The Presidential Psychology at the End of Days
By John P Briggs, M.D. and JP Briggs II, Ph.D.
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Thursday 10 January 2008
The true rule in determining to embrace, or reject anything, is not whether it has any evil in it, but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost every thing, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded. - Abraham Lincoln, June 20, 1848
In defiance of his circumstances as an unpopular, lame duck president with a minority party in Congress, George W. Bush pursues a sharply autocratic tone. He has intimidated both parties in Congress and violated the Constitution. Through dissimulation and delay, he has forced the nations of the world to conclude they must wait until his term ends to negotiate any serious treaty on the imminent perils of climate change.
A sort of thousand-mile stare has descended on the country. Frank Rich writes, "we are a people in clinical depression" as a result of Bush's leadership. Perhaps, a more apt diagnosis would be "dissociation." Like a child or spousal victim of a psychological abuser, Bush's "victims" try to mentally compartmentalize him; they attempt to get on with their lives - even as he keeps on being abusive. You can hear the dissociation when Congressional leaders talk about their inability to make Washington work as it should.
Some, including Daniel Ellsberg, who challenged the autocratic aspirations of Richard Nixon by releasing the Pentagon Papers, suggest Bush has already created a "presidential coup." Ellsberg has said, "If there's another 9/11 under this regime, it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed."
We would like to answer several questions here. Is the president psychologically capable of such treasonous behavior? Why and how does his psychology make it so difficult for Democrats and others to stand up against his negativity and destructiveness (what he thinks of as his optimism)? How might they neutralize his psychology, which seems geared to inflict harm?
Behind the Torture, All That Stuff He Can't Admit
The president's reflex to justify his right to use torture, even as he insists "we don't torture," illuminates how his psychology works and provides a glimpse into its dark potential.
The man who campaigned in 1999 as a "uniter not a divider" constructs and maintains a polarized world. In his book, "A Tragic Legacy," Glen Greenwald, observes polarizing reality "explains the president's personal approach to all matters - his foreign policy decisions; his relations with other countries; his domestic programs; the terms he adopts when discussing, debating, and analyzing political matters; his attitude toward domestic political opponents ... and his treatment of the national media. For the president, there always exists a clear and identifiable enemy who is to be defeated by any means, means justified not only by the pureness of the enemy's Evil but also by the core Goodness that he believes motivates him and his movement." (48)
Those who question the president's policies are either part of the evil or dangerously unaware of its threat. His dictum,"you're either with us or against us," sums up his closed psychological system. As Greenwald says, because Bush believes he is on the side of Good and Right in a struggle with Evil, he construes even his unpopularity as not "an impediment, but a challenge, even a calling, to demonstrate his resolve and commitment by persisting even more tenaciously in the face of almost universal opposition." (37)
So, torture by his administration is justified - in fact is not even torture - because it is used by Good Americans in a war against Satanic forces.
Bush's torture rationale echoes that of an extreme form of Christianity found among his personal "spiritual" advisers and the prominent televangelists he regularly consults. The religious justification for his worldview has prompted him to bestow billions of dollars on radical "faith-based" activities and to sanction an extremist Christian transformation of the military - actions that foster the idea of the US as a theocratic state called on "to rid the world of evil," as the president has asserted.
As reported by Truthout last June, many of the religious figures associated with Bush believe the final battles of the apocalypse are near, with fires that will spread from the Middle East. Where James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye and John Hagee once pressed Bush hard for war with Iraq, they now clamor for one with Iran. The president cloaks himself in the innocuous terms "Christian," "evangelical" and "born again," and carefully avoids stating his beliefs specifically. But the type of Christianity most influential on his thinking is clearly radical or extremist rather than evangelical; it has an authoritarian, punishing, us-versus-them flavor; it views Christ less as a figure of tolerance and forgiveness than as a five-star general coming to wreck vengeance on anyone who has failed to join His army.
Former President Jimmy Carter's faith, like that of many evangelicals, involves a powerful commitment to love and tolerance. We do not detect a similar commitment in Bush. Spiritual issues and political motives appear secondary to Bush's subconscious use of his faith as a psychological defense. That defense "resolves" and protects him from the pain of a core inner conflict. The drinking and alleged drug taking of his younger years once resolved that same conflict. The supposed spiritual awakening Bush underwent in the mid-1980s allowed him to trade one defense for another. (Author Craig Unger has shown Bush's famous "mustard seed" moment with the Rev. Billy Graham - widely celebrated by the president - never happened; at the same time, Bush carefully avoids mentioning the faith awakening moment he probably really did have with radical evangelical preacher Arthur Blessitt.) In one sense, a half-hidden Manichean Christianity was more effective than alcohol in masking Bush's inner conflict. It made it possible for him to be president.
The Core Conflict
The central, secret conflict that consumes George W. Bush and motivates much of his action can be summed up in a few words: the desperate need to avoid, contain and disguise disabling fears about his competence and adequacy in a context where he expects to feel superior. Out of this core conflict have arisen his good and evil worldview, his lack of empathy, even cruelty, his competitiveness, his bullying, his inability to make a rational decision (despite styling himself "the decider"), his tendency for deception and self-deception, his proclivity for unconsciously sabotaging the success of his own projects.
Bush's biography is well known by now: growing up in family circumstances with a mother who was a "bully," and a father who, though passive, seemed effortlessly successful and talented as an athlete, war hero, businessman and politician. The younger Bush, expecting to demonstrate these same gifts, discovered quickly he couldn't measure up. The discovery probably began early, for example, when he wanted to be the catcher on his little league baseball team but couldn't do well because he reflexively blinked every time a batter swung (Unger, "The Fall of the House of Bush" 81), or his slowness in school, perhaps due to undiagnosed dyslexia or anxiety.
Biographer Bill Minutaglio described a moment at Yale when young Bush apparently tried to take another direction from his father, but couldn't pull away. (Minutaglio, "First Son" 104) Instead, he imitated (to the point of parody) his father's career, compiling failure everywhere his father found success: a C-student at Yale, a desultory pilot, a money-losing businessman. The fact his father or his father's friends needed repeatedly to rescue him from his failures (with Defense Secretary Robert Gates the latest rescuer) would have only increased the conflict between his sense of entitlement and expectation on the one hand, and his sense of insufficiency and incompetence on the other. Bush's sensitivity to his father's approval and disapproval is well established. Younger brother Marvin said the elder Bush could, intentionally or not, make his older son feel he alone had "committed the worst crime in history." (Minutaglio 148). And younger brother Jeb once speculated the attempt by George junior to live up to his disapproving father was the kind of thing that "creates all sorts of pathologies." (Minutaglio 101)
So, Bush indulged in pure wishful thinking when he recently told journalist Robert Draper, "I've never had a fear of losing. I don't like to lose. But having parents who give you unconditional love, I think it means I had the peace of mind to know that even with failure there was love. So I never feared failure." (Draper, "Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush" 36)
In fact, failure has been George W. Bush's single greatest fear.
Substance abuse would have numbed the feelings of inadequacy and given license to his hidden anger about his circumstances. He probably understood in a family as hermetically sealed from self-reflection as his, he could never openly admit feelings that he was a child "left behind" emotionally.
Then, George W. Bush accepted Jesus as his personal savior and the drinking - and presumably those painful feelings the drinking needed to numb - disappeared. The failure-shriveled Bush of the past was replaced by a new God-filled Bush of the future, armed against his inadequacies with the defense of "faith." But his sense of his inadequacy continued beneath the surface.
For example, the president tries to control his environment (speaking only to friendly audiences), and consistently seeks to avoid or deflect definitive "tests" of his competency (though he is eager to test the competency of school children). His plain speaking style, rigidly on message, or laced with platitudes and moralistic bromides, compensates to cover his fear that he is unable to cogently think through an argument. He often looks as if he is trying to remember what he's supposed to say because he's fears he'll say the wrong thing.
His biography strongly suggests it was difficult for him to engage in activities involving the ambiguity, uncertainty and mistakes that normally lead to learning and growth. Instead, he put his energies into defenses and avoidance. He undermined his own ability to think about complex issues. He currently likes to imagine he's living a presidential life similar to Abraham Lincoln's, with a war and religious fervor he imagines is like the Second Great Awakening of Lincoln's time. He thinks of himself making decisions in a similar fashion to Lincoln. (Greenwald 64-65) The problem is Bush lacks precisely the characteristic that made Lincoln a profound decision-maker: an ability to tolerate the ambivalence of situations long enough to perceive the shades of positive and negative, and emerge with what Lincoln called "our best judgment of the preponderance between them" (see epigraph).
In place of a Lincolnesque decision process, Bush's Christian defense supplies divine inspiration in the form of what he calls "gut" feelings that tell him, without much thought, what's right and wrong, good or evil. He feels this form of magical thinking absolves him of the fear that his incompetence or confusion might lead to a wrong or "stupid" choice. In his glaring reluctance to admit mistakes, he's like a child confronted by his parents. But for him, admitting a mistake may be even more threatening than the child's fear of losing his parents' love. By admitting a mistake, he would acknowledge the deep inadequacy he secretly believes defines him. So, he assures himself his spiritual gut feelings can never be mistakes or failure because they come from his attunement with God. But what Bush hears in his gut is not the divine; it is the workings of his own psychology organized to deny and transcend the family image of him as a failure that circulates in his head and has become his image of the world.
As part of his Christian defense, the president has developed strategies that substitute for rational evaluation. To decide whether someone is competent, for example, the president believes he needs only to approve (from his gut) that an individual is a "good person" - Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzales, Nouri al-Maliki are some examples. Their actual abilities and performance don't matter. If the president gives his stamp of "good person" approval, then it is "unfair" to quibble about performance or qualifications.
Bush's "Christian defense" also allows him to cope with failures by reassuring him that his divinely inspired decision will prove right in the long run. Seeing himself as Good and those who oppose him as Evil or dangerously naive, Bush can justify using any means at his command to defeat them. In this way, he can also give reign to his underlying anger and his desire to inflict harm on a world that had considered (and, he knows, still considers) him inadequate. He can vent his rage at being shackled to a father he has to endlessly compete with. Because he feels weak himself, the weaker are often his targets: children needing medical insurance, endangered species. Meanwhile, he gives uncritical affirmation to authoritarian ("good father") figures who he thinks approve of him: former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Despite his best efforts, his feelings of anxiety about his own inadequacy constantly spill over. Spillage through his body language is notorious among reporters. In a Washington Post article following his failures to respond to Katrina, Dana Milbank closely observed movements as Bush underwent pointed questioning by NBC's Matt Lauer. "The president was a blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts ... He had the body language of a man wishing urgently to be elsewhere," he wrote. When Lauer asked Laura Bush about the strain on her husband, he jumped in with a mocking third-person statement about himself: "He can barely stand! He's about to drop on the spot." In this abrupt defensive reflex, Bush denied his inner feelings by aggressively ridiculing thoughts he was afraid the viewer might just have had. Explaining his need to have Cheney with him at the 9/11 Commission interview, he said he wanted commission members to "see our body language ... how we work together." Another unconscious leak. What exactly did he think the commission would see except his own exposed inadequacy? His attempt to hide it, revealed it.
From the beginning of his December 4, 2007, press conference, the president offered a display of goofy facial grimaces, scowls, shifting stances, nervous and inappropriate chuckles accompanying serious statements, winking while reporters asked questions as if to indicate that the questions were foolish and that he was in cahoots with other reporters who appreciated the joke. The president had come to explain the fact he had recently trumpeted Iran ready to start "World War III," or a "nuclear holocaust," though the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) had recently concluded that Iran had, in fact, abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
At first, the president claimed (an obvious lie) that he hadn't known about the NIE conclusions when he issued his dire warnings about Iran. (Later the White House had to clarify he had indeed known.) Then, he said the NIE didn't make any difference to his opinion. Bush is famously adverse to attempts to probe his psychology, and so, after about 40 minutes, when a reporter questioned him about his body language and thought it indicated he was depressed, the president lashed back, "And so, kind of Psychology 101 ain't working. It's just not working. I understand the issues, I clearly see the problems ..." - and in a gesture of angry denial, ended the news conference.
A year prior, however, in a more relaxed and expansive context with friendly journalist, Robert Draper, Bush did indicate curiosity about his own inner workings. "I really do not feel comfortable in the role of analyzing myself," Bush told Draper, but then he emphasized. "I'll try." He didn't get far, though. Immediately after saying that he would "try," he launched into how the primaries are a test of will, then insisted ("eyes clenched, like little blue fists," Draper writes) that he felt constantly watched: "I fully understand that the enemy watches me, the Iraqis are watching me, the troops watch me, and the people watch me. The other thing is that you can't fake it. You have to believe it. And I believe it," he told Draper, leaving ambiguous whether the "it" referred to Iraq or something more deeply personal. "I believe we'll succeed." ("Dead Certain" x)
Of course, his feeling watched and "faking it" (faking certainty, faking competence) is exactly what George Bush is doing.
When the Defenses Become the Reality
We have noted in previous articles other prominent defenses Bush employs to cover his feelings of inadequacy: He is a classic emotional bully. Bullies disguise sensations of their own weakness by splitting the weakness off and casting it out of their own conscious awareness - projecting it - onto the consciousness of others. They generate a stream of signals and behaviors that keep others on guard and seek to enfeeble them. Bush's signing statements where he reserves the right not to abide by the law he's just adopted, his foreign policy asserting his right to preemptive strikes, his denial of Habeas Corpus, his fixation on retaining the torture option, his rejection of subpoenas from Congress, his diminishment of people by giving them nicknames - at different scales, these are emotional bullying tactics. Friends from his younger days remember that in basketball and tennis games Bush would force opponents who had beaten him to continue playing until he had worn down their will so he could beat them. Bush emotionally bullies his White House staff, making them afraid to tell him any news that doesn't fit his "optimistic" expectations. Draper reports senior staffer Josh Bolton greeting Bush each morning with the line, "Thank you for the privilege of serving." (397)
In January 2000 - and more decisively after September 11, 2001 - Bush came into possession of what we have called his "presidential defense." He became "the decider," the "commander guy," leader of the most powerful nation on earth overseeing a war he imagines is without end. Bush feels that his powerful office means - magically - that reality is his to define. Many have noted that the president is convinced that just because he says a thing will be so, it will be so.
As "the decider," Bush regularly asserts that he alone is the one who has to make the "tough" decisions, his primary job as president. At the same time, he has often declared that he loses no sleep and suffers no anxiety over his decisions. What does he mean by "tough," then? The statements are actually the paradox of how he avoids his inadequacy: he can be supremely competent on the grounds that he's the decider who decides what is competent; but since his competent decisions come magically, he doesn't lose sleep over them. In talking about why he never gets advice from his former president father, he says they both understand that as president he knows what his father doesn't know. That statement also doesn't make much logical sense; but it makes great psychological sense: a form of "I'm the daddy now, and daddy's not; daddies don't need advice."
Bush clings to a bad decision and can't change it because he had no rational basis for making it, or any decision, in the first place. Sticking with his decisions stubbornly - what he calls "leadership" - is all he really feels he has to offer as the nation's chief executive.
Absorbed in keeping up his psychic deflector shields, Bush seems shockingly unempathetic, even sadistically cruel about the pain of others. He is callous about torture; he takes pride in executions. His empathy for Katrina victims was clearly forced. He's a man who can put on a jacket of compassion or outrage when he needs to, but then takes it off and can't remember where he left it when a new need for empathy arrives. He's too busy expending that energy on his own situation.
Former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan has puzzled in her Wall Street Journal column at "the president's seemingly effortless high spirits" these days, at his "jarring peppiness" in circumstances that call for a sober demeanor. Bush's inappropriate affect connects with his inability to feel empathy and shows that he is disowning his depression about his failures and projecting it elsewhere. At the same time, he wants desperately to be liked. That explains the often inappropriate clowning and joking.
Bush's "presidential defense" traps him in a difficult paradox: It dramatically escalates the potency of his protection against being decisively (in his shifting terms) "found out" as inadequate. But it also dramatically escalates the psychically devastating consequences to him if he were to be found out (or find himself out).
As president, Bush is surrounded by what critics have taken to calling "enablers," a term that alludes to Bush's years of drinking and implies that the alcoholic's dynamic remains in force. Cheney is perhaps the chief enabler. As we've discussed previously, the vice president fulfills his need for personhood and power through taking on the wishes of his "patron" and serving as what Sidney Blumenthal calls "the pluperfect staff man." To do this, Cheney operates behind the scenes, where he is comfortable. His strategy translates into an obsessive secrecy for the administration as he carries out Bush's agenda of disguising weakness through bullying and authoritarianism. Doing the boss's dirty work has turned Cheney into a man who is amoral, paranoid and resentful at having framed himself as always second man. He likes the idea of being considered "the evil genius" who operates from the shadows. A deeply passive character with little sense of his own agency apart from a patron, Cheney makes himself, as he has said, "indispensable." He has worked his whole career to establish the presidency as an almost totalitarian "unitary executive," the ruler above all. His effort strikes us as a metaphor of his own internal struggle to be "the man": the paradoxical attempt to exercise his own will by exercising the will of his patron.
Other enablers include the women who surround Bush, principally Laura Bush, Karen Hughes and Condoleezza Rice. These women probably function for him as "good mothers" in contrast to his own mother. They seem to sense his distress, his inner fragility, and his extensive anxiety on a subconscious level, and try to sooth it. In his observations of Bush during the interview with Matt Lauer, reporter Milbank noted that "the first lady had a calming influence on the presidential wiggles. When Laura Bush spoke about her husband's 'broad shoulders,' the president put his arm around her - and the swaying and shifting subsided. The president, now on more comfortable terrain, delivered a brief homily about the decency of others. Through the entire passage, he blinked only 12 times" (down from 37 blinks the reporter counted during Bush's previous statement). The women may help him control his anxiety, but he would not be able to talk to them about it. They have their own issues with him. Rice revealed much about her psychology as enabler and victim of the administration's Stockholm syndrome when she told a friend, "People don't understand. It's not my exercising influence over him. I'm internalizing his world." (Draper 286) Like the alcoholic he once was, Bush has nobody to genuinely confide his anxieties to, not even Laura, who threatened to leave him if he didn't stop drinking. So, even in his most intimate friendships and relationships he is on stage, on message, exerting self-control (not always successfully), riding his bike to distract himself, keeping up his facade.
Bush's psyche throws out a fog of opposites as he attempts to control his ambivalence by disowning and splitting off parts. He can see himself only as Good, Successful, Loyal, Strong. The opposites of those must be cast outside him. He has negligible capacity to explore and draw nourishment from the fertile ground that exists in all of us between the poles of our conceptions and emotions. Insight grows from that ground. There he might discover, for example, that success and failure have many shades. In place of shades, Bush's character decompensates into stark contradictions. Claiming he is not a divider means the opposite, a "compassionate conservative" means the opposite. When his administration holds conferences to help resolve climate change or the Palestinian issue, his internal fragmentation dictates that he really doesn't want these things resolved - he wants the opposite. When he urges the success of an enterprise, it is likely that he has implanted somewhere the seeds of its failure. In the "surge" plan of last January there were several, for example: one flaw - vigorously warned against by the surge plan's supporters - would have created independent command structures for American and Iraqi forces. The command structures idea has been quietly scuttled by the military, which explains that "there are limitations preventing the Iraqi Security Forces from operating fully independently from Coalition forces." Another flaw involved Bush's remarkable failure to press the Iraqi leadership for the political reconciliation he said last year was the whole point of the surge's improvement of security in Baghdad. Thus, the surge has failed to accomplish its central purpose.
Because he unconsciously expects to be seen by the world as a failure, Bush feels a strange comfort and familiarity in failing and then in denying that he is failing. He can never learn from mistakes. Worse, his psychodynamics ensure that his efforts to avoid his failures inevitably produce more failures.
Bush's administration has become famous for the hubris of believing it would create its own reality; that fantasy inflated an expanding bubble of self-deception that left the White House increasingly out of touch with reality in every political dimension, except for intimidation. The cause of this is clear: To an unprecedented scale, a president's entire administration has been focused on the service of his psychological defense system.
