I recently attended a talk by food movement advocate and journalist Michael Pollan and was going to tell you all about it. But why should I when Pollan gave an interview to Amy Goodman where he said exactly the same thing?
Pollan is well known for his pithy observations and aphorisms such as: “Eat food, not too much. Mostly plants” and also for his “rule” – deliberately tongue-in-cheek, sort of – not to eat any processed food with more than 5 ingredients. Problem is, Pollan is not only read by sympathizers but also by the food industry who are brilliant at co-opting and transforming perfectly reasonable ideas – eating locally, for example – into marketing slogans for their lousy food. So, with this in mind, Pollan has introduced a new aphorism which he thinks will put the kibosh on their plans, namely:
Don’t buy any food you’ve ever seen advertised.
Clever guy, but that won’t stop our intrepid marketeers. Well cultivated and seeded word of mouth, viral marketing, and product placement in vegetable/fruit aisles will do the trick nicely.
Harith al Obaidi, the head of the largest Sunni Muslim bloc in Iraq’s parliament and the deputy chairman of the Committee on Human Rights, also shrugged off the Obama administration’s concerns over the photos.”The people who want to express their opinions through violence are already trying their best to do so,” Obaidi said. “Showing them a few pictures wouldn’t make them any more able to do it.”Obaidi called on Obama to release the photos and to hold any perpetrators of abuse publicly accountable. Keeping the pictures secret will only bolster suspicions that the American government is trying to suppress evidence of more widespread abuse, he said.The desire to protect U.S. soldiers should be weighed against the need to show the world that America doesn’t condone such behavior by its troops, Obaidi said.
I don’t understand that. Both president Bush and president Obama have said that America doesn’t torture. Isn’t that enough for these people?
Nancy Pelosi says she wasn’t told about waterboarding in 2002 and that the CIA misled the congress. Bob Graham says he wasn’t told either. Richard Shelby says he was, sort of. Porter Goss says he wasn’t but everyone thinks he said he was. The classified briefings have been sent up to Capitol Hill and Republican Senator Kit Bond, who says he has seen them, claims they prove that Pelosi is lying. (He also claims that Pelosi could have called for closed hearings on the subject, which is disputed by the rules of the House.)
Leon Panetta released a memo to his troops today which said this:
Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing “the enhanced techniques that had been employed.” Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.
These “partisan food fights” are just so tiring. (Why can’t these people just work together for the good of the American people?) Even Chris Matthews, Jim Warren and Ron Brownstein all agreed today that the partisans are out of control on this thing and the president really needs to put it all behind him and move on (especially considering that kicking the crazed hard left in the teeth is such good politics.)
It’s pretty clear that all this partisan bickering means the “he said/she said” can’t be solved by a truth commission or even a DOJ investigation. After all, they weren’t allowed to take notes, and the CIA’s records when it comes to torture can’t be considered dispositive since they are just a teeny bit implicated themselves. It’s a pickle.
But since they are considered by so many people to be reliable and useful, perhaps ought to consider using some enhanced interrogation techniques on the principals so we can get to the truth of this matter. After all, if they were reliable enough to keep the nation safe from evildoers, they would certainly be reliable enough to get politicians and bureaucrats to admit what happened in some CIA briefings.
And it’s not like this stuff is torture or anything. It doesn’t equal the pain equivalent to organ failure. It doesn’t leave many marks and there is supposedly no lasting psychological damage, so it’s hard to see why any of these people would object to being put to the test on the waterboard. And since we have a very complete rule book in those OLC memos, which according to numerous commenters, are very well reasoned and totally within in the purview of the president to authorize, we can use them as the guideline.
We could even stipulate that no one could be waterboarded more than 83 times or kept awake in shackles for longer than say 21 days at a stretch. (After all, politicians routinely endure sleep deprivation when they’re campaign, so they’ve ben trained in resisting such enhanced techniques.) We could agree that if they are kept naked any videos would be destroyed and all pictures would be withheld as long as possible. (And for the good of the nation, I would have to agree that they be destroyed as well. There’s only so much people can take.)
