Follow the Motive

Besides What Steve Said about Said Ali al-Shihri, the former Guantanamo detainee who is now an al Qaeda leader, I want to highlight a portion of the story that isn't getting the emphasis it should.

My first reaction on hearing about it was, 'who leaked this'? The timing struck me as a little too convenient, coming on the heels of Obama's executive order on Guantanamo. The answer is in the story:

His status was announced in an Internet statement by the militant group and was confirmed by an American counterterrorism official. [emphasis added]

There it is: it comes from al Qaeda. They may or may not have posted it after Obama's executive order (none of the stories is any more specific than 'this week'), but at the very least it coincides with the arrival of a new President who has consistently said he plans to close Guantanamo.

'Coincides.' Right.

So it seems to me the big story here is not that one former Guantanamo detainee joined al Qaeda (whether because the administration blew it in the first place, or because he was radicalized by the Guantanamo experience, or maybe both); the big story is that al Qaeda is trying to sabotage efforts to close Guantanamo.

What does that tell you?

As Robert Gibbs said, Thursday's executive orders "made America safer, made America stronger." Guantanamo has made us less safe, not more; if you don't believe me, just ask al Qaeda.

Manzanar

The town of Manzanar—the Spanish word for “apple orchard”—developed as an agricultural settlement beginning in 1910. Farmers grew apples, pears, peaches, potatoes, and alfalfa on several thousand acres surrounding the town.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power began acquiring water rights in the valley in 1905 and completed the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913. Land buyouts continued in the 1920s, and by 1929 Los Angeles owned all of Manzanar’s land and water rights. Within five years, the town was abandoned. In the 1930s local residents pinned their economic hopes on tourism. With the onset of World War II tourism diminished.

In 1942 the U.S. Army leased 6,200 acres at Manzanar from Los Angeles to establish a center to hold Japanese Americans during World War II.
--NPS website for Manzanar

Back to the Future

J. Edgar Hoover was a man ahead of his time:

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons....

The Constitution says habeas corpus shall not be suspended “unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.” The plan proposed by Hoover, the head of the F.B.I. from 1924 to 1972, stretched that clause to include “threatened invasion” or “attack upon United States troops in legally occupied territory.”

Hoover's spirit is clearly alive and well in this administration.

Torture: Endorsed by Dead People Across the Moral Spectrum

Shorter Chuck Colson:

Torture is okay because Martin Luther King would have used it.

Shorter Alan Dershowitz:

Torture is okay because the Nazis used it.

I can't for the life of me decide which of the two is more appalling.

(Hat tip: Steve M. and d.)

Questions And More Questions

Jose Padilla. Good grief, where in America can you find twelve people dumber than Bush, with the memory of Gonzales and the soul of Cheney? Miami, as in Florida. Well that answers that question.

Can printing more money be far behind? It didn't take long for elation turned to panic, did it?

Why is everybody so surprised that Robert Mueller kept accurate notes? Every medical professional (even me) in the country knew that Ashcroft was definitely not "lucid". This story is old news and even worse, it's about a subject that most Americans like to ignore. Until it happens to them, by which time it is way too late.

From my place.

Market Failures at Guantanamo

Paperwight explains...and throws in this absolutely free bonus advice:

If you take Econ 101, you don't get to stop taking economics until you pass a class specifically on market failures...Econ 101 makes you think you know something, but from everything I've seen, it just makes you stupid...

Travesties Of Justice

Twenty years behind bars after being declared innocent. This doesn't surprise me at all since I've seen a version of it happen before my very eyes.

I was the first alternate in an armed burglary trial and alternates don't get to participate in the deliberation process unless one of the jurors is unable to complete his duties. It took them five days to find the defendant guilty of twelve counts of robbery, even though he was only guilty of ten and they were just tired of debating and decided that since he was guilty of the majority of the crimes, what the heck. It was physically impossible for him to have committed one of the crimes and in the other, the witness was blind as a bat and making it up as she went along. Please don't let me ever get arrested for a crime and have to be tried by a jury of my peers. Anyway, we three alternates wandered the halls of Superior Court in the San Fernando Valley.