Then, What Is He Capable of?
After previous articles about Bush's psychology, we received a number of emails from clinicians agreeing with our description of Bush's basic psychodynamic, and offering their diagnoses. These varied from one another, sometimes substantially, as might be expected, since no one we know of has had access to a first-hand psychiatric evaluation of Mr. Bush. What can we say about his psychopathology? We find no evidence in the public record that the president hears voices or is mentally ill in a way that would require hospitalization or medication, though some psychiatrists or psychopharmacologists might prescribe medication if he came in for treatment of his own accord. We think Bush's psychological dysfunctions are profound, but they are of the sort that would probably not arouse notice if he were, say, the owner of the Texas Rangers, a job he apparently enjoyed. (Draper 42) (Of course, being a baseball team owner replayed his central theme: his father had the baseball talent and he lacked it.) That said, we believe the effect of the presidency on Bush's psychodynamics and the effect of Bush's psychodynamics on the presidency have created a situation where his personality is as genuinely dangerous to the nation as if he were delusional.
Psychologically, Bush's one non-negotiable position is that he must never have to face his failures because once he found Jesus as his personal savior, he put all his failures (and failings) behind him. But now, after seven years as president, his failure is everywhere. Unlike presidents Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson and even Richard Nixon, Bush seems incapable of coping with his defeats by taking some redeeming direction. In the next year, we believe his behavior will continue to be guided by his need for massive avoidance of his feelings of inadequacy, particularly with regard to Iraq. Success in other areas means little to him and he gives them scant concern for his "legacy." He has identified himself as "a war president." The war is linked to his vague sense of divine mission, his internal aggression, his never-ending competition with his father.
We believe the great foreseeable peril of Bush's remaining year in office is the intersection of his Christian defense with Iran. In recent months, when Bush warned that Iran sought to launch World War III, he seems to have unconsciously told us it is he who wants war. The neo-conservative agenda to capture the Middle East for its oil, only reinforces Bush's own psychological reasons for attacking Iran: 1) to certify his biblical mission, and 2) to avoid facing the colossal incompetence of the Iraq war by bequeathing a widened and inextricable conflict to his successor. We believe Bush is aware that the long-term chaos that might result from an attack on Iran could confound the historical image of his administration enough to make his own failures harder to see. In 50 or 100 years - after he is dead, anyway - historians might even see his worldview in a favorable light. After all, they're still debating George Washington. That's what he thinks. The presidency has become for Bush like the popular "global domination" board game he played with fellow undergrads at Yale. There, he was known as the player willing to take the most risks.
Despite the mainstream press's inclination to construe the president's position euphemistically as a "hard line" on Iran, anyone who followed other reports, including Seymour Hersh's in The New Yorker, could reasonably conclude that the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate was a serious blow to Bush and Cheney's long-standing effort to provoke, create or discover a pretext to attack Iran and expand the Middle East wars. Hersh reported that in 2006 the president and vice president had pressed for use of nuclear weapons against Iranian facilities but were rebuffed by the military. We believe the president is probably already committed internally to pursue this belligerent course for his legacy. Vague fantasies of an "end-of-days" mission may be in his mind, as well.
It remains to be seen whether Secretary of Defense Robert Gates - Bush's father's designated new "minder" inside the administration - or senior military commanders can prevent Cheney from finding a way to operationalize the decision. So far they've succeeded. Meanwhile, the Democrats appear to be in denial about the risk of Bush's intentions. They know that almost everyone in authority who is rational actor believes taking on Iran at this time would be a colossal blunder, and they assume - though they must know better - that Bush will be persuaded by that rationality. We think this "misunderestimates" his psychology. The Democrats should overcome their denial and take their own preemptive action to block him from such an attack.
Some have imagined a worse scenario. In 2007, a statement to a small group of constituents by Democratic representative John Olver of Amherst, Mass., made the rounds on the Internet. Olver worried that Bush would attack Iran, declare a national emergency and suspend the 2008 elections. A clarifying email from Olver's press secretary to us said the congressman had no evidence that any of this would happen but that he had worried about a "thought crime" on the part of the president.
Is Bush psychologically capable of acting out such a "thought crime," maneuvering to remain in power? Would Bush ever actually move to suspend the Constitution? Unfortunately, he's done just that already, in significant ways. How committed is he really to the idea of democracy he talks about incessantly? Psychologically these are interesting questions. Given his tendency to polarize and split his ambivalence, we'd have to say that his constant pieties about democracy suggest the opposite is significantly at work in his consciousness. He's even joked about it: "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." Of course, he would vehemently deny that he is dictator even if he became one.
When Draper asked Bush about what plans he had after leaving the White House, they appeared vague, shiftless: making more money than his father on speaking engagements, setting up some foundation or something for encouraging democracy. "I can just envision getting in the car, getting bored, going down to the ranch." (406) His fantasies suggest his polarized ambivalence. He may yearn to escape into his old drinking days shiftlessness to get out from under the constant anxiety he feels about being competent as president; yet, he also seems keenly aware of the narcotic feeling of being a "consequential" person with a biblical mission, surrounded by the most powerful psychological defenses in the world. (Once out of office, how will he return to the family that knows his secret?) Is Bush capable of wanting to take the nation down an authoritarian road (a different question from whether he could get away with it)? If there were a terrorist attack on US soil or the assassination of a candidate, he could claim he is defending America by postponing the election. Cheney's office could provide the Constitutional rationale. With Bush's psychohistory, it's easy to become paranoid. Purely speculating: We think that Olver's "thought crime" is not the first thing on the president's mind and that he is not so out of touch with reality that he wouldn't have serious pause at such an action. (Martial law hasn't worked well for Pakistani strong man Pervez Musharraf.) That said, we believe Bush's psychodynamics could propel him in that direction if certain conditions arose.
As Greenwald observes: "The most dangerous George Bush is the one who feels weak, impotent, and under attack. Those perceptions are intolerable for him and it is doubtful if there are many limits, if any, on what he would be willing to do in order to restore a feeling of potency and to rid himself of the sensations of his own weakness and defeat." (95)
Responding to the Bush Psychology
It's likely that members of Congress in particular have experienced the subliminal shockwaves of what Greenwald describes. When the president feels weak, you don't know what he'll do. You sense that somewhere beneath your feet lie tripwires, which are his psychological defenses. Step on one, and you feel he'll react in a way that will be time consuming, unpleasant, distracting and possibly personally humiliating. He will pretend that his assault on you will be about important matters of national concern, but it will be really about himself. It will be hard to explain all that to the public, however. The president gives off subtle, angry irrationality that takes the air out of individuals of either party who might want to challenge him. They'd rather not deal with him if he can be avoided. They try to evade his polarizations. In that way they, too, become his enablers.
Unfortunately, there's no magic formula countering the psychology of the kind discussed here in the unique circumstance where the owner of that psychology is the president. But here are some things to consider:
Bush-type personality operates in a defensive, binary mode. Greenwald observes that the president's neocon advisers have found they can manipulate him by casting the policy they're advancing in a binary, good-evil terms. Then Bush manipulates others using such polarizations. When he says some variation of, "You're either with us or against us," he makes you feel angry and weak. You want to strike back, but you can't if you wish to remain rational. So you want to say logically, "No, I'm not against you, but I'm not with you, either." But that requires explaining, which is immensely difficult in our media environment. Reporters have become addicted to conflict-based storytelling as a way of getting audience attention. They prefer a polarized fight and will even try to start one if it doesn't exist. They tell stories by juxtaposing antagonistic sound bites. A politician trying to articulate a position that is non-polarized, nuanced and non-conflictual is at a disadvantage. Perhaps, serious politicians need to develop some tactics that can directly confront polarizing. "There you go again, Mr. President, creating a false division. There are third and forth options here." Whenever possible, the mainstream press should be chastised and educated about its addiction to this kind of conflict-based reporting, which creates a free fire zone, an information free environment that destroys public discourse.
A person polarizing the world as Bush does is like a small, weak animal that puffs itself up in order to scare off attackers. In Bush's case, the presidency has frequently led him into the illusion that he actually is his puffed up size. It might help to remember that he's not.
Polarizing tactics work because they provoke and rely on fear in those at the receiving end - fear of being wrong, fear of what the other guy will do, fear of uncertainty, fear of mistakes. Fear these things less and the tactics will work less. Such fears make us feel like children again. But we're adults. Binary, absolutist categories are always an inadequate description of the real world, which is, as Lincoln said, an "inseparable compound" of various polarities. As adults, we can think and speak about subtleties and complexities. If we do, fear will go down, not up. Most adults implicitly understand that the real world is, more often than not, nuanced, and an appeal to the truth of shades has its own strong power.
The Democrats have recently tried to operate in the grand American tradition that opposition and diversity must be accompanied by a willingness to negotiate. That is the message of the Constitution, a document that embodies a psychologically very deep understanding of the give-and-take of creative process. The Democrats attempted to work with the president and their Republican colleagues in this spirit after they won the Congress in 2006. Psychologically, it was the right thing to do. They tried to heal the wounds the president had inflicted and draw him into a creative collaboration. But the president's massive defensiveness over his failures has kept him truculently binary. He has obviously intimidated his fellow Republicans so that they, too, have continued in a merely oppositional mode and are supporting his vetoes. The president is dismissing Congress as incidental to his authority.
At this point, it appears that the Democrats and moderate Republicans are succumbing to their fear of direct confrontation with his psychology. They seem afraid the president might be vindicated by another terrorist attack on US soil (as though the attack would prove that polarizing the world is the true path). They want to avoid a constitutional crisis in the months until Bush leaves office. They haven't wanted their legislative time consumed with investigations of administrative corruption and usurpation of power. They haven't wanted to alienate the electorate during an election season. Their own ambivalence has been set off by his, but with a different result. They waffle: one minute resisting him, the next backing down. All this is understandable, but it misses the point that corruption and usurpation of the sort that has been unleashed by the president's psychology may have already seriously damaged our national institutions. What is the message to the future if we allow this president's psychological defenses against his failures to inflict such damage and then evade our responsibility to hold him accountable for it?
Members of Congress can stop being victims of the president's abusive psychology. You can confront a polarizer about his behavior without yourself becoming a polarizer. Instead of splitting ambivalence as Bush does, ambivalence can be used it to think through a clear course of action . The Constitution helps, in this case. The Democrats might, for example, articulate their balancing duties under the Constitution and carefully and firmly distinguish them from acts of partisan opposition. They might publicly acknowledge that this president, with the past complicity of Congress, has damaged our institutions. They could insist on the investigative and deliberative process called for by our system of government. Methodically holding Bush and his administration to account for his abuses (such a thing has never before happened to him) may be the most effective way to neutralize the further acting out of his dangerous psychology. It would empower others in his administration to resist him. It would refocus Congress on its own responsibilities in the constitutional process. Of course, to accomplish this would require some adults and "profiles in courage."
John P. Briggs, M.D. is retired from over 40 years of private practice in psychotherapy in Westchester County, New York. He was on the faculty in psychiatry at the Columbia Medical Center in New York City for 23 years and was a long-time member of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. He trained at the William Alanson White Institute in New York. For 20 years he practiced co-therapy for married couples with his late wife, Muriel.
JP Briggs II, Ph.D. is a distinguished CSU professor at Western Connecticut State University, specializing in creative process. He is the senior editor of the intellectual journal, "The Connecticut Review" and author and co-author of books on creativity and chaos, including "Fire in the Crucible" (St. Martins Press); "Fractals, the Patterns of Chaos" (Simon and Schuster); "Seven Life Lessons of Chaos" (HarperCollins); and a collection of short stories, "Trickster Tales" (Fine Tooth Press). He is currently at work on a book about the power of ambivalence with Philadelphia psychologist John Amoroso. Email: profbriggs@comcast.net
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Friday, January 11, 2008
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Iraq Outlook 2008
by Erik Leaver
January 10th marks the one year anniversary of Bush’s “surge” strategy. Many analysts are now claiming the “surge” is a success, but with no end in sight to the war, the year of the “surge” really is a tale of two Iraqs. Coming off a very deadly end to 2006, the first half of 2007 brought some of the highest levels of violence and displacement since the war began. But by the middle of the year, the level of violence reportedly began to drop, with December being the second least violent for U.S. troops since 2003. But the current calm has been crafted on a foundation that can topple at any moment, leaving its “success” in doubt.
Iraq Today
The dominant story in Iraq is the downward trend in casualties for both Iraqis and U.S. soldiers. The single-minded focus on casualties however, masks the internal problems in Iraq that could cause the violence to rise to new heights this year. Much of the decrease in violence is a result of the United States cutting deals with Sunni insurgents. The United States now has 70,000 “former” insurgents on its payroll. At the same time, the U.S. military continues to recruit and train members of the Iraqi military and police-agencies heavily dominated by Shiites. Arming and training these two groups has quelled the violence in the short term but makes the chances of future fighting between the groups to be a very bloody affair.
Focusing on training and arming all sides in the conflict has been counterproductive in achieving the main goal of the “surge”-providing the space for political reconciliation. Provincial elections and the referendum on the status of Kirkuk were postponed in 2007. The Iraqi parliament was stalemated for most of the year and when it was functioning much of its activities were in opposition to that of the Iraqi cabinet. And the period for amending the constitution in a fast-track manner, which was the carrot for the Sunnis to help pass the constitution, has been extended for the fourth time. Politically, 2008 appears to be the most difficult to date.
These political tensions will come to a head as President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki move forward in signing a formal agreement for the future U.S. troop presence. This agreement, scheduled for completion by July 31, will likely coincide with the completion of the U.S. embassy. Both of these events will signal what Iraqis feared when the U.S. invaded-that the occupation will become permanent, giving the United States a dominant position with military bases, preferential access to oil and open access to Iraqi markets. With opponents in the parliament, the militias, the insurgency, and Maliki being in an extremely weak position, completion of this agreement could easily send the country into chaos.
The War at Home
In the United States, the focus will be on two events: a drawdown of troops back to pre-surge levels of 130,000 from the current 160,000 and on continued funding of the war. Given the November elections and the perceived advantage Democrats still hold over Republicans on the Iraq War, Congress will likely continue to challenge Bush on the funding. But Democrats will be in the same position they were in 2007, without the votes needed to cut the funds off or to pass legislation to bring the troops home in 2008. The result will be continued funding, with an extension of reporting requirements and perhaps legislation regarding how long troops may be deployed, war profiteering, and permanent bases. A wildcard in this calculation is the state of the U.S. economy, which appears to be floundering at the moment. If the economy weakens further, the public may strenuously object to spending another $100-200 billion in Iraq.
There could also be an important challenge this year in the Senate on the particulars of the Bush-Maliki agreement. Signed in November, the Declaration of Principles sets forth a plan for a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq. A deadline for a final agreement is set for July 2008. The accord could take several legal forms (treaty, congressional/executive agreement, or as Bush argues, avoiding Congress altogether by entering into “a status of forces agreement”). But with the agreement committing the United States to providing security assurances, defending Iraq’s democratic system against internal and external threats, and providing preferential trading conditions, Congress should have a say in shaping this agreement.
Bush will have the upper hand on Iraq in the early part of the year as he will take credit for the “success” of the “surge” and will likely announce by March the drawdown of troops to pre-surge levels. This may have a quelling effect on the public. Public protests led by peace groups such as United for Peace and Justice scheduled for March will have little effect in changing public opinion if the security situation remains stable.
With the drawdown likely to be completed around the same time as the Bush-Maliki agreement in mid-summer, any upsurge in violence will increase pressure to resume larger troop levels. However, if the Iraqi government and security forces are able to keep the peace during the summer and fall, the issue of the Iraq War will fade from the presidential elections, sidelining any discussion on future U.S. redeployments.
Shaping 2008
Without hope for a change in strategy from Congress or Bush, those seeking a change in policy should focus on keeping the Iraq War front and center in the debate on the campaign trail at the national, state, and local levels. The lesson drawn from Ned Lamont’s campaign, where he changed the national debate on Iraq during the mid-term elections, cannot be forgotten.
No President (Republican or Democrat) is going to end this war without strong backing from the Congress for doing so. To the extent that congressional momentum is created in that direction this year, there will be a positive impact on the presidential campaign and decision-making in 2009 and beyond. The fact is that legislation aiming to bring the troops home continued to make progress, even in this last discouraging round of voting on additional funding for the war.
In Congress, significant progress can be made toward improving the livelihoods of refugees, medical care for veterans and deployment periods, and stopping the permanent occupation that Bush and Maliki are pushing. Legislative strategies should address each of these issues, and hearings should be organized at the national and local levels.
Using the supplemental budget bills and the defense, state, and veterans affairs appropriations bills to highlight the costs of the Iraq War will be crucial. Polls last fall indicated that 70 percent of registered voters think President Bush’s supplemental spending requests should be rejected or conditioned on redeployment. While Congress hasn’t been able to capitalize on this public sentiment to cut spending on the war, with the economy ranking as the number one issue coming out of the New Hampshire primary for Republicans and Democrats, the public will continue to balk at the current spending and the long-term impacts.
Large demonstrations in March could help counter Bush’s assertions on the success of the surge. These efforts must be matched by Iraq experts who can to debunk the President’s claim of success, especially before Petraeus testifies before Congress in March. Even more critical is the need to develop messaging and strategy if the current calm continues. Just as the U.S. has been cutting deals with the insurgents, so too could it seek a deal with Iran to stabilize Iraq. While such a deal would be welcome for decreased violence, long-term stability should not be sacrificed for short-term gains.
Finally, pressure must be applied to presidential candidates, especially with many of the Democratic contenders supporting the “occupation lite” solution suggested by the Baker-Hamilton report of keeping some U.S. forces in Iraq for counter-terrorism, training, and diplomatic protection. These plans, eerily similar to the Bush-Maliki Declaration of Principles, could easily leave upwards of 40,000 troops inside Iraq for decades, not to mention an untold number of military contractors. Whoever wins the presidency must have a clear mandate to change the course and bring all the troops home. Without this, the United States will likely continue to occupy Iraq for decades to come.
Iraq: Important Dates in 2008
Jan. 10: Anniversary of the “Surge”
Jan. 28: President’s State of the Union address
Feb. 4: Probable date of submission of the FY 2009 budget, including Iraq funding for FY09
Week of Feb 11: Probable date of 4,000th U.S. Fatality
Feb. 22: Anniversary of Samarra bombing
March: General Petraeus Report
March: Pentagon Quarterly Report
March 19: 5th Anniversary of War
June: Pentagon Quarterly Report
June: War funding runs out
June: Kirkuk Referendum Deadline
July: Troop levels projected to reach 130,000, ending the “surge”
July 31: Deadline for Bush/Maliki Agreement
Sept: Pentagon Quarterly Report, Possible Petraeus report
Sept 1-30: Ramadan
Oct. 2, 2008: Vice Presidential debate (Domestic and foreign policy focus)
Oct. 15, 2008: Presidential debate (Foreign policy focus)
December: Pentagon Quarterly Report
December: UN Mandate Expires
Other Events, Dates Unknown:
FY2008 Supplemental
FY2009: Defense/State Authorizations
FY2009: Defense/State Appropriations
FY2009: Iraq/Afghanistan Supplemental
Iraqi Provincial Elections (delayed from 07)
Completion of US Embassy (early-mid 08)
Erik Leaver is the policy outreach director for Foreign Policy In Focus and a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Copyright © 2008, Institute for Policy Studies
January 10th marks the one year anniversary of Bush’s “surge” strategy. Many analysts are now claiming the “surge” is a success, but with no end in sight to the war, the year of the “surge” really is a tale of two Iraqs. Coming off a very deadly end to 2006, the first half of 2007 brought some of the highest levels of violence and displacement since the war began. But by the middle of the year, the level of violence reportedly began to drop, with December being the second least violent for U.S. troops since 2003. But the current calm has been crafted on a foundation that can topple at any moment, leaving its “success” in doubt.
