Month: September 2006

A Cautionary Tale about Torture from America’s Military Past

Jon Ponder

In just 27 months (if not somehow mercifully sooner) George W. Bush will be back to working on his abs full time in Crawford. When he and his team of hard-nosed incompetents have left the stage, the heat of the present moment — the “get them at any cost” mentality — will also fade.

It appears that the Torture Caucus in Congress will win the day and pass a bill that legalizes particular extreme interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, also known as torture. There is no doubt Pres. Bush will sign the torture bill into law.

But the men and women on the frontline of the Bush Administration’s interrogation of terrorist suspects might do well to look at our country’s history when it comes to torture. What they’ll find is that even when it is tolerated in the heat of the moment, torture is not a natural element of the American psyche. Those who engage in torture under the banner of the United States flag — even with the approval of those higher up in the chain of command — can find themselves treated harshly within a matter of months.

We have seen this recently in the way the military underlings who abused prisoners at Abu Grahib were sent to jail. But there is an even more extreme case in our history. Look what happened to Henry Wirz, the commander of a prison operated by the Confederate government in Andersonville, Georgia, where torture and much, much worse happened during the Civil War:

After the end of hostilities, Wirz was arrested by a contingent of federal cavalry and taken by rail to Washington, D.C., where the federal government intended to place him on trial for conspiring to impair the lives of Union prisoners of war.

In July 1865, the trial convened in the Capitol building and lasted two months, dominating the front pages of newspapers across the United States. The court heard the testimony of former inmates, ex-Confederate officers and even nearby residents of Andersonville. Finally, in early November, the commission announced that it had found Wirz guilty of conspiracy as charged and of eleven of thirteen counts of murder. He was sentenced to death.

In a letter to President Andrew Johnson, Wirz asked for mercy, but the letter went unanswered. Mounting the scaffold on the morning of November 10, 1865, Wirz asserted that he was being hanged for following orders. He was executed on the same site where the Lincoln conspirators met their own fate just several months before, within clear sight of the newly-built dome of the U.S. Capitol. Wirz was eventually buried in the Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington, D.C. He was survived by his wife and one daughter.

The atrocities at Andersonville ranged from abuse and torture to criminal neglect and murder — but when the South began to lose the war and its resources dried up, the facility was plunged into an even worse nightmare. Food was so scarce that the Confederate prison guards died of starvation alongside thousands of the Union prisoners.

At Camp Douglas, a Union prison in Chicago for captured Southern soldiers, “one third of all of the camp’s POWs died there, sometimes due to deliberate torture and often from malnutrition and disease.” After the war, Col. B.J. Sweet, the camp’s commander, was promoted to general. (If this had happened in the current day, Pres. Bush would have given him a medal.)

While I’m not suggesting that there is a one-to-one equivalency between what happened in Civil War prison camps and Pres. Bush’s program of torturing terror suspects, I am cautioning U.S. interrogators to remember that even after Pres. Bush signs the torture bill into law in the next week or so, it will face court challenges. Retroactive immunity can’t be 100 percent guaranteed.

They should also bear in mind that public sentiment can change swiftly. In just 27 months (if not somehow mercifully sooner) George W. Bush will be back to working on his abs full time in Crawford. When he and his team of hard-nosed incompetents have left the stage, the heat of the present moment — the “get them at any cost” mentality — will also fade.

Good has triumphed over evil more often than not in American history, so far. Let’s hope sensibility will win out over the use of torture this time too.

Katherine Harris Tells Chris Matthews She Has Cut Sen. Nelson’s Lead by Half

Jon Ponder

Rep. Katherine Harris was on Hardball this afternoon painting rosy pictures of her campaign to unseat Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson. Host Chris Matthews opened the segment by saying that Rep. Harris had just told him off camera that her poll numbers were surging — that she had cut Sen. Nelson’s lead in half. Nelson lead Harris by about 30 percent last time I checked.

On September 21, Harris was allowed to attend a GOP rally in Orlando headlined by President George W. Bush. She was not allowed to appear on stage with the president and other Republican notables, which included the president’s brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, and the nominee to replace him, Charlie Crist.

