| April 23, 2003 | Wednesday | Safar 20, 1424 |
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Scared of peace?
Behind the dark veil
Mapping the human genome
Ill omens for the new century
Mr Perle’s case
The partition of the subcontinent into Pakistan and India in 1947 was accompanied by a very large traumatic exchange of population and horrible massacres. That these events should cast long shadows over the attitudes of the peoples of the new countries towards each other was only natural. Not natural, however, was that the two governments should have confronted each other for more than a few years. Countries go to war but with signatures on a peace treaty, normal intercourse at government level is quickly resumed.
IN the dying days of the war against Iraq, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared that the world community had never felt so insecure as at present and had never yearned for peace as strongly as it did now. This was the most telling indictment of the war against Iraq, which had a number of unprecedented features.
THE first lady of the United States sees herself as a patron of literature. Laura Bush evidently has failed to transfer her enthusiasm for reading to her husband. To her credit, however, she has been known to invite to her literary soirees writers who have little in common philosophically with her husband.
But there are limits to her indulgence. A conference on Poetry and the American Voice, scheduled for February 12, had to be postponed indefinitely once it became apparent that many of the invitees intended to use the occasion to publicize their concerns over what was then the projected war against Iraq. One of them, on receiving the invitation, immediately launched an e-mail campaign to solicit submissions for an anthology of anti-war verse. He was inundated with responses.
Had it taken place, the conference would have concentrated on three poets: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes. As Katha Pollitt remarked in The Nation, it would be hard to find three more subversive writers: “Whitman’s epic of radical democracy, Leaves of Grass, was so scandalous it got him fired from his government job; Hughes, a communist sympathizer hounded by [Joe] McCarthy, wrote constantly and indelibly about racism, injustice, power; Dickinson might seem the least political, but in some ways she was the most lastingly so — every line she wrote is an attack on complacency and conformity of manners, mores, religion, language, gender, thought.”
None of them, Pollitt wrote, would have had any time for the Bush clan’s socio-political values. “It’s hard,” she added, “to imagine them cheering the bombing of Baghdad.”
The conference may have been put off, but it wasn’t entirely a wasted effort: there were poetry readings right across the US on February 12.
But it did not begin there. Washington’s response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has spawned a veritable sub-genre of literature. A singularly powerful diatribe in verse, Emmanuel Ortiz’s ‘A Moment of Silence Before I Start This Poem’, marked the first anniversary of the outrage. It would be superfluous to quote it, because it has found its way to every corner of the world via the Internet.
Nor did it end there. Even a perfunctory web-search reveals thousands of instances of verse diametrically opposed to the Bush administration’s stance. And poetry is by no means the only creative response to the cowardly new world in which we find ourselves. Cartoonists all over the world have been working overtime, trying to capture the unprecedented surreality of the present circumstances: to cite but two examples out of thousands, The Guardian’s Steve Bell and The Australian’s Bill Leak have been exceptionally successful in exposing the absurdity of the Bush-Blair doctrine.
Not surprisingly, musicians have also boldly risen to the challenge of trying to make sense of the world we live (and die) in. Some of them — Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, for example — are veterans of the movement against the Vietnam War. More intriguingly, well-known artistes not normally associated with political activism have deemed it necessary to react to the new militarism: Madonna and George Michael, for instance, have lately come up with significant (albeit not particularly militant) challenges to the new status quo.
Hollywood’s broad hostility to the Bush regime has also manifested itself in subtle ways — not least in the award last month of the best-documentary Academy Award to Michael Moore’s excoriation of American gun culture, ‘Bowling For Columbine’. Moore happens also to be the author of Stupid White Men, a hilarious treatise that lays bare the nature and inclinations of the Bushies — and which, remarkably, appears to have found a semi-permanent perch on bestseller lists throughout the English-speaking world.
Moore’s opinions are not universally shared in Hollywood, but many prominent actors and actresses, from Martin Sheen and Susan Sarandon to Robert Redford, have been willing to put their careers on the line by heeding their consciences.
