The Moral Cases For and Against Military Intervention in Syria

Let me start by saying I'm not sure where I am on Syria and I'm going to try to work this out on paper, so to speak. First off, President Obama is absolutely correct -- if we stand by after watching a nation use chemical weapons, the idea that this is actually a crime is mostly theoretical. Assad will pay for his crime if he loses his little civil war, which is by no means a given at this point. But if he wins, it all gets swept under the rug and Assad rewrites history to make himself his own nation's Lincoln. Gas attacks -- if they're mentioned at all in Syria's history books -- will be remembered as eminently justified and totally within reason.

Then there's the "both sides are just as bad" argument. It may be true that Syrian rebels are not good people. But the definition of war crime doesn't include the phrase "good people." A murderer killing another murderer is still murder and we put people who kill other criminals on trial for murder all the time. Not necessarily because the victims deserve justice (although I think everyone does), but because punishing crime is designed to keep good order. Besides, gassing civilian populations takes out people who'd rather not have anything to do with the war and are just sitting in their houses waiting for someone to win and end all the violence. I think we can dismiss the "both sides are just as bad" argument right there. If we look the other way when countries commit war crimes against people we don't trust, it's basically condoning it. "It's OK when you use it against bad guys" is legalizing this crime, since everyone thinks they're the good guys and the people they're killing are the bad guys. Whether you agree or disagree with some form of intervention in Syria, we should all agree to put this argument to a very painful and public death. It's extremely dangerous and verges on the genocidal.

But, as so many have rightly pointed out, we are not the world's police. It's not our job to go running off to answer every crime committed by any nation -- and we sure do let enough of them slide. We should only act in unison with the UN. Military action should always be a last resort and to take unilateral action is to travel down the road taken by George W. Bush. This did not work out well the last time. The problem here is the anachronistic and not at all democratic UN Security Council. The five permanent members of the Security Council hold all the power, being the only members who have veto power, and the make-up of the permanent council members -- China, France, Russia, the UK, and the United States -- guarantees that someone's interests will always conflict with the rest. In this case, China and Russia are allies with Syria -- and they're two countries who could not care less about human rights and war crimes.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Censoring the Lessons of History

Today's manufactured outrage of the day, brought to you by the New York Post:

Anthony Weiner has come under intense fire from Jewish leaders for invoking Nazi Germany while criticizing the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program.

“Last year, more than 700,000 in New York were stopped — the overwhelming majority of them were young men of color. Ninety-seven percent of them did nothing wrong,” Weiner told largely black congregants in Staten Island’s First Central Baptist Church Sunday.

“And the mayor stood up and said, ‘Wait a minute, statistically this’ and ‘statistically that.’ Well, you can have 100 percent statistical reduction in crime if you stop everybody.

“You could have 1938 Germany, because everyone has to show their papers.”

Apparently, it's terribly offensive to compare a minority population subjected to police state tactics to another minority population subjected police state tactics. Although, I get the feeling that NYP, being a tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, is grossly overstating the situation, cherry-picking their outraged Jewish leaders (who were likely Weiner opponents to begin with) and ignoring the ones who support him. It seems to me that the lessons of the Holocaust are lost if they're never applied. And to attack anyone who draws a historical parallel to one of the modern world's greatest crimes is to guarantee that those lessons are never applied -- and therefore, never learned. No one's saying "stop and frisk" is the Holocaust -- or even that it's anything approaching genocide -- merely that it's totalitarianism.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

What if Bush was the Peanut Guy?

The Peanut Corporation of America is responsible for hundreds of cases of salmonella in the United States. Investigators found "dead rodents, rodent excrement and bird feathers" in its Plainview, Texas processing plant, prompting the Texas Department of State Health Services to recall every product ever made from peanuts shipped from the facility. In Blakely, Georgia, the story is the same -- Peanut Corporation of America ran an astonishingly unclean operation. All told, 600 people have suffered food poisoning. Nine have died. Calls to the company's telephone number "elicited a recording that said it was no longer in service." For all intents and purposes, Peanut Corporation of America no longer exists.

But the man ultimately responsible for his company's operations still exists. PCA owner Stewart Parnell was subpoenaed to testify to congress. He pleaded the fifth and refused to testify.

Clearly, congress has hit a dead end. Parnell can't possibly be prosecuted, his company is in no danger of ever returning to poison people, and it's time to let bygones be bygones. What we need to do is find out what happened, so we can avoid it ever happening again. And the best way to do that is to put together a blue ribbon panel and hold a third world style truth and reconciliation commission. No one will be charged, no one will go to jail, no one will pay any price, Parnell can get on with his life and we can get on with ours. But we'll get the truth and that's what really counts.

You might've noticed that my little synopsis veered off into crazy town around the third paragraph. Of course Stewart Parnell should be prosecuted -- along with those managers and executives who helped him sell garbage to unsuspecting families. So what if his company is shut down and will never sell poison again? So what if he won't testify? So what if all this has happened in the past?

Parnell lacks one quality that would apparently put him above or beyond the law -- he's not a former President of the United States. Stewart Parnell is just a former Poison Peanut King. When anyone else has committed a crime, they have to face the legal system. When a former President has committed a crime, we have to have a truth commission -- without prosecutions -- to get to the bottom of the crime and let the criminals walk away. There will be no jail time, there would only be embarrassment for the accused -- that is, if he weren't shameless. But the accused is shameless, so there wouldn't even be that. He would face the wagging finger of justice and retire to Dallas a rich, rich man. Maybe hire a ghost-writer and put out a memoir. And his example would do absolutely nothing to prevent future executives from committing similar crimes. After all, the crime without any real consequence might as well be legal -- without punishment, there is no crime.





But this is Sen. Patrick Leahy's solution -- not to the garbage vendor's crimes, of course, just to Bush's. What we need is a truth and reconciliation commission that, in any practical sense, would be a panel put together to write history. They'd have subpoena power and the ability to prosecute perjury, but no power to prosecute the underlying crimes. We'd get the truth, while criminals in the Bush administration get off scott free.

"People would be invited to come forward and share their knowledge and experiences, not for purposes of constructing criminal indictments, but to assemble the facts," Leahy said. "If needed, such a process could involve subpoena powers, and even the authority to obtain immunity from prosecutions in order to get to the whole truth."

Some find Leahy's suggestion a frustratingly wrongheaded. "There's no question that torture occurred here," constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann tuesday. "There's no question that it was a war crime. And so the only reason to have a commission of this kind is to avoid doing what we're obligated to do under a treaty."

"It is shameful that we would be calling for this type of commission..." Turley continued. "We're obligated to investigate. This whole discussion in front of the whole world is basically saying that we are not going to comply with the promise we made, not to ourselves, but to the world." Not surprisingly, law professor Turley is absolutely correct about our obligations under international law. Prosecuting torture is not optional. In other words, Leahy's solution is most likely illegal.

"At the end of the day, no one believes that people will be prosecuted for a known war crime -- and when we do that then we will become accessories," Turley said. "Those crimes of President Bush will become our crimes. His shame will become our collective shame."

Even worries that prosecutions would be politically unfeasible are misplaced. A USA Today/Gallup poll finds that about two thirds support investigations and, of those who want probes into Bush crimes, about 61% want to see prosecutions. In fact, more people (34%) would rather do nothing than those who'd like to see Leahy's proposal (24%). And it's hard to imagine that many who preferred Leahy's idea would be heartbroken if there were prosecutions. I think if you polled people and asked them which solutions they opposed most, you'd probably wind up with very different numbers.

