A Blog Named Sue

When you play at this level there's no ordinary venue

I have to say that I'm one of those New Yorkers who'd rather see the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed take place someplace other than downtown New York City. I'm not afraid of Al Qaeda attempting any dramatic, Tom Clancy-style jailbreak or some other kind of terror attack to disrupt the trial, but I'm also not looking forward to the security theater of the absurd that would inevitably accompany the trial. I still remember the massive disruptions caused by security for the 2004 Republican National Convention, and I'm certain the people arrested and detained for simply being on the wrong street when the NYPD dropped the net remember them even more clearly. That being said, I am in favor of the trial being held in the United States, at an easily controlled venue like Governor's Island (they can just hold off on building the damn water park out there). The most critical point, for me at least, is that the trial be open and accessible to the press and other observers. Otherwise, they might as well hold the damn thing at Gitmo and send us the occasional Twitter update to let us know how it's going.  

One thing I've found curious about various city officials' objections to holding the trial downtown is their continued insistence that the trial will take years:

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly began planning and concluded that it would cost about $215 million for the first year and $200 million in subsequent years to provide security, according to Mr. Browne. The main cost was overtime, not just at the site but all around the city to cope with an anticipated rise in threats.

I'm not at all sure how the trial could take that long. I'm all for due process, hell, that's why I want these guys tried in the States. Do we have so much evidence against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators that we need that long to build our case? Are they figuring in the time his defense will need to prepare their case? If so, does that mean he hasn't yet had access to counsel? That seems unlikely, since the government claims to have already held pre-trial hearings down at Guantanamo Bay. Perhaps the transfer to a civilian court requires him to acquire new counsel, since to this point he has had military representation? Have the conditions at Guantanamo been so heinous that they anticipate prisoners who were held there will have massive grounds for endless appeals? I honestly don't know. Feel free to enlighten me if you do. 

Their claim that the trial will take years fascinates me because I've long suspected that conservatives' claim that Guantanamo prisoners are too dangerous to hold in United States supermax prisons isn't based on any rational assessment of Al Qaeda's operational capabilities but rather their certainty that once these prisoners are on American soil, some judge, somewhere, is going to give them access to civilian counsel and then we're going to find out what really went down at Guantanamo. I'm not sure anyone in the government from either party wants to see that happen. At this point, I don't think the Obama administration can back off from holding the trials in the States - the key will be whether or not the trial is open to the public, or at the very least reporters. A former CIA official claims that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is nearly brain-dead after being waterboarded 183 times in one month. Do you think anyone in the Obama administration wants that shown on TV?

Because everything I say is everything you've ever wanted to hear

You could make a full-time job out of shooting down the bullshit that oozes forth from Dick Cheney's bilious maw. Since I already have a full-time job, I usually leave that to others. But I've got to take a moment to point out this particular bon mot from his national security speech:

It is a fact that only detainees of the highest intelligence value were ever subjected to enhanced interrogation. You've heard endlessly about waterboarding. It happened to three terrorists. One of them was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, who has also boasted about his beheading of Daniel Pearl.

That is one hell of an attempt at misdirection, even for him. First, assuming that we only waterboarded three suspects (I'm old school, I still call them suspects), we waterboarded two of them nearly three hundred times! Also, Dick, it's not only about waterboarding. None of the Abu Ghraib pictures, to my knowledge, portray waterboarding, nor (again, to my knowledge) do the pictures President Obama has declined to release. In fact, we have every reason to believe that what those pictures show is even more horrible than waterboarding. And are you seriously going to tell me that everyone we kicked the living shit out of at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bhagram were of the highest intelligence value? Was this guy of the highest intelligence value? Either Iraq and Afghanistan are stuffed to the gills with terrorist masterminds or Dick Cheney has a remarkably broad definition of "value."

Working so hard like a soldier

One of the many applause lines in Michelle Obama's speech to the Democratic National Convention last night came when she said her husband would work to make sure health benefits - including mental health benefits - would be extended to all veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. That would no doubt help stem the epidemic of suicides currently afflicting veterans returning from Iraq, but any plan to ease wounded soldiers' transition from military care to Veterans Administration/civilian care must include an overhaul of the way soldiers apply for and recieve their benefits.

