It is truly telling that the refusal by the Knicks front office to overpay for a player is the best news we’ve had about the team in a very long time.
Bush and the moral low ground
From Bob Herbert:
The United States had complete command of the moral and ethical high ground in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. Most of the world was with us.
For some reason, the Bush administration deliberately abandoned those heights to pursue policies that were not just morally questionable, but reprehensible. Administration officials have fought like tigers to retain the right to torture. They have imprisoned people willy-nilly, without regard to whether they had actually committed offenses against the United States. They set up a system of kangaroo courts at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that was such an affront to the idea of justice that it should have sent shudders of shame down the spines of decent Americans.
And the president wants to keep it that way. Even with the recent Supreme Court ruling that the administration is not above the law and must abide by treaties, we are still faced with the prospect that the administration will ignore the ruling and/or the Congress will rubberstamp the Bush approach.
More from Herbert:
That rumbling you hear is the sound of the founding fathers spinning in their graves. Incredibly, under the trials originally authorized by President Bush, prosecutors would have been allowed to introduce evidence obtained through torture and other forms of coercion. The Bush administration didn’t just leave the moral and ethical high ground. It sped away with great enthusiasm.
War in the Middle East
Here is a report worth reading from Salon that I think avoids the stereotyping and side-taking that the mainstream outlets have fallen into. The thing that strikes me is that there was deliberate provaction of Israel, but that the response has been out of proportion to the initial provocation and that it plays into the hands of Hezbollah (see previous post).
What also strikes me is how, as with 9/11, the neo-cons are ready to use the Lebanon crisis for their own ends. As with 9/11, when they used the terror attack on the United States to start a war in Iraq, they are now taking the crisis in Lebanon and using it as a pretext for an assault on Iran. I can only hope that there are cooler and wiser heads out there this time around.
Maggi Hill at Sotto in Princeton
My friend Maggi Hill is playing a gig Friday at 9 p.m. at the Sotto in Princeton. Thought I’d give her a plug — she puts on quite a show and is worth seeing. (Photo is one I took at the Lambertville Shadfest several years ago.)
This should be a dead issue
A new state commission has begun the task of determining the fate of the death penalty in New Jersey. It will be holding hearings and gathering information to assess its value — whether it acts as a deterrent, whether it offers the appropriate punishment, whether it can be administered fairly.
My hope is that the commission will do as most civilized nations have already done and end capital punishment.
Several thoughts:
There is a basic moral dilemma at the heart of the debate, one outlined by the French philosopher Albert Camus in “Reflection on the Guillotine” — capital punishment is state-sanctioned and premeditated murder. It “adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organization which is itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death.” Camus says the death penalty is “the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.”
And it is a moral tautology: It is a penalty that punishes the taking of life by taking a life — an equation that may seem logical to some but that hardens the heart of society and endorses the notion of retribution, making it more difficult to argue against vigilante justice. It is, after all, an eye for an eye.
Even if there were not moral issues at stake here — and I understand that there are many who do not follow the same moral and ethical principles that I follow — there are grave concerns about the fairness of its application and the accuracy of the judgments that impose it (given the finality of the death penalty, we have to make sure we are right and we must make sure we are not applying in a discriminatory fashion, neither of which seem possible).
It is time to follow the advice of Justice John Paul Stevens and stopping “tinkering with the machinery of death.”
Hank Kalet 