Lance deHaven-Smith, "State crimes against democracy in the war on terror: applying the Nuremberg principles to the Bush-Cheney Administration" ("Contemporary Politics", 16 [4], December 2010: pp. 403-20):
www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a929282687
Abstract: "This article asks whether, in waging war in the Middle East, the Bush-Cheney Administration developed and executed a conspiracy comparable to the one for which Nazi leaders were tried, convicted, and executed at Nuremberg after World War II. To meet the Nuremberg standards, such a conspiracy must include efforts to subvert the constitutional order. Today, scholars refer to these actions as 'state crimes against democracy' (SCADs). After explicating the Nuremberg standards, the article applies them to the Bush-Cheney Administration's 'war on terror'. The conclusion reached is that evidence of a SCAD-driven conspiracy is extensive and certainly adequate by the Nuremberg standards to warrant investigations and trials."
Excerpts: "To the extent the Bush-Cheney actions mirror the crimes of the Nazis, the administration's moral guilt becomes rather clear even if Bush, Cheney, and other responsible persons are for some reason beyond the reach of the national and international legal systems as they are now constituted. In the Nuremberg war crimes trials, the defendants were charged with, among other crimes, conspiring to [...] transform democratic Germany into a police state by contriving and exploiting threats to the nation's stability and security [...]. Hitler and his associates were charged with staging acts of domestic terrorism, issuing false warnings of impending coups, conducting false-flag attacks on the nation's frontiers, and in other ways mobilizing mass support for authoritarian government and aggressive war. [...]
"The IMT [International Military Tribunal] did not use the term 'state crimes' or 'crimes against democracy', but its jurisdiction and judgments prefigured the SCAD construct [....] [S]tatutory and constitutional reforms should be adopted to strengthen democratic governing institutions so that future presidents cannot repeat past abuses. If, as the evidence indicates, the Bush-Cheney Administration succeeded in hijacking American democracy, the political system was and remains quite vulnerable to SCADs by top officials. [...] The high crimes of the Bush-Cheney Administration show that representative democracy is quite vulnerable to antidemocratic conspiracies in high office."
Lance deHaven-Smith is a Professor in the Reubin O'D. Askew School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University.
Showing posts with label public administration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label public administration. Show all posts
12 November 2010
19 February 2010
Journal special issue on state crimes against democracy
The journal "American Behavioral Scientist" has published a special issue on so-called state crimes against democracy (53 [6], February 2010):
http://abs.sagepub.com/content/vol53/issue6/
It includes the following articles:
Matthew T. Witt (University of La Verne) and Alexander Kouzmin (Southern Cross University/University of South Australia), "Sense Making Under 'Holographic' Conditions: Framing SCAD Research" (pp. 783-94).
Abstract: "The ellipses of due diligence riddling the official account of the 9/11 incidents continue being ignored by scholars of policy and public administration. This article introduces intellectual context for examining the policy heuristic 'State Crimes Against Democracy'
(SCAD) (deHaven-Smith, 2006) and its usefulness for better understanding patterns of state criminality of which no extant policy analytic model gives adequate account. This article then introduces papers included in this symposium examining the chimerical presence and perfidious legacy of state criminality against democracy."
Lance deHaven-Smith (Florida State University), "Beyond Conspiracy Theory: Patterns of High Crime in American Government" (pp. 795-825).
Abstract: "This article explores the conceptual, methodological, and practical implications of research on state crimes against democracy (SCADs). In contrast to conspiracy theories, which speculate about each suspicious event in isolation, the SCAD construct delineates a general category of criminality and calls for crimes that fit this category to be examined comparatively. Using this approach, an analysis of post-World War II SCADs and suspected SCADs highlights a number of commonalities in SCAD targets, timing, and policy consequences. SCADs often appear where presidential politics and foreign policy intersect. SCADs differ from earlier forms of political corruption in that they frequently involve political, military, and/or economic elites at the very highest levels of the social and political order. The article concludes by suggesting statutory and constitutional reforms to improve SCAD prevention and detection."