We wandered into a courtroom just after the victim had given her testimony in a rape case and there was some sparring between the lawyers. It was so fascinating that we decided to come back the next morning. The next day we were there bright and early. We waited for about a half hour and then the judge, assistant DA and the defendant's lawyer came into the courtroom. The first two, both women, were radiating anger.

The judge dismissed the jury and waited until they had left the courtroom, then she called the defendant to the stand. She told him to describe the events in question, and he did. Quite humorously in fact. After he was done, the judge said that she was extremely disappointed and that she had been sure he was guilty and that if he hadn't videotaped (turns out he filmed porn videos) the incident in question she would have made sure he spent many years behind bars. She then revoked his parole for a previous charge of having an open beverage container and sentenced him to finish out his year in county lockup, which was supposed to be eleven months but since he had spent the last six behind bars he could do the remaining five. She wouldn't even let him out to visit his mother, who had just had a stroke, in the hospital. She was actually shaking with anger. So was I.

We were wide-eyed and open mouthed. In astonishment That was when I finally understood how the justice system could be rigged and used to punish the innocent. Previous to that I had always believed that not being guilty would set you free. Now I know better. Our government is so anxious to make sure that everyone has a criminal record for something besides white collar crime, that they will even try someone again on the same charges after they have already received a conviction and the defendant has served his sentence, just because they want to waste the taxpayers money in order to prove a point. Ed Rosenthal can tell you all about that little scenario. If only they would use that pent up frustration to punish someone who dearly deserves it, like Osama bin Laden. But they would have to catch him first and they obviously aren't interested in doing that.

Jimmy Lee Page doesn't deserve to be behind bars any more than the guy I watched get railroaded into prison did. Hopefully Mr. Page will get true justice and be released before too much longer.

In one of those flukes that you usually only see on television, the innocent rapist became my boyfriend's roommate a few months later. Nice guy, he liked my cooking.

Crossposted Debsweb.

Playing Politics with Terrorism, Part 6,582

Last week, Mark Kleiman wrote about the farce that was David Hicks' guilty plea (Hicks is the Australian held in Guantanamo for four years, then finally brought to trial on charges less serious than what he was originally accused of):

One of the most disgusting rituals in the criminal law is the judge's questioning of a defendant who offers to plead guilty. If he says he's been pressured into pleading, the deal is off. So if he has been pressured, the law in effect requires him to lie, and requires the judge to pretend to believe the lie, for the plea to be accepted....

I suppose if you're facing a military tribunal and the judge disqualifies two of your three lawyers on the eve of trial, leaving you only with the one who has already been threatened with prosecution himself for representing you too zealously and daring to criticize the judge, the Secretary of Defense, and the President, you're well-advised to plead guilty if you can get any sort of a deal at all. And of course if you don't say that your plea was voluntary and that the dismissal of two-thirds of your legal team had nothing to do with it, the bargain is no good.

Now comes the sentencing, and it gets worse:

Australian David Hicks pleaded guilty at the Guantanamo Bay Navy Base yesterday to supporting terrorism in exchange for a nine-month prison sentence under a plea deal that forbids him from claiming he was abused in U.S. custody.

In return, Hicks, 31, will be allowed to leave Guantanamo within 60 days to serve out the sentence in his native Australia. He will be free by New Year's Eve. [emphasis added]

So David Hicks is such a dangerous guy that he had to be held without trial for four years, but not so dangerous that he has to serve more than 9 months. Right.

No, obviously they did think he was dangerous...but not in that way. Silencing him was pretty clearly the most important part of the deal. Everything else was just leverage to accomplish that.

And in case it wasn't obvious that the sentencing agreement was purely political, David Kurtz confirms it:

The plea agreement, which includes a one-year gag order on Hicks, was not negotiated by the military tribunal's prosecutors but by the official overseeing the tribunals, reports the Post this morning. In fact, the agreement was reached without the knowledge of the prosecutors, who favored a much stiffer penalty....

The motivation? Bush ally John Howard is up for re-election in 9 months. For the math-challenged, that would be 3 months before David Hicks is allowed to talk again.

Kurtz sums it up:

Could the outcome of the Hicks case be any less legitimate?

