Tag Archives: Cheney

Political Rants

What worked.

The Senate report on torture (a.k.a. war crimes) perpetrated by our government is out, and of course, the vast majority of media and political commentary misses the point by a mile. As is often the case with discussion of this issue, the question of efficacy is paramount. Did torture “work”? Did it yield the intelligence our government needed, for instance, to conduct its unauthorized raid on a sovereign country (Pakistan) and assassinate the prime suspect in the 9/11/2001 terror attacks (rather than bring him to trial)? Does it, more generally, extract reliable, “actionable” information, or just a bunch of blather that victims of torture usually pipe up just to make the agony stop?

Dressed for The HagueThis discussion is not limited to the full-on, proud of all we did crew, like the execrable Dick Cheney, snickering from his podium, confident that he will never pay for his crimes against humanity. This is the discussion being advanced by Senators who supposedly oppose these interrogation techniques. They didn’t work, they say. No useful intelligence was gained. What a strange conversation to be having at this moment in history, when we are confronted with detailed evidence of this latest foray (far from the first) into systematic abuse of those we seek to dominate and suppress.

These are crimes. They are explicit violations of both U.S. law and international law. Whether or not they “work” is immaterial, though I think it’s been fairly well demonstrated that you can’t torture the truth out of people. When someone robs a bank or shoots their neighbors in order to steal their car, we aren’t particularly interested in whether or not they successfully obtained the goods. When people break the law, they should be held accountable and have their day in court. That’s a conservative principle of long provenance.

Of course, what the torture program did produce was intelligence linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks. That was, of course, completely bogus, waterboarded out of Al Libbi. It’s not hard to imagine how this worked. The Bush administration wanted to invade Iraq. They were, at some level, aware that torture may not be an ideal tool for extracting the truth, but it DOES work at getting people to say what you want to hear. Why else waterboard someone 80 times or more? In the end, they got what they wanted – a rationale for invasion.

So … torture works, if your aim is to produce incendiary lies. That’s what Bush/Cheney wanted, and the torture program didn’t disappoint.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Justice in America.

Bradley Manning is guilty, per his military proceeding. That’s the way it’s going to be. The government did not manage to pin the “aiding the enemy” charge on him, but because we live in the era of massive prosecutorial over-charging, he was convicted on about 20 other counts. It’s likely that, on top of abusive pre-trial detention amounting to at least psychological torture (and probably physical torture as well – exposure to extreme temperature, sleep deprivation, etc.) Manning will be treated to decades in prison for the crime he committed; that dastardly crime for which there can be no excuses given, no quarter offered. “Justice” has been served.

Guilty of telling us the truth about us.What was the crime again? Oh, yes. Exposing the sprawling criminality of our foreign policy, namely the Iraq war and the Afghan war, plus releasing a raft of diplomatic cables relating to prosecution of the global war on tactics … I mean, terror. Heinous indeed. Perhaps someone needs to remind me again why the man who informed us of the war’s true impact is going to jail while the men who started the war are living a comfortable – and loudly opinionated – retirement. Rank has its privileges, to be sure.

One thing Manning reminded us of was the fact that, to the federal government – the permanent national security state that persists through administrations of both parties – we are the enemy. Manning was accused of aiding the enemy, and that’s what he did. He gave us the information we need to fully understand the global war being fought in our names. Armed with that knowledge, we could compell our government to stop the killing, the torturing, the endless detentions, etc., because we live in a formal democracy. That makes us a threat to the persistence of the national security state. That makes us the “enemy”.

I know a medical professional whose son is in the military. He had four tours in Iraq, was knocked around by IED explosions. He lives in pain. He’s had his neck operated on, the doctors fusing his vertebrae together. He’s losing his sight. Worse yet, he can’t work but he can’t get decent disability benefits unless he stays in the Army for another 150 days. He’s a very young man with two young children, and his life is ruined. I hear about him, the many thousands like him, the many, many more thousands killed, and I see Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Pearl, Wolfowitz, Feith, and the rest of them, and their comfortable retirements.

That’s justice? Not quite.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Big crimes and little ones.

I’m going to do a brief post about false equivalency, and I want to preface this by saying that I am against the Obama drone war and the ongoing program of detainee detention and (I’m certain) abuse. This would be wrong under any president, and no less under this one. In addition to being morally bankrupt, it is strategically incoherent; worse, detrimental to our long term security. We are, in essence, investing in future generations of terrorists, determined to do us harm based on the carnage we have carried out on their persons, their families, their communities.

Bush explosion or Obama explosion?
Bush explosion or Obama explosion?

That said, I also want to take issue with this argument I keep hearing that this administration is as bad as the last one with respect to extralegal killing, aggressive foreign policy, etc. It is bad enough to be against, bad enough to protest, but if we are comparing Obama with Bush II, there is simply no comparison. It was Bush who started both the Afghan and the Iraq wars, one of which we are still engaged in. These actions alone resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, uncounted thousands of abused detainees, both at the hands of U.S. personnel and under the merciless attentions of our grisly allies.

There is a tendency to minimize the crimes of the Bush era. Joe Scarborough, for instance, talked this week about the last adminstration having waterboarded “three people”. This is ludicrous. Of course, the most famous instances were those three high-value detainees he’s referencing, but there certainly were other instances of waterboarding, and many, many more instances of far worse abuses in Baghram, in Abu Garaib, and elsewhere. We like to shrink the past down to a digestible size, but this is just willful ignorance. Make no mistake – If there were an effective International Criminal Court, Bush/Cheney would be in line ahead of Obama. But they would all be in that line.

We can acknowledge that both administrations are dead wrong on this. But when it comes to comparisons, don’t even go there.

luv u,

jp