Obsidian Wings

With A Broomstick

by hilzoy

I read this report last week, but it has taken me a while to blog it. It's too awful. It's by Physicians for Human Rights. They found and interviewed eleven detainees, held in Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, about their treatment. They then gave them medical exams to see whether their various claims about that treatment held up. You should read the Executive Summary at least, and probably the whole report.

What got the most play was a statement from the preface by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba (ret.):

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

What got me, though, were the details:

"Amir is in his late twenties and grew up in a Middle Eastern country. He was a salesman before being arrested by US forces in August 2003 in Iraq. After his arrest, he was forced, while shackled, to stand naked for at least five hours. For the next three days, he and other detainees were deprived of sleep and forced to run for long periods, during which time he injured his foot. After Amir notified a soldier of the injury, the soldier threw him against a wall and Amir lost consciousness. Ultimately, he was taken to another location, where he was kept in a small, dark room for almost a month while being subjected to interrogations that involved shackling, blindfolding, and humiliation. Approximately one month later, he was transferred to Abu Ghraib. At first he was not mistreated, but then was subjected to religious and sexual humiliation, hooding, sleep deprivation, restraint for hours while naked, and dousing with cold water. In the most horrific incident Amir recalled experiencing, he was placed in a foul-smelling room and forced to lay face down in urine, while he was hit and kicked on his back and side. Amir was then sodomized with a broomstick and forced to howl like a dog while a soldier urinated on him. After a soldier stepped on his genitals, he fainted. In July 2004, he was transferred to the prison and eventually hooded, shackled, and transferred to the prison at Camp Bucca, where he reported no abuse. He was
returned to Abu Ghraib in November 2004 and released two days later.

Amir continues to experience physical symptoms consistent with the abuse he reported. Physical examination revealed features consistent with his account, including tenderness of one of his testicles and rectal tearing. Psychologically, he continues to suffer from debilitating symptoms of severe PTSD, disturbed sleep, moodiness, anxiety, sexual dysfunction, hostility and outbursts of anger, and very frequent suicidal thoughts. He has changed from a stable provider for his family to an unemployed man. Although stressors related to the war in Iraq may exacerbate his symptoms, his most debilitating symptoms are attributable to his experience of torture and sexual violation. “No sorrow can be compared to my torture experience in jail,” he said. “That is the reason for my sadness.”"

That's the short version. The long version is worse. And that's just one story. There are eleven.

Seven of the eleven have major depression to this day; in one case, it's severe enough that the psychiatrist who examined the man recommended immediate hospitalization. (Of course, there is no way to actually make this happen.) Ten have full-blown PTSD. All have various lingering physical problems. All but one report "profound life difficulties and disruptions after their release from detention" (p. 92), which is what you'd expect, given that almost all of them have major psychiatric problems, and serious physical problems, as a result of their treatment.

Or, to put it more simply: we took these people and broke their lives apart, and not only have we done nothing whatsoever to help undo the damage, we have barely begun begun to hold the people who did this accountable for what they did. (And I'm not thinking of the actual guards at Abu Ghraib; I'm thinking of the people who set the policies that made this kind of treatment virtually inevitable.)

I never thought a report on things that were done in my name would include sentences like: "Examination of the peri-anal area showed signs of rectal tearing that are highly consistent with his report of having been sodomized with a broomstick." I never thought my country would fall this low.

Kennedy v. Louisiana

by publius

The Court today held that imposing the death penalty for child rape was unconstitutional. I haven’t read the opinion yet, so this post is subject to change. But as grotesquely heinous as child rape is, I think it’s the right call. I’ll talk about doctrine in more detail later, but I think death (i.e., the victim’s death) is an appropriate bright-line rule for determining when to apply capital punishment.

If humans were omniscient, then I’d have less of an issue. But they’re not. And once you open the door to allowing people to be executed for actions short of death, it introduces an enormous amount of uncertainty and unfairness into the system. For instance, if an 18 year-old has sex with a 15-year old, could that be “child rape”? More to the point, would a racist prosecutor in say Georgia have a pretext to seek capital punishment? And even if that example is flawed, the general point still stands.

Anyway, more later after I actually read the opinion.

