Month: September 2006

Smell The Sulfur

by digby

I just heard John McCain get pissy on on Face the Nation about his bogus torture legislation and say, “The ACLU and the NY Times may not like it but we think people will recognise it defends both our values and our security.”

I honestly don’t know whether he’s stupid or immoral. But assuming he isn’t a complete idiot, I have to say I’m not sure if a man can sink lower than to leverage his heroic status as a tortured POW to codify his own government’s torture policy. You really don’t need to know any more about the man’s character than this.

And in case anyone’s wondering about the vaunted integrity of Huckleberry Graham, after he went on at length on Fox news this morning about protecting the soldiers and the rule ‘o law, he let this slip:

I want one of these guys tried in my lifetime and I’m tired of the supreme court throwing this back. It wasn’t my idea to give em Geneva Convention protections, it was the supreme court. Once the supreme court rules that the Geneva Convention applies we have an obligation to make it work.

And establish yourself as a manly, macho maverick McCainiac. So much for principle.

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Wow

by tristero

I read the transcript but nothing prepared me for the passion and intelligence shown by President Clinton as he makes mincemeat of Chris Wallace. It really must be seen.

More importantly, it must be carefully studied by the leadership of the Democratic Party. This is exactly how to respond to the right wing’s attempt to load the questions and manipulate the debate to their advantage. Notice how Clinton responds immediately to the rhetorical framing* of the question by challenging its honesty. Notice how he reinforces that assertion of opinion – the question is loaded, biased and cheap – by literally overwhelming Wallace with clear, detailed, assertions of fact. Wallace expected evasion and bluster. But he clearly had no idea who he was dealing with.

Within the space of a few minutes, Wallace realized he was in way over his head – that Clinton, this figure he’s held in contempt, knew far more about the subject of his responsibilities, his successes, and his failures than Wallace ever would – and that the trap Wallace had tried to spring on Clinton had totally backfired. He seemed to be all but begging Clinton to let him off the hook. But Clinton, both furious and capable of channeling that fury, toyed with him longer. By the end of the segment, Wallace looked drained, grinning inanely, and Clinton appeared as if he was just getting started.

Many honest folks, as opposed to rightwingers, had serious problems with the Clinton presidency – NAFTA, welfare “reform,” don’t ask don’t tell – and I’m not sure they’re wrong. But warts and all – damn, that was a helluva president and is a helluva human being. There are some great potential presidents out there – Gore, Clark, Kerry, add or subtract your own names – but it is very, very unlikely this country will see anyone as brilliant as Clinton – both intellectually and emotionally brilliant – in my lifetime.

Watch the video. The only thing I can compare it to is Coltrane live at the Half Note or the Ives Concord Sonata. A simply amazing treat for which we have the hapless Chris Wallace to thank almost as much as Clinton. Chris Wallace is surely no Elvin Jones. He’s more like an insipid melody like “My Favorite Things” or “Inchworm” which a genius can turn inside out, develop and reveal a reality that the melody itself could hardly imagine it held.

*Simply because fans of Lakoff have made the words “frame” and “framing” trendy, slathering them on arguments where they don’t belong, is no reason to avoid using it in the proper context.

Aesthetic Insanity

by digby

So I see that the NY Times has teamed up with Drudge and Fox News again, calling any Democrat “crazy” who doesn’t fold himself into a little ball in the corner and meekly take his punishment from the Republicans.

Earlier the wingnuts started hyperventilating that Bill Clinton had completely lost it when he vociferously defended his honor in the face of Mike Wallace’s hellspawn Chris sandbagging him on Fox News after persuading him to come on to talk about the Global Initiative. It made Big Bill a little hot under the collar to have to be rudely interrogated by this Faux journalist who was dutifully following the “Path to 9/11” script and implying that he was responsible for the attacks. Frankly, I would have thought there was something wrong with him if he hadn’t gotten mad.

And now I see that a would-be MoDo named Jennifer Senior is reviewing books written by liberals and calling them “berserk,” unhinged and unglued. Worst of all she feels they confirm all the worst stereotypes about liberals, which is so awfully annoying when you are a smug, contemptuous journalist writing book reviews about politics for the NY Times and everyone confuses you with people who just don’t know how to behave.

The embarrasing books in question are “Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration” a polemic written by Louis Lapham, editor of Harpers magazine and “How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime” a compilation of columns written by journalist Sidney Blumenthal.

