Month: May 2009

Hung Out To Dry

by digby

A lot of people have been parsing Cheney’s latest blurts, but Jonathan Schwarz is the only one I know who’s caught something historically important:

In a new article by Stephen “W.W. Beauchamp” Hayes, former Vice President Cheney gripes extensively about the Obama administration. It’s exactly what you’d expect. But what you might not expect is that Cheney (seemingly inadvertently) confirms that there was a massive cover-up of the Iran-Contra scandal by the Reagan administration:

“I went through the Iran-contra hearings and watched the way administration officials ran for cover and left the little guys out to dry. And I was bound and determined that wasn’t going to happen this time.”

Considering that two national security advisers (Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter) and the Secretary of Defense (Caspar Weinberger) were some of the “little guys” who were prosecuted for Iran-Contra, it’s obvious who Cheney is talking about as hanging them out to dry: President Reagan and Vice President Bush.

Jonathan goes on to recount the back story to all that, in which the top people in the Reagan administration all got together to create the cover story to protect the big boss, making Robert “Bud” McFarland the fall guy. He recounts this rather chilling excerpt from Robert Parry’s Lost History:

How quickly the investigative space was closing down hit home to me on March 10, 1987. I had been asked to attend a dinner at the home of bureau chief Evan Thomas in an exclusive neighborhood in northwest Washington. The guests that night were retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who was one of three members of the Tower Commission [set up by Reagan to investigate Iran-contra], and Rep. Dick Cheney, R-Wyo., who was the ranking House Republican on the congressional Iran-contra committee. At the table also were some of Newsweek’s top executives and a few of us lowly correspondents. As the catered dinner progressed and a tuxedoed waiter kept the wine glasses full, the guests were politely questioned. Scowcroft, a studious-looking man, fidgeted as if he wanted to get something off his chest. “Maybe I shouldn’t say this but,” he began with a slight hesitation. He then continued, “If I were advising Admiral Poindexter and he had told the president about the diversion, I would advise him to say that he didn’t.”

Could Michael Corleone sound any more ominous? And, here’s the really creepy thing, when you look at that comment in context. Robert McFarlane had tried to commit suicide just the month before. Weirdly, this whole thing makes Cheney almost look good by comparison.

Stupid CIA Tricks

by dday

Marcy Wheeler has done the heavy lifting on this story that has cable news in a tizzy about how Nancy Pelosi, according to the narrative, knew about torture techniques in 2002 but said nothing, implicating her in the nefarious scheme. I just want to make a few possibly redundant point.

• CIA agents are a group of professional liars. I don’t even think that’s slanderous, it’s pretty much their job description. They exist to collect intelligence but the means they have used, and the missions on which they have embarked, have strayed far from this purpose and into the areas of disinformation and false flags and just out and out lying. We’ve already seen their psy-ops training put to work in the traditional media recently, when they got ABC to falsely report that Abu Zubaydah was only waterboarded once, and that it succeeded famously. I am thoroughly unsurprised that the CIA went to the very same network to get favorable treatment on their latest story implicating Pelosi. Within a matter of hours, eagle-eyed journalists spotted the flaw – a letter accompanying the documents, none of which prove conclusively that the CIA told Pelosi about waterboarding, states that the information about the briefings may not be accurate or reliable. It says, and I quote, “In the end, you and the Committee will have to determine whether this information is an accurate summary of what actually happened.” Sounds definitive to me! Nancy’s a liar!!!1!

• Let’s say for the sake of argument that Pelosi was briefed about techniques that constitute torture. First, based on the clear timeline, she was briefed after the torture was committed. Second, I find it curious that the wingers appear to be shocked that Pelosi didn’t leak classified information by revealing the contents of the briefings. There is a reasonable debate that can be had over whether the speech and debate clause of the Constitution pre-empts the classification process, and whether Pelosi could have taken to the House floor to raise an objection. I’m wondering whether she would have been praised for her consistency by the right, at that point. Or whether she would have been rhetorically hung as a traitor who damaged national security. In fact, there were few options for anyone to register a complaint. If anything, this entire exercise proves that the briefing process for classified information, and the Select Committees on Intelligence themselves, are terribly broken. Marcy’s post on the briefing process should leave no doubts about that.

• Furthermore, pointing to dishonest and discredited CIA documents and taunting “See, your leaders are just as responsible” may be, if it were true, a useful piece of information when determining why many Democrats aren’t exactly gung-ho for prosecution or accountability, but from a civil liberties standpoint it means absolutely nothing. War crimes are not mollified by their bipartisan nature, or by a caveat that others were briefed about the war crimes after the fact. Those of us who expect accountability when people in government break the law really aren’t concerned with the letter next to their name designating their political party. In fact, this only further cements the need for an independent prosecutor who can bring his own judgments untainted by party to this whole affair. And if Republicans think that threatening to look into crimes from the Clinton Administration will send a chill among those who desire accountability, they’re wrong. It would relieve us that we’re finally putting down childish things and moving away from the make-believe land of American exceptionalism in all things and into a recognition that people are fallible and they deserve to take responsibility for their actions.

