The fact is that the word progressive is always relative to the times and the spiritual and conceptual wisdom of those times. The Democrats before 1908 ran on planks that were populist, free market, anti-corporation, and largely rural, in fact corrupt, and in the South deeply racist. The first progressives in cities were mostly Republicans, largely because the Democratic machines in the cities were incredibly corrupt. Eventually these attributes switched somewhat.
In 1912 Woodrow Wilson tacked "left" and embraced some elements of the progressive cause of the time. Progressive in those days meant economic fairness, judicial reform, and massive industrial policy. It didn't mean desegregation, fairness to minorities or blacks, and in fact Woodrow Wilson was overtly racist. Scientific racism was a credo of the atheist, and religious racism of everybody else. He watched the movie "Birth of A Nation" and applauded, and he instituted Jim Crow for the first time in the Federal Government, where, for all their corporatist and elitist faults, the Republicans had kept true to Lincoln's promises up until then.
While this racism was a severe fault of Wilson's, it also was a severe prejudice, delusion and key source of degredation in the events of the times. Wilson wasn't alone, the system was at fault almost as much as he was. His character flaw was key on this because he had the power to start change and didn't. Franklin Roosevelt, to his credit, at least was aware of the flaws of racism and tribalism and willing to break with previous concept and start changes -- though he didn't end segregation. It took Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson to do that.
At the same time other Democrats embraced all of progressivism enthusiastically and resisted him half heartedly. The Democrats have always been a party that harmonized people with different concepts. At that time Suffragette women were afraid to side with blacks because they'd loose followers, and blacks were afraid to side with women for the same reasons.
These attitudes didn't really strengthen them as much as they thought. On the contrary allowing prejudice and self interest tends to corrupt concepts. And failure to be willing to unite over common purpose and to see common purpose just meant that those whose motives were insincere, selfish, and even perverse could take advantage of them. Just as now.
Some people broke those rules because they perceived they were false. They were willing to take on the suffering that comes from going against societies norms because those norms were erroneous and counterfeit. When people first break rules based on observation of reality it is very dangerous for them. They are like the Child in the Emperor's New Clothes yarn. The Emperor is naked, but for anyone to notice is death.
Samuel Clemens argued against annexing the Philippines after the Spanish American War (and against war in general). He was too famous or he might have been jailed. A socialist, Eugene Debs, ran against Wilson. Wilson later locked him up and had him charged under the Espianage act (which is still on the books). In the USA people have been jailed, lynched, or run out of the country for telling the truth. These people paid a price for their opposition to norms, it was as much because they raised unpleasant questions and spoke the truth that they were attacked. Wilson was wrong, but so was Roosevelt. The great majority of the people were wrong, but it was hazardous to even notice it.
The result of the lack of clarify of purpose and consistency of principle was felt across the board. Wilson embraced universal rights, but then compromised when "brown people" were involved. Wilson's racism provided him a lens that made him oblivious to the rights of common folks in places like the Middle East, Latin America, and Mexico. He practiced a kind of "missionary diplomacy" that consistantly offended potential allies, picked favorites on faulty premises, and let the European Powers move into areas of the world (specifically the Middle East) where they were incompetant to execute any of his principles of human freedom and equality -- all on the basis of the faulty notion that those principles only applied to white people.
The point is not to trash modern or older progressives, but to point out that conceptions change, and even evolve. Conserving faulty strategies often ends up undermining the very concepts they were originally supposed to promote. Modern progressives are still about, and maybe even more than former ones, progress. They are also about the Constitution, preserving its integrity, and human rights, but we also embody a shift in perception of how the bill of rights and the constitution applies to people. We no longer think that people are faulty or inferior and are held down by some sort of genetic original sin, but recognize that environment, genetics and nurture interpolate. We recognize the brilliance of the absolute statement, and the appropriateness of the concept that "All [sentient beings] men are created equal" all the better for this. Even so, like the progressives of old personal prejudice and self interest get in the way more often than they help. Concepts evolve as people challenge the old. Those who maintain that every document means exactly what it means ignore the fact that what it means to them is a matter of their own perspective -- no matter how obvious the meaning may be. An old Robin Hood story talking about his merry band being happy and Gay has a very different connotation from what a more recent reference to Gay would be saying. One reason "privacy" is not in the Constitution is that the word once had the connotation of "using the facilities." They used the expression "secure in one's persons and effects" instead.
Integrity is the integral of human behavior and the degree to which it stays within defined lines of principle. Principles have fractal dimensions. That is some rights seque or derive from other principles, others define, refine, or limit each other. Property is a right that derives from the principle of freedom and liberty. To be free one has to be able to move within a space. To be free one has to be able to own that space. Property rights are an expression of a legitimate need and are universal and are inalienable rights -- but not absolute ones. This is because the property rights of some people can become oppressive to others. An absolute right over property can mean that someone can't get from point a to point b. Being able to own "common necessities" (the commons) enables people to deny life and liberty to others. For property rights to have integrity they can't infringe on freedom more than is necessary to protect the freedom of one against the other. Thus Property limits liberty, and liberty limits property, and the principle of equality derives from the need for property and liberty to be distributed.
Just as Civil Rights activists of yore were divided by an unwillingness to clarify principle, so our modern activists are divided on the core issues that corrupt us by personal interest, the desire to get along with others, and the goal of "moving on" or "getting things done." So how does one combat this?
The answer in part is found in three examples. That of Bodhisattva Never Despise, that of Socrates, that of Nichiren and that of Gandhi. Gandhi practiced Satyagraha, which loosely translates as "seeking truth" or "truth power."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Satyagraha
Bodhisattva Never Despise went to meet with all religious leaders and treated each of them with respect. Socrates practiced relentless questioning seeking truth, and invented the concepts that led to modern Philosophy (love of wisdom). Both were reacted to with hate and disrespect. Never Despise nevertheless brought Buddhism back to his world. Socrates was killed but his disciple Plato revolutionized the Graeco-Roman way of thinking and paved the way for modernity.
Plato paved the way for other philosophers who eventually led to Spinoza and modern philosophy being reinvented.
Locke, Paine and others paved the way for Emerson and Thoreau.
Emerson and Thoreau paved the way for Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
All great philosophers and reformers have practiced along the same evolving standard. Nichiren summarized the power of truth in a short Gosho:
"Though numerous, the Japanese will find it difficult to accomplish anything, because they are divided in spirit. In contrast, although Nichiren and his followers are few, because they are different in body, but united in mind, they will definitely accomplish their great mission of widely propagating the Lotus Sutra. Though evils may be numerous, they cannot prevail over a single great truth, just as many raging fires are quenched by a single shower of rain. This principle also holds true with Nichiren and his followers."
The power of Satyagraha comes from its ability to build itai doshin among those who embrace it, while demolishing or even converting opponents based on the simple reality that lies degrade ones ability to function in actuality. One can't defeat enemies with lies. That only creates two sets of dysfunctional opponents and represents an illusion about where the enemy really is.
When Wilson failed to see that the notions of human rights inherited from Jefferson applied to all people he failed to see that his enemy wasn't black people, but slavery, ignorance, and tribalism. His delusion that "Birth of a Nation" was a great film with a truthful message was based on prejudice.
It took Martin Luther King, operating on the power of truth force / Satyagraha, to break the notions of inferiority, groundless hate, and fear that underlaid Jim Crow. Followers of Wilson's lead weren't killed in battle, they were defeated by truth. How can a man as kind, gentle, intelligent and wise as Martin Luther King be discriminated against simply because of his skin color? The question was posed by his demonstrations and marches. And the answer was illustrated by his behavior. Martin Luther King gave his life to establish a principle. But it was worth it and we are all better for it.
And Martin Luther King died, apparently, largely because he challenged Johnson on Vietnam. He'd already won his point on civil rights partly. But the greater point on human rights contradicted the aims and money making schemes of monied interests, and challenged Johnson's hubristic notions of "winning" the occupation and war in South Vietnam. He was threatened by no less than Hoover. He was followed by both the CIA and the FBI, who conveniently disappeared at the moment a hired assassin was to train his gun at him. He was no threat to the United States, but he was a threat to the monied interests, the privateers, and profiteers, who ran Washington from behind the scenes. Why? Because he spoke the truth.
When Gandhi fought against the assertion of the British that an entire Country, India, was the property of the British Crown run for the use of the people of the royalty and well connected of England he was arguing against the royalist property rights for the rights of the people of India. He would have won his point even if the British had locked him up and tortured him, but because the British had some shred of decency they eventually gave in to him and he won. Nevertheless he was killed because his own people couldn't agree on keeping together and respecting differences once the rebellion was to be over. The enemy is ill got advantage, the use of lies to get and keep advantage, and the propensity to lie, not individuals. The British weren't the enemy. Had India been better run and more united from the beginning, the East India Company would have had no more success there than it had in the US colonies (our Revolutionary war was sparked by them).
This is truth force. It allows people to figure out ways to adjudicate disputes without one exterminating, overpowering and oppressing, or degrading the other.
And obviously, we need to apply the power of satyagraha/truth force, to those who think they are in power in our day. They need to be reminded that power in a democracy derives from the people.
