Disbar The Torture Lawyers

Tell me this isn't torture. I saw a film clip of that awful man -- our former president -- on Keith Olberman's show last night justify the CIA interrogation "program." He -- the awful man -- actually smirked when he said "program."

Seeing him always gives me these mixed feelings of personal satisfaction and civic shame. He never fooled me: I remember telling a conservative friend before the the war that the Bush Administration did not have anything close to the political skills to pull off rebuilding Iraq and that we would be sorry we had ever heard of the place. I've had people tell me "you were right and I was wrong." Then I think of the destruction he wrought at home and abroad...Why did we do it? Why did we put the leadership of the country in such brute, psychotic hands? As Dr. House might put it, there are answers to everything. But will we as a country ever have the courage to face up to these questions, much less the answers? The Bush presidency was the biggest failure of democracy since Adolf Hitler took power in 1932...

JUST A SONG: Follow the evolution of "I Fought The Law" from rockabilly burner to punk anthem. See fetishistic go-go dancers while you're at it!...

Another Historic Day at Fenway Park: Michael Dukakis observes the Red Sox' 500th consecutive sellout and explains the secrets to the Sox success: Strong ownership, a commitment to Fenway Park, and serious community involvement...Is Big Papi back? If he is, the Red Sox will be mighty tough...

Is the Rolling Stones' Get Your Ya-Yas Out the best rock live album? If not, it's one of the best...

Roy's World has the most erudite blog entry I've ever read...

More proof that if you haven't seen a Gulf Coast sunset, then you haven't seen a sunset...

Who wants a public option? We do. Who do Americans trust on health care issues? Let's just say that the Republicans are the Washington Nationals of the health care debate...

New First Lines above. If you didn't notice, the last ones were from Frederick Exeley's 60's classic A Fan's Notes..

Torture Is Wrong. Period.

Charles Krauthammer's ongoing justification of torture reeks of the rationalization and intellectual selling out that produced torture in the first. For this reason alone and if you can stomach it, his latest column is worth reading. A nation can justify a torture policy, Krauthammer writes, under two circumstances:

the ticking time bomb scenario and its less extreme variant in which a high-value terrorist refuses to divulge crucial information that could save innocent lives.

But Krauthammer offers no evidence that the Bush Administration considered either justification as it sought legal validation for torture. To the contrary, the Administration appears to have applied torture indiscriminately on the questionable legal basis that the president's wartime powers were such that they overrode all limitations imposed by the Constitution and international treaties.

Krauthammer then offers an example -- and they always have one -- of an instance where the "crucial information" exception applied:

On Oct. 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car. He was interrogated with methods so brutal that they violated Israel's existing 1987 interrogation guidelines, which themselves were revoked in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court as unconscionably harsh. The Israeli prime minister who ordered, as we now say, this enhanced interrogation explained without apology: "If we'd been so careful to follow the ('87) Landau Commission (guidelines), we would never have found out where Waxman was being held."

First of all, it's news to me that the American conduct should be governed by standards ignored in a bitter central Asian racial and religious struggle. Second, who's to say that the Palestinians did not regard Cpl Waxman as a "high value terrorist" refusing to "divulge critical information that could save lives"? After all, the Bush Administration mistakenly considered Osama bin Laden's driver as a high value. Under Krauthammer's logic, the Palestinians were justified in torturing Cpl. Waxman, which they of course were not.

Of course, if he reads this, Krauthammer will marshal his considerable skill in ad hominem attacks, accuse me of drawing a moral equivalency where none exists, and add that by doing so I had forfeited the moral ground to argue about torture at all. This line of argument raises the specter of exceptionalism, under which a nation's (in this case, Israel and the United States) singular moral standing with God is so exalted that any and all of its actions enjoy moral sanction by definition. In practice, exceptionalism serves as an excuse for a powerful nation to do whatever it wants to do to weaker nations because God is on its side. One saw exceptionalism at work in the British Empire's plundering of Asia, Imperial Japan's expansionist policy toward East Asia that touched off World War II, and the United States' Indian policy and, most recently, invasion of Iraq.

