It’s 1933 Again. But FDR Lost.

NEW YORK—When the economic collapse began a year ago, many Americans took comfort in the historical parallels with the Great Depression. As it had in 1929, the current crisis began under the clueless reign of a Republican, George W. Bush. Universally reviled since his non-response to hurricane Katrina had exposed him and the men around him as both uncaring and incompetent—either one was forgivable, not both—Bush had reacted in the classic cold-blooded Republican form embodied by the president who gave his name to the Hoovervilles.

But all was not lost. The Democrats were coming in! Barack “Yes We Can” Obama was running well ahead in the polls. Soon our new FDR would clean up Bush’s mess.

In the late fall of 2008 Bush looted the stripped-bare U.S. Treasury one final time. Hundreds of billions of dollars in “bailouts,” this time for the benefit of the banks, insurance companies and automobile manufacturers whose profligate ways had contributed to the crisis, were doled out without pre-conditions. Millions of homeowners who faced foreclosure got no help whatsoever.

The way to stimulate a consumer-based economy is to put money directly into consumers’ pockets. Instead, Bush deployed the standard GOP trickle-down approach. Boosting the banks would encourage them to restore liquidity, allowing individuals and businesses to resume borrowing. But the banks weren’t stupid. They no longer wanted to lend to people who couldn’t repay them. They held on to the cash. Credit markets seized up.

Like his father in 1992, Bush finished his reign as he had begun it: tone-deaf, cheerful, obliviously floating above the mayhem, utterly unconcerned with the fate of the average American staring at a stack of bills (and, in the case of a half a million Americans each month, a pink slip).

We were a nation without leadership. We knew there was no point looking to Bush and his GOP gangsters for help. But we weren’t too worried. Obama was coming. He would be the neo-FDR. He would get things rolling again.

During the 1932 campaign Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised that help was on the way. In radio addresses and in speeches across the country, FDR argued against Hoover’s trickle-down approach. He spoke on behalf of the “forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”

In his lucid biography of FDR, “Traitor to His Class,” the historian H.W. Brands described FDR’s sales pitch: “For too long, he said, government had operated for the benefit of the wealthy, consigning the poor to the margins of public life. The Hoover administration had responded to the crisis by furnishing aid to big banks and corporations. This approach was characteristic of the Republicans, Roosevelt said, and characteristically wrong. It treated ordinary men and women as secondary to the powerful firms that had long dominated American life. And it certainly hadn’t done anything to alleviate the Depression, which grew worse with each passing month. Roosevelt advocated “building from the bottom up,” as he put it; supplying aid to those who most needed it.”

Attacking the 2008-09 Great Recession wasn’t rocket science. The causes of the economic collapse were strikingly similar: a real estate bubble feeding a stock market bubble, excessive borrowing and lending. So were the results: by the time Obama became president in January, the real unemployment rate—calculated the way it was calculated in 1933—was the same 20 percent it was when FDR took the oath of office.

Keynesian-influenced economists such as Paul Krugman pushed the incoming Obama Administration to repeat FDR’s successful approach. Putting job creation first, FDR’s New Deal programs directly put millions of people to work on government projects. The WPA, which employed eight million Americans during its existence, built bridges and highways. The TVA put up dams and the CCC improved national parks. The federal government even hired artists and authors to paint murals in public buildings and write travel guides to the 48 states.

Long after World War II ended the Depression once and for all, Americans made use of New Deal-era labor: “The WPA built or improved 651,000 miles of roads, 19,700 miles of water mains and 500 water treatment plants. Workers built 24,000 miles of sidewalks; 12,800 playgrounds; 24,000 miles of storm and sewer lines; 1,200 airport buildings; 226 hospitals; more than 5,900 schools, and more than two million privies,” according to a PBS special about the New Deal. There’s plenty of work to do now: the U.S. needs a national high-speed rail system to compete with European and Asian countries, not to mention new mass transit systems and school buildings. Pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq and hire Americans to start building!

Nine months into his presidency, however, it is clear that Obama is more Hoover than FDR. There has been virtually no investment in public infrastructure. There will be no public jobs programs. According to The New York Times, “Obama’s economic advisers are sifting options for a new package of tax cuts and other job creation measures to be unveiled in next year’s State of the Union address.”

