« March 2009 | Main | June 2009 »
I've written a new feature article for my other blog, Demockracy, which focuses on public policy. The article is about why President Obama and the Democrats shouldn't care whether or not the Republicans are on board for health care reform; they don't even need the Republicans.
Glenn Greenwald, you brilliant man, you. Once again, he points out that the media consider a unilateral condemnation on torture to be a a "left" or "hard left" phenomenon. Why is it radical to condemn torture? Why is it radical for a president to be honest about what has been going on in the name of the United States? As Jon Stewart pointed out on Tuesday's The Daily Show, TV pundits are shocked -- shocked! -- that the government would acknowledge that we tortured! That's what they're upset about. They couldn't care less that the United States tortured people (and, by all accounts, we got our intelligence from the people we captured before we tortured them); they care that we admitted to it. Also, Greenwald noted in a Twitter post yesterday that the use of the phrase "torture debate" normalizes torture. Suddenly, when there is a "debate," there are two legitimate opposing sides, and thus torture, which should be unilaterally wrong in all instances, is open for speculation on whether or not it's legal, useful, and ethical. Again, the false dichotomy: by saying that there are two sides to every issue, the opposition's argument -- however wrong -- is legitimized as it is brought up to the status of "debate," when in fact there shouldn't even be a question that torture is wrong, wrong, wrong.
How wrong is torture? Sen. John McCain reminded us, in 2007 (when he was against torture before he was in favor of it), that some Japanese soldiers were executed after World War II for waterboarding American soldiers.
In today's New York Times, the FBI interrogator who interrogated (not tortured! Seriously; both the FBI and the U.S. military refused to engage in the torture the CIA willingly participated in) Abu Zubaydah refutes the Bush administration argument that torturing Zubaydah provided actionable intelligence:
There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn't, or couldn't have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions -- all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.
And, by the way, 24 is not real and torture doesn't work.
Former Massachusetts Governor and presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who for some reason is still asked his opinion about things, thinks that investigating Bush administration officials for their complicity in torture is just "partisanship." I suppose this means that mercilessly investigating Bill Clinton for eight years in order to get something, anything, to stick and then unsuccessfully impeaching him for perjury is ... justice?
Thankfully, Obama contradicted the statements of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs by saying that it's up to the Attorney General to decide whether or not to prosecute people for torture.
Paul Krugman connects the dots after eight years and discovers a Grand Unified Scandal going on in our name:
Let's say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.There's a word for this: it's evil.
According to Ron Suskind, author of The One Percent Doctrine, you can correlate the torture timeline with the events leading up to the Iraq War, providing support for the argument that torture was not used to prevent another terrorist attack, but was instead used to find support -- any support -- for an invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. Former Vice President Cheney, however, has waffled on the issue of government secrecy. Once the champion of making sure the American people have no idea what their government is doing, Cheney instead wants the CIA to declassify memos showing how effective torture was. That makes it okay!
All of this revelation doesn't stop Fox News' Shepard Smith from putting his head in the sand. It's as though he's having a flashback to when he was eight years old and woke up in the middle of the night to find his mother replacing the tooth under his pillow with a dollar bill.
One more interesting observation: the Spanish government wants to prosecute six former Bush administration officials for holding and torturing five Spanish residents in Guantanamo Bay. If the U.S. government can lay claim to "extraordinary rendition," then why can't Spain order the kidnapping and rendition of such U.S. citizens as John Yoo and Jay Bybee?
But none of these revelations stop Roger Cohen from telling us to let bygones be bygones. Imagine if we told that to Simon Weisenthal? Germany still wants to have John Demjanjuk extradited to stand trial for crimes he committed as a prison guard during the Holocaust, despite his old age. The Justice Department retroactively revoked his U.S. citizenship because he lied about being a Nazi prison guard. Why don't they look forward, and not backward?