Cave Dwellers: More Democratic Deceit on War and Torture
The Washington Post reports that Congressional Democrats are preparing to sign off on a spending bill that will, once again, pour tens of billions of dollars into the ongoing war crime in Iraq. The exact figure is not yet known, because Bush's willing executioners among both parties have rigged up a complicated and deliberately deceitful process to shield the true nature of their craven kowtowing to the bloodstained, filth-encrusted White House autocrat.
(For more on the autocratic, lawless nature of the Bush Regime, see Jonathan Schwarz, Marcy Wheeler, and Scott Horton, and this as well.)
Here's how the scam will work. First, House Democrats will offer up an initial lowball figure -- "only" $30 billion or so -- and claim, falsely, that the funds are intended for the war in Afghanistan and other Pentagon projects, even though "all sides in the deal recognize [that the money] could be shifted to fund the Iraq war," as the Post reports.
Then, the Democrat's so-called leader in the Senate, Harry "Shaky Knees" Reid, will "allow Republicans to increase that amount to avert a filibuster of the spending bill in the Senate." At that point, with the bill now swollen to, say, $70 billion or so for the Iraq war crime (and this is short-term, stop-gap spending, mind you), it will go back to the House, whose "leaders" will then accept the "compromise" reached in the Senate, and send the bill to the murderous, sadistic wretch in the Oval Office.
And that, boys and girls, is the way that the Potomac Empire operates: wilful deceit in the service of undeniable evil.
[For more on the long-term, bipartisan nature of this system, see the indispensable Arthur Silber here.]
However, there could be one possible glitch in the plan. It seems that the Democrats have asked for $11 billion in domestic spending to be included in the deal. It is thought that some Republicans -- and the White House -- will balk at throwing any more coins at the rabble they rule with such cynicism and contempt. Yet even this begged sop represents a cave-in by the Democrats. The Post reports that Shaky Knees last month "signaled that the Democrats were willing to halve their initial request of $22 billion in additional domestic spending, setting 'boundaries for the current debate in which $11 billion serves as the new ceiling." In other words, Reid gave away half the game before the negotiations even started.
On GOP aide quoted by the Post called this move "a bargaining mistake" by Reid. But it is highly doubtful that this was a "mistake" of any kind. It was instead just another instance of the long-running system of deception that allows each side to strike poses before its partisan base, while working feverishly behind the scenes to serve its true masters: the corporate, militarist and financial elites. In this round of the game, Reid and the Democrats posture as champions of the middle class and the poor, playing to the old New Deal base, while the Republicans get to prance around in their threadbare "anti-Big Guvmint" robes. The reality, of course, is that the welfare of the common people has declined precipitously over the past few decades, while government has grown by leaps and bounds -- no matter which party is ostensibly in power.
Thus the final "negotiations" between these cynical factions will see a further cut in the domestic spending option, while the funding for the rapine in Iraq will sail through. There is one other possibility: Bush might refuse to sign the bill if any new domestic spending whatsoever is included. In that case, the outcome is equally certain: the Democrats will once again "cave" -- i.e., do right by their true masters -- and the war crime will go on as before. The Democrats are not going to do anything to stop this crime -- because they are part of it. They are not going to do anything to bring the perpetrators to justice -- because they are deeply complicit in every death engendered by the war as well.
UPDATE: Just as I was finishing up the piece above, fresh confirmation came -- via the Post again -- of the knowing collusion of the Democratic leadership in the worst crimes of the Bush Administration. In this case, it is the foul torture regimen personally instituted by George W. Bush and his top minions, including physical abuses used by Nazi Germany in its torture chambers and psychological torments devised by the KGB and North Korea.
As the Post reports, top members of Congress -- a bipartisan group including Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi -- were given a full description of the Bush-Cheney torture program in September 2002. Some 30 other private briefings with Democratic and Republican leaders followed. In these sessions, the legislators were fully informed on the nature of the tortures, including waterboarding -- a heinous technique for which German and Japanese officials were hanged after World War II.
During Pelosi's 2002 visit, it seems that the Congressional leaders questioned only one aspect of the torture program:
"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.
These new revelations are an outgrowth of the recent discovery that the CIA destroyed direct evidence of their "intense interrogation" of the mentally unbalanced, low-level al Qaeda factotum, Abu Zubaydah. (For more on the Zubaydah case, see the Horton story noted above.) This criminal obstruction of justice is so glaring and indefensible that the Bush Administration is obviously trying to muddy the waters by leaking word of the briefings to Democratic leaders. "We're all in on it," the Bushists are signaling; "we all knew about it -- so it's no big deal. If the Dems want to say we're dirty, they're dirty too."
This is a classic Karl Rove tactic. (Oh, you think he's gone, do you, no longer pulling any strings for the White House?) You spread the muck around, instill a sense of general disgust with politics among the electorate ("A plague on both their houses!"), which drives away the majority of voters, leaving a clearer field for your rabid rightwing base.
It also plays to the corporate media's lazy tropes. "Hey look, the Dems were in on this thing, it had bipartisan backing all the way. So if anybody on that side wants to criticize it now, it's just partisan posturing." This serves the media's need to reduce every aspect of public life and policy to "the usual Beltway bickering."
Finally the leak is also a warning shot to the Democrats: "If we go down because of this, you're going down too -- in fact, the whole damn system, the great golden goose, the endless supply of pork and graft that's made us all rich and powerful, could go down as well."
And of course, all of this is true. The Democrats are in on it too, deeply complicit in the torture and war atrocities. There is much hypocrisy in their very belated, very timid, very limited -- and deliberately ineffectual -- criticisms of waterboarding, aggressive war, presidential dictatorship, etc. And it is certainly true that the whole political system has become steeped in evil: dependent on war, dependent on corruption, dependent on deceit, and lawless to an astonishing degree. If Bush and his gang really were brought to the full measure of justice for their crimes -- and if the full extent of these crimes were to be exposed clearly and copiously -- then the system might indeed collapse, unable any longer to keep up the deliberate lies -- and the deep-seated self-deceptions -- that have allowed it to destroy so many innocent lives, for so many years, in so many countries...including our own.
But you know and I know that this is not going to happen. As with the outrageously cynical "enabling act" for the Iraq war crime noted above, here too with these new revelations about destruction of evidence and Democratic knowledge of torture, we will see the usual striking of ritual poses, while the game -- the deep, dark, dirty, sickening game -- goes on.
UPDATE II: As usual, Arthur Silber is already on the case, but I didn't see his piece on the torture story until now. He lays out well the history that makes this latest revelation of bipartisan partnership in torture less than "news," and makes an eloquent call for a response that we have touched on occasionally here and elsewhere: non-recognition of any authority or legitimacy of the evildoers who rule over us, and their partners. Go read the whole piece, but I'll leave you with Silber's conclusion:
I do not want to be misunderstood on this point, so let me state it as plainly as I can. The time is long since past for every minimally decent American to take a stand: either you are on the side of civilization and humanity, and the irreplaceable, supreme value of an individual human life -- or you are on the side of evil, brutality, torture, sadism, genocidal war, and endless death. The Democrats and the Republicans both stand for Empire, and for the endless horrors already inflicted -- and the endless horrors that still lie in our future....
At this terrible moment in history, we must call things by their proper names. Let the world know where you stand: for life, and the possibility of joy and happiness -- or for death, and cruelty, barbarism and the repetition of horrors that the monsters among us insist on reviving when given the opportunity.
If you choose to support evil and to embody evil yourself, I suggest you follow the vile example of the current administration: do so without apology, and brazenly revel in the evil you choose to inflict on the world. It is far more contemptible -- and, to speak personally, it is sickening beyond my capacity to describe accurately , in significant part because of the complex psychological dishonesties that are required -- to enable evil, while claiming you represent the "moral" and "practical" choice. These are the justifications used by those who made possible the cruelest and most unspeakably horrifying regimes in history, as Mayer's witness and many others attest.
Withdraw your support entirely from those who perpetrate and make excuses for evil. If the refusal to support such people were widespread enough, we still might have a chance. I regard it as the very slightest of chances, one that will almost certainly be destroyed by another significant terrorist attack in the United States -- but it is the only one we have.
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Powered by www.communicationpro.org Before the Flood: The Great Storm Building Beneath the "Surge"
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Jonathan Steele offers a good analysis of the situation in Iraq: another glimpse at the truth behind the "surge success" propaganda, which, as Steele notes, has completely defanged the already feeble Democratic "opposition" to the murderous enterprise. The piece is worth reading in full, and excerpting at length. He begins by noting the shameful silence that greeted the Bush-Maliki announcement of plans for an "agreement" between the conqueror and his vassals for an "enduring" American military presence in Iraq:
More alarming was the Democratic party's reaction and indeed that of the US media. The revelation produced no burst of headlines or commentaries, even though it rides roughshod over most Americans' wishes. A Pew Research poll two weeks ago found 54% wanted the troops home "as soon as possible".
Yet the Democratic contenders for the presidency barely murmured. The passion for a clear timetable of an early US troop pullout that was raging in large sections of the Democratic party last spring, in the weeks after it regained control of the House and Senate, has fizzled out.
Whatever effect Bush's "surge" of extra troops has had in Iraq, it has clearly worked in Washington. The Democrats are in retreat, and the Bush strategy of entrenching the Iraq occupation still further and handing the mess to his successor is proceeding virtually unopposed.
Hillary Clinton, in a recent article in the journal Foreign Affairs, pledged to maintain US troops in Iraq indefinitely to train and equip Iraqi forces, as well as keeping "specialised units" to protect the trainers and confront al-Qaida. She would also leave troops in the northern Kurdish regions. Barack Obama told the New York Times last month that he would need 16 months after taking office to withdraw all US combat troops from Iraq, and would retain a residual force on an open-ended basis "to counter terrorism". He might decide this force would be better based outside Iraq, he suggested, so his position is marginally better than Clinton's. Neither candidate is willing to propose a total US troop withdrawal, as the US agreed in Vietnam in 1973 when it finally resolved to end its disastrous involvement there.
The Democrats' new softness flows in part from the reduction in US combat deaths. The so-called Awakening movement by some Sunni tribal leaders to take arms and money from the Americans to turn against al-Qaida in Iraq has reduced the difficulties for US troops. There is also a perception, carefully nurtured in General David Petraeus's statistical charts and testimony to Congress in September, that the back of the Iraqi resistance has been broken. Now the Iraqi government is trumpeting the fact that thousands of Iraqi refugees are coming home as further proof of a turning security tide.
But none of these indicators is firm. The figures for returning refugees are contested, with the Iraqi government counting anyone who crosses into Iraq even though many had only gone abroad on short visits and were never refugees. Many genuine refugees leave Syria in desperation because their money or visas have run out, not because they feel safe in going back.
When I talked to families in a muddy bus station on the outskirts of Damascus last week as they set off home, I found only Shias. "Of course Sunnis are afraid to go. The buses are provided by the Shia-led Iraqi government and Iraqi police will check them at the border," an Iraqi Sunni told me later. His comment underlined the continuing depth of sectarian suspicions. Sunnis assume the Iraqi police, who are mainly Shias, are either in league with Shia militias and death squads or will behave just as badly. They fear being abducted or slaughtered on the way.
Sunni concerns over Shia militias also explain the Awakening movement. Although Sunni tribal leaders are taking US arms and cash, ostensibly to confront al-Qaida, they see value in getting organised to protect their suburbs from Shia raids. The Americans may be temporarily helping to reduce violence, but their tactics help to build up Sunni militias for possible attacks on Shias in the future. Once again the Americans are looking for a military solution to what is essentially a political problem. Without national reconciliation and dialogue between Sunni and Shia community leaders - a process which neither the government of Nuri al-Maliki nor General Petraeus seems able or willing to broker - the underlying issues remain unresolved.
