#60 GUANTANAMO, ITSELF, IS ON TRIAL (HEY BARACKIE - YOU CLOSED THAT MUTHA FUCKIN' HELL HOLE DOWN YET, AS PER YOUR CAMPAIGN PROMISE?)

Guantánamo, on Trial

In bringing justice to those accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, it will never be possible to have military trials at Guantánamo that Americans can be fully proud of, or that the world will see as credible.

Still, it seems certain those trials will be held. In a triumph of raw politics over the nation’s security interests, the Obama administration was forced to abandon its effort to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four others in federal court, where these cases belong. It announced that they will be tried before a military tribunal at the Guantánamo prison, which President George W. Bush made a symbol of torture and illegal detention.

Attorney General Eric Holder ineptly failed to line up local political support before announcing that the prisoners would be tried in Manhattan. But that did not excuse the hyperventilating and unyielding opposition of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Senator Charles Schumer, Representative Peter King and other pols.

Nor did it begin to justify the law that denied money to move any Guantánamo prisoner to the United States. It was a shocking example of politicians dictating a prosecutorial decision. The result: huge gaps of competency and credibility. Federal courts have a long record of successfully handling complex terrorism cases. These most important of 9/11 trials will take place in a system of questioned legitimacy, operating under untested rules, with no experience in concluding major terrorism trials.

Still, there are things that should be done to avoid an utter legal shambles and administer some justice.

NO TAINTED EVIDENCE Mr. Holder has said repeatedly that there is enough evidence to convict Mr. Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and the others without relying on evidence tainted by torture or coercion or on hearsay evidence likewise inadmissible in federal court. Mr. Mohammed was subject to waterboard torture 183 times — after, his interrogators have said, he gave up all the useful information he had.

Military prosecutors should stick to those parameters, and not try to exploit the somewhat more lenient evidentiary rules in military commissions, or urge a fanciful redefinition of torture to preserve a defendant’s confession or other evidence. That has happened before.

ADEQUATE DEFENSE Experienced military and civilian defense counsel must be made available in adequate number and given sufficient resources and leeway. Last month, the retired vice admiral who serves as the “convening authority” for military commissions, Bruce MacDonald, issued new rules for defense lawyers without first inviting public comment or consulting the military’s chief defense lawyer, Col. Jeffrey Colwell of the Marines.

The rules were put on hold after Colonel Colwell objected that they were “unworkable” and would “unreasonably and unlawfully” interfere with the lawyer-client relationship. One would have required defense lawyers to say what language they would be speaking with their clients and to use the same language during client visits “to the maximum extent possible.” This, Colonel Colwell noted, is an “absurd” rule, unless the government is improperly monitoring the conversations, contrary to its claims.

TRANSPARENCY This is crucial at every level. Beyond allowing 9/11 survivors and families to view the proceedings via a closed-circuit hookup, the Pentagon should arrange for televising the trial worldwide. Federal courts, wrongly, do not permit televising of criminal trials. But military tribunals do not enjoy the same level of public trust, making it even more important to let the public observe them.

In any case, interest in covering the trial is bound to exceed the few dozen journalists that Guantánamo can accommodate. If arguments for televising the trial fail, alternate arrangements must be made so those seeking to cover the trial can conveniently do so.

LESS SECRECY More broadly, the Pentagon needs to change its mind-set regarding both treatment of the press and secrecy. In a troubling episode of censorship last year, the Pentagon banned four reporters covering a hearing for a former child soldier accused of killing an American soldier in Afghanistan. The reason was galling: They published the name of a witness who had already been identified in news reports and public documents.

In response to protests, the rules were revised and the reporters reinstated, but other problems have continued to fester, including lack of timely access to trial filings and transcripts, and overclassification of evidence on flimsy national security grounds, which avoids disclosure and results in needless blanks in the official record.

A decade after 9/11, eight years after Mr. Mohammed’s capture, it is implausible that much evidence still exists that warrants withholding on real national security grounds. Previous secrecy designations need to be regularly re-examined in light of the passage of time.

No doubt the trial will raise a host of thorny issues, including expected questions regarding some defendants’ competency to stand trial or to represent themselves, and whether a military commission may accept a guilty plea without a trial in a death penalty case.

The language of existing military commission rules seem to foreclose that last possibility, but Attorney General Holder says it is “an open question.” Legislation has been introduced in Congress that would clarify the rules to allow a guilty plea to short-circuit a capital trial. That is exactly the wrong move, and in any case, it is too late in the day to be changing the rules.

