From the Los Angeles Times

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Killing in L.A. drops to 1967 levels

Homicides decline despite the faltering economy. The absence of a major drug epidemic may be a key reason.

By Joel Rubin and Robert Faturechi, Los Angeles Times

December 26, 2010

For the first time in more than four decades, Los Angeles is on track to end the year with fewer than 300 killings, a milestone in a steady decline of homicides that has changed the quality of life in many neighborhoods and defied predictions that a bad economy would inexorably lead to higher crime.

As of mid-afternoon on Sunday, the Los Angeles Police Department had tallied 291 homicides in 2010. The city is likely to record the fewest number of killings since 1967, when its population was almost 30% smaller.

Strikingly, homicides in the city have dropped by about one-third since 2007, the last full year before the economic downturn, according to a Times' analysis of coroner records. Throughout the rest of the county, which is patrolled by the L.A. County sheriff and individual cities' police departments, homicides during the same period tumbled by nearly 40%. The Times' analysis showed 159 homicides in areas patrolled by the Sheriff's Department and 164 in the rest of the county through mid-December.

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The city's total translates into roughly 7.5 killings per 100,000 people and puts it in league with New York City and Phoenix as having among the lowest homicide rates among major U.S. cities.

"I never thought we'd see these numbers," said Sal LaBarbera, a veteran homicide detective with the LAPD. "It is night and day compared to the old days. Night and day."

Longer-term declines are even more notable. The city's homicide rate this year marks a 75% drop from 1992, when 1,092 people were killed during a crack cocaine epidemic and gang wars. Homicides investigated by the Sheriff's Department have dropped by more than half since the mid-1990s.

The change, experts say, is not easily explained and is probably the result of several factors working together, including effective crime-fighting strategies, strict sentencing laws that have greatly increased the number of people in prison, demographic shifts and sociological influences.

A significant factor, said Columbia University Law School Professor Jeffrey Fagan, is the absence of a drug epidemic in recent years. The three distinct periods in U.S. history when homicides have spiked, he said, coincide with the emergence of heroin, powder cocaine and crack cocaine, each of which gave rise to "a chaotic, violent street drug culture."

The decline in homicide rates can be seen in places like Los Angeles' West Adams neighborhood. A strip along the south side of the Santa Monica Freeway that is home to about 22,000 people, the neighborhood tallied 17 homicides between 2007 and 2009, making it one of the deadlier areas in the city.

Then, the killing stopped.

Barring deadly violence in the next few days, West Adams will end 2010 with no homicides since a fatal stabbing early on Christmas morning a year ago.

"We are such a small area, we felt every one of those killings," said Elbert Preston, 59, a lifelong resident of the area and president of the West Adams neighborhood council. "It's great to see the changes that are happening here. I give a lot of credit to the work the police are doing, especially on the gangs. But it's also about people in the community becoming more involved."

A few neighborhoods, including Watts and Westlake, have struggled with homicide rates that have not declined significantly over the last four years. Many others, like West Adams, have seen a significant decline. Homicides in the Vermont Square neighborhood of South Los Angeles, for example, have declined in each of the last four years, from 15 in 2007 to three so far this year, the Times' analysis found. Killings in Compton and Long Beach held steady for the three previous years, then posted steep declines this year.

Homicides, which are less likely than other crimes to go unreported, are a bellwether of overall crime rates. Through Dec. 18, the LAPD had posted an 11% decline city-wide in overall violent crime — homicides, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults — compared with the same period last year. Major property crimes in the city were down 6% from last year, according to LAPD statistics. It is the eighth consecutive year that crime has fallen in the city.

Crime in areas patrolled by the Sheriff's Department has been largely stagnant this year, with violent and property crime rates through the end of November down slightly from last year, department figures show.

Law enforcement officials say they worry that depleted resources and staffing shortages brought on by the fiscal crisis could erode their gains. The LAPD has had no money to pay officers for overtime. In lieu of being paid cash, officers have had to take compensatory time off from work. The plan has had the effect of cutting the force by the equivalent of about 500 officers.

In the Sheriff's Department, deputies had to neglect regular assignments for several hours each month in order to carry out routine patrols and low-level administrative tasks. The reshuffling allowed the cash-strapped department to significantly cut overtime but drew grumblings from within the ranks.

In the meantime, however, police officers have been taking satisfaction in the numbers. "Absent some disaster, we're going to have the best year we've had in decades. There were a bunch of indicators warning us that that shouldn't have happened," LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said in a recent interview. "It is a real complex equation.... The factors are a hundredfold and police are, to me, the biggest one."

Beck and his command staff have been talking quietly for months about cracking the 300 barrier, an arbitrary milestone but one with symbolic importance for showing how far the homicide toll in the city has fallen.

How much further the rates could drop is unknown. In Los Angeles city and county, more than in most other U.S. metropolitan areas, gangs play a major role in the story of homicides.

Gang-related homicides account for about half of all killings here, law enforcement officials and researchers estimate. And although there are few things police can do to lower the number of killings that arise from domestic abuse incidents, hit-and-run accidents and other isolated situations, shootings that stem from gang rivalries and initiation rites can be cut with targeted strategies, gang experts believe.

"Before, everyone was under the traditional police strategy of 'arrest your way out of everything,' " said Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca. But in recent years, law enforcement and elected officials have begun to embrace a new approach to combating gang violence that meshes traditional crime fighting with programs to forestall violence, such as one that trains former gang members to intervene between rival gangs.

Civil rights attorney Connie Rice, who was instrumental in pushing through the new strategy, is among those who believe it has begun to pay dividends. She has expressed hope that in coming years, the number of gang-related killings in the city will drop even further.

"We still have far too much gang violence. We've been able to cut away at the edges and limit it when it occurs, but we haven't eliminated it," Beck said. "I know it's a big city, but it doesn't have to be like this."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-la-crime-20101217,0,5741919,print.story

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Anti-bias agency cracks down on the use of credit and criminal checks in job screenings

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sues a firm for using credit histories in its hiring system, a practice that the agency says has a 'disparate impact' on blacks.

By David G. Savage, Washington Bureau

December 27, 2010

Reporting from Washington

The federal agency that enforces workplace anti-discrimination laws is warning employers they could be sued if they refuse to hire blacks or Latinos because of a bad credit history or a criminal record.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last week sued Kaplan Higher Education Corp., accusing the company of using "a selection criterion for hiring and discharge — namely, credit history information — that has had a significant disparate impact on black job applicants."