They are in respectable company, historically. Ideological as well as artistic conformity has been anathema to some of Hollywood’s brightest stars, including Charles Chaplin and Marlon Brando.
Arguably bigger than both in terms of casting in his lot with the oppressed was Pablo Picasso, one of the 20th century’s foremost painters. “Painting isn’t done to decorate apartments”, he once noted. “It is an instrument of war against brutality and darkness.” Picasso’s legacy is too extensive and too profound to be glossed over in passing, but for our present purposes it is sufficient to recall that two of his most iconic works focus on war and peace: Guernica and the white dove.
The latter requires little comment: it enjoys totemic significance all around the globe. The former, painted in 1937, was a commissioned response to a specific incident: the bombardment by the Luftwaffe of a Basque town, in support of Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s Falangist insurgents during the Spanish Civil War.
The attack of April 26, 1937 — market day in Guernica — has gone down in history as the first wilful targeting of a civilian population from the air. The town was built mostly of wood, and the use of incendiary bombs by the Nazi air force reduced virtually the whole of it to ashes. “We tried to enter,” wrote war correspondent George Steer, who was among the first journalists to reach the site of the outrage, “but the streets were a royal carpet of live coals; blocks of wreckage slithered and crashed from the houses, and from their sides that were still erect the polished heat struck at our cheeks and eyes.”
Thousands — many of them children — died in what Steer correctly assumed to be a testing ground for Hitler’s ordnance. Picasso’s grotesque and confrontational depiction of the massacre constitutes not just an extraordinarily powerful comment on a particular instance of barbarity but an indictment of war per se. The (possibly apocryphal) story goes that when the Germans found Picasso in Paris in 1940, they pointed him out as the artist responsible for Guernica. No, the painter is said to have responded, you are the ones responsible for Guernica.
Guernica was first displayed at the Paris Exhibition of 1937, where many visitors reportedly found it too difficult to gaze upon. A German guide to the exhibition dismissed it as a disorderly array of corpses created by a madman.
The painting, which had been paid for by the Spanish Republic before it was overrun by Franco, found a permanent home in Madrid only after the fascist dictator’s demise in 1975. Since 1985, a tapestry of Picasso’s poignant masterpiece has hung outside the United Nations Security Council. An appropriate venue, one would have thought. The UN is supposed, after all, to forestall wars. And Guernica serves up as good a reason for avoiding warfare as humankind is ever likely to be offered. It depicts, among other victims, a mother clutching a dead child, screaming her agony unto the heavens. No one who gazes at the painting can escape her howl of despair.
Yet when the arms inspectors presented their evidence to the Security Council in February — and even more symbolically, when Colin Powell offered his thoroughly unconvincing argument for aggression — the UN decided to drape the mural with a blue banner bearing the organization’s logo. Spokesmen assured journalists it was a temporary measure, and Kofi Annan implicitly denied that he had anything to do with the decision.
But the harm is done, and popular impression forever will be that the UN conspired to spare the US a degree of embarrassment that it thoroughly deserved.
Now there are scenes all over Iraq echoing Guernica. The British poet Tony Harrison has written of “a small child’s shrapnelled scalp scooped of its brains” and “flayed off human flesh like hanging chads”. His compatriot Harold Pinter, a renowned playwright, also committed a poem to print in which he envisioned: “Your head rolls onto the sand/ Your head is a pool in the dirt/ Your head is a stain in the dust/ Your eyes have gone out and your nose/ Sniffs only the pong of the dead/ And all the dead air is alive/ With the smell of America’s God.”
There was a report the other day of a five-year-old who mistook the bright shell from a cluster bomb for a toy. It blew up as soon as he touched it. The shrapnel can be extracted from his legs, but Ali Mustafa will never see again. His namesake Ali Ismail Abbas, aged 12, who has been robbed not only of his family but also of his limbs, is being tended to at a hospital in Kuwait. “I will not be able to go to school any more because I don’t have arms,” he is reported to have remarked. “If someone hit me I would not be able to defend myself.” His lament is a near-perfect metaphor for what the US has done to his country.
