Jeffrey Dubner at TAPPED notes in his post called “HOWARD THE GIP” the fact that many in the blogosphere are making comparisons between Howard Dean and Ronald Reagan.
I don’t really want to open up this can of worms, but I just have to say it:
The difference between Ronald Reagan and Howard Dean is that Ronald Reagan won two straight national elections in landslides that featured huge crossover numbers of Democrats. Howard Dean failed to get even 20% of the Democratic vote in the primaries. He may be similar to the Ronald Reagan of 1972, but he’s a long, long way from the Ronald Reagan of 1980.
Ronald Reagan articulated for the base of his party a very distinct ideological form of conservative Republicanism. His entire worldview was shaped by anti-communism and low taxes and laisse faire capitalism, period. It was, rhetorically speaking, a repudiation of the New Deal and it was a big, big idea that animated many Americans after the hangover of the 60’s. (Of course, he didn’t govern as he preached — and people didn’t really want him to — but the fact that he was able to keep his base fanatically loyal despite that is a testament to his political skill.)
Dean on the other hand offered no such big ideas — not that any of the other Democrats did either. He ran on the “Stop The Republicans Before They Kill Us All” platform, one which I think was very powerful in helping break the trance into which we’d all been forced after 9/11 and the patriotic police started their patrols. I don’t underestimate its significance or its importance in jumpstarting the Democratic will to fight back in this particular election.
But, if Dean is to build on the truly amazing loyalty he has engendered among his core group of Democrats, he’s going to have to articulate a bigger vision and animate Democrats on a more ideological level.
I’m personally hoping that he will take the job of DNC chaiman in the short term, even if he decides to run again. I think it would be a huge statement to the ossified party bureaucracy and would give a voice to all those who feel left out of the party apparatus presently. That job requires a fighter and that’s what Dean is all about.
But, if he is going to have the galvanizing effect on the Democrats that Ronald Reagan had on the Republicans he will have to embrace and articulate a fresh, affirmative, long term vision for the party that goes beyond what he’s talked about in the past. He has a base to build upon if he wants to do it.
Billmon has been writing about Joe Ryan, the “private contractor” from Abu Ghraib who abruptly stopped posting his “diary” as the scandal broke. Alert readers found a cache of Ryan’s previous writings which are interesting mostly for the fact that Ryan is revealed to be dumb as dirt about the country and culture he’s dealing with. (And *sigh* he’s supposed to be a trained intelligence guy, not some grunt from podunk.)
However, Billmon unearthed this interesting little entry:
March 30: The other big news at work was a message sent to us from Ms. Rice, the National Security Advisor, thanking us for the intelligence that has come out of our shop and noting that our work is being briefed to President Bush on a regular basis.
Now, this could be nonsensical “rally the troops” crapola. However, this article in today’s Washington Post makes it much more intriguing:
The head of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of the information being collected from prisoners there had been requested by “White House staff,” according to an account of his statement obtained by The Washington Post.
Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, an Army reservist who took control of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center on Sept. 17, 2003, said a superior military intelligence officer told him the requested information concerned “any anti-coalition issues, foreign fighters, and terrorist issues.”
The Army investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, asked Jordan whether it concerned “sensitive issues,” and Jordan said, “Very sensitive. Yes, sir,” according to the account, which was provided by a government official.
The reference by Jordan to a White House link with the military’s scandal-plagued intelligence-gathering effort at the prison was not explored further by Taguba, whose primary goal at that time was to assess the scope of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. The White House was unable to provide an immediate explanation.
[…]
The precise role and mission of Jordan, who is still stationed in Iraq and through his attorneys has declined requests to speak with the news media, remains one of the least well understood facets of the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.
[…]
Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the chief military intelligence officer at the prison, said in his statement to Taguba that Jordan was working on a special project for the office of Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, the top U.S. intelligence official in Iraq. He also described Jordan as “a loner who freelances between military intelligence and military police” officers at the prison.
[…]
But Jordan, in the statement to Taguba, described himself as more of a functionary than a rogue operator. He said that Pappas was really in charge, as evidenced by the fact that he was not responsible for rating other military intelligence officers in reports to superiors and “had no input . . . no responsibility . . . no resources” under his control. He said he was just a “liaison” between Fast and those collecting intelligence at the prison.