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Exceptional Dissonance

by digby

Both Greenwald and Sullivan take the NY Times to task today for their willingness to call torture torture when it’s applied to Americans but not to terrorists suspects. They cite an obituary today of an Air Force pilot who was shot down over China and tortured into making false confessions. It’s eerily like the stories we’ve heard about our own torture regime, and that’s no coincidence. It was, after all, modeled on the Chinese techniques of that era. Indeed, much of what is described sounds like the milder of the torture techniques the Bush administration approved for the CIA.

In any case, they both do an excellent job of exposing the hypocrisy of the Times, which still refuses to call the Bush torture regime by its rightful name, and point out the, by now, familiar similarities between what was done to our servicemen in the past and what we did to terrorists suspects in the last few years. Sullivan cites this particularly poignant passage from the Obit:

“He wanted me to admit that I had been ordered to cross the Manchurian border,” Captain Fischer told Life magazine. “I was grilled day and night, over and over, week in and week out, and in the end, to get Chong and his gang off my back, I confessed to both charges. The charges, of course, were ridiculous. I never participated in germ warfare and neither did anyone else. I was never ordered to cross the Yalu. We had strict Air Force orders not to cross the border.”

“I will regret what I did in that cell the rest of my life,” the captain continued. “But let me say this: it was not really me — not Harold E. Fischer Jr. — who signed that paper. It was a mentality reduced to putty.”

As Sullivan points out, Dick Cheney wants us all to believe that they really thought a “mentality reduced to putty” was the best way to obtain actionable intelligence. I sincerely have my doubts about that. There is just too much evidence that everyone knew these techniques would result in false confessions. Occam’s Razor says that exactly what Cheney wanted.

But aside from that, whenever I read accounts of these Americans who suffered at the hands of enemies over the years, I can’t quite wrap my mind around the fact that the most famous American victim of exactly this sort of horrific torture is none other than the Republican presidential candidate in 2008. How is it that we’re not more struck by that amazingly ironic turn of events?

Here’s just a little excerpt of his own description of his ordeal:

They wanted a statement saying that I was sorry for the crimes that I had committed against North Vietnamese people and that I was grateful for the treatment that I had received from them. This was the paradox—so many guys were so mistreated to get them to say they were grateful. But this is the Communist way.

I held out for four days. Finally, I reached the lowest point of my 5½ years in North Vietnam. I was at the point of suicide, because I saw that I was reaching the end of my rope.

I said, O.K., I’ll write for them.

They took me up into one of the interrogation rooms, and for the next 12 hours we wrote and rewrote. The North Vietnamese interrogator, who was pretty stupid, wrote the final confession, and I signed it. It was in their language, and spoke about black crimes, and other generalities. It was unacceptable to them. But I felt just terrible about it. I kept saying to myself, “Oh, God, I really didn’t have any choice.” I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine.

Then the “gooks” made a very serious mistake, because they let me go back and rest for a couple of weeks. They usually didn’t do that with guys when they had them really busted. I think it concerned them that my arm was broken, and they had messed up my leg. I had been reduced to an animal during this period of beating and torture. My arm was so painful I couldn’t get up off the floor. With the dysentery, it was a very unpleasant time.

Thank God they let me rest for a couple of weeks. Then they called me up again and wanted something else. I don’t remember what it was now—it was some kind of statement. This time I was able to resist. I was able to carry on. They couldn’t “bust” me again.

I was finding that prayer helped. It wasn’t a question of asking for superhuman strength or for God to strike the North Vietnamese dead. It was asking for moral and physical courage, for guidance and wisdom to do the right thing. I asked for comfort when I was in pain, and sometimes I received relief. I was sustained in many times of trial.

When the pressure was on, you seemed to go one way or the other. Either it was easier for them to break you the next time, or it was harder. In other words, if you are going to make it, you get tougher as time goes by. Part of it is just a transition from our way of life to that way of life. But you get to hate them so bad that it gives you strength.

It goes on in gruesome detail.

Is it not incredibly bizarre that the designated successor to the men who put those very same techniques into practice against terrorists suspects was himself a victim? Is it not even more bizarre that we managed to have a presidential campaign that lasted for what seemed like decades and this was not a more prominent topic of discussion? I can’t believe that we are just carrying on as if this whole thing is perfectly reasonable. Apparently we are just supposed to accept that McCain was horribly tortured by evil “gooks” but Abu Zubaydah was given “enhanced interrogation” by the forces of good. Yet what was done was exactly the same.

