The Commentariat -- Dec. 15, 2014
Internal links removed.
Peter Baker & Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times attempt to explain why CIA Director John Brennan gets away with murder & torture: "... in the 67 years since the C.I.A. was founded, few presidents have had as close a bond with their intelligence chiefs as Mr. Obama has forged with Mr. Brennan. It is a relationship that has shaped the policy and politics of the debate over the nation's war with terrorist organizations, as well as the agency's own struggle to balance security and liberty. And the result is a president who denounces torture but not the people accused of inflicting it." CW: Seems that even though Obama got a dog, he still believes he has friends in Washington. And he's picked some pretty dicey "friends." ...
... Noah Schactman of the Daily Beast: "The Obama administration is withholding hundreds, perhaps even thousands of photographs showing the U.S. government's brutal treatment of detainees.... Some photos show American troops posing with corpses; others depict U.S. forces holding guns to people's heads or simulating forced sodomization. All of them could be released to the public, depending on how a federal judge in New York rules...." ...
[Chuck] Todd continued to press Cheney, pointing out that '25 percent' of the CIA's 'turned out to be innocent.' 'Is that too high?' Todd asked. 'Are you okay with that margin —' 'I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective,' Cheney said. 'I'd do it again in a minute.'
... Alexander Bolton of the Hill: "Senior Bush administration officials are making a coordinated push to discredit a damning Senate report on CIA interrogation tactics authorized during President George W. Bush's first term.... [Dick] Cheney, along with other Bush administration officials, blasted the Senate report as one-sided and misleading. Michael Mukasey, who served as attorney general under Bush, slammed the report as a 'disaster.'... Karl Rove, a longtime senior political adviser to Bush, said on "Fox News Sunday" that interrogation techniques were carefully designed to fall short of torture, a point Cheney made as well on NBC." ...
... Andy Borowitz (satire): "In an appearance on NBC's 'Meet the Press,' on Sunday, former Vice-President Dick Cheney told host Chuck Todd that he was 'sick and tired of Americans being ashamed of our beautiful legacy of torture' and that he was organizing the first 'National Torture-Pride March' to take place in Washington in January." CW: The march would probably get a good turnout. ...
... Jessica Schulberg of the New Republic: "Only 11 percent of self-identified GOP-ers were willing to rule out the use of torture entirely, and over half approved of tactics like sleep deprivation, physical violence, forced nudity, waterboarding, and the threat of sexual violence.... Today, 24 percent of Americans say the use of torture against suspected terrorists is never justified...." ...
... Here's Rove explaining to Chris Wallace that torture isn't torture if it's "'designed' to let the victims live." ...
... The Triumph of Dick Cheney. Digby in Salon: "The brother of the unrepentant president who ordered torture is today considered the most serious Republican candidate for the White House and there can be no doubt that he would continue those practices. The opposition will do little more than make tepid complaints and, if history is any guide, even Democratic presidents of the future who object to such tactics will feel compelled to protect them after the fact. He accomplished exactly what he set out to do all those decades ago. If a White House can get away with ordering torture and bragging about it, it can get away with anything. His cruel legacy is complete." Thanks to safari for the link. ...
What I'm especially troubled by is John Brennan on Thursday really opened the door to the possibility of torture being used again.... I intend to introduce legislation to make it clear, for example, that if torture is used in the future there would be a basis to prosecute. -- Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon)
... Brian Lowry of Variety: "While the [Senate] report called into question the efficacy of torture, as the Washington Post's Terrence McCoy put it, 'That's not how it looks on TV. Harsh interrogation, as an effective means of eliciting crucial information, has become firmly entrenched in popular culture.'... Not only has torture become more frequent since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, but the acceptance of those depictions in entertainment has been cited as a point of reference -- and even an endorsement of the tactics.... It seems reasonable to ask whether pop culture -- along with news operations whose 'News Alert' headlines stoked post-Sept. 11 fears -- has been partially complicit in cultivating the conditions that allowed torture to be deemed a viable option."...
