The sorrows of the Republican Party

Barbara O’Brien at her Mahablog took the occasion of Arlen Specter's switch to the Democratic Party to muse on the state of the Republican Party in What Do They Expect? 04/29/09:

Most political parties exist to represent some part of public opinion. But today’s GOP drives away any part of the public that doesn’t represent its opinion.

In many ways, IMO, the Republican Party is acting like an apocalyptic cult — a small number of true believers waiting for some Big Cataclysmic Event that’s going to change everything, to their advantage. For that reason, present reality doesn’t interest them, because present reality is just a temporary aberration (which it may be, but not in the way they think). Thus, movement conservatives brush off opinion polls that show their positions to be wildly unpopular. They don’t need to worry about election losses, shrinking party membership, an aging political base, or senior senators who jump ship. They don’t need to change with the times. They’ll be vindicated when the Mother Ship arrives. You’ll see.

And they must truly believe in the Event, because they’re betting everything on it. In 2000 they still were shrewd enough to market Dubya as a moderate — a “compassionate conservative” who liked to be photographed surrounded by smiling black children. Now they aren’t even pretending to make adjustments to political reality.

Which brings me to the question — what do they expect? What do they think is to happen that will turn the world back upright (as they see it) and put them on top? [my emphasis]

Her comment makes me think that the seeming bewilderment of the Republican Party in the early months of the Obama era may get back to what is their model of that Event: the 9/11 attacks. The shock of that attack allowed the Republican Party to go wild with their wars, their torture program, their massive domestic spying, thier "culture war" passions, their corruption of the Justice Department including segregation-style voter-suppression, their disregard of treaties and international law and economic regulations. And it allowed them to trash their enemies - Democrats first, The Terrorists second, third or fourth - as cowards, traitors, surrender monkeys, enemies of America, French, degenerates, etc.

Emotionally, maybe a lot of them just can't believe that their day in the sun on the Dark Side is over.

Tags: republican party, republicans

A tale of three columns

Gene Lyons was the first person to my knowledge who got into print with a documented account of how the Establishment press had gone off a cliff with the Whitewater scandal beginning in 1992. It was in his reporting for Harper's, later distilled into his book 2007 Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater (1996). Others had been highly critical of aspects of the American media before, Robert Perry of ConsortiumNews.com not least among them. But Lyons laid out vividly how supposedly sophisticated journalists from the New York Times and other major "quality" news organizations let themselves be led around by the nose by a small bunch of lying Arkansas segregationist sleaze-mongers.

It is still an astounding story. And our "quality" press still seems to be in freefall. Getting a solid investigative story not burdened down by questionable grants of anonymity or warped pre-scripted assumptions is becoming so rare that it seems almost a miracle when it still occasionally happens.

In Keep on whining, Republicans Salon 05/07/09, Gene takes a look at the Republicans' non-stop set of hissy-fits since President Obama took office. And manages to come up with some memorable prose in the process:

Every time you turn on the television, some Republican is ranting like the kind of barstool know-it-all who gives booze a bad name.

Or:

The average American could no more concisely define "socialism" than explain the infield fly rule in Sanskrit. But if Rush Limbaugh calls Obama a socialist, maybe [they think] a socialist's not such a terrible thing to be.

I seriously doubt it will happen. But it would be ironic if the Republicans' mindless babble about Obama's "socialism" actually did make the word more respectable in American politics, where now it is pretty much a synonym for "bad".

Despite his cynical framing of it, Gene is making an important point here. The Republican noise machine has been attacking Obama has being a socialist, a Communist, a fascist and even a Nazi as though there was effectively no difference among those concepts. And that's pretty sad. After decades of idolizing the Good War (Second World War), you might hope that virtually every American literate enough to follow Glenn Beck's train of thought (and actual literacy is probably more of a hindrance than a help there) would be able to make elementary distinctions like that.

Every time I hear that socialistcommiefasconazi business from the Republicans, I wonder how someone who can't make those elementary distinctions could process the history of Germany in the 20th century. What would they make of 1918, when democratic revolution meant the Kaiser abdicating so that the military dictatorship could install a Socialist government which then fought back a Communist revolution with the aid of democracy-hating militarists who eventually became key supporters of the Nazis who then brutally suppressed the Communists and Socialists?

The answer is, you couldn't process it coherently with such a bizarre set of assumptions. No wonder so many people think that runaway inflation in 1924 was what made Hitler's percentage of the vote shoot up suddenly - in 1930, long after that episode of inflation had been overcome and the Great Depression had set in.

Gene Lyons' column was the good one among the three I have in mind. The other two are from the Grey Lady, the New York Times, still nostalgically called "the paper of record". And, despite all its painfully evident quality problems, the Times is still widely considered the flagship of American print journalism.

The culprits are Maureen Dowd (big suprise there!) and Gail Collins, longtime editor of the Times editorial page 2001-2007, meaning that she presided over some of the worst atrocities on that paper's editorial pages.

