Chaos by Design

How long shall we endure
The deliberately obscure
When ‘clear sky’ pollutes
And nothing refutes
The lies and the errors
Describing the terrors?
We need abatement
Of the signing statement
And a word that just seems
To say what it means


As we ponder these 2008 elections, we need to make sense of the claims and counter-claims as well as the specific results. Most of us try to do that with whatever knowledge and experience we bring to the voting booth. Good for us. Unfortunately, political campaigns excel in hyperbole, so we need to calibrate our expectations with our internal “smoke detectors” and make some decisions based on an integration and weighting of lots of factors. Normally, we do this without much conscious thought, but when election season is upon us, we have polls that slice the data in ways that only pollsters could love, and in ways that not even they understand.

The question I need to pose to each of you is this:
When you make your everyday decisions about what you eat and wear; your health care; your investments; expenditures for transportation shelter; entertainment and safety, do you know what you are doing? Seriously, do you know what you are doing? Cessation programs such as those for smoking or drinking ask that you keep logs so you know the circumstances of when you partake. That presents one side of the equation and perhaps it might help, but life has become so complex that knowing yourself is simply not enough. Is there melamine in that milk or formula? Are you swallowing a fast-track drug or is it simply a placebo? Do your children’s toys contain lead? Does the mortgage interest rate change? Does your credit card rate change? Does your spinach or ground beef patty contain E coli 0157: H7 or does your chicken dinner have salmonella? Hmm…think about it.
Now what if I asked you what protected you from the unknown in all the areas of your life? If the FDA is to protect you from untested drugs or reports authored by “scientists” with a conflict of interest, do you know if that has that been subverted? Similarly, if the bright imported toys are laced with lead, do you have a test kit to detect the lead? Do you really have an airbag that will deploy in an accident? What protects you from predatory lending or financial products that cost more than they earn?
Stay with me. Of course, we have federal agencies that are chartered to test and investigate, but will they? What if I told you that the system depends on the existence of adequate regulations, funding and staffing of agencies and the desire of the inspectors and investigators to enforce the rules? We know that the “Clear Skies Initiative” actually adds pollution…but how much? The name gives us no clue. In fact, it sounds like a good deal. Everybody wants clear skies.
Political rhetoric has become confusing. Take this quote from Alaska Governor Sarah Palin:
“And Alaska—we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs. … It’s to maximize benefits for Alaskans, not an individual company, not some multinational somewhere, but for Alaskans.”
Ms. Palin became shrill in her denunciation of Barack Obama for his plan to share the wealth by planning tax cuts for the middle class and rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the more wealthy. She used “socialist” as a pejorative and then words such as “liberal” were thrown into the mix, but it was Teddy Roosevelt, a conservative Republican, that established a graduated income tax nearly a hundred years ago and it has been policy ever since. So if she spreads the wealth in Alaska, it is “American,” but if we continue the graduated tax in the entire country, it is “socialist.” Division is a useful tool when wielded by experts in the process who use political code words for building fear and even panic in a population that has not done due diligence in researching issues but is ready to blame our ills on some “outside” group or person. Likewise, when Palin denounced Obama for voting against an Iraqi funding bill, she left unsaid that McCain also voted against an Iraqi funding bill. One had time lines and one did not.
My point is simply this: Similar to the impossibility to self-analyze our health, safety, and investment decisions because of their complexity and lack of individual tools and skills; we cannot determine the truth or falsity of claims and counter claims in the political arena because there is so much that is hidden from view. Bush has signed bills into law and then added a record number of “signing statements” that gut the legislation. Right at this very moment, Bush has a task force working to deregulate as much as possible before he leaves office. This is not only a low profile event, but is actively hidden from view. In a way, there is a biblical quality to all this activity. Recall the parable in the New Testament where Jesus describes the prudent steward who, one by one, writes down the debts owed his master so as to set up a good life after his pending dismissal. Bush is leaving office and will deregulate those industries that will offer him the continuing good life; the nation be damned. Given his record on deregulation that brought on the chaos of the mortgage meltdown and the lending laments expect the worst, and you will not be disappointed. An ideologue to the end, Bush will leave office continuing the support of lobbyists that were the hallmark of his reign. Will we keep a log of all the regulations that need to be reinstated? Perhaps if we do, we can avoid another catastrophe rooted in the ideology of deregulation. Again, the enemy is not government, but BAD government where chaos is introduced and nurtured by design.

Peace,
George Giacoppe
31 October 2008

Shock Doc

 
I’ve been reading Naomi Klein’s truly shocking book, The Shock Doctrine. Everyone should read it without delay. For not only does it tell a riveting tale about an overarching plan hatched by the right wing in this country for the last 40 years or so, but it helps make sense of the economic turmoil now facing this nation and the world. It also points out that while the Left has focused its attention on the peril it has seen in political violence and war, the Right has focused on “free market” economics and the real control and profits it provides to those in power. Lastly, it tells us how the 9/11 attacks have been used by the Right to “shock” us all into compliance (see www.ae911truth.org for engineering analyses of the tower collapses), and indeed, what that compliance was really about.
            To put it briefly, the right wing objective for more than 40 years has been to foist a fundamentalist version of capitalism—Milton Friedman’s purist version of “free market” capitalism—on the world. This is the system espoused by Friedman and his “Chicago boys” at the University of Chicago. It is a system that argues that all government interference in the economy is evil, especially the social programs (social security, public housing, government regulations on banks, government-run building programs) that Franklin Roosevelt instituted to end the Great Depression, and that many third world governments instituted to ameliorate the misery of their impoverished masses.  Rather, the Chicago plan urges the privatization of all nationalized industries (especially oil, but also water, power, and so on), the elimination of all social programs designed to help the poor, and the opening of every country to “free trade.” Of course, when such purifying “surgery” is administered to a country rapidly, the pain and misery of the population increases dramatically. Therefore, Friedman argued, a shock is needed to instill fear in the people, and force them and the government to accept the harsh medicine, often called “structural adjustment” when implemented by the IMF and the World Bank.  Klein quotes Milton Friedman’s statement in 1982 about the necessity of crisis or shock to implement such ideas:
            “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
            Klein’s book then leads us through the countries to whom this “free market” medicine has been applied in recent years: Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, as well as China, Russia, South Africa, and more recently the United States itself. In almost every case, the medicine is initially rejected as too harsh—rejected, that is, until a shock either occurs from the outside, or is initiated by the government. In every case, as well, the necessity for either a dictator or some form of police state is required to force people to accept the pain. The preferred method, and according to Klein, the virtual twin of such programs, is torture. In Chile, for example, the coup which killed the democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende, and installed as dictator Augusto Pinochet, was the necessary precursor to the transition to free market capitalism. The road to this coup, however, was paved in prior years by a crew of Chileans studying with Friedman at the University of Chicago (the Chicago Boys), a crew which returned to await the chance to implement their policies. The road was also paved by the CIA in helping to overturn the elected government, as well as in the training it supplied in the best methods of counter-insurgency and torture. Once Pinochet seized power, he immediately began to “disappear” people—either dropping them from planes into the ocean or depositing them in torture chambers. In either case, most were never heard from again. And the targets were not only political leaders on the left, but also union leaders of every kind (destroying unions has been a key element of the “free market” program: think Reagan and the firing of 14,000 air traffic controllers). Such killings were not kept secret: the public demonstrations of repression were necessary to send the message that anyone who opposed the new regime did so under threat of death. Thousands left the country, while thousands more—including some of the most prominent figures in the nation like the composer/singer Victor Jara—were eliminated. In sum, Chile endured three complementary forms of shock: the shock of the military coup; the capitalist shock treatment to the economy; and the shock of the CIA-codified torture chamber meant to destroy the left-leaning culture itself. The result was then referred to, especially in the United States, as the Chilean Economic Miracle.
            Of course, what the promoters of this “miracle” never mention is that in fact, the Chicago-inspired shock therapy actually resulted in economic disaster: Chile’s economy crashed in 1982, its debt exploded, it faced hyperinflation, and its unemployment reached 30%, ten times higher than under Allende. Neither do they note that in response, Pinochet was forced to emulate the leader he had killed, and nationalize many of the companies in trouble (he never had to re-nationalize Chile’s biggest industry, copper, because he had never de-nationalized it in the first place.) And even with the economic growth that followed, more than 45% of the population fell below the poverty line, while the richest 10% of Chileans saw their incomes rise by almost 100%. In other words, the free-market “miracle” did what it has done elsewhere, including the United States: it transferred enormous wealth from the poor and middle classes to the very rich (Joseph Giannone of Reuters wrote on Sept. 4, 2008, that “the top 1 percent of all households owned 35% of the world’s wealth last year. Meanwhile, the top 0.001 percent, ultra-rich households holding at least $5 million in assets, commanded $21 trillion—1/5 of the world’s wealth.”)
            This really gets to an underlying thesis of Klein’s book. In each country, the violence against the populace becomes the focus of those opposing the dictator or the dictatorial government. However, the violence is never the goal, but only the means. Klein quotes Claudia Acuna, an Argentine journalist, on the government that “disappeared” so many thousands: “Their human rights violations were so outrageous, so incredible, that stopping them of course became the priority. But while we were able to destroy the secret torture centers, what we couldn’t destroy was the economic program…” The truth pointed out by Klein is that far more lives were stolen by “planned misery” than by bullets:
            “…what happened in the Southern Cone of Latin America in the seventies is that it was treated as a murder scene when it was, in fact, the site of an extraordinarily violent armed robbery.”
            In other words, torture is not meant to extract information, as is commonly stated, but rather is a “means of terrorizing and controlling populations.” It is a means to seize from millions of people what they absolutely require to live with minimal dignity, and would never give up willingly. That this is so can be seen in South Africa. There, the apartheid government “gave” political freedom to Nelson Mandela and the black majority. But while Mandela’s government, the ANC, was focusing on political matters so it could redistribute land and wealth, the white power structure was ensuring that economic power remained with them: the ANC was saddled with the enormous debt of the rulers who had oppressed it, and with paying the pensions of the very officials that had maintained the apartheid system. Further, it became crystal clear that any attempt to renege on those debts or nationalize industries such as mining would cause international investors to withdraw from South Africa and plunge the country into depression. The ANC was, and is trapped, and the majority of South Africans are worse off than ever.
            Many readers would find all this information about “them” interesting, if not compelling. What Klein points out, however, is that the “them” is now “us.” With underdeveloped nations increasingly closing their doors to U.S. privatization schemes, U.S. conservatives saw that the profits of privatization in the new century would have to come from within. Consider the announced plans of our recently- departed Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. This corporate CEO, with a reputed fortune of $250 million, cared little about how best to protect the nation; rather, his primary interest was in reforming the Pentagon bureaucracy—but NOT to save money or increase efficiency. It was to privatize the biggest agency of the United States government. The military, said Rumsfeld, should reduce its focus to warfighting alone…whereas “in all other cases, we should seek (private) suppliers who can provide these non-core activities…” Such suppliers could do everything from cutting DOD checks to running its warehouses to picking up its garbage to providing housing for soldiers to providing computer systems. And as Jeremy Scahill points out in Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, the drive to privatize the military and outsource its traditional functions did not stop with providing clean laundry and Burger Kings at army bases; it was extended to include protection for military leaders and visiting dignitaries, and even to implementing torture (always termed ‘information gathering’) in places like Abu Ghraib.
            Thus, Rumsfeld and his protégé Cheney became the point men not so much in downsizing the United States government that they largely ran for the first 6 years of the Bush administration, but rather in creating a corporate bonanza for their corporate friends and cronies such as Cheney’s Halliburton and Rumsfeld’s Gilead Sciences (maker of Tamiflu, the preferred drug for avian flu, which Rummie expected, when the next flu epidemic hit, to turn into a cash cow of unprecedented proportions). Privatizing and outsourcing were the key policies, and the Gold Dust Twins were already masters of these policies by the time they got to the Bush administration. Under Cheney’s 5-year reign in the 1990s, for example, Halliburton’s take from the U.S. Treasury ballooned by almost 100%---from $1.2 billion to $2.3 billion—while its federal loans and guarantees “increased fifteenfold.” God only knows what Halliburton, now super-enriched by its contracts in Iraq, has been raking in since then.
            There is far more detail in Klein’s book, but the essence is this: The real agenda of the Right since at least the Reagan administration has been not repression and war so much, but an increasing economic stranglehold over the world and its resources. War, violence, spying, torture are only the necessary means to this end. And the corollary truth—which stems from the guru, Milton Friedman himself—is that only a crisis, only deeply disorienting shocks to a national body, can make a population accept the kind of economic pain that goes along with such theft. Everyone now knows what those shocks have been in the last 8 years: the attacks of 9/11, the so-called war on terror, the drowning of New Orleans, and now, the financial meltdown. And it is sobering if not frightening to realize that the most recent shock—the financial one—has done its job perfectly. The United States Congress, even in the face of massive outrage from its constituents, finally succumbed to the shock therapy, and agreed to the massive bailouts for the very banks and CEOs whose policies and thefts were responsible for the collapse in the first place.
            Read Naomi Klein’s book. You may not be glad you did, but you’ll certainly be better equipped to comprehend the public fleecing you’ve been enduring for years.
 
