Green Light for Torture

To follow on ahab's post below, Vanity Fair has a must-read article on the development of the Bush administration's torture policy. It's long, and I'm not even going to try to excerpt. Read the whole thing. Be prepared for disgust, nausea, and that sense of shame that right-wingers are missing. If there is any justice in the world, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington, Gonzales, Yoo, Bybee, and a string of others will find themselves before a war crimes tribunal.

No, I'm not holding my breath.

How I Learned to Start Worrying...

With the Prezdint invoking images of nuclear holocaust and B-52s with nuclear warheads flying overhead, this might be the week to dig up Dr. Strangelove (full title: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) and watch it, especially if you've never seen it, and maybe even if you have.

The dark humor of this film was at least partly derived from the possibility that the plot's bizarre scenario could actually play out in reality. For anyone who hasn't seen it, a B-52 with a nuclear warhead is sent on its mission, when the zany (but plausible) sequence of events brings the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to the brink, and can't be called back. The context back then was that Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D., doncha love it?) was the policy of the time. Except for the fictitious "Doomsday Machine", everything referenced in the film, from the B-52s to the "red phone" and the drunken, bellicose Soviet Premier, was part of our Cold War reality.

I was not just a Cold War kid by virtue of age; we lived in Dayton, Ohio, when nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was a major operations and R&D center for the Strategic Air Command. It seemed like there were always military aircraft overhead, and the occasional sonic boom, far from being an annoyance, was an exciting reminder that we were only fifteen years into the supersonic age. Although the evidence suggests that some of those planes overhead had nuclear weapons aboard, if anything, it was supposed to make us feel safer; the normalization of insane concepts like MAD was a primary feature of Cold War living, just like the acceptance today that the risk of a terrorist attack far outweighs any other concern.

From the AP:

According to the officials, the weapons are designed with multiple safety features that ensure the warheads don't accidentally detonate. Arming the weapons requires a number of stringent protocols and authentication codes that must be followed for detonation.

From the cockpit of the rogue B-52, you see the frozen Arctic landscape screaming by at 500 mph, only 50 feet below (to avoid Soviet radar), as the crew goes through the checklist of decoding their orders, going through it again when they realize it's an order to drop The Big One on a Russian city.

Major T.J. "King" Kong, pilot/mission commander (played by Slim Pickens): "Well, I've been to one world fair, a picnic, and a rodeo, and that's the stupidest thing I ever heard come over a set of earphones. You sure you got today's codes?"

From the AP:

"Nothing like this has ever been reported before and we have been assured for decades that it was impossible," said [Ed] Markey, D-Mass., co-chair of the House task force on nonproliferation.

From the film:

President Merkin Muffley: "General Turgidson! When you instituted the human reliability tests, you *assured* me there was *no* possibility of such a thing *ever* occurring!"

General "Buck" Turgidson: "Well, I, uh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir."

Meanwhile, back in the cockpit...

Slim Pickens as Major "King" Kong again: "Well, boys, I reckon this is it - nuclear combat toe to toe with the Roosskies."

Of course, by the time the situation in Moscow and D.C. is defused, the equipment on which they would have received their callback order has been rendered inoperable by anti-aircraft missiles...

Nowadays there would be some interesting parallels between the characters in our own American tragicomedy of the last few years and the film's characters -- several of whom were played by Peter Sellers, including Dr. Strangelove (who will remind many of Donald Rumsfeld) and the president (who, because he is the voice of reason in the film, should not remind anyone of someone, if you know what I mean).

And to piggyback on Tom's post from earlier today, the plot pits the NARL's against the RL's in a way that should send chills of recognition up any thinking American's spine.

Rent Dr. Strangelove and see it before you wake up one of these mornings to find we're living it. The propaganda runup to war with Iran starts this week.

I Have A Question

I had this idea that taking a day off to recharge my batteries, might give me a more positive perspective on things. And it did, even after I stepped on the hot barbecue coal and burnt one of my middle toes and the ball of my foot. Right up until this morning, when I stupidly started reading an article that would only confirm the accusations I made while the national shame that was Katrina, was occurring. Now I'm absolutely positive that the Bush administration never had any intention of ever helping the citizens of the Gulf Coast and every day that goes by it looks like they actively worked to prevent them from getting help. Even if it didn't cost this country a dime.

