Wednesday, August 20, 2008
The Citizen and the Passport
bq.All persons born . . . in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States. . . .
— Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
August 2008 was a banner month for passports. They played a significant role in world events that garnered them rare publicity. Two of the events demonstrated how easy a government can make it to get passports and one demonstrated how difficult it can be.
In August, Russia and Georgia got into an argument over whether Abkhazia and South Ossetia should be allowed to leave Georgia and become independent or should remain part of Georgia. For the last several years Russia has been issuing passports to residents of South Ossetia, thus bestowing Russian citizenship on the holders. Thus, when invading South Ossetia, Russia was simply going to the aid of its citizens, albeit many of them Russian-come-lately. (If George Bush were clever he would have issued passports to Iraqis prior to invading their country and then announced he was simply acting to protect United States citizens.)
China, too, issued passports in furtherance of national objectives. In November 2007 an associated press release described the success of a young girl gymnast, He Kexin. He was one of the stars at China’s Cities Games in November 2007. Xinhua, the Chinese Government’s news agency reported on her success in those games and said she was 13 years of age. Olympic rules require that for a gymnast to compete in Olympic games the gymnast must attain age 16 in the year in which the games take place. For He to leap over the years that separate 13 from 16 in a mere 9 months was something that not even a gymnast as accomplished as she could hope to accomplish. It was accomplished instead by issuing a passport. In 9 months He aged 3 years and her team became the first Chinese women’s team to win a gold medal in gymnastics. Passports can, of course, be withheld in furtherance of a country’s foreign policy, as the United States showed.
A law that goes into effect next year requires anyone crossing between the United States and Canada or Mexico to present a passport instead of a birth certificate or driver’s license. As a result the thousands who cross borders daily because of employment must now obtain passports. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that many United States citizens who were born in South Texas are having difficulty obtaining passports.
Ordinarily a passport can be obtained by furnishing the issuing authority a certified copy of a birth certificate, acceptable identification and the appropriate fee. Whereas Russia made it easy for people in South Ossetia to get passports, the State Department has made it difficult for people in South Texas to get theirs. A birth certificate is not always accepted because the State Department has learned that some people in South Texas have fake birth certificates. Those people were delivered by mid-wives and some of the mid-wives were convicted of forging birth certificates for children born not in South Texas but in Mexico. The forgeries may have affected as many as 15,000 people. Although people in South Texas can vote, become border-patrol agents or president of the United States, they may not obtain passports without additional proof that they were born in the U.S.A. Here are some of the things these presumptively non-citizens can do to satisfy the State Department. They can obtain affidavits or testimony from the mid-wives who delivered them, assuming the midwives can be found and can remember whom they delivered dozens of years after the birth. They can produce newspaper announcements of their births or they can produce hospital records going back dozens of years to show they were treated in the hospital if, indeed, they were. Juan Aranda is someone who has been unable to get a passport and here is what he has done.
Juan submitted all the required documentation and when he was turned down sent in school records going back 38 years showing that his kindergarten records recited that his birthplace was Weslaco, Texas. He sent in a picture of his kindergarten class that included him. He sent in a baptismal certificate with a church seal reciting he was born in that town. He explained that pre-natal medical history was unavailable because his mother was too poor to have pre-natal care. The State Department told Mr. Aranda that he hadn’t “fully complied with the request for additional information” and he should start the process to become a naturalized citizen. Instead, Mr. Aranda hired a lawyer. If his lawyer is successful it may soon be as easy for an American citizen to get an American passport as it is for a Georgian citizen to get a Russian passport. Mr. Aranda’s success would be remembered as another example of the courts being invoked to protect the citizens of the United States from the administration of George W. Bush.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Bush, Babes and Human Rights
I hate [slavery] because it deprives the republican example of its just influence in the world-enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites-causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity.
— Abraham Lincoln, 1854 speech at Peoria, Illinois
It was a dreadful coincidence and no one felt sorrier for George Bush than I. He made a perfectly wonderful speech in Thailand and was done in by the timing. It made him sound the perfect fool. That is because he made the speech the same day that the military tribunal in Guantánamo rendered its verdict in the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan.
When Mr. Bush was in Thailand he thought it would be a good time to criticize China’s human rights record, which everyone agrees is terrible. The problem is that the Hamdan verdict reminded everyone that both China and Mr. Bush who pride themselves on their respect for human rights have nothing to be proud of.
In Guantánamo, a military tribunal convicted Osama bin Laden’s driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, of providing material support for terrorism. Mr. Hamdan is the first person in Guantánamo to be tried by the military commissions that were created in 2006. Mr. Hamdan was convicted on a Wednesday and the prosecution asked for a life sentence. On Thursday the commission sentenced him to 5 ½ years in prison with credit for the 61 months he has already spent in prison. Within 5 months he will have served his sentence. Unfortunately, that is the end of the good news for Mr. Hamdan unless something unexpected happens. That’s because at the end of the 5 months he will still be an unlawful combatant and that means Mr. Bush can keep him in prison as long as he wants or until the war that Mr. Bush has declared is declared over by Mr. Bush, whichever happens first
Although the trial does not by itself, do anything to hasten Mr. Hamdan’s release, the verdict to the contrary notwithstanding, it serves one useful purpose from Mr. Bush’s, if not Mr. Hamdan’s perspective. It enables the administration and its supporters to point out that, because the trial has been conducted, human rights are being observed and the military commissions are working in a way that proves the United States is a country that follows the rule of law even though it doesn’t. (The people who believe that, of course, are the ones who invented this new justice system. The rest of the world is less credulous.)