If Leahy's truth and reconciliation commission is the best we get, I'll take it. But it's not the best we can do. We can hold criminals accountable for their crimes, no matter who they are or what position they used to hold. It doesn't matter if they were the president of a peanut company or President of the United States, the law is for everyone and applies to everyone. We shouldn't let crimes go unpunished unless we've got a damned good reason to do so.

In the case of George W. Bush and his administration, that "damned good reason" just isn't there. As I said, if you don't punish a crime, then it might as well be legal. With Leahy's proposal, some future president considering crime could look back in history and say, "Let's go ahead and do it, the worst that could happen is that we wind up like Bush."

No one fears the wagging finger of justice.

-Wisco

Not Prosecuting Torture is a Crime in Itself

George W. Bush wasn't going to be the president forever. That seems obvious to most people, but it almost seems to have caught Republicans in Washington by surprise. The president who brought his party to near irrelevance is gone now, but his actions linger on. Bush, having brought even more disaster to the Republican party than he did to the nation, leaves behind a legacy of crime and scandal. Having once hoped he would rebuild American government to match his vision, Bush left DC in worse shape than he found it -- the nation is impatient to see the vision undone.

Still, some Republicans seem to be completely unaware of these new realities, behaving as if nothing had changed, as if the Republican party were still wildly popular, and as if Bush's legacy is anything other than one of failure.

Politico:

Eric Holder’s confirmation vote before the Judiciary Committee will be delayed for up to a week as Republican senators continue to press him on his views about interrogation and other Bush administration intelligence methods.

The Judiciary Committee was originally scheduled to vote today on Holder’s nomination as attorney general, but Republicans have objected, and under committee rules they can delay the vote for up to a week. Holder was grilled last week by Republicans on his views about interrogations, Guantanamo Bay and his involvement in the 2001 pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is seeking more information from Holder on whether the Department of Justice will pursue criminal prosecutions of "intelligence personnel" involved in detainee interrogations.

It was going to be the pardon of Marc Rich that was going to be the bump in the road to Holder's confirmation, but he went and told the senate in testimony that waterboarding is torture. Of course, it's their fault for asking him -- no one who's given it serious thought thinks it's not. "If you look at the history of the use of that technique, " Holder said, "we prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam... Waterboarding is torture."





The question here isn't whether Holder will be confirmed -- it's a near certainty that he will. The question is what the hell answer was it they expected? The idea that waterboarding doesn't fit the definition of torture was always a legal fiction designed to create a loophole. Only ideologues and fools bought it. Any honest reading of the law would find it to be torture.

Which leaves John Cornyn, whose vocal support for torture would cause any principled human being to be ashamed of himself, in a bit of a quandary; he can try to block Holder's confirmation, but what would be the point? The next nominee would give the same answer -- and the next and the next. See, that's the problem with being dead wrong. You have to look long and hard for someone who'll agree with you.

In fact, the torture debate is pretty much over. Turns out, we're pretty solidly against it. A Washington Post/ABC News poll finds that most respondents opposed torture -- in any circumstance. In a question that suggests even the ridiculous "ticking time bomb" scenario, people where asked, "Obama has said that under his administration the United States will not use torture as part of the U.S. campaign against terrorism, no matter what the circumstance. Do you support this position not to use torture, or do you think there are cases in which the United States should consider torture against terrorism suspects?"

58% -- a clear majority -- said no, torture should never be used, regardless of the circumstance. This would've been higher, but Republicans continue to be outside the mainstream and throw the average. For Democrats, 71% said no. Independents against torture number 56%. Only Republicans support torture, with just 42% believing it should never be used. Still, even that number shows only weak support for torture.

Their support may be a moot point, however. In their grilling of Holder over waterboarding, they may have opened a big can of worms. Not only is torture illegal, but the law requires that it be investigated and prosecuted. By getting Holder to drop the "T" word, the senate may have begun a sequence of events that guarantee prosecutions.

When Ronald Reagan signed on to the Convention Against Torture, he brought us into the realm of international law. The convention is a treaty and treaties are the be-all and end-all if international law -- torture's illegal because we agreed it should be. That convention reads, "Each State Party [i.e., signatory nation] shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law," and that, if torture is committed, the nation must "submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution."

There aren't any exceptions here. It must happen. If Holder -- or any other would-be Attorney General, for that matter -- believes that we've waterboarded detainees (and no one thinks we haven't), he has to prosecute. His hands are tied.

In fact, torture prosecutions could happen outside the US, since torture is a violation of international law and a war crime. Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, has called on the United States to prosecute George W. Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Citing the Convention Against Torture, Nowak says the US has a "clear obligation" under law. If it doesn't happen here, it might just happen in The Hague.

Republicans seem to suddenly have become aware of reality and, like John Cornyn, are trying to put the brakes on what may very well be inevitable. They're trying to slow things down long enough to figure out what the hell to do and it may just be that there's nothing at all that can be done.

-Wisco

It's Torture. We Tortured. There was Torture.

Let's start out with a few quotes.

I think on the left wing of the Democratic Party there are some people who believe that we really tortured.
--Dick Cheney

It's torture. It's a means of extracting information that I didn't even believe these people probably had. It's a means of making their lives more miserable.
--Chris Arendt, formerly stationed at Guantanamo

We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case [for prosecution].
--Susan J. Crawford, convening authority of military commissions

Some on the left may think "we really tortured" Dick, but those in the know do too. We've gotten to the point where simple denial isn't going to be good enough. "We don't torture" doesn't wash when everyone knows we do. When cases are thrown out of court because the accused was tortured, then there was torture. When people who work in the prisons say they saw torture, then there was torture. When people coming out of those prisons say they were tortured, then there was torture.

At this point, denial isn't just useless, but it's insulting to everyone's intelligence -- the denier's included. There was torture.





Front page on the Washington Post yesterday was the article "Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official." It kind of gives the impression that someone was tortured -- namely, accused would-be 20th 9/11 hijacker Mohammed al-Qahtani. The finding was made by Bush-appointee Susan J. Crawford, who oversees the trials -- such as they are -- of Guantanamo detainees. According to the report, "Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured."

Hey Dick, that doesn't sound much like "the left wing of the Democratic Party," does it? Sounds more like a principled conservative with respect for the rule of law. The Post piece lays out the specifics.

"For 160 days his only contact was with the interrogators," said Crawford, who personally reviewed Qahtani's interrogation records and other military documents. "Forty-eight of 54 consecutive days of 18-to-20-hour interrogations. Standing naked in front of a female agent. Subject to strip searches. And insults to his mother and sister."

At one point he was threatened with a military working dog named Zeus, according to a military report. Qahtani "was forced to wear a woman's bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation" and "was told that his mother and sister were whores." With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room "and forced to perform a series of dog tricks," the report shows.

The interrogation, portions of which have been previously described by other news organizations, including the Washington Post, was so intense that Qahtani had to be hospitalized twice at Guantanamo with bradycardia, a condition in which the heart rate falls below 60 beats a minute and which in extreme cases can lead to heart failure and death. At one point Qahtani's heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute, the record shows.

When your interrogation is so harmful to you that you need to be hospitalized, you kind of think that this might qualify as torture. Asked for comment, the White House took Dick's lead -- deny the obvious. "Let me just make sure it's clear -- and I'll say it on the record one more time -- that it has never been the policy of this president or this administration to torture," spokesperson Dana Perino told the Associated Press.

AP also got a comment from the Pentagon:

"We have always taken allegations of abuse seriously," [Pentagon spokesman Bryan] Whitman said. "We investigate all allegations, all credible allegations, of abuse," and have done some dozen investigations of interrogation methods, Whitman said.

