Does Anyone Else Find the Right Wing's Hard-on For Jack Bauer Creepy?

National Review's Jonah Goldberg goes in for a hug.

I don't get it. I guess Kiefer Sutherland is OK looking, but he's certainly no Christian Bale. Yet the right wing seems to have a dual obsession with him. First, he really puts the dill in their collective pickle. Second, they seem to think that he, a fictional character, is the best possible argument for torturing people. It reminds me of those people in college who, when I told them I was a socialist, would tell me that Lord of the Flies had shown why I had it all wrong. I liked to respond that Star Trek had proven Marx was right.

So today we have the Wall Street Journal crying JB at Obama's executive order restricting intelligence service interrogation techniques to those specified in the Army Field Manual. The Journal sniffs that the CIA would "now be required to give prisoners gentler treatment than common criminals. The Field Manual's confines don't even allow the average good cop/bad cop routines common in most police precincts." The Journal seems willfully unaware of what goes in some police precincts, but that's beside the point.

The article's main argument is same tired ticking bomb scenario. Alfred McCoy dissected the scenario expertly in 2006, and the argument hasn't changed since then. Here McCoy recounts the rather improbable sequence of events involved in the scenario:

—First, FBI or CIA agents apprehend a terrorist at the precise moment between timer’s first tick and bomb’s burst.

—Second, the interrogators somehow have sufficiently detailed foreknowledge of the plot to know they must interrogate this very person and do it right now.

—Third, these same officers, for some unexplained reason, are missing just a few critical details that only this captive can divulge.

—Fourth, the biggest leap of all, these officers with just one shot to get the information that only this captive can divulge are best advised to try torture, as if beating him is the way to assure his wholehearted cooperation.

David Rose has updated McCoy's argument recently in Vanity Fair. Rose interviewed a whole host of intelligence operatives, who uniformly told him that torture did not produce good intelligence. In fact, it tended to produce bad intelligence that caused investigators to waste resources following. Of the much hallowed waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one Pentagon analyst said “K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were.”

The WSJ article is useful in one respect, however: it disproves the self-righteous laments from Democrats who angrily shake their fist and cry "This never would have happened but for NADER!" Observe:

An anecdote former Clinton counterterror czar Richard Clarke recounts in his memoir "Against All Enemies" is instructive. In 1993, White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler was horrified by Mr. Clarke's proposal for "extraordinary rendition," where our spooks turn over prisoners to foreign countries like Egypt so they can do the interrogating.

While Mr. Clinton was still chewing his fingernails and seemed to side with Mr. Cutler, Al Gore arrived late to the meeting. "Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides," Mr. Clarke writes. "Gore laughed and said, 'That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.'"

Not Torturing People Can Be Such a Pain!

William McGurn can't figure out how to close Guantanamo. To any would be do gooder looking to close the camp, he poses the following questions:

Where in America would you put these men? Would you release them on American soil if they are found not guilty? What about those whose home countries will not take them back? And what do you do with the toughest cases: those for whom the evidence is insufficient for a trial, but sufficient to tell us they are far too dangerous to release?

A perplexing quandary, indeed. It would, perhaps, be besides the point to mention that we wouldn't be faced with this spurious "problem" if people like McGurn hadn't been vigorously arguing for the United States' right to kidnap anyone we don't like from anywhere on the planet. Though it may seem

Any discussion of Guantanamo has to begin with acknowledging that two-thirds of the 775 "enemy combatants" who have been held there have been released with no charges. Of these, only a few have been linked to terrorist activity after release. The highest estimate I saw was at National Review, which said 20. Any District Attorney in the United States with such an abysmal record would quickly find herself out of a job.

McGurn's first question sets the tone for the rest. Where in America to put Them? I think first we should acknowledge that there are many former residents of Guantanamo who I would much rather have living amongst us than Mr. McGurn himself. Moazzam Begg, for example, was held for three years before being released. Similarly, Murat Kurnaz seems like a very upstanding fellow. Even though he was kidnapped and held for five years, he says he doesn't hold ordinary Americans responsible for the outrages he suffered. Kurnaz's interview is part of a very valuable McClatchy database of interviews with 66 released prisoners. Reading the interviews, you get a sense of the sheer arbitrariness that characterizes imprisonment at Guantanamo. Jan Mohammed was conscripted by the Taliban in 2001. Wissam Abdul Ahmad was a Jordanian Sunni missionary in Iran arrested by Iranian authorities and turned over to the Americans in Afghanistan. In short, many of the men at Guantanamo were doing nothing wrong when they were kidnapped, and were found to have done nothing worth imprisoning them for.

McGurn's next problem is similarly contrived: What about those countries that won't take prisoners back? Once again, this would not be a problem had the United States not kidnapped these people in the first place. Facing the situation at hand, it would seem that it would be the duty of any civilized country, having wrongfully abducted and imprisoned someone for several years, to provide them with some sort of compensation. Finding a country that would be acceptable to former detainees is the least we could do.

McGurn's first two challenges are effectively smokescreens. Even if we grant the questionable propositions that we can find nowhere willing to take former detainees and we don't want them Here, neither of these is a compelling reason for keeping people captive in six by eight foot cells in a prison known to be a site of torture. Even if McGurn's questions were actual dilemmas, they would still not justify keeping Guantanamo open.

