(no subject)

[pecunium]

I am sick and tired of this shit. Not just the lies (“this is not the America I know”) but rather the facile conniving at turning the rest of us into either Sgt. Schultz or concentration camp guards (and before some idiot comes in and tries to invoke Godwin... when the analogy is apt, there is no reason not to use it. Pretending America is in some way so special that our shit can’t stink is exactly the sort of complicity Eisenhower had the people who’d been ignoring the camps dragged through them to see. When someone goes wrong, you have to tell them).

For the past few weeks the apologists and torture mongers (like Cheney, and Bush, who have, both, now admitted to authorising, even selecting specific tortures. Not with the shame of someone who did something in a moment of weakness, but rather the pride of someone who expects to get an economium and a gold watch as they leave the company) have been running about setting the stage for a general amnesty of those who committed heinous crimes.

Am I hyperbolic? No. I am apoplectic. This is not the country I signed up to defend. It’s not the country I, with reservations, went to war to serve. This is a bunch of people making the Nuremberg Defense, “We were only following orders.” It was bullshit then, and it’s bullshit now. Up until a few years ago the consensus was that defense was not only inadequate to get one off the hook, it wasn’t even ameliorating. Some orders were so bad that following them was something we’d hang one by the neck for.

No longer. The people who spent all of my lifetime (going on 42 years now) saying, “actions have consequences,” and, “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,” and a whole lot of other moralistic stuff about the “absolutes” which can’t be negotiated... well they don’t seem to care that they have tossed it all in a cocked hat.

We are told, by all sorts of, “serious” people that the people who carried out the tortures ought not be prosecuted. Why? Because they were following orders. The people who gave the orders... they are off the hook because they were given advice by people like Bybee and Yoo.

Bybee and Yoo (and the other enablers) are off the hook because they had good intentions.

Whoop-de-fucking-doo.

I can go into any prison in the world, and find a whole lot of people who committed their crimes with the best of rationalised intentions. They did it to feed their families, or to get back at a company which cheated them. They killed whomever it was because he was going to ruin someone’s life, etc., etc., etc. I don’t see anyone saying we need to examine their motives and think about why they did it.

No. See they weren’t trying to serve some higher purpose, they are just common criminals.

Well guess what... the people who rationalised, the people who authorised, the people who organised, and the people who carried out the regime of torture our president, vice president and their consiglieri admit they set into motion... those are some uncommon criminals.

If I were given the authority to deal with them (which, thank God I will never be given), I’d toss them in an oubliette. Being less than kind, I’d let them have unlimited water, and; not quite enough, food. Slow starvation. Years of wasting misery to contemplate how far they’ve fallen. Time to ponder the sort of disgust required to make the effort to keep them in such squalor and misery.

I don’t hate them. I despise them. I loathe them. I will not shed a tear when they die, but I don’t hate them. They are so far from my ken that, like rabid dogs, they aren’t something one can identify with enough to hate.

I grew up in a country I knew to be flawed. We committed genocides, both active and passive. We created, fostered and even nurtured a system of chattel slavery horrific in its nature. We treated the people we’d wronged with that system like beasts afterwards.

We destroyed nations, and propped up terrible dictators, because a company which wanted to grow bananas on the cheap hated the idea of giving an honest wage for an honest days work.

I knew all that. And I accepted it. I believed in progress. I believed our Ideals were something we, as a people, were striving for. Were we perfect? No. Were we the best thing going? Who knows. But we had something. The rest of the world had hope. Even when we were engaged in the most egregious of violations of the ideals we were espousing, we managed to convince most of the world we were failing.

Not ignoring, not betraying, not abandoning those ideals. No, we were failing at them. We were falling short of ourselves.

I can’t believe that anymore. Not right now. Not when my nation is led by people who say, “We can’t look back to what we did, we have to look ahead to the future,” and follow it up with, “the people who tortured were just following orders and the people who gave the orders were afraid the Nation was in dire peril.”

Oh goody. Stalin could make the argument. Heck, he did. He starved Ukraine because it was needful for the rest of the Soviet Union. He built the gulag because those people were trying to destroy the State from inside. The Taliban sentenced missionaries to death because they were undermining the state.

That sort of justification is without limit. Any abuse can be rationalised in the interest of saving the State.

Well, that’s not the state I want to live in. Obama has a chance to fix it. If he repudiates torture, closes Gitmo, releases everyone who was tortured; because the rule of Law demands it (better a hundred guilty men go free than one innocent should be falsely bound). If he does those things then the Ideal of “America” may yet recover.