The lawsuit is part of a stepped-up but controversial effort to eliminate "arbitrary barriers" to employment for minorities by the EEOC, which is governed by five commissioners, three appointed by President Obama.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids racial discrimination by employers. And since the 1970s, courts have said this includes not just blatant bias, but unjustified hiring standards that have an "adverse" or "disparate" effect on blacks and other minorities. But this aspect of discrimination law has remained subject to considerable dispute.

EEOC lawyers say background checks can wrongly exclude a large percentage of minority applicants. "Employers need to be mindful that any hiring practice be job-related and not screen out groups of people, even if it does so unintentionally," said Debra M. Lawrence, an EEOC lawyer who filed the suit against Kaplan.

But Roger Clegg, a former Reagan administration lawyer, criticized these claims as "fundamentally misguided."

"If the hiring criterion does not involve race and it was not racially motivated and it was applied evenhandedly, then it's not racial discrimination," said Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Virginia. "It's not government's business to second-guess a company's hiring standards unless they are treating people differently because of their race."

The Supreme Court has voiced some skepticism over "disparate impact" claims in recent years.

Two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that the city of New Haven, Conn., had discriminated against white firefighters who had high scores when it threw out a promotion test given to firefighters because it had an adverse effect on blacks. But the justices did not issue a broad ruling clarifying this part of discrimination law.

The EEOC, an independent agency with the power to sue employers, recently launched an initiative to "eradicate racism and colorism from employment," and it filed suits against several employers for their use of background checks in hiring. In one case, Freeman Cos., a national events and exhibitions marketing company, was sued for using criminal records and credit checks to screen job applicants.

The agency's lawyers have said such hiring practices are not automatically illegal even if they have an adverse effect on minorities. However, an employer must be able to show that a disputed hiring criterion — such as a good credit history or a clean criminal record — is necessary for the job in question.

EEOC lawyers say that since 1987, the agency has advised employers they may be violating the law if they refuse to hire anyone with a criminal record, even if the crime was in the distant past.

"This is not novel. The test is whether the practice has a negative impact on certain groups," said Carol Miaskoff, an assistant legal counsel for the agency.

She cited the case of a middle-age black man who was turned down for a job by a transit agency in Philadelphia because he was convicted of a gang crime when he was 15.

The suit against Kaplan accused the company of unlawfully discriminating "by refusing to hire a class of black job applicants nationwide" because of their credit history. It sought a court order forbidding the practice and an award of back pay to the unsuccessful applicants.

The agency said the number of workplace discrimination suits rose to the unprecedented level of 99,922 in 2010.

Kaplan, a private education company owned by the Washington Post Co., refused to change its hiring standards in response to EEOC's complaint, and it issued a statement saying it would fight the lawsuit.

"We are an equal opportunity employer, and we are proud of the diversity of our workforce," the company said, acknowledging it "conducts background checks on all prospective employees. For employees whose responsibilities include financial matters, such as those who advise students on financial aid, background checks also include credit histories."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-employment-discrimination-20101227,0,6321291,print.story

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Pakistan's blasphemy law seen as tool of oppression

In a country with countless ethnicities and religious minorities, the 1980s law against insulting Islam is used to settle scores, critics say. The case of a Christian woman sentenced to death has led to renewed calls for its repeal.

By Alex Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times

December 27, 2010

Reporting from Nankana Sahib, Pakistan

Muslim cleric Muhammad Salim isn't worried that a court or Pakistan's president might spare a Christian woman from this village who has been sentenced to death on blasphemy charges.

After all, if Asia Bibi, a mother of two, escapes the hangman's noose, he's confident someone else will kill her.

"Any Muslim, if given the chance, would kill such a person," Salim said calmly, seated cross-legged on a straw mat at a mosque here. "You would be rewarded in heaven for it."

Salim isn't the only one calling for vigilante justice. A cleric in Peshawar has offered 500,000 rupees, or $6,000, to anyone who kills Asia Bibi, if her execution doesn't take place. Other hard-line clerics have warned they would mobilize nationwide protests against the government if President Asif Ali Zardari pardoned her.

Asia Bibi's case has exposed deep rifts in Pakistan over the blasphemy law, seen by some as an appropriate measure to defend the tenets of Islam, but viewed by others as a dangerous tool easily abused in a society that is a volatile patchwork of ethnicities, religions and sects.

The nation's Shiite Muslim minority has been victimized by extremist Sunni Muslim groups for years. Members of the smaller Ahmadi sect, viewed by most Pakistanis as traitors to Islam because they revere another prophet in addition to Muhammad, have been frequent victims of suicide bombings, kidnappings and other attacks. Last year, in the central Punjab city of Gojra, a mob of 1,000 Muslims set fire to more than 40 Christian homes, killing seven people.

Asia Bibi's case gained notoriety because it involved capital punishment. There have been other controversial blasphemy cases since. Accused of burning pages from the Koran, Imran Latif was charged with blasphemy in Lahore but then released on bail Nov. 3 after questions arose about the veracity of the charges. Eight days later, two men shot him to death in an attack police believe was linked to the blasphemy case.

This month in the southern city of Hyderabad, a Shiite Muslim doctor was arrested on blasphemy charges after police received a complaint that he had maligned the prophet Muhammad. His crime? He tossed out the business card of a pharmaceutical company representative whose first name, Muhammad, was printed on it. The doctor belongs to the smaller Shiite sect known as Ismailis.

"There's a fundamental lunacy to it," said Ali Dayan Hasan, South Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. "There is no good spin to put on the blasphemy law. It's used frequently in these preposterous ways, for preposterous reasons."

The law makes it a crime to make any derogatory remarks or insult in any way the prophet Muhammad, the Koran or the Islamic faith. Various subsections of the law carry different penalties, but under the section Asia Bibi was prosecuted, the only sentence is death.

The law dates to the 1980s and the rule of Gen. Zia ul-Haq, who instituted a policy of Islamization to placate hard-line religious parties in exchange for their political support. Since Zia's rule, 974 people have been charged under the law, according to reports in the Pakistani news media.

No one has been put to death for a blasphemy conviction. But at least 32 people awaiting trial or acquitted of blasphemy charges have been slain.