[UPDATE: I'm almost finished with the opinion, and I'm changing my mind. I obviously like the result and I think the policy argument above is important. But the Court's methodology is extremely sloppy, and it's very expansive. But I'll elaborate on this later tonight -- this case deserves more than one post].

"Unless A Soldier Has A Personal Fortune ..."

by hilzoy

From the Army Times, via VetVoice:

"His lifelong dream of becoming a soldier had, in the end, come to this for Isaac Stevens: 28, penniless, in a wheelchair, fending off the sexual advances of another man in a homeless shelter.

Stevens’ descent from Army private first class in 3rd Infantry Division began in 2005 — not in battle, since he was never sent off to Iraq or Afghanistan, but with a headfirst fall over a wall on the obstacle course at Fort Benning, Ga. He suffered a head injury and spinal damage.

The injury alone didn’t put him in a homeless shelter. Instead, it was military bureaucracy — specifically, the way injured service members are discharged on just a fraction of their salary and then forced to wait six to nine months, and sometimes even more than a year, before their full disability payments begin to flow. (...)

Most permanently disabled veterans qualify for payments from Social Security and the military or Veterans Affairs. Those sums can amount to about two-thirds of their active-duty pay. But until those checks show up, most disabled veterans draw a reduced Army paycheck.

The amount depends on the soldier’s injuries, service time and other factors. But a typical veteran and his family who once lived on $3,400 a month might have to make do with $970 a month.

Unless a soldier has a personal fortune or was so severely injured as to require long-term inpatient care, that can be an extreme hardship."

$970 a month really isn't a lot for a family. And I don't really think we should count on our troops' having personal fortunes to tide them over until they start getting the benefits they're entitled to. Do you?

When I read this, I remembered an interview with Linda Bilmes, who co-wrote The Trillion-Dollar War with Joseph Stiglitz. She starts by describing what happens to a wounded vet on discharge, and then offers a really good proposal:

"When he is finally ready to discharged from the military, if he's discharged right away, he would then lose all the benefits that he has associated with being in the military, which includes pay, it includes medical care, it includes any kind of family benefits, and he would essentially have nothing. So what happens is that that veteran often is hanging in limbo (...) while they are effectively trying to get into the veterans' benefits compensation system.

Now, the burden as it's currently structured is entirely on that veteran to prove that all of the things that he says are wrong with him actually happened. So the presumption is that those things didn't happen, and the veteran has to gather all of the documentation, and all of the doctors' notices, and all of the hospital forms, and all of the things from all the different places, which can often take a very long time. And the system is not electronic, so you're talking about essentially a paper-based system. And for someone who comes out of a long tour of duty and an injury and often has some measure of post-traumatic stress disorder or at least mental disorientation, that's a very very tall order.

And it's completely unnecessary. Because what happens in Britain, for example, in New Zealand, in Australia, in Canada, is that the presumption is that the veteran is entitled to these benefits, and the government has to prove why not. Here in the US we have that sort of policy for taxes, for example. The IRS takes your tax form and then they just audit a small subset. They don't make you do all the paperwork, as it were, up front They accept your taxes and they assume that your taxes are honest and they audit only a subset. And what we have proposed is that we should do this for veterans. The presumption should be that what a veteran says is wrong, is wrong, on the basis of a medical examination when they exit. And a subset should be audited to weed out fraud."

Doing veterans' benefits the way we do taxes, with the presumption in favor of the veteran, the standard operating procedure being to accept veterans' claims, and the responsibility for weeding out fraud falling on government auditors, strikes me as an excellent idea. It might even save money, since we would need many fewer people to process claims. But even if it didn't, ensuring that vets get the benefits they're entitled to quickly would be worth it. We owe them, and we should not ask them to subsist on next to nothing for months or years while we process their claims when there's a better way of doing things.

Politicizing the Department Of Justice

by hilzoy

When I first saw this story, about how "Justice Department officials improperly used political and ideological factors to screen applicants for the agency's prestigious honors and summer intern programs", I didn't immediately flag its importance. I suspect that this was because of the phrase "the agency's prestigious honors and summer intern programs", which suggested small, unimportant programs, a sort of DoJ analog to the Congressional Page program. It was only when I sat down to read the DOJ Inspector General's report (pdf) that the story is based on that I realized that I was wrong.