That’s a second best. The thing to hope for is investigations, and; where there is evidence of crime, prosecutions. No one gets a pass. No one gets to be, “the good soldier” who was only “following orders.” The fish rots from the head down (and all that talk of, “a few bad apples”.... well one bad apple spoils the barrel). Officers are supposed to get harsher punishments for the same offences. Why? Because responsibility increases as one gets closer to the origination of an order.

If Presidents didn't mandate it, then generals wouldn't order it. If the generals didn’t order it, the colonels wouldn’t organise it, and the sergeants wouldn’t carry it out.

Which is why we need to have investigations, and the results have to be made public. If we don’t address it, well the rot is there, and it ignoring it won’t fix it. Rot spreads. The only disinfectant for this is sunlight, lots of sunlight.

Comments

[michael-b-lee.livejournal.com]

I must confess my ignorance here - what is the process of setting up such an amnesty? Can it be done by executive order, or does it have to be voted on by Congress?

Cause if it has to come up for a vote, then this could well become a referendum on the state of our collective soul.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

It can be done by refusing to prosecute. The longer we wait, the greater the urge to let the dead past bury its dead.

A real amnesty would require a law, and that would open a huge can of worms, but mere unwillingness to drag the filth out and clean it up will do the deed.

[magentamn.livejournal.com]

Yes! I still want Bush, Cheney, et. al to do the perp walk. I want to see them in orange jump suits. I want them punished for what they did to my, to our, country. We have to root out this rot, or it will continue to get worse.

In some ways, I can trace it back to Nixon being pardoned. If he had gone to jail, would things have been different?

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Yes. Funny, a friend and I were having this talk. I used to think the Nixon Pardon was needed, if unpleasant. He used to think it was a travesty.

Oddly, we've reversed position. He now thinks it was the right thing to do, and I think it's the root cause of Bush/Cheney/DeLay, thinking they are allowed to do whatever they want.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

It's not the pardon, it's the persecution. They think Nixon was unfairly persecuted for his Imperial Presidency policies, and they'd probably only be even more incensed had he been prosecuted and jailed.

Considering that Cheney and Rumsfeld both worked for Ford, who tried (however imperfectly) to be a corrective to Nixon, it's startling that they learned so little. But apparently they spent the whole Ford administration feeling muzzled by Congress.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

What they learned was that getting caught was bad. That secrecy was best, and there were ways to massage the system.

What they were lucky enough to have was an opposition which was willing to let itself be led by the nose.

Had Nixon been impeached, had there been a trial, had the facts come to light, the nation would be (I think) less likely to wink at the cupidities being presently practised.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I rather think Obama will consider that he has so many immediately crucial things to do when he becomes President that he won't actively pursue this kind of Investigation and Airing. Regrettably, that seems reasonable.

My hope is that others, in Congress, _will_ follow-up on it, and that the Administration won't stand in the way of this. On the whole, I don't have much hope for Conclusive Results -- it's in the hands of people who were mostly, to some degree, Enablers (in that they did not protest it strongly enough), and they are aware of their own share of guilt. The better of them are probably ashamed of this, but I suppose just about all of them will opt to make it One Of Those Things We Don't Talk About. That _might_ be enough for us to learn from, but I'm not especially optimistic.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

I am really peeved at Nancy Pelosi and the Dems who were voted in in '06 on a wave of "enough, no more!", declaring they would not impeach. Kudos to Dennis Kucinich, and I wish he had more support.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

You've got it.

Now, mind you, I don't think it will happen. DC being what it is, people are going to make deals, and if we're lucky the most that will come of it all will be laws making these things explicitly illegal, so that the next time a president or vice-president asks a legal counsel to cook up a position paper it'll be a lot harder to do so.

But it does make it a hell of a lot harder for people like you and me to command our troops, and it seriously undermines the character of our nation.

[michael-b-lee.livejournal.com]

I hold out hope that Obama's recent reversal on the decision to close Guantanamo (thank heavens) indicates that he'll heed the will of the People if we demand an accounting. At least, I hope and pray that this is so.

Now we just need to make our voices heard. We need to show the world that we will won't sit by and let these crimes go unpunished.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

John Cusack's, Two Questions for Eric Holder shows how to do that.

[uberdionysus.livejournal.com]

I rarely comment but I always read your posts. Glad you're on my f-list.

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

I do not think there will be any prosecutions, I am sorry to say.

You've said a lot of what I've been thinking. I am having trouble keeping interested in politics and government -- after all, aren't they going to do just what is expedient?

I am praying Obama changes some of that. I also hope the World Court -- even though we have never recognized it -- names Bush and Cheney as having committed crimes against humanity. Not that it's likely to happen, but a person can still hope.