Iraq Today
The dominant story in Iraq is the downward trend in casualties for both Iraqis and U.S. soldiers. The single-minded focus on casualties however, masks the internal problems in Iraq that could cause the violence to rise to new heights this year. Much of the decrease in violence is a result of the United States cutting deals with Sunni insurgents. The United States now has 70,000 “former” insurgents on its payroll. At the same time, the U.S. military continues to recruit and train members of the Iraqi military and police-agencies heavily dominated by Shiites. Arming and training these two groups has quelled the violence in the short term but makes the chances of future fighting between the groups to be a very bloody affair.
Focusing on training and arming all sides in the conflict has been counterproductive in achieving the main goal of the “surge”-providing the space for political reconciliation. Provincial elections and the referendum on the status of Kirkuk were postponed in 2007. The Iraqi parliament was stalemated for most of the year and when it was functioning much of its activities were in opposition to that of the Iraqi cabinet. And the period for amending the constitution in a fast-track manner, which was the carrot for the Sunnis to help pass the constitution, has been extended for the fourth time. Politically, 2008 appears to be the most difficult to date.
These political tensions will come to a head as President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki move forward in signing a formal agreement for the future U.S. troop presence. This agreement, scheduled for completion by July 31, will likely coincide with the completion of the U.S. embassy. Both of these events will signal what Iraqis feared when the U.S. invaded-that the occupation will become permanent, giving the United States a dominant position with military bases, preferential access to oil and open access to Iraqi markets. With opponents in the parliament, the militias, the insurgency, and Maliki being in an extremely weak position, completion of this agreement could easily send the country into chaos.
The War at Home
In the United States, the focus will be on two events: a drawdown of troops back to pre-surge levels of 130,000 from the current 160,000 and on continued funding of the war. Given the November elections and the perceived advantage Democrats still hold over Republicans on the Iraq War, Congress will likely continue to challenge Bush on the funding. But Democrats will be in the same position they were in 2007, without the votes needed to cut the funds off or to pass legislation to bring the troops home in 2008. The result will be continued funding, with an extension of reporting requirements and perhaps legislation regarding how long troops may be deployed, war profiteering, and permanent bases. A wildcard in this calculation is the state of the U.S. economy, which appears to be floundering at the moment. If the economy weakens further, the public may strenuously object to spending another $100-200 billion in Iraq.
There could also be an important challenge this year in the Senate on the particulars of the Bush-Maliki agreement. Signed in November, the Declaration of Principles sets forth a plan for a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq. A deadline for a final agreement is set for July 2008. The accord could take several legal forms (treaty, congressional/executive agreement, or as Bush argues, avoiding Congress altogether by entering into “a status of forces agreement”). But with the agreement committing the United States to providing security assurances, defending Iraq’s democratic system against internal and external threats, and providing preferential trading conditions, Congress should have a say in shaping this agreement.
Bush will have the upper hand on Iraq in the early part of the year as he will take credit for the “success” of the “surge” and will likely announce by March the drawdown of troops to pre-surge levels. This may have a quelling effect on the public. Public protests led by peace groups such as United for Peace and Justice scheduled for March will have little effect in changing public opinion if the security situation remains stable.
With the drawdown likely to be completed around the same time as the Bush-Maliki agreement in mid-summer, any upsurge in violence will increase pressure to resume larger troop levels. However, if the Iraqi government and security forces are able to keep the peace during the summer and fall, the issue of the Iraq War will fade from the presidential elections, sidelining any discussion on future U.S. redeployments.
Shaping 2008
Without hope for a change in strategy from Congress or Bush, those seeking a change in policy should focus on keeping the Iraq War front and center in the debate on the campaign trail at the national, state, and local levels. The lesson drawn from Ned Lamont’s campaign, where he changed the national debate on Iraq during the mid-term elections, cannot be forgotten.
No President (Republican or Democrat) is going to end this war without strong backing from the Congress for doing so. To the extent that congressional momentum is created in that direction this year, there will be a positive impact on the presidential campaign and decision-making in 2009 and beyond. The fact is that legislation aiming to bring the troops home continued to make progress, even in this last discouraging round of voting on additional funding for the war.
In Congress, significant progress can be made toward improving the livelihoods of refugees, medical care for veterans and deployment periods, and stopping the permanent occupation that Bush and Maliki are pushing. Legislative strategies should address each of these issues, and hearings should be organized at the national and local levels.
Using the supplemental budget bills and the defense, state, and veterans affairs appropriations bills to highlight the costs of the Iraq War will be crucial. Polls last fall indicated that 70 percent of registered voters think President Bush’s supplemental spending requests should be rejected or conditioned on redeployment. While Congress hasn’t been able to capitalize on this public sentiment to cut spending on the war, with the economy ranking as the number one issue coming out of the New Hampshire primary for Republicans and Democrats, the public will continue to balk at the current spending and the long-term impacts.
Large demonstrations in March could help counter Bush’s assertions on the success of the surge. These efforts must be matched by Iraq experts who can to debunk the President’s claim of success, especially before Petraeus testifies before Congress in March. Even more critical is the need to develop messaging and strategy if the current calm continues. Just as the U.S. has been cutting deals with the insurgents, so too could it seek a deal with Iran to stabilize Iraq. While such a deal would be welcome for decreased violence, long-term stability should not be sacrificed for short-term gains.
Finally, pressure must be applied to presidential candidates, especially with many of the Democratic contenders supporting the “occupation lite” solution suggested by the Baker-Hamilton report of keeping some U.S. forces in Iraq for counter-terrorism, training, and diplomatic protection. These plans, eerily similar to the Bush-Maliki Declaration of Principles, could easily leave upwards of 40,000 troops inside Iraq for decades, not to mention an untold number of military contractors. Whoever wins the presidency must have a clear mandate to change the course and bring all the troops home. Without this, the United States will likely continue to occupy Iraq for decades to come.
Iraq: Important Dates in 2008
Jan. 10: Anniversary of the “Surge”
Jan. 28: President’s State of the Union address
Feb. 4: Probable date of submission of the FY 2009 budget, including Iraq funding for FY09
Week of Feb 11: Probable date of 4,000th U.S. Fatality
Feb. 22: Anniversary of Samarra bombing
March: General Petraeus Report
March: Pentagon Quarterly Report
March 19: 5th Anniversary of War
June: Pentagon Quarterly Report
June: War funding runs out
June: Kirkuk Referendum Deadline
July: Troop levels projected to reach 130,000, ending the “surge”
July 31: Deadline for Bush/Maliki Agreement
Sept: Pentagon Quarterly Report, Possible Petraeus report
Sept 1-30: Ramadan
Oct. 2, 2008: Vice Presidential debate (Domestic and foreign policy focus)
Oct. 15, 2008: Presidential debate (Foreign policy focus)
December: Pentagon Quarterly Report
December: UN Mandate Expires
Other Events, Dates Unknown:
FY2008 Supplemental
FY2009: Defense/State Authorizations
FY2009: Defense/State Appropriations
FY2009: Iraq/Afghanistan Supplemental
Iraqi Provincial Elections (delayed from 07)
Completion of US Embassy (early-mid 08)
Erik Leaver is the policy outreach director for Foreign Policy In Focus and a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Copyright © 2008, Institute for Policy Studies
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Beyond NH: Campaign Promises Are Empty Until the War Ends
By Bill Boyarsky, Truthdig
MANCHESTER, N.H. -- When Hillary Clinton, seriously set back by the Iowa caucuses, landed in New Hampshire to resuscitate her presidential campaign, the first question from the audience was unsparingly blunt: "When will the troops come home?"
She replied, as she has done before, that she hopes to begin bringing them home a brigade or two a month, but will leave enough troops in Iraq to protect themselves, American civilians and Iraqis who have helped the United States. That's not too much different from what has been proposed by Barack Obama and John Edwards.
In other words, no matter who wins, Democrat or Republican, get ready for an extended war, a nagging pain that won't go away. That simple, infuriating thought has been lost in the deluge of analysis, vote figures, handicapping and moments of drama that accompanied the Iowa caucuses and are carrying over into the New Hampshire's primary.
Neither the weekend's debates nor Clinton's furious effort to reduce Obama's lead in the polls gave comfort to Americans who want to end the war. For those of us who do, the most significant article of the weekend appeared on the back page of The New York Times Week In Review, saying "numbers don't lie: for those in uniform, 2007 was the deadliest year since the invasion." The centerpiece was a powerful chart, in color, breaking down the 2,592 recorded deaths suffered last year by American and other coalition troops, Iraqi security forces and Kurdish-controlled militias.
And as the candidates invoked the vague phase change, also lost in the process was the important point that a decent health insurance plan and the war are intertwined. In other words, the war is so expensive that it will be impossible for a Democratic president to keep campaign promises regarding federal health insurance while the conflict continues.
The man who asked Clinton about the war opened a question-and-answer session that lasted considerably longer than her speech. She clearly was determined to reintroduce herself in a state where she once had a strong lead in the polls.
She spoke in a large hangar at the Nashua airport, north of Manchester, after finishing third to Obama and Edwards in Iowa. It was a damaging finish, made worse for her by the size of Obama's win and by his powerful, moving victory speech afterward.
Her New Hampshire staff had labored to give the hangar the ambiance of victory. A big American flag hung on the closed doors of the chilly building. A bus was to the right of the flag, painted in blue, red, gray and white, with a slogan on the sides: "Big Challenges, Real Solutions." It was there to take the Clintons -- Hillary, Bill and Chelsea -- off on a New Hampshire tour that the senator hopes will save her campaign. "We got in at 4:30 [a.m.]," the former president told the crowd, which occupied almost half the large hangar. "I think my girls look good, don't you?"
I was happy that the first question was about the war, and that it was asked in such a direct way. When the campaign began, the war was a critical issue. But it has come up less and less frequently in past weeks as Democratic candidates concentrated more on health care and other domestic issues.
There are reasons for this. Casualties are down. TV news directors and their counterparts in the print media and online have a short attention span and suffer from war fatigue. The economy is troubled, home foreclosures are growing, and health care horror stories abound. The polls show increased public concern about the domestic issues.
Yet, as the University of Michigan's Juan Cole pointed out in his blog Informed Comment, the fact that the war "is tied with health care does not mean it isn't important to voters. It means it is as important to them as the health of themselves and their loved ones, which is to say it is very important."
The war's cost is tremendous. Economist Scott Wallstein estimates it so far at close to $1 trillion. Economists Linda Bilnes and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former Clinton administration adviser, said the figure is twice that much. A 2006 study by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service put the cost at $2 billion a week.
Universal health care would also be very expensive. Various studies by advocates estimate the cost over several years at between $34 billion and $69 billion. Even so, it would be cheaper than the war.
The issue is tremendously important here in New Hampshire. The state is recovering from an industrial decline, with high-tech business coming in. "It started in the '90s," Mike Vlacich, director of the New Hampshire Division of Economic Development, told me.
But I got a gloomier view from Jay Ward, political director for the Service Employees International Union, which is supporting Edwards in the state.
It's true, Ward said, that high-tech jobs have increased, but not enough to take up the slack from the loss of manufacturing, particular the paper mills in the northern part of the state. "These jobs allowed people to work 40 hours a week and send their kids to college," he said. The unemployment rate remains comparatively low, he said, but the jobs are in retail and service -- low paying and with minimal benefits. "There's underemployment, which means you have three jobs," he added.
These people need a system of Medicare for all -- a form of which is advocated by Obama, Clinton and Edwards, the three real post-Iowa survivors among the Democrats.
There are differences in their plans, but they are all good.
The candidates also say they are against the war and want our troops out. But Clinton wants withdrawal in phases and wouldn't have most troops out until 2013. After that, she would keep a residual force in Iraq. Edwards would withdraw 40,000 to 50,000 immediately and all within nine or 10 months, another phased pullout. Obama, who -- unlike Clinton and Edwards -- opposed the invasion, would withdraw all troops before 2010, again in phases.
All these plans would leave troops there for a substantial time. And that's assuming that the winner can keep a withdrawal promise. It's easy to imagine what will happen when the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the so-called wise men and women of the Washington foreign policy establishment start "talking sense" to the new president, urging him or her to keep a strong force in Iraq to guard strategic interests and oil supplies in the Middle East and to protect Israel. Only Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich favor an immediate pullout.
Republicans John McCain, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney all support the war and oppose even setting a timetable for withdrawal. And none of them favor a decent federal health insurance plan.
These Republican ideas are not acceptable. But the Democratic candidates must recognize we can't have speedy action on better health insurance while our troops remain in Iraq.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/73158/
MANCHESTER, N.H. -- When Hillary Clinton, seriously set back by the Iowa caucuses, landed in New Hampshire to resuscitate her presidential campaign, the first question from the audience was unsparingly blunt: "When will the troops come home?"
She replied, as she has done before, that she hopes to begin bringing them home a brigade or two a month, but will leave enough troops in Iraq to protect themselves, American civilians and Iraqis who have helped the United States. That's not too much different from what has been proposed by Barack Obama and John Edwards.
In other words, no matter who wins, Democrat or Republican, get ready for an extended war, a nagging pain that won't go away. That simple, infuriating thought has been lost in the deluge of analysis, vote figures, handicapping and moments of drama that accompanied the Iowa caucuses and are carrying over into the New Hampshire's primary.
Neither the weekend's debates nor Clinton's furious effort to reduce Obama's lead in the polls gave comfort to Americans who want to end the war. For those of us who do, the most significant article of the weekend appeared on the back page of The New York Times Week In Review, saying "numbers don't lie: for those in uniform, 2007 was the deadliest year since the invasion." The centerpiece was a powerful chart, in color, breaking down the 2,592 recorded deaths suffered last year by American and other coalition troops, Iraqi security forces and Kurdish-controlled militias.
And as the candidates invoked the vague phase change, also lost in the process was the important point that a decent health insurance plan and the war are intertwined. In other words, the war is so expensive that it will be impossible for a Democratic president to keep campaign promises regarding federal health insurance while the conflict continues.
The man who asked Clinton about the war opened a question-and-answer session that lasted considerably longer than her speech. She clearly was determined to reintroduce herself in a state where she once had a strong lead in the polls.
She spoke in a large hangar at the Nashua airport, north of Manchester, after finishing third to Obama and Edwards in Iowa. It was a damaging finish, made worse for her by the size of Obama's win and by his powerful, moving victory speech afterward.
Her New Hampshire staff had labored to give the hangar the ambiance of victory. A big American flag hung on the closed doors of the chilly building. A bus was to the right of the flag, painted in blue, red, gray and white, with a slogan on the sides: "Big Challenges, Real Solutions." It was there to take the Clintons -- Hillary, Bill and Chelsea -- off on a New Hampshire tour that the senator hopes will save her campaign. "We got in at 4:30 [a.m.]," the former president told the crowd, which occupied almost half the large hangar. "I think my girls look good, don't you?"
I was happy that the first question was about the war, and that it was asked in such a direct way. When the campaign began, the war was a critical issue. But it has come up less and less frequently in past weeks as Democratic candidates concentrated more on health care and other domestic issues.
There are reasons for this. Casualties are down. TV news directors and their counterparts in the print media and online have a short attention span and suffer from war fatigue. The economy is troubled, home foreclosures are growing, and health care horror stories abound. The polls show increased public concern about the domestic issues.
Yet, as the University of Michigan's Juan Cole pointed out in his blog Informed Comment, the fact that the war "is tied with health care does not mean it isn't important to voters. It means it is as important to them as the health of themselves and their loved ones, which is to say it is very important."
The war's cost is tremendous. Economist Scott Wallstein estimates it so far at close to $1 trillion. Economists Linda Bilnes and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former Clinton administration adviser, said the figure is twice that much. A 2006 study by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service put the cost at $2 billion a week.
Universal health care would also be very expensive. Various studies by advocates estimate the cost over several years at between $34 billion and $69 billion. Even so, it would be cheaper than the war.
The issue is tremendously important here in New Hampshire. The state is recovering from an industrial decline, with high-tech business coming in. "It started in the '90s," Mike Vlacich, director of the New Hampshire Division of Economic Development, told me.
But I got a gloomier view from Jay Ward, political director for the Service Employees International Union, which is supporting Edwards in the state.
It's true, Ward said, that high-tech jobs have increased, but not enough to take up the slack from the loss of manufacturing, particular the paper mills in the northern part of the state. "These jobs allowed people to work 40 hours a week and send their kids to college," he said. The unemployment rate remains comparatively low, he said, but the jobs are in retail and service -- low paying and with minimal benefits. "There's underemployment, which means you have three jobs," he added.
These people need a system of Medicare for all -- a form of which is advocated by Obama, Clinton and Edwards, the three real post-Iowa survivors among the Democrats.
There are differences in their plans, but they are all good.
The candidates also say they are against the war and want our troops out. But Clinton wants withdrawal in phases and wouldn't have most troops out until 2013. After that, she would keep a residual force in Iraq. Edwards would withdraw 40,000 to 50,000 immediately and all within nine or 10 months, another phased pullout. Obama, who -- unlike Clinton and Edwards -- opposed the invasion, would withdraw all troops before 2010, again in phases.
All these plans would leave troops there for a substantial time. And that's assuming that the winner can keep a withdrawal promise. It's easy to imagine what will happen when the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the so-called wise men and women of the Washington foreign policy establishment start "talking sense" to the new president, urging him or her to keep a strong force in Iraq to guard strategic interests and oil supplies in the Middle East and to protect Israel. Only Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich favor an immediate pullout.
Republicans John McCain, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney all support the war and oppose even setting a timetable for withdrawal. And none of them favor a decent federal health insurance plan.
These Republican ideas are not acceptable. But the Democratic candidates must recognize we can't have speedy action on better health insurance while our troops remain in Iraq.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/73158/
Why Do Democrats Keep Funding the War?
Kicking the Can Down the Road in Iraq
By WILLIAM S. LIND
A piece in the December 27, 2007 Cleveland Plain Dealer, "Vote on fate of Kirkuk postponed," by Tina Susman and Asso Ahmed of the L.A. Times, reported that,
Kurdish lawmakers agreed Wednesday to a six-month delay in a referendum on whether the oil-rich city of Kirkuk should join the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan or remain under Iraqi central government control.
Also Wednesday, the head of the Iraqi parliament's constitutional review committee, Humam Hamoudi, said he would request a three-month delay in rewriting the national constitution. That would mark the fourth time the target datehas been put off.
The delay in the constitutional revision could hinder progress on other issues.
As the Iraqis kick the can down the road, so do the Americans. The American-funded Sunni militia, aka the Concerned Local Citizens or the Awakening, has grown to 72,000 volunteers in nearly 300 communities in Iraq. They have been credited with reducing violence in some of Iraq's most violent areas. But many people, including some Sunnis, worry that the groups could de-stabilize Iraq.
The concern is a valid one. With our usual charming naiveté, we seem to think the Sunnis have become our friends. But they are merely using us to help them get ready for the next round with the Shiites and, in the case of Kirkuk, the Kurds.
In fact, kicking the can down the road, more formally a strategy of delay, makes good sense in the face of Iraqi realities provided we do something with the time gained. Regrettably, it appears we are doing little but sitting on our bayonets, waiting, like Mr. McCawber, for something to turn up.
What might we do with this pause between phases of the Iraqi civil war? Obviously, get out. Violence is not likely to diminish much further; at some point it will almost certainly start to rise again. What better moment can we hope for than the present to announce "Mission accomplished" and head for the door?
The Bush administration will not make a decision to withdraw no matter how favorable the opportunity. It has adopted the ugly baby approach, planning to hand the war off to its (probably Democratic) successor.
But what of the Democrats who control both Houses of Congress? Why do they keep funding the war, as they just did again?
The reasons are several, and none of them are pretty. Obviously, Democrats think they will garner more votes in November if the war is still going on with no end in sight. Running against "Bush's war" appears more promising than ending it.
Most of the leading Democratic Presidential candidates are ambiguous, at best, about ending the war in Iraq if they win. Why? In part, because just as the neo-cons now dominate Republican circles, so the Democratic Establishment is in thrall to the neo-liberals. Both cabals of neos favor a world-dominating American empire, run of course by themselves. We are reminded once again that while there may be, at least on paper, two parties, there is one Establishment. It does not look favorably on ending the games off which it feeds.