And the Pentagon did investigate Qahtani's case in 2005. US generals Randall Schmidt and John Furlow looked into it. The Schmidt-Furlow report documented everything that Crawford mentions in the WaPo piece, as well as "twice reducing his body temperature to 92-97 degrees Fahrenheit." The dog tricks, the insults, the humiliations were all laid out, yet Schmidt-Furlow found it was all "legally permissible under the existing guidance," that it didn't "rise to the level of prohibited inhumane treatment," but warned that if overdone, it would be abusive -- "the cumulative effect being degrading and abusive treatment," the two fine generals wrote.

Wait a second, making a guy where women's underwear and forcing him to perform dog tricks is only degrading if you do it too often? Really? What's the number of times that goes too far? How often can you humiliate someone before it becomes degrading? And aren't "humiliating" and "degrading" pretty much synonymous? Schmidt and Furlow apparently left logic to reach conclusions they wanted to reach.

But someone out there is reading this and thinking, "Qahtani deserved it." Here's a question for you, what other crimes do you think people should be punished for before they're tried? What if you had to pay a fine first, then go to court to see if you got your money back? Would that seem fair or just to you?

Somehow, I doubt it. If it had turned out that Qahtani was innocent, how would you pay him back for nearly killing him twice anyway? When punishment precedes trial, justice is impossible.

Yes, there may be some people out there who believe we really did torture, Vice President Cheney. And those people may actually believe that torture isn't just wrong, but un-American, unjust, and illogical.

Those people are what you call "realists."

-Wisco

The Unpunished Crime Might as Well be Legal

I usually hate these "two headlines" things, where two sources report the same event and come up with entirely different takes. Usually, this means that, of the two, one of them is BS. But not always. Sometimes the event is difficult to assess and the headlines they write depend as much on what the writers had for breakfast that morning as anything else. If your inclined to see bad news, you'll see bad news.

The event in question here is an appearance by Barack Obama on This Week with George Stephanopoulos Sunday. Raw Story reports "Obama not likely to prosecute torture." Meanwhile, USA Today's The Oval blog tells us "Obama: Time to look forward, but Bush aides aren't above the law."

Given the noncommittal nature of Obama's statements to Stephanopoulos, it's easy to see how this could happen. He really didn't give any definitive answer. Maybe there will be prosecutions for torture, maybe not.





Asked by Stephanopoulos, "The most popular question on your own website is related to this. On change.gov it comes from Bob Fertik of New York City and he asks, 'Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?'" Obama answered:

We're still evaluating how we're going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we're going to be looking at past practices and I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. And part of my job is to make sure that for example at the CIA, you've got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don't want them to suddenly feel like they've got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.

If, like me, you think that the people responsible for torture must be prosecuted, this isn't the best news you've gotten lately. In fact, throughout the interview, Obama keeps falling back on that line, "looking forward." I know that's supposed to sound optimistic and high-minded, but the phrase that keeps going through my head is "those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it." Yes, I understand that the Obama administration won't be about the Bush administration, but I also understand that the past actually does exist. Planning for the future is realistic, pretending the past never happened is not.

Stephanopoulos pressed the issue, asking, "So, no 9/11 commission with Independence subpoena power?"

"We have not made final decisions, but my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing," Obama said. "That doesn't mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law. But my orientation's going to be to move forward."

I think that's where the opinions split. It's maddeningly noncommittal. He doesn't rule it out, but he doesn't make any promises either. Personally, I think the idea of a blue ribbon panel is the worst option. And I didn't have to look far for someone to agree with me.

In an interview of former Nixon White House counsel John Dean -- a serious Bush critic -- MSNBC's Keith Olberman brought up the idea, saying that these sort of commissions are "almost openly dedicated to not pointing fingers."

"Don't we have to point fingers?" he asked. "Is that not the way justice works?"

"[T]his is going to really reflect terribly on the entire country, not just on the Bush administration which has engaged in these activities, but it really will reflect on the Obama administration for its refusal to pursue them and prosecute them." he answered. "I think there's serious consequences if they refuse to point fingers."

Those consequences could be in the form of another executive, somewhere in the future, deciding -- once again -- that torture is just fine. If no one is prosecuted this time around, we've essentially legalized it. Like the cowardly and useless Democratic leadership in congress who established the precedent that there's no such thing as an impeachable offense, Obama would be setting the precedent that there's nothing keeping an executive from ordering torture. If there's no consequence -- no punishment -- for a crime, it's virtually legal.

Pressed even further in the interview, Obama finally punted. "What I -- I think my general view when it comes to my attorney general is he is the people's lawyer," he said. "Eric Holder's been nominated. His job is to uphold the Constitution and look after the interests of the American people, not to be swayed by my day-to-day politics. So, ultimately, he's going to be making some calls, but my general belief is that when it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed looking at what we got wrong in the past."

Passing the buck. Disappointing. It's starting to look like Raw Story's headline is the most accurate; Obama's not likely to prosecute torture. If this is the case, when he said, "I don't believe that anybody is above the law," he wasn't including the President of the United States. This would make the Bush administration will most definitely be above the law.

I guess once we stop fighting Bush, we start fighting Obama. That's the nature of democracy -- it never ends.

But, I'm still glad I'm not having this fight with McCain.

-Wisco

A History of Torture

President Bush finished what will apparently be his final press conference this morning. He managed to make most of the answers the press threw at him into defenses of his presidency. This guy's pretty much already punched out, thinking more about next Wednesday and beyond. For example, he spoke about the future in discussing Iraq.

"When the history of Iraq is written, historians will analyze for example the decision on the surge," he said. "I decided to do something about it, and to send 30,000 troops in as opposed to withdrawing. The part of history is certain in the situation did change."

This strikes me as kind of a crazy hope for the future, like saying that the lessons scholars take from Vietnam is that napalm works really well. It's the invasion itself that people remember, not some tactic used during the occupation -- Civil War history isn't all about Pickett's Charge. Bush may hope that historians put a lot of emphasis on his "surge" -- while also hoping they don't look too closely at it -- but that seems a vain hope.





For the past couple of months or so, the Bush administration has been all about defending their record and preemptively spinning away all their failures. The danger here is that it's nearly impossible to spin mistakes and crimes without discussing them. In many ways, this spin doctoring has always been a problem for Bush, keeping some issues alive longer than they would normally have lived. At other times, this spinning of major scandals created minor scandals of their own. And sometimes it leads to confessions to war crimes.

In an interview with FOX News Sunday, Bush had this to say:

One such person who gave us information was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed... And I’m in the Oval Office and I am told that we have captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the professionals believe he has information necessary to secure the country. So I ask what tools are available for us to find information from him and they gave me a list of tools, and I said are these tools deemed to be legal? And so we got legal opinions before any decision was made.

This is an admission that he personally authorized torture. That he asked whether it was legal or not is beside the point -- if a lawyer tells you to commit a crime and you're later busted for it, all you can really say is that you've got a lousy lawyer. You're still guilty. Ignorance of the law is famously no defense.

Bush argues that his torture policies have kept the United States safe, but most people who've looked closely at it say it's only making terrorism worse. In November, Matthew Alexander, an interrogator, wrote a piece for the Washington Post titled "I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq." In it, he called US interrogations "deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American."

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

Bush has always been shameless in hiding behind the military, but this is just one more example of how he serves poorly those who serve us. Bush, who bears a large part of the responsibility for 9/11, throws soldiers into the meat grinder in order to claim he's keeping us safe from terrorism. "Other than that one time the house burned down," he might as well say, "I've been a really good housesitter." Bush wants to be seen by history as being a great protector against terrorism -- as long as you don't count the worst terrorist attack in American history.