... CW: Hmmm. It does seem Hollywood director Kathryn Bigelow is more disturbed by elephant poaching -- which is truly awful -- than she is with torturing humans, which she describes as "complicated." She certainly bought into the "torture work" theory in an interview last year with Stephen Colbert. regarding her film "Zero Dark Thirty," which portrays torture as producing "actionable intelligence." As Scott Shane of the New York Times reported two years ago, "In a message sent Friday to agency employees about the film, 'Zero Dark Thirty,' [then-Acting CIA Director Michael] Morell said it 'creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Laden. That impression is false.'" Too bad President Obama passed over Morell for the top job. He surely has a better idea about the effectiveness of torture than does Obama's choice John Brennan, who defended torture last week & suggested the U.S. could use it again:
I defer to the policymakers in future times when there is going to be the need to make sure this country stays safe if we face a similar type of crisis.... Our reviews indicate that the detention and interrogation program produced useful intelligence that helped the United States thwart attacks, capture terrorists, and save lives. But let me be clear. We have not concluded that it was the use of EITs within that program that allowed us to obtain useful information from detainees subjected to them. -- John Brennan, last week
Does that even make sense? -- Constant Weader
... ** One Definition of "American Exceptionism." Amy Davidson of the New Yorker: Basically, in Cheney’s world, nothing Americans do can be called torture, because we are not Al Qaeda and we are not the Japanese in the Second World War (whom we prosecuted for waterboarding) and we are not ISIS. 'The way we did it,' as he said of waterboarding, was not torture. In other words, it was not really the Justice Department that 'blessed,' or rather transubstantiated, torture; it was our American-ness.... Neither [Dick Cheney nor John Brennan ]would call what the C.I.A. did torture. Each, in his own way, suggested that American torturers have not faced a reckoning so much as a lull in their business.... This President has told his agents not to torture, and Brennan says he can work with that, while the C.I.A. waits for instructions from the next one."
Harry's Last Hurrah. Sean Sullivan of the Washington Post: "After [Harry] Reid (D-Nev.) exploited a weekend rebellion on immigration by rogue Republican senators as a $1.1 trillion spending bill was up against the clock, the Senate will move ahead this week on key executive branch nominations submitted by President Obama that appeared to be stalled not long ago.... Beginning Monday, Reid plans to set in motion votes for Vivek Murthy to serve as surgeon general, Daniel Santos to take a seat on the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board and Frank Rose to serve as an assistant secretary of state. Then, Reid will set up votes for Antony Blinken to serve as a deputy secretary of state and Sarah Saldaña to head the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. It is unclear whether Republicans will allow Reid to accelerate the process."
Zachary Goldfarb of the Washington Post: Elizabeth Warren hasn't taken Larry Summers' advice to keep her head down, & her decision has paid off. "She's remained outspoken, but has become even more influential.... For the 300 former Obama campaign officials who last week urged her to run in 2016 -- she is the one they've been waiting for."
Paul Krugman: "The Masters of the Universe, it turns out, are a bunch of whiners. But they're whiners with war chests, and now they've bought themselves a Congress.... The people who brought the economy to its knees are seeking the chance to do it all over again. And they have powerful allies, who are doing all they can to make Wall Street's dream come true." Read the whole column.
Jim Tankersley of the Washington Post: "The American economy has stopped delivering the broadly shared prosperity that the nation grew accustomed to after World War II. The explanation for why that is begins with the millions of middle-class jobs that vanished over the past 25 years, and with what happened to the men and women who once held those jobs. Millions of Americans are working harder than ever just to keep from falling behind.... Those workers have been devalued in the eyes of the economy, pushed into jobs that pay them much less than the ones they once had. Today, a shrinking share of Americans are working middle-class jobs, and collectively, they earn less of the nation's income than they used to." ...
