Welcome to my archives. This is a long list of most of the commentaries and longer articles I have written since 1989; the hundreds of articles I wrote for the New York Times from 1980-1988 can be found via the SELECTED MEDIA OUTLETS box. They are sorted by date, with the most recent posts first. If you want to find something specific, I would encourage you to use the search feature in the sidebar. It is powered by Google. It is fast and accurate.
A Most Promising Start For Obama
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
Like a great many other Americans at this singular moment in history, I have rarely been so alarmed about the state of the world — and have never been so hopeful about the promise of a new president.
Standing amid hundreds of thousands of celebrants between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument at the "We Are One" concert on Sunday, and watching Barack Obama’s inaugural address two days later, my family and I felt the thrill that raised so many spirits. Despite the dark economic times, the wars, the terrorist threat, the health care mess, the impossibility of quickly surmounting any of these crises — despite even the overarching fear that America’s best days may be behind us — hope was ascendant.
No human being could possibly meet the soaring expectations that electrified those inaugural crowds. But our new president may have what it takes to uplift the country as much as any president could.
I worried in a pre-election column that Obama’s down-the-line liberal voting record and associations with some extremists did not give a centrist like me much confidence that he would "resist pressure from Democratic interest groups, ideologues, and congressional leaders to steer hard to the left."
But since then he has done much to fulfill the hope expressed in that same column that he might prove to be "the pragmatic, consensus-building, inspirational Obama who has been on display during the general election campaign."
He has chosen a talented, experienced, pragmatic team of national security and economic advisers who seem more focused on fixing what’s broken than on grinding ideological axes.
His retention of Bush Defense Secretary Robert Gates is one of several signs that he "does not want to be the guy who lost Iraq when it is close to being won," as Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told The New York Times.
Obama’s Dangerous Detainees
by Stuart Taylor, Jr
News reports suggest that the Obama transition team may be pushing for an approach that could mean releasing within a year as many as 100 (or perhaps even more) Guantanamo detainees who appear to be dangerous but may not be prosecutable for any crimes.
In particular, a New York Times front-pager reported on January 13 that sources "said the incoming administration appeared to have rejected a proposal to seek a new law authorizing indefinite detention inside the United States" of any of the approximately 250 Guantanamo detainees.
This seems to imply that Obama will either continue to rely on Bush’s legal arguments for continued detention without charges — arguments that many Obama supporters have assailed — or yield to the demands of left-leaning human-rights groups that he release any and all Guantanamo detainees who cannot be criminally prosecuted.
But the president-elect said on January 11, on ABC’s This Week , that he wants "a process that adheres to [the] rule of law [but] doesn’t result in releasing people who are intent on blowing us up." He also said that "many" detainees who "may be very dangerous" present special problems because "some of the evidence against them may be tainted even though it’s true." And Eric Holder testified on Thursday, during the Senate confirmation hearing on his nomination to be attorney general, that "I don’t think . . . we can release" people known to be dangerous.
What kind of process does Obama have in mind? If seeking a new detention law has been ruled out — a scoop that The Times attributed somewhat shakily to "people who have conferred with transition officials" — Obama would have only two options for dealing with the 100 or so apparently-dangerous-but-perhaps-not-prosecutable detainees.
Inconvenient Facts And Detainee Abuse
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
"It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong."
This was perhaps the most chillingly outrageous, widely quoted statement by a government official to be aired by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., at hearings last summer and in the committee’s December 11 report on abuse of detainees by U.S. forces.
But the quoted official, CIA lawyer Jonathan Fredman, told the committee on November 18 that he had made no such statement. In fact, Fredman added in a heretofore confidential, five-page memo, he had stressed at the 2002 meeting with interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility described in the Levin committee’s report, "Interrogation practices and legal guidance must not be based upon anyone’s subjective perception" (emphasis added) but rather upon "definitive and binding legal analysis."
The overall effect of selective reporting by many critics has been to paint honorable former and current officials as a bunch of sadistic war criminals.
Remarkably, the 18-page report issued by the committee (headed "Executive Summary") does not mention Fredman’s vehement — and, in my view, quite plausible — denial of the horrifying words attributed to him in a document of debatable reliability that the report, and Levin, have treated as established fact.