On the one hand, you have Hicks being held for five years without trial amidst allegations of torture and other mistreatment, fighting simply to get a fair hearing. His case has become an internationally known example of the Bush Administration's blatant disregard for basic human rights.

On the other hand, you have the outcome of the case determined not by conventional Anglo-American standards of due process, including evidence presented to an impartial fact-finder, but by the political considerations of the Bush Administration and its ally Howard.

The shamelessness of these people is breathtaking.

La Bombe à Retardement de Coutil

The New Yorker profile on the odious Joel Surnow (and when I say 'odious', I mean this is a 51-year-old guy with a soul patch) is chock full of fascinating tidbits. This is my favorite so far:

According to Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College and the author of the forthcoming book “Torture and Democracy,” the conceit of the ticking time bomb first appeared in Jean Lartéguy’s 1960 novel “Les Centurions,” written during the brutal French occupation of Algeria. The book’s hero, after beating a female Arab dissident into submission, uncovers an imminent plot to explode bombs all over Algeria and must race against the clock to stop it. Rejali, who has examined the available records of the conflict, told me that the story has no basis in fact. In his view, the story line of “Les Centurions” provided French liberals a more palatable rationale for torture than the racist explanations supplied by others (such as the notion that the Algerians, inherently simpleminded, understood only brute force). Lartéguy’s scenario exploited an insecurity shared by many liberal societies—that their enlightened legal systems had made them vulnerable to security threats.

So every time some dumbass wingnut trots out the ticking bomb scenario to justify torture, they're following the lead of the French.

I like that.

[That's all, folks]

Why We Fight

There has been copious, noisy, and confused debate over what we're fighting against: 'terror', 'violent extremism', 'Islamic fascism', 'jihadism', 'wahhabism', 'militant Islam', or just al Qaeda. It's all been hashed out at great length and to little productive end.

Meanwhile, there has been far too little discussion of what we're fighting for...

The wingnuts try to sidestep the question by pretending (or convincing themselves) that terrorism is an existential threat to the United States--that what we're fighting for is our survival. This is how they justify doing violence to the most fundamental principles of American government: if losing means we as a nation will cease to exist, then nearly anything is justified in the name of winning. All of which is complete nonsense; anyone who's paying even a little bit of attention can tell that there is no threat to our existence.

This is not to minimize the importance of keeping Americans safe from further terrorist attacks...but while we are talking about a non-trivial number of potential casualties, we're not talking about the End of Everything. At that point we're in the realm of tradeoffs: there are less expensive ways to save more lives than what we've been doing.

But I do believe in the fight against al Qaeda and other terrorist groups (including homegrown terrorists), and I believe there is something worth fighting for.

Given the nature of the enemy, it's clear what that is: we have to fight for an open, tolerant society, rather than a dictatorship of religious bigotry; for the rule of law, rather than the arbitrary rule of an all-powerful executive; for due process, rather than brute violence and kangaroo courts; for international norms of civilized behavior, rather than the barbaric cruelty of torture and beheadings.

And if we as a nation are to fight for these values, we have to live them. The 'war' isn't just a military matter; it's a struggle for the goodwill of the world. If we lose that, we lose the fight. Any merely military victory over some terrorist organization that does not also demonstrate the superiority of our values is ultimately meaningless.

Which means in this war, refraining from torture (or illegal detention or illegal wiretapping or any other tactic inconsistent with our values) isn't tying our hands; it's an affirmative tactic, one that advances our cause.

Conversely, every time Bush and company torture a suspect, or illegally detain random people without trial, or usurp the authority of Congress and the courts, it actively undermines our ability to fight the war. For five years, they have been making America weaker.

I think the Democrats have a tremendous opportunity (an opportunity that may be slipping away) to regain the initiative on national security by making the point that any 'war on terror' has to be fought as a war for American values. If the Democrats can articulate a vision of American superiority based not on mindless tribalism ('America! Fuck yeah!') but on our principles--as Roosevelt did when fascist aggression was the threat--if they can make the argument that these principles are integral to whatever power and influence we have in the world, then they can turn the debate over torture (and illegal detention and illegal wiretapping and executive supremacy) into one in which Republicans are on the defensive.