Then there is the matter of a certain Small Middle Eastern Country which likes the war in Iraq, and hopes for a war on Iran as well. Said SMEC speaks with a loud voice in Democratic Party circles, the voice of campaign contributions. Never does money speak more audibly than in an election year.
So the politicians will sit and wait while the time we have so dearly bought in Iraq runs out. In no human activity is time more precious than in war. Frittered away, it can never be recovered. There is good reason why Napoleon said, "I may lost a battle but I will never lose a minute."
If we are to make good use of the time kicking the can down the road has bought us, it falls to the senior military to do so. The moral burden of command demands that they go public and say, "If we are going to get out of Iraq, the time to do so is now." Some of them may get fired for it, although General Petraeus is probably (again, for a time) untouchable. The Bush White House still will not be moved, but squirm as they might the Democrats in Congress would almost have to act or risk a revolt of their base, which is not very happy at the moment in any case.
Regrettably, as we saw throughout the war in Vietnam, American generals are more likely to step up to the trough than to the plate.
William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.
By WILLIAM S. LIND
A piece in the December 27, 2007 Cleveland Plain Dealer, "Vote on fate of Kirkuk postponed," by Tina Susman and Asso Ahmed of the L.A. Times, reported that,
Kurdish lawmakers agreed Wednesday to a six-month delay in a referendum on whether the oil-rich city of Kirkuk should join the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan or remain under Iraqi central government control.
Also Wednesday, the head of the Iraqi parliament's constitutional review committee, Humam Hamoudi, said he would request a three-month delay in rewriting the national constitution. That would mark the fourth time the target datehas been put off.
The delay in the constitutional revision could hinder progress on other issues.
As the Iraqis kick the can down the road, so do the Americans. The American-funded Sunni militia, aka the Concerned Local Citizens or the Awakening, has grown to 72,000 volunteers in nearly 300 communities in Iraq. They have been credited with reducing violence in some of Iraq's most violent areas. But many people, including some Sunnis, worry that the groups could de-stabilize Iraq.
The concern is a valid one. With our usual charming naiveté, we seem to think the Sunnis have become our friends. But they are merely using us to help them get ready for the next round with the Shiites and, in the case of Kirkuk, the Kurds.
In fact, kicking the can down the road, more formally a strategy of delay, makes good sense in the face of Iraqi realities provided we do something with the time gained. Regrettably, it appears we are doing little but sitting on our bayonets, waiting, like Mr. McCawber, for something to turn up.
What might we do with this pause between phases of the Iraqi civil war? Obviously, get out. Violence is not likely to diminish much further; at some point it will almost certainly start to rise again. What better moment can we hope for than the present to announce "Mission accomplished" and head for the door?
The Bush administration will not make a decision to withdraw no matter how favorable the opportunity. It has adopted the ugly baby approach, planning to hand the war off to its (probably Democratic) successor.
But what of the Democrats who control both Houses of Congress? Why do they keep funding the war, as they just did again?
The reasons are several, and none of them are pretty. Obviously, Democrats think they will garner more votes in November if the war is still going on with no end in sight. Running against "Bush's war" appears more promising than ending it.
Most of the leading Democratic Presidential candidates are ambiguous, at best, about ending the war in Iraq if they win. Why? In part, because just as the neo-cons now dominate Republican circles, so the Democratic Establishment is in thrall to the neo-liberals. Both cabals of neos favor a world-dominating American empire, run of course by themselves. We are reminded once again that while there may be, at least on paper, two parties, there is one Establishment. It does not look favorably on ending the games off which it feeds.
Then there is the matter of a certain Small Middle Eastern Country which likes the war in Iraq, and hopes for a war on Iran as well. Said SMEC speaks with a loud voice in Democratic Party circles, the voice of campaign contributions. Never does money speak more audibly than in an election year.
So the politicians will sit and wait while the time we have so dearly bought in Iraq runs out. In no human activity is time more precious than in war. Frittered away, it can never be recovered. There is good reason why Napoleon said, "I may lost a battle but I will never lose a minute."
If we are to make good use of the time kicking the can down the road has bought us, it falls to the senior military to do so. The moral burden of command demands that they go public and say, "If we are going to get out of Iraq, the time to do so is now." Some of them may get fired for it, although General Petraeus is probably (again, for a time) untouchable. The Bush White House still will not be moved, but squirm as they might the Democrats in Congress would almost have to act or risk a revolt of their base, which is not very happy at the moment in any case.
Regrettably, as we saw throughout the war in Vietnam, American generals are more likely to step up to the trough than to the plate.
William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
A Surge of Lies
Dear Jeff,
Many thousands of you have asked to learn more about my position on the Iraq war and related funding. As you may know, a few weeks ago I voted again to deny funding without a timetable.
I am bothered by the recent movement to repackage the Surge as a success. Today, I released an editorial (below and also published on the Daily Kos) regarding my view of the Surge's so-called "success." If you have a moment, please read it when you get a chance.
Thank you again for your support.
Congressman Robert Wexler
*************************
A Surge of More Lies
by Congressman Robert Wexler
A new troubling myth has taken hold in Washington and it is critical that the record is set straight. According to the mainstream media, Republicans, and unfortunately even some Democrats, the President's surge in Iraq has been a resounding success. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
This assertion is disingenuous, factually incorrect, and negatively impacts America's national security. The Surge had a clear and defined objective - to create stability and security - enabling the Iraqi government to enact lasting political solutions and foster genuine reconciliation and cooperation between Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds.
This has not happened.
There has been negligible political progress in Iraq, and we are no closer to solving the complex problems - including a power sharing government, oil revenue agreement and new constitution - than we were before the Administration upped the ante and sent 30,000 more troops to Iraq.
Too many Democrats in Congress are again surrendering to General Petraeus and have failed to challenge the Bush Administration's claims that the surge has been successful. In fact -- it is just the opposite.
The reduction in violence in Iraq has exposed the continuing failure of Iraqi officials to solve their substantial political rifts. By President Bush's own stated goal of political progress, the Surge has failed.
Of course raising troop levels has increased security - a strategy the Bush administration ignored when presented by General Shinseki before the war in Iraq began - but the fundamental internal Iraqi problems remain and the factors that were accelerating the civil war in 2007 have simply been put on hold.
The military progress is a testament to the patience and dedication of our brave troops - even in the face of 15 month-long deployments followed by insufficient Veteran's health services when they return home. They have performed brilliantly - despite the insult of having President Bush recently veto a military spending bill that enhanced funding and benefits, and increased care.
Despite the efforts of American soldiers, the surge alone cannot bring about the political solutions needed to end centuries of sectarian divide.
As it stands, little on the ground supports the assertion that Iraqis are ready to stand up and govern themselves. Too few Iraqi troops are trained, equipped and combat ready, and they cannot yet provide adequate security. Loyalty is also an issue in the Iraqi army as Al Queda and Sunni insurgents infliltrate their defense forces. The consequences turned deadly just recently when an Iraqi soldier purposely killed two U.S. troops.
On the streets of Baghdad and Mosul, the Sunni and Shia factions have paused their fighting, awaiting guarantees and protections that have not yet been delivered. As Iraqi refugees return, there is no mechanism to help them rebuild their lives, nor recover their now-occupied homes. Neighborhoods once mixed are now segregated.
In Northern Iraq, Kurdish terrorists conducting nefarious operations across the border into Turkey have compelled our NATO ally to strike at bases, inflaming tensions between Baghdad and Ankara.
The surge is working? We suffered more U.S. casualties in 2007 than in any other year of the war. We can't afford any more of this type of success.
How can we create the situation that is most likely to deliver political progress in Iraq? Not by continuing the surge and occupation. Our best chance (there is no guarantee) is by putting real pressure on the Iraqi government to force action. Telling the national and local Iraqi leaders that we are withdrawing our troops can help accomplish this goal. Today, the majority Iraqi Shia government led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has little incentive to act when American troops remain in the country to provide security and stability.
Based on the Administration's plan, John McCain's proposal of a 100-year US occupation could be a reality!
The Democratic Congress must act aggressively to first cut off funding for the surge and then the entire war. Many of my colleagues avoided a showdown with the administration because they mistakenly believed such a fight would endanger the safety of the troops.
In fact, we must accept that every soldier killed or injured in the coming months should have already been home. Every billion dollars of war-appropriations we spend from here on should have been spent on genuine priorities here at home such as children's heath care.
Enough is enough: While the Administration over-commits American forces in Iraq, we see Al Qaeda-regrouping and Osama Bin Laden still at large. We remain seriously bogged down in Afghanistan, and are witnessing a crisis in Pakistan that has left a nuclear country on the brink of a meltdown. America's resources and attention are desperately needed elsewhere and our soldiers must no longer be needlessly sacrificed as we wait for Iraqis to stand up.
The Surge has failed. If my colleagues gullibly accept the moving rationale for the Surge, just as so many have for the war itself, we will have failed as well.
***To contact me or for more information, go to www.wexlerforcongress.com .
Many thousands of you have asked to learn more about my position on the Iraq war and related funding. As you may know, a few weeks ago I voted again to deny funding without a timetable.
I am bothered by the recent movement to repackage the Surge as a success. Today, I released an editorial (below and also published on the Daily Kos) regarding my view of the Surge's so-called "success." If you have a moment, please read it when you get a chance.
Thank you again for your support.
Congressman Robert Wexler
*************************
A Surge of More Lies
by Congressman Robert Wexler
A new troubling myth has taken hold in Washington and it is critical that the record is set straight. According to the mainstream media, Republicans, and unfortunately even some Democrats, the President's surge in Iraq has been a resounding success. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
This assertion is disingenuous, factually incorrect, and negatively impacts America's national security. The Surge had a clear and defined objective - to create stability and security - enabling the Iraqi government to enact lasting political solutions and foster genuine reconciliation and cooperation between Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds.
This has not happened.
There has been negligible political progress in Iraq, and we are no closer to solving the complex problems - including a power sharing government, oil revenue agreement and new constitution - than we were before the Administration upped the ante and sent 30,000 more troops to Iraq.
Too many Democrats in Congress are again surrendering to General Petraeus and have failed to challenge the Bush Administration's claims that the surge has been successful. In fact -- it is just the opposite.
The reduction in violence in Iraq has exposed the continuing failure of Iraqi officials to solve their substantial political rifts. By President Bush's own stated goal of political progress, the Surge has failed.
Of course raising troop levels has increased security - a strategy the Bush administration ignored when presented by General Shinseki before the war in Iraq began - but the fundamental internal Iraqi problems remain and the factors that were accelerating the civil war in 2007 have simply been put on hold.
The military progress is a testament to the patience and dedication of our brave troops - even in the face of 15 month-long deployments followed by insufficient Veteran's health services when they return home. They have performed brilliantly - despite the insult of having President Bush recently veto a military spending bill that enhanced funding and benefits, and increased care.
Despite the efforts of American soldiers, the surge alone cannot bring about the political solutions needed to end centuries of sectarian divide.
As it stands, little on the ground supports the assertion that Iraqis are ready to stand up and govern themselves. Too few Iraqi troops are trained, equipped and combat ready, and they cannot yet provide adequate security. Loyalty is also an issue in the Iraqi army as Al Queda and Sunni insurgents infliltrate their defense forces. The consequences turned deadly just recently when an Iraqi soldier purposely killed two U.S. troops.
On the streets of Baghdad and Mosul, the Sunni and Shia factions have paused their fighting, awaiting guarantees and protections that have not yet been delivered. As Iraqi refugees return, there is no mechanism to help them rebuild their lives, nor recover their now-occupied homes. Neighborhoods once mixed are now segregated.
In Northern Iraq, Kurdish terrorists conducting nefarious operations across the border into Turkey have compelled our NATO ally to strike at bases, inflaming tensions between Baghdad and Ankara.
The surge is working? We suffered more U.S. casualties in 2007 than in any other year of the war. We can't afford any more of this type of success.
How can we create the situation that is most likely to deliver political progress in Iraq? Not by continuing the surge and occupation. Our best chance (there is no guarantee) is by putting real pressure on the Iraqi government to force action. Telling the national and local Iraqi leaders that we are withdrawing our troops can help accomplish this goal. Today, the majority Iraqi Shia government led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has little incentive to act when American troops remain in the country to provide security and stability.
Based on the Administration's plan, John McCain's proposal of a 100-year US occupation could be a reality!
The Democratic Congress must act aggressively to first cut off funding for the surge and then the entire war. Many of my colleagues avoided a showdown with the administration because they mistakenly believed such a fight would endanger the safety of the troops.
In fact, we must accept that every soldier killed or injured in the coming months should have already been home. Every billion dollars of war-appropriations we spend from here on should have been spent on genuine priorities here at home such as children's heath care.
Enough is enough: While the Administration over-commits American forces in Iraq, we see Al Qaeda-regrouping and Osama Bin Laden still at large. We remain seriously bogged down in Afghanistan, and are witnessing a crisis in Pakistan that has left a nuclear country on the brink of a meltdown. America's resources and attention are desperately needed elsewhere and our soldiers must no longer be needlessly sacrificed as we wait for Iraqis to stand up.
The Surge has failed. If my colleagues gullibly accept the moving rationale for the Surge, just as so many have for the war itself, we will have failed as well.
***To contact me or for more information, go to www.wexlerforcongress.com .
Monday, January 7, 2008
But No Justice for Iraq Atrocities
There Will Be Blood
By CHRIS FLOYD
The headline in last Friday's Washington Post says it all: "No Murder Charges Filed in Haditha Case."
Two years ago, a group of Marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians -- including women and children cowering in their own homes -- in a revenge rampage in Haditha. Once the story emerged from the usual layers of lies and cover-up, the atrocity flared briefly on the public stage, and eight of the Marines and their officers were charged "with murder or failing to investigate an apparent war crime," as the Post reports. But public attention moved swiftly on, and over the past few months, the Pentagon's "military justice" system has quietly reduced or dropped charges against most of the men. Yesterday's announcement signaled the final climb-down in the case, leaving only a single Marine, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, facing a charge of voluntary manslaughter, and lesser charges against one other enlisted man and two officers.
Two dozen civilians slaughtered, as confirmed by the Pentagon itself -- and yet there was no murder. Indeed, Brian Rooney, the lawyer for one of the officer charged with failing to investigate the killings, now says "it's clear now that no massacre occurred, yet this legal fiction is moving forward." Twenty-four actual, physical dead bodies in the ground -- yet the incident was a "legal fiction" -- "no massacre occurred."
The Pentagon has decided that the beserkers who killed two dozen innocent civilians were essentially following the accepted rules of engagement for U.S. forces in Iraq -- a revealing fact in itself. As the Post notes:
Investigating officers in the cases have recommended lesser charges because they have found that the Marines determined the houses were hostile and believed they could kill everyone inside, more likely a case of recklessness than intent to commit a crime.
Even the indictment of Wuterich contains mitigating circumstances in the charge itself, which, the Post notes, alleges "that he had an intent to kill and that his actions inside a residential home and on a residential street in November 2005 amounted to unlawful killing 'in the heat of sudden passion caused by adequate provocation.'"
"Adequate provocation" to kill twenty-four unarmed civilians in cold blood -- or rather, as the indictment terms it, in hot blood, "the heat of sudden passion."
There is little I can say about this case beyond what I first wrote about it in 2006 in a piece called "The Line of Atrocity: From the White House to Haditha."
"Many observers have compared the methodical murder of 24 innocent civilians by U.S. Marines in the Iraqi town of Haditha now confirmed by Pentagon and Congressional sources to the infamous My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when American troops slaughtered hundreds of civilians in a bloody rampage. But this is a false equation, one that gravely distorts the overall reality of the Coalition effort in Iraq.
"For it is not the small-scale Haditha atrocity that should be compared to My Lai: it is the entire Iraq War itself. The whole operation from its inception in high-level mendacity to its execution in blood-soaked arrogance, folly, greed and incompetence is a war crime of almost unfathomable proportions: a My Lai writ large, a My Lai every single day, year after year after year.
"....Photos taken afterwards by U.S. military intelligence document the carnage [at Haditha]. 'One portrays an Iraqi mother and young child, kneeling on the floor, as if in prayer,' the Sunday Times reports. 'They have been shot dead at close range. The pictures show other victims, shot execution-style in the head and chest in their homes.' The victims 'included a 76-year-old amputee and a four-year-old boy,' the Observer reports. "In one house an entire family, including seven children, were attacked with guns and grenades. Only a 13-year-old girl survived.' A U.S. government official told the Sunday Times that the attackers had 'suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership.'
"Take special note of that last statement: it may be the first time that a Bush Administration spokesman has ever told the truth about the war. There has indeed been a "total breakdown in morality and leadership" in Iraq; but it's not confined to the Haditha killers. They are just the inevitable end product of the culture of lawlessness, brutality, and aggression deliberately manufactured by the White House to serve its predatory geopolitical ambitions and its dirty war-profiteering schemes.
"This fish has rotted from the head, and the corruption has eaten through the entire body politic. It was bound to find its most extreme manifestations in those whom Bush has armed with lies a majority of U.S. soldiers believe that Iraq was involved in 9/11, polls show and sent off to kill and be killed in an illegal war of aggression based on knowingly false and tricked-up evidence. If atrocity is the foundation of your enterprise, if atrocity is the atmosphere you breathe, why then, you are bound to produce atrocities, over and over, despite the many individual soldiers and honorable officers who struggle against the infected tide.
"These massacres aren't just momentary outbursts of revenging anger; they're learned behavior. The Marines who killed at Haditha were veterans of the much larger atrocity at Fallujah the year before. There they took part in one of the most savage demolitions of a city since World War II. Eight weeks of relentless bombing was followed by a cut-off of the city's water, electricity and food supplies. a clear war crime under the Geneva Conventions. More than two-thirds of the city's residents, some 200,000 people, fled the coming inferno, refugees in their own land. Those who remained were considered fair game in the house-by-house ravaging that followed. Among the Americans' first targets were the city's hospitals and clinics, as U.S. officers freely admitted to the New York Times: another blatant war crime. They were destroyed or shut down, with medical staff killed or imprisoned, to prevent bad publicity about civilian casualties from reaching the outside world, the officers said. Later, an investigation by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government found credible evidence of the use of chemical weapons against the city; yet another war crime. Up to 6,000 people were killed in the attack, most of them civilians.
"The few hundred Fallujah-based insurgents who had been the ostensible target of the assault had escaped long before the onslaught began. Thus there was no real military purpose to the city's destruction, which had been ordered by the White House; it was instead an act of reprisal, a collective punishment against the Iraqi people as a whole, non-combatants included, for the armed resistance to the Coalition conquest. The Marines of Kilo Company simply took what they were taught by their eminently respectable superiors in Fallujah and applied it in Haditha.
"...Like Abu Ghraib, Haditha is not an aberration by a few 'bad apples' but the emblem of a wider, systemic crime, the natural fruit of an outlaw regime that has made aggressive war, torture, indefinite detention, 'extrajudicial killing,' rendition and concentration camps official national policy. This moral rot is Bush's true historical legacy."
It is also the historical legacy of every single public figure and presidential candidate who fails to stand up -- right now, today, and every single day-- and demand that this abomination come to an immediate end, and that its perpetrators face the full measure of justice for what they have done. Who gives a damn about Obama's "elevating rhetoric" or Hillary's "tough fight-back" in New Hampshire -- or any of the other soul-rotting bullshit of the presidential campaign -- when this innocent blood drenches us all, day after day after day? Moral insanity has gripped this nation -- and we are all of us, every single one, tainted and corrupted by it...and are passing it on to our children. Who will break this chain of madness? And where will we find mercy for these crimes?
Chris Floyd is an American journalist and frequent contributor to CounterPunch. He is the author of the book Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium. He can be reached through his webistie: www.chris-floyd.com.
By CHRIS FLOYD
The headline in last Friday's Washington Post says it all: "No Murder Charges Filed in Haditha Case."
