But let’s not forget a recent story, the Clinton/Wallace confrontation where Clinton showed the kind of brilliance and anger towards the rightwing that we can only hope all politicians opposed to Bushism and modern Republicanism will show in the next month or so.
Wallace accused Clinton of providing aid and comfort to bin Laden by withdrawing from Somalia after Blackhawk Down. You may not remember the Somalia story too well or you may be too young to remember. But the standard line propogated for years by the rightwing, and recycled by Wallace in his question to Clinton, is that Clinton cut and ran; therefore bin Laden took from that ignominious flight the lesson that Americans are cowards. The implications are:
1. Clinton behaved like a coward who wouldn’t stay the course and he emboldened the terrorists by leaving.
2. By extension, all Democrats cannot be trusted with foreign policy and national security.
It’s a complete lie. Let Glenn Greenwald tell you who really wanted to cut and run from the terrorists. It was Republicans including St. John McCain.
More importantly, let Greenwald show you who fully understood the implications of withdrawing from Somalia precipitously after Blackhawk Down. It was Clinton and Kerry who got it exactly right and understood the situation.
Knowing the truth of what happened regarding the fight over staying or leaving in Somalia, we can apply the “logic” of the rightwing to historical reality. And the implications are very clear:
1. Republicans, including McCain, behaved like cowards who wouldn’t stay the course. They emboldened the terrorists by calling for the US to leave.
2. By extension, all Republicans, including McCain, cannot be trusted with foreign policy and national security.
Note to rightwingers and others who have cognitive difficulties understanding English prose: I do NOT agree with the “logic” of the rightwing. I dislike McCain intensely, but his Vietnam record, like Kerry’s, demonstrates he is no coward. I believe the real implications of this inexcusable piece of historical revisionism are:
1. Republicans, including McCain, were fools for failing to gauge the effects of a precipitous withdrawal. They emboldened future terrorists by their panic in hysterically calling for the US to leave.
2. By extension, all modern Republicans, including McCain, have demonstrated they do not have the judgment or character to conduct competent and robust foreign policy in a sober manner. They can, and they have, made the US far less safe when they are in power than when Democrats have been.
One more note. There are very few parallels between the Somalia situation back then and what is going on in Iraq today. It is utterly fallacious to compare the Republican fools immediately after Blackhawk Down with a majority of the world calling for a US withdrawal more than three years after an illegal invasion.
And for the record, back in 0’3 it was not only liberals horrified that Bush had invaded Iraq in the first place who urged a rapid withdrawal from Iraq. Deluded neoconservatives who were the instigators of the war did as well, confident that the mission was codpieced, I mean accomplished, the only piece missing being the installation of Chalabi as Emperor of Ir…I mean president.
Truly incredible, the extent of the right’s projection and lying. and that they are allowed to get away with it. As Greenwald writes, “As always, no matter how many times it occurs, it is truly disturbing how there seems to be no limit on the false propaganda and rank historical revisionism which can be disseminated by this administration and its followers and uncorrected by our national media. “
Many blogs have linked to the comma quote as one more indication that Bush epitomizes the callous conservative. I agree: it’s a disgusting remark. But I perceive something even more distressing about it than obscene sociopathic indifference to human suffering.
Let’s say I was president of the United States and when someone asks me about my central achievement, I respond that one day it will look like “just a comma.” I think you’d be quite justified in thinking I was very depressed and unsatisfied with my record. Why? Because I’d just told you I hadn’t done anything much more important than an historical speck, a squib, a doodle. And being president, I’d be wanting to accomplish something really big, really memorable. Like, say, attacking a really large country. Like being the first since Truman to drop a nuclear weapon in war. Now we’re talking. That’s worth at least a paragraph in the Book of Human History Before The Rapture.
In other words, I think Bush’s comma is a signal to the world that he’s barely started with the bang bang and the carnage. The casualties he’s already inflicted around the world are too small to mean anything to someone as narcissistic and grandiose as the Churchill of Crawford. He expects – no, he needs – many, many more battles, bigger targets. Real men, after all, go to Tehran. And we know that Bush – Oedipus Tex, the black sheep awol drunk loser who failed at business – has some problems thinking about himself as a real man.
But how realistic is this? That is, setting Bush’s truly dubious mental health aside (and regardless of whether you buy my speculations above, he is not the tightest of screws at the best of times), can the US military actually give Bush something more than a comma to remember him by anytime soon?