Critics of the law say it can be exploited as a means to settle scores against adversaries or persecute minorities. Human rights advocates say the law is frequently used by Pakistanis embroiled in property disputes or as a tool to bully Christians, Ahmadis or other minorities. Usually, evidence in blasphemy cases is scant, apart from the accounts given by the accusers.

In Asia Bibi's case, her accusers were three Muslim women who worked alongside her picking fruit in a field in the tiny mud-hut hamlet of Ittanwali, in eastern Pakistan. On June 14, 2009, as Asia Bibi and the three women sat under a tree eating lunch, an argument broke out. Asia Bibi had drunk water from the same glass the others had been using, which prompted them to avoid that glass, said Mafia Sattar, one of the women.

Asia Bibi reacted angrily, making several disparaging remarks about the prophet Muhammad and adding that the Koran "is not a book of God, but a book written by you people," Sattar said during an interview at her home in Ittanwali.

That evening, Sattar's sister told cleric Salim's wife what Asia Bibi had said. Five days later, a band of villagers marched to the field, grabbed Asia Bibi, and brought her to Salim. She admitted making blasphemous remarks, Salim said, and later repeated her admission at the Nankana Sahib police station.

But according to a police report, Asia Bibi insisted to investigators that she was innocent. "My God knows that I never used those words," she told police investigator Syed Amin Bukhari. Arrested and imprisoned, Asia Bibi was convicted of blasphemy Nov. 8 and sentenced to death.

Asia Bibi's husband has received death threats and has had to go into hiding with the couple's two teenage daughters.

"This has been so terrible for us," said Asia Bibi's 31-year-old sister, Najma Younis, shooing away a cloud of flies from her toddler daughter. "I am very worried that they are going to go ahead and hang her. Asia's got kids, and I'm very worried about what will happen to them."

No effort to get the blasphemy law repealed has ever gained momentum. Even within Zardari's ruling Pakistan People's Party, there are stark disagreements over the law's place in society. Although several party leaders have been strongly critical of the law, another top official, Law Minister Babar Awan, has staunchly defended it.

"While I am law minister, no one should think of finishing this law," Awan told Pakistani news media in November.

After Asia Bibi's conviction, Zardari had signaled he might exercise his constitutional authority to grant her a pardon. But before he could do so, the Lahore High Court stepped in and barred him from doing so while it heard her appeal, a ruling that human rights activists argue was unconstitutional.

Whether Pakistan tackles the larger issue of repealing the blasphemy law remains to be seen. Hasan, with Human Rights Watch, says keeping the law on the books in effect sanctions the marginalization of minorities: "Intolerance has been mainstreamed into law."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-pakistan-blasphemy-20101227,0,4924522,print.story

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California nursing homes to begin posting federal star ratings

The state is first in the nation to mandate the posting of rankings on a 1 to 5 scale, which are designed to evaluate and compare the quality of care at 1,235 facilities.

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times

December 26, 2010

Patients and visitors at California nursing homes will be greeted with something new come the new year: publicly posted ratings of each facility. The federal ratings give facilities one to five stars depending on quality of care, much like restaurants display letter grades evaluating health and safety compliance.

The new law is intended to ensure that patients and their families are aware of the evaluations. Nursing home officials also must post information explaining the ratings and how to obtain information about the nursing home's state licensing record from the Department of Public Health's website. Facilities that fail to follow the law face a range of potential fines.

California will be the first state in the nation to mandate posting of the ratings, which went into effect in 2008 and are designed to evaluate and compare the quality of nursing homes.

The legislation, sponsored by Assemblymen Cameron Smyth (R- Santa Clarita) and Mike Feuer (D- Los Angeles), faced opposition from patient advocates and nursing home officials. Critics fault the federal ratings for failing to include recent state violations and also say the star ratings unfairly penalize well-run nursing homes that care for the most critically ill patients for failing to improve their condition.

California is home to 1,235 federally rated nursing homes, more than any other state. Of those, 195 got the lowest rating, one star, and 187 got five stars. The new law will affect about 400 nursing homes in Los Angeles County serving about 30,000 people.

Los Angeles County's five-member Board of Supervisors unanimously voted in January to encourage Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state health department officials to post the ratings.

"In addition to providing incentives for operators to establish and maintain high-quality standards of care and compliance, this vital five-star rating system improves care for the patient by providing the information families need to make informed decisions when selecting a facility to meet the needs of their loved ones," said Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich.

But patient advocates and nursing home officials said they remain dissatisfied with the ratings, which they hope federal officials will improve during the coming year.

Federal officials initially scored nursing homes based on quality, staffing and inspections, issuing the top 10% of facilities in each category nationwide five stars, the bottom 20% one star and the middle 70% two, three or four stars, with an equal proportion in each category, about 23%. They have since adjusted staffing and quality measures so that nursing homes that improve can boost their star rating, according to a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Nursing home officials complain that the scoring system does not accurately reflect a facility's quality.

"It should just be a straight rating in a free-market system where you get stars based on performance," said Mary Jann, director of regulatory affairs for the Sacramento-based California Assn. of Health Facilities, which represents about 800 skilled nursing facilities statewide.

Jann said federal officials have told her they are in the process of revising the ratings, but they have yet to provide specifics.

"The quality measures are changing," said Edward Mortimore, technical director of the survey and certification group in the Baltimore office of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. "We're still evaluating what will happen."

Mortimore said the ratings could be frozen or temporarily eliminated from April to next fall while improvements are made. It was not clear what information nursing homes would be required to post during that time.

Patient advocates hope the federal improvements to the ratings will include incorporating state public health complaints and citations.

But even if they do, the ratings are no replacement for seeing a nursing home and speaking with managers and staff, said Pat McGinnis, executive director of California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, which has offices in Pasadena and San Francisco.

"I don't think anyone can pick a nursing home using a ratings system — it's not like picking a car. There's so many factors involved," McGinnis said. "We tell people this is an indicator, one of many, and nothing's going to substitute for your own personal visit."

Feuer said he worked with nursing home officials and patient advocates to shape the law, and although the ratings need to be refined, it was important to provide as much information as possible now.

