A Blog Named Sue

f*ck

I consider the "supermax" prison system to be a monstrosity. Don't get me wrong - I do believe there are people who are such a danger to themselves and others that they need to be sequestered from the rest of society. It's just that I believe the strictures and privations of the supermax system only serve to make those SOBs even crazier, and that doesn't benefit anyone.

And yet, here I am arguing that the our domestic supermax prisons are viable alternative to Guantanamo because at least there the Guantanamo detainees would have some access to counsel and some protection under the law.

Man, Bush really did a number on all of our souls, didn't he?

The Internet is for baseless speculation. Oh, and porn.

First off, Harry Reid is the complete polar opposite of balls. The anti-testicle. If Harry Reid and an actual pair of testicles were ever in the same room, they'd mutually annihilate each other. Fortunately he's in the Senate so the odds of this happening are low.

Now for the baseless speculation I promised you: a lot of people I know are scratching their heads over why the Democrats are obstructing Obama's plans to close Guantanamo, and Obama's sudden embrace of the military tribunals process he swore to dismantle when he was running for president. (Doesn't that seem like it was a hundred years ago?) It does seem rather pointless to oppose closing Guantanamo at this point - the tide of public opinion in favor of doing so seems inexorable. And I can't believe anyone in the Democratic party is still concerned about the GOP portraying them as weak on national security. That's just what they do. You might as well take the weather personally.

I think the key is the insistence from both sides that the Gitmo detainees never be imprisoned on American soil, not even in the supermax prisons that do a fine job of containing our good old homegrown American brain-eaters. Imprison these guys on American soil and at some point they're going to get lawyers. And then at some point those lawyers are going to go on the Rachel Maddow Show and tell us all what the hell really went down at Guantanamo. And then everyone in DC is going to be longing for the good old days of debating whether or not Nancy Pelosi should resign because it would make Dick Cheney happy.

Gitmo is a dead prison walking and everyone knows it. The only option left that will keep the ugly truth from hitting the fan is the military tribunals process, which isn't exactly hermetic but it is sealed a lot tighter than a straightforward criminal prosecution. I sort of pity Obama, having to triage all this horrible shit, but he knew the country was broken when he volunteered for the job. There's no keeping a lid on what's happened at this point, so he might as well choose the path of human decency. Then again, that's easy for me to say. On the Internet.

(Swiped anti-matter illustration from here.)

The bullsh*t event horizon

Let me see if I've got this straight: Nancy Pelosi should resign because she knew about the program that Dick Cheney should get a Medal of Freedom for. Because, um, she should have told everyone about the double-secret classified program that wasn't illegal at all and in fact saved American lives because it was so classified and wonderful and not at all illegal. Do I have the gist of it?

If I do, shoot me now because that would mean I'm starting to understand how Republicans think.

Looks like the modern Republican party has finally gone and done it: they've crossed the bullshit event horizon and entered into a region of nonsense and mendacity packed together so tightly that even coherence cannot escape.

I wouldn't even care about this so much (well, OK, yes I would) if the cable newsreaders hadn't predictably and eagerly followed them across the bullshit event horizon and made Pelosi the story, even though she had nothing to do with formulating or implementing the torture policy. Granted, she was in a role to advise the administration and we all know how well Bush and Cheney took advice. Especially from Democrats. In the unlikely event that anyone cable news personalities are reading this, I have to ask you: you do realize that you are pursuing a story that doesn't make a lick of sense, right? You're spending hours of airtime trying to get to the heart of a matter that is completely illogical. Good luck with that. Even Colin Powell (allegedly) got to the point where he said, "I'm not reading this, it's bullshit."  But I guess we can't expect you all to be Colin Powell.

You want to know what the story is? Try this: the United States is now a country that abducts people off the street based on hearsay evidence and tortures them, in some cases to death. This is an incontrovertible fact. We started this policy of imprisoning and torturing people based on hearsay evidence in a country known for generational family and tribal bloodfueds - damn, you just know we were getting good intel from those locals. Many of those we imprisoned and tortured could be charitably described as "minors" but let's call them what they were: children. That's your fucking story, but I can see how that's not as interesting as the deliberations of the House Intelligence Committee.

Cheney's jumping in front of every damn camera he can find to demand the release of documents he claims prove that torture worked and lives were saved. We're talking about two documents here, by the way  - two documents, two interrogations out of the hundreds if not thousands we've conducted. And the CIA is not refusing to release them on the basis of national security concerns but rather because the documents are relevant in two FOIA lawsuits the CIA is fighting. One of the parties suing for the release of the documents is Amnesty International. Somehow, I don't think these documents say what Cheney wants us to believe they say.