Senior is disturbed by the angry tone:

One can certainly understand how these developments — and Bush’s correspondingly rotten approval ratings — have emboldened the opposition. The problem is that these developments have also made the president’s critics more susceptible to rhetorical excess, and Bush, like his predecessor, already has an impressive gift for bringing out the yawping worst in those who disagree with him. Otherwise reasonable people go slightly berserk on the subject of his motives; on the subject of his morality, the hinged fall off their door frames and even the stable become unglued. This is both an aesthetic problem and a substantive one. Substantively, it means gerrymandering evidence so that inconvenient facts don’t make it onto the map. And aesthetically, it means speaking in a compromising and not wholly credible tone.

Yes, getting angry about usurping the constitution, torture and sending thousands to their deaths in a losing war for inexplicable reasons among a hundred other outrages is aesthetically jarring. Please, children, use your indoor voices. There’s no reason to scream.

I haven’t read Lapham’s book, although this review prompted me to order it immediately. I expect polemics to be filled with righteous indignation and I’m quite sure I will not be offended by the intemperate tone. Indeed, that’s why I bought it. Lapham, apparently, still has a beating heart in his body and a functioning brain in his head.

I have read the other book, “How Bush Rules” by Sidney Blumenthal and I simply don’t get what Senior’s gripe is. It’s a compilation of columns written during Bush’s tenure that lays out in damning detail the case for his total immorality, corruption and incompetence. The truth hurts but it’s still the truth. There are no inconvenient facts to “gerrymander” (which means, what?)

I do agree that Blumenthal is guilty of a very serious misjudgment, however. He sees a difference between the Ken Starr witchhunt and Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the Valerie Plame matter. You see, Blumenthal thought that a blatantly partisan special prosecutor fishing around in President Clinton’s pants was inappropriate. Therefore, by Senior’s logic, he must think that all federal prosecutions are inappropriate. The fact that he dedicated his book to Joseph Wilson and included columns about the Scooter Libby jihad (oh, excuse me, that’s so aesthetically inappropriate) … Scooter Libby’s noble whistleblowing campaign to inform the American people what their government was doing, is hypocritical. Surely his previous defense of president Clinton against the Republican smear machine means it would be inconsistent for him to speak out on behalf of another victim of the Republican smear machine. Oh wait.

Anyway, he’s done something aesthetically hypocritical but I can’t quite figure out what it is. And he’s kinda crazy and obsessive, too.

After a while, it’s hard to deny that these columns have a certain cumulative power. But their content has also been curated with one aim in mind, and that’s to cast the Bush administration in the grimmest possible light, rather like Philip Roth telling the story of his protagonist in “Everyman” from the point of view of his illnesses. Blumenthal also has a taste for tiresome epithets — he calls Paul Wolfowitz “the neoconservative Robespierre” and compares Bush (yawn) to a cowboy. And rather than letting damning facts speak for themselves, Blumenthal insists on pushing his arguments to the breaking point. He claims Bush had “plenty of information” to act on before Sept. 11, but fails to produce anything more specific than the findings of the 9/11 Commission. He suggests the tragedy of New Orleans might have been prevented if funds for a flood control project hadn’t been diverted to the Iraq war (as if dozens of other factors hadn’t conspired against the poor city). He even suggests that Rudolph Giuliani became a figure of national reassurance after the Sept. 11 attacks “in large part because President Bush was not to be seen for days.” (Does he really think Giuliani would have been less impressive if Bush had responded with alacrity? Was Blumenthal anywhere near New York that morning?)

Well, this clears something up once and for all. Apparently it is quite common for journalists like Jennifer Senior to believe that it’s their job to mitigate unpleasant facts about President Bush or risk being accused of lacking credibility. Good to know.

Apparently, Mr Bringdown Blumenthal should have included a few columns about some of the “good things” Bush has done to even out the grim ones. I’m not sure what they would be. Those Barney videos are sort of cute; perhaps Blumenthal could have gotten a column or two out of them. After all, as she says “it’s hard to trust a narrator who only and always assumes the worst.” Lord knows George W. Bush has given us little reason to assume the best but he does like to make jokes at others’ expense, so maybe that should count for something. (Senior really enjoys that kind of humor apparently.)

I, on the other hand, couldn’t help but be amused that she faults Blumenthal for not providing more evidence that Bush had “plenty of information” than the 9/11 commission did. After all, all the 9/11 commission found was that Bush sat on his ass for eight months ignoring terrorism while Richard Clark and others were running around with their hair on fire screaming that the terrorists were getting ready to strike inside the United States any day. Surely one needs more evidence than that before one can condemn Bush for his inaction.

Senior delivers the sweeping coup de grace in her final paragraph:

The left has often complained that what it needs isn’t polite speech, but voices as pungent as those on the right. Maybe so. But even the angriest people on the right tend to be funny. Books like this one are a depressing reminder of how important it is for writers to have a slight sense of humor about themselves, if they want to be taken at all seriously.