Lawrence DiStasi
 



addendum on joe the so-called plumber, from the Daily Kos:


The facts - as even the reluctant to bother actually doing reporting Corporate Media have revealed - are that: Joe The Plumber only makes $40,000 a year, doesn't have a valid plumbers license in the state of Ohio, has only been a "plumber" for 6 years - not 15, has never finished his plumber courses, has never apprenticed as a plumber, can't afford to buy his bosses business - which only generates $100,000 a year in income Profit, not $250,000 - is a registered republican who owes over a $1,000 in back taxes, and under any version of Obama's plan would get a tax cut that would be larger than McCain's.

His (first) Name isn't even Joe - It's SAM!
=

Government is Not the Problem

And who can view this mess
And pray for success
With Wall Street tycoons
Using us buffoons
With fundamentals strong
Yet bread lines long
And finances so dire
Who is the biggest liar?
Bush/Paulson hints at Fate
But is it deliberate?


Let me shed some light on the questions posed in the verse above to those of you who may not be keeping up with the financial and political theater currently playing in venues near you. The crisis is deliberate. The fear being injected by the White House is exactly parallel to the fear generated by GW Bush just prior to invading “sovereign” Iraq. I was struck by the 25 September 2008 John Stewart parallel running of video clips of the Bush drumbeat of fear not only repeated, but that it was virtually word for word from his “warnings” about Iraq. For those of you who see government as a purposeful instrument to create commonwealth, this will be heart-breaking news, but some far right-wingers want to destroy government. Their patron saint, Grover Norquist has finally seen his dream within reach. He sees government as the “beast” that must be starved until it can be drowned in the bathtub. What better way to starve the beast than to create debt so huge that none of the usual services of government can be provided? If New Orleans and Galveston did not provide a sufficient bathtub, then Wall Street has exceeded expectations. Victory for the plutocrats can now be achieved by destroying all the usual government services and firmly establishing the rule of money. All services, including human services, and even our national defense services have been badly maimed by profligate spending, outsourcing of key activities, elimination and diminution of oversight and regulation, and damaging labor and the agencies supporting it. When the Bush Administration was forced to recognize some of the agencies such as the USDA or FDA, it deliberately chose to reduce the number of inspectors and, worse, indicated that the purpose of those remaining was to help the companies providing goods and services rather than the public at large. To be fair, this began before GW Bush. He simply perfected the assault techniques.
Bush has simultaneously presided over the largest increase in government while reducing critical government services in areas such as food inspection, drug testing (remember VIOXX?), OSHA, Mine Safety, EPA, etc. Further, he has done it through a simple premise that the market knows better than government and that his clients are the corporations in the marketplace rather than the citizens paying the taxes. He uses clever names such as the “Clear Sky Initiative” while fouling the air. His Neocon tactics include the following:
1. Where possible, eliminate government agencies that now provide services to oversee corporations. Deregulate.
2. Where that cannot be done, under-staff or do not staff the agencies at all.
3. Where that cannot be done, then staff the agencies with incompetent and/or antagonistic managers.
4. In any event, outsource key activities including oversight to corporations loyal to the administration. Use no-bid contracts and executive discretion in assigning contracts.
5. Where these measures fail, support corporations through judicial review by sympathetic judges. The “free” market needs a boost to ensure the right corporations thrive.
Time was when caveat emptor might have been sufficient for most circumstances. If nobody added chemicals to milk and you could smell that it was not sour, then perhaps it was safe for your children to drink. In today’s marketplace, we need testing for listeria, for melamine, for E. coli, etc., in our food products; we need to know about lead contamination in toys and we need to be able to compare complex products. People get hurt when we do not set rules, test and enforce. We, as a commonwealth, need to protect one another and to nurture life rather than corporations. Again, corporations do not have colonoscopies. People do. It seems ironic to me that the very politicians who scream to protect the unborn deliberately ignore safety and health after that moment of birth as they champion the interests of corporations over the common man.
The complexity of our food and other products we use daily extends to the financial world. We use general terms to describe some of these products, but it takes experts to distinguish one derivative from another. Some products were so complex that valuation escaped the experts. The upshot of all this…the only conclusion that we can draw is that Reagan was incorrect. Government is not the problem. Bad government is the problem. Medicare is one of the best programs ever developed by our government, yet the Neocons seek to destroy it and replace it with commercial systems. Social Security has protected the dignity and financial security of our citizens from the 1930s, but Neocons would have replaced it with individual commercial accounts using the mantra of an “ownership society.” Exactly where would we be if the Bush plan had been adopted given our current financial meltdown? We would have bread lines without bread, that’s what. We need to fix Social Security, not destroy it. We need to remember that the federal drug plan was written by drug companies for drug companies, just as our energy plan was written by energy companies. It put the government in the position of, again, protecting corporations rather than people, especially those on fixed incomes. It forbid the government from getting low bids for drugs and is far more expensive than it needs to be. That is not due to government. That is due to bad government. There is a clear difference. Government must serve the people first; not corporations, except as they help our commonwealth.
Just think calmly about the tactics. Bush and McCain accuse Democrats of being the “Tax and Spend” party while they borrow and spend and reduce taxes on the most wealthy among us. If they borrow enough, then the government cannot function and they win by default and by de-funding programs that are needed in a complex new world. This borrowing is now at a record high and about to rocket higher. In the interim, prior to collapse, Neocons can give out contracts to friends and appoint “agency assassins” to head up government departments they want to shut down. Examples abound. Bush insisted on appointing John Bolton to the UN despite his hatred of the institution. But long before GW Bush, Nixon appointed Howard Phillips, a virulent right winger, to lead the Office of Equal Opportunity that Phillips antagonistically described as a “Marxist concept.” He systematically fired moderate Republicans; hired YAF extremists, and withheld budget. Katrina has cost taxpayers about $100 Billion and yet few victims have returned to New Orleans. Contracts went to cronies and work simply did not get done much as in Iraq. The ice for Katrina victims continued to avoid refugee centers and was shipped willy-nilly to “earn” money by favored shippers. Until this latest financial crisis and with the painful exception of the questionable but costly war in Iraq, Katrina provided the single largest boondoggle of any in our history. FEMA was led by a man who had failed at arranging horse shows. Brown was a byproduct of Joe Allbough who had no FEMA experience either, but was a close friend of GW Bush and a major contributor to Bush campaigns. After recommending Brown to Bush, then Joe Allbough set up his lobby and was able to garner millions in Katrina contracts. That’s what friends are for.
Please read The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank. Most of the examples provided in this essay are from his well-documented book. It is scary, but you need to read it to understand why things do not appear to make sense and why people now trust government less today than at any time in history. We need moderates to gain control of government. Good Republicans and Democrats who understand the common good, the commonwealth. We need quality employees and a vibrant Civil Service dedicated to citizens instead of corporations. We need to insist on good government to earn the trust of America.




