The Anniston Star from Anniston, Alabama • Page 9

Efje JVnniston OP-ED Wednesday, April 25, 2006 Page 9A Reflections on Confederate History Month ed their lives. So.for Confederate History Month, I did a little reading in one newspaper of the period, and this is what I found. In case you missed it, April is Confederate History Month. Now, if you haven't done anything already, it is probably too late. But looking ahead to next year, At the beginning oflhe war, the editor, no doubt like editors all around the, state, tried to assure readers that life would go on despite the fighting far away.

A report of the firing on Fort Sumter was followed by the announcement that a new Baptist Church was being organized, the news of which was, he wrote, "truly refreshing to hear in these warlike times." Indeed, the newspaper could even make light of things happening on the homefront as a consequence of the this would be a good time to begin thinking about an appropriate way to remember what the Confederacy was all about. Re-enact a battle? Visit a historical site? (Janney Furnace is close by and worth the trip.) Decorate the graves of veterans? Or maybe we could use the month to' consider what the Confederacy meant to the people of the South, at least a few of them, who lived under its brief authority and knew firsthand what today we call history. gomery gave up without firing a shot. With that, the newspaper announced, "all attempts to establish a Southern Confederacy must be abandoned." And they were. In what must have been one of the hardest columns he ever wrote, the editor advised readers that the time had come to "yield to the force of circumstances which we have been unable to control" and "to the stern logic of events and make the best of the situation." And that is what he and his fellow citizens did.

Not long after Montgomery fell, the newspaper noted that "since the return of many of the our town presents a more lively appearance than it has in the last three or four years. The young people and some not so young are beginning to enjoy themselves again, and picnics are becoming fashionable as of yore." So folks set out to recover what they had lost during four years of war. I like to think that, in their quieter moments, they looked back on what the Confederacy had meant to them. Next year, during Confederate History Month, perhaps we should take a quiet moment and do the same. Harvey H.

Hardy) Jackson teaches history at Jacksonville State University and is an op-ed and editorial writer for The Star. He can be reached at hjacksonjsu.edu, how county troops "lost all their clothing" in battle and in their "needy condition" they appealed "in the strongest possible" language to their friends" for help. Reading on, you begin to wonder why neither the state nor the Confederate government could come to their aid. Then you see why, for another article told of the 1 863 "War Tax" and how county residents owning property valued at $6,328,608 were required to pay only $3 1,643 .49 in taxes an assessment of about one-half of 1 percent. So small a sacrifice for so noble a cause.

Much of the money collected was spent to support "indigent families," wives and children reduced to poverty because fathers and sons and brothers had gone into the army. So there was little to give the sergeant who arrived in one town in early 1 864, pleading for anything to help local soldiers in Virginia, men "who had left their home and families to drive back the enemy" and were "destitute of shoes and many of them need clothing." By summer of that year, the newspaper 'was calling for volunteers to defend the state from the invasion everyone knew was coming, but there were not many left to turn out. And in the spring of 1 865, the headlines told the tale: "YANKEES IN SELMA." A Union army had swept down from the north, into the heart of the state, with little to oppose it. Then the Federal forces turned east and a few days after Lee surrendered in Virginia, Mont HARDY JACKSON conflict. Surely readers smiled to learn thai ajudge in a neighboring county had, announced that he would not issue any more mar- riage licenses until the young men in the army returned.

This, the editor noted, had "effectually 'euchred' the lazy, selfish fellows who have stayed home, calculating to get pick and choice" of the i young ladies. No hint. yet. that the men who went off might not come back at all. As the struggle wore on, this casual attitude changed.

Letters appeared in the press telling of I don't mean just those Southerners fighting at the front, soldiers pulled between the deadly dullness of camp life and the absolute horror of battle. I also mean the people back home, who saw the Confederacy from a different perspective. I find their stories best told in local newspapers, county-seat publications that were weekly circulated to a meager list of subscribers who were less interested in great debates over' slavery and states rights and more concerned with how eventsaffect- CIA leaker Bush's thousand days should be labeled 'traitor' What do you call someone who. in violation of her oath, reveals government secrets to a reporter, who then prints them and exposes a clandestine operation designed to get information from suspect J. ed terrorists that could save American lives? Here is what one dictionary says about that word: "One who betrays another's trust or is false to an obligation or word so defined is traitor.

The Central Intelligence Agency fired an intelligence officer after determining she leaked classified information to a Washington Post reporter about secret overseas prisons I CAL THOMAS BY ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR. Special to The Washington Post The Hundred Days is indelibly associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Thousand Days with John F. Kennedy. But as of this week, a thousand days remain of President Bush's last term days filled with ominous preparations for and dark rumors of a preventive war against Iran.

