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Court reports – resonant messages

Thursday, February 12, 2009

THAT BIG TRADITIONAL MEDIA set-piece – a new President’s first full court press conference (pictured left) – revealed little actual news (again very traditional) but it did offer a sidelight on how our times are a-changin’.

Working from the list pre-selected by his main communications aide Robert Gibbs, Barack Obama caused a heart-flutter throughout the blogosphere by calling on a reporter, Sam Stein, from the website Huffington Post. There was much digital gloating that reps from staid old regulars like the (now Rupert-Murdoch-owned, but ailing) Wall Street Journal, and the (bankruptcy-protection filing) Chicago Tribune were left out in the cold.

 

But how Obama answered Stein is more important than his taking the HuffPo question. Stein raised “the misdeeds of the Bush administration”, and asked whether the President would “here and now” (the usual huffing from a White House press corps member, however new) take a clear position on prosecutions against members of his predecessor’s team.

 

Obama assumed the question (rightly, of course) was about torture, which he repeated his administration will not practice, and the Geneva Conventions, which his administration will observe. But anodynely he said he was “more interested” in looking forward than in looking backwards. He did, however, cover himself a bit - by adding: “My view is also that nobody's above the law and, if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen”.

 

Meanwhile, though, a court case was unfolding across the country, in which the Obama Justice Department flat-out adhered to a course set by Bush’s lawyers – leading me and others to question if some people are indeed still being allowed to operate “above the law”.

 

The case, Mohammed et al. vs. Jeppesen DataPlan Inc., was brought by five detainees (one in Guantanamo, two in north African jails, and two now freed) who accuse the company – a flight-planning subsiduary of the Boeing Company – of complicity with the Central Intelligence Agency in having the men flown to other countries and into secret CIA camps, where they were tortured. (They were victims of the program euphemistically labeled “extraordinary rendition”, in that now redolent Bushian phrase).

 

Bush’s Justice Department had persuaded a lower court to throw the case out on grounds of national security. And when the American Civil Liberties Union brought the matter to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco this week, an Obama administration lawyer stood up and argued, just as before, that the entire subject remains a state secret.

 

I know it’s still early days, and maybe the entirety of the Justice Department hasn’t yet undergone its necessary clean-up. (There were hopeful cheers from the staff when the new Attorney General Eric Holder arrived at the office promising “It is time once again to base our actions on policies that are rooted in fairness and in the desire to ensure a more just America”). But, quite simply, the Department’s case to the Court of Appeals does not jibe with Obama's stated noble goals.

 

Professor Amanda Frost of American University, who’s written extensively on the “state secrets” privilege in law, says the government argument here is “an extreme position”. She argues: “While there may be individual pieces of evidence that need, for state secret reasons, to be kept secret, “it is simply ludicrous to declare that the very subject matter of the case is a state secret."

 

Ben Wizner of ACLU who represents the detainees and ex-detainees, was crisp in his assessment of the Obama team for using “exactly the same arguments that were made by Bush lawyers to throw out torture victims' lawsuits”. He described it as “a profound disappointment." 

  

 

** EVERY WEEK CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) AIRS A DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

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FORTY-FIVE YEARS AGO IT WAS WELL-NIGH INCONCEIVABLE that a black man could be President. Indeed, in 1964 a black man with such ambitions to lead his nation, even back then, was in court on terrorism charges.

 

The country was South Africa, and the man Nelson Mandela. Exactly nineteen years ago yesterday, the chances shifted seismically of him becoming President, as he was released from prison (above right) to a media storm of welcome.

 

On that gloriously bright February day Mandela went to the steps of Cape Town’s town hall and repeated, word for word, the most resounding statement he had made back in the courtroom just before he was sentenced. He had faced the death penalty (though in the end the sentence was modified to life imprisonment) and he famously expressed his stand as a matter of life and death:

 

“I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live and to see realized. But, my lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

 

[“My Lord” was of, course, an honorific reference - in quaint old British legal style - to the presiding judge.]

 

Over the years that followed the trial I became, like everyone else watching Mandela’s and his country’s struggle, very familiar with those solemn phrases, as they turned into a fundamental rallying call for the African National Congress. Indeed, using the court transcript, I had put them on television many times, more than once employing an actor’s voice to read them over documentary footage.

 

Hearing him in Cape Town quoting his younger defiant self was moving enough. But I never thought I’d hear his actual voice from 1964. Now everyone can hear it. Mandela, as this recording captures [below] took 58 seconds to say those 69 words (- even then, as now, he had a stately delivery).

 

            

                                 

 

This aural miracle is a technological one. For a long time it wasn't known that a recording from the courtroom existed. Then it was found, in the arcane form of several “Dictabelts” - heavy duty technology originally from the Dictaphone Company in the US - which were made of plastic, with grooves cut into them rather like vinyl records.

 

As chance would have it the British Library’s oral history curator, Dr Rob Perks, had a team of technicians who could struggle through the technical obstacles involved in rescuing the audio – not least the different voltage powering South African Dictabelt machines compared with British ones, which produced varied recording speeds. At one point the belts had to be heated up (a rare occurrence among precious artifacts, I would think) and a whole new playback unit was built from scratch.

 

In a world that can now make every communication (and every record of a communication) seem so easy, I’m glad I can still have my breath taken away. As I have now - by the sound of this determined forty-five year-old warrior, who is now the grandfather of his country at ninety. 

 

 

 

 

BY AN ODDITY OF HISTORY, YESTERDAY'S anniversary of Mandela's release yesterday turned out to be the day when President Robert Mugabe of neighboring Zimbabwe finally swore in his opposition rival Morgan Tsvangirai as Prime Minister, thus creating - ostensibly - a “government of national unity”.

 

We’ll see. Optimism doesn’t run high.

 

Mugabe’s own mouthpiece, the state-owned Herald newspaper, couldn’t find much to be ultra-positive about. The lead paragraph on a top story this morning read like this:

 

“IRAN fully supports the establishment of an inclusive Government in Zimbabwe and considers it a step in the right direction.”

 

 

 

APOLOGIES TO ALL SUBSCRIBERS - I can't say this enough - who received multiple copies of last week's THE MEDIA BEAT. Our site's resident gremlinologists investigated the problem but many of your inboxes were deluged before they could correct it. Sorry. Won't happen again.

 

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