All it takes is courage and conviction. We have seen glimpses of them in the debate over the habeas corpus amendment. What we need now, and need desperately, is a whole lot more of both.

[Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog]

[That's all, folks]

Shorter Jonah Goldberg

Liberals are dishonest to say Bush is 'pro-torture' when he's really just anti-anti-torture. (Hat tip: Scott Lemieux)

[That's all, folks]

Guantanamo: How We Got Here

The New Yorker profile on David Addington that I wrote about over the weekend has all kinds of nuggets that clarify where and how we went horribly wrong in the 'war on terror'. One passage in particular explains why Guantanamo is such a hopeless disaster:

Just a few months after the Guantánamo detention centers were established, members of the Administration began receiving reports that questioned whether all the prisoners there were really, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had labelled them, “the worst of the worst.” Guter said that the Pentagon had originally planned to screen the suspects individually on the battlefields in Afghanistan; such “Article 5 hearings” are a provision of the Geneva Conventions. But the White House cancelled the hearings, which had been standard protocol during the previous fifty years, including in the first Gulf War. In a January 25, 2002, legal memorandum, Administration lawyers dismissed the Geneva Conventions as “obsolete,” “quaint,” and irrelevant to the war on terror. The memo was signed by Gonzales, but the Administration lawyer said he believed that “Addington and Flanigan were behind it.” The memo argued that all Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees were illegal enemy combatants, which eliminated “any argument regarding the need for case-by-case determination of P.O.W. status.” Critics claim that the lack of a careful screening process led some innocent detainees to be imprisoned. “Article 5 hearings would have cost them nothing,” the Administration lawyer, who was involved in the process, said. “They just wanted to make a point on executive power—that the President can designate them all enemy combatants if he wants to.”

Battlefield screenings would seem to be a matter of simple common sense as well as basic decency. The inhumanity of locking up innocents aside, it just doesn't do us any good to detain (indefinitely!) a bunch of people who aren't really targets. It doesn't help the fight against al Qaeda; it has probably substantially harmed it. And to what end? To make a point on executive power.

And having made that point, they have to keep making it. They have to avoid scrutiny at any cost not just for the sake of avoiding scrutiny (which is reason enough under the Addington Standard) but to avoid admitting how completely they screwed things up when they made that point in the first place. It becomes a perfect feedback loop of obsessive authoritarianism.

Nixon isn't just looking up and smiling; he's laughing his evil ass off.

[That's all, folks]

Addington, Cheney, and Nixon

I've been reading the New Yorker profile on David Addington, the architect of executive infallibility, and I highly recommend it. Addington is the guy who argued for unlimited 'wartime' powers, and signing statements, and military tribunals, and sactioning torture...and so on. Addington's involvement in all of these makes Mayer's profile a pretty good summary of the administration's war on the Constitution.

It's also a reminder that this war has been going on for a very long time: it's Nixon's war, and Nixon's war never really ended; its partisans just went underground. The chief partisan was Representative Richard Cheney; Addington, just out of high school when Nixon resigned, was a sympathizer. Cheney and Addington hooked up in 1987, when Cheney commissioned the Minority Report on Iran-Contra--a whitewash that accused Congress of overstepping its bounds (“legislative hostage taking”) in exercising oversight of intelligence matters--and Addington helped research it. It was one more battle (kind of a draw, in the end) in the war for executive supremacy.

Throughout it all, Cheney and Addington have kept alive the Nixonian dream. Now they have achieved it. Somewhere below, the sneaky bastard is looking up and smiling.

[That's all, folks]

Hamdan and the Geneva Conventions

You know all those people who say the Geneva Conventions don't apply to Guantanamo prisoners?

The Supreme Court says they're wrong:

Even more importantly for present purposes, the Court held that Common Article 3 of Geneva aplies as a matter of treaty obligation to the conflict against Al Qaeda. That is the HUGE part of today's ruling. The commissions are the least of it. This basically resolves the debate about interrogation techniques, because Common Article 3 provides that detained persons "shall in all circumstances be treated humanely," and that "[t]o this end," certain specified acts "are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever"—including "cruel treatment and torture," and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment."

This really is enormous news.