I firmly believe that Ends equal means:
"Referring to the relationship between satyagraha and Purna Swaraj, Gandhi saw "an inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree." He wrote, "If the means employed are impure, the change will not be in the direction of progress but very likely in the opposite. Only a change brought about in our political condition by pure means can lead to real progress."
Further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Satyagraha
On the other hand, endorsing torture, spying, expropriation, and other vile acts in the name of "realpolitik" may be tactically expedient, but it is always strategically inferior in results.
Chris
I walked out the Door
and wandered out into the night.
I looked up at a star so far away
and felt alone
Above me tumbled the lights
Images of countless suns
Imagining children of other nights,
so far away, also alone.
2.
Don't fill the world with fear!
We don't have enough years
to live all our dreams,
why live the nightmares?
Don't make my eyes tear!
The cold is bad enough,
without the sadness.
3.
I don't know today,
How can I know tomorrow?
When we have each other,
why hold on to sorrow?
The nights are dark, the nights are cold,
Inside we are warm, whether young or old;
Stretch the muscles, warm our hearts
don't let them burn like aching coals.
4.
Old wounds remind us of too much foolishness,
Old pleasures comfort.
Illusions never hold,
I am getting old.
Old aches tell me I am still here.
I ache therefore I am.
I am the Descartes of Pain,
Get used to it.
Chris
"If the nation is destroyed and people's homes are wiped out, then where can one flee for safety? If you care anything about your personal security, you should first of all pray for order and tranquility throughout the four quarters of the land, should you not?"
(WND, 24)
On Establishing the correct Teaching for the Peace of the Land
Submitted to Hojo Tokiyori on July 16, 1260
The thing I admire about Nichiren, and the thing I don't admire about many spiritual leaders before and after him, was that he made the connection between public ethics and spiritual salvation. The fact is that the two are linked. Spiritual corruption and political corruption are linked. And counterfeit religion and counterfeit politics and political advertizing (otherwise known as propaganda) go hand in hand. The word "con" isn't in "neo-con" for nothing.
Great religious leaders sometimes seem naive as political leaders. But that is not always a truth so much as a cynical and degraded view of the truth. When Nichiren moved to Kamakura he was engaging in creating a political religion. The idea that politics is an evil thing is bogus. Politics is imply the art of getting things done and defining boundaries between people and rules for crossing those boundaries.
As long as there is more than one person interracting in a society there is politics. Politics, good and evil, religion and survival, are all tied up and interpolated. The first act of good and evil was also political. When the bible depicts Eve and Adam eating the apple, they are depicting a political act, with political consequences.
Law is politics codified. Law, politics, without justice is naked tyranny, and it is also politics. When a politician says "politics should have nothing to do with it" that politician is stating an absurdity. I know what he means; Corruption, self interest, "realpolitik", "idealism", all are political. When one works for an employer, 50% of one's work is usually political, and that is if one works on a factory floor. For management, the entire work is political. The notion that somehow corporations are different from "governance" is absurd. Corporations are a way of Governing a business. Corporate Government was created to imitate military and executive Governments. What libertarians mean when they say "get Government off my back" is "let me be the Government of my own roost." Different things.
One can have Aristocrats in a Republic. They are the ones who are allowed to vote when the franchise is denied to everyone else. They are the ones who can pretend to be virtuous because they have enough power, money and influence, so that they can corrupt others. Government is the exercise of power. Democracy is when power is well enough distributed so that people have to consult with one another, or get coalitions in order to oppress people.
Government is always a fight between Aristocrats, wannabe Aristocrats, and other people, generally the aristocrats and wannabe aristocrats are the most loud and obnoxious. Aristocrats because they already govern considerable portions of the commons, have arrogated properties to themselves, and they want the right to oppress people with impunity. Wannabe aristocrats because they often prey on people's sense of justice so they can acquire property through political means and oppress people -- often including the aristocrats they are fighting.
Adjudicating claims and counter claims on the common good is the function of Government at all levels. Claims that there is an automatic and rigid separation between, say, the tenth amendment "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people," forget that the people own this country and if they select delegates, and can get enough consensus on a thing than that thing is perfectly constitutional. The Government doesn't own our rights, it is a trustee of them.
For example, If we create a National Health System that is not an abrogation of the people's right, but the people deciding to put their trust in a National Health System. It is by its very nature constitutional, especially if the creators of such a system (As Bernie Sanders would do) put the execution of the system in the hands of State Branches, constituent members, or in the hands of the State Governments. Politics is about misreading a law conveniently, and then arguing that someone is violating it -- because such a law if enacted would create inconvenience for the few opposing the law.
It's just politics, but it is spiritual too. If we lived only for our selfish gratification, if there were any truth to the notion that we all should be islands to ourselves, then perhaps right wing propaganda and libertarian economics would make some kind of selfish sense, but even then it would fail, because working for the common good is in the common good, and not working for it simply gambling on not being a victim of the gamble. Fibbertarianism is based on the notion that "greed is good" "selfishness is good" and the common good is bad. All that is deluded thinking. There is no good that comes out of greed, and very little good that comes from selfish thinking.
So when you hear a libertarian pontificating about how having single payer health care is "nanny state" and "unconstitutional" or calling people who advocate such "statists" just remember that
a; they are silent when it comes to torture, to legal oppression, and
b; see it as a good thing when Corporations are allowed to exercise rights denied to living person citizens.
Governance is also ownership, so transfering ownership from States and Federal Government to Corporations is just giving over power to the Corporate State -- it isn't really freeing anybody except the executives of those companies. So when economic aristocrats want to do away with Nanny State, it is so they can exercise baronial corporate state powers locally and do away with "nanny" provisions such as 5 day work-weeks or statutory vacations.
It's all POV. I guess there is nothing wrong with oppressing employees if one is a corporate baron (or baronette in some cases) or one of his retainers. If you don't believe me just follow the logic over a period of time of so called "libertarians" and you'll see them come out and rant about how mandating a weeks vacation is tyranny. Just follow the logic, follow the money, and deconstruct the logic, and the truth becomes clear.
The welfare of the nation depends on us looking out for the common welfare and not giving in to economic royalists and
Chris
To move forward, sometimes we first have to clean up the garbage. From the politicization of the Justice Department to torturing inmates at Guantanamo, to grand theft campaign donations, financial corruption, and procurement violations, the United States is in such a state that we can't move on unless we clean up the current mess. We have to investigate. We have to prosecute.
If Bill Clinton had done his job and cleaned house when he came into office -- prosecuted Iran Contra, investigated the massive corruption of the Bush/Reagan years. He might still have been targetted by the GOP, but it would have been a very different GOP because at least half their leadership would have been where they belonged; either discredited and back in private life, or in jail where they belonged. And if he'd been targeted by a clean and not corrupt GOP for actually breaking the law, I'd have welcomed a President Gore.
Instead he tried to play nice, and the GOP responded with what? With Contract on America, with Special Prosecutors going after his personal life, and with an attempt to impeach him. He was an idiot to think that corrupt and sneaky people would like him. It's not in their interest to.
Obama faces the same choice. He's not dealing with people of integrity or good intentions. If he were we wouldn't have to listen to Oxycontin Rush, Klepto-Cheney or Dump the sick wife Gingrich, as their spokesmen. We wouldn't be debating the merits of torture, just whether to give Yoo a suspended sentance or hard time. Time to clean house!
If you want to understand how corrupt our mavens are start with this article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/22/AR2009052202396.html
And then read the article he is commenting on. No relation, except that Will seems offended by the notion that buying influence and power aren't free speech but are in fact corruption.
http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/research/cornell-law-review/upload/Teachout-Final.pdf
Chris
I've seen it happen so many times. When someone powerful moves in a certain direction, sometimes one can see the outcome long before anybody else does, just by looking for what is happening behind the scenes. This is especially true in politics, where passion counts more than either reality or justice.
The passionatly foolish concept will often beat better ideas, simply because those holding the better ideas acquiesce. Both Justice and Injustice require passion to achieve, largely because injustice flows from passionate feelings. In a truly just system justice is boring. There are people who are up-front with their goals and motives, and people who are sneaky, but most people are somewhat in between. There is nothing wrong with passion, nor with folks working behind the scenes to accomplish things. But because passion is often decoupled from accuracy, and even where people hold accuracy as a personal principle that accuracy is so hard to get, the result is that passionate injustice often wins out over legal principle, written laws, or even common sense. Fiction, such as the tv series 24! wins the day, even if it is based on false premises and complete spin.
This is true in the case of right wing ideology, where influential libertarians and right wing politicians have been able to push their ideas on an often skeptical majority for more than 30 years.
But it takes passion to fight back. And I applaud Obama for publicly debating (Darth) Dick Cheney.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/21/AR2009052101748.html
Some of these people go over a moral and ethical line to the point of being passionate monsters (See Dirty War posts). There would be little interesting about our efforts to bring, say, Bin Laden, to justice if it weren't for the injustices perpetrated by our own passionate monsters in their determined efforts to achieve their will, on our own side. For 40-50 years they've been pushing a shadow war, sometimes with the connivance of "liberals" and sometimes behind their back. They've done so with the cooperation of other politically powerful intelligence services, private individuals with intelligence connections, and groups such as the John Birch society, and others, and with the cooperation of the intelligence services of other countries who share a similar outlook.
