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.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: One Nation, Two Systems of Justice
•
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.
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
A Terrible Reckoning
•
Torturers are warned that they may face a tender accounting for Bush Administration war crimes.
Nothing to See
•
Blogger appears to be back on track.
Obama continues to protect the torturers and block investigations. I am done with him.
Goldilocks the Torturer
•
Blogger has been acting tweaky lately. It took me 48 hours to get this cartoon to load. My apologies for the delay; wish me luck getting the next ones up there.
Reforming the Torture Industry
•
This is a riff on Obama’s decision to push out the chairman of GM. Obviously he’s fine with the way his torture operation is going, which is why it’s being expanded and moved from Gitmo to Bagram.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Change You Can Parse
•
Obama Abandons Bush’s Talk, Keeps His Walk
You can’t blame Dick Cheney for being annoyed at Barack Obama. Obama is closing Guantánamo. He’s ordering the CIA to interrogate prisoners according to the rules written in the Army Field Manual, which doesn’t allow torture. He’s even phasing out such classic Bushian phrases as “enemy combatant” and “war on terror.”
But the dark prince of neoconservatism should relax. Obama’s inaugural address may have promised to “reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals,” but—in all the ways that matter—he’s keeping all of Bush’s outrageous policies in place. Sure, he talks a good game about “moving forward.” But nothing has really changed. From reading your e-mails to asserting the right to assassinate American citizens to bailing out companies whose executives pay themselves big bonuses, Obama’s changes are nothing but toothless rhetoric.
Closing Gitmo, reported The New York Times, was merely “a move that seemed intended to symbolically separate the new administration from Bush detention policies. But in a much anticipated court filing, the Justice Department argued that the president has the authority to detain terrorism suspects there without criminal charges, much as the Bush administration had asserted. It provided a broad definition of those who can be held, which was not significantly different from the one used by the Bush administration.”
What will happen to the 241 POWs still at Gitmo? They won’t be called “enemy combatants” anymore but most won’t be going home. “The filing signaled that, as long as Guantánamo remains open, the new Administration will aggressively defend its ability to hold some detainees there,” wrote the Times. Where will they go after that?
Welcome to Gitmo II—courtesy of Barack Obama.
Countless victims have been tortured by U.S. military personnel at Bagram, the U.S. airbase in Afghanistan where Bush imprisoned 600 people without charges. Some were murdered in the camp’s notorious “salt pit.” “Even children have not been spared,” says Amnesty International.
Now Bagram is being expanded—nearly doubled in size—in order to accommodate 200-plus detainees from Gitmo, as well as future POWs from Obama’s expanded war against Afghanistan. As bad as Guantánamo was, conditions at Bagram are worse.
Unless you believe indefinite detention without due process to be torture, Obama says his detainees won’t be tortured. Mostly. Probably. Maybe. The Washington Post quotes an Administration insider as saying that the CIA will enjoy “more leeway” than the Army Field Manual allows, in order to “take into account the differences between battlefield interrogations and those aimed at eliciting intelligence about terrorist groups and their plans.”
Extraordinary renditions, the Times reports in a different article, will continue under Obama. “In little-noticed confirmation testimony recently,” says the paper, “Obama nominees endorsed continuing the CIA’s program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials even if they were arrested far from a war zone.”
During the 2008 campaign Obama’s critics accused him of saying nothing, albeit beautifully. Now that we’ve gotten to know him a bit, it’s time to refine that assessment: He’s just a weasel. An eloquent weasel. But a weasel who says the right things while doing the opposite.
On March 9th Obama ordered federal agencies to suspend Bush’s infamous “signing statements,” sneaky documents issued after the signing of a bill that ordered government agencies not to enforce the very same bill he’d just approved in front of the cameras. Signing statements, says the American Bar Association, use one-man dictatorial rule to negate the people’s will as expressed by Congress and are thus “contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers.”
“Yet two days later—literally—Obama signed a $410 billion spending bill and appended to it a signing statement claiming that he had the Constitutional authority to ignore several of its oversight provisions,” writes Glenn Greenwald of Slate.
Greenwald regrets having to quote the vile Rich Lowry of the right-wing National Review magazine. So do I. But even the right is right sometimes:
“Barack Obama has perfected a three-step maneuver that could never even be attempted by a politician lacking his rhetorical skill or cool cynicism. First: Denounce your presidential predecessor for a given policy, energizing your party’s base and capitalizing on his abiding unpopularity. Second: Pretend to have reversed that policy upon taking office with a symbolic act or high-profile statement. Third: Adopt a version of that same policy, knowing that it’s the only way to govern responsibly or believing that doing otherwise is too difficult.”
This week’s example is Obama’s grandstanding over $165 million in bonuses paid to executives of American International Group (AIG), which received billions in federal bailout money. He feigned outrage: “How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?” But his Treasury Department knew about the bonuses—which amount to roughly 55 cents per American—ages ago. He also knows there isn’t much the government can do legally to claw the money back.
Unlike the word count limit of this column, Obama’s perfidy knows no limits. He’s already become more dangerous to democracy and basic human rights than George W. Bush. Unlike Bush, he has no political opposition. Cheney may nitpick, but most Republicans are happy to see Bush’s policies remain in place. Meanwhile, liberals remain loyal, silent, and tacitly pro-torture.
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
•
This came out of a conversation with fellow editorial cartoonist Matt Bors. What if Obama were succeeding Hitler? Would he let him off the hook for his crimes too? The parallels are eerie.
Free to Go
•
Incredibly, mass murderer and mass torturer George W. Bush remains at large. Justice, apparently, is not something Obama cares about.
New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
•
So much for change you can believe in: the torture continues at Gitmo and will continue at least another year. And nary a word about the NSA’s despicable warrantless wiretapping and espionage program against American citizens.