Moreover, Krauthammer barely deals with just who can decide whether his circumstances have been met. He writes vaguely about the "reasonable man" legal concept and seems to include the likes of Dick Cheney and Alan Dershowitz among them. I'll pass on that one. Moreover, I doubt that many of Krauthammer's "reasonable men" could be found in Guantanamo or the rendition prisons. We certainly didn't see evidence of them at Abu Ghraib.

He goes on to airily cite the "fact" that Nancy Pelosi knew about torture as somehow relevant to its morality because Pelosi is an elected figure. (I guess that means that Adolf Hitler was essentially moral because he assumed power by democratic means.) Pelosi has pushed back on CIA claims and has received plenty of support in doing so (see Just My Little Piece of the World here and here). Let's face it: Historically, the agency that brought us the Shah of Iran, the Bay of Pigs, and the "slam dunk" of WED's in Iraq has little reputation for either competence or probity.

Krauthammer doesn't address at all the possibility that his "standards" would lead to the slippery slope of indiscriminate torture even though it is clear that that is exactly what happened. Is it justifiable to torture an innocent person in the interests of extracting "crucial information"? What is the likelihood that torture will result in wrong information that leads to grave policy errors? Are these risks worth taking? Is torture the only means of disarming the "ticking time bomb"? Does torture expose captured American soldiers to greater risk? These questions have no place in the Krauhammerian world where you can tell the bad guys by their turbans.

Back in 2004, Dick Cheney asserted that "detainees interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had revealed that Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives in chemical and biological warfare," a claim we now know to be factually untrue (if not a lie). As this article points out, it's now known that interrogators at Guantanamo were under tremendous pressure to produce evidence of a connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. As the article points out

During the same period, two alleged senior al Qaida operatives in CIA custody were waterboarded repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times and Khalid Sheik Mohammed at least 183 times.

Did this torture produce the false information that helped justify the debacle in Iraq? Was it reasonable men putting the pressure on interrogators to justify a conclusion that had already been reached? Torture is wrong. It's always wrong. No nation, especially one that sees itself as divinely blessed, can justify it under any circumstances. The Bush Administration approved of torture because it could, because torture made the chickenhawks who got us into Iraq feel powerful. It's that simple. It's that pathetic...

Just A Song: Patty Griffin's "Be Careful"...

There just ain't no cure for the "Summertime Blues". Stupid and Contagious writes:

With its legendary guitar riff, and its combination of striking verite, innovation, elan, sparseness, and anti-establishment angst, "Summertime Blues" established a template for countless other songs, from the Fifties onwards.

In fact , it could be said that, in many ways, "Summertime Blues" opened the door for the most important music revolutions of the Sixties and, via punk, of the Seventies too. Almost all the significant artists from those periods have paid Eddie, and this specific song, glowing tributes...

Fade to gray at the foot of Canal Street...

The Public Interest

It was the spring of 1979. My father found the car, a 1971 Plymouth Satellite that became known as the "Satellite of Love." A former Schlumberger field car, it was well-kept and cost $900. I had saved the money and could have paid in cash, but being a recent college graduate I wanted to establish credit. So, I made an appointment with a loan officer at my bank so that I could borrow the money to pay for the it.

When the loan officer explained to me that I needed collateral in order to take out at loan, I responded that I already had the money in the bank and that I simply wanted to establish that I could take out a loan and pay it off. So, the bank happily loaned me the $900 at a marginal interest rate, complete with a plan to pay them off in a year via an automatic withdrawal from my savings account. Cashiers check in hand, my soon-to-be fiancee drove me from San Antonio to Kingsville where I picked up the car and she met my parents. The automatic withdrawals commenced, and a year later both the car and a good credit rating were mine.