According to a criminal complaint that will be submitted to the Obama administration, Bush and thirty of his administration are guilty of war crimes, including "savage beatings, sleep deprivation, slow drowning, hanging by chains, being slammed head-first into concrete walls, temperature extremes, food deprivation, burial alive in coffin-like boxes for extended periods, and even threats against their families."

And does any of this work? Not really. A former senior CIA official familiar with the interrogations of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed told Vanity Fair that "90 percent of it was total f*cking bullsh*t." A Pentagon official told the magazine that "K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were." Either that or he was just tortured into false confessions. Torture me or you or anyone long enough and we'll confess to shooting JFK. Torture doesn't actually work as a way of determining truth.

But I think the worst crime here is incidental. We were once a society that hated torture. Just a few short years ago, torture was nearly synonymous with evil. Today, you don't have to look far to find someone who thinks it's a great idea.

Those people are cowards, just like the president they adore. But they're also poorly informed -- a claim the president can't make. He knows that torture is turning up crappy intelligence, he knows it's being used to recruit new terrorists, and he knows that it's putting US military personnel at risk -- people who believe they'll be tortured don't surrender, they fight to the death.

Bush can try to pre-emptively rewrite history and he's certain to fail. Too many of us know the truth and too many are more than willing to call BS on it all. He's made too many mistakes -- mistakes that were easily avoided -- for his revisionism to work. Whether he's tried as a war criminal is an open question, but whether he'll be remembered as a war criminal is up to us.

History is just human memory. All we need to do is remember the events of 2001-2009 correctly.

-Wisco

(Transcript of the final press conference is available here)

Crimes Without Consequence

A new Senate Armed Services Committee report [PDF] begins with the words of Gen. David Petraeus -- who the right has convinced themselves sits directly at Jesus's side in the pantheon of the unquestionable:

What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight... is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also all human beings.

It's ironic then, that the report details not humanity, but monstrosity. The document, titled "Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody," kills neocon blame-shifting on its very first page:

The Abuse of detainees in US custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority. This report is a product of the committees inquiry into how those unfortunate results came about.

In their cowardice, top Bush administration officials blamed everything on personnel acting on their own. Donald Rumsfeld, in testimony to the committee, said, "In recent days, there has been a good deal of discussion about who bears responsibility for the terrible activities that took place at Abu Ghraib. These events occurred on my watch. As secretary of defense, I am accountable for them. I take full responsibility. It is my obligation to evaluate what happened, to make sure those who have committed wrongdoing are brought to justice, and to make changes as needed to see that it doesn't happen again."

After taking "full responsibility," Rumsfeld almost immediately blamed it on others.





"It's important for the American people and the world to know that while these terrible acts were perpetrated by a small number of the U.S. military," he said, "they were also brought to light by the honorable and responsible actions of other military personnel." Rummie had nothing to do with it and was grateful that good people brought it out in the open. "It's all my fault -- although it pays to remember that I had absolutely nothing to do with it."

"I take full responsibility" has always been a magic incantation the Bush administration has used to avoid taking responsibility and avoid consequence. The theory seems to be that saying it is the consequence of wrongdoing. Say the magic words -- even if you contradict them right away -- and you're off the hook. Meanwhile, right wing media argues that what you did was exactly the right thing to do and that you're a freakin' hero -- no matter how lousy and stupid and counterproductive your actions were. As I've already said, the White House neocons are cowards -- and right wing media applauds them for it.

But cowardice only works for so long. You can hide behind others, but they drop one by one and you're left with no one to hide behind. You can keep throwing sacrifices into the volcano, but sooner or later, you run out of people to throw. The Senate report places the blame squarely where it belongs:

New York Times:

The report was issued jointly by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the Democratic chairman of the panel, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, the top Republican. It represents the most thorough review by Congress to date of the origins of the abuse of prisoners in American military custody, and it explicitly rejects the Bush administration’s contention that tough interrogation methods have helped keep the country and its troops safe.

The report also rejected previous claims by Mr. Rumsfeld and others that Defense Department policies played no role in the harsh treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 and in other episodes of abuse.

There are no surprises in the report. The testimony used in compiling it was public and commented on again and again. Bush, Rumsfeld, and other top White House officials are ultimately responsible for the actions of their "few bad apples." Even Bush rhetoric was so inconsistent that taking it at face value would be absurd. The White House argued that the Geneva Conventions didn't apply to detainees, since they were "unlawful combatants." But, at the same time, we were assured that the US doesn't torture. Why point out that you think you legally could torture these guys if you weren't planning to? As always, Team Bush believed that anyone who doesn't work in the White House is stupid. You'd never figure out the obvious, because only neocons are capable of thought.

In fact, Bush himself authorized torture, at least indirectly, by arguing in favor of it's legality. The report tells us:

On February 7, 2002, President Bush signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to the conflict with al Qaeda and concluding that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or the legal protections afforded by the Third Geneva Convention. The President's order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would've afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees...

Why say that international law didn't apply if you weren't planning on violating it? Wouldn't that make the "fact" you've just made up an uninteresting bit of trivia? "We could torture these guys -- of course, we're not going to -- but remember, it'd be totally legal if we did" doesn't do much to put down suspicion.

There's a lot more -- 19 pages in all -- but there isn't anything there we didn't know. Bush, Rumsfeld, Pearl, Yoo, various and sundry other morons, are all torturers. They didn't do it personally, but they had it done. And they did it in the most cowardly way possible, but trying to avoid responsibility with what they thought would be plausible deniability.

They needn't have bothered trying to hide their guilt. The Senate Armed Services Committee report is just that -- a report. It comes with no consequence. The torturers in the White House get the wagging senatorial finger and they'll go on to write books and make big money on speaking tours. Having already established that there is no such thing as an impeachable offense, the congress is poised to set the precedent that it's impossible for Executive branch officials to commit war crimes. There is no longer any offense so heinous, so evil, so contrary to our common decency that the offender can't possibly avoid paying for it. The bottom has dropped out of the shebang -- there is no bottom, no lower limit to just how lousy and criminal and morally repellant an American president is allowed to be. The White House is the world's smallest anarchy, a patch of land about one city block where no law applies.

Richard Nixon once said, "If the president does it, that means it is not illegal." All these years later, Richard Nixon has won that argument.

-Wisco

The Bestest President Ever

Have you heard? George W. Bush is the Bestest President Ever -- hands down, no contest. He's the smartest and the most successful and the handsomest and we were damned lucky to have him for the last eight years. Otherwise, we'd all have been killed by al Qaeda or Democrats or bears or something. Anything good that happened to you during the Bush years? Bush's work. Anything bad? Democrats fault. That is, if it really happened at all and wasn't just media hype.

Like soviet propagandists, Team Bush is looking to edit certain events and airbrush certain people out of the history books. It's called the "legacy project" and, under the direction of master propagandist Karl Rove, the goal is to rewrite history in Bush's favor.

Weekly Standard columnist and leading neocon Stephen Hayes spilled the beans on CNN earlier this month, telling a talking-head panel, "We're going to be seeing a lot more of this and there's an ongoing Bush legacy project that's been meeting in the White House, really, with senior advisers, Karl Rove, Karen Hughes has been involved, current senior Bush administration advisers and they are looking at how to sort of roll out the President's legacy."





It's typical of Bush and the neocon mindset. All problems are problems of perception -- if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there, it doesn't make a sound. If you can't be happy and informed, then the obvious solution is to be happy and ignorant. Failing that, the next best thing is to be happy and misinformed. If no one knows there's a problem, there is no problem. If everyone says there's a problem, then that's just the media over-hyping a bump in the road to "bash Bush." In the Bush White House, problems aren't solved by action, they're solved with public relations campaigns, propaganda, photo ops, and denial.

