Morality

"Toward a Brighter Future"

Jonathan Schwarz — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:14:06 -0500

Judge Patricia Wald, former chief judge for the D.C. Court of Appeals and jurist on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, writing in the new report "Guantánamo and Its Aftermath" (pdf):

There are bound to be casualties when any nation veers from its domestic and international obligations to uphold human rights and international humanitarian law. Those casualties are etched on the minds and bodies of many of the 62 former detainees interviewed for this report, many of whom suffered infinite variations on physical and mental abuse, including intimidation, stress positions, enforced nudity, sexual humiliation, and interference with religious practices. Indeed, I was struck by the similarity between the abuse they suffered and the abuse we found inflicted upon Bosnian Muslim prisoners in Serbian camps when I sat as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, a U.N. court fully supported by the United States. The officials and guards in charge of those prison camps and the civilian leaders who sanctioned their establishment were prosecuted—often by former U.S. government and military lawyers serving with the tribunal—for war crimes, crimes against humanity and, in extreme cases, genocide.

From an AP story, June 30, 2001:

The dramatic decision to deliver Milosevic to the tribunal in defiance of an order by the Yugoslav Constitututional Court staying any extradition threatened to plunge the Balkan country into a political crisis.
Milosevic's successor, Vojislav Kostunica, denounced the handover as ''illegal and unconstitutional.'' Others accused Serb Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, who spearheaded the decision, of ''treason'' and knuckling under U.S. pressure....
President Bush praised Yugoslavia for handing over Milosevic, saying the move showed the Balkan nation wants to turn away from ''its tragic past and toward a brighter future.''
U.S. officials said the administration planned to make a pledge in the range of about $100 million for a Yugoslav assistance package, to be discussed Friday in Brussels at a conference of international aid donors.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair hailed the handover as ''a thoroughly good thing.''

The full statement by Bush, available on the White House website:

I applaud today’s transfer of indicted war criminal Slobodan Milosevic to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. This very important step by the leaders in Belgrade ensures that Milosevic can finally be tried for his war crimes and crimes against humanity. During various visits by Yugoslav authorities to Washington, they pledged that Yugoslavia was committed to cooperating with the Tribunal. Milosevic’s transfer is a strong sign of that commitment. We are confident that the government of Yugoslavia will continue down the path of cooperation with the Tribunal.
The transfer of Milosevic to the Hague is an unequivocal message to those persons who brought such tragedy and brutality to the Balkans that they will be held accountable for their crimes. Milosevic’s transfer further signals the commitment of the new leadership in Belgrade to turn Yugoslavia away from its tragic past and toward a brighter future as a full member of the community of European democracies.
The United States stands ready to assist the people of Yugoslavia as they continue to take the difficult steps to advance its democratic and economic reform.

(Suggested by Glenn Greenwald's reference here: "[T]here were early statement from the Bush White House in 2001 about how critical it was to prosecute these Yugoslav leaders for war crimes...")

Corporate Media Journalists Just Love Rich Guys

dlindorff — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:39:02 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The people who pose as journalists in today’s corporate media are
in awe and in love with the rich. How else to explain their fatuous
praise for the likes of Warren Buffett, who on one hand bets $5 billion
on Goldman Sachs shares, and on the other, posing as a disinterested
wise man and patriot, publicly advises Congress to go along with
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s
$700-$1-trillion bailout of Goldman and the rest of Wall Street?

Buffett, whatever else he is, is no fool. He looks at Goldman
Sachs, its shares knocked for a loop by the current crisis, but about
to become a merged entity—bank and investment bank combined—with
government backing to unload its bad credit risks—and he buys $5
billion worth of it, and then turns around and tells Congress to step
up and vote for a bailout which would double his money almost instantly.

What a guy! A true hero.

And then the corporate media praises the man for his “courage” and his “faith in the markets.”

But that’s only one guy. We also have the panic among Wall Street
industry lobbyists, working overtime to make sure that nobody in
Congress seriously tries to limit executive compensation in the
financial sector. As one lobbyist put it today, “If you limit the
amount a bank or investment bank can pay for talented people, they
won’t be able to hire them.”

Wait a minute. Wasn’t America famous for the “work ethic” of its
people? We’re always told that Americans want the “dignity” of a job,
and that we Americans have this wonderful “work ethic.” Give us a
job—any job—and, whatever the pay, we’ll buckle down and do it to the
best of our ability.

That apparently doesn’t apply to the upper ranks of the banking
elite, though. If they can “only” earn $400,000, instead of $40 million
a year, they’re not going to lift a goddam finger.

Smart guys like John Thain, chief of Merrill Lynch, and Kenneth
Lewis, head of Bank America, or Dick Fuld, head of now bankrupt Lehman
Brothers, would never do a lick of work in the Wall Street mines if
they could only earn a few hundred grand for their efforts. If that was
all they could earn, they’d rather stay home and clip coupons.

There’s your “work ethic” for you.

I’m not so bothered by the sloth and greed of the Wall Street
crowd. What bothers me is the respect they are treated with by the
journalists covering them.