Christopher L. Hinson (Florida State University), "Negative Information Action: Danger for Democracy" (pp. 826-47).
Abstract: "This article explores evidence of, and provides insight into, secrecy-related information actions that are sometimes used to circumvent established government policy and law. These information actions may also be used to cover up such circumventions after the fact. To better understand secrecy as a negative information action and its impact on democracy, secrecy-related information actions are described according to methods, information technologies, and knowledge support. Negative information actions are willful and deliberate acts designed to keep government information from those in government and the public entitled to it. Negative information actions subvert the rule of law and the constitutional checks and balances. Negative information actions used by government officials to violate policies and laws during the IranContra Affair are identified, analyzed, and categorized by type. The relative impact of negative information actions on enlightened citizen understanding is demonstrated using a Negative Information Action Model by assigning a location according to type on a continuum of enlightened citizen understanding. Findings are compared with democratic theory and conspiracy doctrine."
Laurie A. Manwell (University of Guelph), "In Denial of Democracy: Social Psychological Implications for Public Discourse on State Crimes Against Democracy Post 9/11" (pp. 848-84).
Abstract: "Protecting democracy requires that the general public be educated on how people can be manipulated by government and media into forfeiting their civil liberties and duties. This article reviews research on cognitive constructs that can prevent people from processing information that challenges preexisting assumptions about government, dissent, and public discourse in democratic societies. Terror management theory and system justification theory are used to explain how preexisting beliefs can interfere with people's examination of evidence for state crimes against democracy (SCADs), specifically in relation to the events of September 11, 2001, and the war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. Reform strategies are proposed to motivate citizens toward increased social responsibility in a post-9/11 culture of propagandized fear, imperialism, and war."
Kym Thorne (University of South Australia) and Alexander Kouzmin (Southern Cross University/University of South Australia), "The USA PATRIOT Acts (et al.): Convergent Legislation and Oligarchic Isomorphism in the 'Politics of Fear' and State Crime(s) Against Democracy (SCADs)" (pp. 885-920).
Abstract: "The irrelevance of habeas corpus and the abolition of 'double jeopardy,' secret and protracted outsourcing of detention and torture, and increasing geographic prevalence of surveillance technologies across Anglo-American 'democracies' have many citizens concerned about the rapidly convergent, authoritarian behavior of political oligarchs and the actual destruction of sovereignty and democratic values under the onslaught of antiterrorism hubris, propaganda, and fear. This article examines synchronic legislative isomorphism in responses to 9/11 in the United States, the United Kingdom and European Union, and Australia in terms of enacted terrorism legislation and, also, diachronic, oligarchic isomorphism in the manufacture of fear within a convergent world by comparing the 'Politics of Fear' being practiced today to Stalinist-Russian and McCarthyist-U.S. abuse of 'fear.' The immediate future of Anglo-American democratic hubris, threats to civil society, and oligarchic threats to democratic praxis are canvassed. This article also raises the question as to whether The USA PATRIOT Acts of 2001/2006, sanctioned by the U.S. Congress, are examples, themselves, of state crimes against democracy. In the very least, any democratically inclined White House occupant in 2009 would need to commit to repealing these repressive, and counterproductive, acts."
Matthew T. Witt (University of La Verne), "Pretending Not to See or Hear, Refusing to Signify: The Farce and Tragedy of Geocentric Public Affairs Scholarship" (pp. 921-39).
Abstract: "This article opens with an inventory of how popular culture passion plays are homologous to the stampeding disenfranchisement everywhere of working classes and the emasculation of professional codes of ethics under siege by neoliberal initiatives and gambits. The article then examines a recent example of contemporary, 'deconstructive' scholarly analysis and inventory of presidential 'Orwellian doublespeak.' The preoccupation among contemporary critical scholarship with 'discourse analysis' and language gambits is criticized for displacing interrogation of real-event anomalies, as with the porous account given by the 9/11 Commission for what happened that fateful day. The article concludes by explaining how critical scholarship consistently falls short of unmasking Master Signifiers."
