Progressive globalization

It's nearly the end of another long weekend -- at least for some of you. Me, there are no holidays in the news biz. I'm lucky to have weekends off from the daily grind of the newsroom. So I'll be heading back there tomorrow, where the latest installment of We Love the Troops Day will finally be winding down.

Now don't get me wrong. I certainly support our troops -- where they serve honorably, ethically and morally, as I suspect most are.

But there are, as we've been told, a few "bad apples" in the bunch who stink up the place and cast a really bad pall on everybody else. And that goes for some of the lower ranked troops they command as well.

Ha. You thought I was talking about the non-coms, didncha? I certainly coulda been. We've seen plenty of Article 31 hearings and courts martial -- some of which actually ended in convictions but most of which let the accused off with little more than a slap on the wrist, if anything -- and even a murder trial for a former soldier now convicted of raping and killing an Iraqi teenaged girl and killing most of her family.

But nah. I'm much more concerned about the guys who give the orders, who set the tone for the troops who fight and work under them. No, I'm not letting the little guys off either -- a soldier has a duty to question illegal orders. But the real culprits, the ones who never seem to suffer the consequences of their actions, are the officers. The high ranking officers, and their civilian masters.

Take Abu Ghraib, for example. And handful of bad apple soldiers were convicted, and a couple of officers got minor disciplinary actions. Except for the general in command of Abu Ghraib at the time, one Janis Karpinski. You will notice that she is not the typical male general. However, a typical male general -- Geoff Miller, who set the tone at Guantanamo before coming to Abu Ghraib -- was working the interrogations at the notorious prison. But it was Karpinski who got busted.

Miller? The guy who trained soldiers in torture techniques retired a major general. To be fair, Congress delayed his retirement because they thought he wasn't completely truthful with them about torture, but they eventually relented. If GW were still president, he'd probably get a Medal of Freedom. As it was, he did get a Distinguished Service Medal.

Karpinski was forced to retire as a colonel although she told the truth. How convenient to have a woman scapegoat available.

And the civilians. Well, we already know that not even Barack Obama is gonna hold their feet to the fire. He's letting the Dick and Liz show set the tone, and it's working like a charm. Americans are absolutely convinced now that torture is a pretty bad thing, but it's necessary to keep America safe from the evil Muslims. I mean terrorists.

Meanwhile, our friendly neighborhood Congressional Democrats are busy doing what they do best -- fuck up the best chance of having an actual liberal government with liberal policies and liberal outcomes that serve the greater good rather than do good for the greater wealth of this country.

And the Republicans. Oh my god, the Republicans. They seem to get more out of sync with the universe every day, while my colleagues fall all over themselves to make sure their every utterance is broadcast to the world as if it were the words of someone who actually understands the world, you know, like, Gandhi or somebody.

And yet ... and yet ... for all the surface sameness we're seeing these first few months of the Obama presidency -- and there is quite a bit -- there's quite a bit different as well. Hell, just having a Democrat in office makes it quite a bit different from the last eight years. And really, do you think Darth Cheney would have come out from whatever dark hole he lives in and put himself all over our televisions if he weren't worried that Obama was gonna fuck up everything he worked so hard for? Hell no, he wouldn't.

But the biggest difference isn't playing out on television. It's not even on the radio or in the newspapers. You see a little of it at some of the Big Blogs, but those places are so infected with the virus of popularity now that they, too, have lost touch with the common ground.

But places like this, well, this is the common ground. I've spent the last several days preparing for A World of Progress' upcoming redesign (oops, Publisher Lady, was I not sposed to mention that yet?), and as part of that I've actually had a look at just about every post on the site, from calls to action to personal stories to hints on making a compost pile to political rants.

And in each and every post I found the same thing -- a yearning to learn, to improve, to help others along this long and difficult path. To progress beyond both the petty and the personal and to redefine the way we look at globalization, heretofore viewed as some nefarious plot for the wealthy to secure their hold on us by both the right and the left.

But that's just the obvious part, carried out by obvious people in pursuit of their obvious enrichment. The real acts of globalization are taking place right here, where an American man living in Mumbai reads a post by a journalist in one of the media capitals of the United States and wants to publish it in an online magazine he writes for published by a woman in the Appalachian Mountains.

That worked out pretty well, so soon the journalist is fully on board, along with an historian with degrees in U.S. and Middle Eastern history, a lesbian on the West Coast, an environmentalist in Texas and a whole bunch of contributors who make A World of Progress one of the most exciting spots on this thing we call Internet.

I knew that, but going through the whole history of the place really made it very, very clear. And I'm not just saying that to curry favor with the boss. The puppy, well, that's another matter altogether.

I like it here so much, in fact, that I'll soon be shutting down my other blogs and posting exclusively here. OK, I'm already posting exclusively here, but soon I'll shut down the other blogs.

But my point, and I do have one, is that it is our leaders who set the tone, who make it clear what's acceptable and not acceptable, who point out the direction we underlings -- no matter how much peer level we actually have -- should be moving.

That's certainly true at dank Iraqi prisons where generals teach torture and walk away with their rank intact. And it's true in places like this where the right people come together at the right time to create something unique and powerful.

Either way, the troops get the message and respond accordingly. The difference plays out across the globe, for better or worse.

But here, unlike at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and who knows how many secret facilities around the world, the good guys win. And when we do, the world benefits.



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Remember 9/11, Cheney style

Sheesh. I go away for a few days and y’all let all hell break loose. Can’t a News Writer catch a little break around here?

But no. I come back to find out that Darth Cheney’s ratings are on the rise? What the????

OK, so it’s still only 37 percent of Americans with a favorable view of the former vice president, who spent the last eight years hidden away in some undisclosed location but whom we now cannot seem to be rid of.

Meanwhile, GW, who never missed a chance to smirk at a camera, is nowhere to be seen. I repeat, WTF? And the Republican Party can’t get its shit together.

The Republican National Committee, which I think is still led by Michael Steele, seems almost irrelevant, while Rush, Newt and Cheney are all over the place calling for Nancy Pelosi’s resignation and claiming that torture is a good thing.

