Bernd Debusmann

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

No matter how the wrangling over America’s national debt is resolved, it will leave lasting dents in the international image of a country that prides itself on its can-do spirit and its competence. “The entire whole world is watching,” as President Barack Obama put it, and parts of it are dismayed by a monumental display of dysfunction.

Not to speak of an equally impressive display of rigid dogmatic thinking by anti-tax zealots more befitting Afghanistan’s Taliban than legislators of the Republican Party, a mainstay of America’s democracy for more than 150 years. An outspoken British cabinet minister, Vince Cable, described Tea Party-backed Republicans as “right-wing nutters” posing a threat to the world financial system.

Elsewhere in Europe, less sharp-tongued commentators saw the deadlock in Washington over raising the debt ceiling and avoiding default as a sign of America’s decline.

“The United States must fundamentally renew itself,” columnist Ansgar Graw wrote in the conservative German newspaper Die Welt. “This means that both parties must place the common good above gains in electoral campaigns.”
Failing to do so, he said, could result in turning “the American 21st-century crisis into the demise of the dominant power of the 20th century.”

One of the most striking depictions of the gap between long-held perceptions of the United States as a model of democratic competence and the new reality of politicians risking financial havoc for the sake of the purity of anti-tax dogma came not from abroad but in a political cartoon in the New Jersey Record newspaper. Cartoonist Jimmy Margulies portrayed Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and Afghan Prime Minister Hamid Karzai standing together looking at a paper marked “U.S. default.”

The bubble coming out of Maliki’s mouth says: “Maybe they are not ready for self-government just yet …”

Both in Afghanistan and Iraq, after invading the countries and waging war, the United States has engaged in costly nation-building efforts designed to lead to the adoption of America’s system of democratic government. Belief in its superiority has been a constant in U.S. foreign policy, illustrated by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright with her famous observation that “we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

The last few months of a Washington spectacle that resembled the game of chicken more than a joint problem-solving exercise by mature politicians have left parts of the world to wonder how correct Winston Churchill was when he said, in a 1947 speech, that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried from time to time.”

CHINESE CONCERNS

The leaders of China, the world’s most populous country, never subscribed to that idea but less so now than ever. The Chinese prize stability and predictability above all else and over the years became America’s largest creditor, amassing more than $1.5 trillion in U.S. Treasuries, long considered the world’s safest asset.

There’s nothing safe and predictable in the Washington wrangling over the national debt.

Which is why U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to considerable lengths during a tour of Asia, including China, this month, to reassure worried Chinese officials that the debt debate was a perfectly normal part of the democratic process in the United States. “These kinds of debates have been a constant in our life throughout the history of our republic — and sometimes they are messy,” she said.

True enough. The American political system is messy and disputatious. But to describe what has been happening in the past few months as business as usual is a stretch. Both in the United States and abroad there is a growing perception that political leadership has sunk to its lowest point in decades.

Four out of 10 Americans responding to a Gallup poll this month said they were seeing the worst leadership in Washington in their lifetimes.

Some seasoned Washington watchers agree. On a panel discussion on National Public Radio this week, the interviewer asked Norman Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute and Alice Rivlin of the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution how they viewed the present quality of leadership. The two are prominent members of the capital’s political establishment.

Said Ornstein: “Inmy lifetime, I have not seen a level of dysfunction in congressional leadership that comes close to what we are seeing now. Leaders in the past always knew they had to deal with your wings (on the far side of the spectrum) and you had to deal with your idiots, but you would come together.” Ornstein is 63.

Said Rivlin, whose government posts included vice chairman of the Federal Reserve: “I’m older than Norm and I would say it’s the worst in my lifetime, the most dysfunctional Congress.” Rivlin is 80.

(You can contact the author at bernd.debusmann@thomsonreuters.com)

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

What’s the connection between a South African Nobel Peace Prize winner, Israel, and one of America’s biggest pension funds? An international campaign for economic, cultural and academic boycotts of Israel and Jewish settlements on the West Bank.

The South African in question is retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu, whose role in the fight against apartheid in the 1980s gained him the Peace Prize and world-wide fame. The pension fund is the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association – College Retirement Equities Fund, better known as TIAA-CREF. The connecting link is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, BDS for short, launched by Palestinians in 2005.

In an op-ed article in the Charlotte Observer, timed to coincide with TIAA-CREF’s annual shareholders meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, on July 19, the archbishop rebuked the pension fund for having refused to allow a vote on a resolution questioning its holdings in companies that profit from operating in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Tutu drew parallels between BDS and the global wave of divestments, spurred by grassroots activists, which contributed to the collapse of apartheid.

The activists in the TIAA-CREF case belong to Jewish Voice for Peace, a small but growing American group that says the fund had denied its investors the chance “to decide for themselves if they want to retire with the help of Caterpillar D-9 bulldozers to demolish Palestinian homes, Veolia landfills on West Bank lands, and Elbit surveillance systems securing settlements throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem and on the Separation Wall.”

