Waterboarding for God, With Decency and Compassion
After one spends 45 years in Washington, high farce does not normally throw one off balance. I found the past few days, however, an acid test of my equilibrium.I missed the National Prayer Breakfast-for the 45th time in a row. But, as I drove to work I listened with rapt attention as President George W. Bush gave his insights on prayer:
“When we lift our hearts to God, we’re all equal in his sight. We’re all equally precious…In prayer we grow in mercy and compassion…. When we answer God’s call to love a neighbor as ourselves, we enter into a deeper friendship with our fellow man - and a deeper relationship with our eternal Father.”
Vice President Dick Cheney skipped Thursday’s prayer breakfast in order to put the final touches on the speech he gave later that morning to the Conservative Political Action Conference. Perhaps he felt he needed some extra time to devise careful words to extol “the interrogation program run by the CIA…a tougher program for tougher customers, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11,” without conceding that the program has involved torture.
But there was a touch of defensiveness in Cheney’s remarks, as he saw fit repeatedly to reassure his audience yesterday that America is a “decent” country.
After all, CIA Director Michael Hayden had confirmed publicly on Tuesday that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other “high-value” detainees had been waterboarded in 2002-2003, though Hayden added that the technique has since been discontinued.
An extreme form of interrogation going back at least as far as the Spanish Inquisition, waterboarding has been condemned as torture by just about everyone-except the hired legal hands of the Bush administration.
On Wednesday President Bush’s spokesman Tony Fratto revealed that the White House reserves the right to approve waterboarding again, “depending on the circumstances.” Fratto matter-of-factly described the process still followed by the Bush administration to approve torture-er; I mean, “enhanced interrogation techniques” like waterboarding:
“The process includes the director of the Central Intelligence Agency bringing the proposal to the attorney general, where the review would be conducted to determine if the plan would be legal and effective. At that point, the proposal would go to the president. The president would listen to the determination of his advisers and make a decision.”
Dissing Congress
Cheney’s task of reassuring us about our “decency” was made no easier Thursday, when Attorney General Michael Mukasey stonewalled questions from the hapless John Conyers, titular chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Conyers tried, and failed, to get straight answers from Mukasey on torture.
Conyers referred to Hayden’s admission about waterboarding and branded the practice “odious.” But Mukasey seemed to take perverse delight in “dissing” Conyers, as the expression goes in inner city Washington. Sadly, the tired chairman took the disrespect stoically.
He did summon the courage to ask Attorney General Mukasey directly, “Are you ready to start a criminal investigation into whether this confirmed use of waterboarding by U.S. agents was illegal?”
“No, I am not,” Mukasey answered.
Mukasey claimed “waterboarding was found to be permissible under the law as it existed” in the years immediately after 9/11; thus, the Justice Department could not investigate someone for doing something the department had declared legal. Got that?
Mukasey explained:
“That would mean the same department that authorized the program would now consider prosecuting somebody who followed that advice.”
Oddly, Mukasey himself is on record saying waterboarding would be torture if applied to him. And Michael McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, was even more explicit in taking the same line in an interview with Lawrence Wright of New Yorker magazine. McConnell told Wright that, for him:
“Waterboarding would be excruciating. If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can’t imagine how painful! Whether it’s torture by anybody else’s definition, for me it would be torture.”
Okay, it would be torture if done to you, Mike; how about if done to others? Sadly, McConnell, too, missed the prayer breakfast and the president’s moving reminder that we are called “to love a neighbor as ourselves.” Is there an exception, perhaps, for detainees?
Cat Out of Bag
When torture first came up during his interview with the New Yorker, McConnell was more circumspect, repeating the obligatory bromide “We don’t torture,” as former CIA Director George Tenet did in five consecutive sentences while hawking his memoir on 60 Minutes on April 29, 2007. As McConnell grew more relaxed, however, he let slip the rationale for Mukasey’s effrontery and the administration’s refusal to admit that waterboarding is torture. For anyone paying attention, that rationale has long been a no-brainer. But here is McConnell inadvertently articulating it:
“If it is ever determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it.”
Like death. Even Alberto Gonzales could grasp this at the outset. That explains the overly clever, lawyerly wording in the Jan. 25, 2002 memorandum for the president drafted by the vice president’s lawyer, David Addington, but signed by Gonzales. Addington/Gonzales argued that the president’s determination that the Geneva agreements on prisoners of war do not apply to al-Qaeda and the Taliban:
“Substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441)…enacted in 1996…
“Punishments for violations of Section 2441include the death penalty…
“[I]t is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441. Your determination would create a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution.”
MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT, January 25, 2002, p. 2
Mike McConnell needs to get his own lawyers to bring him up to date on all this. For that memorandum was quickly followed by an action memorandum signed by George W. Bush on Feb. 7, 2002. The president’s memo incorporated the exact wording of Addington/Gonzales’ bottom line; to wit, the U.S. would “treat the detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of [Geneva]. (emphasis added)
That provided the loophole through which then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and then-CIA director George Tenet and their subordinates drove the Mack truck of torture. Even the Bush-administration-friendly editorial page of the Washington Post saw fit on Friday to declare torture “illegal in all instances,” adding that “waterboarding is, and always has been, torture.”