The Iraqi resistance is also undimmed. The nationalist Shia cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, has called a unilateral ceasefire, which is largely holding while the US troop "surge" is under way. The Sunni resistance is doing much the same, though without formally declaring it. As I was told by a senior resistance spokesman in Damascus, many nationalist groups have reduced their attacks in western Baghdad and parts of Anbar province while regrouping and retraining.
A few weeks earlier I spoke to one of the spiritual fathers of the Sunni insurgency, Sheikh Harith al-Dhari, now in exile in Amman. The head of the Association of Muslim Scholars, he argued that the Awakening movement only represented a small proportion of Sunni tribal leaders. "The situation in Anbar is very bad, and many are out of work and impoverished. Some will work with anyone who pays them, whether it is al-Qaida or the US army. I agree the attacks on US forces in Anbar have gone down, but in a few months they may go up again. The US is building its hopes on a small trend. It doesn't follow it will continue," he said.
His remarks chimed with a poll conducted in mid-August for the BBC and ABC news. It found Anbar was still the strongest bastion of hostile anti-US opinion in Iraq. While criticising al-Qaida's attacks on civilians, every Anbar respondent supported attacks on US forces: 70% wanted them to leave immediately, a higher figure than in a March poll before the "surge".
One day Iraqi resistance leaders will have to be brought into negotiations. They are a legitimate factor in the complex Iraqi equation. National reconciliation which attempts to exclude people who have sacrificed so much in the struggle against foreign occupation has no chance of succeeding. The pre-condition - as happened when the Vietnam war ended - has to be a clear declaration by Washington that it is going altogether, with no bases or "residual forces" left behind. Only then will Iraqis come to the negotiating table seriously, and work out a future that does not leave an elephant in the room.
But of course, this is precisely what is not going to happen as long as one member or another of Washington's "bipartisan foreign policy establishment" is in charge. Neither the Republicans or Democrats want the Iraqis to work out their own future; both parties want a compliant client state, with its oil resources opened to favored Western firms. And both parties want to retain American military dominance of the region. Barring some miraculous epiphany of wisdom and moral courage in the next occupant of the White House -- which is almost inconceivable, given the gaggle of third-rate goobers being offered up as "major," "serious" candidates and likely winners -- we are certainly destined to see much more bloodshed, more atrocity, more chaos and deadly privation in Iraq, until, at last, as in Vietnam, the Americans are driven out by force.
It doesn't have to be that way; but everything in the historical record of the "bipartisan foreign policy establishment" tells us that it will be that way. They went into Iraq in order to control it, by hook or crook, in one way or another; that's what they want, that's why they are there. And that's why they will never willingly do the one thing that might -- just might -- ease some of the vast suffering, the vast evil, they have inflicted on Iraq: leave.
*(The New York Times has more on the fragility of the surge's "success." As does Juan Cole at Salon.com.)*
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Powered by www.communicationpro.org Special Relationship: Global Snatch and Grab is the Law of the Land
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The "rule of law" will never be anything more than what the human beings alive at the time in a given society make of it. It depends entirely on the character of those who fashion, interpret and uphold the law – and on the public's attitude toward it.
The government of the United States has officially informed the courts of Her Majesty the Queen that Her Majesty's subjects may be kidnapped (and that was the precise term used by the government of the United States) by agents of the United States at any time – and there is not a bloody thing that Her Majesty can do about it.
And you thought "extraordinary rendition" was just for "terrorists"? No, the Bush Regime has decreed that this bounty extends to every human being on the face of the earth. (And yes, Virginia, it also applies to U.S. citizens kidnapped on U.S. soil – just ask Jose Padilla. No wait, you can't ask him; his mind has been destroyed by the years of torture and isolation that was inflicted on him before the Regime finally tried him on minor charges.)
This week, The Times reported on a remarkable appearance before the UK's Court of Appeal by Alun Jones, QC, representing the American government. Jones told the slack-jawed jurists:
that it was acceptable under American law to kidnap people if they were wanted for offences in America. "The United States does have a view about procuring people to its own shores which is not shared," he said.
He said that if a person was kidnapped by the US authorities in another country and was brought back to face charges in America, no US court could rule that the abduction was illegal and free him: "If you kidnap a person outside the United States and you bring him there, the court has no jurisdiction to refuse — it goes back to bounty hunting days in the 1860s."
Of course, there is nowt surprising in any of this. As I have been reporting in various venues since November 2001, George W. Bush has long claimed the arbitrary right not only to kidnap and imprison anyone on earth he pleases, but also to have them killed, without charge or trial or any legal procedure. What's more, he has even delegated this literal license to kill to selected U.S. agents in the field, who have been given the green light to assassinate victims on their own initiative, without an OK from Washington.
As we've noted before, this remains one of the great unspoken scandals of the entire bloodsoaked reign of the Crawford Caligula. Brief glimpses of this imperial murder program were offered by Regime insiders in the first heady weeks after 9/11 (the "new Pearl Harbor" which that proto-Bush Administration, Project for the New American Century, openly pined for in election year 2000); the Bushists were eager to show that "the gloves are off," with CIA agents exulting, "We're killing people!" and Cheney himself muttering on national television about working "the dark side, if you will." So for a time you could find stories in the mainstream press where Regime officials boasted of "renditioning" captives to foreign toture chambers, and revealed secret executive orders asserting the president's arbitrary power over the liberty and life of the global population.
Then these stories dried up – probably about the time that Bush's own torture program took off in earnest, and the Administration began hiding what they fully realized were capital crimes under U.S. law. Now no one in the great, good, bipartisan media-political establishment ever mentions these Caesarian powers – except, oddly enough, Bush himself, who once boasted openly of the extrajudicial killings he had ordered: on national television, before Congress, in the State of the Union address just weeks before he ordered the act of aggression against Iraq. (For more on this, see "Fatal Vision: The Deeper Evil Behind the Detainee Bill.")
Given all this, a claim that a bunch of Limeys are fair game for kidnapping is actually pretty small beer for this crew.
The Times story has been making the rounds on the larboard side of the political blogosphere. For example, lawyer and blogger Scott Horton says Bush's kidnapping claims in the UK court are a ludicrous perversion of U.S. law:
This is not U.S. law, it is a Bush Administration hallucination as to U.S. law. The sort of nightmare that comes flowing freely from the pen of John Yoo or David Addington. 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.
Alas, it is the attitude of a criminal who imagines himself busy enforcing the law, even as he holds himself above the law. It is the attitude which has brought our nation low in the world and threatens more damage still.
I hate to disagree with Horton, who is often astute in his analyses (and has done heroic work in exposing the political imprisonment of former Alabama governor Don Siegelman), but in this case, I think he's wrong. It looks like the Bushists are in fact correct in their claim: this extraordinary procedure has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court; it is "U.S. law." As the Times notes:
[Jones] cited the case of Humberto Alvarez Machain, a suspect who was abducted by the US government at his medical office in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1990. He was flown by Drug Enforcement Administration agents to Texas for criminal prosecution. Although there was an extradition treaty in place between America and Mexico at the time — as there currently is between the United States and Britain — the Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that the Mexican had no legal remedy because of his abduction.
And if you go back to that 1992 ruling – written by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the old vote-suppressing partisan hack foisted on the Court as a bitter joke by Richard Nixon – you will indeed find the supreme arbiters of law in the United States overturning a series of lower court rulings and affirming the right of government agents – or even bounty hunters hired by the government – to kidnap people from foreign countries and bring them to trial in the United States. Rehnquist cites an 1882 case, Kerr v. Illinois, as the chief precedent, and notes that it was upheld again in 1952:
This Court has never departed from the rule announced in [Kerr] that the power of a court to try a person for crime is not impaired by the fact that he had been brought within the court's jurisdiction by reason of a 'forcible abduction.' No persuasive reasons are now presented to justify overruling this line of cases. They rest on the sound basis that due process of law is satisfied when one present in court is convicted of crime after having been fairly apprized of the charges against him and after a fair trial in accordance with constitutional procedural safeguards. There is nothing in the Constitution that requires a court to permit a guilty person rightfully convicted to escape justice because he was brought to trial against his will.
Even Rehnquist recognized that Machain "may be correct that [his] abduction was 'shocking'…and that it may be in violation of general international law principles." But as anyone who has opened their eyes for more than ten seconds during the past century will have observed, "general international law principles" mean absolutely nothing when a powerful state wishes to have its way.
Rehnquist – and now Bush – relies on the ludicrous fig-leaf argument that because such abductions are not specifically prohibited by extradition treaties, then they are "legal." This is of course using the letter of the law to strangle its spirit -- and its plain, common-sense meaning: any extradition treaty that allows one party to pluck the other's citizens from their own soil and haul them back to a foreign land for trial is a bitter sham. But again, this is the way of the world: might makes right, and "law" is bent to accommodate the interests of the powerful.
It would be nice to believe, with Horton, that this current claim of the Bush Regime is some kind of nightmarish perversion of U.S. law, some terrible falling away from a former golden age, when the United States never failed to "recognize the sovereignty of foreign states [and] the solemn commitments of U.S. governments over the last two centuries in treaties and conventions." [You might want to ask, say, the Iraqis – or the Cherokee – about this sometime.] It would be nice to believe that "the rule of law" would somehow save us, if it could only be "restored." But the fact is, the Bush Regime could go back and find a precedent in "law" for almost all of their atrocities; and indeed, almost every depredation in American history – slavery and Jim Crow, military incursions, covert actions, the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, etc. – have been regarded as "legal." (Dred Scott, anyone? Or how about Bush v. Gore?)
Yes, we should continue to pursue the vision of law as an impartial arbiter, a vessel of justice, equality and comity, and a brake upon the unrestrained exercise of raw power. It is a worthy goal, calling us to rise above the baser elements of our nature – the mud and blood and greed and fear and ape-like lust for dominance. But we should not ignore what law can be – and so often is – in our degraded reality: a blunt instrument of hegemony; a fig leaf for crime and "shocking" violations of legal and moral principles; and, in the immortal words of Dickens' Mr. Bumble, "an ass."
The "rule of law" will never be anything more than what the human beings alive at the time in a given society make of it. It depends entirely on the character of those who fashion, interpret and uphold the law – and on the public's attitude toward it. Are they acquiescent and servile in the face of rank abuses of the law on behalf of the powerful? Or do they stand up strongly for their rights, for their dignity as citizens, and for equal justice under the law?
I think the historical record of our times clearly shows how the vast majority of the people of the United States have answered – and are answering – these vital questions.
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Powered by www.communicationpro.org More War is Job One: Torturing the Truth on Iran
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Anyone hoping that the "no nukes in Iran" NIE report might hobble the Administration's armed march toward Persia should take note of how George W. Bush moved the goal posts in his warmongering game during a press conference on Tuesday.
As the New York Times reports, Bush declared that Iran will not be "allowed" to acquire even the "scientific knowledge" required to build a nuclear weapon. Previous "red lines" which could trigger an attack had been based on Iran actually building a weapon; now even nibbling at the forbidden fruit of nuclear knowledge could serve as "justification" for a "pre-emptive strike" to quell the "danger." After all, as Bush rather illiterately told reporters, "What's to say they couldn't start another covert nuclear weapons program?" Better safe than sorry, right?