The last question is supposedly the most vexing. What about the eeeeeeevildoers? Well, what about them? What exactly is the evidentiary situation that requries the US to continue holding someone indefinitely but is not enough evidence for a trial?

I think the legal structure of indefinite detention that we are seeing at Guantanamo is a reflection of the open-ended status of American occupations in the Mideast. While in traditional inter-imperialist wars, prisoners of war were held until one state was victorious over the other, the United States' failure in suppressing the insurgency in either Afghanistan or Iraq is leading the state to previously unheard of policies for detention. This is, I believe, part of the reason why the prisoner of war status has been unceremoniously dumped (the other, more important reason is that it confers well-defined legal protections on its subjects.) The open-ended imprisonment of those held at Guantanamo is a manifestation of what Michael Schwartz has called the America's plan for War Without End.

TORTURE: From Guantanamo to Chicago Interrogation Rooms

Jeremy Scahill, Martina Correia, and Darrell Cannon at Socialism 2008.

Bush gives yet another green light to torture

This Saturday Bush is going to veto legislation banning the CIA from using water boarding. Though this is yet another disgusting, though not unsurprising, Bush act, what is equally as troublesome is that the vaunted 'anti-torture' legislation still allows the CIA to use some 19 interrogation techniques in the field! If anyone has skimmed through the Kubark Manual, the CIA's how-to torture technique compiled through rigorous torture and experimentation on Vietnamese, South and Central Americans, and Irish people throughout the 20th century, it is clear that anything short of banning torture will be useless.


By the way, Waterboarding was a common tactic in the Spanish Inquisition.

A Fitting Holiday Gift for ex-torturers and murders

A Tribunal in Rome, Italy signed 146 arrest orders today for military officials involved in Operation Condor ( or check out the National Security Archive for documentation) during the 70s and 80s. The list includes 61 argentinos, 7 bolivianos, 13 brasileños, 22 chilenos, 7 paraguayos, 4 peruanos and 32 uruguayos, although 6 are already dead, including ex-Chilean dictator Agosto Pinochet.

The Tribunal demands the respective countries commence the search for and extradition of those named.

Weekly Dave: Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Donald Kerr

Testifying before congress, Mr. Kerr told Americans they would have to rethink their definition of privacy. Elaborating on his point, he said:

that he finds it odd that some would be concerned that the government may be listening in when people are "perfectly willing for a green-card holder at an [Internet service provider] who may or may have not have been an illegal entrant to the United States to handle their data."

Well, let's see. An undocumented immigrant who has my data is not going to use it to kidnap me and send me to Egypt to be tortured. The government will. That's difference enough for me.

It's Like Rain on Your Wedding Day

According to the LA Times, Blackwater 'employees' in Iraq may legally constitute unlawful combatants (to any rational person, there is no bloody doubt) and thus, under the policies, actions and precedents set by the Bush Administration, theoretically earn them a one way ticket to Guantanamo Bay:

"U.S. officials have described many of the suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban affiliates it holds at Guantanamo Bay as unlawful combatants either for taking part in hostilities against the United States or by supporting the hostilities while not part of a nation's military."

I just couldn't resist

Time for a smart ass comment! This comes from former U.S. attorney in the Clinton Administration Melanie Sloan who was asked to comment on the Craig case:

"If pleading guilty to charges stemming from an attempt to solicit an undercover officer in a public restroom is not conduct that reflects poorly upon the Senate, what is?"

Um, gee wiz, how about not taking any action to stop torture, or perchance continually voting to support the murderous war in Iraq (see ticker), or ok, what about the arms to Israel? Sometimes I think some of those Dems have their heads so far up their arses...

Phew. That felt good to get out of my system.

What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Right?

Anyone who has had internet/tv/radio access for the past few months have been unable to avoid the clamor and racist diatribes against Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick. Some may feel that all the anger and backlash is justified given that he entered a guilty plea last Friday. Ok, dog fighting is brutal and Vick has taken responsibility for his actions. That's good enough for me. However, what really burns me is the rampant hypocrisy in the media's (and general public's) attacks on Vick.

Let's put this into context: Paris Hilton: several DUIs, serves some 20 hours in jail. Lindsey Lohan: several DUIs, possession of cocaine (multiple times), posh resort-like 'rehab' clinic. and the biggest whopper, Phil Spector, known gun-toting crazy person and probably MURDERER, still lounges in court and doesn't even make headlines any more.

When you see that white celebrities are getting off relatively scot-free everyday for crimes that young black males are being sent to jail and death row in overwhelming numbers (more black youths sit in jail than in university desks) for crimes they most often don't even commit, the ugliness of racism in the media and in US society cannot be ignored. Ask yourself, if I wouldn't have mentioned Phil Spector, would you have known about his case. I'm sure enraged Beatles/Ramones/Crystals fans aren't using their albums to wipe up shit, or more appropriately blood, in protest against the groundbreaking producer.

Following motyat's post, put Vick's case in the context of the overwhelming, incontrovertible evidence that a) the US is torturing and massacring people from Iraq, to Guantanamo to our own prisons, and b) it has received the green light from the highest offices of our government: who really deserves to heat?