So, my question is this. Exactly what constitutes high crimes and misdemeanors in this country? Even if we blow off the incompetence of preventing 9/11; the lack of pursuit of Osama bin Forgotten (by the crew without clue that is);, Abu Ghraib; Guantanamo; Pat Tillman and the cover-up; the varied and false premises for war with Iraq; the debacle of said war; the lack of a connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda; the abuse and lack of support for our troops (both during and after service); still no WMDs; deliberately outing a member of the CIA; the destruction of the Bill of Rights and the flagrant disregard of the Constitution; doesn't deliberately refusing while actively preventing to help the citizens of the country you supposedly are in charge of, deserve some type of formal charges? There are dictatorships that have been held to more accountability than these guys.

Crossposted at Debsweb.

The Moral Of The Story

Moral waivers or is that morality wavering? Either way, we no longer have the moral high ground, as if we ever did, and the body count of innocents (military and civilians) continues to increase. And no, I don't think this was the reason they hid this report. They didn't want the public to have the information, it might have made the election results worse than they already were for the warmongers.

Though Bargewell completed his secret report in June 2006, it has not been publicly released because of ongoing criminal investigations of three Marines on murder allegations and four Marine officers who allegedly failed to look into the case. Bargewell's report, now unclassified, focuses on the reporting of the incident and the training and command climate within the Marine Corps leadership; it does not address the actual incident in detail.

The officer in charge, Lt. Kallop is getting immunity to testify against his troops. Exactly when are the so-called superiors going to take responsibility for any of the tragedies in this debacle? From Abu Ghraib to Pat Tillman to Abeer Hamza to Haditha, the only ones who pay are the troops and the civilians. What's up with that?

When we were stationed in Germany, we lived on the economy (off base) and most of the troops referred to the German citizens as Herbies (after the original Love Bug, not the Lindsey Lohan remake!). It wasn't nice, it wasn't polite, but we were generally respectful of the people and obeyed their laws and customs, of which the beer drinking was very popular for some reason and speeding along the autobahn just rocked, usually when a BMW or Mercedes blew past my Gremlin.

Things are different now, we treat the Iraqis like they are interlopers in their own country. We force them to identify themselves, to stop their cars on a dime or be shot, we burst into their homes unannounced, shoot first and ask questions later. Maybe. Meanwhile, back here in the States, we have no empathy for those who are injured or killed. As people rush to help the Virgina Tech survivors, we act like this is the biggest tragedy in the world. A tragedy that is suffered daily by the Iraqi and Afghanis (remember them?) and we expect them to pick up their lives and go on as if nothing has happened. Until the next time, which can be in just a few minutes, hours or days.

There is a whole generation of children who are growing up knowing nothing but war and suicide bombers, not unlike the Palestinians and the Lebanese, except that we are the perpetrators of the Iraq war. We started it and we are incapable of finishing it. We are responsible for every innocent man, woman and child who have been, and will continue to be, maimed and killed by our actions. And our inactions.

It is no longer possible to convince the world that we are right, because we aren't. We can drop all the Number Twos we want, the smell of this debacle will never improve. Nobody believes us anymore, we don't even believe our own government and we certainly don't believe their reports.

The only moral to this story seems to be to do unto others what you think they are going to do to you, but do it first and leave no survivors. And people are wondering why our kids feel so disenfranchised and react with violence.

Crossposted at Debsweb.

Happiness is a Warm Gun

In his column in yesterday's NY Times (subscription required), Bob Herbert makes a Freudian reading of violent crime in America:

This time it was 32 innocents slaughtered on the campus of Virginia Tech. How could it have happened? We behave as if it was all so inexplicable.

But a close look at the patterns of murderous violence in the U.S. reveals some remarkable consistencies, wherever the individual atrocities may have occurred. In case after case, decade after decade, the killers have been shown to be young men riddled with shame and humiliation, often bitterly misogynistic and homophobic, who have decided that the way to assert their faltering sense of manhood and get the respect they have been denied is to go out and shoot somebody.

Dr. James Gilligan, who has spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts, and as a professor at Harvard and now at N.Y.U., believes that some debilitating combination of misogyny and homophobia is a “central component” in much, if not most, of the worst forms of violence in this country.

Herbert then smoothly shifts to this insightful consideration of President Bush's motives in Iraq:

“What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal,” [Dr. Gilligan] said, “is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.”

[...]

In a culture that is relentless in equating violence with masculinity, “it is tremendously tempting,” said Dr. Gilligan, “to use violence as a means of trying to shore up one’s sense of masculine self-esteem.”

Yet Bush, despite his best efforts to buck himself up and to dominate Iraq through ultra-violent shock and awe, remains just another many-time loser with the country. Indeed, recent reports anticipate that even the suggestively-named "Plan F" for Iraq will succumb to Bush's long history of frustrating inadequacy.

[I removed a paragraph of Herbert's from the original post for clarity.]