Following up the dog story below, here’s another one about our new cineaste army in Iraq:
When Pfc. Chase McCollough went home on leave in November, he brought a movie made by fellow soldiers in Iraq. On his first night back at his parents’ house in Texas, he showed the video to his fiancee, family and friends.
This is what they saw: a handful of American soldiers filmed through the green haze of night-vision goggles. Radio communication between two soldiers crackles in the background before it’s drowned out by a heavy-metal soundtrack.
“Don’t need your forgiveness,” the song by the band Dope begins as images unfurl: armed soldiers posing in front of Bradley fighting vehicles, two women covered in black abayas walking along a dusty road, a blue-domed mosque, a poster of radical cleric Muqtada Sadr. Then, to the fast, hard beat of the music — “Die, don’t need your resistance. Die, don’t need your prayers” — charred, decapitated and bloody corpses fill the screen.
“It’s like a trophy, something to keep,” McCullough, 20, said back at his cramped living quarters at Camp Warhorse near Baqubah. “I was there. I did this.”
I don’t blame these dumb kids. They are taught to have these attitudes. Maybe it’s a natural consequence of being in a war zone. But war supporters really need to stop pretending that it isn’t the usual exercise in cruelty and brutality because it is. You can dress up this “liberation” to make Americans feel good about their goodness all you want, but it’s just another violent, dehumanizing war of domination. Certainly, that soldier thinks it is. And he’s proud of it.
Majikthise calls for a Schiavo blogswarm. Click over there for the info.
I’m inclined to agree. Peggy Noonan and her macabre cronies are saying that there is no opposition to this travesty. We should probably cure the media of that notion.
I’m sure they’ll be surprised that Peggy doesn’t speak for the whole country. They always are.
The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. – Thomas Babington Macaulay, History of England
Hi my name is M. D. formaly of A TRP 1-10 CAV 4ID and while in Iraq we had a sport of killing dogs whenever the Iraqis werent shooting us. So when I shot this one at about 50 yards with my M4 and it ran yelping to lower ground, we had to finish it so my friends and I went to it and started shooting it. I ve never seen a dog take as many shots to the head at least 4 as this one did and then after we thought it was dead we dug a hole and when I picked it up with the shovel it came back to life, so we shot it a couple more times….its pretty funny.”
But why shouldn’t a simple soldier like this do such things? Our government is, after all, officially condoning torture for humans. Law professors are arguing for cruel and unusual punishment because of the emotional satisfaction it will give family members of the victims. Surely our society cannot then say that torturing a stray dog is wrong. How could it be?
Last June, the Boston Red Sox chartered an executive jet to help their manager make a quick visit home in the midst of the team’s championship season.
But what was the very same Gulfstream–owned by one of the Red Sox’s partners, but presumably without the team’s logo on its fuselage–doing in Cairo on Feb. 18, 2003?
Perhaps by coincidence, Feb. 18, 2003, was the day an Islamic preacher known as Abu Omar, who had been abducted in Italy the previous day and forced aboard a small plane, also arrived at the Cairo airport.
Omar, whose given name is Osama Nasr Mostafa Hassan, was imprisoned by the Egyptians and, he claims, brutally tortured. The public prosecutor in Milan, Armando Spataro, who is investigating Omar’s apparent kidnapping, expects to file charges within a few days, according to an Italian official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Spataro made headlines last month when, attempting to identify the plane that transported Omar from Italy to Egypt, he served a warrant on the Italian commander of the air base at Aviano, Italy, which is home to the U.S. Air Force’s 31st Fighter Wing.
Spataro declines to say whether the Gulfstream that landed in Cairo, which bore the tail number N85VM, departed from Aviano around the time of Omar’s disappearance.
But Federal Aviation Administration records obtained by the Tribune show that Gulfstream N85VM has been many places around the world that the Red Sox have almost certainly never gone.
Between June 2002 and January of this year, the Gulfstream made 51 visits to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, site of the U.S. naval base where more than 500 terrorism suspects are behind bars.
During the same period, the plane recorded 82 visits to Washington’s Dulles International Airport as well as landings at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., outside the capital and the U.S. air bases at Ramstein and Rhein-Main in Germany.