I wasn't able to access the full text of any of these articles.
http://abs.sagepub.com/content/vol53/issue6/
It includes the following articles:
Matthew T. Witt (University of La Verne) and Alexander Kouzmin (Southern Cross University/University of South Australia), "Sense Making Under 'Holographic' Conditions: Framing SCAD Research" (pp. 783-94).
Abstract: "The ellipses of due diligence riddling the official account of the 9/11 incidents continue being ignored by scholars of policy and public administration. This article introduces intellectual context for examining the policy heuristic 'State Crimes Against Democracy'
(SCAD) (deHaven-Smith, 2006) and its usefulness for better understanding patterns of state criminality of which no extant policy analytic model gives adequate account. This article then introduces papers included in this symposium examining the chimerical presence and perfidious legacy of state criminality against democracy."
Lance deHaven-Smith (Florida State University), "Beyond Conspiracy Theory: Patterns of High Crime in American Government" (pp. 795-825).
Abstract: "This article explores the conceptual, methodological, and practical implications of research on state crimes against democracy (SCADs). In contrast to conspiracy theories, which speculate about each suspicious event in isolation, the SCAD construct delineates a general category of criminality and calls for crimes that fit this category to be examined comparatively. Using this approach, an analysis of post-World War II SCADs and suspected SCADs highlights a number of commonalities in SCAD targets, timing, and policy consequences. SCADs often appear where presidential politics and foreign policy intersect. SCADs differ from earlier forms of political corruption in that they frequently involve political, military, and/or economic elites at the very highest levels of the social and political order. The article concludes by suggesting statutory and constitutional reforms to improve SCAD prevention and detection."
Christopher L. Hinson (Florida State University), "Negative Information Action: Danger for Democracy" (pp. 826-47).
Abstract: "This article explores evidence of, and provides insight into, secrecy-related information actions that are sometimes used to circumvent established government policy and law. These information actions may also be used to cover up such circumventions after the fact. To better understand secrecy as a negative information action and its impact on democracy, secrecy-related information actions are described according to methods, information technologies, and knowledge support. Negative information actions are willful and deliberate acts designed to keep government information from those in government and the public entitled to it. Negative information actions subvert the rule of law and the constitutional checks and balances. Negative information actions used by government officials to violate policies and laws during the IranContra Affair are identified, analyzed, and categorized by type. The relative impact of negative information actions on enlightened citizen understanding is demonstrated using a Negative Information Action Model by assigning a location according to type on a continuum of enlightened citizen understanding. Findings are compared with democratic theory and conspiracy doctrine."
Laurie A. Manwell (University of Guelph), "In Denial of Democracy: Social Psychological Implications for Public Discourse on State Crimes Against Democracy Post 9/11" (pp. 848-84).
Abstract: "Protecting democracy requires that the general public be educated on how people can be manipulated by government and media into forfeiting their civil liberties and duties. This article reviews research on cognitive constructs that can prevent people from processing information that challenges preexisting assumptions about government, dissent, and public discourse in democratic societies. Terror management theory and system justification theory are used to explain how preexisting beliefs can interfere with people's examination of evidence for state crimes against democracy (SCADs), specifically in relation to the events of September 11, 2001, and the war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. Reform strategies are proposed to motivate citizens toward increased social responsibility in a post-9/11 culture of propagandized fear, imperialism, and war."
Kym Thorne (University of South Australia) and Alexander Kouzmin (Southern Cross University/University of South Australia), "The USA PATRIOT Acts (et al.): Convergent Legislation and Oligarchic Isomorphism in the 'Politics of Fear' and State Crime(s) Against Democracy (SCADs)" (pp. 885-920).