I mean, come on. These are just greedy people who got where they
got because they went to the right schools, made the right connections,
and checked their principles and morals at the door when they entered
the building. Their sole motivation in life is making money—as much as
they can possibly hoard.

The truth is it’s pretty easy to get rich if you’re willing to
screw the public to do it, and it’s a pretty safe bet that that’s
what’s been going on with Wall Street, especially over the last two
decades of deregulated boom times.
______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

The Things They Left Behind (or Didn’t Remind You About)

dlindorff — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:02:23 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The introduction to John McCain at the Republican National
Convention last night was all about family values. There was the paean
to his mother and father, the touching story of his and Cindy’s
adoption of a baby girl from India, and then there was Cindy herself,
who was the focus of much of a gauzy introductory film on McCain, and
who also did the introductory speech, and who brought all the kids up
on stage with her at the end.

Oddly missing from this warm, feel-good picture, however, was a
single mention of McCain’s first wife Carol Shepp—the one who stood by
him, raising their three kids, through his trying five years in a
Vietnamese prison, only to be dumped upon his heroic return for a
younger woman, despite, or because of, her having suffered permanent
disabling and disfiguring injuries in an auto accident during his
absence. As in a Stalin-era photo, she had been air-brushed from the McCain family tableau, even as her offspring were up there on the stage on display with the rest of the Senator's spawn.

Now I’m not faulting McCain for leaving his wife for a younger,
richer woman. Who knows what the relationship was like at the time.
Maybe Shepp wanted him out of her life by the time he started slipping
off to date beer heiress Cindy Lou Hensley. But if McCain and his
campaign staff wanted to make him a poster child for “family values,”
they should have had the basic integrity to explain that he didn’t
always consider marriage a binding covenant, for better or worse,
richer or poorer, and in sickness or in health. (If you want an
unvarnished view of the real John McCain, read an interview with Carol
McCain published last June in the UK newspaper, The Mail, headlined The Wife US Republican John McCain Callously Left Behind.)

McCain’s party, and his fundamentalist Christian backers, are
always attacking efforts by gay Americans to win the right to marry by
saying that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman, but
clearly, with over half of all those marriages between a man and a
woman ending in divorce, it’s not all that sacred, and McCain is living
testament to that hypocrisy.

But this was just the most blatant of a string of hypocrisies that ran on for four days in the Twin Cities.

There was the long list of speakers touting America’s “freedoms”
as, outside the convention hall, police thugs dressed in military gear,
and armed with huge batons and assault weaponry were bashing in doors
and terrorizing journalists, arresting others and dragging them face
down along the street, using teargas against peaceful demonstrators and
arresting them by the hundreds.

There was McCain talking about how everyone, including the “child
of Latino immigrants,” is an American, to an audience of Republicans
that was so embarrassingly white that you had to shield your eyes from
the glare of the screen.

There was Sarah Palin, complaining about a media focus on her
pregnant 17-year-old daughter Bristol, all the while shamelessly
parading that same daughter and her 18-year-old impregnator, who was
dragged down to the convention to be shown off after the two had been
somehow convinced to get married and make the baby “legal.”

There were the repeated characterizations of McCain as a battler
against corruption and the influence of “special interests,” without a
word of mention of his having been the recipient of over $100,000 in
cash from Charles Keating, a corrupt banker whose interests McCain
shamelessly pimped for in Congress, only narrowly escaping indictment
himself.

Perhaps the most outrageous hypocrisy of all was claiming that the
McCain/Palin ticket would be “taking on” the corrupt Washington
Establishment, as though that establishment hadn’t been predominantly
Republican for most of the past decade, and as though McCain and Palin
hadn’t been an integral part of it. McCain, after all, has spent those
years dutifully voting with his Republican peers over 90 percent of the
time, shoveling out perks to the rich and the corporations, while
Palin, first as mayor of the small town of Wasilla, and then as
governor of Alaska, employed an Abramoff-linked Washington lobbyist to
help win massive amounts of corrupt “earmarks” for her town and state.
She even backed the notorious $400-million earmark for the “Bridge to
Nowhere” until it became a national joke, yet there she was, in her
acceptance speech, claiming to have opposed that outrageous taxpayer
ripoff.

Republicans are claiming that this election will not be about
issues as much as about character. But given the incredible fraud that
was perpetrated on viewers by the four-day Republican extravaganza, I’d
say it’s more about caricature.
_________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback). His work is available at: www.thiscantbehappening.net

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Shoot Your Friends First: The Cheney Doctrine

dlindorff — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:28:17 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Some people are expressing consternation and disbelief at a report
by journalist Seymour Hersh that Vice President Dick Cheney had
discussed the idea in his office of having some Navy Seals dress up as
Iranians, and then putting them in faked Iranian speedboats to make a fake
attack on US ships in the Persian Gulf. The ensuing faked battle, with
fake Iranians shooting at US ships and US ships firing back, he
suggested, could be used to spark a war between the US and Iran.

