Month: June 2004

The Agenda

I’m sure many blog readers, like me, spend an inordinate amount of time reading about current events. The Iraq war, terrorism, a presidential election and all the other stories, many of which I barely have time to skim, much less write about or even think much about, all start to run into one another in my mind after a while. It becomes a sort of pageant for my amusement on some level, an entertainment from which I find interesting nuggets to amuse myself and my readers and friends. I’m laughing about silly things and ranting about outrageous things and it all becomes part of one long continuous comment that loses meaning with each pithy little observation I add to it.

And then I read something that shocks me, which is not easy to do since it seems that everything is, or should be, shocking on one level or another these days.

This torture memo (pdf) shocked me. And it shocked me not because of its endorsement of torture, we knew something about that already, indeed we’ve seen pictures of it. No, strangely, it shocked me because it was the product of a bureaucratic “working group” and it was delivered in the dry prose of a government report on the legality of setting aside an executive order on train travel requirements. But this “working group,” consisting of lawyers from throughout the executive branch, was tasked with something a little bit different than your average government project. Its job was defining the legal limits of the president’s authority to order people to be tortured.

They had meetings at which I’m sure they all believed very sincerely that they were doing important work on the War on Terror. I’m sure they worked long hours and diligently analyzed the law and offered their advice to the president and secretary of defense with nothing but the good of the country in their minds. And they produced a 50+ page paper from which, I understand, only one person — the state department representative — dissented.

And that report, this product of a bureaucratic “working group” of lawyers is so deeply depraved and contrary to American values that one wonders if at any time during the discussions if someone had stood up and said, “we’re talking about TORTURE for God’s sake!” they would have produced a report at all.

Perhaps they wouldn’t have. But, more importantly, I seriously doubt that anyone stood up and said such a thing. After all, this was being dryly discussed in the op-ed pages of major newspapers and in the weekly magazines as if it were just another method of warfare — like terrorism itself. I’m sure these fine bureaucrats and political appointees believed they were doing their duty.

People are undoubtedly already in the process of wearing out the term “banality of evil” (if it has not already been trod over until its meaning is completely eradicated.) And I have already been taken to task by some who continue to believe that any comparison of the Bush administration to Naziism or totalitarianism in general is some sort of cheating. But, totalitarianism, incipient or full blown, has many features. Legal torture is one of them.

Here we have a “working group” of government lawyers tasked to find out what, if any, legal obstacles there are to presidential orders to torture prisoners in the war on terrorism. They found that the president of the United States has the unlimited power to set aside the laws of the land within his capacity as commander in chief. As has been noted by others, this general idea was explicit in the Nazi Fuehrerprinzip and is implied in what Republican legal theorists similarly like to call the “unitary executive.” The American government has, up to now, never openly embraced such a concept.

Michael Froomkin and other legal experts have examined the final product of this ‘working group” and found the legal reasoning seriously flawed as one might expect. Froomkin concludes his review with this:

If anyone in the higher levels of government acted in reliance on this advice, those persons should be impeached. If they authorized torture, it may be that they have committed, and should be tried for, war crimes. And, as we learned at Nuremberg, “I was just following orders” is NOT (and should not be) a defense.

Whatever the legal merits (and I’m sure Froomkin is correct — this is an abomination) there is something even more frightening at work, I believe, than following bad legal advice and committing a war crime. It’s the fact that a group of people working together from all different parts of our government came to this conclusion apparently without serious controversy.

I can’t get past the fact that this is the product of a “working group” of lawyers, all of them highly educated, presumably intelligent, decent hardworking Americans who love their country. And, not one of them resigned their post rather than participate in creating a legal justification for torture. And, it was not just an abstraction to them; they went into great detail about the precise amount of pain that was to be allowed. There are long passages in which the meaning of “severe pain” is discussed, the effect of long term mental damage is assessed and where the justification of the infliction of long term damage is defined as a matter of intent rather than result. The Washington Post describes it like this:

In the view expressed by the Justice Department memo, which differs from the view of the Army, physical torture “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” For a cruel or inhuman psychological technique to rise to the level of mental torture, the Justice Department argued, the psychological harm must last “months or even years.”