"Having as much information available as possible is crucial when families and patients are making what could literally be a life-or-death decision," Feuer said. "There's much more we need to do in terms of the quality of care at nursing homes, but it begins with patients and their families making the right decision."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-nursing-home-20101227,0,5231562,print.story

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Invading our privacy on the Internet

Internet companies track and sell advertisers virtually everything we do online. That's why a 'do not track me' system is vital. If Washington fails to act, California should create its own system.

Jamie Court

December 27, 2010

Article 1 of California's Constitution broadly declares that privacy is among our inalienable rights. But the laws enforcing this right are from another era, and our constitutional protection is being undermined.

For example, the law requires the consent of both parties before recording telephone calls and restricts official snooping in our private business. Yet some of California's biggest companies, such as Google and Facebook, violate our privacy daily by tracking us online and collecting massive amounts of private information without our explicit consent.

The Federal Trade Commission issued a landmark report recently showing how little recourse Americans have against Internet companies that track, and sell to corporate advertisers, our choices in foods, friends, books, medicines, search engine search words — virtually everything we do online. The agency threw its weight behind building a "do not track me" feature into every Internet browser — a one-click path to online anonymity.

Silicon Valley companies are already flooding Capitol Hill with lobbyists to warn about the "end of the Internet" if Congress passes such a requirement. They say that about 200 million Americans joined the landmark "do not call me" phone list. What if the same number opted not to be tracked online? Wouldn't that kill the online advertising industry?

These are the same arguments made by companies and the telephone boiler-room operators they hired who once made incessant sales calls that interrupted dinnertime. Yet American commerce did not wither after "do not call" gave us a peaceful meal.

Advertisers may be able to target us better if they know everything about us, but it is the moral mission of government to protect us from being targeted for such invasive data collection without our knowledge and consent.

Consider the case of an Illinois woman whose husband had recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer. "I sent an e-mail using this e-mail [Gmail] account to friends and family," she said. "Almost immediately, I started receiving prostate cancer-related Google ads when I did searches (the ads appear on the sidebar) or opened my e-mail mailbox." She said: "I thought my e-mail could be hacked, but I did not expect my e-mail carrier to be selling our private information."

Giving Americans a visible, uncomplicated choice to stop Internet companies from tracking us online will not end online advertising, but it will force advertisers to respect our personal boundaries. If that means fewer targeted sales of Viagra or shady mortgage refinance schemes, so be it.

The "do not track me" movement is so important because it sets the principle and precedent of the first real governmental limits on the Wild West of Internet data mining. Privacy violations are not victimless. Identity theft has run rampant because so much of our personal information is available in so many places. Teenagers are particularly at risk because they tend to share too much information online. And our jobs, familial relationships and friendships can be jeopardized if information about our medical condition, sexual preferences or lifestyle choices is evident and available to anyone who can see the advertisements on our computer screens.

A poll by Consumer Watchdog this summer found that 90% of Americans want legislation to protect their online privacy and 80% support a "do not track me" mechanism. Another 86% want a single-click button on their browsers that makes them anonymous when they search online.

Today, we have no such choices. The FTC report calls for a shift from focusing on privacy problems after harm occurs to prevention of harm. "Do not track me" is no panacea, but it initiates real control by the consumer over the type of information Internet companies can collect. It's even more important that we have an across-the-board ban on trafficking of children's personal information.

Although bipartisan support exists for a "do not track me" proposal, President Obama, who counts Google executives among his biggest campaign supporters, hasn't thrown his full weight behind a congressional mandate. Online privacy is one of the few bipartisan gifts he can give us at little cost to the government.

The Commerce Department issued a report recently calling for voluntary industry adoption of online privacy but the FTC report makes clear that self-regulation has resulted in the loss of our online privacy. Speaking at a Consumer Watchdog conference in Washington earlier this month, Commerce Department official Daniel Weitzner said Internet browsers were already including "do not track me" functionality. But the fact is without a congressional mandate Internet goliaths that makes billions from tracking us will hardly respect those functions.

If Washington fails to act, California should create its own "do not track me" system through the Legislature or the ballot box. The state that pioneered Internet commerce can also lead the way in ensuring that it does not run roughshod over one of our fundamental rights.

Jamie Court is the president of Consumer Watchdog and author of "The Progressive's Guide To Raising Hell: How To Win Grassroots Campaigns, Pass Ballot Box Laws and Get The Change We Voted For."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-court-privacy-20101227,0,3109096,print.story

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Surviving terrorism

Californians know what to do in an earthquake, and Kansans know what to do in a tornado, but the U.S. as a whole is prepared only to overreact to even a small act of terrorism.

Doyle McManus

December 26, 2010

A year ago, on Christmas Day, a young Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to blow up a passenger jet in midair as it was landing in Detroit, using a bomb hidden in his pants. As he fumbled with the detonator, other passengers realized something was amiss and wrestled him to a halt.

In the 12 months since, the U.S. government has fixed the most obvious problems the "underwear bomber" exposed. The State Department says it now checks routinely to see whether potential terrorists have U.S. visas. The Department of Homeland Security says it can now block suspects from boarding U.S.-bound planes more reliably. The National Counterterrorism Center, which was supposed to "connect the dots" of intelligence from various sources, says it has improved its ability to search government databases for information on potential threats.

And, of course, airline passengers are now subjected to full-body scans -- or, if they choose, to old-fashioned pat-downs.

But some of the most vexing problems have not been fixed. At the National Counterterrorism Center, for example, there's still no single database that automatically merges information from the entire spectrum. Officials say the information systems of the CIA and FBI are still mostly incompatible, both technically (different computer languages) and legally (different rules on how information can be shared). As a result, analysts still sit in front of multiple computer screens, run their searches in different systems and, in effect, connect dots by hand.

Meanwhile, terrorists are still out there, still trying to find a gap in all those defenses. When a shoe bomb didn't work, they tried liquid explosives. When those were detected, they tried the underpants bomb. When air travel became difficult, they encouraged a disgruntled Pakistani American to load a station wagon with explosives and drive to Times Square. When passenger scrutiny increased, they shifted to sending packages. And when large-scale attacks became impractical, plans for small-scale attacks began to crop up.

One of these days, one of these plots is going to succeed. It's not unpatriotic or defeatist to say that; it's realistic.

And that's why one of the most intriguing concepts in counterterrorism today is called "resilience" -- preparing for terrorist attacks and minimizing their impact when they happen.