` I don’t know why people would find it hard to believe that this
vice president would think up an idea like having Americans shoot at
other Americans in the interest of his own warped view of national
security.

After all, this is a guy who shoots his own friends.

Besides, Cheney is in good company in this kind of thinking. We know
from reports of the meeting filed by British intelligence that
President Bush engaged in the same kind of thing when he was having
trouble getting the country and the rest of the civilized world behind
his and Cheney’s plan to attack Iraq. It was disclosed years later that
in early 2003, Bush suggested to Prime Minister Tony Blair that the US
could paint a U-2 spy plane in UN colors and fly it over sensitive
parts of Iraqi airspace, so that Saddam Hussein would order it show
down. That, he argued, would anger enough UN member states to win a
security resolution to support a war on Iraq, and failing that, would
give the US an excuse to go in on its own. Blair was reportedly
horrified at this kind of kamikaze thinking—but not horrified enough to
expose the president as a nutcase.

So that’s where we are today folks. A president and a vice president
who both think that it’s a great idea to either send some of your own
troops under false flags into harm’s way to get shot at so you can
start a war, or, even worse, to dress up some of your soldiers as the
enemy you want to go after, and have them open fire on your own guys so
that you can claim you were attacked, and then go to war.

Who gets tricked by all these mad schemes?

Not the Iranians, or in the earlier instance, the Iraqis. They know
they aren’t attacking American forces. No. It’s us, the American
people, who are being tricked. Cheney knows that most Americans think
the idea of attacking Iran—especially when we’re five years into an
interminable war in Iraq and seven years into another war in
Afghanistan, neither of which has an end in sight—is really, really
stupid. So they’re trying to think up a way to trick us into supporting
doing such a stupid thing. And the only thing they can come up with to
overcome our reticence is making us think that our guys are being
attacked.

Now let me say that I’ve been a skeptic about people who claim the
9-11 attacks were an “inside job”—that the US government actually
organized those attacks. I know all the arguments and evidence, but it
always seemed to me that it was over the top to think that our leaders
would try to deliberately kill Americans in order to achieve some
policy goal. And yet, here we have Dick Cheney, the real brains (such
as they are) behind the Bush administration, discussing a plan, using
American forces, to fake an attack on other American forces.

It makes me wonder whether maybe Cheney deliberately shot his friend
Harry Whittington, either to flush those damned elusive quail he was
after, or so that he could generate public sympathy for the embattled
President Bush. And it even makes me wonder whether crazy Dick actually
did have a hand in bringing down those Twin Towers. He may be too
stupid to pull something like that off, but he has made it clear that
it isn’t moral scruples that would prevent him from doing such a
monstrous thing.

As ludicrous, pathetic and outrageous as this administration is, we
need to take this latest Hersh report seriously. It seems clear that
Cheney has a predilection for using fratricide to achieve his nefarious
ends.

It’s one thing when he does it with his own rifle, though. It’s
another when he does it with the world’s most mighty military machine.
______________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available
in paperback edition). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

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Keeping Count (When Ours Goes Down, Theirs Goes Up)

dlindorff — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 13:18:25 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Celeste Zappala, the Gold Star mother of an early casualty in
America's invasion of Iraq who lost her son when he was doing guard
duty during a fraudulent "search" for alleged WMDs in Iraq, was
speaking from the heart when she told a group of antiwar demonstrators
at Philadelphia's Independence Mall Saturday that she was grateful no
American troops had been killed during the past week in Iraq.

Her concern for the troops' well-being is understandable.

But left unsaid is that the lower US casualty figures in Iraq are
coming at the expense of much higher civilian casualties. This is even
more true in Afghanistan, where the war is heating up.

The reason for this ugly calculus is that in order to keep
politically damaging US casualties as low as possible, the US military
and the Bush/Cheney administration that gives the generals their
marching orders, are resorting increasingly to the use of air
power--bombs and rockets and remote controlled, missile-equipped
Predator drone aircraft--to attack suspected militant targets.

Case in point--the 22 people the BBC reports
were killed in eastern Afghanistan's Nangarhar Province yesterday in a
US missile strike on what turns out to have been a wedding procession.
According to reports from local Afghan police and other officials
quoted in the BBC story, 19 of the victims of this horrific attack were
women and children.

This slaughter--which US military authorities, following their
standard MO, are denying, claiming that those killed were "militants"--
follows an earlier one Friday in Afghanistan, in which a missile fired
from a US helicopter killed 15 people, all civilians.

It has reached a point that in Afghanistan, the US and its NATO
allies (though primarily the US, since most NATO forces are not in
front-line combat roles, and are not conducting most of the air
strikes) are killing far more Afghan civilians than are the Taliban and
their allies in the country.

The same thing is true in Iraq, where the on-the-ground combat role
of US forces is being scaled back, while the use of air power is being
ramped up.

The very idea of conducting an "occupation" via airpower is
fundamentally criminal in nature, since there is simply no way that
people operating at command centers and computer terminals--sometimes
in the case of Predator drones, terminals that are actually situated in
the US!--can make accurate determinations about who the target is, and,
equally importantly, how many innocent civilians may be in the
immediate vicinity of a strike.