Two years ago, a group of Marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians -- including women and children cowering in their own homes -- in a revenge rampage in Haditha. Once the story emerged from the usual layers of lies and cover-up, the atrocity flared briefly on the public stage, and eight of the Marines and their officers were charged "with murder or failing to investigate an apparent war crime," as the Post reports. But public attention moved swiftly on, and over the past few months, the Pentagon's "military justice" system has quietly reduced or dropped charges against most of the men. Yesterday's announcement signaled the final climb-down in the case, leaving only a single Marine, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, facing a charge of voluntary manslaughter, and lesser charges against one other enlisted man and two officers.
Two dozen civilians slaughtered, as confirmed by the Pentagon itself -- and yet there was no murder. Indeed, Brian Rooney, the lawyer for one of the officer charged with failing to investigate the killings, now says "it's clear now that no massacre occurred, yet this legal fiction is moving forward." Twenty-four actual, physical dead bodies in the ground -- yet the incident was a "legal fiction" -- "no massacre occurred."
The Pentagon has decided that the beserkers who killed two dozen innocent civilians were essentially following the accepted rules of engagement for U.S. forces in Iraq -- a revealing fact in itself. As the Post notes:
Investigating officers in the cases have recommended lesser charges because they have found that the Marines determined the houses were hostile and believed they could kill everyone inside, more likely a case of recklessness than intent to commit a crime.
Even the indictment of Wuterich contains mitigating circumstances in the charge itself, which, the Post notes, alleges "that he had an intent to kill and that his actions inside a residential home and on a residential street in November 2005 amounted to unlawful killing 'in the heat of sudden passion caused by adequate provocation.'"
"Adequate provocation" to kill twenty-four unarmed civilians in cold blood -- or rather, as the indictment terms it, in hot blood, "the heat of sudden passion."
There is little I can say about this case beyond what I first wrote about it in 2006 in a piece called "The Line of Atrocity: From the White House to Haditha."
"Many observers have compared the methodical murder of 24 innocent civilians by U.S. Marines in the Iraqi town of Haditha now confirmed by Pentagon and Congressional sources to the infamous My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when American troops slaughtered hundreds of civilians in a bloody rampage. But this is a false equation, one that gravely distorts the overall reality of the Coalition effort in Iraq.
"For it is not the small-scale Haditha atrocity that should be compared to My Lai: it is the entire Iraq War itself. The whole operation from its inception in high-level mendacity to its execution in blood-soaked arrogance, folly, greed and incompetence is a war crime of almost unfathomable proportions: a My Lai writ large, a My Lai every single day, year after year after year.
"....Photos taken afterwards by U.S. military intelligence document the carnage [at Haditha]. 'One portrays an Iraqi mother and young child, kneeling on the floor, as if in prayer,' the Sunday Times reports. 'They have been shot dead at close range. The pictures show other victims, shot execution-style in the head and chest in their homes.' The victims 'included a 76-year-old amputee and a four-year-old boy,' the Observer reports. "In one house an entire family, including seven children, were attacked with guns and grenades. Only a 13-year-old girl survived.' A U.S. government official told the Sunday Times that the attackers had 'suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership.'
"Take special note of that last statement: it may be the first time that a Bush Administration spokesman has ever told the truth about the war. There has indeed been a "total breakdown in morality and leadership" in Iraq; but it's not confined to the Haditha killers. They are just the inevitable end product of the culture of lawlessness, brutality, and aggression deliberately manufactured by the White House to serve its predatory geopolitical ambitions and its dirty war-profiteering schemes.
"This fish has rotted from the head, and the corruption has eaten through the entire body politic. It was bound to find its most extreme manifestations in those whom Bush has armed with lies a majority of U.S. soldiers believe that Iraq was involved in 9/11, polls show and sent off to kill and be killed in an illegal war of aggression based on knowingly false and tricked-up evidence. If atrocity is the foundation of your enterprise, if atrocity is the atmosphere you breathe, why then, you are bound to produce atrocities, over and over, despite the many individual soldiers and honorable officers who struggle against the infected tide.
"These massacres aren't just momentary outbursts of revenging anger; they're learned behavior. The Marines who killed at Haditha were veterans of the much larger atrocity at Fallujah the year before. There they took part in one of the most savage demolitions of a city since World War II. Eight weeks of relentless bombing was followed by a cut-off of the city's water, electricity and food supplies. a clear war crime under the Geneva Conventions. More than two-thirds of the city's residents, some 200,000 people, fled the coming inferno, refugees in their own land. Those who remained were considered fair game in the house-by-house ravaging that followed. Among the Americans' first targets were the city's hospitals and clinics, as U.S. officers freely admitted to the New York Times: another blatant war crime. They were destroyed or shut down, with medical staff killed or imprisoned, to prevent bad publicity about civilian casualties from reaching the outside world, the officers said. Later, an investigation by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government found credible evidence of the use of chemical weapons against the city; yet another war crime. Up to 6,000 people were killed in the attack, most of them civilians.
"The few hundred Fallujah-based insurgents who had been the ostensible target of the assault had escaped long before the onslaught began. Thus there was no real military purpose to the city's destruction, which had been ordered by the White House; it was instead an act of reprisal, a collective punishment against the Iraqi people as a whole, non-combatants included, for the armed resistance to the Coalition conquest. The Marines of Kilo Company simply took what they were taught by their eminently respectable superiors in Fallujah and applied it in Haditha.
"...Like Abu Ghraib, Haditha is not an aberration by a few 'bad apples' but the emblem of a wider, systemic crime, the natural fruit of an outlaw regime that has made aggressive war, torture, indefinite detention, 'extrajudicial killing,' rendition and concentration camps official national policy. This moral rot is Bush's true historical legacy."
It is also the historical legacy of every single public figure and presidential candidate who fails to stand up -- right now, today, and every single day-- and demand that this abomination come to an immediate end, and that its perpetrators face the full measure of justice for what they have done. Who gives a damn about Obama's "elevating rhetoric" or Hillary's "tough fight-back" in New Hampshire -- or any of the other soul-rotting bullshit of the presidential campaign -- when this innocent blood drenches us all, day after day after day? Moral insanity has gripped this nation -- and we are all of us, every single one, tainted and corrupted by it...and are passing it on to our children. Who will break this chain of madness? And where will we find mercy for these crimes?
Chris Floyd is an American journalist and frequent contributor to CounterPunch. He is the author of the book Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium. He can be reached through his webistie: www.chris-floyd.com.
Rewriting history in real time
January 7, 2008 - 6:56am
Bush;'s latest attempt to fix his errors comes too late
By THOMAS P.M. BARNETT
The White House's recent policy reversals amount to a stunning repudiation of the first seven years of George W. Bush's presidency. Where allies were previously disrespected, now they're viewed as essential. Where diplomacy was eschewed, now it's pursued with vigor. No longer running the government from his "base," Bush finally tries to lead the entire nation.
His political opponents detect weakness and regret and a last-ditch attempt to salvage legacy, while supporters point to a self-professed "dissident" leader extending a "freedom" agenda in his final months. Both perspectives hold much truth.
But as someone who's worked extensively throughout the national-security community across this administration, both inside and outside government, I am struck by how the world seems to be returning to its pre-9/11 correlation of forces, like a cosmic clock being reset. It's almost as if the sum total effect of the second Bush term will be to repair the damage caused by the first.
They say time heals all wounds. It similarly muddles all doctrines.
When Bush entered office, transnational terrorism seemed dangerous but manageable -- an "over there" challenge. Fast forward to 2008 and tell me what's different, other than your approach to air travel. Yes, we now know that a 9/11 is eminently possible and we're keenly aware of its likely engineers and where they reside. When they pull off the next one, probably in Europe, we'll collectively head to roughly the same spot to roust them out again.
Meanwhile, we'll make reasonable efforts to bolster networks, both here and there, but the world must go on. Terrorists monopolized America's attention for a while but nowhere else, either because other regions were used to such travails or because bigger things were happening.
At the beginning of 2001 we sensed that the Middle East was broken, with little chance of peace. Iraq and Iran were clearly dangerous, but both were considered manageable through a mix of economic and military efforts. No doubt we have far many more boots on the ground today, and our sacrifice in blood and treasure is alarmingly large, but back then the Persian Gulf was seen as something primarily left to the U.S. military to handle, and so it is again today.
Bush's pre-emptive war became Gen. David Petraeus' counterinsurgency becomes Central Command's enduring challenge, along with Afghanistan and -- suddenly --Pakistan. If, in 2001, I described a Pentagon dreaming of brilliant, high-tech war with "rising China" but operationally engrossed by a messy, unstable, low-tech security landscape, today you'd find all the same bureaucratic tensions, exponentially expanded and increasingly fueled by a young generation of ground officers bristling for institutional reform.
The Bush administration entered office complaining that scant attention was being paid to the "big pieces" of international security, like Russia, China, Europe and India. Then 9/11, triggering a fit of unilateralist pique, pushed all those great-power concerns aside as we targeted failed states and rogue regimes.
Fast forward to 2008 and we're back to focusing on how those "big pieces" help us manage the little ones. It turns out that you'd better ask the neighbors before you start "draining the swamp."
But no, this whole journey wasn't merely the result of Bush's mis-education at the hands of his now-discredited foreign-policy "Vulcans." In certain instances, like global warming, the mountain came to Mohammad. If, in 2001, the smart money said the Kyoto treaty was doomed because it excluded booming China and India, today's conventional wisdom admits the same. Thus we now search for more sensibly comprehensive and sustainable strategies for dealing with this global issue.
Is it enough, in the end, for Bush's second administration to repair -- for the most part -- the damage to America's global standing created by his first?
Yes and no.
The reason I supported John Kerry in 2004 was because I felt the Bush team, while being more than up to the necessary task of resetting the rules in the wake of 9/11, was distinctly incapable of subsequently gaining much buy-in from the rest of the world. Generating such buy-in always involves tradeoffs: winning most means compromising some.
I remain convinced that a Kerry administration would have propelled America far faster toward that inevitable adjustment, the very same realignment the Bush White House finally undertakes today.
So what's been lost?
Merely time and opportunity, our two most precious assets.
(Thomas P.M. Barnett is a visiting scholar at the University of Tennessee's Howard Baker Center and the senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC. Contact him at tom(at)thomaspmbarnett.com.)
Bush;'s latest attempt to fix his errors comes too late
By THOMAS P.M. BARNETT
The White House's recent policy reversals amount to a stunning repudiation of the first seven years of George W. Bush's presidency. Where allies were previously disrespected, now they're viewed as essential. Where diplomacy was eschewed, now it's pursued with vigor. No longer running the government from his "base," Bush finally tries to lead the entire nation.
His political opponents detect weakness and regret and a last-ditch attempt to salvage legacy, while supporters point to a self-professed "dissident" leader extending a "freedom" agenda in his final months. Both perspectives hold much truth.
But as someone who's worked extensively throughout the national-security community across this administration, both inside and outside government, I am struck by how the world seems to be returning to its pre-9/11 correlation of forces, like a cosmic clock being reset. It's almost as if the sum total effect of the second Bush term will be to repair the damage caused by the first.
They say time heals all wounds. It similarly muddles all doctrines.
When Bush entered office, transnational terrorism seemed dangerous but manageable -- an "over there" challenge. Fast forward to 2008 and tell me what's different, other than your approach to air travel. Yes, we now know that a 9/11 is eminently possible and we're keenly aware of its likely engineers and where they reside. When they pull off the next one, probably in Europe, we'll collectively head to roughly the same spot to roust them out again.
Meanwhile, we'll make reasonable efforts to bolster networks, both here and there, but the world must go on. Terrorists monopolized America's attention for a while but nowhere else, either because other regions were used to such travails or because bigger things were happening.
At the beginning of 2001 we sensed that the Middle East was broken, with little chance of peace. Iraq and Iran were clearly dangerous, but both were considered manageable through a mix of economic and military efforts. No doubt we have far many more boots on the ground today, and our sacrifice in blood and treasure is alarmingly large, but back then the Persian Gulf was seen as something primarily left to the U.S. military to handle, and so it is again today.
Bush's pre-emptive war became Gen. David Petraeus' counterinsurgency becomes Central Command's enduring challenge, along with Afghanistan and -- suddenly --Pakistan. If, in 2001, I described a Pentagon dreaming of brilliant, high-tech war with "rising China" but operationally engrossed by a messy, unstable, low-tech security landscape, today you'd find all the same bureaucratic tensions, exponentially expanded and increasingly fueled by a young generation of ground officers bristling for institutional reform.
The Bush administration entered office complaining that scant attention was being paid to the "big pieces" of international security, like Russia, China, Europe and India. Then 9/11, triggering a fit of unilateralist pique, pushed all those great-power concerns aside as we targeted failed states and rogue regimes.
Fast forward to 2008 and we're back to focusing on how those "big pieces" help us manage the little ones. It turns out that you'd better ask the neighbors before you start "draining the swamp."
But no, this whole journey wasn't merely the result of Bush's mis-education at the hands of his now-discredited foreign-policy "Vulcans." In certain instances, like global warming, the mountain came to Mohammad. If, in 2001, the smart money said the Kyoto treaty was doomed because it excluded booming China and India, today's conventional wisdom admits the same. Thus we now search for more sensibly comprehensive and sustainable strategies for dealing with this global issue.
Is it enough, in the end, for Bush's second administration to repair -- for the most part -- the damage to America's global standing created by his first?
Yes and no.
The reason I supported John Kerry in 2004 was because I felt the Bush team, while being more than up to the necessary task of resetting the rules in the wake of 9/11, was distinctly incapable of subsequently gaining much buy-in from the rest of the world. Generating such buy-in always involves tradeoffs: winning most means compromising some.
I remain convinced that a Kerry administration would have propelled America far faster toward that inevitable adjustment, the very same realignment the Bush White House finally undertakes today.
So what's been lost?
Merely time and opportunity, our two most precious assets.
(Thomas P.M. Barnett is a visiting scholar at the University of Tennessee's Howard Baker Center and the senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC. Contact him at tom(at)thomaspmbarnett.com.)
Sunday, January 6, 2008
This is Democracy?
‘Chatsworth Farnsworth’ Strikes Again
by Jack Kenny
In her 2004 book Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk, stubbornly irreverent New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recalled in her introduction that "Poppy" Bush, (Bush ’41) was rather uncomfortable with Ms. Dowd in her role during the first Bush administration as the Times’ White House correspondent.
"Poppy Bush had been expecting a traditional pin-striped Times correspondent, one with a name like Chatsworth Farnsworth III, who would scribble about ’41 leading the Atlantic alliance," Dowd observed. Not only the New York Times, but the whole media establishment has too many aspiring Chatsworth Farnsworths, with or without Roman numerals, who are all too eager to discover the next world leader of grand ambition and global "vision." We would be better served if they would just stand back and report and comment on how the American people choose the president of the United States. Where have you gone, Theodore H. White?
The Anything But Candid (ABC) television network and cable channel Fox News this week announced plans to limit the number of candidates participating in this weekend’s televised debates – ABC’s on Saturday night and the Fox News event on Sunday night. This is, for the benefit of that portion of the rest of the civilized world that may not have been paying attention, the weekend immediately preceding next Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary elections. ABC had a number of criteria for winnowing the field based on standing in the polls, money raised and how they fared in the Iowa caucuses. Fox had already made its decision for its Republican debate and U.S. Reps. Ron Paul of Texas and Duncan Hunter of California didn’t make the cut.
That means the Fox debate will include the Big Three – Romney, McCain, Giuliani – whom former candidate Tommy Thompson called by one name: "Rudy McRomney." And Gov. Huckabee will be both seen and heard by the national TV audience, unless he has lost another 100 pounds by then and has become invisible. And former Tennessee Senator and Law and Order star Fred Thomson will be included and will no doubt lead a nationwide TV audience to the dramatic discovery of the missing smoking gun, or "mushroom-shaped cloud" that justified the war in Iraq.
Duncan Hunter won’t get to talk about his fence to keep the illegal immigrants out. And without Ron Paul, there won’t be single voice in the Republican debate raised against our continued participation in the great neo-nuthouse Bush War II in Iraq that Paul has always opposed, still opposes and would end soon after he enters the White House. At that time, Fox News may fall on its propagandistic sword and stop covering the White House, though there may be occasional mention of rumors of an alleged White House somewhere in Washington, DC. Perhaps there will even be rumors of a Washington, D.C. Who needs a real president, White House or capital, anyway? Who needs a real debate? Fox News creates its own reality.
Indeed, that is what many, if not most, of the columnists, commentators and alleged reporters in Chatsworth Nation wish to do. They like to create our reality for us. They will tell us who the candidates and what the issues are, thank you. A caller on a talk show here in New Hampshire made the point that it was not so much an issue of who gets left out of the debates, but what is being left out. Neither Paul’s argument against the war in Iraq nor his call for abolition of the Federal Reserve will be heard by the Fox News audience. Nor will Dennis Kucinich’s plan for universal health care be heard on ABC. The marketplace of ideas that should be part of a presidential debate has been shrunk by the imperial edict of the Chatsworth Caesars of the Fourth Estate.
Listening to that very insightful argument, I didn’t think it had much impact on the two professors who were guests on the program, one from the University of New Hampshire, the other from Harvard. Both offered tepid defenses of the ABC’s and Fox’s fiats. Neither, I suspect, gives a cat’s keyster or a rat’s rear end about "the marketplace of ideas." Neither, I am certain, do the two major political parties. And neither does the "mainstream media" which is so much and so often in bed with the political establishment that they are no doubt breaking laws against incest and fornication in every state in the union.
Is it a coincidence that the establishment, kennel-fed media want to keep out pretty much the same people that the political establishment wants to keep out – the Pauls and the Kuciniches and the Hunters, the bulls in a political china shop, who aren’t afraid of breaking a few political icons? That gives the "mainstream media" or Nuthouse News, Inc., more time to dote on the stars and amplify their messages for them. We hear, for example, that voters in New Hampshire or Iowa, are being asked to compare Hillary Clinton’s "experience" versus Barack Obama’s promise of change. What we don’t hear much of is the substance, or lack of it, in the change Obama promises. And we seldom hear the journalistic gatekeepers of the political conversation challenge Clinton’s claim of experience. The cartoonists do a better job – especially the one who depicted Sen. Clinton in an operating room advising a patient not to worry: "I’m not a surgeon, but I was married to one for eight years."
I recently heard one of the talking heads on the radio refer offhandedly to Sen. Clinton’s "sensible foreign policy." Really? On what, I wonder, is that glib assumption based? Her cop-out, pass the buck vote in October of 2002 to authorize the Great Decider to unilaterally decide whether or not he would take this nation to war in Iraq – when it was all too obvious he would? Someone should have brought Senator Clinton and each of her colleagues who voted as she did a bowl of water so each could ritually wash his or her hands in the tradition of Pontius Pilate.
That is what the "mudstream" media is inclined to call a "sensible foreign policy." Go along to get along. Follow the conventional wisdom, defined so well by Joe Sobran as, "what everybody thinks everybody else thinks." People like Paul or Kucinich, who opposed our war of aggression in Iraq from the beginning and have consistently opposed the funding of it, are usually labeled, "controversial" at best and "extremist" and "isolationist" at worst.
Last year, PBS correspondent Bill Moyers produced a documentary called Buying the War, showing how the major news media swallowed the lies, half-truths and deceptions that somehow convinced most of the nation (if the polls were to be believed) that Iraq was a serious threat to the United States. Did the establishment media "buy" the war? Or was the media "bought" by the war’s proponents?
At the end of last week, Fergus Cullen, chairman of New Hampshire’s Republican State Committee, was still trying to convince Fox News, with whom the state GOP is co-sponsor of the debate, to relent and let the banned candidates participate. My suggestion to Mr. Cullen was that he announce the New Hampshire Republican Party has withdrawn its sponsorship, leaving Fox to either go it alone or find another sponsor. For the sake of candor, I recommend that Fox sponsor this debate as a joint venture with the American Kennel Club. That, or something like that, is where I would assume the political establishment finds the accommodating Chatsworth Farnsworths of the Fourth Estate.