Terrorists aim to damage their opponents partly by provoking reactions bigger than the original attack. Osama bin Laden spent less than half a million dollars on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington, but he caused billions in damage by prompting a shutdown of financial markets, air travel and other chunks of the U.S. economy -- not to mention the war in Afghanistan and the other counterterrorist campaigns that ensued.

But if a society is prepared for terrorist attacks, makes sure its citizens know how to react when they happen, and protects its transportation, communications and utilities networks from being paralyzed by local disruptions, the impact of terrorism is reduced. It's still a problem, but it's no longer an existential threat.

"As a practical matter we should be far better prepared for these events and make them far less disastrous," says Stephen E. Flynn, a former Coast Guard counterterrorism expert who now runs a think tank called the Center for National Policy.

We can't control everything, Flynn notes, but "we are in control of how we react."

The federal government has spent a lot of time and money working on ways to protect infrastructure. And it has encouraged local governments to improve their emergency planning.

But there hasn't been much focus on public education since the days when Tom Ridge, the first secretary of Homeland Security, encouraged people to seal rooms with duct tape as protection against chemical weapons.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has a website called Ready.gov that explains what to do in case of various emergencies, agency's publicity budget is small; it relies mostly on donated advertising time to get the word out. Homeland Security sponsored National Preparedness Month in September, but I'll bet most of us didn't notice.

Here's an example of how public education can work:

In case of most terrorist bombs, experts say, the best thing to do is to seek shelter inside a building -- whether the bomb is conventional, chemical, radiological or (in the least likely scenario) nuclear. If the bomb is inside your building, get out; but if it's somewhere else, take shelter.

The greatest danger from most of those bombs may be from secondary explosions, airborne contaminants or radiation. Jumping into your car to flee merely exposes you to more risks, and when thousands of people try to evacuate, they choke the roads, cause traffic accidents and impede emergency responders.

But not everybody knows that. A 2007 survey found that in the event of a "dirty bomb," a conventional explosion that spreads radioactive material, 65% of people said their first impulse would be to flee. Flynn talked last year with New York City firefighters and said some of them didn't know whether they should tell people to evacuate or seek shelter in the event of an explosion. ("The policy of the department is clear, and that's shelter in place," responded Joseph W. Pfeifer, New York's assistant fire chief for counterterrorism. "We've trained everyone on that.... The real challenge is educating the public.")

"Nobody ever told the emergency responders what to do," he said.

In the case of a nuclear explosion, a study by Stanford professor Lawrence Wein estimated that a small nuclear device in Washington, D.C., could kill 120,000 people if most people sought shelter in buildings -- but 180,000 if most people tried to evacuate.

Brooke Buddemeier of Lawrence Livermore recently estimated that an explosion in Los Angeles could cause 285,000 deaths or injuries from fallout among people a mile or more away from the blast if they took no shelter, but only a small fraction of that number if they found shelter in brick or concrete buildings. Even a wood-frame house would provide some protection.

Flynn offers three ideas for reducing deaths and injuries in an attack: First, make sure everyone knows that if a bomb goes off, the first thing to do is seek shelter -- preferably underground. Next, teach airline passengers to recognize bombs and detonators, so the next Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab doesn't have a better chance of success. And third, develop national standards for emergency planning that communities would have to meet -- or see their insurance rates go up.

The Obama administration, to its credit, has focused on resilience as a major goal of its homeland security policy. And some officials have been blunt in warning that an attack is likely to succeed some day. "We must be honest with ourselves," Obama's top advisor on terrorism, John O. Brennan, said this year.

Still, in practice, the administration hasn't talked about much about preparedness. "There's a concern about sounding as if you're no longer focused on preventing attacks from happening," one official acknowledged.

But Californians know what to do in an earthquake. Kansans know what to do in a tornado. Floridians know what to do in a hurricane.

Everybody ought to know what to do in the event of an attack -- of any kind.

We're tougher than we look. We can take it.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus-terrorism-20101226,0,973993,print.column

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Keeping a crucial DREAM alive

Critics of the Dream Act are wrong to think the legislation would somehow encourage illegal immigration and diminish the value of U.S. citizenship.

Gregory Rodriguez

December 27, 2010

The DREAM Act, a bill that would have put some undocumented immigrants who arrived in this country before they were 16 on a path to citizenship, failed to pass the Senate in part because Republicans are in full anti-immigrant mode. But it also failed because not one American leader urged us to seriously consider what it means to be American in the 21st century.

I'm not a flaming liberal on immigration issues. I don't believe, as some activists have insisted, that illegal immigrants should be given the right to vote in municipal elections. I am concerned about the growing number of immigrants -- particularly wealthy ones -- who choose dual citizenship for themselves and their children, a practice I fear leads to split or weakened loyalties. I understand that we can't simply open our borders to all.

Still, critics of the DREAM Act are wrong to think the legislation would somehow encourage illegal immigration and diminish the value of U.S. citizenship. That kind of thinking stems from opponents thinking of citizenship in only the most narrow, legal terms. Ultimately, national citizenship and the rules that govern it are meant to limit membership. The assumption, of course, is that the people the rules govern are foreigners, who stand on the outside looking in, desperate to qualify for membership in an exclusive club but ignorant about its culture and traditions.

The DREAM Act was meant to benefit a very different group: the already Americanized children of illegal immigrants who, as one undocumented student recently wrote, may have fallen asleep in Michoacán one day and awakened the next in Boyle Heights. It was designed to legalize the status of young people who did not themselves break the law to come here, but were brought unwittingly and often have no memory of any other home. Moreover, the law would have applied only to those who had shown a commitment to education or joined the military. In other words, the DREAM Act would have legally conferred Americanness on individuals who were already rooted culturally, geographically in the United States, and in the promise of the American dream.

I believe, as the late liberal philosopher Richard Rorty once wrote, that love of nation is a necessary requirement for making a country a better place to live. Today, air travel, international trade and digital technology have blurred all sorts of jurisdictional lines between nation states. But when push comes to shove, I think nations should require their citizens to choose one loyalty over all others. And the Dream Act was aimed precisely at people who have done that.

Patriotism is rooted in attachment to home and community, and the DREAM Act was written to benefit people who demonstrated their attachment by pursuing an education or through service to the country. In the late 18th century, when the U.S. was new, it was this sort of patriotism and love of country that the founders expected from anyone who wanted to become a citizen.