We cannot celebrate the reduction in US casualties if they are
coming at the expense of innocent civilians (and I know that this was
not Ms. Zappala's intent, either).

The same strategy of killing from the air was adopted in the later
years of the Vietnam War. It wasn't as successful at reducing US
casualties, because in Vietnam, US forces were confronting a large,
well organized military force, and had to confront them on the ground,
but it was successful at killing innocent Vietnamese, as well as people
in Cambodia and Laos, who were dying at a more prodigious rate towards
the end of that conflict than in its earlier years, thanks to
indiscriminate US bombardment.

The same thing is happening now in America's current imperialist wars.

At the Independence Mall demonstration, organized by the venerable
Brandywine Peace Community, there was a somber memorial made to
America’s dead in Iraq: a black cloth on which was painted the number
4000 in large white numerals. Several blood-red long-stemmed roses were
laid upon the cloth. But there should have been a second black cloth
also strewn with roses, on which should have been painted the number
1.2 million—the estimated number of innocent Iraqis killed in America’s
invasion and occupation of their country. (I don’t mean to criticize
either Celeste or Brandywine here, and certainly the Iraqi and Afghani
deaths were mentioned by speakers at the event.)

We in the anti-war movement need to make certain that we do not
allow the issue to be narrowly focussed on protecting American troops.
We need to continually make the point that it is criminal for America's
military forces to be slaughtering innocent Iraqis and Afghanis.
___________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available
in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

DEMS UNITE!

redhed67 — Wed, 28 May 2008 07:18:17 -0400

Well, as we all know, election season is once again upon us. Our choices are, as always, a great source of controversy and strife among the American people. This is understandable as not every candidate fits our ideals of the perfect President.

However, I've noticed some very disturbing trends among voters and, most glaringly, the Democrats. Frankly, it's appalling. I can't get through a blog or a chat room without seeing Democrats at each other's throats, each bashing the views and private lives of one another's pick as the Dem candidate.

You know what, people?? Knock it off. I'm not particularly wild about Hillary nor Obama either, to be honest... but all have a common goal here. That goal is to do everything we can to keep the GOP out of the White House.

Haven't the GOP done enough damage already? For the past 7 years, we've been subjected to two recessions, the invasion of a sovereign country with no violent designs on us, over 935 lies from this administration ABOUT IRAQ ALONE, and the blatant trampling of our civil rights such as our privacy with the warrantless surveillance and with free speech with arrests of peacful protestors and even people whose only "crime" was merely wearing an anti-war or anti-Bush T-shirt.

John McCain has stated that he plans on continuing our occupation of Iraq. He has also stated that he not only wants us to stay in Iraq for 100 years, but is already planning on attacking Iran, as he so playfully reiterated in his rousing rendition of the Beach Boys song "Barbara Ann" titled "Bomb Bomb Iran."

Obama and Hillary's ideas are really not so different from one another. They have similiar ideas on health care, Iraq, national security in general, etc. There are subtle nuances that make their plans slightly different but when it comes down to it, one is really just as good as the other.

It's bothersome that people are saying things like "Hillary is a warmonger"... or "Obama is a Muslim sympathizer." These same lines that Rightwingers were using against the two of them just a few short months ago and the Dems were scolding them for, the Dems are now using. I, personally, never chose a particular party with which to label myself. I consider myself an Independent even though I never formally even declared myself as such... and this is why. Both sides seem to go off the deep end when elections come up and I am so disappointed that Dems have allowed themselved to stoop to the level of "The Righties."

I don't like any party spreading lies and innuendo about any candidate, whether he or she be Republican or Democrat. It's juvenile and ignorant. I don't approve of McCain's policies but I'm not going to perpetuate the rumor that he committed treason while in the service. I have no proof that he did. On the same token, I won't perpetuate the rumor that Barack Obama is a Muslim terrorist sympathizer. We have more than ample evidence that he is not.

Let's think about that particular rumor for a moment. George W. Bush has been more in the pocket of Muslim terrorist sympathizers than anyone else. Despite the fact that the Saudis not only have an appalling track record on human rights but they're also funding terrorists and helping to fund the insurgency which is killing our soldiers... Bush calls them "friend." Not only that but he's also given them weapons which are in turn being used against our troops in Iraq.

Same with Pakistan who has openly harbored Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden for a couple of decades. Then there's Uzbekistan, a nation with a record of committing unspeakable atrocities against its citizens...again, Bush calls them "friend."

So to say anything about Obama is not only stupid but incredibly hypocritical if you're Bush supporter. If you're a Dem, it's insincere and ridiculous. We need to pull together in these elections this year and vote for whomever the Dem nominee turns out to be, even if we have to hold out collective noses to do it. I know I will. If a GOP president gets in again, I would hate to look back and know that my missing vote helped to get him in.

So come on... remember that common goal we have to do something good for this country and keep the GOP out.