Oh my goodness yes. The most obvious characteristic of the right’s “pungent” books about liberals being “Unhinged,” “The Party of Death” and “Godless, Slanderous Traitors,” is their self-effacing humor. How refreshing it is to be called a fascist by people with such delightful wit.(And you’ll note that those books are written about their fellow Americans, not the political leadership, as these books about Bush are.) I now understand why the rightwing publishing industry is taken seriously by journalists like Jennifer Senior. They apparently share an aesthetic obtuseness, which explains a lot.

Blumenthal’s book, by the way, is very good. You probably read at least some of the columns in Salon or elsewhere before, but it’s seeing them in their totality, over time, that gives the full picture of how Bush rules. And I have to say that when I read it I didn’t find a thing funny about it. I guess somewhere between the intelligence faking, the waterboarding and the constitution shredding I lost my sense of humor.

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Churning Them Out

by digby

And the hits just keep on coming. From the beginning many of us made the very down to earth, non-pie-in-the-sky, pragmatic argument that invading Iraq would exacerbate the terrorist threat and would therefore make America less safe. Saddam was successfully contained, the benefit of taking him out was not worth the price we would pay in escalating terrorism.

Now, four years later, that position has sadly been validated:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

Glenn Greenwald suggests:

If I were shaping the Democrats’ election strategy, I would create a television commercial where someone reads the [previous] four paragraphs — from a new report in the NYT today — and then I would air it over and over and over every single day as much as possible until November 7.

Absolutely. Bush’s iraq adventure has put this country in much more danger than it was and for no good reason. If people believe terrorism is a serious threat, then these Republicans are the last people they should trust. They have alienated everybody in the world (especially our allies) with their arrogance and disregard for the rule of law. And their drive to invade Iraq for no good reason has put everyone on this planet in more danger.

Bush has been election season fearmongering all over the country for the past few weeks getting more and more hysterical, coming very close to actually shrieking “they are coming to kill you in your beds, don’t you understand!!!”

THE PRESIDENT: Matt, I’m just telling you, what this government has done is to take steps on security to protect you and your family. You asked me about your family, and you represent a lot of other people, and the best information we can get is from people we take off the battlefield, so we can act on it. So we can stop plots before they happen. We’re at war. These are people that want to come and kill your families. And the best way to protect you is to get information. And I’m confident the American people understand why we’ve done that. We’ve acted on information they’ve given us to prevent attacks. And these are real. This isn’t make-believe. These are attacks that were coming to hurt the American people again.

That’s nice George, but it might have been smarter not to start another completely useless and inexplicable war that’s creating terrorists at ten times the pace you can catch and waterboard them!

If we had concentrated on Afghanistan, today we’d be dealing mostly with the morons trying to blow up their tennis shoes and take down the Brooklyn Bridge with blow torches. Instead we’re making hundreds of battle-hardened, violent jihadists by the boatload in Iraq and getting them ready for export all over the world. Excellent plan, Just excellent. You can see why the Republicans are so proud of their expertise on national security.

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Rigorous Process

by digby

More from the great Billmon:

It’s hard to picture Haji Nasrat Khan as an international terrorist. For a start, the grey-bearded Afghan can barely walk, shuffling along on a three-wheeled walking frame. His sight is terrible — he squints through milky eyes that sometimes roll towards the heavens — while his helpers have to shout to make themselves heard. And as for his age — nobody knows for sure, not even Nasrat himself. “I think I am 78, or maybe 79,” he ventures uncertainly, pausing over a cup of green tea.

Yet for three and a half years the US government deemed this elderly, infirm man an “enemy combatant”, so dangerous to America’s security that he was imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay.

The Guardian
Three years on, Guantánamo detainee, 78, goes home
September 22, 2006

I’ve got more of your rigorous process for you, right here:

August 25, 2006. A German native who was imprisoned by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was released Thursday, more than 18 months after a federal judge in Washington ruled there was insufficient evidence to detain him.

and here:

August 21, 2006. On Jan. 18, 2002, six men suspected of plotting to attack the U.S. Embassy were seized here by U.S. troops and flown to Cuba, where they became some of the first arrivals at the Pentagon’s new prison at Guantanamo Bay.

The seizure was ordered by senior U.S. officials in defiance of rulings by top courts in Bosnia that the men were entitled to their freedom and could not be deported. Today, more than four years later, the six remain locked up at Guantanamo, even though the original allegations about the embassy attack have been discredited and dropped, records show.