What do you suppose the White House staff would have been so impressed with? There have been numerous reports that the only good intel anybody was getting in Iraq during this time came from the field. Abu Ghraib seems to have been almost worthless, which is not surprising since most of the people in there were poor schmucks who got caught up in raids and personal vendettas and wouldn’t know an “insurgent” from a ballet dancer.
Specialist Monath and others say they were frustrated by intense pressure from Colonel Pappas and his superiors – Lt. Gen Ricardo Sanchez and his intelligence officer, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast – to churn out a high quantity of intelligence reports, regardless of the quality. “It was all about numbers. We needed to send out more intelligence documents whether they were finished or not just to get the numbers up,” he said. Pappas was seen as demanding – waking up officers in the middle of the night to get information – but unfocused, ordering analysts to send out rough, uncorroborated interrogation notes. “We were scandalized,” Monath said. “We all fought very hard to counter that pressure” including holding up reports in editing until the information could be vetted.
Ahhh. So, perhaps it was the “flow of intelligence” that was coming out of Abu Ghraib that impressed the White House so much rather than the intelligence itself. Condi Rice is, after all, notorious for not even reading reports as important ans the NIE. I’m sure a “document count” — the GWOT version of the “body count” was more than sufficient to show “progress”:
Miller’s mission came shortly after the horrific suicide bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad. He was encouraged by Rumsfeld’s senior intelligence aide, Stephen Cambone, to ensure there was “a flow of intelligence” from detainees picked up in Iraq.
Everyone’s been speculating that the reason General Fay has requested to be replaced by a higher ranking General is because of a need to interview General Sanchez and army protocol precludes him interviewing someone of a higher rank than he. I’m sure that’s at least partly true, although it is more likely that this shuffle is designed to kill more time before the election. But there is also the problem that Fay cannot complete his investigation without being able to talk to his equal in rank, Maj. General Barbara Fast, something which is also prohibited.
And, she may just be the key to the whole story:
Back on May 12, David Hackworth is quotedin the Sydney Morning Herald as saying:
“This is unravelling like a cheap Chinese sweater,” said David Hackworth, a retired colonel whose organisation, Soldiers for the Truth, helped bring the abuse story to the US media.
[…]
But Mr Hackworth said he believed that more junior soldiers would soon come forward to “blow the whistle”.
He said the general who was in charge of military intelligence in Iraq, Barbara Fast, who has escaped media scrutiny, was likely to become the focus of questions in the next few weeks.
So, what’s the story with Fast? Surely she is under increased scrutiny since the Abu Ghraib scandal happened under her command, right?
In September, Fast set up the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison. There, detainees were questioned for whatever light they could shed on the insurgency.
Fast’s involvement, if any, in the abuse remains unclear. She was in charge of military intelligence officers at the prison, including Col. Thomas Pappas, who is accused in an Army report of being “directly or indirectly responsible” for the abuse. According to the New York Times, Pappas emerged from meetings with Fast and Sanchez “clutching his face as if in pain.”
Fast also had oversight of civilian interrogators at the prison, two of whom are implicated. And another female general says Fast was largely to blame for the overcrowding at Abu Ghraib.
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who ran Iraq’s prison system until February, said Fast refused to release prisoners who were no longer security threats and ordered them “back in the box” for more questioning
Quite a few of the prisoners who were tortured and abused wouldn’t have even been there if it weren’t for Fast. I wonder if “quantity” over “quality” may have been her watchword with prisoners as well as bureaucratic reports to the White House staff and pentagon command?
Whatever it was, it was enough to get her promoted:
In February, as investigators were deep into their still-secret probe of prisoner abuse, the Senate confirmed Fast’s promotion to major general. On March 1, Sanchez pinned the second star on Fast’s collar in a ceremony seen via videoconferencing at Fort Huachuca, where her husband watched, and at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, near where her parents now live.
At the same time, it was announced that Fast would return to Fort Huachuca this summer in the plum post of commanding general.
“She’s done outstanding things,” said Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defense secretary, “and I expect more in the future.”