There is great virtue in a public legal proceeding that lays out 9/11 in detail and serves as a reminder of its horror. It deserves precedence over any desire by the Pentagon to avoid a trial that might reveal embarrassing information about torture, or serve Khalid Shaik Mohammed’s stated desire to accelerate his delusional martyrdom.

#59 The Power of Mockery By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

The juiciest story behind the Middle East uprisings doesn’t concern Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s “voluptuous” Ukrainian nurse or C.I.A. bags of cash. Rather, it’s the tale of how a nonviolent revolutionary strategy crafted by Serbian students and an octogenarian American scholar came to challenge dictators in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and many other countries.

This “uprising in a bottle” blueprint was developed by the Serbian youth movement, Otpor, to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. One of Otpor’s insights was that the most effective weapon against dictators isn’t bombs or fiery speeches. It’s mockery. Otpor activists once put Milosevic’s picture on a barrel that they rolled down the street, inviting people to hit it with a bat.

Otpor’s strategy mirrors one promoted by a rumpled Boston academic named Gene Sharp, who is little known in America but inspires tremors among dictators abroad. Sharp’s guide to toppling despots has been translated into 34 languages so far and was widely circulated in Egypt last year in Arabic.

After Otpor toppled Milosevic, it began to hold seminars for pro-democracy activists from other parts of the world, including many from the Middle East.

“About 15 of us went to Serbia from Egypt,” Mohammed Adel, one of the leaders of Egypt’s awesome April 6 Youth Movement, which helped lead the way in overthrowing President Hosni Mubarak, told me a few days ago. “The methods we learned from Serbia are what we are using in Cairo.”

A crucial lesson, he said, is the power of nonviolence: “If somebody is beating you, don’t attack him. Don’t use any violence against them. Just take photos of them and put them on the Internet.”

Toppling dictators is only one application of this kind of grass-roots movement. One of the most exciting trends in the struggle against poverty and social pathologies such as crime is the use of similar youth-owned movements to change cultural norms from the bottom up.

Tina Rosenberg, a longtime writer and journalist who contributes to the Opinion section of nytimes.com, offers a brilliant look at bottom-up initiatives to achieve social change in her new book, “Join the Club.” My favorite example has to do with teenage smoking.

From the 1970s through the 1990s, nothing seemed to work to dissuade teenagers from smoking. Television commercials warned that smoking kills you or turns your teeth yellow, but teenagers felt invulnerable. And with adults united in disapproval of teenage smoking, what better way for adolescents to rebel than to cough their way through a cigarette?

Then in the late-1990s, some frustrated anti-smoking campaigners showed teenagers how cigarette companies were manipulating them into addiction. Starting in Florida, the teenagers then designed a series of funny and withering commercials, many based on prank phone calls.

One depicted a couple of teenagers telephoning an ad agency that promoted cigarettes. The kids tried to give the agency a prize for killing teenagers in large numbers, flummoxing the staff.

In one multistate commercial, a young man calls a cigarette company and says that he is a dog walker. Then he explains his business proposition: He wants to sell dog urine. “Dog pee is full of urea, and that’s one of the chemicals in cigarettes,” he explains.

“It is likely that never before in the history of public health had anyone done a media campaign based on prank phone calls,” Rosenberg notes — but it worked.

The youth campaign spread to other states and avoided any goody-two-shoes message of “don’t smoke.” It channeled kids to rebel against tobacco instead of rebelling by using tobacco. Florida had the biggest one-year drop in high school and middle school smoking of any state in two decades. The high school smoking rate dropped in half in less than a decade.

The team effort to change culture isn’t new. It’s part of the model of Alcoholics Anonymous, Weight Watchers, microfinance lending groups and many initiatives to chip away at poverty, crime and gang violence. Rosenberg cites a housing project area in the District of Columbia, Benning Terrace, where 53 people had been killed in gang violence over two years. Then a group of local ex-convicts and former drug addicts intervened and began working with the gangs.

The ex-convicts had street cred that the police and social workers didn’t, and they worked with young people to make gang violence “uncool.” There wasn’t another gang-related killing for 13 years.

Another example is an extraordinarily successful effort to improve the performance of black college students in calculus. Started at the University of California, Berkeley, after black students there earned an average grade of D+ in calculus, it puts black and Hispanics into small groups to provide peer support, and participants by some measures now outperform white and Asian students.