And the UN covered up a painting that offered an inkling of what war would entail.
Another British playwright, David Hare, has this to offer: “At some level,” he says, “I believe this administration does not even know why it chose Iraq ... The intention to destroy the credibility of the United Nations ... is not a byproduct of recent American policy. It is its very purpose. Bush chose Iraq not because it would make sense, but because it wouldn’t. He did it, in short, because he could.”
E-mail: mahir@eudoramail.com
Today, over fifty-five years after independence, the governments of India and Pakistan can still be quite articulate in justifying the uninterrupted hard policy stand they adopt to confront each other. At times, each government’s logic may seem unassailable, but considering the opportunities they have missed of ushering in peace and progress in their respective lands, their policies appear nothing short of tragic. They have gone to wars but peace has eluded them. They have remained in a state of no war, no peace.
After fourteen years of promoting peace and friendship between the two countries, I have come to conclude that both the ruling elites are genuinely scared of peace breaking out between them. They seem to recognize enormous dangers that peace in the subcontinent may bring to their political power and the flow of wealth that comes with power. Strong vested interests for the two elites have developed to maintain the status quo.
In India, politicians, the civil apparatus of the state, its army protectors, big traders and businessmen make up the elites. The Pakistani elites comprise the officers of the military and civil services, their client politicos and supporting feudal and business classes.
Internally, by using the authoritative administrative structure built by the British to deny democratic governance at the grassroots level, the elites have maintained their political hegemony. No social contract between the state and the people has emerged. Governance is based on arbitrary use of coercive power. The elites have legislated draconian laws giving wide powers to the police, paramilitary legions and armed forces in the name of maintaining law and order.
Externally, by adopting a policy of confrontation with the neighbouring country, the two elites have indulged in an open-ended arms race and recruited division after division of armed personnel. Large armies, paramilitary legions and huge intelligence apparatuses have immensely helped the elites to maintain their political power, simultaneously threatening their neighbour. They have built weapons of mass destruction along with delivery systems by spending vast amounts from national budgets.
By maintaining confrontation towards each other and building massive armed power and often violating the rule of law and sanctity of basic human rights, both elites have done fabulously well for themselves during the last half a century. They have amassed riches through legal and illegal means which will be the envy of the Mughal princes should they come to life. Their vested interests have vastly grown in size, exacting an enormous amount of wealth from poor farmers, industrial workers and other labouring classes — all in the name of national security, irredentist ventures and a deliberately distorted view of history.
To maintain their hegemony and to secure the support of the masses, the two elites have stoked the fires of communal hatred and intolerance to intensify the gulf between communities and nations. They have failed to settle disputes such as that of the transfer of assets relating to partition, Kashmir and Siachin among others. They would do all they can to widen existing cleavages and to create new ones by reneging on settled issues such as that of the division of the Indus Basin waters. They have gone to wars and now claim the right to pre-emptive military action against their sovereign neighbour.
However, there are elements among the two elites who, time and again, have made unsuccessful efforts at bridging the gulf. Towards the end of the eighties, foreign secretaries — Rasgotra of India and Niaz Naik of Pakistan — had agreed on the draft of a peace deal. The Indian side blames Pakistan for going to sleep over it. India and Pakistan had come to an agreement on ending the confrontation over the Siachen glacier. Pakistan blames India for not solemnizing the agreement.
During his first term as prime minister, Nawaz Sharif desperately wanted to start negotiations but Prime Minister Narsimha Rao would not agree. As soon as Benazir took over as prime minister, Narsimha Rao greeted her assumption of office but she would have none of the talks that the Indian wanted. After a meeting with the Indian prime minister, when this writer approached Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto for an interview, she loudly said in the presence of press reporters and photographers: “Dr Sahib, come and talk to me on any issue but not about relations with India. They will think that I had sent you to India”.