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

I was a member of Amnesty International for several years, more or less for the same reasons you decided to serve(the commitment was, needless to say, a lot less burdersome). After a while, and after having read a few books, I came slowly to the realization that justice comes only in very, very few occasions. When Pinochet was arrested in London I was both jubilant and incredulous. (I will gloss over the horrible disappointment that I felt when a Labour minister, who had actually marched against the fucker in his time, let him go).

I came to realize that the truth is that those who commit the worse crimes, those who kill and torture thousands, those who make would countries cower in fear and shame, as a rule don't get their comeuppance. In fact - well, I will tell you why I went and became a member.

I went with my then partner to see this movie, which is, as I learned later, pretty much autobiographical down to the details of the topography of the place, about a young politically active Argentinian girl who gets snatched with all the results that we know of. I knew most of this stuff and during the course of the movie I told myself over and over (ad I have done in the one occasion when I have gone to see a concentration camp): why did I subject myself to this? It's not as if I need to be informed, and this is not fun at all.

When I got out, I noticed that I kept my eyes down, and couldn't look at any of the other people on the theatre, because of an obscure sense of shame.

My boyfriend, who was younger than me and more innocent, was in a much worse state. He couldn't talk, he had to be prodded and directed to walk, he was pretty much in shock. So I gently took him to a Mexican restaurant, put a strong beer in front of him, and at his first utterance - that he felt ashamed to be human - started talking sort of in a freewheeling comforting way, telling him that we were not responsible; that our fathers and grandfathers (and mothers and grandmothers, come to that) had fought and died in the last war precisely so that we could live in a country where those things did not happen: and that when we had seen them, we hadn't turned our heads, we hadn't shut our eyes, we had not been indifferent, and we had done what we could to fight them.

This last was a bit of a lie, since I had been wanting to join Amnesty since I was a kid and never did it. So I went and joined. And of course, most of the work consisted in standing on street corners often in the cold trying to wrestle from people a) money and b) some interest in the gruesome material we were pushing on them.

I arrived when local groups no longer "adopted" single prisoners, but concentrated on issues or places. Out special area of interest was Sudan. This was long before Sudan was news. It was an extremely frustrating assignment because, frankly, in those days when Darfur was at best a kind of chocolate candy nobody gave a flying goose about Sudan. We would organize meetings and conferences and only African people would come, would stand up and talk in broken Italian about how grateful they were that we were talking about this, and that was basically it. Even the small satisfaction of getting a response from a government ("Honest to God, we don't torture our citizens!") didn't happen. Worse yet, the passersby didn't give a damn and were often vocal about it.

So this taught me that this is thankless, frustrating, depressing work. Not only horrible things happened, not only justice was not done, but people did not care. On top of it I had to ask for money, which was, to put it mildly, not something I was good at.

After a while you realize that this is precisely why you have to keep going, because it's not easy and not glamorous but the very small changes that you affect, tiny tiny changes, are the only way forward. And you do it with a sense of fatalism, because after you have accepted that there is on the whole no justice and no redress, the very very few times when a small victory comes along it cheers you up an awful lot.

(continued in next post)

[shunra.livejournal.com]

We are watching our bedrock ideals turn to dust before our very eyes.

Damn it, I *love* the United States. My country, my country, beloved and free!!!

History will swing back, I hope, and soon.

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

(sorry, LJ won't let me post this much, and usually I would just not post, but I sort of need to this time)
Then 9/11 came along. That was a Tuesday, right? Our group met on Wednesdays. I remember driving to the community centre where we met, and feeling totally defeated. I sat down and cried silently. I thought, that's it - all the small little things we thought we had achieved, they are going to be swept away. This is not just a setback - this will be such a huge backlash that we might as well pack up and go home.

Before 2001 I was writing a space opera and one of the characters was genuinely in favor of torture. I had to tie myself up in knots to find lunatic rationalizations for his beliefs, and thought, nobody is going to buy it anyway. I mean! torture! come on! Back then governaments flatly denied doing such things. They didn't say, oh but we only do it a little bit when it's really really necessary and to really bad people. Because they knew damn well it wouldn't cut any ice. They would say "Human rights violations? Gosh no! We are totally committed to defending international conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights!"

So when Alan Dershowitz came up with his article I just went "What? _What_? WHAT?"

