Shrubya’s architects of torture and other reactionaries are falling over themselves in the rush to justify coercive interrogation based on the link between the recent successful destruction of Bin Laden and the name of Osama’s courier given during a standard interrogation session.
The article is interesting, but Peartree3′s comment really caught my eye:
“What does it say about the character of a person who WANTS to believe that torture works?”
Guest post from Spy Buddy:
Kazakhstan is now heading up the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) for 2010, which is ironic since the Associated Press has reported Kazakhstan has almost concluded a deal with Iran to export 1,350 tons of purified uranium ore .
States from Europe, Central Asia and North America to form the largest regional security organization in the
world. According to the OSCE’s website, that Organization addresses a wide range of security-related issues such as military and human rights. And we all know that Iran has been determined a rogue state due to its political and military policies (i.e. building nuclear weapons and holding fraudulent elections) and continues its poor human rights records with ordering death sentences to the opposition party as well as raping, torturing and murdering rounded up protesters.While its chilling to think Iran getting hold of so much uranium its even worse seeing Kazakhstan leading the OSCE since its does little to uphold the organization’s charter. Kazakhstan is ranked 142 out of 174 by
Reporters Without Borders. Just recently the government jailed Yevgeny Zhovtis-a prominent human rights activist, and in December Gennady Pavlyuk, a Kyrgyz opposition journalist, was apparently
thrown from the sixth-floor window of an apartment with his hands and feet bound with duct tape.I now understand why Sacha Baron Cohen selected Kazakhstan as the home nation for Borat.
I guess defenestration is making a comeback!
If there is one thing politicians should have learned from the Damnpeachment of Clinton, it’s that you’re better just admitting something and asking for forgiveness, rather than denying the obvious then continuously changing your story with ever finer parsing of words like “is.”
Nancy Pelosi, please step aside and let somebody more competent assume the Speaker of the House position – preferably somebody who wasn’t a Quisling Democrat during the reign of King George the Witless.
*Update 6/3/09* Turns out there is more to the story – maybe even some credence to Nancy’s claims that she was misled. Turns out Dick Cheney led all these Congressional intelligence briefings, even those on torture techniques. Forget the Truth Commission, it’s time for Congress to subpoena his ass and start grilling him…pronto!
Via Raw Story, another media figure has had to learn the hard way that water torture — excuse me, waterboarding — really is torture, after all:
Chicago radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller decided he’d get himself waterboarded to prove the technique wasn’t torture. It didn’t turn out that way. “Mancow,” in fact, lasted just six or seven seconds before crying foul.
… “It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that’s no joke,” Mancow told listeners. [...]
… “If I knew it was gonna be this bad, I would not have done it,” he said.
Mancow joins Christopher Hitchens and at least two other journalists in learning what Steve Benen points out should be obvious to anyone (“If this wasn’t torture, we wouldn’t have done it. The whole point is to do something so horrific that the detainee would feel compelled to give up information.”). But even if this is the least efficient way in the world to teach people morals, maybe in these times we have to settle for what we can get.
Matt Yglesias nominates Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard to be next in line for personal education, but I think most of the rest of us would agree the most worthy “volunteer” is Sean Hannity of Faux News.
However, I’ll hasten to add that I understand those who argue that these grotesque experiments should stop. First of all, waterboarding is wrong. It’s torture, and that’s nothing to joke about. Even worse, the more people think of it as something that’s “cool” to try, the greater the odds that some teenager somewhere will do it carelessly and die.
Even so, there’s a point to calling the bluff of the posturing phonies who advocate torture publicly. As anyone familiar with framing understands, the purpose of their argument is to shore up the right-wing pose of being morally self-assured tough guys who are willing to do what it takes to defend America.
The truth, which isn’t brought up nearly often enough in the cable back-and-forth, is exactly the opposite: At a time when America was tested, these cowards folded, throwing in the hand on the precise values they should have been protecting.
So I’m not above rude tactics in pointing out their weakness, their irresponsibility, and their hypocrisy. If Sean Hannity and others won’t back up their talk about waterboarding, I’m fine with humiliating them using the same derisive language they’ve been aiming at the left for years.
They’re cowards, and moral failures. And they need to be told that to their faces.
(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)
I did some further reflection on the ‘same tired strategy’ issue, and I think the crux of the problem is ‘same tired premise.’ Although Obama renamed the ‘War on Terror’ to the Global Contingency Operation, nothing has essentially changed.
After the USSR imploded, the reactionaries were left with gays, aborted fetuses, illegal aliens and Libruhls as The Enemy. Unfortunately (for them), you can’t justify ridiculous levels of defense spending to fight that enemy, so their corporate masters in the defense contractor sector were unsatisfied.
9/11 gave Shrubya & Cheney all they needed to create a new bugbear to replace Raygun’s defunct ‘Evil Empire’ – a “global conspiracy” of Islamic terrorists, dedicated to destroying Pax America through the use of terror. They fanned the flames of fear mercilessly through ‘doomsday’ speeches, Threat Level warnings and airport strip searches.
The reality-based community’s arguments that these threats required greater intelligence and coordinated international police actions were laughed at and shrugged off by the Repugs who for a time completely dominated the MSM.
In the case of Afghanistan, the original goal, was to catch Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive,’ neutralize the threat of the other architects of 9/11 and their sympathizers, the Taliban, then install and nurture a Western-friendly government and do some nation building to eliminate the terrorist ‘breeding ground.’ Of course Osama and the Taliban had plenty of time to escape into the ‘failed statelet’ of Western Pakistan, which continually threatens to distabilize the installed Karzai government, forcing us to remain and even escalate our presence just to stay in place.