Under this definition you could for instance, shove bamboo shoots under someone’s fingernails, pull their hair out of their head in clumps or beat them with a hose. According to the memo, you can force hallucinogenic drugs on them. You can repeatedly threaten them or their families with death. The imagination is boundless under this definition. After all, who knows how another person experiences pain, and that is what underlies their definition of torture — how the victim experiences his pain.

What was the process by which they came to these dry legalistic definition of when, how and where on is allowed to inflict terrible pain as long as it doesn’t reach the level of intensity that would accompany serious physical injury or organ failure? Did they discuss this around a conference table over a take-out Chinese dinner? Did they all nod their heads and take notes and write memos and have conference calls and send e-mails on the subject of what exactly the definition of “severe pain” is? Did they take their kid to school on the way to the meeting in which they finalized a report that says the president of the United States has the unlimited authority to order the torture of anyone he wants? Did they tell jokes on the way out?

These nice people with nice backrounds and nice jobs spent weeks contemplating how to legally torture human beings. Then they went home and watched television and ate dinner and went to bed and made love to their wife or husband and got up and did it again because it was their job and their duty to find ways to legally justify it:

A former senior administration official involved in discussions about CIA interrogation techniques said Bush’s aides knew he wanted them to take an aggressive approach.

“He felt very keenly that his primary responsibility was to do everything within his power to keep the country safe, and he was not concerned with appearances or politics or hiding behind lower-level officials,” the official said. “That is not to say he was ready to authorize stuff that would be contrary to law. The whole reason for having the careful legal reviews that went on was to ensure he was not doing that.”

These last few days in which I’ve been pondering the unique horror I feel at this latest revelation, I was reminded (of all things) of a quote from George Will recently, in which he condemned the admnistration for being unable to think:

This administration be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts.

I doubt that Will intended anyone to make this connection to his phrase but it is, of course, the central thesis of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Her observations of Eichman were of a “ludicrous” person defined by what she called his “thoughtlessness” as opposed to stupidity. He was filled with contradiction, spoke in nothing but bromides and cliches and believed that he had done his duty to the end. He was, in Arendt’s view, the perfect embodiment of the banality of evil. A company man, a bureaucrat, a regular guy, the kind of man who would join a “working group” to find legal justification for torture without having one second of stricken conscience about it. Indeed, he was too shallow, too dully conformist to ever question himself about anything and thus even have a conscience. Arendt expounded on this theme in “Thinking and Moral Considerations” in which she says:

Evil is a surface phenomenon, and instead of being radical, it is merely extreme. We resist evil by not being swept away by the surface of things, by stopping ourselves and beginning to think, that is, by reaching another dimension than the horizon of everyday life. In other words, the more superficial someone is, the more likely will he be to yield to evil. An indication of such superficiality is the use of clichés, and Eichmann, …was a perfect example.

These people who set about legalizing inhumane behavior on behalf of a president on whom they confer absolute power to order it at will are as shallow and evil as the cliché spouting president who demanded it. The slippery slope to totalitarianism started in a conference room where coffee and donuts and microsoft power point presentations on torture and pain were on the agenda one morning.

The Right Man For The Job

Demosthenes posits the theory that the executive power grab revealed by the WSJ yesterday is surprising only in the fact that it hasn’t happened before. He says it’s related to the weakness in our system that holds the head of government and the head of state in the same office.

When crises arise, then, there is both the opportunity and, lets face it, a clear desire for the head of state to “take charge and lead the people”. If the problems of politics get in the way, then the president has a nearly irresistable opportunity to sweep those “problems” away, which usually means “emergency powers” of some sort. Once gained, these powers are very rarely given up, as there are always new “crises” to exploit to retain them.

