The other day I wrote a post about the pathetic Republican psyche and described them as “a bunch of paunchy middle aged men in ill fitting suits who never got laid when they were young, never went to war, never made a team or played in a rock band, so their dreams of masculine glory remain unfulfilled well into their 50’s.”
Remember the other day I told you nerds rule? Now, proof, from no less than the president of the United States, that they’re also very influential. You don’t believe me? Look where I’m standing!
[. . . ]
I just wish my old pals in high school could see me now: Neil the nerd, now Neil-the-invited-to-the-White-House nerd standing on the same hallowed ground as Fox super cool guys Wendell Goler, Jim Angle and James Rosen.
Take that football team captain. Take that all you cheerleaders who dismissed me as some freak of nature. Still a freak, but now a force of nature freak.
Just ask anyone. Just ask … the president of the United States.
Geez. That’s sad. The Frat Rat in chief would be the first guy in the room to give you an atomic wedgie, Neil.
Josh and Matt are teasing out the insider take on Chalabi so we don’t have to. They seem to agree that there probably isn’t anything new but rather that a power shift within the Bush administration that has caused the anti-Chalabi faction to flex its long abused muscles.
So we have really two possibilities here. One is that some piece of evidence came to light that changed the mind of Chalabi’s backers inside the beltway. The other is that there was simply a shift in the correlation of forces inside the government — no one changes their mind about Chalabi, it’s just that the anti-Chalabi forces, formerly weak, became strong. Hence the new policy.
One good piece of evidence for scenario two is the behavior of the out-of-government friends of Ahmed — David Frum and the AEI crowd. If an influential Chalabi-backer on the inside (call him, “Ronald Dumsfeld”) had changed his mind, then you would think Dumsfeld would call his fellow-travelers in the media and make his case. That might not convince all — or even most — of the media Chalabistas, but it would surely convince some of them. Instead, all of the nongovernmental Chalabi-fans seem to still be Chalabi fans, indicating that all the anti-Chalabi stuff coming out of the government is coming from traditional anti-Chalabi sources.
That’s assuming that there are any sane Chalabi backers in the first place. I think most of them are as blind about him as they are about everything else, so I doubt that they would believe there was anything wrong with their boy even if they saw him french kissing the Ayatollah Khomeni. The ties go way back and undergird the entire neocon movement and its traditional concern with Israeli affairs. After all their guru, Alfred Wohlstetter, is the one who introduced Chalabi to his bitch, Richard Perle:
Almost to a man, Washington’s hawks lavishly praise Chalabi. “He’s a rare find,” says Max Singer, a trustee and co-founder of the Hudson Institute. “He’s deep in the Arab world and at the same time he is fundamentally a man of the West.”
In Washington, Team Chalabi is led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the neoconservative strategist who heads the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. Chalabi’s partisans run the gamut from far right to extremely far right, with key supporters in most of the Pentagon’s Middle-East policy offices — such as Peter Rodman, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Michael Rubin. Also included are key staffers in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, not to mention Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA Director Jim Woolsey.
The Washington partisans who want to install Chalabi in Arab Iraq are also those associated with the staunchest backers of Israel, particularly those aligned with the hard-right faction of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Chalabi’s cheerleaders include the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). “Chalabi is the one that we know the best,” says Shoshana Bryen, director of special projects for JINSA, where Chalabi has been a frequent guest at board meetings, symposia and other events since 1997. “He could be Iraq’s national leader,” says Patrick Clawson, deputy director of WINEP, whose board of advisers includes pro-Israeli luminaries such as Perle, Wolfowitz and Martin Peretz of The New Republic.
What makes Chalabi so attractive to the Washington war party? Most importantly, he’s a co-thinker: a mathematician trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago and a banker (who years ago hit it off with Albert Wohlstetter, the theorist who was a godfather of the neoconservative movement), a fellow mathematician and a University of Chicago strategist. In 1985, Wohlstetter (who died in 1997) introduced Chalabi to Perle, then the undersecretary of defense for international-security policy under President Reagan and one of Wohlstetter’s leading acolytes. The two have been close ever since. In early October, Perle and Chalabi shared a podium at an American Enterprise Institute conference called “The Day After: Planning for a Post-Saddam Iraq,” which was held, appropriately enough, in AEI’s 12th-floor Wohlstetter Conference Center. “The Iraqi National Congress has been the philosophical voice of free Iraq for a dozen years,” Perle told me.