Obama’s Cheney Dilemma
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
Dick Cheney, who will step down as vice president on Jan. 20, has been widely portrayed as a creature of the dark side, a monstrous figure who trampled on the Constitution to wage war against all foes, real and imagined. Barack Obama was elected partly to cleanse the temple of the Bush-Cheney stain, and in his campaign speeches he promised to reverse Cheney’s efforts to seize power for the White House in the war on terror.It may not be so simple. At a retirement ceremony recently for a top-lev
Dick Cheney, who will step down as vice president on Jan. 20, has been widely portrayed as a creature of the dark side, a monstrous figure who trampled on the Constitution to wage war against all foes, real and imagined. Barack Obama was elected partly to cleanse the temple of the Bush-Cheney stain, and in his campaign speeches he promised to reverse Cheney’s efforts to seize power for the White House in the war on terror.
It may not be so simple. At a retirement ceremony recently for a top-level intelligence official, the senior spooks in the room gave each other high-fives. They were celebrating the fact that terrorists have not attacked the United States since 9/11. In the view of many intelligence professionals, the get-tough measures encouraged or permitted by George W. Bush’s administration-including "waterboarding" self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed-kept America safe. Cheney himself has been underscoring the point in a round of farewell interviews. "If I had advice to give it would be, before you start to implement your campaign rhetoric, you need to sit down and find out precisely what it is we did and how we did it, because it is going to be vital to keeping the nation safe and secure in the years ahead," he told CBS Radio.
Too Much Law Guarantees Unfairness
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
It’s no secret that America’s public schools, health care system, and lawsuit industry — among other institutions — are broken. After decades of alarming reports and reform efforts, they still cost far more, and with worse results, than those of almost all other developed countries. And President-elect Obama’s hope of changing things dramatically for the better faces an uphill battle.
A big part of the reason, New York City lawyer-author-civic leader Philip Howard writes in a forthcoming book, Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans From Too Much Law, is that our institutions and their leaders are paralyzed by tangles of legal rules and diverted "from doing what we think is right" by fear of being unfairly hauled into court.
"We will never fix our schools, or make health care affordable, or re-energize democracy, or revive the can-do spirit that made America great," Howard writes, "unless American law is rebuilt to protect freedom in our daily choices." By this he means freeing ourselves from "the confusion of good judgment with legal proof."
"Washington is paralyzed," writes Philip Howard, by "decades of accumulated law, beyond the influence of anyone except special interests."
Reprising the themes of Howard’s best-selling Death of Common Sense in 1995, Life Without Lawyers also proposes some far-reaching remedies, designed in part to affirmatively define and protect the freedom of people in positions of authority to fulfill their responsibilities in their own way. To be published on January 12, its 191 pages are crammed with telling cases, anecdotes, and data. It brims with insights into how "rights" that were created to prevent "unfairness by those in authority" are now "guaranteeing unfairness to the common good."
Opening Argument – New Haven’s Injustice Shouldn’t Disappear
by Stuart Taylor, Jr
Frank Ricci, a firefighter in New Haven, Conn., worked hard, played by the rules, and earned a promotion to fire lieutenant. But the city denied him the promotion because he is not black. Ricci sued, along with 16 other whites and one Hispanic firefighter. After a 7-6, near-party-line vote by a federal Appeals Court to dismiss the lawsuit, the plaintiffs petitioned for Supreme Court review.
If the Court grants the petition, the now-obscure case will vault to the top of the nation’s racial policy agenda, presenting a tough issue not only for the justices but also for President-elect Obama. He could come under great pressure to take a position for or against the blessing conferred by eight liberal lower-court judges on what many voters — and, I would guess, five justices — would see as a raw racial quota.
To be sure, it is far from clear that the Court will take the case, one of dozens scheduled to come before its confidential conference on December 12. Although a dissent by six conservative and moderate Appeals Court judges urged Supreme Court review, the case does not involve the kind of clear split among lower courts that only the high court can resolve. So it may disappear without a trace, with no occasion for Obama or his Justice Department to take a position.
Balancing Security and Liberty
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
President-elect Obama’s announcement of his (mostly) stellar national security team coincides with the release this week of a bipartisan commission report with this chilling assessment of the most important challenge that team faces: "Without greater urgency and decisive action by the world community, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013."
Perhaps the commission, former Defense Secretary William Perry, and other experts who have issued similarly dramatic warnings are crying wolf. Perhaps the likelihood of any terrorist group getting a nuclear bomb is "vanishingly small," as Ohio State political science professor John Mueller has forcefully argued. Or perhaps it’s closer to 30 percent over the next 10 years, as Matthew Bunn of Harvard’s Kennedy School estimated last month in "Securing the Bomb 2008."