Waterboarding has been condemned as torture for a very long time. After WW-II Japanese soldiers were hanged for the “war crime” of waterboarding American soldiers.
Patriots and Prophets
Patriots and prophets have made it clear from our earliest days that such abuse has no place in America.
Virginia’s Patrick Henry insisted passionately that “the rack and the screw,” as he put it, were barbaric practices that had to be left behind in the Old World, or we are “lost and undone.” Attorney General Mukasey, for his part, recently refused to say whether he considers the rack and the screw forms of torture, dismissing the question as hypothetical.
As for prophets, George Hunzinger of Princeton Theological Seminary has awakened enough religious folks to form the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, a coalition of 130 religious organizations from left to right on the political spectrum. Hunzinger puts it succinctly: “To acknowledge that waterboarding is torture is like conceding that the sun rises in the east,” adding:
“All the dissembling in high places that makes these shocking abuses possible must be brought to an end. But they will undoubtedly continue unless those responsible for them are held accountable…. A special counsel is an essential first step.”
Sadly, Hunzinger and his associates have been unable to overcome the pious complacency of the vast majority of institutional churches, synagogues, and mosques in this country and their reluctance to exercise moral leadership.
How It Looks From Outside
Sometimes it takes a truth-telling outsider to throw light on our moral failures.
South African Methodist Bishop Peter Storey, erstwhile chaplain to Nelson Madela in prison and longtime outspoken opponent of apartheid, has this to say to those clergy who might be moved to preach more than platitudes:
“We had obvious evils to engage; you have to unwrap your culture from years of red, white, and blue myth. You have to expose and confront the great disconnect between the kindness, compassion, and caring of most American people and the ruthless way American power is experienced, directly or indirectly, by the poor of the earth. You have to help good people see how they have let their institutions do their sinning for them.
“All around the world there are those who long to see your human goodness translated into a different, more compassionate way of relating with the rest of this bleeding planet.”
Mukasey’s thumbing his nose at Conyers’ committee yesterday was simply the most recent display of contempt for Congress on the part of the Bush administration. The Founders expected our representatives in Congress to be taken seriously by the executive branch, and expected that Members of Congress would hold senior executives accountable-to the point of impeaching them, when necessary, for high crimes and misdemeanors.
That used to worry those officials and put a brake on more outlandish behavior. Not any more.
No Worries, George
One reads George Tenet’s memoirs with some nostalgia for the days of a modicum of congressional oversight, and with a strong sense of irony-as he confesses concern that Congress might one day hold him and others accountable for taking liberties with national and international law.
It seems likely that then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington counseled Tenet that his concerns were quaint and obsolete and, alas, they may have been right, the way things have been going. But Tenet apparently entertained lingering misgivings-perhaps even qualms of conscience.
In the immediate post-9/11 period, Tenet says he told the president “our only real ally” on the Afghan border was Uzbekistan, “where we had established important intelligence-collection capabilities.” We now know from UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray that those “collection capabilities” included the most primitive methods of torture, including boiling alleged “terrorists” alive.
Tenet adds that he stressed the importance of being able to detain unilaterally al-Qaeda operatives around the world. His worries shine through the rather telling sentences that follow:
“We were asking for and we would be given as many authorities as CIA ever had. Things could blow up. People, me among them, could end up spending some of the worst days of our lives justifying before congressional overseers our new freedom to act.”
At the Center of the Storm, p. 177-178
Tenet need not have worried. He would be shielded from accountability by a timid Congress as well as an arrogant White House able to arrogate unprecedented power to itself and to shield those it wished to protect.
Setting the Tone
It was President George W. Bush who set the tone from the outset. After his address to the nation on the evening of 9/11, he assembled his top national security aides in the White House bunker-the easier, perhaps, to foster a bunker mentality. Among them was counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, who quoted the president in his memoir:
“I want you to understand that we are at war and we will stay at war until this is done. Nothing else matters. Everything is available for the pursuit of this war. Any barriers in your way, they’re gone. Any money you need, you have it. This is our only agenda…
“I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.” Against All Enemies, Free Press, 2004
Clarke, of course, took his book’s title from the oath of office we all swore as military officers and/or senior government officials: “To defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
John Ashcroft, head of the Department of Justice at the time, fell in lockstep with the thrust of the president’s comment dismissing any concern with international law-or, as would quickly be seen, domestic law, as well. With the enthusiastic assistance of David Addington, the affable Ashcroft assembled a cabal of Mafia-like lawyers whose imaginative legal opinions on torture, warrantless eavesdropping, and other abuses mark them forever as “domestic enemies” of the Constitution.
Add Mukasey to this distinguished roster.
Torture: the Hallmark
What is not widely known is that Justice Department-approved torture was first applied on an American citizen, John Walker Lindh, who was captured in Afghanistan in late November 2001. The White House and corporate press immediately sensationalized Lindh as “the American Taliban.”
Jesselyn Radack, a conscientious legal advisor in the Justice Department’s Professional Responsibility Advisory Office, which gives ethics advice to Department attorneys, insisted that Lindh be advised of his rights before any interrogation. Instead, he was tortured mercilessly during the first few days of his internment and denied medical care.
Lindh had had the foolishness and bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time; i. e., in a large group of prisoners rounded up by CIA and Army paramilitary forces-too large a group, it turned out.