As Linda Bilmes and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Steiglitz point out in their book The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, a disabled veteran bears the entire burden of proving to the Veterans Administration that he or she is not only disabled but that the disability occurred as a result of his or her active duty in the United States military - and this is often after that veteran has spent several months before discharge being treated by the military for that very same disability! (That's an NPR interview with Bilmes on the other end of that link; the transcript is unavailable, but take a few minutes to listen to it - it's astonishing.) Veterans must gather all appropriate documentation from every medical professional involved in their treatment and present it to the VA in order for their claims to be processed. This is a paper-based system, and as you can imagine it is currently overloaded. As of March, the date of the NPR interview with Bilmes I link to above, this process took about six months. If there is an error, or the veteran in question wishes to appeal the VA's decision for whatever reason, the process stretches out to two years. Two years is a hell of a long time to ask someone suffering from severe PTSD to wait for treatment; is it any wonder we're seeing record suicide rates among soldiers returning from Iraq?

Bilmes recommends that we switch to a system similar to the one employed by Canada and Great Britain; in those systems, the veteran's claim is assumed to be genuine and the burden of proving otherwise, if necessary, falls to the government. It's basically the same system the IRS uses here in the States - as Bilmes points out, the vast majority of tax claims are assumed to be genuine and a only a small subset of claims gets audited in order to discourage fraud. In other words, returning veterans' disability claims should be given at least as much credibility as Dick Cheney's tax return.

That's a brilliant first step, and I'd recommend an additional reform: in our information age, in which TRW has a record of every time I've scratched my ass during the past five years, it couldn't be too difficult to establish a paralell electronic service record between the Pentagon and the Veterans Administration that begins the moment a volunteer musters in to the service. That way, the VA would already have all of the records it needs to process a veteran's claim on the day he or she is discharged from the service.

With all the talk recently about United States troops withdrawing completely from Iraq by 2011, now is the time to lay the groundwork for an improved system that will help those returning soldiers re-integrate into civilain life as smoothly as possible.

(X-posted at Pax Americana)

Those are people who died

(x-posted at Pax Americana)

The epidemic of suicides among veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts appears to be reaching a crisis point, as testimony is set to begin in a class-action lawsuit against the Veterans Administration for failing to provide more and better psychiatric care. Internal VA e-mails obtained by the plaintiffs say an average of eighteen veterans kill themselves each day. A RAND Corporation study found that an additional one thousand veterans attempt suicide every month. Clearly, the system currently in place simply can't deal with the sheer numbers of veterans whose psyches have been torched and gutted during their service in our mismanaged war in Afghanistan and our completely elective mismanaged war in Iraq. Returning veterans must navigate an incredibly labyrinthine process in order to claim any benefits; I've been clinically depressed myself (obviously, not to the degree that these returning veterans are) and I can tell you that paperwork is the last thing you're capable of dealing with when you're in that state. That's something I plan on writing about in more detail later on.

Right now, I want to touch on something I've written about before: human beings are simply not designed for war. I'm way too much of a misanthrope to have any illusions about human nature; it's clear that the default setting for much of our race is 'douchebag.'  But 'douchebag' is a far cry from ruthless killing machine.'  We have to be goaded, perverted into a warlike state, with promises of wealth or increased social status or threats of being cast out from the herd. One of the stated goals of military training is to tear down the recruit, to short circuit his human nature so he becomes able and willing to commit violence against strangers on the order of another stranger. Of course, the enemy too is dehumanized to the soldier (and, via propaganda, to the citizen) in order to make his death more palatable and less troubling. Arguably, this is done to make the soldier better able to survive the nightmare that is the modern battlefield.

The only problem is that it doesn't seem to work. Thich Nhat Hanh, no stranger to the reality of war, writes that military training designed to strip both the soldier and the enemy of their humanity will necessarily result in atrocities like Abu Ghraib, because "Preparing for war and fighting a war means allowing our human nature to die." But our human nature can't die as long as we remain alive, and it seems to come squirreling out of us from the weirdest places and in the weirdest ways and the next thing you know you've woken up in a cold sweat holding the gun you keep under the pillow and holy shit when did you start keeping a gun under your pillow?