The lefty blog Think Progress, run by the Center for American Progress and Obama transition head John Podesta, has done a pretty good job of tracking the legacy project. But they cover a lot of things and it's impossible to shoot down every bit of propaganda that comes out of the White House and the Bush-friendly media.

To do that, we need pre-emption -- a word Bushies know very well. Put just about every damned failure of the Bush administration out there and have all the facts ready for the next revisionist lie that comes out of Washington. Fight fire with fire, fight a project with a project.

So we have the Center for Public Integrity detailing the failures of the Bush administration. In an investigation they call "Broken Government," CPI lists 128 failures of the Bush administration since 2000. Even that isn't comprehensive. The early failures of a surveillance plane and crew captured by China and maintaining unsafe levels of arsenic allowed in drinking water are two right off the top of my head that aren't covered. 128 is a good start, but it's still incomplete.

CPI tells us there are 45 million Americans without health care, that 1,273 whistleblower complaints were filed from 2002-2008 (1,256 were dismissed), that 30 million pounds of beef were recalled in 2007, that 2,145 troops killed and 21,000 injured in Iraq from March 2003 through November 1, 2008 by IED -- many while waiting for body armor, and that there were 935 lies told in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. That's a tiny fraction of the massive screwups that bear Bush's signature.

Seriously, reading the whole thing gives you a headache. But it's good to know that it's there. It's looking more and more like the only punishment any Bushie might face will be the judgment of history. They can't be allowed to dodge even that. And they're trying -- the White House has already issued revisionist talking points to staffers. The L.A. Times got hold of them.

The document presents the Bush record as an unalloyed success.

It mentions none of the episodes that detractors say have marred his presidency: the collapse of the housing market and major financial services companies, the flawed intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, the federal response to Hurricane Katrina or the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

In a section on the economy, speakers are invited to say that Bush cut taxes after 2001, setting the stage for years of job growth.

As for the current economic crisis, the memo says that Bush "responded with bold measures to prevent an economic meltdown."

That last one strikes me as pretty funny, since everyone knows Bush didn't actually "prevent an economic meltdown." I'm sure they'd argue that it could be much worse -- no one's resorted to cannibalism yet and we can all thank the Bestest President Ever for that. The point of the memo -- titled "Speech Topper on the Bush Record" -- is to provide Bush loyalists with handy examples of the successes of the most successful president in history. You'd think that examples would leap readily to mind, but remember -- it's all BS. Even Whitehousers have a hard time thinking of examples of Bush triumphs.

And that may be where the Bush "legacy project" fails. While they need spinny notes to come up with some sort of success to pin on Bush like a medal, all we need to do is reach into the grab bag of history and pull out pretty much anything. The Center for Public Integrity makes that a bit easier, but it wouldn't really be much of a challenge without them.

Bush's final battle will be fought against the enemy he's fought most of his battles with -- reality. It's poetic justice that his legacy project to erase his record of failure will likely be a battle he fails to win.

-Wisco

Tortured Logic

If Bush is remembered for anything, it's my hope that he's remembered for torture. If the Republican party under Bush is remembered for anything, I hope it's for being the pro-torture party. There aren't many aspects of the Bush years that disgust me nearly as much as the policy of torturing detainees and none that disgust me more. The whole thing is so obviously evil that it almost seems cartoonish. If I wanted to accuse a president of something unthinkably awful, torture would be on the list, along with keeping child sex slaves and stealing human organs. If I had my choice, Bush would forever be remembered as the ridiculously, cartoonishly evil president. Like Sen. Joe McCarthy before him, Bush would become a living example of just how lousy a person can become in their quest for personal power, how the very worst person can wrap their crimes up in the flag, and how abusive and brutal even a democratic government can be if it abandons the law. Do me a big favor, would you? Spend the rest of your life talking about Bush this way. Evil, corrupt, and criminal. Make sure to include all the neocons and the Democrats and Republicans who've supported him in this.

Evil is the word. But another we can throw in is stupid. Bush's Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, demonstrated that stupidity yesterday.

Reuters:

Departing U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey said on Wednesday that he saw no reason for prosecutions or for pardons for those who gave legal advice on the Bush administration's terrorism policies.

Some human rights groups have urged President-elect Barack Obama to launch criminal investigations into the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on al Qaeda terrorism suspects.

They also have questioned whether the Bush administration broke the law with its warrantless domestic spying program adopted after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Whether this is real stupidity or feigned stupidity is an open question. I'll take him at his word and assume he's as stupid as he may or may not be pretending to be. Mukasey is a former federal judge, so you'd think he'd know that torture is a felony. But it'd be a terrible, terrible thing to say he's being dishonest, so we'll assume he's being totally upfront and say he's as stupid as he wants you to believe he is. That's giving him the benefit of the doubt, because we want to be fair.





See, torture is illegal under title 18, chapter 113C of the US Code. How did I, someone who isn't a former federal judge, find this out? I took about ten seconds to type "federal torture statute" into Google. It was the first result. Mukasey wouldn't have thought of checking to see if torture's illegal because -- to be fair -- he's stupid.

But Mukasey's talking about people who didn't actually torture. He's talking about people who advised torturers, right? That comes under Title 18, U.S.C., Section 241. That crime is called "conspiracy against rights." How did I find that one? I typed "federal statute conspiracy" into Google. Not much of a stumper, but remember, we're cutting Michael Mukasey some slack and assuming he's a moron.

"There is absolutely no evidence that anybody who rendered a legal opinion either with respect to surveillance or with respect to interrogation policy did so for any reason other than to protect the security of the country and in the belief that he or she was doing something lawful," he said. "In those circumstances, there is no occasion to consider prosecutions, there is no occasion to consider pardons." Whether or not they believed it was legal is completely irrelevant. "I thought it was legal, but it turns out I was wrong" isn't much of a defense.

Of course, the Bush administration have painted themselves into a political corner here -- that's why Mukasey mentions pardons. If Bush were to pardon his torture team, he'd practically be admitting he knew their actions were illegal. They've got to pretend everything was above board and hope for the best.

Will they be investigated for what would literally be crimes against humanity? We're getting mixed signals on that front. Some on Team Obama say yes, while others say no. No matter which answer is true, experts say they should.

"The only way to prevent this from happening again is to make sure that those who were responsible for the torture program pay the price for it," Michael Ratner, a professor at Columbia Law School and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights said. "I don't see how we regain our moral stature by allowing those who were intimately involved in the torture programs to simply walk off the stage and lead lives where they are not held accountable." Put simply, if Bush and company get away with it, torture will only be technically illegal from now on. It'll be a crime without punishment. In their cowardice, this congress has already established that there's no such thing as an impeachable offense. The next congress and administration shouldn't established that the executive branch is beyond any law. That's the definition of dictatorship.

Even if no one is prosecuted or even investigated for this, we can still make sure they pay some sort of price. History can remember them as evil, stupid, and criminal.

Do me a solid and see to it that -- at the very least -- happens.

-Wisco

Creating a New Mandate

I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.
-Franklin Roosevelt, comment to reformers

Yesterday, I wrote that the winners of the 2008 election were the people and that the winners shouldn't go home. We can count on Obama to work on the agenda he spelled out on the campaign trail, but there is still a place for activism after your guy wins. While the right is trying to launch an "Obama doesn't have a mandate" narrative, this seems doomed to failure to me, since it requires you to believe BS about what it is you want. I kind of think you're the expert there. You really don't need some jerk explaining to you what you think. As spin jobs go, this one seems a little pointless.