A spontaneous uprising took place, and CIA paramilitary officer Johnny “Mike” Spann, who had questioned Lindh just minutes before, was shot dead. Outraged, Spann’s colleagues applied “frontier justice,” totally ignoring the Constitutional cautions of Ms. Radack.
The Department of Justice moved quickly to fire Radack for her principled stand. But she had the presence of mind to save emails providing chapter and verse of the difficult exchanges in which she had insisted on respect for Lindh’s rights as an American citizen. Newsweek carried the story briefly, but neither Congress nor anyone else in the media showed much interest.
Radack’s book recounting this experience, The Canary in the Coalmine: Blowing the Whistle in the Case of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, is available on line at: http://www.patriotictruthteller.net/.
Against this backdrop, together with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, Patrick Henry’s warning remains a challenge for our time: Are we “lost and undone?” I think not; but we had better get it together soon, for, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., cautioned, “There is such a thing as too late.”
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was an Army intelligence officer before joining the CIA where he had a 27-year career as an analyst. He is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Letting the cat out of the bag.
I always wondered where this expression originated.
Is it from the practice of putting unwanted cats in bags and dropping them in rivers?
Ironic given the subject matter being discussed.
The American pseudo-empire in decline is more than a little desperate at the moment, hence morals are mutating, that is, if they ever existed.
Cruelty is nothing new. The difference now is the Washington punks in favor of torture are attempting to make it “legal” and a matter of established national policy.
Back in the days of liberating the Vietnamese, a common practice was to question captured VC while in a helicopter. If a captive would not talk after a beating, he was thrown out of the helicopter. If he did talk, the information was noted and then the captive was thrown to his death.
A good PTSD Nam Green Beret friend I once knew explained one unusual method used when in the field with a fresh captive brought back to a forward operations base.
The VC freedom fighter would be buried alive with a rubber hose inserted in his mouth for breathing. From time to time, guys from camp would go over to the live burial and piss in a funnel that was inserted into the air hose. Of course the fellow underground had no way of knowing when that was coming. Obviously, the person underground could not do much useful talking. The main idea was to indulge in very methodical sadism and perhaps scare the next captive in line watching a friend die slowly.
But of course the VC did some mean things as well with American captives, but then we were invading their country and killing millions.
Yet now that we are blatantly engaging in torture in an attempt to enforce our imperial Big Oil schemes on the Middle East and Central Asia for, the question of racism raises it’s ugly historic head.
Native Americans and Africans were treated as less than human with calculated brutality while exploring our divine manifest destiny. We also nuked Japanese civilians and carpet bombed Koreans and Vietnamese in thier homes. And with napalm we inflicted suffering with psychotic efficiency in both Nam and Iraq.
Ironically, systematic torture is being used as part of the “war on terror” when we are the ones who actually began the conflict through previous foreign policy and injustice. And of course we only torture the “evil-doers”.
A remarkable comparison emerging from this situation is that despite their obvious crimes, we did not often torture Nazi captives while mopping up the end of Hitler’s regime. It appears we treated them as humans because they were white Europeans.
Now, when attacking different “races” or cultural groups around the world, the old deranged racist imperial cruelty is surfacing again as an example of the true mindset of America.
When we identify others as being apart from ourselves it become terribly easy to not understand the suffering we are creating.
There is no easy answer, but first we must recognize the disease. I might add my Beret friend had hideous nightmares linked to combat but more deeply, to his conscience.
Abusing someone you have under your total control is torture.
Other definitions are usually some form of bullshit on a waffle.
actually the bush administration follows much of the bible which is equally violent thinking as they are.
Letting the cat out of the bag is usually considered to have originated in the Middle Ages and refers to farmers’ markets, where livestock, usually chickens or young pigs, were sold alive and put in tied-up bags so the purchaser could carry them easily. Unscrupulous merchants would, or so the story goes, sometimes put a cat in the bag before tying it up (cats were available and cheap) and giving it to the purchaser. If the purchaser opened the bag right there, they would know they were tricked and would then demand reparation from the merchant, but if they waited ’til they got home it would be too late to do anything about it because they couldn’t prove anything.
Of course this would require a doped-up or dead cat, because most live cats are pretty noisy and uncooperative when you put them in a sack, so this may not be true at all.
Either way, the Bush adminstration is very good at feeding us things which may not be true at all.
“Addington/Gonzales argued that the president’s determination that the Geneva agreements on prisoners of war do not apply to al-Qaeda and the Taliban:”
This doesn’t come as a surprize considering that our “decider” King George has also decided to use “singing statements” which undermine and negate the laws which Congress passes. If King George doesn’t like any part of the legislation that he signs into law, he simply attaches a signing statement to it giving himself permission to ignore that which doesn’t fit his agenda.
These “signing statements” are like having the authority of “line-item” veto power which is unconstitutional. So, if you think you’re not living under a dictatorship, think again!
First rule of law: Might is Right.
These ex-cia guys are great - Ray may be a nice guy but all those years of fascist work and now he talks of “decency” - strange.
It is nice to see that John Walker Lindh has not been entirely forgotten. One of the questions I ask of the candy stripers who call me up wanting my vote for their pet candidate is whether they intend to leave the poor guy in jail for 20 years. (”Who?” they say.) Not that he isn’t lucky to be alive, having fallen into the clutches of George of Mordor and his demented Orcs.