For the curious, the decision is here. The relevant portion is this:

there is at least one provision of the Geneva Conventions that applies here even if the relevant conflict is not between signatories. Common Article 3, which appears in all four Conventions, provides that, in a "conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties [i.e., signatories], each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum," certain provisions protecting "[p]ersons ... placed hors de combat by ... detention," including a prohibition on "the passing of sentences ... without previous judgment ... by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees ... recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."

Meanwhile, Bush is going to try to get Congress to authorize his military tribunals, and the Guantanamo commander says the ruling won't change anything at Guantanamo. We can only hope he's wrong.

[That's all, folks]

What Really Matters Is the Appearance of Appearances

Start with the suicides of three detainees at Guantanamo--one of whom had been cleared for transfer.

Compound that with (Assistant Deputy Secretary of State) Colleen Graffy's comments to the BBC that the suicides were a "good P.R. move" and "a tactic to further the jihadi cause."

It looks bad, and the administration realizes it looks bad. The problem, of course, is not that what Graffy said was completely appalling to civilized humans; the problem is that it didn't work. She certainly wasn't off the reservation:

Graffy's remarks were sharper than those of other U.S. officials, but not entirely off-message. The camp commander at Guantanamo, Rear Adm. Harry Harris, told reporters Sunday that the detainees "have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own."

"I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us," Harris said.

But it isn't playing well, so at this point they back away from Graffy's remarks. But even in this story, there is a line that highlights the utter disgrace that is this administration:

Graffy's unscripted remarks threw a monkey wrench in the administration's careful plan to demonstrate concern over the deaths andrespond to rising criticism of the U.S. operation of the prison. [emphasis added]

Note: it doesn't say that the administration is concerned; it says they have a careful plan to demonstrate concern. Not because, you know, it's bad when inmates commit suicide...but to respond to rising criticism.

It's like they're not even pretending anymore; they're just pretending to pretend, because we expect them to pretend. "An administration spokesman today acknowledged that they had erred in allowing the public to see their true face, and assured reporters that they are taking measures to put the mask back in place." That's what we're dealing with here. That's what this story is saying.

And beyond the outrage there is the meta-outrage, the 'where is the outrage?' outrage. Because every day reporters report, newspapers print, stories like this one--stories about the post-modern presidency, about an administration that no longer bothers to conceal the fact that there is nothing at all behind the mask--and it goes largely unremarked.

The damage these people have caused goes far beyond the concrete effects of their catastrophic corruption and incompetence; what they have done is corrupted the entire culture. They have conditioned us to shrug at the indefensible, to expect the unimaginable. They have normalized deception, abuse of power, invasion of privacy, corruption, aggressive warfare, torture. They have turned the moral universe upside-down and made us their accomplices.

It's going to take a long time to recover from this...and if when this is over the public at large remains as indifferent as they have been, if we do not recoil in horror at the things we allowed to happen, then the nation will never recover.

[Cross-posted at Property of a Lady]

[That's all, folks]

Letter to Democratic Senators

Dear Senator,

I write now to urge you not only to oppose Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court, but also to support a filibuster, which is the only way for your opposition to have any practical value. If you are already committed to doing so, then I thank you for your support. If you are not, then I respectfully ask you to reconsider.

I won't dwell on the extent to which Judge Alito is out of the mainstream on social or regulatory issues. These are crucial issues, of course, and bad decisions will have real and terrible human costs; but bad decisions on these issues will not (in themselves) threaten the republic. Bad decisions on executive power, on the other hand, will permanently (or for the foreseeable future) distort the nature of American government.

By way of perspective, I think we need to go back a year and look at the confirmation hearings for Alberto Gonzales. As President Bush's attorney, he had a troubling of arguing for unchecked executive power, including (but not limited to) the right to torture prisoners in wartime. He was interrogated at some length about this by the Judiciary Committee, and in his testimony he did his best to allay these concerns:

With the consent of the Senate, I will no longer represent only the White House; I will represent the United States of America and its people....

And I want to make very clear that I am deeply committed to the rule of law. I have a deep and abiding commitment to the fundamental American principle that we are a nation of laws and not of men. I would not have the audacity to appear before this committee today if that commitment were not the core principle that has guided all of my professional endeavors....

