Can you hear me?

The Future

"It may be said with rough accuracy that there are three stages in the life of a strong people. First, it is a small power, and fights small powers. Then it is a great power, and fights great powers. Then it is a great power, and fights small powers, but pretends that they are great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of its ancient emotion and vanity. After that, the next step is to become a small power itself."

G.K. Chesterton

IMPRISON BUSH NOW!

Perhaps we can sentence the President of the United States to life in prison without parole. (I really don't need to have a talk with the US Secret Service. I'm hoping that the current President of the US will be imprisoned for high crimes against the US government through the criminal justice system, not through fiat.)

About conservatives

The following is stolen from Dave Neiwert's Orcinus blog and was written by Sara. It sums up my feelings pretty well with respect to the great majority of conservatives.

When conservatives tell us that we need constant surveillance to make us secure, what they're telling us is that they themselves are prone to criminal behavior if they think nobody else is watching. The fear of exposure is the only force keeping them on the right side of the law -- and that's why it's the only form of "security" they understand. Bear this in mind if you decide to do business with them.

When they tell us that our future depends on supporting a military that's bigger than the rest of the world's fighting forces combined, what they're telling us is that they can't handle chaos, complexity, change, or being out of control. The whole world is a threat; the only solution is a bigger gun. Bear this in mind if you find yourself in conflict with them.

When they tell us diplomacy isn't an option, they're telling us that it's not an option they understand. Words, agreements, treaties, and contracts mean nothing to them. Brute force is the only option they comprehend...or are likely to respond to themselves. Bear this in mind before you negotiate with them.

When they tell us that homosexuality is a threat to American families, what they're telling us is that homosexuality is a threat to their families. As in: if they ever dared to admit their own sexual interest in other men, their wives would leave them, and take the kids. Bear this in mind when they hold themselves up as moral paragons.

When they tell us the Islamofascists are a threat to our way of life, they are quite correctly pointing out that there are fascists threatening our way of life. They're just deflecting their own intentions on to brown people far away. Bear this in mind before assuming they share your belief in constitutional democracy.

When they accuse reality-based folks of promoting "junk science," they're telling us they basically think all science is junk. Bear this in mind before attempting to present them with convincing evidence of anything.

When they tell us to support the troops, what they're really saying is: You better, because we won't. Bear this in mind when you evaluate the real costs of the war.

When they tell us the government can't be trusted, they're telling us they can't be trusted to govern. Bear this in mind every time you step into a voting booth.

Torture, revisited

The following is stolen from the Manchester[New Hampshire] Union-Leader. The writer is a professor of political science at Reed College(which I attended in the early 1990s).

So the CIA did indeed torture Abu Zubaida, the first al-Qaida terrorist suspect to be waterboarded. So says John Kiriakou, the first former CIA employee directly involved in the questioning of “high-value” al-Qaida detainees to speak publicly. He minced no words last week in calling the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” what they are. But did they work? Torture’s defenders, including the wannabe tough guys who write Fox’s “24,” insist that the rough stuff gets results. “It was like flipping a switch,” said Kiriakou about Abu Zubaida’s response to being waterboarded. But the al-Qaida operative’s confessions — descriptions of fantastic plots from a man whom journalist Ron Suskind has reported was mentally ill — probably didn’t give the CIA any actionable intelligence. Of course, we may never know the whole truth, since the CIA destroyed the videotapes of Abu Zubaida’s interrogation. But here are some other myths that are bound to come up as the debate over torture rages on.

1. Torture worked for the Gestapo.
Actually, no. Even Hitler’s notorious secret police got most of its information from public tips, informers and interagency cooperation. That was still more than enough to let the Gestapo decimate anti-Nazi resistance in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Russia and the concentration camps. Yes, the Gestapo did torture people for intelligence, especially in its later years. But this reflected not torture’s efficacy but the loss of many seasoned professionals to World War II, increasingly desperate competition for intelligence among Gestapo units and an influx of less disciplined younger members. (Why do serious, tedious police work when you have a uniform and a whip?) It’s surprising how unsuccessful the Gestapo’s brutal efforts were. They failed to break senior leaders of the French, Danish, Polish and German resistance. I’ve spent more than a decade collecting all the cases of Gestapo torture “successes” in multiple languages; the number is small and the results pathetic, especially compared with the devastating effects of public cooperation and informers.