As I said at the outset, the timing of the verdict was awful. That did not inhibit the national orator. On the same day Mr. Haman’s sentence was imposed Mr. Bush gave a speech and that was where the awkwardness came in. The speech was given by Mr. Bush during a stop-over in Thailand on his way to the Olympics in China.
Mr. Bush relished the opportunity to be the first U.S. president to attend an Olympic ceremony outside the U.S. In part he viewed it as a reward for the tough time he has had during the last 8 years. The opportunity came, appropriately enough, during the twilight of his perpetually dark administration. And there could hardly be a better reward for a job poorly done, than to attend the games as the leader of the entire free world (except for Guantánamo.)
It was clearly a fun time. He took his wife and one of his daughters. There were lots of good parties including a dinner for 300 people to which he and his father and other important people were invited. He got to play a little beach volley ball with one of the very pretty bikini-clad beach volley ball women, tap one on the back and have his picture taken with her with their arms around each other, he wearing a cocky baseball cap and looking every bit the frat boy he was in college and still is. But even though this was a fun trip he was mindful of his responsibilities as leader of the free world and took advantage of the trip to make a verbal show of being committed to human rights. And that is why he made a really good speech in Thailand.
In that speech he expressed “deep concerns” about restrictions on faith and free speech in China. He expressed concern about the detention of dissidents. The detained dissidents are not, of course, the detainees at Guantánamo. Those people are not called dissidents. They are called unlawful combatants. They have something in common with dissidents, however. Both dissidents and unlawful combatants are kept in jail until the country that is holding them decides, in its sole discretion, when they can be released. Nonetheless, all in all it was a good speech and Mr. Bush had a very good time in China.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
The Games and The Promises
I stood there in the whirling summer,
My hand capped on a withered heart,
And thought of China and of Greece. . . .
— Richard Eberhart, The Groundhog
Now that the Olympic games have begun, it is time to compare promise with performance.
China’s first attempt in recent memory to host the Olympic summer games was in 1993. At that time its efforts to be selected were Herculean. The visit by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to evaluate Beijing’s bid took place in March 1993 when smog hangs heavily over the city. The authorities knew that if the committee got wind of the smog it would never select Beijing as a site for the summer games. To reduce coal smoke in the atmosphere the government cut off all heat to large areas of Beijing.
Taxi drivers and peddlers with cars were advised to take a vacation so that the IOC members would not be slowed by traffic or offended by seeing people munching on food purchased from street vendors. Three hundred thirty thousand school children were enlisted to clean traffic signs. All buses and 30,000 taxicabs were required to post window-stickers supporting the city’s Olympic bid. The government reduced its surveillance of foreign reporters. And that was not all.
China modeled itself after the state of Utah that 2 years earlier had lost out to Nagano, Japan for the 1998 winter games, Saddened by its loss to Nagano, but determined to do better when bidding for the 2002 games, Utah began wooing African IOC members by offering them and members of their families tuition and athletic training assistance in what some perceived as an attempt to get their votes when the venue for the 2002 games was determined. (The effort was enhanced when 5 years later the Salt Lake City bidding committee paid some individuals $500,000 in scholarships, 6 of the recipients being relatives of IOC members.) Recognizing what a good idea Utah had, the Chinese followed suit. They presented the IOC committee with a pair of cloisonné vases estimated to have a value of about $40,000. In addition, they gave the new Olympic museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, a terra cotta soldier from Xian for which China had earlier reportedly declined a $100 million offer. China’s bid for the games did not succeed in 1993, but the IOC has a long memory and that may explain in part why Beijing is hosting the 2008 games.
When Beijing was awarded the games some, but not all, thought it would enhance human rights in China. In an interview with Ray Suarez on the News Hour shortly after the games were awarded, Sally Jenkins, a sports columnist for the Washington Post, was asked whether awarding the games would affect China’s human rights policy. She said there was no evidence to support that. She was right. Two weeks before the games were to start, Liu Shaokun was sentenced to serve a year of “re-education through labor” because he posted pictures on the web of schools that had collapsed during the recent earthquake. He was charged with “disseminating rumours and destroying social order.” Ye Guozhu was convicted in 2004 of “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble” for trying to organize a group against forced evictions without just compensation in order to make way for construction in preparation for the games. His sentence served, his release was delayed until after the Olymics thus preventing him from being interviewed by visiting reporters. Smog, traffic and press freedom have fared no better than human rights.
Smog covered the Beijing during much of July and early August. In 2007 authorities said driving restrictions would not be needed to solve the pollution and congestion problems. July 21 marked the first workday in which “car restrictions”: were imposed on Beijing’s residents.
The press, like driving, were restricted, contrary to earlier assurances that the press, like cars, would be able to operate freely. In 2001, Wang Wei, Secretary General of the Beijing Olympic Games Committee, told the IOC that the international press would have “complete freedom to report when they come to China.” “Echoing those comments”: last month, Jacques Rogge, the International Olympic Committee president and Cheer Leader In Chief “told Agence France-Presse”: “For the first time, foreign media will be able to report freely and publish their work freely in China.” On July 31 it was reported that the IOC had failed to insist on unfettered press access to the Internet. On August 2 Kevan Gosper, press commission chief of the IOC said somewhat enigmatically: “We believe we are moving to a point where you will be moving toward a point where you can report in an unfettered way.”
The games have begun, the smog’s in the heavens, the cars clog the roads, activists and the Internet are imprisoned and all’s right with the world. As Mr. Rogge said on August 2: “Come the 9th of August the magic of the games and the flawless organization will take over.”