MoDo lives for stories about politics-and-sex and for opportunities to go postal over someone acting outside of MoDo's own narrow conceptions of what proper gender roles are. So in A Complicated Question 05/06/08 (online date), she takes on Elizabeth Edwards' sad tell-all campaign about her husband John's now-famous affair. And, of course, MoDo can't write about such a thing without bringing up Monica, which she dutifully does. But despite his stereotypical male indiscretion, MoDo's gender-nut mind can't let go of her obsessions about his insufficient virility (by MoDo's insane standards): "The Edwardses reminded me of the Quayles — smooth, pretty boys married to tough, smart women they’d met at law school."

Collins also writes about sex in Bristol Palin's New Gig 05/06/08 (online date). The best thing you can say about her column is that the word "Monica" doesn't appear in it. There's nothing inherently bad in writing about Bristol Palin. But her column is pretty much on the tabloid-gossip level. Plus, she manages to gratuitously trash Britney Spears in the fourth paragraph.

If there's any substance worth discussing about the fact that Bristol Palin is out promoting abstinence for teenagers, it would be the kind of "scarlet letter" aspect to it, which goes right by the great Gail Collins. Sarah Palin is one of the leading spokespeople now for a Christian Right movement, and in her case more specifically for the Third Wave Pentecostal movement, which promotes authoritarian notions of family (and not just family!) and opposes sex outside of marriage. In practice, the notion of sending a pregnant teenager off to "live with her sister" for few months to have the baby and put it up for adoption and pretend it never happened isn't so popular any more even among fundamentalists. And, faced with the reality of a baby coming into the world with a teenaged mother, both of whom will need lots of support, even devout fundamentalists often choose love and family over woman-hating moralism.

But Bristol going around as a public advocate for abstinence looks uncomfortably like a public shaming to me. And Collins essentially gives that aspect of it a green light: "Her mom ought to know by now that the only way to protect your family from becoming tabloid fodder is to make it clear to the media that the kids are absolutely, totally off limits." Notice she seems to think it's only the tabloids who would report sensationally about the families of public figures. In other words: Collins is declaring Bristol Palin fair game for "quality" journalists like herself to use her as "fodder" along with the tabloids.

But, if you ask yourself, how did we ever end up in Iraq? How did a blatantly criminal torture program go on for years at the orders of the President? How could a failure like the federal response to Katrina happen? A significant part of how that stuff happened is that people like MoDo and Collins saw to it that a large part of the valuable journalistic real estate of the New York Times editorial pages was taken up with drivel, reported at levels often inferior to the tabloids. And with MoDo's endless trashing of Democrats for their awful, scary, contemptible failures to fit her own warped and narrow vision of what Real Men and Proper Women should be like.

They are the cream of a crop of an industry that's dying. Or, better put, because they are industry's cream of the crop, their industry is dying.

The Times must have thought their opinion pages were under-sexed lately. In yet another column for the May 7 edition, Nicholas Kristof writes about under-age prostitutes in Girls on Our Streets. The fact that the Oldest Profession is still practiced and involves terrible exploitation of women and young girls is scarcely new. But at least Kristof's column was on a public-policy issue. Kinda-sorta. He opens it with a thinly-sourced salacious tale about a policeman and a 14-year-old prostitute.

So I guess that makes this a tale of four columns.

Tags: establishment press, gene lyons, maureen dowd

98 dead: enough for several mass graves

From US interrogators may have killed dozens, human rights researcher and rights group say by John Byrne Raw Story 05/06/09:

United States interrogators killed nearly four dozen detainees during or after their interrogations, according a report published by a human rights researcher based on a Human Rights First report and followup investigations.

In all, 98 detainees have died while in US hands. Thirty-four homicides have been identified, with at least eight detainees — and as many as 12 — having been tortured to death, according to a 2006 Human Rights First report that underwrites the researcher’s posting. The causes of 48 more deaths remain uncertain.

The researcher, John Sifton, worked for five years for Human Rights Watch. In a posting Tuesday, he documents myriad cases of detainees who died at the hands of their US interrogators.

Sifton's post reference in the Raw Story piece is The Bush Administration Homicides The Daily Beast 05/05/09. Sifton reminds us that the military's and CIA's prosecution and punishment of such homicides have been less than aggressive:

Another infamous case from Iraq involved a CIA “ghost” detainee named Manadel al-Jamadi, who was tortured to death by a CIA interrogation team at Abu Ghraib prison in November 2003. Pictures of Abu Ghraib guards Charles Graner and Sabrina Harman posing with al-Jamadi’s dead body, the so-called Ice Man, were among the most notorious of the Abu Ghraib photographs published in April 2004. A CIA officer named Mark Swanner and an interpreter led the team that interrogated al-Jamadi. Nine Navy personnel were also implicated. An autopsy conducted by the U.S. military five days after al-Jamadi’s death found that the cause: “blunt force injuries complicated by compromised respiration.” Reporting by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer and NPR’s John McChesney revealed that al-Jamadi was strung up from handcuffs behind his back, a torture tactic sometimes called a “Palestinian hanging.” After an investigation, the CIA referred the case to the Department of Justice for possible criminal prosecution of the CIA personnel involved, but no charges were ever brought. Prosecutors accused 10 Navy personnel of the crime; nine were given nonjudicial punishments, such as rank reductions and letters of reprimand, and a 10th was acquitted.