And at the very least, moving the goalposts in this manner will allow the Bush Regime to portray Iran as a dangerous, defiant menace for merely carrying on with its fully legal nuclear power program, as authorized by international treaty and monitored by the IAEA. Thus no matter what Iran actually does – or doesn't do – the Bushists will continue to use the "Persian menace" as fodder for the imperial war machine. [Josh Marshall notes how Bush laid the groundwork for this shift in his "World War III" press conference in October.]
[And as noted here yesterday, we again see this "damaging" NIE being used by the Regime to "confirm" its earlier contention that Iran indeed had a nuclear weapons program prior to 2003. This trope has already been adopted by every news story on the subject, and by almost all bloggers as well. (Including Marshall in the above-linked post, although he does put in an "apparently" when referring to the alleged pre-2003 weapons program.) Yet if the hardline, saber-rattling 2005 NIE on Iran had no hard evidence of an Iranian nuke-bomb program, then where did the go-softly, let's-talk 2007 NIE come up with any? Remember, the change in emphasis between the two documents stems, we are told, from new evidence showing that Iran has no active weapons program. If hard evidence of an existing weapons scheme before 2003 had actually been found, you can be sure the Bush Regime would be trumpeting it to the rooftops right now. I would imagine that the 2003 angle has been thrown in there either as a face-saving sop to the White House, or as a deliberate plant by the White House – or more likely, as a devious massaging of the new intelligence. The latter, if it actually exists, probably comes from a source whose involvement in the Iranian nuclear program either began sometime after 2003, or else was able to confirm to U.S. intelligence that "those activities which you believed were associated with a weapons program were not continued after 2003." What those activities might have been, and their actual relevance to a weapons program, will doubtless remain one of those Rumsfeldian unknown unknowns. In any case, as Arthur Silber pointed out yesterday: "The second you start arguing about intelligence, you've given the game away once again. This is a game the government and the proponents of war will always win. By now, we all surely know that if they want the intelligence to show that Country X is a 'grave' and 'growing' threat, they will find it or manufacture it. So once you're debating what the intelligence shows or fails to show, the debate is over."]
In seeking to prohibit Iran from acquiring the scientific knowledge to build a bomb, Bush is once again employing one of the Regime's most effective methods of fueling the wars and rumors of war that "justify" the "unitary executive's" tyrannical power grabs, keep the populace in a proper state of fear and confusion – and gorge the military-industrial complex with blood money: the Impossible Crusade.
As we all know, Bush has declared war on "Terror": a "long war," a "multi-generational war," a war without end…against an abstract noun, against an ever-elusive, ever-elastic, ill-defined concept which can never be "defeated" because it is, literally, no thing. It is just a name applied to various actions at various times. (Who can forget how Ronald Reagan's "freedom fighters" from the international jihadi army in Afghanistan became the "Islamofascists" who now threaten the very existence of Western Civilization?)
In like fashion, Bush has now declared war on "scientific knowledge" about nuclear weapons. (He has also declared war on many other forms of scientific knowledge, of course, but that's a story for another day.) Yet as Jonathan Schell points out in an excellent interview with Tom Englehardt, that genie is long gone from the bottle:
The bomb itself is the fruit of basic twentieth-century discoveries in physics, specifically its most renowned equation -- energy equals mass times the speed of light squared -- which gives the amount of energy that's released in nuclear weapons. Being rooted in science, the bomb is a mental construct to begin with, which means it's always present and will always be present, even if we do get rid of the hardware. The bomb in the mind will be there forever.
So, before any physical bomb existed, there was the bomb as conceived by scientists, destined, sooner or later, to become available to all competent and technical minds in the world. What follows, of course, is that a growing list of countries -- at present probably around 50 -- are able to have nuclear weapons if they so decide. What, in turn, follows is that, if those countries are not going to have the bomb, it will only be because they have made a political decision not to have it.
And what follows no less surely is that this global issue cannot be solved by any means but the political. More specifically, it can't be solved by military force....
For the bomb is misconceived as just a piece of hardware, or even many pieces of hardware scattered around the world. It is essentially, originally, and everlastingly a set of scientific and technological capacities open to all and coming at you, in a certain sense, from all directions at all times. As soon as you put out the fire over here, another is likely to spring up over there, and so on. Military force is singularly inappropriate for facing this conundrum and yet that's what the Bush administration chose. It's like trying to dispel a mist with a machine gun, just the wrong instrument for the job.
But of course, as we have often noted before, the Bush Administration is not really interested in stopping nuclear proliferation. Rather, the Bushists are interested in using nuclear proliferation as a fearmongering goad to advance their agenda of dominion and loot. The fact that it is impossible to eliminate or control the scientific knowledge of nuclear weapons only makes it a more potent tool for stoking permanent war fever: it will always be out there, it's a "dire threat" that will never go away.
As Schell wisely notes, military force is indeed singularly inappropriate for resolving a political issue like nuclear proliferation. But it is manifestly the right instrument for imposing your will on others. And that is the "job" that the Bush Regime is pursuing with such dogged determination.
UPDATE: Iran expert Farideh Farhi has a surreal moment while hearing the unstoppable vomiting of lies coming from George Bush's mouth in his press conference about Iran. But we have to agree with one of Fahri's commenters: method, not madness or ignorance, is behind Bush's crude lies. He knows that the corporate media will not call him on his bare-faced, self-serving revision of the historical record, so he feels free to invent and pervert as he sees fit. Still, it's good to see some of the lies flayed open – for those who still care about such things. Obviously, our high media mandarins don't.
From "What is George Bush Smoking?":
...But being an "Iran person," my moment of utter disbelief came when I heard him say this in the news conference:
"People say, would you ever talk to Iran? For you veterans here, for those who have been following this administration for a while, you might remember that I have consistently said that we will be at the table with the EU-3 if Iran would verifiably suspend their program -- and the offer still stands. What changed was the change of leadership in Iran. We had a diplomatic track going, and Ahmadinejad came along and took a different tone. And the Iranian people must understand that the tone and actions of their government are that which is isolating them...But their leadership is going to have to understand that defiance, and hiding programs and defying IAEA is not the way forward. And my hope is, is that the Iranian regime takes a look at their policies and changes their policies back to where we were prior to the election of Ahmadinejad, which was a hopeful period. They had suspended their program, they were at the table. The United States had made some very positive gestures to convince them that there was a better way forward. And hopefully we can get back to that day."
This goes even beyond deception and reaches the level of unreal. The man must either think that no one is watching or he must have really convinced himself that prior to Ahmadinejad things were going all swell with Iran.
Just for the record, it is important to remember that the inclusion of Iran as a standing member of axis of evil came in May 2002 when the reformist Mohammad Khatami was president and after Iran and the United States had cooperated in Afghanistan. It was also during the Khatami presidency, in 2003 and beyond, that the Bush Administration reportedly ignored Iran's offer of a deal and continuously complained about the European track to negotiate with Iran. In fact, as late as spring and summer of 2005, until the last days of Khatami's presidency, the Bush Administration refused to allow the Europeans to entertain any scenario that would permit Iran to contemplate engagement in any enrichment-related activity even in the future.
..It was this intransigence that ultimately led Iran to bring its uranium conversion plant in Isfahan out of suspension during the last days of the Khatami Administration. I continue to believe that this intransigence was also very instrumental in pushing aside the more conciliatory foreign policy that was practiced during the Khatami era and opened the path for the hard-line argument that no concession will satisfy the United States. The United States only understands the language of power and not dialogue, it was and is continued to be said.
Just in case you are wondering, the Bush Administration did finally make an offer of direct negotiation, of course with the precondition of Iran suspending its uranium enrichment activities. It also abandoned the long standing opposition the United States has had to Iran entering negotiations with the World Trade Organization. But it did so not during the Khatami Administration but when Ahmadimejad was president in 2006!
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Powered by www.communicationpro.org Fools Rush In: An Expert Dissection of the NIE Report
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As usual, Arthur Silber delivers the goods -- and several hard zen-slaps -- on the NIE report about Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons program: "Played for Fools Yet Again: About that Iran "Intelligence" Report."
First he notes the self-evident truths that we alluded to in our hurried piece on the matter the other day: "that this latest NIE tells us nothing -- let me repeat that, nothing -- that was not entirely obvious to a reasonably intelligent layperson following mainstream media reports about Iran for the last several years," and that the report "simply means that the warmongers, whether of the Republican or Democratic variety...cannot easily avail themselves of this particular bogeyman for the moment. For those who seek to begin the next phase of this neverending war, there are many other bogeymen available for use to the identical end."
But as is his wont, Silber delves deeper, and repeats a rare insight he has offered before:
The reaction from all quarters to the NIE relies on several interrelated central assumptions, ones that are regarded as so unquestionably true that no one thinks they need to be stated: that major policy decisions, including decisions of war and peace, are based on intelligence in the first place; that a decision to go to war is one made only after cool and careful rational deliberation; and that nations go to war for the reasons they announce to the world.
ALL OF THIS IS ABSOLUTELY, UNEQUIVOCALLY FALSE.
He then quotes from an earlier essay on the subject:
Intelligence is completely irrelevant to major policy decisions. Such decisions are matters of judgment, and knowledgeable, ordinary citizens are just as capable of making these determinations as political leaders allegedly in possession of "secret information." Such "secret information" is almost always wrong -- and major decisions, including those pertaining to war and peace, are made entirely apart from such information in any case.
The second you start arguing about intelligence, you've given the game away once again. This is a game the government and the proponents of war will always win. By now, we all surely know that if they want the intelligence to show that Country X is a "grave" and "growing" threat, they will find it or manufacture it. So once you're debating what the intelligence shows or fails to show, the debate is over. The war will inevitably begin...
To repeat...[intelligence] is always irrelevant to major policy decisions, and such decisions are reached for different reasons altogether. This is true whether the intelligence is correct or not, and it is almost always wrong. On those very rare occasions when intelligence is accurate, it is likely to be disregarded in any case. It will certainly be disregarded if it runs counter to a course to which policymakers are already committed.
The intelligence does not matter. It is primarily used as propaganda, to provide alleged justification to a public that still remains disturbingly gullible and pliable -- and it is used after the fact, to justify decisions that have already been made.
Several commenters -- including some astute EB readers -- have noted that the Bush Regime has already used the story to perform a neat bit of jiu-jitsu on many of its critics. By accepting the NIE report uncritically -- because part of it does indeed reveal that the Bushists have been lying about the Iranian threat for years -- they inadvertantly (or willingly) buy into the report's underlying assumption: that Iran really was building a bomb all these years, and only stopped because big bad Bush rolled into Baghdad and put the fear of God into them. Thus the report can be seen as accepting a bit of short-lived bad PR -- "NIE Report Muddies the Water in Administration Stance on Iran," etc. (and that's as bad as it would ever get with the corporate media) -- in exchange for "confirmation" of the Regime's basic contention (the dire threat posed by Iran) and another "justification" of the war crime in Iraq.
Silber ably dispatches that last sinister canard:
Several of the reactions collected by Glenn Reynolds advance the notion that, assuming the NIE is accurate, this demonstrates that the invasion and occupation of Iraq did in fact lead to the elimination of a gravely serious threat, namely, the threat that an Iran with nuclear weapons would have represented. If the invasion and occupation of Iraq prevented such a development, that means the Iraq catastrophe was justified.