The issue of preventive war as a presidenT tial prerogative is hardly new. In February 1848, Rep. Abraham Lincoln explained his opposition to the Mexican War: "Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion and you allow him to do sa whenever he rriay choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose and you allow him to make war at pleasure emphasis added). If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us'; but he will say to you, 'Be silent; I see it. if you This is precisely how George W.

Bush sees his presidential prerogative: Be silent; I see it, if you don't However, both, Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, veterans of the First World War, explicitly ruled out preventive war against Joseph Stalin's attempt to dominate Europe. And in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, President Kennedy, himself a hero of the Second World War, rejected the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a preventive strike against the Soviet Union in Cuba. It was lucky that JFK was determined to get the missiles out peacefully, because only decades later did we discover, that the Soviet forces in Cuba had tactical nuclear weapons and orders to use them to repel a U.S.

invasion. This would have meant a nuclear exchange. Instead, JFK used his own thousand days to give the American University speech, a powerful plea to Americans as well as to Russians to reexamine "our own attitude as individuals and as a nation for our attitude is as essential as theirs." This was followed by the limited test ban treaty. It was compatible with the George Kennan formula containment plus rence to presidential preventive war: Be silent; I see it, if you don't. Observers describe Bush as "messianic" in his conviction that he is fulfilling the divine as Lincoln observed in his second inaugural address, "The Almighty has His own purposes." There stretch ahead for Bush a thousand days of his own.

He might use them to start the third Bush war: the Afghan war (justified), the Iraq war (based on fantasy, deception and self-, deception), the Iran war (also fantasy, deception and self-deception). There is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidential preventive war. Maybe President Bush, who seems-a humane man, might be moved by daily sorrows of death and destruction to forgo solo preventive war and return to cooperation with other countries in the interest of collective security. Abraham Lincoln would rejoice. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

is a historian and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He served as aitadviser to President John-F. Kennedy. deterrence that worked effectively to avoid a nuclear clash. The Cuban missile crisis was not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War.

It was the most dangerous moment in all human history. Never before had two contending powers possessed between them the technical capacity to destroy the planet. Had there been exponents of preventive war in the White House, there probably would have been nuclear war. It is certain that nuclear weapons will be used again. Henry Adams, the most brilliant of American historians, wrote during our Civil War, "Some day science shall have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race shall commit suicide by blowing up the world." But our Cold War presidents kept to the Kennan formula of containment plus deterrence, and we won the Cold War ithout lating it into a nuclear war.

Enter George W. Bush as the great exponent of preventive war. In 2(X)3, owing to the collapse of the Democratic opposition. Bush shifted the base of American foreign policy from containment-deter- What does Parker do with his time? used for interrogating suspected terrorists. News reports say the fired employee is Mary McCarthy, who was appointed by former National Secu-: rity Adviser Samuel Berger as special assistant to President Bill Clinton and senior director for Intelligence Programs.

Berger has had his own problems with classified In 2005, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges that he stole five copies of highly classified terrorism documents while doing "research" at the National Archives building. Virtually all people who handle classified documents, whether members of Congress or their staff, or employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, take an oath not to reveal those documents to anyone without proper authorization. McCarthy is alleged to have violated that oath. Such oaths are nothing new. They extend back to the founding of the nation.

On Nov. 9, 1 775, the Continental Congress adopted its own oath of secrecy. The language may seem antiquated, but it appeals to character qualities that appear to be in short supply today: "Resolved: That every member of this Congress considers himself under the ties of virtue, honour and love of his country, not to divulge, directly or indirectly, any matter or thing agitated or debated in Congress which a majority of the Congress shall order to be kept secret. And that if any member shajl violate this agreement, he shall be expelled (from) this Congress, and deemed an enemy to the liberties of America, and liable to be treated as Virtue? Honour? Love of his country Where does one see such character qualities lauded or even taught in contemporary culture? Certainly not often in the media. The Washington Post's Dana Priest won the Pulitzer Prize for printing secrets allegedly leaked to her by McCarthy.

Priest also won a George Polk Award and a prize from the Overseas Press Club. Leonard Dow nie the Post's executive editor, said people who provide citizens the information they need to hold their government accountable should not "come to harm for that. Would Dpwnie have felt the same if Americans were leaking information to the Nazis or the Japanese during World War IJ? Imagine this scenario: A terrorist has information that, if revealedcould save tens of thousands of American lives. But interrogators cannot question him because leaks to the media prevent them from engaging in practices that would pry loose the critical information. Would Downie be defending the "right" of government employees to undermine the security of his country in the aftermath of a preventable attack? Former CIA operative Aldrich Ames went to prison for selling American secrets to the Soviet.

Union. McCarthy allegedly gave hers away. If she is prosecuted and found guilty, her fate should be no less severe. This isn't a political game in which a Clinton administration official serves as a mole for the Democrats within a Republican administration and leaks information that may benefit her party; this could be harmful to the nation. Has politics come to this: that the national security of this country can be compromised for political gain? In previous wars, traitors were shot or served lengthy prison terms.