His concluding comment is also very true:

Homicide presents legal issues impossible to ignore. Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice cannot conclude their deliberations about Bush-era torture policies without closely investigating the homicide cases tied to them. One cannot speak glibly of "policy differences" and "looking forward" and "distraction" when corpses are involved.

Tags: accountability for torture, torture

Obama and the Vatican

John L Allen, Jr. in Vatican's moderate line on Obama has deep roots National Catholic Reporter 05/04/09 observes that the Vatican has been much friendlier in its treatment of President Obama than some American Catholic fundamentalists have been, like those trying to get him banned from speaking at Notre Dame University.

Allen sees a couple of basic reasons for this:

First, abortion has never been the overriding focus for conservative Catholic intellectuals and activists in Europe that it is in the United States. In Europe, the dominant issue tends to be the continent's Christian identity, which is often expressed in anti-EU activism or concern about the social impact of immigration. As a result, it does not come naturally for many European Catholics, including many in the Vatican, to evaluate leaders primarily through the lens of their policies on life issues.

Second, the Holy See is a sovereign state with its own diplomatic corps and a wide range of international interests. On several matters of global concern -- including the reconstruction of Iraq, the Israeli/Palestinian problem, multilateralism in foreign policy, and nuclear disarmament -- Vatican diplomats generally believe the early signals from the Obama administration are encouraging. For that reason, some Vatican officials are reluctant to take a hard anti-Obama line, particularly on the eve of Pope Benedict XVI's much-anticipated trip to the Holy Land, which the Vatican hopes will lend momentum to the peace process. [my emphasis]

While the Vatican has generally opposed anti-immigrant extremism, it has promoted the "Europe's Christian identity" business.

There are other distinctions between the Vatican and the Catholic Church in Europe, on the one hand, and the American Christian Right on the other. Don't get me wrong: Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) is a reactionary in terms of his theology. And there is a tradition of Christian Democratic parties in Europe that gives the Vatican close allies among conservative politicians.

But Christian Democrats in Europe are not like American Republicans. The leader of the Partido Popular (PP) in Spain, a party closely aligned with the very conservative Church hierarchy there, said after the US election last November that the PP was a less conservative party than Obama. I haven't looked hard to see in what ways that might be true. But the point is that the conservative parties close to the Catholic hierarchies in their respective countries don't understand their politics in the way the US Republican Party understands theirs.

And the hardline rightwingers, those who would be impressed with European versions of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, don't tend to be aligned with overtly religious activists like US Republicans are. On the contrary, the European far right tends to be anti-clerical. Some of them promote kitschy "pagan" religions, something in America that people tend to associate more with tree-hugging New Agers.

Tags: christian right, pope benedict XVI

Ron Paul and the Republicans

Republican Congressman Ron Paul

Ron Paul attracted a good bit of positive attention from critics of the Iraq War during the 2008 Republican primaries because of his antiwar positions. But his political viewpoint is what is politely known as Old Right isolationism. Which is, in a less polite formulation, hardcore anti-union, segregationist, hardcore opposed to government regulations of business, fond of conspiracy theories (especially ones in which Israel or Jews loom large), anti-women's rights and nationalistic/unilateralist/jingoistic to the point of opposing any concept of international law other than narrow trade regulations.

Ron Paul has also been one of the prime conduits through which ideas from the crackpot Bircher/white supremacist/"Patriot" movement far right have been "mainstreamed" into the Republican Party.

So I was interested though not especially pleased to see this piece by David Weigel Ron Paul’s Economic Theories Winning GOP Converts Washington Independent 05/05/09 on the subject of what purports to be Paul's growing influence among Congressional Republicans.

I was particularly struck by the references to what the "libertarian" right - which would be known in Europe as rightwing liberals, a concept that really doesn't compute in the American political vocabulary - call "the Austrian school" of economics, as represented in particular by Frederick von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.

I have a friend who holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Vienna. I asked her one day out of curiosity if she had studied what some Americans call the "Austrian school" of economics. She was unaware that there was such a thing. Although she did remember having heard of Von Hayek. Which made me wonder if maybe we shouldn't call them the "rightwing American school".

Jamie Galbraith has a cute anecdote about the "Austrian school" in the text of a portion of a debate he recently held with former House Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey, reproduced in Causes of the Crisis Texas Observer 05/01/09. Jamie's father John Kenneth was the best-known liberal economist of the 1960s and the two or three following decades. Jamie said in his speech:

Leader Armey spoke to you of his admiration for Austrian economics. I can’t resist telling you that when the Vienna Economics Institute celebrated its centennial, many years ago, they invited, as their keynote speaker, my father [John Kenneth Galbraith]. The leading economists of the Austrian school - including von Hayek and von Haberler - returned for the occasion. And so my father took a moment to reflect on the economic triumphs of the Austrian Republic since the war, which, he said, “would not have been possible without the contribution of these men.” They nodded - briefly - until it dawned on them what he meant. They’d all left the country in the 1930s.

The Iraq War gave the Ron Paul-type Old Right isolationists to get a hearing on foreign policy among a wider audience than would have been attracted by the dystopian dogmas of "Austrian" economics. Antiwar.com and The American Conservative are two sources that have notably benefited from their antiwar stance while also producing extreme "free market" economic agendas.