... CW: Weirdly, Tankersley puts the blame for this phenomenon on various economic factors & never once even mentions the political factors that have grossly exacerbated middle-class economic woes. Thus, the story, which could have been an important one, ends up being nothing more than an excellent example of how the media give Republicans a pass for their stupid, cruel "free-market" philosophy & policy prescriptions. If you wonder why Republicans get away with destroying the economy, here's a big part of the answer. Fortunately, a few of the commenters get it. (Others crazily blame "the national debt." They have been carefully taught -- in this case, by the WashPo/Pete Peterson cooperative.)
Don't Count on the Kids. Sean McElwee of Salon with a sobering reality chek: "... while social liberalism will continue to be a political winner, economic liberalism may be tougher to sell to white millenials. Additionally, while white millenials say they want to live in a racially equitable society, they are no more likely than their parents to support policies to make that society come about."
Annals of "Justice," Ctd.
Jon Swaine of the Guardian: "Police aggressively questioned the tearful girlfriend of a young black man they had just shot dead as he held a BB gun in an Ohio supermarket -- accusing her of lying, threatening her with jail, and suggesting that she was high on drugs. Tasha Thomas was reduced to swearing on the lives of her relatives that John Crawford III had not been carrying a firearm when they entered the Walmart in Beavercreek, near Dayton, to buy crackers, marshmallows and chocolate bars on the evening of 5 August.... After the case was handed to a special prosecutor, a grand jury decided in September that [the shooter, Officer Sean] Williams, and another officer involved should not face criminal charges. Williams was in 2010 responsible for the only other fatal police shooting in Beavercreek's recent history." CW: So if you're a friend of a victim of a white-police-on-black shooting, expect the cops to abuse you, too.
David of Crooks & Liars: "A Texas police officer was placed on administrative leave on Friday after he reportedly used a Taser on a 76-year-old man after the suspect had already been forced to the ground. The Victoria Advocate reported that 76-year-old Pete Vasquez was driving a work-owned vehicle back to his place of business on Thursday when 23-year-old Officer Nathanial Robinson pulled him over for an expired inspection. Vasquez said that he explained that the car belonged to a car lot, and that the dealer tags made it exempt from having an inspection." CW: The elderly person's name is Vasquez; the copy's name is Robinson & he's whitey-white-white. What do you expect? ...
... Heather Alexander of the Houston Chronicle: "Two police officers opened fire on an apparently unarmed man during a traffic stop in southwest Houston Friday night, allegedly shooting him three times for not following commands. HPD officers pulled over the car the man was a riding in for an illegal lane change around 9:30 p.m.... As standard procedure, both officers have been put on three-day administrative leave and will receive psychological support...." The passenger, identified as Michael Paul Walker, is black.
Annals of "Journalism," Ctd.
Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker writes a long autopsy of the New Republic.
Terrence McCoy & Fred Barbash of the Washington Post: "After days of silence, Sony Pictures Entertainment acknowledged a voluminous, embarrassing leak of internal e-mails and other materials on Sunday, warning numerous media outlets in a strongly worded letter against publishing or using the 'stolen' corporate data exposed by unidentified hackers." ...
... Aaron Sorkin, in a New York Times op-ed: "I understand that news outlets routinely use stolen information. That's how we got the Pentagon Papers, to use an oft-used argument. But there is nothing in these [Sony] documents remotely rising to the level of public interest of the information found in the Pentagon Papers.... So much for our national outrage over the National Security Agency reading our stuff. It turns out some of us have no problem with it at all. We just vacated that argument.... As demented and criminal as it is, at least the hackers are doing it for a cause. The press is doing it for a nickel."
News Ledes
AP: "Five people escaped from a Sydney cafe where a gunman took an unknown number of hostages during Monday morning rush hour. Two people inside the cafe were earlier seen holding up a flag with an Islamic declaration of faith that has often been used by extremists, raising fears that a terrorist incident was playing out in the heart of Australia's biggest city." ...