According to the report (p. 3), "The Attorney General’s Honors Program is the exclusive means by which the Department hires recent law school graduates and judicial law clerks who do not have prior legal experience." That is: it's not some minor program; it's one of the main ways in which DoJ lawyers get hired. Their appointments are permanent. Moreover, the people who are hired under this program are career, not political, appointees, which means that it is against the law to take politics into account when hiring them. But according to the report, for two of the five years it covers, political considerations were huge:

"The documentary evidence and witness interviews also support the conclusion that two members of the 2006 Screening Committee, Esther Slater McDonald and Michael Elston, took political or ideological affiliations into account in deselecting candidates in violation of Department policy and federal law. For example, the evidence showed that McDonald wrote disparaging statements about candidates’ liberal and Democratic Party affiliations on the applications she reviewed and that she voted to deselect candidates on that basis.

We also found that Elston, the head of the 2006 Committee, failed to take appropriate action when he learned that McDonald was routinely deselecting candidates on the basis of what she perceived to be the candidates’ liberal affiliations. The evidence also showed that Elston himself deselected some candidates – and allowed the deselection of others – based on impermissible considerations." (p. 99)

Or, to quote the member of the screening committee whom the IG found to have acted in good faith:

"I'm still kind of reeling from the résumés that you . . .showed me . . . people from Harvard, Yale, Stanford who were deselected. There were a lot of them. And I am shocked and very disappointed about that. . . . I didn't know that this was going on. I thought that this was being conducted in good faith. I was conducting my reviews in good faith and making my recommendations based on merits and what I thought were the people [who] were going to be the most qualified candidates for the Department. And I'm sickened by this. And I'm not happy that I'm associated with this." (p. 75)

If you read the whole report, or even just the part that focusses on 2006 (the worst year), it is sickening. You can see some of the data from the report here; it's really worth looking at. (Percentages of identifiably liberal vs. identifiably conservative candidates who were rejected, etc.) Some other highlights below the fold.

Still More Lobbyists ...

by hilzoy

TPM cites Roll Call:

"For almost two years former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge failed to register a nearly half-million-dollar lobbying contract that he had with the government of Albania.
Ridge filed a registration statement on behalf of the country earlier this month after being contacted by the Department of Justice. ...

Ridge's registration was spurred by a DOJ inquiry after press accounts surfaced noting Ridge's connection to the country. (...)

FARA prosecutions, or even, as in Ridge's case, contact by the Justice Department to encourage registration, are unusual, ethics lawyers said."

In a subsequent post, Josh Marshall explains why it really is exceptional for the DoJ to contact Ridge.

Unfortunately, it's not at all exceptional to find lobbyists on John McCain's campaign, even though he claims to have purged them -- at least the ones who didn't go resign or go on leave from their lobbying positions. Among the stories I haven't blogged recently: McCain's campaign manager's lobbying firm has been working for Viktor Yanukovich, the Ukrainian politician backed by Russia who was suspected of having poisoned his chief rival for the presidency:

"For instance, a lobbying firm owned by Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager, has worked in recent years for a Ukraine politician, Viktor Yanukovich. Both Mr. McCain and the Bush administration supported the opponent of Mr. Yanukovich, who had close ties to Vladimir V. Putin, then the president of Russia and now prime minister.

During this time, however, Mr. Davis’s firm, Davis Manafort, never registered as a lobbyist for Mr. Yanukovich even though Paul Manafort, Mr. Davis’s business partner, had met with the United States ambassador in Kiev on Mr. Yanukovich’s behalf.

In a related development, Mr. McCain may have first become aware of Davis Manafort’s activities in Ukraine as far back as 2005. At that time, a staff member at the National Security Council called Mr. McCain’s Senate office to complain that Mr. Davis’s lobbying firm was undercutting American foreign policy in Ukraine, said a person with direct knowledge of the phone call who spoke on condition of anonymity."