The CIA despises [Ahmed] Chalabi; the State Department despises him. They did everything they could to put him out of business. Now there is a deliberate effort to marginalize him.”
“He has devoted his life to freeing his country,” Perle added. “He is a man of enormous intelligence, and I believe the effort to marginalize him will fail. They will end up looking ridiculous.”
I don’t think even Rummy could drive a wedge between those two crazy young kids in love.
But the next morning, he said, doctors and dentists arrived to care for their injuries. Beds and pillows were brought back in. They were fed. Everyone was nice, Mr. Abd said. Then at night, the same crew with “Joiner” would return and strip them and handcuff them to the walls.
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.
Not exactly a bunch of Albert Schweitzers, were they?
On the other hand, the beginning of the article is about Joseph Darby, a person who put his humanity above his job.
WASHINGTON — The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources.
“Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein,” said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency’s conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents.
The Information Collection Program also “kept the Iranians informed about what we were doing” by passing classified U.S. documents and other sensitive information, he said. The program has received millions of dollars from the U.S. government over several years.
An administration official confirmed that “highly classified information had been provided [to the Iranians] through that channel.”
The Defense Department this week halted payment of $340,000 a month to Chalabi’s program. Chalabi had long been the favorite of the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. Intelligence sources say Chalabi himself has passed on sensitive U.S. intelligence to the Iranians.
Patrick Lang, former director of the intelligence agency’s Middle East branch, said he had been told by colleagues in the intelligence community that Chalabi’s U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence operation. “They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to,” he said.
He described it as “one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history.”
“I’m a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work,” he said.
That this came from the DIA means that Feith is in {big} trouble, I think.
It makes his old law partners words to Salon last week (later retracted) even more interesting:
“Ahmed Chalabi is a treacherous, spineless turncoat,” says L. Marc Zell, a former law partner of Douglas Feith, now the undersecretary of defense for policy, and a former friend and supporter of Chalabi and his aspirations to lead Iraq. “He had one set of friends before he was in power, and now he’s got another.”
Zell, a Jerusalem attorney, continues to be a partner in the firm that Feith left in 2001 to take the Pentagon job. He also helped Ahmed Chalabi’s nephew Salem set up a new law office in Baghdad in late 2003. Chalabi met with Zell and other neoconservatives many times from the mid-1990s on in London, Turkey, and the U.S. Zell outlines what Chalabi was promising the neocons before the Iraq war: “He said he would end Iraq’s boycott of trade with Israel, and would allow Israeli companies to do business there. He said [the new Iraqi government] would agree to rebuild the pipeline from Mosul [in the northern Iraqi oil fields] to Haifa [the Israeli port, and the location of a major refinery].” But Chalabi, Zell says, has delivered on none of them. The bitter ex-Chalabi backer believes his former friend’s moves were a deliberate bait and switch designed to win support for his designs to return to Iraq and run the country.
These neocons are even dumber than I realized.
Update: Either somebody didn’t get his talking points, or a full fledged knife fight is breaking out in the Pentagon:
Thursday’s raid appeared to be a final break between Mr Chalabi and his former US patrons.
But Gen Myers defended the INC, saying its military intelligence had been “useful and accurate” during the year-long occupation.
“The organisation that he is associated with has provided intelligence to our intelligence unit there in Baghdad that has saved soldiers’ lives,” he told a congressional committee.
Gen Myers’ comments reflect the personal support that Mr Chalabi enjoys in some sections of the administration, particularly the Pentagon. However, this support has been overriden by the importance attached to the political process by Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and Lakhdar Brahimi, United Nations special envoy to Iraq. To them, Mr Chalabi has come to be seen as an obstacle to UN plans to form a caretaker government to assume sovereignty.
We are long overdue for some real analyses of Kerry’s strengths and weaknesses. So far, he is just being caricatured by the Republicans as a slimy opportunist and by the Democrats as an overqualified stiff. (Is it 2000 again?)
I am thinking that the way to interpret that is that he has the personality of Gore with the political savvy of Clinton, which isn’t a bad combo.The country might be ready for a little sober, programmatic seriousness after our little foray into rightwing fantasy. But, the Republicans aren’t going to just sit back and allow him to clean up the mess they’ve made; they are going to do everything they can to destroy him. For that you need good instincts, good timing and the ability to play rough and bounce back.