But Obama only has a mandate to do what he proposed in his presidential campaign; restoring tax fairness, reforming health care, rebuilding the economy, getting out of Iraq, investing in infrastructure and green energy, etc. These are the things we can expect the new president to address in his first term.

But there are issues that weren't brought up on the campaign trail. In discussing the president-elect, we tend to forget the sitting president. George W. Bush hid out during the campaign, an invisible president who avoided the public spotlight the way a vampire avoids sunlight. One big issue was fairly successfully avoided by John McCain and that was what the hell to do about George W. Bush and company.





A mandate isn't only given at the ballot box. When the people demand that something be done, that becomes an instruction to the government. "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny," Thomas Jefferson once said, "When the government fears the people, there is liberty." Government should be responsive to the people, not the other way around. The fact that we've been running this whole thing backwards needs to be addressed. Future executives must know that running the country like a dictatorship won't be without consequence, that the Constitution actually means something, that we are a government of laws.

Which brings us to a remedy proposed by my own congress member, Rep. Tammy Baldwin:

Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin has introduced the Executive Branch Accountability Act of 2008, calling on the next President to reverse the damaging and illegal actions taken by the Bush/Cheney Administration and to collaborate with Congress to proactively prevent any further abuses of executive branch power.

“Over the past several years, serious questions have been raised about the conduct of high ranking Bush/Cheney Administration officials in relation to some of the most basic elements of our democracy: respect for the rule of law, the principle of checks and balances, and the fundamental freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights,” said Baldwin. “The list of abuses of executive branch power is long, as are the Administration’s attempts to impede congressional oversight.

The act would:

-Ensure that any Bush/Cheney administration official guilty of a war crime is prosecuted under the War Crimes Act and the Anti-Torture Act.

-Affirm that it is the sole legal right of Congress to declare war.


-Restore the writ of habeas corpus as an essential principle of our democracy.


-Ensure that torture and rendition are uniformly prohibited under United States law.


-Immediately close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.


-Ensure that Americans can bring claims against their government.


-Immediately take affirmative steps to protect all documents from the Bush/Cheney Administration and publicly reaffirm that the Office of the Vice President is indeed part of the executive branch.


-Publicly review potential abuses of the presidential pardon process.


-Reform the use of presidential signing statements.

"On January 20, 2009, the next President of the United States will stand before the American people and take an oath of office to '...preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.' Along with this oath, it is my fervent hope that he will take the decisive actions detailed in this legislation to restore our democracy," Baldwin says.

"On the surface, this may seen like a last jab at Bush and Cheney, and surely the portions of this proposal that address holding the former president and vice president, and members of their administration, to account will not sit well with those who would prefer to forgive and forget," says Baldwin constituent and writer for The Nation John Nichols. "But the real focus of the Executive Accountability Act is on the next presidency and the next Congress."

In a sane world, all of the provisions of the Executive Branch Accountability Act would be seen as redundant. But the validity of the Constitution of the United States of America has become a partisan issue, with the right seeming only to give a damn about the Second Amendment. I've joke that the Republican view of the Constitution can be summed up as "You can't take our guns. Praise Jesus. The End." Everything else is just crap we can all go ahead and ignore.

But without that founding document, this nation is nothing. There is no core, no guiding principles. And, if we allow a president to ignore the Constitution whenever the law becomes inconvenient, then we don't actually have one. It becomes meaningless and when someone actually cites constitutional requirements, it becomes a mere technicality that only nitpickers and anal retentive types care about. As a result, the president exists in a virtually lawless world which, as we all know now, leads to disaster for the nation.

Whether or not Baldwin's legislation actually goes anywhere is an open question. But if a fight is worth winning, then it's worth fighting regardless. I'd lose a thousand battles in a war for the right thing. I'd imagine that Barack Obama would probably be resistant to the idea, but as FDR pointed out, we can make the president we need.

We've got at least four years to pull this off and -- even if it only keeps Bush and Cheney from sleeping soundly at night -- it'd be worth the effort. Law without consequence is not law.

-Wisco

The Good Fight

I want to share a fun fact; the vast, vast majority of people think George W. Bush sucks. And there's this guy who's running for president who's close to Bush. This is a problem for that guy:



Yeah, it's not the newest poll, but that's kind of the point. Rev. Wright is a dead issue -- George W. Bush is not. And, while people may not like Jeremiah Wright, there aren't many who would argue that he's screwing up the country. Wright is not a national disaster, Bush is. In fact, Bush is such a disaster that the GOP was stuck with a little bit of a problem -- how to deal with him in their national convention?

They had to have him speak. It would be huge -- and counterproductive -- news if he weren't to address the convention. So they decided to hide him. Bush will address the RNC on the day most people won't be watching. Bush is scheduled for Labor Day evening -- a massive media black hole. The only way to get fewer viewers would be to have him speak on Christmas.

Bonus, they can hide Cheney in the same hole. So, of course, they did. There was some question as to whether Darth Cheney would address the convention at all, but -- like Bush -- it turned out that the bigger story would be to not feature him. The only place to hide Bush and Cheney was out in the open.



All of this is good news for Democrats for more than one reason. Allowing the Republican National Convention to come immediately after the Democratic National Convention was a mistake. In any debate, the final position is stronger, being the rebuttal. There's a reason that our legal system allows the defendant to make the second argument -- it's much easier to argue against than to argue for. In the conventions battle, Democrats lost the high ground.

On the other hand, the rebuttal forces negativity -- which will highlight Obama's positive message. People already think of the GOP as the party of darkness. There's a broad gray line between good and evil, with a lot of elbow room in between. But with kidnapping and spying and killing and torture, the Bush administration has dragged the Republican party all the way across that line. Allow me a poetic turn of phrase here, but where a neocon goes, death and sorrow follows. These are not good people. In fact, they're almost cartoonishly evil.

That's their eventual failing. Evil seems powerful because it's not limited by morals or ethics or law. What we call evil is basically a shortcut, crossing lines and breaking barriers that are pretty much conceptual. Goodness, at its most basic, means always making the same choice, always following the same road. Evil takes whatever path serves it best. Evil doesn't do evil for evil's sake, it does evil for expediency's sake.

Evil is, at its most basic, lazy. And that's why it doesn't endure. We are a relentless species that knows the future exists. What we've built took generations, people who helped build our world lived and died with no hope of ever seeing this. People fought for this and died for this and it's still a work in progress. Perfection isn't possible, but that's our bar.

So don't fool yourself. The Democrats aren't good either. It's said that all it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing and today's Democratic party is a great example of that. By refusing to punish evil, they allow it. By refusing to fight evil, they become de facto allies.

But this is a long fight that is never done. As I said, goodness is a matter of always making the same choice. So you can start being good at any time. And you can stop being good at any time. This is the time when we can choose good. Every day is the time when we can choose good.

If history shows us anything, it's that humanity is constantly improving. That the right choice is made more often than the wrong one. We become a little wiser with each generation and shed our evils -- we're better than we were when we had slaves, better than we were when we burned witches, better than we were when we believed the world was flat. We've made the right choice more often than not -- perhaps barely more often -- and that's been enough to improve our world immensely.

The GOP can try to hide their evil on Labor Day, to display Bush and Cheney when the fewest cameras will be rolling, but they can't hide them altogether. The evil at the heart of their party will be there until they make the right choice and drive it out.

All of this talk about good and evil is done without hyperbole, by the way. I think that when people embrace torture, when they celebrate needless war, when they abandon law, they have become literally evil. We may not live in a nation with a good guy party, but we inarguably live in one with a bad guy party.

The party beginning their convention tonight aren't the bad guy party. They aren't the good guy party either. But they're the ones in the best position to take down evil. Once they do that, we can make the right choice once again and fight them too.