VOTE FOR THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE!!!
_________________
Don't blame this mess on me... I'm an Independent!

Out of Iraq Town Hall Meeting

harleymeyer — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 21:23:06 -0400

An Out of Iraq Town Hall meeting in the month of April will be held in Tucson, Arizona - 7th Congressional District. The time and the date of the meeting to be announced. The actual topics to be addressed at the Town Hall meeting will be released about one week before the meeting. To be a part of this meeting contact info@harleymeyer.com

Contact Info: info@harleymeyer.com

Harley Meyer

Independent Candidate for US Congress

7th Congressional District Arizona

www.harleymeyer.com

McCain and the Lobbyist--Missing the Story of the Miss

dlindorff — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 10:43:27 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

All the attention in the breaking story about John McCain's 2000 relationship with a blonde young telecom lobbyist has been focussed on the question of whether or not they were "doing it."

As George Stephanopoulos claimed on ABC, the importance of the story depends upon whether McCain is shown to have had a "relationship" with the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman.

But really, who cares whether they were shacking up on the campaign trail? McCain, after all, already double-timed his starter wife and dumped her for a trophy wife, the statuesque and wealthy beer industry heiress Cindy Hensley, so it's not as though he is campaigning on a strong pro-family platform.

No, the reason his aides, back in 1998-2000, started working behind the scenes to keep Iseman away from McCain, and confronted McCain over his dalliances was because McCain, who had a history of corruption, most notably his card-carrying membership in the Keating Five savings and loan scandal, couldn't afford to appear to be backsliding.

It isn't, that is to say, a matter of whether or not McCain was diddling Vicki. It's whether he was delivering for her and her clients, perhaps in return for her delivering for him.

As the New York Times reported in its investigative story on the McCain/Iseman liason, published February 21, the media were reporting back in 2000 on how McCain had been writing letters on behalf of some of Iseman's telecom clients.

The Times article reports that McCain wrote letters in 1998 and 1999 to the Federal Communications Commission urging it to uphold marketing agreements that would allow TV companies like Glencairn Ltd., an Iseman client, to control two stations in the same city. The paper says the senator also introduced a measure in the Senate that would create tax incentives for minority ownership of stations, a measure sought by Iseman on behalf of several media clients. McCain also on two occasions reportedly pushed legislation that would permit a company to control television stations in overlapping markets. That was a measure being sought by Paxson (now Ion Media Networks), yet another Iseman client.

The Times reports that in 1999, Iseman asked Mr. McCain's staff to send a letter to the FCC seeking approval of a television deal being sought by Paxon. McCain sent that letter, and a second one--a level of interference which led to a rebuke from the then FCC chairman.

So what's the story here? Is it whether Sen. McCain is an adulterer? Or is it whether he is a rank hypocrite posing as a Mr. Clean Government?

The problem may be that what McCain was doing shilling for the telecom industry is not illegal, and is not uncommon. In fact, it's what our legislators do. Virtually all of them. The only thing different about McCain is that he claims he doesn't do that, at least not since he saw the light when he nearly went to jail for it, or at least had a near political death experience after hitching his nascent congressional career to a corrupt banker's wagon.

Meanwhile, we see once again what a wussy newspaper the New York Times is, at least where investigative stories about the Right are concerned. Once again, we learn, this time from the New Republic, that the Times and its executive editor, Bill Keller, held, this time for over two months, a political story that the public had a need and right to know about during a critical election campaign. How different might the presidential campaign look now if the Times had run its story in December, when it was ready to go, well ahead of the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, instead of now when McCain has the Republican nomination all but sewn up?

This kind of dithering and backpedaling and censorship by Keller, which reportedly followed intense lobbying and threats by McCain and his campaign, recalls Keller's holding (for a year, and until after the 2006 Congressional election!) of a reporter's story about the National Security Agency's illegal warrantless spying program, and his holding and ultimately killing of an already typeset story (a week before the 2004 presidential election) about the remote cueing device on President George Bush's back and in his ear during the 2004 presidential debates.
(See my story on this in FAIR's Extra magazine and in Mother Jones magazine.)

We are left to wonder, what other great stories is Keller hiding from us, perhaps until after Election Day this November?
_______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is also found at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Just Gimme Some Truth!

dlindorff — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 16:16:16 -0500

The New York Times called Mitt Romney a liar today, but not CIA Director Michael Hayden.

What was Romney’s big one? He ran an ad in New Hampshire this week saying Sen. John McCain had called for allowing illegal workers in the US to collect Social Security, and the the paper of record said he was lying. That’s not what McCain had said. But When Gen. Hayden told a much bigger whopper, saying that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of the “interrogations” of two suspected Al Qaeda leaders because of concerns that the tapes might disclose the identities of CIA agents, thus exposing them and their families to danger, the Times, in the same issue of the paper, let it pass.

Near the end of the lengthy half-page, one-jump article, the paper did quote Tom Malinowski, director of the Washington office of Human Righst Watch, as saying that Hayden’s explanation “wasn’t credible,” which indeed it wasn’t. But you’d have to read a lot of verbiage to get to that gentle challenge.