Sometimes the most powerful force for social change is a bunch of irreverent and wise-cracking students, working together. 

#58 France Flies, Germany Flops By ROGER COHEN

Berlin

I’ve always had a soft spot for Nicolas Sarkozy. He was the guy with the wrong name and the wrong background who took on the smug talkers with names like Dominique de Villepin and vanquished them. He was the outsider from the wrong schools who believed in energy and talent and had the audacity to smash the taboo that said a French politician can’t love America and prosper.

Sarkozy was a doer. He thought François Mitterrand’s seductive phrase (in French at least) — “Il faut laisser le temps au temps” (You must let time take its course) — was baloney that left you with disasters like the Bosnian genocide. He thought work and reward should be linked, a Gallic heresy, and he worked hard.

He hated the dependency culture of an overdeveloped French state, which entrenched rights and enfeebled responsibility. That he was elected president showed that France, deep in its soul, knew it had to escape the Mitterrand-Chirac rut with its glut of erudition and its glob of inaction. That was heartening.

The sanctimonious attacks on him from the left oozed the paralyzing conservatism that had blinded France to change. The attacks on Sarkozy from a blue-blooded or petit-bourgeois right often betrayed the same quasiracist disdain evident in rightist attacks on President Obama.

Yes, I liked Sarkozy — and still do. Then there was his rudeness; his taste for his rich friends’ yachts; his need for adulation that helped reduce a good newspaper, Le Figaro, to a fawning mouthpiece; his authoritarian itch from which gypsies most conspicuously suffered; his petulant impatience, his petty vanities and his peevish jealousies — what Nicole Bacharan, a social scientist, calls “the one-man soap opera.”

These were more than peccadilloes. But sharp elbows were needed to shift France from sleepwalk mode.

Only in recent weeks has the distance traveled come into focus: France, reintegrated in 2009 into the command structure of NATO, spearheading the United Nations-backed NATO military operation in Libya; providing armed muscle to the U.N. forces in Ivory Coast; and giving its pacifist-trending ally Germany a lesson in 21st-century Atlanticism.

Adenauer and de Gaulle must be turning in their graves. Here was Germany standing wobbly with Brazil, Russia, India and China — and against its closest allies, France and the United States — in the U.N. vote on Libyan military action. And here was France providing America’s most vigorous NATO support.

This was a dramatic inversion of postwar roles. It revealed the drift of a navel-gazing Germany unprepared to lead despite its power and impatient with Adenauer’s Western anchoring. It also demonstrated France’s break under Sarkozy from the posturing Gaullist notion of a French “counterweight” to America. These are seismic European shifts.

In Benghazi, the capital of free Libya, when they see a NATO aircraft they say, “There goes another Sarkozy.” After the French shame of Rwanda, a genocide where Mitterrand let time do its fullest work, that’s something.

Perhaps it’s only now with Sarkozy that another, deeper French shame is passing, one Mitterrand and Chirac knew: the “strange defeat” of 1940 with its paralyzing subsequent obfuscations.

Certainly, a presidential election next year has not been unrelated to Sarkozy’s activism. Nor has a compensatory urge after France took the wrong side in Tunisia. But the president’s instinct to save Benghazi and to oust Ivory Coast’s usurper was right.

Sarkozy has intuited three things. First, the democratization of the Arab world is the most important European strategic challenge of the decade. Second, it was time “to take the training wheels off,” in the words of Constanze Stelzenmüller of the German Marshall Fund, and have Europe rather than an overextended America lead in Libya. Third, the U.N. cannot always be an umbrella that folds when it rains. If its “responsibility to protect” means anything, it must be when an Arab tyrant promises to slaughter his people.

We stand at a high point in French postwar diplomacy and a nadir in German. There were strong arguments on either side of a Libyan intervention, but with a massacre looming in Benghazi, Germany had to stand with its allies. Angela Merkel has proved herself more a maneuverer than a leader. Germany often conveys the sense that it now resents the agents of its postwar rehabilitation — the European Union and NATO.

I don’t think Germany believes its future lies with the BRIC countries, as the U.N. Libya vote suggested. I do think Germany has entered a new era of ambivalence and nationalist calculation.

That means several things. European integration is on hold, and as long it’s on hold the future of the euro is at risk. The German-French alliance will remain under strain. Obama should look to Sarkozy, not Merkel, for strategic support.

A last thought. This restless French leader is at his best with his back to the wall. He’s shown that. The same quality means it would be foolish to count him out next year. 

