Tortures of the Simple Truth

The United States of America has never been much of a culture. It has been a gargantuan maker and peddler of toxic crap posing as culture, and has addicted the world to thinking a lifestyle built upon consuming toxic crap was a good thing, even though it is wrecking the planet.

Of course the USA did have some principles that seemed, on parchment, better than most everybody else's. Posturing about "freedom", and "rights" sure sounded good, there for a while anyway, huh? You had that old piece of sheepskin, containing the Bill of Rights, for example, and the "no cruel and unusual punishment" bit which was supposed to assert among other things that the USA did not approve torturing people, and for a long time it seemed the masters in charge of things were generally respectful of those rights, and the principles underlying them.

Anyway, as a Pakistani once told me, reflecting upon the difference between the USA and his country, or pretty much all other countries: "The brilliance of the American system is that its people are just as unfree as anybody else, but they think they are freer than anybody else." Yeah, it makes it a lot easier for masters to rule, when the dumbasses they are ruling think it matters what the people have to say about anything. As we have been learning, once again, the USA exists to protect and promote the interests of the rich and powerful, and it is they who get gigantic government bailouts, not the middle class, and certainly not the poor. The vast majority of Americans are glorified serfs.

When I finally, and permanently, realized that there was just no point in hoping the USA could ever live up to its alleged principles, was when I looked at the pictures from Abu Ghraib, which were first released five years ago. While the Bush regime quickly responded to these documents as the products of "bad apples" that had all managed to congregate together in one prison wing in Baghdad, I knew what I was looking at was the product of a government policy, and all the evidence has pointed to it having been a policy dictated from the White House.

Of course, the Bush regime and the military scapegoated the Abu Ghraib torturers, and blamed the whole thing on enlisted personnel they claimed had run amuck. As we know, they sent Lyndie England to prison for three years for abusing Iraqi prisoners, something she said had been ordered by her superiors. The military denied there were such orders or that anybody except England and her fellow soldiers thought it was a good idea to torture Iraqi prisoners.

But this week we have seen explicit evidence that torture was approved and ordered by the White House in early 2002, in response to the CIA (some reports say the request began with civilian contractors) wanting authorization to start torturing detainees, and that the Abu Ghraib tortures were nothing except a continuation of the policy being inflicted upon victims at Gitmo, and anywhere else the CIA was running its gulag of horrors.

Now, there is a debate about what to do about this. Barack Obama has already said he thinks it would be bad to actually hold the torturers, the CIA and other US personnel who committed the illegal acts, responsible in any way. He doesn't want them or their agency to feel bad, and maybe to stop doing their jobs of acting like a bunch of terrorists. After all, look at their outstanding record of service: Bay of Pigs...Vietnam...domestic spying (which is supposed to be illegal)...Iran-Contra...9/11 (whoops!)...Iraq (whoops again!!)...and of course the CIA gulag of torture chambers.

Yet, Barack Obama is worried somebody over at the CIA might get his feelings hurt and stop doing his job if he thinks he might get in trouble for committing crimes against humanity.

Shouldn't Obama instead be worried somebody over at the CIA might actually continue to do the horrific jobs they actually do?

Now, all this said, there are a lot of Americans, regular folks, i.e. redneck morons, who think all this torture business has been blown all out of proportion by the rotten, liberal media.

After all, they complain, shouldn't we want to waterboard those evil Qaeda guys, the ones who slammed those planes into our buildings on 9/11 and killed all those people? And they slap each other on the back when they say these moronic things, as if the mere ability to utter sheer idiocy was the very epitome of good First Amendment practice.

And they ask how it is we are even supposed to know what torture is or isn't. It's all just subjective in the end, and isn't it better to be tortured than dead?

Thing is, some (we don't know how many) of the tortured ended up dead as a result.

Anyway, how do we know what torture is or isn't?

There is one thing to consider here which I have not seen much talked about, even in the blogosphere.

Torture is illegal in the USA, or outside of it too if it is committed by Americans acting "under color of law".

Now, I know most of you know that, or maybe feel it or something, but do you know how exactly it is illegal? Have you read the statute that makes it illegal? It is unusual, in that it was written in pretty clear English, and leaves little wiggle room for pretending you really believed waterboarding was somehow OK and not torture—like any decent human being with even half a brain would even try to make that argument.

Anyway, here is the statute.

It defines "torture" in this way:

"'torture' means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control"

What that means is that while confining a detainee might cause him to suffer mental pain, that alone would not necessarily constitute torture. Nor would making the detainee obey certain rules of his confinement, so long as they did not inflict "severe" suffering. And what exactly is "severe" suffering?