No one in Congress has proposed a single jobs-creation bill. Instead, they’re working to extend unemployment benefits to 79 weeks. “As Democrats have found, aiding those who have lost their jobs,” comments the Times, “is simpler than preventing more layoffs and creating more jobs.”

Is Obama stupid? Or is he crazy? More than one out of five Americans is jobless. Many more are underemployed. There are six jobseekers for every job. Inflation is out of control. Yet he thinks we can wait until January 2010? Does he really believe that tax cuts create jobs?

Other ideas include “a tax credit for homebuyers and accelerated depreciation for businesses.” There’s also “a $3,000 tax credit for each new hire” and “allowing more businesses to deduct their net operating loans going back five years instead of the usual two.”

When Bush flew home to Texas, we thought we were getting an FDR to replace a Hoover. Instead, we got another Hoover.

Even if we had a president willing and able to offer the bold and decisive leadership that FDR offered in the 1930s, the challenge posed by the fiscal crisis would be daunting. But we’re not as lucky as our grandparents. We’re stuck with a small-minded schmuck with the vision of a small-time Chicago alderman. Think about it: this is a guy who thinks tinkering with the tax code is going to save American capitalism!

It’s 1933. This time, however, Hoover got reelected. Can we hold out until 1937 for a president who understands that we need 10 million new jobs, and that we need them yesterday?

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the upcoming graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.”)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

In Afghanistan, Pull Out Soldiers and Send in Engineers

Eight years into the longest war in American history, we’ve learned what doesn’t work in Afghanistan. What will?

More troops won’t help. But neither will the prescription now being floated in Washington: maintaining bases of small commando units that could be called upon to wage covert counterinsurgency operations across the border in Pakistan.

Now it’s time to fight the war for hearts and minds the way it ought to have been done from the start—instead of hostile troops, Afghanistan needs civil engineers. Stop blowing up wedding parties and start building bridges. Pack away the Predator drones and string up fiberoptic cable. It’s time to give Afghanistan what it needs most, and what Afghans crave: the gift of infrastructure.

More than anything else, Afghans need paved roads. The second priority is electricity. Third is telephone service. An Afghanistan possessing these three building blocks of nationhood could modernize its own economy and political system at an astonishing speed. And it would have the people of the United States to thank.

According to the Pentagon, fewer than 15 percent of Afghanistan’s roads are paved, but most of these include roads that no American driver would deem passable. NGOs say fewer than one percent are in decent shape. Either way, moving people or goods from one place to another is a daunting prospect in Afghanistan. Distances that can be covered in the U.S. by a 15-minute drive require hours of torturous travel over backbreaking, axle-shattering ruts and blast craters.

The U.S. recently spent $1 million to help Afghanistan open its first national park, in the relatively peaceful Bamiyan province. But no one visits the park—due to the state of the roads. “The drive to Band-e-Amir from the Afghan capital of Kabul, 150 miles away, takes as long as 12 hours over rocky roads,” reports USA Today. “Trucks easily overturn, and the talc-like dust of the high desert regularly chokes the air filters of even the hardiest vehicles.” In addition, hundreds of bridges have been blown up during 30 years of civil war, forcing motorists to ford rivers. Cars get washed away all the time.

A local eco-tourism guide says the park is a waste of money. “We need a road. We need electricity. We need an airport,” says Jawad Wafa, 22. Afghans have been pleading with the U.S. to stop bombing and start building for years. The U.S. makes promise after promise, but the bulldozers never arrive. Americans blame corrupt Afghans. Afghans complain that the Taliban makes construction too dangerous. Billions of dollars have vanished; little has been accomplished.

With relatively few natural resources and little arable land, Afghanistan is economically most notable for the countries it separates. Its only hope for prosperity relies on trade. Pakistani truckers want to ply a new Silk Road by shipping cheap manufactured goods from India and China into Central Asia, the Caucasus, Russia and eastern Europe. The Afghans could collect tolls and customs duties on products passing through their territory. But this traffic will remain a mere trickle as long as the roads remain impassable and unsafe.

Farmers currently account for 85 percent of the population, and some of them could be persuaded to stop growing opium and return to traditional Afghan crops—pomegranates, apricots and almonds—if decent roads allowed them to get their produce to markets.