The archbishop’s op-ed drew a response that highlights the deep divisions between American Jews critical of Israeli policies and those in unquestioning support. Jeffrey Epstein, a leader of the Jewish community in Charlotte, said in an op-ed in the same newspaper that by lending his moral authority to the BDS campaign, Tutu had aligned himself with Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah “and other enemies of freedom and peace in the Middle East.”

The archbishop had allowed himself to be drawn into an effort by Israel’s enemies to “delegitimize” the very existence of the state of Israel, Epstein wrote. That view of BDS is shared by Israel’s government (and mainstream American Jewish organizations) as well as the Israeli legislators who approved a law making public calls for boycotts a punishable offense.

As counter-productive measures go, the law is in a class by itself. BDS supporters say it will strengthen their movement rather than weaken it.

“It will go down as a galvanizing moment,” said Rebecca Vilkomerson, Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace. “It is already boosting us.” In a conference call with U.S.-based reporters this week, a Palestinian leader of the boycott movement, Omar Barghouti, and an Israeli BDS activist, Ofer Neiman, both thought boycotts would gain momentum internationally.

WAVE OF CONDEMNATION

The expectation is that the movement will be spurred by a wave of condemnation of the law, both in Israel and outside, from a long list of individuals and groups including several that are firmly opposed to boycotts. Much of the criticism echoed a statement by Amnesty International which said the law would have “a chilling effect on freedom of expression in Israel” and was “a blatant attempt to stifle peaceful dissent and campaigning.”

Not only that, Amnesty lamented, it was only one of many laws recently passed or being considered which have been criticized by Israeli human rights non-governmental organizations for restricting freedom of expression, the work of Israeli civil society organizations, or the rights of Palestinians.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary, William Hague, called the law an “infringement of the freedom of expression.” The New York Times, in an editorial, said the law was not befitting a democracy and said no country could be delegitimized if it held true to its democratic principles.

All that did nothing to persuade TIAA-CREF to make changes in its investment portfolio. Neither did a group of shareholding activists led by Vilkomerson who argued their case at the fund’s Charlotte meeting. Vilkomerson, in an interview, said the boycott movement has had no major successes in the United States so far. But in Europe, BDS pressure has had results. Both in Sweden and Norway, large pension funds removed Elbit System Ltd., an Israeli defense electronics company, from their portfolios.

The reason: the company’s involvement in building and operating the separation barrier between Israel and the West Bank in defiance of a 2004 ruling by the International Court of Justice which found the wall “contrary to international law.” (The Israeli government points out that suicide bombings have dropped sharply since the barrier went up).

Another success story cited by BDS supporters is an international campaign against the French multinational Veolia Transportation for its involvement in a controversial project to link West Jerusalem and Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The Dutch ASN bank divested itself of Veolia holdings in 2006 and the company later dropped out of the project.

The lack of BDS’s success in the United States raises a question: how much impact can a grassroots movement have in a country where neither the administration, nor Congress, nor the majority of the public is inclined to take Israel, America’s closest ally in the Middle East, to task for building settlements — illegal under the Fourth Geneva convention — in what would be a Palestinian state.

You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

America’s system of meting out death sentences is unfair and arbitrary. Race, money and politics play major roles. Since society’s ultimate punishment cannot be applied fairly, it should not be applied at all.

So says a report timed to coincide with the re-instatement of capital punishment in the United States 35 years ago this July, after a four-year suspension prompted by a Supreme Court ruling that the death penalty was being administered so arbitrarily and capriciously that it amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. As a result, many states rewrote their laws and when the Supreme Court returned to the issue in 1976, it said the new statutes had taken the randomness out of the system. Did they?

Not according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based non-profit organization which has been keeping track of capital punishment for more than two decades. Its report concludes that the death penalty, post-1976, “has proven to be a failed experiment. The theory that with proper guidance to juries the death penalty could be administered fairly has not worked in practice. Thirty-five years of experience have taught the futility of trying to fix this system.”

The Death Penalty Information Center is not alone in viewing the system too broken to fix. In March, when Illinois became the 16th U.S. state without a death penalty, Governor Pat Quinn, a Democrat and long-time supporter of capital punishment, said: “I have concluded that our system of imposing the death penalty is inherently flawed. The evidence presented to me by former prosecutors and judges … has convinced me that it is impossible to devise a system that is consistent, that is free of discrimination on the basis of race, geography or economic circumstance, and that always gets it right.”

Similar views prompted New York and New Jersey to abolish the death penalty in 2007 and New Mexico in 2009. World-wide, capital punishment has been in steady decline and now only five developed nations practice it. The United States, where the number of executions has been shrinking since a 1999 peak of 98, remains one of the world’s top executioners.