Because these people are so passionate, and their opposition has been so ambivilant, there is no guarantee there will ever be justice for either Moslem extremists or Crusading Christian/Authoritarian extremists in our own country. On the contrary, nobody in the major media has been willing to confront them except the few people who feel as passionately as they do. The flegmatic middle is thus left pretending that both sides have arguments of equal weight. I reached the point last night where I was wondering if the fix was in. But then Obama gave his speach.
I am encouraged another day. I started this blog entry as a very depressing discussion of whether or not "the fix is in" on national security and the Bill of Rights. It is depressing that when ordinary folks win a rare victory such as a right to a two week vacation from their employers, that gets labeled by fibbertarians as "nanny state" and a violation of the constitution, but when the constitution is actually violated these thugs are quiet or even piling on folks complaining about its use as Police State toilet paper. Working people need more victories. These hierarchs and little barons need to be told that they don't own us. And these fibbertarians need to be refuted.
Further Reading:
Ruth Marcus offers this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/27/AR2009052702961.html
Chris
I was at a birthday party for a friend. He's doing pretty well actually. But he told how as a young student he lived in Chile during the Repression. He was lucky actually. He took a song, written by a famous poet and put it to music, and then sang it on the campus. It's a lovely song. But the song was a criticism of oppression, and that was wrong. He was fortunate. All they did was to expell him from school and force him to flee to other countries. He wound up in the United States and eventually married a lady lawyer who fell in love with him. Years later he's alive, and Pinochet is dead. He's fortunate. He survived the ConoSur (Southern Cone States of South America) based "dirty war." He celebrated with a Mexican writer and poet, and we all ate fish and feasted and listened to his songs.
We like to think that we don't oppress, that we are champions of democracy and that we enjoy unique freedoms. And all my life I've known such champions of democracy. Some of them democrats, some democratic socialists, and of course some of them people who once gave their allegience to communism. I learned the discipline of talking to people in the Gakkai. We were trying to do Shakubuku, but I was told the best way to do that was to dialogue with people. After a while I realized that trying to convert people required a level of presumption I couldn't afford spiritually, but I never gave up the spirit of talking to people. And I'm richer for it. My friend sang lovely songs.
Most of these people who I sometimes lamblast as ideologues; left and right, are idealistic and peaceful folks. The folks who had any dreams of acting like Che Guevara or taking up arms, well I've never met and would probably not be willing to have a prolonged conversation with if I did meet. There is a book out there called "the war between academia and capitalism." Most of the lefties I've ever met were academics, or clerics; monks and nuns; devoting to feeding the poor, healing the sick and counseling the unhappy.
But they weren't at war with capitalism. Not most of them and certainly not literally. Most of them wouldn't know what to do with a gun if they held one. They were simply people who had a sense of what is right for society. They wanted things like universal health care, decent education for children and an end to poverty. Some loathed it, the way that Libertarians are at war with Government. Being at war with an idea presents an impossible situation. Idealism usually involves confusing abstracts with realities and framing reality based on impossible standards. You always get a hint when the defense for something not working is that it wasn't a "pure enough" application. These people were harmless cranks at worst.
But various societies have been at war with them. In Chile people like my friend Jose were arrested in the middle of the night and carried off to hidden prisons where they were tortured and killed. Simply for being idealistic. The Government was afraid of 5 day work-weeks, daycare, health care, "nanny state" and took measures to make sure that nobody would be happy or secure in response. The Socialists might have had a theoretical war against capitalism, but the capitalists responed with a real war, a dirty war. They weren't afraid of Communists. They were afraid of worker rights, of 5 day work weeks, of benefits for sick people, of having to keep promises made during advertizing. They killed priests and nuns for trying to help the poor. The rich and powerful were afraid of being generous and sharing.
When I first read articles like the following;
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98dec/elsalv.htm, I didn't believe them. But now I see they were all too true.
Dirty war is not just police state, it is official lawlessness. It is where the methods of intelligence collection, of spying, extracting confessions, secret trials, secret evidence, terror, and total control are applied to repress a movement, a set of ideas, or simply people who are different from those in control. It relies on severe, but hidden, ill intentions to be successful. It was / is state terrorism, usually levied against invisible "terrorists" and an invisible "terrorist threat." It is "counter insurgency" as performed by CIA and special forces, under a very brutal and cynical set of strategies:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9308.htm
And when we went into Gitmo, the expression was the "Salvadorean solution" after the dirty war there. Well the advisors for the El Salvador effort came from Argentina and France, and other places, and the El Salvador Effort was also tied to El Salvador's neighbors; Guatemala and Nicaragua. The Salvadorean solution was "dirty warfare." Extralegal detentions. People being shot in the back of the head by lawless police officers working for anonymous "spooks." And this stuff doesn't lead to good "intelligence" or good outcomes:
Cheney said in 2004 Gitmo detainees revealed Iraq-al Qaida link
By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers
"WASHINGTON — Then-Vice President Dick Cheney, defending the invasion of Iraq, asserted in 2004 that detainees interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had revealed that Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives in chemical and biological warfare, an assertion that wasn't true...
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/68315.html?storylink=omni_popular
Now we know that he was able to make these assertions because people captured in the war on Terror were tortured until they told his interrogators what they wanted to hear.
We are now learning that much of what we learned from the 9/11 report, from the administration, from various other sources, relied on faulty sources; torture.
http://deepbackground.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/01/30/624314.aspx
http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?titleNumber=1098832
This is profoundly dangerous material. It's not something that we can move on from easily. Once people start breaking the law at the direction of authority, once officials get impunity, the natural progression is for them to exercise it with more and more impunity, and on behalf of their business associates. The danger isn't that we'll have a Government that is suddenly Fascist or ruled by a dictator, but that we will have a Government that serves business leaders and no longer listens to any of us. Judging from Obama's current behavior, we may already have that Government. If so, then this administration could be a mere partial respite from an authoritarian Corporatocratic dictatorship where the President is just a figure-head, Congress an adornment, and the real power lies with others working behind the scenes. When that happens we may find ourselves targeted by the same means that were used against "Communists" in other countries, Moslems in our own country. Is being a "liberal" next on the list?
This has to be prevented, and the only way to stop it is to keep pushing until all the evidence has been released, perpetrators punished, and the policies are changed. And yes I'd like to see Cheney in an Orange Jumpsuit. But even more importantly I'd like to see those officers who practice "counter-insurgency" of this type put to pasture and this sort of machievellian policy ended. It makes me far more nervous to see torture rewarded by Obama. General McChrystal should be the one retired, not General McKierney. Special Ops have a place, but there is no place for sheep dipping and torture in winning wars. And he is famous for the misbehavior of Task force 6-26.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_McChrystal
Chris
Well at least I'm not alone. I was looking at the Washington Post, and there is a quite public dustup going on between Charles Krauthammer and Dan Froomkin in which Krauthammer with characteristic obtuseness refers to Froomkin as "occasionally stupid". To his credit Froomkin just keeps doing his old fashioned job of reporting facts. Krauthammer is trying to make the "ticking bomb" case for torture as if the fact that torture is illegal, immoral and not guaranteed to get good information doesn't matter. He uses an Israeli horror story where the IDF violated their own laws in a hurry to free one of their own people, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman. Krauthammer uses this to argue the efficacy of the ticking bomb scenario. The trouble is that Nachson Waxman died.
Krauthammer is slamming Froomkin, but to do it he has to stretch the truth to the breaking point.
I hope the personal nature of these responses will lead Mr. Froomkin to hold on like a bull Terrier in a dogfight. It's not a matter of anger, but of principle. The trouble with Rabin and Krauthammer, is that while the prisoner may have given up the location, he probably knew full well that:
"The order was, 'If there's any movement around the house, your first step is to kill the soldier. ... Don't think about your life. Your first step is to kill the soldier,'" said Imad Falouji, who was one of the Hamas leaders negotiating in secret with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. "From then on, one man stood by the soldier 24 hours."
"When Israel located Waxman, its commandos stormed the safe house in the West Bank and began blasting the reinforced doors that stood between him and them. By the time they reached the second-floor room where the Israeli-American was tied to a chair, he had a bullet hole in his neck and one in his chest. He was dead."
Torturing the prisoner didn't yield up a live Nachshon, it only was part of a hard-power deal that guaranteed his death. The Arabs neither gave nor expected quarter. And the Israelis seem to have adopted the same attitude.
The solution might seem to be an exchange of prisoners, both sides would prefer live young men to dead ones, but the reality is that once one goes down the course of brutality one might be able to yield up bodies, but not living solutions. There are Arabs who'd be amenable to that, and most Israelis would prefer to get their boys home. At one time they'd exchange 50 arabs for one Israeli. But that just led to Arabs kidnapping Israelis just to get their boys out of jail. The nastiness is ugly, but torturing prisoners doesn't help Israel make its case.
Newsday article
Krauthammer's article:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/14/AR2009051403601.html
The ticking bomb scenario makes sense in 24, sort of. But the truth is that there is no justification for torture. If it were justifiable, Nachson could speak for himself. As it is we are finding out that the administration wasn't even after facts anyway. Wilkinson testified today:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/white-house-watch/cheneys-motives.html?wprss=white-house-watch
Froomkin writes and quotes Wilkerson:
""[W]hat I have learned," Wilkerson writes, "is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida."
"So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee 'was compliant' (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, 'revealed' such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop."