The word ‘Torture’ has many different forms. When I listen to George Bush talk I experience agony as, brilliantly, he mangles the American language and destroys any semblance of logic.
When I see people like Murdoch and Bill O’Rielly and Cheney, I feel such deep pain inside my heart. It’s as if a dagger was being slowly pushed home. How come people like them are worshiped by so many, I ask myself. Is the world mad?
And when I see the Palestinian’s plight, one they’ve endured for forty years, I feel tortured. How can a civilized world continue to be so indifferent?
I wish someone would stop my torture!
www.dangerouscreation.com
The purpose of torture is revenge. The rest is excuses.
“Is there an exception, perhaps, for detainees?”
Turns out, there is:
“The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the detainees captured in Afghanistan aren’t recognized as “persons”…
And there is no law against torturing a non-person, unless it’s a pit bull and you’re a black pro quarterback…
~grigor~, this Ray McGovern is quite believable in his sincerity and dedication to the progressive cause. That’s why I don’t trust him. Perhaps the “sanity” of which he speaks (Intelligence Veterans for Sanity) is actually the type of “sanity” which allows the CIA and other Intelligence agencies (Mossad, MI6, etc…) to continue their nefarious practices unmolested by an aroused public.
I view this as a sort of “damage control” where the best the CIA can hope for is a consensus among some Americans that decent people do, indeed, work in the CIA, and that the CIA is actually a rather balanced governmental agency, containing elements of progressive left as well as rabid right and all points in-between. The notion that Mr. McGovern…um…actually is RETIRED from the CIA rather than an ACTIVE OPERATIVE is what I take issue with.
This is something like the Apostle Paul, who used to be an undercover agent of the status quo until his ‘retirement’ and ‘transformation’ into a “Christian” who essentially stood the revolutionary message of Jesus on it’s head in order to, in effect, serve power.
If “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” has any meaning whatsoever, it shouldn’t be inscribed in the floor of the CIA building. The ‘truth’ as far as I can tell, is that CIA and Mossad got together and planned and carried out the attacks of 9/11/01.
To those that grow tired of my posts I apologize but–it took me 50 years to learn this-
Heat is energy. Cold is not. Cold is simply the relative absence of heat. One cannot manufacture a machine that produces cold. To make something cold, remove the heat.
Light is energy. Darkness is not. Darkness is simply the relative absence of light. One cannot manufacture a machine that produces darkness. To make something dark, remove the light.
Compassion (love) is energy. Evil is not. Evil is the relative absence of compassion. To make something evil, remove compassion.
The degree to which one lacks compassion is the degree to which one serves evil. This is true regardless of religious beliefs, political alignment or anything else.
Imagine yourself in a giant auditorium with all of the lights turned off. Total darkness. In your hand is a flashlight. A flick of the thumb sends a beam through the darkness. While the flashlights beam is not infinitely powerful, all of the darkness in the universe, if you could bring it into the auditorium, would have no effect on it whatsoever. There is no battle between darkness and light. Darkness is powerless. The battle takes place in the thumb.
The same thing can be said for the trigger finger. The battle between good and evil does not take place “out there” where the bullet is. It takes place in the finger.
The battle is between that which is separate from all else (ego) and that which is connected to all else (spirit).
To borrow from Joseph Campbell-
“…every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness, Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late.”
“Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively missionizing cults represent only partial solutions of the psychological problem of subduing hate by love; they only partially initiate. Ego is not annihilated in them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of thinking only of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the whole of his society. The rest of the world meanwhile (that is to say, by far the greater portion of mankind) is left outside the sphere of his sympathy and protection because outside the sphere of the protection of his god. And there takes place, then, that dramatic divorce of the two principles of love and hate which the pages of history so bountifully illustrate. Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world. The laws of the City of God are applied only to his in-group (tribe, church, nation, class, or what not) while the fire of a perpetual holy war is hurled (with good conscience, and indeed a sense of pious service) against whatever uncircumcised, barbarian, heathen, “native,” or alien people happens to occupy the position of neighbor.”
Open the door to a dark room. Does the darkness flow out or the light rush in?
Truth Faerie
The_truth_faerie@yahoo.com
miftin: Mr. McGovern is in NO way a covert approver of torture. I suggest you read more of his writings.
Re: The so-called “legality” of torture. Since only the Congress can make law, how can the administration pretend that either US or international law applies only to those situations not declared “exceptions” by Bush or his Attorney General.
Ditto signing statements. Maybe Congress has to pass a law saying anyone who obeys a signing statement instead of the law as passed is guilty of breaking that law.
If Mukasey will not investigate this AND OTHER Justice Dept. crimes, Congress should itself appoint an investigator. (I believe that is permitted.)
the big question remains, will he ever face prosecution for his crimes? If not why not?
To be against torture I think is to be supportive of basic human rights.
All that have argued on this board against torture have also argued (whether they like it or not) against most abortion procedures.
Are we still going to deny that the desmemberment unto death, partial birth (i.e. stabbing the back of the childs skull) or saline abortion (burning the skin and lungs unto death) isn’t torture.
I think its time for honesty in everything here. Torture in prison is wrong just as torture in the womb is wrong.