The plane’s flight log also shows visits to Afghanistan, Morocco, Dubai, Jordan, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, Azerbaijan and the Czech Republic.
In case you are wondering, this isn’t the same plane that was offered to John Kerry’s legal team on election night. This plane is owned by another Red Sox partner named Philip H. Morse. Morse, the wealthy former owner of a catheter company, is listed as the sole officer and director of a company called Assembly Point which Dun and Bradstreet describes as a “religious organization” that is somehow involved with “churches, temples and shrines.”
Now this seems like it would be a good topic on which the congress could hold fruitful “baseball” hearings. They could call Curt “Bush shill” Schilling in just for fun and harrass him about whether he knows anything about his pals in the Bush administration using one of the Red Sox owners’ private planes to transport suspects to countries where they can be tortured with impunity. And if he refuses to appear maybe the committee could charter the plane to take him to one of those countries that have been so helpful to us to see if he changes his mind.
This is another of those juicy stories that just eludes the mainstream media. I know they write a story or two here and there. But, it never gets the kind of attention that these right wing soap operas get.
Let’s look at the nut here. The US government appears to be using one of the world series winning Boston Red Sox’s jet to kidnap and transport suspected terrorists all over the world to be tortured.
This isn’t a big story. Scott Peterson, however, is. Problem #7,556 with the corporate media.
“Mrs. Schiavo’s life is not slipping away – it is being violently wrenched from her body in an act of medical terrorism,” DeLay said. “Mr. Schiavo’s attorney’s characterization of the premeditated starvation and dehydration of a helpless woman as ‘her dying process’ is as disturbing as it is unacceptable. What is happening to her is not compassion – it is homicide. She doesn’t need to die, and as long as Terri Schiavo can breathe and her supporters can pray, we will not rest.”
By now most people who read liberal blogs are aware that George W. Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient’s family’s wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother’s wishes in Texas just this week. A 68 year old man was given a temporary reprieve by the Texas courts just yesterday.
Those of us who read liberal blogs are also aware that Republicans have voted en masse to pull the plug (no pun intended) on medicaid funding that pays for the kind of care that someone like Terry Schiavo and many others who are not so severely brain damaged need all across this country.
Those of us who read liberal blogs also understand that that the tort reform that is being contemplated by the Republican congress would preclude malpractice claims like that which has paid for Terry Schiavo’s care thus far.
Those of us who read liberal blogs are aware that the bankruptcy bill will make it even more difficult for families who suffer a catastrophic illness like Terry Schiavo’s because they will not be able to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy and get a fresh start when the gargantuan medical bills become overwhelming.
And those of us who read liberal blogs also know that this grandstanding by the congress is a purely political move designed to appease the religious right and that the legal maneuverings being employed would be anathema to any true small government conservative.
Those who don’t read liberal blogs, on the other hand, are seeing a spectacle on television in which the news anchors repeatedly say that the congress is “stepping in to save Terry Schiavo” mimicking the unctuous words of Tom Delay as they grovel and leer at the family and nod sympathetically at the sanctimonious phonies who are using this issue for their political gain.
This is why we cannot trust the mainstream media. Most people get their news from television. And television is presenting this issue as a round the clock one dimensional soap opera pitting the “family”, the congress and the church against this woman’s husband and the judicial system that upheld Terry Schiavo’s right and explicit request that she be allowed to die if extraordinary means were required to keep her alive. The ghoulish infotainment industry is making a killing by acceding once again to trumped up right wing sensationalism.
This issue gets to the essence of the culture war. Shall the state be allowed to interfere in the most delicate, complicated personal matters of life, death and health because a particular religious constituency holds that their belief system should override each individual’s right to make these personal decisions for him or herself. And it isn’t the allegedly statist/communist/socialist left that is agitating for the government to tell Americans how they must live and how they must die.
One of the things that we need to help America understand is that there is a big difference between the way the two parties perceive the role of government in its citizens personal lives. Democrats want the government to collect money from all its citizens in order to deliver services to the people. The Republicans want the government to collect money from working people in order to dictate individual citizen’s personal decisions. You tell me which is the bigger intrusion into the average American’s liberty?
The Friday lunch crowd at Jimmy’s Eastside Diner was starting to dwindle. Jerita Collins, a waitress everyone calls Shorty, was carrying several plates when she noticed the television behind the counter airing a Washington, D.C., news conference featuring House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.