Diapering, forced enemas, walling, solitary confinement and being put in coffins with bugs will only be used if the subjects refuse to admit what they’ve done. (We’re not completely uncivilized, after all.) (We’re not sure what that is, admittedly, but it’s logical that it’s best discerned by who cracks last. This would work along the lines of other tried and true techniques for getting to the truth, like witch dunking.)
It’s not as if these techniques are cruel or inhuman. They aren’t even illegal if the president authorizes it (although we may have to conduct the interrogations on a ship at sea somewhere, just to be sure we don’t violate the spirit of the constitution.) There is absolutely no reason that we can’t use them to get to the truth in Washington as we used them to get to the truth in Afghanistan and Guantanamo. After all, the Obama administration is all about “what works.”
So, let’s “interrogate” the lot of them — Cheney, Pelosi, Graham, Goss, Shelby, Kit Bond, the CIA briefers, anyone on the Senate and House staffs who may have been privy to these classified hearings. In my view, to fail to use these techniques is a slap in the face to all the fine American military personnel who ever went through the SERE program. As far as I’m concerned, we might as well be spitting on the troops if we don’t agree to start using torture on members of the US Government.
I don’t know why Nancy Pelosi wants to get involved in a fight with the CIA that is all now about her, questions about her credibility.
Here’s the media drill. The CIA puts out a bogus list of assertions. Nancy Pelosi questions them, along with practically everyone else who was briefed. And the story becomes about Nancy Pelosi rather than the discredited assertions of the CIA. And of course all of this misdirects the key new information about torture, that the Vice President has been charged by top officials of desiring to torture detainees to extract false confessions about a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda and justify the invasion of Iraq.
Multiple news accounts this morning report that Pelosi’s credibility is in question after yesterday’s press conference, in which she accused the CIA of lying about what they told members of Congress about the agency’s use of torture. This theme was sounded by MSNBC, WaPo’s Dan Balz, the New York Times write-up, and many others.
That’s as it should be. But I challenge you to find a news account that stated with equal prominence that the CIA’s credibility is also in question.
Let’s briefly recap. Three senior Democrats — Pelosi, Bob Graham, and Jay Rockefeller — have all publicly claimed that the CIA didn’t brief them about the use of torture in the manner the agency has claimed. Meanwhile, the CIA itself has conceded that its own accounting may not be accurate.
Yet key facts that cast doubt on the CIA’s claims have been buried or completely omitted from multiple news reports. The Times’s first mention of Graham’s claims came today, five days after he first made them, and they were buried in the 22nd paragraph of the paper’s write-up. Neither The Time nor The Post have even mentioned Rockefeller’s claims once. The networks have refused across the board to mention the CIA’s own unwillingness to vouch for the accuracy of its information.
Even Leon Panetta’s response to Pelosi today fails to stand behind their documents, hedging his bets by saying that “it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.” And Pelosi, for her part, wants to evaluate all the evidence, another fact left out of the news reports.
Everybody’s talking about Nancy Pelosi’s press conference yesterday. I’m listening to Republicans on cable yapping about this contradiction or that contradiction. But what I’ve seen very little attention to is the fact that Pelosi had an answer that really answers all the questions, a plenary answer you might say: she supports a Truth Commission […]
That says it all. She wants it all investigated. The whole point of this storm about Pelosi is that her critics want her to be embarrassed and stop supporting a Truth Commission or any sort of examination of what happened. But she’s not. She still says there should be an investigation. Her critics still want the book closed. That says it all. She’ll have to stand or fall with the results of an actual investigation. Her opponents on this are simply risible hypocrites.
And who are her opponents? The media swarm, which is chasing the soccer ball of the latest conflict rather than exercising any judgment about the relative merits of all the claims or the additional circumstances.
An Obama administration official says the United States has released the Guantanamo Bay prisoner who was at the center of a Supreme Court battle giving detainees the right to challenge their confinement.The official said Lakhdar Boumediene left the U.S. naval facility in Cuba Friday headed to relatives in France. The official spoke on a condition of anonymity because the release was not yet cleared for official announcement.
