YOU BETCHA'

In the background of the current disaster filled news and opinions there is still ranting on the part of certain voices on the conservative side about the War on Terror. Actually, the opinion pieces I've seen are not about the W.O.T., they're about how much of a failure President Obama is. They run the usual list of presidential failures, including his apologizing for America's past actions, bowing to foreign leaders, not treating attempted terror attacks as acts of war and so on. It's that last one that bothers me.

The drum beat to treat every act of terrorism, or attempted terrorism, as an act of war carries with it certain baggage which the right wing pundits just seem to ignore. Like, what constitutes a terrorist act? Or more precisely, is it an act of terror if it's done, or attempted, by a non-Muslim actor? You know, like shooting an abortion doctor in his church. Or, is it an act of war, rather than a criminal act, if done by an American citizen? The Times Square car bomb attempt fits this category. See how this might get sticky?

The right wing seems to just assume that any action, taken by a Muslim, against American interests, is a terrorist act of war. Simple and straight forward. But here in the world of reality it's not so simple.

There are all those Miranda Warning problems. We can't stop interrogating some Muslim guy even if he is a citizen, so let's strip him of his citizenship! That is, in fact, what Senator Lieberman suggested. We just strip suspected terrorists citizens of their U.S. citizenship and we can then ignore all the rules.

Of course, once we have these bad guys, we sure don't want to house them in the good old U.S.A. No sir, just because we've got more than 300 convicted terrorist prisoners in our prisons now, we sure can't keep these new bad actors here. Now, does it ever bother these folks (the right wing pundits, not the terrorists) that they appear scared stiff of guys who can't even make a bomb go boom.

But the big issue to be is the whole war versus crime comparison. The right, and in particular the so called Neocon right is, and has been, utterly wedded to the War on Terror way of looking at this. They backed (and pushed) the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so they're sort of stuck with that solution. Even though, as had been much reported after the Christmas crotch bomber's failed attempt, the Bush administration had used the Federal Courts to prosecute guys like the shoe bomber. The Neocons just ignore that. Their position is that it's always an act of war because, well, we're at war.

Now, can we stop for a minute and explode that thought. Writers far smarter than I have explained, slowly and carefully, in words of only one or two syllables, that the "War on Terror" is an empty concept involving as it does the declaration of war against a tactic. May I be blunt? It's stupid! It's stupid because it assumes (wrongly) that the U.S.A. has a right to enter any country, at any time, to kill or capture anyone who we deem to be a threat to us. It's stupid because it ignores the basic human values of protecting family and tribe if the ones doing the protecting are not of our particular tribe. It's stupid because it completely ignores the fact that for every civilian death in Iraq or Afghanistan we create more people who hate us and want harm to come to us. And it's stupid because the current crop of attempts were made by a guy from Pakistan and a guy from Yemin and we aren't at war with either of them (yet).

So, if I may paraphrase that great American thinker, Sarah Palin, when it comes to protecting the homeland from the threat of terror my dear Neocons, how's that War on Terror thing workin' out for ya?  

WHY ALL THE ANGER?

I've been scratching my head over the very vocal anger being expressed by some at town hall meetings, in interviews and in blogs. While it's easy to see that people fed a steady diet of Rush or Glenn Beck distortions and false claims (see my last post), intended to arouse anger, would result in anger, I think that there may be an underlying cause.

Note that most of what is said (shouted) is anger at GOVERNMENT. "I don't want the Government to get between me and my doctor" or "The Government can't run anything right. What makes them think that they can run GM, health care or whatever." While the Obama = Hitler trope is there too, the overall sense is that these folks really hate THE GOVERNMENT. Since Obama has only been in office 7 months this, to me, seems a bit excessive. What is going on here?