January 5, 2008
Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.
by Jack Kenny
In her 2004 book Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk, stubbornly irreverent New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recalled in her introduction that "Poppy" Bush, (Bush ’41) was rather uncomfortable with Ms. Dowd in her role during the first Bush administration as the Times’ White House correspondent.
"Poppy Bush had been expecting a traditional pin-striped Times correspondent, one with a name like Chatsworth Farnsworth III, who would scribble about ’41 leading the Atlantic alliance," Dowd observed. Not only the New York Times, but the whole media establishment has too many aspiring Chatsworth Farnsworths, with or without Roman numerals, who are all too eager to discover the next world leader of grand ambition and global "vision." We would be better served if they would just stand back and report and comment on how the American people choose the president of the United States. Where have you gone, Theodore H. White?
The Anything But Candid (ABC) television network and cable channel Fox News this week announced plans to limit the number of candidates participating in this weekend’s televised debates – ABC’s on Saturday night and the Fox News event on Sunday night. This is, for the benefit of that portion of the rest of the civilized world that may not have been paying attention, the weekend immediately preceding next Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary elections. ABC had a number of criteria for winnowing the field based on standing in the polls, money raised and how they fared in the Iowa caucuses. Fox had already made its decision for its Republican debate and U.S. Reps. Ron Paul of Texas and Duncan Hunter of California didn’t make the cut.
That means the Fox debate will include the Big Three – Romney, McCain, Giuliani – whom former candidate Tommy Thompson called by one name: "Rudy McRomney." And Gov. Huckabee will be both seen and heard by the national TV audience, unless he has lost another 100 pounds by then and has become invisible. And former Tennessee Senator and Law and Order star Fred Thomson will be included and will no doubt lead a nationwide TV audience to the dramatic discovery of the missing smoking gun, or "mushroom-shaped cloud" that justified the war in Iraq.
Duncan Hunter won’t get to talk about his fence to keep the illegal immigrants out. And without Ron Paul, there won’t be single voice in the Republican debate raised against our continued participation in the great neo-nuthouse Bush War II in Iraq that Paul has always opposed, still opposes and would end soon after he enters the White House. At that time, Fox News may fall on its propagandistic sword and stop covering the White House, though there may be occasional mention of rumors of an alleged White House somewhere in Washington, DC. Perhaps there will even be rumors of a Washington, D.C. Who needs a real president, White House or capital, anyway? Who needs a real debate? Fox News creates its own reality.
Indeed, that is what many, if not most, of the columnists, commentators and alleged reporters in Chatsworth Nation wish to do. They like to create our reality for us. They will tell us who the candidates and what the issues are, thank you. A caller on a talk show here in New Hampshire made the point that it was not so much an issue of who gets left out of the debates, but what is being left out. Neither Paul’s argument against the war in Iraq nor his call for abolition of the Federal Reserve will be heard by the Fox News audience. Nor will Dennis Kucinich’s plan for universal health care be heard on ABC. The marketplace of ideas that should be part of a presidential debate has been shrunk by the imperial edict of the Chatsworth Caesars of the Fourth Estate.
Listening to that very insightful argument, I didn’t think it had much impact on the two professors who were guests on the program, one from the University of New Hampshire, the other from Harvard. Both offered tepid defenses of the ABC’s and Fox’s fiats. Neither, I suspect, gives a cat’s keyster or a rat’s rear end about "the marketplace of ideas." Neither, I am certain, do the two major political parties. And neither does the "mainstream media" which is so much and so often in bed with the political establishment that they are no doubt breaking laws against incest and fornication in every state in the union.
Is it a coincidence that the establishment, kennel-fed media want to keep out pretty much the same people that the political establishment wants to keep out – the Pauls and the Kuciniches and the Hunters, the bulls in a political china shop, who aren’t afraid of breaking a few political icons? That gives the "mainstream media" or Nuthouse News, Inc., more time to dote on the stars and amplify their messages for them. We hear, for example, that voters in New Hampshire or Iowa, are being asked to compare Hillary Clinton’s "experience" versus Barack Obama’s promise of change. What we don’t hear much of is the substance, or lack of it, in the change Obama promises. And we seldom hear the journalistic gatekeepers of the political conversation challenge Clinton’s claim of experience. The cartoonists do a better job – especially the one who depicted Sen. Clinton in an operating room advising a patient not to worry: "I’m not a surgeon, but I was married to one for eight years."
I recently heard one of the talking heads on the radio refer offhandedly to Sen. Clinton’s "sensible foreign policy." Really? On what, I wonder, is that glib assumption based? Her cop-out, pass the buck vote in October of 2002 to authorize the Great Decider to unilaterally decide whether or not he would take this nation to war in Iraq – when it was all too obvious he would? Someone should have brought Senator Clinton and each of her colleagues who voted as she did a bowl of water so each could ritually wash his or her hands in the tradition of Pontius Pilate.
That is what the "mudstream" media is inclined to call a "sensible foreign policy." Go along to get along. Follow the conventional wisdom, defined so well by Joe Sobran as, "what everybody thinks everybody else thinks." People like Paul or Kucinich, who opposed our war of aggression in Iraq from the beginning and have consistently opposed the funding of it, are usually labeled, "controversial" at best and "extremist" and "isolationist" at worst.
Last year, PBS correspondent Bill Moyers produced a documentary called Buying the War, showing how the major news media swallowed the lies, half-truths and deceptions that somehow convinced most of the nation (if the polls were to be believed) that Iraq was a serious threat to the United States. Did the establishment media "buy" the war? Or was the media "bought" by the war’s proponents?
At the end of last week, Fergus Cullen, chairman of New Hampshire’s Republican State Committee, was still trying to convince Fox News, with whom the state GOP is co-sponsor of the debate, to relent and let the banned candidates participate. My suggestion to Mr. Cullen was that he announce the New Hampshire Republican Party has withdrawn its sponsorship, leaving Fox to either go it alone or find another sponsor. For the sake of candor, I recommend that Fox sponsor this debate as a joint venture with the American Kennel Club. That, or something like that, is where I would assume the political establishment finds the accommodating Chatsworth Farnsworths of the Fourth Estate.
January 5, 2008
Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.
Saturday, January 5, 2008
How Bush Took Us to the Dark Side
By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on January 5, 2008, Printed on January 5, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/72365/
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" -- Emma Lazarus, 1883
If you don't mind thinking about the Bush legacy a year early, there are worse places to begin than with the case of Erla Ósk Arnardóttir Lilliendahl. Admittedly, she isn't an ideal "tempest-tost" candidate for Emma Lazarus' famous lines engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty. After all, she flew to New York City with her girlfriends, first class, from her native Iceland, to partake of "the Christmas spirit." She was drinking white wine en route and, as she put it, "look[ing] forward to go shopping, eat good food, and enjoy life." On an earlier vacation trip, back in 1995, she had overstayed her visa by three weeks, a modest enough infraction, and had even returned the following year without incident.
This time -- with the President's Global War on Terror in full swing -- she was pulled aside at passport control at JFK Airport, questioned about those extra three weeks 12 years ago, and soon found herself, as she put it, "handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep... without food and drink and... confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned." It was "the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected."
By her account, she was photographed, fingerprinted, asked rude questions -- "by men anxious to demonstrate their power. Small kings with megalomania" -- confined to a tiny room for hours, then chained, marched through the airport, and driven to a jail in New Jersey where, for another nine hours, she found herself "in a small, dirty cell." On being prepared for the return trip to JFK and deportation, approximately 24 hours after first debarking, she was, despite her pleas, despite her tears, again handcuffed and put in leg chains, all, as she put it, "because I had taken a longer vacation than allowed under the law."
On returning to her country, she wrote a blog about her unnerving experience and the Icelandic Foreign Minister Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir met with U.S. Ambassador Carol van Voorst to demand an apology. Just as when egregious American acts in Iraq or Afghanistan won't go away, the Department of Homeland Security announced an "investigation," a "review of its work procedures" and expressed "regrets." But an admission of error or an actual apology? Uh, what era do you imagine we're living in?
Erla Ósk will undoubtedly think twice before taking another fun-filled holiday in the U.S., but her experience was no aberration among Icelanders visiting the U.S. In fact, it's a relatively humdrum one these days, especially if you appear to be of Middle Eastern background.
Take, for instance, 20-year veteran of the National Guard Zakariya Muhammad Reed (born Edward Eugene Reed, Jr.), who, for the last 11 years, has worked as a firefighter in Toledo, Ohio. Regularly crossing the Canadian border to visit his wife's family, he has been stopped so many times -- "I was put up against the wall and thoroughly frisked, any more thoroughly and I would have asked for flowers..." -- that he is a connoisseur of detention. He's been stopped five times in the last seven months and now chooses his crossing place based on the size of the detention waiting room he knows he'll end up in. It took several such incidents, during which no explanations were offered, before he discovered that he was being stopped in part because of his name and in part because of a letter he wrote to the Toledo Blade criticizing Bush administration policies on Israel and Iraq.
The first time, he was detained in a small room with two armed guards, while his wife and children were left in a larger common room. While he was grilled, she was denied permission to return to their car even to get a change of diapers for their youngest child. When finally released, Reed found his car had been "trashed." ("My son's portable DVD player was broken, and I have a decorative Koran on the dashboard that was thrown on the floor.") During another episode of detention, an interrogator evidently attempted to intimidate him by putting his pistol on the table at which they were seated. ("He takes the clip out of his weapon, looks at the ammunition, puts the clip back in, and puts it back in his holster.") His first four border-crossing detentions were well covered by Matthew Rothschild in a post at the Progressive Magazine's website. During his latest one, he was questioned about Rothschild's coverage of his case.
The essence of his experience is perhaps caught best in a comment by Customs and Border Protection agent made in his presence: "We should treat them like we do in the desert. We should put a bag over their heads and zip tie their hands together."
Or take Nabil Al Yousuf, not exactly a top-ten candidate for the "huddled masses" category; nor an obvious terror suspect (unless, of course, you believe yourself at war with Islam or the Arab world). According to the Washington Post's Ellen Knickmeyer, Yousuf, who is "a senior aide to the ruler of the Persian Gulf state of Dubai," always has the same "galling" experience on entering the country:
"A U.S. airport immigration official typically takes Yousuf's passport, places it in a yellow envelope and beckons. Yousuf tells his oldest son and other family members not to worry. And Yousuf -- who goes by 'Your Excellency' at home -- disappears inside a shabby back room. He waits alongside the likes of 'a man who had forged his visa and a woman who had drugs in her tummy'... He is questioned, fingerprinted and photographed."
Despite his own fond memories of attending universities in Arizona and Georgia, Yousuf has decided to send his son to college... in Australia. Knickmeyer adds:
"A generation of Arab men who once attended college in the United States, and returned home to become leaders in the Middle East, increasingly is sending the next generation to schools elsewhere. This year, Australia overtook the United States as the top choice of citizens of the United Arab Emirates heading abroad for college, according to government figures here."
This is what "homeland security" means in the United States today. It means putting your country in full lockdown mode. It means the snarl at the border, the nasty comment in the waiting room, the dirty cell, the handcuffs, even the chains. It means being humiliated. It means a thorough lack of modulation or moderation. Arriving here now always threatens to be a "tempest-tost" experience whether you are a citizen, a semi-official visitor, or a foreign tourist. (After all, even Sen. Ted Kennedy found himself repeatedly on a no-fly list without adequate explanation.) Think of these three cases as snapshots from the borders of a country in which the presumption of innocence is slowly being drained of all meaning.
News from Nowhere
So far, of course, we've only been talking about the lucky ones. After all, Erla Ósk, Zakariya Muhammad Reed, and Nabil Al Yousuf all made it home relatively quickly. In the final weeks of 2007, a little flood of press reports tracked more extreme versions of the global lockdown the Bush administration launched in late 2001, cases in which, after the snarl, the door clanged shut and home became the barest of hopes.
Take, for example, a December 1st Washington Post piece in which reporter Craig Whitlock revealed one more small part of the CIA's global network of secret imprisonment. We already knew, among other things, that the CIA had set up and run its own secret prisons in Eastern Europe and probably in Thailand; that it had a network of secret sites in Afghanistan like "the Salt Pit" near Kabul; that it may have used the "British" island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, as well as American ships, naval and possibly commercial, to hold prisoners beyond the purview of any authority or even the visits of the International Red Cross; that it ran an air fleet of leased executive jets (including some from Jeppesen Dataplan, a subsidiary of Boeing, which made it back into the news in December because of a lawsuit launched by the ACLU); that these were used to transport terror suspects it snatched up off city streets or battlefields anywhere on the planet to its own "black sites" or which it "rendered" in "extraordinary" manner to the jails and torture chambers of Syria, Egypt, Uzbekistan, and other lands whose agents had no qualms about torturing and abusing prisoners.
Whitlock, however, added a new piece to the CIA's incarceration puzzle: an "imposing building" on the outskirts of Amman, Jordan. This turns out to be the headquarters of the General Intelligence Department, Jordan's powerful spy and security agency (and the CIA's closest Arab ally in the Middle East). Known as a place where torture is freely applied, it has been a way-station for "CIA prisoners captured in other countries." The first terror suspects kidnapped by Agency operatives were, it seems, flown to Jordan and housed in that building before Guantanamo was up and running or the Agency had been able to set up its own secret prisons elsewhere. There, the prisoners were hidden, even from the International Red Cross. To cite but one case Whitlock mentions:
"Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a Yemeni microbiology student, was captured in a U.S.-Pakistani operation in Karachi a few weeks after 9/11 on suspicion of helping to finance al-Qaeda operations. Witnesses reported seeing masked men take him aboard a Gulfstream V jet at the Karachi airport Oct. 24, 2001. Records show that the plane was chartered by a CIA front company and that it flew directly to Amman. Mohammed has not been seen since. Amnesty International said it has asked the Jordanian government for information on his whereabouts but has not received an answer."
Also in December, because of that lawsuit against Jeppesen, we got our first insider's account of the CIA "black sites" (and, thanks to Salon.com, even architectural plans for a few of the interrogation rooms and prison cells at those sites, all of which seem to have cameras in them). It was here that "high-value targets" were incarcerated, isolated, and subjected to various "enhanced interrogation techniques."
Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, a Yemeni, was picked up by the Jordanians in Amman in 2003 and tortured into signing a "full confession" (to acts he had not committed). He was then turned over to the CIA and flown to Kabul (and possibly Eastern Europe as well) where he was imprisoned. He has offered in-depth accounts that give a sense of what those "enhanced interrogation techniques" the Bush administration sponsors so enthusiastically are all about at a personal level. In the end, while in CIA custody, Bashmilah was driven to several suicide attempts, including one in which, using a bit of metal, he slashed his wrist and wrote, "I am innocent," on a cell wall in his own blood.
Here is just part of a description he offered Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! of being prepared for transport by CIA air taxi into black-site hell:
"And then they put... like little plugs inside the ears, plastic. And then they put gauze on that, on the ears. And then they taped that with very strong adhesive tape. And then they put a hood over my head. And then, on top of that, they put a headphone. This is as far as the top of my body was. And then they handcuffed me with a chain, and also they chained my ankles. Then they put a belt above the pants, and then they tied the hands and the ankles to that belt. This was after being slapped and kicked until I almost fainted."
In his cell in a secret prison in Afghanistan, "[i]n the beginning, it was totally dark. It was as if you were inside a tomb. Then, after that, they would turn a light on. Above the door, there was a camera. And there was constant loud music." From then on, neither the lights, nor the music went off. As Mark Benjamin of Salon.com wrote, "His leg shackles were chained to the wall. The guards would not let him sleep, forcing Bashmilah to raise his hand every half hour to prove he was still awake... Guards wore black pants with pockets, long-sleeved black shirts, rubber gloves or black gloves, and masks that covered the head and neck. The masks had tinted yellow plastic over the eyes. 'I never heard the guards speak to each other and they never spoke to me,' Bashmilah wrote in his declaration...
"After 19 months of imprisonment and torment at the hands of the CIA, the agency released him [in Yemen] with no explanation, just as he had been imprisoned in the first place. He faced no terrorism charges. He was given no lawyer. He saw no judge. He was simply released, his life shattered."
No charges, no lawyers, no judge. This is increasingly the norm of -- and a legacy of -- George Bush's world. In this way, the snarl at the borders melds with the screams of terror in cells worldwide.
Embedded Reports from the Dark Side
A new Pentagon term came into use in the Bush era. With the invasion of Iraq, reporters were said to be "embedded" in U.S. military units. That term -- so close in sound to "in bed with" -- should have wider uses. You could, for instance, say that Americans have, since September 2001, been "embedded," largely willingly, in a new lockdown universe defined by a general acceptance of widespread acts of torture and abuse, as well as of the right to kidnap (known as "extraordinary rendition"), and the creation and expansion of an offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice, all based on the principle that a human being is guilty unless proven (sometimes even if proven) innocent. What might originally have seemed like emergency measures in a moment of crisis is now an institutionalized way of life. Whether we like it or not, these methods increasingly define what it means to be an American. In this manner, despite the "freedom" rhetoric of the Bush administration, the phrase "the price of freedom" has been superseded by the price of what passes for "safety" and "security."
Media coverage of such subjects reflects this. The cases above, all reported in December, barely scratch the surface of this universe. Just a glance at other December stories -- some barely attended to, or dealt with by minor outlets or in humdrum ways, but many well covered in major papers and still causing little consternation -- indicates just how normalized all this has become.
A legacy can often be framed in words. So here's a little rundown of just some areas in which, when it came to torture, kidnapping, and offshore imprisonment, 2007 ended in a deluge, not a trickle:
Destroyed Tapes: One issue connected to torture -- sorry, "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- did get major coverage last month, the revelation on the front page of the December 6th New York Times of the destruction, in 2005, of hundreds of hours of CIA videotapes of the first two major interrogations, including waterboardings, of al-Qaeda operatives -- in this case, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. In the weeks that followed, responsibility for the decision to destroy those tapes has been creeping ever higher, with four key lawyers connected to the White House and the Vice President's office brought into the mix in mid-December, and reports that the chief of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, Jose A. Rodriguez, who ordered their destruction, may soon testify before Congress under immunity and implicate as yet unnamed higher-ups.
As with all such cover-up stories, this one can only get worse. It has already been reported in the Wall Street Journal that the faces of more senior CIA officials, not just low-level interrogators, may have been caught on those tapes from the administration's secret torture chambers. We are sure to learn that these were hardly the only interrogations taped by the Agency. As yet, by the way, almost all attention has gone to the destruction of the tapes, little to why they were made in the first place. As December ended, however, Scott Shane of the New York Times wrote a piece, "Tapes by CIA Lived and Died to Save Image," with this telling line from the CIA's then number three official, A. B. Krongard: "You want interrogators in training to watch the tapes." Think about that a moment. The Justice Department, which, along with the CIA's Inspector General, launched an investigation of the tape destruction under pressure, also attempted to shut down congressional investigations of the same -- unsuccessfully.
Kidnapping Is the Law: According to the British Sunday Times, "A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the U.S. Supreme Court has sanctioned it." According to that lawyer, the precedent "goes back to bounty hunting days in the 1860s." This applies, it seems, not just to terror suspects in extraordinary rendition cases, but to white businessmen wanted for, say, fraud. "The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington." International human rights lawyer Scott Horton writes at his No Comment blog:
"This is not U.S. law, it is a Bush Administration hallucination as to U.S. law... The sort of nightmare which refuses to recognize the sovereignty of foreign states or the solemn commitments of U.S. governments over the last two centuries in treaties and conventions. The sort of nightmare that refuses to recognize the 'law of nations' referred to by the Founding Fathers and incorporated into the Constitution."
