Institutional privilege

On the balancing act between institutional privilege and credibility with the public. Is a "win-win" solution possible or is it a "zero-sum" or "win-loss" kind of "game"?

In a piece in the Inky, we learn of the Roman Catholic Church's response to Americans seeking to hold the Vatican, and specifically the current Pope, accountable for pedophile priests.

Court documents obtained yesterday show that Vatican lawyers plan to argue that the pope has immunity as head of state, that U.S. bishops who oversaw abusive priests weren't employees of the Vatican, and that a 1962 document is not the "smoking gun" that shows proof of a cover-up.

Would that the Vatican would concentrate only upon the last defense! That's the only part of their legal strategy that bears directly upon the Pope's guilt or innocence. The other two defenses are purely ones of institutional privilege. I can understand institutional privilege and can see why people defend it, but that's at direct cross-purposes with giving a credible explanation that would, in turn, build trust.

Wonkette reproduces a press briefing wherein the Press Secretary Tony Snow discusses the balancing act between institutional privilege and openness, transparency and credibility. Snow tries to convince the press corps that golly-gee willikers guys, we'd be open and honest and transparent, but hey y'know, Congress is seeking to impinge upon the institutional prerogatives of the President and associated subordinates.

MR. SNOW: What you’re saying is that every time somebody wants to try to mount a charge you ought to be able to get hauled up and testify under oath, with a presumption of criminality, rather than a presumption of goodwill. I’m not going to buy that.

Of course, as 911truthmovement.org makes clear, the people who wanted haul up Bush & Cheney upon "a presumption of criminality," were actually on very solid ground to make that presumption. About a year after Snow's scolding of the press corps, Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta confessed that there were several war games that were being conducted on 11Sep01, at the same time that the 9/11 attacks were taking place. The question this raises is:

...did the NORAD war games (Vigilant Guardian, Vigilant Warrior, Northern Vigilance) being run on 9/11 impact in any way, positively or negatively, the response by the military that morning?

But

[Richard Clarke] denied that there were multiple exercises.

The georgewashington.blogspot.com concludes that:

...the dedicated rank-and-file personnel at Norad were misled, intentionally, by the planners of 9/11. Specifically, the good and dedicated lower-level military people were confused by the events of 9/11 because 9/11 occurred at the same time as the multiple war games with their live fly exercises, plane into building scenarios, false radar inserts, and apparent interference by Cheney. [emphasis in original]

Were there any such war games taking place? That's hard to say because institutional privilege allowed Bush & Cheney to testify under the following conditions:

The two leaders were not under oath and no recording was made of the private session at the White House.

--snip--

It was eventually agreed that the meeting would be held in the Oval Office, alongside Mr Cheney. There were no television cameras and also no photographs or transcripts of answers given by the two men.
Democrats had suggested the president's joint appearance with Mr Cheney might be an attempt to eliminate the possibility of providing contradictory testimony over whether the White House did all it could to head off the attacks.
But Mr Bush laughed off the suggestion.

It's very difficult to have any confidence that candid answers were given at the 2004 meeting considering that the record, even years later, still has so many troubling holes in it. By the same token, how are either Catholics or non-Catholics supposed to have any confidence that the problem of pedophile priests was properly or will ever be appropriately dealt with? The current, decades-old problem first came to the attention of the public in 2002:

Ultimately, it became clear that, over several decades in the 20th century, priests and lay members of religious orders in the Catholic Church had sexually abused minors on a scale such that the accusations reached into the thousands. Although the majority of cases were reported to have occurred in the United States, victims have come forward in other nations such as Ireland, Canada and Australia. A major aggravating factor was the actions of Catholic bishops to keep these crimes secret and to reassign the accused to other parishes in positions where they had continued unsupervised contact with youth, thus allowing the abusers to continue their crime. [emphasis added]

The real damage to the Church's credibility wasn't simply that it was embroiled in a scandal about adults abusing their positions of authority for their own sexual pleasure, it was in the fact that these crimes were enabled by a hierarchy that should have put the interests of the young people first. So, while I fully understand why the Church puts its institutional privileges first and acts to protect its "chain of command," the price of such protection is their credibility with the public.

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The author is a Congregationalist Protestant, a New England denomination that is a direct theological descendant of English Puritanism. As such, he's mildly suspicious of the Roman Catholic Church in general, but only as an institution. He doesn't go so far as to hold Catholicism against anyone in a personal manner.

The "a few bad apples" defense

A local columnist summarizes the current rap against ACORN:

...consider the ACORN videos, in which a fake pimp and prostitute seek help from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now to set up a brothel, commit tax fraud, and engage in sex trafficking of underage illegal immigrants. ACORN employees at five offices seemed happy to help.

He goes on to say racism is a bogus defense that an ACORN board member used. From what I've seen of the case, I agree with the columnist that racism appears to be completely irrelevant to the launching of the sting operation. For me the question is: Just how much of a problem did the sting operation uncover? ACORN's CEO, Bertha Lewis, said:

Well, when you run an organization, what you need to do is to make sure that everyone knows your standards and everyone is trained to understand how to do intake. I think, in the end, most of these employees just felt like, well, I have to talk to whoever comes in here. However, that cannot trump common sense and also it cannot trump someone going to their supervisor and saying this is unusual, what do I do? So, in any case, though it's indefensible, that's why I terminated everyone. And I am making sure not to take this lightly. My board was outraged, and I think I owe it to the other employees that did the right thing. It's just a handful of folks out of hundreds and hundreds of employees.

