Blog Archive » 2007 » March

Plato first posed the question in describing his notion of The Republic: who will ensure that those responsible for security do not abuse their power? Who will police the police? The question survives across the millennia, evidence of the corrupting influence of power.

I thought of this old Political Theory maxim again last week as the news broke about the firing of U.S. attorneys and the various explanations offered by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. One of the excuses was that similar firings occurred during the Clinton Administration, too. That's not so much an excuse as simply further proof of Plato's wisdom.

It's been a long and bitter winter for people in power in Washington. The vice president's chief of staff now convicted of perjury; generals responsible for Walter Reed Army Medical Center fired over the scandalous conditions there; the wilful exposure of CIA Agent Valerie Plame; now, calls for Attorney General Gonzales to resign over the politically-motivated firings of Justice Department lawyers.

Every political administration has its woes, its critics, its bad judgments and ethical scandals. Our work in education is not about taking political sides, but rather, trying to find the right lessons to teach in the face of a great deal of bad behavior among people who really should know better. We say that we are preparing the future generations of citizen leaders — the future U.S. Attorneys, the intelligence agents and staff to Congressional committees, perhaps the elected officials and their senior counsel, the leaders of public interest groups, health professionals and the managers of governmental agencies responsible for delivering social services.

To ask what these future leaders might be learning from today's scandals seems too simplistic. More pointedly, what can we do in education to improve the ethical performance of public officials in the future? Your ideas are welcome — I will return to this topic in some of my next blogs. Please share your thoughts by clicking on the envelope below or send me a message at president@trinitydc.edu

For more on the firing of the federal prosecutors see the New York Times coverage and The Washington Post.

See gonzales, prosecutor, Justice Department

Yesterday, Friday, March 9 may well go down as a very bleak day in D.C. history. Yesterday, two judges made a decision that has the potential to expose thousands of local lives to grave danger. Those two judges — Laurence H. Silberman and Thomas B. Griffith — were the majority on a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that heard the appeal in a case brought by six D.C. residents who sought to overturn the District of Columbia's ban on the private possession of handguns. D.C.'s law is one of the strictest in the nation.

The plaintiffs had legal assistance and support from the Cato Institute and the National Rifle Association.

The lower court — the U.S. District Court — threw the case out. The plaintiffs appealed, and the Appeals Court agreed with them that the D.C. ban on handguns — a law in effect since 1976 — violates the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. One judge on the three-judge panel of the Appeals Court, Karen LeCraft Henderson, dissented from the majority opinion.

D.C. will appeal this ruling, so the law remains in effect until that appeal is heard at the U.S. Supreme Court, which may take years.

People who like the idea of citizens possessing guns to "defend" themselves are hailing this as a great victory for "civil rights." This kind of claim reminds me of nothing so much as a Lewis Carroll tale in which words lose their meaning, and everything through the looking glass becomes the opposite of what the words are supposed to mean.

There's no conceivable justice or freedom in a society where everyone lives as an armed combatant, ready to shoot at will whomever may appear to be a threat. cf. Baghdad 2007. Read Cormac McCarthy's The Road for an allegory of a society that has devolved into such a state of fear and lawlessness.

Some people who are hailing this decision are claiming that the D.C. law was ineffective, that gun violence has continued all these years in the city, that police responses are too slow, that criminals know how to get guns anyway so the ban just prevents "lawful" people from protecting themselves. My gun will make me safe by giving me the power to shoot people who pose a threat to me, so the reasoning seems to go.

What a great failure of moral reasoning! What hard evidence of the breakdown in confidence in governmental institutions whose essential first task is to protect the social order! When a society gets to a point where people are using the language of liberty to defend the impulse to do violence to another person, under the guise of self-protection, we have reached a very low state, indeed. In the name of my freedom, I will build my bunker against the world.

Our life's work at Trinity is dedicated to the idea that we can improve the conditions of human society through cultivation of the intellect through education, that we can forge just solutions to human problems through the thoughtful, moral application of knowledge. The continuing prevalence of crime, particularly in the most impoverished neighborhoods in the nation's capital, is surely a devastating human problem in the richest nation the world has ever known. But arming the citizens of the city against each other is most certainly a quick path to even more destruction.

To say that the response to the problem of violence must be even more violence is sheer madness.

Read Parker v. District of Columbia

See gun control

Haven't we seen this movie before? Something bad happens involving agents of the Administration in power. High ranking staffers then try to cover up the malfeasance, adding to the problem by lying under oath, which is perjury. A special prosecutor gathers evidence, organizes a grand jury, secures indictments, and wins the grim verdict: guilty.

Yes. We've seen this movie over and over again.

Today the name of the convicted perjurer is Scooter Libby, former chief of staff to the vice president of the United States. Mr. Libby apparently didn't see the movie starring characters like H.R. Haldeman, John Mitchell, John Erlichman — high ranking staffers to President Richard Nixon starring in a movie called Watergate. Didn't he see the movie about the tawdry impeachment trial of a President named Clinton who lied about having an affair with an intern? How many versions of the same ancient story can be told?

The trial and conviction is never about the "third rate burglary" or the cheap sex or any of the other scandalous acts that start the film rolling. No, the trial is almost always about the lie — the cover-up, the perjury, the intense effort to hide the truth.

What did Scooter Libby lie about? He denied and made false statements about how and what he knew about a leak of a CIA agent's identity, Valerie Plame. The agent happened to be the wife of Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who became a critic of the Iraq war at a very early time. The accusation was that someone in the Bush Administration leaked Ms. Plame's identity in retaliation for her husband's criticism fo the war, and Mr. Libby lied to cover-up the source of the leak, or perhaps to cover-up his own role in the leak. Leaking a CIA agent's identity is a crime. Mr. Libby, however, was not convicted of that crime, but rather, of lying about facts related to the leak.

Lies always come back, like boomerangs. Rather than spending his latter years writing memoirs of his public service, now it seems that Scooter Libby might possible spend some portion of his years in prison. All for lying about what happened.

Of course, the tragedy of Scooter Libby has many more implications — the question of whether he truly took the hit for his boss, the quagmire of Iraq, the unraveling of the current Administration as the next election looms. Pundits and advocates and critics and defenders will deconstruct and reconstruct their arguments and theories for years, conflating Scootergate and Watergate and so many other misadventures of the powerful.

But my interest is less about the politics and more about the ethics: are remakes of old movies inevitable?

At Trinity, we value our Honor System as a method to teach students about the fundamental values of integrity and honor in the community. We need this somewhat old-fashioned methodology because we live in a culture that accepts deception as normal, that assumes deceit in so many transactions, that even sometimes rewards clever liars with celebrity status. How can we teach about honor when the liar is often exalted?

Sometimes, it takes a bad headline.

Guilty.

Sometimes, the best lesson about Truth is found in the consequences of lies.

See libby, watergate