. He told the museum’s curators that he found the photo album in a Frankfurt apartment where he lived in 1946.

The photos of the Auschwitz Album were discovered by Lili Jacob, a Hungarian Jew who was deported in May 1944 to Auschwitz, near Krakow in Poland. She was transferred to another camp, Dora-Mittelbau in Germany, where she discovered the pictures in a bedside table in an abandoned SS barracks.

She was stunned to recognize pictures of herself, her rabbi and her brothers aged 9 and 11, both of whom she later discovered had been gassed immediately after arrival.

Höcker fled Auschwitz before the camp’s liberation. When he was captured by the British he was carrying false documents identifying him as a combat soldier. After the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, West German authorities tracked down Höcker in Engershausen, his hometown, where he was working as a bank official.

He was convicted of war crimes and served seven years before his release in 1970, after which he was rehired by the bank. Höcker died in 2000 at 89.

Argentine Church Faces ‘Dirty War’ Past

From The New York Times:


By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
Published: September 17, 2007

LA PLATA, Argentina, Sept. 10 — A simple wooden cross hanging from his neck, the Rev. Rubén Capitanio sat before a microphone on Monday and did what few Argentine priests before him had dared to do: condemn the Roman Catholic Church for its complicity in the atrocities committed during Argentina’s “dirty war.”

“The attitude of the church was scandalously close to the dictatorship” that killed more than 15,000 Argentines and tortured tens of thousands more, the priest told a panel of three judges here, “to such an extent that I would say it was of a sinful degree.” The panel is deciding the fate of the Rev. Christian von Wernich, a priest accused of conspiring with the military who has become for many a powerful symbol of the church’s role.

The church “was like a mother that did not look for her children,” Father Capitanio added. “It did not kill anybody, but it did not save anybody, either.”

Father Capitanio’s mea culpa came nearly a quarter century after the junta was toppled in 1983 and democracy was restored. But in some ways, it occurred at just the right time. Through the trial of Father von Wernich, Argentina is finally confronting the church’s dark past during the dirty war, when it sometimes gave its support to the military as it went after leftist opponents.

That past stands in stark contrast to the role the church played during the dictatorships in Chile and Brazil, where priests and bishops publicly condemned the governments and worked to save those being persecuted from torture and death.

Officially, the church has maintained its silence throughout the trial, even knowing weeks in advance that Father Capitanio had been compelled by the tribunal to testify. The priest said in an interview that he was not ordered by the church to testify and was not speaking on its behalf.

Father von Wernich worked as a police chaplain during the dictatorship, from 1976 to 1983. He escaped to Chile but was found in 2003 in the seaside town of El Quisco by a group of journalists and human rights advocates. He was working as a priest under the name Christian González.

Some three months of often chilling testimony in the trial illustrated how closely some Argentine priests worked with military leaders during the dirty war. Witnesses spoke about how Father von Wernich was present at torture sessions in clandestine detention centers. They said he extracted confessions to help the military root out perceived enemies, while at the same time offering comforting words and hope to family members searching for loved ones who had been kidnapped by the government.

His lawyer, Juan Martin Cerolini, said Father von Wernich was a “Catholic scapegoat” for those who wanted to prosecute the church. “The witnesses did not say that he tortured, kidnapped or murdered,” Mr. Cerolini said in a recent interview. “Nobody said he participated in any act of torture.”

Calls to Father von Wernich’s home parish were not returned.

[Testimony in the trial ended Thursday. Now a three-judge panel will read documents into the record before convening to decide Father von Wernich’s fate; a decision is not expected until October. He stands accused of involvement in seven murders and 42 cases of kidnapping and torture. He faces life imprisonment if found guilty, though many expect the 69-year-old priest will be sentenced to live out his days under house arrest.]

Father von Wernich has declined to testify; he appeared only a few times during the proceedings at the request of the judges seeking clarification in other witness testimony. At those appearances, he wore a bulletproof vest and sat behind a glass screen.