That, of course, is the basis for Cheney’s popularity rising -- he’s attracting the attention of the bloodthirsty on the right, the ones he and GW worked their magic on for eight years, scaring the bejesus out of ‘em so that now they’re absolutely petrified that the pansy-assed liberals in charge are gonna sell us all out to the terrorists.

It’s the same reason that Fox “News” has seen its ratings skyrocket since a liberal black guy became president. That’s pretty damn scary to certain segments of our population.

So anyway, Cheney was out there Thursday using that old tactic that worked so well for so many years for the GOP -- insert “9/11” every 14th or 15th word, just like Rudy Giuliani -- in a speech that could only be called preaching to the converted, the very conservative American Enterprise Institute.

When President Obama makes wise decisions, as I believe he has done in some respects on Afghanistan, and in reversing his plan to release incendiary photos, he deserves our support. And when he faults or mischaracterizes the national security decisions we made in the Bush years, he deserves an answer. The point is not to look backward. Now and for years to come, a lot rides on our President’s understanding of the security policies that preceded him. And whatever choices he makes concerning the defense of this country, those choices should not be based on slogans and campaign rhetoric, but on a truthful telling of history.

What that means is that as long as Obama agrees with what we did, he’s on the right track and we’ll support him. But it’s the same old same old if he disagrees -- after all, we all know that the previous administration never ever ever made a mistake. Except I think for boasting about smoking Osama bin Laden out of his cave. Yeah, that didn’t turn out so good.

It's the Cheney battle cry: Remember 9/11! But that's kinda like the Texan battle cry Remember the Alamo, which was also based on a fanciful retelling of the truth.

And the rest of Cheney’s speech is just more of the same, accusing Democrats of “distorting the truth” and therefore being “in no position to lecture anyone about ‘values.’” We prevented attacks and saved lives by torturing people and spying on Americans with illegal wiretaps, we had “universal support back then” because everybody knew what was at stake, blah blah blah.

Well, no. Everybody knew what the Bush administration told them, which, we now know, was a stack of lies. The justification for illegally torturing and spying on people is that “we saved lives,” but that’s not exactly true either, as plenty of other people have pointed out.

But old Darth, he just keeps on going, just like he kept making that non-existent connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda way back when. Kinda like publishing photographs of them using the same gesture side by side.

And we do know this, if nothing else: When somebody keeps repeating the same shit day after day, and my colleagues keep reporting as if it actually means something, then the people who already believe the bullshit have no reason to think and those who might be unsure have no choice to consider that the lies are actually truth.

They are not.

The whole Nancy Pelosi thing -- please. What a blatant distraction, but then, some of our fellow citizens have not been known for their ability to see through obfuscation.

And on it goes. I’ve said before and I’ll say it again -- if Nancy Pelosi knew we were torturing people and did nothing, then she is culpable. But now is not the time to be arguing that part of the story. Now we need to get to the bottom of what we did, to understand that what we did was morally, ethically and legally wrong and then to punish first those who actively made it happen. After that, we can get to what member of what committee may or may not have been briefed on waterboarding.

And besides, where Pelosi’s concerned, the GOP has been after her for years. I’m not quite sure why they’re so afraid of her, except that she is a woman and she is right behind Joe Biden -- and before that Cheney himself -- in line for the presidency, but they are absolutely terrified of the California congresswoman.

Meanwhile, Cheney -- who appeared to be salivating on the idea of a fresh terrorist attack on the United States, which could then be blamed on Obama and all thought of that August 2001 daily briefing saying that bin Laden wanted to attack the United States and might use airliners to do it could be done away with forever.

And the Rush-Newt-Cheney cabal keeps pushing the horrible idea of actually imprisoning suspected terrorists -- most of whom are not terrorists -- in the United States and trying them in American courts. And some of them actually have the nerve to say that they don’t want them tried in American courts because then they’d have constitutional rights. Hello? Isn’t that what this country was founded on? But that doesn’t really count if your Muslim, I mean a terrorist, I guess.

Obama, also speaking on Thursday, saw things a different way.

After 9/11, we knew that we had entered a new era - that enemies who did not abide by any law of war would present new challenges to our application of the law; that our government would need new tools to protect the American people, and that these tools would have to allow us to prevent attacks instead of simply prosecuting those who try to carry them out. Unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions. And I believe that those decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people. But I also believe that - too often - our government made decisions based upon fear rather than foresight, and all too often trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions. Instead of strategically applying our power and our principles, we too often set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford. And in this season of fear, too many of us - Democrats and Republicans; politicians, journalists and citizens - fell silent. In other words, we went off course.

On the Guantanamo debate, the president was just as clear.

Now, over the last several weeks, we have seen a return of the politicization of these issues that have characterized the last several years. I understand that these problems arouse passions and concerns. They should. We are confronting some of the most complicated questions that a democracy can face. But I have no interest in spending our time re-litigating the policies of the last eight years. I want to solve these problems, and I want to solve them together as Americans. And we will be ill-served by some of the fear-mongering that emerges whenever we discuss this issue. Listening to the recent debate, I've heard words that are calculated to scare people rather than educate them; words that have more to do with politics than protecting our country.

So, here's the choice: Follow Cheney, and return to the fearful days of the Bush administration, where bogeys are around every corner and your neighbor could be a Muslim, I mean, terrorist.

Or, stick with Obama. Yeah, so he’s going back to the military commissions -- but do you really believe those commissions under Obama would be conducted with the same disregard for the rule of law as they were under Bush-Cheney? Um, no.

All right then. Here’s the deal. Don’t let my colleagues continue to act as if Darth Cheney has anything new to say. Well, yeah, for him it is new since he never said much before, but what he’s saying is the same crap they force-fed us after they failed to protect us on 9/11. Don’t let ‘em do it again.Don’t let my colleagues help them. Challenge them. Often. Loudly.

And never, ever back down. That’s how we win. That’s how we keep the real forces of darkness away.

AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press!


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Enough with Nancy Pelosi

My colleagues are at it again, and by that I mean they are salivating over Republican talking points and ignoring the real issues.