Everybody knows the name Boumadiene because of the Supreme Court case bearing his name which restored the writ of habeas corpus. But I wonder if people recall Boumadiene’s story. Here’s the wikipedia version:
In early October 2001, less than a month after al Qaeda‘s attack on September 11, 2001, American intelligence analysts in the Embassy became concerned that an increase in chatter was a clue that al Qaeda was planning an attack on their embassy. At their request Bosnia arrested Bensayah Belkacem, the man they believed had made dozens of phone calls to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and five acquaintances of his. All six men were residents of Bosnia, who were born in Algeria. Five of the men were Bosnian citizens. In January 2002, the Supreme Court of Bosnia ruled that there was no evidence to hold the six men, ordered the charges dropped and the men released. American forces, including troops who were part of a 3,000 man American peace-keeping contingent in Bosnia were waiting for the six men upon their release from Bosnia custody, and transported them to Guantanamo. On November 20th, 2008, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon ordered the release Lakhdar Boumediene along with four other Algerians he was being held with. A sixth Algerian detainee, Belkacem Bensayah, was not ordered to be released.[2]
This man was kidnapped from the streets of Bosnia and rendered to Guantanamo where he sat in prison for more than six years. Now he is free to go back to his life as if it never happened. Huzzah. But all that sounds so dry and bureaucratic. You hardly get the sense that any of it had to do with actual human beings. Perhaps this excerpt, from Jane Mayer’s 2005 article in the New Yorker called “Outsourcing Torture” about one of Boumadiene’s fellow Bosnians, will illustrate that a bit, lest we forget that these were people with real lives and people who loved them:
Nadja Dizdarevic is a thirty-year-old mother of four who lives in Sarajevo. On October 21, 2001, her husband, Hadj Boudella, a Muslim of Algerian descent, and five other Algerians living in Bosnia were arrested after U.S. authorities tipped off the Bosnian government to an alleged plot by the group to blow up the American and British Embassies in Sarajevo. One of the suspects reportedly placed some seventy phone calls to the Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah in the days after September 11th. Boudella and his wife, however, maintain that neither he nor several of the other defendants knew the man who had allegedly contacted Zubaydah. And an investigation by the Bosnian government turned up no confirmation that the calls to Zubaydah were made at all, according to the men’s American lawyers, Rob Kirsch and Stephen Oleskey. At the request of the U.S., the Bosnian government held all six men for three months, but was unable to substantiate any criminal charges against them. On January 17, 2002, the Bosnian Supreme Court ruled that they should be released. Instead, as the men left prison, they were handcuffed, forced to put on surgical masks with nose clips, covered in hoods, and herded into waiting unmarked cars by masked figures, some of whom appeared to be members of the Bosnian special forces. Boudella’s wife had come to the prison to meet her husband, and she recalled that she recognized him, despite the hood, because he was wearing a new suit that she had brought him the day before. “I will never forget that night,” she said. “It was snowing. I was screaming for someone to help.” A crowd gathered, and tried to block the convoy, but it sped off. The suspects were taken to a military airbase and kept in a freezing hangar for hours; one member of the group later claimed that he saw one of the abductors remove his Bosnian uniform, revealing that he was in fact American. The U.S. government has neither confirmed nor denied its role in the operation. Six days after the abduction, Boudella’s wife received word that her husband and the other men had been sent to Guantánamo. One man in the group has alleged that two of his fingers were broken by U.S. soldiers. Little is publicly known about the welfare of the others. Boudella’s wife said that she was astounded that her husband could be seized without charge or trial, at home during peacetime and after his own government had exonerated him. The term “enemy combatant” perplexed her. “He is an enemy of whom?” she asked. “In combat where?” She said that her view of America had changed. “I have not changed my opinion about its people, but unfortunately I have changed my opinion about its respect for human rights,” she said. “It is no longer the leader in the world. It has become the leader in the violation of human rights.” In October, Boudella attempted to plead his