... The Guardian is liveblogging the hostage crisis. So is the Sydney Morning Herald. ...
... Guardian Update: "Two hostages and a gunman are dead after a 17-hour armed siege in Sydney's Martin Place ended with police storming the cafe. Four people were also injured as the siege ended in a chaotic shootout in the early hours of Tuesday." ...
... New York Times: "The gunman who seized hostages in a downtown Sydney cafe and was killed in a police raid early Tuesday was known to both the police and leaders of the Muslim community as a deeply troubled man with a long history of legal trouble, including a pending case involving the murder of his former wife."
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Reader Comments (9)
So Cheney's a sick bastard and his translucent slime lets anyone with decent eyesight see right through his indefensible positions. Yet his no-apology tour on all the major networks is doubling down not just on his toxic reputation, but the standing of the US in the world. All of the major international media I've seen has included clips of Cheney's scowl while he admits no wrongdoing and in fact he'd do it again. The news anchors try to pass the information without bias but you can hear in their speech intonations the astonishment of this cruel bastard's ideas. As he's only concerned in saving his own wrinkly ass from the gates of historical purgatory, he still has no sense as to how much his legacy and its blowback is hurting our image across the world.
Please yank that horrible human being off the teevee screens. Let him scream and yell on any radio program that will invite him, but for the sake of our country, bury him in the trash bins of local media stations. We know exactly what he's going to say every fucking time, so please just shut down his soap box.
Digby's got a good piece recalling Cheney's true legacy that he's bestowed onto his favorite nation. Thanks a lot Dick.
http://www.salon.com/2014/12/15/time_to_take_the_gloves_off_how_dick_cheney_accomplished_exactly_what_he_set_out_to_do/
Yes, wouldn't we love to be a part of that gab fest between Bill Daley and John Brennan, but only after, as Bill says, John retires and has a few drinks in him. There they are, two Irishmen, talking smack after downing a few pints or whiskey straight, much like Reagan and Speaker Tip used to do on many an afternoon or so we've been told.
If drinks loosen tongues, perhaps we need to encourage more alcohol
consumption during working hours so everyone tells us the truth––wouldn't that be a kick. But back to reality:
Presidents can fire directors they don’t like and the CIA has no other customer. The big mistakes all come when presidents don’t listen, or let it be known that they don’t want to hear. The CIA is as serious, as prudent, as honest as the presidents for whom it works—never more. Directors deliver what is wanted, or depart. The F.B.I. answers to the attorney general, the Defense Intelligence Agency to the secretary of defense, but the CIA answers only to the president and once that is understood the mechanics of skewed intelligence all fall into place. Now if I'm wrong about this and the CIA. is indeed more of a rogue organization–-something Brennan vehemently denies––then the administration and its CIA director during the torture procedures should be the culprits and I would think it's up to Congress to proceed with whatever methods they need to– it's their job–not this president and his C.I.A. director.
After reading safari's post on Cheney: this man has been in many administrations–-he and Rummy working together–-and yet he never ran for president which I find interesting. What he did do was deed himself a vice under a man he knew he could manipulate and thus orchestrate without holding the baton. Really very clever maneuvering when you think about it. We could call this man's character Shakespearian or call him "a sick bastard" as safari does–-either way he presents as a malodorous human being and history will not look upon him kindly.
I've become increasingly exasperated by the insistence on the use of euphemisms when touchy subjects like, say, death or torture arise so as not to unduly rattle anyone's morality chain.
"Collateral damage" is not something that reduces your chances of a quick loan at the bank. It means non-combatants--ie, innocent bystanders, children, for instance--were killed during some kind of combat operation. The death of an innocent human being is not euphemistic.
"Enhanced interrogation techniques" do not refer a spot light in the eyes and no bathroom breaks. It's torture. And reducing the reference even further to an acronym makes the whole thing stink even more than it does now. "You were using EIT's? Well, shit, that doesn't sound all that bad."