In 2004, Bosnian prosecutors and police formally exonerated the six men after a lengthy criminal investigation. Last year, the Bosnian prime minister asked the Bush administration to release them, calling the case a miscarriage of justice.

and here:

February 13, 2006 Five Muslim detainees from China’s western Xinjiang province are stranded in a legal no man’s land at the US terrorism prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

They shouldn’t be there. Even the US military has found that the men, members of the besieged Uighur ethnic group, are not enemy combatants. But their ordeal in custody isn’t over. Because they could face harsh treatment back in China – and the US doesn’t want to set a precedent by granting them asylum here – they sit in a barracks-like detention center waiting for a country to give them a home.

or here:

12 June 2006: One of the three men who committed suicide at the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay was due to be released – but did not know it, says a US lawyer.

[…]

At the weekend, one top state department official called them a “good PR move to draw attention”, while the camp commander said it was an “act of asymmetric warfare waged against us”.

(These terrifying terrorists are so formidable that they can wage war against us by hanging themselves in their cages. They are the strongest and most powerful enemy the world has ever known.)

or here:

3/10/2004 vAll four men who were arrested on their return to Britain from U.S. military detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were released Wednesday without charge, police said.

A fifth man had not been arrested when the group arrived at Northolt Royal Air Force Base Tuesday, and he was freed within hours.

In case anyone’s not convinced, how about this “Report on Guantanamo Detainees: A Profile of 517 Detainees through Analysis of Department of Defense Data:“

There are now about 490 prisoners at Gitmo, and “55 percent of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or coalition allies.

“Only 8 percent of the detainees were characterized as Al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40 percent have no definitive connection with Al Qaeda at all and 18 percent have no definitive affiliation with either Al Qaeda or the Taliban.

“Only 5 percent of the detainees were captured by United States forces. [A total of] 86 percent of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86 percent of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were turned over to the United States at a time at which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.”

But the US insists that no innocent men have ever been held at Guantanamo:

MORAN: Are you holding any innocent men here?

HARRIS: I believe truly that I am holding no innocent men in Guantanamo.

[…]

MORAN: So no man who ever came to Guantanamo Bay came there by mistake [or] was innocent?

HARRIS: I believe that to be true.

(Read that whole interview if you want to see some twisted logic in action.)

The evidence shows that the “rigorous process” allows the United States to capture or buy many innocent or low level grunts and then hold them and torture them in Guantanamo as long as they choose. This is indisputable. And we are now codifying that process — and granting legal immunity to those who do it. There’s nothing more to know. It’s all out there.

And aside from the indefinite imprisonment of both guilty and innocent men,this is what else they are excusing:

The information from the various sources frequently matched, providing corroboration of the use of specific procedures, which included prolonged sleep deprivation and shackling prisoners in uncomfortable positions for many hours. One F.B.I. agent wrote his superiors that he saw such restraining techniques several times. In the most gruesome of the bureau memorandums, he recounted observing a detainee who had been shackled overnight in a hot cell, soiled himself and pulled out tufts of hair in misery.

Military officials who participated in the practices said in October that prisoners had been tormented by being chained to a low chair for hours with bright flashing lights in their eyes and audio tapes played loudly next to their ears, including songs by Lil’ Kim and Rage Against the Machine and rap performances by Eminem.

[…]

Mr. Kahtani was, for example, forcibly given an enema, officials said, which was used because it was uncomfortable and degrading.

Pentagon spokesmen said the procedure was medically necessary because Mr. Kahtani was dehydrated after an especially difficult interrogation session. Another official, told of the use of the enema, said, however, “I bet they said he was dehydrated,” adding that that was the justification whenever an enema was used as a coercive technique, as it had been on several detainees.

[…]

The interrogators also discussed another factor in the Red Cross report, the use of a Behavioral Science Consultation Team, known as Biscuit, comprising a psychologist or psychiatrist and psychiatric workers. The team was used to suggest ways to make prisoners more cooperative in interrogations.

“They were supposed to help us break them down,” one said.

The same former interrogator said the Red Cross report was correct in asserting that some female interrogators used sexual taunts to harass the detainees.

They’re all off the hook. All the perpetrators, all the personnel who ordered them to do it, the doctors who betrayed their oaths and all the politicians and their sycophants in the military, the CIA and the Justice Department who sat around in Washington dreaming up this sick, sadistic, perverted program.

And there’s no guarantee that George W. Bush (the man who had his aides scan the reports for him before he personally signed off on 150+ executions in Texas and famously said he knows that none of them were innocent) will not use these measures in the future. The brave Knights of the Big Kabuki, McCain, Huckleberry and Mr Elizabeth Taylor all agreed to allow him to “interpret” decency out of existence. After all, it’s something he knows a lot about.