It is difficult to imagine a more heinously bankrupt moral argument. Iraq itself was no threat to the United States, and it was known to be no threat. We have destroyed Iraq completely, unleashed a genocide that continues with every blood-drenched day that passes, created refugees in the several millions, and wreaked havoc and devastation in numerous other ways. Because Iraq was known to be no threat to the U.S., the U.S. did all this in a criminal war of aggression -- precisely the kind of crime against peace for which we properly condemned the Nazi regime. Yet now it is suggested that all this was morally justified -- because it may have prevented a threat from arising in another country. Because most Americans know only the mythologized, sanitized version of our history, many of you may be surprised to learn that this was one of the "justifications" used to defend the incineration of hundreds of thousands of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- to deliver a "message" to Soviet Russia. It was abominable then, and it is abominable now.
He then lays into the uncritical acceptance of the NIE estimate by liberal bloggers, focusing on Digby's reaction, especially her comment that the Republicans might be "nuts" enough to attack Iran anyway:
On that last point and insofar as the crucial general principles involved are concerned, may it be duly noted that the leading Democrats are just as "hawkish" and "nuts" on this issue: Hillary Clinton, who speaks of our inalienable "right" to take "offensive military action against Iran"; Barack Obama ("In today's globalized world, the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people," which is license to intervene anywhere and everywhere, on any pretext whatsoever, real or imagined); and all the other prominent Democrats, with their endless trash talk of keeping "all options on the table."
Silber then points out -- as he has done before -- another indisputable but entirely ignored truth: that even if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would not pose a direct threat to the United States.
In the most critical sense, I don't care about this latest assessment, just as I did not care about the earlier ones, about Iran or on any other subject at all -- for in addition to the rather important fact that such assessments are invariably wrong, I recognize that policy decisions are made on different grounds altogether. Moreover, in terms of U.S. foreign policy, I don't care if Iran does get nuclear weapons. As I have noted before, I do not view it as a remotely good thing that any nation has nuclear weapons, including the U.S. -- and I remind you once again that it is only the U.S. that has used them, when it did not have any legitimate reason for doing so and when it lied about every aspect of its actions and their consequences. But in terms of an Iran with nuclear weapons five or ten years in the future: "So Iran Gets Nukes. So What?" But the bipartisan commitment to American world hegemony has not altered in the slightest degree. The criminal catastrophe of Iraq is irrelevant to our ruling class, and it has not caused them to alter any of their most crucial goals.
Finally, Silber notes yet another incontrovertible truth: that the Bush Regime has already laid in another store of "justifications" for a war with Iran -- justifications that have been eagerly embraced by the Democrats. (For more on this, see "War Alarms Drowned by Beltway Bloodlust" and "The Senate's Blank Check for War with Iran.")
This brings us to the most likely way in which a conflict with Iran may still occur in the very near future: as the direct result of the continuing, ghastly, genocidal, criminal occupation of Iraq. In moral and historic terms, it is unforgivable that the Democratic Congress has not defunded the Iraq occupation completely. They have the power to do so, and they refuse to use it. Some people object to defunding on the grounds that Bush will use other funds to pay for it -- and the Democratic Congress has obligingly provided plenty of those. But if Bush is going to do that, then make him do it. It is only the nauseating corruption of our politics that makes it necessary to point out that decent human beings would choose not to have blood on their own hands. With two or three exceptions, there are no such decent human beings to be found in Washington.
There is much, much more in Silber's essay -- including all the essential links that I've omitted here in my midnight haste. Do yourself a favor, give yourself an education, and go read the whole thing now.
Read more...
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Cave Dwellers: More Democratic Deceit on War and Torture
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Cave Dwellers: More Democratic Deceit on War and Torture
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Cave Dwellers: More Democratic Deceit on War and Torture
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Cave Dwellers: More Democratic Deceit on War and Torture
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Cave Dwellers: More Democratic Deceit on War and Torture
A strenuous business, keeping pace with Mr. Silber. "I regard it as the very slightest of chances, one that will almost certainly be destroyed by another significant terrorist attack in the United States..." The NIE furore is cold comfort, and has ...
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Cave Dwellers: More Democratic Deceit on War and Torture
Written by Chris Floyd
Sunday, 09 December 2007
The Washington Post reports that Congressional Democrats are preparing to sign off on a spending bill that will, once again, pour tens of billions of dollars into the ongoing war crime in Iraq. The exact figure is not yet known, because Bush's willing executioners among both parties have rigged up a complicated and deliberately deceitful process to shield the true nature of their craven kowtowing to the bloodstained, filth-encrusted White House autocrat.
(For more on the autocratic, lawless nature of the Bush Regime, see Jonathan Schwarz, Marcy Wheeler, and Scott Horton, and this as well.)
Here's how the scam will work. First, House Democrats will offer up an initial lowball figure -- "only" $30 billion or so -- and claim, falsely, that the funds are intended for the war in Afghanistan and other Pentagon projects, even though "all sides in the deal recognize [that the money] could be shifted to fund the Iraq war," as the Post reports.
Then, the Democrat's so-called leader in the Senate, Harry "Shaky Knees" Reid, will "allow Republicans to increase that amount to avert a filibuster of the spending bill in the Senate." At that point, with the bill now swollen to, say, $70 billion or so for the Iraq war crime (and this is short-term, stop-gap spending, mind you), it will go back to the House, whose "leaders" will then accept the "compromise" reached in the Senate, and send the bill to the murderous, sadistic wretch in the Oval Office.
And that, boys and girls, is the way that the Potomac Empire operates: wilful deceit in the service of undeniable evil.
[For more on the long-term, bipartisan nature of this system, see the indispensable Arthur Silber here.]
However, there could be one possible glitch in the plan. It seems that the Democrats have asked for $11 billion in domestic spending to be included in the deal. It is thought that some Republicans -- and the White House -- will balk at throwing any more coins at the rabble they rule with such cynicism and contempt. Yet even this begged sop represents a cave-in by the Democrats. The Post reports that Shaky Knees last month "signaled that the Democrats were willing to halve their initial request of $22 billion in additional domestic spending, setting 'boundaries for the current debate in which $11 billion serves as the new ceiling." In other words, Reid gave away half the game before the negotiations even started.
On GOP aide quoted by the Post called this move "a bargaining mistake" by Reid. But it is highly doubtful that this was a "mistake" of any kind. It was instead just another instance of the long-running system of deception that allows each side to strike poses before its partisan base, while working feverishly behind the scenes to serve its true masters: the corporate, militarist and financial elites. In this round of the game, Reid and the Democrats posture as champions of the middle class and the poor, playing to the old New Deal base, while the Republicans get to prance around in their threadbare "anti-Big Guvmint" robes. The reality, of course, is that the welfare of the common people has declined precipitously over the past few decades, while government has grown by leaps and bounds -- no matter which party is ostensibly in power.
Thus the final "negotiations" between these cynical factions will see a further cut in the domestic spending option, while the funding for the rapine in Iraq will sail through. There is one other possibility: Bush might refuse to sign the bill if any new domestic spending whatsoever is included. In that case, the outcome is equally certain: the Democrats will once again "cave" -- i.e., do right by their true masters -- and the war crime will go on as before. The Democrats are not going to do anything to stop this crime -- because they are part of it. They are not going to do anything to bring the perpetrators to justice -- because they are deeply complicit in every death engendered by the war as well.
UPDATE: Just as I was finishing up the piece above, fresh confirmation came -- via the Post again -- of the knowing collusion of the Democratic leadership in the worst crimes of the Bush Administration. In this case, it is the foul torture regimen personally instituted by George W. Bush and his top minions, including physical abuses used by Nazi Germany in its torture chambers and psychological torments devised by the KGB and North Korea.
As the Post reports, top members of Congress -- a bipartisan group including Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi -- were given a full description of the Bush-Cheney torture program in September 2002. Some 30 other private briefings with Democratic and Republican leaders followed. In these sessions, the legislators were fully informed on the nature of the tortures, including waterboarding -- a heinous technique for which German and Japanese officials were hanged after World War II.
During Pelosi's 2002 visit, it seems that the Congressional leaders questioned only one aspect of the torture program:
"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.
These new revelations are an outgrowth of the recent discovery that the CIA destroyed direct evidence of their "intense interrogation" of the mentally unbalanced, low-level al Qaeda factotum, Abu Zubaydah. (For more on the Zubaydah case, see the Horton story noted above.) This criminal obstruction of justice is so glaring and indefensible that the Bush Administration is obviously trying to muddy the waters by leaking word of the briefings to Democratic leaders. "We're all in on it," the Bushists are signaling; "we all knew about it -- so it's no big deal. If the Dems want to say we're dirty, they're dirty too."
This is a classic Karl Rove tactic. (Oh, you think he's gone, do you, no longer pulling any strings for the White House?) You spread the muck around, instill a sense of general disgust with politics among the electorate ("A plague on both their houses!"), which drives away the majority of voters, leaving a clearer field for your rabid rightwing base.
It also plays to the corporate media's lazy tropes. "Hey look, the Dems were in on this thing, it had bipartisan backing all the way. So if anybody on that side wants to criticize it now, it's just partisan posturing." This serves the media's need to reduce every aspect of public life and policy to "the usual Beltway bickering."
Finally the leak is also a warning shot to the Democrats: "If we go down because of this, you're going down too -- in fact, the whole damn system, the great golden goose, the endless supply of pork and graft that's made us all rich and powerful, could go down as well."
And of course, all of this is true. The Democrats are in on it too, deeply complicit in the torture and war atrocities. There is much hypocrisy in their very belated, very timid, very limited -- and deliberately ineffectual -- criticisms of waterboarding, aggressive war, presidential dictatorship, etc. And it is certainly true that the whole political system has become steeped in evil: dependent on war, dependent on corruption, dependent on deceit, and lawless to an astonishing degree. If Bush and his gang really were brought to the full measure of justice for their crimes -- and if the full extent of these crimes were to be exposed clearly and copiously -- then the system might indeed collapse, unable any longer to keep up the deliberate lies -- and the deep-seated self-deceptions -- that have allowed it to destroy so many innocent lives, for so many years, in so many countries...including our own.
But you know and I know that this is not going to happen. As with the outrageously cynical "enabling act" for the Iraq war crime noted above, here too with these new revelations about destruction of evidence and Democratic knowledge of torture, we will see the usual striking of ritual poses, while the game -- the deep, dark, dirty, sickening game -- goes on.
UPDATE II: As usual, Arthur Silber is already on the case, but I didn't see his piece on the torture story until now. He lays out well the history that makes this latest revelation of bipartisan partnership in torture less than "news," and makes an eloquent call for a response that we have touched on occasionally here and elsewhere: non-recognition of any authority or legitimacy of the evildoers who rule over us, and their partners. Go read the whole piece, but I'll leave you with Silber's conclusion:
I do not want to be misunderstood on this point, so let me state it as plainly as I can. The time is long since past for every minimally decent American to take a stand: either you are on the side of civilization and humanity, and the irreplaceable, supreme value of an individual human life -- or you are on the side of evil, brutality, torture, sadism, genocidal war, and endless death. The Democrats and the Republicans both stand for Empire, and for the endless horrors already inflicted -- and the endless horrors that still lie in our future....
At this terrible moment in history, we must call things by their proper names. Let the world know where you stand: for life, and the possibility of joy and happiness -- or for death, and cruelty, barbarism and the repetition of horrors that the monsters among us insist on reviving when given the opportunity.
If you choose to support evil and to embody evil yourself, I suggest you follow the vile example of the current administration: do so without apology, and brazenly revel in the evil you choose to inflict on the world. It is far more contemptible -- and, to speak personally, it is sickening beyond my capacity to describe accurately , in significant part because of the complex psychological dishonesties that are required -- to enable evil, while claiming you represent the "moral" and "practical" choice. These are the justifications used by those who made possible the cruelest and most unspeakably horrifying regimes in history, as Mayer's witness and many others attest.