Could it be our old friend cognitive dissonance? Our country has been through hell over the past 8 years. A terrible attack on the Homeland. A war to catch the people who planned and ordered the attack and the failure of that war to catch them. Another war started on grounds that proved to be pretty much completely false. A storm ravaged American city and the incompetent Government response. The revelations of mistreatment and torture of prisoners. The past 8 years have shown those average citizens out there in Sarah Palin's "Real America" that, by gosh, the Government IS incompetent and can't seem to do anything right.

But wait. These are the same folks who believed that Saddam had WMD. They believed that if we fight them over there they won't come here. They believed that we don't torture our prisoners. Classic cognitive dissonance. "The uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously" is exactly what we are now seeing. And, since they believe that they should both respect our leaders and their policies and that the Government run by those leaders has resulted in poorly planned and run wars, programs and agencies (can you say FEMA?) their brains are faced with the pain of cognitive dissonance.

What we are seeing now is the expression of that pain against the new guy and his Government. "He's Black you know. Not like us. He has a funny name. I heard he wasn't even born here." They find it much easier to yell about Obamacare now rather than protest the war back then. The anger and frustration has been building for 8 long years (longer still when you consider the 1996 congressional election and the impeachment of Clinton). Their buttons are easy to push, and as we can see, the Rushes and Becks of the world know where those buttons are.

It's going to be a very angry fall and winter.

LIES OF THE TORTURE REGIME

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) spoke in the Senate yesterday about this nations "Torture Regime" and the lies that are being told to protect the guilty. Here's a taste. The entire statement (it's not too long) in the Congressional Record is here.

President Bush told us ``America does not torture'' while authorizing
conduct that America itself has prosecuted as crime and war crime, as
torture.
 Vice President Cheney agreed in an interview that waterboarding was
like ``a dunk in the water'' when it was actually a technique of
torture from the Spanish Inquisition to Cambodia's killing fields.
 John Yoo, who wrote the original torture opinions, told Esquire
magazine that waterboarding was only done three times. Public reports
now indicate that just two detainees were waterboarded 83 times and 183
times. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed reportedly was waterboarded 183 times. A
former CIA official had told ABC News: ``KSM lasted the longest on the
waterboard--about a minute and a half--but once he broke, it never had
to be used again.''
 We were told that waterboarding was determined to be legal, but we
were not told how badly the law was ignored and manipulated by the
Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, nor were we told how
furiously government and military lawyers tried to reject the defective
OLC opinions.
 We were told we couldn't second guess the brave CIA officers who did
this unpleasant duty, and then we found out that the program was led by
private contractors with no real interrogation experience.

He goes on with more of the facts that fly in the face of what the members of the former administration, and their apologists, have been saying. I so hope that we can get all of the facts out and prosecute these war criminals!

...SO WE DON'T HAVE TO FIGHT THEM HERE

Matt Taibbi, in a great post about the torture/anti torture divide that seems to be part of the current political discourse, has hit on something that also bothered me during the last four or five years, particularly during last years White House race. "We fight them over there so we don't have to fight them at over here." What the heck does that mean? Matt says:

I never understood what the hell that was all about. The best I could figure is that the people who were saying this think of the world like a big game of Risk, and they think that if we commit a big force to some place like Iraq, the “other side” will have to leave all his forces over there or something to keep us from moving through Eurasia. This might make sense in a real war, in a war-between-nations war, but it’s completely absurd in a conflict where the “other side” is actually hundreds if not thousands of different/unrelated actors and can successfully attack a country like the U.S. using just a few people at a time. Sending 160,000 troops to Iraq does absolutely nothing to prevent a terrorist group like al-Qaeda from sending over a couple of “exchange students” to dump botulinum toxin into the Akron reservoir.

Okay check that — it does nothing positive. Because it might prevent such attacks in the sense of giving foreign terrorists an array of more enticing targets to shoot at who are closer to home. But in real terms the idea “we fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here” is just magical thinking, the kind of notion that feels like it makes sense because your brain is running amok in the unconscious making unsupervised connections between unrelated things, sort of like an OCD patient who believes that if he steps on every third sidewalk crack he won’t get into a car accident. What’s amazing about this sort of propaganda is that once it gets hammered into your head enough, the logic of it begins to feel self-evident, above the need for explanation. Over and over again on the campaign trail last year I had people explain this concept to me by simply repeating themselves.