And, the Democrats definitely need somebody with some healthy self-confidence. If he wins, he’s going to need it.
If you ever wanted to see an article that perfectly captures the fact that Democrats have internalized all the right wing propaganda of the last 20 years, you only have to look at this one By EJ Dionne.
The party’s 20-year-old fights are — well, 20 years old. Enough already:
For two decades, the Democratic party has been riven by sharp ideological arguments. Those debates were in some respects necessary and important. But it’s obvious that many of those conflicts are irrelevant to our moment, and say far more about the past than the future. The road to nowhere is paved with rote disputes between center and left. Here are 10 tired and useless arguments that progressives ought to stop having, and 10 new ones that they should start making.
I wasn’t aware that we were in a deep ideological struggle. I thought we mostly argued about tactics and strategy. But, lay it on me.
1)Big Government Versus Small Government.
What is the point of this argument? Progressives and Democrats clearly favor a rather large government when it comes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education spending, environmental rights, worker rights, civil rights, and consumer protection. There is nothing here that requires apologies. Progressives don’t have to defend themselves against charges that they favor the government takeover of private business because they are proposing no such thing. And they have always defended individual liberty against government incursions. The big versus small government argument miscasts what’s at stake. There is nothing wrong with favoring a strong and active government that operates within limits. You might even say that this is the American way.
No kidding. But, since when are Democrats arguing among ourselves about this? This frame is a bullshit tactic of the Right designed to make Democrats look like tax and spenders, regulators and gun appropriators. To the extent that we even engage in this discussion it’s in response to the Right, not each other. Tell it to Grover, it’s his rap.
2)Pro-Business Versus Anti-Business.
Since when have Democrats or liberals been anti-business? Didn’t business flourish in the Clinton years — and in the Kennedy and Johnson years? Democrats want business to prosper, and their actual policies when they held office have favored growth, prosperity, and entrepreneurship. They also want businesses not to cheat. Supporting capitalism means opposing fraud, guaranteeing investors honest information, opposing monopoly and oligopoly, and resisting measures that throw government’s power on the side of the most powerful economic actors. Believing in the strength of the capitalist system means countering the idea that regulation destroys business.
Uh, yeah. But, which Democrats disagree with this? Are there really a bunch of them holding forth about their “anti-business” beliefs? I haven’t kept up with the latest Internationale, but I don’t imagine that there are many Democrats attending these days.
Tell this one to George W. Bush.
3. Populist Versus Mainstream.
Some Democrats think Al Gore went off the rails when he went “populist.” What did Gore do? He attacked big oil companies, polluters, HMOs, and big insurance companies. Does anybody think he lost voters by doing this? Gore went up in the polls after his Democratic national convention speech that made these points. On many issues, the “mainstream” is populist. That’s why John Edwards’ warnings about “two Americas,” one for the rich and one for the rest, struck such a chord during the 2004 primaries.
Dionne is right about this. But, it is a tactical not an ideological argument.
I would love to see the Democrats stop arguing about tactics and strategy, but this being politics and all, I think it may actually be part of the process. Why, even the lockstep GOP Borg do it sometimes.
4. New Middle Class Versus Old Working Class.
Democrats are supposed to face a choice between rallying working-class voters or appealing to voters in the new middle class. But they won’t win elections unless they get votes from both constituencies. Gore did very well in the new middle class. He fell short among working-class voters, especially in rural areas and the South. George W. Bush appeals to rich business people and lower-middle-class Christian conservatives. Can’t Democrats also walk and chew gum at the same time? Democrats need to hold the gains they have made in the professional classes on the issues of social tolerance. They also need to be more respectful toward religious people and more explicit about supporting economic policies that would create opportunities for voters with modest incomes who now vote Republican on cultural issues.
More tactical argument. But, in his explanation he pulls out the right wing (widely internalized) trope that Democrats are hostile to religion, which is not true. They are hostile to the religious Right because the religious Right is wielding its alleged superior morality like a club for partisan political gain. We have a right to fight that on those terms.
But, our political tradition is actually much more religious than the GOP’s and our politicians are just as religious as theirs are. The problem is that our northern politicians do not speak “Evangelical” very naturally, which is, again, a tactical not an ideological problem.