Eighteen people a day lose the struggle to reconcile what they've become with what they once were. Another twelve thousand people each year succumb as well, but for the grace of whatever they believe or maybe only because of dumb luck they survive to struggle on. There are no half-time show salutes to honor those who survive their PTSD and the ones who die are not counted among the honored dead and their names will never be carved on a monument. Remember this the next time anyone tells you to be "realistic" and accept that war is "inevitable" and it's all just "human nature."

Be friends, you English fools, be friends! We have French quarrels enow, if you could tell how to reckon.

I have a picture on my hard drive. I don't look at it much, but I keep it around.

It's a picture of a four-year-old girl.

She's Iraqi.

It's dark in the picture, but the girl is standing in a pool of light created by a Maglite attached to the barrel of a U.S. Marine's assault rifle. She's covered in blood. It's not hers. It's her parents' blood. They died when the Marines shot up their car for whatever reason things like that happen in Iraq.  No weapons or explosives were found in the car. The girl in the picture is screaming, screaming while covered in her parents' blood.

Like I said, I don't look at that picture much. But I looked at it today in order to remind myself what five years in Iraq really means.  I saved the picture because at the time it was taken my older daughter was four years old, and all I could think about after I saw it was my daughter, screaming while covered in her parents' blood.

My older daughter is seven now. We've been in Iraq for most of the time she's been alive. The war in Iraq encompasses the entirety of my younger daughter's time on this Earth. I'm having trouble remembering a time when we weren't in Iraq.

This isn't about the Marines. Maybe they were justified - shit, for all I know maybe the guy driving the car was Osama's BFF. Maybe it was what they call a "clean" kill, which means maybe the guys who did it will only wake up screaming from nightmares about it for the next five years or so rather than until the day they die. I don't know and I don't care. All I know is that no four year old girl deserves to find herself covered in her parents' blood.

This is about the reality of this war and all wars: a four year old girl screaming while covered in her parents' blood. War is not politics by other means, no god calls you to smite the infidel and save your soul, war is not what makes generations great. War is a dark lonely street and a bloody child. That's it.

Today I went and signed this petition, a Quixotic effort to get Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to stop tearing into each other with such gusto as to leave either too weak fight McCain in the general election. A month ago if you had asked me to sign such a petition I wouldn't have, as I thought that this vigorous primary contest was a good thing, whetting our eventual nominee for the fight to come and giving his or her ideas a highly visible platform. In other words, a month ago I was an idiot. I haven't heard an idea yet in this contest - have you?

I want you to go and sign that petition, too - even though I don't think either the Obama or Clinton camp will pay any attention to it. They've got too much invested in the fight at this point, and neither is going to give any quarter. I want you to sign it anyway,  for a totally different reason: if you do something to remind yourself what's at stake in this election, maybe you won't be a complete fucking asshole to someone who supports the other candidate. Right now, we're in danger of leaving ourselves too exhausted for the general election too, and there's too much at stake this time to let that happen.

See, I don't care which one of our candidates gets the nomination. I really don't. Hillary's got corporate ties? I don't care. Obama's inexperienced? I don't care. Hillary's too polarizing? I don't care. Obama's pastor fucked a goat on the high altar on Christmas Eve? I don't care. I care about John McCain not becoming president. Period. John McCain thinks this gory clusterfuck in Iraq is a good thing, and what's more, he says he wants to start a few more wars, well, just because.

I'm not naive. I don't think Hillary or Obama is going to get us the hell out of Iraq right away and I'm not sure doing so is all that high on either one of their agendas. But at least with one of them we'll have a chance. At the very least, President Hillary Clinton or President Barack Obama will take the oath of office knowing that a large percentage of their base want this war over; they want no more screaming children. President John McCain will take the oath of office knowing that his base thinks singing "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" at a campaign event is funny as shit.