”It is now 1 o’clock on the East Coast, the time preordained by a Florida state judge to allow for denial of food and water to Terri Schiavo,” the Texas Republican declared. “That act of barbarism can be and must be prevented.”
Across the bottom of the screen CNN noted a judge temporarily stopped Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube from being removed because Congress had issued subpoenas for the brain-damaged woman to appear in Washington.
As DeLay spoke, Shorty stared at the TV and shook her head. ”This is wrong,” she said. “This is incredibly wrong. How can they interfere like this?”
Shorty, 57, a waitress at the Biscayne Boulevard diner for 35 years, should know.
”Two years ago,” she said, “I had to make the same decision for my son. It was the hardest thing I ever did. You don’t plan on your children dying before you do. You don’t even want to think about it.
”But if you love your child,” she continued, tears welling up in her eyes, “sometimes you have to let them go.”
Shorty’s son, Jerry, was 36 when he died in 2003 from pancreatic cancer. He wasn’t married. He had one child who was a minor, so the decisions fell to her.
”Toward the end, he didn’t want to be kept alive,” she said. “But I wanted him to live. I didn’t want him to go. The hospital, they had to tie his hands down so that he couldn’t pull his own tubes out.
‘After a while, I realized he was ready. I told him how much I loved him and I didn’t want him to continue to suffer because of me. He couldn’t talk anymore, so he wrote me a note. It said, `Forgive me.’ And I looked at it and I said, ‘For what? For dying?’ And he shook his head yes.”
He died a few days later, on Dec. 29, from a heart attack. By then, Shorty had signed directives for her son’s care, including instructions not to resuscitate him if his heart stopped.
On the TV, another politician talked about saving Schiavo.
”These politicians,” Shorty hissed, her hands trembling with emotion. “They’re just playing a game. It’s not about her anymore, it’s about them getting what they want. It’s about them wanting to look good in front of the people who are pro-life. I’m against abortion, too, but I believe each person has their own right to decide. You know in your heart what is right for you and you have to live with any decision you make.”
Kevin Drum has an interesting post up regarding this article by Dana Milbank in which Milbank decries a “postmodern morass where there are no such things as facts, only competing perceptions of reality.” It’s nice that Milbank’s finally noticed, but really, this has been in the works for a long time.
Kevin agrees that this is unhealthy and sees signs that the left is beginning to follow the right’s example and only tune in to its chosen media. I agree with him, but I really think it’s unavoidable. For the left it’s largely a matter of self-defense. And it’s because of what Milbank says here:
Would liberals really favor the absence of a press that calls into questions the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq’s weapons and ties to al Qaeda? Would conservatives really favor the absence of a press that brought the Clinton scandals to light?
That Milbank continues to see these things as being equivalent is the problem.
The Clinton scandals were contrived political character assassination that were investigated to the tune of 70 million dollars by numerous Republican congressional committees and Republican special prosecutors and WERE PROVED TO BE WITHOUT MERIT!!! The mainstream press were not muckrakers, they were willing whores and shills for a partisan agenda. They obsessed over a decades old land deal, the firing of some employees in the travel office, some bozo in the basement reading FBI files and Clinton’s sex life among many other trivial charges. None of them came to anything. These facts are clear. If there is any doubt in anyone’s mind that the right wing was willing to do anything to cripple Clinton’s presidency one need only remember that they IMPEACHED him over a consensual extra-marital affair that he lied about in a trumped up sexual harrassment case that was thrown out of court.
Now, I know that official Washington remains upset that the Clintons allegedly came in and “trashed” the place, but I really think it’s a bit much to compare that pathetic tabloid witchhunt with the uninvestigated, officially sanctioned lies that got us into a WAR.
I can’t speak for everyone on the left, but this is why I cannot trust the mainstream media. It’s not because they are biased. I don’t know what the individual reporters’ politics are and I don’t care. I mistrust the media because they get played over and over and over again by the right wing and keep coming back for more. I don’t know if they are stupid or weak, but it’s clear to me that they are addicted to spoonfed puerile right wing generated gossip and completely unwilling to pursue serious Republican scandals beyond a perfunctory story or two before they move on to the next atrocity. (And I mean right wing generated gossip because it’s clear that they will not breathlessly pursue a Republican sex scandal with equal fervor even when it features a gay prostitute in the conservative White House press room who plastered pictures of his erections all over the internet.)