Tags: old right, radical right, ron paul

What George McGovern says

Tags: afpak war, afghanistan war, george mcgovern

AfPak War

Pat Lang observes that it is not at all clear that the Obama administration has a clear strategy for Afghanistan (Iraq and Afghanistan Policy 04/26/09):

The announced Obama policy set the goals as essentially negative actions intended to confound and disrupt America's enemies. Covert action, limited SOF commando strikes, political support for our friends, some measure of basic infrastructure aid (roads, etc), these would be the kind of tools in such an effort. In spite of the announcement of these reasonable goals and implied actions, there continues to be a constant drum beat of talk, leaks, panel discussions in which people both within and without the administration insist that the real policy is a full blown COIN [counterinsurgency] campaign in which the United States will commit itself to an effort to create a socety [sic] in Afghanistan so attractive that rural Pushtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, etc. will support a unifying national government against Islamic zealots who do not believe in the legitmiacy [sic] of national governments at all. Such an effort would be hugely expensive and would last for decades. Well, which is it, Obama Administration, which is it? These two visions of the future are not comptible. [sic] [my emphasis]

The good news here is that if Obama wants to increase the US political and military investment in a situation that cannot turn out well for us, it's better that he's limiting the amount of new "investment".

And I'm happy to hear that Defense Secretary Robert Gates is publicly expressing caution about raising NATO troop levels higher than those already announced in Afghanistan. In an interview broadcast 05/03/09 on Fareed Zakaria's GPS show on CNN, Gates said:

ZAKARIA: You once said that the chief lesson you learned from 40 years in government was the limits of power. So, apply that lesson to Afghanistan today.

What does it -- what do you think of -- what are the limits to what America can do in Afghanistan?

GATES: Well, I have been quoted, accurately, as saying I have real reservations about significant further commitments of American military -- of the American military to Afghanistan, beyond what the president has already approved.

The Soviets were in there with 110,000, 120,000 troops. They didn't care about civilian casualties. And they couldn't win.

If there's ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience. And I think there's a lot we can learn from that. ...

I think we will have -- between the American military commitment and our coalition partners, the ISAF partners --we will have about 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. That's only about 10,000 shy of what the Russians had. And I think we need to think about that. [my emphasis]

In a more recent post on Policy in Afghanistan 04/28/09, Lang has the following observations:

I think that we Americans need to stop exagerating [sic] the level of threat to the United States that originates or will originate in Afghanistan. The temptation to see the activities and scheming of takfiri jihadis as parts of a world war between the Islamic "House of War" and the rest of us has caused us to begin to re-design our society(ies) for total war against an all powerful and virtually eternal enemy. ...

In Afghanistan there is always war; war for resources, honor, leadership, authenticity of Islamic identity. The causes of war are endless. There are many different peoples in Afghanistan; Pushtun, Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara, Turkmen, Nuristani, etc. etc. etc. Many of these groups speak mutually incomprehensible languages. They are mostly Sunni, but some, like the Hazara, are Shia. What we see now in Afghanistan is NOT a "theater of war" in a "global war on terror." Rather, it is a continuation of the ancient Afghan pattern of traditional warfare among the peoples, their groupings old and new, and sectarian definitions of Islamic truth. The minions of the Al-Qa'ida related zealot groups are scattered and hidden in the "landscape" of ever shifting conflict that is Afghanistan. They are like raisins in a cake. These "raisins" are a danger to the United States. They are a danger but not an "existential" threat to our "way of life" as they are sometimes described.

He actually likes the relatively restrained stated goals that Obama has articulated:

President Obama in his announcement of policy with regard to Afghanistan, said that our goal would be to disrupt, disorganize and destroy our enemies. That is an appropriate goal given the actual size and intensity of the threat. Forget about nation building in Afghanistan. Forget about generational commitments of vast amounts of treasure that we no longer possess.

I'm becoming increasingly dubious of the talk from advocates of COIN. Because for one thing, it's not at all clear that what the Army touts as its totally new COIN strategy integrating all the lessons of COINs past - like France's losing war in Algeria, or the US' losing war in Vietnam - comes down to anything much more than conventional warfare with fewer indiscriminate air strikes and slightly nicer PR. Buying off the Sunni insurgent groups was fine to give a short-term show of success. But it was a relatively short-term fix that threatened to make any Shi'a-Sunni national political reconciliation more difficult. It may have worked in the opposite direction. And sectarian violence has shown some worrisome signs of escalating significantly in Baghdad this month.

Also, I should point out that while Pat Lang cautions about exaggerating the threat from Afghanistan, he embraces the highly questionable concept that the Pushtun tribes in Pakistan could somehow seize control of Pakistan and its nuclear arsenal. His solution?

The nuclear arsenal of Pakistan makes a victory of the hillmen [Pushtuns] unacceptable to the US. As I wrote at the National Journal blog this week, a return to Pakistan Army control of the government and imposition of government control over the border country seems the only acceptable solution and the United States should stop impeding that outcome.

Putting US policy behind a coup in Pakistan would likely draw the US in even deeper to the political and internal military problems of that country. And the Pakistan-is-about-to-fall scenario sounds to me like threat inflation.

But as Obama prepares for important summit meetings in with the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan in Washington, the New York Times is pushing the Pakistani threat on its front page: Pakistan Strife Raises U.S. Doubts on Nuclear Arms by David Sanger 05/03/09.