Peace,
George Giacoppe
28 September 2008

The “Inexperience” Code

 
You’ve all heard it endlessly by now, the Republican attack on Barack Obama which maintains that he has no experience in running a government or a business, and thus is too inexperienced to be President. Now aside from the inanity of this argument, especially when considering the opposite argument employed for Sarah Palin—CEO of Alaska, with a population (around 600,000) smaller than most cities, and Mayor of Wasilla, with a population (6,000) smaller than most colleges—there is a coded message here that is necessary for Americans to understand.
            “Inexperience,” when applied to Barack Obama, is code for “race.”
            Let me explain with an example. Prior to World War II, the United States Navy was desperately searching for boats to supplement its vastly under-equipped Navy. It began to inspect fishing boats, among them the large purse seiners used by hundreds of Sicilian fishermen along the west coast. The Navy would eventually requisition hundreds of such boats and outfit them as mine sweepers, but before it did, it considered whether it would, like England, induct not just the boats but their crews as well. A February 1939 memo from Admiral Hepburn, commandant of the 12th Naval District, summarizes the Navy’s findings, including its assessment of the Sicilian fishermen it might wish to induct. Here is part of what it said:
            “The majority of Italians are not good seamen, good fishermen, nor good navigators. They are not over-intelligent, do not know the Rules of the Road, and, in general, appear to have the characteristics of big, overgrown children….” (see my “Fish Story,” in Lawrence DiStasi, UNA STORIA SEGRETA [2001],  for more details.)
Based on such assessments, the Navy decided that it would requisition the boats alright, but not these “child-like” Sicilians, a group that was, at that very time, presiding over the most efficient and opulent sardine fishing industry the world has ever seen.
            This type of more subtle racism has been thoroughly analyzed by David A.J. Richards in his 1999 book, “Italian American: The Racializing of an Ethnic Group.” In that book, Richards argued that phrases like “big, overgrown children” really represent a judgment that a group is developmentally inferior, even genetically incomplete. This means that its members never quite reach the full mental and moral development that would make them truly adult, i.e. truly human. African Americans, Native Americans, and, in their turn, many immigrant groups like Italians and Latin Americans have been judged in exactly this way.
            Now we come back to the code for Obama. The term “inexperienced,” I would maintain, when applied to Obama, means not just that he has never been a CEO. It cuts deeper, cuts to a place that most Americans understand, if not consciously, then subliminally. And what it is meant to signify is that this man, Harvard-educated or not, U.S. Senator or not, lacks the full development that one finds most ideally in white people—Sarah Palin, for instance. No matter what he does, no matter how eloquently he can speak, therefore, he can never quite rise to the level of full humanity signified by whiteness. That’s because as a black man, by (America’s) definition, he is lacking in those adult qualities of mind and morality that America must have in its president.
            Of course, not John McCain nor Sarah Palin nor even the vicious conservative shock jocks could say this outright. That would be racism, and so toxic is this label that even Obama’s comment about not being the right “type” elicited a “reverse racism” accusation from the outraged McCain. No, the Republican slime machine is too canny for that. So it uses code. This year the code word is “inexperienced.” During the Reagan campaign, it was “welfare queens.” George H.W. Bush employed the now-infamous Willie Horton commercial, suggesting that his opponent, Michael Dukakis, would free black rapists. And our dear George, G.W., not only spread racial slurs in the Carolinas to sink McCain’s surging campaign for the nomination (McCain was said to have a black child), but then employed several techniques to disenfranchise mostly black urban voters in Florida, Ohio, and elsewhere in order to steal one, and probably two elections. These slimy tactics are still going on, the latest being the Republican ploy of requiring all voters to display photo IDs allegedly to “ensure against election fraud” (though hardly a single case of election fraud has ever been demonstrated in states with these requirements, like Indiana.) But in reality the tactic is meant to discourage as many inner-city black voters (who almost universally vote Democratic) as possible from attempting to vote. More generally, it is no secret that the Republican Party’s southern strategy—to incite the racial animosity and fear still prevalent in southern and Midwestern states—has been the key to its ability to win elections since Nixon first employed it in 1968.
            So count on it. You will hear the “inexperienced” slur against Obama repeatedly, daily, without letup. And to the increasingly fearful white populace of the heartland it will signify what it has always signified: in the United States of America, a black man simply does not have the mental, moral, or emotional heft to be fully human, much less to be the highest official in the land.
 
Lawrence DiStasi

The Pit Bull

 
 
I am meditating on violence this morning, the violence endemic to the United States--especially after enduring the acceptance speech of Sarah Palin, the VP choice of John McCain at last night’s  Republican Convention. What a white devil she is turning out to be; a mocking devil cloaking herself in her wonderful, Christian, family-based American values. All of which might have worked save for a few lapses, the main one being the quote whereby she characterizes herself as a “hockey mom,” and how she defines that update of the once-influential “soccer mom.” Here’s how she did it: 
            “What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?” She asked, pausing with her white-devil, mocking grin, and then giving the punchline: “Lipstick.” And she smiled again. Ho ho.
            Naturally, that hall full of desperate Republicans eager to cheer every line, went wild over this one. We’ve got a winner, they were cheering, we’ve got a tough one. No foreigners or journalists or liberals are going to push our Sarah around!
            But let’s look carefully at this self-characterization, one of the most alarming things I’ve ever heard from a political figure. This aspirant for the Vice Presidency, this person who could be one stroke by an aging McCain away from the Presidency, compares herself to a PIT BULL. That is, this allegedly Brady Bunch mom compares herself to the most aggressive, vicious, killing machine ever bred by dog fanciers. No, not dog fanciers, fanciers of illegal dog-fights. You know, those lovely little matches where two dogs are dumped into a ring and urged to tear each other apart to satisfy the blood lust of adoring dog-fight fans. And pit bulls have been bred specifically for this, for their “gameness,” which is to say, for their insane aggressiveness and refusal to quit even when mortally wounded and bleeding to death. All of which Americans nominally condemn, for it wasn’t all that long ago that football star Michael Vick was arrested and jailed for raising just these fighting dogs on his estate. Pilloried for his association with such cruelty. Forced to forfeit a brilliant career.
            Of course, Michael Vick is a black man. Sarah Palin, by contrast, is a lily-white, “pro-life” super-woman. So from her, the comparison to a pit bull is funny. Haha. But is it? Consider. This Republican convention has already made clear that, with its adoption of the McCain demand for “victory in Iraq” (nevermind that an occupation, by its very nature, cannot end in “victory”), and its criticism of Democrats for “not once mentioning the word “victory,” these people have portrayed themselves as the quintessential, jingoistic American killers D.H. Lawrence long ago wrote about (see his Studies in Classic American Literature). They have made clear that they embody that long tradition in America, which has made not baseball but killing the national pastime. Thus, when, at their convention, they have chanted after every red meat line, “USA! USA!” like some hysterical crowd of American supporters at the Olympics, they are not just being embarrassing, jingoistic yahoos. They are harking back to the entire history of this country, conceived in liberty, perhaps, but steeped in violence and killing even earlier—first, against its original inhabitants, hunted down and exterminated and penned into reservations; second against its imported slaves, where the mere act of keeping and trading in slaves requires the constant threat of violence and death, as does keeping the “freed” slaves powerless, exploited, and trapped in ghettos until this very day; and third and throughout, against the environment itself, the land itself, which from the first has been denuded of its forests, plundered for its riches, plowed, leveled, and flattened in every corner of this continent, and now, in Alaska. And the position of Palin to drill for oil in one of the last wildlife preserves in Anwr is just the latest manifestation of this environmental violence, of which we were constantly reminded by that other bloodlust chant of the Republicans last night, “Drill, baby, Drill.”           
            So just think about what we have here: a woman—casting herself as this compassionate nurturing mother, so compassionate for life that she opted to bear her Down’s Syndrome fifth child—whose chief metaphor to characterize herself is the pit bull. So that she seems not only to be saying that she’s vicious and relentless and willing to fight to the death; she’s also saying she LIKES blood, enjoys blood sport, thrives on the vicious tearing to pieces of her adversaries—and by extension everyone in the world who might think to oppose the US of A. Because she has compared herself to an animal that loves to kill. And her hunting background—hunting from the safety of an airplane where no life form has a chance—perhaps confirms this.
            Is this what we want in the White House? Yet another vice president who’s an avowed killer, (our current one having shot his best friend in the face), another Cheney to turn the White House into the center and source of unbridled horror, including the torturing and killing of anyone who MIGHT be an adversary? Nevermind the law?  Nevermind sparing the innocent? Nevermind sissy negotiations?
            It seems. Because Palin mocked Obama last night as someone who would “want to read terrorists their rights;” omitting, of course, the important point, that it is detainees whose innocence or guilt has never been even considered, much less proven, who deserve the rights of habeas corpus. Because that’s what the Republican chant about “victory,” McCain’s victory, really means: Full spectrum dominance over the entire world, law and/or innocence be damned. Anyone who resists such U.S. dominance, any nation that refuses to bow down to United States demands for its resources or its fealty, that nation will be threatened and attacked and nothing will do but victory. And victory means precisely that: giving up, bowing down, agreeing that the United States, the victor, and its victorious corporations (especially those run by the likes of Cheney and company) is dominant over that nation and calls the shots.
            All of which comes to this: if you like pit bulls—and Sarah Palin seems to—if you’re proud of the American history that honors enslavement and violence and extermination and exploitation, then the McCain-Palin team are your guys.
            And that brings to mind what the Republicans might do this season: instead of the elephant as their symbol, perhaps they ought to be honest and change it to a snarling, slavering, blood-spattered pit bull, rampant. That would be ‘straight talk’ indeed.
 
