Strange Bedfellows......

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Andrew Sullivan and Glen Greenwald come to a consensus.

This Administration has done more damage to this country than I could ever have imagined.

The Bush Paradox

Glenn Greenwald sees it in his new book, "A Tragic Legacy":

The president who vowed to lead America in a moral crusade to win hearts and minds around the world has so inflamed anti-American sentiment that America's moral standing in the world is at an all-time low. The president who vowed to defend the Good in the world from the forces of Evil has caused the United States to be held in deep contempt by large segments of virtually every country on every continent of the world, including large portions of nations with which the U.S. has historically been allied. The president who vowed to undertake a war in defense of American values and freedoms has presided over such radical departures from the defining values and liberties of this country that many Americans find their country and its government unrecognizable. And the president who vowed to lead the war for freedom and democracy has made torture, rendition, abductions, lawless detentions of even our own citizens, secret "black site" prisons, Abu Ghraib dog leashes, and orange Guantánamo jumpsuits the strange, new symbols of America around the world.

And yet this tale of Manicheanism gone awry, of a utopian vision ending in a dystopia, of the terrible dangers of any moral crusade that sanctifies "any method necessary" (in Giuliani's language) in its well-intentioned pursuit of evil is not a new story. It is one of the oldest stories human beings have told to themselves. Human beings seem to need to relearn it with each generation; and I can only express remorse that, in my time, I needed a lesson as well.

The genius of the American constitution, however, is that it provides the framework for such immoral moralism to be checked and moderated. Alas, we have also seen these past few years how dependent such a system is on the integrity and courage of the people in it.

It depends on an elite willing to stand up against their own power, and it depends on a people alert to the erosion of their freedom. Today, both guardrails against tyranny appear weakened, and the pushback against a radically authoritarian executive has been weak. We have an elite class in Washington either too cowardly to stand up to the power grab or too co-opted by the perquisites of power to care. And we have a people seemingly content to watch freedom being stripped from them - because, right now, it's mainly people with brown skin and funny names being railroaded by the executive branch. Al-Marri and Padilla can be distanced. And the Hollywood fantasies of Jack Bauer can distract from an honest moral assessment of how far we've degenerated in so short a time.

There is still a chance to repair the damage - but given how much we have lost since 9/11, the constitutional consequences of another major attack are likely to be terminal to the American experiment in liberty. If a Giuliani or a Cheney is in power on such a day, we can kiss goodbye to the constitution. If I sound overly alarmed by what has happened to American liberty, it's because I honestly didn't expect to see habeas corpus, the most basic freedom we have, so casually thrown away and torture so casually enshrined in the American system. I never believed an American president would not only claim but exercise the power to detain any person in America and jail and torture them with impunity - indefinitely. But these are the facts; and my own book was an attempt to account for them within the conservative philosophical tradition. Glenn Greenwald comes from a very different place, but we have sadly come to the same conclusion.

America has exchanged some if its basic freedoms for the patina of phony security - and so easily. The Republican party, to its historic shame, has been the main vehicle for the replacement of doubt, empiricism and calm judgment with certainty, fundamentalism and raw force. We have terrible enemies abroad, seeking to destroy our way of life. But this truth should never blind us to the danger within as well. Al Qaeda can only give us death. It is up to us to surrender the liberty they despise. In so many ways, we already have.

Plausible Deniability......

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How can we, as a country, purport to be the beacon of democracy when our leaders willfully ignored the lawless actions at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo that defied the Geneva conventions and our own military regulations?

The general who headed the military's own internal investigation now states that the torture and mistreatment of prisoners was not the act of a few renegades, but was tacitly supported by the top levels of this administration, who even now continue to hide behind a farcical shield of "plausible deniability".

May their lawless actions be subjected to the full light of day, and may they be held acountable and prosecuted to the full extent of our judicial system.

"Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba—of the Taguba report!" Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, "I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting."

In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. "Could you tell us what happened?" Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, "Is it abuse or torture?" At that point, Taguba recalled, "I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, 'That's not abuse. That's torture.' There was quiet."

Is this what our country now stands for?

Quote of the Day

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Nice rebuttal to any concept of "democracy building strategy" in our invasion of Iraq on Andrew Sullivan's blog.

"We tried to construct a constitutional order [in Iraq] for a non-dictatorial, national political settlement."

We did what, exactly? Here's what we did. We disbanded the army, throwing thousands out into the street with no pay, no pension, no way to support their families. We shut down the state-owned industries that produced goods and services basic to the national infrastructure, throwing thousands out into the street with no pay, no pension, no way to support their families. And then we expected investors to line up while we threw reconstruction dollars at Halliburton and KBR and other American firms under no-bid loopholes in U.S. Government Procurement Law. Worse still, we eviscerated the civil service by purging it of Baath party members (who wasn't a member of the Baath Party? The cleaning crew?) thus ripping out the bare bones that would have supported the construction of constitutional order. Never mind throwing thousands out into the street with no pay, no pension, no way to support their families. We sat back while all these constitutionally and economically disenfranchised people looted what remained, said "stuff happens" and then proudly we pointed to purple fingers and claimed victory.

We burned down the house, that's what we did.

Saying of the Day....

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Sometimes in this hectic world it's important to take some time to evaluate one's behavior. Many times we are quick to anger and quick to focus only on one's personal needs. I read this quote today and it seemed to resonate with me;

Try to have a large radius of tolerance and a small radius of entitlement.

Words to live by.

-UF

The "We Don't Torture" Lie.....

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We do torture. Specifically by the order of this administration. And we modeled our torture based on what we learned from our worst enemies. Sad and sick.

It goes without saying that these atrocities should be investigated and the people responsible for these sorry decisions should be placed on trial.

Many of the controversial interrogation tactics used against terror suspects in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo were modeled on techniques the U.S. feared that the Communists themselves might use against captured American troops during the Cold War, according to a little-noticed, highly classified Pentagon report released several days ago. Originally developed as training for elite special forces at Fort Bragg under the "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape" program, otherwise known as SERE, tactics such as sleep deprivation, isolation, sexual humiliation, nudity, exposure to extremes of cold and stress positions were part of a carefully monitored survival training program for personnel at risk of capture by Soviet or Chinese forces, all carried out under the supervision of military psychologists.

The report, completed last August but only declassified and made public on May 18, suggests that the abusive techniques stemmed from a much more formal process than the Defense Department has previously acknowledged. By 2002 the Pentagon was looking for an interrogation paradigm to use on what it had designated as "unlawful combatants" captured in the "war on terror." These individuals, many taken prisoner in Afghanistan, were initially brought to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo, although others were subsequently hidden away in CIA secret prisons or turned over to U.S.-allied governments known to practice torture. That same year, the commander of the detention facility at Guantanamo began using the abusive "counter resistance" techniques adopted from SERE on prisoners at the base, and according to the Pentagon report SERE military psychologists were on hand to help.


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