Tags: afghanistan war, afpak war, pakistan

Torture and the law

I really do think it's a sign of serious decay in our national political culture when even writers and pundits who actually seem to be trying to take the torture crimes seriously can't really grasp the fact that we're dealing with crimes. That there are laws and treaties that the federal government is obligated to enforce by investigating and prosecuting the perpetrators.

Philip Gourevitch has a piece in the New Yorker dated 05/11/09 (accessed 05/05/09) called Interrogating Torture. In the first part of the article, he makes a decent case against the use of torture. Yes, in American politics opposing torture is an argument that has to be made now. But then he sounds fairly clueless - literate but clueless - about the laws at stake:

America is now embroiled in a debate about how, or whether, to hold the true masterminds - the former President, the former Vice-President, the former Defense Secretary, and their top lawyers - to account for their criminal policies. Here, we are on uncharted ground.

No, it's not "uncharted ground". Senior federal officials have been investigated for crimes, and some prosecuted and sent to jail. And the United States is not the first country and surely not the last to have the most senior officials commit serious crimes, including torture. Argentina is still prosecuting government and military officials who committed crimes during the 1976-83 military dictatorship known as "El Proceso". Peru just sentenced a former President to jail for substantive criminal acts.

Here in the United States, we have impeached two Presidents, arguably in both cases on charges far less serious than the acts to which former Vice President Cheney and former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice have publicly admitted. Andrew Johnson's efforts to sabotage Reconstruction were pretty bad, and like the Cheney-Bush torture policy affected democracy and the rule of law in basic ways. Anyone who thinks the acts for which Bill Clinton was impeached were remotely as serious as the torture crimes has a train-wreck version of values.

As a rule, the war-crimes prosecutions of the past century were conducted by a group of states, acting collectively, against the (usually defeated) leaders of another state.

Except for the ones that weren't. Like the prosecution and conviction of mass murdered William Calley over the My Lai massacre. Like the numerous prosecutions of American soldiers that the US has conducted in recent years over acts of torture and murder in Iraq and Vietnam. Like the very politically significant Auschwitz Trial by the West German government against former concentration camps guards and administrators in the 1960s.

When states hold their own leaders to account, it tends to happen not after an election but after a revolution, when the very premise of the ancien régime is treated as criminal.

Part of the whole point of the rule of law is that it shouldn't take a revolution to hold public officials accountable for breaking the law. If former officials can be prosecuted for bribery, embezzlement or corruption, don't tell me they can't be prosecuted for torture.

Furthermore, prosecution and punishment are not necessarily the best means to eradicate the rot from a political system, because in adjudicating systemic crimes political compromise is inevitable.

Which has what to do with the enforcement of these very serious laws and treaties? Prosecuting the torture perpetrators doesn't preclude other kinds of investigations or new legislation. And is it really true that in prosecuting crimes "political compromise is inevitable"? In the case of the 1984 Torture Convention, the treaty was designed specifically to override considerations of political compromise in prosecuting torture. It seems to me that the treaty would even remove the President's power to pardon such crimes prior to prosecution and conviction.

It is practically impossible, and politically intolerable, to contemplate holding to account every corrupted officer in the chains of command that ran between the White House and the guardhouse at Abu Ghraib or at Bagram Airbase.

Why? People who committed torture crimes should be prosecuted and removed from military command and military service. Gourevitch's argument makes no sense, other than as a plea not to prosecute torturers.

A full and public reckoning of the historical record might be less cathartic but would ultimately be more valuable than a few sensational trials.

Whatever catharsis or sensation may be involved, enforcing the laws against torture have take precedence under the torture laws and treaties. And, again, prosecuting the criminals doesn't prevent Congress or citizens groups from providing other forms of "full and public reckoning of the historical record".

In any event, President Obama, who has taken a courageous lead in bringing the issue of torture to light, and in insisting on recriminalizing it, appears to have no interest in taking any of the policymakers to court — though he has not precluded doing so. Still, to date the only Americans who have been prosecuted and sentenced to imprisonment for the criminal policies that emanated from the highest levels are ten low-ranking servicemen and women—those who took and appeared in the Abu Ghraib photographs, and embarrassed the nation by showing us what we were doing there. Charles Graner is the only one remaining in prison, serving ten years. His superior officers enjoy their freedom, and C.I.A. interrogators, who spent years committing far worse acts against prisoners than Graner did even in the darkest days at Abu Ghraib, have been assured immunity.

But, if full justice remains impossible, surely some injustices can be corrected. Whenever crimes of state are adjudicated — at Nuremberg or The Hague, Phnom Penh or Kigali — the principle of command responsibility, whereby the leaders who give the orders are held to a higher standard of accountability than the foot soldiers who follow, pertains. There can be no restoration of the national honor if we continue to scapegoat those who took the fall for an Administration — and for us all. [my emphasis]

This pseudo-liberal argument that everybody is guilty so nobody is guilty is poisonous. It's a "liberal" excuse for ignoring the laws against torture. Gourevitch stops just short of saying that we should drop all charges against everybody involved in the torture program. But given his insistence that it's not possible to prosecute everyone involved and that prosecuting high-level perpetrators would be wrong, it's hard to read his closing pitch any other way.