Osama accepted this status quo and just did his first escalation – I guarantee there will be more. The original premise – that we are in a life-or-death struggle with a global, violent fundamentalist Islam – remains. The follow-on reactionary addition to the premise is that this threat can and should be dealt with via military means, and that by doing so, we can make America ‘safe from Terrorism.’
Current reactionary talking points revolve around Dem rule making America ‘less safe,’ for anything from (re)outlawing torture and closing Gitmo, to cutting boondoggle projects from the defense budget.
Obama needs to attack this premise head-on, or it will continue to drive him down the doomed policy path we are currently on.
Here are the reality-based premises that he needs to push forward to counter the reactionary bullshit.
First, the government can’t make us completely safe from terror. It’s impossible. It’s a cheap and easy tactic easily employed by malcontents. Suspending civil liberties and employing harsh tactics internally just create more and nastier malcontents.
Terrorists come in many flavors. Notice how the reactionaries freaked out over the government’s report on the danger of our own home-grown, reactionary terrorists. No mystery there – they want us to ignore the Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph and the Anthrax Mailer behind the curtain and focus on the Islamic Fundamentalist bugbear. This is a critical point – even if we were somehow able to magically lock down all of the Islamic world, we still wouldn’t be safe from terror!
I won’t belabor the third point, that massive occupations of jihadi-prone foreigners punctuated by kid-killing blind airstrikes creates more terrorists – that point has been beaten to death over the last 8 years.
This leads me back to the premise specifically underpinning the current Afghanistan policy – if we pull out, the Karzai government will fall at the hands of the Taliban, leading to failed state and becoming another breeding ground/homebase for terrorists. Here is the crux of the problem – the Al Qaeda home base has shifted to W. Pakistan, a failed statelet, and neither Shrubya or Obama hase the inclination to take the war there. Ergo – stalement.
How is that different from just letting Afghanistan fall again? It’s just a slightly bigger breeding ground. And going back to the War on Terror – isn’t the supposed Islamic Fundamentalist terror threat supposed to be global? There are no end of Islamic ‘failed states’ out that, or near-failed states, that could harbor another head of the terrorist hydra – admittedly not as well financed as the Pashtun poppy-growers, but not without access to other funding sources.
Bottom line is that Obama needs to start a serious dialog on the broke-ass reactionary fear-mongering premises, attacking the ‘War on Terror’ head on, not just relabeling it and continuing the policy. And Evil Dick is giving Obama a perfect opportunity to have the dialog. Obama could take the high ground and just debate him directly, tear him to shreds. Or we could actually have that truth commission, but open it up to include all the lying and bullshit perpetuated by Cheney to sell the war as well as investigations into renditions, torture and the Valerie Plame scandal.
Otherwise, expect us to continue down this losing path at the cost of tens of thousands of more Afghani and Iraqi civilian lives, hundreds more of our soldiers and budget-busting costs - and ultimately making this war *the* election question of 2012.
It seems like Cheney is just asking for it with his continuing crticisms of the Obama Administration. I guess he didn’t bother to read the memo that says former Administration members should just shut the fuck up and let the new guy do his job.
Yesterday, I was idly thinking of posting advice to Obama to consider opening up a Torture Truth Commission to put a little pressure on Cheney and maybe get him to shut up that way, but I figured Obama really isn’t interested in spending any political capital on going after Shrubya-era crimes, no matter how egregious, so I didn’t bother.
Imagine my delighted surprise with Obama’s pronouncement that he won’t give immunity to the architects of torture.
Maybe that’ll shut Dick up.
Muriel Kane reports for Raw Story:
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an “executive assassination ring” throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.
. . . “It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” he explained. “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. … Congress has no oversight of it.”
My first reaction to reading this was skeptical: “Who did they assassinate?” After all, how could the claim be true if they completely failed to accomplish anything?
Then I remembered who was in charge. Failure would be the expected result, wouldn’t it?
Eric Black has more on Hersh’s comments, in a less snarky vein. Ditto Emptywheel, with more on the incompetence angle. Kinda like the Keystone Kops, only with more dead bodies.
As much as I hate to side with a Repug, Obama should withdraw Lisa Jackson as candidate head of the EPA; that’s much too important of a role right now to go to Michael Brown in a dress!
*Update * – While he is at it, he should also find a new Director of National Intelligence - Retired Adm. Dennis Blair is apparently unclear on the concept of ‘torture‘ :
“I don’t mean to reopen those cases,” Blair said. “I’m hesitating to set a standard here.”
Michigan Democratic Sen Carl Levin told Blair, “If the attorney general designee can answer it, you can too…”
Some rock bands are upset that Shrubya has been using their music to illegally torture illegal detainees. The reporter had some fun with this one, raising the obvious question – are they more upset about the fact the music is being used without authorization to torture people illegally, or the fact that listening to their music could be preceived as torture? He even found one self-unaware musician, Stevie Benton of Drowning Pool:
“People assume we should be offended that somebody in the military thinks our song is annoying enough that played over and over it can psychologically break someone down,” he told Spin magazine. “I take it as an honor to think that perhaps our song could be used to quell another 9/11 attack or something like that.”
Some questions weren’t posed, though. Are they really as concerned about the use of their music in illegal torture, or the fact that the Military isn’t paying them royalties (notice RIAA-friendly Metallica not mentioned among the complainers) for the songs. And why has it taken them so damn long to complain?
I just had to chuckle when I read this article about the U.S. is refusing to send 17 Chinese Muslim Guantanamo detainees to the PRC for “fear they might be tortured.” As opposed to the coddling they are getting at Gitmo? Maybe they are just jealous of the PRC, afraid their techniques will do a better job of extracting fantastic tales of imagined conspiracies than the waterboarding, stress positions and other “Bush League” methods we employ?
Seriously, how could a government PR person issue a statement like that with a straight face?