A mysterious unwritten understanding seems to exist between the permanent establishments of the two countries to discourage taking any measure that will bring the two nations nearer. I learnt on good authority that on one occasion Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif speaking to a high-level Indian diplomat, said that visa restrictions between India and Pakistan should be removed. The diplomat politely responded that it was a good idea but also pointed out the difficulties in the way. When the Indian diplomat told a high-level Pakistani diplomat what was in the mind of the Pakistani prime minister, the Pakistani responded to the Indian, “I hope you tried to dissuade him”.
At a Commonwealth Conference, prime ministers Nawaz Sharif and Chandrashekar had verbally agreed to do away with visa formalities for travel between the two countries. Pakistan is alleged to have gone back on the idea.
When they met in Edinburgh, Scotland, Prime Minister I K Gujral asked Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif about progress on the Pakistani proposal to sell electricity to India. Nawaz Sharif confirmed that Pakistan was agreeable. Right there, in the presence of the Indian prime minister, the senior Pakistani diplomat present there told the two prime ministers that the sale could not take place. Mr Gujral was dumbfounded at the daring shown by the Pakistani bureaucrat in contradicting his prime minister.
It is a curious state of relations between the two countries. When India is ready to talk, Pakistan is not willing and when Pakistan is ready, it is India which refuses to talk and most of the time both sides indulge in confrontational rhetoric. On occasions the two sides seem to reach the brink of a deal or an agreement. However, at the last minute, as two senior Indian diplomats confided to me, something or the other happens to thwart the deal — an act of sabotage, an armed incursion, a murderous attack, an artillery duel on the border, an irresponsible statement by a leader or an arms deal with another country.
These days it happens to be India’s turn to close all doors and windows of negotiations between the two countries. Rail, road, and air communications have been suspended. Representation at ambassador level stands withdrawn. The high commissions’ strength is badly denuded. They do not allow their citizens to read the newspapers of the other country.
It takes only one government to refuse to negotiate at a particular time but the refusal serves the traditional interests of both the elites. It serves to preserve the status quo. The severity of the present-day restrictions on normal intercourse is indicative of the severity of internal and external pressures on the government placing such restrictions. In the past, confrontation and a semblance of normality could exist simultaneously. For the moment, the Indian stance has allowed Pakistan to yield to the internal and external pressures on it and show its all-out readiness for unconditional negotiations.
The present situation cannot last long. Opportunities for genuine peace negotiations can arise sooner than later. The forces of confrontation are at their weakest in both countries. It is important that personages of high profile and peace activists in both the countries join together to mobilize their people for peace. The billion-plus peoples of the subcontinent are ready to learn and be convinced that confrontation only serves the interests of the two elites and is against the interests of the overwhelming majority.
I AM not a good Muslim in the ritualistic sense of the word, but I do believe that the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was the greatest teacher in the history of mankind. But we have this habit of not looking objectively, and with an analytical mind, at incidents that have helped to distort the great legacy of Islam which the Prophet left us. His noble soul certainly needs the Almighty’s choicest blessings, for his followers have badly let down his teachings, his principles and those of his deeds that they are supposed to emulate as sunnah.
Every other day we read in the newspapers that a Christian has converted to Islam. Much is made of the fact that Boota Masih, or some such person recited the kalima before Maulana So-and-so and was (invariably) given the name Abdullah. Of course we are not told what made old Boota give up the cross for the crescent. It’s well that he isn’t asked, because being uneducated he might not know how to explain.
But one can understand the social — and sometimes political — needs, in fact compulsions, that oblige some members of the minority community to relinquish their faith and join the majority. Personal security in a land overwhelmingly peopled by those subscribing to the state religion could be one. The other could be the belief among many Muslims that the surest way of securing a seat in paradise was to kill a Christian, or better still, a Shia.