The use of "It's just a handful of folks..." raises immediate red flags because we heard that for the Roman Catholic priests who were engaged in pedophilia. Father John Geoghan was identified as a child rapist by the alternative newspaper The Boston Phoenix in March 2001 (The Boston Globe followed up in January 2002 shortly before Geoghan was convicted, whereupon the case came to the attention of the public at large). A major aspect of the case from the very beginning was that Father Geoghan's activities were so extensive that it was suspected immediately that his activities had to have been known of by his superiors. He was "suspected of fondling, assaulting, and raping hundreds of children over three decades." And, "parents had complained to Geoghan’s superiors about his behavior with children as far back as 1973."

During the investigation and trial, Fitzpatrick, among other victims, charged that top Church authorities at the Diocese of Fall River had known about Porter’s behavior all along. ... Cardinal Law infamously blasted reporters for focusing on what he termed “the faults of a few”: “We deplore that.... By all means we call down God’s power on the media, particularly the Globe.” ... At the time Law made these remarks, Geoghan had already been placed on temporary “sick leave” at least once, according to the Official Catholic Directory. This leave of absence, as alleged in court records, followed a complaint of abuse against Geoghan by one mother of an alleged victim from Jamaica Plain.

Since then, pedophile priests have shown up in Ireland - In April 2002, the Irish government began its own investigation and issued its report in October 2005 and in Italy - The Meter Association, founded by Italian Father Fortunato Di Noto announced the existence of "A hundred online pedophile communities" in September 2009 and said they'd be dismantled and prosecuted.

Defenders of pedophile priests certainly tried to claim that the problem was limited to "a few bad apples," and while it's certainly true that it's wrong to physically attack priests "As if all priests are pedophiles. As if all priests are perverted. As if all priests are immoral, or corrupt, or just bad" (emphases in original), it was clear from the very start that the problem was an institutional one, that it wasn't just a couple of rogue individuals.

Torture at the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib was also allegedly limited to "a few bad apples," but the US made a very poor case for that owing to the lies used to justify the invasion of Iraq in the first place and again, the problem didn't trace back to just a few rogue individuals. The historical roots of the practice of torture with American assistance traced back to the Shah of Iran and his agency SAVAK. The Red Cross had found serious problems with US treatment of and policy towards Iraqi detainees as early as March 2003, the month that the US invaded Iraq. By March 2006, the website Salon had collated a list of government and private investigative reports.

It was also confirmed in May 2009 that the Bush Administration had a few low-level employees write out some torture-justifying memos, memos that opined on the authority of the President to order the lawless abuse of helpless prisoners at will. As the blogger Christy Hardin Smith put it:

The ACLU has put together a video of these words of tortured logic being read aloud. Watch it.

The words you are hearing were written by and for the US government. As guidance for governmental agencies acting in all of our names.

So, again, we're not dealing with just a couple of rogue individuals, we're dealing with an institution that went seriously off the tracks.

Back to ACORN, do we have any evidence that we're dealing with a deep, systemic problem? Any indication that ACORN is a corrupt institution? Well, the NPR story that quotes the ACORN CEO came out on September 21st and the quote from a local columnist came out today, October 4th. As one can see, there are no new developments in the case. There is no evidence that any of the employees who agreed to help the fake pimp and prostitute brought their case up to any higher levels. There's no evidence that any money actually changed hands or that any organizational favors were actually granted. As Anonymous Liberal points out, it's entirely understandable for people, faced with a completely unexpected situation to improvise as best they can and importantly, in as non-confrontational a mode as they can. This does not, of course, excuse the people who agreed to help the fake prospective clients, but it does make their actions more understandable.

No, I think the ACORN case is one where the idea of "a few bad apples" does indeed apply.

Why do some institutions exist?

In The Deputy by the German author Rolf Hochhuth, the question of what the Roman Catholic church should have done about Nazi persecution of the Jews was raised forcefully. The book acknowledged that the Roman Catholic church faced the very real possibility of extinction, but asked what the purpose of the church was. Was it not better for the church to cease to exist in Germany rather than to continue as nothing more than an interest group?

The group blog Firedoglake has raised much the same question about NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League. It's boss, Nancy Keenan, has been raking in contributions hand over fist for the express purpose of protecting abortion rights. What has Keenan's performance actually been like on the issue? Well, "Then NARAL goes and endorses people like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Arlen Specter and Joe Lieberman — all of whom voted for cloture on Alito." There were other votes involved, but voting for cloture allowed Alito to get onto the Supreme Court.

As we've seen, Alito has not been friendly to choice. Alito wrote in 1985 that: "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion" and according to CNN in April "New justices Alito, Roberts provided solid conservative majority to uphold ban." The "ban" was the ban on late-term abortions and was vaguely worded. The only female on the court, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read out a "bitter dissent" on that.

The same question arises in the case of the mainstream news programs and Jose Padilla. The piece provides links to commentaries at the bottom as to what the Padilla case is all about, but the important question that the piece concentrates on is whether or not the news programs looked at the question of whether Padilla was tortured or not. Unfortunately, there is ample evidence that he was, evidence that is documented as having been comprehensively ignored by the news programs.

The simple question as to whether Padilla received counsel was crystal clear. Padilla did not receive any counsel for such a long period that when he did

"...according to Padilla's lawyers and a forensic psychiatrist who examined him, Padilla was uncertain whether his attorneys actually represented him or were part of the government's interrogation tactics, refused to review video recordings of his interrogations, and was reluctant to discuss what happened to him in the brig for fear of being sent back. According to one attorney, 'During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body. ... The contortions are particularly poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has meetings with counsel.' "

Keep in mind that the news media was advised of all this in December 2006. They then had until August 2007 to inform the American public, but did not do so. Why do these news programs exist? If they can't be counted on to tell American citizens when an American citizen is being locked up and tortured, when they can't be bothered to protest the fact that a fellow American citizen is being held without charges, what CAN they do?

Our media is very badly broken and desperately needs to be fixed!