And Now for Something Not at All Different

Do you need a break from reading about the Gulf of Mexico and weeping? Well, go read this and continue weeping for what we have become. Or maybe for what humanity has always been, what we were supposed to leave behind when George Washington built that city on the hill, but what we have been unable to escape.

Physicians for Human Rights has released a 27-page report which clearly documents what we already know: The Bush Administration tortured detainees. The more startling conclusion is this: The Bush Administration experimented on those detainees in order to refine, define and justify their torture regimen.

Nothing like setting the bar, jumping over it, then defining that bar for everyone else as some sort of standard. Yet that's exactly what they did.

We're not supposed to overreach in our metaphors, in our stark comparisons, for fear of understating the horrors of the Inquisitors and the Nazis while simultaneously overstating the evils perpetrated by our government, in our name. Because we're not that bad. We can't be that bad and still be us, because Americans don't do those things. Except that they have, and they do, and it's been utterly without hesitation or reflection beyond wondering exactly how much shit they--we--can get away with before the stench becomes so bad that even the most resolutely entrenched-in-denial among us can't look the other way any more.

This is not what my grandfathers fought for in World War II, to borrow a meme that's currently popular among right-wing Arizonans aghast that their forebears sweated and bled to allow Mexican gardeners to prune the oleanders in Scottsdale for three bucks an hour. That aside, this is not why they fought, not why my great-uncle Jim was shot down and killed over Hildesheim, not why my grandfather's friend Virgil took a bullet in the spine at Anzio and came home in a wheelchair. It's also not why my brother left the better part of his spirit in Baghdad and not why his best friend bled out in Kandahar. Unfortunately, his buddy's death and the rest of the deaths and maimings he saw on a daily basis mean torture is simply, to him, justified retribution. The rage and hatred of war left him not giving a rat's ass about torture as long as it happened to the bad guys.

Our leadership is supposed to rise above the blood in the eyes of the guys on the ground. It didn't.

Holy Shit.

Jonathan Mann was on Maddow a couple nights back, singing about Paul Krugman. Where that was delightful, this is horrifying. This is a song actually "written" by the Bush lawyers who decided to twist both language and law to the point that up is down and black is white and waterboarding is an afternoon at the beach, a song whose lyrics were taken without modification from the memoradum explaining how detainees could be tortured without having to call it that. This is where the pick-your-own-adventure moral constructs of the Bush administration have brought us. If Obama does nothing else in his adminstration, it's his absolute moral duty to bring us back.



(Homer found this first)

Oh. Guess That's Settled, Then.

Last week I wondered if Obama's troubling decision to let bygones be bygones and not prosecute order-followin' CIA torturers was simply a token olive branch to the pro-torture camp, a gesture that would free him up to go after the White House legal flunkies who wrote the memos stating that torture was fine and dandy in the first place.

Apparently not.

Asked Sunday on ABC's "This Week" about the fate of those officials, Emanuel said Obama believes they "should not be prosecuted either, and that's not the place that we go."

O_o. Is there anyone we can prosecute, or do we just leave all-expense-paid tickets to Madrid lying around in strategic locations and sit back and hope the Spaniards follow through? This is getting more disillusioning by the day.

Obama: Let Bygones be Bygones

Hmm. Ah...

President Obama absolved CIA officers from prosecution for harsh, painful interrogation of terror suspects Thursday, even as his administration released Bush-era memos graphically detailing — and authorizing — such grim tactics as slamming detainees against walls, waterboarding them and keeping them naked and cold for long periods.

Obama said he wanted to move beyond "a dark and painful chapter in our history."

So the people who conducted activities best described--especially by one-time candidate Obama--as torture are getting a free pass. Because... well, apparently because Bush administration lawyers wrote memos saying the techniques were A-OK, that, say, subjecting a person to controlled drowning right up to but not crossing the line into actual death is not torture because it does not result in "severe pain or suffering." Apparently it tickles so much that people decide to talk just to stop the laughter, and that's why the CIA was so desperate to keep it on the list of approved extreme interrogation measures.

Jesus. Well, okay, so now we have a bunch of torturers exonerated because "I was just following orders" is now back in vogue as a bulletproof excuse. Is this simply the opening gambit in a larger gameplan to go after the people who wrote the memos? Or the people who asked other people to write the memos and then signed off on them? Or possibly their boss, or their boss' boss? Because after making so much noise on the campaign trail about Bush ceding the moral high ground with his torturefest, issuing get-out-of-jail-free cards is kind of a bad idea, isn't it?