But why should anyone from the majority community, and a true believing Muslim, see fit to convert to a religion of the minority, and that too in Pakistan? It would be strange. And yet this seems to have happened. An article in a national Urdu daily reported that a large number (exact words, ‘ek bari tadad’) of Muslims in Sialkot district had, a couple of years ago, abandoned their faith and accepted Christianity as their creed.
This had naturally created a stir in some circles, and the article called upon the Ministry of Religious Affairs to probe the reasons. I don’t know if the ministry took any action on the demand or not, and whether it really tried to find out the reasons for the slide, but if it did I don’t think it was bold enough to tell the truth or even feel the need to take the people into confidence. Maybe what it did was to pull up the local auqaf maulvis for their negligence in letting so many sheep walk out of the fold.
Another news item that drew my attention came from Kuala Lumpur some time ago. It said the Malaysian High Court had “upheld the government’s dismissal of a female clerk for disobeying an official dress code by covering her face with a dark veil (worn by very conservative Muslims) during working hours.”
The judge, a Justice Yusuf Chen, quoting evidence from a local Islamic authority, said: “The Quran required a Muslim woman to cover her body but not her face, palms, fingers and feet... As far as he could remember, Malaysian women did not cover their faces until recently when leaders of the Muslim extremist Arqam movement started forcing their young wives and female followers to do so with dark veils.”
An element of weird humour was imparted to the judgment by the justice’s remarks that, with the dark veil in position, the wearer could even be a man “padded in the right places” to look like a woman! He granted the lady leave to appeal to the Supreme Court.
Another incident that caused me both despair and annoyance and made me pull my sparse hair out with exasperation took place some years ago. This was when the Frontier Assembly passed a unanimous resolution that since Pakistan was an Islamic state it should have the kalima inscribed on its national flag. (That the kalima was engraved on the hearts of its Muslim population did not bother the Assembly). Funny thought this, coming after more than 45 years of the Islamic state’s creation.
Please note that the Assembly’s decision was unanimous. Which means that not even the ANP, the one party in the Frontier that normally uses its head rather than a misguided heart, had raised any objection, obviously out of the fear that it would be taken as a kafir for opposing such a beautiful Islamic idea. It also means that in that “august” house there was not a single member who could see, for example, that if this pious resolution was put into effect, hundreds of thousands of small national flags would be trampled under foot on August 14.
If I had been a member of the Frontier Assembly I would have suggested to the honourable house that there was yet ground for improvement on the historic and unprecedented resolution. I would have proposed that every Muslim male in Pakistan must wear on his breast a badge inscribed with the kalima, and every Muslim woman to do likewise on her dupatta. Whatever good that may do or not do it would at least leave no doubt in our minds about our being Muslims in the printed word. Yes, the word part of it is well looked after. It is only the deed part that is causing the difficulty. Some people among us insist that we should also behave like good Muslims apart from professing the faith orally.
I have no means of knowing what led to the apostasy in Sialkot, but maybe it was due to the empty ritual to which even the most enlightened of Muslims are daily becoming prey to in Pakistan, actually ever since General Ziaul Haq made it fashionable to say one’s prayers. Maybe the faith in its present form meant nothing to those who reneged from it. I am sure, however, that they did not do so after comparing the two faiths. There is more to it (by way of inducement from missionaries) than meets the eye.
This stress on the ritual is not confined to Pakistan. That business of the dark veil in Malaysia shows that adherence to signs and symbols, rather than conforming to Islamic tenets in practice, is becoming the order of the day all over the Muslim world. Look at own people, as I do in Islamabad. The white skull cap must be worn even when taking the morning walk, just to indicate that we have risen straight from the prayer mat. Where was the skull cap (and the rosary in hand) previously when people didn’t have to show off that they say their prayers regularly?