Lawrence DiStasi

Robo-Pols

 
 Though I couldn’t bring myself to watch the entire interview, I did see a tiny segment of Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin’s interview with Charles Gibson last night. And it finally struck me: all those grins, all those talking points glibly delivered, all that salesman-like addressing of the interviewer by his first name, “Charlie,” all raise one question.
            Is this a real flesh-and-blood woman, or a robot?
            Think about it. She has this piled up hair, all in place. She dresses in perfectly fitted suits (not Hillary-type feminist pantsuits either) that fit her perfectly. She has this perfect smile and this near-perfect delivery of her perfectly crafted lines. I mean if the Republicans had designed a candidate to their exacting specifications—hockey mom with five kids, small town mayor, governor of the most Republican state in the Union, rabid supporter of the NRA, Christian Fundamentalist in the most extreme segment of the most extreme end-times sect in the nation, pro-lifer who not only talks the talk but walked the walk to bear a child she knew would emerge with Down’s Syndrome—they couldn’t have come up with a better model. She even talks about the Iraq war as divinely inspired. And while she was at it, last night, suggested that in order to assure Georgia’s entry into NATO, it would be worth risking a war with Russia.
            I mean, is there no doubt in the woman? Not a tic or a pause to reflect on what her blithely optimistic words might mean? It seems not. Robots have no doubts. Robots do not reflect. Robots simply move straight ahead to their programmed ends. God wants war—we go straight ahead. God wants my firstborn to serve in that war (apparently with a little help from a drug bust to be fixed by enlisting)—praise be. God gifts me a child with Down’s Syndrome—have it and be thankful. No doubts. Not a worry line in sight.
            It’s something that has kept gnawing at me since that convention night when she gave her speech. All I could think of was that Down’s baby. The dominant impression was that he, like the rest of the family, only more so, was on display. He kept being handed back and forth, first to Cindy McCain, then to the 8-year-old daughter, then another daughter, then the father, then on stage to Mom for a few seconds, then back and forth and to and fro. An exhibit—a human exhibit to prove his pro-life Mother’s humanity. Only that humanity was nowhere on display, then, or since. I mean having a child with Down’s cannot be a picnic. One knows the difficulties that are coming. The heartache. The constant questioning of the decision. But none of that ever seems at issue with Sarah Palin. Her smooth brow remains smooth, her smile fixed, her cheeks rosy, her upbeat aggressive confidence ever undimmed. Is there a heart there to ache at all?
            This is why the robot answer comes to mind. A robot doesn’t have heartache. A robot doesn’t fret about the future. A robot simply rolls straight to the target. All systems go, like a drone swooping to launch its rockets into a suspected enemy hideout. And if there happen to be a few collaterals damaged, no problem. We’ll just tinker with the targeting system and do better next time.
            What is most alarming about all this is that, increasingly, it appears that our politicians are all becoming more robotic. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the prototype—the original robot who gloried in his past role as the Terminator. A killing machine. Perfect candidate to be governor, where he became known as the Governator. McCain too; since the Convention repeating without letup the same lines, the same expressions, the same fake emotions. A robot. It almost seems to come with the political territory these days: you want to win public office, you become a robot.
            The trouble is, these robots get into office and make decisions that affect our lives. Reading about Bush and his robotic response to 9/11 makes the blood run cold. He wanted blood. The man had to prove how tough he was, and his programmers, Cheney et al, knew just which buttons to push to get him to “man up” and agree to the most cruel and inhuman measures. Kill the bastards. That was really the program the CIA initially came up with: we’re going to go into Afghanistan and kill ‘em all; there’ll be flies walking across their eyeballs. Nevermind trials; nevermind habeas corpus; never mind Geneva; nevermind the law; just kill ‘em. And the cold eyes of the robot president sparkled with anticipation, his robotic response being the one all robots employ: “do whatever it takes.”
            Robots. The entire nation, more often than not, seems robotized. Seems to WANT to be robotized. Robots that don’t feel. Robots that don’t worry or have fears. Robots who live their lives out on computer screens or TV screens where robots like Sarah Palin look perfectly cool for the perfectly scripted parts they play. And if there are some malcontents who yearn for the days when real humans displayed real concerns about real human problems, why never fear. The luddites you will have always with you—until, of course, the robotic End Times sort out the us’s from the them’s, once and for all.
 
Lawrence DiStasi

Republican Hypocrites

Don’t you just love the Republicans? Here we have the party of pure selfishness and self-enrichment and every man for himself (they characterize it as self-reliance), the party that gave us the Reagan years of “trickle-down” economics (where just about everything trickled UP), the party that has saddled us and the world with privatization (i.e., the crippling of every government program save corporate welfare), the party that presided over the greatest destruction via neglect of a large American city in history—and they are now preaching the gospel of togetherness, of “Country first,” of “we must devote all our efforts to helping the unfortunate victims of Hurricane Gustav.” Suddenly, all these Gucci-clad conventioneers eager to indulge in the caviar and fine wine at fat corporation parties, have found the religion of restraint, of “we’re all in this together.” For it would be unseemly to be seen scarfing up fancy hors d’oeuvres while New Orleanians were once again drowning in their impoverished soup. So nominee McCain announces he might not ever make it to the convention—but rather might have to pipe in his acceptance speech from ground zero, with ‘the people.’ And George W. Bush makes a show of rolling up his shirtsleeves and posing with emergency managers in Texas—allowing all Republicans to breathe a sigh of relief that they won’t, after all, have to pretend to cheer him after he inevitably reminds America of his last hurricane fiasco.

            And we, the American public, are supposed to buy it. ‘See,’ we’re supposed to opine, ‘Republicans are big-hearted Americans after all, concerned over their fellow men, and even women. Even dark skinned ones.’ That first storm, that Katrina, was just an aberration. Like Iraq. Like torture. Like the greatest debt in American history.

            And who knows, it might work. Just as the other massive hypocrisy of this convention season—the selection of a woman, no less, to be McCain’s vice-presidential running mate—might work to paper over the years of Republican contempt for women’s rights. Why just look—the party of macho really does have its gentler side. And what a feminine side it is, she is. A beauty queen. A gun-toting Alaskan mama. A mother of five—including one she insisted on birthing despite the negative of Down’s Syndrome. A woman who challenges the establishment at the same time she caters to Big Oil, a no-nonsense, pro-life Palin’ woman who isn’t afraid to thumb her nose at environmentalists (much less those over-population fear-mongers), and campaigns for oil drilling in the Anwar wildlife refuge. Wildlife hell, is her motto: I hunt and fish and will have no truck with polar bears as an endangered species. Or, most of all, sex education in the schools. Abstinence is the only teaching we need. Teach your young ones abstinence, and all will be well.

            Except, of course, when it’s one of OUR young ones. Isn’t this always the Republican way? It’s always, with Republicans, “You people”—you ghetto people, you welfare moms, you oversexed over-proliferating dark-skinned peoples. But when it comes to “our” people, our good Christian people, why then it’s a different story. We’re human, after all. No one’s perfect, say our preachers. And surely not little 17-year-old Bristol, 5 months pregnant and unmarried, yes, but isn’t she a woman after all? A natural, human woman? Human like us all, after all. And determined to keep the baby. And marry the baby’s father. What’s the problem?

            The problem is your bottomless hypocrisy. The problem is your abstinence-only program masquerading as sex education. Which, as your own daughter proves, is no program at all. The problem is that here, in the United States in the 21st Century, we can’t risk a vice-President so retrograde, so out of touch, so hypocritical that she can’t even see a problem when it hits her own family. That’s the problem. The only question being this: can enough Americans summon enough common sense, enough outrage to send this party of hypocrites packing, once and for all?

Larry DiStasi

Where Have All the Soldiers/Citizens Gone?

The loneliest job in the world these days has to be that of US Army or Marine infantrymen, and their close ground support comrades. One is hard pressed to find any historical examples of such inattention paid by any nation to the life of its defenders while they suffer and die in battle. It doesn’t stop when those of all services come home and need help.
Even during the Vietnam War, citizens were attentive, if disapproving. Today they are disengaged.
“Once again a generation of Americans is tempted to live undisturbed, buying tranquility on credit while hearts atrophy, quarantined from any great enthusiasm but private ambition.”
Bill Moyers

Sadly, even many of our fellow veterans pay little attention to the soldiers themselves, concentrating on the elusive goal of “winning” – without understanding in almost any sense what “winning” as a nation entails. They most often reduce it to the simple concept of “winning” as in a fistfight, or a bar brawl. They hoot and holler with ramped-up nationalistic vigor at the thought of our soldiers “winning”, meaning beating the daylights out of “them” – “the other guys”.
The picture many of us older, and dare I say more thoughtful veterans and citizens have of the American soldier is as the defender of a bright and clear vision of equality, freedom, democracy, and fairness. We see the soldier more like Gary Cooper in High Noon – quiet, reserved, fair, thoughtful, professional, hard to provoke, firm in his convictions, deadly in his execution, then benevolent in his victory.
The view of those who hold the ferocious warrior or even the berserker concept of the soldier, is as relentless, quick to anger, violent and bloody in execution, giving no quarter, and holding an eternal grudge against those who dare challenge him or his nation. The model is Mel Gibson as "Mad" Max in Beyond Thunderdome, or worse yet the Lord Humungous from the same film.
Don’t get me wrong. This latter view, I am sure, is not how most soldiers view themselves, rather it is how a disengaged and self-pampering public views them, when they bother to think of them at all. Unfortunately it comes close to how some of our fellow veterans view them as well. Just read some of the blogs and the websites if you don’t believe me. The blood-lust is palpable, and the language praising our soldiers sounds like an advertisement for a super-violent MA-rated video game. But ~
“It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”
William Tecumseh Sherman
So one model is that of maturity, strength, wisdom. The other model is that of the comic book super-hero-turned-slayer.
Those other guys may be right, at least in part. We only need to look at some of today’s reality TV to find a metaphor. Take the Spike TV “Ultimate Fighter” cage-fighting series as a fair example.
It’s 2003 and two fighters are in the cage. One well-armed but not perfectly; a rested, strong, and fully supported heavyweight faces up against the other, a poorly trained poorly armed lightweight. The battle is over shortly, and the ring attendants slip the noose around the loser’s heels and drag him from the arena like a defeated bull at Madrid’s Las Ventas bullring. His leaders and supporters declare “Victory” but they are wrong.