There is little question that human rights advocates hope to make an example of him. Hernán Brienza, a journalist who helped find the priest in Chile and wrote a book about the case, said he believed that about 30 other Argentine priests, some already dead, could have been brought up on human rights charges for their involvement in torture. But Mr. Brienza said that if Father von Wernich was found guilty, he was likely to be the last to be tried.

Either way, Father Capitanio, a 59-year-old priest from the town of Neuquén who attended the same seminary as Father von Wernich, said he saw the trial as a noble effort. “There are some who think that this trial is an attack on the church, and I want to say that this is a service to the church,” he said in his final words to the tribunal. “This is helping us search for the truth.”

The von Wernich trial takes place as Argentina’s neighbors are also continuing to unearth human rights violations from their dictatorships. In Brazil, the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva just last month released a 500-page report — after an 11-year investigation — that sought information about the cases of government opponents who were killed or “disappeared” by state security forces from 1961 to 1988. More than 350 people are known to have been killed.

And in Chile late last month, a court said it would put on trial a Catholic priest for his suspected involvement in the assassinations of 28 opposition figures in October 1973, at the beginning of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s rule.

In Argentina, however, there was a much tighter relationship between the clergy and the military than existed in Chile or Brazil. “Patriotism came to be associated with Catholicism,” said Kenneth P. Serbin, a history professor at the University of San Diego who has written about the Roman Catholic Church in South America. “So it was almost natural for the Argentine clergy to come to the defense of the authoritarian regime.”

Those days may be over. After he finished his testimony on Monday, Father Capitanio was surrounded by a sea of elderly women from the Mothers of May Plaza, a group that has pushed successive Argentine governments for answers since the dirty war began in 1976. They wore white scarves in their hair bearing the names of family members who disappeared. Dabbing away tears, they clung to the priest, kissing him on the cheek and whispering their thanks.

Father Capitanio said that he felt that a weight had been lifted — and that he was not alone. “Many men and women of the church, bishops as well, have come to agree with my way of looking at the reality of the church’s role,” he said. “We have much to be sorry for.”

Vinod Sreeharsha contributed reporting from La Plata, and Andrew Downie from Rio de Janeiro.

Conservative with a Conscience

Jack Goldsmith, who, along with John Yoo, aided the Bush administration in justifying the use of torture, comes clean in this NY Times magazine article.


By JEFFREY ROSEN
Published: September 9, 2007

This article will appear in the Sept. 9 issue of the New York Times magazine.

In the fall of 2003, Jack L. Goldsmith was widely considered one of the brightest stars in the conservative legal firmament. A 40-year-old law professor at the University of Chicago, Goldsmith had established himself, with his friend and fellow law professor John Yoo, as a leading proponent of the view that international standards of human rights should not apply in cases before U.S. courts. In recognition of their prominence, Goldsmith and Yoo had been anointed the “New Sovereigntists” by the journal Foreign Affairs.

Goldsmith had been hired the year before as a legal adviser to the general counsel of the Defense Department, William J. Haynes II. While at the Pentagon, Goldsmith wrote a memo for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warning that prosecutors from the International Criminal Court might indict American officials for their actions in the war on terror. Goldsmith described this threat as “the judicialization of international politics.” No one was surprised when he was hired in October 2003 to head the Office of Legal Counsel, the division of the Justice Department that advises the president on the limits of executive power. Immediately, the job put him at the center of critical debates within the Bush administration about its continuing response to 9/11 — debates about coercive interrogation, secret surveillance and the detention and trial of enemy combatants.