innocence before the Pentagon’s Combatant Status Review Tribunal. The C.S.R.T. is the Pentagon’s answer to the Supreme Court’s ruling last year, over the Bush Administration’s objections, that detainees in Guantánamo had a right to challenge their imprisonment. Boudella was not allowed to bring a lawyer to the proceeding. And the tribunal said that it was “unable to locate” a copy of the Bosnian Supreme Court’s verdict freeing him, which he had requested that it read. Transcripts show that Boudella stated, “I am against any terrorist acts,” and asked, “How could I be part of an organization that I strongly believe has harmed my people?” The tribunal rejected his plea, as it has rejected three hundred and eighty-seven of the three hundred and ninety-three pleas it has heard. Upon learning this, Boudella’s wife sent the following letter to her husband’s American lawyers:
Dear Friends, I am so shocked by this information that it seems as if my blood froze in my veins, I can’t breathe and I wish I was dead. I can’t believe these things can happen, that they can come and take your husband away, overnight and without reason, destroy your family, ruin your dreams after three years of fight. . . . Please, tell me, what can I still do for him? . . . Is this decision final, what are the legal remedies? Help me to understand because, as far as I know the law, this is insane, contrary to all possible laws and human rights. Please help me, I don’t want to lose him.
John Radsan, the former C.I.A. lawyer, offered a reply of sorts. “As a society, we haven’t figured out what the rough rules are yet,” he said. “There are hardly any rules for illegal enemy combatants. It’s the law of the jungle. And right now we happen to be the strongest animal.”
That is what we did to innocent people. Maybe most Americans don’t think we should play the blame game, but I’m not sure people around the world will be satisfied that we have actually stopped acting like animals based solely on our promise to stop being animals.
In that regard, Obama has announced that he will reinstate the Military Commissions. The only reason to do that is because the US has people in custody whom they can’t prove guilty in either civilian court or a normal military court. But somebody, somewhere believes they are guilty anyway and so a separate justice system that will allow them to be “proven” guilty must be created. It’s an interesting concept. I guess we’ll just have to count on the good faith and good will of our leaders to always know who’s “really” guilty. As a reader wrote into Jack Cafferty yesterday (about the Abu Ghraib photos):
Why are we always second guessing the president. Give him a break on this. And while I’m ranting, I wish we’d stop taking those ideologue positions of liberal and conservative views on everything. P.S., I’m a radical liberal Democrat myself, but I pledge to give that up right now.”
Words to live by. By the way, I have to wonder why it’s taken centuries to come up with the civilian and military justice systems? Apparently, creating a new one is piece of cake. Why all the sturm and drang with appellate court challenges and legislation? Just put it in a presidential memo and carry on.
I know I’m heartened by the news that Democrats plan to develop a plan to communicate on health care. Who thought of that, give him or her a cookie! To think, political parties can create a “message” that they can “argue” to the “public.” It’s really heady stuff.
Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, said many Democrats felt “unease that we did not have a strategy” to answer the criticism coming from Republican members of Congress and Republican consultants like Frank I. Luntz, an expert on the language of politics.
Senate Democrats met for more than an hour at the Capitol with David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, and Jim Messina, a deputy White House chief of staff.
“Axelrod came to reassure us that they do have a strategy,” Mr. Bayh said.
Wouldn’t want to make Evan Bayh nervous that there wasn’t a structure in place for him to defy. Oh, and the Luntz talking points are 16 years old, so if you were caught flat-footed by them you’re not much of a politician.
Incidentally, the details of the Democratic messaging on this give me a little pause. Max Baucus explained that “You can choose your own doctor, you can choose your own health plan. There’s total choice here. I do not want to say this defensively, but this is not a big government plan.” If you’re saying “I do not want to say this defensively,” then you’re saying it defensively.
The overall message is one of “shared responsibility,” which just doesn’t sound all that consumer-friendly. Especially when the “sharing” part of the responsibility has already started to collapse.