These sorts of events are incredibly common. In fact, they’re so common that the fact that the United States has never had this happen has baffled political scientists since the phenomenon was noticed. There are a number of theories as to why, but my own favorite stems from an American military tradition, which is that soldiers swear loyalty to the Constitution, not the president, despite being their “commander in chief”. One of the most treasured aspects of the American system is its balance of power between judiciary, executive and legislature; while its effectiveness can sometimes be questioned, it’s important in that it enshrines the idea that the United States is a country where the laws stand above the president; that the symbolic power of a head of state will never confer absolute power upon him. “L’etat c’est moi” does not apply. It is, perhaps, the only way in which one can have a powerful president without having the system fly apart in the face of crisis.

Perhaps this weakness in our system is only likely to be exploited by a special kind of chief executive, the kind who takes office in an anomolous fashion and then governs radically without a mandate from the people; the kind who sees his legitimacy stemming from God rather than the ballot box; the kind who is convinced that he is leading a great crusade rather than running a democracy on behalf of it’s citizens.

Perhaps it took the unique combination of an attack on the country and a president of limited intellect and legitimacy to go that extra mile.

Spoiled Jerk

Bush bonds with leaders who see the world as he does, who in his view “get” the war on terrorism, who talk simply and straightforwardly and do not break any private commitments and understandings, officials said. Leaders who are willing to accept his point of view may be able to modify it somewhat, or gain something in return, but those looking for real negotiations or give-and-take are liable to come away disappointed, officials and diplomats say.

According to one former White House official, Bush appears to have a simple test for evaluating his fellow leaders: Good people or bad people? Do they have a vision for their countries or not?

“Whenever he talked about leaders, these were the categories he used,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. He said a CIA official who regularly attended the president’s daily intelligence briefings first pointed out to him Bush’s use of these terms, which was then confirmed by his own experience as a senior policymaker in the White House.

[…]

Bush puts a lot of stock in his gut-level assessments of his fellow leaders. The fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin treasures a cross given by his mother — and had it blessed in Israel — convinced Bush he could deal with the former KGB operative. As a result, Bush declared after their first meeting that Putin was “very straightforward and trustworthy” and he was able to “get a sense of his soul.”

Since then, Bush has continued to have close relations with Putin, who also will attend the summit, even as questions have arisen about whether Putin was smothering Russia’s fragile democracy. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that the relationship is “so broad and deep, the presidents could talk about anything on the map” when they meet at the summit.

Jayzuz. I cringe every time I think of this silly little man making judgments based on his “gut” reaction. What possible qualification does his “gut” have to do anything but digest peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? It’s not as if his instincts ever led him to any success at anything until they bought him a governorship in 1994.

Read the whole sickening article, which outlines his “relationship” with various world leaders. He comes off as if he sees the world as high school and he’s the BMOC dumb jock — throwing his weight around, disrespectful of anybody who doesn’t see things his way, stupid, crude and thuggish. (Another contrast with Reagan. Reagan didn’t show disgusting manners in foreign countries. For such a blue blood, Bush is a real pig.)

And for someone who apparently judges leaders on their “vision” for their countries, does anybody know what Bush’s is for this country? World domination? The Rapture? Hell in a handbasket?

Getting Old

Jesse says, ” I know (from personal experience) that conservatives tend to take the elitist attitude that if you disagree with them, it’s because you’re either young or immature.”

Jesse, you are obviously to young and immature to know what you are talking about.

Actually, you know exactly what you are talking about, but you will find that conservatives come up with something even more insulting as you get older. They simply say that you are ill informed and stupid. Everything becomes an epistomological knife fight because you can’t possible know what you claim to know because you aren’t reading, watching, mind-melding the right things. And if, perchance, you are a complete freak like me and actually read, watch and mind meld that right wing drivel, unless you completely eschew any other type of drivel you are being brainwashed and cannot be relied upon to know reality from never-never land.