Happily, they define that too, including this bit, where they point out that "'severe mental pain or suffering' means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from...the threat of imminent death."

Now, anybody who has read any informed description of waterboarding will know that the very point of it is to give the victim the sense that he is imminently in danger of dying from drowning. That isn't because it "simulates" drowning and therefore isn't really dangerous. It's because it actually causes the person to slowly, agonizingly, drown.

It is torture, plain and simple. And if you wonder why you should take my word for it, you don't have to. You can take the word of the United States military, which used waterboarding in various elite training programs (including for SEALs) for many years to prepare participants for the reality of being captured and tortured by enemy forces. They never for a moment imagined that waterboarding was anything other than torture, and used it for that purpose. And it was considered such a dangerous practice, it was noted for this feature in a 1991 General Accounting Office report on "high-risk training" in the US Navy:

“The Chinese water board torture demonstration is another potentially dangerous exercise that has been conducted during BUD/S [Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL] training in the past, even though it was not an official part of the curriculum.”

While the GAO report pointed out this practice "had no place" in basic SEAL training, and recommended it be discontinued, it noted a similar technique was being used in an "advanced survival course", where a psychologist was "present at all times to monitor both the instructors and the students." The CIA employed special torture shrinks for their gulag also, to make sure they were effectively driving their victims to the brink.

In the lead-up to the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis, there were some people who argued that it would just be wiser to forget all that looking backwards and justice stuff and pay attention to the future and reality. After all, most of those Nazis were "just following orders" and thought it was the right and legal thing to be doing, so you should just blame Hitler, and not upset the Germans, who were after all now sort of our allies against the Russian menace. We needed the Germans to feel good about themselves, which they probably wouldn't if we made the case their leaders, and by implication the people following their lead, were a pack of uncivilized monsters.

It may be inconvenient to Barack Obama to hold the Bush regime torturers accountable for their uncivilized, monstrous and of course illegal acts, but it is nevertheless the right thing for him to do.

As usual, I am not in any way confident he shall do the right thing.

(jk)

Tea Parties And Torture

Sons of Liberty dressed up as indians
dump tea in Boston Harbor, 1773
Last week, some Republican-orchestrated tax “tea parties”, meant to remind everybody of the Boston Tea Party, took place all over the USA. The people who attended these very public protests—the Boston Tea Party was a privately attended, costumed bit of vandalism—are called by Democrats part of an astroturf movement, as opposed to a grass-roots one. The astroturf crack is meant to suggest that all the protesters are artificially grass-roots, and are really the puppets if not the paid agents of the Republican Party. While it is true that few Democratic Party leaders seem much bothered by blowing the hell out of the already blown-to-hell US federal budget, and at some point they will have to raise taxes to help pay for all their extravagant giveaways to rich people, Republicans (ironically) are not the only people deeply concerned by this.

But the thing is, the real tea parties won’t likely be organized by conservative goombahs (after all George III was pretty fucking conservative), nor will they just be about some stinking tea or taxes.

They’ll probably be aimed at disrupting or breaking something essential—e.g. the nation’s financial system—oh wait, that’s already disrupted and broken. Hmm—OK, then the nation’s housing market—nope, disrupted and broken. The economy—nope, disrupted and broken. The nation’s computer security—disrupted and broken. The nation’s international reputation—LONG disrupted and broken. The nation’s position as the number one thug in the world! Oh, that’s still safe.

Which brings us to the torture bit of our story.

Now, it isn’t really news that the United States has for a long time been the biggest thug in the world. Hell, it’s the only nation that has ever thought it was OK to actually nuke cities. It acts a lot like Southpark’s Jimbo Kern and Ned Gerblansky, who regularly violate Nature, and hunting regs, by loudly proclaiming that anything they are about to shoot is “coming right for us”. Of course Jimbo and Ned are just redneck morons, whereas the United States of America is—uhm—a whole nation of redneck morons, armed to the teeth with nukes, tanks, aircraft carriers, a really hateful shoot-first-and-count-the-collaterals-later attitude, and of course the CIA monsters who work for the Ministry of Love.

Granted, from a Western point of view, Qaeda guys are real scumbags, but is it really doing the US any good whatsoever to now be known as the nation that thought it was wise to waterboard 2 Qaeda bozos 266 times!? If that doesn’t violate the US constitutional prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishments”, I don’t know what would. Iron maidens and the rack, followed by a little drawing and quartering? And oh by the way, how fucking effective is a method of interrogation that has to be employed that many times on the same person, and how worthwhile is the information you’re likely to get from a victim that you’ve driven insane with that monstrous kind of treatment?