For a long time I was just depressed. Well, for personal reasons too, but the fact that the world went to hell in a handbasket with most of the Western democracies cheering didn't help. Then things started happening. The Annapolis instructors went on the set of 24 to ask the producers to stop feeding their cadets this nonsense, please. Various military people, some of them with impressive ranks, wrote polite editorials saying that Somebody On The Internet Is Wrong. Hey, I had thought these people were the enemy! Turns out there are plenty of now sad-eyed retired intelligence officers, FBI investigators, and generally people I would not have expected to agree on anything much, that were giving a small cough, standing up politely, and saying the equivalent of "Stop this fucking bollocks because a) it insults my country and what I've done for it and b) it doesn't work."

I used to go and talk to schools for Amnesty. I enjoyed it and was good at it, and not all of it was preaching to the converted. But back then I didn't have the wealth of material I would have now to lecture them. I remember telling one assembly that we have to have the courage to stand against torture even if it DOES prevent a terrorist attack - and explained to them why. Now I could tell them - oh and besides, it doesn't work.

So, long story short - I am not even sure LJ is going to allow me to post all of this - I have gone through anger, despair, hope, then anger, defeat, despair, hope again. I don't think any of the people who instigated torture in the current administration will ever be punished, because, well, because mostly torturers don't get punished. This lot will never pay. We can maybe work towards getting the tribunal in The Hague recognized, and then maybe the next lot will be. I haven't got great hopes that that will happen either, at least not in the near future. But, you know: eventually. The thing with great crimes is that they poke people in their outrage and you find allies in unexpected quarters. Things are vastly better now than they were when I sat in my car and cried that Wednesday eight years ago. Because even then, although it hadn't happened yet, I knew a lot of mostly innocent people were going to pay. Dearly.

Of course I'd sing a different tune if things had gone the other way on November 4th. But the fact that they did not, not even close, shows how far we have come.

Did I just post a huge lump of things that had nothing to do with your post? I hope not. What I mostly wanted to say was - take heart. We won't get the justice we want, but maybe we'll get the public opinion we need.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I agree. Nixon (and most of his underlings) walking was the start of the rot. Now it's in full flood. If Obama doesn't do something to bring the criminals to book, nobody on the Republican/neocon side will respect him at all; they'll see it as getting away with murder a second time. Behaviors that you reinforce are repeated.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I've always thought the pardon was the right thing, and am now coming around to your thinking. But I think Ford made the right decision in light of what we knew at the time: I think he (and many of us) saw Nixon's behavior as some kind of unexplainable aberration that would not be repeated. I suspect also that Ford saw Nixon's being forced to resign in disgrace as more of a punishment than Nixon did, and that those who have followed in Nixon's footsteps have thought they are smarter than Nixon and would avoid even that fate.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I think that Nixon always relished the role of victim, of the wrongfully persecuted.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Thank you, along with pecunium, for saying these things. There are those who will never listen to someone like me--a person who never was in the military, who was always a "peacenik"--who will find it harder to ignore what veterans say. (And when veterans and old peaceniks agree, one might consider the possibility that they're right!)

[barondave.livejournal.com]

As is often the case, Jon Steward nails it in yesterday's (1/13) Daily Show (http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=215905&title=six).

I'm glad adults are in charge. We'll be living with the disastrous effects of the Bush administration longer than America suffered through the disastrous Coolidge/Hoover administrations. Yes, we need an accounting.

And

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

I always thought Ford was an idiot covering for a crook.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I wish I could believe that our ideals have been betrayed, but the US generally doesn't have a problem with coerced confessions: as far as I can tell, most Americans believe that if you're accused, you're guilty and if you're guilty, you deserve whatever is done to you. This was all in place before 9/11.

They don't mind police lying to accused people to get confessions. It's been a lot of work to get videotaping of even a few interrogations. Plea bargaining is standard practice, even though it's obviously pressure to get innocent people to plead guilty.

Convictions have been overturned by DNA evidence, but it's taken a lot of pressure from outside the government. And it can be a hard haul just to get the DNA tested-- if it hasn't been destroyed.

Defense attorneys are on the automatic hate list for a lot of people.

There is generally no concern for prisoner rights, or as it's commonly said "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime."

A lot of the best fighters against these abuses say that the real America is better than Abu Graib. That level of extreme abuse isn't typical, but opposition to that sort of thing wasn't principled and wasn't pervasive enough to even begin to keep it from happening.

I'm talking about the sort of gut-level opposition which meant that, as bad as Abu Graib was, mutilation wasn't a standard part of torture, even though the whole chain of command was free to do what it pleased. That's what a real taboo looks like. What we need is to get from that much (and it's something-- not all cultures, including ours in the past, have that taboo) to an equal revulsion against trying to get false confessions or taking out hatred on helpless people.