Withdraw your support entirely from those who perpetrate and make excuses for evil. If the refusal to support such people were widespread enough, we still might have a chance. I regard it as the very slightest of chances, one that will almost certainly be destroyed by another significant terrorist attack in the United States -- but it is the only one we have.
The Washington Post reports that Congressional Democrats are preparing to sign off on a spending bill that will, once again, pour tens of billions of dollars into the ongoing war crime in Iraq. The exact figure is not yet known, because Bush's willing executioners among both parties have rigged up a complicated and deliberately deceitful process to shield the true nature of their craven kowtowing to the bloodstained, filth-encrusted White House autocrat.
(For more on the autocratic, lawless nature of the Bush Regime, see Jonathan Schwarz, Marcy Wheeler, and Scott Horton, and this as well.)
Here's how the scam will work. First, House Democrats will offer up an initial lowball figure -- "only" $30 billion or so -- and claim, falsely, that the funds are intended for the war in Afghanistan and other Pentagon projects, even though "all sides in the deal recognize [that the money] could be shifted to fund the Iraq war," as the Post reports.
Then, the Democrat's so-called leader in the Senate, Harry "Shaky Knees" Reid, will "allow Republicans to increase that amount to avert a filibuster of the spending bill in the Senate." At that point, with the bill now swollen to, say, $70 billion or so for the Iraq war crime (and this is short-term, stop-gap spending, mind you), it will go back to the House, whose "leaders" will then accept the "compromise" reached in the Senate, and send the bill to the murderous, sadistic wretch in the Oval Office.
And that, boys and girls, is the way that the Potomac Empire operates: wilful deceit in the service of undeniable evil.
[For more on the long-term, bipartisan nature of this system, see the indispensable Arthur Silber here.]
However, there could be one possible glitch in the plan. It seems that the Democrats have asked for $11 billion in domestic spending to be included in the deal. It is thought that some Republicans -- and the White House -- will balk at throwing any more coins at the rabble they rule with such cynicism and contempt. Yet even this begged sop represents a cave-in by the Democrats. The Post reports that Shaky Knees last month "signaled that the Democrats were willing to halve their initial request of $22 billion in additional domestic spending, setting 'boundaries for the current debate in which $11 billion serves as the new ceiling." In other words, Reid gave away half the game before the negotiations even started.
On GOP aide quoted by the Post called this move "a bargaining mistake" by Reid. But it is highly doubtful that this was a "mistake" of any kind. It was instead just another instance of the long-running system of deception that allows each side to strike poses before its partisan base, while working feverishly behind the scenes to serve its true masters: the corporate, militarist and financial elites. In this round of the game, Reid and the Democrats posture as champions of the middle class and the poor, playing to the old New Deal base, while the Republicans get to prance around in their threadbare "anti-Big Guvmint" robes. The reality, of course, is that the welfare of the common people has declined precipitously over the past few decades, while government has grown by leaps and bounds -- no matter which party is ostensibly in power.
Thus the final "negotiations" between these cynical factions will see a further cut in the domestic spending option, while the funding for the rapine in Iraq will sail through. There is one other possibility: Bush might refuse to sign the bill if any new domestic spending whatsoever is included. In that case, the outcome is equally certain: the Democrats will once again "cave" -- i.e., do right by their true masters -- and the war crime will go on as before. The Democrats are not going to do anything to stop this crime -- because they are part of it. They are not going to do anything to bring the perpetrators to justice -- because they are deeply complicit in every death engendered by the war as well.
UPDATE: Just as I was finishing up the piece above, fresh confirmation came -- via the Post again -- of the knowing collusion of the Democratic leadership in the worst crimes of the Bush Administration. In this case, it is the foul torture regimen personally instituted by George W. Bush and his top minions, including physical abuses used by Nazi Germany in its torture chambers and psychological torments devised by the KGB and North Korea.
As the Post reports, top members of Congress -- a bipartisan group including Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi -- were given a full description of the Bush-Cheney torture program in September 2002. Some 30 other private briefings with Democratic and Republican leaders followed. In these sessions, the legislators were fully informed on the nature of the tortures, including waterboarding -- a heinous technique for which German and Japanese officials were hanged after World War II.
During Pelosi's 2002 visit, it seems that the Congressional leaders questioned only one aspect of the torture program:
"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.
These new revelations are an outgrowth of the recent discovery that the CIA destroyed direct evidence of their "intense interrogation" of the mentally unbalanced, low-level al Qaeda factotum, Abu Zubaydah. (For more on the Zubaydah case, see the Horton story noted above.) This criminal obstruction of justice is so glaring and indefensible that the Bush Administration is obviously trying to muddy the waters by leaking word of the briefings to Democratic leaders. "We're all in on it," the Bushists are signaling; "we all knew about it -- so it's no big deal. If the Dems want to say we're dirty, they're dirty too."
This is a classic Karl Rove tactic. (Oh, you think he's gone, do you, no longer pulling any strings for the White House?) You spread the muck around, instill a sense of general disgust with politics among the electorate ("A plague on both their houses!"), which drives away the majority of voters, leaving a clearer field for your rabid rightwing base.
It also plays to the corporate media's lazy tropes. "Hey look, the Dems were in on this thing, it had bipartisan backing all the way. So if anybody on that side wants to criticize it now, it's just partisan posturing." This serves the media's need to reduce every aspect of public life and policy to "the usual Beltway bickering."
Finally the leak is also a warning shot to the Democrats: "If we go down because of this, you're going down too -- in fact, the whole damn system, the great golden goose, the endless supply of pork and graft that's made us all rich and powerful, could go down as well."
And of course, all of this is true. The Democrats are in on it too, deeply complicit in the torture and war atrocities. There is much hypocrisy in their very belated, very timid, very limited -- and deliberately ineffectual -- criticisms of waterboarding, aggressive war, presidential dictatorship, etc. And it is certainly true that the whole political system has become steeped in evil: dependent on war, dependent on corruption, dependent on deceit, and lawless to an astonishing degree. If Bush and his gang really were brought to the full measure of justice for their crimes -- and if the full extent of these crimes were to be exposed clearly and copiously -- then the system might indeed collapse, unable any longer to keep up the deliberate lies -- and the deep-seated self-deceptions -- that have allowed it to destroy so many innocent lives, for so many years, in so many countries...including our own.
But you know and I know that this is not going to happen. As with the outrageously cynical "enabling act" for the Iraq war crime noted above, here too with these new revelations about destruction of evidence and Democratic knowledge of torture, we will see the usual striking of ritual poses, while the game -- the deep, dark, dirty, sickening game -- goes on.
UPDATE II: As usual, Arthur Silber is already on the case, but I didn't see his piece on the torture story until now. He lays out well the history that makes this latest revelation of bipartisan partnership in torture less than "news," and makes an eloquent call for a response that we have touched on occasionally here and elsewhere: non-recognition of any authority or legitimacy of the evildoers who rule over us, and their partners. Go read the whole piece, but I'll leave you with Silber's conclusion:
I do not want to be misunderstood on this point, so let me state it as plainly as I can. The time is long since past for every minimally decent American to take a stand: either you are on the side of civilization and humanity, and the irreplaceable, supreme value of an individual human life -- or you are on the side of evil, brutality, torture, sadism, genocidal war, and endless death. The Democrats and the Republicans both stand for Empire, and for the endless horrors already inflicted -- and the endless horrors that still lie in our future....
At this terrible moment in history, we must call things by their proper names. Let the world know where you stand: for life, and the possibility of joy and happiness -- or for death, and cruelty, barbarism and the repetition of horrors that the monsters among us insist on reviving when given the opportunity.
If you choose to support evil and to embody evil yourself, I suggest you follow the vile example of the current administration: do so without apology, and brazenly revel in the evil you choose to inflict on the world. It is far more contemptible -- and, to speak personally, it is sickening beyond my capacity to describe accurately , in significant part because of the complex psychological dishonesties that are required -- to enable evil, while claiming you represent the "moral" and "practical" choice. These are the justifications used by those who made possible the cruelest and most unspeakably horrifying regimes in history, as Mayer's witness and many others attest.
Withdraw your support entirely from those who perpetrate and make excuses for evil. If the refusal to support such people were widespread enough, we still might have a chance. I regard it as the very slightest of chances, one that will almost certainly be destroyed by another significant terrorist attack in the United States -- but it is the only one we have.
Read more...
Powered by www.communicationpro.org Before the Flood: The Great Storm Building Beneath the "Surge"
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Jonathan Steele offers a good analysis of the situation in Iraq: another glimpse at the truth behind the "surge success" propaganda, which, as Steele notes, has completely defanged the already feeble Democratic "opposition" to the murderous enterprise. The piece is worth reading in full, and excerpting at length. He begins by noting the shameful silence that greeted the Bush-Maliki announcement of plans for an "agreement" between the conqueror and his vassals for an "enduring" American military presence in Iraq:
More alarming was the Democratic party's reaction and indeed that of the US media. The revelation produced no burst of headlines or commentaries, even though it rides roughshod over most Americans' wishes. A Pew Research poll two weeks ago found 54% wanted the troops home "as soon as possible".
Yet the Democratic contenders for the presidency barely murmured. The passion for a clear timetable of an early US troop pullout that was raging in large sections of the Democratic party last spring, in the weeks after it regained control of the House and Senate, has fizzled out.
Whatever effect Bush's "surge" of extra troops has had in Iraq, it has clearly worked in Washington. The Democrats are in retreat, and the Bush strategy of entrenching the Iraq occupation still further and handing the mess to his successor is proceeding virtually unopposed.
Hillary Clinton, in a recent article in the journal Foreign Affairs, pledged to maintain US troops in Iraq indefinitely to train and equip Iraqi forces, as well as keeping "specialised units" to protect the trainers and confront al-Qaida. She would also leave troops in the northern Kurdish regions. Barack Obama told the New York Times last month that he would need 16 months after taking office to withdraw all US combat troops from Iraq, and would retain a residual force on an open-ended basis "to counter terrorism". He might decide this force would be better based outside Iraq, he suggested, so his position is marginally better than Clinton's. Neither candidate is willing to propose a total US troop withdrawal, as the US agreed in Vietnam in 1973 when it finally resolved to end its disastrous involvement there.
The Democrats' new softness flows in part from the reduction in US combat deaths. The so-called Awakening movement by some Sunni tribal leaders to take arms and money from the Americans to turn against al-Qaida in Iraq has reduced the difficulties for US troops. There is also a perception, carefully nurtured in General David Petraeus's statistical charts and testimony to Congress in September, that the back of the Iraqi resistance has been broken. Now the Iraqi government is trumpeting the fact that thousands of Iraqi refugees are coming home as further proof of a turning security tide.
But none of these indicators is firm. The figures for returning refugees are contested, with the Iraqi government counting anyone who crosses into Iraq even though many had only gone abroad on short visits and were never refugees. Many genuine refugees leave Syria in desperation because their money or visas have run out, not because they feel safe in going back.
When I talked to families in a muddy bus station on the outskirts of Damascus last week as they set off home, I found only Shias. "Of course Sunnis are afraid to go. The buses are provided by the Shia-led Iraqi government and Iraqi police will check them at the border," an Iraqi Sunni told me later. His comment underlined the continuing depth of sectarian suspicions. Sunnis assume the Iraqi police, who are mainly Shias, are either in league with Shia militias and death squads or will behave just as badly. They fear being abducted or slaughtered on the way.