The moral dissonance on this issue is so extreme that it’s no wonder everyone wants it to just go away. If we confront what’s really happened then we have to admit that what this country did (is doing?) was no different than the North Vietnamese and the Chinese and the Soviets and the North Koreans. If that truth is ever accepted and the myth of American exceptionalism is finally retired, I’m not sure how the right goes on. Their worldview rests on the notion that America is a shining city on a hill and everyone else are grubby losers toiling in the darkness.

It would be far better for this country to face the fact that we have never been morally superior and so desperately need to work to live up to the standards we set for the world and ourselves. A good first step would be putting and end to this nonsensical fiction that “America Doesn’t Torture.” We do.

Throwback To Calhoun

by digby

Trying to keep up with GOP hypocrisy is difficult even in the best of times, but these days it’s so pervasive it will give you a migraine just trying to sort out the most egregious from the merely laughable. The examples are flowing now that their eight year reign is over. I think one of the most interesting is their retreat to states’ rights after the greatest expanse of not just Federal, but executive, power in history. It’s quite a leap in just a few months, but they seem to be making the seamless transition that only a truly incoherent movement can make — no shame or even awareness of their hypocrisy plagues them.

The New York Times touches on this rebuilding of the states’ rights and secession movement today, indicating that it’s having some problems since most people don’t know what in the hell these weirdos are going on about. But it’s an old old strain in American politics that asserts itself when the Conservative Southern Party shrinks to its essence.(Conservative isn’t really the right word, of course, but it’s the oxymoronic label most people now attach to this political rump. These people are radicals, always have been.)

Anyway, some people around the sphere have been doing some nice work on this that should be read. First of all, Daily Kos asked some questions along these lines in its latest Research 2000 poll that sheds light on the subject:

Do you think the state that you live in would be better off as an independent nation or as part of the United States of America?

US Independent

All 79 5
Northeast 90 2
South 61 9
Midwest 86 4
West 84 4

Would you approve or disapprove of the state that you live in leaving the United States?

Approve Disapprove Unsure

All 4 82 14
Northeast 1 94 5
South 8 63 29
Midwest 3 89 8
West 3 87 10

In most of the country, the 9 out of 10 people love America. But in the South, less than two-thirds would disapprove of their state leaving the US. And sure, while the “approve” contingent in the South is just 8 percent, 29 percent aren’t sure.

Aren’t sure? There’s a debate as to whether leaving the US is good or bad? Is their love of America so shallow, so skin deep, that leaving the country is even an option? And check this out:

Would you approve or disapprove of the state that you live in leaving the United States?

Approve Disapprove Unsure

All 4 82 14
Dem 2 95 3
Rep 9 63 28
Ind 3 83 14

This is objective evidence that Democrats love America more than anyone else. 95 percent of them want their states to remain as part of the union, while only 63 percent — less than two-thirds — of Republicans similarly love their country.

Hence we’ll continue to see wingnutty “sovereignty” resolutions and proclamations made in the South, and you’ll continue getting wingnuts like Pittsburgh cop killer Richard Poplawski motivated to defy the authorities. As his friend said, “We recently discovered that 30 states had declared sovereignty. One of his concerns was, Why were these major events in America not being reported to the public?”

There’s a lot of crazy out there, and it’s mostly percolating among Republicans. Those bumper stickers that say “these colors don’t run”? Well, they’re running.

And to think it was only a couple of years ago that Ann Coulter was feted on the cover of TIME magazine for her book about liberals called Treason. Again, it’s hard to keep up with the inconsistencies, but there you are. The great patriots who draped themselves in the red, white and blue for years are now metaphorically ripping it in tiny little pieces.

But as I said, this is an old story. Ed Kilgore takes us back to the beginning with this post about the history of the Southern State Sovereignty and the concept of “nullification” which is all in vogue among people who believe we are only one country under leaders of whom they approve:

There was plenty of chuckling in progressive circles when Texas Gov. Rick Perry made public remarks that sounded like a semi-endorsement of the idea that his state might want to secede from the United States, as it tried to do in 1861, or reclaim the independence it gave up in 1845. But Perry and a growing number of other Republican politicians are now embracing an idea that dates all the way back to 1832: that states have a constitutional right to nullify what they consider to be illegitimate acts of the federal government. As you may recall from your high school history lessons, the effort to put that idea into practice, by South Carolina at the urging of former vice president John C. Calhoun, didn’t work out too well, though it was later cited as a precursor to the secessionist movement led, again, by South Carolina.

The vehicles for the sudden contemporary resurgence of nullification theories are “sovereignty resolutions” being introduced in the legislature of as many as 20 states, and passing in at least one legislative chamber in eight states this year.

The language of these resolutions, and particularly the throat-clearing “whereas” clauses, isn’t uniform, but virtually all have a kicker similar to this Texas resolution, which Rick Perry endorsed:

That the 81st Legislature of the State of Texas hereby claim sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the Constitution of the United States; and, be it further RESOLVED, That this serve as notice and demand to the federal government, as our agent, to cease and desist, effective immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of these constitutionally delegated powers; and, be it further RESOLVED, That all compulsory federal legislation that directs states to comply under threat of civil or criminal penalties or sanctions or that requires states to pass legislation or lose federal funding be prohibited or repealed.

