You Call This News?

Turns out Fox News manipulates its coverage by "cropping comments by progressives and Democratic political figures in a manner that misrepresents them."

Who would've thought?

PS: These are the same people who make big production out of slandering a President for his choice of burger condiment.

So, at long last, torture has become part of the national conversation. Too bad the press would never talk about it when it was more relevant, but that does nothing to diminish the fact that we've got to have it out as a nation: how far do we want our military-intelligence program to go in our names?


A review of some notable news items:

• The CIA waterboarded self-described 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times in one month, March of 2003.
• The NYTimes reports that a large consenus on torture regimes for the CIA was possible, largely because no one involved "investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate." For example, no one rummaged around to find out that the program they were modelling after "had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans." Nor did they look into the history of waterboarding long enough to learn that "waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition."
• WaPo reports that "intelligence and military officials under the Bush administration began preparing to conduct harsh interrogations long before they were granted legal approval to use such methods--and weeks before the CIA captured its first high-ranking terrorism suspect."
• And perhaps worst of all, McClatchy reports that "the Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime". A former senior U.S. intelligence official is quoted as saying, "'But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.'"

And that's to say nothing of these oldies-but-goodies:

• A June 2007 piece in Salon demonstrates that psychologists and physicians were part of the effort to prolong the experience of torture.
  
• A December 2008 piece in Vanity Fair quotes FBI Director Robert Mueller as saying that he is unaware of any attacks having been disrupted by what the administration was then calling "enhanced interrogation techniques."
  

It's clear that torture was a premeditated policy that originated from the highest levels of the Bush administration. And yet here are some of the responses coming from the loony Right:

• Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan went on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” to make the following comments about Obama administration's release of torture memos: “Some things in life need to be mysterious”; “Sometimes you need to just keep walking [as in, with blinders on]”; "It’s hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that.”
• Former VP Darth Vader went on Fox "News" to make the claim "that the interrogation methods were 'enormously valuable' in thwarting terrorist attacks."

Meanwhile, MediaMatters does a piece showing how "media outlets continue to cite Dick Cheney's criticism of President Obama for releasing previously classified Justice Department memos authorizing the CIA's use of harsh interrogation techniques while ignoring Cheney's self-acknowledged role in authorizing the use of those techniques" (emphasis added).

Isn't torture something better left to Nazis and Spanish Inquisitors? I'm baffled as to why people think there's any room for debate on this--especially since there is no reason to believe that torture yields actionable results. That methodological question mark might be raised if one were to wonder why it took 183 times to waterboard Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. And it's especially troubling that this is one of the primary methods used to forge the claim that Iraq and al Qaeda were in cahoots in the planning of the September 11th attacks.

And that's to say nothing of the moral questions...

Update: Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, says here that the primary impetus for the Bush administration to advance the torture agenda was to help bolster the claim that Iraq was working with Al Qada on the 9/11 attacks. The so-called "interrogation" program's "principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda," Wilkerson said.

So not only was torture used to make the bogus link that led us into a disastrous mistake (I feel like "mistake" doesn't begin to cover the problem, but I lack a better synonym), but it also was in use well before the Justice Department claims having authorized it. It leads one to wonder if the Justice memos were post-hoc justifications of what was already going on. That certainly seems to be what this NPR story is getting at: " It is clear that increasingly abusive interrogation techniques were used on Abu Zubaydah, the first high-value detainee, in the months between his capture and the first Justice Department memo authorizing harsh interrogations. But the legal guidance that authorized those early interrogations remains shrouded in secrecy. Zubaydah was picked up on March 28, 2002. The Justice Department issued its first memo on torture four months later on Aug. 1."

Update: The media frenzy continues. If only this conversation had been aired out during the emergence of the torture policies. Here a Salon columnist identifies the 13 people responsible for the torture policies, in order of culpability.

This Whole Fuckin Thing

So you know how the GOP is trying to blame all of the economic meltdown on unions? Funny thing, all those people at GM are living pretty high on the hog, what with the company gas cards and the brand-new, free company ride they get every each year.

I guess it's true that such perks for 8,000 employees won't make the difference between success and bankruptcy for a billion-dollar corporation. But how can they be serious when they tell lay people off by the thousands without making cuts to their pet perks? Really?

Signs of the Times

I was talking to my bro-in-law about Him Who Must Not Be Named and about His Highness's imperial disregard for the balance of powers. A lot of that conversation revolved around W's insidious use of presidential signing statements, and Todd was completely unfamiliar with that phenomenon. So I looked up some news stories and editorials on the subject and sent them to him, and while I'm at it I'll post them here for future reference:

• Charlie Savage's Pulitzer Prize-winning report that broke the news
• A NYTimes editorial on how W uses the signing statements to avoid more public actions like the presidential veto
• Another NYTimes editorial that covers some of the legislation impacted by W's signing statements and details the unparalleled proliferation of this tool under his administration. Spoiler: "Over 212 years, 42 presidents issued 'signing statements' objecting to a grand total of 600 provisions of new laws. George W. Bush has done that more than 800 times in just over five and a half years in office."

Worst. President. Ever.