This week's diversion, of course, is the dizzying discussion of what Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it, as if that actually matters. Whether Pelosi, or any other member of Congress knew or did not know about what the Bush administration was doing in the name of the American people but behind our backs is irrelevant.

What matters is what the Bush administration did and why did they hide it.

The second part of that is easily answered. They hid it because they knew it was wrong. They knew it was torture, and they knew it was wrong. Period. End of story. Despite my beloved colleagues game attempts to convince you otherwise, there is no gray area here. The "ticking bomb" scenario only happens on "24." So let me say this again.

Torture is wrong. The Bush administration tortured people in our names. Torture is wrong. Always.

So please. Let's shut up about what the CIA did or did not tell Nancy Pelosi in 2002. Let's talk about what the United States was doing to detainees in 2002. And 2003. And 2004. All the way up until George W. Bush left office. Maybe longer.

Let's talk about how many of the detainees who underwent torture -- and torture goes far beyond waterboarding -- were actually "terrorists" at all. And how many of them came to hate the United States after their treatment at the hands of U.S. interrogators.

And let's talk about how the vice president's office desperately wanted some connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and it didn't really matter if it was true or not. They only wanted to be able to say they had "intelligence" connecting them. What they didn't say, though, was that the "intelligence" was wrung out of detainees under torture. What would you tell an interrogator if you were waterboarded 83 times in a month? 183 times?

Let's talk about an administration that bent the Constitution to its will and wants it to stay that way so that no one will know the extent to which they undermined the very foundation of this country.

And let's launch an investigation of these things. An independent investigation that can look into everything -- including what Nancy Pelosi knew or didn't know, what she objected to or didn't object to.

But most of all, let's stop this insane game of speculation, coming up with document after document, each one appearing to contradict the one before -- but all of them being a very vague and incomplete record of a shadowy and hidden policy.

Nancy Pelosi isn't the problem here, and yet my colleagues have spent countless hours discussing her, and virtually no hours discussing why there's even a question about her role at all.

It's time to stop. Now.

It's time to stop being afraid, time to own up to what's been done by us and to us.

Time to stop pretending to be a moral giant among nations and actually become one.

Time to say the word "torture" and look it square in the face, to acknowledge that this is what we did.

Until we do, recovery from the disaster of the last eight years will elude us. This point is key. It is the very symbol of the depravity that follows when a nation's leadership believes the law does not apply to them, no matter how "great" that nation believes itself to be.

We must put it behind us. But before we do, we have to take it all in, embrace what we did, as distasteful as that is. Only then can we truly let it go and move on.

To do otherwise is to condemn ourselves to follow this destructive path again.

Enough with the distractions. Nancy Pelosi is not the issue. Nancy Pelosi is just a shiny object the Republicans are dangling in front of our ADHD eyes. And we, my colleagues and I, are jumping after it like a cat after a moth. Even if we catch it, the victory will be insubstantial because we've ignored the real issue.

Torture. That's the real issue -- the only one that matters in this discussion.


AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press!

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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Lift the veil

He’s wrong.

Barack Obama is wrong.

The president should step aside and allow the release of photographs detailing the type of treatment detainees received at the hands of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He said releasing the photos now could put our troops in greater danger. How? It’s not like al-Qaeda doesn’t already know what we did. Hell, they probably know more about what happened in those dank cells better than any of us do. After all, they were there. We’re still over here, still being kept in the dark by our own government.

The photos that were to be released, before Obama ordered his lawyers to argue more forcefully against it, "are not particularly sensational, especially when compared with the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib," he said.

You remember those photos. Naked men, forced to pile on top of one another in a human pyramid while smiling soldiers stand behind them. A hooded man, with wires attached to his genitals. A hooded man with a military dog snarling in his face. A naked man with a military dog snarling in his face. A naked man with a pair of underwear for a hood. Blood smears on the floor where someone hurt badly was dragged away. A dead man packed in ice with a U.S. soldier smiling and giving a thumbs up sign by his body.

Yes, those were pretty damned “painful images.” The new ones weren’t as bad, Obama tells us, “but they do represent conduct that did not conform with the Army conduct manual.”

Conduct that was AOK under the Bush administration, but banned by Obama. The Americans shown in the photos abusing prisoners have already been dealt with, the president said.

The publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals. In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them would be to further inflame anti-American opinion, and to put our troops in greater danger.

And that’s where he’s at his most wrong. Those who hold extreme anti-American opinion don’t need any photos to inflame their positions. And our troops are already in great danger.

But most of all, the photos would greatly add to our understanding of the type of conduct that was not only allowed but encouraged by the Bush administration. Carried out “by a small number of individuals?” Maybe. But it wasn’t their idea in the first place.

But Obama’s already let us know he’s not interested in pursuing the real perpetrators of this heinous behavior. Maybe he doesn’t want to listen to the Republicans accuse him of “criminalizing policy decisions,” as if that is even remotely what’s going on.

Criminalizing policy decisions would be seeking to prosecute members of the Bush administration for refusing to participate with the U.N. Human Rights Council. That may be stupid, but it isn’t criminal.

Abusing prisoners -- especially when you already know that many of your prisoners may not be “terrorists” at all, but farmers and cab drivers teachers who pissed off somebody who then fingered them to the U.S. military as al-Qaeda members –- is criminal.

We need to see what they did, how they treated human beings. We’re not even talking about “high value detainees” who were tortured. That’s a different matter, and we need to see and hear about that too.

And the president needs to stop perpetuating the myth that it was just a few "bad apples" who foisted this barbaric behavior on the American psyche. It wasn't. It came from the top. And if that's not obvious by now -- with Darth Cheney and his little girl Liz all over the airwaves talking about how great it was what we did -- then we are a far more deluded people than I thought.

As long as we keep these things secret, the American people can go on pretending nothing really bad happened to these detainees and that they all deserved it anyway.

No human being deserves to be treated this way, and what happened to them was horrible. All of them, not just the ones who were waterboarded.

It was wrong, what happened to them. And it’s wrong for Barack Obama to keep it from us.


AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press!

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Morally Exceptional

When last we discussed torture, we were talking about a survey that showed 75 percent of the respondents endorsing the use of torture in some situations. I find it utterly appalling that anyone would endorse torture under any circumstances, and I'm pleased to note, so do the people I consider friends.