While these resolutions obviously aren’t going to be enforced, they squarely assert the power of states to unilaterally define the powers of the federal government and to order said government to “cease and desist” in exercising them. That is nullification.

He goes on to discuss the more recent uses of this concept:

As someone just old enough to remember the last time when politicians in my home southern region made speeches rejecting the Supremacy Clause and the 14th amendment, I may take this sort of activity more seriously than some. But any way you slice it, Republicans are playing with some crazy fire. For all the efforts of its sponsors to sell the “sovereignty resolution” idea as a grassroots development flowing out of the so-called Tea Party Movement, its most avid supporters appear to be the John Birch Society and the Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor to the White Citizens Councils of ill-fame. And given the incredibly unsavory provenance of this “idea,” it’s no surprise that these extremist groups are viewing the “movement” as an enormous vindication of their twisted points of view.

There you have it.

Finally, I wanted to point you to this piece by Lance Mannion discussing the history of the Democratic Party in the South, should you find yourself confronted with one of those cretins who pulls out the standard “I know you are but what am I” idiocy about how the Democrats are the racists because Lincoln freed the slaves. It’s a nice primer and beautifully written as always.

I’m certainly not surprised to see these arguments make a comeback. I’ve long seen a certain through line in American political history as essentially a two century battle between the old confederate states (and their later allies) and the rest of the country. The nation was forged through compromises (mostly over slavery)that were never fully accepted and which the civil war actually exacerbated. We have always been a country at war with itself to one degree or another.

This latest little throwback to Calhoun is clumsy and somewhat silly, but it’s tapping into a strong and resilient strain in American history. It would be a mistake to simply discount the feeling that undergirds it. It goes far deeper than race or politics — it’s tribal and it is a definitional feature of American culture.

Update: Hilzoy demonstrates that in Georgia they are going all the way back to 1798 — and cribbing from Jefferson for their nullification language, like nothing has happened in the interim. It’s going to be a fun few years.

Village-Style Character Assassination

by dday

The Swift-Boating of Sonia Sotomayor has really been an object lesson for how the Village treats people it decides not to like for whatever reason. Jeffrey Rosen at The New Republic decided to write a gossipy hit piece based on anonymous sources that was immediately taken up by conservatives looking to torpedo a top Obama Supreme Court possibility, and set impressions among official Washington. Though other news outlets were able to find named sources to praise Sotomayor, the characterization made by Rosen’s article clearly provided those inclined to oppose Obama with a rationale. After lots of criticism from the blogosphere, which Rosen wouldn’t have dealt with in past years, when he would just be able to inject a hit piece into the DC bloodstream, he had to offer an apologia, where he blames the headline writer for creating a misimpression.

Many people have mischaracterized my argument, and I can understand why. The headline–“The Case Against Sotomayor”–promised something much stronger than I intended to deliver. As soon as the piece was published, I regretted the headline, which I hadn’t seen in advance. The piece was not meant to be a definitive “case against” Judge Sotomayor’s candidacy. It was intended to convey questions about her judicial temperament that sources had expressed to me in the preceding weeks. That’s why I concluded the piece not by suggesting that Sotomayor was unqualified for the Supreme Court, but by suggesting that “given the stakes, the president should obviously satisfy himself that he has a complete picture before taking a gamble.”

I would definitely blame the headline writer for the parts of the piece where Rosen calls Sotomayor “not that smart” and “not the brainiest.” How could that headline have steered us wrong?

Then Rosen defends his anonymous sources by pointing to the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary item on Sotomayor, again picking out a few negative comments despite the line “most of lawyers interviewed said Sotomayor has good legal ability.” He defends the line in the original piece where he says that he hasn’t read enough of Sotomayor’s opinions to make an informed judgment (really) by claiming no, he had read enough, and found them “good but not great.”

Quite a bit of the other “evidence” for Sotomayor’s opinion in the piece comes out just wrong. Rosen’s assertion that a footnote from a “senior judge on the Second Circuit” was misleading, but a law professor pretty conclusively argues that the footnote says just the opposite. Rosen had little to say in his defense – “there’s more than one way to read that footnote,” he claims. That’s just not true. Rosen cropped the comment of one of the few named sources in the article to make Judge Jose Cabranes, who called Sotomayor “tough and tenacious and also smart” in the original quote, seem like a critic.