The tragedy with Islam is that we have surrendered its preservation to the professional maulvi who makes it sound a complex esoteric practice, instead of a plain and rational way of life that it really is. If the maulvi were to make it simple he would not be needed. So the entire stress in on the demonstrative and the incomprehensible, and hardly any on understanding the spirit of the faith.
This was a week of cosmic triumph for biology, as scientists with the Human Genome Project announced they had mapped the landscape of the human genetic code, or what its directors termed, more biblically, “the Book of Man”. This means they can pinpoint which of the 3 billion “letters” that make up the code determines eye colour, or an enzyme important to the correct functioning of, say, the central nervous system.
And our individual code exists on nearly every molecule of every cell of our bodies, so a bit of spit or hair and a special microscope is all they need to call it up. “The key to life”, the scientists revealed; and yet hearing this, one couldn’t help but feel a little alarmed, as though human beings were little more than machines programmed by, as National Human Genome Research Institute Director Francis Collins called it, the “instruction book for life”.
The project’s enormous potential for curing diseases, for determining our propensity for certain behaviours, for law enforcement. But there are already examples from current applications that give cause for humility and ethical concerns. One of the more fantastic promises is gene replacement therapy, in which abnormal copies of a certain gene are replaced by healthy ones.
— The Washington Post
Rarely has such an unjustifiable war been launched. Weapons of mass destruction were neither found by the UN weapons inspectors, nor used by the Saddam regime even when it was in its death throes. Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, told the Spanish daily, El Pais, on April 9 that the war against Iraq had been decided upon a long time in advance; that the WMDs occupied a low priority in the US calculations vis-a-vis Iraq and that the destruction of an entire society and large-scale civilian casualties were a very high price to be extracted when the weapons inspection process was going on satisfactorily. As for the plea of regime change, the US had declared on the eve of the war that even if Saddam Hussein left Iraq, US armed forces would enter Iraq to look for weapons of mass destruction.
The pre-emptive attack, in defiance of the UN, is not only a deadly blow to the UN credibility and international legality; it also sets a dangerous precedent for other regional predators such as India, who would look at the US example as facilitating their aggressive designs. In spite of US statements rebutting the parallel drawn by India between Iraq and Pakistan, the US will be morally responsible for any military move that India might make against this country on the pretext of pre-emption, because of the example set by Washington.
The motivation of the attack on Iraq was apparently fuelled by a combination of two factors: on the one hand, the element of realpolitik involving oil and Israel and, on the other, the factor of religious and racial antagonism bred in the wake of 9/11 involving antipathy towards the Muslims and the Zionist-neo-conservative lobbies and Southern Baptist evangelism. The next step in the expansionist US-Israel agenda is the browbeating, politically or militarily, of the remaining independent forces in the region, including Iraq, Syria and the Hezbollah which played a crucial role in the expulsion of Israel from South Lebanon after a quarter-century-long war of attrition.
During the Iraq war, the UN General Assembly did not even meet once, in spite of a call by the Arab League. If other predator states emboldened by the pre-emptive war against Iraq are to be held in check, the General Assembly must meet immediately to put on record its condemnation of the US-led aggression and its denial of legitimacy for the fruits of the coalition’s occupation of Iraq.
On the post-war reconstruction of Iraq, President Bush had, at his Belfast summit with Prime Minister Tony Blair, spoken of a “vital role” for the UN in respect of provision of food and medicine. On the question issue of an interim Iraqi government, he said that the UN may suggest names but would not be the determining authority, which would rest with the US-led coalition. Unless the UN is given a central role in the post-war political and economic reconstruction of Iraq, through a Security Council resolution, will would serving it would be restricted to humanitarian relief, leaving the reshaping of the future destiny of Iraq in the hands of the war coalition. That would be another setback for the legitimacy and relevance of the world body in an increasingly trouble-ridden world.