"There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just 'committed suicide' in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi....)"
So, what's with these people defending unamerican tactics that bear ugly and destructive fruit? Who do they think they are defending? Certainly torturing prisoners doesn't improve Israel's security or ours.
Chris
The key to survival for our country, to reaching enlightenment, to winning out a successful life; is to be able to believe. The key to being able to believe when the evidence is not obvious is to be able to cultivate wisdom. Belief and understanding are keys to being able to navigate the murky paths we often have to tread. But what do we do when people are untrustworthy, tricky, treacherous, or base? Do we give up? No.
The story of Bodhisattva Never Despise illistrates this. It is in the Lotus Sutra. It depicts a fellow who never gave up on his people or his country.
http://lotus.nichirenshu.org/lotus/sutra/english/watson/lsw_chap20.htm
So what does this have to do with trust? Well the point is that, regardless of how nasty a person is, somewhere inside is going to achieve Buddhahood. If Government is corrupt, it is because we let it be corrupted, especially in a democracy, but monarchy and oligarchy both only exist when people let them exist. If we all let our Buddhahood shine, the words of the lotus Sutra will come to us, and we can transform this land into a Buddha land. There is no inevitability to Mappo. As long as people uphold a spirit of never disparage.
Chris
The Buddha starts:
"At that time the Buddha said to the bodhisattva and mahasattva Gainer of Great Authority: 'You should understand this. When monks, nuns, laymen or laywomen uphold the Lotus Sutra, if anyone should speak ill of them, curse or slander them, he will suffer severe recompense for his crime, as I have explained earlier. And I have also explained earlier the benefits gained by those who uphold the sutra, namely, purification of their eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind."
Purifying eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind requires cultivation. How do we do this? With years of meditation? No. The Lotus Doesn't tell you "do this or do that" the voice instead tells a story:
"Gainer of Great Authority, long ago, an immeasurable, boundless, inconceivable number of asamkhya kalpas in the past, there was a Buddha named Awesome Sound King Thus Come One, worthy of offerings, of right and universal knowledge, perfect clarity and conduct, well gone, understanding the world, unexcelled trainer of people, teacher of heavenly and human beings, Buddha, World-Honored One. His kalpa was called Exempt from Decay and his land was called Great Achievement."
So this story creates a scenario where a Buddha in a distant universe reached enlightenment, and brought about an entire Kalpa (long time) of peace and prosperity. He did this by laying out concepts of enlightenment:
"This Buddha Awesome Sound King during the age when he lived preached the Law for heavenly and human beings and asuras. For those who were seeking to become voice-hearers he responded by preaching the Law of the four noble truths so that they could transcend birth, old age, sickness and death and eventually attain nirvana. For those seeking to become pratyekabuddhas he responded by preaching the Law of the twelve-linked chain of causation. For the bodhisattvas, as a means to lead them to anuttara-samyak-sambodhi, he responded by preaching the Law of the six paramitas so they could eventually gain the Buddha wisdom."
So he teaches according to each persons capacity, so that people could discover for themselves what he'd become enlightened to. But of course the content of enlightenment is the same whatever means is used to bring it out.
"Gainer of Great Authority, this Buddha Awesome Sound King had a life span of kalpas equal to four-hundred thousand million nayutas of Ganges sands. His correct Law endured in the world for as many kalpas as there are dust particles in one Jambudvipa. His counterfeit Law endured in the world for as many kalpas as there are dust particles in the four continents. After this Buddha had finished bringing great benefits to living beings, he passed into extinction."
So, this story explicitly segues on the concept of Correct Law, and Counterfeit law. Correct law is what it says it is; insights and practices founded on reality, wisdom and a clear vision of where things can go. Counterfeit law looks like correct law, but the vision is garbled, the wisdom is imperfect, and the resulting reality dysfunctional.
But then the Buddha offers something new:
"After his Correct Law and Counterfeit Law had come to an end, another Buddha appeared in the same land. He too was named Awesome Sound King Thus Come One, worthy of offerings, of right and universal knowledge, perfect clarity and conduct, well gone, understanding the world, unexcelled worthy, trainer of people, teacher of heavenly and human beings, Buddha, World-Honored One. This process continue until twenty-thousand million Buddhas had appeared one after another, all bearing the same name."
In most narratives about the three ages, the degredation is portrayed as inevitable. But in this story that degredation is shown as the result of people playing doctor with dharma. The first folks hear it clearly, their disciples get it garbled, and each generation gets it even more confused and distorted, until finally a correct law is replaced with its counterfeit.
In most conceptions of "end times", the "end times" are seen as either the end of the material world, or a segue to a magical rebirth and the punishment of the wicked. The world is so utterly destroyed that some magical agency must intervene and create a new one. This is therefore a reinterpretation of the concept of the "end times." There is nothing fixed in stone that there will be only "one Buddha" in a Universe.
On the contrary the Buddha can return over and over again. If but people realize the scope, purpose and methodology of the Buddha path and the path of Bodhisattva. The wheel can be restarted as many times as necessary as long as the counterfeit can be replaced with the correct. I love Burton Watson's translation as "correct" and "counterfeit" the issue isn't that people's capacities decline. On the contrary the issue is that the correct gets replaced with the counterfeit, not only in the field of religion but in all fields of human conception. The enemy of Buddhism is never people as people, it is people operating under bad conceptions.
The same land can have one Buddha after another. They might be given the same name or in some cases renamed, but the law they teach is Buddhism so long as the subject is reaching enlightenment, the goal is enlightenment, and people are able to reach enlightenment through its practice. What counts is not the names and terms, but the wisdom, truth and "skillfulness" of the teachings.
It is the shift in conception that makes the difference. But how does one re-establish a direct connection with the law after years of authority, people playing doctor with doctrines and practice, and resulting confusion and dysfunction.
The practice necessary to cultivate a direct connection with Buddhism is illustrated by bringing in Bodhisattva Never despise.
"After the original Awesome sound King Thus Come One had passed into extinction, and after his Correct Law had also passed away, in the period of his Counterfeit Law, monks of overbearing arrogance exercised great authority and power."
Now this is the period of the Counterfeit Law. Some People think they are practicing Buddhism but don't reach enlightenment because their practice is selfish, self interested, and their conception of Buddhism is wrong. Others sincerely try to practice but are deluded by teachers who are selfish, confused, and/or attached to wrong concepts. The result is whole hordes of people teaching and practicing "counterfeit law". Because the concepts are dysfunctional, practices based on them don't yield good fruit. Because of that people are frustrated and angry when they should be too busy with practice, study and sharing to bother with such emotions. They think they are teaching and practicing Buddhism and their pride in their attached views causes them to think that even though they are practicing a counterfeit law it is a correct one.
However, even though that is true, the "enemy" is not these people. It is their conception of Buddhahood that is holding them back.
"At this time there was a bodhisattva monk named Never Disparaging. Now, Gainer of Great Authority, for what reason was he named Never Disparaging? This monk, whatever persons he happened to meet, whether monks, nuns, Laymen or laywomen, would bow in obeisance to all of them and speak words of praise, saying, 'I have profound reverence for you, I would never dare treat you with disparaging and arrogance. Why? Because you are all practicing the bodhisattva way and are certain to attain Buddhahood.'"
The point of Bodhisattva Never Despise is that each person has the power, innate ability, and potential to reach enlightenment. These people are having trouble reaching that final state, not just because they have the wrong conception of Buddhahood but because instead of admitting that it takes life time effort, they pretend they are already there. Instead of working with others to reach enlightenment they prefer to pose as experts, as teachers. This leads to two problems. One is that they don't get feedback about their own reality. The other is that the very effort to pose as an expert leads to withholding information, and in turn not getting the feedback information one needs in order to improve oneself. Bodhisattva Never despise didn't need to criticize these people.
"This monk did not devote his time to reading or reciting the scriptures, but simply want about bowing to people."
If the available scriptures are counterfeit, why attach to them? This is not Patriarchal Zen, where the monks purposely ignored sutras, but it is simply someone seeking enlightenment directly. If there are genuine sutras to attach to, then perhaps they are worth effort. But if people possess Buddhahood in them, then if we bow to them, the Buddha will eventually bow back to us. We can learn from everyone; by watching what they say and do, and by learning from their contusions as they do wrong things, say wrong things, and demonstrate that their concepts are faulty in the process. So, when the scriptures available are faulty, the best way to learn Buddhism is to bow to everyone and learn from everyone. One need not be naive or gullible to do this.
"And if he happened to see any of the four kinds of believers far off in the distance, he would purposely go to where they were, bow to them and speak words of praise, saying, 'I would never dare disparage you, because you are all certain to attain Buddhahood!'"
Talking to people one learns what works and what doesn't work. This is the approach that the Dalai Llama is advocating. He's recommending a great critique of what works and doesn't work in all the existent religions. In a sense he's following the example of Bodhisattva Never despise. So did Nichiren. Nichiren had one sutra he trusted and studied and devoted himself to it, but mostly he spent his time talking to people and visiting monasteries and Monks. Later he criticized their teachings as counterfeit law.
"Among the four kinds of believers there were the those who gave way to anger, their minds lacking in purity, and they spoke ill of him and cursed him, saying, 'This ignorant monk - were does he come from, presuming to declare that he does not disparage us and bestowing on us a prediction that we will attain Buddhahood? We have no use for such vain and irresponsible predictions!'"