The truth is that the CIA is full of documents that if leaked would disclose agents’ identities, and the CIA doesn’t destroy those records.

The truth is also that if the CIA wanted to keep the tapes, and even make them available if asked to, it has the means to easily wipe away the identities of any agency assets or agents who appear in the film, and even to mask their voices. News programs do that all the time. So the excuse doesn’t wash.

The reason the Agency destroyed those tapes is not because of concerns about agent safety, but because those tapes are the CIA’s Abu Ghraib moment. They are incontrovertible documentary evidence of the CIA’s blatant use of torture, which it was authorized and instructed to use against terror suspects by President Bush after 9-11, in what is clearly an impeachable act. And in Hayden’s view, and the view of the agency heads before him, it was better to break the law and destroy the evidence than to turn it over to Congressional investigators, defense attorneys for terrorism suspects on trial, and the 9-11 Commission, all of which groups had asked about the existence of such tapes, and about those tapes in particular. And all of which were lied to by the Agency.

So let’s at least call a lie a lie.

Chisled into the marble entranceway to the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency is the phrase: “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

Right.

Obviously that line is meant ironically. The CIA is not about truth. It is about shadows, secrecy and deceit.

The question is why someone like Hayden is accorded any credibility at all by the news media.

I’m past expecting Congress to do anything about this torture scandal, or about Hayden’s lies, since it hasn’t done anything about any of the other scandals of this administration. But it would be nice if the media, including the New York Times, would at least call a lie a lie.

We can only hope that some person of character at the CIA , or someone with a grudge or a problem who needs some insurance or payback potential, has kept a copy of those tapes, and that at some point they will see the light of day. (If you’re out there, please mail it to me at PO Box 846, Ambler, PA 19002. Confidentiality guaranteed.)

Maybe many Americans think torturing our enemies is a good thing. But they’re wrong. Torture not only is a poor and perhaps even a useless tool for learning anything of value (since the victim clearly will say anything, true or false, to get the torture to stop, and thus can send people on endless wild goose chases, wasting resources and time), but it is inevitable that some of the people who get tortured wil be innocent. Besides, once it is known that torture is the fate of those who are captured by American forces, people will go to much greater lengths to avoid capture, which means more fights to the death, and inevitably more casualties on our side. Better to let our enemies know that if they give up, they’ll be treated fairly, with respect and in accordance with the law.

Besides, if we torture, how are we any better than the terrorists and the rogue nations?

For that matter, if we have an agency that is founded and built on lies, what does that have to do with a democracy?

And if we have a media that lets those lies pass, and that treats the liars with respect, what kind of a media do we have?

____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and columnist. His latest book, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky, is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Mukasey and Digby Give Postmodernism a Bad Name

davidswanson — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 12:51:28 -0500

By David Swanson

I've often seen Bush compared to a child and Cheney to a monster, which I think is incredibly unfair to children and monsters. The following is a commentary on a blog posting by Digby that compares the Bush-Cheney crime gang to postmodernists and “relativists”, which I think is entirely unfair to postmodernists and “relativists”. In fact, I think the Bush-Cheney gang's defense of cruel and criminal actions fits seamlessly with their opposition to “postmodern relativism,” rather than constituting a glaring and hypocritical contradiction to it, as Digby supposes.

The basic ethical assumption of the postmodernism of the 20th century European philosophers or of Richard Rorty's neo-pragmatism is that we must create our own system of ethics. We cannot look into an ancient text, pray to a god, or get in touch with the great spirit of the universe to discover as a scientific fact that we should not torture someone, or for that matter that it is permissible to torture someone. We can oppose torture as the result of deference to law or tradition, after studying the general failure of torture to produce anything other than misery, after realizing the likely damage to be done by establishing a general rule permitting torture. Etc. We can be as convinced as humanly possible and advocate against torture with the height of passion and devotion. Certainly I do. We just can't swear with any more than 99.9999% certainty that we'll never change our minds or that generations in the future will never change their minds. And nobody else can do so with any credibility either. And we can't argue that past or future generations, or own own contemporaries, who advocate for torture are wrong by any standard other than our own practical arguments that torture does more harm than good. And nobody else can credibly do so either.

You might suppose this to somehow weaken the case against torture. You might imagine the case would be stronger if we could just point to a holy book or a philosophy dissertation and say “See, it's wrong, now shut up.” But you'll have failed to notice that most of the defenders of torture are precisely the people who tend to argue that way. They tell us that homosexuality and abortion and peace and single payer health care are evil for this sort of childish reason, and we aren't convinced. Why would having such a reason to oppose torture help us convince them? It wouldn't. It would just comfort us, and we don't need comforting.