Read the whole thing. He has a better handle on this than most. To me the real shame of this is that the Mainstream Media (MSM) never asked the question. When McCain would throw out the "over there/not here" sound bite he was never called on it. Couldn't someone in the press have just said, "Senator, what does that mean?" or "Senator, how exactly does that work?" But no, he and his backers just kept saying it.

By the way. The Matt Taibbi piece also points out one of the great frustrations of writing a blog. Someone somewhere has probably already written the same thing that a blogger has just thought of. Oh well. It's a big web world.

SOME OF THE LAWS

Here is a nice, compact listing of relevant law pertaining to torture. Please notice that at no time does the issue of how well the practices work enter into the prohibitions against torture.

THE METHODS OF TORTURE

A reader writes:

About the torture post, it amazes me that the dems are making such a big deal about the methods of torture. Those methods have enabled us to catch many terrorists and nobody dies as a result. My idea of torture is slowly sawing someone's head off while video taping the event (i.e, Daniel Pearl). That event was newsworthy for about 2 days...

I'm afraid I have to disagree. First, it seems to me that it's not the Dems who are making a big deal about the methods of torture. It was Rush who slapped his own face while on air to show that "that's not torture." In fact the primary defense of the Bush administration's is exactly what this reader expressed: nobody died, these actions leave no marks or permanent damage, etc. The Dems and their side of the debate are looking at history and seeing that we, the USA, tried and convicted a number of Japanese officers after WWII for torturing captured American servicemen by waterboarding. Great Britain prosecuted another group of Japanese officers who had tortured British soldiers using this technique, and sentenced them to death. Here is a Washington University Law Review article simply titled "Waterboarding is Illegal."

The reader's claim that "those methods enabled us to catch many terrorists" which would appear to be former VP Cheney's defense, has not yet been verified. I would only note that we've not seen any trials, let alone convictions, for the supposed plots revealed by enhanced interrogation techniques. If your response to that is, "we caught them and tossed them into Gitmo," then the circular reasoning bites it's own tail and we can never know or find the truth. I'm much more inclined to believe that the Bush administration would have trotted out the terrorists, captured before they could strike, to show the world, and the people here at home, just how tough they (the good guys) were. We shall see.

As to the tragic death of Daniel Pearl, we clearly know what that was. It's called Murder.

THE ONLY THING WE HAVE TO FEAR…

That quote from FDR has been running around my head for the past week or so. As more details of the Bush administrations torture program come to light and more conservatives raise their hands and gesture wildly when anyone asks, “who thinks torture is good”, I’m lead to the conclusion that FDR’s words have been the rallying cry of the Republican Party since 9/11. By this I mean that from Bush on down they were, and have been, scared out of their wits since that terrible morning. Scared to the point of irrationality. Scared to the point of throwing large chunks of the Constitution away, if only that would make the fear go away too.

Historically the GOP have been the greatest cheerleaders for American Exceptionalism and America’s unfettered military power. It is somewhat surprising then to realize that as the twin towers fell that day our leaders’ very guts were awash with abject terror. Anger was apparent, as was the bitter need for revenge. But underlying it all was fear. The fear that we would be struck again. The fear that the enemy was among us. The fear of the unknown and the fear of the “other.”

We knew that the fears were real to a greater or lesser extent, but I don’t think most of us realized that the fear was all consuming and pervasive. The leaders in whom we had placed our trust, and their followers in the media, began to suffer from a wide ranging case of PTSD. No matter what they did, the terror wouldn’t go away. They even gave it a name: The Global War on Terror.