Electricity is another vital component of a modern state. But only seven percent of Afghanistan has any electricity whatsoever. Even Kabul suffers daily blackouts. Were the Afghan electrical grid to become widespread and reliable, people wouldn’t have to rush home before dusk to avoid gangs of roving rapists and murderers. It would be harder for Taliban forces to plant roadside bombs and ambush vehicles on brightly lit highways. Factories and offices could remain open, run computers, and operate after dark. Water pumps would become more efficient and ubiquitous.

A broad communications network is the third prerequisite for economic viability. When I was in Afghanistan during the fall of 2001, I was struck by how easily misinformation could be used to fleece people. “The U.S. dollar is down versus the afghani,” a moneychanger told me, “because many U.S. cities have been destroyed.” By whom? I asked. “The Taliban!” Nice try. But others believed him.

On another occasion, I needed to know whether the Uzbek-Afghan border crossing at Termiz was open. There was no way to find out.

It’s impossible to conduct business without the reliable exchange of information. But only eight percent of Afghans have access to any form of telephone service, including public call booths. Those with a dedicated phone number—where people can reach them any time—are even fewer. Without telephone service, it’s impossible to know when a truckload of goods is due to arrive. Casual conversations that could lead to innovation (“What? You can’t get them in Kandahar? They’re cheap here in Herat.”) never have a chance to take place.

Investment in infrastructure would allow Afghans to stand on their own feet economically. As happened in the U.S. a century ago, rural electrification and highway construction would bring outsiders to communities cut off by war and rugged terrain. Radios and televisions, currently useless, would introduce 21st century mores to 14th century cultures. As has occurred in many parts of the world—whether for better or for worse—popular culture would have a liberalizing influence on Afghans. How long would women tolerate the burqa after they learned that it’s an anomaly within the Muslim world?

The United States should offer its expertise in building infrastructure with no strings attached, while renouncing all interest in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. Regardless of who runs the show in Kabul—even the Taliban—we should continue to help. And it should be free. No loans.

First rebuild Afghanistan. Then leave. After all, we broke it.

(Ted Rall is author of the books “To Afghanistan and Back” and “Silk Road to Ruin.”)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Why Are Insurers Blocking H1N1 Treatment Prescriptions?

I got swine flu. Five days later, I was at death’s door—because my evil insurance company wouldn’t honor my doctor’s prescription. Memo to future revolutionaries: if you require a firing squad for the executives of the Health Insurance Plan (HIP) of New York, I’m handy with a rifle.

I wasn’t worried at first. A little sneezing, slightly achy joints. I figured it was my usual bout of fall allergies. There’s usually nothing to do but suffer. But I felt worse each day: achier, more congested, stiffer, headache, fevers. The third night was bad. I went to bed under a pile of comforters, chattering uncontrollably. Then nightsweats. I checked my temperature: 103.7. When your temperature looks like a classic rock station, it’s time to see the doctor.

I’ve known my general practitioner for decades. So I pay out-of-pocket to see him even though he’s not on HIP’s list of plan-approved doctors. Hey, what do you expect for $749.01 a month?

My ordeal with the insurance company began when I went to fill my prescription for Tamiflu, an antiviral medication that is widely considered the standard treatment for swine (and other types of) flu.

“Your insurance isn’t going to cover this,” the pharmacist said. “You would need a pre-approval from your doctor.”

“But that’s a prescription,” I said, motioning to the white slip of paper in her hand. For younger readers, I come from a generation when a doctor’s prescription was all you needed to get a medication.

“It’s not going to work,” she said, slowing her speech for emphasis. “This drug is for people who have the flu.”

“Um…I have the flu.”

“You have the flu?” She looked shocked.

Because Tamiflu or another drug called Relenza can significantly reduce flu symptoms if taken less than 48 hours after the onset of symptoms, people have been hoarding and taking anti-viral drugs prophylactically—especially in New York City. Given what was about to happen to me, I admire the hoarders. Smart.

I called my doctor. No answer; left a message. Waited. I called back. Got his assistant, who patched me through. I explained the situation. “Put her on,” my doctor said.

I offered my cellphone to the pharmacist. She recoiled in horror. “You have the flu! I’m not using your phone!” She believed I had the flu enough to shriek like a wee girl. So why did she need to confirm it with my doctor?

I asked my doctor to call the pharmacy. “Right away,” he promised.

Wait. Wait. Wait more.

I called back. “Wait. Are you already at the pharmacy?” he asked. “You want me to call where?”

At this point I began to lose my mind.