As vocal as Cheney has been about the release of the documents, he's been completely silent about the release of the torture photos. Why? Because they're fucking horrible. What we did was fucking horrible. We can pretend we give a damn about parlimentary procedure all we want but the story here is that we did awful things to people, many of whom were simply in a shitty place at the shittiest possible time. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Dumb as paint

Via Think Progress, we learn that there is still some confusion over whether or not waterboarding is, in fact, torture:

VAN SUSTEREN: But you said a minute ago that it was torture, waterboarding...

GINGRICH: No, I said it's not something we should do.

VAN SUSTEREN: OK. Is it torture or not?

GINGRICH: I -- I -- I think it's -- I can't tell you.

VAN SUSTEREN: Does it violate the Geneva Convention?

GINGRICH: I honestly don't know.

I have only one question for anyone who is still unsure about whether or not waterboarding is torture: if it's not torture, then how the hell is it supposed to get anyone to talk?

I was surprised to see a Fox host actually press Gingrich on the issue; I think he was, too, which is why he seems to take a position that he doesn't know much about it but he's pretty sure it's bad. This, by the way, is pretty much how I feel about any movie directed by Michael Bay. Torture is a bit more important than Transformers 2, especially for someone like Gingrich who's been gurgling on about running for president in 2012.

Of course, one of the reasons Gingrich comes off looking like such a dolt in that segment is because, he, like everybody else jockeying for leadership of the Republican party, has to somehow reconcile the evidence before his own eyes with the knowledge that a huge chunk of his party's base thinks waterboarding isn't severe enough. Good luck with that, Newt.

Gingrich might be pinned down by electoral considerations, but there was absolutely no excuse for this stupidity:

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans. (Emphasis mine.)

In other words, they tore down what little moral standing America still had in the world without even researching if the techniques they were embracing would work. I can't get my head around that. Not at all. Was this some kind of mad game for them, some kind of sick role-playing? "Well, boys, we can't be serious about this unless we torture a few folks, right?" It didn't even seem to occur to them that soldiers receiving SERE training are subjected to waterboarding under medical supervision and have the option of leaving the program (admittedly, not without consequences to their military careers). They are not detainees, and therefore have a completely different legal status under the Geneva Conventions.

And sometimes the news is good

Read this and then read this.

Lives will be saved by this decision. It's not often that I write about anything I can describe as unequivocally good news - hell, I don't think I've ever been able to do that. But make no mistake - lives will be saved by this decision.

Sometimes the news is, in fact, good.

It was business as usual, in police room 619

Dan Froomkin, Digby, and Atrios have all linked to this Washington Post article about the brutal and ultimately ineffective treatment of Abu Zubaida, whom the Bush Administration claimed was Al Qaeda's "Chief of Operations" and a vital source of information that prevented further terror attacks and saved American lives. Problem is, like so many other things Bush claimed, it's all bullshit, and there's no evidence that the torture of Abu Zubaida provided America's intelligence agencies with anything other than stroke material for Dick Cheney.

Bush, Cheney, and the rest of those sorry bastards, with their constant verbal malaprops, perpetual scowls, cub-reporter-man-whores and old-man-buckshot-bukkake were easy to mock. Lord knows I did my share; I think that's because deep down I couldn't forget that these people were (and remain), for lack of a better term, monsters.  And now I can't help thinking that, just like the core of my mockery of Bush and his cronies was my fear and loathing of them, the root cause of some of Bush and Cheney's most absurd and laughable antics was, in fact, something horrible.

To wit: their periodic noodling with the color-coded terror alerts. It was always good for a few yuks when they nudged it up to orange, or told us to duct tape our household pets' orifices shut - usually and transparently because they needed a boost in their poll numbers. But then I read this:

Finn and Warrick reported that "not a single significant plot was foiled" as a result of Zubaida's brutal treatment -- and that, quite to the contrary, his false confessions "triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms."

Does anyone reading this have any difficulty imagining Cheney ordering a confession beaten out of someone in order to justify tweaking the terror alert, just in case someone called him on it? No, I don't either.

(The picture above is from a contemporary account of waterboarding as used by the Spanish Inquisition. One of my simple rules of thumb is that if the Spanish Inquisition did it, IT'S TORTURE.)