Dear Bernice:
I’m very familiar with Mr. McGovern’s writings. I’ve been following Mr. McGovern’s writings for years. So what? He was a CIA operative for 27 years. I, on the other hand, was not a CIA operative. Are you familiar with my writings? Why not? Could it be because I don’t have access to the Amy Goodman show or can’t get my opinions published nationally because I wasn’t first a CIA operative for 27 years?
kelmer February 10th, 2008 1:36 pm said, “Letting the cat out of the bag. I always wondered where this expression originated.”
In the old navy, the common punishment for every offense from spitting on the deck to disobeying an order was to be flogged with “the cat” aka the Cat-o’-nine-tails.
It was, “Hands to witness punishment,” and the crew was mustered. The man was triced up to the shrouds or to a grating and the cat, kept in a bag by the Bos’un, was brought out. “The cat was let out of the bag.”
“Having your back scratched by the cat,” was a euphemism for a flogging as the process cut the back to the bone and left him scarred for life. A really valued Bos’un was one who was ambidextrous and could lay the blows on criss-cross. That really shredded the back.
By the was, a Bosun or Bosun’s mate who was deemed to be holding back and not laying on with all his strength might well find himself triced up for a taste of the cat, himself.
Gee, perhaps we haven’t advanced as far as we thought, eh?
miftin - thanks - screw the cia and the rest of the fascist slime.
I’m not sure what the issue is here. Legally speaking, waterboarding is not torture, apparently. I am not a lawyer myself but I do know that the best lawyers in the USA (and therefore the world) are at the Justice Department. Are CD contributors claiming to know the law better than the U.S. Justice Department? Come on. No way. And besides, it has been catagorically stated by the Bush Administration that hundreds of thousands of American lives have been saved because terrorists have been subjected to legal, enhanced interrogations. We should all pull together in a time of war.
Don’t blame anyone for being cynical re CIA or ex CIA. To be naive in this time of virtual reality would be a form of insanity. However, when a person awakens, or stops resisting his own discomfort and nagging conscience–whatever it was for Ray McGovern, and continuously, for years and years, speaks truth to power, including calling Rumsfeld a liar at a public event, it is sane to give that person a chance, and more than that, to carefully read his body of work and recognize a hero when you see one.
Sometimes it takes a truth-telling outsider to throw light on our moral failures.
South African Methodist Bishop Peter Storey, erstwhile chaplain to Nelson Madela in prison and longtime outspoken opponent of apartheid, has this to say to those clergy who might be moved to preach more than platitudes:
“We had obvious evils to engage; you have to unwrap your culture from years of red, white, and blue myth. You have to expose and confront the great disconnect between the kindness, compassion, and caring of most American people and the ruthless way American power is experienced, directly or indirectly, by the poor of the earth. You have to help good people see how they have let their institutions do their sinning for them.
“All around the world there are those who long to see your human goodness translated into a different, more compassionate way of relating with the rest of this bleeding planet.”
This bore repeating… sweet stuff!
The REAL heros are people who live in places like Winchester, VA and spend decades of their lives experiencing very REAL economic and social discrimination because they choose to continually speak truth to power without a fat U.S. government pension to rely on.
I am glad to hear more comparisons with the Imperial Japanese of WWII as not only does it give perspective to what dastardly deeds are being claimed to be legal but also because whenever you mention the nazis everyone loses their minds.
The Japanese had many of the same problems we face in the Middle East, in China during WWII and they also used the faux term ‘ILLEGAL COMBATANTS’ to try and justify their treatment of their POWs in their Kangaroo courts. :puke:
When I think of my family members and friends who served during that time and our current dishonorable actions it tears me up inside =(
Thank you Ray McGovern (and your many honorable colleagues) for your tireless efforts in spreading the word and defending our constitution you are truly a great inspiration and an American hero who I am proud to introduce to my friends and family! :toast:
peace
Waterboarding was used during the Spanish Inquisition:
http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m41014
“When we lift our hearts to God, we’re all equal in his sight. We’re all equally precious…In prayer we grow in mercy and compassion…. When we answer God’s call to love a neighbor as ourselves, we enter into a deeper friendship with our fellow man - and a deeper relationship with our eternal Father.” -George W. Bush.
How about putting a crown of thorns on the Lamb’s head? Is that torture? How about nailing your guy through His hands and feet? Is that acceptable if it doesn’t cause major organ damage?
“Even as you do unto the least of these, you do unto me” — Jesus
fanny666 wrote:
Waterboarding was used during the Spanish Inquisition:
http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m41014
My point exactly. There is internationally recognized legal precedent.
And clearly an International war-crime Tribunal will not care about what people advising the adminitrators of toture said or didn’t say. Torture is Torture; even if the commander in chief says it isn’t with some of his prisonners of war, and his “legal advisors” agree with him.
All are likely to face death penalty, or life in prison, whith their assets confiscated and given to victims.
We’ll see.
Bible quotes are interesting: I wonder if the Evangelists who support Bush agree?
A maniacal lunatic like Bush praying has to be the most nauseating events in recent history! I’ll bet the people there had a hard time keeping their breakfast down. I say that because there is nothing anymore sickening and disgusting than the pretense of piety! It’s something he has used for years to further himself in politics! If he represents the Christian religion I am glad I gave it up. The whole religion has become infested with less than Godly people!