I recognize that a lot of this is because there is no partisan left wing media that can pound away at the stories that are damaging to Republicans thereby keeping the mainstream media focused and aware of the drumbeat. Indeed that is why many of us are advocating that we create such a thing. It’s been clear for more than a decade that the mainstream media responds almost unthinkingly to the deafening sounds of the right wing noise machine and now seems paralyzed by the power the Republican establishment exerts over it. They simply are incapable of speaking truth to power and employing the kind of skepticism that is required if this body politic is to be healthy.
I struggle with this issue as Kevin does because I really don’t want to have two competing discourses out there. It’s a risky and frightening thing to do and I honestly don’t know where it will lead. But I think we have no choice but to enter this fray and just hope that we can keep things straight in our own minds. I know that I am not crazy. I know what I am seeing with my own eyes. This bullshit by Frank Luntz is not something out of my fevered imagination. Neither was the stage managed tabloid circus that I watched with stunned disbelief in the 90’s. Or the jingoistic spectacle that led up to this misbegotten war in Iraq or the continuing glassy-eyed servility that they show toward this administration every single day. This stuff is really happening.
As it stands, we have a Republican alternate version of reality and a mainstream press that is apparently impotent to take it on with any real zeal. I don’t know what else to do but create our own discourse that hopefully provides the flaccid media with another point of view that they can then flog with equal fervor. I hope that our discourse is more honest and more true, but I cannot guarantee it. All I know is that we have to pull on the other end of the ideological rope or we are all going to be dragged off the cliff together.
I was busy yesterday and didn’t weigh in on Matt Stoller and Sean Paul Kelley’s open letter to bloggers regarding the Brookings panel. Since the letter was inspired by a post of mine and furthered by an e-mail from a reader of mine, I feel that I should weigh in.
On a personal note, I must make it clear that I wasn’t agitating for a spot on the panel. Believe me, I have a voice made for writing. My original comments were more of an amused observation of the thickheadedness of the DC establishment about blogging rather than pique.
After reading Kelley and Stoller’s letter, along with comments to my post and those by Gilliard and Armstrong, I realize that I should probably address this issue a bit more seriously. There seems to be a controversy developing about whether bloggers should even appear in the MSM at all. My feeling is that if they are good at it, of course they should. Any chance we have to force new liberal voices out into the ether is a good thing.
Since blogging seems to be the pet rock of 2005, we should take advantage of that opportunity to get some new, articulate people out there. Who knows when we will get the chance to breathe some new life into the punditocrisy again. If you appear in public and do well, there is a good chance you will be asked to speak again. If you can bring some bloggy stimulation in the form of edgy, fearless informed commentary, you could become a valued television speaker. Gawd knows we need some. I’m awfully tired of being represented by colorless, frightened journalists who are presumed to be liberal because the wingnuts say they are.
I was extremely impressed with John Aravosis of Americablog, for instance, in his television appearances. He took his blog personality right on TV with him, showing no sense of the cliquish, beltway insiderism you see so often. Instead, he challenged the conventional wisdom and took the conversation in the direction he wanted it to go. I don’t know if others would have the same presence, but I sense something refreshing in his approach that I think may stem from his immersion in the combative world of blogging.
In a different way, I thought that Peter Daou’s appearance on the Crowley/Reagan show yesterday was effective. He was called upon to do a round-up style spot and took the opportunity to mention the Volokh brouhaha (and, yes, gave me a plug — thank you Peter.) This is important because Volokh is often mentioned for a federal judgeship, so its nice to have this statement (since retracted) disseminated. Moreover, a segment like Daou’s is a way for the liberal blog arguments to seep into the MSM. Daou was attractive and articulate and if someone like him were to have a regular segment it could offset the Jeff Jarvis monopoly which slants the coverage to topics of interest and advantage to the right thus reinforcing the Republican CW tilt of the media in general.