Basking in their reflected glory seems to have helped.

FL Gov: GOP’s Crist Has ‘Commanding’ Lead over Dem Davis

Jon Ponder

“Grim:”

Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist has taken a commanding lead over Democrat Jim Davis among a large swath of Florida’s electorate, a new poll indicates.

Six weeks out from the Nov. 7 election to replace Gov. Jeb Bush, Crist leads Davis 51 percent to 36 percent in the poll of 625 likely voters conducted last week.

The Mason-Dixon poll conducted for Gannett Co. and other news organizations puts Crist over the magic 50-percent threshold, a significant signpost for campaigns.

And the overall picture it paints for Davis is grim.

Poll: Schwarzenegger Widens Lead over Angelides

Jon Ponder

Arnold leads Democrat Phil Angelides 17 percentage points in one poll and 12 in another. This is bad:

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has widened his lead over his Democratic gubernatorial rival, according to two polls released on Wednesday. One survey puts him 17 percentage points ahead.

A Public Policy Institute of California survey of 2,003 adult residents between September 13 and 20 found 48 percent favoring the Hollywood action star to 31 percent for State Treasurer Phil Angelides in the November election. The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percent.

The 17-point difference compares with a 13-point spread between the two men in both July and August.

A separate Field Poll survey of 557 likely voters conducted from September 14 to 24 found 44 percent favoring the Republican incumbent, compared to 34 percent for the Harvard-educated former real estate developer Angelides.

In July, 45 percent said they favored Schwarzenegger, compared to 37 percent for his opponent.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

The War Prayer: O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be thou near them! O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief …. For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimmage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it in the spirit of love, of Him who is the Source of Love, and who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all who are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

— Samuel Langhorne Clemens, “Mark Twain” (1835-1910), American writer

Olbermann: Pres. Clinton’s Counter-Assault on Fox News Should Inspire New Aggressiveness toward Rightwing Lies

Jon Ponder
“To hear [Pres. Bush] bleat and whine and bully at nearly every opportunity, one would think someone else had been president on September 11, 2001 or the nearly eight months that preceded it.”
— Keith Olbermann

Starting with the 9/11 commemorations, Keith Olbermann has been giving Democrats considerable cover to start speaking out against the GOP White House spin and smear operation. Pres. Clinton took the opening and went with it in a stunning counter-offensive on Fox News last week. On Monday night, Olbermann responded with this on-air editorial about the Fox News “sandbag” attempt and Mr. Clinton’s aggressive response:

OLBERMANN: Finally tonight, a special comment about President Clinton‘s interview. The headlines about it are, of course, entirely wrong. It is not essential that a past present bullied and sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster finally lashed back. It is not important that the current president‘s portable public chorus has described his predecessor‘s tone as crazed. Our tone should be crazed. The nation‘s freedoms are under assault by an administration‘s policies can do us as much damage as al Qaeda. The nation‘s marketplace of ideas is being poisoned by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would have quit.

Nonetheless, the headline is this: Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done in five years—he has spoken the truth about 9/11 and the current presidential administration. “At least I tried,” he said, of his own efforts, “to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. That‘s the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They had eight months to try, they did not try, I tried.”

Thus in his supposed emeritus years, has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and triumphant action for honesty and for us. Action as vital and courageous as any of his presidency. Action as startling and as liberating as any, by anyone, in these last five long years.

The Bush administration did not try to get Osama bin Laden before 9/11. The Bush administration ignored all the evidence gathered by its predecessors. The Bush administration did not understand the daily briefing entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The Bush administration did not try.

Moreover, for the five years, one month, and two weeks, the current administration and in particular the president has been given the greatest pass for incompetence and malfeasance in American history.

President Roosevelt was rightly blamed for ignoring the warning signs, some of them 17 years old before Pearl Harbor. President Hoover was correctly blamed for, if not the Great Depression itself, then the disastrous economic steps he took in the immediate aftermath of the stock market crash. Even President Lincoln assumed some measure of responsibility for the Civil War, though talk of Southern secession had begun as early as 1832.