Maybe saying we aren't really like that is the best strategy, maybe the most likely way of making a change is by assuming it's already the underlying reality, but it just isn't true, and if it was ever true, please tell me. America is enough better than a lot of places that there's a steady flow of illegal immigrants, but that's not the same thing as taking the Bill of Rights seriously.

If we're to have an end to torture, it's going to be by the general public acquiring new and better visceral reactions.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't throw them in an oubliette or slowly starve them. My religion seeks compassion even toward those I despise - but I might let them think that they could be subjected at any time to any of the treatments they authorized for others.

While keeping them confined where they would no longer present a danger to society, like any other dangerous criminals.

[pgdudda.livejournal.com]

My question: How do you convince a society that torture is morally wrong when that society believes that good behavior can only be guaranteed by threat?

Even if these people are prosecuted, their punishments will be nothing but slaps on the wrist. That doesn't make it pointless to prosecute, but it changes the game a little when you know that there is no threat sufficient to guarantee their good behavior. They knew that when they started, and is the reason they had no compunctions about doing what they did: any 'punishment' they received would be beneath their notice, since their morality is defined entirely by degree of threat.

Psychopaths, the lot of them, is what I think. We have lovely places called "mental institutions" for such people. Too bad our society doesn't recognize the danger in people whose good behavior can only be procured by threat.

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

«   »

(and before some idiot comes in and tries to invoke Godwin... when the analogy is apt, there is no reason not to use it. Pretending America is in some way so special that our shit can’t stink is exactly the sort of complicity Eisenhower had the people who’d been ignoring the camps dragged through them to see. When someone goes wrong, you have to tell them).

pecunium

Would you like the T-Shirt I am thinking of making?

"Fuck Godwin! Remember Santayana!"

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

Obama has a chance to fix it. If he repudiates torture, closes Gitmo, releases everyone who was tortured; because the rule of Law demands it (better a hundred guilty men go free than one innocent should be falsely bound). If he does those things then the Ideal of “America” may yet recover.

Only if he also repudiates extraordinary or irregular rendition.
If he doesn't, he is no better then what came before.

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

Amen.

America is not alone in aspiring to be better. Some have the Gettysburg Address, some have the Magna Charta and Hume and so on. Some have Cesare Beccaria. We don't (well, I don't) for a moment think that the "real" constituency we live in and serve is better. We want it to aspire to better - and at least have the sense of shame when it fails.

I have to say that in many ways the US has failed even compared to others, and not its own ideals. The situation in American prisons has almost no equal in any other industrialized country, and the US is alone with Japan in still exercising the death penalty in the "free world". But, you know, you measure this kind of thing on how much you improve, or not.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid history *is* swinging back; the post-WWII liberalism was a large excursion, and it's mostly evaporating.

[jpmassar.livejournal.com]

Great essay. Have you considered giving it wider distribution?
(e.g., posting it on Daily Kos or similar, or submitting as an
opinion piece to a newspaper?)

[sethb.livejournal.com]

People mostly don't get Godwin right anyway. His Law applies when one party in an argument compares the party he's arguing with; I haven't seen the criminals under discussion show up here.

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law)

Uh, I wanted to make sure before I pointed this out.
The original law makes no such statement (see above).
It implies that any use of Hitler or Nazis in the argument (be it regarding the subject or the participants) triggers a violation.

[sethb.livejournal.com]

I don't consider the Wiki World News definitive. About anything.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

How do you convince a society that torture is morally wrong when that society believes that good behavior can only be guaranteed by threat?

Unfortunately, this is a common side-effect of America's majority religion. I get into this argument a lot with the sort of person who says that you can't have morality without Christianity; my response to that is to say that if the only thing keeping you in line is fear of going to Hell when you die, then you don't have any morals, all you have is a big bully standing over you with a stick! This can be generalized to fear of temporal punishment as well.

Okay, Let's Try This:

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

I. The Basics
1. What is Godwin's Law?

Godwin's Law is a natural law of Usenet named after Mike Godwin
(godwin@eff.org) concerning Usenet "discussions". It reads, according to
the Jargon File:

As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison
involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.


2. What does it mean?

It pretty much means exactly what it says - as a Usenet thread
goes on, the chances of somebody or something being compared to a Nazi
approach one.

(http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/legends/godwin/)

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Yes. this is short enough (less than 1,000 words) that it can be reworked into a publishable piece.

Which I am doing.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Well, shelleybear's statement of the law is as I first recall encountering it, way back in the says when Usenet was the way such conversations as this were conducted.

If you don't like her reference you might try this FAQ on Godwin's Law.

If you don't like that, I've done the work to type, "Godwin's Law into Google, and pasted the link to the results