2. Everyone talks sooner or later under torture.
Actually, it’s surprisingly hard to get anything under torture, true or false. For example, between 1500 and 1750, French prosecutors tried to torture confessions out of 785 individuals. Torture was legal back then, and the records document such practices as the bone-crushing use of splints, pumping stomachs with water until they swelled and pouring boiling oil on the feet. But the number of prisoners who said anything was low, from 3 percent in Paris to 14 percent in Toulouse (an exceptional high). Most of the time, the torturers were unable to get any statement whatsoever. And such examples could be multiplied. The Japanese fascists, no strangers to torture, said it best in their field manual, which was found in Burma during World War II: They described torture as the clumsiest possible method for gathering intelligence. Like most sensible torturers, they preferred using torture for intimidation, not information.

3. People will say anything under torture.
Well, no, although this is a favorite chestnut of torture’s foes. Think about it: Sure, someone would lie under torture, but wouldn’t they also lie if they were being interrogated without coercion? In fact, the problem of torture does not stem from the prisoner who has information; it stems from the prisoner who doesn’t. Such a person is also likely to lie, to say anything, often convincingly. The torture of the informed may generate no more lies than normal interrogation, but the torture of the ignorant and innocent overwhelms investigators with misleading information. In these cases, nothing is indeed preferable to anything. Anything needs to be verified, and the CIA’s own 1963 interrogation manual explains that “a time-consuming delay results” — hardly useful when every moment matters. Intelligence gathering is especially vulnerable to this problem. When police officers torture, they know what the crime is, and all they want is the confession. When intelligence officers torture, they must gather information about what they don’t know.

4. Most people can tell when someone is lying under torture.
Actually, no — and we know quite a bit about this. For about 40 years, psychologists have been testing police officers as well as normal people to see if they can spot lies, and the results aren’t encouraging. Ordinary folk have an accuracy rate of about 57 percent, which is pretty poor considering that 50 percent is the flip of a coin. Likewise, the cops’ accuracy rates fall between 45 percent and 65 percent — that is, sometimes less accurate than a coin toss.
Why does this matter? Because even if a torturer breaks a person, the torturer has to recognize it, and most of the time they can’t. Torturers assume too much and reject what doesn’t fit their assumptions. For instance, Sheila Cassidy, a British physician, cracked under electric-shock torture by the Chilean secret service in the 1970s and identified priests who had helped the country’s socialist opposition. But her devout interrogators couldn’t believe that priests would ever help the socialists, so they tortured her for another week until they finally became convinced. By that time, she was so damaged that she couldn’t remember the location of the safe house. In fact, most torturers are nowhere near as well trained for interrogation as police are. Torturers are usually chosen because they’ve endured hardship and pain, fought with courage, kept secrets, held the right beliefs and earned a reputation as trustworthy and loyal. They often rely on folklore about what lying behavior looks like — shifty eyes, sweaty palms and so on. And, not surprisingly, they make a lot of mistakes.

5. You can train people to resist torture.
Supposedly, this is why we can’t know what the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” are: If Washington admits that it waterboards suspected terrorists, al-Qaida will set up “waterboarding-resistance camps” across the world. Be that as it may, the truth is that no training will help the bad guys. Simply put, nothing predicts the outcome of one’s resistance to pain better than one’s own personality. Against some personalities, nothing works; against others, practically anything does. Studies of hundreds of detainees who broke under Soviet and Chinese torture, including Army-funded studies of U.S. prisoners of war, conclude that during, before and after torture, each prisoner displayed strengths and weaknesses dependent on his or her own character. The CIA’s own “Human Resources Exploitation Manual” from 1983 and its so-called Kubark manual from 1963 agree. In all matters relating to pain, says Kubark, the “individual remains the determinant.” The thing that’s most clear from torture-victim studies is that you can’t train for the ordeal. There is no secret knowledge out there about how to resist torture. Yes, there are manuals, such as the IRA’s “Green Book,” the anti-Soviet “Manual for Psychiatry for Dissidents” and “Torture and the Interrogation Experience,” an Iranian guerrilla manual from the 1970s. But none of these volumes contains specific techniques of resistance, just general encouragement to hang tough. Even al-Qaida’s vaunted terrorist-training manual offers no tips about how to resist torture, and al-Qaida was no stranger to the brutal methods of the Saudi police. And yet these myths persist. “The larger problem here, I think,” one active CIA officer observed in 2005, “is that this kind of stuff just makes people feel better, even if it doesn’t work.”