Now, it’s true one of the Qaeda suspects nearly drowned over 100 times was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, always noted as being “the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks”, which is a pretty bad thing to be. But last time I checked, describing yourself, especially under torture, as a mass-murder-planner is not necessarily the same thing as being one. Even Charlie Manson got a trial after all. And they didn’t have to torture anybody to convict and put away the Manson family.

In fact, they didn’t have to torture the Qaeda guys to get whatever information they thought they wanted. Nope. The CIA just decided to torture people, in some cases we now learn with a fervor that would have done Torquemada proud, and with Bush regime OK, because they wanted to expand the scope of legally acceptable “interrogation methods” to include torture, and also to test the ability of the victims to withstand the various methods.

You can understand that, right?

In addition to torturing alleged evil people, Pakistani agents of the US government were reportedly happy to also torture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s children, using methods, involving “ants or other creatures put on their legs to scare them”, we now understand were OK’d to use on CIA torture victims also.

You can understand that too, right? You can understand the word “Orwellian” too, right? Because that isn’t just an adjective describing a work of fiction. It is the nature of the political system presently enveloping the “civilized” world.

And what is Barack Obama going to do about this awful torture faux pas?

Nothing, as usual, nothing at all.

Note, the questions raised here ask in part whether war itself, especially as perpetrated by the USA on thousands of innocent victims for almost eight years now, is unconstitutional.

A nation cannot and should not stand upon ideals of respect for human life and liberty, when that nation daily offends those virtues with ghastly war crimes. Indeed, such a nation should not stand at all.

Fast spread the tempest’s darkening pall,
The mighty realms were troubled,
The storm broke loose, but first of all
The Boston teapot bubbled!

---

Update April 21, 2009, 3:38PM CDT
I note that the MSM is widely reporting the premise that Obama has now "opened the door" for possible prosecutions of Bush regime torture-policy makers. As noted here, this contradicts what Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, said in an interview on Sunday, and the possible prosecutions would still not include any of the CIA personnel who actually conducted the tortures, but it might include people such as former Attorney General Gonzales and the infamous torture-enabling law professor, John Yoo. As we have seen so far with Obama, opening a door and hinting, is hardly the same thing as walking through it. At any rate Obama says he will wait for what his Attorney General, Eric Holder, decides after reviewing the matter. Of course Obama has no control over what investigations of Bush regime torturing (and for that matter kidnapping) the US Congress might decide to pursue. In fact, in order to prevent a wider-ranging Congressional inquiry, which Obama has said would likely be destructively partisan, the White House might offer Democratic leaders a sacrifice or two of Bush thugs.

(jk)

Dots And Ostriches

Here in just a second I'm going to connect some dots for you. Now, it will be Iraq dots so you probably should just stop reading now, and go stick your head back in that comfortable sand of "I've got a depression to worry about—don't tell me any more war stories!"

But then many of you didn't want to hear the war stories in the first place. You wanted to hear about how in 2003 the brave American troops had swept into Iraq, and some SEALs or something had fired off some sniper shots and the whole thing was mission accomplished, just like the idiot-in-chief claimed.

When the news started, and it started pretty quickly, to turn against thinking the US invasion of Iraq had been a success, or ever would be that, you wanted the bad people who told you these upsetting things to shut up and go away. You didn't want to hear about tortures and murders committed by US troops (and other collaborating occupiers) against innocent Iraqi civilians.

So, you decided, much as the US military decided, that there weren't any innocent Iraqi civilians. If some Iraqi got rousted out of his house late at night by US military, and got tortured or dead as a result of being interrogated, well hey that's because that Iraqi was a "bad guy". Right?

I mean after all, so many of you were, and still are, so fucking stupid, you thought Saddam Hussein and Iraq attacked the United States on 9/11. You thought, because the war criminals in charge of your country kept telling you these lies, that Saddam Hussein was a partner of Osama bin Laden, and was about to dip into his stockpile of WMD to nuke-up Qaeda and blow you and your dog to kingdom come.

Yep, that's how stupid and how wrong you really were.

And now of course you think somebody else should care about the fact you don't have a job or you're scared of losing it. After years of your support for horrific war crimes, you want sympathy?

Anyway—so I promised some dots—right.