Sunni concerns over Shia militias also explain the Awakening movement. Although Sunni tribal leaders are taking US arms and cash, ostensibly to confront al-Qaida, they see value in getting organised to protect their suburbs from Shia raids. The Americans may be temporarily helping to reduce violence, but their tactics help to build up Sunni militias for possible attacks on Shias in the future. Once again the Americans are looking for a military solution to what is essentially a political problem. Without national reconciliation and dialogue between Sunni and Shia community leaders - a process which neither the government of Nuri al-Maliki nor General Petraeus seems able or willing to broker - the underlying issues remain unresolved.
The Iraqi resistance is also undimmed. The nationalist Shia cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, has called a unilateral ceasefire, which is largely holding while the US troop "surge" is under way. The Sunni resistance is doing much the same, though without formally declaring it. As I was told by a senior resistance spokesman in Damascus, many nationalist groups have reduced their attacks in western Baghdad and parts of Anbar province while regrouping and retraining.
A few weeks earlier I spoke to one of the spiritual fathers of the Sunni insurgency, Sheikh Harith al-Dhari, now in exile in Amman. The head of the Association of Muslim Scholars, he argued that the Awakening movement only represented a small proportion of Sunni tribal leaders. "The situation in Anbar is very bad, and many are out of work and impoverished. Some will work with anyone who pays them, whether it is al-Qaida or the US army. I agree the attacks on US forces in Anbar have gone down, but in a few months they may go up again. The US is building its hopes on a small trend. It doesn't follow it will continue," he said.
His remarks chimed with a poll conducted in mid-August for the BBC and ABC news. It found Anbar was still the strongest bastion of hostile anti-US opinion in Iraq. While criticising al-Qaida's attacks on civilians, every Anbar respondent supported attacks on US forces: 70% wanted them to leave immediately, a higher figure than in a March poll before the "surge".
One day Iraqi resistance leaders will have to be brought into negotiations. They are a legitimate factor in the complex Iraqi equation. National reconciliation which attempts to exclude people who have sacrificed so much in the struggle against foreign occupation has no chance of succeeding. The pre-condition - as happened when the Vietnam war ended - has to be a clear declaration by Washington that it is going altogether, with no bases or "residual forces" left behind. Only then will Iraqis come to the negotiating table seriously, and work out a future that does not leave an elephant in the room.
But of course, this is precisely what is not going to happen as long as one member or another of Washington's "bipartisan foreign policy establishment" is in charge. Neither the Republicans or Democrats want the Iraqis to work out their own future; both parties want a compliant client state, with its oil resources opened to favored Western firms. And both parties want to retain American military dominance of the region. Barring some miraculous epiphany of wisdom and moral courage in the next occupant of the White House -- which is almost inconceivable, given the gaggle of third-rate goobers being offered up as "major," "serious" candidates and likely winners -- we are certainly destined to see much more bloodshed, more atrocity, more chaos and deadly privation in Iraq, until, at last, as in Vietnam, the Americans are driven out by force.
It doesn't have to be that way; but everything in the historical record of the "bipartisan foreign policy establishment" tells us that it will be that way. They went into Iraq in order to control it, by hook or crook, in one way or another; that's what they want, that's why they are there. And that's why they will never willingly do the one thing that might -- just might -- ease some of the vast suffering, the vast evil, they have inflicted on Iraq: leave.
*(The New York Times has more on the fragility of the surge's "success." As does Juan Cole at Salon.com.)*
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Powered by www.communicationpro.org Special Relationship: Global Snatch and Grab is the Law of the Land
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The "rule of law" will never be anything more than what the human beings alive at the time in a given society make of it. It depends entirely on the character of those who fashion, interpret and uphold the law – and on the public's attitude toward it.
The government of the United States has officially informed the courts of Her Majesty the Queen that Her Majesty's subjects may be kidnapped (and that was the precise term used by the government of the United States) by agents of the United States at any time – and there is not a bloody thing that Her Majesty can do about it.
And you thought "extraordinary rendition" was just for "terrorists"? No, the Bush Regime has decreed that this bounty extends to every human being on the face of the earth. (And yes, Virginia, it also applies to U.S. citizens kidnapped on U.S. soil – just ask Jose Padilla. No wait, you can't ask him; his mind has been destroyed by the years of torture and isolation that was inflicted on him before the Regime finally tried him on minor charges.)
This week, The Times reported on a remarkable appearance before the UK's Court of Appeal by Alun Jones, QC, representing the American government. Jones told the slack-jawed jurists:
that it was acceptable under American law to kidnap people if they were wanted for offences in America. "The United States does have a view about procuring people to its own shores which is not shared," he said.
He said that if a person was kidnapped by the US authorities in another country and was brought back to face charges in America, no US court could rule that the abduction was illegal and free him: "If you kidnap a person outside the United States and you bring him there, the court has no jurisdiction to refuse — it goes back to bounty hunting days in the 1860s."
Of course, there is nowt surprising in any of this. As I have been reporting in various venues since November 2001, George W. Bush has long claimed the arbitrary right not only to kidnap and imprison anyone on earth he pleases, but also to have them killed, without charge or trial or any legal procedure. What's more, he has even delegated this literal license to kill to selected U.S. agents in the field, who have been given the green light to assassinate victims on their own initiative, without an OK from Washington.
As we've noted before, this remains one of the great unspoken scandals of the entire bloodsoaked reign of the Crawford Caligula. Brief glimpses of this imperial murder program were offered by Regime insiders in the first heady weeks after 9/11 (the "new Pearl Harbor" which that proto-Bush Administration, Project for the New American Century, openly pined for in election year 2000); the Bushists were eager to show that "the gloves are off," with CIA agents exulting, "We're killing people!" and Cheney himself muttering on national television about working "the dark side, if you will." So for a time you could find stories in the mainstream press where Regime officials boasted of "renditioning" captives to foreign toture chambers, and revealed secret executive orders asserting the president's arbitrary power over the liberty and life of the global population.
Then these stories dried up – probably about the time that Bush's own torture program took off in earnest, and the Administration began hiding what they fully realized were capital crimes under U.S. law. Now no one in the great, good, bipartisan media-political establishment ever mentions these Caesarian powers – except, oddly enough, Bush himself, who once boasted openly of the extrajudicial killings he had ordered: on national television, before Congress, in the State of the Union address just weeks before he ordered the act of aggression against Iraq. (For more on this, see "Fatal Vision: The Deeper Evil Behind the Detainee Bill.")
Given all this, a claim that a bunch of Limeys are fair game for kidnapping is actually pretty small beer for this crew.
The Times story has been making the rounds on the larboard side of the political blogosphere. For example, lawyer and blogger Scott Horton says Bush's kidnapping claims in the UK court are a ludicrous perversion of U.S. law:
This is not U.S. law, it is a Bush Administration hallucination as to U.S. law. The sort of nightmare that comes flowing freely from the pen of John Yoo or David Addington. 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.
Alas, it is the attitude of a criminal who imagines himself busy enforcing the law, even as he holds himself above the law. It is the attitude which has brought our nation low in the world and threatens more damage still.
I hate to disagree with Horton, who is often astute in his analyses (and has done heroic work in exposing the political imprisonment of former Alabama governor Don Siegelman), but in this case, I think he's wrong. It looks like the Bushists are in fact correct in their claim: this extraordinary procedure has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court; it is "U.S. law." As the Times notes:
[Jones] cited the case of Humberto Alvarez Machain, a suspect who was abducted by the US government at his medical office in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1990. He was flown by Drug Enforcement Administration agents to Texas for criminal prosecution. Although there was an extradition treaty in place between America and Mexico at the time — as there currently is between the United States and Britain — the Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that the Mexican had no legal remedy because of his abduction.
And if you go back to that 1992 ruling – written by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the old vote-suppressing partisan hack foisted on the Court as a bitter joke by Richard Nixon – you will indeed find the supreme arbiters of law in the United States overturning a series of lower court rulings and affirming the right of government agents – or even bounty hunters hired by the government – to kidnap people from foreign countries and bring them to trial in the United States. Rehnquist cites an 1882 case, Kerr v. Illinois, as the chief precedent, and notes that it was upheld again in 1952:
This Court has never departed from the rule announced in [Kerr] that the power of a court to try a person for crime is not impaired by the fact that he had been brought within the court's jurisdiction by reason of a 'forcible abduction.' No persuasive reasons are now presented to justify overruling this line of cases. They rest on the sound basis that due process of law is satisfied when one present in court is convicted of crime after having been fairly apprized of the charges against him and after a fair trial in accordance with constitutional procedural safeguards. There is nothing in the Constitution that requires a court to permit a guilty person rightfully convicted to escape justice because he was brought to trial against his will.
Even Rehnquist recognized that Machain "may be correct that [his] abduction was 'shocking'…and that it may be in violation of general international law principles." But as anyone who has opened their eyes for more than ten seconds during the past century will have observed, "general international law principles" mean absolutely nothing when a powerful state wishes to have its way.
Rehnquist – and now Bush – relies on the ludicrous fig-leaf argument that because such abductions are not specifically prohibited by extradition treaties, then they are "legal." This is of course using the letter of the law to strangle its spirit -- and its plain, common-sense meaning: any extradition treaty that allows one party to pluck the other's citizens from their own soil and haul them back to a foreign land for trial is a bitter sham. But again, this is the way of the world: might makes right, and "law" is bent to accommodate the interests of the powerful.
It would be nice to believe, with Horton, that this current claim of the Bush Regime is some kind of nightmarish perversion of U.S. law, some terrible falling away from a former golden age, when the United States never failed to "recognize the sovereignty of foreign states [and] the solemn commitments of U.S. governments over the last two centuries in treaties and conventions." [You might want to ask, say, the Iraqis – or the Cherokee – about this sometime.] It would be nice to believe that "the rule of law" would somehow save us, if it could only be "restored." But the fact is, the Bush Regime could go back and find a precedent in "law" for almost all of their atrocities; and indeed, almost every depredation in American history – slavery and Jim Crow, military incursions, covert actions, the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, etc. – have been regarded as "legal." (Dred Scott, anyone? Or how about Bush v. Gore?)
Yes, we should continue to pursue the vision of law as an impartial arbiter, a vessel of justice, equality and comity, and a brake upon the unrestrained exercise of raw power. It is a worthy goal, calling us to rise above the baser elements of our nature – the mud and blood and greed and fear and ape-like lust for dominance. But we should not ignore what law can be – and so often is – in our degraded reality: a blunt instrument of hegemony; a fig leaf for crime and "shocking" violations of legal and moral principles; and, in the immortal words of Dickens' Mr. Bumble, "an ass."
The "rule of law" will never be anything more than what the human beings alive at the time in a given society make of it. It depends entirely on the character of those who fashion, interpret and uphold the law – and on the public's attitude toward it. Are they acquiescent and servile in the face of rank abuses of the law on behalf of the powerful? Or do they stand up strongly for their rights, for their dignity as citizens, and for equal justice under the law?
I think the historical record of our times clearly shows how the vast majority of the people of the United States have answered – and are answering – these vital questions.
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Powered by www.communicationpro.org More War is Job One: Torturing the Truth on Iran
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Anyone hoping that the "no nukes in Iran" NIE report might hobble the Administration's armed march toward Persia should take note of how George W. Bush moved the goal posts in his warmongering game during a press conference on Tuesday.
As the New York Times reports, Bush declared that Iran will not be "allowed" to acquire even the "scientific knowledge" required to build a nuclear weapon. Previous "red lines" which could trigger an attack had been based on Iran actually building a weapon; now even nibbling at the forbidden fruit of nuclear knowledge could serve as "justification" for a "pre-emptive strike" to quell the "danger." After all, as Bush rather illiterately told reporters, "What's to say they couldn't start another covert nuclear weapons program?" Better safe than sorry, right?