The Stern Gang. Potentially offsetting the conservative dominance of the radio waves is Howard Stern. The nationally-syndicated radio host is listened to by 17 percent of likely voters, and nationally, they would support Kerry over Bush by a margin of 53 percent to 43 percent. In the battleground states, their preference for Kerry is even stronger, backing him by a margin of 59 percent to 37 percent.
More importantly, one-quarter of all likely voting Stern listeners are swing voters. This means that four percent of likely voters this fall are swing voters who listen to Howard Stern, showing Stern’s potential ability to impact the race. Generally, likely voters who are Stern listeners are: 2 to 1 male to female; 40 percent Democrats, 26 percent Republicans, and 34 percent Independents; more liberal and less conservative than the average voter; significantly younger than the average voter (two-thirds are under 50 and 40 percent are under 35); more diverse; and more driven in their vote by economic issues.
Sleeping giant, I tell you. I have some relatives who live in Nevada — early 30’s, apolitical mostly, libertarian by instinct, hard core Howard, Tool and Quentin Tarantino fans.
I don’t know if they are representative, but their big issues are freedom of speech, the religious right, Iraq and The Patriot Act. One has never voted before and the other two considered themselves Republican until now. Howard has them all fired up about this election and they can’t wait to vote against Junior.
Via Catch.com, I found the awesome, majestic Ronald Reagan Circle in Tarnow, Poland, courtesy of “The Legacy Project.”
I agree that we should have one of these in every single town in America! How could we do any less than this for the greatest president America has, no — the greatest leader the world has ever known.
Brad DeLong has a must read post up featuring an e-mail from a reader who heard Sy Hersh give a lecture at the University of Chicago.
DeLong says:
If what it reports is true, then once again it looks like the Bush administration is worse than I had imagined–even though I thought I had taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is always worse than one imagines. Either Seymour Hersh is insane, or we have an administration that needs to be removed from office not later than the close of business today.
Your terrorist has no regard for human life. Not even his own.
I missed his show last night and didn’t get a chance until just now to catch it, but I just have to say, “bless you Jon Stewart.”
He’s the only voice I’ve heard outside the blogosphere who shows the proper incredulity that the United States of America is actually having a national debate about whether we should legally torture people, a large number of whom don’t seem to be guilty of anything more than being at the wrong place and the wrong time.
9/11 was bad. But, we don’t have to go this far. This War On Terror has gone completely over the top and it’s getting frighteningly Kubrickian.
I honestly don’t think we could have had a worse administration to be in power during a terrorist attack. Bin Laden was very lucky that he waited until he had a president who would overreact to such an extent that we’d destroy ourselves almost immediately. Now he knows that all he has to do is pop up and say boo once in a while and we’ll go all to pieces.
Q: Mr. President, I wanted to return to the question of torture. What we’ve learned from these memos this week is that the Department of Justice lawyers and the Pentagon lawyers have essentially worked out a way that U.S. officials can torture detainees without running afoul of the law. So when you say that you want the U.S. to adhere to international and U.S. laws, that’s not very comforting. This is a moral question: Is torture ever justified?
BUSH: Look, I’m going to say it one more time. Maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you.
We’re a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at these laws. And that might provide comfort for you. And those were the instructions from me to the government.
Makes you proud to be an American to have a snotty, little asshole of a president refuse to say whether he thinks torture is immoral.
But, why should any of us be surprised:
From: “Devil May Care” by Tucker Carlson, Talk Magazine, September 1999, p. 106
“Bush’s brand of forthright tough-guy populism can be appealing, and it has played well in Texas. Yet occasionally there are flashes of meanness visible beneath it.
While driving back from the speech later that day, Bush mentions Karla Faye Tucker, a double murderer who was executed in Texas last year. In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. ‘Did you meet with any of them?’ I ask.
Bush whips around and stares at me. ‘No, I didn’t meet with any of them,’ he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. ‘I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like ‘What would you say to Governor Bush?’ ‘What was her answer?’ I wonder.
‘Please,’ Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, ‘don’t kill me.’
I must look shocked — ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel, even for someone as militantly anticrime as Bush — because he immediately stops smirking.