But Bodhisattva Never despise got a similar result without needing to criticize, to attack, to lamblast them, their own lack of confidence in what they were doing was already doing that. All he had to do was to express genuine mettawaves (the real things) and talk to people. When people are twisted, friendly advice is received as slander, and people respond to lies with efforts to shut a person up or slander them personally.
And I can see him now. "I am indeed ignorant, but thanks to meeting you I'm sure that both of us will reach enlightenment. Surely, since you know so much about Buddhism you will reach enlightenment!"
"Many years passed in this way, during which this monk was constantly subjected to curses and abuse. He did not give way to anger, however, but each time spoke the same words, 'You are certain to attain Buddhahood.' When he spoke in this manner, some among the group would take sticks of wood or tiles and stones and beat and pelt him. But even as he ran away and took up his stance at a distance, he continued to call out in a loud voice, ' I would never dare disparage you, for you are all certain to attain Buddhahood!' And because he always spoke these words, the overbearing arrogant monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen gave him the name Never Disparaging."
By not giving way to anger, we cultivate courage, forebearance, wisdom and develop grace. We learn to tell fact from fiction, truthsayers from liars, and we can learn from our freinds and even more importantly from our enemies.
"When this monk was on the point of death, he heard up in the sky fully twenty thousand, ten thousand, a million verses of the Lotus Sutra that had been previously preached by the Buddha Awesome Sound King, and he was able to accept and uphold them all. Immediately he gained the kind of purity of vision and purity of the faculties of the ear, nose, tongue, body and mind that have been described above. Having gained this purity of the six faculties, his life span was increased by two hundred ten million nayutas of years, and he went about widely preaching the Lotus Sutra for people."
So in the story the mere act of not despising people, never giving up on learning and sharing correct concepts, and thus challenging the arrogance and forebearance of others enables a return of "correct" law.
On an interpetative level, looking at counterfeit teachings enables us to distinguish what is true and what is false. And if we are humble enough to admit that nobody or tradition has the answers 100% right, then we can open our minds to hear the "million verses" of the actual lotus sutra (which is bigger than the 26 volumes) in our heart.
And when we don't give up on people. With some folks it is infectuous. People start talking, they start looking within, they start to see that Buddhahood was for everyone. Incorrect concepts can't stand the light of day. Esotericism proves to be either something worth sharing, or garbage. Authorities prove to have clay feet. We are in it together. The Buddha was there all along. By not giving up, we make the cause to eventually hear all the verses.
Similarly in the world around us, the tyranny, injustice and official violence of authorities as much illustrates the importance of liberty, justice and equality, as does anything written on a piece of paper, or mouthed at a podium. Like Bodhisattva Never Despise we can say to people "you too can vote." "This country belongs to you." Even as folks try to take it away from us. When it turns out that our military goes to the darkside, we can see that we were right when we decried torture and claimed universal and general rights. Their denial proves that they are genuine needs. The misery caused by oppression proves that they are necessary to the tranquility and well being of our Country, which is after all the World.
Chris
So far, the health care reform effort is turning into a big Kabuki dance. All the usual corporate suspects are suddenly onboard for "reform" -- as long as single payer and measures that would actually and really bring costs down are taken off the table.
For more on this visit: http://www.healthcare-now.org/hr-676/
After diverting hundreds of millions, billions even, of dollars to their own pockets, the big boys are willing to try to cut costs. At least so they say. And they should be, our health care system kills people. Maybe not directly, but the uninsured, underinsured, and scammed; regularly die from neglect, late diagnosis, poor treatment, under standard treatment, and from denial of claims leading to economic ruin and inability to afford medical care. We have the worst system money can buy, and we are already paying for it.
The government will never do the right thing unless we push it to.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/13/baucus_raucus_caucus_doctors_nurses_and
In the long run all this is related. We have two visions of America. One vision is a land of some of the people, controlled by secrets, and run by those people who have those secrets or are in the elites. The other vision is of a land where we have genuine democracy, genuine enlightenment, and genuine opportunity to live a decent life.
The key to changing things is to not lie, not to accept lies, and not be cowed when someone threatens or retaliates because one had the temerity to speak the truth. We don't have to lie on someone elses behalf. Some people aren't worth defending. And we can't let people intimidate us.
Chris
I have an answer for Greed, Let go.
I have an answer for fear, lets go talk
I have a message for all of us.
The answers are all out there.
I'm not inventing anything new.
Sages in many places,
have shared the same point of view.
The answers are all there,
Our problem is not asking questions
I have a question for the Greedy:
What good do you do?
Does all that wealth really help you?
Does it make you more secure?
Have you had a coronary?
Do you need a bypass?
Does it make you feel healthy,
to be so fat when others are so thin?
I have a question for the Angry:
Who do you think you are fooling?
When you puff yourself so full of air?
Do you really think others can't sense the fear?
Have you considered all you've stepped on,
to get where you are?
Have you considered that all your anger,
is only your pain?
Are those you hate cockroaches?
Or are they people?
I have a question for the rich and powerful:
Who do you really owe?
Was it the mother who bore you?
The Doctor who eased your birth?
What role does the laborer play,
Who brought you food from the earth?
Don't you know you stand on the shoulders of giants?
And that when you build oppression,
you are oppressing your brother?
I have a question for the fearful:
Why not stand up tall and proud?
Don't You have rights?
Are you not as good as good as any other?
Yes, are not the rich and powerful your brothers?
Do you not know, you have a jewel in your coat?
Don't you know that Enlightenment is there for attaining?
Let us cultivate fearlessness!
Mindfulness not mindlessness!
Can't you stand up for yourself?
Are you so beaten down that you can't rise up?
Do you think that all your toil has no merit?
If so, won't you change your mind?
The only chains we wear are the ones on our brains.
Chris
A simple poem:
When Peter Becomes a Pirate
What's this about a magical girl under a bell?
Is this heaven or hell?
Or Tinkerbell?
Are we off to fight with pirates,
Or have pirates we become?
Do we play and love and dream?
Or do we follow some imaginary friend?
If we can believe,
Our souls can leave the mundane earth behind.
Sprinkle some fairy dust,
Open our minds!
At some point we think we have to grow up.
To do leveraged takeovers and make business.
If we do, we won't be able to appreciate,
the moments we step over that fine curtain
and enter the land of imagination and dreams.
We won't see that we can be architects.
How else do we follow when our Peter Pan becomes a Pirate?
Bricks and mortar, wood and love,
Can cement together to build joy.
If we become our own architects.
If Peter becomes a pirate,
Let him scheme, let him fight, let him dream.
We can live free in our hearts,
Without robbing Paul to pay Peter.
We don't have to build prisons or slums.
If Peter is a Pirate; We need not follow him on that.
We can be brave, we can be joyous, we can fight for principles.
We can build cathedrals and houses instead.
If we can believe,
We can fashion bricks and mortar the way we conceive.
Our souls can inhabit a world so fashioned,
that there is room for adults and children,
and nobody is lost.
If Peter becomes a pirate,
then the Peter we know is dead.
We need not follow that Peter anymore.
We need to recreate him instead.
We need not chase his shadow.
That shadow is too sad.
We can grow up and still love like a child.
If Peter is using our hopes and dreams,
In making war on eternal enemies,
in Ponzi Schemes, in futile things.
We need not follow that dream,
but cross the fine threaded boundary,
where hope, and dreams and forests still grow.
We need not seek never never land;
To follow better and nobler goals.
We don't need all the stars in heaven,
Just to reach one.
If we can believe,
That is all we need in fairy dust.
The waters are fresh, the dust is temporary,
and we can garden the garden all green,
growing under our very own star.
Open your minds!
Chris
Ring of fire reports:
http://ringoffireradio.com/blogengine/post/The-Raw-Roundup-Joe-The-Plumber-Quits-the-GOP.aspx
On the one hand:
"According to a new report released this week by Human Rights First, US interrogators killed nearly four dozen detainees during or after their interrogations. In all, 98 detainees have died while in US hands. Thirty-four homicides have been identified, with at least eight detainees — and as many as 12 — having been tortured to death. Most of those taken captive were killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at least one was wrongfully arrested and detained. The CIA claims that it had medical personnel on hand during all of the torture sessions, which they referred to as interrogations. "
On the other hand:
"In a related story, Attorney General Eric Holder announced this week that he authorized rendition during his time with the Clinton Administration. Cautioning Holder that any potential investigation into the Bush administration’s torture program could result in Democrats being roped in, Republicans Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Richard Shelby of Alabama pressed Holder on the CIA’s ‘rendition’ program that moved terrorism suspects from one country to another in the cover of darkness. Despite frequent condemnation of the practice around the world, rendition — the secret capture, transportation and detention of suspected terrorists to foreign prisons in countries that cooperate with the U.S. — remains in the CIA’s playbook, thanks to a Jan. 22 executive order issued by President Obama. "
Why didn't this come out during his confirmation hearings?
Now, what the Clinton Administration did was deceptive and wrong. Here is how extraordinary rendition worked under Clinton. Apparently the top brass of the administration would decide that a high value prisoner might have useful information. They would get together, draft up a letter of rendition. The letter would offer to deliver a prisoner to a country, usually someone who was a national of that country, for interrogation. The letter would include empty promises that the prisoner would be well treated. Bill Clinton later confessed that these "extraordinary renditions were wrong" when pressed by his wife, who was running for President and criticizing extraordinary rendition. They were wrong. And Holder was part of that effort.