DARIUS REJALI
Saturday, Dec. 15, 2007
Darius Rejali is a professor of political science at Reed College. He is the author of the recently published
“Torture and Democracy.”

Nuclear Capacity Needed to Deter America

The following is not from me, but it says something very important that is, for me, transcendentally ironic. The writer's credit is at the end of the piece.

"The American intelligence reports’ recent assertion that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 does not change anything about the current situation as long as it does not fundamentally change the minds of American policymakers. Judging from President Bush's dismissive response, this doesn't seem to be the case. The truth is, Americans do not need a pretext to continue their bullying of Iran, which is precisely why Iranians want to and in fact should build nuclear capacity.

The National Intelligence Estimate report is only one interesting development that seemingly reveals cracks on the American front in the bound-to-be-long history of conflict over Iran's right to nuclear armament. I am curious about how such a vague report that doesn't rule out any possibility was co-signed by all American intelligence groups and submitted to the White house in the midst of American efforts to isolate Iran internationally. It is not hard to imagine that once the report was submitted, the White House did not have much choice but to release it given the leak scandals it has faced before. Looking at this from the Middle East perspective, such a break during a time of struggle seems way too un-American. That leads me to think that there is something larger at work here.

I don't buy the arguments that the current American administration has learned from the failures of pre-war Iraq intelligence and that the new report reflects a change of methods for the intelligence community. In my view, the move towards relaxing intelligence assumptions is not the way Americans chose to go after 9/11 and despite the unpopularity of the Iraq war, American public opinion has not changed on tightening security. I find it hard to believe that the Bush administration's post-9/11 choice of intelligence heads chose this approach naively. All this makes me think that more than a true break in alliance, this is merely a change in tactics for the Americans. Perhaps America's post-Iraq awareness of the unpopularity of pre-emptive strikes has led them to alter their methods and combine different strategies in dealing with Iran.

With the uncertainty of elections looming over American policy, this report will act as the foundation of the narrative for the switch in tactics in case a Democratic president takes office. Probably, the report intends to send a message across to others involved in the conflict that America is sincere in trying soft-power; sort of a cease-fire offer. Experience tells us that declaring a cease-fire during a time of internal change is a clever yet common move. I certainly don't think America's eagerness to stop Iran should be ruled out in the shadow of this report.

Because recent headlines in the American press about Iran usually revolve around her nuclear ambitions, the American public tends to forget the background of the conflict with Iran. It started roughly in 1953 when a coup d'état backed by America and Britain removed the elected Prime Minister Mosaddeq in favor of America-friendly Shah of Iran. Back then, the American-British coalition did not have any reasons for ousting him, other than their stakes in Iran’s nationalized oil companies and the fact that they disagreed with Mosaddeq's ideology. Today, much remains the same except the western alliance cannot rally another coup to overthrow the current regime. It is not just that they are no more capable of it, but they have seen how badly it backfired as well. But this does not mean that they will not resort to their second favorite tool of coercion: force. In the current case, there are strong indications that the use of force is still the first option even when soft-power is also combined into the general strategy. I think Anton Chekhov's maxim that, "if a gun is hanging on the wall in the first act, it will always go off by the play's end" explains this situation pretty well. With public talk and planning of strikes on Iranian targets and with Israel's actual bombing of Syrian buildings suspected of being nuclear-research related, the gun is hung high and visible on the wall. I do not doubt it will go off.

On the other hand, it is worth remembering that it was not the Iranians who hung this gun on the wall and who opened the curtain for this play. After meddling with Iran’s democratic system, America tried to support secessionism there and also supported Iraq's assault on Iran. It cost millions of Iranian lives and an incredible amount of wealth. Today, United States still helps military groups destabilize Iran and slyly accuses Iran of meddling in Iraq and seeking regional domination – whereas her own aspiration for global domination is no secret to anybody.