‘It’s tough stuff,’ Bush says, suddenly somber, ‘but my job is to enforce the law.’ As it turns out, the Larry King-Karla Faye Tucker exchange Bush recounted never took place, at least not on television. During her interview with King, however, Tucker did imply that Bush was succumbing to election-year pressure from pro-death penalty voters. Apparently Bush never forgot it. He has a long memory for slights.” [Carlson, Talk, 9/99]
And he always has been a nasty little fucker, too.
In this NY Times op-ed, called Physician, Turn Thyself In, the writer alerts us to another phenomenon that I have wondered about of late concerning torture — the role of the medical profession.
Much of the evidence of abuse at the prison came from medical documents. Records and statements show doctors and medics reporting to the area of the prison where the abuse occurred several times to stitch wounds, tend to collapsed prisoners or see patients with bruised or reddened genitals.
Two doctors recognized that a detainee’s shoulder was hurt because he had his arms handcuffed over his head for what they said was “a long period.” They gave him an injection of painkiller, and sent him to an outside hospital for what appeared to be a dislocated shoulder, but did not report any suspicions of abuse. One medic, Staff Sgt. Reuben Layton, told investigators that he had found the detainee handcuffed in the same position on three occasions, despite instructing Specialist Graner to free the man.
“I feel I did the right thing when I told Graner to get the detainee uncuffed from the bed,” Sergeant Layton told investigators.
Sergeant Layton also said he saw Specialist Graner hitting a metal baton against the leg wounds of a detainee who had been shot. He did not report that incident.
Sgt. Neil Wallin, another medic, recorded on Nov. 14: “Patient has blood down front of clothes and sandbag over head,” noting three wounds requiring 13 stitches, above his eye, on his nose and on his chin.
Sergeant Wallin later told investigators that when he got to the prison: “I observed blood on the wall near a metal weld, which I believed to be the place where the detainee received his injury. I do not know how he was injured or if it was done by himself or another.”
He also told investigators that he had seen male detainees forced to wear women’s underwear and that he had seen a video in which a prisoner known to smear himself with his own feces repeatedly banged his head against the wall, “very hard.”
Helga Margot Aldape-Moreno, a nurse, told investigators that in September she reported to the cell to tend to a prisoner having a panic attack, and that, opening the door, she saw naked Iraqis in a human pyramid, with sandbags over their heads. Military police officers were yelling at the detainees, she said.
Ms. Aldape-Moreno tended to the prisoner, she said, then left the room and did not report what she saw until the investigation began in January.
Today, the Washington Post reports that interrogators have been given access to detainee’s medical files, presumably so that information contained therein can be used to extract information. Accroding to medical ethicists interviewed for the story, this is strictly and unequivocally unethical:
How military interrogators used the information is unknown. But a previously undisclosed Defense Department memo dated Oct. 9 cites Red Cross complaints that the medical files “are being used by interrogators to gain information in developing an interrogation plan.” Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the facility at the time, denied the allegations, according to the memo.
[…]
An account pieced together from confidential documents and sources familiar with the matter shows that a Red Cross team discovered the sharing of the medical records in a visit to the Guantanamo Bay medical facility in mid-2003, during Miller’s tenure there.
The Red Cross team’s task, repeated at prisons throughout the world, was to assess how the complex’s medical facility functioned. The medical team studied equipment and treatment options, speaking with detainees and U.S. military medical staff. Other Red Cross experts monitored other aspects of prison life.
The team’s mission was not to treat detainees, but to ensure that they received adequate care. If a prisoner had persistent headaches, was he able to see a doctor? If he suffered from psychological problems — 21 captives have tried to kill themselves at Guantanamo Bay — was he receiving treatment?
U.S. military doctors told Red Cross medics that interrogators had access to prisoners’ medical records, according to two people knowledgeable about the issue who demanded anonymity because details of the interrogations and Red Cross monitoring are kept secret. As one source said, the doctors “were very honest about that” and “some people expressed concern.”
Daryl Matthews, a civilian psychiatrist who visited Guantanamo Bay in May 2003 at the invitation of the Pentagon as part of a medical review team, described the prisoners’ records generated by military physicians as similar to those kept by civilian physicians. Matthews said they contain names, nationalities, and histories of physical and psychological problems, as well as notes about current complaints and prescriptions.