Innocence at Guantanamo: New military and court documents were released in December, thanks to a suit by lawyers representing Murat Kurnaz, that further illuminated the case of the 19-year old German citizen who "chose a bad time to travel." Kurnaz was captured by the U.S. Army in Pakistan in 2002 and transported to Guantanamo. There, within months, according to the Washington Post's Carol D. Leonnig, "his American captors concluded that he was not a terrorist." This was the consensus of intelligence officials. He was nonetheless declared a "dangerous al-Qaeda ally" by successive military tribunals at the prison and was not released until August 2006 when he was flown to freedom in Germany "goggled, masked and bound, as he had been when he was flown to Guantanamo Bay."
Evidence from Waterboarding: According to Josh White of the Washington Post, Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, "[t]he top legal adviser for the military trials of Guantanamo Bay detainees told Congress... that he cannot rule out the use of evidence derived from the CIA's aggressive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding." He even refused to say that waterboarding would be illegal if used by the interrogators of another country on U.S. military personnel. In a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, like his boss Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Mark Filip, the administration's nominee for second-in-command at the Justice Department, also refused to take a stand on waterboarding, even though he called it "repugnant."
Torture Veto: In December, President Bush threatened to "veto a House [of Representatives] bill that would explicitly ban a variety of abhorrent practices. The bill would require U.S. intelligence agencies to follow interrogation rules adopted by the armed forces last year."
Torturers speak out: In December, two figures connected with U.S. torture practices spoke out. John Kiriakou, a CIA agent involved in capturing top al-Qaeda operatives, gave interviews to ABC and NBC News in which he called waterboarding "torture," regretted its use ("we Americans are better than that"), and also insisted that "[t]his was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the National Security Council and justice department." In the meantime, Damien Corsetti, a former private in the U.S. Army who served as an interrogator in Kabul, Afghanistan (and was nicknamed the "king of torture" and "the monster" by his colleagues at Bagram prison), gave an interview to the Spanish paper El Mundo, describing the beatings and torture techniques used there. ("They tell them they are going to kill their children, rape their wives. And you see on their faces, in their eyes, the terror that that causes them. Because, of course, we know all about those people. We know the names of their children, where they live -- we show them satellite photos of their houses. It is worse than any torture.") He also claimed that 98% of the prisoners, as far as he could tell, had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and observed, "In Abu-Ghurayb and Bagram they were tortured to make them suffer, not to get information out of them." Both men denied themselves torturing or mistreating anyone.
Justice Moves Fast: The Justice Department, which dragged its feet on those destroyed CIA videotapes (and then tried to submarine a congressional investigation of the same), nonetheless reacted strongly to the horrors of torture in another context. Its officials moved swiftly to investigate whether former agent John Kiriakou, in giving that interview about waterboarding to ABC News, had "illegally disclosed classified information in describing the capture and waterboarding of an al-Qaeda terrorism suspect." Consider that a message about priorities from the powers that be.
Iraqis in American Jails: Latest estimates are that up to 30,000 Iraqis are now held in American prisons in Iraq. While this figure falls 10,000 short of the number of Iraqis American commander Gen. David Petraeus believed might be arrested during the "surge" months in Baghdad and elsewhere, it does add up, as Juan Cole points out at his Informed Comment website, to 0.1% of what's left of the Iraqi population, or approximately one out of every 1,000 Iraqis.
Think of these eight stories as themselves only the tip of December's melting iceberg of news on such topics. You could no less easily write about lawyer Andrew Williams, a JAG officer with the Naval Reserves, who resigned his commission in response to the unwillingness of Gen. Hartmann "to call the hypothetical waterboarding of an American pilot by the Iranian military torture." In a letter to The Peninsula Gateway of Gig Harbor, Washington, Williams wrote in part:
"Thank you, General Hartmann, for finally admitting the United States is now part of a long tradition of torturers going back to the Inquisition.... Waterboarding was used by the Nazi Gestapo and the feared Japanese Kempeitai... Waterboarding was practiced by the Khmer Rouge at the infamous Tuol Sleng prison. Most recently, the U.S. Army court martialed a soldier for the practice in 1968 during the Vietnam conflict.
"General Hartmann, following orders was not an excuse for anyone put on trial in Nuremberg, and it will not be an excuse for you or your superiors, either. Despite the CIA and the administration attempting to cover up the practice by destroying interrogation tapes, in direct violation of a court order, and congressional requests, the truth about torture, illegal spying on Americans and secret renditions is coming out."
Or you could mention the news that the "Australian Taliban," David Hicks, the sole person actually convicted on terrorism charges at Guantanamo, was released after serving a nine-month sentence in Australia (and five years of non-sentence time in Cuba); or the first reports on the Internet of speculation in Washington that George Bush himself might have viewed parts of those CIA interrogation tapes, or the Washington Post report that, in 2002, four key Congressional figures, including Nancy Pelosi, had been given "a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk," including waterboarding, without objections being raised. Or... but the list is almost unending.
The Bush Legacy
As a people, we Americans have not faintly come to grips with how centrally the Bush administration has planted certain practices in our midst -- at the very heart of governmental practice, of the news, of everyday life. Many of these practices were not in themselves creations of this administration. For instance, the practice of kidnapping abroad -- "rendition" -- began at least in the Clinton era, if not earlier. Waterboarding, a medieval torture, was first practiced by American troops in the Philippine insurrection at the dawn of the previous century. (It was then known as "the water cure.")
Torture of various sorts was widely used in CIA interrogation centers in Vietnam in the 1960s. Back in that era, the CIA also ran its own airline, Air America, rather than just leasing planes from various corporate entities through front businesses. Abu Ghraib-style torture and abuse, pioneered by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, was taught and used by American military, CIA, and police officials in Latin America from the 1960s into the 1980s. If you doubt any of this, just check out Alfred McCoy's still shocking book, A Question of Torture. Even offshore secret CIA prisons aren't a unique creation of the Bush administration. According to Tim Weiner in his new history of the Central Intelligence Agency, Legacy of Ashes, in the 1950s the Agency had three of them -- in Japan, Germany, and the Panama Canal Zone -- where they brought double agents of questionable loyalty for "secret experiments" in harsh interrogation, "using techniques on the edge of torture, drug-induced mind control, and brainwashing."
And yet, don't for a second think that nothing has changed. Part of the Bush legacy lies in a new ethos in this country. In my childhood in the 1950s, for example, we knew just who the torturers were. We saw them in the movies. They were the sadistic Japanese in their prison camps, the Gestapo in their prisons, and the Soviet Secret police, the KGB, in their gulags (even if that name hadn't yet entered our world). As the President now says at every opportunity, and as we then knew, Americans did not torture.
Today, and it's a measure of our changing American world, a child turning on the TV serial "24" or heading for the nearest hot, new action flick at the local multiplex knows that Americans do torture and that torture, once the cultural province of our most evil enemies, is now a practice that is 100% all-American and perfectly justifiable (normally by the ticking-bomb scenario). And few even blink. In lockdown America, it computes. The snarl at the border fits well enough with what our Vice President has termed a "no-brainer," a "dunk in the water" in the torture chamber. There is no deniability left in the movies -- and little enough of it in real life.
American presidents of the Vietnam and Latin American war years operated in a realm of deniability when it came to torture and other such practices. No American could then have imagined a Vice President heading for Capitol Hill to lobby openly for a torture bill or a President publicly threatening to veto congressional legislation banning torture techniques. Call it the end of an era of American hypocrisy, if you will, but the Bush legacy will be, in part, simply the routinization of the practice of torture, abuse, kidnapping, and illegal imprisonment.
George W. Bush didn't invent the world he inhabits. He, his top officials, and all their lawyers who wrote those bizarre "torture memos" that will be hallmarks of his era chose from existing strains of thought, from urges and tendencies already in American culture. But their record on this has, nonetheless, been remarkable. In just about every case, they chose to bring out the worst in us; in just about every case, they took us on as direct a journey as possible to the dark side.
It's not necessary to romanticize the American past in any way to consider the legacy of these last years grim indeed. Let no one tell you that the institution of a global network of secret prisons and borrowed torture chambers, along with those "enhanced interrogation techniques," was primarily done for information or even security. The urge to resort to such tactics is invariably more primal than that.
Words matter more than one would think. In the Bush era, certain words have simply been sidelined. Sovereignty, for instance. If, in principle, you can kidnap anyone, anywhere, and transport that person into a ghost existence anywhere else, then national sovereignty essentially no longer has significance. This is one meaning of "globalization" in the twenty-first century. On Planet Bush, only one nation remains "sovereign," and that's the United States of America.
If you want to test this proposition, just take any case mentioned above, from Erla Ósk's landing in New York on, and try to reverse it. Make an American the central victim and another country of your choice the perpetrator and imagine the reaction of the Bush administration, no less the American media and the public (no matter what Gen. Hartmann may be unwilling to say about the waterboarding of an American serviceman).
Or consider another word that once had great resonance in American culture, not to speak of its legal system: innocence. Americans prided themselves on their "innocence" -- even when mocked as "innocents abroad" -- and took pride as well in a system based on the phrase, "innocent until proven guilty."
Despite their repeated, thoroughly worn denials about torture, the top officials of this administration remade themselves, in the wake of the attacks of 9/11, as a Torture, Inc. And their actions since then have gone a long way toward turning us, by association and tacit acquiescence, into a nation of torturers, willing to accept, in case after case, that a "war" against "terror" supposed to last for generations justifies just about any act imaginable, including the continued mistreatment and incarceration of people who remain somehow guilty even, in certain cases, after being proven innocent.
This is the American welcome wagon of the twenty-first century. If you really want to catch the spirit of the Bush legacy one year early, try to imagine the poem an Emma Lazarus of this moment might write, something appropriate for a gigantic statue in New York harbor of a guard from Mohamed Bashmilah's living nightmare -- dressed all in black, a black mask covering his head and neck, tinted yellow plastic over the eyes, a man, hands sheathed in rubber gloves, holding up not a torch but a video camera and dragging chains.
Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/72365/
Posted on January 5, 2008, Printed on January 5, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/72365/
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" -- Emma Lazarus, 1883
If you don't mind thinking about the Bush legacy a year early, there are worse places to begin than with the case of Erla Ósk Arnardóttir Lilliendahl. Admittedly, she isn't an ideal "tempest-tost" candidate for Emma Lazarus' famous lines engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty. After all, she flew to New York City with her girlfriends, first class, from her native Iceland, to partake of "the Christmas spirit." She was drinking white wine en route and, as she put it, "look[ing] forward to go shopping, eat good food, and enjoy life." On an earlier vacation trip, back in 1995, she had overstayed her visa by three weeks, a modest enough infraction, and had even returned the following year without incident.
This time -- with the President's Global War on Terror in full swing -- she was pulled aside at passport control at JFK Airport, questioned about those extra three weeks 12 years ago, and soon found herself, as she put it, "handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep... without food and drink and... confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned." It was "the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected."
By her account, she was photographed, fingerprinted, asked rude questions -- "by men anxious to demonstrate their power. Small kings with megalomania" -- confined to a tiny room for hours, then chained, marched through the airport, and driven to a jail in New Jersey where, for another nine hours, she found herself "in a small, dirty cell." On being prepared for the return trip to JFK and deportation, approximately 24 hours after first debarking, she was, despite her pleas, despite her tears, again handcuffed and put in leg chains, all, as she put it, "because I had taken a longer vacation than allowed under the law."
On returning to her country, she wrote a blog about her unnerving experience and the Icelandic Foreign Minister Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir met with U.S. Ambassador Carol van Voorst to demand an apology. Just as when egregious American acts in Iraq or Afghanistan won't go away, the Department of Homeland Security announced an "investigation," a "review of its work procedures" and expressed "regrets." But an admission of error or an actual apology? Uh, what era do you imagine we're living in?
Erla Ósk will undoubtedly think twice before taking another fun-filled holiday in the U.S., but her experience was no aberration among Icelanders visiting the U.S. In fact, it's a relatively humdrum one these days, especially if you appear to be of Middle Eastern background.
Take, for instance, 20-year veteran of the National Guard Zakariya Muhammad Reed (born Edward Eugene Reed, Jr.), who, for the last 11 years, has worked as a firefighter in Toledo, Ohio. Regularly crossing the Canadian border to visit his wife's family, he has been stopped so many times -- "I was put up against the wall and thoroughly frisked, any more thoroughly and I would have asked for flowers..." -- that he is a connoisseur of detention. He's been stopped five times in the last seven months and now chooses his crossing place based on the size of the detention waiting room he knows he'll end up in. It took several such incidents, during which no explanations were offered, before he discovered that he was being stopped in part because of his name and in part because of a letter he wrote to the Toledo Blade criticizing Bush administration policies on Israel and Iraq.
The first time, he was detained in a small room with two armed guards, while his wife and children were left in a larger common room. While he was grilled, she was denied permission to return to their car even to get a change of diapers for their youngest child. When finally released, Reed found his car had been "trashed." ("My son's portable DVD player was broken, and I have a decorative Koran on the dashboard that was thrown on the floor.") During another episode of detention, an interrogator evidently attempted to intimidate him by putting his pistol on the table at which they were seated. ("He takes the clip out of his weapon, looks at the ammunition, puts the clip back in, and puts it back in his holster.") His first four border-crossing detentions were well covered by Matthew Rothschild in a post at the Progressive Magazine's website. During his latest one, he was questioned about Rothschild's coverage of his case.
The essence of his experience is perhaps caught best in a comment by Customs and Border Protection agent made in his presence: "We should treat them like we do in the desert. We should put a bag over their heads and zip tie their hands together."
Or take Nabil Al Yousuf, not exactly a top-ten candidate for the "huddled masses" category; nor an obvious terror suspect (unless, of course, you believe yourself at war with Islam or the Arab world). According to the Washington Post's Ellen Knickmeyer, Yousuf, who is "a senior aide to the ruler of the Persian Gulf state of Dubai," always has the same "galling" experience on entering the country:
"A U.S. airport immigration official typically takes Yousuf's passport, places it in a yellow envelope and beckons. Yousuf tells his oldest son and other family members not to worry. And Yousuf -- who goes by 'Your Excellency' at home -- disappears inside a shabby back room. He waits alongside the likes of 'a man who had forged his visa and a woman who had drugs in her tummy'... He is questioned, fingerprinted and photographed."
Despite his own fond memories of attending universities in Arizona and Georgia, Yousuf has decided to send his son to college... in Australia. Knickmeyer adds:
"A generation of Arab men who once attended college in the United States, and returned home to become leaders in the Middle East, increasingly is sending the next generation to schools elsewhere. This year, Australia overtook the United States as the top choice of citizens of the United Arab Emirates heading abroad for college, according to government figures here."
This is what "homeland security" means in the United States today. It means putting your country in full lockdown mode. It means the snarl at the border, the nasty comment in the waiting room, the dirty cell, the handcuffs, even the chains. It means being humiliated. It means a thorough lack of modulation or moderation. Arriving here now always threatens to be a "tempest-tost" experience whether you are a citizen, a semi-official visitor, or a foreign tourist. (After all, even Sen. Ted Kennedy found himself repeatedly on a no-fly list without adequate explanation.) Think of these three cases as snapshots from the borders of a country in which the presumption of innocence is slowly being drained of all meaning.
News from Nowhere
So far, of course, we've only been talking about the lucky ones. After all, Erla Ósk, Zakariya Muhammad Reed, and Nabil Al Yousuf all made it home relatively quickly. In the final weeks of 2007, a little flood of press reports tracked more extreme versions of the global lockdown the Bush administration launched in late 2001, cases in which, after the snarl, the door clanged shut and home became the barest of hopes.
Take, for example, a December 1st Washington Post piece in which reporter Craig Whitlock revealed one more small part of the CIA's global network of secret imprisonment. We already knew, among other things, that the CIA had set up and run its own secret prisons in Eastern Europe and probably in Thailand; that it had a network of secret sites in Afghanistan like "the Salt Pit" near Kabul; that it may have used the "British" island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, as well as American ships, naval and possibly commercial, to hold prisoners beyond the purview of any authority or even the visits of the International Red Cross; that it ran an air fleet of leased executive jets (including some from Jeppesen Dataplan, a subsidiary of Boeing, which made it back into the news in December because of a lawsuit launched by the ACLU); that these were used to transport terror suspects it snatched up off city streets or battlefields anywhere on the planet to its own "black sites" or which it "rendered" in "extraordinary" manner to the jails and torture chambers of Syria, Egypt, Uzbekistan, and other lands whose agents had no qualms about torturing and abusing prisoners.
Whitlock, however, added a new piece to the CIA's incarceration puzzle: an "imposing building" on the outskirts of Amman, Jordan. This turns out to be the headquarters of the General Intelligence Department, Jordan's powerful spy and security agency (and the CIA's closest Arab ally in the Middle East). Known as a place where torture is freely applied, it has been a way-station for "CIA prisoners captured in other countries." The first terror suspects kidnapped by Agency operatives were, it seems, flown to Jordan and housed in that building before Guantanamo was up and running or the Agency had been able to set up its own secret prisons elsewhere. There, the prisoners were hidden, even from the International Red Cross. To cite but one case Whitlock mentions:
"Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a Yemeni microbiology student, was captured in a U.S.-Pakistani operation in Karachi a few weeks after 9/11 on suspicion of helping to finance al-Qaeda operations. Witnesses reported seeing masked men take him aboard a Gulfstream V jet at the Karachi airport Oct. 24, 2001. Records show that the plane was chartered by a CIA front company and that it flew directly to Amman. Mohammed has not been seen since. Amnesty International said it has asked the Jordanian government for information on his whereabouts but has not received an answer."
Also in December, because of that lawsuit against Jeppesen, we got our first insider's account of the CIA "black sites" (and, thanks to Salon.com, even architectural plans for a few of the interrogation rooms and prison cells at those sites, all of which seem to have cameras in them). It was here that "high-value targets" were incarcerated, isolated, and subjected to various "enhanced interrogation techniques."
Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, a Yemeni, was picked up by the Jordanians in Amman in 2003 and tortured into signing a "full confession" (to acts he had not committed). He was then turned over to the CIA and flown to Kabul (and possibly Eastern Europe as well) where he was imprisoned. He has offered in-depth accounts that give a sense of what those "enhanced interrogation techniques" the Bush administration sponsors so enthusiastically are all about at a personal level. In the end, while in CIA custody, Bashmilah was driven to several suicide attempts, including one in which, using a bit of metal, he slashed his wrist and wrote, "I am innocent," on a cell wall in his own blood.
Here is just part of a description he offered Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! of being prepared for transport by CIA air taxi into black-site hell:
"And then they put... like little plugs inside the ears, plastic. And then they put gauze on that, on the ears. And then they taped that with very strong adhesive tape. And then they put a hood over my head. And then, on top of that, they put a headphone. This is as far as the top of my body was. And then they handcuffed me with a chain, and also they chained my ankles. Then they put a belt above the pants, and then they tied the hands and the ankles to that belt. This was after being slapped and kicked until I almost fainted."
In his cell in a secret prison in Afghanistan, "[i]n the beginning, it was totally dark. It was as if you were inside a tomb. Then, after that, they would turn a light on. Above the door, there was a camera. And there was constant loud music." From then on, neither the lights, nor the music went off. As Mark Benjamin of Salon.com wrote, "His leg shackles were chained to the wall. The guards would not let him sleep, forcing Bashmilah to raise his hand every half hour to prove he was still awake... Guards wore black pants with pockets, long-sleeved black shirts, rubber gloves or black gloves, and masks that covered the head and neck. The masks had tinted yellow plastic over the eyes. 'I never heard the guards speak to each other and they never spoke to me,' Bashmilah wrote in his declaration...
"After 19 months of imprisonment and torment at the hands of the CIA, the agency released him [in Yemen] with no explanation, just as he had been imprisoned in the first place. He faced no terrorism charges. He was given no lawyer. He saw no judge. He was simply released, his life shattered."
No charges, no lawyers, no judge. This is increasingly the norm of -- and a legacy of -- George Bush's world. In this way, the snarl at the borders melds with the screams of terror in cells worldwide.