Therefore I believe the Iranians should find much wider support from international community to protect themselves from this unending American aggression and the only way to do that is to have a nuclear deterrent. The greatest danger in the Middle East is American meddling. Bush's earlier remarks about assuming the Middle East was a chaotic place before American intervention were a grave distortion of truth. Without America and with its own commodity wealth, the Middle East can still be a prosperous and peaceful region."

Mustafa Domanic is a financial analyst at the London office of a global hedge fund. He is also an online activist and blogger. He contributes to several blogs on Turkish current affairs as well as global political issues including foreignsight.blogspot.com.

Unions

With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in men, than any other association of men.

Clarence Darrow

Torture is wrong, the Roman Catholic perspective

Thomas J. Reese, S.J. wrote the following (full disclosure, I knew his brother when I was a boy [as if anyone cared, or even read this]):

Although Hollywood is routinely condemned by conservatives as a hotbed of liberal elitists, in fact it perpetuates the American myth that violence is the way to overcome evil.

We grew up on cowboys and Indians, war movies and espionage thrillers that showcased the good guys beating up and killing the bad guys. And if the heroine is in danger, then the end justifies the means, any means. We all booed when the criminal tortured by Dirty Harry was released back into society by the court. We cheered when Harry blew him away. Don’t get mad, just get even.

The American faith in the efficacious use of violence led us astray first in Vietnam and now in Iraq. And when you are fighting an evil such as Communism or terrorism, the argument goes, any means is legitimate.

There are numerous reasons why torture is wrong.

• Torture is a violation of U.S. and international law.

• If we torture, we cannot object to the torturing of our solders and agents. This is why the U.S. military opposes torture. Senator John McCain, a victim of Vietnamese torture, speaks eloquently to this point.

• Although movies and novels can create artificial scenarios where information is needed in minutes in order to avoid catastrophes, in fact these situations rarely if ever arise in real life. It would require 1) an immediately impending catastrophe, 2) a captive, 3) who actually has information, 4) that could be used to stop the catastrophe, 5) who will give accurate and timely information under torture, and 6) we are capable to putting into action a response in time to avert the disaster. The stars are rarely so aligned except on TV programs like "24."

• The experts who have studied the question find that torture does not work. Information given under torture may in fact be false. People who know nothing will admit to anything and give false information to stop the pain. People who know something can lie. Other interrogation techniques provide better information both quantitatively and qualitatively.

• The work of torture attracts sadists who are more interested in torturing than in getting information. These people cannot be controlled, and we cannot trust their judgments about what is appropriate. And a decent person who engages in torture soon becomes degraded by the experience. Is this a line of work you would recommend to your son or daughter? As John Paul II said, “the dignity of man is as much debased in his torturer as in the torturer’s victim.”

• The history of Christian and Islamic martyrs shows that people can resist and that they become heroes to their communities when they are killed.

• Torture was wrong when done by the Romans, by the Inquisition, by Queen Elizabeth, by Hitler, by Stalin and by Mao. This is not the company we wish to keep.

The Vatican and catholic bishops have argued strongly against the use of torture.

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church states that “the regulations against the use of torture, even in the case of serious crimes, must be strictly observed…. International juridical instruments concerning human rights correctly indicate a prohibition against torture as a principle which cannot be contravened under any circumstances.” It quotes John Paul II as saying, “Christ’s disciple refuses every recourse to such methods, which nothing could justify….”

Christians must work for the abolition of the death penalty and all forms of torture, said Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace according to Catholic News Service. "Christians are called to cooperate for the defense of human rights and for the abolition of the death penalty, torture, inhuman or degrading treatment" both in wartime and in times of peace, the cardinal said. "These practices are grave crimes against the human person created in the image of God and a scandal for the human family in the 21st century," he said.

“Genocide, torture, and the intentional targeting of noncombatants in war or terrorist attacks are always wrong,” according to the draft of “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility from the Catholic Bishops of the United States,” which will be considered by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops at the annual meeting, November 12-15.

Archbishop Edwin F. O'Brien of Baltimore, who headed the U.S. Archdiocese for the Military Services for 10 years, argues that military chaplains are expected to intervene to stop torture. “Where there is an acceptance of direct killing of noncombatant civilians, for instance, there is no chaplaincy worth its name. Where torture is justified in eliciting prisoner information, chaplaincy is ineffective or nonexistent.”

It would be ironic and perverse for Christians, who worship a man who was tortured and killed, to use torture themselves.