Let’s extend the metaphor and make it more like 2003 – 2008’s real battle. We leave the winning fighter in the cage – the gate is locked. We improve his armor from time to time and give him a new weapon or two, but he cannot leave the cage. The cage is brilliantly lighted but the spectator area outside the cage is pitch black. He believes that his fellow citizens are still out there watching and rooting for him.

The lights outside the cage are flashed on for a moment and he sees the truth. His fellow citizens aren’t even there anymore. He has new opponents but they are outside the cage armed with sniper rifles and roadside bombs. He can’t see them but they can see him only too well. His leaders are only present in order to act or fail to act in a way to ensures that the supply of foes is steadily increased. After all, we need a continuing war to be able to claim war-leadership.
When our soldier asks for help, the handlers occasionally send in another soldier, but he or she too is locked in the bright cage in the dark stadium, and is subject to the same attacks from unseen foes.

When our soldier asks for more help, he is given some money and by pushing it through bars of the cage he is able to buy off a few, but not all of his foes, and the attacks continue with some relief from at least one quarter. When he runs out of money, or his leaders act to ramp up the rage of his foes, the bought-off ones resume their attacks.
The cage is impregnable from his side as it is made of political choices that cannot be retracted. His cage and his way out of it are based on a policy of “winning”, but no one can explain that policy to him – no one knows what the hell “winning” means! The key to the cage is hidden in the undefined goal.

The outer lights flash on now and then, briefly, and still there are none of his fellow citizens there to cheer him on, much less to aid him, and certainly not to involve themselves. The seats reserved for them remain empty – reserved, of course, in recognition of their importance, but empty nonetheless..
If he is killed he is sent home but hidden from view. When he is wounded he is replaced, and sent home to find yet another cage.
This time he is outside the cage and the cage door is locked, for inside it are those who make the money, have the power, and hand down the decisions that control his life. They post long lists on the outside of the cage of the benefits available to him, but the benefits are inside this home cage, and he has to fight to get inside.
He isn’t allowed to get any help in getting through this cage wall, while those inside stack up the regulations that reinforce those walls, and they line up the new foes – those who make him fight this new battle once again all alone – those who hand down the arbitrary decisions that govern his life for good, or more often for ill.

These are the keepers of the new cage who talk about “average wait times” and “budget limitations”, interspersed with “Support the Troops” and “Honor the Veteran” speeches. They will only listen to him long enough to tell him that the wound he suffered or those horrific dreams he is having are not combat-related unless he can provide proof that he was once in combat, and that that specific time resulted in his problem. Somehow he forgot to take notes.

Deep inside the home cage there is an inner ring of all those of his fellow citizens who were rooting for him in the first few weeks of the conflict, but who disappeared from the audience around the original battle cage. They are surrounded by all of the amenities of the self-indulgent life. They shop at stores with banners hawking their “Veterans Day Sale” and their “Memorial Day Sale”. They are surrounded by a soundproof wall that excludes his pleas for help. Their televisions don’t have a channel that shows the outside of the cage. The ads for their high-priced goodies and their fanciful vacations appear daily in the paper many pages before the occasional article about the soldier and his comrades.