But what happened with the Bush Administration was different. They used the same structures, but they decided to employ "torture lite" themselves and "enhanced interrogatiions" directly. The difference was qualitative but on an order of magnitude. This is the distinction between hypocritically looking the other way while an enemy is tortured and ordering murder and torture. The Clinton Administration was sleazy, but the Bush administration was criminal.
Prisoners were still renditioned, but now questioning was in the hands of the CIA. The memo from Bibey, is a letter from him to an unnamed psychologist/psychiatrist/SME, who wanted to use a variety of torture methods on Abu Zubaya, which directly contradicts the self-serving, and violent denials of the far right crowd who claim that we didn't practice Torture. After Zubaya, we tortured regularly. And starting around 2003 with Miller's "Gitmoization" of interrogations there, we tortured in Iraq too.
He wanted to use the "Insect treatment"; Because Zubayah was afraid of insects, they would tell him that they were going to place Zubayah in a box with a stinging insect. "You would however, place a harmless insect in the box." Ann and company deny that, making abusive comments about fat caterpillars. But the fact is that stress positions, walling, and other excruciating tortures were regularly practiced at Guantanamo and in Iraq, in circumvention of our own treaty standards, the Military Code of Justice, and our own handbooks and instructions.
Ann Coulter also lies by saying that Japanese were not prosecuted for war crimes that included waterboarding. People like Bibey, Robin or Ann Coulter can deny that Waterboarding is torture. They try to claim that the form of waterboarding is not torture because the method is slightly different from that used by the Japanese. This isn't a matter of listening comprehension, this is deliberate dishonesty. The difference between the two forms of waterboarding is so miniscule it only exists in their propaganda. Therefore, when they do so it is they who are practicing the big lie:
“Yuki placed some cloth on my face. And then with water from the faucet, they poured on me until I became unconscious. He repeated that four or five times.”
Exactly the same method. And note, each session is no more than 20-30 seconds.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/dec/18/john-mccain/history-supports-mccains-stance-on-waterboarding/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201170.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
http://www.pegc.us/archive/Journals/Wallach_CWR_nexus.pdf
After watching the right wing march in goose-step on this subject I now can understand how our more conventional, naive and trusting fellows could be taken in by this material. These people act like they'd go to jail if the people who ordered these things went to jail. But it would destroy the Republican party if ordinary Republicans understood just how much the Bush administration betrayed them. On the other hand, there is a core of people who think that waterboarding isn't torture, rape isn't rape, white is black, and its okay to hate if you are Anglo/American, go to church, and say it is okay.
Really sick. In Rwanda, the massacres there were fueled by hate-rhetoric of fired up and sick talk show hosts who labelled "Tutsis" cockroaches and advocated killing them. Once one starts down the path of demonization, torture, and condoning it, the slip cann be awfully fast. When a Liddy or Michael Savage starts using violent rhetoric I start worrying about who's going to die. Mussolini started his career inciting violence through the Socialist Newspaper Avanti!, eventually it wasn't enough for him. We can't just dismiss violent and angry people as moonbats. They can be very dangerous.
It also should and might humble Democrats to realize that Bill Clinton started the extraordinary renditions program which the Bush Administration took as their starting point in entering a twilight zone of horror. It should be humbling to remember just how angry we all got after 9/11, including me. I never went so far as advocating torture however and there never was a need for extraordinary renditions.
Holder has to prosecute. Jessee Ventura gives the best argument anyone can muster as to why:
The idea that anyone should be able to justify such high crimes on the basis of "I was just following orders" is disgusting. If anybody had ordered me to do such a repulsive thing -- I'd resign on the spot. Heck, when I was asked to cover up some inventory shennanigans at a company I'd hoped to make a career of, I resigned -- and shared what was going on with senior management. Sometimes it is more important to be able to look at oneself in a mirror. I don't know how Cheney and his allies can handle looking at their own faces.
Further reading:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15886834
http://www.rothkochapel.org/billgoodman.pdf (need PdF)
2005 Memo reaffirming use of Stress Positions, "walling", waterboarding on selected prisoners. (http://luxmedia.vo.llnwd.net/o10/clients/aclu/olc_05102005_bradbury46pg.pdf)
The list is here:
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/olc_memos.html
Most problems come from people jumping to conclusions, jumping to solutions, and as a result "jumping to contusions." To resolve real problems in real time, we have to slow down, analyze, define missions and principles, and then figure out how we can use those principles to solve those problems within the scope of our organizations mission. The irony is that valid principles are practical things. The problem with using them isn't the principles, but the realism of how they are put to practice.
People tend to throw solutions at problems before really diagnosing them. They tend to think that if they throw a solution out there, it will solve the problem. Often It doesn't. Often it only aggravates it.
This is true in the realm of laws, and in every other realm. Often when the cry goes up, "there ought to be a law!" A law is usually already there When one isn't present there was formerly one there and it was rescinded, or a law existed that had been hopelessly mangled by selfish and twisted interpretations.
Adding new laws doesn't help if the old laws have been corrupted and the system itself is corrupt. Telling someone they have to do something isn't going to accomplish what we want if at the same time we are telling them we'll punish them for doing the right thing, or actually punishing them for doing so. All it results in is selective law enforcement, corruption, and folks arbitraging delusion.
When there are discrepancies between reality, what "ought to be" and the rules of the real world game, this creates what in economics are known as externalities, and in law is known as public hazard or outright public harm. Still folks stand to make a lot of money by arbitraging the benefits of a private good against the risk of being made to pay its public costs, so they are always going to try. That is why we always need laws against fraud, racketeering and conspiracy. People have a way of pirating other people's goods for their private needs.
One doesn't make money from owning a single refinery. Owning a network of refineries, the entire distribution system, and the banks which finance that refinery is a way to make a whole lot of money. Somebody has to be king. Somebody has to organize the system. That person is creatively organizing what is essentially a new reality. JP Morgan and Rockefeller organized Standard Oil this way. They leveraged the common good into fortunes. Fortunes they deserved on one level. However, the reality they leveraged clipped out competitors, workers, and consumers from participation. It was a Kingdom not a democracy, and oppression not freedom for many participants. As long as they could sell the public taste and beauty of a giant retail monopoly they were able to arbitrage the difference between public good and private gain.
It is easy to make lots of money from a mine if one doesn't worry about what the asbestos in that mine is doing to the town where the mine is located and the people inhaling that asbestos. It is easy to ignore a problem when one is raking in the dough. Arbitraging delusion involves socializing costs and privatizings the commons. When a good (or harm) is public it is a public problem, which makes it political. Externalities are an intensely political area, because of this. The most politically involved people are people who make their living by arbitraging public goods to private profit. And all these people are essentially arbitraging delusion because their job involves conning the rest of us into thinking that there is no public harm, that they are doing something legitimate, and that they deserve the vast sums they rake in doing it.
That is also why there is so much money to be made in gaming the issue. In the early modern age, public costs were deemed not important enough to stop private enterprise, monied capital, from investing in factories and employing labor to work in those factories. It was deemed enough of a public good that those poor ignorant peasants be driven from their lazy villages and forced to move to cities and towns where they could be put to productive work. Clean air, clean water, or workers rights, conditions or health, were considered secondary issues.
The only public good that mattered was State power and the wealth of the country as a whole. Workers didn't mind sacrificing their health to feed their families because at least their families would be fed. We applauded folks who turned themselves into millionaires and billionaires. The public good matters.
However, external costs are only external to a subsystem or a member of a system. Eventually such shared (socialized) costs add up to enough expense and misery that all but the most benighted of Scrooges and libertarians will take notice. That is why a culture of secrecy and impunity is necessary to all forms of long term oppression. Using advertizing (propaganda really) businesses could get people to think that it was worth a few people needing to be on oxygen in order to have better quality clothes and food for society as a whole.
However, even with secrecy and impunity, the Jacob Marley's ghosts of the past come in the form of cost sheets, sick managers, sick owners, and sickly children even of the very rich. The Tobacco industry eventually gave up fighting its externalities, when one of its marketing executives realized his cancer was caused by smoking and started spilling secrets. It's in their interest to deal with global warming, etc... eventually.
However, meanwhile they can raise the pirate flag and level broadsides at naysayers. They can encourage the delusions necessary to sustaining the difference between actual costs and benefits and their portion in the affair. Or they can figure out ways to leverage the externalities into a way to make money; Cap and Trade is designed to do this. Eventually we'll fight pollution. Perhaps not until some few very wealthy pirate individuals won't wake until they find that the only thing left of their Caribean Tax Havens is their boat anchored to the ruins of their former home under the waves. They have to take the pirate flag down and sail home sometime.
The principle of the "public good" is a fundamental one. It is memorialized in the pre-amble to the constitition. Liberty, Equality and "right to happiness" all derive their meaning from it.
The beginnings of all law is when folks get together to divide up the property in their common realm. Every society starts as a communal gathering. It takes a governnment to have anything but anarchy. Government is an organizing principle. Anarchism and some forms of libertarianism are not only illogical they are absurd.