But there's a group of people on both the right and left -- who would generally oppose torture -- who have bought the bullshit "ticking bomb" scenario. That's one where something Really Bad is about to happen and Many People Will Be Killed, and you have in custody The One Guy Who Can Tell You Where The Bomb Is and he's not talking. The question, of course, is, "Do you torture him?"

There are several variants of that ticking bomb scenario, including that most ingenious of variants, the one where you harken back to September 11, 2001, invoke the people killed that day and their children, who had to be told that mommy and daddy wouldn't be coming home. In that variant, the only answer, of course, is "Hell yes" I'd torture to stop that from happening.

That, too, is bullshit, mainly because if we'd only had, say, a competent government that was really interested in national security instead of justifying an invasion of Iraq, 9/11 might have been prevented -- without torture.

See, here's the thing. If you're really gonna portray yourself as a moral or an ethical individual, you don't justify torture. Period. That may mean, theoretically or perhaps even realistically, making the hardest decision you'll ever have to make in your life. But you don't torture living creatures. Not bees, not mice, not cats, not monkeys, not human beings.

It's interesting, though, as that survey showed, that the more "morally right" one considers oneself, the more one is likely to endorse torture. There's a group of people out there -- a sizable group -- that believes it has a lock on morality, that they -- and only they -- know the difference between right and wrong. And yet, when we look at what they actually say, it's not so clearly black and white.

Torture is bad, they say, except ...

Discrimination is wrong, they say, except ...

Bombing civilian sites is wrong, they say, except ...

Brutal dictators are wrong, they say, except ...

Taking a disputed election to the Supreme Court is wrong, they say, except ...

>There's just an awful lot of exceptions, dontcha think? And if the exceptions really do delineate some clear differences, then the exceptions have a purpose. But these exceptions are much more arbitrary. In fact, it'd be perfectly reasonable to finish off each of those sentences up there with "when we do it."

Likening the president of the United States to Hitler is wrong, except when we do it.

Now, before you get all apoplectic on me, please go reread my second sentence, the one that starts "But there's a group of people on both the right and left ... " Actually, that's all you need to read. Just wanted to make sure you remembered the "both the right and left" part, because this next part doesn't fall in that category.

Along with those who can find ways to justify torture, there are others who can find ways to justify murder. Or at least justify fantasizing about it. Take one David Feherty, a CBS golf analyst who apparently lives "about a par 5 away" from GW in that formerly all white Dallas enclave, Preston Hollow.

Feherty, the golf analyst, says he generally hates his neighbors, apparently on principle, especially "the ones that want to talk to me who aren’t doctors or gun dealers or who don’t have their own airplanes."

Oh, or GW.

But here's the point I'm getting to. Feherty, the golf analyst, was asked to write about his new neighbors in D magazine, which I think is something about Dallas, only where most cities have magazines named after the city, Dallas apparently thought just "D" was enough. I have no idea what Detroit and Denver think of that.

Now, apparently, we're all very late getting this news, since the story was published on D's Web site in March for the April issue. I guess nobody of any import actually reads D, but hey. GW probably does.

But anyway, Feherty, the golf analyst, writes about how history is gonna absolve GW of all the crimes he committed and all. He was just "dealt a rotten hand," he says. And then he says this:

From my own experience visiting the troops in the Middle East, I can tell you this, though: despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious media, if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Osama bin Laden, there’s a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death.

I'm guessing the speaking fees for Feherty, the golf analyst, just went up considerably in certain circles, and I'm betting he'll be talking a lot about free speech too. Because, you know, the first amendment guarantees his right to be a fucking idiot in print.

Now, while cracking what I'd be willing to bet Feherty, the golf analyst, will say is a joke -- because that's what the right does when one of them says something so completely moronic that there's no reasonable explanation for it -- he's also displaying the very same arrogance of those folks who justify torture, except he's actually talking about murder. Murder of people he doesn't like. And the number one person he doesn't like? Apparently Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House.

Not Barack Obama, because that would bring the Secret Service on his ass, and besides, Obama is black and Feherty, the golf analyst, probably didn't want to have to go through the "that's a racist thing to say" bullshit. Now, I don't know if Feherty, the golf analyst, is racist, anymore than I know if he is misogynist since he happened to name the first woman to ever be third in line to the presidency as the one who will take the two bullets. It is true that an awful lot of folks on the right are scared to death of the black guy in the White House, and just hate like hell that a woman has finally settled into her place in the House.

But the truth is, Feherty, the golf analyst, didn't make his statement out of some racist place, or some misogynist place. Instead, it's about his complete conviction that he and others like him -- and no one else -- know the score around here. The rest of us shoot bogeys, literally and figuratively.

But it also does something else. It attempts to taint all U.S. soldiers with his ugly disease. Richard Smith, a veteran who writes for had something to say about that:

Evidently, Feherty believes that we are mindless machines of death, who would without hesitation accept a loaded weapon from a stranger in civilian society, and then use that weapon to assassinate political leaders of the country we have sworn to defend. ... Feherty, who to my knowledge has never served his country or ours in uniform, makes the assumption that he knows Soldiers and Veterans, and that 'any U.S. soldier' has such hatred for (again) the political leaders of the country we have sworn to defend, that we could not be professional enough to help ourselves from committing murder on the spot. What Mr. Feherty might not understand is that there are few Americans who have been as loyal to Veterans and Soldiers as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. If I found myself in that proverbial elevator, the first thing I would do is thank them both profusely.

Honestly, that little statement of golf analyst Feherty was kinda outta the blue. Was it really necessary in an article about having the former president become his neighbor to insult soldiers and let us know that he wouldn't mind seeing the top two Democrats in Congress dead?

And sure, he has the right to say whatever he wants. But it's kinda interesting ... here, I'll let Mustang Bobby from Bark Bark Woof Woof say it:

The point is that the people who complain the most about their restrictions of free speech rights are the ones who both abuse the right and have no compunction about restricting it for other people. They also don't get the basic concept of taking responsibility for your own actions. The right of free speech includes the responsibility for using the judgment to know when to not say something that might come back and bite you in the ass. A mature and responsible person would know that and not blame the consequences on someone else.