While I look forward to answering your specific questions concerning my actions and my views, I think it is important to stress at the outset that I am and will remain deeply committed to ensuring that the United States government complies with all of its legal obligations as it fights the war on terror, whether those obligations arise from domestic or international law.

That was a year ago. Here is what he said last week:

It has long been recognized that the President's constitutional powers include the authority to conduct warrantless surveillance aimed at detecting and preventing armed attacks on the United States. Presidents have uniformly relied on their inherent power to gather foreign intelligence for reasons both diplomatic and military, and the federal courts have consistently upheld this longstanding practice.

Mr. Gonzales, having asserted his commitment to the rule of law, now argues that the executive branch is not in fact bound by the law. Having assured us that he would be our attorney and not President Bush's, he argues for the privileges of the president and against the rights of American citizens. It is no great leap to conclude that Mr. Gonzales deliberately misled the Senate in order to be confirmed.

With Judge Alito, we have a similarly troubling record on executive power. He has argued for the right of administration officials to commit crimes with impunity. He came up with the idea of using 'signing statements' to negate the will of Congress, and expand the power of the President. He has embraced the radical theory of the 'unitary executive', in which Federal power is concentrated in the Executive branch--in direct conflict with the system set up by the Founders.

I have read that some Democratic Senators feel reassured by Judge Alito's testimony. I read these reports and cannot help but conclude that some are making the same mistake the Senate made with Alberto Gonzales. Whatever deference the Senate owes to the President in regard to his appointment--and that, of course, is a matter of debate in the first place--is entirely negated once an appointee misleads the Senate as egregiously and shamelessly as Mr. Gonzales did. The burden is now on the President and his appointees to demonstrate in real, concrete ways--not just with soothing platitudes for the benefit of the Judiciary Committee--that they are not committed to the radical transformation of American government. Judge Alito has completely failed to meet this burden.

I understand that a number of Senators agreed that they would use the filibuster only in extreme circumstances. As Professor Kleiman says: "If the nomination to the Supreme Court of a judge who thinks the President can sometimes order his subordinates to violate criminal laws, by a President who is currently doing exactly that, doesn't count as an "extraordinary circumstance," what would count?" These are precisely the circumstances under which a filibuster is not just acceptable but a moral necessity.

I understand that many Democrats worry about the political repercussions they might suffer if they filibuster Alito's nomination. This is not unreasonable. At the same time, it seems clear to me that of all the attitudes a politician can adopt, the least appealing--the one guaranteed to drive away supporters and harden opponents--is fatalism. To say it isn't worth filibustering because it will fail is to say that Democrats are weak, that Democrats have no interest in winning, that Democrats are unworthy of anyone's support.

I do not believe any of these are true. I am a proud Democrat, and have been all my life. I first worked for the party as a child, in 1972, and I have supported the party ever since. I believe you and the other Democratic Senators are worthy of my support.

I hope you will find it in your conscience to prove me right.

Respectfully yours,

Thomas V. Hilton

[That's all, folks]

Reagan's Legacy and Human Rights

Andrew Sullivan seems to have an unwritten rule that every time he posts something thoughtful and informative, he has to balance it out with something outrageously wrong. (Sadly, it doesn't work the other way around.) So a very good post about torture, shredding the Bush administration's excuses therefor, is followed by an exercise in wishful thinking in which he suggests that the anti-torture faction within the administration is gaining the upper hand. That may well be factually correct, but all it means is that people who were perfectly comfortable with covert torture are less comfortable defending it in the open. (Gotta give Cheney credit for sticking up for his values, no matter how odious they are.)

But that's not the part of the post that elevated my blood pressure. What got to me was this quote:

Those of us who recall the Reagan legacy and who believe in America's vital role in fighting terror while preserving its values of...human rights are finally gaining ground.

In Nicaragua, the Reagan administration backed a rebel army, composed largely of officers from Somoza's notoriously brutal National Guard, that engaged in the indiscriminate slaughter of rural civilians. The aim was to bring down a government that, while comically inept, was less repressive than most Latin American regimes at the time.