That's how it worked back then. Today, lending institutions want borrowers to do anything but pay off their loans, thanks to a 1978 the Supreme Court decision Marquette National Bank v. Omaha Service Corp. This cursed moment in American history in essence overrode usury laws by holding that state anti-usury laws did not apply to nationally chartered chartered banks. Thus, a bank chartered in Nebraska could operated branches in Illinois free from the inconvenience of obeying Illinois anti-usury legislations.

Marquette set the stage for banks to charge today's usurious loan rates of 25-30%, for credit card companies to do the same, and for both to ladle on arcane and often undefined loan fees. It also broke ground for the scourge of predatory payday loans, on which primarily poor people and military service families find themselves taking in short-term loans that they can't pay off because because interest penalties swiftly accrue to 100%, 2oo%, even 700%. Thomas Geoghegan and Daniel Brook spell this out in the April edition of Harper's, in their essays "Infinite Debt" and "Usury Country." The articles are available on-line for a fee, so I urge you to purchase the edition at your local news stand, as the two articles make for essential reading.

Between the two of them, Geoghegan and Brook explain how lenders now have no incentive whatsoever for borrowers to pay off loans, as the interest are so high that lenders want to collect them indefinitely. In the process, banks and credit companies have overseen a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class on down to the financial sector, created a nation of individual debtors, contributed to the decay of the manufacturing sector, and even forged the impetus for their own destruction.

Geoghegan explains what happens "...when an advanced industrial economy tries to function with no cap at all on interest rates:"

...the financial sector bloats up. With no law capping interest, the evil is not only that the banks prey on the poor (they have always done so) but that capital gushes out of manufacturing and into banking. When banks get 25 percent to 30 percent on credit cards, and 500 or more percent on payday loans, capital flees from honest pursuits, like auto manufacturing. Sure, GM is awful. Sure, it doesn't innovate. But the people who could have saved GM and Ford went off to work at AIG, or Merrill Lynch, or even Goldman Sachs. All of this used to be so obvious as to not merit comment. What is history, really, but a turf war between manufacturing, labor, and the banks? In the United States, we shrank manufacturing. We got rid of labor. Now it's just the banks. (Geoghegan, Harper's, April 2009, p. 32)

And the irony is that banks didn't keep their ill-gotten gains. With interest rates -- and therefore profitability -- so high, they kept making and investing in bad loans until the whole house of cards tumbled about them. At which point they turned to the very taxpayers they had been screwing for a bailout.

But aren't household incomes higher than ever? Sure, but so are expenses. Incomes are higher because both parents work, which means daycare, two cars and all of the expenses from gas to maintenance to insurance that come with them, more eating out, and so on. As for single-parent homes, well, who do you think takes out the payday loans?...

President Obama now appears open to an independent commission that would investigate the Bush Administration's legalization of torture. Harper's reports that at least some of the impetus may be a result of good old-fashioned infighting between the Department of Justice and White House political advisors. Unlike anything that ever happened in the Bush Administration, the political people may have lost out. However it happens, too many nauseating stories like this one have made it clear that the approval and practice of torture by Americans and American agencies must be investigated. And if former high-ranking people go to jail, well, somehow we'll survive...

We haven't heard from the Colton Kitchen Project for a while, but they're still forging ahead, despite structural problems like this: "Our public schools don't have kitchens, they have reheating stations..."

Wow! "Beeping birds" indeed! The caption doesn't do this photo justice...

Oak Street at Carrolton...

The Cudgels Of Certitude

Spending a month away, among people who had a lot of questions about where the United States is heading, made me realize more than ever what a colossal, nearly impossible job the next president has. Not only have Bush and Cheney driven the country into a ditch, the wheels have pretty much come off the car. And we all know how expensive it will be to fill it with gas.

When they're not spending their last days trying to exploit high gas prices to produce one more quick profit for their buddies, Bush and Cheney try desperately to bog us down in Iraq indefinitely while they rattle sabers at Iran. Having put us in a ditch and removed the wheels, they now want to dig the hole as deep as possible between now and January 20. Should Barack Obama be elected, it's a foregone conclusion that the Administration will be up to something nefarious and brazenly unconstitutional right up until he says "so help me God."