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche,”Jenseits von Gut und Bose, IV, 146.
Soeharto,
Yes there is precedent…
“The United States knows quite a bit about waterboarding. The U.S. government — whether acting alone before domestic courts, commissions and courts-martial or as part of the world community — has not only condemned the use of water torture but has severely punished those who applied it.
After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. At the trial of his captors, then-Lt. Chase J. Nielsen, one of the 1942 Army Air Forces officers who flew in the Doolittle Raid and was captured by the Japanese, testified: “I was given several types of torture. . . . I was given what they call the water cure.” He was asked what he felt when the Japanese soldiers poured the water. “Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning,” he replied, “just gasping between life and death.”
Nielsen’s experience was not unique. Nor was the prosecution of his captors. After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan’s military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201170.html
Let’s not torture the definition of the word. Waterboarding is not ’simulated drowning’ as it is often described. It is controlled drowning, and no doubt very effective in getting anyone to say whatever you want to hear.
This song, “The Winning Side”, by singer/songwriter Robbie O’Connell, says it all:
Another hour has passed away,
Another slowly turning moment of another endless day
But nothing’s changed at all, he still walks from wall to wall
And every year that passes by
Will be one less year for living when he finally steps outside
A heavy price to pay, to waste your life away
CHORUS
Ah but justice is a fickle thing
One law for the common man, another for the king
And don’t you know when kings can’t win the game
It won’t be long ’til all the rules are changed
And it’s all justified when you’re on the winning side
The man who stands in jail today
Could well become tomorrow’s leader, that’s how history often plays
The price it’s understood is sometimes paid in blood
And when the battle lines are drawn
Who can foretell who’ll be the one to play the king or play the pawn
Or who will bear the blame in such a deadly game
Even one day is too much time
To be held without a charge, to be condemned without a crime
A cruel irony in the land of liberty
For when it comes to human rights
Why is it always in some foreign land we choose to stand and fight
When will we realize what’s right before our eyes
Never Learned to Dance - Green Linnet, GLCD 1124
Words and Music, Robbie O’Connell © 1990
Slievenamon Music (BMI)
If you want to hear an .mp3 of the song, be sure to visit Robbie’s web site:
http://www.robbieoconnell.com/
Comparing torture to abortion is like comparing apples and apple seeds.
Is there any doubt that psychopaths rule? Giovanna where are you? I love you!
“Not all conservatives are stupid, but all stupid people are conservative.”
John Stewart Mill
To which I would add, “not all conservatives are psychopaths, but all psychopaths are conservative.”
As research shows, conservatives are to a degree, anti-democratic authoritarian psychopaths:
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~hannahk/index1.html
http://www.alternet.org/story/37947/?page=1
Like a poster said here, conservatives attack by coining words like “liberal fascists”, while liberals react and defend. Worse, liberals still believe the old “traditional, frugal and careful” definition of these regressive, greedy, and berserking psychopaths.
It’s to liberal’s credit that we respect diversity, but it’s also our vulnerability. To keep our liberal principles while preventing conservative psychos from ruling over us, we need the decentralization of direct democracy.
The Internet has made representative government obsolete but we have no website to propose and vote on laws securely yet. It will be a hoot at first, but as it grows so will it’s influence. The rate of change is accelerating. Such a site could soon displace corrupt representative “democracy”.
Anybody interested and competent in starting such a site? We can call it Global Online Democracy (G.O.D.) or whatever.
Sorry about the typos on the previous post, but it was spontaneous and dredged up heavy memories.
“ Central Asia , the question of racism ”
“ it becomes terribly easy ”
To add another perspective, there is a worse case scenario when someone actually adjusts to or revels in premeditated torture. This is not “normal“ and common, but it can happen. Judging by the sadistic humor shown in the photos of torturers and captives at Abu Ghraib, there was not much remorse evident in the jailers. In fact, they were amazingly stupid to allow photographs that documented what they were ordered or encouraged to do. Perhaps they actually thought they were doing nothing “wrong”. Sources indicate Rumsfeld was most likely monitoring the action at Abu Ghraib on a regular basis.
Unfortunately, some personalities lack a healthy “conscience” for whatever reason. And some become jaded to the pain of others through repeated exposure. How such states of mind develop remains a difficult question. But to have this type of psychological deterioration become a collective national characteristic is a very scary situation.
When we are no longer concerned with the suffering of others under such insane circumstances we have reached a critical condition where the abnormal becomes normal.
And the very sick spin being used by the mental defectives who seek to institutionalize torture is that they claim to be “compassionate conservatives”.
No easy answers here, but it is time to pay attention and focus some light on this heart of darkness.
NO One expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Soeharto February 10th, 2008 8:35 pm
“I am not a lawyer myself but I do know that the best lawyers in the USA (and therefore the world) are at the Justice Department.”
Soeharto,
Did these lawyers at the “Justice Department” pass some kind of constitutional or litigation “genius” exam that makes them the best in the world?
Couldn’t any f-king moron figure out that if the executive branch of government tries to keep information “secret” under the guise of “national security” or “executive privilege” that Congress is not going to apply pressure by using their constitutional privileges and obligations of checks & balances?
