Ted Rall, Author at Ted Rall's Rallblog

Obama Sells Out to Military Torturers

May 14, 2009•

Barack Obama is a liar.

Reneging on his earlier agreement to release some 2000+ photos of detainees being abused by American service personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq, he releases a stream of bullshit that doesn’t stand up to the most casual contemplation:

“The publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals,” Mr. Obama told reporters on the South Lawn. “In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”

To the contrary, additional information always provides additional understanding. If it’s more of the same, that tells us that the incidents at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were more widespread than was previously known. If it’s less, then it tells us that maybe it wasn’t. As for inflaming anti-Americanism, well, Obama’s decision not to release the photos tells me one thing: they must be fucking insanely disgusting.

As, indeed, they are. An ACLU rep appeared on MSNBC yesterday to say that he had it on good (military) authority that the photos are, in fact, much worse than what we’ve seen from Abu Ghraib. Seymour Hersh and other reporters with first- or secondhand knowledge of the photos say they are essentially pornography—orgies between soldiers and with detainees. Whether the detainees are being forced to participate or not is unknowable.

Obama says the photos aren’t as ugly as those from Abu Ghraib. If that’s true, why not release them? The imagination runs wild, and only imagines the worst. Reality can’t possibly be as bad.

The real reason Obama is covering up for the military is that they’re scared shitless of facing prosecution for their crimes—and responsibility for them goes way up the chain of command.

Obama ought to resign in shame for being such a pussy.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Excuses You Might Believe In

May 12, 2009•

Ted Rall

Democrats Are More Powerful Than Ever. How Will They Justify Doing Nothing?

The defection of Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter and the imminent certification of Al Franken as the winner of Minnesota’s election recount has handed Democrats what they always said they lacked in order to pass a progressive agenda: a filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate. Now they face the awful problem of coming up with new excuses for not doing anything.

How will Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and other fake liberals weasel out of making good on their promises for real action on healthcare, the economy and the war? It won’t be easy. They control both houses of Congress and the White House. Obama is about to fill a new vacancy on the Supreme Court. The Times of London writes that “Mr. Obama, by some assessments, has more political leverage than any president since Franklin Roosevelt in 1937″—at the peak of the New Deal, just before he overreached by trying to pack the Supreme Court.

The Republican Party, on the other hand, is suffering a crisis of faith—too much God-cheering and not enough adherence to core values like small government, fiscal conservatism, isolationism and protectionist trade policy. A mere 21 percent of Americans still call themselves Republicans, the lowest number since 1983. Similarly, reports the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, “just 21 percent say they’re confident in the Republicans in Congress ‘to make the right decisions for the country’s future,’ compared with 60 percent who express that confidence in Obama.”

Democrats have never been as powerful. Republicans are weak. Obama won with a decisive, sweeping rejection of the Republican status quo. Harry and Louise, call your agents—socialized medicine is on the way! Not.

Be careful what you wish for—what you say you wish for, anyway. “The left is going to push Obama—now that he’s got a veto-proof majority—to drive an agenda that a smart president would realize is a long-term political disaster,” GOP pollster Rick Wilson tells ABC. “Long-term political disaster” is mainstream media code for “stuff that corporations hate.”

Well, yes. What passes for the left in this country (center-right everywhere else, because they read) now has some not-unreasonable questions for Barack Obama. Such as:

Pretty please, can we now live in a country where people don’t have to spend $800 a month to health insurance companies that deny their customers’ claims?

Why are we still in Iraq?

How about some help for the victims of Katrina, many of whom never collected one red cent after losing everything?

Why are we paying billions to banks and still letting them gouge us with 25 interest credit card rates? Speaking of which:

How about doing something that might actually help people who live in the economy, rather than just capital markets?

These queries seem all the more relevant coming, as they do, from the liberal base of the Democratic party—the people who got Obama elected.

The trouble for our cute, charming prez is that he has no intention whatsoever of introducing a true national healthcare plan: one that covers everybody for free. He wants to expand the war in Afghanistan and drag out the one against Iraq. He will not punish Bush or his torturers, rescue homeowners in foreclosure, or nail scumbag banks to the wall. These changes would cost trillions of dollars to multinational insurance companies, defense contractors and other huge financial concerns who donate generously to candidates of both political parties and have a history of using their clout to manipulate elections in favor of their favorite candidates. A classic example is oil companies, who push down gas prices before elections in order to help Republicans.