#57 MAUREEN DOWD

Atlas Without Angelina

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

It was Ayn Rand’s nightmare: the president who gave hundreds of billions in hand-outs to homeowners, banks, car executives and various others she would have labeled “moochers” was explaining his vision of why America is great.

“It’s not the size of our skyscrapers,” President Obama told cheering fans at a late-night rally Thursday at Chicago’s Navy Pier. “It’s not the size of our G.D.P.”

It’s not even just because we’re individuals, he said, adding, “We also have this idea that we’re all in this together, that we look out for one another, that I am my brother’s keeper.”

Rand would have considered this warmed over, mommy party, it-takes-a-village piffle.

Obama is antithetical to Rand’s ideal man, Howard Roark, the architect of skyscrapers who violently refuses to exist for others. Paul Ryan, trying to push the cost of Medicare and Medicaid onto the old, the sick and the disabled while rewarding insurance companies with bigger profits, would be more up her alley.

Indeed, Congressman Ryan has said the reason he got involved in public service was “by and large” because of Rand, and he has encouraged his staffers to read “Atlas Shrugged.”

You’d think that our fiscal meltdown would have shown the flaw in Rand’s philosophy. She thought we could derive morals from the markets. But we derived immorality from the markets.

She wrote about Nietzschean superheroes who made things. She died before capitalism evolved into a vampire casino where you could bet against investments you sold to your clients, and make money off something you didn’t own or that existed only on paper.

The sexy Manichean ’toons in the novels of the goddess of capitalism don’t behave unethically. When they blow up things, it’s because they will not be sacrificial victims to evil second-raters.

Greed had a less ennobling effect on real genius capitalists. Instead of fighting the looters, they joined the looters.

What Rand and acolytes like Alan Greenspan failed to realize is that if everyone acts in self-interest and no one takes into account the weakness to the entire system that occurs when everybody indulges in the same kind of risky behavior, the innocent and the guilty are engulfed.

Nevertheless, Rand is blazing back as an icon of the Tea Party, which overlooks her atheism, amorality in romance and vigorous support for abortion.

Tea Party groups are helping to market part one of a low-budget film version of “Atlas Shrugged,” with no stars and none of the campy panache of the Gary Cooper-Patricia Neal movie of “The Fountainhead.” “Atlas Shrugged” aptly opened on Tax Day, getting a rave from Sean Hannity, who said it wouldn’t have been released “had Hollywood liberals gotten their way,” and a dismissive shrug from most critics, even conservatives.

“I will not pan ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ ” P. J. O’Rourke wrote in a pan in The Wall Street Journal. “I don’t have the guts.”

“I’m not sure she’s dead,” he said of Rand.

The 1,200-page novel took Rand 12 years to write. After debuting to searing reviews in 1957, it has been going gangbusters ever since. It was at No. 19 on Amazon Friday night.

Al Ruddy, the charismatic producer of “The Godfather” and “Million Dollar Baby” (and a Democrat), spent decades trying to make Rand’s master work into a movie.

“Dagny Taggart is the greatest role ever written for a woman,” he said in his gravelly voice. “She’s a great executive, she’s gorgeous, and the three greatest guys in the world are all mad about her. Hot stuff about cool geniuses.” In 1975, he wanted to pull together “a dream cast,” with Fay Dunaway as Dagny, Clint Eastwood as Hank Rearden, Robert Redford as John Galt and Alain Delon as Francisco d’Anconia.

He went to New York to talk to Rand, crowding onto a love seat at her agent’s with the tiny objectivist, who loved manly men like Ruddy. She agreed that he could focus on the love story. “That’s all it ever was,” she said.

But she wanted final script approval. “Darlink,” she told him in her Russian accent as she smoked, “I trust you, but the Russians will buy Paramount to destroy my book.”

He refused to give Rand, who started as a tyro Hollywood screenwriter in the days of Cecil B. DeMille, that much control. He kept trying, including for a TNT miniseries with John Aglialoro, an exercise machine mogul who owns the rights (he produced and co-wrote the film that’s out now), hoping for Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and Javier Bardem.

But after 9/11, he gave up. “At the end of ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ mills, ships and mines are blown up,” Ruddy said. “And I thought, wait a second, do people really want to see a movie about America being blown up and destroyed?”

He thinks the story will have a second life with stars. “ ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is the most important novel of the 20th century,” Ruddy says, “It will rise again.”‘

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