I sincerely hope you are joking!
The mistake McGovern and others make in bringing up the apparent hypocrisy of our self-proclaimed devout Christian leaders is that they confuse cultural Christianity with true Christian discipleship.
The power culture of Christianity has absolutely nothing to do with God, with Jesus, with a personal moral code that is tied both to the love of God and to the wrath of God.
The cultural brand of Christianity is best thought of as a lifestyle choice that complements secular ambitions. It gives you access to power circles and networks. It acts as a political lever to arouse constituents, to energize voting blocks. It provides a sham framework for justifying illegal activity such as pre-emptive war.
Christianity is a secular tool for politicians. It has absolutely nothing to do with a spiritual way of life modeled after Jesus of Nazareth based on love of all men and characterized also by charity, humility, and repentance.
That’s why the questions “what would jesus do?” or “how can you lead a prayer breakfast in the morning and then escalate cluster bombing of Fallujah in the afternoon?” are totally off the mark and scoffed at.
They’re non-sequiturs because they totally miss the true meaning of Christianity for these political men.
Mirf59
Interesting thoughts.
However, you have overlooked the fact that McGovern is saying exactly what you are saying.
McGovern has pointed out that politicians are often hypocrites because they are pretending to be Christian while doing terrible things to other people. He has clearly implied that the Christian faith is not consistent with the actions of the Bush administration.
But, if you asked the average American whether or not Bush is a Christian, what do you suppose they would say? And do you think it is possible to be a true Christian while supporting the Republican party or the Democratic party for that matter?
Another interesting example I ran into along these lines was a self-professed Christian who stated the following view on American foreign policy. “ How many Muslims are there in the world, 2 billion, do you think we can kill them all ? ”
But as you are presenting yourself as someone who understands the “true Christian discipleship” , I am wondering if you think the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, and waterboarding, are against the will of God and the teachings of Jesus ?
JConrad,
Of course they are against the teachings of Jesus. The Gospels are a pretty easy and unambiguous read on these points. One might safely characterize the Gospel as redundant accounts of Jesus beating these points to death (OK, maybe an unfortunate pun).
I think I’m trying to say something slightly different from McGovern. Namely, that there is a brand of Christianity that is not a religion or a moral code but rather a lifestyle choice like the choice of which country club to patronize. In fact, very similar.
In that sense, Bush and his type are Christians. When they say there are Christians, this is what they mean. When someone replies, “have you read the Gospel and do you have better than a 2nd grade reading aptitude?” — they can accurately look bewildered because the question has nothing to do with the lifestlye brand of Christianity they have signed on for.
There is absolutely no justification for the war in Iraq to be found in the New Testament. Those that try to cram it into St. Augustine’s Just War Theory are minimizing the first rule: wars must be defensive. Not based on PERCEIVED threat. They have to be actual, physical defense based on events NOW on the ground in the homeland.
Similarly, there is no justification for diverting funds away from caring for the dispossessed, there is no justification for capital punishment, for abortion, for social dominance hierarchies, maybe Capitalism, etc.
The Gospel is fundamentally at odds with the American way of life, when you get right down to it. It’s not fair to lay it all on the lap of neo-conservative fruitcakes.
I don’t think there’s anything special about Bush in this respect. Most Americans who claim to be Christian are much the same way. It’s basically a cultural phenomenon almost completely divorced from anything Jesus said or did.
Any of you remember Rudolf Hess? Sentenced to forever in prison by the tribunal at Nuremberg?
He was declared guilty of “crimes against peace” (”planning and preparation of aggressive war”) and “conspiracy” with other German leaders to commit crimes. Thats it. not for war cimes not for anything messy. just planning, preparing and conspiring.
if a tribunal is ever struck to try the BushAdministration and his collaborators, there will only be 5 or 10 people left in DC to notice that the lawn needs mowing…
GetOfftheGrid,
Yeah. Laws apply only to losers. Winners are above all law. You can hear this plainly in the daily utterances of Bush and Cheney and the whole crew.
Impeachment is a good example. Clinton was impeached. Why? Not because of anything he did, but rather because Democrats lost control of Congress in the Gingrich thing, and the losers paid a price.
Now, we have a situation where leaders far more deserving of impeachment are sitting pretty. John Dean, somewhat of an authority on impeachable offenses by profession and by personal experience, says the familiar laundry list of Bush-Cheney violations is far more egregious than Nixon. Ditto Bruce Fein, prominent conservative and expert on the Constitution.
Why hasn’t it happened? Again, because the Democratic Party is the Party of losers. That’s the Democratic Party’s role to play in the illusory game of pretending that the one corporatist party is two separate parties rather than two deliberate factions of One Party.
Losers are subject to the law, and winners are above it. That’s how the world works right now.
Osama kills 3,000 Americans and it’s an outrage around the world. Americans kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and we’re doing them a favor.
Winners and losers. Justice has exactly ZERO to do with any of it.