Obama disagreed, saying in a statement, "Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past."

Really? Really, Barack? Please tell me that was just a very unfortunate choice of words and not an accurate representation of your--or, more saliently, your Justice Department's--viewpoint on the last administration's war crimes. Nothing will be gained? Nothing will be regained. Like our standing in the world and the trust of our allies. Or our national integrity. We have already laid blame for the past, so in that sense you're right in not seeing the need for more resources to be spent in that direction. Making amends for the past and bringing to justice the people who led us down that path? Lots and lots will be gained by spending time and energy in that arena. Some stuff you can let slide. Other stuff you need to exact retribution for. Please don't think for a moment that you can pass off the torture doctrine as belonging to the former category.

Michael "I Dunno" Mukasey Nomination Going to Vote

Spectacular. The Attorney General nominee isn't sure whether waterboarding is torture or not--no word on whether he takes the Giuliani "it depends on who does it" tack or the Limbaugh "splashing a little water in a guy's face" angle--and Bush says it's an unfair question because he hasn't been briefed on top secret enhanced interrogation techniques and Feinstein and Schumer say he's the best we can expect from this administration and he promises to enforce any future laws that may ban torture, should the Congress ever grow a spine, so bam, there you have it.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) spoke out furiously against Mukasey's answers on torture, specifically dismissing the assurances the nominee gave to Schumer last week that he would enforce an anti-torture law if Congress were to pass one.

"He will in fact enforce the laws that we pass in the future? Can our standards have really sunk so low?" Kennedy said. "Enforcing the law is the job of the attorney general. It's a prerequisite, not a virtue."

In related news, reported by The Guardian,

The top legal adviser within the US state department, who counsels the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, on international law, has declined to rule out the use of the interrogation technique known as waterboarding even if it were applied by foreign intelligence services on US citizens. ...

When Mr Sands said he found Mr Bellinger's inability to exclude waterboarding on Americans very curious, the US official replied: "Well, I'm not willing to include it or exclude it. Our justice department has concluded that we just don't want to get involved in abstract discussions."

I am not sure where abstraction comes in to this discussion, unless the question of precisely how inhuman it is to convince a person he's seconds away from death by drowning has suddenly moved from the concrete, material world to the lofty sphere of philosophy. Perhaps by "abstract discussion," Mr. Bellinger means to say "hypothetical question," such as "when George Bush and Dick Cheney attempt to travel to their retirement estates in Uruguay in January 2008, will they be subject to arrest and prosecution for crimes against humanity, much like Augusto Pinochet was and, more recently, Donald Rumsfeld almost was?"

If Mr. Bellinger and Mr. Mukasey require more information to help them move from abstraction to reality, they can give waterboarding.org a look; the site was helpfully put together with people just like them (actually, people exactly them) in mind.

Waterboarding.org would like to offer to help the nominee become more familiar with water-based coercive interrogation techniques. Using unclassified sources, news reports, and historical records we are attempting to put together as clear a picture as possible of this technique, its history, its legality, and the scope of its use. We are also attempting to organize a group of doctors, paramedics, lawyers, and volunteers to allow anyone who remains confused or unclear on the details of waterboarding to safely subject themselves to as much of the technique as they are willing to endure.

We look forward to advising, educating, and assisting Michael Mukasey, future candidates, public figures, and anyone else who professes ignorance of our nation's most controversial coercive interrogation technique.

Well, Who Could Have Known?

Back at the end of 2005, in response to accounts of the abuse of detainees at Guantanamo and other military prisons, Congress voted to ban cruel, inhumane, and degrading interrogation techniques--or "torture," in the quaint language of the Geneva Conventions--including simulated drowning and exposure to extreme cold. The New York Times reports that secret DOJ memoranda released yesterday maintain that such techniques are, in fact, legal.

One 2005 opinion gave the Justice Department’s most authoritative legal approval to the harshest agency techniques, including head slapping, exposure to cold and simulated drowning, even when used in combination.

The second opinion declared that under some circumstances, such techniques were not “cruel, inhuman or degrading,” a category of treatment that Congress banned in December 2005.

Administration officials said Thursday that there was no contradiction between the still-secret rulings and an opinion made public by the Justice Department in December 2004 that declared torture “abhorrent” and appeared to retreat from the administration’s earlier assertion of broad presidential authority to conduct harsh interrogations.

So when George Bush stood up before the nation and said, "We don't torture," it was purely an exercise in semantics. We don't torture because we can simply change the definition of torture to whatever we want it to be. It's abhorrent enough that the government would move the goalposts on this one, but doing it in secret while throwing up a facade of ethics and integrity simply reeks.

Another Day, Another Little Death of America

Sigh. I listened to too much of the debate over the Detainee Act today and went home with a splitting headache. Far too much went on to dissect in detail here, particularly without a transcript, but a couple things stand out in my mind.

During the waning half hour or so of the debate, before the proposed amendments to the bill were brought to a vote, Lindsay Graham argued that Geneva has never applied in this war because the enemy doesn't wear a uniform or fight in conventional ways. So the enemy isn't entitled to any protections at all. Not even the most basic tenets of human decency apply, apparently; by his arguments an SS officer caught machine-gunning a roomful of civilians would be absolutely protected from torture and entitled to humane treatment by virtue of that natty black uniform with shiny insignia, while a guy in jeans plucked off the street on a tip in Baghdad or Kandahar is fair game.

The moment that made my brain utterly fold in on itself in protest came during John Warner's response to Ted Kennedy's impassioned speech in favor of the Kennedy Amendment, which would have required the US State Department to notify all the other countries in the world of exactly what interrogation methods/torture tactics would be considered war crimes if perpetrated against a captured American soldier. Warner scoffed at this because (1) we can't predict in advance precisely what methods someone's going to come up with in the future, and so shouldn't limit ourselves to a finite set of war crimes (despite having, just ten minutes before, voted against the Byrd Amendment that would have required a reassessment of the interrogation protocols after five years) and (2) congressional oversight will prevent the CIA from doing anything we wouldn't want done to our own guys anyway (despite having, just ten minutes before the Byrd Amendment, voted against the Spector Amendment that would have mandated full congressional oversight of CIA interrogation programs).

Warner assured us that aggessive interrogation tactics are not really torture but, instead, are consistent with American values. Bush has been handed the power to decide who's an enemy combatant, and to hold such people indefinitely with an explicit provision preventing them from appealing their detention to a higher court. Bush gets to decide what's torture and what's simply "aggressive interrogation," and anyone who has inflicted what the civilized world would label "torture" on detainees--even those found later to not be terrorists or insurgents--has blanket immunity. Pandora's Box has been reopened, and this time it's the license for inhumane behavior that's gotten out.

John McCain voted against the Spector Amendment (congressional oversight). John McCain voted against the Byrd Amendment (reassess the program in five years). John McCain voted against the Kennedy Amendment (define interrogation tactics and detainee treatment that the US will consider war crimes if perpetrated against US servicemembers). John McCain voted to approve the Detainee Treatment Act. John McCain, ex-POW, voted to condone torture.

I don't know the America John Warner was talking about, or the set of values torture is supposed to be consistent with. Neither one is mine.

One Day, Two Hearings, Little New

Two separate congressional confabs today, although only one officially reached the level of "hearing." Naturally, that's the one I'm finding zero coverage of tonight on my first sweep through the online editions of the major papers. You know, the judiciary committee's hearings on whether it's okay to dispense with habeas corpus when dealing with suspected terrorists, unlawful combatants, shifty-lookin' Arabs acquired through dubious means... okay, after some digging I found a few stories. Interestingly, Specter's setting himself up as the anti-White House maverick on this one. It was certainly contentious.

Several witnesses told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the protections should be afforded all detainees.

Retired Adm. John Hutson says habeas corpus protects the innocent.

He says it would give "no comfort" to any terrorists who have fought the US.

But Texas Senator John Cornyn says "enemies of the US captured on the battlefield" shouldn't be afforded protections that are in the Constitution.

Never mind that an open-ended war on a noun makes the entire world a battlefield, to say nothing of the fact that I find it extremely curious that a man who has argued so vociferously that detainees should have no protections because they (1) don't wear a uniform or (2) fight out in the open in conventional ways should be so fixated on the no-rights detentions being okay because they were captured "on the battlefield" as if both sides were lining up in ranks and marching broadside into each other. As if they all actually had been captured with guns in their hands rather than being sold out by a rival warlord holding a grudge or maybe, just maybe, being grabbed under false pretenses on a layover in the States on their way home to Canada. Admiral Hutson summed it up best:

Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, a former judge advocate general of the Navy who is now the president of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H., told the senators they would be winning a “military victory’’ if they managed to preserve habeas corpus rights for detainees.