The debate over the Dream Act was disappointing in part because it was a wasted opportunity to explore the connection between community and patriotism, to examine geographic rootedness and what it means to be American. It was our chance to begin understanding Americanness more broadly as encompassing loyalty to and common fate with the people who share our towns and cities.

It's not that legality does not matter. It does. This country, like any other, has the right -- and the need -- to police its borders. But when we deny legal status to young people who have spent most of their lives here, have no other country and are American in everything but legal status, we miss the point and ultimate benefit of patriotism, which is to make our country and its thousands of communities more cohesive and better places to live.

The Dream Act, which was first introduced a decade ago, is dead for now but almost certainly will be taken up again one day. Next time, proponents should push a broader, more illuminating discussion of what it means to be American.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rodriguez-dream-duplicate-20101227,0,4699180,print.column

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From the New York Times

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British Police Charge 9 on Terror Offenses

LONDON — A week after a series of coordinated raids in three cities, the British police said on Monday that they had charged 9 of the 12 men they arrested in what seemed to be a sign that Europe's concerns over potential terrorist attacks are spreading.

Three of the 12 men were released without being charged, the West Midlands Police said in a statement shortly before the men appeared in court in London accused of “engaging in conduct in preparation for acts of terrorism.”

The men, five of whom were said in British news reports to be of Bangladeshi origin, were accused of offenses including reconnoitering targets, conspiracy to cause explosions and testing incendiary material.

The arrests came shortly after the police in Germany moved against two Salafist Muslim networks suspected of seeking the imposition of an Islamic state. The arrests earlier this month were seen as reflecting growing concern in Berlin over the radical messages of some Islamic groups.

On Saturday, prosecutors in the Netherlands said they had arrested 12 Somalis suspected of plotting a terrorist attack.

In recent days, European concerns over terrorism have also seemed to mount after a suicide attack in Sweden by a British resident, a number of terrorism arrests in Spain and France, and other alarms in Germany over fears of a terrorism attack modeled on the 2008 Mumbai killings. The alerts have been given added weight by a warning in October from the State Department in Washington, cautioning of reports of a planned attack in a European city.

In London the men charged with terrorism offenses, aged between 19 and 28, were from three separate areas of Britain: Cardiff in Wales, Stoke-on-Trent in the English Midlands and London. The charges related to various periods between Oct. 1 and Dec. 20 — the day of their arrests.

Their alleged offenses were said by the police to include downloading and researching material from the Internet. The nine men were said to have agreed on potential targets, although those have not been made known.

The West Midlands Police said those charged from Cardiff were Gurukanth Desai, 28; Omar Sharif Latif, 26; and Abdul Malik Miah, 24.

The London residents charged on Monday were Mohammed Moksudur Rahman Chowdhury, 20; and Shah Mohammed Lutfar Rahman, 28.

The accused from Stoke-on-Trent were identified as Nazam Hussain, 25; Usman Khan, 19; Mohibur Rahman, 26; and Abul Bosher Mohammed Shahjahan, 26.

Sue Hemming, the head of the Counter-Terrorism Division of the Crown Prosecution Service, said in a statement that she was satisfied that there was sufficient evidence “for a realistic prospect of conviction, and it is in the public interest that these men should be charged with these offenses.”

When the men were seized, the BBC said they were linked to an investigation, led by the MI5 domestic security service, into a conspiracy related to an operation by Al Qaeda within Britain. The suspected plot was said to be in its early stages.

Britain's Press Association news agency said 5 of the 9 men in court — those from Cardiff and London — were ordered to be held in prison until a further hearing on Jan. 14. The fate of the other four, from Stoke-on-Trent, was still to be determined.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/world/europe/28britain.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Medicaid Bonuses to Reward States for Insuring More Children

The Obama administration plans to announce Monday that it will make $206 million in bonus Medicaid payments to 15 states — with more than a fourth of the total going to Alabama — for signing up children who are eligible for public health insurance but had previously failed to enroll.

The payments, which were established when Congress and President Obama reauthorized the Children's Health Insurance Program in 2009, are aimed at one of the most persistent frustrations in government health care: the inability to enroll an estimated 4.7 million children who would be eligible for subsidized coverage if their families could be found and alerted. Two of every three uninsured children are thought to meet the income criteria for government insurance programs.

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, has called the matter “a moral obligation” and has challenged health care providers, state and local governments and community groups to seek out eligible children.

The stubbornness of the problem is one reason the government expects millions of people to remain uninsured even after 2014, when the new health care law requires most Americans to have coverage and vastly expands government programs to make it affordable.

The bonus grants are distributed according to a formula. To qualify, states must have adopted at least five of eight measures aimed at streamlining enrollment for children in public insurance programs and have recorded Medicaid caseload increases that could not be attributed solely to a worsening economy. Thirty-two states did not even apply for the grants. Three of the 18 that did apply did not qualify for payments.

Alabama will receive a $55 million bonus, more than twice as much as any other state, for having 133,000 more children on its Medicaid rolls than projected by a formulated base line, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. The 15 states that will receive bonuses reported a total of 874,347 children above the baseline, which factors in population growth and, to some degree, demand driven by the economy.

To make enrollment easier, Alabama has eliminated asset tests for children, ended requirements for an in-person interview and allowed children to remain eligible for a year without renewal. It also sends out renewal forms with blanks filled in when data is known, and allows applicants to verify their forms with an electronic signature. The state has adopted “express lane eligibility” so that Medicaid application processors can use income findings from other safety net programs to validate eligibility.

“We are absolutely ecstatic about the $55 million,” said Lee A. Rawlinson, Alabama's deputy Medicaid commissioner. “It just could not have come at a better time for the state. And had we not had all these streamlining efforts we would never have been able to get to these applications and get all these children awarded.”

Oregon, which will receive a $15 million bonus, made many of the same refinements, while also extending coverage to more children. “Without these efforts to make enrollment simplified, the resources we put into outreach and marketing would be wasted,” said Cathy H. Kaufmann, administrator of Oregon Healthy Kids, which encompasses both Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program. “We'd have driven thousands of people to the front door but many of them wouldn't be able to get in.”

Because of the formula's requirements, none of the money will go to California, Texas or Florida, which account for nearly 40 percent of all uninsured children. Nor will any go to the four states that do the best job of signing up eligible children — Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine and Hawaii.