This argument is the basis for the Right Wingnut mantras “youcontinuetoignoretheFACTS”, “youcan’tstandtolookattheFACTS”, “thesearetheFACTSprovemewrong.”

And, what’s worse is that when you get older they haul out the “if you’re not a liberal when you’re young you have no heart, but if you’re not a conservative when you’re old you have no head” chestnut. (To which I usually think, “no, if you’re a conservative, young or old, you get no head,” which I’m quite sure must be true judging from their hysterical reaction to Clinton’s little hallway forays.)

In any case, conservatives remain condescending and rude throughout your life. Growing older won’t cure it.

The Third Degree

It’s interesting that the crack lawyers who devised this new immunity from war crimes evoked the Nuremberg defense. Aside from the obvious fact that the Nuremberg defense failed spectacularly, it is also interesting because one of the war crimes the Nuremberg defendents, which included the SS, SA and the Gestapo as well as individuals, were tried and convicted of were using what they believed to be a legally prescribed interrogation method they called “the third degree.” I’m sure you’ve all heard of it:

The GESTAPO and SD conducted third degree interrogations. On 26 October 1939 an order to all GESTAPO offices from the RSHA signed Mueller, “by order,” in referring to execution of protective custody during the war, stated in part:

“In certain cases, the Reichsfuehrer SS and Chief of the German Police will order flogging in addition to detention in a concentration camp. Orders of this kind will, in the future, also be transmitted to the State Police District Office concerned. In this case, too, there is no objection to spreading the rumour of this increased punishment. ***” (1531-PS)

On 12 June 1942 the Chief of the Security Police and SD, through Mueller, published an order authorizing the use of third degree methods in interrogating where preliminary investigation indicates that the prisoner could give information on important facts such as subversive activities, but not to extort confessions of the prisoner’s own crimes. The order stated in part:

“*** 2. Third degree may, under this supposition, only be employed against Communists, Marxists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, saboteurs, terrorists, members of resistance movements, parachute agents, anti-social elements, Polish or Soviet-Russian loafers or tramps. In all other cases, my permission must first be obtained.

“*** 4. Third degree can, according to the circumstances, consist amongst other methods, of:

very simple diet (bread and water)

hard bunk

dark cell

deprivation of sleep

exhaustive drilling also in flogging (for more than 20 strokes a doctor must be consulted).” (1531-PS)

George W. Bush has been making comparisons between the “War On Terrorism” and WWII. I didn’t realize that in this sequel we were the Germans.

Update: Just in case Rummy’s lawyers need a head start on a Nuremberg defense for third degree interrogation war crimes, here’s the one the German defense lawyers used. I think they may actually be familiar with it already:

The prosecution accuses the Gestapo of having employed the third degree method of interrogation. I had already spoken about this when I discussed the question whether the methods employed by the Gestapo were criminal. At this point I have the following to say with reference to this accusation:

The documents submitted by the prosecution made it perfectly clear that it was only permissible to employ third degree methods of interrogation in exceptional cases, only with the observance of certain protective guarantees and only by order of higher authorities. Furthermore, it was not permissible to use these methods in order to force a confession; they could only be employed in the case of a refusal to give information vital to the interests of the State, and finally, only in the event of certain factual evidence.

Entire sections of the Gestapo, such as the counter- intelligence police and frontier police, have never carried out third degree interrogations. In the occupied territories, where occupation personnel were daily threatened by attempts on their lives, more severe methods of interrogation were permitted, if it was thought that in this manner the lives of German soldiers and officials might be protected against such threatened attempts. Torture of any kind was never officially condoned. It can be gathered from the affidavits submitted, for instance, numbers 2, 3, 4, 61, and 63, and from the testimonies of witnesses Knochen, Hermann, Straub, Albath, and Best, that the officials of the Gestapo were continuously instructed during training courses and at regular intervals, to the effect that any ill-treatment during interrogations, in fact any ill-treatment of detainees in general, was prohibited.