Matthews said an individual’s records would routinely list psychologists’ comments about conditions such as phobias, as well as family details, including the names and ages of a spouse or children.
Such information, he said, would give interrogators “tremendous power” over prisoners. Matthews said he was disturbed that his team, which issued a generally favorable report on the base’s medical facility, was not told patient records were shared with interrogators.
Asked what use nonmedical personnel could make of the files, he replied: “Nothing good.”
The practice made some military medical workers at Guantanamo Bay uncomfortable. “Not everyone was unified on this,” said one person aware of the situation. “It creates a tension. You have people with many different opinions.”
There is another aspect of this that is also troublesome, aside from the apparent lack of professional ethics on the part of all the participants, is the fact that there appears to be drugs being used to coerce information or confessions and it seems likely that medical professionals are taking part in the administration of them.
Various reports from those who were detained either in Afghanistan and let go or transported to Guantanamo from other places bring this up over and over again. According to the Washington Post’sanalysis of the torture memo:
The law says torture can be caused by administering or threatening to administer “mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the sense of personality.” The Bush lawyers advised, though, that it “does not preclude any and all use of drugs” and “disruption of the senses or personality alone is insufficient” to be illegal. For involuntarily administered drugs or other psychological methods, the “acts must penetrate to the core of an individual’s ability to perceive the world around him,” the lawyers found.
We have apparently been operating on this premise, because there have quite a few accounts of drugs being forcibly used on prisoners:
“Finally, on 1 May, he was dressed in goggles and an orange jump suit, injected with a sedative and flown to Guantanamo Bay.” The Guardian May 16, 2004
“Mr. Shah alleged that the Americans had given him injections and tablets prior to interrogations. ‘They used to tell me I was mad,’ the 23-year-old told the BBC in his native village in Dir district near the Afghan border. ‘I was given injections at least four or five times as well as different tablets. I don’t know what they were meant for.'” BBC May 22, 2004
“Many detainees were given regular injections, after which ‘they would just sit there like in a daze and sometimes you would see them shaking’. He [al-Harith] said he was beaten and put in isolation because he refused injections and was sometimes forcibly given unidentified drugs.” Sun Herald (Sydney) March 14, 2004 Sunday
“A British detainee recently released from Guantanamo Bay has said that Habib had told him he had been subjected to beatings, electric shocks and injected with drugs while in Egypt.” The Age (Melbourne) May 24, 2004
“A team of intelligence service psychiatrists, psychologists, behavioural scientists and psychoanalysts known as “the specialists” have prepared a detailed study of how the interrogators can break him…Truth drugs will be administered intravenously shortly before Saddam’s interrogation begins – probably in the new year. Drugs were used early on in their captivity on Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to try to discover where Osama bin Laden is hiding.” The Advertiser December 20, 2003
The good news is that we are being “compassionate conservatives.” Despite the fact that virtually eveyone (except for General Ripper) admits that there has been almost no good intelligence gleaned from the prisoners in Guantanamo and even our own soldiers have been beaten severely in training exercizes, we can rest assured that the medical personnel are looking after the prisoners well being:
In the last six weeks alone, he said, three inmates have tried to hang themselves in their cells with camp-issued “comfort items” such as towels and sheets, and another tried to slit his wrists with a plastic razor. None has succeeded.
Hoey said camp doctors are treating some detainees for psychological disorders and have administered antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs.
I’m sure many blog readers, like me, spend an inordinate amount of time reading about current events. The Iraq war, terrorism, a presidential election and all the other stories, many of which I barely have time to skim, much less write about or even think much about, all start to run into one another in my mind after a while. It becomes a sort of pageant for my amusement on some level, an entertainment from which I find interesting nuggets to amuse myself and my readers and friends. I’m laughing about silly things and ranting about outrageous things and it all becomes part of one long continuous comment that loses meaning with each pithy little observation I add to it.
And then I read something that shocks me, which is not easy to do since it seems that everything is, or should be, shocking on one level or another these days.
