From time to time I plan to post mini-reviews of blogs I like. I like a number of the ones you see linked to all over the place, but there are also some less well-known, quirky and human ones that appeal to me. One of these, although far from obscure, is called Sneaking Suspicions. I like it for several reasons. The author is a practicing administrative lawyer who lives in a small town, Rehoboth Delaware. I teach federal administrative law, and it’s fun to see someone talking in a level-headed way about applying the stuff I teach to practical contexts. That he does state admin law makes little difference to the fundamental principles. Plus, Rehoboth was where we went to the beach when I was a kid. I didn’t (and don’t) particularly love going to the beach—in some ways Miami is wasted on me—but I it’s fun to have a tie to the place being talked about. Perhaps what I like best, though, is the reasonableness of it all; Fritz Schranck, the author, reads the advance sheets (recent court decisions), and makes wry and sensible comments on the foibles of the often somewhat unreasonable litigants.
And then, there’s the occasional off-the-wall item. As Washingtonians, our taste of Delaware was limited to the coast. Who knew what delights were hidden inland? For example, my kids were very impressed when I showed them the picture of the Marshmallow Farm.
I thought for sure the blogosphere would jump all over this, but if so I missed it. The other day the New York Times ran an article about General Wesley Clark by Katharine Q. Seelye entitled Weighing his Run, General Was Encouraged and Praised by Clintons. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that the source here is not the most reliable one. This is after all the same Katharine Seelye who so memorably and unprofessionally slanted her coverage of the last Presidential election. (Want examples to substantiate this serious charge? OK. Look here, here, and here.) Nevertheless, this was an eyebrow-raiser:
To Clark’s humiliation, Clinton’s Pentagon relieved him of his command. And Clinton had signed off on the plan, according to several published accounts, apparently unaware that he was being deceived by Clark’s detractors.
…
The end came unceremoniously. It was July 1999, shortly after Clark had led the successful air war against Serbia. Clark was forced to retire early by top people at the Pentagon who, according to several accounts, tricked Clinton.
This is pretty amazing stuff: top military or civilian officials deceiving or tricking the President. Is this common knowledge? Substantiated? Did heads roll? If not, why not?
Of course, it makes a major difference if it was the civilians or the military.
If it was the civilian appointees, it is a sign that things were more rotten in the bowels of the Clinton administration that I’d suspected, that the mendacity of some officials involved in the Hilarycare plan was equaled elsewhere. At this point, that would be more of a historical curiosity than anything else. If, on the other hand, the deceivers wore uniforms, that would be a big deal.
Our top military officers now play political roles. General Clark’s own experiences in Kosovo illustrate this, but the real proconsuls are the “CINCs”—the five regionally oriented Unified Commands (Central Command, Southern Command, Pacific Command, European Command, and Joint Forces Command). As General James T. Scott put it, CINCs “find themselves more and more relied upon to exercise ‘operational diplomacy’ because of the resources the CINC’s possess”. That doesn’t mean we want them feeling they can lie like politicians.
To avoid being misunderstood here, I suppose I should say a thing or two about my utterly unscientific view of the officer corps. I grew up in a time and place in which the military was not popular. The Vietnam war was the issue of the day, and the military was stereotyped by Gen. Curtis LeMay and Lt. William Calley. That is not my view today. I’ve met a number of serving and former officers, and been very, very impressed by the higher-ranking ones and some but not all of the more junior officers. The Army Captains and down I’ve met are a pretty mixed bag, but by the time you get to Lt. Colonels, or Navy Captains, they tend to be pretty serious people, and even more so when they have stars on their shoulders. All the more reason why I’d imagine it was the politicals, and be surprised and disappointed to find Admirals and Generals lying to the President in this way, even to one they may not have liked much.
Rose Burawoy was born in Bialystock, then a thriving metropolis with a substantial Jewish population. She told me once -- exactly once, as she never mentioned it again -- that she remembered 'the Cossacks' running through and killing people in a pogrom when she was a child. She described it as something that had happened to other people, perhaps not far away, not as an eyewitness. (And, indeed, there was a pogrom in Bialystock in 1903, more killings in the area in 1920, and a pattern of killings and other anti-Semitic incidents in the 1930s ). In the retelling at least, my grandmother seems to have been as bothered by what she saw as provincialism, and was happy to escape to the bright lights of Berlin. Her life, and marriages, would later take her to Paris, and London, where she lived when World War II began, and finally to New York, where I think she was happy to be.
This geography explains something my grandmother once said that I find myself thinking of fairly often these days. I vividly recall my grandmother -- alone in the family -- objecting when I first said I wanted to become a lawyer. Don't do that, she said. Why not be a doctor? Or a businessman, or anything else that involves a portable skill. A lawyer can only work in one country, and you can't take your skill with you if you have to leave. 'What's wrong with that?' I asked, 'I like it here.' And my grandmother, who usually treated me like a child, and who rarely said anything terribly grave about anything, much less the war -- tending to limit her political commentary to how bad it was that old people had to worry about being mugged by the hooligans on the Manhattan streets, and how /insert-conservative-politician/ was good for the Jews because he was strong on defense -- gave me a knowing, wise, slightly sad, very grownup look, that said she knew I, the American grandson, was not going to understand, and said, 'When the Nazis come to America, what will you do then?'.
I laughed, of course. The Nazis were not going to take over America. And she said, quite seriously, 'That's what we said in Germany. Germany was the freest more democratic country in the world before Hitler. You'll see.'
I still don't think the Nazis are coming. But my grandmother's question is an galling reminder that in politics, like in the securities markets, past performance is no guarantee of future results. The people who founded this country called it a great experiment. As a citizen, a lawyer, and especially as a law professor, I have the luxury to think about the rules we use to govern ourselves and each other. Periods of stress do not bring out the best in most people, and current times provide ample evidence of that.
In the past two years, our government has embarked on a course of conduct, and legal argument attempting to justify that conduct, that I find simply horrifying. According to the current Administration, our government can:
When a government claims the power to grab anyone off the street and lock them up indefinitely without trial, watch out.
I still think my grandmother was wrong about the Nazis taking over in America. But I'm reluctantly coming around to believing that she was right about my complacency. Our liberty is not now something we can take for granted. While we face somewhat amorphous threats from abroad -- threats I am confident we can endure and overcome -- we face increasingly concrete threats to our liberty at home. If we do not face the Gestapo, we nonetheless face a security apparatus that has claimed the right to methods that until recently we would have called Gestapo tactics. I am not predicting a pogrom, and solitary confinement, however unpleasant is not the Final Solution.
But I do not feel safer, nor even all that safe, when anyone -- no matter how well-intentioned -- claims that they can put me in a Navy brig, incommunicado, indefinitely, without charges or trial, just because they can satisfy themselves -- and no one else -- that I deserve it.