A study published in the journal Health Affairs estimated the national participation rate among children eligible for Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program at 82 percent in 2008. Thirteen states had rates below 80 percent, with Nevada at only 55 percent. Ms. Sebelius said in an interview that it would be “a huge win for kids” if the rate could be pushed to 90 percent.

A third of all children are now insured by two programs, compared with 10 percent of nonelderly adults, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Medicaid covers 24 million children, most of them living below the poverty line, and the Children's Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, picks up nearly eight million in families with slightly higher incomes.

The programs' costs are shared by the federal government and the states. Washington sets income-based eligibility thresholds, which states can exceed.

But in times of economic distress, the pressure on states, which must balance their budgets, is to reduce costs in the revenue-draining programs. One traditional method for doing so has been to make enrollment cumbersome and to devote minimal resources to marketing.

“We've long had a problem, more in some states than others, with an application process that is riddled with red tape,” said Cindy Mann, who oversees the federal Medicaid program.

The bonus grants are intended to make it worth a state's while to enroll and retain eligible children. That has been crucial, officials said, at a time when job losses have increased the number of people who qualify for assistance.

Recessionary pressures drove total Medicaid enrollment to 50 million in 2009, up 2.4 million over 2008, with half the increase among children.

“We're still fighting a bit of an uphill battle at this particular juncture,” Ms. Sebelius said. “What's been encouraging is that even in this time of economic downturn, states continue to push enrollment in CHIP and Medicaid.”

Because of expanded eligibility and simplified enrollment, the percentage of children without insurance has actually declined this decade, even as the percentage of uninsured adults has soared, according to a study by John Holahan, director of the Urban Institute Health Policy Center. He estimated that about 10 percent of children were uninsured in 2009, the lowest rate in more than a quarter-century. That compares with 23 percent of nonelderly adults.

The Children's Health Insurance Program reauthorization, a Democratic initiative that passed with modest Republican support, also authorized grants to states and community groups to help identify eligible children. The Department of Health and Human Services awarded $40 million in such grants last year, along with $75 million to 10 states in the first round of bonus payments.

Alabama was the big winner last year, too. Other states receiving bonus payments this year are Alaska, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Washington and Wisconsin.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/health/policy/27medicaid.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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OPINION

On Forgiveness

We are in a season traditionally devoted to good will among people and to the renewal of hope in the face of hard times.  As we seek to realize these lofty ideals, one of our greatest challenges is overcoming bitterness and divisiveness.  We all struggle with the wrongs others have done to us as well as those we have done to others, and we recoil at the vast extent of injury humankind seems determined to inflict on itself.  How to keep hope alive?  Without a constructive answer to toxic anger, addictive cycles of revenge, and immobilizing guilt, we seem doomed to despair about chances for renewal.  One answer to this despair lies in forgiveness.

What is forgiveness? When is it appropriate? Why is it considered to be commendable?  Some claim that forgiveness is merely about ridding oneself of vengeful anger; do that, and you have forgiven.  But if you were able to banish anger from your soul simply by taking a pill, would the result really be forgiveness ?  The timing of forgiveness is also disputed. Some say that it should wait for the offender to take responsibility and suffer due punishment, others hold that the victim must first overcome anger altogether, and still others that forgiveness should be unilaterally bestowed at the earliest possible moment.  But what if you have every good reason to be angry and even to take your sweet revenge as well?  Is forgiveness then really to be commended? Some object that it lets the offender off the hook, confesses to one's own weakness and vulnerability, and papers over the legitimate demands of vengeful anger.  And yet, legions praise forgiveness and think of it as an indispensable virtue.  Recall the title of Archbishop Desmond Tutu's book on the subject: “No Future Without Forgiveness.”

These questions about the what, when, and why of forgiveness have led to a massive outpouring of books, pamphlets, documentaries, television shows, and radio interviews.  The list grows by the hour. It includes hefty representation of religious and self-help perspectives, historical analysis (much of which was sparked by South Africa's famed Truth and Reconciliation Commission), and increasingly, philosophical reflection as well.  Yet there is little consensus about the answers.  Indeed, the list of disputed questions is still longer. Consider: may forgiveness be demanded, or must it be a sort of freely bestowed gift?  Does the concept of “the unforgivable” make sense?  And what about the cultural context of forgiveness: does it matter? Has the concept of “forgiveness” evolved, even within religious traditions such as Christianity? Is it a fundamentally religious concept?

On almost all accounts, interpersonal forgiveness is closely tied to vengeful anger and revenge.  This linkage was brought to the fore by Bishop Joseph Butler (1692-1752) in his insightful sermons on resentment (his word for what is often now called vengeful anger) and forgiveness.  These sermons are the touchstone of modern philosophical discussions of the topic. Butler is often interpreted as saying that forgiveness requires forswearing resentment, but what he actually says is that it requires tempering resentment and forswearing revenge. He is surely right that it requires at least that much.  If you claim you've forgiven someone and then proceed to take revenge, then you are either dishonest or ignorant of the meaning of the term.  Forgiveness comes with conditions, such as the giving up of revenge.  What are other conditions?

If you seethe with vengeful thoughts and anger, or even simmer with them, can you be said to have forgiven fully?  I would answer in the negative.  That establishes another condition that successful forgiveness must meet.  In the contemporary literature on forgiveness, the link between forgiveness and giving up vengefulness is so heavily emphasized that it is very often offered as the reason to forgive: forgive, so that you may live without toxic anger.

However, if giving up revenge and resentment were sufficient to yield forgiveness, then one could forgive simply by forgetting, or through counseling, or by taking the latest version of the nepenthe pill.  But none of those really seems to qualify as forgiveness properly speaking, however valuable they may be in their own right as a means of getting over anger.  The reason is that forgiveness is neither just a therapeutic technique nor simply self-regarding in its motivation; it is fundamentally a moral relation between self and other.