This torture memo (pdf) shocked me. And it shocked me not because of its endorsement of torture, we knew something about that already, indeed we’ve seen pictures of it. No, strangely, it shocked me because it was the product of a bureaucratic “working group” and it was delivered in the dry prose of a government report on the legality of setting aside an executive order on train travel requirements. But this “working group,” consisting of lawyers from throughout the executive branch, was tasked with something a little bit different than your average government project. Its job was defining the legal limits of the president’s authority to order people to be tortured.
They had meetings at which I’m sure they all believed very sincerely that they were doing important work on the War on Terror. I’m sure they worked long hours and diligently analyzed the law and offered their advice to the president and secretary of defense with nothing but the good of the country in their minds. And they produced a 50+ page paper from which, I understand, only one person — the state department representative — dissented.
And that report, this product of a bureaucratic “working group” of lawyers is so deeply depraved and contrary to American values that one wonders if at any time during the discussions if someone had stood up and said, “we’re talking about TORTURE for God’s sake!” they would have produced a report at all.
Perhaps they wouldn’t have. But, more importantly, I seriously doubt that anyone stood up and said such a thing. After all, this was being dryly discussed in the op-ed pages of major newspapers and in the weekly magazines as if it were just another method of warfare — like terrorism itself. I’m sure these fine bureaucrats and political appointees believed they were doing their duty.
People are undoubtedly already in the process of wearing out the term “banality of evil” (if it has not already been trod over until its meaning is completely eradicated.) And I have already been taken to task by some who continue to believe that any comparison of the Bush administration to Naziism or totalitarianism in general is some sort of cheating. But, totalitarianism, incipient or full blown, has many features. Legal torture is one of them.
Here we have a “working group” of government lawyers tasked to find out what, if any, legal obstacles there are to presidential orders to torture prisoners in the war on terrorism. They found that the president of the United States has the unlimited power to set aside the laws of the land within his capacity as commander in chief. As has been noted by others, this general idea was explicit in the Nazi Fuehrerprinzip and is implied in what Republican legal theorists similarly like to call the “unitary executive.” The American government has, up to now, never openly embraced such a concept.
Michael Froomkin and other legal experts have examined the final product of this ‘working group” and found the legal reasoning seriously flawed as one might expect. Froomkin concludes his review with this:
If anyone in the higher levels of government acted in reliance on this advice, those persons should be impeached. If they authorized torture, it may be that they have committed, and should be tried for, war crimes. And, as we learned at Nuremberg, “I was just following orders” is NOT (and should not be) a defense.
Whatever the legal merits (and I’m sure Froomkin is correct — this is an abomination) there is something even more frightening at work, I believe, than following bad legal advice and committing a war crime. It’s the fact that a group of people working together from all different parts of our government came to this conclusion apparently without serious controversy.
I can’t get past the fact that this is the product of a “working group” of lawyers, all of them highly educated, presumably intelligent, decent hardworking Americans who love their country. And, not one of them resigned their post rather than participate in creating a legal justification for torture. And, it was not just an abstraction to them; they went into great detail about the precise amount of pain that was to be allowed. There are long passages in which the meaning of “severe pain” is discussed, the effect of long term mental damage is assessed and where the justification of the infliction of long term damage is defined as a matter of intent rather than result. The Washington Post describes it like this:
In the view expressed by the Justice Department memo, which differs from the view of the Army, physical torture “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” For a cruel or inhuman psychological technique to rise to the level of mental torture, the Justice Department argued, the psychological harm must last “months or even years.”
Under this definition you could for instance, shove bamboo shoots under someone’s fingernails, pull their hair out of their head in clumps or beat them with a hose. According to the memo, you can force hallucinogenic drugs on them. You can repeatedly threaten them or their families with death. The imagination is boundless under this definition. After all, who knows how another person experiences pain, and that is what underlies their definition of torture — how the victim experiences his pain.
What was the process by which they came to these dry legalistic definition of when, how and where on is allowed to inflict terrible pain as long as it doesn’t reach the level of intensity that would accompany serious physical injury or organ failure? Did they discuss this around a conference table over a take-out Chinese dinner? Did they all nod their heads and take notes and write memos and have conference calls and send e-mails on the subject of what exactly the definition of “severe pain” is? Did they take their kid to school on the way to the meeting in which they finalized a report that says the president of the United States has the unlimited authority to order the torture of anyone he wants? Did they tell jokes on the way out?