Like I said, with Hillary or Obama we have a chance. When I look at that picture on my hard drive, I know that I'll take whatever chance, however slim, that I can get.

The Mel Cooley Index For Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Today, Mel Cooley is thinking this guy is such a slacker that he couldn't even make it an even thousand, could he?

Sometimes I See You In the Water at Night

Reading the coverage of Mukasey's confirmation woes  (and this bizarre post about Rudy's definition of torture), it seems to me that Mukasey is not the only one who's a bit unclear on what actually happens when you waterboard someone; some bloggers and commenters appear to be unfamiliar with the practice as well.

This video from current is outstanding; it features an ex-Special Forces soldier who volunteers to undergo the procedure in order to demonstrate what it entails. Warning: link contains graphic, disturbing footage and Alan Dershowitz saying stupid things.

Whether you watch the video or not, trust me on this - waterboarding is a remarkably shitty thing to do to someone, and it's a spectacularly shitty thing to do to someone who's innocent of any crime. Torture proponents always bring up the "Jack Bauer scenario": would you waterboard someone in order to prevent a nuclear attack on Los Angeles? Thankfully, nuclear attacks on major American cities are still theoretical, but sweeping the innocent up in anti-terror sweeps isn't. It's something I always ask people to bear in mind when they're forming their opinion on torture: much like the death penalty, this shit is happening to innocent people. Right now.

She Knows They All Want Her to Go - That's OK Man She Don't Like Them Anyway

I've been seeing a lot of articles lately - like the one Eli discusses here - about how Condoleezza Rice is the voice of reason in the Bush bunker, the calm statesman struggling with Dick Cheney for control of the clueless cipher we call a president. See, Condi's the one we're all counting on to keep us from bombing Iran. Hooray Condi.

Good lord. If Condi "Mushroom Cloud" Rice is the voice of reason in the Bush bunker we are well and truly screwed. But I'm feeling magnanimous today and I'm willing to give this story the benefit of the doubt. So, Condi, if you're reading this (and I know she is - just like I know she's sending me messages through the TV. Dammit, Condi, this has to stop! I'm a married man!) I have just one suggestion for you: quit.

See, I remember how we all thought Colin Powell was the voice of reason in the Bush bunker and look how well that turned out. It must be something about the office of Secretary of State - we all assume that whoever holds it must be less crazy than Dick Cheney. But sure enough, in the end Powell went on the world stage and spun his tale of flatbed trucks of doooom. Granted, he's made some tentative suggestions that he might have fucked up just a little with that whole Iraq-will-destroy-us-all-thing, but I can't think of anyone who didn't greet that mini-mea culpa with a shrug and derisive snort of "too little, too late." Well, this is your chance Condi. Be the man Colin Powell never was. Quit.

If it's true, if you're the only one in the bunker keeping the bombers on the ground, then the single best thing you can do is get the hell out of there and get your face on to the TV. Start with your BFF Gwen Ifill and then work your way to the shallow end of the gene pool occupied by Hannity and the like. Tell your story. Cut support for an attack on Iran off at the knees. Make any politician who backs such an attack look like a tool of Dick Cheney, possibly the most loathed figure in American politics. Jesus, you're a diplomat, for God's sake - do you really think Bush is going to listen to you?

There are only two ways out of the Bush administration - you can go the way Richard Clarke did and still enjoy the respect of your peers or there's the Alberto Gonzales method. If it's true that you're the last sane one in the whole administration - and that is one huge goddamn if - you know what you need to do.

Fleecing the Rubes

You've no doubt seen this little gem already, either at Kos, Digby, or a million other places. I first saw it courtesy of Chicago Dyke over at Corrente Wire. In the unlikely event you haven't read it, let me offer you a few highlights:

The wisest course would have been for President Bush to use his nuclear weapons to slaughter Iraqis until they complied with his demands, or until they were all dead. Then there would be little risk or expense and no American army would be left exposed. But if he did this, his cowardly electorate would have instantly ended his term of office, if not his freedom or his life.

The simple truth that modern weapons now mean a nation must practice genocide or commit suicide...