Hospitals and insurance companies said Thursday that President Obama had substantially overstated their promise earlier this week to reduce the growth of health spending.
Mr. Obama invited health industry leaders to the White House on Monday to trumpet their cost-control commitments. But three days later, confusion swirled in Washington as the companies’ trade associations raced to tamp down angst among members around the country […]
Health care leaders who attended the meeting have a different interpretation. They say they agreed to slow health spending in a more gradual way and did not pledge specific year-by-year cuts.
“There’s been a lot of misunderstanding that has caused a lot of consternation among our members,” said Richard J. Umbdenstock, the president of the American Hospital Association. “I’ve spent the better part of the last three days trying to deal with it.”
These are out and out lies coming from the industry. We have their pledge in writing, calling for a reduction of 1.5 percentage points to the annual growth of health care. Now they’re trying to hedge that the 1.5% would be achieved eventually. You knew they would backtrack, I guess I’m surprised it happened within five days, but since $2 trillion dollars in savings equals $2 trillion dollars in their profits, this idea that they would patriotically put the good of the country ahead of their bottom line was always suspect.
So I have another “message” for David Axelrod, Max Baucus and the gang. How about this: “the insurance companies are thieves, they don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, and we need to both enforce their proposed savings and institute a public health care plan to compete with them on price and quality of service.”
Many of us realized a while ago that the real purpose of all the torture Bush and Cheney ordered was to elicit false information of an al Qaeda/Saddam connection that would justify an invasion of Iraq, an obsession of the Cheney circle that predated 9/11. But Joe Conason has written an especially compelling essay laying out the evidence piece by piece.
There simply is no good reason why the leading members of the Bush administration who ordered, justified, and implemented torture should not stand trial. And many good reasons why they should.
I happened to catch a rerun of one of those Arthur Miller seminars on PBS called Reinventing Health Care. There was the usual array of people from different parts of the health care system represented, everyone from a rural doctor who treats people mostly for free to giant health care CEOs. (The biggest asshole, of course, was a lying piece of work named Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute, followed closely by some wingnut harridan from Harvard Business School who thinks that we should “give money back to the people” because “it’s their money.”)
When one of the health care CEOs said that there’s magical thinking that says government is an endless pot of money and we have to make “hard choices” Pete Peterson Foundation president David Walker said this:
News flash. The government has no money. The government is running huge deficits it’s tens of trillions of dollars in the hole in real accounting on an accrual basis and if there’s one thing that can bankrupt America, it’s health care and we’re going to have to make choices and one of the choices we have to make is how do we ration, rationally.
He kept saying that people need “basic and essential” coverage, whatever that means.
I don’t believe that David Walker thinks we shouldn’t reform health care. He said some other things in the program that indicated he believed that there should be some form of universal coverage, scientific outcomes and other reasonable things. But his and others’ insistence on talking about rationing is going to tank the thing because that’s exactly what Frank Luntz has determined is the kiss of death.
“I want my name off of that list and I want a letter of apology from this [British Home Secretary] Jacqui Smith.” Now it appears that Savage is seeking help from an old nemesis: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The San Fransisco Chronicle’s Rich Lieberman reports that “[l]awyers for Savage are formally asking [that] she call on the British Government to withdraw its ban.” It’s interesting that Savage is now turning to Clinton for help, considering what he has had to say about her in the past. Some examples:
– “Hillary Clinton, the most Godless woman in the Senate.” – Regarding one of Clinton’s speeches: “That’s rubbish. That’s Hitler dialogue. Goebbels would be proud of you, Hillary Clinton. I know Mao Zedong would have been proud of you.” – “[Clinton has] destroyed the war effort against terror. And if, God forbid, a suitcase bomb goes off you’ll know who to blame.” – On Clinton’s run for the presidency: “[She would] stir up a race war, a civil war in the country to get that hag, that harridan elected.”
Savage also once suggested that Clinton had something to do with the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. so she could run for U.S. Senate in New York.