This notion that the whole country is guilty of torture and that by prosecuting torturers we're unfairly making the actual perpetrators scapegoats is really an argument against the rule of law. Anyone who can't separate the collective responsibility of citizens from the legal guilt of actually committing crimes is really not grasping the whole concept of the rule of law.

Tags: accountability for torture, torture

Scary

I was channel-flipping and stopped for a few seconds on C-Span. Jeb Bush was on the screen talking at some "town hall" meeting as part of the Republicans' rebranding effort. Jeb Bush. Jeb.Bush.

Tags: jeb bush

Gene Lyons on the Dark Lord of torture

After years of going to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Web site for Gene Lyons' weekly column, which just recently started appearing on Thursday rather than Wednesday, it appears that Salon is now regularly picking up his column in syndication. Which is good, not least because their fonts are more readable than the ones the Democrat-Gazette uses.

In Cheney's painful war for torture 04/30/09, he asks:

Having stampeded his ill-informed predecessor into a series of catastrophic blunders, it appears that Dick Cheney has declared open bureaucratic war -- the only kind he's ever known how to fight -- upon President Barack Obama. After decades of bullying the CIA and other intelligence agencies to affirm his crackpot worldviews, he's trying to pull the same routine on the White House to redeem his own shattered reputation. Or is it something more sinister?

Since in my mind "sinister" and "Cheney" have pretty much become synonyms, that would be easy enough to believe.

But Gene's got Cheney's number:

Perennially wrong, but never in doubt, Cheney and his circle first pooh-poohed the al-Qaida terrorist threat, then panicked after 9/11 -- quickly magnifying a band of stateless fanatics with an appetite for mass murder into yet another existential threat to the nation's survival.

He also takes a thoroughly deserves poke at The Dean Of All The Pundits:

The FBI, believing the orders [to torture] illegal, actually withdrew from the investigation -- a development conveniently overlooked by establishment Beltway pundits now bleating like sheep that despite their shamefulness, the "memos on torture represented a deliberate, and internally well-debated, policy decision, made in the proper places ... by the proper officials."

That's the Washington Post's mincing arbiter of propriety David Broder. God forbid we should criminalize decisions made by insiders; better to junk the Constitution than create awkwardness at Washington dinner parties.

And, dadgummit, from his perch down there in Arkansas, Gene Lyons seems to be able to see the nose in front of his face when it comes to criminal torture:

Prosecuting career CIA agents while Cheney does guest shots with Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh accusing Obama of weakening America's defenses, all but openly hoping for a successful terror strike with the potential to restore his faction to power, would be a grave moral and political error.

This isn't a fight Obama has wanted, but Cheney's making it one he cannot avoid. Nothing short of a full-scale investigation can cauterize this wound.

I don't want to misrepresent his preferences here. A "full-scale investigation" doesn't necessarily mean criminal prosecutions. But enforcement of the law and the relevant treaties requires the Justice Department to do a "full-scale investigation" and then prosecute the perpetrators.

Tags: accountability for torture, gene lyons, torture

John Brown

It doesn't have to be April (Confederate "Heritage" Month) for me to post about Civil War-related issues. Kevin Levin, who writes my favorite Civil War blog (there's beginning to be a whole sub-genre of them), Civil War Memory, was posting this past week about a Civil War Sesquicentennial conference he attended, including a session about John Brown (Session 3 “Making Sense of John Brown’s Raid” 04/29/09). I left a long comment on his post, and I'm passing along the basic content of it here.

I think Brown had a pretty clear plan, and a realistic one, at that. His goal was to seize weapons in Harper’s Ferry, escape from town and go into the Appalachians in the South. There he would set up guerrilla camps in the mountains and make raids to free slaves. He hoped some of the slaves would join him in the effort. His goal was to destabilize the slavery system.


He was certainly aware that the slaveowners and many non-slaveowning Southern whites had a grossly exaggerated fear of "servile insurrection", and that the kind of raids he planned would fan those fears. Which is a big part of the reason even small raids to free slaves would be destabilizing to the system.

But Brown wasn’t trying to stir up a mass slave insurrection. He planned a long-term guerrilla campaign in the mountains, where he could apply the practical skills at "slave-stealing" and guerrilla warfare he had learned in Kansas.

But apparently he did hope that more slaves would abandon their owners on the night of the Harper’s Ferry raid and come together with his core group. That’s probably at least one reason why he delayed so fatally in taking the captured weapons and moving South out of town into the mountains. He also made a deadly tactical error by allowing the passenger train that came into town to leave, because the train crew and passengers were then able to quickly spread the alarm.

And while it’s true that Brown struggled in his various businesses for much of his life, he was actually fairly successful in his early years at tanning and farming. But he got land-speculation fever, borrowed too much money, and the 1837 recession was devastating for him. He continued to struggle economically after that with less success than before.

But he wasn’t the ne’er-do-well scoundrel that advocates of the Lost Cause view like the early Robert Penn Warren tried to make him out to be. His record in business and farming probably compares well to others of his time in similar circumstances. That he didn’t become a large plantation owner or a millionaire industrialist is scarcely the sign of moral depravity that Warren and others tried to portray.