The most that Democratic voters can expect from Democratic politicians is incremental, symbolic change that doesn’t cost their corporate sponsors any serious coin. The New York Times marked Obama’s 100th day in office with an editorial that approvingly encapsulated his accomplishments to date: “He is trying to rebuild this country’s shattered reputation with his pledge to shut down the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, his offer to talk with Iran and Syria, and, yes, that handshake with Venezuela’s blow-hard president, Hugo Chávez…The government is promoting women’s reproductive rights. It is restoring regulations to keep water clean and food safe. The White House has promised to tackle immigration reform this year.”

Trying. Promoting. Has promised.

Guantánamo isn’t being closed; it’s being moved. Gitmo’s detainees will be transferred to a new harsher gulag under construction in Afghanistan. Thawed relations with Iran and Syria would create new business opportunities for big oil. Defending the right to an abortion is popular and doesn’t cost Bank of America a dime. Immigration reform is code for legalizing illegal immigrants, not closing the border. Safety regulations reassure consumers and pump up the economy. Closing the border would raise wages. Corporations won’t allow that.

Unfortunately for Obama’s Democrats, small-bore initiatives only go so far, especially with the economy in meltdown. When people are desperate and angry they don’t care as much about flag-burning or creationism or a handshake with Hugo Chávez. They want action—real action.

How will the Democrats avoid genuine change now that they enjoy the ability to enact it? Will they blame obstructionist Republicans? Will Democrats cross the aisle to vote with the Republicans? A new war, perhaps?

If nothing else, whatever dog-ate-my-homework excuse they come up with for sitting on their butts is bound to be amusing. If nothing else.

Reader Poll: Which Book Do You Want More?

May 11, 2009•

Ted Rall

I’m thinking of publishing a high-quality (hard back, nice printing) limited-edition run of my next book. The content will be one of the following:

A Best of the Early ’90s cartoon collection
-or-
A collection of my longer essays

The cartoon collection would bring together the best stuff from Waking Up in America and All The Rules Have Changed, both out of print, along with other previously unpublished (in books) stuff from before 1996. It will focus on Clinton’s first term, with a view toward doing sequel books for Clinton’s second term, Bush’s first term, Bush’s second term and, someday, Obama’s first term. There would also be some background and comments throughout.

The essay collection would bring together the long essays I wrote for Link, Might, P.O.V. and other late, great magazines that are no longer with us. Topics range from Gen X to romance to Lake Sarez in Tajikistan.

The cost per copy would probably be fairly high, like $40, because of the low print run.

Do you think you would buy one or both of these books?
If so, would you be willing to commit (by paying for it via PayPal) in advance?
Which one do you prefer? Is there something you’d like to see more?

Please post your comments or email me and let me know. Thanks in advance!

NEW ANIMATION: Dharma Bums

May 5, 2009•

Ted Rall

Here it is—my latest animation with David Essman! This is closer to what these are going to look like from now on…around a minute in length, short and sweet. Fans of “Lost” may appreciate the Dharma Initiative-style training video technique. Fans of torture will appreciate the fact that the CIA thought it was necessary to waterboard one guy 183 times.

5. “Dharma Bums”

May 5, 2009•

Ted Rall

Animated editorial cartoon by Ted Rall and David Essman. Episode five “webisode” of a new series about downward mobility in America. This time, Sarah takes up an offer for an Indecent Proposal.

New Animation Coming

May 5, 2009•

Ted Rall

My newest animation is “Dharma Bums,” a simultaneous hat tip to “Lost”–one of my favorite shows–and a send-up of the torture policy that led to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed getting waterboarded 183 times in one month. Because, you know, 182 times just ain’t enough.

Anyway, the video goes up at 4 pm East Coast time. Hope you like it!

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Why We Fight

May 4, 2009•

Ted Rall

U.S. Troops Die For Rapists

American soldiers serving in Vietnam wondered what they were fighting for. U.S. troops in Afghanistan don’t have that problem. They know exactly what they’re fighting for: rapists.

After President Obama’s coming “Afghan surge” there will be 72,000 soldiers in Afghanistan. Their primary mission is to prevent Afghans from overthrowing the unpopular regime of Hamid Karzai, the former oil consultant installed by George W. Bush when the U.S. occupation began nearly eight years ago.