See? The Germans didn’t believe in ill-treatment of “detainees,” either. But, sometimes they just had to use harsher measures when the security of the state was at stake. Surely, anyone can understand that.

Not that they didn’t have a few bad apples who took things too far from time to time. Doesn’t everybody?

From The Beginning

I posted a short piece last month about Rumsfeld approving extraordinary “interrogation techniques” from the LA Times. Looking at it now, the timing implies that this is the same shocking memo that the Wall Street Journal reported on in detail today.

What the Wall Street Journal Story doesn’t say is that the permission to torture was sought by none other than our good friend General Geoff D. Ripper, the man currently in charge of cleaning up Abu Ghraib prison. From the earlier LA Times story:

Rumsfeld approved in April 2003 a request five months earlier by Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who had arrived at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in November 2002 to oversee prisoners. Miller sought permission to use a broad range of extraordinary ‘nondoctrinal’ questioning techniques on an Al Qaeda detainee, a general with the Pentagon’s Judge Advocate General’s office said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

[…]

The effort to define how far interrogators can go in pressuring detainees for information without violating international law exposed the rift between interrogators and JAG lawyers, who considered some of the techniques Miller proposed to be illegal.

‘You had intelligence officials that might have been pulling in a direction that was different from the lawyers,’ Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said. ‘It’s a competitive process.’

[…]

Rumsfeld trimmed the list of requested interrogation techniques by about one-third, and he insisted that he personally approve a ‘handful’ of techniques, the senior Pentagon lawyer and the JAG official said. Rumsfeld approved the revised proposal in April 2003.”

I commented at the end of my earlier piece that if it is true that Rumsfeld himself signed off on specific acts of torture it was the kind of evidence that war crimes trials were made of. Silly me. Today’s WSJ story reveals that the administration knew very well they were giving General Ripper explicit permission to commit war crimes and went to extraordinary lengths to fashion legal loopholes in order to set Don, Dick and Geoffrey’s minds at ease that they couldn’t be prosecuted. And they did it all under the newly discovered doctrine of Presidential Infallibillity.

To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a “presidential directive or other writing” that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is “inherent in the president.”

Unbenownst to anyone up to now, the US Constitution is apparently the basis for a legal dictatorship. Very interesting indeed that such a radical new interpretation of presidential power should be “discovered” by an administration that was installed by a 5 to 4 vote by the Supreme Court, isn’t it?

What’s the old saying, “begin as you mean to go on?” They went on as they began, all right, using all levers of power in service of their desired goals regardless of legal precedent or constitutional legitimacy. We shouldn’t be surprised. This is what people who pursue power for its own sake always do.

Hitch’s Epiphany

Christopher Hitchens calls Reagan a senile old lizard, dumb as as a stump and worse. He compiles a list of Reagan’s greatest hits from Iran Contra to greenlighting the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

But, then he remembers all the silly liberals who wished Democrats had been in power when the Soviets threw in the towel and has “been wondering ever since not just about the stupidity of American politics, but about the need of so many American intellectuals to prove themselves clever by showing that they are smarter than the latest idiot in power, or the latest Republican at any rate.”

He used to be a pretty tough fellow but the inherent cognitive dissonance associated with Junior worship is making him soft and mushy. He’s reduced to claiming repressed memories of the day he discovered that his intellectual superiority demanded that he embrace dumb luck as the guiding principle in the fight against totalitarianism. I think I finally understand why he became a drunk.

Con Artists In Arms

EMPHYRIO has all the goods on Chalabi’s bosom pal and fellow INC flim flammer, Francis Brooke, the man who is now under indictment from the Iraqi police — whatever that means.