An hour passed after my doctor and pharmacist exchanged the required bureaucratic pleasantries. She returned to the counter. “I’m sorry, Mr. Rall,” she said, “but your doctor is going to have to call HIP to get their advance approval. It will take him quite a bit of time…it’s complicated, especially for doctors.”

Especially for doctors?

Remember, this isn’t heroin. It’s Tamiflu. The street value of this stuff isn’t that great, and it’s a really, really bum trip. My brain may be baked from a week of triple-digit fevers, but I want to know:

Why the hell would an insurer make it more difficult to get the main drug prescribed to treat the number-one most-talked-about disease in America, one that’s a probable pandemic?

Shouldn’t HIP and other insurers be shoveling these yellow and white capsules out the door, trying to keep their own costs down by getting as many flu victims to recover as quickly as possible?

What the hell is a “pre-approval”? If a doctor prescribes a drug, why isn’t that good enough for the health insurance company?

Oh, and why doesn’t the federal government make Tamiflu available free? Hey, President Obama: What part of “pandemic” do you not understand?

Another hour went by. My pharmacist’s phone rang. She winked at me. “Everything should be fine now,” she said.

Everything was not fine.

I was getting sicker and sicker, just sitting there. My head reeled; an invisible C-clamp tightened behind each ear. I could barely breathe. It felt as though there were shards of glass stuck in my lungs. Every breath hurt. I barely had enough energy to stand up and take a step. My fingers were bluish-gray (an early sign that breakdown of the cardio-pulmonary system is imminent.) I coughed and caught a ball of phlegm in a napkin. It was soaked in blood.

Four hours and 12 phone calls after I arrived at the pharmacy, I went home empty-handed. HIP’s approval still hadn’t appeared in the pharmacy’s computer system.

When swine flu appeared in the U.S. this spring, the government prompted hysteria, predicted the deaths of as many as 90,000 Americans. Now they’re going to the opposite extreme, downplaying a genuine threat by trying to ignore it. They’re no longer even tracking new cases. And Obama Administration health officials are now selling an official line—for most people, swine flu symptoms are no worse than those of any other random flu—that isn’t quite accurate.

For example, while it’s true that children and the elderly are in high-risk categories for swine flu, “40-year-olds are the group most at risk of developing life-threatening complications from H1N1,” according to Canadian researchers cited by the Montreal Gazette. (Centralized data collection is a big advantage of a national healthcare system.)

Another difference is that swine flu is much more likely to cause viral pneumonia, the most common life-threatening complication of flu. It is not just another flu.

Lord knows, it’s not like any other flu I’ve had. I spent that night coughing up blood and downing aspirins to try to keep the fever down. By way of comparison, I’ve been thrown down two flights of stairs—and swine flu is worse. I had pneumonia last year; it sucked hard, but it was a joke next to this.

I went back to the pharmacy in the morning. Still nothing. I called HIP. Unsurprisingly, their voice recognition voicemail tree had some trouble understanding my voice by this time. God forbid they should hire someone in India to actually answer the phone. Finally—success. Sort of.

“The pharmacy needs to enter the approval code,” the HIP lady explained. She read me a long number. I gave it to the pharmacist. She typed it into her computer. “No. Still nothing,” she said.

She didn’t look surprised.

“Would you like me to call HIP?” the pharmacist asked.

“I thought you’d never ask,” I replied.

Half an hour, an overnight and about two pints of phlegmy blood later, I had my Tamiflu in hand. “$87.12,” demanded the pharmacist.

I asked her how much it would have been out-of-pocket, without insurance.

“$112,” she said.

Losing that night has diminished the effectiveness of the drug. It took three days more of feeling like death just to advance to the stage of feeling like crap. Now I’m settling into a nice, comfortable state of wretched.

I just read that a recent ABC News poll says that 32 percent of Americans think the current healthcare system is just peachy. Let’s hope they don’t catch swine flu this winter.

(Ted Rall, President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, is author of the books “To Afghanistan and Back” and “Silk Road to Ruin.”)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

How Many More Must Die for Karzai?

“For five years Mr. Karzai was my president,” Ashraf Ghani, an opposition candidate, bemoaned after widespread reports that incumbent Hamid Karzai had used fraud on a massive scale to steal the election. “Now how many Afghans will consider him their president?”