And we'll win -- eventually. History shows that. If evil is lazy, good is relentless.

-Wisco

A Potemkin Olympic Village

China is evil. Freakin' evil. Of that, there should be no doubt. We all remember Tiananmen Square and the brutal way a student protest was put down there in 1989. Prior to the Olympics, China also put down unrest in Tibet. As the Olympics are happening, China fights Uighur separatists in the western province of Xinjiang -- although there's very little coverage of that.

How should we respond to the oppression in China? President Bush, who never misses an opportunity to kiss the religious right's butt, cast China's entire human rights record as merely religious oppression -- as if China were guilty only of shutting churches.

Of course, part of the problem is that Bush -- who's used his term as president to spend money like a drunken sailor in a strip club -- has basically sold the US to nations like China. It's one thing to embarrass them slightly, it's another to call a criminal regime a criminal regime. Being part of a criminal regime all his own doesn't help Bush's position any, either.



So Bush was solemn when solemnity was called for and, for the rest of his visit to Beijing, acted the way Bush typically behaves abroad -- loud, clownish, and generally a douchebag. There's a reason this guy shies away from diplomacy; he has zero natural ambassadorial talent.

So, the fact that China has mobile organ harvest vans isn't mentioned. Big freakin' buses that go out, capture dissidents and Falun Gong practitioners, execute them, remove their organs, and sell them. China's isn't a wasteful government. If you can kill dissidents and sell their body parts, then literal rolling butcher shops are the answer.

Sometimes, they're able to sell the entire corpse, which is stuffed like a dead horse and put on display in traveling exhibits. Either way, they manage to get rid of a problem citizen and profit from their death at once. It's just good business for a nation that's come more and more to resemble the soulless American corporations that power its rising economy -- profits first, people last. China is the very definition of the modern corporate nightmare.

The environmental damage can't be ignored, either. The only place in the world that may have worse air is Mexico City. China's water comes in pastel shades, from the dyes and chemicals used in manufacturing. In 2005, China admitted that more than 70% of its lakes and rivers were contaminated with pollution. "China's waterways are dying, and its rivers are running black from industrial effluent and untreated sewage," reported the BBC at the time. An estimated 360 million people have no access to safe drinking water.

Given all of this, people are left with a problem -- do you watch the Olympics and support this corporate hellhole?

The truth is, these corporations don't give a damn whether you watch or not. They want you to see their commercials. If you don't want to support China, don't buy the crap. It's that simple. Refusing to watch isn't going to do anything; refusing to shop at Wal-Mart will do a lot more. Sure, China's using the Olympics to portray themselves as wonderfully modern and worldly, but seeing that Potemkin Olympic village isn't going to harm anyone. Believing it is the problem.

The fact is that China is what a corporate world would look like. A world not of citizens, but of consumers. No environmental regulations, no consumer protections, no rights or individuality -- just a pocketful of money to spend on crap made out of lead paint and poison.

It doesn't make any difference to them who wins what medal, who watches what event, who is whose fan. What matters is that you buy the Official Happy Meal of the 2008 Olympics, the Coca-Cola in the commemorative can, the official sportswear made in a sweatshop in Shenzhen. If you don't watch a second of Olympic coverage, it doesn't make a damned bit of difference -- so long as you buy the stuff. Just stay away from crap with the Olympic rings on them and you'll do more than averting your eyes -- athletes aren't eating Snickers bars anyway.

And then, in two years, we can go through all of this again, when the winter Olympics are hosted by Russia. Corporations won't give a damn if you watch those, either.

-Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; China; human rights; environment; Bush; sports; Corporations don't care if you watch the 2008 Olympics -- they just want you to buy Chinese crap from Wal-Mart

Justice Delayed -- For Centuries

There are two opinions by two candidates on the Boumediene et al v Bush ruling by the Supreme Court that restored habeas corpus rights to prisoners at Gitmo. One is from a former senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, the other's from an ex-Navy pilot.

Hell, we could quit right here; it's pretty obvious who'd be right. But soldier on we will. First, the senior lecturer from the law school. Barack Obama said, "that principle of habeas corpus, that a state can't just hold you for any reason without charging you and without giving you any kind of due process -- that’s the essence of who we are. I mean, you remember during the Nuremberg trials, part of what made us different was even after these Nazis had performed atrocities that no one had ever seen before, we still gave them a day in court and that taught the entire world about who we are but also the basic principles of rule of law. Now the Supreme Court upheld that principle yesterday."

The ex-Navy pilot weighed in. "These are enemy combatants," John McCain said of the ruling. "These are people who are not citizens. They do not and never have been given the rights that people in this country have. And, my friends, there are some bad people down there, there are some bad people."

Have I ever mentioned that these neocons always talk to you like you're a freakin' three year-old? Yeah, there are some "bad people" at Guantanamo. Perhaps even a boogeyman or two. But there are "bad people" in civilian jails right now. What McCain seems to be arguing is habeas corpus rights should only be granted to prisoners the state believes are innocent. That's no one. McCain, not surprisingly, doesn't seem to understand the purpose of "The Great Writ."

The surest way to get out of jury duty is to tell interviewers, "If he wasn't guilty, he wouldn't have been arrested." Anyone who doesn't understand why that makes you an unfit juror should probably shut up now. People who equate incarceration with guilt just plain don't understand the concept of justice.

Yet that's the test that the Bush administration has been putting their prisoners to. If they aren't terrorists, they wouldn't be at Guantanamo. That's all the proof that you or I or anyone is supposed to need -- their say-so.

But given what the Bush administration's word has been proven to be worth -- over and over and over, scandal after scandal, crime after crime, lie after lie -- it's kind of worth the effort to just go ahead and doublecheck.

Which is what an independent study of detainees at Gitmo has done.

McClatchy Newspapers:

A study published by a professor at the Seton Hall School of Law found that 45 percent of 516 Guantanamo detainees examined had committed hostile acts against the United States or its allies, and that only 8 percent of them had been al Qaida fighters. The study drew on unclassified Department of Defense transcripts and documents from military tribunals at Guantanamo.

To be fair, a study by West Point's Combating Terrorism Center found that 73% posed a "demonstrated threat." No matter which study you believe, that adds up to a lot of people who aren't a threat. And West Point's study is deeply flawed. "West Point included in its 'demonstrated threat' category anyone who'd committed hostile acts; been identified as a fighter; received training at a camp run by al Qaida, the Taliban or associated forces; or received training in combat weapons other than rifles or other small arms," McClatchy reports.

It's that identification "as a fighter" that's problematic. "The system of identifying men as fighters..." the report goes on, "depended on the accounts of the men who initially detained the 'fighters,' often Afghan commanders looking for bounties from U.S. forces who paid more for men alleged to be Taliban or al Qaida leaders."

In other words, anyone looking to make a few bucks and get rid of someone they didn't like could sell them -- there is no other way to put it -- to the Bush administration and the US military. Another McClatchy article tells us the story of Mohammed Akhtiar, a prisoner at Guantanamo.

"American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo's Camp Four who hissed 'infidel' and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn't," we're told. "The U.S. government had the wrong guy." He was "imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops."

In an investigation of released detainees, McClatchy found that most were "low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals." At least seven had worked for the US-backed Afghanistan government and had no ties to militants.

"The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners," the report reads.

But they still get those military tribunals, right? Even without habeas rights, they still get their day in court.