Our way of life may well depend on catching nuclear or biological terrorists before they can strike.
Whatever the odds, if terrorists ever smuggle a crude, Hiroshima-sized nuke into, say, Manhattan, the immediate death toll could exceed 500,000. And the ensuing panic could threaten our constitutional system, spur evacuations of major cities, kill international trade, bring the worst economic depression in history, and perhaps usher in a new dark age worldwide.
This prospect puts into perspective the efforts of many human-rights activists, Obama supporters, and journalists to weaken essentially all of the government’s most important tools for disabling terrorists before they can strike.
Judicial Excess On The Left
by Stuart Taylor, Jr
How would soon-to-be-President Obama like it if the courts were to order the Navy — his Navy — to cripple its training in Southern California coastal waters in the use of sonar to detect enemy submarines, and thereby perhaps endanger the Pacific Fleet?
That’s what four Democratic-appointed federal judges in California and two liberal Supreme Court justices voted to do in a recent case, to avoid any possibility of harming marine mammals, not one of which has suffered a documented injury in 40 years of sonar training off the California coast.
And that’s the sort of thing that liberal groups want done by the judges that President-elect Obama will soon be appointing.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court overturned on November 12, in Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the major restrictions on sonar training that the four lower-court judges had ordered. The majority held that with the nation embroiled in two wars, "the Navy’s interest in effective, realistic training of its sailors" far outweighed the speculative harm that the training might do to the plaintiffs’ interest in marine mammals.
"For the plaintiffs, the most serious possible injury would be harm to an unknown number of the marine mammals that they study and observe," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for himself and the four other more-conservative justices. "In contrast, forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained antisubmarine force jeopardizes the safety of the fleet."
Obama’s 250 Tough Calls
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
What should Barack Obama do with the 250 men who are still locked up in the Guantánamo Bay prison camp? Of the many problems the new president will face, this is one of the most difficult, and one he must get right. Along with it, he must answer equally tough questions about how his administration will deal with suspected terrorists in the future: Where will they be held and what legal rights will they have? Which interrogation methods will President Obama allow-and which will he forbid?He ma
What should Barack Obama do with the 250 men who are still locked up in the Guantánamo Bay prison camp? Of the many problems the new president will face, this is one of the most difficult, and one he must get right. Along with it, he must answer equally tough questions about how his administration will deal with suspected terrorists in the future: Where will they be held and what legal rights will they have? Which interrogation methods will President Obama allow-and which will he forbid?
He made some of the answers to these questions clear in his campaign promises, and he would be wise to announce his intentions on or before Inauguration Day. Obama should and probably will renounce all brutal interrogation methods, not just those that the Bush administration defines as torture. He should and probably will discontinue or overhaul the widely derided and largely failed system of "military commissions" that President Bush created in 2001 to try suspected terrorists for war crimes. And he should and probably will announce a detailed plan to close Guantánamo, possibly within a year.
In my view, that plan should include promptly appointing a bipartisan,…
Which Obama Would America Get?
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
When John McCain and many other Republicans ask, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" there is an implication that maybe he is somehow sinister or extremist.
I don’t believe that. But I do think that there are two very different Obamas. Both are extraordinarily intelligent, serene under pressure, and driven by an admirable social conscience — albeit as willing to deploy deception as the next politician. But while the first Obama would be a well-meaning failure, the second could become a great president.
An ultraliberal in moderate garb? The first Obama has sometimes seemed eager to engineer what he called "redistribution of wealth" in a 2001 radio interview, along with the more conventional protectionism, job preferences, and other liberal Democratic dogmas featured in his campaign. I worry that he might go beyond judiciously regulating our free enterprise system’s all-too-apparent excesses and stifle it under the dead hand of government bureaucracy and lawsuits.
This redistributionist Obama has stayed in the background since he set his sights on the presidency years ago, except when he told Joe the Plumber that his tax plan would help "spread the wealth." This Obama seems largely invisible to many supporters. But he may retain some attachment to the radical-leftist sensibility in which — as his impressive 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, explains with reflective detachment — he was marinated as a youth and young man.
Obama spent much of his teenage years searching for his black identity. He was mentored for a time by the poet Frank Marshall Davis, a black-power activist who had once been a member of the Communist Party, and who was (according to Obama’s book) "living in the same Sixties time warp" as Obama’s mother, a decidedly liberal free spirit.