By wpengine
Last night, former 2000 presidential candidate Pat Buchanan and Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), debated on the subject of civil liberties to a half-filled audience at Bailey Hall. Henrik N. Dullea ’61, vice president for University relations, acted as mediator of the event. The debate opened with approximately twenty-minute introductory remarks by each speaker. Strossen stressed the necessity of the government to protect individual freedoms as it implements policies to ensure the safety of its people. She specifically criticized the Bush Administration’s current increase in governmental autonomy over the rights of the people. “This is about the core traditional American values enshrined in our Constitution. We should look behind any label the government places on its policies and see to it that they enforce maximal security with minimal costs. Too many of their policies after 9/11 have made us less free without being more safe,” Strossen said. According to Strossen, “examples of such unjustified post-9/11 policies” include the Total Informational Awareness Program, secret military tribunals, deportations and arrests, new FBI guidelines that allow spying without suspicion and the unilateral Presidential power to imprison citizens without trial or charge. “Bush, Ashcroft and others have constantly targeted people not because of what they’ve done but who they are. All of us, every single one of us is significantly less free without corresponding gains in security,” Strossen said. As a counterargument to Strossen’s emphasis on the governmental assertion of authority during the current terrorism and Iraqi crises, Buchanan responded with historical accounts of presidential violations of national laws. “During the Civil War, President Lincoln made himself an absolute dictator, and now liberals regard him as one of the greatest heroes in the country,” Buchanan said. He also pointed to the espionage and sedition acts that were implemented during the Wilson Administration and the encampment of Japanese Americans during the Roosevelt Administration. Because of the historical pattern of policy violations by the government that have resulted in national success, Buchanan fully supports the policy measures of the current Bush Administration. “Whatever you say about Mr. Bush’s act, you must keep in mind that he went to Congress for authorization. Every act that has been passed so far has gone through Congress, and if it should’ve been discarded, it would’ve by now,” Buchanan said. The debate was then opened up to the audience for questions which the speakers then continued to discuss. Some of the questions were solicited beforehand from several campus political organizations and leaders. Other questions were posed by audience members. One of these questions came from the Cornell Political Forum, which inquired about the Sept. 11 impact on the civil liberties of illegal immigrants. Strossen responded in support of a guarantee of rights to everyone living in the United States. “[Illegal immigrants] do have Constitutional rights because the language of the Constitution states in the all-important due process and equal access clauses that no ‘person
By wpengine
The Cornell astronomy department will see off its infrared telescope, part of the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) project, next month when it launches into orbit. SIRTF, the fourth and last of NASA’s Great Observatories program, has been in the works for over 20 years. According to James R. Houck, the K.A. Wallace Professor of Astronomy and the principal investigator on the project, the “main objective is to extend the type of observations done by Hubble [Space Telescope] into the infrared part of the spectrum.” Houck’s area of specialization is on the infrared spectrograph. The spectrograph, according to the official SIRTF website, is an “instrument which spreads light out into its constituent wavelengths, creating a spectra.” The spectrograph has the special capability to use infrared light to penetrate clouds of matter obscured by gas and dust and is one of four instruments on board the telescope facility. Unlike the Hubble, which “can image a galaxy or star through starlight, we’re seeing the light emitted through the dust,” Houck said. Houck chronicled the progression of the SIRTF project. In 1978 the project began, and Cornell was officially selected to build the instrument in 1984. The team became “serious about building in the mid-1990s,” he said. In terms of what the general public should be aware of, Houck feels that “SIRTF will bring tremendous sensitivity in the infrared.” Associated with the SIRTF project is the Space Infrared Telescope Facility Fellowship Program, which recruits postdoctoral students of astronomy to contribute to the project. Fellows chosen for the program must choose a U.S. academic institution at which to study. Of the four fellows selected for the 2003 team, one will be studying at Cornell. Henrik Spoon, a Dutch astrophysicist who recently graduated from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, is going to be on a team of ten postdoctorate students when he arrives at Cornell this summer, Houck said. Spoon, according to the SIRTF website, plans to study “dust in ultraluminous infrared galaxies.” On his personal website, Spoon said that he is excited to see the new data that will be generated by SIRTF because he has already seen nearly every galaxy spectrum obtained by the Infrared Space Observatory. The other projects of NASA’s Great Observatories include the Hubble, the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. SIRTF is also part of NASA’s Astronomical Search for Origins Program, which deals with probing the formation of the universe and the formation of galaxies. Houck supported the broader implications of the SIRTF project. It will “enable us to understand the formation of the early universe and galaxies” in the quest to “learn about how the universe formed,” he said. Houck, Spoon and the other postdoctorates hope to see results soon after the April launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla. Archived article by Natalie Adams