Nine months later, in June 2004, Goldsmith resigned. Although he refused to discuss his resignation at the time, he had led a small group of administration lawyers in a behind-the-scenes revolt against what he considered the constitutional excesses of the legal policies embraced by his White House superiors in the war on terror. During his first weeks on the job, Goldsmith had discovered that the Office of Legal Counsel had written two legal opinions — both drafted by Goldsmith’s friend Yoo, who served as a deputy in the office — about the authority of the executive branch to conduct coercive interrogations. Goldsmith considered these opinions, now known as the “torture memos,” to be tendentious, overly broad and legally flawed, and he fought to change them. He also found himself challenging the White House on a variety of other issues, ranging from surveillance to the trial of suspected terrorists. His efforts succeeded in bringing the Bush administration somewhat closer to what Goldsmith considered the rule of law — although at considerable cost to Goldsmith himself. By the end of his tenure, he was worn out. “I was disgusted with the whole process and fed up and exhausted,” he told me recently.

After leaving the Office of Legal Counsel, Goldsmith was uncertain about what, if anything, he should say publicly about his resignation. His silence came to be widely misinterpreted. After leaving the Justice Department, he accepted a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School, where he currently teaches. During his first weeks in Cambridge, in the fall of 2004, some of his colleagues denounced him for what they mistakenly assumed was his role in drafting the torture memos. One colleague, Elizabeth Bartholet, complained to a Boston Globe reporter that the faculty was remiss in not investigating any role Goldsmith might have played in “justifying torture.” “It was a nightmare,” Goldsmith told me. “I didn’t say anything to defend myself, except that I didn’t do the things I was accused of.”

Now Goldsmith is speaking out. In a new book, “The Terror Presidency,” which will be published later this month, and in a series of conversations I had with him this summer, Goldsmith has recounted how, from his first weeks on the job, he fought vigorously against an expansive view of executive power championed by officials in the White House, including Alberto Gonzales, who was then the White House counsel and who recently resigned as attorney general, and David Addington, who was then Vice President Cheney’s legal adviser and is now his chief of staff. Goldsmith says he is not speaking out for the money; though he received a low six-figure advance for the book, he is, after deducting some minor expenses, donating the advance and any profits to charity. Nor is he speaking out because he disagrees with the basic goals of the Bush administration in the war on terror. “I shared, and I still share, a lot of their concerns about what we have to do to meet the terrorist threat,” he told me. When I asked whether he thought Gonzales should have resigned and whether Addington should follow, he demurred. “I was friends with Gonzales and feel very sorry for him,” he said. “We got along really well. I admired and respected Addington, even when I thought his judgment was crazy. They thought they were doing the right thing.”

read on

International Law and the Armenian Genocide: conference this weekend

I am planning to attend this on Saturday, so if anyone wants to join me, just leave a comment on this post and we can carpool perhaps.

USC INSTITUTE OF ARMENIAN STUDIES

International Law & the Armenian Genocide: Recognition, Responsibility & Restitution

Program

Morning Session

9:00 Breakfast

9:35 Richard Hrair Dekmejian – Director, USC Institute of Armenian
Studies

Opening Remarks

9:40 Sarkis Bezelgues – Freie Universität Berlin

International Liability and State Succession: The Responsibility of the Turkish
Republic for the Armenian Genocide

10:00 Michael Bazyler – Whittier Law School

Litigation for Restitution – Comparative Analysis of Armenians and Other
Groups

10:20 Break

10:40 David Nersessian – Harvard University

The Armenian Genocide and Human Rights Litigation in US Federal Courts

11:00 Payam Akhavan – McGill University
Criminalizing Historical Truth: Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code and
the Armenian Genocide

11:20 Discussants and Q&A

12:10 Dean Howard Gillman – USC College of Letters Arts & Sciences

Welcoming Remarks

12:20 Break for Lunch

Afternoon Session

12:50 Mark Geragos, Esq. – Geragos & Geragos – Luncheon Speaker
Tales from the Trenches: A Practitioner’s View

1:10 Hon. John Marshall Evans – US Ambassador to Armenia (2004-2006)
The Armenian Genocide: The International Political and Diplomatic Context of
Recognition and Redress

1:30 Alison Renteln – University of Southern California
An Overview of Holocaust Denial Litigation

1:50 John Torpey – City University of New York
Beyond Recognition: Truth, Reparations, and the Armenian Genocide