And there’s nothing these guys in Gitmo can do about it:

Another huge problem remains section 6 (in both of the underlying draft bills), which presumably will “overrule” Rasul, by purporting to strip aliens detained overseas of the right to petition for habeas review, and to drastically limit any further rights of such aliens to seek judicial review of (i) the legality of their detention; (ii) the terms and conditions of their detention and interrogation; and (iii) the proceudres and results of any military commission trial. Jack and others have thoroughly explained why this section is so troubling.

They hate us for our freedom.

Update: The bill is so bad, so convoluted that it’s taking all our smart lawyers awhile to wade through it a figure out just what in the hell is going on. Hilzoy at Obsidion Wings has hit upon something I hadn’t seen before:

I was thinking of the habeas-stripping provisions from the point of view of a detainee, who might wonder: what legal recourse do I have if this bill goes through? How can I protest my detention if, for instance, I have been found innocent but not released, or if I have been tortured? The answer to that question is, as far as I can tell, ‘you have no recourse’; and that horrified me.

But then it occurred to me to think of it from a different angle: from the perspective of the system of extraterritorial prisons that we seem to be setting up. From that point of view, the main question raised by the “compromise” bill (pdf) is a different one, namely: who has the right to question, in a court of law, any aspect of our treatment of alien combatants held outside the US? As far as I can tell, with very limited exceptions, the answer to this question is: no one but the very same government that set the system up in the first place.

This means, basically, that this bill will remove the entire system of detention, with the exception of its military commissions and combatant status review tribunals, from any judicial oversight at all…Literally anything could be going on during interrogation and detention, and the courts would have no way to pronounce on its legality, or to require anything to change.

This means that while the Republicans are pretending to keep the Geneva Conventions intact and prohibiting torture and taking great credit for it, they have removed any means by which one could hold the US government accountable for failing to live up to those rules. Rights without remedies. In other wrods, the whole thing basically just legalized torture for any practical purpose — and that means all of it, from forced enemas to waterboarding to the rack. What’s a furriner gonna do about it? He’s is specifically not allowed any judicial review of anything to do with his treament unless his US government torturers turn themselves in and ask their superiors to punish them.

This is it folks. There will be no judicial oversight of torture which means there is no way to enforce the law. The world will just have to trust George W. Bush to follow those laws based upon his superior morals and decency.

Update II: Here’s the WaPo pretty much saying the same thing. This bill is an abomination.

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Hicks Fer Jesus

by digby

I just watched “Red State” yesterday. It’s very well done. The narrative seems slow moving and kind of meandering at first and then everything just sneaks up on you until by the end you are truly creeped out.

At first I thought it was a slightly unfair portrayal because he was only showing a very particular kind of red state person. By the end I knew why — he had a point to make and it’s scary as hell. He let these people make it for him. There are way too many Americans who truly believe that the government of the United States should be a theocracy. And throughout this film you see how that idea has so permeated a certain constituency that there’s almost no way to get through to them. (The film works well as a companion to Kevin Phillips’ “American Theocracy” and Michelle Goldberg’s “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism.”)

There is one character in the film — a youngish car dealer in Mississippi — who represents an interesting contrast. He votes GOP because he perceives that they are looking out for his business interests but he doesn’t buy the social conservatism — although it was obviously politically incorrect in his social melieu to come right out and say it. He struggled mightily to make his point without insulting his tribe. (It reminded me a bit of certain hippies I knew back in the day who couldn’t quite come out and say they didn’t want to live in a commune because they thought they’d offend their friends.)

My favorite moment was when Mrs Gill, the Mississippi director of Concerend Women For America, gets upset that she’s been “worked over” by this interviewer who had just asked her what she believed in. It’s clear that when the totality of Mrs Gill’s racism and intolerance became manifest in the few minutes that she spoke, she suddenly realized that she had given herself away as a white supremecist and Christian nationalist. Naturally she claimed victimhood and ended the interview.

One of the things that’s obvious in this film is that these people are practiced phonies too. They say things like “we took us a trip to California and couldn’t believe what we saw out there!” like it’s 1952 and they’re Andy and Barney. You can’t tell me these people don’t watch TV. There’s a good part of their schtick that’s pure poseur — the “heartland hick fer Jesus” is very often a thoroughly modern American who’s playing just as many games as anybody else. Taking their “moral concerns” at face value and thinking they can be persuaded by tweaking issues and changing rhetoric is to be a chump. This is a tribal game.

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The USA Mengele Act

by tristero

I’ve spent a good chunk of the morning reading and re-reading Adam Liptak’s news analysis of the so-called compromise deal regarding the use of torture and unconstitutional trial procedures.* And for the life of me, I can’t make head or tail out of it. Maybe if I spent a week slogging throught the “94-page measure” it would start to reveal its meaning but that’s not the point. The point is that it is deliberately obtuse. And in real-life, ie, when interrogating suspects, it is bound to lead to more, not less, extreme torture and murder paid for by you and I. Y’think any Bush administration lawyer is gonna sift the nuances when asked to interpret the law for commanders in the field?