Not many. In a country where civil war is the national pastime and five-year-old boys learn how to fire an AK-47, this is not good. But Ghani is asking the wrong question. The real question is, how many Americans will continue to see Karzai as viable–and be willing to continue to pay the price of propping him up?

California Senator Diane Feinstein used to support Karzai. “Afghanistan is our beachhead on our war on terror. We cannot lose it, or we lose our war on terror,” she said in 2002. What a difference seven years makes! “I do not believe we can build a democratic state in Afghanistan,” she finally admitted last week.

Americans are finally waking up. Afghanistan, most people finally understand, is not “the good war” but the stupid one. We can’t win. Even worse, there’s nothing to win. The historical parallels aren’t perfect–they never are–but it’s hard not to think of the cost of propping up the corrupt Diem regime and its successors in South Vietnam when you see Hamid Karzai prancing around in Kabul, never an arm’s length away from U.S. Special Forces commandos. You see, Karzai’s own troops can’t be trusted not to kill him.

A July headline in The Christian Science Monitor asked an intentionally hilarious question: “Afghan Election: Can Karzai’s Rivals Close the Gap?” Not with the way Karzai stuffs ballot boxes!

There were at least 800 fake polling sites on Afghanistan’s election day–places that “existed only on paper,” reported The New York Times. “We think that about 15 percent of the polling sites never opened on Election Day,” the paper quoted a “senior Western diplomat.” “But they still managed to report thousands of ballots for Karzai.”

Also, “Mr. Karzai’s supporters also took over approximately 800 [additional] legitimate polling centers and used them to fraudulently report tens of thousands of additional ballots for Mr. Karzai.”

Actually, make that hundreds of thousands. In “Kandahar…preliminary results indicate that more than 350,000 ballots have been turned in to be counted. But Western officials estimated that only about 25,000 people actually voted there.”

Overall “pro-Karzai ballots,” reports the Times, “may exceed the people who actually voted by a factor of 10.”

The truth is, there’s nothing new here. Ashraf Ghani may have been the only Afghan to have ever considered Karzai legitimate. To most Afghans, Karzai has always been a curious “impotent dictator,” propped up by U.S. military force but with insufficient funding to exert his power outside the capital Kabul. In the provinces, tribal warlords fight the Taliban for control.

Looking at Karzai’s resume, it’s hard to imagine what George W. Bush and his “pet Afghan” Zalmay Khalilzad were thinking when they appointed Karzai as the U.S. puppet “interim president” of occupied Afghanistan in late 2001. Granted, all three were oilmen–Karzai and Khalilzad had both worked as consultants for the energy corporation Unocal, which tried to build an oil-gas pipeline across Afghanistan in the mid-1990s.

But Karzai lacked both integrity–as a Taliban official in 1997, Karzai was caught embezzling government funds and forced to flee the country–and support. He was a Pashtun, and the new Northern Alliance government was predominantly Tajik. Always essential in a nation permanently at war, Karzai had no military bona fides, having rarely seen a shot fired in anger.

Karzai’s drive to consolidate power since 2001 has been marked by trickery, intimidation, ballot stuffing and systemic corruption. One “election” has followed another. But none have been conducted legitimately.

Perhaps democracy was too much to hope for in a nation whose infrastructure had been degraded to the 14th century. There was no census, no house addresses, no mail service. How could a fair election be held?

Karzai didn’t even try.

At a June 2002 loya jirga (grand assembly) to choose the new head of state, Karzai got his U.S. masters to lean on his main rival, former king, Mohammed Zahir Shah. Zahir Shah withdrew, as did 70 of his delegates. They did the same to ex-President Burhanuddin Rabbani, guaranteeing Karzai a phony mandate.

“Voting for the loya jirga has been plagued by violence and vote-buying,” said UN envoy to Afghanistan Lakhdar Brahimi at the time. “There were attempts at manipulation, violence, unfortunately. Money was used, threats were used.”

“This is not a democracy, it is a rubber stamp. Everything has already been decided by the powerful ones,” added the Women’s Affairs minister.

On October 9, 2004, Karzai “won” his first “democratic election.” As before, Karzai’s goons stacked the deck. Unsympathetic elections officials were kidnapped. The UN concluded that “that fraud had occurred, particularly ballot-box stuffing” in the 2004 election. The UN “noted that some estimates have said that 10 percent to 15 percent of the 11.5 million registered voters, in Afghanistan and among Afghan refugees abroad, may be registered more than once,” reported The New York Times at the time. The three-member committee that counted the ballots were all appointed by Karzai.