Terrorists “want to bring us down to their level,’’ he said. “Military doctrine says you have to hold the high ground.’’

The other event today was a Democrat-sponsored forum on the state of the war. This received considerable airplay and bandwidth, and featured three retired generals--all of whom served in Iraq--blasting the administration and Rumsfeld in particular.

"I believe that Secretary Rumsfeld and others in the administration did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war in Iraq," retired Maj. Gen. John R. S. Batiste told a forum conducted by Senate Democrats.

A second military leader, retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, assessed Rumsfeld as "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically."

Predictably, the Republican leadership (which was not in attendance; they were too busy whinging about the considerable costs involved in giving detainees basic judicial rights) called it a pre-election stunt (with straight faces!):

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a member of the Armed Services Committee, dismissed the Democratic-sponsored event as "an election-year smoke screen aimed at obscuring the Democrats' dismal record on national security."

"Today's stunt may rile up the liberal base, but it won't kill a single terrorist or prevent a single attack," Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a statement. He called Rumsfeld an "excellent secretary of defense."

No comments were forthcoming from Sen. McConnell about the recent National Intelligence Estimate that concluded the war in Iraq has actually created more terrorists and increased the likelihood of future attacks. Nor about the news today that we have, at present, no more than three combat brigades available for emergency deployment. That's 10,000 guys, tops.

Think about the billions of dollars that have been squandered in Iraq, the thousands of lives wasted for Bush's, Rumsfeld's, Cheney's lies. Think about the couple hundred who have died in Afghanistan as their troop numbers and equipment have been inexorably drawn down, down, to the point of such ineffectiveness that the Taliban are resurgent and Osama's boys have found new digs in Pakistan. These fuckwits abandoned their first war before it was over to start a new one we can never honorably end, and in the process have left this country more vulnerable and less ready to respond to a disaster than it has ever been. And still they have the gall to stand up there and defend themselves and chide those of us who are screaming that enough is enough.

Predicted Response

It didn't take long for the predicted righty responses to surface, and it may have taken less time than I thought since I didn't wade into Redstate and its ilk until this afternoon. A sample comment from Redstate:

At americablog there are posters acting like it is an appropriate response to American's "torturing" prisoners.

That's an interesting misreading. The Americablog comments I've read so far are acting like it's a predictable response, but I have yet to find anyone who thinks torturing (or "hideously torturing," in case drawing-room variety torture isn't heinous enough) captured American soldiers is appropriate. The consensus is grief for the men's families and continually growing outrage at the administration's refusal to adopt a timetable for getting the hell out of there.

And wait for it, waaaaaiiiit for it... oh, never mind, you don't actually have to wait for it after all. As expected, we also immediately had:

What they won't tell you is that to desert Iraq would be to dishonor their deaths, and to throw away what they were fighting to accomplish.

By this logic we will never, never leave Iraq until the very last man dies. To borrow the White House's favorite nautical metaphor for this desert hell, "staying the course" dead into the path of a hurricane sacrifices the ship and all hands for no purpose other than the captain's ego. "What they were fighting to accomplish" was thrown away a while ago when the adminstration failed to consider and plan for the likelihood of post-Saddam sectarian conflict, whether you want to call it civil war or not. It was thrown away when they failed to adjust patrol protocols and tactics to deal with IEDs, which created an atmosphere of even more paranoia and fear than normal combat does, and when the chain of command failed to control the boots' reactions to seeing their buddies randomly blown into bits while riding in under-armored vehicles. It was shot all to hell when Abu Ghraib was tacitly condoned, when white phosphorous was used on Fallujah, when soldiers abused detainees and marines shot innocent children in retribution and airstrikes accidentally blew away families rather than the insurgents in the house next door.

My brother came back alive and physically sound from Baghdad two years ago, before things really started to go to shit. If he hadn't, I wouldn't be beating the drums for more young guys to go and die themselves just because he did, out of some twisted logic telling me that his death could only make sense if thousands more lost their lives in service of the same hopeless cause.

I'm not going wading any more today. I'm sick enough to my stomach as it is without reading more tripe about how the "leftist media" are making this look worse than it really is by publishing pictures of the dead men intended to make them look as young as possible, and by talking about how much their families will miss them. The cluelessness of the people those kids thought they were fighting to defend is part of the tragedy too.