Switching gears, we can recognize that there might be a ticking-bomb scenario in which torture would be the best thing to do, and still believe in the wisdom of not establishing a policy permitting it. That debate, over whether to allow torture because it might in some rare instance be desirable or to ban it because a policy supporting torture will likely lead to abuse, is not a philosophical debate, but simply a practical one. The philosophical debate begins when someone lays claim to superhuman authority in arguing for or against torturing. If Gandhi or Kant or Amnesty International claims that torture can never ever be the right move, then we're into philosophy, because “never ever” claims precedent over all possible factors, even those not yet imagined. Similarly, if Addington or Yoo or Gonzales claims that anything done in the name of fighting evildoers is good and right, we are right back into metaphysics from the other side of the field. The postmodernist position, in contrast, is not that torture is never good or always good or good depending. The postmodernist position is that what we conclude about torture we must conclude relying entirely on our own human faculties.

With this in mind, let's take a look at Digby's post:

There was a time when conservatives used to commonly insult liberals with an accusation that they were empty "pomo relativists." Lynn Cheney, in particular, made a point of it when she was the chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities and even wrote a book about it called "Telling The Truth," if you can believe that.

CHENEY: It's postmodernism, the notion that there is no such thing as truth. There's only your version of events and my version and Charles' version and Harry's version, and the one that prevails will be that of whoever is the most powerful. This seems to fly in the face of the way scholarship has proceeded for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Now, as Digby proceeds you'll see that she (Digby) thinks Lynn Cheney was right in this remark, rather than ignorant or disingenuous, as I believe. In a Pragmatist worldview, all of science and human understanding is just that, human understanding. And there is nothing greater. There are some common beliefs that have proved themselves extremely useful and enduring, such as the belief that the sun will come up again just like it did before, or the belief that WMDs that Iraq destroyed will stay destroyed unless someone goes to a heck of a lot of trouble to rebuild them. But we learn important things with each passing day and millennium, including that the sun stays still while we spin around. Our most fundamental beliefs are no more - and no less! - than the beliefs that we most strongly expect to hold in the future. One of them is, of course, that objects – like WMDs – don't appear because some jerk says they exist. I can't imagine I'll ever drop that belief, but I have nothing other than my confidence to point to, no secret world outside Plato's cave, no Jungian myth, not even the magically built in concepts of Chomsky. Nothing. And I don't need it, and neither do you, and there's nothing to worry about. Relax. Europeans got over this loss of mumbojumboism a half century ago. Suck it up, America! Of course there is truth, it's just not metaphysical, it's human. Back to Digby:

It takes your breath away, doesn't it? The exposure of the conservative movement as extreme epistemic relativists has been one of the most fascinating (and frustrating) stories of the Bush years.

The simpler concept of hypocrisy (never very strong in the political world) had been retired some time ago, of course, when all the family values adulterers worked themselves into a lather over Bill Clinton's furtive indiscretions (although at the time we never could have anticipated the antics of the Foley, Vitter and Craig faction.) But when the Bush administration took over, the right wing went far beyond hypocrisy to a denial of reality itself — a post-modern conservatism, as oxymoronic as that sounds. It was perhaps best encapsulated in the famous quote captured by journalist Ron Suskind:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

No postmodernist believes this in a philosophical sense, that you can pull out a bag of Christian Science and make the world be something by thinking it. That's a rightwing strawman. But I'm not even clear the fascist quoted here means to be talking philosophy at all. He says that he'll change the world (presumably in the ordinary way), while others will observe those changes. He also may be saying that he'll create mass belief in lies (such as that Iraq blew up the World Trade Center). But is he claiming that those lies will actually become true, even in the minds of those making them? Is he claiming that these will be perfect lies that everyone accepts as true, and that last as truth and are never exposed? The rhetorical flourish about the “reality-based community” may suggest as much. But this is not exactly new and blamable on English departments, unless we're going to rank Machiavelli or Goebbels a postmodernist. Telling a lie with enormous success can indeed leave a lot of people believing it's true, but cannot guarantee it will last, and cannot make it true in the minds of the liars. Most lies are statements that fit into a web of other beliefs that are less easily controlled. As we learn what happened in Iraq in the 1990s, as we learn what was said in the CIA in 2002, etc., it becomes harder for the WMD lie to fit into the web. As long as it does fit, we may believe it, but we won't know we're believing a lie, we won't have entered the realm of philosophy. Digby goes on:

(The Bush administration's "up-is-downism" was discussed in depth in a trenchant article from 2003 by Josh Marshall called "The Postmodern President".)

I'm not sure if it's that we've become used to it or the administration has used less of it recently, but I don't find myself pounding my head on the desk as often I once did at some Bush official (or often the president himself) essentially saying "you can believe me or you can believe you lying eyes." Creationism, the denial of global warming (indeed, all scientific inquiry), the Enronization of the budget, even the continuing insistence among many that there were WMD in Iraq — there are examples around us everywhere of conservatives(particularly regular Fox News viewers) who, because they are delivered by a "trusted" source, believe things that have long since been proven wrong or make no sense.