Here they are:

1. Most Iraqi civilian deaths were caused by executions (bullets or drills in the head, or more gruesome tortures), not Sunni insurgent bombs. While the majority of these deaths are alleged to have happened through the sectarian warfare that occurred between Shiites and Sunnis—in fact "death squads largely run by Shiite militias [in retaliation against Sunni bombers] were believed to be behind many of the bullet-riddled bodies that turned up by the dozens on the streets of Baghdad and other cities"—some portion of them were the result of US troops committing war crimes.

And so, dot 2:

2. US military finally convicts a US soldier of executing Iraqi civilians. Yep, even though the US military executed thousands of Iraqi civilians in (literally) countless war crimes, and even though they indicted some US soldiers for torture and murder, only a few (mostly guards responsible for the Abu Ghraib prison tortures) were convicted. Generally, Iraqis understood there was no point in accusing American soldiers of war crimes. Nothing would be done about it. Here's a really great line from US military prosecutors, attempting to demonize the convicted soldier: "On two separate occasions, the accused became the judge, jury and executioner". In other words, he became and behaved as a US soldier, following the orders of his savage masters.

Which brings us to dot 3:

3. Gutless Spanish turn tail and run from war crimes indictments of of Bush's henchmen. "If one is dealing with a crime of mistreatment of prisoners of war, the complaint should go against those who physically carried it out"—really, that's what the idiot Spanish prosecutors said. In that way of equivocating, Hitler was just a victim of a lot of overly zealous generals and death-camp guards. Of course, "those who physically carried it out" are never going to be identified or charged with anything, because after all they were just torturing and killing "bad guys". See also this discussion.

Bush scumbags let off the hook by gutless Spain
A brief note about the Somali pirate situation and in particular the resolution—of death—arrived at by the US Navy, as ordered by the warlord Barack Obama. First off, the United States has been conducting a clandestine war in Somalia for a long time, once again murdering and torturing bunches of poor people who are called "bad guys" if they are adult males and of course "collateral casualties" if they are women and children. In fact, the hatred the United States feels for Somalia, where a bunch of poor Somalis defeated the US Army Rangers back in 1993, probably exceeds that which Americans feel for Iraq, where of course thousands of Americans went to die for nothing—AKA George Bush—this past decade.

Given the disastrous mess the United States has helped to make of Somalia, is it any wonder that some Somalis have thought it honorable and certainly profitable to turn to piracy (which is of course a proud European and American tradition)? As one of the men aboard the Maersk Alabama said about the Somali pirates: "They're just hungry."

I'll just leave you with a thought, one written a long time ago by a fellow who had much to say about life, war and the difference between a warrior ethic and that of an ostrich:

After Victory you must not parade your success,
You must not boast of your ability,
You must not feel proud,
You must rather regret that you had not been able to
prevent the war.
—Lao Tzu

Or to put it and look at it another way: The more of "them" you kill, the more of "them" there will be.

(jk)

Psycho Insurgency

God laughing his ass off at our dilemma
Orson Welles once remarked that as life (especially marriage) got crammed into smaller and smaller spaces in the future "more and more people are going to rush out into the street and kill everybody they can find."

What's really interesting is that nobody is all that surprised that a crop of recent mass killings are happening all over the United States. According to this, there are almost as many guns as people in the US, and there are a whole lot of really disturbed people, so that means a whole lot of them are packing guns. And, as the article makes clear, a lot of the recent cases were really disturbed people packing heat legally, with permits.

If this keeps up, and especially if the psychos form a club and plan some kind of coordinated celebration, it won't be long before being a nut with a gun will be equivalent to being a domestic terrorist. And that is when somebody, probably some esteemed representative from Berkeley or Massachusetts, will offer up a constitutional repeal of the Second Amendment.

Now, I'm sure most of us have a list of people we figure need to be shot, or maybe stabbed, or hanged, or hey—guillotined—it's hard to get through life without making such a list. Of course, allegedly sane people keep it to themselves and never have any serious intentions of making the list an active "to-do".

One thing we ought to think about is how often American leaders make the national kill lists both very public and very active and very costly to just about everybody.

But most people don't call presidents psychos or nuts with nukes. But they sure end up killing a lot more people, in all kinds of ways, then the psycho insurgency—at least so far.

All things considered, with the nation and the world marching to Mordor, you guys can give up your guns if you want to. Probably safer I suspect. Especially since you probably wouldn't know a cartridge from a suppository.

But if you live in someplace like Texas, where everybody and his poodle is packing, maybe surrendering your heat doesn't sound like such a good idea.

Funny how Baghdad's coming home to roost, huh?

(jk)