And at the very least, moving the goalposts in this manner will allow the Bush Regime to portray Iran as a dangerous, defiant menace for merely carrying on with its fully legal nuclear power program, as authorized by international treaty and monitored by the IAEA. Thus no matter what Iran actually does – or doesn't do – the Bushists will continue to use the "Persian menace" as fodder for the imperial war machine. [Josh Marshall notes how Bush laid the groundwork for this shift in his "World War III" press conference in October.]
[And as noted here yesterday, we again see this "damaging" NIE being used by the Regime to "confirm" its earlier contention that Iran indeed had a nuclear weapons program prior to 2003. This trope has already been adopted by every news story on the subject, and by almost all bloggers as well. (Including Marshall in the above-linked post, although he does put in an "apparently" when referring to the alleged pre-2003 weapons program.) Yet if the hardline, saber-rattling 2005 NIE on Iran had no hard evidence of an Iranian nuke-bomb program, then where did the go-softly, let's-talk 2007 NIE come up with any? Remember, the change in emphasis between the two documents stems, we are told, from new evidence showing that Iran has no active weapons program. If hard evidence of an existing weapons scheme before 2003 had actually been found, you can be sure the Bush Regime would be trumpeting it to the rooftops right now. I would imagine that the 2003 angle has been thrown in there either as a face-saving sop to the White House, or as a deliberate plant by the White House – or more likely, as a devious massaging of the new intelligence. The latter, if it actually exists, probably comes from a source whose involvement in the Iranian nuclear program either began sometime after 2003, or else was able to confirm to U.S. intelligence that "those activities which you believed were associated with a weapons program were not continued after 2003." What those activities might have been, and their actual relevance to a weapons program, will doubtless remain one of those Rumsfeldian unknown unknowns. In any case, as Arthur Silber pointed out yesterday: "The second you start arguing about intelligence, you've given the game away once again. This is a game the government and the proponents of war will always win. By now, we all surely know that if they want the intelligence to show that Country X is a 'grave' and 'growing' threat, they will find it or manufacture it. So once you're debating what the intelligence shows or fails to show, the debate is over."]
In seeking to prohibit Iran from acquiring the scientific knowledge to build a bomb, Bush is once again employing one of the Regime's most effective methods of fueling the wars and rumors of war that "justify" the "unitary executive's" tyrannical power grabs, keep the populace in a proper state of fear and confusion – and gorge the military-industrial complex with blood money: the Impossible Crusade.
As we all know, Bush has declared war on "Terror": a "long war," a "multi-generational war," a war without end…against an abstract noun, against an ever-elusive, ever-elastic, ill-defined concept which can never be "defeated" because it is, literally, no thing. It is just a name applied to various actions at various times. (Who can forget how Ronald Reagan's "freedom fighters" from the international jihadi army in Afghanistan became the "Islamofascists" who now threaten the very existence of Western Civilization?)
In like fashion, Bush has now declared war on "scientific knowledge" about nuclear weapons. (He has also declared war on many other forms of scientific knowledge, of course, but that's a story for another day.) Yet as Jonathan Schell points out in an excellent interview with Tom Englehardt, that genie is long gone from the bottle:
The bomb itself is the fruit of basic twentieth-century discoveries in physics, specifically its most renowned equation -- energy equals mass times the speed of light squared -- which gives the amount of energy that's released in nuclear weapons. Being rooted in science, the bomb is a mental construct to begin with, which means it's always present and will always be present, even if we do get rid of the hardware. The bomb in the mind will be there forever.
So, before any physical bomb existed, there was the bomb as conceived by scientists, destined, sooner or later, to become available to all competent and technical minds in the world. What follows, of course, is that a growing list of countries -- at present probably around 50 -- are able to have nuclear weapons if they so decide. What, in turn, follows is that, if those countries are not going to have the bomb, it will only be because they have made a political decision not to have it.
And what follows no less surely is that this global issue cannot be solved by any means but the political. More specifically, it can't be solved by military force....
For the bomb is misconceived as just a piece of hardware, or even many pieces of hardware scattered around the world. It is essentially, originally, and everlastingly a set of scientific and technological capacities open to all and coming at you, in a certain sense, from all directions at all times. As soon as you put out the fire over here, another is likely to spring up over there, and so on. Military force is singularly inappropriate for facing this conundrum and yet that's what the Bush administration chose. It's like trying to dispel a mist with a machine gun, just the wrong instrument for the job.
But of course, as we have often noted before, the Bush Administration is not really interested in stopping nuclear proliferation. Rather, the Bushists are interested in using nuclear proliferation as a fearmongering goad to advance their agenda of dominion and loot. The fact that it is impossible to eliminate or control the scientific knowledge of nuclear weapons only makes it a more potent tool for stoking permanent war fever: it will always be out there, it's a "dire threat" that will never go away.
As Schell wisely notes, military force is indeed singularly inappropriate for resolving a political issue like nuclear proliferation. But it is manifestly the right instrument for imposing your will on others. And that is the "job" that the Bush Regime is pursuing with such dogged determination.
UPDATE: Iran expert Farideh Farhi has a surreal moment while hearing the unstoppable vomiting of lies coming from George Bush's mouth in his press conference about Iran. But we have to agree with one of Fahri's commenters: method, not madness or ignorance, is behind Bush's crude lies. He knows that the corporate media will not call him on his bare-faced, self-serving revision of the historical record, so he feels free to invent and pervert as he sees fit. Still, it's good to see some of the lies flayed open – for those who still care about such things. Obviously, our high media mandarins don't.
From "What is George Bush Smoking?":
...But being an "Iran person," my moment of utter disbelief came when I heard him say this in the news conference:
"People say, would you ever talk to Iran? For you veterans here, for those who have been following this administration for a while, you might remember that I have consistently said that we will be at the table with the EU-3 if Iran would verifiably suspend their program -- and the offer still stands. What changed was the change of leadership in Iran. We had a diplomatic track going, and Ahmadinejad came along and took a different tone. And the Iranian people must understand that the tone and actions of their government are that which is isolating them...But their leadership is going to have to understand that defiance, and hiding programs and defying IAEA is not the way forward. And my hope is, is that the Iranian regime takes a look at their policies and changes their policies back to where we were prior to the election of Ahmadinejad, which was a hopeful period. They had suspended their program, they were at the table. The United States had made some very positive gestures to convince them that there was a better way forward. And hopefully we can get back to that day."
This goes even beyond deception and reaches the level of unreal. The man must either think that no one is watching or he must have really convinced himself that prior to Ahmadinejad things were going all swell with Iran.
Just for the record, it is important to remember that the inclusion of Iran as a standing member of axis of evil came in May 2002 when the reformist Mohammad Khatami was president and after Iran and the United States had cooperated in Afghanistan. It was also during the Khatami presidency, in 2003 and beyond, that the Bush Administration reportedly ignored Iran's offer of a deal and continuously complained about the European track to negotiate with Iran. In fact, as late as spring and summer of 2005, until the last days of Khatami's presidency, the Bush Administration refused to allow the Europeans to entertain any scenario that would permit Iran to contemplate engagement in any enrichment-related activity even in the future.
..It was this intransigence that ultimately led Iran to bring its uranium conversion plant in Isfahan out of suspension during the last days of the Khatami Administration. I continue to believe that this intransigence was also very instrumental in pushing aside the more conciliatory foreign policy that was practiced during the Khatami era and opened the path for the hard-line argument that no concession will satisfy the United States. The United States only understands the language of power and not dialogue, it was and is continued to be said.
Just in case you are wondering, the Bush Administration did finally make an offer of direct negotiation, of course with the precondition of Iran suspending its uranium enrichment activities. It also abandoned the long standing opposition the United States has had to Iran entering negotiations with the World Trade Organization. But it did so not during the Khatami Administration but when Ahmadimejad was president in 2006!
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Powered by www.communicationpro.org Fools Rush In: An Expert Dissection of the NIE Report
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As usual, Arthur Silber delivers the goods -- and several hard zen-slaps -- on the NIE report about Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons program: "Played for Fools Yet Again: About that Iran "Intelligence" Report."
First he notes the self-evident truths that we alluded to in our hurried piece on the matter the other day: "that this latest NIE tells us nothing -- let me repeat that, nothing -- that was not entirely obvious to a reasonably intelligent layperson following mainstream media reports about Iran for the last several years," and that the report "simply means that the warmongers, whether of the Republican or Democratic variety...cannot easily avail themselves of this particular bogeyman for the moment. For those who seek to begin the next phase of this neverending war, there are many other bogeymen available for use to the identical end."
But as is his wont, Silber delves deeper, and repeats a rare insight he has offered before:
The reaction from all quarters to the NIE relies on several interrelated central assumptions, ones that are regarded as so unquestionably true that no one thinks they need to be stated: that major policy decisions, including decisions of war and peace, are based on intelligence in the first place; that a decision to go to war is one made only after cool and careful rational deliberation; and that nations go to war for the reasons they announce to the world.
ALL OF THIS IS ABSOLUTELY, UNEQUIVOCALLY FALSE.
He then quotes from an earlier essay on the subject:
Intelligence is completely irrelevant to major policy decisions. Such decisions are matters of judgment, and knowledgeable, ordinary citizens are just as capable of making these determinations as political leaders allegedly in possession of "secret information." Such "secret information" is almost always wrong -- and major decisions, including those pertaining to war and peace, are made entirely apart from such information in any case.
The second you start arguing about intelligence, you've given the game away once again. This is a game the government and the proponents of war will always win. By now, we all surely know that if they want the intelligence to show that Country X is a "grave" and "growing" threat, they will find it or manufacture it. So once you're debating what the intelligence shows or fails to show, the debate is over. The war will inevitably begin...
To repeat...[intelligence] is always irrelevant to major policy decisions, and such decisions are reached for different reasons altogether. This is true whether the intelligence is correct or not, and it is almost always wrong. On those very rare occasions when intelligence is accurate, it is likely to be disregarded in any case. It will certainly be disregarded if it runs counter to a course to which policymakers are already committed.
The intelligence does not matter. It is primarily used as propaganda, to provide alleged justification to a public that still remains disturbingly gullible and pliable -- and it is used after the fact, to justify decisions that have already been made.
Several commenters -- including some astute EB readers -- have noted that the Bush Regime has already used the story to perform a neat bit of jiu-jitsu on many of its critics. By accepting the NIE report uncritically -- because part of it does indeed reveal that the Bushists have been lying about the Iranian threat for years -- they inadvertantly (or willingly) buy into the report's underlying assumption: that Iran really was building a bomb all these years, and only stopped because big bad Bush rolled into Baghdad and put the fear of God into them. Thus the report can be seen as accepting a bit of short-lived bad PR -- "NIE Report Muddies the Water in Administration Stance on Iran," etc. (and that's as bad as it would ever get with the corporate media) -- in exchange for "confirmation" of the Regime's basic contention (the dire threat posed by Iran) and another "justification" of the war crime in Iraq.
Silber ably dispatches that last sinister canard:
Several of the reactions collected by Glenn Reynolds advance the notion that, assuming the NIE is accurate, this demonstrates that the invasion and occupation of Iraq did in fact lead to the elimination of a gravely serious threat, namely, the threat that an Iran with nuclear weapons would have represented. If the invasion and occupation of Iraq prevented such a development, that means the Iraq catastrophe was justified.