Those who can’t win, cheat. Without the U.S., Karzai would never have won power in Afghanistan. He certainly wouldn’t have kept it.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported May 18, 2009 that Zalmay Khalilzad “could assume a powerful, unelected position inside the Afghan government under a plan he is discussing with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, according to senior American and Afghan officials.”

Bush’s corrupt oilmen are still having fun looting Afghanistan. The question for us Americans is: why should anyone die to help them?

(Ted Rall, President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, is author of the books “To Afghanistan and Back” and “Silk Road to Ruin.”)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

A poll says that 67 percent of Americans don’t understand Obama’s healthcare plan. I’m one of them.

It’s not because I don’t pay attention. I’m a news junkie. Could it be that I’m an idiot? If my insurer offered psychiatric coverage I could afford to find out.

I’m pretty sure, though, that my friends are smart. I asked my publisher, who runs the oldest publisher of graphic novels in the U.S., whether he understood what Obama’s “public option” was. He didn’t. I asked a teacher, who earned a masters from an Ivy League school. She didn’t either. I asked a bunch of political cartoonists. Neither did they.

Obama’s attempt to reform healthcare is all but dead; his polls are dropping. How did Obama turn lemonade into battery acid? Obama PR flack David Alexrod tries to explain that “to make choices is to make some unhappy.” GOP strategist Charles Black counters that the president’s popularity and “good will” doesn’t equate to support for “liberal policies.”

I think they’re both wrong. The collapse of ObamaCare is rooted in the problem described by the cognitive linguist George Lakoff: liberals do a crappy job of communicating to the public.

Speaking of which: what is/was this mysterious “public option”?

On the left, The Nation magazine says it’s “designed around not making people change their healthcare if they like what they have.” OK, so that’s what it’s not. What is it? “Instead, there will be rules that insurance companies have to follow to provide better care, and a health insurance exchange, including a public option, for people who don’t have employer-provided care.”

A public option is a public option is a public option. How helpful.

I rely on words to make a living. I’ve published 14 books. Some have even sold well. “Health insurance exchange”? WTF?

You know what I think? I think this is like that fairy tale about the emperor’s new clothes. I think The Nation doesn’t know what the “public option” is any more than the rest of us. They’re just afraid to admit it.

On the right, The National Review says it’s “a government-run insurance plan that will compete with private insurers.” Compete how?

For a guy reputed to have a way with words, Obama isn’t adding any clarity.

Huh?

Dems say the “trigger” isn’t a death panel. Instead, private insurance companies would have to make their services cheaper within a certain number of years (say, five). If costs stayed high, the U.S. government would then create a…public option. (Unless Congress, feeding at the trough of insurance company lobbyist money, was persuaded to amend the law between now and then.)

“This is the best shot we’ve got for getting a public option,” a House Democratic adviser told UPI. “It’s better than nothing.”

Actually, it’s exactly the same as nothing. Except that nothing sounds better.

I understand “nothing.”

Nazis. Americans are Nazis. We are Nazis.

Godwin’s Law be damned–it’s impossible to read the newly-released CIA report on the torture of Muslim prisoners without thinking of the Third Reich.

Sadism exists in every culture. A century ago, for example, Western adventurers who visited Tibet reported that the authorities in Lhasa, that supposed capital of pacifism, publicly gouged out criminals’ eyes and yanked out their tongues. But Nazi atrocities were stylistically distinct from, say, the Turkish genocide of the Armenians or the Rwandan massacres of the early 1990s. German war crimes were characterized by methodical precision, the application of “rational” technology to increase efficiency, the veneer of legality and the perversion of medical science.

Nazi crimes were also marked by public indifference, which amounted to tacit support. Here and now, only 25 percent of Americans told the latest Pew Research poll that they believe torture is always wrong.

“The CIA’s secret interrogation program operated under strict rules, and the rules were dictated from Washington with the painstaking, eye-glazing detail beloved by any bureaucracy,” observed The New York Times. We have much in common with the Germans.

“In July 2002,” the declassified report reveals, a CIA officer “reportedly used a ‘pressure point’ technique: with both of his hands on the detainee’s neck, [he] manipulated his fingers to restrict the detainee’s carotid artery.” Another agent “watched his eyes to the point that the detainee would nod and start to pass out; then…shook the detainee to wake him. This process was repeated for a total of three applications on the detainee.”