2:10 Break

2:30 Alfred De Zayas – Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes
Internationales, Genève The Armenian Genocide in the Light of the
Genocide Convention

Paper to be read in absentia by Harut Sassounian

2:50 Discussants and Q&A

4:00 End of Symposium

Free Admission, with complementary Breakfast & Lunch, Reservations Required: Armenian@college.usc.edu

Colt Serves as a Reminder of a Philosopher’s Reach

From The New York Times:

By JOE DRAPE
Published: September 3, 2007

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y., Sept. 2 — Rabbi Israel Rubin conceded that it was an unusual field trip for his students. They were here at Barn 70 on the backside of Saratoga Race Course on Friday morning to see a trainer about a horse. The trainer was Bob Baffert, and the horse, Maimonides, was a fast one who just may capture the Kentucky Derby next May.

Maimonides cost $4.6 million at last year’s Keeneland September Sale, and last month he appeared as if he was worth every penny when he won his debut by 11 ½ lengths. He is one of the favorites Monday to win the Grade I $250,000 Hopeful Stakes, a seven-furlong sprint for 2-year-olds.

None of that, however, interested Rubin or his charges. He does not attend horse races or gamble. In fact, upon hearing about the colt, Rubin thought long and hard before arranging to take his students here.

“Some may think this is sacrilegious,” he said.

Ultimately, however, the rabbi and his students were drawn here from the Maimonides Hebrew Day School in Albany for what is in a name.

The school and the colt are named for Moses Maimonides, who lived more than 800 years ago and is considered among the greatest Jewish philosophers. He was the chief rabbi of Cairo and the physician to the sultan of Egypt.

“He blended religious study and intellect with worldly manners to heal the sick and guide the healthy,” Rubin said.

“He was respected and honored by both Jews and Arabs. This is especially relevant now in our life and times.”

Maimonides is owned and was named by Ahmed Zayat, an Egyptian now living in New Jersey.

He did not know about Rubin’s visit, and, indeed, was flying back from San Diego and Del Mar on Friday morning. When told of the smiles of the youngsters petting the nose of his expensive colt, however, Zayat was beyond gratified.

He is a Muslim who grew up in a suburb of Cairo and had put much time and effort into bestowing the name Maimonides on his prize purchase.

“He was a very special man who was highly regarded by all people, regardless of faith,” Zayat said of Maimonides. “What has happened with Sept. 11, Iraq, and what’s going on in the region is contrary to the way I grew up. If this horse was going to be a superstar, I wanted an appropriate name. I wanted to say something with the tool I had, which was a horse. I wanted it to be pro-peace, and about loving your neighbor.”

When Zayat tried to register the name Maimonides with the Jockey Club, however, he discovered that it had been reserved for more than nine years by Earle I. Mack, a New York real estate investor and a former ambassador to Finland.

In 1997, Mack, then the chairman of the board for the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, was instrumental in bringing King Juan Carlos I of Spain to New York to accept the school’s Democracy Award.

Mack had been moved by the king’s remarks about how much Spain’s culture had lost when the country expelled its Jews in 1492 as part of the Inquisition.

The king mentioned Maimonides, who was born in Córdoba, Spain, in 1135, and who, with his family, was forced out of the country while Spain was ruled by Muslims.

“I was just waiting for a horse good enough to deserve the name,” Mack said.

He has owned and bred horses for more than 40 years, and knew that Zayat’s colt, a son of Vindication, was bred to be special. Each also understood the other’s good intentions. Zayat donated $100,000 to Cardozo to commemorate the king’s visit there, and to promote tolerance. Mack released his claim to the name Maimonides.

“He had the right horse, and the right motives,” Mack said. “We are all after the same thing: to touch people across cultures.”

Zayat and Mack know that horse racing is an unpredictable business, and a thoughtfully named horse hardly guarantees future fame and fortune.

When Eli O’Brien, 14, patted Maimonides between the ears and promised to say some prayers for him, Baffert nodded enthusiastically.

“We’ll take anything you can give us,” Baffert said.