In 2010, it ranked fifth, after China, Iran, North Korea and Yemen, ahead of Saudi Arabia and Libya. This is not the kind of group that fits the average American’s image of his or her country as a place a class above the dictatorships and human rights violators most active in handing out death sentences.

Capital punishment in America is reserved, at least in theory, for the “worst of the worst” but a series of studies show that the practice is different. For example: In 2003, the worst serial killer in U.S. history, Gary Ridgway, pleaded guilty to murdering 48 people in the state of Washington. He was sentenced to life without parole and spared the death sentence in return for detailed information on the young women he strangled over a 20-year period.

VIGOROUS TRUTH-SEEKING PROCESS?

In Virginia, Justin Wolfe was convicted of murder-for-hire in the killing of a drug dealer and sentenced to death in 2002. A federal judge overturned the conviction this week, nine years after Wolfe was sent to death row, ruling that prosecutors had ignored or withheld evidence and “stifled a vigorous truth-seeking process.”

How consistently such a process can flourish in the adversarial U.S. justice system is open to debate. Thane Rosenbaum (http://tinyurl.com/65eaxw6), a law professor at New York’s Fordham University, has described courtroom wrangling as “winner-take-all, scorch the earth contests that make America’s trials similar to its sporting spectacles.”

Except that the stakes are higher in the courtroom. There, wrongful convictions are not isolated events but stem from systemic defects, according to The Innocence Project, a New York-based organization that has been using DNA testing to win the freedom of people behind bars or on death row.

Seventeen of the 272 people exonerated through DNA since 1989 had been sentenced to death. Scores of others on death row have had their sentences overturned (and in most cases changed to life imprisonment) on appeal. In both state and federal courts, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, appellate reviews find that mistakes were made in two-thirds of the cases.

Which throws question marks over the notion of a fair process of narrowing down tens of thousands of eligible cases to the “worst of the worst” and helps explain why death sentences and executions have dropped nation-wide by about 50 percent since 2000. Less than one in a hundred murders draws a death sentence and far fewer end in an execution.

Even in Texas, America’s leading executioner, the number of convicted killers put to death has declined over the past few years. So is it time to drop capital punishment and join most of the rest of the world, where a life behind bars is considered the ultimate punishment?

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters)

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

The United States is deploying missile-laden remotely piloted aircraft to kill enemies in six countries, scientists are working on ever more sophisticated military robots, and there are a host of unanswered questions on the future of warfare. Some of the more intriguing ones are asked abroad.

Such as: “Is the Reaper operator walking the streets of his home town after a shift a legitimate target as a combatant? Would an attack (on him) by a Taliban sympathizer be an act of war under international law or murder under the statutes of the home state? Does the person who has the right to kill as a combatant while in the control station cease to be a combatant on his way home?”

This comes from a study by Britain’s Ministry of Defence and refers to the air war waged by U.S. pilots who operate, from bases in the United States, heavily-armed drones flying over Afghanistan or Pakistan 7,500 miles away. The Reaper is the workhorse of the drone fleet, which has grown from around 50 a decade ago to more than 7,000 today. It is increasing at a fast clip, unaffected by defense spending cuts in other areas.

Most of the drone missions for the military are flown from Creech Air Force base near Las Vegas. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has a separate, covert, program that critics see as targeted assassinations. The CIA’s drones are operated from northern Virginia. The pilots, sitting in cockpits in front of television monitors, run no physical risks whatever, a novelty for men engaged in war.

Debate over the remote-control air wars — drones are now in action over Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya and Somalia – has been largely confined to academia and think tanks, both civilian and military. But reports this week that the CIA had extended drone strikes to Somalia have prompted calls for a closer examination of where war ends and assassinations begin.

It is not an issue, however, that strikes a chord with the public and U.S. politicians are largely in favor of drone strikes. They are seen as an inexpensive way of targeting enemies, with no risk to the lives of American personnel. The downside to the seemingly risk-free elimination of Taliban fighters, al Qaeda militants and assorted other anti-American elements is of little apparent concern in the U.S.

What downside? High technology and precision weapons notwithstanding, the “surgical strikes” drone enthusiasts like to talk about are on occasion anything but, resulting in “collateral damage”, the euphemism for dead civilians.
Collateral damage tends to create more recruits to anti-American causes. Even without civilian casualties, remote-control warfare tarnishes the image of the United States, and the few close allies who use drones, in the countries where they are fighting.

“The West … is seen as a cowardly bully that is unwilling to risk his own troops but is happy to kill remotely,” the British study noted.

SCIENCE AND WISDOM

Such sentiments are unlikely to sway public opinion in the West, nor will they stop weapons developments that bring to mind an observation by the late science fiction writer Isaac Asimov more than four decades ago: “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than science gathers wisdom.”