In El Salvador, the Reagan administration backed the scorched-earth campaign of death squad puppeteer Roberto d'Aubuisson. Again, indiscriminate slaughter of rural civilians.

In Guatemala, the Reagan administration was extremely cozy with President Efrain Rios Montt, the most brutal of a long line of military tyrants, who was responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Guatemala's dirty war. Again, indiscriminate slaughter of civiilians in the service of American interests.

Now, I'll confess that every now and then I feel a twinge of nostalgia for Reagan. If Sully's point is that Bush is worse than Reagan, I'll happily concede that. Far worse. These ratfuckers are wackier than Reagan, more vindictive than Nixon, more corrupt than Harding or Grant, worse than the lot of them put together.

But none of that should obscure the fact that putting 'Reagan' in the same sentence as 'human rights' is an atrocity against truth, basic decency, and the English language. The Reagan legacy is what the Bush people have taken as a jumping-off point, and only a terminal amnesiac could pretend that the current atrocities are anything other than a continuation of the same philosophy taken to grotesque and horrible extremes.

Is Your Senator Pro-Torture?

Via Laura Rozen, here's the list:

Allard (R-CO)
Bond (R-MO)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Roberts (R-KS)
Sessions (R-AL)
Stevens (R-AK)

The Senate voted 90 to 9 to include an amendment in the defense appropriations bill defining and limiting the interrogation techniques the military can use against terrorism suspects. The nine senators listed above opposed it. The WashPo story is here (free registration required).

You know who else is pro-torture? Hint: he has announced plans to veto the appropriations bill if it includes this provision--which would be the first veto of his presidency.

Chateau d'If Revisited

I was rewatching the miniseries of The Count of Monte Cristo (the version with Gerard Depardieu) the other night, and about five minutes in I came to the jarring realization that I hadn't seen it since...oh, just to pick a date at random...September, 2001.

(It's an excellent adaptation, faithful to the spirit of the original (with the exception of one indefensible alteration) even when it takes liberties with the details. Check it out. Better yet, read the book. Don't bother with the Hollywood version with James Caviezel and Guy Pearce, which my girlfriend refers to as The Count of Monte Crap.)

The miniseries monkeys around with the chronology, and opens with Edmond Dantes already imprisoned in the Chateau d'If. The Chateau d'If was, in historical fact as in the novel, where political prisoners were sent to rot and die--to disappear. It operated without public oversight, without the restrictions of due process. It was the sort of place where a prosecutor like Villefort could put away a nobody like Dantes with nobody to ask any questions; where Dantes could be held indefinitely based on the unsupported claim (by Villefort, covering his tracks) that he was a 'fanatical Bonapartist'; where, in the face of frantic inquiries from family and friends, nobody would confirm or deny his presence there.

So it was just a few minutes into the thing that I realized: the last time I watched this, we didn't have our own Chateau d'If.

For all my outrage and horror at Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib, at the whole off-the-books prison system they've cooked up, it took The Count of Monte Cristo to show me in a visceral way what a tremendous leap backward they represent. The system is a throwback to the days of a state that operated unchecked, in which political power was its own justification. This is the Bush administration's legacy.

The apologists will quibble with my characterization of Guantanamo (or Abu Ghraib) as the equivalent of Chateau d'If; they will argue, for example, that conditions are better now than they were at Chateau d'If. (Based on the e-mails attached to the Taguba report, that's a dubious claim.) The point remains: we now have prisons where people can be--are--held indefinitely as suspects. Without being charged. Without lawyers. Without (in some cases) anybody even knowing they're there.

Yes, the Supreme Court has ruled against the administration (stung, perhaps, by the knowledge that when the Justice Department attorney said we don't torture prisoners he was lying through his ass). In theory, prisoners now have recourse to the civil justice system--introducing, in theory, a level of oversight. Yes, the Pentagon released a bunch of prisoners to make a show of good faith (but how long have they known these guys were innocent?). I'll take good news where I can get it these days. But damn...if the only good news is that the horrible news may be ever so slightly mitigated, things are really pretty bad. This should never have happened in the first place.

When I read the novel, when I first watched the miniseries, I was able to think (without even being aware I was thinking it): we don't do that; we're better than that. Now I can't. Now none of us can.