Glennzilla sums this all up:

What really happened here is now manifest — and typical. A couple of Rosen’s secret friends don’t like Sonia Sotomayor and called him to encourage him to smear her in the pages of The New Republic. Rather than do the work to determine if these “questions” about her abilities had merit — by, say, conducting a thorough survey of her key judicial opinions the way a conscientious law professor might — he instead set out dutifully to undertake the mission assigned to him by these “eminent legal scholars” by calling the people they handpicked for him, who then eagerly attacked Sotomayor. Rosen then mindlessly wrote it all down — including facts that were either false (the footnote) or highly distorted (Judge Cabranes’ New York Times statement about Sotomayor, which was clearly a compliment, not a criticism), and then sent it to TNR, which slapped a provocative and (by Rosen’s account) misleading headline on it and then happily published it. That Rosen himself was a chief champion of John Roberts, and had already expressed concerns that Obama might take diversity into account when appointing someone to the Supreme Court, undoubtedly made Rosen more than happy to be chosen to carry out this dirty task against someone who is most assuredly not part of his circle.

In other words, Rosen did what the modern journalist of the Respectable Intellectual Center does by definition: he wrote down what Serious People told him to say, agreed to protect their identity, and then published their very purposeful chatter without doing any real work to verify, investigate or scrutinize it. As a result, a woman who spent the last four decades of her life using her talents and intellect and working extremely hard to reach amazing heights in the face of great obstacles is now widely viewed as an intellectually deficient, stunted, egotistical affirmative-action beneficiary who has no business being on the Supreme Court — all thanks to the slimy work of Jeffrey Rosen, his cowardly friends of the Respectable Intellectual Center, and The New Republic.

John Cole has some more thoughts, noting that Rosen irreparably harmed Sotomayor’s reputation and changed her life, all because his friends wanted to stop her career rise. The “white man’s burden” argument picked up by the more subtle parts of the Village media complex is just an recapitulation of Rosen’s story, making the snap judgment that Sotomayor isn’t “deserving” of the appointment, in the way, oh, a white man would be. I’d gather this happens far more than we all think – the Gladys Kravitz gossips in the Village whisper to one another about such-and-such, whether because of jealousy or backstabbing or whatever, then find enough anonymous sources to confirm the storyline and enough facts they can twist to back it up. And the target gets smeared in enough high places to set that storyline in concrete, and wherever he or she walks in Washington, they are subjected to disapproving stares and the shaking of heads. Somewhere in the Village, there’s a list of those on the inside and those on the outside, and the insiders guard their turf in the most zealous, vindictive way possible.

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Tough Love

by digby

The other day I wrote about the prison guard who was suspended for shocking little kids with tasers on “take your child to work” day — with the parents’ permisson. Yes, some people are too stupid to breathe.

But it turns out that this was not the only incident of cretinous morons in the Florida prison system doing “demonstrations” on kids that day:

Two more state prisons have acknowledged incidents in which guards zapped visiting children with handheld stun guns, bringing to three the number of facilities where the unapproved demonstration was used on “Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day.”

On Friday, the Department of Corrections said that several kids visiting Franklin Correctional Institution in the Panhandle on April 24 were shocked by a guard who was demonstrating what corrections officers do at work. On Tuesday, the department revealed that children visiting Indian River Correctional Institution in Vero Beach and Martin Correctional Institution in Indiantown were also zapped with 50,000-volt electronic immobilization devices.

The devices used on the children, who are between the ages of 8 and 14, require bodily contact. Used on unruly inmates, the devices usually knock victims to the ground, cause a few minutes of disorientation and leave two small burn marks.

The daughter of the warden at Indian River was among the victims.

Frank Gonzalez, the owner of Self-Defense USA, a large stun gun company in San Diego, describes the 50,000-volt shock as “similar to grabbing a live wire in your house with a wet hand — like a hard punch in the stomach with the added trauma of electricity running through your body.”

The Department of Corrections did not release the number of children, or their conditions or names. But Matthew Foster, an attorney for one of the children who was injured at Franklin, said that more than six children were shocked at that facility.

His client, a 12-year-old girl, sustained abrasions and trauma when the powerful jolt knocked her to the ground, requiring a doctor’s treatment, said Foster, who asked that neither the child nor her father be named. Her mother works at the prison and gave permission for the demonstration, according to Foster, but the father, who is separated from the mother, did not approve and has sued.

“These devices are designed for stopping dangerous prisoners and can cause injury or death,” Foster said. “They are not for experimenting on children.”

Upon hearing rumors that Franklin was not an isolated incident, George Sapp, deputy secretary of institutions for the Department of Corrections, began calling wardens around the state. His survey turned up two more similar incidents on the same day, said Gretl Plessinger, a corrections spokeswoman.

Ten employees — five at Indian River, which incarcerates teenage males between 14 and 18, and five at Martin, which incarcerates adult males — have been suspended while the incidents are investigated. At Franklin, a guard was fired last week.

Plessinger said it appeared the three incidents were “separate and unrelated,” with no coordination or planning linking them. But the possibility will receive further scrutiny, she said.