The establishment is pretending to be bimbos about blogging as a way of covering for their ignorance. We have seen a pattern emerge in which they excuse the rightward bias of their blogger choices by saying that their spot/panel/conference isn’t really about politics, it’s about “new media” so balance isn’t required. The logical conclusion I draw from that is that the only new media these people read is gossip and rightwing blogs. We should not let them get away with this argument. When you choose political bloggers you are making a political statement in itself. When only rightwing blogs are representing new media then new media is perceived as right wing. These bloggers are unabashed partisans and to ignore that fact is to ignore their purpose.
Furthermore, liberal and rightwing bloggers see the blogosphere differently, interact differently and deal with their parties differently. If you think that “new media” can be explained without looking into how the two political spheres approach politics in entirely different ways then you are missing the story. The right blogosphere is an extension of the right wing message machine and the Republican party. The left is a grassroots political constituency of its own. Exclude the liberal bloggers from this discussion and you are missing the most important new development in the new media.
I am glad to see that the action taken yesterday resulted in the inclusion of two excellent bloggers in the Brookings discussion, Laura Rozen and Ruy Teixeira. I’m of the same mind as Atrios that “live blogging” is a little bit dumb — there’s really no good reason to have people writing down their comments at a live event. Blogging isn’t a “live” medium. But whatever. It’s good news that smart liberals get their names into rolodexes so that when somebody wants a “blogger” the only name that comes to mind isn’t Andrew Sullivan, Wonkette or Hinderocket.
The most important thing about this brouhaha isn’t really defending the honor of the blogosphere or explaining why it is innovative and different. This matters because liberals need to take every opportunity to get the word out any way we possibly can — not for the sake of blogging but for the sake of the country. If articulate bloggers can worm their way onto panels or TV shows or radio shows because blogging is the flavor of the week then they should do it. Whatever it takes to get our views heard, we should do it. Always.
Ok, everybody. It’s time to flood the news outlets with the talking points that Linda Douglas reported last night. The senate is holding a prime time Saturday sideshow to vote on this Schiavo issue and the networks should be FORCED to report that the Republicans are pulling this garbage for political reasons. Via Oliver Willis and NoMoreMisterNiceBlog here is the report:
ABC News has obtained talking points circulated among Republican senators explaining why they should vote to intervene in the Schiavo case. Among them: “This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited…” and “This is a great political issue… this is a tough issue for Democrats.”
This circus is being produced purely for the benefit of the right to life zealot base of the Party for political reasons. They admit it. Here’s Peggy Nooner:
Here’s both a political and a public-relations reality: The Republican Party controls the Senate, the House and the White House. The Republicans are in charge. They have the power. If they can’t save this woman’s life, they will face a reckoning from a sizable portion of their own base. And they will of course deserve it.There is a passionate, highly motivated and sincere group of voters and activists who care deeply about whether Terri Schiavo is allowed to live.
This should concentrate their minds.
So should this: America is watching. As the deadline for removal of Mrs. Schiavo’s feeding tube approaches, the story has broken through as never before in the media.
[…
The supporters of Terri Schiavo’s right to continue living have fought for her heroically, through the courts and through the legislatures. They’re still fighting. They really mean it. And they have memories.
Nice little party you have here boys. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.
Gosh it seems like only yesterday that Peggy was complaining about anti-smoking laws because of their pernicious intrusion into people’s liberty. I sure can’t wait to hear another lecture on how Republicans just want the government out of our lives. I need for Peggy to tell me again how government can’t solve the problem, it is the problem. I keep forgetting how that’s supposed to work. Is it that the government is only interfering if it charges Republicans for the services that Republicans so willingly use? Is that the problem? Because it sure looks as if the only thing people like Peggy don’t want the government to do is send them a bill. Other than that it’s just fine if the Republicans use the strong arm of the law to step right into the living rooms, bedrooms and hospital rooms of American citizens because a “sizable portion of their … base” doesn’t approve of the difficult moral decisions that they make. What a very interesting view of limited government these people have. What a twisted, greed-soaked view of freedom.
On the other side of this debate, one would assume there is an equally well organized and passionate group of organizations deeply committed to removing Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube. But that’s not true. There’s just about no one on the other side. Or rather there is one person, a disaffected husband who insists Terri once told him she didn’t want to be kept alive by extraordinary measures.