There's nothing like being abroad to make one think about what one's country stands for. From 1946 to 1980, the United States was virtually synonymous with scientific achievement. The Reagan Administration began the politicization of science, but the Bush/Cheney cabal has carried this to an unimaginable extreme. And it starts at the top with a president who believes that the jury is out on natural selection, a scientific certainty along the same lines as water being two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. 

When I was in Brooklyn earlier this year, a German woman asked me incredulously if it were really true that many Americans -- including Bush -- did not accept evolution as scientific fact. She found that frightening, and I took her point: If the leader of the most powerful nation in the world takes crackpot quackeries like Intelligent Design seriously, what does that say about the intellect and judgement of the man with his finger on the nuclear trigger?

And this is merely the canary in the coal mine. We've become inured -- at least the punditocracy has -- to the endless parade of news reports about the White House political operation directing the scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency to alter or suppress findings regarding climate change. This gang of trolls lurks under the bridge of science with cudgels of certitude, ready to beat facts into lies.  They approach science with the same absence of objectivity with which they evaluate the battlefield: If the facts don't align with political exigency, they dismiss the facts. It's frightening, it's one of many things that the press ought to be screaming about, and it's one of many things that the Administration gets away with by virtue of the sheer volume of falsehoods that they daily perpetrate on the world. 

Perhaps no falsehood is as egregious as Bush's insistence that "we don't torture." And according to the narrow, legalistic opinion provided him by Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, he's right. Of course, this leaves him and the country resting on a moral foundation akin to the legalisms that permitted Kristallnacht. According to any half-human grasp of the realities of Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and extraordinary rendition, we do torture, and any assertion to the contrary is an insult to the name of humanity. 

Watch this repellent video of the interrogation of 16-year old Omar Khaddr, a Canadian who has now been in U.S. custody for six years. How about we get together tomorrow for a talk, his interrogator says. Whatever happens between then and tomorrow reduces Omar to an abject wreck begging for his mother. An interrogator orders him to put his shirt on, a form of torture in itself because Omar can't lift his shoulder without experiencing excruciating pain. Watch it, if you can stomach it:

This is what we've come to. Forty years ago, our country dared to put a man on the moon. Forty years later, we've extinguished the beacon of science on our way to the dungeons of Torquemada. 

Note: Don't miss Dahlia Lithwick's account of the linguistic contortions Administration apparatchiks apply to convince themselves and their Republican enablers in Congress that we don't torture. The corruption of language is yet another of their many affronts to decency. Again, words do matter.

The Dark Side

We don't torture. So says President Bush. Except when we do, and then we don't because, well, we don't torture. That's why it was so important for him to veto a bill banning water boarding, which -- far from being torture -- is "one of most valuable tools we have in the war on terror." (It's so valuable that even the CIA doesn't do it any more.) Besides being a tool, water boarding is a "specialized interrogation procedure" reserved for the most "hardened terrorists" and innocent Afghan taxi drivers. (The account below is largely taken from the web site for the Academy Award winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side.)

For just one example of the "proven track record" of water boarding, consider the case of suspected terrorist Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. After being wrapped in duct tape and stored in a plywood box "for his own protection," the FBI transported al-Libi to Cairo for questioning by experts in "'enhanced' interrogation techniques." After a water boarding session, al-Libi confessed that Iraq had trained Al-Qaeda in the manufacture of bombs and poison gas. Secretary of State Colin Powell used this incontrovertible information as proof positive when he informed the U.N. of the "sinister nexus" between Iraq and Al-Qaeda.

Al-Libi later recanted his "confession" as having been under duress, and the CIA confirmed its falsity. 

[Cartoon by the Austin American Statesman's great Ben Sargent. Subscribe to Sargent's work through www.mycomicspage.com.]