Not long ago, I was watching one of the Bourne films. Pretty good stuff as those types of movies go. But at one point, I found myself wondering exactly how many of these supermen the CIA has out there? Because they seem to pop up with surprising regularity in these films. I mean, how many guys can do all the amazing stuff Jason Bourne can do, not just the physical stuff, the encyclopedic mastery of martial arts and weapons handling, including knowledge of obscure explosives, but also the so-called spycraft skills, being able to forge identity papers in a hotel room in Calcutta with nothing but a Bic pen and a razor blade, or understanding how to track someone three continents away with a cell phone and a web browser? How many?
Yeah, I know it's a movie, but now ask yourself how many guys the CIA had, on 9/11, who were ready and able to effectively interrogate captured members of Al Qaeda? How many knew enough about the structure of that and other terror operations to know when they ran into something interesting, and how to follow it up, how to tell when it was bogus, a dead end, or something worth pulling on?
How many?
If you guessed none, you're probably much closer to the truth than the large number of people who were used to set upon suspects, including a fair number of innocents.
But never mind. Dick Cheney said it was all good, so all those Torquemada wannabes and torture chamber Joes who wouldn't know the difference between actionable intelligence and some guy reciting verses from the Koran if you told him his house would be burned down if he couldn't understand it, were sent out with orders to destroy people, whether it did any good or not.
And speaking of euphemisms. I had to laugh this morning when I heard John Rizzo, the CIA legal affairs officer during the great Bush-Cheney Amoral Clusterfuck, claimed that he all the go ahead he needed when John Yoo did his best to plunge human rights into the toilet. He stated that the Yoo "get out of jail free card" was "euphemistically referred to as the 'Torture Memo'"
No, John. There was no euphemism there. It WAS the Torture Memo.
These fucking people!
The Tankersley piece is more proof (or at least another strong suggestion) that the common understanding of economics today is the equivalent of astronomy and cosmology before Galileo. It's the difference between the way things feel and the way things are; we suffer from a naive economic anthropocentricity, which tell us that the way things appear to us is universal truth, that the sun does in fact revolve around the earth, that our limited experience of the economic factors in our lives sets some kind of universal standard.
Our own experience tells us that working hard does get us ahead in the economic game; therefore those who don't get ahead haven't worked hard and do not deserve the benefits of that hard work.
Our experience tell us that since hard work brings success in its wake, those who have immense wealth must have worked extremely hard and that therefore their vast material rewards are all deserved.
Since we were told since birth that the accumulation and careful management of money are emblems of responsibility and morality, despite Christ's chance and easily-ignored remarks about our responsibility to the poor, we persist in believing money and virtue are closely allied.
Our experience tells us that our household budgets have to be balanced; therefore government budgets must also be. Any other behavior is bad economics and likely immoral to boot.
Economics is the purportedly objective study of resource distribution but is always tainted by the large dollop of oughts thrown in. Here, even more so than in other studies, we get into trouble when we confuse our limited points of view with fundamental realities that operate undetected by our perceptions. then we compound the problem by further confusing those perceptions with the way things ought to be.
And once we do that we're in the world of morality, not science.
Not that our discussions of economics don't need a healthy dose of morality. We should just be willing to call our economic discussions what they are and take responsibility for the moral positions we espouse.
I have to say that the Karl Rove quote about how it's not torture if you're still alive afterwards, is one of the most idiotic statements yet on this horrible topic. First of all, does anyone think having fingernails pulled out isn't torture? For that matter, during the Spanish Inquisition, the array of horrific torture devices and techniques were never designed or employed to ensure death. Torture was just the warm up. Death came later during those very salubrious public ceremonies sponsored by the church, called public execution of heretics. But according to Rove's logic, nothing that came before can be called torture.
Moreover, the purported idea of torture is to extract information. How is that supposed to happen if you kill the detainee?