As for being more explicit about promoting economic policies that would create opportunities among cultural conservatives — well, what a good idea. How about being for national health care and school loans and child tax credits and job treaining programs and the minimum wage and…oh that’s right. They already are. The cultural conservative don’t listen because they have been persuaded that Democrats want to storm into their houses and confiscate their gun and their bible. You can try to argue that they’ll get health care, but they just don’t hear you.
Just once I’d like for somebody to come up with a REAL solution to that little problem. Droning on about our “Children and Adult learning and healthcare program initiative for college students and seniors” isn’t going to do it.
5. Globalist Versus Protectionist.
Democrats are told that they either have to defend the new global economy or fall back on protectionism. It’s a no-win choice. The global economy is not going to go away — and it does create injustices. It also poses challenges to regulations in areas such as labor standards and the environment. Isn’t the real issue whether it’s possible to create a global New Deal under which the new economy is accepted as inevitable but under rules that make the playing field fair and protect the vulnerable? And don’t the sharp decline in manufacturing jobs over the past few years and the flight of both manufacturing and professional jobs overseas suggest a need for new thinking about the impact of free trade and globalization?
Yes. Which is why it isn’t an “old tired” argument at all. The world is changing. Dionne doesn’t even begin to address the actual issue other than to suggest that both sides might have a point. But it has to be hashed out. It’s important and it isn’t a result of some sort of political gamesmanship or posturing. There isn’t an easy solution.
6. Deficits Versus Balanced Budgets.
This is a real choice. The Bush administration decided to throw balanced budgets overboard. Why is it so hard for Democrats — and liberals and moderates — to argue both that the Bush approach is dangerous fiscal policy for the long term and that it threatens government’s ability to solve problems in the short term? Where is the money to establish universal health insurance, to help state governments balance their budgets, or to stop tuition increases at public universities? And where will the money come from to pay for the retirement of the baby boomers?
Gosh EJ, I don’t know. But, that doesn’t sound like something we are arguing about. The last time the Democrats were in power we had a multi trillion dollar surplus.
He asks, “why is it so hard for Democrats to argue both that the Bush approach is dangerous fiscal policy for the long term and that it threatens government’s ability to solve problems in the short term?”
It isn’t, and they are. They all are. It’s a huge issue. But, this is an argument that hinges on tax policy as Dionne well knows. And tax policy is a much stickier wicket for the Democrats because the Republicans have managed to convince a large number of Americans that we want to tax them to pay for cadillacs for terrorists and illegal aliens to get free health care. That was the whole point of the “balanced budget” Dem policy of the 90’s, to prove — again — that we could be trusted. It might have even worked if Dionne and his ilk didn’t help Rove with his talking points by continuing to state, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Democrats can’t seem to decide if deficit spending is our official policy or whether we prefer an economy that’s healthy and thriving. That is the GOP frame, not ours.
(There is, of course, an ongoing economic argument about deficits and balanced budgets but, unlike the Republicans, the Democrats haven’t relegated science to the garbage disposal so they consider whether the country is better served, one way or the other, by certain fiscal policies at certain times. Let’s hope actual Democratic policy makers never stop discussing economics in those terms because otherwise there will be nobody left in the country who doesn’t view economics as their personal political playground.)
7. Strong on Defense Versus Weak on Defense.
Who, these days, is for a weak defense? The challenge to the Bush administration is whether its unilateral approach protects the United States and strengthens our standing in the world. It’s tough, not weak, to insist that Americans will be better protected in a world that does not hate the only remaining superpower. It’s tough, not weak, to defend a progressive internationalism that tries to create a more democratic world that will be less hostile to the United States. It’s tough, not weak, to think through military commitments in advance and to tell the truth about the costs of these enterprises
.
I know. I just wish the Democratic Party would decide once and for all if it cares more about America or Osama bin laden. Personally, I wish we could persuade all these Democrats not to run on the “weak on Defense” platform of total surrender to our enemies. I don’t think it’s a winner.
Maybe at the convention we can get them to change their minds.
8. Interest-Group Dependent Versus Independent.
Why does no one talk about Republican special-interest groups — the wealthy, big business, and Christian conservatives? Here again, Democrats are hopelessly defensive. There is nothing wrong with defending your own, especially when your side is supposed to stand up for the poor, the marginalized, and the minorities. And why are progressives so prone to battles among their own supporters based on race, gender, ethnicity, and interest? Solidarity, a word the left has long prized, is now the characteristic of a conservative movement in which gun owners, abortion opponents, and corporate executives manage to sit down together at the table of political brotherhood. Why should progressives be less than the sum of their parts?
Exactly. We are hopelessly defensive about this and we shouldn’t be because there is nothing wrong with defending your own. And we wouldn’t have to be so defensive if our damned racial, ethnic, gender and interest groups would just shut up.
Rush undoubtedly has some advice on how we might accomplish that, seeing as how he’s been pushing this idea for 15 years.
9. Traditional Versus Permissive.
Who, pray tell, is really “permissive”? Most social liberals have kids, worry about porn on television and the Web, and aspire to a world in which children are raised in strong families. They also aspire to a tolerant world that honors religious liberty and opposes discrimination on the grounds of marital status or sexual preference. Most Americans combine a reverence for tradition with a respect for tolerance. Indeed, by all measures the United States is a more tolerant and open country than it was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago.
I like to define this argument in more simple terms, “good” vs “evil.”
At this point, Dionne seems genuinely confused. Does he really think that the Democratic Party is in the grips of this argument? That’s the GOP vs Dem frame, not our own. (If it is, then we truly have internalized their central charge against us.) His argument seems to recognise this, so I don’t know what he really means.
There is a genuine tension between “civil liberties” and “religious morality” (which has been going on for over 200 years and is not confined to the Democratic party) but I don’t think that it will be solved by having Joe Lieberman and Larry Flynt make nice-nice.
Anyway, with the Republicans embracing the “tradition” argument with such phony fervor, while their big money owners make such huge profits on “permissiveness,” my inclination is for the Democrats to kick back and wait for them to have their own little political Armageddon. That’s an “ideological” smackdown worth watching.
10. Clinton Is the Solution Versus Clinton Is the Problem.
The Clinton obsession is dangerous to Democrats and to the country. Bill Clinton presided over a booming economy and governed effectively. At the same time, he got himself inveigled in a scandal (and made dubious last-minute pardons) that turned off millions of Americans who were not at all opposed to his politics. Why is it so difficult both to embrace the positive parts of Clinton’s record and to criticize his foolishness? If Al Gore had figured out how to do that, he’d be president. Most Americans find this distinction an easy one to make.
I hear that this is some sort of parlor game in Washington but I don’t think there is a Clinton obsession among Democrats out here in the rest of America. I think he’s about as relevant as a Seinfeld re-run. Which is why any more criticism by elected officials of his “foolishness,” particularly in light of the, you know, economic and international unravelling that has come since, is simple self flaggelation.
There is one group of Americans, however, who share this desire to keep Bill Clinton at the top of the political agenda. Republicans.
So there you have it. The “10 tired and useless arguments that progressives ought to stop having.” I’m sure that the Mighty Wurlitzer is pleased as punch to see us finally admitting that they’ve been right about us all along.
We are not a perfect party, by any means. We have been very slow to recognise that the modern GOP is a “take no prisoners” (perhaps I should say, “torture prisoners for fun”) kind of party. And, we have consistently underestimated the power of the Republican Noise machine on the political subconscious of ordinary Americans, even ourselves.
But no Democrats are actually arguing that we should be the party of permissive, anti-business, deficit-loving, protectionist, weak on defense, interest group dependent Clinton apologists.
The words sure do sound familiar, though, don’t they?
I have been remiss for not putting out a special plea to keep our blogospheric treasure, the Mighty Atrios, on line and ongoing.
He’s my blogfather. I was a poster on his blog from early on and one whom he gently badgered for months into starting one of my own. I’m not the only one. The blogosphere is littered with Atrios’s blogbastards.
He has the best nose for news in the blog business, bar none. I once wrote that he is the Beatles of blogging, riding the zeitgeist, leading us all in the right direction.
This election is the most important in my lifetime, perhaps since 1932. Blogs have a role to play and Atrios is the heart and soul of left blogosphere. We need him.
Here’s what I hated more than anything after 9/11 — the fact that everybody seemed to lose their frigging minds and turned into complete, blithering idiots. There’s not a lot of grace under pressure in the old US of A, I’m afraid.
Do you remember the old Kipling poem, If?
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
[…]
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run –
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!
Remember that? Well, let’s just say that the American body politic has a lot to learn about maturity. I’m reminded of this whenever I read something depressing and stupid that people said right after the attacks that has now come back to bite us.
In following this ongoing blogosphere discussion of Jonathan Alter’s somewhat relative criticism of Bush, I came across a column of his from November 2001. Honestly, I’m wondering why people were so upset at Ann Coulter’s call to “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,” when “liberal” guys like Alter were blithely writing amoral crap like this:
In this autumn of anger, even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to … torture. OK, not cattle prods or rubber hoses, at least not here in the United States, but something to jump-start the stalled investigation of the greatest crime in American history. Right now, four key hijacking suspects aren’t talking at all.
COULDN’T WE AT LEAST subject them to psychological torture, like tapes of dying rabbits or high-decibel rap? (The military has done that in Panama and elsewhere.) How about truth serum, administered with a mandatory IV? Or deportation to Saudi Arabia, land of beheadings? (As the frustrated FBI has been threatening.) Some people still argue that we needn’t rethink any of our old assumptions about law enforcement, but they’re hopelessly “Sept. 10”—living in a country that no longer exists.
[…]
Actually, the world hasn’t changed as much as we have. The Israelis have been wrestling for years with the morality of torture. Until 1999 an interrogation technique called “shaking” was legal. It entailed holding a smelly bag over a suspect’s head in a dark room, then applying scary psychological torment. (To avoid lessening the potential impact on terrorists, I won’t specify exactly what kind.) Even now, Israeli law leaves a little room for “moderate physical pressure” in what are called “ticking time bomb” cases, where extracting information is essential to saving hundreds of lives. The decision of when to apply it is left in the hands of law-enforcement officials.
[…]
Short of physical torture, there’s always sodium pentothal (“truth serum”). The FBI is eager to try it, and deserves the chance. Unfortunately, truth serum, first used on spies in World War II, makes suspects gabby but not necessarily truthful. The same goes for even the harshest torture. When the subject breaks, he often lies. Prisoners “have only one objective—to end the pain,” says retired Col. Kenneth Allard, who was trained in interrogation. “It’s a huge limitation.”
Some torture clearly works. Jordan broke the most notorious terrorist of the 1980s, Abu Nidal, by threatening his family. Philippine police reportedly helped crack the 1993 World Trade Center bombings (plus a plot to crash 11 U.S. airliners and kill the pope) by convincing a suspect that they were about to turn him over to the Israelis. Then there’s painful Islamic justice, which has the added benefit of greater acceptance among Muslims.
We can’t legalize physical torture; it’s contrary to American values. But even as we continue to speak out against human-rights abuses around the world, we need to keep an open mind about certain measures to fight terrorism, like court-sanctioned psychological interrogation. And we’ll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that’s hypocritical. Nobody said this was going to be pretty.
It’s contrary to American values? How fucking touching after that precious little whine about “can’t we at least play loud music in their ears or threaten their families?” Is forced sodomy with a glow stick contrary to American values if it doesn’t actually, you know, take place here in the United States? Hey, nobody said this was going to be pretty.
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
A pundit be not, you’re much too wise
The four men who Alter contemplated sending to “the land of beheadings,” by the way, were all innocent.
Update: A commenter informs me of this piece by Mark Ames, which makes this point and more.
COLLINS: In retrospect, do you believe that you erred in not coming forward, not just to the president and the Congress — you’ve made very clear today that you regret not doing that — but to the world community? Would it have made a difference if it had been the Pentagon itself that had disclosed the full extent of this abuse, whatever you knew, and what actions you were going to take?
RUMSFELD: I think in my statement I responded in full to your question. The — I would characterize what was done in the Central Command by way of swift, corrective action as being just that — swift, corrective action.
And second, the — I don’t know quite how to respond to your question. The Department of Defense announced that their abuse was being charged, there were criminal investigations under way. No one had seen the photographs.
They were part of a criminal investigation. And they were in that Central Command — I say no one in the Pentagon had seen them. And they were part of that investigative process.
It is the photographs that gives one the vivid realization of what actually took place. Words don’t do it. The words that there were abuses, that it was cruel, that it was inhumane — all of which is true — that it was blatant, you read that and it’s one thing. You see the photographs and you get a sense of it and you cannot help but be outraged.
He’s a lying bastard. Here are the words and they convey extremely well what kind of sick, sadistic shit was going on in that prison. One after another they tell the same disgusting story over and over again.
He knew very well was going on. At best, he didn’t give a damn. At worst, he ordered it.