Which brings us to aspects of 21st century war that go beyond the pros and cons of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as drones are also known. While they are frequently referred to as “killer robots,” they are “human-in-the-loop” weapons, so named because a human being navigates the aircraft and pushes the button that fires the missile.

If and when to cut the human out of the loop – and open a new era of warfare – is a matter of debate between scientists. “It … would be only a small technical step to enable an unmanned aircraft to fire a weapon based solely on its own sensors, or shared information, without recourse to a higher, human authority,” according to the British study.

That would mean, in effect, outsourcing life-and-death decisions to computer programs controlling both aerial and ground-based robots. Questions yet to be answered are complex and varied: How do you get a robot to tell an insurgent from an innocent? Can you program the Laws of War and the Rules of Engagement into a robot? Can you imbue a robot with his country’s culture?

If something goes wrong, resulting in the death of civilians, who will be held responsible? The robot’s manufacturer? The designers? Software programmers? The commanding officer in whose unit the robot operates? The U.S. president who gives the green light?

A number of scientists alarmed by such unanswered questions last September formed a group, the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, that is pressing for an international debate on the regulation and control of armed military robots. The prospect of that happening looks remote.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters)

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

The numbers tell the story of a criminal justice system blighted by racial disparities in drug law enforcement: African-Americans make up around 12 percent of the U.S. population, account for 33.6 percent of drug arrests and 37 percent of state prison inmates serving time for drug offenses.

The figures come from Human Rights Watch, a New York-based watchdog which complains in its 2011 report about “overwhelming racial disparities” in drug incarcerations despite the fact that blacks and whites engage in drug offenses at equivalent rates. The Sentencing Project, an advocacy group which has tracked disparities in the criminal justice system for the past 25 years, says the black-white gap cannot be explained by disproportionate criminal behavior.

While African-Americans are the minority most affected by racial disparities, they are not the only one, according to Human Rights Watch: “Black non-Hispanic males are incarcerated at a rate more than six times that of white non-Hispanic males and 2.6 times that of Hispanic males. One in 10 black males aged 25-29 were in prison or jail in 2009; for Hispanic males the figure was 1 in 25; for white males only 1 in 64.”

Such statistics have been studied for years by academics, lawyers, and law enforcement experts but public debate has been subdued. This is changing in the wake of sharply critical reports timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s declaration of the war on drugs in June. There is growing recognition that the war has been a costly mistake.

But winding it down would require fresh thinking at all levels of the government and the criminal justice establishment and there is little evidence of that from the man who, in January 2004, declared that “the war on drugs has been an utter failure. We need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws … we need to rethink how we’re operating in the drug war. Currently, we are not doing a good job.” That was then-state Senator Barack Obama, no stranger to drugs in his youth.

In his memoir, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance”, he wrote that when he felt down “pot had helped, and booze, maybe a little blow (cocaine) when you could afford it.” Good thing he wasn’t caught – many of the young black men arrested for drug offenses and thus getting a criminal record find it virtually impossible to get a job.

Their plight is documented in a detailed examination of racial inequality in the American criminal justice system, a book titled “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness“, by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights lawyer. She argues that the crackdown on drug use initiated by Nixon revived old racial biases and are a new form of segregation.

“Once you are labeled a felon,” she writes, “the old forms of discrimination – employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights … than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.”

THE WORLD’S LEADING JAILER

This is a harsh judgment and food for a debate which might hasten a long overdue review of the criminal justice system and an investigation into why the United States is the world’s leading jailer. It has 5 percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of the world’s prisoners and an incarceration rate five times as high as the rest of the world.

There will be no quick answer, and no quick exit strategy from the drug war. Legislation is pending – the National Criminal Justice Commission Act – for the establishment of a blue-ribbon commission to review the criminal justice system and recommend reforms within 18 months.

The bill is sponsored by Lindsay Graham, a Republican Senator from South Carolina, and Jim Webb, a Democratic Senator from Virginia, and won the backing in June of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, an organization that represents cities with a population of 30,000 or more. The mayors noted the need to reduce incarceration, reform drug policies and eliminate racial disparities.

How likely is this to happen? There is reason for pessimism. Since Obama took office, the rhetoric on drugs and incarceration has changed. The president’s drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, said early in his tenure he would drop the phrase “the war on drugs” and observed that “we cannot arrest ourselves of this problem.”

The new language did not translate into deeds. The Obama administration’s 2011 drug control budget includes a 13 percent increase in anti-drug spending for the Pentagon and an 18 percent increase in the drug control funds for the Bureau of Prisons.

The biggest obstacles for change are entrenched interests. By some estimates, getting the prison population back to where it was (in terms of percentage of the overall population) before the drug war began would cost the jobs of at least a million people working for the criminal justice system. Not to forget the damage reduced incarceration would do to the flourishing private prison industry.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters)