Torture is in the news again, big time. I just wrote a post about it on a local newspaper’s Web site, in response to someone’s comment about 
the effectiveness of waterboarding. The writer – whose anonymous user name suggests he/she is a veteran – makes the claim that waterboarding produced the intelligence that foiled the plot to fly a jetliner into the library tower in Los Angeles. Of course, the claim falls apart on the most superficial level. The Bush administration took credit for foiling the plot in February of 2002; the torture (“enhanced interrogation”) program went into effect in August of that year. I can understand the writer’s confusion, though. There has been so much garbled noise around this issue in the past few weeks, much of it stirred up by that bloated ex-Vice President of ours, whom Gore Vidal once likened to “300 pounds of condemned veal in a gray suit.” Yes, Dick Cheney, evident war criminal, wants more memos released – the ones that show how effective his war crimes truly were in producing actionable intelligence. I say, tell it to the jury.
Cheney’s not the only one blowing smoke, though he’s certainly among the most visible. (Christ, you can see him from space!) Other ex-minions of the Bush team are creeping their way through the media hive, popping up here or there to offer a spirited defense of the indefensible. Some, like Phillip Zelikow, Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission and adviser to Condi Rice, have appeared mainly to distance themselves from the controversy. But a lot of the noise reflects the same type of argument Bush himself used throughout his presidency – this is not torture, and it is being used to keep your families safe. Doesn’t matter that it breaks both domestic laws and international law. Doesn’t matter that aside from being fundamentally wrong and immoral, it is ineffective and known to produce unreliable information. (In fact, torture of the kind implemented by the last administration was formulated specifically to elicit false confessions.) Doesn’t matter that the examples they provide of terror plots foiled through torture hold not an ounce of water. The big lie continues.
I heard Pat Buchanan on MSNBC this past Friday defending “enhanced interrogation techniques” partly on the basis that most Americans favor their use against terrorists. I don’t know that this is true, but it wouldn’t surprise me. People have 
become so used to the idea, both through the actions of their government and via television shows like “24,” that they consider the “smoking gun” scenarios constantly referred to in the media as plausible. This is a bit like the phenomenon of judges – actual trial judges – deciding cases partly on the basis of science used in shows like “CSI”. It’s as if NASA started basing everything they do on the scientific principles embodied by “Lost in Space.” That’s kind of scary… almost as scary as the torture itself. If we’re getting that detached from reality when we set policy or even just consider its effects, we are in “deep doo-doo,” as Bush’s father used to say. Just the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded more than 180 times over the course of a single month should indicate that, as a “smoking gun” remedy, this does not work.
In any case, forget whether or not psychos on the talk shows say it works. If we resort to Cheney’s hammer, we’re sacrificing what’s left of our humanity.
luv u,
jp
You hear that sound? A little subtle, eh? Well, it’s cotton on cotton. That’s me turning my pockets inside out and shrugging my shoulders. Bottom scraped, my friends.
our ideas had gone flat. The portraits with Lincoln didn’t pan out. People refused to believe he actually was Lincoln. I think it was because we had one Lincoln on both ends of town. (We nuked our own credibility on that one, I’m afraid.) There was a suggestion – I think it may have come from me – that we put the man-sized tuber up for sale, but that didn’t fly either. (The bottom fell out of the tuber market months ago.) It seemed as though the only thing left was to start searching for honest remunerative employment. Odd jobs, perhaps. Like bending pretzels and raising alligators. (Apologies to Mad comics.)
Mill out as a luxury resort hotel! Apart from the luxury, we have everything we need. I could print tickets. Matt could borrow some floral umbrellas from the local sporting goods store. John could stop by the lumber yard and pick up some groceries. We could rename the mill something like “Falcon’s Harbor” or “Happy Acres”, even though there’s no harbor and there are no acres. (It’s what’s called the “Pelican Cove” principle, after a planned community by that name that had neither pelicans nor a cove.) We could start selling reservations on the internets – just post a message on any old site and patrons will flock toward us like lemmings. It’s just that easy.
triumphalist rhetoric about some military action against a “worthy” opponent. But the U.S. Navy vs. some teenage pirates… that’s about as lopsided a contest as I can imagine. Sure, they needed to get that ship captain out alive. Perhaps there was no other way to resolve the standoff – I can’t say, really. But this is nothing to crow about, and certainly not some enormous success that strikes a blow against tyranny. These pirates are desperate young men driven to a bandit’s life by circumstances we can barely comprehend. The very life’s blood of international commerce flows right past their shores in the form of these enormous freighters and tankers, and they see this as a meager opportunity to scrape some wealth out of a global system that passes them by. Not surprising that they grasp this nettle, even at risk of life and limb.
control their coastal waters, they have been unable to compete with unregulated fishing vessels from elsewhere in the region as well as Europe. Groups of Somalis have attempted to interdict illegal fishing, and these efforts have been conflated with piracy. There has also been a history of illegal dumping of toxic materials in Somali waters – something