Well, there’s a post over at Talking Points Memo which makes a pretty convincing argument that logistically the US military, quagmired in Afghanistan and Iraq, is in no condition to attack Iran anytime soon.
It seems likely this could be true. Unless you consider a first strike nuclear attack as part of a concerted effort to effect regime change. Which is insane. Which, coming full circle, brings up the relevance of the mental state of a president who would characterize the ghastly horrors of the Bush/Iraq war as a mere comma in history.
Please, people. Do not misunderestimate him or this administration. They are crazy, and I am not speaking metaphorically here. They were crazy to ignore the warnings in the summer of ’01. They were crazy to invade Iraq. They were crazy to pass laws keeping a brain-dead woman hooked up to a feeding tube. They are crazy to write into law that George W. Bush has the right to torture people at will. Indeed, they are crazy in their lust to assert their will over anything and everything.
And they are crazy to plan any kind of attack on Iran (in both senses: it’s nuts to consider it, and they really, really want to do it). They are crazy to think that threatening something like that will put pressure on the Iranian government to capitulate; if anything it will increase Iranian nationalism, fuel anti-Americanism and increase the Iranian government’s support.
They are also crazy to think that retaliation will come only via terrorist attacks on the US and those attacks will increase domestic support for the Bush regime (“we’re the ones serious about national security”). No. Retaliation for a pre-emptive strike on Iran will be swift, brutal, and on numerous fronts. The US will be economically and culturally quarantined. The world will unite to fight the US on trade agreements, will implement sanctions and make international business deals impossibly difficult. To those rightwingers who say, “Yeah? The Frenchies gonna threaten us? Haha! Bring ’em on!” I say, be careful what you wish for. They don’t call this a global economy for nuthin’.
Again, as unlikely as it seems, as offhand as it appears to be, I see the comma remark as one more indication that Bush expects to attack Iran very soon. And, while he doesn’t go so far as to believe it will involve nuclear, I note that Gary Hart writes, “It should come as no surprise if the Bush Administration undertakes a preemptive war against Iran sometime before the November election.” It’s not just inconsequential bloggers who are very worried, dear friends.
This ain’t no party. This ain’t no disco. This ain’t no fooling around.
[Update: As pointed out by a coupla folks in comments, Steve Gilliard has a terrific take on Bush’s comma:
When Bush said Iraq was a comma, he was speaking in dog whistle to the fundies. It comes from a saying “Never put a period where God puts a comma”.Which means things will get better. Which is, of course, insane.
Indeed. And while I agree with Steve, and glad he mentioned it, I’m not sure that necessarily invalidates my psychoanlytic interpretation, although, it’s true, it seems less convincing to me in the light of Steve’s post.]
As mentioned in a previous post, my copy of Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions by Iranian author Shahram Chubin arrived and it looks very good, very compact, and very detailed.
Assuming that those of you who expressed interest in reading the book together will receive it by today/tomorrow, I propose we read up throught the first two chapters, to page 43, and discuss it this Friday, when I’ll post a summary and some thoughts of my own.
In glancing through it, it’s dispassionate, clearly the work of a serious and knowledgeable author, and seems to be free of polemics. Heaven knows we need more resources like this.
Jonathan Wells, the Moonie from the Discovery Institute who is one of their principle shills for “inteliigent design” creationism – and, incidentally, a man who actually believes that the earth is about 6,000 years old, tops – has released a book with a title so misleading it amounts to blatantly false advertising. As the delicious multi-part series at The Panda’s Thumb makes quite clear, it should be titled “The Thoroughly Incorrect Guide to Darwinism [sic] and Intelligent Design.”
Check it out.
And by the way, those of you who object to my calling Wells a Moonie and referring to him in an obviously contemptuous fashion, perhaps you should remember that Wells is the stupid sonuvabitch who once compared biologist Ken Miller to the Hitler’s propagandist Heinrich Himmler, thus simultaneously exhibiting the gutter level at which his department at Discovery operates, his historical ignorance and the sheer sloppiness of his “scholarship.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s important for Americans and others across the world to understand the kind of people held at Guantanamo. These aren’t common criminals, or bystanders accidentally swept up on the battlefield — we have in place a rigorous process to ensure those held at Guantanamo Bay belong at Guantanamo.
George W. Bush White House Address September 6, 2006
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