As demonstrated by the Tobacco example, there are a lot of folks who make their income by arbitraging delusion. It is the adjudication between group rights and individual power and hierarchy that defines the complexity of law and our society. And the only difference between a lawless and a lawful society is whether or not people pay attention to the principles on which their laws are drafted. And the only result from promoting or exploiting delusion is to acquire things we don't really need at the expense of others. If someone tells me he wants to sell his things at a discount because he's about to be raptured or go to Mars. I can make money from him, but I'd rather convince him to be realistic.
Most countries where bad things happen have perfectly good laws on the books, which they permit their leaders, their officers, to ignore. If we don't hold our deputies, representatives, and officers accountable then we don't have democracy whatever our papers say we have. The source of impunity and bad governance is in our behavior as citizens. If we go off to a mountain retreat and ignore what is happening in the cities we are giving those officials impunity, no matter how we might delude ourselves that we are practicing metta, peacefulness, etc. No man is an island is as true, or more so, today, than it was in John Dunne's time.
There is a law! it's called reality.
Chris
I noticed a long time ago that things go in cycles. Most of us don't make the mistakes of our parents. We usually make the mistakes of our grandparents, great-grandparents, or even their parents. This is a real shame, but it is reality. Long after I noticed this phenomena I learned about Kondratiev waves and realized that my observation was not my own alone. Our Grandparents and great grandparents suffered some horrific effects that came entirely from bad business, Government and banking policies. They experienced something called a "Great Depression." They also took steps to avoid a repeat of the Great Depression. Unfortunately, my generation and the ones that have been following it, decided that they'd done such a good job, they could afford to dismantle it. We got folks like Rush Limbaugh promising to "do something about that" in regard to those policies. And they did. Now we are facing a disaster.
In the late 19th century and early 20th century ordinary people were encouraged to invest in the Stock Market through "Bucket shops" scattered all over the country. They also invested indirectly by depositing their money in banks, and the banks would invest in stocks or where-ever they thought they could maximize risk. There was no thought about risk. Some of this was through Bucket Shops. The way a bucket shop worked is that a local salesman would sell a derived security that allowed a number of investors to pool together to buy a security on wall street. This allowed ordinary people to play the stockmarket, and was sold as a way to protect their investments. Unfortunately the same stock could be sold 10 times and the profit pocketed by rich and well connected con men 9 times before anyone caught on. Some bucket shops actually bought stocks, but many of them turned into simply cons. And eventually even "legitimate" bucket shops would get caught short when the stock market did something expected and didn't perform as expected. As a result of tens of thousands of people being scammed bucket shops were outlawed.
Even after the bucket shops were exposed, ordinary people were still encouraged to invest in the stock market. Worse, most people put their money in banks, and many of those banks over-leveraged (borrowed more than they had assets to cover) or invested in the Stock market. Eventually the stock market crashed, the banks closed. And ordinary folks realized that this whole idea was stupid, they'd been had. Meanwhile unemployment levels went to 30% while the rich, many of whom had created the casino in the first place, continued to live a life of inconsiderate luxury.
When men were put out on the street in the 1930's, they'd been so sold on "rugged individualism" that many of them wouldn't admit that they had been victimized or work together. Men in those days would blame themselves. That is part of the reason suicide rates were high, and men would ride the rails looking for work.
Casino capitalism is for people with enough money to be able to diversify their holdings and afford to take a risk with some of their money. It's not for people who depend on their income to eat. Eventually casino capitalists either outsmart themselves and whatever bubbles they are blowing pop. Unfortunately they are usually working with Other People's Money, so its ordinary folks left holding the bag. We are seeing this in the current financial crisis. We outlawed a large number of practices in the 30's because they were risky, downright fraudulent, or not in the public interest.
Enter the 1970's. Specifically, our society changed. Our business leaders decided that they didn't want to pay pensions anymore, so they started selling us on 401K's and pension plans. They hired folks like the now deceased Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan to sell us on the notion that "we too" could be stockholders and make lots of money investing in risky things. They seem to have honestly believed that making ordinary people investors would help invest ordinary people in the system. They knew that if people identified with the investor class it would be easier for investors to rule the country. It worked. These guys enabled 30 years of more and more blatent kleptocracy. The risky behavior repeated. And now we are paying the price.
What they most people didn't understand is that getting people to invest in a casino is only good for the casino owners. As a result most of us now have inadequate 401K's and Keogh's and no pension plan. Those of us with pensions have them in the able hands of the PBGC, which usually has to cut benefits to keep them solvent. And we are facing a demographic disaster. And what are people doing? Blaming themselves. Well to a certain extent we deserve some blames. We are the ones who didn't pay attention in history class.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/06/AR2009050603322.html
Robin writes:
"Hi Chris, Are you going to delete this too? I realize that you will call me all kinds of names; but I shall just take that as a test of my patience and compassion. I do confess I am tempted to retaliate; but then I would become what I do not like."
First I didn't name names in that post. I quoted, cited sources that prove the article I was quoting were wrong, said the material was wrong and showed why. I could have been quoting quite a few yahoogroups. But in this case it came from BDG, which used to actually have actual dialogues. Someone is telling on himself!
Second, I think the main reason that Robin doesn't retaliate is that he's already gone after me as much as he dares to out in the open. I've left the Buddhist Dialogue Group. I've left the Buddhist Moderators Group. Both groups I used to think I co-owned. He was moderating most of my posts there, and ones he didn't agree with were just disappearing. He could probably go after me more, he's already tried. I just hope he doesn't try. Such behavior is unseemly.
Robin: "Now, I do not support the use of coercive methods."
But:
"However, I just do not think the coercive methods allowed rose to the level of real torture. To call those methods torture trivializes the word."
Is he kidding? No, and that is why I withdrew from Buddhist_Dialogue_Group and gave up arguing with him there. There is no word to express the contempt I feel for this argument. But listen it continues....
"If I were running things, I would subject the detainees to maitri-waves; to stimulate the empathy centers in their brains. That would, however, likely violate freedom of religion."
But he isn't running things, and I don't really have confidence that if he were he'd do much different. Maybe its bitter experience. Maybe its cynicism. But I've heard too many stories of people who loved Mozart or little children supervising torture and murder to believe this. Besides he follows this with an indirect insult:
"I realize you like to tell people what I really mean, and do not like being corrected."
So I'm going after him? I think this is projection. Yes, I don't like to be wrong. I'll go out of my way to get things right and I've on more than one occasion crawled across the floor in misery after realizing I was wrong on something. I don't mind being corrected when someone is speaking truth or speaking truthfully. But that is not the case here. So telling me this was just another effort to discredit me personally. Does he think this would win me over to his view? Does he think it convinces anybody?
"I just thought I would try to convey my actual thoughts on the topic. You know, equal time?"
He has an entire Yahoogroup, and legions of others sharing the same propaganda. All I have is this little corner here to express the truth. And what is different from what he actually says? As opposed to my quotes from his post of his arguments on BDG? How is this argument going to be different? Well I'll give him the benefit of the doubt:
"I have read through the memos. As I note above; it appears to me that what was allowed simply does not rise to the level of torture. That said, the ICRC reports allege actions that went beyond what was allowed; things that would be torture."
So much for the benefit of the doubt. Bibey's memo specifically authorized water-boarding, stress positions and other means of inflicting excruciating pain. Like all torture, the goal is to cause maximum pain without leaving permanent marks. This is not even a real argument.
Here is Singh's testimony;
http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/safefree/singh_testimony_20071108.pdf
"There are new charges that false confessions were obtained, that at least one detainee was killed. If true; those things were wrong. I simply do not believe, based in the evidence known to me, that those things happened."
It was more than one detainee. It has been documented since at least 2005. I have posts on the subject dating back to then here at Fraught with Peril. Here is one of them from Singh's testimony:
"Thus, in November 2003, interrogators in Iraq killed Abed Hamed Mowhoush, a fifty-six-year-old Iraqi general, during an interrogation in which they put him into a sleeping bag and tied him up with electrical cord. An Amy officer reprimanded for Mowhoush's death asserted that the "sleeping bag technique" was a "stress position" that he considered to have been authorized by a "September 10 2003 CJTF-7 order," and that "[iln SERE, this position is called close confinement and can be very effective." See id. at 33, A-246-47."
He goes on:
"Numerous autopsy reports attribute the homicide deaths of prisoners in U.S custody to "strangulation," "asphyxia," and "blunt force injuries." See id. at 29-30. One such autopsy report records the homicide death of a 47-year old Iraqi male who was shackled to the top of a doorframe with a gag in his mouth at the time he lost consciousness and became pulseless and died. See id. at 30. Other autopsy reports confirm that in December 2002, U.S. interrogators at Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan killed two prisoners by subjecting them to "blunt force injuries." See id. at 19,20, A-185-86, 187."
"You accurately cite what was allowed. That is a just huge step in the right direction. "A cloth is placed over the forehead and eyes. Water is then applied to the cloth in a controlled manner As this is done the cloth is lowered until it covers both the nose and mouth. Once the cloth is saturated and completely covers the mouth and nose, air flow is slightly restricted for 20 to 40 seconds due to the presence of the cloth. This effort plus the cloth produces the perception of drowning."