The fear showed itself in the actions taken to protect us. Look back at the language the President and others in the administration used. Bush told us repeatedly that he had “taken an oath to protect us.” Of course, he hadn’t. The Oath of Office of the President of the United States says: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Preserve, Protect and Defend the Constitution. Not the citizens of the United States, the Constitution. From the very beginning, before the fires stopped burning at Ground Zero, Bush and his administration misstated their duty and expressed their fear. The terrorists had no chance of overturning our form of government, but if the President could stand on the smoldering rubble in New York City and tell us how he’d protect us because he swore an oath, well then maybe the fear would lessen. Then the real damage began.

The Patriot Act, wiretapping without warrants, rounding up thousands of Arab named or Arab looking people. All done to protect us from the fear. Send our troops into a sovereign nation (Afghanistan) to bring the evil doers back “Dead or alive.” We were at war. Those who objected were called traitor or worse. We were at war but the enemies we captured on the battle field, or those turned over to our forces by helpful warlords, weren’t prisoners of war. They were Enemy Combatants, therefore the Geneva Conventions didn’t apply. About that time maybe we should have been concerned. Maybe we should have asked more and better questions. But the fear just burned deeper.

They started to remodel Gitmo to handle all of the Enemy Combatants. Why didn’t we wonder why? We have plenty of prisons in this country. We sure know how to house prisoners. With 5% of the world’s population we hold 25% of the world’s prisoners. Yet why didn’t we see that housing captured combatants at a leased Naval base in Cuba, of all places, was somehow wrong? Then came the drum beat to attack Iraq. The entire endeavor was based on fear. WMD and mushroom clouds of fear. The Bush Doctrine of preventive war can be restated: “If we’re afraid of you we can attack and invade your country.” No real proof was needed and none was offered. When Saddam claimed to not have WMD we refused to believe him. The fear was everywhere.

I won’t outline the whole sad history of the past eight years. But it is important to reflect, as each new revelation of torture by agents of the United States of America comes to light, that there were reasons that our leaders went that far. Listen to the pundants. Listen to Rush and Hannity and O’Reilly as they tell us, on the one hand, that what was done in our name wasn’t torture, while also claiming that it was highly effective. Listen to the fear underlying Chaney’s words as he tells us that we are now less safe because we’ve stopped using torture. Listen to the interviews of citizens who don’t want Gitmo prisoners relocated to their city or state. These people are still deathly afraid. Why?

I think, in a way, that it goes back to the very nature of the enemy. Americans are the most religious people in the developed world. We understand the power, and duty, of faith. Ask your average church going born again Christian if he or she would defend their faith to the death and they would most likely say yes. Now look at the enemy. We know that they’re very religious, but we don’t really understand what Islam is. But the single most important factor is: THEY’RE WILLING TO COMMIT SUICIDE AS A TACTIC! That terrifies us and really terrified the Bush administration. You can’t talk to a suicider. How can you negotiate a peace treaty with folks who strap bombs around their waist and blow themselves, and some of us, to kingdom come? In WWII when the Kamikaze pilots dove their planes at our ships we could at least try to shoot them down. Not these guys. They hijack jetliners and fly them into buildings.

Our fear has imbued our enemy with superhuman powers. They must be stopped by any means. Listen to the torture defenders. Why, we have to torture them and, by god, if we tell them how we do it they can prepare and we’ll never expose the next plot until it’s too late. Fear is the only explanation that makes any sense. The torture defenders would take away all of our civil rights, all of our moral high ground, all of our constitutional protections just to stop these unstoppable terrorists. They are that afraid.

I am not. What the torture defenders forget is that the true price of freedom in a free society is freedom. Freedom from the torturer’s horrible tools. Freedom from the pounding on the door in the dark of night. Freedom from being strip searched in order to board an airplane. Freedom from the wiretap and the spying camera eye. Mr. Bush, Mr. Chaney, Mr. Hannity, et al, need to understand this. I sure hope Mr. Obama does.