It is difficult to imagine a more heinously bankrupt moral argument. Iraq itself was no threat to the United States, and it was known to be no threat. We have destroyed Iraq completely, unleashed a genocide that continues with every blood-drenched day that passes, created refugees in the several millions, and wreaked havoc and devastation in numerous other ways. Because Iraq was known to be no threat to the U.S., the U.S. did all this in a criminal war of aggression -- precisely the kind of crime against peace for which we properly condemned the Nazi regime. Yet now it is suggested that all this was morally justified -- because it may have prevented a threat from arising in another country. Because most Americans know only the mythologized, sanitized version of our history, many of you may be surprised to learn that this was one of the "justifications" used to defend the incineration of hundreds of thousands of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- to deliver a "message" to Soviet Russia. It was abominable then, and it is abominable now.
He then lays into the uncritical acceptance of the NIE estimate by liberal bloggers, focusing on Digby's reaction, especially her comment that the Republicans might be "nuts" enough to attack Iran anyway:
On that last point and insofar as the crucial general principles involved are concerned, may it be duly noted that the leading Democrats are just as "hawkish" and "nuts" on this issue: Hillary Clinton, who speaks of our inalienable "right" to take "offensive military action against Iran"; Barack Obama ("In today's globalized world, the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people," which is license to intervene anywhere and everywhere, on any pretext whatsoever, real or imagined); and all the other prominent Democrats, with their endless trash talk of keeping "all options on the table."
Silber then points out -- as he has done before -- another indisputable but entirely ignored truth: that even if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would not pose a direct threat to the United States.
In the most critical sense, I don't care about this latest assessment, just as I did not care about the earlier ones, about Iran or on any other subject at all -- for in addition to the rather important fact that such assessments are invariably wrong, I recognize that policy decisions are made on different grounds altogether. Moreover, in terms of U.S. foreign policy, I don't care if Iran does get nuclear weapons. As I have noted before, I do not view it as a remotely good thing that any nation has nuclear weapons, including the U.S. -- and I remind you once again that it is only the U.S. that has used them, when it did not have any legitimate reason for doing so and when it lied about every aspect of its actions and their consequences. But in terms of an Iran with nuclear weapons five or ten years in the future: "So Iran Gets Nukes. So What?" But the bipartisan commitment to American world hegemony has not altered in the slightest degree. The criminal catastrophe of Iraq is irrelevant to our ruling class, and it has not caused them to alter any of their most crucial goals.
Finally, Silber notes yet another incontrovertible truth: that the Bush Regime has already laid in another store of "justifications" for a war with Iran -- justifications that have been eagerly embraced by the Democrats. (For more on this, see "War Alarms Drowned by Beltway Bloodlust" and "The Senate's Blank Check for War with Iran.")
This brings us to the most likely way in which a conflict with Iran may still occur in the very near future: as the direct result of the continuing, ghastly, genocidal, criminal occupation of Iraq. In moral and historic terms, it is unforgivable that the Democratic Congress has not defunded the Iraq occupation completely. They have the power to do so, and they refuse to use it. Some people object to defunding on the grounds that Bush will use other funds to pay for it -- and the Democratic Congress has obligingly provided plenty of those. But if Bush is going to do that, then make him do it. It is only the nauseating corruption of our politics that makes it necessary to point out that decent human beings would choose not to have blood on their own hands. With two or three exceptions, there are no such decent human beings to be found in Washington.
There is much, much more in Silber's essay -- including all the essential links that I've omitted here in my midnight haste. Do yourself a favor, give yourself an education, and go read the whole thing now.
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Cave Dwellers: More Democratic Deceit on War and Torture
Written by Chris Floyd
Sunday, 09 December 2007
The Washington Post reports that Congressional Democrats are preparing to sign off on a spending bill that will, once again, pour tens of billions of dollars into the ongoing war crime in Iraq. The exact figure is not yet known, because Bush's willing executioners among both parties have rigged up a complicated and deliberately deceitful process to shield the true nature of their craven kowtowing to the bloodstained, filth-encrusted White House autocrat.
(For more on the autocratic, lawless nature of the Bush Regime, see Jonathan Schwarz, Marcy Wheeler, and Scott Horton, and this as well.)
Here's how the scam will work. First, House Democrats will offer up an initial lowball figure -- "only" $30 billion or so -- and claim, falsely, that the funds are intended for the war in Afghanistan and other Pentagon projects, even though "all sides in the deal recognize [that the money] could be shifted to fund the Iraq war," as the Post reports.
Then, the Democrat's so-called leader in the Senate, Harry "Shaky Knees" Reid, will "allow Republicans to increase that amount to avert a filibuster of the spending bill in the Senate." At that point, with the bill now swollen to, say, $70 billion or so for the Iraq war crime (and this is short-term, stop-gap spending, mind you), it will go back to the House, whose "leaders" will then accept the "compromise" reached in the Senate, and send the bill to the murderous, sadistic wretch in the Oval Office.
And that, boys and girls, is the way that the Potomac Empire operates: wilful deceit in the service of undeniable evil.
[For more on the long-term, bipartisan nature of this system, see the indispensable Arthur Silber here.]
However, there could be one possible glitch in the plan. It seems that the Democrats have asked for $11 billion in domestic spending to be included in the deal. It is thought that some Republicans -- and the White House -- will balk at throwing any more coins at the rabble they rule with such cynicism and contempt. Yet even this begged sop represents a cave-in by the Democrats. The Post reports that Shaky Knees last month "signaled that the Democrats were willing to halve their initial request of $22 billion in additional domestic spending, setting 'boundaries for the current debate in which $11 billion serves as the new ceiling." In other words, Reid gave away half the game before the negotiations even started.
On GOP aide quoted by the Post called this move "a bargaining mistake" by Reid. But it is highly doubtful that this was a "mistake" of any kind. It was instead just another instance of the long-running system of deception that allows each side to strike poses before its partisan base, while working feverishly behind the scenes to serve its true masters: the corporate, militarist and financial elites. In this round of the game, Reid and the Democrats posture as champions of the middle class and the poor, playing to the old New Deal base, while the Republicans get to prance around in their threadbare "anti-Big Guvmint" robes. The reality, of course, is that the welfare of the common people has declined precipitously over the past few decades, while government has grown by leaps and bounds -- no matter which party is ostensibly in power.
Thus the final "negotiations" between these cynical factions will see a further cut in the domestic spending option, while the funding for the rapine in Iraq will sail through. There is one other possibility: Bush might refuse to sign the bill if any new domestic spending whatsoever is included. In that case, the outcome is equally certain: the Democrats will once again "cave" -- i.e., do right by their true masters -- and the war crime will go on as before. The Democrats are not going to do anything to stop this crime -- because they are part of it. They are not going to do anything to bring the perpetrators to justice -- because they are deeply complicit in every death engendered by the war as well.
UPDATE: Just as I was finishing up the piece above, fresh confirmation came -- via the Post again -- of the knowing collusion of the Democratic leadership in the worst crimes of the Bush Administration. In this case, it is the foul torture regimen personally instituted by George W. Bush and his top minions, including physical abuses used by Nazi Germany in its torture chambers and psychological torments devised by the KGB and North Korea.
As the Post reports, top members of Congress -- a bipartisan group including Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi -- were given a full description of the Bush-Cheney torture program in September 2002. Some 30 other private briefings with Democratic and Republican leaders followed. In these sessions, the legislators were fully informed on the nature of the tortures, including waterboarding -- a heinous technique for which German and Japanese officials were hanged after World War II.
During Pelosi's 2002 visit, it seems that the Congressional leaders questioned only one aspect of the torture program:
"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.
These new revelations are an outgrowth of the recent discovery that the CIA destroyed direct evidence of their "intense interrogation" of the mentally unbalanced, low-level al Qaeda factotum, Abu Zubaydah. (For more on the Zubaydah case, see the Horton story noted above.) This criminal obstruction of justice is so glaring and indefensible that the Bush Administration is obviously trying to muddy the waters by leaking word of the briefings to Democratic leaders. "We're all in on it," the Bushists are signaling; "we all knew about it -- so it's no big deal. If the Dems want to say we're dirty, they're dirty too."
This is a classic Karl Rove tactic. (Oh, you think he's gone, do you, no longer pulling any strings for the White House?) You spread the muck around, instill a sense of general disgust with politics among the electorate ("A plague on both their houses!"), which drives away the majority of voters, leaving a clearer field for your rabid rightwing base.
It also plays to the corporate media's lazy tropes. "Hey look, the Dems were in on this thing, it had bipartisan backing all the way. So if anybody on that side wants to criticize it now, it's just partisan posturing." This serves the media's need to reduce every aspect of public life and policy to "the usual Beltway bickering."
Finally the leak is also a warning shot to the Democrats: "If we go down because of this, you're going down too -- in fact, the whole damn system, the great golden goose, the endless supply of pork and graft that's made us all rich and powerful, could go down as well."
And of course, all of this is true. The Democrats are in on it too, deeply complicit in the torture and war atrocities. There is much hypocrisy in their very belated, very timid, very limited -- and deliberately ineffectual -- criticisms of waterboarding, aggressive war, presidential dictatorship, etc. And it is certainly true that the whole political system has become steeped in evil: dependent on war, dependent on corruption, dependent on deceit, and lawless to an astonishing degree. If Bush and his gang really were brought to the full measure of justice for their crimes -- and if the full extent of these crimes were to be exposed clearly and copiously -- then the system might indeed collapse, unable any longer to keep up the deliberate lies -- and the deep-seated self-deceptions -- that have allowed it to destroy so many innocent lives, for so many years, in so many countries...including our own.
But you know and I know that this is not going to happen. As with the outrageously cynical "enabling act" for the Iraq war crime noted above, here too with these new revelations about destruction of evidence and Democratic knowledge of torture, we will see the usual striking of ritual poses, while the game -- the deep, dark, dirty, sickening game -- goes on.
UPDATE II: As usual, Arthur Silber is already on the case, but I didn't see his piece on the torture story until now. He lays out well the history that makes this latest revelation of bipartisan partnership in torture less than "news," and makes an eloquent call for a response that we have touched on occasionally here and elsewhere: non-recognition of any authority or legitimacy of the evildoers who rule over us, and their partners. Go read the whole piece, but I'll leave you with Silber's conclusion:
I do not want to be misunderstood on this point, so let me state it as plainly as I can. The time is long since past for every minimally decent American to take a stand: either you are on the side of civilization and humanity, and the irreplaceable, supreme value of an individual human life -- or you are on the side of evil, brutality, torture, sadism, genocidal war, and endless death. The Democrats and the Republicans both stand for Empire, and for the endless horrors already inflicted -- and the endless horrors that still lie in our future....
At this terrible moment in history, we must call things by their proper names. Let the world know where you stand: for life, and the possibility of joy and happiness -- or for death, and cruelty, barbarism and the repetition of horrors that the monsters among us insist on reviving when given the opportunity.
If you choose to support evil and to embody evil yourself, I suggest you follow the vile example of the current administration: do so without apology, and brazenly revel in the evil you choose to inflict on the world. It is far more contemptible -- and, to speak personally, it is sickening beyond my capacity to describe accurately , in significant part because of the complex psychological dishonesties that are required -- to enable evil, while claiming you represent the "moral" and "practical" choice. These are the justifications used by those who made possible the cruelest and most unspeakably horrifying regimes in history, as Mayer's witness and many others attest.
Withdraw your support entirely from those who perpetrate and make excuses for evil. If the refusal to support such people were widespread enough, we still might have a chance. I regard it as the very slightest of chances, one that will almost certainly be destroyed by another significant terrorist attack in the United States -- but it is the only one we have.
posted by Tapir's Rants at 7:43 AM
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