But, pace Lynn Cheney, this describes perfectly “the way scholarship has proceeded for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.” What is new, what is modern, is the notion that there are no authorities worthy of that sort of trust. Postmodernism is the notion that an entirely unexpected way of looking at physics or chemistry might give us insights into global warming that we cannot now imagine, and that something as mundane as global warming itself might stimulate such thinking. Postmodernism is not the idea that the rising temperature of the earth can really be cooling if we think chilly thoughts. he White House claim that global warming does not exist or has not been proven is an ordinary lie. The later White House claim that global warming has health benefits is a perfectly pre-modern panglossian remark. Creationism is deference to a 6,000 year old story. Cheating on accounts is also probably 6,000 years old. Fox is not postmodern, it's prehistoric. But that's not how Digby sees it:

But just as I've become somewhat inured to this right-wing epistemic relativism over time, I've become more and more astonished at the right's simultaneous rejection of some of the great moral taboos of human history. After all, even more than their assault on liberals for rejecting rationalism or universalism, for years they characterized liberal social tolerance as despicable "moral relativism" and excoriated those who sought equality as threats to the foundations of civilization itself. It's more than a little bit stunning to see these so-called conservatives suddenly dancing on the head of a pin trying to defend the immoral act of torture by saying it all depends on what the meaning of waterboarding is.

Again, counting angels on the head of a pin was a pre-modern, not post-modern, activity. Tweaking rules of behavior to fit the preferences of the powerful is as old as rules of behavior. Digby's throwing around terms like “epistemic relativism” as if epistemology had anything to do with what she's talking about won't make any of this into news. Our nation has been torturing and using others to torture for us for decades, and rightwing hypocrites have been the proponents of that policy. What's new is the openness and the greater willingness to do the torture ourselves, but lying about it is nothing new. “Thou Shalt not Kill” has never covered the death penalty. People who love simplistic holy rules are dishonest people. You should EXPECT them to lie and ignore their own rules. What is new and encouraging in the world is the increased willingness by others to think for themselves and abandon the longing for simplicity. Digby quotes some garden variety hypocrites:

“Well, I’m not sure it is either. I’m not sure it is either. It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it. I think the way it’s been defined in the media, it shouldn’t be done. The way in which they have described it, particularly in the liberal media. So I would say, if that’s the description of it, then I can agree, that it shouldn’t be done. But I have to see what the real description of it is."

or...

ABRAMS: All right. Let me ask - Pat, you just real quick, I want to move on to—Pat, do you think it‘s torture?

BUCHANAN: I think when you have people on the table and make them think like they‘re drowning and they don‘t know if they‘re ever going to get up, that comes very close to it in my judgment. Certainly with this exception, if you‘re going to end it before something critical happens — I don‘t know.

Unfortunately for the Bush administration, the old "it depends on who's doing it" excuse doesn't work very well with the rule of law.

An important point, just not a philosophical point.

This is why we have spectacles like this taking place now:

The top legal adviser within the US state department, who counsels the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, on international law, has declined to rule out the use of the interrogation technique known as waterboarding even if it were applied by foreign intelligence services on US citizens. John Bellinger refused to denounce the technique, which has been condemned by human rights groups as a form of torture, during a debate on the Bush Administration’s stance on international law held by Guardian America, the Guardian’s US website. He said he would not include or exclude any technique without first considering whether it violated the convention on torture.

This is the crowd that prided itself on its so-called moral clarity. Why, "virtues czar" William Bennett even wrote a book about it called "Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War On Terrorism" in which he said:

The comparative study of culture and civilization is a quintessential product of western curiosity. It ought to fill us with complex but securely founded confidence in our own culture and civilization --- in its particular values and universal values...But the terrible effect of contemporary relativism --- a debased and decadent product of that same western impulse of curiosity --- is that instead of imbuing us with confidence, it fills us with self-doubt and debilitates us instead.

Do you feel debilitated? I don't. The lack of stupid infantile simplicity in moral decision making can only debilitate those who need it. Those who need it tend to be weak-willed people who fall for such obsessions as gambling.

Bennett was trying, as usual, to snidely blame liberalism for everything that is wrong in the world, but his words, when seen through the prism of right wing contemporary relativism ring true. When you have lost your moral moorings to the extent that you no longer can say with any "clarity" that tying someone down and repeatedly forcing them to inhale water into their lungs until they almost drown is torture, then I would suggest that you are indeed a moral relativist in the most pejorative sense of the word.

Read this amazing article from someone who knows it inside and out, on whether waterboarding is torture.

All those terms that conservatives used to love to use, the proud, patriotic words like Honor, Decency, Honesty, Morality no longer apply to them. The right-wing relativists have faced their own ultimate test and they have failed it in every possible way.

But, see, I can say with great clarity that we must not torture. We must respect the longstanding international ban on all torture. That's clear enough for most people. If you have to frost that clarity with metaphysical Platonic “clarity” then you are suffering from the same need for guidance and leadership that gives us neocons and fascism, which after all promotes very CLEAR rules, albeit horrific ones.

Articles like Digby's make use of a certain variety of relativism that I do oppose. Only Republicans are ever guilty. Democrats never are. This is an absurd pretense on the question of torture. So is the pretense that there is something philosophical here.