“There are very clear rules about when, where and who these devices are to be used on, and all officers are clearly trained in this. So, we don’t yet know how this could have happened at three facilities on the same day,” Plessinger said.

You probably noticed that one of the facilities where this happened is for youthful offenders between the ages of 14 and 18. So I guess it makes sense these people think using a weapon which makes its victim feel as if he’s “grabbing a live wire in your house with a wet hand — like a hard punch in the stomach with the added trauma of electricity running through your body” is so harmless that it can be used on their own children.

The casual use of electricity to subdue another human is admittedly beyond my personal experience. But I have had a bad electric shock and it was the most painful violent thing that ever happened to me. Maybe I was usually traumatized by it, but the idea of someone doing that to another human being to control them literally makes me sick. I cannot see it as anything but torture. And yet, it is used throughout our society now, people make fun of it, it’s completely accepted by our legal system, the only question at this point being whether or not it kills too many people. It’s so accepted that people who use it every day are willing to use it on their own children.

I have been wondering why I’m so out of step on this. It’s not that I don’t understand that police have a thankless job and are often put in dangerous situations. I can even see the use of these things in those circumstances where a gun would otherwise be used. But the way they are deployed most often is simply to give a jolt of horrible, mind bending pain so that people will instantly turn docile and cooperative — at the sole discretion of the authority who wields it. Where does this eager subservience on the part of allegedly freedom loving Americans come from, that the population so willingly accepts that the police have right to make any of them feel “a hard punch in the stomach with the added trauma of electricity running through your body” whenever they feel the need? I can’t wrap my mind around that.

I came across an article the other day by Maia Szalavitz, author of “Help At Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids” in Mother Jones that pointed me in a direction I hadn’t thought of before. And it sheds some light on the larger torture debate as well, digging into a certain way of thinking that our society has developed, largely I’m sorry to say, at the hands of some crackpot psychologists who legitimized torture and abuse of teenagers — and made a tidy profit doing it.

We are, famously, blasé about our acts of torture overseas. But why? The laser-like focus on fixing the economy, wanting to avoid more political divisiveness, the diminishment of watchdog journalism—are all part of the explanation. But there’s another overlooked reason as well.

Americans tend to valorize tough love—at times, even tough love that verges on torture—in prisons, mental hospitals, drug rehabs, and teen boot camps. We aren’t squeamish about the psychological aspects of torture. We might even admire them.

Thousands of troubled children, for instance, now attend tough “wilderness programs” “emotional growth boarding schools” and other “tough love” camps where they face conditions like total isolation, sleep deprivation, food deprivation, and daily emotional attacks.

Thousands also attend religiously based residential programs, some of which claim to “cure” homosexuality and stop teen promiscuity. In this context, the recent poll showing that evangelicals are the group with the highest level of support for torture begins to make sense.

If we think humiliation, stress positions, and isolation are OK for disobedient teens, why not for suspected terrorists?

As the author of the first book-length history and expose of the troubled-teen industry, I’m familiar not only with the distressing stories of abuse coming from these programs, but also with their roots in the same tactics now being exposed in the CIA torture program.

If more people understood the psychological and physical consequences of these “thought reform” techniques, I don’t think we’d find them acceptable for anyone.

The article goes on to discuss how these “coercive” techniques work, showing the way troubled teens are often coerced into making false confessions and telling bizarre tales under very similar conditions and torture techniques as those used against the “detainees.” It’s chilling in the same way the OLC memos were chilling — the use of modern, bureaucratic, “medical” language to couch unspeakable, barbaric cruelty. Her piece shows how fully we’ve accepted over the past three decades the concept that unruly teenagers can be ritually tortured to force them to conform. We think nothing of it — just last week, after all, it was revealed that they commonly shock 14 to 18 year old boys with 50,000 volts of electricity at that Florida prison.

If you add in the random tasering of citizens all over the country and the horrors of our prison system (including the exaltation of its famous sadists like Sheriff Joe Arpaio)it’s pretty clear that we are awash in torture, often using it against people who have been convicted of nothing more than being unwilling or unable to conform to authority.

I’m sure the usual cynics will harangue me for being a silly old fool as usual for not recognizing what a torturing society this is long before now. And I would have to admit there’s a kernel of truth in the fact that this is not something I probably wanted to know. However, this current debate has made it impossible to ignore any longer: the United States of America tortures its own children. It tortures prisoners. It tortures average citizens whom any policeman believes is failing to smartly comply with his orders and it tortures suspected terrorists. We just call it (in true Orwellian fashion) “Tough Love.”

Torture, in fact, is one of our defining features. The only really surprising thing, considering its ubiquity, is that the number of people who openly support it isn’t larger. I suppose that’s some sort of comfort.