McCain's chief advisor, Charlie Black, lobbied for a Chinese firm with extensive ties to Iran. Moreover:

"One of John McCain's top economic surrogates -- Republican National Committee Victory Fund Chair Carly Fiorina -- was head of Hewlett-Packard at a time when the company was actively working to circumvent export controls established as part of a trade boycott of Iran."

McCain's chief foreign policy advisor was until recently a paid lobbyist for Russia and a number of other eastern European countries (h/t matttbastard):

"John McCain is a saber-rattler when it comes to Russia. (...) But the sound of sabers rattling is music to the ears of Randy Scheunemann, the McCain campaign's senior foreign policy and national security advisor. A long-term confidant of the candidate, Scheunemann also supports a very tough stance toward Russia. Unlike McCain, until very recently he was paid to support that stance. McCain, already under fire for the role of lobbyists in his campaign, is taking his foreign policy advice from someone who was a paid lobbyist for former Soviet Bloc countries that are wary of Russia, and seems to advocate those policies the countries and their former lobbyist want. Notably, McCain supports a quick expansion of NATO, and Scheunemann has already helped two former Soviet satellites gain admission to NATO and has worked on behalf of two others.

Until early this year, Scheunemann was simultaneously working for the McCain campaign and as a lobbyist for a shifting menu of Eastern European and former Soviet Bloc countries with NATO aspirations. Some, including Georgia, have chilly relations with Russia. At various times from 2001 through early this year, Georgia, Latvia, Romania and Macedonia paid Scheunemann and his partner, Mike Mitchell, more than $2 million. Much of Scheunemann's work focused on paving the way into the NATO fold. Two of Scheunemann's clients, Latvia and Romania, were admitted to full NATO member status in 2004, after which they ceased paying him."

There are a lot of former paid foreign agents, registered and otherwise, on the McCain campaign.

Returned To The Battlefield

by hilzoy

In his dissent in Boumedienne (pdf), Justice Scalia wrote:

"At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield."

When I read this, I wondered about the word 'returned', since it seems to assume that these detainees were enemy combatants when they were captured. But I didn't wonder whether 30 prisoners had, in fact, taken up arms against the US since their release. I don't keep track of these things, and the idea that people whom we had locked up for years, without justification, might take up arms against us didn't seem all that farfetched.

Silly me. Luckily, researchers at the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research were paying closer attention. They tracked down the sources of Scalia's claim (Scalia cites a Senate Minority Report, which cites a CNN story, which cites the DoD.) One published statement by the DoD's Principal Deputy General Counsel, made shortly before the CNN story, cites the number thirty, but gives no details. But a DoD press release issued about six weeks after the CNN story does. This press release seems to have been pulled, but luckily, a copy is included as Appendix 1 in this paper (pdf).

The first thing to notice about it is that it says that 30 detainees have returned not to the battlefield, but to "the fight". Since I have become accustomed to treating the words of this administration the same way I treat such words as "Orange Juice Drink: Made With Real Orange Juice!" (which automatically makes me wonder: OK, so exactly how many drops of orange juice per vat of corn syrup would that involve?), I naturally thought: ah, "the fight". I wonder what counts as returning to "the fight"? Luckily, the DoD elaborates:

"we are aware of dozens of cases where they have returned to militant activities, participated in anti US propaganda or other activities through intelligence gathering and media reports. (Examples: Mehsud suicide bombing in Pakistan; Tipton Three and the Road to Guantanamo; Uighurs in Albania)"

Well, this clarifies things somewhat. The Tipton Three were three British citizens who were captured in Afghanistan, and suspected of being members of al Qaeda, in part because they were thought, wrongly, to be in a videotape of a rally featuring bin Laden. After British intelligence cleared them of that charge (one of the three had in fact been working at a Curry's electronics store in Birmingham when the rally was taking place in Afghanistan), they were released. And after that, they participated in the movie The Road To Guantanamo. Apparently, this counts as "returning to the battlefield".

And then there are the Uighurs. Here's Sabin Willett:

"It turns out that clients of our firm, who were sent to Albania in 2006, were two of the 30. What fight had they returned to? Abu Bakker Qassim had published an op-ed in The New York Times. Adel Abdul Hakim had given an interview. These press statements were deemed hostile by the Department of Defense.

Surely the Pentagon was joking? They weren't.