While the “compromise” is incoherent, what’s quite clear are the moral and legal issues involved. Whether you argue from within a faith or from a purely naturalistic standpoint without recourse to any higher deity or cause, torture is wrong. Always. It’s wrong not because it doesn’t work and leads to false and often dangerously misleading confessions. It’s wrong because it violates the essence of what it means to be a human being, whether you define that essence as a gift from God or derive it from purely naturalistic principles.

It is that simple. And it is beyond mind-blowing that such a basic goes-without-saying moral principle as a ban on torture needs to be asserted in 21st Century America. But it has to be, because the people who have taken over this country are in the process of tossing out every single law and moral principle adhered to by human society since what seems like the code of Hammurabi.

What especially stuck in my mind were these two things from the article. First, a moment of the kind of dark humor my friends in communist Prague used to indulge in about their leaders:

“The McCain, Graham, Warner trio really fought back and prevented the administration from winning its effort to reinterpret Common Article 3,” said Jennifer Daskal, the United States advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

The proposed law, at least if it is interpreted honestly, Ms. Daskal said, would prohibit interrogation techniques like sleep deprivation, forced standing for long periods and extreme temperatures.

“The proposed law, at least if it it is interpreted honestly…” Now, that’s funny. The other thing that caught my attention isn’t:

But some voiced concern that using statements obtained through coercion, even coercion forbidden by the McCain Amendment to Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, would still be allowed in many circumstances. So would be hearsay evidence, as well as a combination of the two.

“You create a situation,” Ms. Daskal said, “in which someone could be convicted based on a second- or third-hand statement from a detainee during an abusive interrogation.”

That sure sounds as if, in many cases, even if information is obtained via torture, even if that torture results in the death of the tortured, that information is admissible against a defendant.

And that’s why I”m calling this law, if it is passed, the USA Mengele Act, because it empowers modern-day American psychopaths to do their worst and pass it off as just trying to do their best for their homeland. Republican Ted Bundy would have loved this law, including the sheer cynicism of it. Torment and maim whomever you want just as long as you get something that can be used against a Bush-fingered terrorist. And yes, it’s true, you can get into biiiiiiiig trouble if you do the nasty a little too much, but let’s get real here. Someone tortures a prisoner to fink on Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and that “information” is used to convict KSM – that person’s a friggin’ hero, for crissakes. Okay, he got a little too enthusiastic, but his only crime was being too eager to protect his country!

The USA Mengele Act permits legal evidence to be gathered for an American legal procedure by committing atrocities against prisoners. Exactly the way Josef Mengele went about gathering his “scientific” evidence during the Nazi era.

And let’s not kid ourselves that this will stop with terrorist suspects. After all, Tom DeLay used the Department of Homeland Security to try to round-up Democrats to pass his gerrymandering efforts. Of course, I’m not saying that Bush intends to torture to death his American political opponents. But it opens up the possibility down the line of using torture to produce legal evidence for American courts in, say, drug cases, and sex crimes. And when that happens, then yes, it will be pretty easy to re-evaluate the defintion of “terrorist.” Let’s say a modern-day Elllsberg – we should be so lucky – leaks a new set of Pentagon Papers. With this law, there’s no reason to have Plumbers to burglarize his psychiatrist’s office – you just grab the doctor and let him find out what a real headshrinking feels like.

I don’t think in his wildest dreams Osama bin Laden could have anticipated such a tremendous and rapid victory over America and its values as Bushn delivered. Yes, the destruction of Iraq and any day now, the fall of Iran and the consequent radicalization of millions of Muslims, the ruination of American prestige and influence, not to mention the vampirical drain on our economy: all that bin Laden joyfully anticipated. But for America to abandon all pretense of adherence to western law and morality, that was a pure gift from God to his obedient servant, Osama.

*Full disclosure: NY Times reporter Adam Liptak is a friend of mine. I know him to be an enormously dedicatd reporter (I believe he also is, or was, a lawyer), scrupulously honest and unbiased. That doesn’t mean I necessarily agree with everything he says, or his analyes. I simply respect him.

Unleashing The Beast

by digby

I have written often about how the Republicans are becoming what they railed against for decades: totalitarians. Unsurprisingly I suppose, it turns out that what they really hated about Soviet communism was the economics. The 50 years of ranting about personal liberty and anti-authoritarian government seems to have been mere political rhetoric. Now that they are in power themselves they have adopted certain Soviet values quite seamlessly.