What’s truly creepy is that this guy seems to be some kind of avenging fundamentalist firebreather on top of everything else (or so he says):

Francis Brooke says he would support the elimination of Saddam, even if every single Iraqi were killed in the process. He means it. “I’m coming from a place different from you,” he says in the soft southern drawl one hears from preachers and con men. “I believe in good and evil. That man is absolute evil and must be destroyed.”

It has become clear to me that the neocon intellectual infrastructure was actually some kind of affirmative action program for right wing freaks of all stripes who didn’t have any business connections. How else can you explain the absurdity of a fundamentalist Left Behinder becoming the errand boy to a cosmopolitan, muslim con artist like Chalabi?

I’m beginning to think that the smart thing to do rather than build a media message apparatus, would be to simply infiltrate the one the GOP has already funded and start using it for ourselves. How hard can it be to get a sinecure at one of these thinktankmedia operations? Clearly, you don’t have to have any experience or track record — look at Brooke. This could be the answer folks. They won’t even know it’s happened.

I’m Shocked

Oh, what a big asshole I am for even suggesting that the Republicans would wrap Reagan’s legacy around Junior like a mink coat on a WalMart greeter.

From the shores of Normandy to President Bush’s campaign offices outside Washington, Mr. Bush and his political advisers embraced the legacy of Ronald Reagan on Sunday, suggesting that even in death, Mr. Reagan had one more campaign in him — this one at the side of Mr. Bush.

In France, Mr. Bush heralded the late president as a “gallant leader in the cause of freedom,” and lionized him in an interview with Tom Brokaw. In Washington, Mr. Bush’s aides said that it was Ronald Reagan as much as another president named Bush who was the role model for this president, and they talked of a campaign in which Mr. Reagan would be at least an inspirational presence

Mr. Bush’s advisers said Sunday that the intense focus on Mr. Reagan’s career that began upon the news of his death on Saturday would remind Americans of what Mr. Bush’s supporters have long described as the similarities between the two men as straight-talking, ideologically driven leaders with swagger and a fixed idea of what they wanted to do with their office.

“Americans are going to be focused on President Reagan for the next week,” said Ed Gillespie, the Republican national chairman. “The parallels are there. I don’t know how you miss them.”

Yes they are. Except Reagan, it turns out, had an excuse.

Other Republicans worry that Bush might not hold up so well by comparison:

Some Republicans said the images of a forceful Mr. Reagan giving dramatic speeches on television provided a less-than-welcome contrast with Mr. Bush’s own appearances these days, and that it was not in Mr. Bush’s interest to encourage such comparisons. That concern was illustrated on Sunday, one Republican said, by televised images of Mr. Reagan’s riveting speech in Normandy commemorating D-Day in 1984, followed by Mr. Bush’s address at a similar ceremony on Sunday.

“Reagan showed what high stature that a president can have — and my fear is that Bush will look diminished by comparison,” said one Republican sympathetic to Mr. Bush, who did not want to be quoted by name criticizing the president.

No kidding. As I’ve been watching the mediawhore self-serving treacle marathon, I’ve been struck by just how good Reagan really was on television. He had tremendous confidence before the camera, as a professional actor would, and performed the role of president with humor and flair. Compared to him Junior is playing the second lead in the Midland Junior High version of “Grease.” Let’s face it, even when Bush was deep into his Top Gun phase, he looked more like a member of the Village People than the steely-eyed rocket man. He can’t even ride a fucking horse, fergawdsake.

Reagan looked good in the costume. Bush always looks like he’s swimming in suits a size too big. They’re just not in the same league.

Whoopsie Daisy:

The United States and its allies are winning some battles in the terrorism war but may be losing the broader struggle against Islamic extremism that is terrorism’s source, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Saturday.

The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists — whom he termed ”zealots and despots” bent on destroying the global system of nation-states — are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.

”It’s quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this,” Rumsfeld said at an international security conference.”

Should we put this quote on every campaign web-site, bumper sticker and campaign commercial going forward?

Heavens, yes.