PS: In completely unrelated news, here's one response to the Obama election from Huntsville, Arkansas. It seems the owners of the Faubus Motel--yes, previously owned by the Faubus you're thinking of--have raised a Confederate Flag to protest the President Elect. And they've flown it up until at least Nov. 28.

"I've found a flaw."

I've gone a long time without a post, missing out on the big news of the last couple months: the financial meltdown leading our economy into recession, and Obama's election. Both are historic, but I just want to focus on one little issue relating to the former.

On October 23, responding to the initial mortgaged-fueled bank failures that set off the economic slide that continues today, Alan Greenspan was called into Congress to talk about the state of the economy. What did Greenspan, a lifelong neoliberal ideolgist, have to say for himself?

When Henry Waxman asked him, “Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?”, he gave this response: “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”

Wow. Nice avoidance of responsibility, Al. And let's make sure to add that it could just be a minor flaw. I mean, maybe that little flaw wouldn't lead to the failure of Detroit, fast-rising unemployment, or the worst economic crisis in a century, would it?

Wanna hear something fucked up about the War on Terror? No, seriously. I mean, want to hear something really, really fucked up about the War on Terror?

So there's this guy, and he's been chauffering Osama bin Laden (funny how we can find this guy but not his boss, right?), and he gets picked up by counterterrorist forces and taken to Gitmo. God only knows what happens to him there, but later on he's tried for supporting terrorism and for conspiracy to murder. Conspiracy with whom is never fully articulated, but then such details aren't exactly salient in a military tribunal. I digress. This guy has the deck stacked against him: the jury was made up of uniformed officers handpicked by the Pentagon, and the prosecution was allowed to use evidence never seen by the defense--evidence that may well have relied on hearsay and may have been acquired through torture.

Does this guy look familiar?

Turns out that he's acquitted on the charge of conspiracy to murder, and he gets five and a half years for supporting terrorism. Since he's been detained for five years or so, he might be released in another few months. Justice carried out, right? Well, here's where the fucked up part steps in: after he finishes his sentence, the Pentagon will still hold him as a so-called "enemy combatant".

That's right: the Bush administration rigs the proceedings, and when that fails to get the result they demand, they just go ahead and do as they please anyway.

Now, I don't know the details--after all, this is a show trial and such details aren't exactly shared with the public--so I don't have any special thoughts on Salim Hamdan as an individual. I doubt he's totally on the up and up, and I doubt he's some kind of Al-Qada Sith Lord. I mean, you can't be totally oblivious to what's going on when you're driving bin Laden around ("This seems to be the limit for RPGs in the trunk, sir!"). But then again, he's just the driver, and I can't imagine he would be consulted on the Al-Qada actions for precisely the reason that he might get picked up for being bin Laden's driver.

Dude's innocence is not the point here. I don't know why, but I'm kind of surprised that, after the goddamn show trial that was an international embarrassment for our Crusade in the Name of Democracy, the juridicial proceedings were completely discounted by throwing this guy right back into the slammer.

If she weighs the same as a duck,
she's made of wood, and therefore, a witch.

So the press has covered this affair as a rebuke to the Bush administration, in so far as their "legal strategy" did not yield the desired verdict. Kind of funny that people are making so much of the rebuke, though, when it's clear that the verdict doesn't mean a damn thing to the administration in the first place. It's clear that they're not interested in anything more than the appearance of legal legitimacy.

UPDATE: Hamdan will be released, according to a report published some 3 months after the show-trial. Could it be that the Bushies are trying to get on the good side of the history books, recognizing the inevitability that Obama will close down Gitmo?

UPDATE: As of 8 July 2009, the Obama administration is claiming the right to detain non-citizens accused of terrorism "even if they have been acquitted of terrorism charges by a U.S. military commission." Looks like that gesture to close down Gitmo is all but symbolic.

Propagandist on Campus

(Goebbels addressing a crowd with Nazi propaganda)

In February, UF's Turkish Student Association hosted Justin McCarthy, who spoke on the Armenian genocide. The title of his talk was "'So-Called' Armenian Genocide," which should give you the idea that his argument was that the genocide didn't really happen.

Why write about this almost 4 months after the fact? McCarthy's name came up in the summer 2008 newsletter of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Intelligence Report. Intelligence Report tracks hate groups and their movement across the US. In the newsletter's lead story, the SPLC identifies an "Armenian genocide denial industry" that's largely funded by the Turkish government and that has been trying to get its tentacles into the American university system. And it indicates that Justin McCarthy is a big wheel in this movement.

The archives of The Alligator include a preview story indicating that ACCENT co-sponsored the event. There's also a pro-McCarthy letter to the editor and a review article that recaps McCarthy's argument, mostly focusing on his intent to keep the "debate" open.

The review article remains "objective" merely trying to recap the "debate" without intrusive "editorializing." I don't hold the Alligator staff responsible for uncovering the national trend of revisionist propaganda, but this does raise an interesting question: had they known, would they have given this event the same treatment as a campus-sponsored, revisionist-funded speaker who wanted to keep open the "debate" on the Holocaust?

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Update: The Turkish-American Legal Fund is suing the Southern Poverty Law Center for decrying the work of another genocide denier, Guenter Lewy. It's a pretty brutal assault on the right of academic freedom to disagree with or criticize another's work.