Here’s a former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, writing in this Sunday’s the Washington Post:

This is a new debate for Americans, but there is no need for you to reinvent the wheel. Most nations can provide you with volumes on the subject. Indeed, with the exception of the Black Death, torture is the oldest scourge on our planet (hence there are so many conventions against it). Every Russian czar after Peter the Great solemnly abolished torture upon being enthroned, and every time his successor had to abolish it all over again. These czars were hardly bleeding-heart liberals, but long experience in the use of these “interrogation” practices in Russia had taught them that once condoned, torture will destroy their security apparatus. They understood that torture is the professional disease of any investigative machinery.

Apart from sheer frustration and other adrenaline-related emotions, investigators and detectives in hot pursuit have enormous temptation to use force to break the will of their prey because they believe that, metaphorically speaking, they have a “ticking bomb” case on their hands. But, much as a good hunter trains his hounds to bring the game to him rather than eating it, a good ruler has to restrain his henchmen from devouring the prey lest he be left empty-handed. Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one’s sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin’s notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will. He finally succeeded only by turning the fury of the NKVD against itself; he ordered his chief NKVD henchman, Nikolai Yezhov (Beria’s predecessor), to be arrested together with his closest aides.

So, why would democratically elected leaders of the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling? Why would anyone try to “improve intelligence-gathering capability” by destroying what was left of it? Frustration? Ineptitude? Ignorance? Or, has their friendship with a certain former KGB lieutenant colonel, V. Putin, rubbed off on the American leaders? I have no answer to these questions, but I do know that if Vice President Cheney is right and that some “cruel, inhumane or degrading” (CID) treatment of captives is a necessary tool for winning the war on terrorism, then the war is lost already.

I wrote some time back about the ramifications for the torturers in this regime. I quoted liberally from this great article article by Jason Vest in the National Journal:

“If you talk to people who have been tortured, that gives you a pretty good idea not only as to what it does to them, but what it does to the people who do it,” he said. “One of my main objections to torture is what it does to the guys who actually inflict the torture. It does bad things. I have talked to a bunch of people who had been tortured who, when they talked to me, would tell me things they had not told their torturers, and I would ask, ‘Why didn’t you tell that to the guys who were torturing you?’ They said that their torturers got so involved that they didn’t even bother to ask questions.” Ultimately, he said — echoing Gerber’s comments — “torture becomes an end unto itself.”

[…]

According to a 30-year CIA veteran currently working for the agency on contract, there is, in fact, some precedent showing that the “gloves-off” approach works — but it was hotly debated at the time by those who knew about it, and shouldn’t be emulated today. “I have been privy to some of what’s going on now, but when I saw the Post story, I said to myself, ‘The agency deserves every bad thing that’s going to happen to it if it is doing this again,'” he said. “In the early 1980s, we did something like this in Lebanon — technically, the facilities were run by our Christian Maronite allies, but they were really ours, and we had personnel doing the interrogations,” he said. “I don’t know how much violence was used — it was really more putting people in underground rooms with a bare bulb for a long time, and for a certain kind of privileged person not used to that, that and some slapping around can be effective.

“But here’s the important thing: When orders were given for that operation to stand down, some of the people involved wouldn’t. Disciplinary action was taken, but it brought us back to an argument in the agency that’s never been settled, one that crops up and goes away — do you fight the enemy in the gutter, the same way, or maintain some kind of moral high ground?

This is an important thing for us to think about. It’s not just a matter of abstract morality. It’s a practical question of what happens to societies when they let go. It’s hard to imagine how gay marriage or women’s rights could even come close to the kind of weird, inhumane behavior that is set free when you go this deeply into sanctioned authoritarian sadism. I wrote in that post, called Genie In A Bottle:

To some extent civilization is nothing more than leashing the beast within. When you go to the dark side, no matter what the motives, you run a terrible risk of destroying yourself in the process. I worry about the men and women who are engaging in this torture regime. This is dangerous to their psyches. But this is true on a larger sociological scale as well. For many, many moons, torture has been a simple taboo — you didn’t question its immorality any more than you would question the immorality of pedophilia. You know that it’s wrong on a visceral, gut level. Now we are debating it as if there really is a question as to whether it’s immoral — and, more shockingly, whether it’s a positive good. Our country is now openly discussing the efficacy of torture as a method for extracting information.

When Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase “defining deviancy down” he couldn’t ever have dreamed that we would in a few short decades be at a place where torture is no longer considered a taboo. It certainly makes all of his concerns about changes to the nuclear family (and oral sex) seem trivial by comparison. We are now a society that on some official levels has decided that torture is no longer a deviant, unspeakable behavior, but rather a useful tool. It’s not hidden. People publicly discuss whether torture is really torture if it features less than “pain equavalent to organ failure.” People no longer instinctively recoil at the word — it has become a launching pad for vigorous debate about whether people are deserving of certain universal human rights. It spirals down from there.

People and societies don’t just wake up one morning to find they no longer recognize themselves. It’s a process. And we are in the process in this country of “defining deviancy down” in ways I never thought possible. We are legitimizing torture and indefinite detention — saying that we will only do this to the people who really deserve it. One cannot help but wonder what “really deserves it” will mean in the years to come as we fight our endless war against terror.

Sure, right now it’s just a bunch of foreigners and I guess we don’t feel foreigners are entitled to basic human rights. They must not be human — or at least not as human as “we” are. When you think about it, who knows who “we” are either? Right wingers make millions of dollars writing books about how liberals are godless, death-loving, traitors within. Many people who read those books probably believe these liberals are only one step away from being sub-human too —- they are, after all, godless traitors.

But as the soviet experience shows, anyone can be defined as such sub-humans and at some point it usually comes around to catch even the people who wrote the original tales of godless, death-loving traitors within. I don’t know why — maybe it’s a kill the messenger thing.

I would almost guarantee that if we continue down this path there will someday be a fine, loyal conservative who, for reasons of petty insider warfare or political expediency finds himself in a position like this at the hands of his former comrades:

In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner — through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.

The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man — my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit. . . . Grrrr. There had just been time for everything to start healing during the night when they came back in the morning and did it all over again, for 10 days, when the guards could stand it no longer. As it happened, it was a Sunday and no bosses were around. They surrounded the doctor: “Hey, listen, let him drink it straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It’ll be quicker for you, too, you silly old fool.” The doctor was in tears: “Do you think I want to go to jail because of you lot? No, I can’t do that. . . . ” And so they stood over my body, cursing each other, with bloody bubbles coming out of my nose. On the 12th day, the authorities surrendered; they had run out of time. I had gotten my lawyer, but neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again.

Perhaps nobody cares that that this very thing is being done every day to hunger strikers in Guantanamo. But do people honestly think it can’t happen to them? Once we unleash this beast it won’t only be terrorists or muslims who will be in danger. In one way or another, we all will be.

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Here We Go Again

by tristero

US Strike group ordered to move off Iran’s west coast. And it looks like Bush is gonna try a blockade. Assuming he does, everyone better brush up on their Cuban Missile Crisis history because that is how they’re gonna try to market this product.

And yes, I know, the situation is in no way analogous to the Cuban Missile Crisis. For one thing, Iran is a little farther from the east coast of the US than Cuba is. That’s the kind of knowledge you glean when you glance at a map. The president of the United States might want to do so every once in a while.

[Update RC in comments linked to two articles about the Eisenhower Strike Group (here and here), the implication being that the deployment to the Gulf is not being moved up because of war but because of exercises. However, RC agrees that Bush is up to something vis a vis Iran. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see if the ESG deployment is part of that. An already existing plan for an exercise in the Gulf sounds like a pretty good cover, doesn’t it?]

“I Tried”

by digby

Oooh. Chris Wallace interviewed Bill Clinton today and sandbagged him with a question right out of the box about “why he didn’t do more to stop bin Laden.”

Clinton went ballistic. I just saw the excerpt on Fox:

At least I tried. That’s the difference between me and some, including all the right wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try. They did NOT try. I tried.

No kidding. I remember hearing this kind of garbage constantly:

“Look at the movie ‘Wag the Dog.’ I think this has all the elements of that movie,” Rep. Jim Gibbons said. “Our reaction to the embassy bombings should be based on sound credible evidence, not a knee-jerk reaction to try to direct public attention away from his personal problems.”

And back in the day Republicans were so concerned about encroaching federal police power that they routinely watered down Clinton’s anti-terrorism proposals:

The measure, which the Senate passed overwhelmingly Wednesday evening, is a watered-down version of the White House’s proposal. The Clinton administration has been critical of the bill, calling it too weak.

The original House bill, passed last month, had deleted many of the Senate’s anti-terrorism provisions because of lawmakers’ concerns about increasing federal law enforcement powers. Some of those provisions were restored in the compromise bill.

[…]

Sen. Don Nickles, R-Oklahoma, while praising the bill, said the country remains “very open” to terrorism. “Will it stop any acts of terrorism, domestic and international? No,” he said, adding, “We don’t want a police state.”

Yes, they cared a lot about a police state when a Democrat was in office. So much so that looking back you’d have to conclude that by their standards today they failed to properly anticipate the threat.

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