The 'perception' is Bibey's words. The reality is that this is a strangulation/drowning reflex. The only reason Waterboarding is stopped after 40 seconds is that the person goes unconscious. 5 time or 185 times it is torture, and it is illegal.
"They even counted the pours of water. Confusion over this led to an erroneous report that KSM was wb'd 183 times; while it was actually only 5. That shows how closely this was monitored. They counted the "pours."
This isn't even an accurate defense. It is a confession.
"That is also not what was traditionally called water boarding. With the real thing, water was either pumped into the stomach, causing severe bloating; or poured into the mouth and throat. The latter was not simulated drowning; it was drowning. Water actually entered the lungs."
Excuse me I've been studying the inquisition Robin, and dude you are either severely misinformed or deluding yourself. This is exactly how they do it. If they pour water into the lungs, the odds are the patient/subject won't survive long enough to give up and spill his beans.
"From what I understand, the methods used were simulations of torture; which are used on our own personnel, as training exercises, to prepare them for the real thing."
You have that totally backwards. You are confusing SERE training where we torture our own soldiers to prepare them for battling bad-guys, with the reality of what we were doing. Again, either you are confused, lying, or severely deluded. And since I've presented these facts to you over and over again over the past few years, my conclusion is not charitable. This was the real thing. People died.
"Again, sticking to what was allowed, this was only permitted in very limited conditions. {1}. the detainee was known to have information about impending terrorist attacks. {2}. Other methods, such as rapport building, had been tried and failed. That is what I gather from reading objective reports and the memos."
Well, KSM had already given a load of information to an FBI interrogator, who protested the stupidity of the CIA's methods. To go back to the ACLU testimony:
"Not only are these tactics at odds with legally
permissible interviewing techniques used by U.S.
law enforcement agencies in the United States, but
they are being employed by personnel in GTMO
who have little, if any, experience eliciting
information for judicial purposes. The continued
use of these techniques has the potential of
negatively impacting future interviews by FBI
agents as they attempt to gather intelligence and
prepare cases for prosecution."
"The memos also reveal that some ICRC allegations involved methods that were not allowed. For example, there were allegations a collar was used to slam detainees against concrete walls. Actually, the detainees were allowed to be pushed against false, flexible walls. Protective collars had to be used; to prevent whiplash."
Not allowed? That is part of the reason they are illegal. As the ACLU noted:
"While much of the widespread abuse described in government
documents reflects direct applications of authorized interrogation methods, some
of this abuse is also attributable to "force drift," a phenomenon described by
former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora as the tendency for the "escalation"
of force used to extract information "once [an] initial barrier against the use of
improper force [has] been breached." See id. at 30-3 1. By issuing directives
that violated laws requiring humane prisoner treatment and declaring that the
"gloves were off," the chain of command in effect gave interrogators license to
apply still more abusive variations of authorized interrogation methods. See id.
at 31."
"Another proposed "torture" was scaring a detainee with bugs. However, they could not use a stinging insect. They could use a caterpillar; but had to tell the detainee it was not a stinging insect."
Where do you get this? Bibey didn't tie their hands in his memos. On the contrary the memo says that
"One more thing. I think Gitmo was a bad idea. It was just better than any other idea. We do not know what to do with them now. Our European allies do not want them. We can not try them, the evidence against them would not be allowed in a US court."
So its a bad idea but its a good idea because the other ideas were worse? Give me a break. We are afraid to release these people because a: they'd sue us, and be; at least one might strap a bomb on himself in vengeance.
Well you got it half right.
"We can not return them to their home countries. Why? Because they would be arrested, charged with terrorism, and subjected to real torture."
We'll find places for them. The fact is we subjected them to 'real torture.' You can say what you want, but the facts speak for themselves, and hopefully eventually at least a few of the real culprits will go to jail.
"One more thing. If you really think I am such a horrid person, maybe you should pray for me? I mean instead of doing this smear campaign? The acorn evidently did not fall far from the Soka Spirit tree?"
To be a smear campaign;
a) I have to be aiming at you. This is not about you. It is about what you are putting out on the internet. You've got to stop personalizing this and look at the evidence afresh. Now, I'd prefer if you'd stop championing torture, apologizing for the folks who used it, and diminishing its reality. But even if you did I'd still continue blogging about the subject until the real culprits are brought to justice.
b) I don't see how you can complain about me smearing you while saying that somehow protesting torture is akin to Soka Spirit. If Soka Spirit were actually creating any value I'd still be involved with them. However, like "enhanced interrogations" the term is a misnomer. All I care about is truthfulness and in the case of abuse of power, and wholesale violation of law, justice. As long as Soka Spirit were truthful I'd defend their right of free speech. They aren't always truthful so I stay away from them.
Further reading:
http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/printers/111th/IPres090316.pdf
http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/printers/111th/IPres090316.pdf
Robin: gassho
Chris: Gesunheit, and see you get a whole blog entry.
This lie was put out on an international discussion board purporting to involve dialogue, but which recently has become a sounding board for disinformation and propaganda:
Buddhist Dialogue message 49687:
"You have been lied too by people who know darn well what was done did not rise to the level of torture. They also likely know what kind of information was obtained. To those with clarity, the released memos actually vindicate the Bush
Administration on the charges of torture."
What???
Waterboarding was done to at least two high value detainees. Even Fox news has a report on this:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/22/timeline-released-senate-shows-condoleezza-rice-okd-waterboarding/ Waterboarding is definitely not "torture lite", it is torture heavy.
He goes on to say:
"I am just not at all sure that what was done even constitutes water boarding, if
we look at what was permitted:
-- No water could enter any orifices. So, there was no aspiration.
-- There was the 40 second time limit,
-- Doctors were observing to enforce the rules."
First the sensation of drowning doesn't come from water entering the orifices it comes from the inability of air to enter those orifices and the way the body responds to the torture.
http://luxmedia.vo.llnwd.net/o10/clients/aclu/olc_08012002_bybee.pdf
"A cloth is placed over the forehead and eyes. Water is then applied to the cloth in a controlled manner As this is done the cloth is lowered until it covers both the nose and mouth. Once the cloth is saturated and completely covers the mouth and nose, air flow is slightly restricted for 20 to 40 seconds due to the presence of the cloth. This effort plus the cloth produces the perception of drowning."
Whether it is done by pouring water down the throat or with water over a cloth it induces a drowning sensation and severe pain.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/11/09/nance/
"The SERE community was designed over 50 years ago to show that, as a torture instrument, waterboarding is a terrifying, painful and humiliating tool that leaves no physical scars and which can be repeatedly used as an intimidation tool."
Waterboarding is illegal, and has been all along. Rice's recent statement that if the President says it is legal it is legal notwithstanding. http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=1356870
"Torture is defined under the federal criminal code as the intentional infliction of severe mental pain or suffering," said John Sifton, an attorney and researcher with the organization Human Rights Watch. "That would include water boarding."
Water boarding was designated as illegal by U.S. generals in Vietnam 40 years ago. A photograph that appeared in The Washington Post of a U.S. soldier involved in water boarding a North Vietnamese prisoner in 1968 led to that soldier's severe punishment.
"The soldier who participated in water torture in January 1968 was court-martialed within one month after the photos appeared in The Washington Post, and he was drummed out of the Army," recounted Darius Rejali, a political science professor at Reed College.
Earlier in 1901, the United States had taken a similar stand against water boarding during the Spanish-American War when an Army major was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor for water boarding an insurgent in the Philippines.
"Even when you're fighting against belligerents who don't respect the laws of war, we are obliged to hold the laws of war," said Rejali. "And water torture is torture."
The ACLU says of this:
http://blog.aclu.org/category/torture-abuse/
Since the release of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) torture memos a few weeks ago, the public discussion about torture has been robust, to say the least. First of all, it’s important to keep in mind that empirical evidence suggests that torture is an ineffective tool in securing valid information. In other words, torture doesn’t work.
Despite this crucial fact, the torture conversation has gotten muddied with irrelevant tangents. The media has been touting public polls about what Americans think about torture.
Let’s be clear: These things don’t matter.
It doesn’t matter if torture works, because it’s illegal. (Heather at Crooks & Liars points to Salon’s Joan Walsh slamming this “does it work?” argument.)
And it doesn’t matter what the polls say, because it’s still illegal. The use of torture isn’t a popularity contest.
"And while we’re at it, let’s call a spade a spade. As constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley said on Rachel Maddow the other night:
" It’s obviously disturbing to hear torture still referred to by the president as a “technique.” That’s like saying bank robbery is a “technique” for withdrawing money from a bank. It’s not a “technique”, it’s a crime…"
"Despite the past eight years, the United States is governed by the rule of law. We don’t sign treaties only to disregard them, and we don’t allow those who break the law to go unpunished."
'Let’s reconsider the torture argument in these terms: Do we want to be known to the rest of the world as a country that flagrantly ignores its own laws, not to mention the international human rights laws it agrees to? Does our government have a “do as we say, not as we do” approach to the law?"
"We do not. So let’s refocus here. Torture is illegal: There’s no two ways about it. It’s never acceptable. As Attorney General, Eric Holder is obligated to enforce and uphold the laws of this country. Remind him of this sacred duty by signing our petition calling for an independent prosecutor to investigate those who authorized the torture of detainees."
Further reading:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/08/hitchens200808
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/01/national/main3441363.shtml