Our veteran soldier tries to find a copy of the US Constitution – the document and the idea that he had sworn to defend, and which he believed also defended him. To no avail. Those in the inner circle had burnt every last copy back at the beginning to keep them from being uncomfortable on chilly and scary nights.
In the end, the soldier gives up and fades away. He walks away from the cage, looking back over his shoulder to read the inscription over the cage door:
America ~ Land of the Happy ~ Home of the Indulgent
~~~
No entry to veterans – closed for indifference

Sandy Cook

Cossacks Ride Again

And the Bear South shall sweep
To thrust her claws far and deep
Into the mountains, the seas and the prairies
Grasping farmland and dairies
Sparing not honey or berry
Nor prince nor monastery
Alas, you will never find rest
For the Bear wheels East and then West
And now with our global warming
Fresh routes are still forming
To the North; now a lake
For the Bear to swim for her take



History has an odd and sometimes irreverent way of repeating itself. Most of us saw the fall of the USSR (Reagan’s “Evil Empire”) as a triumph of the god-fearing West over the evil, atheist and Communist state. The truth is more complex than that and has a long and Byzantine trail through history. Russia has always been a little paranoid about her neighbors, but rather than build a border fence like ours at Mexico, Russia has preferred to control her fate by forming buffer states under her influence. East Germany was both a buffer state and had a fence because the West resisted creation of further buffers. Part of that is a natural outcome of ever more distant buffers because what was once a buffer becomes integrated into the central control of Russia herself. This process has been going on for centuries. Indeed, the word “Ukraine” means border. Belarus is “White Russia.” Now Russia has had some rough patches in her history when greater buffers might have saved the day for the motherland. The Mongols swept through many of her border states. Napoleon made it to the outskirts of Moscow and Hitler nearly drove through to the heartland. Buffers prevailed.

History shows that Russia has been involved in the formation of many states as well as alliances that offered her space and time from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Much of the early history is tied closely to Byzantium and the Orthodox Church, if we look south, but Russia has not been fixed on Georgia and the Caucuses or Bulgaria and the Balkans. She has wrestled with Poland and the Baltic states and has tried to annex Finland (a noteworthy military failure although they outnumbered the Finns). She wants warm water ports and farmland and forests and “friendly” (read that subordinate) neighbors. We should not be strategically or even tactically surprised by her incursion into Georgia. Georgia has been in the Bear’s sandbox for centuries. Our presence in Western Europe for decades after the Second World War served to place Russia in the awkward position of challenging our intentions, especially with hundreds of thousands of our troops in Germany. Were we bluffing, or would the USA actually commit troops to fend off the Bear? But now we are preoccupied with a pointless preventive war in Iraq and dallying in a former Russian buffer state (Afghanistan). We can shake our fingers or employ nuclear weapons, but we have no credible force to encourage Russia, the Bear, to cease and desist. We have hollowed NATO by our departure and have not yet strengthened the smaller nations of Europe to carry their own sabers. As Americans, we need to make some weighty decisions. Our economy is in shambles; we have already outsourced much of our defense to low-bid and no-bid contracts; we have alienated our “Old Europe” allies and have put our “New Europe” allies in peril by encouraging them to resist militarily before they are ready and by failing to create credible alliances. We cannot fight our way out nor can we buy our way out. Our encouragement of Georgia is similar to the encouragement we provided the Kurds before Saddam crushed them or before the Hungarians and Czechs were over-run by Russian tanks. Even the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia as well as Poland to the west expected our help to achieve freedom from the clutches of the Bear. We broadcast Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America and hinted that we would assist these European brethren. They may still love us, but the bitterness of unanswered brutal oppression lingers. Georgia is only the latest example and it will remind them all of our hesitation and our rhetoric of “looking into the eyes/soul of Putin” while they look at Russian boots. Russia has historically employed the flooding of neighbor states with ethnic Russians in order to generate stability and loyalty in her buffer states. Estonia is especially filled with Russians, but so were Ukraine and Belarus much before them. If the Russian justification of entering Ossetia or Abkhazia “to protect ethnic Russians” sounds like the German rationale for entering the Sudentenland, it is the same. The only difference is that the Russia placed Russians there to begin with to help guarantee a loyal buffer. Stalin, a Georgian by birth, frequently used boxcars to cross-balance ethnic Russians in the far-flung reaches of the USSR, but he was only keeping up with Russian history and using the technology of the time. He did not invent the practice.

The Cossacks, in the time of the Czars, were quick to ride out to punish any breakaway vassal state or any group that had the temerity to challenge Mother Russia. That practice was aided by an Orthodox Church that often exiled or excommunicated individual nobles who were feared by the central state. There was little difference between Church and State. Communism was merely another ideology that served as an overlay or a garnish to the fundamental Russian approach to protecting the state. As a child, I recall praying for the conversion of Russia, but I was unaware that we needed to pray for the healing from the paranoia that has gripped her for a millennium. Putin is doing what Russians and the current president want done. Do not expect that to be changed by investment in US Steel or Getty Oil. It is basic Russian and it has worked to their satisfaction.

All this sounds negative, and it is. It is far from hopeless, however. Let us list a few approaches we must consider to make things better:
Use more tools than the military option. We have seriously damaged our military in the past 7 years and cannot stretch it any further. We need real diplomacy through rebuilt alliances with old friends. Iraq has not only damaged our military, but has alienated our friends who we need to balance power region by region. We need official friends and need to encourage their participation in the process of ongoing international relations; not merely the military support of wars that we start without their consultation and agreement.

Rebuild the military to the numbers and quality we need to defend our homeland and to confront real threats to our national security. Iraq had no real capability to reach us in any significant way to pose a threat. I won’t even mention the fear mongering of weapons of mass destruction. Although we know and most of us knew that Iraq had none, even the slowest among us knew that the Iraqis had no delivery system capable of a real threat to us.

Immediately stop the practice of encouraging dissent and discontent in foreign countries as a specific policy. It has not worked in any of the countries enumerated above nor in Cuba nor Iran or any country you might pose. Worse, it engenders resentment in those countries that believe that we will support them in ways that we will not or cannot do.

Reconsider the security effects of global economics when we invest or permit investment in our corporations. It is easier to deny entry to a threat than to nationalize an industry to remove them from our critical industries. NAFTA and CAFTA have not brought prosperity to us or to our friends. Most corporations (foreign as well as domestic) pay absolutely no income taxes. Given the loss of control over our own resources including our human resources, should we be opening ourselves to unlimited investment by foreign companies and governments?

We cannot change the nature of the Bear, but we can build a better Bear trap and can learn how to use our moral leadership by earning it back by being true to ourselves as well as our word. The world forest is large and dark and sometimes scary, but if we join with other nations, we can protect one another from the paranoid Bear. The last thing we need to do is to confront the Bear with a slingshot and a prayer. Actually, that could be the last thing


Peace,
George Giacoppe
20 August 2008

War in Georgia

When I heard about the conflict in the Caucasus between the Republic
of Georgia and Russia, and especially Michael Klare’s (author of
"Blood and Oil") comments about its relationship to United States
designs on the huge oil deposits nearby, something rang a bell.

Then I remembered. Jeremy Scahill, in his book "Blackwater: The Rise
of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army," has a short chapter on
Blackwater and Caspian Sea oil. Take a look at a map of the region
and you see that Georgia is located smack in the corridor between the
Caspian and the Black Seas. Its closest neighbor, bordering its south
and east, is Azerbaijan. Scahill tells us that in order to protect
western oil and gas interests in that region, the Pentagon “deployed
‘civilian contractors’ from Blackwater and other firms to set up an
operation that would serve a dual purpose: protecting the West’s new
profitable oil and gas exploitation in a region historically
dominated by Russia and Iran, and possibly lay the groundwork for an
important forward operating base for an attack against Iran” (p. 173).

Now, with the battle over Georgia, we see more of what’s going on.
According to Klare, the United States, beginning with the Clinton
administration, has been pouring arms into a province, Georgia, that
had never had a real army of its own (it is, after all, the Russian
province which gave the world Josef Stalin). Now it’s armed to the
teeth, and those arms (plus special forces training similar to the
kind the U.S. has long exported to its neighborhood friendly
dictators via the School of the Americas) apparently gave it the
notion that it could simply invade Ossetia without consequences. In
Azerbaijan, the tactic is a bit subtler, but possibly more dangerous:
send in private “contractors,” i.e. mercenaries, instead of our own
forces. And why? Because we love democracy, as the President would
have it; because we love freedom?

Not exactly. As Scahill and Klare make clear, it’s about oil, folks.
Russia and its Caspian Sea region has all this oil. And we have
almost none (Klare, in a recent essay, “Portrait of an Oil-Addicted
Former Superpower,” contends that, because of its insatiable need for
foreign oil, the U.S. has already faded as a superpower). Russia also
has these former provinces which seem open to western money,
influence, and clandestine activities—not to mention that western-
owned pipeline which bypasses Russia and therefore avoids Russian
control. More than that, both countries, Georgia and Azerbaijan, are
“sandwiched between Russia and Iran,” so sending uniformed American
troops could be provocative, but sending private contractors keeps
things a bit quieter (at least, that was the hope).

Now, however, the Georgian attack on Ossetia and the overwhelming
Russian response has blown things into stark relief. The United
States has been caught playing a risky game, inciting the Georgians
into a tweak of the Russian bear’s whiskers, and no doubt doing the
same in Azerbaijan. In the latter country, according to Scahill,
Blackwater mercenaries are being used to “bolster Azerbaijan’s
military capabilities, including creating units modeled after the
United States’ most elite Special Forces, the Navy SEALs—this in a
country, according to Human Rights Watch, already prone to employing
“torture, police abuse, and excessive use of force by security
forces.” In Georgia, though, the Russian bear has struck back, with
consequences no one can really predict. What we can predict is that,
once again, the United States is stirring up a witch’s brew of
conflicting loyalties, as in Iraq, which may prove impossible to
control. And it is doing so in a region that has exploded before, and
could well explode again. For all we know, that may be the intention
here: start a little backfire, set the tanks and planes rolling, and
perhaps find the excuse the Bushies have been looking for to invade
yet another muslim country, Iran. Then the United States of America,
the great “peacemaker,” will have torched not just Afghanistan, not
just Iraq, not just Georgia, but the whole damn region.

Meantime, our leaders are singing their song of outrage: big bully
Russia has attacked a defenseless “democracy,” is trying to
reincorporate Georgia into its “empire,” and must withdraw,
immediately. How noble they sound, demanding a ceasefire, pretending
to work hard for peace—all the while knowing that they themselves are
the incendiaries, the naughty boys who simply can’t stop pouring oil
on fire, or fire on oil, take your pick. Only this time, the game is
not working very well. Russia holds all the cards here. It has all
the oil, and the United States has nothing but oil debt. So weakened
has the Bush Administration made us (Klare points out that with the
average GI in Iraq using 27 gallons of petroleum-based fuels per day,
America’s gasoline bill for 160,000 troops comes to more than $14
million per day, or $5.1 billion per year) that it took France’s
President Sarkozy to put together an initial cease-fire.

At this writing, Georgia is licking its wounds and a once-invincible
superpower is left with nothing but protests about the brutality of
Russia’s “invasion.” That, and the vain hope that somehow its oil
exploitation in the Caspian region can survive the blow. If it does
not, and if the U.S. keeps adding fuel to the regional fire (such as
today's Bush administration action of using military planes to send
"humanitarian aid" to its dear ally, Georgia), the least of the
consequences may be the $200-a-barrel oil prices that many have
predicted.

Lawrence DiStasi

The Department of Just Us

By God, we love to compete
It’s so rewarding and neat
And you can always tell
Because of our smell
We’re frugal and chaste
Upright and laced
Not spendthrifts so bawdy
Or common or gaudy
We’re loyal and true
And nothing like you
Though we hold all the cards
And have special guards
To keep out most gnats
And all Democrats


