Debate these days, whether in the political arena or on national news programs, reminds me more and more of these words from Shakespeare’s immortal Macbeth:

…it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

So much of what masquerades as discourse lacks logic, reason, and support. Talking heads hurl unsubtantiated opinions back and forth across the airwaves or through cyberspace.

There are, however, those who seek a different path. Those who long for a more rigorous and disciplined approach to debate will welcome the advent of Debatus, a wiki forum for meaningful, structured argumentation.

From the Debatus mission statement:

Debatus is translating this force of the internet and “wikis” to the presentation and refinement of substantiated argumentation and debates. The aim is to foster the ordered and concise presentation of the primary argumentation for and against certain positions. This has not truly been achieved through traditional mediums of newspapers, journals, scholarly work, books. The basic problems of these traditional sources is that they lack a sound point-counterpoint structure, rely on too few minds, and become closed to refinement when ‘printed’. Blogs suffer from basically the same problems because they rely on “posts” that are locked away from refinement and reduction, and generally lack a structured methodology for debate. Debatus moves beyond these limitations.

Debatus sets some basic guidelines for participants: No personal opinion. Arguments must be supported by third-party facts and hew to a standard of logical consistency. A premium is placed upon conciseness and objectivity. Facts must be derived from credible sources.

For more information on this extraordinary collective experiment in principled debate, visit the Debatus web site.

My friend and colleague, Roni Lipton, Assistant Director of the Graduate Programs in Dispute Resolution at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, asked me to pass along news of the Sixth Biennial Conflict Studies Conference.

This year’s theme is “Conflict Studies: The New Generation of Ideas“. The Conference will be held on November 2-4, 2006, at the UMass Boston campus.

From the conference description:

Organized by the UMass Boston Graduate Programs in Dispute Resolution, the Conflict Studies Conference brings together graduate students from a variety of fields to present their work and share ideas. It provides students with the opportunity to interact with eminent scholars and practitioners of conflict resolution and analysis, and builds community in the field. The conference is held in the state-of-the-art Campus Center of the University of Massachusetts Boston, allowing participants easy access to the City of Boston with its wealth of educational and cultural resources. Previous conferences have each attracted more than 150 participants from universities across the United States, Canada, and numerous other countries.

Program details and registration information are available at http://www.disres.umb.edu/conference.php.

Although this blog is, generally speaking, not political in nature, on rare occasions I do weigh in on political issues when there is reason to do so.

I have a reason today.

To learn why, simply read on. If you prefer to skip this, no hard feelings.

No matter where you are in the world, you have probably read about last week’s vote by the U.S. Senate to pass the innocuously titled Military Commissions Act of 2006–a bill governing the detention and prosecution of terror suspects.

It is, of course, disastrous for what it means to U.S. standing in the world court of public opinion and to American democracy and justice. It broadly redefines who may be deemed an enemy combatant to now include permanent residents of the U.S., strips detainees of their right to challenge their detentions in court through the centuries-old mechanism of habeas corpus, denies detainees full access to the evidence against them, allows for the use of aggressive interrogation techniques, and immunizes the executive branch from prosecution.

Bad enough in the abstract. Consider for a moment what that means on a personal level.

My husband, a British national, has been a permanent resident of the U.S. since 1972. Since that time he has raised three children, all born here in the U.S. As a professor of law, he has educated and mentored thousands of American attorneys, and as a mediator and arbitrator has assisted countless people resolve difficult disputes. Like most of us here, he is a taxpayer. He has been a productive and contributing member of American society since he arrived here 34 years ago. The U.S. has been both physical and emotional home to him for a very long time.

That has all changed for him.

Now, under the bill the Senate passed, permanent residents like my husband could be detained. He would be unable to challenge his detention in court. I would be denied information about where he is being held. And he could be held indefinitely by the U.S. government.

For the first time since he arrived in the U.S., he no longer feels safe. His position here feels precarious and uncertain. This is not the America he first knew. It’s not, for that matter, the America I grew up in.

We don’t think we’re being paranoid. Not when you stop to consider that our elected leaders are regularly accused of a lack of patriotism or even treason simply for speaking out against the war in Iraq. And if that’s what members of Congress can look forward to, is it paranoia or just good common sense to wonder what might lead to detention for a mere permanent resident like my husband? One too many leftist letters to the editor of the local newspaper? An unguarded comment to his students about American constitutional law? A donation to the wrong charitable cause?

As one letter writer to the Boston Globe put it yesterday:

I grew up in Argentina during the rule of a military junta that disappeared more than 30,000 people. I know that when a president has the sole power to detain people he deems to be enemies, when he alone can set the rules for interrogation, when detained people don’t have the right to go to court, and when laws are written to immunize officials who have already committed torture, one is no longer living in a democracy but in a dictatorship.

The political is now personal. The question is, What will you and I do about it? Before it’s too late to ask, What can you and I do about it?