Abstract: "The irrelevance of habeas corpus and the abolition of 'double jeopardy,' secret and protracted outsourcing of detention and torture, and increasing geographic prevalence of surveillance technologies across Anglo-American 'democracies' have many citizens concerned about the rapidly convergent, authoritarian behavior of political oligarchs and the actual destruction of sovereignty and democratic values under the onslaught of antiterrorism hubris, propaganda, and fear. This article examines synchronic legislative isomorphism in responses to 9/11 in the United States, the United Kingdom and European Union, and Australia in terms of enacted terrorism legislation and, also, diachronic, oligarchic isomorphism in the manufacture of fear within a convergent world by comparing the 'Politics of Fear' being practiced today to Stalinist-Russian and McCarthyist-U.S. abuse of 'fear.' The immediate future of Anglo-American democratic hubris, threats to civil society, and oligarchic threats to democratic praxis are canvassed. This article also raises the question as to whether The USA PATRIOT Acts of 2001/2006, sanctioned by the U.S. Congress, are examples, themselves, of state crimes against democracy. In the very least, any democratically inclined White House occupant in 2009 would need to commit to repealing these repressive, and counterproductive, acts."
Matthew T. Witt (University of La Verne), "Pretending Not to See or Hear, Refusing to Signify: The Farce and Tragedy of Geocentric Public Affairs Scholarship" (pp. 921-39).
Abstract: "This article opens with an inventory of how popular culture passion plays are homologous to the stampeding disenfranchisement everywhere of working classes and the emasculation of professional codes of ethics under siege by neoliberal initiatives and gambits. The article then examines a recent example of contemporary, 'deconstructive' scholarly analysis and inventory of presidential 'Orwellian doublespeak.' The preoccupation among contemporary critical scholarship with 'discourse analysis' and language gambits is criticized for displacing interrogation of real-event anomalies, as with the porous account given by the 9/11 Commission for what happened that fateful day. The article concludes by explaining how critical scholarship consistently falls short of unmasking Master Signifiers."
I wasn't able to access the full text of any of these articles.
19 January 2010
Articles: Detecting State Crimes against Democracy
A rather odd little article, in thrall to conspiracy theories – and casually accusing Richard Nixon of being behind the assassinations of both John F. and Robert Kennedy: Lance deHaven-Smith, "When Political Crimes Are Inside Jobs: Detecting State Crimes against Democracy" ("Administrative Theory & Praxis", 28 [3], September 2006: pp. 330-55):
http://mesharpe.metapress.com/link.asp?id=a364x632353048qh
Abstract: "Public administration theory and practice tend to overlook the possibility of state political criminality in liberal democracies. This article proposes a policy science to detect state crimes against democracy (SCADs), using social and political theory to understand when, why, how, and by whom such crimes are likely to be committed. After defining SCADs and differentiating them from other types of political crimes, the article analyzes SCADs in terms of antidemocratic tendencies posited by theories of liberal democracy. SCADs are traced to specific institutional objectives by analyzing patterns in SCAD targets, timing, and modus operandi. The role played by career civil servants in exposing government crimes and deceptions suggests that professional public administrators are a critical line of defense against the criminalization of the state."
Some excerpts: "Public administration scholars and practitioners have seldom considered the possibility that agencies or whole branches of government might be corrupted by top leaders or subverted for illegal purposes by strategically placed insiders. [...] [They] do not envision organized efforts by public officials to undermine democracy and popular control of government. [...] SCADs include not only election tampering, vote fraud, government graft, political assassinations, and similar crimes when they are initiated by public officials, but also more subtle violations of democratic processes and prerequisites. [...]
"In the vortex between aggressive military interests and a frightened, uninformed mass public, the worst features of presidents and of presidential politics can be unleashed. Paranoia and impulsivity can be reinforced by the pressures of the office; intelligence agencies can be pressured to distort their findings; elite megalomania can resonate with mass ethnocentricity, homophobia, and authoritarianism; and critics of military actions can end up being targeted as enemies of the state. [...]
"However, nothing that is currently known about SCADs precludes the possibility that SCAD networks are much more widely dispersed, involving either a more or less stable group of mid-rank professionals intent on protecting certain values (anticommunism, white supremacy, Christianity, etc.), or temporary combinations of opportunistic officials in the middle ranks who come together briefly to achieve limited objectives (financial gain, career advancement, inter-institutional advantages, etc.). It is also possible that multiple networks coexist and cooperate or compete."