Statements like these, and Cheney's snarling "I'd do it again in a minute" demonstrate just how desperate the torture apologists are. It's not torture unless the guy dies? That's just stupid talk, right there.
And all this blather about the relative effectiveness of torture completely ignores the concept that it's wrong in the first place. That argument maintains that as long as you get something, it's all good. But it's not. We agreed to the fact that torture is wrong. We signed the paper!
Once that argument is shot down, the old "Ticking Time Bomb" rationale is trotted out. The Ticking Time Bomb is as much a philosophical question as anything. But here's the difference. Most arguments on the ethics of employing torture without complete moral dissipation (your kid has been kidnapped, the authorities have one of the kidnappers and they are going to torture him to find the location of the other kidnapper(s) and hopefully save the child) posit that you have in hand someone who actually does know something. The Cheney-Bush plan was round up a bunch of people, torture the shit out of them, kill a few, and see what pops up. There is no ticking time bomb there.
And let's go beyond the realm of the hypothetical. Cheney and the other torture lovers have all claimed the mantle of "ticking time bomb" as their blanket excuse. Okay. So very early on, they capture Abu Zubaydah. The Bushies scream that they've got the number three guy in the Al Qaeda command chain. They didn't. He was never in Al Qaeda, but never mind the facts. He's their ticking time bomb. They spirit him away to a black site then go to work on him, but suddenly, it all stops. The CIA guys doing the waterboarding have to go back to the states for personal reasons. They stick Zubaydah in a cell and for over a month nobody questions him. How the hell is he a ticking time bomb with information vital to another imminent attack if no one talks to him for 40 days? That sounds more like a dud than a time bomb.
This whole thing stinks to high heaven.
And to echo PD's comment, the whole running around like idiots and doing crazy shit just to do something came from the top down. If the administration had been in the least bit intelligent and competent, they wouldn't have frightened and threatened everyone else to go along with their murderous, illegal, and amoral schemes.
And one more thing that I have yet to hear anyone toss back at Cheney as he snarls about keeping the country safe is the fact that they had their chance to do exactly that and they flat out blew it. They had actionable intelligence about hijacked planes being flown into buildings. They did nothing. NOTHING. They failed. Failed at everything. But now they all demand medals.
Pigs.
Just walked by one of my son's desks in his long-since abandoned room and saw a copy of "King Leopold's Ghost," an object lesson of what occurs when we pretend economics is a science and separate morality from our discussion of it.
Roger Casement, a tragic figure who had a hand in exposing the horrors of economic and physical slavery in the Congo and went on to do the same for the Amazon rubber plantations, understood that economic systems are not a given, but a creation of men and can therefore be adjusted by them to accomplish the ends we most devoutly wish.
If those ends here in America are the decline of the middle class and the gradual impoverishment of the majority, we're on the right track.
Ken,
"King Leopold's Ghost" demonstrates what good history should be. I had only a smattering of information about the Beligian tyrant before reading Adam Hochschild's excellent book. I think I probably first heard of him in the Vachel Lindsay poem, "The Congo", something about Leopold's ghost burning in hell, and demons laughing as they cut off his hands (a regular punishment doled out to the locals by Leopold and his minions--he probably had his own "Hand Lopping Memo").
Just makes me wonder about the possibility of Bush and Cheney and Yoo and the lot of them being waterboarded forever in the beyond.
To show you what a topsy turvy nuthouse world we live in, I went to the link suggested by Safari referencing the Digby story on Cheney's ascent of Depraved Mountain, and there, next to a picture of the vicious, fulminating Cheney who is free to thump his chest about all the outrageous human rights violations he has championed and executed in his disgraceful career, violations that include lying to start a war that has killed, maimed, or displaced millions, and torturing innocent people, sometimes to death, is a web ad asking readers to support impeachment for President Obama for the shameful tragedy of Benghazzzzzzi.
It's like demanding that the cops arrest a jay walker while Al Capone drives by riddling innocent bystanders with a Tommy gun.