But for this president. To hear him bleat and whine and bully at nearly every opportunity, one would think someone else had been president on September 11, 2001 or the nearly eight months that preceded it.

[…]

Is There a Pentagon Patsy in the Audience?

Buck Banks

Planting questions: A few days ago Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, chair of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, had a Q&A session with some lower-echelon staffers at the Pentagon. Now, it is entirely possible that it wasn’t staged and the questions weren’t planted, but … here, you be the judge. This is from the press release issued by the DoD today:

“Negativity in the press is absolutely detrimental to the morale of our forces and our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Cpl. John A. Stukins said to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a Sept. 22 town hall meeting.

“What are we doing to confront this problem and to better the morale of our forces over there — not only over there, but here as well?” asked Stukins, a 23-year-old administrative specialist from Lafayette, La., who works with the Marine Staff at the Pentagon.

Rumsfeld and Pace both congratulated Stukins for asking his question.

Fielding Stukins’ query, Pace said there was around-the-clock media coverage of the overseas exploits of the U.S. military early on during the global war on terrorism.

“We had television, newspapers, magazines,” Pace explained. “If you were interested, you could read as much as you wanted and you could watch as much as you wanted, and you could form your own opinions.”

‘I also have the right to respect your right to be wrong.’
— Cpl. John Stukins

However, as the conflict continued, other issues began to compete with military news for radio or television airtime or newspaper or magazine copy inches, Pace said.

“News is a business, and now the news cycle is such that only certain amounts (of coverage) of every day are allocated to coverage of the war,” Pace said. “And, unfortunately, the parts of the war that then become shown are the parts that capture people’s attentions.”

And, more often than not, Pace noted, today’s military news coverage in Iraq and Afghanistan seems to focus on “where the bombs are going off,” instead of “where the schools are being built and the like.”

So, the general said, it’s important that department leaders and rank-and-file military members tell the public about the good, as well as the not-so-good, military news from overseas.

So Stukins is like the Radar O’Riley character in M*A*S*H, a paper-pusher. He just happened to be able to string together his two-part question well enough to give his bosses a segue into politely telling the rest of the staff to keep their mouths shut about the negative stuff.

In an interview later with American Forces Press Service, Stukins used the term “reprehensible” to describe people who criticized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the media. And he left us this gem:

Stukins says he’s a firm believer in freedom of speech as guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights. “But, I also have the right to respect your right to be wrong,” he said.

Thanks, Corporal! And we respect your right to be a tool of the military-industrial complex.

House Set to Join Senate to Screw You Out of Another Right

Buck Banks

So sue me: The House of Representatives is set to vote today on a bill that is either ironically or sarcastically called the Public Expression of Religion Act of 2005, or HR 2679 IH. Nice-sounding title, eh? You’d think it’s intended to protect your right to religious expression, but you’d be wrong.

It’s designed to protect official yahoos who blurt Bible babble or religious hate language or manage to trample someone’s civil rights through some obnoxious conflation of church and state. Let’s say you’re offended by a yahoo acting in his official capacity who spouts a bunch of religious garbage. You can sue sue the yahoo for violating your civil rights underthe Civil Action for Deprivation of Rights, Section 1979 of the Revised Statutes of the United States (42 U.S.C. 1983). But with this new amendment, you can’t make him pay your legal fees and court costs. Here’s the actual language from the bill:

A Bill: To amend the Revised Statutes of the United States to eliminate the chilling effect on the constitutionally protected expression of religion by State and local officials that results from the threat that potential litigants may seek damages and attorney’s fees.

The bill is designed to protect official yahoos who blurt Bible babble or religious hate language

The amendment, which already has passed the Senate, and only needs to be ratified by the House and signed by the Worst President Ever to become law. Talk about deprivation of rights ….

You have to love the language and how they twisted it to make it sound like the amendment is actually protecting officials from the “chilling effect” of the “threat of litigation.” Said another way, it protects the official’s right to spout religious hate language while protecting your right to pay your attorney for suing the bastard. Beauty!

Want to complain to your representative about it? You can do it here.

Thanks to AK for the tip.