I don’t know why she thinks this, but it clearly isn’t true. It may be that there isn’t a group of blindered fetishists who have devoted their pathetic lives to interfering in the intimate personal lives of their fellow humans as the pro-life people have, but there are millions of people who have had to face these situations and who have strong opinions about it. Many, many of them have decided to let their loved one die a natural death rather than live as they would never have wanted to live — with no mind. These decisions are faced every day all over the country and it is not, as Nooner suggests, that nobody cares. People care deeply and she may just be surprised how much people despise the sick openness with which Republicans are using this issue for political purposes.
This reminds me of another issue in which the Republicans were willing to flout all the known laws that really protect families in their zeal to pander to the radicals in their base. Little Elian. In that case they were more than willing to keep a little boy from his own father because they didn’t approve of the father’s politics. In this case they are flouting the very essence of what constitutes a family by insisting that they have the right to veto the wishes of both the patient and the patient’s spouse.
The Schiavo case also shows that their braying about the sanctity of marriage is a load of rubbish. One of the things that gays want from the marriage contract is the right to make decisions for their spouse in case like this one. Clearly, those rights are only applicable even to straight people if Bill Frist and Randall Terry approve. Otherwise, they may actually enact an act of Congress to stop you — especially if it’s “a great political issue” that “excites their base.” I guess the traditional view of marriage isn’t so sacred after all, is it? And here I thought this stuff was handed down from God. Go figure.
Update: For those who would like a clear rundown of the medical aspects of this case Respectful of Otters has a full compendium of links and analysis.
What do you suppose would happen if the congress and the media spent as much time on say, torture, as they are on this absurd inquisition on steroids in baseball?
If Democrats think that this is good theatre for them they are nuts. The “optics” on this are not good judging from the off hand comments I’ve heard from varous people today. This is America’s pastime, not the tobacco industry. It is highly unpleasant to watch a bunch of politicians browbeat famous players and then grill baseball owners as if they are a mafia family — while we are at war, the treasury is being bankrupted and unprecedented government corruption is happening right before their eyes. Listening to them sanctimoniously lecture baseball about its ethics and practices is just mind boggling.
If they really want to tackle the issue of steroid use they should call one person — Arnold Schwarzenneger. He knows everything there is to know about the product and he would be an exceptionally good witness who would provide them all with the limelight they apparently need so badly. Publicly humiliating Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa et al, just looks gratuitous. This faux outrage wouldn’t get first place in an 8th grade talent show.
Dennis Kucinich is the only one who made any sense all day when he pointed out that this is rally about America’s “win at all cost” ethos in athletics, business and politics. But he’s the only one. Everybody else is publicly accusing people willy nilly of taking steroids without any proof and then riffing on and on about the shocking, shocking nature of this most important public health matter.
The blogosphere is gobsmacked by Eugene Volokh’s startling admission that he approves of this Iranian style justice:
Mohammad Bijeh, 24, dubbed “the Tehran desert vampire” by Iran’s press, was flogged 100 times before being hanged.
A brother of one of his young victims stabbed him as he was being punished. The mother of another victim was asked to put the noose around his neck.
The execution took place in Pakdasht south of Tehran, near where Bijeh’s year-long killing spree took place.
The killer was hoisted about 10 metres into the air by a crane and slowly throttled to death in front of the baying crowd.
Hanging by a crane – a common form of execution in Iran – does not involve a swift death as the condemned prisoner’s neck is not broken.
The killer collapsed twice during the punishment, although he remained calm and silent throughout.
Spectators, held back by barbed wire and about 100 police officers, chanted “harder, harder” as judicial officials took turns to flog Bijeh’s bare back before his hanging.
The condemned collapsed twice during the pre-execution flogging Bijeh was stabbed by the 17-year-old brother of victim Rahim Younessi, AFP reported, as he was being readied to be hanged.
Officials then invited the mother Milad Kahani to put the blue nylon rope around his neck.
The crimes of Mohammed Bijeh and his accomplice Ali Baghi had drawn massive attention in the Iranian media.
The condemned collapsed twice during the pre-execution flogging
Volokh, a professor of constitutional law, writes:
I particularly like the involvement of the victims’ relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he’d killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging. The one thing that troubles me (besides the fact that the murderer could only be killed once) is that the accomplice was sentenced to only 15 years in prison, but perhaps there’s a good explanation.