Consider its genesis in the interpersonal context: one person wrongs another.  Forgiveness is a response to that wrong, and hence to the other person as author of that action.  Forgiveness retains the bilateral or social character of the situation to which it seeks to respond.  The anger you feel in response to having been treated unjustly is warranted only if, in its intensity and its target, it is fitting.  After all, if you misidentified who did you wrong, then forgiving that person would be inappropriate, indeed, insulting.  Or if the wrongdoer is rightly identified but is not culpable, perhaps by virtue of ignorance or youth, then once again it is not forgiveness that is called for but something else — say, excuse or pardon.  (One consequence: as philosopher Jeffrie Murphy points out in his exchange with Jean Hampton in their book “Forgiveness and Mercy,” “they know not what they do” makes Christ's plea on the cross an appeal for excuse rather than forgiveness.)  Moreover, it is not so much the action that is forgiven, but its author.  So forgiveness assumes as its target, so to speak, an agent who knowingly does wrong and is held responsible.  The moral anger one feels in this case is a reaction that is answerable to reason; and this would hold too with respect to giving up one's anger.  In the best case, the offender would offer you reasons for forswearing resentment, most obviously by taking a series of steps that include admission of responsibility, contrition, a resolve to mend his or her ways and recognition of what the wrong-doing felt like from your perspective.

Of course, as the wronged party you don't always get anything close to that and are often left to struggle with anger in the face of the offender's unwillingness or inability to give you reason to forswear anger.  But if the offender offered to take the steps just mentioned, you would very likely accept, as that would make it not only psychologically easier to forgive, but would much more perfectly accomplish one moral purpose of forgiveness — namely, restoration of mutual respect and reaffirmation that one is not to be treated wrongly.  A similar logic holds on the flip side: if as the offender you take every step that could reasonably be asked of you, and your victim is unable or unwilling to forgive, you are left to struggle with your sense of being unforgiven, guilty, beholden.  Offered the chance that your victim would set aside revenge and vengefulness, forgive you, and move onto the next chapter of his or her life, you would very probably accept.

The paradigm case of interpersonal forgiveness is the one in which all of the conditions we would wish to see fulfilled are in fact met by both offender and victim.  When they are met, forgiveness will not collapse into either excuse or condonation — and on any account it is essential to avoid conflating these concepts.  One of the several sub-paradigmatic or imperfect forms of forgiveness will consist in what is often called unconditional, or more accurately, unilateral forgiveness — as when one forgives the wrongdoer independently of any steps he or she takes.  Some hold that unilateral forgiveness is the model, pointing to the much discussed case of the Amish unilaterally forgiving the murderer of their children (for an account of this case, see “Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy,” by D. B. Kraybill, S. M. Nolt, and D. L. Weaver-Zercher). I contend, by contrast, that the ideal is bilateral, one in which both sides take steps.  I also hold that whether forgiveness is or is not possible will depend on the circumstances and reasons at play; not just anything is going to count as forgiveness.  Establishing the minimal threshold for an exchange to count as “forgiveness” is a matter of some debate, but it must include the giving up of revenge by the victim, and an assumption of responsibility by the offender.

Other familiar cases of imperfect forgiveness present their own challenges, as when one seeks to forgive a wrong done to someone else (to forgive on behalf of another, or what is commonly called third-party forgiveness, as for example when the victim is deceased).  Another case concerns self-forgiveness.  The latter is particularly complicated, as one may seek to forgive oneself for wrongs one has done to others; or for a wrong one has done to oneself (say, degrading oneself) by wronging another; or simply for a wrong one has done only to oneself.  Self-forgiveness is notoriously apt to lapse into easy self-exculpation; here too, conditions must be set to safeguard the integrity of the notion.

Excuse, mercy, reconciliation, pardon, political apology and forgiveness of financial debt are not imperfect versions of interpersonal forgiveness; rather, they are related but distinct concepts.  Take political apology, for example.  As its name indicates, its context is political, meaning that it is transacted in a context that involves groups, corporate entities, institutions, and corresponding notions of moral responsibility and agency.  Many of the complexities are discussed by philosopher Nick Smith in “I Was Wrong: the Meanings of Apologies.”  Apology figures into interpersonal forgiveness too.  But in the case of political apology, the transaction may in one sense be quite impersonal: picture a spokesperson apologizing for a government's misdeeds, performed before the spokesperson was born, to a group representing the actual victims.  A lot of the moral work is done by representation (as when a spokesperson represents the state).  Further, the criteria for successful apology in such a context will overlap with but nevertheless differ from those pertinent to the interpersonal context.  For example, financial restitution as negotiated through a legal process will probably form an essential part of political apology, but not of forgiveness.

But, one may object, if the wrongdoer is unforgivable , then both interpersonal forgiveness and political apology are impossible (one can pronounce the words, but the moral deed cannot be done).  Are any wrongdoers unforgivable?  People who have committed heinous acts such as torture or child molestation are often cited as examples.  The question is not primarily about the psychological ability of the victim to forswear anger, but whether a wrongdoer can rightly be judged not-to-be-forgiven no matter what offender and victim say or do.  I do not see that a persuasive argument for that thesis can be made; there is no such thing as the unconditionally unforgivable.  For else we would be faced with the bizarre situation of declaring illegitimate the forgiveness reached by victim and perpetrator after each has taken every step one could possibly wish for.  The implication may distress you: Osama bin Laden, for example, is not unconditionally unforgivable for his role in the attacks of 9/11.  That being said, given the extent of the injury done by grave wrongs, their author may be rightly unforgiven for an appropriate period even if he or she has taken all reasonable steps.  There is no mathematically precise formula for determining when it is appropriate to forgive.

My sketch of the territory of forgiveness, including its underlying moral ideals, has barely mentioned religion. Many people assume that the notion of forgiveness is Christian in origin, at least in the West, and that the contemporary understanding of interpersonal forgiveness has always been the core Christian teaching on the subject.  These contestable assumptions are explored by David Konstan in “Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea.”  Religious origins of the notion would not invalidate a secular philosophical approach to the topic, any more than a secular origin of some idea precludes a religious appropriation of it.  While religious and secular perspectives on forgiveness are not necessarily consistent with each other, however, they agree in their attempt to address the painful fact of the pervasiveness of moral wrong in human life. They also agree on this: few of us are altogether innocent of the need for forgiveness.

Charles L. Griswold is Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy at Boston University.  His books include “Forgiveness: a Philosophical Exploration” (2007) and “Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment” (1999). He is currently co-editing a book with David Konstan on ancient Greek, Roman, Christian, and Judaic notions of forgiveness.  An exchange between Griswold and Father William Meninger about forgiveness was published by Tikkun in its March/April 2008 issue.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/on-forgiveness/?pagemode=print

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