America’s media repeatedly claimed that Afghan women would be better off under the U.S.-supported Northern Alliance puppet government headed by Karzai than under the Taliban. But when I went to Afghanistan and asked women what they thought, they had a different story. The defeat of the Taliban brought about the collapse of law and order, making life even more dangerous, especially for women. “Under the Taliban,” a woman told me, “I watched rapists being executed. Now I see them in the government.”

The Afghan women’s rights group RAWA has repeatedly told anyone willing to listen that there hasn’t been much improvement for women and girls since the U.S. occupation began in 2001. But no one–least of all left-of-center Americans eager to embrace the Afghan war–has wanted to hear what they had to say. “Most women still wear the all-encompassing burqa through fear of attack and social pressure, a third of women in Kabul do not leave the house, forbidden from doing so by the male members of the family, and it is still almost impossible for women to get a divorce,” reported The Sunday Herald in 2005.

Liberal Democrats who cling to Afghanistan as “the good war” the U.S. should be fighting are being forced to confront the ugly truth about their ally. Karzai has signed a law that states that “women cannot leave the house without their husbands’ permission, that they can only seek work, education or visit the doctor with their husbands’ permission, and that they cannot refuse their husband sex,” reported the British newspaper The Guardian on March 31st.

The Shiite Personal Status act applies only to devotees of the Shia branch of Islam, which account for between 10 and 20 percent of the population. How can a secular democratic state have different laws depending on a citizen’s faith? The answer is: It can’t. Afghanistan isn’t secular or democratic. The “new” Afghanistan’s constitution is based on Sharia law–exactly as it was under the Taliban. But the U.S. media has purposefully failed to report the icky truth about our ally.

The new law requires women to have sex with their husbands at least once every four days unless they are sick or menstruating. “Obedience, readiness for intercourse and not leaving the house without the permission of the husband are the duties of the wife,” reads the law of a nation ostensibly invaded by U.S. troops in part to liberate Afghan women. “As long as the husband is not traveling, he has the right to have sexual intercourse with his wife every fourth night,” it says.

Afghan Senator Humaira Namati calls the rape bill “worse than during the Taliban” and said it was rammed through parliament without debate. “Anyone who spoke out was accused of being against Islam,” she said. Several hundred women protesting the law on the streets of Kabul were viciously assaulted by men as police stood back and watched.

In fairness to the responsible male legislators, they did add a provision to protect Shiite women from “dead bed”: Afghan men have to put out “at least once every four months.”

Karzai signed legalized rape into law in order to appease right-wing legislators in an election year. After international criticism, however, he began backpedaling with the lamest of all possible reasons: he didn’t read the bill before he was for it.

“I was not aware of what I had signed,” Afghan parliamentarian Sabrina Saqib said Karzai told her. The legislation “has so many articles,” Karzai told CNN. “Now I have instructed, in consultation with clergy of the country, that the law be revised and any article that is not in keeping with the Afghan constitution and Islamic Sharia must be removed from this law.”

As Karzai BSes for the cameras, hundreds of Afghan women languish in prisons around the country. Their crime? They’re teen brides, some as young as 10, who ran away from much older husbands who purchased them. “In President Hamid Karzai’s Afghanistan, women are still imprisoned for running away from home,” reports The Sunday Herald.

Nice theocracy you got there, Mullah Karzai.

Remember this column the next time you watch a flag-draped coffin returning from Afghanistan. The young man inside that box didn’t die for nothing. He died to protect rapists.

Blogger Problems with Image Posting

May 3, 2009•

Ted Rall

Any computer experts who use Blogger would be most useful right now.

I can’t post images to the . Here’s the situation:

When I click the Load Image icon in the Create New Post screen, it cycles through and then says “done”. But there’s no code, and no image. Usually there’s a string of code.

I’ve tried clearing my cache in Firefox. Nothing.

The workaround I’ve discovered is to create an entirely new blog, load the image up there, then cut and paste the code for the image from there into the .

I am trying to move to WordPress–which is itself a nightmare–but in the meantime, I’d like to have this basic functionality at Blogger. Anyone got a clue what’s going on?

SYNDICATED COLUMN: One Nation, Two Systems of Justice

April 30, 2009•

Ted Rall

Why Bush Must Go to Prison

Do you believe in “intelligent design”? It’s the argument that the universe is so logical that it must have been planned out by a master creator. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, single-handedly disproves the existence of such a God.