Monica Goodling has brought a new dimension to the DOJ. We suspected that the department was corrupt given the leadership of John Ashcroft who, when on his own, could not win running as an incumbent against a dead man or the leadership of Alberto Gonzales who could not recall anything he said or did during his tenure or Michael Mukasey who could not call torture what it is unless if it were done to him. Corruption is as much a product of the inept as it is of the sinister schemer. The incompetent are slow to recognize the signs of corruption and are less likely to be able to respond effectively when it is uncovered. The incompetence can be technical, interpersonal or ideological. I believe that we have seen all three aspects in the past 7+ years of the George II reign. John draped marble statues so as to not offend the eye, yet allowed detention of Middle East residents of the US to be rounded up and incarcerated like criminals but without trials and he established the extraordinary system of detention and “enhanced interrogation” of Guantanamo. Alberto Gonzales furthered the policy of absolute executive immunity through his tacit if not direct approval of torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and sites of extraordinary rendition such as Syria. Ideology of “strict” Christian fundamentalism makes both marble modesty and torture in the defense of country “heroic.” International law sees these latter actions as illegal and yet none of the serial DOJ triumvirate admits illegality. Not incidentally, even the internal Inspector General of the Justice Department found serious lapses in law.
While one could point to defective leadership by the Attorney General to mitigate the actions of Monica Goodling, they are far more complex and extensive. The scope and nature of the corruption are vastly different. The Attorneys General affected our national appearance to the outside world and Alberto Gonzales affected the employment of some 93 politically appointed US Attorneys for the period of the Bush Administration. Monica Goodling potentially has affected the employment of 120,000 career attorneys in the Department of Justice for the indefinite future. The US Civil Service system has been a model merit system that uses testing and performance standards applied by other career servants and not political or religious grounds for hiring or promotion. Corruption of that scale has, until now, not ever been seriously threatened. What happened?
First, Monica Goodling may have graduated from a little known law school, but she knew enough about the law to plead the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution to prevent self-incrimination. She was one of about 150 graduates of Pat Robertson’s Regent University Law School absorbed by the White House after she was hired by the Republican National Committee. Remember John Ashcroft? He is now “Distinguished Professor of Law and Government” at Regent. The Huffington Post repots that Kay Coles James was named by Bush as head of the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (2001-2005). That job affected the careers of about 1.8 million federal civil service employees. Ms. James was formerly Dean of Regent’s Robertson School of Government. Accidental and coincidental, I am pretty sure! It was equally coincidental that Jim David, current Assistant dean for Administration in the Robertson School of Government served in the Justice Department as Deputy director for the Task Force for Faith Based and Community Initiative. Huffington quotes Jim David after the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans “We do not grieve, however, for the flooded and destroyed sex clubs that filled men with lust and degraded women.” “We do not miss the casinos that preyed upon individuals whose lack of self-control deprived families of needed food and shelter. We do not lament the destruction of voodoo stores prevalent in New Orleans before the flood.” In pleading the Fifth, Monica clearly chose the law rather than the Commandment to not bear false witness. Nice evangelist touch.
When we understand that Ms. Goodling took a direct hand in the hiring decisions, it is not comforting that she used Google to get background information in three major areas: political affiliation; religious and sexual orientation; and loyalty to GW Bush. These were not “tie-breakers,” but an integral part of the decision. There was no weight given to experience or what most of us would call “qualifications.” I do not know of a more direct way to ensure mediocrity or, worse, incompetence, than to systematically employ criteria that are irrelevant to the jobs being filled. As you have probably read, Goodling used the computer search engine using “god, guns+gays.” Other applicant key words included: “abortion,” “homosexual,” and “Florida recount.” On second thought, perhaps we should be grateful that the key words were not truly job requisites.
Now, I do not want to be naïve and assume that because Goodling is Republican, that she was therefore dishonest. Nor is it true that Conservatives are godless louts who always believe that the ends justify the means. What we need to understand is that this breech of the law and disregard for ethical behavior will have long term consequences that are highly negative and may lead some Democrats to “justify” partisan illegal behavior in hiring and firing and that the compromise of the Civil Service System is absolutely unacceptable as is the outsourcing of these jobs to contractors on a similar partisan basis. I understand that the hiring and firing practices of the 93 US Attorneys was also illegal. I don’t like it, but it is almost to be expected that some maneuvering will happen with political appointments even when the job as US Attorney is apolitical. The Civil Service must remain free from partisan hiring, promotion and firing if we are to ever attain even modest qualifications for labor. Let there be no compromise. Let the job essential qualifications determine the winners and losers. That gets me to Goodling’s sports analogy of “building a farm team” for the GOP. We have seen what the GOP did with the K Street project by teaming with the lobbyists to their self perpetuation and the sale of more earmarks than have ever been seen before or since. That was building the “dollar farm team.” We have seen the building of the “legal farm” through appointment of judges that agree with the unitary executive concept and executive immunity from prosecution for crimes.
I can recall some relatives in Albany, NY complaining that only opposing party cars parked on many Albany streets were towed during snowstorms. It was done using voter registration and automobile registration rolls. Partisanship will rear its ugly head in some unusual places. As Americans, we have an abiding interest in a clean and non-partisan Civil Service. It is not cute. It is not funny. It is illegal and it is damaging to organizational effectiveness. We cannot allow illegal “farm teams” to be part of our nation. And I am getting to hate sports analogies applied to non-sports, anyway. It seems to lead to cheerleading and winning and losing instead of building a government for and by the people.

Peace,
George Giacoppe
8 August 2008

I Know How To Win Wars

Not content with crowing about his macho credentials once, Republican presidential candidate John McCain, on July 18 in Albuquerque, blared out his assertion twice:

            “ I know how to win wars. I know how to win wars.”

If this were not so alarming, it would be funny. I mean this is the guy who got shot down over North Vietnam on one of his first combat missions, spent the rest of the war as a POW, and may well have provided information to the enemy about American strategy and tactics. Worse, this was not McCain’s only mishap: before he got to Vietnam, he crashed his airplanes no less than 4 times. One, on the deck of the aircraft carrier Forrestal, occurred when he “wet-started” his A4E Skyhawk while awaiting takeoff and “caused a jet of flame to strike the Phantom F4 immediately behind him. That caused a Zuni rocket to ignite and launch, starting a chain of events that killed at least 164 men” (from George Giacoppe, splinters-splinters.blogspot.com, June 30, 2008).

            So here we have a “hot-dog” Navy pilot, who seems to have escaped several courts-martial for reckless behavior while flying because of his father’s position in the Navy, who then becomes a “hero” because he is shot down over North Vietnam. It is presumably this “heroic” status as a POW (he would have had a great deal of time to think), and all those crashes which taught McCain “how to win wars.” Of course, the United States cannot by any stretch of the imagination claim a win in Vietnam, but that’s another matter.

            But let’s look at the war McCain claims in his win column—the war in Iraq, now going so swimmingly because of the surge which McCain backed. To begin with, this is not and never has been a “war.” No war was ever declared. The United States simply imposed an arbitrary deadline for the president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, to get out of his country. When he did not, the U.S. invaded, first with a rain of bombs and missiles, then with a ground invasion. It is now accepted by almost everyone that the justification for invading Iraq—the famous WMD Saddam supposedly had—was a blatant lie. So this aggression, which McCain claims as a war he knows how to “win,” was illegal from the beginning. According to international law, such aggression is a crime against humanity, the supreme crime of all the crimes a nation can commit.

            The occupation which followed the U.S. invasion was also a crime. It has resulted in an estimated 1 million Iraqi deaths, the destruction of an entire country including its infrastructure, the exile of more than 2,000,000 Iraqis (out of a population of 26,000,000) who could not survive the civil war the invasion and occupation unleashed, and the displacement of at least 2,000,000 more within the country. The entire nation has gone from the richest Arab nation in the Middle East with an almost universally educated populace to a third-world basket case: spotty electricity, polluted water, hospitals and schools hardly functional. Its oil production, once second only to that of Saudi Arabia, has been since the invasion in a state of almost complete disrepair. Recent agreements, signed with U.S. and European oil companies, guarantee that most of the revenue from Iraqi oil will be stolen by the West rather than supporting the Iraqi people themselves. As to the surge, its most visible sign is the ethnic segregation of a population which used to live in totally mixed neighborhoods. Huge blast walls, similar to those in Israel, line most of Baghdad’s streets. And the real success of the “surge” has been the paying off of the Sunni population which comprised most of the insurgency. Sunni leaders and their soldiers now get weekly salaries courtesy of the U.S. Government, a payoff which is apparently cheaper than financing the fight against them.

            This is the war McCain “knows how to win.” It will “only” cost the United States, when it is done, something in the area of 2 trillion dollars, a military crippled by the strain, a reputation as a decent nation in tatters, and the lifeblood of more than 4,000 men and women (not to mention the thousands crippled in various physical and mental ways for the rest of their lives.) It will also make the world, and America itself a more dangerous place for all Americans.

            And all this for a lie.

            In the face of all this, one can only work and pray and organize to prevent “Hot Dog” McCain and his ilk from ever ever getting the chance to teach us “how to win” more such lovely wars.



Lawrence DiStasi

Hussein in Yarmulka

 

 

Among the dismaying news items from yesterday, July 23, were these two:

1) a photo of presidential hopeful Barack Obama at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, wearing a yarmulka—the skull cap worn by Jewish men on occasions deemed culturally or spiritually significant;

2) an interview on NPR with distinguished Israeli historian, Bennie Morris, concerning the op-ed piece he wrote in the July 18 New York Times predicting that “Israel will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months.”

            Consider the Morris prediction first. Despite all the talk about a new effort by the United States to engage Iran diplomatically, the war threats from Israel have never really ceased. Coming from Bennie Morris—a historian who was among the first to publicize the true story of the 1948 ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Israelis, including the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin, and so one who knows intimately the grave crimes committed by his country—this was grim news indeed. So were his reasons for why Israel cannot count on diplomacy to stop the Iranians from “getting a nuclear weapon,” and the reasons why Israel is certain that Iran with a nuclear weapon would mean an Iran which would drop a nuke on Israel. Simple, said Morris: “the Iranians are not rational people.” They are controlled, he said, by religious zealots who are irrational; they “threaten Israel with destruction every day.” Here, once again, we have the purposeful distortion of what Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, which was not so much a threat as a prediction:  “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time”—and one that Iran scholar Juan Cole says “does not imply military action or killing anyone at all.” By contrast, it is Morris’ article that contains the real threat, for what he concludes it with is this: Iran should hope that Israel’s conventional strike succeeds, for though it would mean “thousands of Iranian casualties and international humiliation,” the alternative—Israel being forced to use its nuclear weapons on an Iran that did succeed in building its own nuke—“is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland.” 

            Isn’t this rich? Here we have an Israeli scholar who has researched the international crimes his nation has committed and continues to commit. He also must be aware that his nation is controlled by a Zionist ideology which is nothing if not zealous, racist, and ruthless in its admission that in order for it to survive, it must rid Palestine of all Palestinians, and perhaps Iran of all Iranians. He also must know that his nation is animated by a sense of its own superiority—that is, the superiority of even a single Jewish life over the lives of thousands of Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims—indeed, a nation whose leaders have routinely referred to Palestinians as insects or worse. Finally, he clearly, in the very op-ed piece under discussion, threatens Iran with a nuclear holocaust. And he is calling the Iranians “irrational.” He is saying that the Iranians are so “irrational” that they cannot be trusted with a single nuclear weapon (ignoring the fact that the best U.S. evidence indicates that the Iranians gave up their nuclear program in 2003).