Embedded Reports from the Dark Side
A new Pentagon term came into use in the Bush era. With the invasion of Iraq, reporters were said to be "embedded" in U.S. military units. That term -- so close in sound to "in bed with" -- should have wider uses. You could, for instance, say that Americans have, since September 2001, been "embedded," largely willingly, in a new lockdown universe defined by a general acceptance of widespread acts of torture and abuse, as well as of the right to kidnap (known as "extraordinary rendition"), and the creation and expansion of an offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice, all based on the principle that a human being is guilty unless proven (sometimes even if proven) innocent. What might originally have seemed like emergency measures in a moment of crisis is now an institutionalized way of life. Whether we like it or not, these methods increasingly define what it means to be an American. In this manner, despite the "freedom" rhetoric of the Bush administration, the phrase "the price of freedom" has been superseded by the price of what passes for "safety" and "security."
Media coverage of such subjects reflects this. The cases above, all reported in December, barely scratch the surface of this universe. Just a glance at other December stories -- some barely attended to, or dealt with by minor outlets or in humdrum ways, but many well covered in major papers and still causing little consternation -- indicates just how normalized all this has become.
A legacy can often be framed in words. So here's a little rundown of just some areas in which, when it came to torture, kidnapping, and offshore imprisonment, 2007 ended in a deluge, not a trickle:
Destroyed Tapes: One issue connected to torture -- sorry, "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- did get major coverage last month, the revelation on the front page of the December 6th New York Times of the destruction, in 2005, of hundreds of hours of CIA videotapes of the first two major interrogations, including waterboardings, of al-Qaeda operatives -- in this case, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. In the weeks that followed, responsibility for the decision to destroy those tapes has been creeping ever higher, with four key lawyers connected to the White House and the Vice President's office brought into the mix in mid-December, and reports that the chief of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, Jose A. Rodriguez, who ordered their destruction, may soon testify before Congress under immunity and implicate as yet unnamed higher-ups.
As with all such cover-up stories, this one can only get worse. It has already been reported in the Wall Street Journal that the faces of more senior CIA officials, not just low-level interrogators, may have been caught on those tapes from the administration's secret torture chambers. We are sure to learn that these were hardly the only interrogations taped by the Agency. As yet, by the way, almost all attention has gone to the destruction of the tapes, little to why they were made in the first place. As December ended, however, Scott Shane of the New York Times wrote a piece, "Tapes by CIA Lived and Died to Save Image," with this telling line from the CIA's then number three official, A. B. Krongard: "You want interrogators in training to watch the tapes." Think about that a moment. The Justice Department, which, along with the CIA's Inspector General, launched an investigation of the tape destruction under pressure, also attempted to shut down congressional investigations of the same -- unsuccessfully.
Kidnapping Is the Law: According to the British Sunday Times, "A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the U.S. Supreme Court has sanctioned it." According to that lawyer, the precedent "goes back to bounty hunting days in the 1860s." This applies, it seems, not just to terror suspects in extraordinary rendition cases, but to white businessmen wanted for, say, fraud. "The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington." International human rights lawyer Scott Horton writes at his No Comment blog:
"This is not U.S. law, it is a Bush Administration hallucination as to U.S. law... The sort of nightmare which refuses to recognize the sovereignty of foreign states or the solemn commitments of U.S. governments over the last two centuries in treaties and conventions. The sort of nightmare that refuses to recognize the 'law of nations' referred to by the Founding Fathers and incorporated into the Constitution."
Innocence at Guantanamo: New military and court documents were released in December, thanks to a suit by lawyers representing Murat Kurnaz, that further illuminated the case of the 19-year old German citizen who "chose a bad time to travel." Kurnaz was captured by the U.S. Army in Pakistan in 2002 and transported to Guantanamo. There, within months, according to the Washington Post's Carol D. Leonnig, "his American captors concluded that he was not a terrorist." This was the consensus of intelligence officials. He was nonetheless declared a "dangerous al-Qaeda ally" by successive military tribunals at the prison and was not released until August 2006 when he was flown to freedom in Germany "goggled, masked and bound, as he had been when he was flown to Guantanamo Bay."
Evidence from Waterboarding: According to Josh White of the Washington Post, Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, "[t]he top legal adviser for the military trials of Guantanamo Bay detainees told Congress... that he cannot rule out the use of evidence derived from the CIA's aggressive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding." He even refused to say that waterboarding would be illegal if used by the interrogators of another country on U.S. military personnel. In a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, like his boss Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Mark Filip, the administration's nominee for second-in-command at the Justice Department, also refused to take a stand on waterboarding, even though he called it "repugnant."
Torture Veto: In December, President Bush threatened to "veto a House [of Representatives] bill that would explicitly ban a variety of abhorrent practices. The bill would require U.S. intelligence agencies to follow interrogation rules adopted by the armed forces last year."
Torturers speak out: In December, two figures connected with U.S. torture practices spoke out. John Kiriakou, a CIA agent involved in capturing top al-Qaeda operatives, gave interviews to ABC and NBC News in which he called waterboarding "torture," regretted its use ("we Americans are better than that"), and also insisted that "[t]his was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the National Security Council and justice department." In the meantime, Damien Corsetti, a former private in the U.S. Army who served as an interrogator in Kabul, Afghanistan (and was nicknamed the "king of torture" and "the monster" by his colleagues at Bagram prison), gave an interview to the Spanish paper El Mundo, describing the beatings and torture techniques used there. ("They tell them they are going to kill their children, rape their wives. And you see on their faces, in their eyes, the terror that that causes them. Because, of course, we know all about those people. We know the names of their children, where they live -- we show them satellite photos of their houses. It is worse than any torture.") He also claimed that 98% of the prisoners, as far as he could tell, had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and observed, "In Abu-Ghurayb and Bagram they were tortured to make them suffer, not to get information out of them." Both men denied themselves torturing or mistreating anyone.
Justice Moves Fast: The Justice Department, which dragged its feet on those destroyed CIA videotapes (and then tried to submarine a congressional investigation of the same), nonetheless reacted strongly to the horrors of torture in another context. Its officials moved swiftly to investigate whether former agent John Kiriakou, in giving that interview about waterboarding to ABC News, had "illegally disclosed classified information in describing the capture and waterboarding of an al-Qaeda terrorism suspect." Consider that a message about priorities from the powers that be.
Iraqis in American Jails: Latest estimates are that up to 30,000 Iraqis are now held in American prisons in Iraq. While this figure falls 10,000 short of the number of Iraqis American commander Gen. David Petraeus believed might be arrested during the "surge" months in Baghdad and elsewhere, it does add up, as Juan Cole points out at his Informed Comment website, to 0.1% of what's left of the Iraqi population, or approximately one out of every 1,000 Iraqis.
Think of these eight stories as themselves only the tip of December's melting iceberg of news on such topics. You could no less easily write about lawyer Andrew Williams, a JAG officer with the Naval Reserves, who resigned his commission in response to the unwillingness of Gen. Hartmann "to call the hypothetical waterboarding of an American pilot by the Iranian military torture." In a letter to The Peninsula Gateway of Gig Harbor, Washington, Williams wrote in part:
"Thank you, General Hartmann, for finally admitting the United States is now part of a long tradition of torturers going back to the Inquisition.... Waterboarding was used by the Nazi Gestapo and the feared Japanese Kempeitai... Waterboarding was practiced by the Khmer Rouge at the infamous Tuol Sleng prison. Most recently, the U.S. Army court martialed a soldier for the practice in 1968 during the Vietnam conflict.
"General Hartmann, following orders was not an excuse for anyone put on trial in Nuremberg, and it will not be an excuse for you or your superiors, either. Despite the CIA and the administration attempting to cover up the practice by destroying interrogation tapes, in direct violation of a court order, and congressional requests, the truth about torture, illegal spying on Americans and secret renditions is coming out."
Or you could mention the news that the "Australian Taliban," David Hicks, the sole person actually convicted on terrorism charges at Guantanamo, was released after serving a nine-month sentence in Australia (and five years of non-sentence time in Cuba); or the first reports on the Internet of speculation in Washington that George Bush himself might have viewed parts of those CIA interrogation tapes, or the Washington Post report that, in 2002, four key Congressional figures, including Nancy Pelosi, had been given "a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk," including waterboarding, without objections being raised. Or... but the list is almost unending.
The Bush Legacy
As a people, we Americans have not faintly come to grips with how centrally the Bush administration has planted certain practices in our midst -- at the very heart of governmental practice, of the news, of everyday life. Many of these practices were not in themselves creations of this administration. For instance, the practice of kidnapping abroad -- "rendition" -- began at least in the Clinton era, if not earlier. Waterboarding, a medieval torture, was first practiced by American troops in the Philippine insurrection at the dawn of the previous century. (It was then known as "the water cure.")
Torture of various sorts was widely used in CIA interrogation centers in Vietnam in the 1960s. Back in that era, the CIA also ran its own airline, Air America, rather than just leasing planes from various corporate entities through front businesses. Abu Ghraib-style torture and abuse, pioneered by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, was taught and used by American military, CIA, and police officials in Latin America from the 1960s into the 1980s. If you doubt any of this, just check out Alfred McCoy's still shocking book, A Question of Torture. Even offshore secret CIA prisons aren't a unique creation of the Bush administration. According to Tim Weiner in his new history of the Central Intelligence Agency, Legacy of Ashes, in the 1950s the Agency had three of them -- in Japan, Germany, and the Panama Canal Zone -- where they brought double agents of questionable loyalty for "secret experiments" in harsh interrogation, "using techniques on the edge of torture, drug-induced mind control, and brainwashing."
And yet, don't for a second think that nothing has changed. Part of the Bush legacy lies in a new ethos in this country. In my childhood in the 1950s, for example, we knew just who the torturers were. We saw them in the movies. They were the sadistic Japanese in their prison camps, the Gestapo in their prisons, and the Soviet Secret police, the KGB, in their gulags (even if that name hadn't yet entered our world). As the President now says at every opportunity, and as we then knew, Americans did not torture.
Today, and it's a measure of our changing American world, a child turning on the TV serial "24" or heading for the nearest hot, new action flick at the local multiplex knows that Americans do torture and that torture, once the cultural province of our most evil enemies, is now a practice that is 100% all-American and perfectly justifiable (normally by the ticking-bomb scenario). And few even blink. In lockdown America, it computes. The snarl at the border fits well enough with what our Vice President has termed a "no-brainer," a "dunk in the water" in the torture chamber. There is no deniability left in the movies -- and little enough of it in real life.
American presidents of the Vietnam and Latin American war years operated in a realm of deniability when it came to torture and other such practices. No American could then have imagined a Vice President heading for Capitol Hill to lobby openly for a torture bill or a President publicly threatening to veto congressional legislation banning torture techniques. Call it the end of an era of American hypocrisy, if you will, but the Bush legacy will be, in part, simply the routinization of the practice of torture, abuse, kidnapping, and illegal imprisonment.
George W. Bush didn't invent the world he inhabits. He, his top officials, and all their lawyers who wrote those bizarre "torture memos" that will be hallmarks of his era chose from existing strains of thought, from urges and tendencies already in American culture. But their record on this has, nonetheless, been remarkable. In just about every case, they chose to bring out the worst in us; in just about every case, they took us on as direct a journey as possible to the dark side.
It's not necessary to romanticize the American past in any way to consider the legacy of these last years grim indeed. Let no one tell you that the institution of a global network of secret prisons and borrowed torture chambers, along with those "enhanced interrogation techniques," was primarily done for information or even security. The urge to resort to such tactics is invariably more primal than that.
Words matter more than one would think. In the Bush era, certain words have simply been sidelined. Sovereignty, for instance. If, in principle, you can kidnap anyone, anywhere, and transport that person into a ghost existence anywhere else, then national sovereignty essentially no longer has significance. This is one meaning of "globalization" in the twenty-first century. On Planet Bush, only one nation remains "sovereign," and that's the United States of America.
If you want to test this proposition, just take any case mentioned above, from Erla Ósk's landing in New York on, and try to reverse it. Make an American the central victim and another country of your choice the perpetrator and imagine the reaction of the Bush administration, no less the American media and the public (no matter what Gen. Hartmann may be unwilling to say about the waterboarding of an American serviceman).
Or consider another word that once had great resonance in American culture, not to speak of its legal system: innocence. Americans prided themselves on their "innocence" -- even when mocked as "innocents abroad" -- and took pride as well in a system based on the phrase, "innocent until proven guilty."
Despite their repeated, thoroughly worn denials about torture, the top officials of this administration remade themselves, in the wake of the attacks of 9/11, as a Torture, Inc. And their actions since then have gone a long way toward turning us, by association and tacit acquiescence, into a nation of torturers, willing to accept, in case after case, that a "war" against "terror" supposed to last for generations justifies just about any act imaginable, including the continued mistreatment and incarceration of people who remain somehow guilty even, in certain cases, after being proven innocent.
This is the American welcome wagon of the twenty-first century. If you really want to catch the spirit of the Bush legacy one year early, try to imagine the poem an Emma Lazarus of this moment might write, something appropriate for a gigantic statue in New York harbor of a guard from Mohamed Bashmilah's living nightmare -- dressed all in black, a black mask covering his head and neck, tinted yellow plastic over the eyes, a man, hands sheathed in rubber gloves, holding up not a torch but a video camera and dragging chains.
Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/72365/
Friday, January 4, 2008
Oh God! Another year of George W. Bush
Can the nation survive?
By ANN McFEATTERS
Wrapped up as we have been in presidential-election hoopla, machinations and drivel, we have to sober up and realize we still have another entire year of the Bush administration to deal with. What should we expect?
Ed Gillespie, senior White House counselor and one of the few experienced work-a-day Republicans who haven't fled the administration, says President Bush plans to spend this year in a "lot of travel."
He says the time frame for getting anything through Congress will expire on or about July 4 as senators and representatives race home to campaign for re-election.
The basics: No major new initiatives on foreign policy, another try at extending No Child Left Behind, more funding for the troops in Iraq, a reprise of past State of the Union speeches, some vague effort on reforms to make the housing market more stable and, as always, making the tax cuts permanent. Oh, yes. More fights with Congress over last year's budget.
Folks, this is depressing.
It's for certain we don't want any more disasters from this president. His legacy involving the war in Iraq, the tragic, botched response to Katrina, the confused non-commitment to saving the planet from greenhouse gases, the failure to capture Osama bin Laden, the catastrophes of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the loss of American prestige, the probably illegal destruction of the CIA torture tapes and a huge national debt is bad enough.
But Bush has only a little more than 365 days to try to save his presidency from a thorough trashing by historians. (begin ital) And the former co-owner of the Texas Rangers has no game plan! (end ital)
The last edition in 2007 of Parade, the ubiquitous Sunday-newspaper supplement, has a smiling picture of Bush on the cover advertising an article called "What Made My Year Special by President George W. Bush."
In an article the president most assuredly did not write personally, he says that as he and his wife Laura took stock of the past year, they found themselves thinking about the "extraordinary people we have met."
The article then spoke about the president's inspiration at presenting the Medal of Honor to a dead soldier's mother, presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a genome scientist who believes in God, visiting the bread factory of a "single mom" in Tennessee, holding the HIV-free baby of an HIV-positive South African woman visiting the White House and meeting with the wife of a doctor imprisoned in Cuba for advocating democracy.
"The caring, compassionate, hardworking people who use their skills and talents to build a better America and a more hopeful world" are what keeps the president going and makes him "so optimistic about America's future -- in 2008 and beyond," the article concluded.
I don't know about you, but I am disheartened that the president thinks the most satisfying thing about being the most important elected official in the world is meet-and-greets with neat people, all of whom have sacrificed more, worked harder and accomplished more against greater obstacles than he has.
We elected Bush the first time because he seemed to be a nice guy (despite the irksome smirk) and because Florida has messed-up ballot procedures. We elected him the second time because John Kerry was not a compelling alternative and we didn't feel like jumping to a different horse mid-stream in a post-9/11 world.
Bush almost assuredly will never again run for elective office. He has the rare luxury of being able to set aside electoral politics to become a statesman and a whole year to try to correct his mistakes. But this president does not admit -- publicly, at least -- to having made any mistakes. He seems absolutely, arrogantly convinced that he made all the right decisions.
So the coming year will be much like the past seven dreary, tumultuous, conflict-riddled years.
The next president will have to deal with the war in Iraq, restoring respect for the United States, figuring out what to do with 12 million people illegally in the country, agreeing on a framework to prevent a meltdown of Social Security and Medicare, strengthening the weak dollar and bolstering a faltering economy. Not counting all the crises and surprises that bedevil every president every year.
The Iowa caucuses solved nothing. We still have big decisions to make. Let's hope this time we get it right.
(Scripps Howard columnist Ann McFeatters has covered the White House and national politics since 1986. E-mail amcfeatters(at)nationalpress.com.)
By ANN McFEATTERS
Wrapped up as we have been in presidential-election hoopla, machinations and drivel, we have to sober up and realize we still have another entire year of the Bush administration to deal with. What should we expect?
Ed Gillespie, senior White House counselor and one of the few experienced work-a-day Republicans who haven't fled the administration, says President Bush plans to spend this year in a "lot of travel."
He says the time frame for getting anything through Congress will expire on or about July 4 as senators and representatives race home to campaign for re-election.
The basics: No major new initiatives on foreign policy, another try at extending No Child Left Behind, more funding for the troops in Iraq, a reprise of past State of the Union speeches, some vague effort on reforms to make the housing market more stable and, as always, making the tax cuts permanent. Oh, yes. More fights with Congress over last year's budget.
Folks, this is depressing.
It's for certain we don't want any more disasters from this president. His legacy involving the war in Iraq, the tragic, botched response to Katrina, the confused non-commitment to saving the planet from greenhouse gases, the failure to capture Osama bin Laden, the catastrophes of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the loss of American prestige, the probably illegal destruction of the CIA torture tapes and a huge national debt is bad enough.
But Bush has only a little more than 365 days to try to save his presidency from a thorough trashing by historians. (begin ital) And the former co-owner of the Texas Rangers has no game plan! (end ital)
The last edition in 2007 of Parade, the ubiquitous Sunday-newspaper supplement, has a smiling picture of Bush on the cover advertising an article called "What Made My Year Special by President George W. Bush."
In an article the president most assuredly did not write personally, he says that as he and his wife Laura took stock of the past year, they found themselves thinking about the "extraordinary people we have met."
The article then spoke about the president's inspiration at presenting the Medal of Honor to a dead soldier's mother, presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a genome scientist who believes in God, visiting the bread factory of a "single mom" in Tennessee, holding the HIV-free baby of an HIV-positive South African woman visiting the White House and meeting with the wife of a doctor imprisoned in Cuba for advocating democracy.
"The caring, compassionate, hardworking people who use their skills and talents to build a better America and a more hopeful world" are what keeps the president going and makes him "so optimistic about America's future -- in 2008 and beyond," the article concluded.
I don't know about you, but I am disheartened that the president thinks the most satisfying thing about being the most important elected official in the world is meet-and-greets with neat people, all of whom have sacrificed more, worked harder and accomplished more against greater obstacles than he has.
We elected Bush the first time because he seemed to be a nice guy (despite the irksome smirk) and because Florida has messed-up ballot procedures. We elected him the second time because John Kerry was not a compelling alternative and we didn't feel like jumping to a different horse mid-stream in a post-9/11 world.
Bush almost assuredly will never again run for elective office. He has the rare luxury of being able to set aside electoral politics to become a statesman and a whole year to try to correct his mistakes. But this president does not admit -- publicly, at least -- to having made any mistakes. He seems absolutely, arrogantly convinced that he made all the right decisions.
So the coming year will be much like the past seven dreary, tumultuous, conflict-riddled years.
The next president will have to deal with the war in Iraq, restoring respect for the United States, figuring out what to do with 12 million people illegally in the country, agreeing on a framework to prevent a meltdown of Social Security and Medicare, strengthening the weak dollar and bolstering a faltering economy. Not counting all the crises and surprises that bedevil every president every year.
The Iowa caucuses solved nothing. We still have big decisions to make. Let's hope this time we get it right.
(Scripps Howard columnist Ann McFeatters has covered the White House and national politics since 1986. E-mail amcfeatters(at)nationalpress.com.)
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