[snip]

Caesar pacified Gaul by mass slaughter; he then used his successful army to crush all political opposition at home and establish himself as permanent ruler of ancient Rome...

If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestiege while terrifying American enemies.

He could then follow Caesar's example and use his newfound popularity with the military to wield military power to become the first permanent president of America...

It goes on like that for a while. What's remarkable about the document is its pedigree. This isn't some long-winded post at Free Republic but rather an official communication from a group whose board of directors includes (as Kos put it):

...mainstream conservatives Barbara Comstock, Monica Crowley, Frank Gaffney, Laura Ingraham and James Woolsey.

Which is exactly why I call bullshit on it. Oh, I have no doubt that they wrote it, but I don't think they mean a word of it. James Woolsey was the frikkin' Director of the CIA - he knows damn well that de-populating Iraq is militarily impossible (even with nuclear weapons), and even if it weren't stranding the American citizens we've sent re-populate Iraq in a country surrounded by people with very good reason to be pissed at them is a terrible idea. Just what we need - another Israel! He also probably knows it's a very bad idea to send a bunch of your citizens to live in a country you just nuked the bejeezus out of. (Yes, I ended that sentence with a preposition. Sue me.)

If this is anything, it's a fund-raising letter, designed to keep their members scared and the money flowing into their sad excuse for a think tank or whatever the hell they are. And if were a contributor to the Family Security Council, I'd be damn pissed about this - how stupid do they think their contributors are?

One last thing: it's not uncommon to hear Serious People say they can't get on board with the anti-war movement because many left-wingers do strange things like get dreadlocks even though they're white and listen to Dave Matthews. Whatever. I haven't seen anything on the "extreme" left in this country, including people with massive toe-nail fungus insisting on wearing Birkenstocks, that comes remotely close to the scary, freakish and just plain wrong that you see the American far right proudly wallow in every goddamn day.

But There's No Danger, It's A Professional Career

Via Avedon at The Sideshow, I found this lovely Washington Post article about private contractors (who for some reason we no longer call mercenaries) running amok in Iraq. The Post article states the official number of contractors in Iraq is approximately 127,000, but that's a lowball estimate since the CIA and intelligence arms of the various armed services are also employing private contractors and the exact number of how many they've hired is classified. Obviously, not all of them are engaged in combat-related activities but most of them are. Let me do a little math here - there are currently 162,000 US troops in Iraq, along with let's say 100,000 armed mercenaries who are not subject to the Geneva Conventions or the Uniform Code of Military Justice, plus heaven only knows how many insurgents and foreign fighters and armed Iraqi citizens (Saddam's policy was to have every household own an AK-47 assault rifle). Now, we add all that up and it comes out to Iraq being the most fucked-up place there has ever been on the planet Earth.

This being Iraq, of course it gets even worse when you take a closer look. This article from The Indypendent puts the number of contractors at 180,000, but also points out that:

...more than 1,000 contractors working for the U.S. occupation have been killed with another 13,000 wounded. Most are not American citizens, and these numbers are not counted in the official death toll at a time when Americans are increasingly disturbed by casualties.

In other words, Iraq is even bloodier than we thought.  It's like the onion from hell: every layer of nightmare you peel back reveals an even more terrifying one underneath.

The Indypendent article speculates that the increasing reliance on mercenaries beyond parliamentary controls might embolden governments around the world to engage in even more reckless military gambits. Maybe. But historically, mercenaries have always been unreliable, so much so that Niccolo Machiavelli, the spiritual father of the realpolitik the right wingers all claim to follow, argued vigorously against their use. He was all too familiar with the various betrayals and usurpations that occurred in many Italian city states that relied on mercenary armies. Worse yet, it wasn't uncommon for mercenary armies who met in the field to stage a nearly bloodless battle of maneuvers - actual combat tended to make their contracts much less lucrative. Who knows? Maybe the private armies of the 21st century will come to the same conclusion and thus rein in the Bush adminstration's ambitions in Iraq.

I hate that we live in an age where we have to rely on the common sense of hired guns for any shred of hope.