So I can't speak for the other 28, if indeed there are another 28, but for the two men I do know about, giving hostile interviews constituted "returning to the fight.""

You can read Abu Bakker Qassim's "return to the battlefield" here. Be careful of the bullets whistling past your ears as you click through to the NYT Op-Ed page battlefield!

Last December, the researchers at Seton Hall compared the DoD's claims to publicly available government documents and concluded (pdf):

"Extending to the Government the benefit of the doubt as to ambiguous cases, the list of possible Guantánamo recidivists who could have been captured or killed on the battlefield consists of two individuals: Mohammed Ismail and Mullah Shazada. If an apartment complex in Russia falls within the definition of “battlefield,” then as of June 2007—after the Department of Defense had already cited thirty (30) as the total number of recidivists—an additional individual, Ruslan Odizhev, can be added to the list. Thus, at most—of the approximately 445 detainees who have been released from Guantánamo—three (3) detainees, or less than one percent (1%), have subsequently returned to the battlefield to be captured or killed. Two (2) other detainees (Abdul Rahman Noor and Mohammed Nayim Farouq), while not re-captured or killed, are claimed to be engaged in military activities, although the information provided by the Government in this regard cannot be cross-checked."

Since then, the DoD has changed the number of detainees it claims have returned to the battlefield from thirty to twelve, of whom six are new. (They did this before Scalia wrote his opinion, but oddly enough, he didn't mention this change.) The Seton Hall researchers (pdf):

"Of the twelve, five (5) are listed as “killed” (one of whom is ISN 220, a Kuwaiti national whose story is spelled out below), and one is listed as “at large.” There are five more listed as “arrested” and only one listed as “captured.” It is not clear what the distinction is, but it may indicate where the apprehension occurred – “on the battlefield” or elsewhere. The “arrested individuals” included two Moroccans, two Russians, and one Turkish national, all of whom were arrested in their home country. There is no information about the charges filed, nor any information that these individuals attacked or plan to attack America. Further, it is not clear that actions against Morocco, Russia, and Turkey can be fairly characterized as "return[ing] to the fight""

***

In this country, we assume that people are innocent until proven guilty. It should go without saying that innocent people will die because we adopt this principle. When we let people we suspect committed homicide go free because the government cannot prove the case against them, for instance, we run the risk that they will kill again.

We think it is worth it because we do not have the option of locking up all and only guilty people against whom we have insufficient evidence. We have to choose between letting the government lock people up when it cannot make a case against them, knowing that some, perhaps most, of these people will be innocent; and requiring that the government actually make a case against someone, in which case we will of course let some guilty people go free.

If we want to call this principle into question, it's not enough to say: if we let people go, they might kill Americans. That's what I call "cost analysis": asking whether some alternative has costs, and if it does, deciding that we can't possibly adopt it, without asking whether it has benefits as well, and whether any proposed alternative is better. Of course requiring that the government be able to make a case against people it throws in jail has costs.

But those costs are exactly the same in the rest of the law. And it would amaze me if the number of Americans who were killed during the last decade as a result of our letting people accused of homicide go free did not exceed the number killed on 9/11. Should we conclude from this fact that we should stop asking the government to prove its case against suspected murderers? That we should give up not just our right not to be thrown in jail unless there's a case against us, but also a fundamental principle of justice? I don't think so. And I don't think that terrorism is, in this respect, different from other crimes. I do think that the rules required to hold someone captured on a genuine battlefield and held as an enemy combatant should be different from those required to hold an ordinary criminal: as right-wing bloggers are forever reminding us, wartime does not allow for, say, a careful recitation of Miranda rights. But I think this holds only on actual battlefields, and this line of argument is made untenable by the Bush administration's insistence on calling the entire earth the battlefield in the war on terror.

But if we're going to get into a debate about whether the costs of taking people to be innocent until proven guilty are too high, it's crucial to know what those costs actually are. And claiming that participating in a documentary about your arrest and detention, granting an interview, or writing an op-ed constitute "returning to the fight" do not help at all. They merely darken counsel by words without knowledge.