There's more to the right of freedom of speech than just saying something.

And more than stamping the ground and screaming "I'm right, I know I'm right."

And that's the real thing about morality, see. It's consistent. People aren't arbitrarily dropped into groups of "good" people (not to be tortured) or "bad" people (can be discriminated against). That way of thinking is, well, it's medieval. And it has no place in the 21st Century.

So, for those of you who agree with Feherty, the golf analyst, say whatever you want. But do us a big favor and step out of the way.

After all, if you're not for us, you're against us. And you get to decide -- the moral path, or the one with all the exception clauses?


News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press!

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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Morality play

Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?

That's the question the Pew Research Center asked 742 Americans recently. They found that group almost evenly split -- 49 percent saying often or sometimes, and 47 percent saying rarely or never.

Actually, let me change that. They found that group overwhelmingly endorsed torturing suspected terrorists. Only 25 percent said torture could never be justified.

Most media outlets who reported this survey did so to point out that people who attend religious services on at least a weekly basis were more likely to endorse torture than those who rarely or never went to services. My colleagues pointed out that of the very religious, 54 percent said that torture was often or sometimes justified, while among the miscreants who don't attend services, only 42 percent said torture was often or sometimes justified.

But what I find much more interesting is that the 25 percent number holds almost across the board -- 25 percent of those who attend services at least weekly, 23 percent of those who attend services monthly or several days a year and 26 percent of those who rarely or never attend services think that torture is unjustifiable.

Which means that roughly three-quarters, across the board, can find a justification for waterboarding, or forcing someone to stand for hours with their hand held above their head, or sticking someone's head in a box with insects and telling him or her they're poisonous, or a whole list of really atrocious actions.

75 percent.

So, while it is interesting to note that the religious amongst us, who generally love telling the world how caring they are, are generally more bloodthirsty than their non-religious counterparts. But when it comes down to it, we're a nasty, cruel lot, we Americans.

Of course, nearly 65 percent of us back the death penalty too, another barbaric custom that would seem to sit so well with the religious. And, once again, 27 percent -- according to a 2008 Gallup poll -- see the death penalty as morally wrong.

Interestingly, another Gallup poll, this one taken in 2007, showed that more than 80 percent of Americans think that morality in America is getting worse, with 44 percent describing the moral state of the country as already poor. Care to guess what they think is the cause of all this lack of morality?

Me, I'm thinking that our priorities are a tad screwed, that we're missing the mark on what's moral and what's not, that we've abdicated our, if you'll excuse my use of the term, god-given ability to think for ourselves and handed it over to men and women who are more interested in their own elevation than in our salvation.

We've fallen prey to our baser "instincts," if you can call it that. I think it's just the easiest thing to do. If you don't like it, if you fear it, if you don't understand it, make it "other." Make it so different that you no longer need to see it as anything worthy of your compassion.

Then kill it. That way it won't bother you anymore and you can go right on with your narrow-minded self. And we have plenty of political and religious leaders more than ready to encourage us down that dark and risky pathway.

So, when you see this new administration gauging the political winds on things like investigating the torture regime, let alone prosecuting it, here's why.

When only 25 percent of us think that torture is morally wrong, there's just not much there to counter the rest of the Romans with their thumbs down before they even know the story on the guy to be tortured.

Bloodthirst. Revenge.

That just doesn't sound very spiritual to me. Or moral.

I'd always thought that it we humans were supposed to be moving in a more positive direction. You know, away from the sadistic practices of folks like, oh, Vlad the Impaler and Augusto Pinochet and Pol Pot.

I always thought America was better than that.

What was I thinking?


News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press!

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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Of pigs and men

My beloved colleagues are at it again.

• Fears grow as new swine flu cases are confirmed (Fox)


• Swine flu fear spreads with new cases in U.S. (MSNBC)


• More swine flu hits U.S., emergency in Mexico (CNN)


• 2 Swine Flus in Kan., US Total 11; 8 Likely in NYC (ABC)


• Swine flu has "pandemic potential" (CBS)

That's right. They're trying to scare you, and this time it's not some terrorist (read: Islamic) threat. No, this time it's the dreaded swine flu. From Mexico.

The horrors. From listening to the news readers on the tubes, you'd think it was bubonic plague. It's not. It is a particularly virulent strain of flu, largely because it's relatively new. But like any other strain of flu, it will vary in severity from mild to severe. Some people, usually the very young, the very old and those with compromised immune systems, may die. And sometimes, peeople who don't fit into those three categories may contract the virus and die.

Right now, in the United States, there are 11 confirmed cases of this new strain of swine flu -- nine in California and two each in Texas and Kansas. There may be more cases in New York, but that has not yet been confirmed. No one in the United States has died from the swine flu.

So far, in the flu season that began in the first week of October 2008, there have been 26,000 confirmed cases of the flu in the United States. There have probably been a lot more, because the CDC doesn't test everyone who has flu-like symptoms. In fact, the CDC estimates that an average of 36,000 people in the United States die from the flu -- any strain -- or complications from the flu each year.

Mexico is having a much more serious outbreak of this particular strain of influenza, but it is not on the scale of the bubonic plague either. More than 1,300 people have been hospitalized recently with flu-like symptoms, and health officials say that at least 81 people are likely to have died from the strain. Officials there have confirmed 20 cases of this strain of swine flu. Not all have died.

The World Health Organization has convened a meeting of influenza experts to take a closer look at what's going on and decide what action, if any, to take. They did say it was a "public health emergency of international concern." WHO is concerned because this particular strain has never been seen before and because in Mexico, it appears to be affecting young, relatively healthy people rather than the groups normally susceptible to the virus.

Swine flu is a disease of pigs that may be spread to humans who come in contact with infected pigs. It is a contagious disease, and may also spread from human to human. But it is not spread through eating meat from an infected animal.

And about those flu shots. Every year, the experts get together and figure out what strains of influenza they think will be predominant in the coming flu season, and they concoct a vaccination based on their predictions. Like any vaccine, it will not prevent you from contracting the disease. It may make it less likely. Because this strain of swine flu is brand new, there's nothing in this year's flu vaccine to counter it.