Today In The Utterly Crazy

by dday

Let’s take a moment to meditate on this tenured professor at Cornell Law School, who has now spent close to 36 hours publicly obsessing over Barack Obama’s choice of Dijon mustard for his hamburger. In any other country, anywhere in the world, the story itself, accompanied by 10 updates, two companion articles, and continued smug pronouncements that “I must have hit a nerve” uncovering the evil Dijon mustard/Presidential agenda and the refusal of the lib media to report the FACTS, would be followed by a small group of men coming to his house and asking if he would like to lay down for a bit, perhaps with some herbal tea and a friend. In America, this brilliant insight gets picked up by multiple top-ranked radio outlets and the most heavily-watched cable news station in America.

This guy hasn’t even discovered yet that the mustard DOESN’T HAVE AN OFFICIAL AMERICAN BIRTH CERTIFICATE.

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3/4 Of A Hooray

by tristero

I’m still reeling from dday’s literally unbelievable post on “The Republican Stupid, It Burns! Act.” So it’s nice to have a little bit of good news and that’s exactly what this is: a little bit of good news.

{From the link} The 2010 Budget proposes a new Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative to support community-based and faith-based efforts to reduce teen pregnancy using evidence-based and promising models. In addition, a new Strengthening Communities Fund will help build the capacity of non-profit organizations and State, Local and Tribal entities to better serve low-income and disadvantaged populations. This Budget also proposes funding for (1) a new child welfare initiative, and (2) a human services case management system for Federally-declared disasters. This Budget eliminates funding for Community-Based Abstinence Education, the mandatory Title V Abstinence Education program, the Compassion Capital Fund, and Rural Community Facilities.

What this means is not that abstinence-only sex ed, which flat-out doesn’t work and will never work,* has been defunded. It is still eligible for 25% of the funds available. And that’s nuts.

So is the continuation of government funding for “faith-based” sex-education, and what, I wonder could that be? I guess they teach you how to do the missionary position or something. Sorry for the snark, but the federal government has no fucking business funding “faith-based” anything, let alone sex-education.

Still it’s the beginning of a walkback to sanity on this issue, and that’s something; not much, but something.

* Some wag, I can’t remember who, said that you know your idea is batshit crazy when Levi Johnston can go on tv and sound like an intelligent person well-versed on the issues merely by opposing it.

Pundit On Wheels

by digby

Kyra Phillips is now doing commentary. (Perhaps she’s had the segment for a while and I just couldn’t tell.) But today, I noticed. And I’m gobsmacked:

Ok, full transparency here. I am not a fan of beauty pageants. I think they actually take us backwards. And the media blitz over this blond bombshell Miss California is case in point. She looks great in a bikini and apparently in those topless photos that we haven’t seen yet. But why is her opinion on gay marriage relevant to you and me?

Which take me now to the other side of the world and a beauty contest that’s more like a beauty contrast. Saudi Arabia, a place where women don’t have rights like they do here in the states, but maybe there is something to say for how it judges its beauty pageant contestants. Saudi’s Miss Beautiful Morals begins this week-end. No bathing suits, no choreography, no tuxedoed judges. Just good old fashioned Q&A on morals. 200 Saudi women in Islamic veils will be quizzed on discovering inner strength, leadership and respect for parents. Men are not involved, by the way. Women are the judges. The winner receives cash and prizes.

And it’s a pretty good bet old pictures won’t come back to haunt them.

Well hell, where do we sign up?

According to Kyra, beauty contests are a step back for women and we should instead embrace the forward looking, modernism of Saudi Arabia. And asking Miss California about gay marriage is not a moral issue with any relevance to “you and me” but asking about respect for parents among women in a repressed patriarchal religious monarchy is something worth emulating. (There sure won’t be any topless photos! They cut off their heads! Hahaha!)

It was so bizarre that even Rick Sanchez, who isn’t exactly an intellectual ball of fire, seemed confused about what he was supposed to think about her “observation.”

Kyra has a lot to offer the punditocrisy, obviously. I’m just surprised it took CNN so long to recognize it. After all, she is known for sensitivity and quick mind. Joan Walsh commented on this example back in 2003:

“CNN hit rock bottom on Wednesday morning, when anchor Kyra Phillips interviewed Ali’s doctor in Kuwait, Dr Imad al- Najada explained that, although Ali told reporters he was grateful for his treatment, he also hopes no other ‘children in the war will suffer like what he suffered’. Phillips seemed shocked by Ali’s apparent inability to understand we were only trying to help him. ‘Doctor, does he understand why this war took place? Has he talked about Operation Iraqi Freedom and the meaning. Does he understand it?'”

I think I see a Washington Post op-ed column in Phillips’ future if she continues to play her cards right.

Terrorizing The Rule Of Law

by dday

The GOP’s resident geniuses think they’ve found an issue they can run with. This has slowly built over the past several weeks, but now they’ve done a full rollout. It starts with the movie trailer, a preview of coming attractions.