The CIA’s rinse-lather-repeat approach to torture is reminiscent of Dr. Sigmund Rascher’s experiments at Dachau and a parallel project conducted by the Japanese Imperial Army’s infamous Unit 731 in occupied Manchuria in 1942-43. Rascher, who was tried for war crimes after World War II, froze or lashed detainees nearly to death, then revived them over and over. German and Japanese doctors developed detailed protocols governing the severity of exposure to which inmates could be subjected–protocols seized by U.S. occupation forces and turned over to the OSS, predecessor of the CIA.

(Or, to be more accurate, so it is. Bush publicly banned torture in 2006, but we know it was still going on as of 2007. Obama supposedly banned it again earlier this year, but then his CIA director Leon Panetta told Congress the agency reserves the right to keep doing it. Until the entire secret prison network is dismantled and every single prisoner released, it would be absurd to assume that torture is not continuing.)

Among the verbal treasures in the CIA papers is the “Water Dousing” section of the “Guidelines on Medical and Psychological Support to Detainee Rendition, Interrogation and Detention,” which “allow for water to be applied using either a hose connected to tap water, or a bottle or similar container as the water source.” Ah, the glorious war on terror. Detainees may be soaked in water as cold as 41 degrees Fahrenheit for as long as 20 minutes–no longer, no colder.

For the record, the CIA’s medical expertise is about as reliable as its legal and moral sense. Forty-one degrees is bracingly cold; 41 was the temperature of the Hudson River was when US Airways Flight 1549 crashed into it earlier this year. (Remember the ice floes?) “Generally, a person can survive in 41-degree water for 10, 15 or 20 minutes,” Dr. Christopher McStay, an emergency room physician at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital told Scientific American magazine.

Like its Gestapo and SS antecedents, the CIA is highly bureaucratic. CIA employees were informed that “Advance Headquarters approval is required to use any physical pressures [against prisoners].” And those permissions came from the very top of the chain of command: the White House, which ordered the Office of Legal Counsel and other legal branches of the federal government to draft “CYA” memoranda. The memos, wrote Joshua L. Dratel in his introduction to “The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib,” a compilation of memos authorizing torture of Muslim detainees reflect “a wholly result-oriented system in which policy makers start with an objective and work backward.”

Also reminiscent of Nazism is the utter absence of firewalls that has come to characterize the behavior of top government officials. Totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany corrupt the judiciary by using the courts to carry out political policy. Beginning under Bush and now under Obama, judicial independence has been eradicated.

On August 28th The New York Times reported: “In July, Leon E. Panetta, the CIA director, tried to head off the investigation [of the CIA’s torture program], administration officials said. He sent the CIA’s top lawyer, Stephen W. Preston, to [the Department of] Justice to persuade aides to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to abandon any plans for an inquiry.” There’s a term for this: Obstruction of Justice. You’re not supposed to try to influence the outcome of an investigation. It was count six of the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.

To Holder’s credit, he has appointed a special prosecutor. To his discredit, the focus of the investigation is narrow: he will only go after officials who went beyond the Bush Administration’s over-the-top torture directives (which allow, as seen above, freezing people to death). He does not plan to go after the worst criminals, who are the Bush Administration lawyers and officials, including Bush and Cheney themselves, who ordered the war crimes–much less those like Obama who are currently covering them up.

He should change his mind. While he’s at it, he should throw Leon Panetta in jail.

Holder’s brief currently involves just 20 cases, which include detainees who were murdered by the CIA. But even those will be tough to prosecute, reports The New York Times: “Evidence, witnesses and even the bodies of the victims of alleged abuses have not been found in all cases.”

Because, you see, the bodies were burned and dumped.

They–the CIA–are Nazis for committing the crimes.

And we are Nazis for not giving a damn. Only a third of Americans told the April 27th CBS News/New York Times poll that there ought to be an investigation of Bush-era war crimes–and they don’t care enough to march in the streets, much less break a few windows. So few of my columns on torture have been reprinted by American newspapers or websites that I seriously contemplated not bothering to write this one.

We have met the Nazis, and they are us.

(Ted Rall, President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, is author of the books “To Afghanistan and Back” and “Silk Road to Ruin.”)