Now you have the facts, which my colleagues are giving you, but they are stuffing them in between large doses of breathless fearmongering. And here's why.

My lovely colleagues are scared out of their ever-loving minds. This week, it's been proven that the United States tortured its prisoners during the Bush administration. A lot of people knew about it and approved of it. A lot of people lied about it and are still lying about it.

This is the most perplexing dilemma my colleagues have faced in a long time -- how do they report this? If they report that the United States tortured people, they are being biased toward the Democrats. If they continue to use the Republican language -- "alternative interrogation techniques," etc. -- then they're supporting the Republican position.

Because they have convinced themselves that their job is to report what everybody says and make no judgment on what they say -- the "he said/she said" school of "journalism" -- and because it is impossible for any sane individual to look at what was done to our prisoners and not call it torture, they don't know what to do. They have completely forgotten their real job -- to look through the various "spins" on the news and tell us what's really going on.

They haven't done that in such a long time that they've not only forgotten that it's what they're supposed to be doing, they've even forgotten how.

All week long they've struggled with this dilemma. They've put pundits on the air to talk about the issue from one side or another. They've focused on various nuances of the matter, like whether the presence of doctors -- who, by the way, violated their Hippocratic Oath just by being there -- meant it wasn't so bad or whether the legal numbskulls who wrote the memos were right to determine that torture isn't torture if you don't intend to actually hurt someone.

And then, at the end of the week came what they were looking for -- a suitable distraction. The journalists' shiny object. And this time it wasn't just the journos' ADD that got triggered. It was their desire to run far, far away from an issue that terrifies them.

Telling the truth.

But I want to tell them, my dear, dear colleagues, to be brave. Telling the truth won't hurt you. In fact, you'll feel quite free once you've done it a few times.

I understand why it scares them. Once they tell the truth about this -- once they say that there is no excuse whatsoever for one human being to do to another human being what the United States government did to those prisoners, it will be such a profound experience they'll start to question everything. Their eyes will be open not only to truth, but the truth about morality.

They'll know that they can no longer put Rick Warren on camera one and Gavin Newsome on camera two, have them talk about same-sex marriage and call it journalism. They'll know that they can't have a guest who calls Barack Obama a socialist or a fascist and not challenge him or her with the truth.

They'll see through the lies and know they must name them. And they'll know that our humanity is defined by how we treat other living things, not how much money we make, or what kind of car we drive or how much power we've taken from others.

That's a lot to ask of one person, especially one who's been so blind for so long and is beginning to see just how wrong one person can be.

But I'm here to tell you, my colleagues, you won't be alone. Stop running from the truth. Stop acting from fear. Stop promoting fear.

Instead, promote the truth. There is, indeed, strength in numbers. And there are already large numbers where you need to be. More will follow.

Step into the light, my friends. Don't be afraid. You don't need to go chasing after the scary swine flu to avoid the scarier torture. It really won't hurt you.

And the truth is, we need you. We need you to record all this, truthfully. To make sure that those who imposed this scourge on us all are held accountable for their crimes. To make sure we never forget what happened to us when we lost our ability to feel compassion, to recognize unethical and immoral behavior.

And to make sure it never, ever happens again.

This is the change I voted for in November -- a fundamental shift in world view.

Without it, we're nothing.


News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press!

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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'We do not fucking torture'

Apparently, it's not true that everybody at Fox "News" is a complete jackass. While Trace Gallagher was trying to explain the "two school of thought" on whether torture is effective during the online "Strategy Room," Shepherd Smith interrupted. Pounding his hand on the desk in front of him for emphasis, he was very nearly shouting.

We are America! I don’t give a rat’s ass if it helps, we are America! We do not fucking torture! We don’t do it.

Gallagher continued as if he hadn't heard Smith. Somebody said "Oops," apparently realizing the newsman had said a bad word -- or maybe realizing he'd stepped out of the conservative talking points -- and Smith repeated "doesn't matter, we don't do it," more quietly. Don't believe me? Here. Watch it.



He was a little less, ahem, emphatic, on his own show, but still got the point across.

We are America. We don't torture. And the moment that is not the case, I want off the train.

Damn, I sure hope nobody makes him apologize for speaking his mind. It is, of course, against Fox policy to condemn anything a Republican administration does, particularly anything related to national security. At least he didn't insult Rush Limbaugh. And, um, where was he for the past eight years?

Speaking of whom, the Real Leader of the Republican Party compared the outcry against such a barbaric practice with the outcry against domestic violence, and not in a good way.

We have allowed — we have allowed these guys, Obama and his buddies over at the CIA and in Congress, to water down the definition of torture to mean anything that makes a person uncomfortable. You know what this reminds me of? Remember when the NOWgang and all these other social interest groups started asking women if they’d ever been a victim of domestic violence? They didn’t like the numbers they got initially. The numbers weren’t high enough for the NOW gang. So they expanded the definition to include a man shouting at them. A man shouting at them equaled domestic violence. It didn’t matter if the women shouted first. But let’s not get sidetracked. The important thing to understand is that these appeasers have painted themselves into a corner. Dick Cheney has now called their bluff. The stark truth is that despite what the political left and the Hollywood elite say, extreme measures, enhanced measures, so-called torture — whatever you want to call it — it works. And he’s seen the memos. And he wants them released.

Right. It works. That might be why the FBI director, Robert Mueller, said last year in a Vanity Fair interview that he did not "believe" that there had been a case where "any attacks had been disrupted because of intelligence obtained through the coercive methods." Oh, and just to be sure, Mueller's office confirmed that again on Tuesday.

And torture is anything that makes somebody feel uncomfortable? Hell, I'm uncomfortable right now because there's a damn cat on my lap and my leg is tingling. I guess I should call him a torturer. But that really doesn't compare with, say, being forced to stand for hours on end with your arms held above your head or being forced to masturbate while being photographed or being threatened by a snarling police dog, including the threat of letting the dog off the leash.