            "But doesn’t Israel have nuclear weapons itself?" asked the NPR interviewer. “Yes,” said Morris, “but they have never threatened anyone with their use.” In other words, unlike the irrational Iranians, the Israelis are MORAL people; they would NEVER use nuclear weapons, or even threaten to use them (again, forgetting his own words). But wait: who has been at war for virtually its entire existence as a nation? Who has attacked and continues to attack a population with virtually no weapons, and certainly none comparable to the American-supplied planes, tanks, rockets, and ships possessed by armed-to-the-teeth Israel? Who has just written an entire essay that is essentially a threat of nuclear destruction? And from the other side, who has Iran ever attacked in modern times? No one, unless we call Iran’s defending itself from Iraq’s aggression in 1980 an “attack.” No, what Iran has done is make the supreme error of taking over its own oil fields. It has made the supreme error of getting rid of its U.S.-backed and-created dictator, the Shah. It has made the supreme error of telling the western powers, including Israel, that it doesn’t need them and their exploitation. And in the lexicon that pertains today in Israel and the United States, that translates into that dread word: “irrational,” which justifies not only a pre-emptive strike, but a nuclear holocaust.

            The sad part of all this is that Barack Obama has made irrational statements agreeing with such propaganda. As I noted in a previous blog, Obama, groveling before the rabidly pro-Israel minions at the recent AIPAC conference in Washington, DC, said:

“Now, there's no greater threat to Israel or to the peace and stability of the region than Iran…. The Iranian regime supports violent extremists and challenges us across the region. It pursues a nuclear capability that could spark a dangerous arms race and raise the prospect of a transfer of nuclear know-how to terrorists. Its president denies the Holocaust and threatens to wipe Israel off the map. The danger from Iran is grave, it is real, and my goal will be to eliminate this threat.”

            Then yesterday, he continued his groveling, attending sit-downs with no less than half a dozen Israeli leaders, topping it off with his yarmulka-enhanced photo op at the Wailing Wall. This is truly disturbing stuff. For it not only indicates the lengths to which Obama now seems willing to go to demonstrate his fealty to Jewish Americans and the money they contribute to Democratic Party candidates, but also his fear of the concerted power of Jewish-controlled opinion in the United States and the West. This is a serious situation indeed. For where Obama has been at great pains to downplay what would seem to be his logical concern for his own people in his own country—the African Americans who are supporting him almost universally and who need his help—he does public prostrations meant to announce in bold type his willingness to “go to the wall” on behalf of a foreign nation that has been at the center of international conflict for its entire existence, and now threatens a neighboring nation with a nuclear holocaust.

            Any hope, therefore, that an American president would finally take a look at history and conclude that the United States places itself and all its people in peril by supporting a nation that condemns entire peoples and religions to sub-human status, must be abandoned. Absent growing outrage from Americans themselves, and that includes condemnation of the powerful forces in this country, like AIPAC and other Jewish organizations, which exist to bludgeon politicians into undying support for Israel regardless of its actions or its threats, we can expect more of the same, with the consequent rising frustration and hatred from Arab and Muslim nations.

            What a terrible irony for a man whose middle name is “Hussein.”            

Lawrence DiStasi
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Let's kill all the lawyers

In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part II, we find Dick the butcher, one of the rebel followers of Jack Cade, uttering these lines:
            “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.” (IV.ii.83-84)
Especially after listening to Congressional hearings featuring such legal eagles of the Bush Administration as John Yoo, David Addington, Alberto Gonzalez, Jim Haynes, and most recently Douglas Feith, the lines seem uncannily appropriate to our time. Each lawyer has taken the stand in his turn and, like that other legal eagle, former President Bill Clinton, chosen denial and obfuscation and parsing of words as the means to escape all culpability. In Clinton’s case, though, the offense involved fellatio in the Oval Office—a rather crude offense, but not one that endangered the Republic. In the case of Yoo, Addington, Gonzalez, Haynes and Feith, by contrast, the offenses amounted to supplying the legal justification for war crimes, most notably the torture that now almost everyone agrees took place at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and probably numerous other “black sites” around the world. Such torture subverts not only several treaties to which the United States is a signatory—the Geneva Conventions, the Torture Convention of 1984—but also the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, and the policies for interrogation laid out in the Army Field Manual.
            All these lawyers, of course, argue either that they were just doing the job their client, the President of the United States or, in some cases Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld asked them to do; or that they were endeavoring to “protect the security of the nation.” In order to do this, they argue, they had to find a way to extract vital information from “the bad guys” captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Thus they argued in memo after memo, and in meeting after meeting, that since this was not a regular war, the rules governing prisoners of war (POWs) did not apply; or that even if they did apply, these particular “bad guys” were not regular, uniform-wearing troops but were “enemy combatants” (i.e. terrorists) and undeserving of the protections offered by the Geneva Conventions. Yoo and his boss Jay Bybee—another legal eagle now rewarded with a lifetime position as a federal judge—took a slightly different tack. They argued that the Geneva rules governing torture were outdated, having defined torture much too broadly. They then “tortured” torture to refer to only that kind of treatment which led to injury equivalent to “organ failure or death” or long-term psychological damage.
            What resulted from all these coordinated attempts to justify “taking the gloves off” was torture. Prisoners were hooded for long periods, shackled to the floor like dogs, kept standing for long hours until their ankles swelled to excruciating size, sexually humiliated in a host of ways, frightened with dogs, religiously tormented, and waterboarded. All these methods (18 of them were outlined in Haynes’ December 2, 2002 memo to his boss, SecDef Donald Rumsfeld), both alone and in combination, were meant to reduce a prisoner to total hopelessness, misery, disorientation, de-personalization, and psychosis, the aim being to force him to reveal what he knew about future terrorist plans or the whereabouts of superiors.
            The astonishing thing about all this—especially as it is laid out in numerous books and articles like Philppe Sands’ recent Torture Team—is that where usually we expect the military to be pushing for tougher measures in war and civilians in the Justice Department to be reigning them in with legal objections (as happened in World War II regarding internment of civilians), here the opposite occurred. In 2002 it was civilian appointees in the Pentagon, the Department of Justice and the White House who argued ferociously for extreme interrogation methods, and Pentagon lawyers, usually in the Judge Advocate General’s office, who objected to the violations of U. S. laws and military traditions. In short, instead of trying to reign in the hawks in the military, the Bush Administration let loose its own Chicken hawks. It was these civilian policy makers who badgered and bullied and, most often, simply cut the military lawyers out of the decisional loop entirely. And indeed, what Philppe Sands, himself an English barrister, concludes is that in the Bush Administration, policy ruled. The policy was set by civilians, by Bush himself, by his Machiavellian Vice President Cheney, and by all the sycophants, mostly lawyers, who followed and sought to please their clients by offering advice they wanted to hear. In Sands’ words:
            “The legal advice was fitted around the policy” (Sands, p. 226)
If the policy was war in Iraq, the lawyers found ways to justify it. If the policy was torture, the lawyers found ways to disqualify prisoners from protections against it, or found ways to define torture so narrowly that almost anything was permissible. And overall, they argued fiercely that even if it were torture, it was necessary to save the people from terrorism. This was the tack taken by that distinguished legal eagle, not a part of the administration but one of the reigning nabobs at Harvard’s Law School, Alan Dershowitz. He it was who invented the last-ditch rationale, the “ticking time-bomb” scenario. Its import was simple, or simple-minded: if we capture a terrorist whom we suspect has information about a bomb, a nuclear weapon about to explode in a crowded city, what could possibly limit our attempts to get that information in time? Shouldn’t our policy be that any and all methods are warranted in such a dire emergency?
            Without questioning this ridiculous scenario—for how often could it be, aside from on an imaginary thriller like “24” (the favorite program of most of the interrogators at Guantanamo, as well as many of the lawyers), that a single captive would have such information, with his captors knowing he had it?—the Administration based policy on it. And administration lawyers gave the requisite advice: it is legitimate to do virtually anything to prisoners to make them talk. In short, the legal advice was fitted around the policy—just as, earlier, as we learned from one of Britain’s diplomats, the intelligence required to justify invading Iraq was fitted around that policy as well.
            What Sands points out in Torture Team, however, is that lawyers have a legal obligation not simply to win for their clients, not simply to provide them with legal rationales for the unlawful behavior they wish to engage in (this is the job rather, of mafia lawyers), but the obligation to warn them of the legal consequences of such actions. Lawyers have a primary responsibility to make sure their clients do NOT resort to measures that violate the law. Lawyers are officers of the court. And what the government lawyers in the Bush Administration failed to do, it now seems clear, was sound the alarm about the legal peril facing their clients for the illegalities they wanted to employ.
            Instead, they strove mightily to frame arguments and find justifications for those illegalities, as well as expedients to indemnify both themselves and their clients from the penalties such acts incurred. They worked mightily to avoid their culpability for the war crimes that resulted from their arguments. And for the most part, they succeeded.
            On the other hand, perhaps they did not succeed as thoroughly as they once hoped. The 1984 Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment, to which the United States is a signatory, makes very clear that not only are public officials prohibited from “intentionally inflicting” physical or mental pain upon a person (including so-called enemy combatants), but there are no circumstances, including a war against terrorism, that justify such treatment. Not only are all such acts criminal offenses, but more important, “any act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture” is also a criminal offense. In other words, the lawyers whose arguments authorized such acts are also culpable—as the Nuremberg Trials demonstrated.
            This is not just an academic argument. In June 2006, in the Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld case, the Supreme Court ruled that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention did, in fact, apply to all Guantanamo detainees. Taliban or al-Quaeda, state combatants or enemy combatants, all had these rights. Justice Anthony Kennedy went even further. He wrote that “violations of Common Article 3 are considered ‘war crimes,’ punishable as federal offenses, when committed by or against United States nationals and military personnel” (quoted in Sands, p. 174).
            Of course, this “ominous” decision put the Bushies, including the lawyers, in a bit of a panic. For one thing, the Torture Convention of 1984 contains the requirement that all parties to this Convention, i.e. all nations who signed it, are “required to investigate any person who is alleged to have committed torture.” This act also “criminalizes any act that constitutes complicity” in torture (Sands, p. 177). So what did President Bush and his lawyers do? Why they proposed, and passed the Military Commissions Act, signed into law in November of 2006. This act “created a new defense to alleged breaches of Common Article 3…where the misconduct concerned the ‘detention and interrogation of aliens’ between September 11, 2001 and December 30, 2005” (Sands p. 208). Thus it gave the interrogators, and the lawyers, and any Bush Administration officials retroactive immunity from prosecution for their crimes. Rather a nice ploy, it seems. Commit crimes that violate the law both domestic and international; then create a new law absolving oneself of guilt for the crime. We’ve just seen a re-enactment of this in the bill that gave telecommunications companies immunity from their crimes in spying on the American people.
            But the rejoicing in the White House may have come too soon. For as two jurists pointed out to Philippe Sands when he questioned them about the immunity legislation, this was a “very stupid” thing to do. Such legislation, allowing a crime to be covered up, “was almost an admission that a crime had occurred.” As one of the jurists pointed out, it had all the earmarks of a “pactum scaelaris,” or “evil pact,” bringing into play that part of the Criminal Code which “showed that contributing to the avoidance of an investigation of a crime could itself give rise to complicity” (Sands, p. 208).
            Sands sums up the case he makes throughout the book as follows:
“The lawyers advising the Administration played a decisive role in subverting the system of international rules that should have protected all detainees from cruel and degrading treatment, a system that the United States had done so much to put in place. This was no mere accident or oversight. Nor was it a case of responding to a legitimate request that came up from the ground-level interrogators at Guantanamo, as the Bush Administration would have us believe. September 11 gave rise to a conscious decision to set aside international rules constraining interrogations.”
 
            In short, it was the lawyers who enabled torture by subverting the constraints against it. Absent their legal arguments rationalizing the banned techniques, circumventing the international constraints against them, and justifying their use in the alleged crisis, the torture could not have happened. Which brings us back to Shakespeare’s formulation for a remedy:
            “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
           
Lawrence DiStasi 
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