Now they get fired and the reportervho prints the secrets, possibly damaging her nation, wins prestigious journalism awards. Morality and patriotism appear to have been turned upside down. CIA Director Porter Goss is known to take leaks seriously. He has called the damage they cause "very severe to our capabilities to carry out our mission." No one can recall a recent example bf a CI A employee being unmasked for leaking information to the media, though many have done so. For the safety and security of the country.

McCarthy's firing should serve as a warning to anyone who takes an oath to preserve their nation's secrets that they will no longer be able to count on getting away with violating that oath. sonal attack on late U.S. Supreme Court Justice and former U.S. senator from Alabama Hugo Black, an inductee chosen unanimously by the bar's 72-member governing board. Parker erroneously states that Black "personally launched the war to kick God out of the public square." Parker also continues misstating the factual Furthermore, it is to fail to point out errors made by lower courts; harmonize decision rules used by the legal system; and ensure that results in one case are sufficiently principled to permit their application also to other, like cases.

To perform his duties, he must issue princi and legal record of Justice Black's participation in religion cases of the hitter's court, which has never "ruled against prayer perse and Bible reading perse in public schools." It has ruled that officially sponsored prayer and devotional Bible reading are unconstitutional. If a judge can't get that distinction right, then he has no business pled opinions rather than press releases, by authoring opinions that his fellow justices can agree to join for the reason a former Arkansas Supreme Court justice once described like this: Preparing "a formal opinion assures some measure of thoughtful review of the facts in a case and of the law's bearing upon them" and helps to avoid An appellate judge who does not write majority opinions is simply misusing his time. BYJIMVICKREY Special to The Star What is my fellow churchman Tom Parker doing with his time? It's certainly not the work of an associate justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, the position for which he is being paid handsomely by taxpayers. Appellate cases go into his office at the Judicial Building and seem to disappear into a black hole of inexcusable inaction. So bad is his record of stewardship at the court that through April 21 he had authored only two published majority decisions.

Two, not counting an "advisory opinion" last year, which was not joined in by any other justices. Such a damning record of judicial inactivity would embarrass most judges on any court, especially one on a state's highest court. (Chief Justice Drayton Nabers, who spends half his time administering the unified court system, authored 12 times as many last year. The average for 2005 of the other eight justices is 43.25.) Parker has thereby made himself the per- 1 sonification of Gladstone's admonition: "Jus-1 tice delayed, is justice denied." Justice, according to Black's Law Dictionary, 6th is "the constant and perpetual disposition of legal mat-, ters or disputes to render every man his sic due" (emphasis added). i So what does Judge Parker do with all of the time he's not spending dispensing justice on the job? He devotes himself to such activities as personally attacking his fellow judges in newspaper essays for not doing what they are required by state and federal oaths and the U.S.

Constitution to do follow the precedents of higher courts. He insults the entire Alabama Bar, including me and every other lawyer in the state, by having distributed at its Good Friday Hall of Fame induction ceremony a per "snap judgments and lazy preferences for armchair theorizing as against library research and time-consuming cerebral effort." The great English jurist Sir Edward Coke said: "Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason." Determining the bases of decisions for future reference (something Justice Parker's provided just twice) is thus much more important than knowing how he feels about his personal relationship with other members of his court or binding U.S. Supreme Court precedents or even Chief Justice Nabers or Justice Black. An appellate judge whd doesn't write majority opinions is simply misusing his time on the court and ought to be ashamed of himself. Indeed, he ought to consider resigning if he cannot change his ways.

Jim Vickrey of Montgomery is a former college president, a professor of rhetoric and a lawyer who has argued cases before the Alabama Supreme Court. being on an appellate court where such is the essence of its work. When he announced his last-minute intention to ask Alabamians to promote him to chief justice, Parker's "spokesman," not he, tried to explain away his abysmal inactivity in his ent job in this way: "Writing opinions is discretionary and Parker prefers principled quality of sir bureaucratic moreover, he has "considered and voted'on just as many, cases as his colleagues What that leaves out is that the primary work of any appellate court is to explain why it reached its carefullyiconsidered and researched conclusions of fact and law, on all but the most obviously unjustified appeals. Without such, neither lower courts nor lawyers would have definitive guidance regarding future legal disputes, which is the major part of the common law system, For Parker to argue that "writing opinions is purely discretionary" in all cases is to tell litigants and the people of Alabama they have no right of access to the rationales of cases. Cal Thomas 'column is distributed by Tribune Media Services.

He can be reached at CalCalThomas.com. A AA A A A AAAAA A.AAA AAA A A AAA A A A A A AAAAAAAAAA A A A A A A A. AAA A A A A AAA. A A A A A A A AAAAA.A.a.AA.AAA.AA A A A A. A A A A A a a a a Aaa.aa.aaa AVjj.