(Torture cat is a representation of News Writer's cat and not News Writer's actual cat)

So if deliberately harming another human being didn't stop any attacks, I guess that just leaves Dennis Blair's "deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization," which, I suspect, could have been gotten from just as easily and with less destruction to our image abroad from the Federation of American Scientists or GlobalSecurity.org or even Wikipedia.

Limbaugh and his video game addict buddies are so wrong on this one that they just guaranteed themselves a ticket straight to the hell they believe in so completely. Lou Dobbs, CNN's complete moron, said yesterday that the administration was "on the defensive" over this issue. Really? Because I kinda thought they've been quite firm about the whole thing. Torture is banned. Waterboarding, etc., is torture. Now, they've been too wishy-washy for my tastes about dragging the miscreants who ordered this vile practice (and those who did it -- I don't buy the "just following orders line"). But they've been quite clear that torture is wrong. And now, really, America does not torture. But defensive? Must be wishful thinking.

Let's see. Torture didn't stop any attacks. Probably didn't get any confessions -- which is generally the real purpose of torture -- because from what I've seen, the "high value detainees" have been quite proud of their accomplishments. Maybe have gotten false confessions from the innocent people dragged into American custody just because. And any "deeper understanding" could have been gotten from anywhere.

So for what godforsaken reason did the Bush administration's minions think it necessary to waterboard a guy 183 times in 30 days?

There's only one answer to that.

Revenge.

Because, you know, waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, didn't work the first 182 times. But that 183rd, boy, he spilled his guts then.

Conservatives want revenge. Anyone with the audacity of attacking them must be punished. And they have very long memories for that sort of thing. Honestly, revenge was the reason for the ridiculous assault on Bill Clinton in the 1990s -- revenge for kicking out Richard Nixon. Never mind that Clinton really was a bit of a scumbag and pretty damn conservative himself -- he was a Democrat. And for that, he must die.

See, conservatives see themselves as all powerful, not to be challenged. It's the very basis of the Party of No. Challenging them -- and winning -- has to be punished. It's not about discipline. It's about revenge. Showing them who's boss. Reinforcing strict hierarchical standings.

Sara Robinson at the Campaign for America's Future likens it to two differing parenting styles:

For conservatives, the goal of discipline is to assert the power of external authority. In their worldview, most people aren't capable of self-discipline. They can't be trusted to behave unless there's someone stronger in control who's willing to scare them back into line when they misbehave. Don't question the rules. Don't defy authority. Just do what you're told, and you'll be fine. But cross that line, dammit, and there will be hell to pay.

In this view, the whole point of punishment is for greater beings (richer, whiter, older, male) to impress the extent of their authority upon lesser beings (poorer, darker, younger, female). I'm in control, I make the rules, and I'm the only one of us entitled to use force to get my way. Since emotional and/or physical domination is the goal, the punishments themselves often use some kind of emotional or physical violence to drive home that point. Spanking, humiliation, arrest, jail and torture all fill the bill quite nicely. I'm not interested in what you think. Do as I say, or I will be within my rights to do whatever it takes to make you behave.

Note, too, the hierarchical nature of this system. Those at the top of the heap enjoy the freedom that comes with never being held accountable by anyone. This exemption is implicit in conservative notions of 'liberty,' and is considered an inalienable (if not divine) right of fathers, bosses, religious leaders, politicians, and anyone else on the right who holds power over others. The privilege of controlling others' liberty, without enduring reciprocal constraints on your own, is at the heart of the true meaning of 'freedom.'

Liberal parenting books, on the other hand, talk a lot about "logical and natural consequences." Since liberals believe that most people are perfectly capable of making good moral choices without constant oversight from some outside authority, the goal of discipline is to strengthen the child's internal decision-making skills in order to prepare him for adult self-governance.

Wherever possible, parents are encouraged to do this by letting misbehaving kids live with the natural consequences of their own bad choices. I'm not mad at you. I still love you. But you spent all your allowance on Tuesday, and now you get to be broke until Saturday—and I'd be lying to you if I let you think that the world works any other way. Since you two can't figure out a peaceable way to share that toy, I'm going to take it away. Now that you've annoyed the bus driver to the point where the principal had to call me and put you off the bus for a week, you're not going anywhere else for a while, either—including that big event this weekend you've been looking forward to for the past two months.

So here we are. Big Daddy is exploding all over the place that he just might be actually held accountable for his actions, which is, of course, completely nonsensical to him. He's Big Daddy. He's in charge. He is always right.

And so they lie. The administration is on the defensive. There are memos showing how torture worked. It wasn't really torture.

But they lie because they know that torture is wrong. They know they authorized and utilized torture, and they know it's wrong. And now they have to raise a huge fuss to distract us.

To distract us from the real reason for the torture. To keep us from knowing that they only did it because they could. Because they were pissed at the assholes who dared to attack this country. Because the assholes deserved punishment, strong punishment, not the weak little slap on the wrist that the laws of the United States would give them.

For all their bluster about loving America, conservatives actually hold our system of government in great contempt. They hate the deliberative nature of the courts, the legislative branch of government. They hate -- as we saw only too well in the past 8 years -- that a president isn't the sole arbiter of power, that America does not have a monarch, a dictator, a tyrant.

And they hate you and me -- because we can see right through them. As Digby noted,

Here's the thing: these people are puerile, schoolyard thinkers who believe in any means to an end. If they could have done what they truly wanted to do after 9/11, they would have opened concentration camps or started a nuclear war. They believe that you have to use everything you have at your disposal or the wogs (everyone but us) will think you are weak. That's the full extent of their understanding of the way the world works.

That using torture and endless imprisonment of innocent people are immoral and disgusting taboos that put the perpetrator in the same company as history's most evil villains is entirely unpersuasive to these people --- they think that's a good thing. But even on a practical level that even a very average 9th grader should be able to understand, you would hope they could see that these people hurt the nation in ways that we'll be dealing with for decades --- we showed that America loses its head when attacked, overreacts, spends and then botches the whole thing so badly we don't know whether we are coming or going. We've shown that we are pants wetting, panic artists who will harm ourselves when frightened. And that is a weakness no powerful nation should ever allow the world to see.