Then they followed through with the main event, a bill literally called “The Keep Terrorists Out Of America Act,” which would prohibit the transfer of any “Terrorist” from Guantanamo Bay into a prison facility in the United States, without approval from the state’s Governor and legislature, and some other legislative hoop-jumping.

Taken to its extreme, Republicans would call for the immediate closure of all prisons (“criminals… in your community!”), and the dispatching of all 2.3 million prisoners to some offsite floating barge, Australia, or that island of plastic in the Pacific. To suggest that a maximum-security prison could not possibly hold a Dangerous Terrorist is an insult to the men and woman of the federal corrections system, who already hold convicted terrorists in custody who received justice through a court of law, and basically acknowledges that those facilities are completely insecure, and should be feared by local residents. I’m sure the RNC and the Republican members of the House will pick up the costs of moving every single prisoner over to that plastic island. Because think of the children.

When pressed on the point that Americans held 425,000 German POWs at the height of WWII, bill sponsor Pete Hoekstra, who is crazy, incidentally, casually remarked that the threat of Al Qaeda surpasses the Nazis.

A substantial chunk of the Republican Party believes that people who live in caves represent a greater threat to the American way of life than the Third Reich. Just so you know.

However, I’m convinced that this is a bit of misdirection and Overton Window-lifting. Of course the idea that Scary Terrorists would endanger local communities while in prison is absurd and should be rejected. But that’s not really the ultimate plan. John McCain and Lindsey Graham posted on the conservative blackboard, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, with the more “sensible” view – that we must hold suspects indefinitely without trial for as long as we please, in violation of habeas corpus statutes, until they are tried in sham courts without Constitutional criminal justice protections.

• Second, military commissions remain the appropriate trial venue for these individuals. We would strenuously oppose any effort to try enemy combatants in our civilian courts. By an overwhelming bipartisan vote in 2006, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which set forth procedures for trying enemy combatants for war crimes.

Our domestic criminal laws — including their treatment of classified information — are ill-suited for the complex national security issues inherent in the trial of enemy combatants. We have great faith in our military justice system — appropriately modified for war crimes trials — and we believe that military judges and lawyers render fair and impartial justice not only for our troops, but for enemy combatants as well.

• Third, preventive detention will continue to have a place in the war on terror . Under the law of war, the idea that an enemy combatant has to be tried or released is a false choice. Rather, it is well-established that combatants can be held off the battlefield as long as they present a military threat.

While there is little doubt that we initially cast the net too broadly in determining who merited enemy combatant status, the Department of Defense estimates nearly one in 10 detainees released from Guantanamo have returned to the battlefield, including Said Ali al-Shihri (al Qaeda in Yemen’s second-in-command), and Abdullah Gulam Rasoul, who reportedly now serves as the Taliban’s operational commander in southern Afghanistan. We cannot let this continue.

A significant group of detainees still in custody at Guantanamo may be too dangerous to release, but they are not suitable for war crimes trials. In these cases, a system needs to be devised in which a designated national security court, with a uniform set of standards and procedures administered by a civilian judge, hears the petitions for habeas corpus authorized by the Supreme Court, and an annual interagency review is conducted to determine whether the detainee remains a security threat to the United States.

“Preventive detention” is a nice turn of phrase. “I think you may steal a candy bar later. Better put you in jail for a few months until everything blows over.”

And unbelievably, this “fallback” position, which I always considered the reason to close Guantanamo in the first place, has gained traction inside the White House.

The Obama administration is moving toward reviving the military commission system for prosecuting Guantánamo detainees, which was a target of critics during the Bush administration, including Mr. Obama himself.

Officials said the first public moves could come as soon as next week, perhaps in filings to military judges at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, outlining an administration plan to amend the Bush administration’s system to provide more legal protections for terrorism suspects.

Continuing the military commissions in any form would probably prompt sharp criticism from human rights groups as well as some of Mr. Obama’s political allies because the troubled system became an emblem of the effort to use Guantánamo to avoid the American legal system […]

In a news conference this week, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. emphasized that if the administration did use military commissions, the rules must give detainees “a maximum amount of due process.”

But, speaking of detainees whom American officials have accused of involvement in major terrorist plots, Mr. Holder added, “It may be difficult for some of those high-value detainees to be tried in a normal federal court.”

These military commissions represent a total obviation of the rule of law, an attempt to gather convictions they could not otherwise get. And what’s left unsaid is the always shaky phraseology of the Obama plan, where some Gitmo detainees would be tried, some released, and this vague “third category,” where the legal black hole of Guantanamo apparently remains.

It does no service, particularly in relating to our allies, to just insource Guantanamo with the same methods. People weren’t angry about the site or the symbol, but the policies. But because the Republicans are being so transparently ridiculous with their “Eek! Prisoners going to prison, they’ll kill us all!!!” pose, there may be a tendency to back up the White House’s viewpoint. Not until they make perfectly clear that they intend to either try Gitmo prisoners in American courts, or release them. Any other options are unacceptable.

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