Nomination - Worst Op-Ed of 2008

by publius

I should probably give up reading Richard Cohen columns. But I honestly don’t understand how he could make such two utterly inconsistent points in the same column. First, he tries to absolve himself from the McCain Crush by pointing out that McCain has flip-flopped a lot:

But, for the record, let's recapitulate: McCain has either reversed himself or significantly amended his positions on immigration, tax cuts for the wealthy, campaign spending (as it applies to use of his wife's corporate airplane) and, most recently, offshore drilling. In the more distant past, he has denounced then embraced certain ministers of medieval views and changed his mind about the Confederate flag, which flies by state sanction in South Carolina only, I suspect, to provide Republican candidates with a chance to choose tradition over common decency. There, I've said it all.

But then, after listing all these significant policy changes, Cohen writes that the really cool thing about McCain is that we know his “bottom line”:

It's also -- and more important -- that we know his bottom line. As his North Vietnamese captors found out, there is only so far he will go, and then his pride or his sense of honor takes over. . . . Obama might have a similar bottom line, core principles for which, in some sense, he is willing to die. If so, we don't know what they are. . . . McCain has a bottom line. Obama just moved his.

In short, Cohen's examples contradict the very argument he’s trying to make about consistent core principles.

Jindal Has Company

by publius

When I heard that Bobby Jindal had written (non-ironically) about exorcising a demon, I thought it would pretty much sink his VP chances. Turns out -- America agrees with him. From the Post, I saw that Pew released a comprehensive survey on Americans' religious views. And, as you might expect, America remains extremely religious. However, this particular tidbit from the actual Pew report (pdf) is depressing:

Nearly seven-in-ten Americans (68%) believe that angels and demons are active in the world.

Jindal's stock just went back up.

You Rang? (Ambinder On Hume)

by hilzoy

Publius asks: what on earth does Marc Ambinder mean when he writes: "Let's put aside our Humean selves and ask: is Black right? Regrettably, despite being a philosopher and all, I have absolutely no idea. I do know a few things that he couldn't possibly mean, though.

For starters, Ambinder couldn't be referring to Hume's actual view of the self, since, um, Hume doesn't believe in any such thing:

"There are some philosophers, who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our SELF; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. (...)

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are remov'd for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions remov'd by death, and cou'd I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I shou'd be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity. If any one, upon serious and unprejudic'd reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu'd, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me.

But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change; nor is there any single power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment. The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is compos'd."

When I try to imagine what would be involved in putting aside a complete nonentity, I don't get much farther than Hume did when trying to imagine what sort of SELF the metaphysicians he's arguing with might have in mind. Nor does it help to think: maybe Ambinder had some other aspect of Hume's philosophy in mind, since none of the things that Hume is famous for seem to have the slightest relevance to what he's saying. I mean: is he referring to Hume, the scourge of the doctrine of innate ideas? The one who famously denied the existence of real causal powers in things? The one who skewered the argument from design? The one whose dazzling skeptical arguments woke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers? The one who held that "reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions"? It's hard to see what any of this has to do with Charlie Black.

My best guess, then, is that Ambinder is either misremembering some college survey course or referring to some pronouncement by that eminent thinker, Brit Hume. Or maybe it's one of these other Humes: Basil Cardinal Hume, former Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster; Andrew Hume, Australian convict and leader of final failed attempt to rescue Leichhardt's expedition; Rob Hume, English ornithological writer; or Tobias Hume, English composer, viola player and soldier. Who knows?

All I can say is: whoever Ambinder had in mind, it's not David Hume, the greatest philosopher ever to write in English, and one of the sharpest prose stylists of all time.

Philosophers Needed

by publius

Unsurprisingly, Marc Ambinder defended (or perhaps "contextualized") Charlie Black's terrorism comments -- you know, bold truth-telling and all. But I didn't quite understand this:

Let's put aside our Humean selves and ask: is Black right? When existential worries predominate, will voters flock to the security blanket provided by a guy with decades of national security experience? Or will they blame McCain by proxy?

Anybody have any idea what the Hume reference is supposed to mean? Because it sure doesn't seem related to anything I know about Hume. Maybe he meant Hobbes? I mean, the whole paragraph isn't exactly a model of clarity, but the Hume reference makes no sense.

Any resident philosophers around here?