As if it wasn't surprising enough that this one passed peer review, a follow-up article appeared last year: Lance deHaven-Smith and Matthew T. Witt, "Preventing State Crimes Against Democracy"
("Administration & Society", 41 [5], September 2009: pp. 527-50):
http://aas.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/41/5/527
Abstract: "This article analyzes U.S. vulnerabilities to state crimes against democracy (SCADs). SCADs are actions or inactions by government insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes and undermine popular sovereignty. Watergate and Iran-Contra are well-known examples of SCADs involving top officials. SCADs in high office are difficult to detect and successfully prosecute because they are usually complex and compartmentalized; investigations are often compromised by conflicts of interests; and powerful norms discourage speculation about corruption in high office. However, liberal democracies can reduce their vulnerability to state political criminality by identifying vulnerabilities proactively and instituting policies for SCAD detection and prevention."
I haven't been able to access the latter article yet.
Lance deHaven-Smith is a Professor in the Reubin O'D. Askew School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University.
Matthew T. Witt is Associate Professor of Public Administration at the University of La Verne.
http://mesharpe.metapress.com/link.asp?id=a364x632353048qh
Abstract: "Public administration theory and practice tend to overlook the possibility of state political criminality in liberal democracies. This article proposes a policy science to detect state crimes against democracy (SCADs), using social and political theory to understand when, why, how, and by whom such crimes are likely to be committed. After defining SCADs and differentiating them from other types of political crimes, the article analyzes SCADs in terms of antidemocratic tendencies posited by theories of liberal democracy. SCADs are traced to specific institutional objectives by analyzing patterns in SCAD targets, timing, and modus operandi. The role played by career civil servants in exposing government crimes and deceptions suggests that professional public administrators are a critical line of defense against the criminalization of the state."
Some excerpts: "Public administration scholars and practitioners have seldom considered the possibility that agencies or whole branches of government might be corrupted by top leaders or subverted for illegal purposes by strategically placed insiders. [...] [They] do not envision organized efforts by public officials to undermine democracy and popular control of government. [...] SCADs include not only election tampering, vote fraud, government graft, political assassinations, and similar crimes when they are initiated by public officials, but also more subtle violations of democratic processes and prerequisites. [...]
"In the vortex between aggressive military interests and a frightened, uninformed mass public, the worst features of presidents and of presidential politics can be unleashed. Paranoia and impulsivity can be reinforced by the pressures of the office; intelligence agencies can be pressured to distort their findings; elite megalomania can resonate with mass ethnocentricity, homophobia, and authoritarianism; and critics of military actions can end up being targeted as enemies of the state. [...]
"However, nothing that is currently known about SCADs precludes the possibility that SCAD networks are much more widely dispersed, involving either a more or less stable group of mid-rank professionals intent on protecting certain values (anticommunism, white supremacy, Christianity, etc.), or temporary combinations of opportunistic officials in the middle ranks who come together briefly to achieve limited objectives (financial gain, career advancement, inter-institutional advantages, etc.). It is also possible that multiple networks coexist and cooperate or compete."
As if it wasn't surprising enough that this one passed peer review, a follow-up article appeared last year: Lance deHaven-Smith and Matthew T. Witt, "Preventing State Crimes Against Democracy"
("Administration & Society", 41 [5], September 2009: pp. 527-50):
http://aas.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/41/5/527
Abstract: "This article analyzes U.S. vulnerabilities to state crimes against democracy (SCADs). SCADs are actions or inactions by government insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes and undermine popular sovereignty. Watergate and Iran-Contra are well-known examples of SCADs involving top officials. SCADs in high office are difficult to detect and successfully prosecute because they are usually complex and compartmentalized; investigations are often compromised by conflicts of interests; and powerful norms discourage speculation about corruption in high office. However, liberal democracies can reduce their vulnerability to state political criminality by identifying vulnerabilities proactively and instituting policies for SCAD detection and prevention."
I haven't been able to access the latter article yet.
Lance deHaven-Smith is a Professor in the Reubin O'D. Askew School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University.
Matthew T. Witt is Associate Professor of Public Administration at the University of La Verne.
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