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)

Downtown the young ones are growing

This story, about a teenager charged with tagging a 9/11 memorial mural in New York City, depressed the hell out of me. Not so much because there's a teenager out there clueless enough to think that tagging a memorial mural is a good idea, although that's depressing enough, but mostly because of a comment made by a firefighter who worked out of the same house as the firefighter commemorated on the mural. When interviewed by local cable outlet New York 1 before the tagger's arrest, he (correctly) surmised that the perpetrator was probably a "teenager," someone around nine or ten years old when the 9/11 attacks took place and therefore he probably had no idea what it was all really about.

That got me thinking about how much more aware I became between the ages of nine and seventeen, and that's when the abyss really opened up for me. For all intents and purposes, today's adolescents have come of age knowing nothing but post-9/11 America. Growing up in an age of anxiety is nothing new; I grew up during the height of the Cold War (and I've got the Nena songs on my iPod to prove it) and we actually had to watch and summarize The Day After as a school assignment. (Spoiler alert: Nuclear war sucks ass!) What bothers me is that so many things about post-9/11 America that have outraged many of us are simply the status quo for today's young people. The United States government has always had the ability to monitor your cell phone calls without a warrant. The government has always tracked the books you borrow from the library and the movies you rent from Blockbuster. The government has always been able to declare you an "enemy combatant" and hold you indefinitely without trial or access to counsel. There have always been extraordinary renditions. There has always been a Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay.

The United States has always tortured.

I guess I'm lucky, inasmuch as I grew up in the lull between J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO and today's Patriot Act. Those of you reading this who are old enough to have lived through both probably think I'm a bit naive, and it's a fair charge.  COINTELPRO, however, was ultimately shut down after its excesses were exposed. Our elected leaders stepped in and did their jobs. The Patriot Act continues along its merry way and one of our major party's presidential candidates has declared that he sees nothing wrong with warrantless wiretapping.

This is why accountability matters, and why measures designed to hold our elected leaders accountable when they abuse their power must never be "off the table." What is it like to come of age in a country where rights and freedoms that our leaders claim to be sacrosanct are, in fact, anything but? How will today's young people react - with anger? fear? cynicism? docility?

I know which reaction I'm hoping for, but I have no idea which one we're going to get.

Now Beshrew My Father's Ambition

About a hundred years and two kids ago, or so it feels, sometimes, I had a radio show at my college station. There was a fellow named Rick who came in at five minutes after the hour to read the news - or at least, that's what he was supposed to be doing. Rick's ambition after graduation was to become a conservative pundit. To give you an idea of how long ago this was, the model of conservative punditry at the time was Morton Downey, Jr. (Told you I was older than dirt.) We were a music station, so we didn't really have a show whose format allowed Rick to hone the crucial skills needed to become a pseudo-intellectual carnival barker for our nation's lunatic fringe; therefore, Rick had to find creative ways to make the most of his limited air-time. It began innocently enough, with Rick adding a sports segment to his news report. To this he soon added "Rick's Picks at Aqueduct," for all those kids on campus who were slipping off to OTB between classes or something. Being a freshman, I was just trying to go along to get along, so I didn't even complain when he started wrapping up his newscast with "Rick's Thought for The Week," which was usually a fairly unoriginal four to five minute rant against typical conservative bugbears like affirmative action, women's athletics and the death tax. (Who the hell thinks about the death tax when they're in college? For Christ's sake, go get laid or something.) 

Anyway, I decided that I had finally had enough of Rick the day Rick's Thought for The Week was directed towards "the ladies in the audience." Rick wanted "the ladies" to remember that they had a "duty to America," and the best way they could fulfill that duty was to have no fewer than four children. Now, Rick understood that "most of you ladies" were probably more concerned with having a good career and such, but the defense of our nation must come before all that - and by having at least four children, two "could be sent to the army" while the other two could remain with the family so "you ladies" wouldn't "get lonely."

Rick never made it out of his chair. I cut his mike, walked around the console, rolled him out of the studio and locked the door behind him. It was a small studio, and frankly being that close to that kind of stupid was unnerving and I feared contagion.

Now, as Bill Cosby used to say back when was still funny, I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Conservatives as a whole and the Christian right in particular have been saying for decades that large families - "full quivers" of children - are essential for a strong nation. This rhetoric is becoming increasingly frenzied now that they have decided America and Europe's declining birth rates mean Christian civilization is ceding the planet to Islam - and, by Christian civilization they mean white people, since the overwhelmingly Christian population of Latin America never seems to get mentioned in this discussion. Pat Buchanan wrote a whole book dedicated to this idea, and I have seen more than one conservative blogger lament that we probably wouldn't have a manpower shortage in Iraq if we didn't have so many abortions in this country. 'Cause, you know, had those pregnancies been carried to term all those people would have signed up to go to Iraq, Iraq being so awesome and all.