These nice people with nice backrounds and nice jobs spent weeks contemplating how to legally torture human beings. Then they went home and watched television and ate dinner and went to bed and made love to their wife or husband and got up and did it again because it was their job and their duty to find ways to legally justify it:
A former senior administration official involved in discussions about CIA interrogation techniques said Bush’s aides knew he wanted them to take an aggressive approach.
“He felt very keenly that his primary responsibility was to do everything within his power to keep the country safe, and he was not concerned with appearances or politics or hiding behind lower-level officials,” the official said. “That is not to say he was ready to authorize stuff that would be contrary to law. The whole reason for having the careful legal reviews that went on was to ensure he was not doing that.”
These last few days in which I’ve been pondering the unique horror I feel at this latest revelation, I was reminded (of all things) of a quote from George Will recently, in which he condemned the admnistration for being unable to think:
This administration be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts.
I doubt that Will intended anyone to make this connection to his phrase but it is, of course, the central thesis of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Her observations of Eichman were of a “ludicrous” person defined by what she called his “thoughtlessness” as opposed to stupidity. He was filled with contradiction, spoke in nothing but bromides and cliches and believed that he had done his duty to the end. He was, in Arendt’s view, the perfect embodiment of the banality of evil. A company man, a bureaucrat, a regular guy, the kind of man who would join a “working group” to find legal justification for torture without having one second of stricken conscience about it. Indeed, he was too shallow, too dully conformist to ever question himself about anything and thus even have a conscience. Arendt expounded on this theme in “Thinking and Moral Considerations” in which she says:
Evil is a surface phenomenon, and instead of being radical, it is merely extreme. We resist evil by not being swept away by the surface of things, by stopping ourselves and beginning to think, that is, by reaching another dimension than the horizon of everyday life. In other words, the more superficial someone is, the more likely will he be to yield to evil. An indication of such superficiality is the use of clichés, and Eichmann, …was a perfect example.
These people who set about legalizing inhumane behavior on behalf of a president on whom they confer absolute power to order it at will are as shallow and evil as the cliché spouting president who demanded it. The slippery slope to totalitarianism started in a conference room where coffee and donuts and microsoft power point presentations on torture and pain were on the agenda one morning.
Demosthenes posits the theory that the executive power grab revealed by the WSJ yesterday is surprising only in the fact that it hasn’t happened before. He says it’s related to the weakness in our system that holds the head of government and the head of state in the same office.
When crises arise, then, there is both the opportunity and, lets face it, a clear desire for the head of state to “take charge and lead the people”. If the problems of politics get in the way, then the president has a nearly irresistable opportunity to sweep those “problems” away, which usually means “emergency powers” of some sort. Once gained, these powers are very rarely given up, as there are always new “crises” to exploit to retain them.
These sorts of events are incredibly common. In fact, they’re so common that the fact that the United States has never had this happen has baffled political scientists since the phenomenon was noticed. There are a number of theories as to why, but my own favorite stems from an American military tradition, which is that soldiers swear loyalty to the Constitution, not the president, despite being their “commander in chief”. One of the most treasured aspects of the American system is its balance of power between judiciary, executive and legislature; while its effectiveness can sometimes be questioned, it’s important in that it enshrines the idea that the United States is a country where the laws stand above the president; that the symbolic power of a head of state will never confer absolute power upon him. “L’etat c’est moi” does not apply. It is, perhaps, the only way in which one can have a powerful president without having the system fly apart in the face of crisis.
Perhaps this weakness in our system is only likely to be exploited by a special kind of chief executive, the kind who takes office in an anomolous fashion and then governs radically without a mandate from the people; the kind who sees his legitimacy stemming from God rather than the ballot box; the kind who is convinced that he is leading a great crusade rather than running a democracy on behalf of it’s citizens.
Perhaps it took the unique combination of an attack on the country and a president of limited intellect and legitimacy to go that extra mile.