I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way.
This is awfully interesting, don’t you think? How long has it been since we were talking about torture for the alleged higher purpose of obtaining information a suspect may or may not have? A couple of months? Yesterday? And now the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment has entered the dialog as well.
When critics say that radical professors have “a unique hostility toward Western traditional and commonsense attitudes,” and that their “true raison d’etre is in practice nothing other than to destroy utterly whatever allegiance a young person might have to traditional conceptions in morality, religion, politics and culture,” are they talking about this guy [Volokh]?
They should be. This kind of “moral intuition” coming from a law professor is a rejection of just about everything the West and particularly the enlightenment has been progressing toward for hundreds of years. He rejects empiricism, reason and logic for a primitive bloodlust that can only be described as barbaric.
(I can hardly wait to hear the PoMo spin on this in which it will be argued that flogging, choking and stabbing are long standing Christian traditions and cannot be construed as torture or cruel and unusual punishment when the person actually dies from the activity.)
It’s not really all that surprising. We have been leaning this way for a while with our move away from the idea of dispassionate justice to revenge. Listening to the inescapable rundowns of the Peterson verdict yesterday, I was struck as I often am by the sarcastic angry tone of the victim’s family in front of the cameras just as I’ve often been struck by the spectacle of the families inside the courtroom when they get their chance to confront the perpetrator in the penalty phase. It’s not that I blame them for feeling such rage. But I find it very disconcerting that our justice system believes that this revenge and catharsis should be part of the judicial process itself. Justice is supposed to be blind. Or so I thought.
I don’t believe in the death penalty because I think that the only justification for killing is self defense and when someone is locked up forever that is protection enough from their depredations. But I’m beginning to wonder if accepting the death penalty as we have presents another problem. So much focus is placed on the feelings of the victim’s families these days that I think we may have lost sight of the fact that there can be no recompense for the loss of a loved one. Therefore, the death penalty can never really be enough to satisfy the need that we are trying to make it satisfy.
As Volokh suggests, people will want to inflict pain to try to ease their own but that will not be sufficient either, will it? If one were to ask those relatives who helped in the torture and execution of that criminal if they felt satisfied, I would bet you that they don’t believe that real justice was served. Perhaps they think they should have been allowed to inflict the exact kind of pain that was inflicted on their kids, forced sodomy. Maybe they think that they should have been allowed to relive the murders with him as the victim. But would even that be enough? Could he suffer exactly the same way a child would have suffered in similar circumstances? It’s never going to be enough. And once you go down this road the line between those who kill because of mental defect, disease and evil and those who do it for revenge becomes very hard to see.
Volokh goes on to say that he thinks the constitution should be amended to allow cruel and unusual punishment in certain cases:
Naturally, I don’t expect this to happen any time soon; my point is about what should be the rule, not about what is the rule, or even what is the constitutionally permissible rule. I think the Bill of Rights is generally a great idea, but I don’t think it’s holy writ handed down from on high. Certain amendments to it may well be proper, though again I freely acknowledge that they’d be highly unlikely.
That is exactly why I gave up on arguing for gun control. You cannot even go near the Bill of Rights until Americans have evolved much, much further than we already have. When influential conservative constitutional law professors start giving the Bill of Rights only tepid support then we have to just say no. The Bill of Rights may not be a sacred writ, but it’s the best thing this misbegotten country ever did and it’s the single thing that makes the American system worth a damn.
Of course we have a brand new democracy of our very own creation taking shape before our eyes. Perhaps this will be legally institutionalized in a way that Volokh could heartily endorse: (Via Spencer Ackerman)
When Iraqi and American soldiers detained a suspected Sunni insurgent in Haifa this week, a group of the Shiite troops crowded around him. A sergeant kicked him in the face. Another soldier grabbed him by the neck and slammed his head into a wall. A third slapped him hard in the face.
Ali Abdul Mohsen, a 22-year-old Shiite, pointed his AK-47 at the man and screamed, his eyes bulging, “You will confess or I swear to God I will shoot you here.” Most of the Iraqi soldiers nearby smiled in approval. “This is revenge for everyone who has been killed,” Mohsen said.
Check out the posts commenting on this subject for a real eye opener.
Update: Matt Yglesias makes the erudite philosophical argument.