Brown’s egalitarian relationships with blacks - and his commitment to the equality of women - is an important part of his story. Part of the Lost Cause scam is to point to the white supremacist notions common to Northerners and to say, look, they were racists, too, so they couldn’t possibly have cared about slavery. The trick there is to project today’s standards back on the antebellum North and confuse people who might logically think that whites who opposed slavery would also have favored something like equal rights for African-Americans then. In actual fact, white supremacist attitudes actually very often went hand-in-hand with opposition to slavery, even bitter opposition, as in Hinton Helper’s case.

John Brown, on the other hand, was one of the few whites in America who in the 1850s clearly articulated notions of racial and gender equality that 21st century Americans would find to be contemporary. This also raises a big question for me about the accusation that Brown was “crazy”. In fact, Brown had a sacrifice-oriented Calvinist religious faith that he took very seriously. And as part of that, he recognized blacks and women as equals in a way that was unusual for his time, but which we today recognize as being ahead of his time in his democratic outlook.

So, whatever clinical mental health issues he may have had - and I’m not convinced on any of the arguments I’ve seen about that - neither his passionate desire to end slavery (which was shared by many less militant Northerners) nor his guerrilla warfare plan that he initiated at Harper’s Ferry are evidence of any such condition.

Finally, I’m not sure that Virginia’s trial of a wounded Brown who was still so ill he had to lie on a cot during much of it is very strong evidence of Virginia’s dedication to the rule of law in a broader sense. After all, it was a year and a half or so later that they agreed to a bloody rebellion against their own country. So I would say their devotion to the rule of law in general was less profound than their devotion to preserving the Peculiar Institution.

Tags: john brown, slavery, us civil war

Notable quotes from the "war on terror"

Secretary of Defense Rummy, CNN's Hunt Novak & Shields program 12/01/01, being questioned by Robert Novak on possible war crims by our Afghan ally, the Northern Alliance:

NOVAK: Do you feel, Mr. Secretary, there is a problem, however, when apparently most of the prisoners, all of the prisoners, are in the hands of the Northern Alliance, which I don't believe signed the Geneva Convention and are not the nicest guys in the world? Does that bother you at all? [Novak's premise was wrong; the Northern Alliance was bound by the Genevan Convention.]

RUMSFELD: ... The fact that they don't happen to subscribe to some convention that we do or that other countries do is a fact. It is also a fact that we have to stop those terrorists from killing more Americans. And I don't feel even the slightest problem in working with the Northern Alliance to achieve that end. [my emphasis]

I blogged about this in one of my earliest blog posts on 10/13/03.

Rummy and Bush

From CNN (Last Cabinet Meeting of 2003 12/11/03), reporter questioning President Bush:

QUESTION: Sir, Chancellor [Gerhard] Schroeder [of Germany] says international law must apply in this case. Well, what's your understanding of the law?

BUSH: International law? I better call my lawyer.

Said, as I recall, with his sideways preppie smirk.

Tags: establishment press, bush doctrine, iraq war

A twisted Beltway Village notion of collective guilt

Michael Kinsley makes a "liberal" case for not prosecuting torture perpetrators in Where This Buck Stops Washington Post 05/01/09. His argument is - what's the closest to a polite word? - pernicious in several ways.

For one thing, it ignore the very serious legal issues at stake, including a very basic issue of the rule of law. His bottom line is that none of the people who actually broke the law in the torture program should be prosecuted for their crimes. In that, he's firmly in the near-unanimous consensus among the Beltway Villagers that under no circumstances should the torturers of the Cheney-Bush administration should be prosecuted. At this particular moment, I'm not sure that the rhetorical flourishes anyone uses to get to the let-the-torturers-go-scott-free position really matter.

Having said that, I am disturbed by the collective-guilt argument he makes. Despite the poor job he and his Village colleagues generally did on reporting the torture story during the Cheney-Bush years, and also ignoring the steadfast denials from the Cheney-Bush officials that the US government was torturing people, he assumes that American voters were essentially fully informed about the torture program from 2004 on. And because Bush was re-elected in 2004, all Americans are guilty of torture. It's an old rhetorical trick that shouldn't actually fool anyone over the age of 12: Everyone is guilty, so no one is guilty.

But he even gets very specific that he himself never really gave a s**t about the torture program. Writing about the 2004 Bush re-election, he says:

There is no way of knowing how many of those who voted against [John Kerry] were affected by the torture question. A good guess would be "not many." (Not me, for one, I'm sorry to say.) [my emphasis]

If you were from some other country and weren't familiar with the bizarre nature of our press corps, you might think that a celebrity pundit would be embarrassed to open display the fact that when it comes to public affairs, he has the moral compass of a pile of beached bones. But you would be wrong.

In any case, whatever ideological label one chooses to put on his collective guilt argument, the concept is as empty as Dick Cheney's conscience. People who commit crimes are guilty for those acts and should be held legally responsible. That's not a "liberal" or "conservative" concept. It's the basic idea of the rule of law.