Friedman is the nation’s most prominent opinion writer. He wins journalistic prizes. Audiences shell out big bucks to hear him speak. Book collections of his columns become bestsellers for months on end. Yet the dude can’t write. I’m not talking about his opinions. Friedman doesn’t know how to arrange nouns and verbs in a way that is pleasing to readers of the English language. He is to writing what George W. Bush is to oratory.

Stranger still is Friedman’s role as über barometer of conventional wisdom. When Congress, media tastemakers and thus most Americans bought into Bush’s Saddam-has-WMDs story, Friedman did too. When the Iraq War started to go wrong but officially acceptable opinion wanted to stay and “finish the job,” so did he. When everyone threw up their hands in disgust, Friedman was there with them.

Of course, he was wrong. He’s always wrong. But he’s always in perfect sync with conventional wisdom–which is almost always wrong.

Friedman’s prose appears to have barely survived the linguistic equivalent of a harsh interrogation technique: “Because that is when Al Qaeda’s remnants will try to throw a Hail Mary pass–that is, try to set off a bomb in a U.S. city–to obscure its defeat by moderate Arabs and Muslims in the heart of its world.” Did he get this sports metaphor from some think tank neocon, or was he lame enough to make it up himself? Whether he leads or follows the average mean of the mainstream, Friedman’s role as the nation’s ultimate bellwether is what makes him worth reading.

Which is why it’s so disquieting to read Friedman support of Obama’s refusal to prosecute torturers. Times Tom may be a fool. His logic is certainly hopeless. But the people who matter–Congress, editors and producers at the big papers and broadcast networks and thus most of the public–agree with him.

Seven years after accounts of torture by American soldiers and CIA operatives first became public, the revelation that one detainee had been waterboarded 183 times in a single month has sticken a Katrina-like nerve. Conventional, mainstream, average, generic U.S. public opinion wants something done about it–an investigation, maybe prosecution of a few of the attorneys who authored the Torture Memos–but nothing close to genuine accountability. Friedman’s April 29th column reflects this internal conflict:

“Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has testified to Congress that more than 100 detainees died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, with up to 27 percent of these declared homicides by the military. They were allegedly kicked to death, shot, suffocated or drowned. Look, our people killed detainees [Friedman’s emphasis], and only a handful of those deaths have resulted in any punishment of U.S. officials.”

By Friedman’s math, the military admits to the torture-murders of 27 people. He’s low-balling. He doesn’t include detainees murdered by the military in other places like Guantánamo or the Navy’s fleet of prison ships, killed by the CIA at secret prisons, or slaughtered by foreign torturers after being “extraordinarily renditioned” by the U.S. Even so, 27 is a lot. No one would suggest letting a serial killer off the hook for 27 torture-murders.

Friedman does. “The president’s decision to expose but not prosecute those responsible,” he writes, is justified. Why? Because “justice taken to its logical end here would likely require bringing George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials to trial, which would rip our country apart.”

“Rip our country apart.” Wow.

Granting prosecutorial immunity to war criminals like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell is already “tearing the country apart.”

First and foremost, it confirms many people’s suspicion that there are two systems of justice in America: one for the rich and powerful and another for you and me. If I kidnap a man and hold him overnight, I face the death penalty or life in prison. Bush and his top officials ordered the kidnapping of tens of thousands of men as young as 12 years of age, the torture of thousands and the murder of hundreds. Until America’s official mass murderers are treated as harshly as its freelance psychos, Americans will view their justice system as something to be feared rather than respected.

Not only does extending executive privilege into retirement–and not even conservatives think there’s a legal basis for this–encourage lawless behavior by current and future political leaders, it feeds partisanship. Republicans impeached Bill Clinton for lying about a BJ. He was also disbarred (and rightly so). Nixon, on the other hand, resigned before being impeached and never faced a jury. If Bush and his minions get away with murder, does that mean that only Democrats are subject to the rule of law?

If the officials who ordered torture, the legislators who let it happen, the lawyers who justified it and the men and women who carried it out are not held accountable, the message will not be–as Obama seems to believe-that the Bush years represented some weird aberration in American history. Obama will be telling the world that the 2008 election changed nothing, that legal illegality could return at the drop of a hat (or the detonation of a dirty bomb), that his Administration protects the criminals and thus endorses their crimes. Millions of Americans, many of whom voted for him, already feel alienated from a country that expresses values that it doesn’t live up to. Refusing to prosecute Bush deepens their cynicism.

Cynicism, Mssrs. Friedman and Obama, is what’s ripping the guts out of America every second of every day. Only consistent and fair application of the law can begin the healing.