I guess so, if you can call the kangaroo courts of the military tribunals anything other than a sham. Prisoners are denied evidence that would help in their case -- either because such evidence was destroyed to cover up war crimes or because the evidence has been classified. And that "day in court" is entirely theoretical. So far, one has been held (other cases never went to trial). The wheels of phony justice grind slow, I guess. At this rate of one trial every six years, the final detainee of maybe 500 held can expect to see justice in the year 5008 -- 3,000 years from now.

Of course, that ratio's about to be thrown by a whopping five trials of high profile detainees -- just in time for the elections. None of these detainees' guilt is in very much doubt. The highest profile trial will be that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- the so-called "Mastermind of 9/11" who broke under torture. He admits he did it and wants to be martyred. Anyone whose guilt is iffy isn't getting anywhere near a even a kangaroo court any time soon. Even with this new ratio of six trials every seven years, we're looking at 583 years of pre-trial detention. Being found innocent nearly six centuries from now isn't exactly justice.

So, of the two candidates, the senior law lecturer has a better argument than the ex-pilot. Yes, there are "bad people" at Gitmo. But habeas corpus isn't going to set any of them free. It's the people who aren't so bad that the writ is designed to protect. In fact, letting prisoners exercise the right of habeas corpus would help sort out the mess the Bush administration has made of the detainee situation and keep us from wasting time and money on people who are no threat.

And those are, apparently, people John McCain and the rest of the neocons can't be bothered with worrying about.

-Wisco

Techorati tags: politics; law; Constitution; human rights; torture; Guantanamo; habeas corpus; Bush's and John McCain's "War on Terror" would keep people in Guantanamo for life without trial

Losing the Fight Against Evildoers

I've never been comfortable using the word "evil." It's too simple for what it describes, too cartoonish to be taken seriously. Dracula is evil, the devil is evil, Lex Luthor is evil. In children's stories, evil does evil for the sake of evil. It doesn't make any sense and it doesn't describe anything that happens in the real world. When someone uses the word, it goes straight to the part of my brain that detects ridiculousness. When George W. Bush talks about "evildoers," the first thing I think of is Cesar Romero as "The Joker" on Batman. Evil has become a word to describe either impossible supernatural creatures or absurd criminals who steal diamond encrusted jack-in-the-boxes.

For me, evil is a word to be used sparingly -- the word has already been abused into near meaninglessness, I don't want to further the erosion. As a result, when I do use the word, I'm either using it correctly (about 10% of the time) or as comic hyperbole ("According to Jim is a horrific evil that must be erased from human history").

Now is one of the 10% of times. When I say evil, I mean evil. Because torture is evil. Don't agree with that? How about this? Torturing children is evil. Agreed? How about people who "you could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas" about ways to torture people?

Now that we're all on the same page -- excepting, of course, the deluded and the genuinely evil -- let's look at evil in America today.

Let's look at the Bush administration.

Washington Post:

The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003 asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda captives because the president's ultimate authority as commander in chief overrode such statutes.

The 81-page memo, which was declassified and released publicly yesterday, argues that poking, slapping or shoving detainees would not give rise to criminal liability. The document also appears to defend the use of mind-altering drugs that do not produce "an extreme effect" calculated to "cause a profound disruption of the senses or personality."

Although the existence of the memo has long been known, its contents had not been previously disclosed.

Interrogators, according to Yoo, would be protected by a "national and international version of the right to self-defense." Of course, this is such crazy BS that you wonder how anyone could make the claim with a straight face. If someone came over to my house and beat me up, I wouldn't then be able to sit around for a while thinking, "That sucked," before kidnapping the guy and torturing him. Claiming the right to self-defense would get you laughed out of court and straight into prison. As it should. I guess there are times when evil really is as ridiculous as the word makes it seem. To bring it back to the reality of evil, it was John Yoo who argued that we have every right to torture children -- including crushing some kid's testicles.

Yoo had this exchange with Human Rights scholar Doug Cassel:

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

To those who occasionally defend torture in the comments -- defend this.

Of course, I suppose you could argue that this is purely academic, that this is a hypothetical situation that -- while repulsive -- has never happened. That brings up a damned good question; how do you know that?

The Bush administration hasn't exactly been the most transparent in history. And we didn't find out about the abuses at Abu Ghraib until after they'd occurred. You can't say it's never happened. You can't even say it's probably never happened. The best you can logically argue is that you hope it's never happened. If the belief is that it's not illegal, then there's nothing actually stopping it from happening -- other than conscience and shame. Few in the Bush administration have either.

I think history has proven that the Bush administration rules nothing out -- no matter how boneheaded or how cruel. This has been a lawbreaking administration, with no respect for human dignity or the rights of the individual. For them, the Constitution and law are merely impediments to be sidestepped. They exist only to slow down the weak-willed and the less-than-visionary. There's a new neocon world to be built. A New American Century of what amounts to military domination of the globe. Law applies to the menschen, not the ubermenschen. Visionary supermen are the new tomorrow.

Writes Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson:

[The Yoo memo argues] The president is unbound by international law -- ever -- and not constrained by either federal law or the Constitution in his role as commander in chief, which gives him carte blanche authority to have illegal enemy combatants who are detained on foreign soil assaulted, maimed, tortured, and otherwise subjected to war crimes, so long as the president deems it necessary or in “self-defense” of the nation.

I’m literally sick.

As am I. Dickinson's reading of the memo shows that Yoo argues that there are laws that "would conflict with… Commander in Chief power": "assault… maiming… interstate stalking… war crimes… and torture."

And John Yoo's mind is not the only repugnant little slice of hell in all of this. The whole damned administration thinks like this -- and have acted on these beliefs. This has gone beyond the acedemic and theoretical into the realm of the actual and the practical. This reasoning has been applied.

In a very thorough piece in Vanity Fair ("The Green Light: Politics & Power"), Phillippe Sands reveals that these "legal theories" aren't theories at all, but practices that have been applied since 2001.

The Bush administration has always taken refuge behind a “trickle up” explanation: that is, the decision was generated by military commanders and interrogators on the ground. This explanation is false. The origins lie in actions taken at the very highest levels of the administration—by some of the most senior personal advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense. At the heart of the matter stand several political appointees—lawyers—who, it can be argued, broke their ethical codes of conduct and took themselves into a zone of international criminality, where formal investigation is now a very real option. This is the story of how the torture at Guantánamo began, and how it spread.

It's much more expansive than I can comment fully on here -- I advise you to go read it when you have the chance. Suffice it to say that no one gets off easy -- not Alberto Gonzales, not Dick Cheney, not Bush himself. What Sands details are not theories or hypothetical "ticking time bomb" scenarios. What he finds is a direct link between the White House and war crimes. He finds evil.

One last quote and then I'll wrap it up. From a Gitmo interrogation log, relayed by Sands:

Detainee began to cry. Visibly shaken. Very emotional. Detainee cried. Disturbed. Detainee began to cry. Detainee bit the IV tube completely in two. Started moaning. Uncomfortable. Moaning. Began crying hard spontaneously. Crying and praying. Very agitated. Yelled. Agitated and violent. Detainee spat. Detainee proclaimed his innocence. Whining. Dizzy. Forgetting things. Angry. Upset. Yelled for Allah...

Urinated on himself. Began to cry. Asked God for forgiveness. Cried. Cried. Became violent. Began to cry. Broke down and cried. Began to pray and openly cried. Cried out to Allah several times. Trembled uncontrollably.

Let me remind you that this is done in your name and on your behalf. Is this the very best we can be? Is this the government you want? When the president asserts that he has the legal authority to kick anyone he wants in the nuts, the question isn't who'll protect you from the terrorists, but who'll protect you from the president.

When your government is evil, terrorists are the least of your problems.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; law; Constitution; Guantanamo; human rights; war crimes; John Yoo; neocon; The Bush administration -- torture central