Tags: accountability for torture, michael kinsley, rule of law, torture

Village atheism

This advertisement has been running on blog ads for as long as I can remember there being blog ads. I haven't seen the whole film and probably won't, because the advertising and the trailers make it sound like a complilation of typical "village atheist" kinds of arguments. Those are the kind that take an adolescent delight poking fun at the beliefs of the devout without bothering to much know what they are talking about themselves.

Secular historians don't generally question the existence of Jesus of Nazareth as a human being. And Christians who don't maintain some kind of "literalist" view of the Christian Scriptures also don't try to argue that there is secular historical proof of supernatural actions on his part, nor of the Resurrection. But the preservation of sayings and stories about Jesus, wrtitten down in the form that we have them within decades of his life and based on what for oral traditions were very recent events, are themselves persuasive secular historical evidence that the man Jesus existed and was a religious teacher with a strong core following.

For most Christians, understanding the "signs and wonders" of Jesus as reported in the Gospels and the Resurrection itself, the core event for the Christian religion, as spiritual events that neither require nor are subject to historical proof in the sense of battles or dynasties in the ancient world is not a problem. Biblical literalists find it problematic. And "village atheists" seem to think the lack of historical evidence should be as much of a problem as fundamentalists see it to be. But they are not dealing with Christianity as most of the religion's practitioners experience it.

Tags: atheism, jesus christ, jesus of nazareth

Thinking about war crimes

I watched a couple of minutes of Meet the Press several days ago and heard host David Gregory talk about how the issue of prosecuting torturers being a matter of the tremendous pressure President Obama is receiving from "the left" of his Party. Is that really where we are in American politics? That only "the left" support enforcing the laws against torture?

No, that's where the general consciousness of the Beltway Village is. And they've been creating their own reality for some time.

I don't mind being regarded as one of the dang hippie bloggers that so distress the Village people. But I actually don't see prosecution of torture as a "left" issue in any meaningful qualitative sense of the word. Though it's sadly true right now that Democrats are more interested in prosecuting the torture crimes than Republicans and our Pod Pundits, most of whom clearly support the Cheney-Bush torture program either overtly or "objectively", to borrow a favorite neocon word (which in turn is a heritage from their Troskyist intellectual background). My own thinking about the torture issue when it was beginning in 2001 and hints of it were first emerging in the press was shaped by several different things.

One is the legacy of lynch-law. I am most familiar with the Deep South version of it because I grew up there, not least because my small Mississippi hometown was the scene of the lynch-murder of two 14-year-old boys back in October of 1942, which became something of a international incident at the time. As Dave Neiwert explained in Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America (2004), events like that leave a very lasting impression on small towns especially.

Another is having studied the Second World War and the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials and learning from that the importance of the enforcement of national and international laws against war crimes. A related area with which I'm familiar and that influenced my thinking a great deal is the "politics of memory" particularly over the Second World War and the Holocaust in Germany and Austria. I also paid close attention in learning about the Vietnam War to the issue of war crimes there. The book Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (1970) by Telford Taylor, who was the US Chief Counsel at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials really impressed on me the importance of an international law framework to limit the horrors of war.

And ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 - almost 20 years ago now! - I've been fascinated by both the "politics of memory" and issues of transitional justice when major regime changes happen. It was only more recently that I began to learn much more about transitional justice issues in Spain and Argentina.

So I knew that torture, the execution of prisoners of war (or "enemy combatants") and some other practices were big-time problematic. And I keep saying that the torture accountability issue isn't going away. I find myself struggling not to sound melodramatic in saying this, but torture goes to the heart of the rule of law. If the government can torture confessions and use torture as an instrument of terror against its own people and others, it breaches the whole concept of the rule of law. You can have a lot of laws in that situation but not the rule of law. It's really that serious. And I don't see that in a qualitative sense as a left/right, liberal/conservative kind of issue. But it's a very discouraging development that the Republican Party is willing to embrace this kind of criminality. It's a sign of how authoritarian a party it has become.

We also have to face the fact that while torture is an issue that has to be dealt with in itself, the Cheney-Bush torture program was part of the implementation of Dick Cheney's Unitary Executive theory of Presidential power which holds that the President is not bound by the laws or even the Constitution itself as long as he's acting in what he himself decides are situations to protect national security. That justification was elaborated repeatedly in Bush's notorious signing statements and explicitly in relation to torture in at least one of the Bybee memos. And in the Pedilla case, they applied the torture and illegal detention program to an American citizen arrested on American soil. If the Cheney-Bush torture policy is taken to be a legitimate policy option, then the precedent for using completely arbitrary Presidential power even on American citizens is set.

The one piece of the Cheney program that hasn't fall into place yet if for a successor government - Obama's in this case - to effectively validate those policies by refusing to prosecute criminal acts committed under those policies. The damage went far beyond the torture program. John Dean spells out the seriousness of Justice Department prosecutorial misconduct in The Strong Message Attorney General Eric Holder Sent to All Federal Prosecutors When He Dismissed the Indictment Against Senator Ted Stevens, and the Apparent Basis for the Dismissal 04/03/09. (Dean's Findlaw articles always have long titles.) Dean weighed in on the torture issue on Olbermann's Countdown in this segment of 04/17/09.

And if you think that a new Republican administration won't resume the same policies and worse, watch this segment of Dick Cheney's daughter Liz defending torture:



Tags: establishment press, torture, war crimes