The destruction of Iraq, with the Arab and Islamic world acting as bystanders, has exposed the bankruptcy of the OIC and the serious contradictions within the Arab League. At least three of the regional states served as launching pads for the US-led invasion of Iraq. The perceived conflict of interests between Arab states as well as their dependence on western powers made it almost inevitable for them to side with the US-led war coalition.
The war against Iraq has so inflamed passions in the region that instead of curbing terrorism, it will spawn a new generation of revenge-seeking terrorists. As Arundhati Roy wrote in the Guardian: “In most parts of the world, the Iraqi invasion is being seen as a racist war. The real danger of a racist war, unleashed by a racist regime, is that it engenders racism in everybody: perpetrators, victims and spectators. It sets the parameters for the debate; it lays out a grid for a particular way of thinking.”
The world-wide disapproval of the war against Iraq is evident from the fact that outside the US and Britain, there was just one country in the whole wide world where opinion polls revealed a popular majority in favour of the war understandably, that country is Israel.
US President Woodrow Wilson had inspired the founding of the League of Nations and President Franklin D Roosevelt had done the same for the United Nations. For his part, Present Bush has dealt a grievous blow to the United Nations and the existing world order through his mindless pursuit of unilateralism and pre-emption as the prime determinant of his foreign policy.
The writer is a former ambassador of Pakistan
The controversy surrounding the business dealings of Defence Policy Board member Richard N. Perle raises the question: Why aren’t such activities subject to the kind of financial disclosure rules that apply to other senior government types?
Perle resigned last month as chairman of the defence board after news reports about his activities as a private businessman, but he remains a member of the board, an unpaid advisory panel that includes — not surprisingly, given the expertise one would expect from such a group — a number of people with ties to the defence industry.
For ethics purposes, the board members are considered “special government employees”, a category that includes thousands of outside consultants, temporary employees and members of part-time advisory committees sprinkled throughout government. These SGEs, as they are known, are subject to many federal ethics rules; for example, they aren’t permitted to participate in government matters directly related to their financial interests. They file financial disclosure forms, but generally these aren’t open to public inspection; instead, they’re reviewed for possible conflicts of interest by agency ethics officers.
The notion — and it’s not one to be dismissed lightly — is that making the forms public would pose too great a disincentive to public service, particularly for those who volunteer their time.
Perle’s situation suggests that Congress might want to take another look at the matter, at least for some in this hybrid category. Unlike ordinary government employees, who face strict limits on outside employment, special government employees find themselves almost by definition at the intersection of government service and private enterprise. This is precisely the point where conflicts are more likely to arise and would seem therefore to present at least as much of a case for public disclosure as the ordinary government official.
Perle — like many of his Defence Policy Board colleagues — has numerous business interests touching on the Defence Department, some already discoverable on the public record, others that have been unearthed by reporters. He is managing director of a venture-capital company that invests in homeland security and defence concerns. He serves as a director of a British data-mining firm with Defence Department contracts. He was retained by Global Crossing, a telecommunications company seeking Defence Department approval to be sold to a firm controlled by Chinese investors; Perle was to be paid $125,000 plus a $600,000 success fee, although he has since ended his relationship with the company and said he would contribute his fees to families of service members killed in Iraq. Our point isn’t that such dual roles are impermissible or inherently unethical. It’s just that the public ought to know about them and be able to judge for itself whether they pose a problem. This doesn’t necessarily require that special government employees spill their intimate financial secrets.
The confidential form they are now required to submit is far less intrusive than the standard disclosure form; it requires simple listings — with no dollar figures attached — of assets, liabilities, positions held and sources of outside income. The one thing that’s missing, from our vantage point, is a roster of individual clients. Requiring that this information be made public might be enough to dissuade some from signing up, but that seems a reasonable cost to bear. Moreover, this isn’t — or shouldn’t be — a partisan issue. During the Clinton administration, Rep. Frank R. Wolf, R-Va., pressed political consultants with White House passes to reveal their outside clients; we agreed with Wolf then, and the consultants made the disclosures. The same arguments hold true today.
—The Washington Post