Our task now is to make sure that the Obama administration does what's necessary to hold these people accountable for their actions. Not doing so will guarantee it will happen again, and we the People cannot allow that to happen.


News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press!

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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Here There Be Monsters

All right. Enough. Just fucking enough. It's bad enough that Darth Cheney and all the airwave bloviators are bitching about Obama releasing four measly little torture memos.

Cheney, mind you. The guy who was always in an undisclosed location when he was vice president, has now been everywhere telling us how unsafe we are because the eVille liberal Obama released those damn memos.

But now Obama's own director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, says torture may have helped. Of course, we know that because someone who received a memo from Blair leaked it. Here's the relevant quote:

High-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.

I guess it was just plain necessary to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Muhammed 183 times in 30 days. That's six times a day, people. Six times every day they strapped him down and poured water on his face to make him think he was drowning.

And that's just an average. What it really means is that if they didn't exactly stick to the six times a day average, there were days when they did that to him more than six times a day.

But get this. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen, a former Bush speechwriter -- cause we all know how many interrogations speechwriters participate in -- justified torturing the detainees by saying -- as pointed out at Every Man a Giant -- that "we were actually doing the terrorists a favor by torturing them."

But the memos note that, 'as Abu Zubaydah himself explained with respect to enhanced techniques, brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship.' In other words, the terrorists are called by their faith to resist as far as they can -- and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know. This is because of their belief that 'Islam will ultimately dominate the world and that this victory is inevitable.' The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely. This is the secret to the program's success.

Know what? That's fucking crazy talk.

Because it does not matter one iota that Khalid Sheikh Muhammed -- or "KSM" as the government prefers to refer to him so they don't have to openly acknowledge that he's a human being -- was the mastermind behind 9/11.

And it doesn't matter because torture is wrong, no matter who you are torturing or why. It doesn't matter if you got any good information. Torture is morally repugnant. It flies in the face of the very idea of decency.

When you torture another living creature, you lose your humanity. It's gone. It's why Paul Krugman was right when he said after reading the four released memos that "There is now no way to view the people who ruled us these past 8 years as anything but monsters."

What did it really get for us? According to Blair, "a deeper understanding of al-Qaeda." What deeper understanding did we need? Al-Qaeda's leaders regularly send out messages telling us what they're about. Did we really need to stick a guy's head into a box with bugs and tell him they were poisonous to find out that al-Qaeda is a radical fundamentalist group that has no problem using deadly violence to get its way?

Did torturing any of the taxi drivers and farmers who ran afoul of the wrong people and were falsely singled out to the U.S. military as terrorists get us Osama bin Laden? Did waterboarding Abu Zubaydah 83 times the month they waterboarded Muhammed 183 times get us Ayman al-Zawahiri?

Did torture stop the Mumbai attacks? The Madrid train bombings? The London transit bombings?

No. And even if it had done even one of those things, it wouldn't be worth it. We are not meant to be a nation of savages, and yet, when we torture -- when we allow torture -- that is what we are. Brutal savages.

And that goes for any Democrat who knew this was going on as well. If a Democratic congressman or woman sat in a "classified" meeting where torture was discussed -- no matter what euphemism they used to keep from calling it what it is -- then they're culpable too.

Let's say this again: Torture is wrong. It demeans not only the tortured but the torturers and anyone associated with them. And it does. not. work. Bryan at Why Now:

The only two groups who really think torture works, are people who enjoy it, and people so frightened that they would spill their guts on the threat of torture, i.e. the same people who fall for the 'good cop/bad cop' routine.

What torture did get us is much less safe, much less respect, much more hatred and much more anger. Digby:

Aside from the moral dimension, which should be the most relevant, the premise that the world must believe the United States will stop at nothing is very, very dangerous. It confirms the world's darkest suspicions about us and validates many of the arguments made by our enemies. I honestly can't conceive of anything that makes the US less safe than that.

Torture is immoral. Any country that practices it (or even pretends to practice it) much less contrives an entire bureaucratic legal underpinning for it, is then, by definition, immoral. That's the kind of 'exceptionalism' that turns countries into feared pariah states, veritably begging for mistrust among allies and the creation of new enemies. Unless we are prepared to do a lot more torturing, invading and occupying -- basically becoming a malevolent superpower holding on primarily by brutal force --- we have to repudiate this concept. The more powerful a country is, the more it needs to be seen as operating from a moral, ethical and responsible standpoint --- and the less chance it will be seen by others as a threat. Making the world recoil in disgust at their brutality is about the stupidest thing the leaders of an empire could do unless they plan to spend all their time fighting wars and fending off enemies.

A world power of our magnitude and unequaled military might naturally engenders mistrust around the globe, which our government must already go to great lengths to assuage. To add to that already delicate, difficult situation by illegally invading countries and endorsing something as barbaric, crude and indefensible as torture is criminally irresponsible. The United States is made much less safe by these actions and we will all be paying the price for that schoolyard mentality for the rest of our lives.

Far greater empires than ours have been brought low by exactly the kind of juvenile thinking that leads to the belief that unless the world is petrified of a nation's power to commit violence it will be unsafe. It's a self-fulilling prophesy.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has been all over the map -- the operatives who did the torturing won't be prosecuted, the big guys who ordered it won't be either. "Time for reflection, notretribution," or some such shit. Now, the president is "open" to prosecutions of the big guys.

Guess he got an earful from people who voted him into office. Well, good for you, Mr. President, that you've at least banned torture. But now it's time to tell the truth.

The Bush administration authorized and ordered torture. Despite their "memos" declaring torture legal, it wasn't. It isn't. And there were plenty questioning what was going on. A report from a Senate Armed Services Committee investigation released Tuesday night, in fact, reveals that just about every time someone -- say, CentCom or Army psychiatrists -- some new legal opinion would surface answering their concerns.

For eight years, our government did things in our name that were repugnant. They were repulsive, offensive and obscene.

And so were the people who did those things. Just because they stopped short of ripping out fingernails with pliers or cutting out tongues or burning body parts with hot irons doesn't mean it wasn't torture.

It was, and it was wrong. And we are all lesser for it.


News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press!

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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