JConrad - excellent comments in my opinion…
What we ordinary people here in Europe (and elsewhere…) find so hard to bear is the fact that the US (government) sees itself exempted from the fundamental principles of international law that it played the primary role in formulating , as a result of the Nuremberg Trials in 1945:
“If certain acts ….. are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.” (Justice Jackson)
The ugly little truth is of course that US governments (not just Bush) do not accept “any legal restraints on their conduct” and their only concern has been to sell these violations to the public as a necessary and legitimate means of “defense” against various “enemies”. To protect “our economic interests” or “national security”,etc. whatever is convenient. The rulers of “God´s own country” may (use others to) torture and kill, it´s always for “a good cause”, always good vs. evil… Of course, hypocrisy happens everywhere but the “last remaining superpower” is the only serial perpetrator whose severe violations of law and ethics are presented as actions to “protect freedom, justice and democracy”.
The chief political philosopher during the Nazi era, Carl Schmitt defined a dictatorship as the romans did, as “a necessity to maintain or restore a threatened order”. This is a perfect excuse to undermine democracy: just declare a state of emergency,define certain people as enemies of the state and all “legal restraints” (to protect citizens,human rights, etc.)no longer apply. The Nazis began their rule with “emergency laws” perhaps an earlier version of the “Patriot Act”?…
Recently, we saw a TV-documentary about the origin of “special forces” dealing with “insurgents, etc. Of course the use of torture is as old as mankind but in modern history the systematic use of “special interrogation methods” on civilians leads inevitably to Nazi Germany where the SS and other special units committed horrible crimes. The torture trail then goes to France, whose military (drawing on “experiences” in Indo-China..) was so impressed by the German atrocities that it used them against “insurgents” in their former colony Algeria. They even wrote a book about the first “war on terror” (the legitimate uprising in colonized Algeria) called “La Guerre moderne” http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/resources/csi/trinquier/trinquier.asp).
Apparently, this book and the (deadly) efficiency of Nazi “special forces” inspired the US military (not unfamiliar with the subject of course)to establish a kind of academy (SOA)which would in the coming decades turn out plenty of ruthless torturers and killers, pardon me, “counterinsurgency specialists” trained for the brutal dictatorships of Latin and South America, who of course fought a “war of terror” against their own poor, disenfranchised population….
The final conclusion is: EVERYTHING GOES - in order to fulfil their “noble mission” (good vs. evil….)no moral scruples, no legal restraints may prevent the use of all available methods to defeat “the enemy” (the terrorist, formerly known as the “guerilla”.
On the interrogation of “terrorists” the French wrote:
“… If the prisoner gives the information requested, the examination is quickly terminated; if not, specialists must force his secret from him. Then, as a soldier, he must face the suffering, and perhaps the death, he has heretofore managed to avoid(N.B. suicide-bombers did not exist in those days!) The terrorist must accept this as a condition inherent in his trade and in the methods of warfare that, with full knowledge, his superiors and he himself have chosen.
Once the interrogation is finished, however, the terrorist (My comment: what is left of him?..) can take his place among soldiers.From then on, he is a prisoner of war like any other….”
It would be as useless and unjust to charge him with the attacks he was able to carry out, as to hold responsible the infantryman or the airman for the deaths caused by the weapons they use.
(My comment: the French “Resistance” were the most successful “terrorists” during the war..)
“According to Clausewitz:War is an act of violence intended to compel an opponent to fulfill our Will…. Violence is therefore the means; the compulsory submission of the enemy to our will is the ultimate object. . . . In such dangerous things as war, the errors which proceed from a spirit of benevolence are the worst. … it follows that he who uses force unsparingly… must obtain a superiority if his adversary uses less vigor in its application. . . .To introduce into the philosophy of war itself a principle of moderation would be an absurdity.”
Any questions?
A fine thread and I could not agree more on the definition of “cultural” Christianity given here.
About 45 years ago I noticed a glaring difference between the typical behavior of members my childhood Methodist church and the more idealistic, poetic, and esoteric content of Christian texts. Hence, this fellow dropped out of institutionalized Christianity and became something of a curious independent eventually ending up (as did Thomas Merton) in northern India living among Tibetan refugees for about a year of eye-opening experience among some of the most sane and kind people on earth.
Returning to America over thirty years ago was a culture shock that remains a source of amazement and disappointment to this day. Consider the possibility that most of what we call a civilization here is a collective cultural psychosis with nearly all the lemmings going over the cliff together.
An important question on legalizing torture is what that may do to our society as a whole over time. Will Americans have a awakening of conscience or will they become jaded to calculated cruelty ? And as a technical legal question, if we can waterboard “enemy combatants”, then why not Americans suspected of whatever ? Accepting torture under any circumstances becomes a very slippery slope to a man-made hell.
To add another thought on torture, there is the issue of cause and effect relationships similar to the laws of physics where one form of energy becomes or creates another equal or opposite form of energy, often called “cyclic existence” to a Buddhist. 9/11 could be seen as the logical result of historic imperial racist actions, both known and covert, by the west. And rather than attempt to understand the cause of the 9/11 effect, we decided to add fuel to the fire setting new cycles of violence in motion.
Relevant examples of reactions to torture can be see in Algeria, modern Egypt and Iraq. In Algeria, French torture did not defeat the resistance but rather intensified the will to resist. And once again, when members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt were imprisoned and tortured by an American funded government, certain Muslim brothers morphed into Al Qaeda which became far more militant than the Brotherhood. And recently in Iraq, the occupation was immediately defined by ignorant brutality at Abu Ghraib removing any doubts as to legitimacy and intentions of America for all the world to see.