The sexist overtones of this position are obvious, and ably demolished here by Echidne; seeing as she's about ten times smarter and five times more talented than me I'll let her handle that.  I find this whole line of thinking disturbing for another reason: as a parent, it is utterly incomprehensible to me that anyone would even consider conceiving a child for the express purpose of that child being used as cannon fodder in the culture wars.

And make no mistake about it: that's exactly what these people claim it is our duty to do. "Pro-family" activist groups such as the World Council for Families actually use language like "full quivers of children" and refer to children as "arrows for the war." Then, without a hint of irony, they turn around and accuse non-breeding men and women of child-bearing age of being excessively self-centered.

The title of this post comes from Shakespeare's Henry V; it's from the scene where Henry's struggling to woo the French princess and having limited success due to the language barrier and the fact that he's just killed most of her family. Henry tries to explain to her that his fierce looks are due to his father "thinking of civil wars when he got me." I don't believe in the medieval science of physiognomy, but it does seem obvious to me that something very similar would happen to children born for the sole purpose of stemming the rising Muslim tide: while they may seem perfectly ordinary on the outside, I believe a certain ugliness of spirit might overtake them. It seems inevitable, given the mindset of the parents - people who are so afraid of the other that they transform what should be a joyous and creative act into a salvo against their perceived enemies aren't likely to be the most enlightened and nurturing folk. And how on earth would you ever have that conversation with your kid? "Billy, there's something you need to know. Mommy and I decided to have you because we need more white people in the world ." Holy crap.

Rick, who I discussed above, is obviously an extreme example of this type of thinking but not particularly so. While most "pro-family" activists don't come out and say you're breeding for the army, for conflict, you don't have to be especially sensitive to detect that subtext. But what if none of your kids want to join the army? What if they all decide that the whole idea is bonkers and for that matter you are too? What then? I guess it's possible to run roughshod over your children's free will - it happens all the time. But there's no way I could ever "choose" which of my kids was to be sent off to join the military, and I don't know how these people expect to be able to do that.

Then again, I have a sneaking suspicion that they aren't thinking that far ahead.

See No Evil

I've been wondering when this was going to start. YouTube has pulled the plug on an Egyptian activist who was using his channel to post evidence of torture and police brutality in his home country, apparently because of his graphic and shocking content. The activist, blogger Wael Abbas, was previously instrumental in distributing a clip that led to the arrest and conviction of two Egyptian police officers for sodomizing a prisoner. YouTube has brought his work - and the work of other Egyptian activists like him - to an even wider audience.

It seems viewers were complaining about the disturbing nature of his videos, although one wonders why someone who would be disturbed by video of police brutality and torture clicked on a video clearly labeled as depicting police brutality and torture. (It should be noted that YouTube policy strictly forbids posting videos depicting graphic violence and YouTube is completely within their rights to suspend Abbas' account. It should also be noted that YouTube rarely acts to remove content or shut down accounts unless someone complains. With the incredibly vast amount of material posted to YouTube on a daily basis, it's virtually impossible to police the site any other way.) Calls for censorship in the name of decency have always been one of the most effective tools for restricting access to information, whether that information concerns sex education or evidence of governmental wrongdoing. Who wants to be the one to stand up in the public square and declare that its OK for video of police officers sodomizing prisoners to be posted where children might stumble across it?  It should be - the responsibility for monitoring what kids watch on YouTube falls squarely with their parents in my book.

But still, "decency" trumps all. How many disturbing images of what really happened at Abu Ghraib did we not see because CNN considered them too graphic, too disturbing? That's what makes the "decency" argument so infuriating to me - it gives the people who control our access to information the perfect dodge for not pursiung an important story. (Of course, the decency argument did not apply when media pundits saw fit to describe the really juicy bits of the Starr Report in explicit detail.)  What other stories are we missing out on because they don't want to "disturb" us? It's worth noting that other Eygptian bloggers aren't certain YouTube's actions are due to pressure from the Egyptian government:

Elijah Zarwan, a prominent blogger in Egypt, said he thought it unlikely that YouTube had come under official Egyptian pressure to suspend Abbas's page.

He claimed it was more plausible that the site was reacting to the graphic nature of the videos. "I suspect they are doing it not under pressure from the Egyptian government, but rather because it made American viewers squeamish," he said.

(Hat tip to Moonbootica via the Crack Den.)