I like the fact that John McCain and other Republicans -- perhaps a majority of them veterans -- speak out against Cheney's bullshit. The fact is that torture is so patently immoral that it really needs to be seen as the kind of thing, as Slavoj Zizek has stated, that nobody should ever have to point out, much less debate on its merits.
But the fact that McCain is willing to demur publicly and categorically is good for reasons pertaining to what maybe could be called public discourse. Let me explain: The present reader and I agree that, of course, legally sanctioned torture is beyond the pale. That the notion of legally sanctioned torture has so much as appeared in the public conversation (and it has) is itself a nauseating and Orwellian phenomenon. So: When such a specter is unleashed upon 'civilization', how can it be made obvious to all of our ovine fellow citizens that it is, of course, beyond the pale and self-undermining for our ostensibly free, democratic society to engage in legally-sanctioned torture?
It isn't a matter of convincing people, because anybody who's able to think it through is of course going to oppose it. The problem is those people who don't think but feel. Or, more specifically, who feel in the place of thinking. These are the people for whom Dick Cheney's propaganda proved so effective in mobilizing the bovine United States population into supporting his Hundred Years Oil War.
How do you influence them if you can't convince them? Counter-propaganda? No. That merely serves to further radicalize the terms of the 'debate'. No, you make sure that the discourse is framed in such a way as to oppose clear-thinking, historically minded and morality-based against Cheney's wing-nut fringe.
If the emerging framework -- the one that casts Cheney as the wing-nut/liar that he is -- is to prove durable, we need the John McCains to continue speaking out. The long-term effect of this, I hope, is that during the next Presidential election, we will no longer have candidates of either major party issuing pledges to emulate Jack Bauer in their national security policies.
Richard "Dick" Cheney: The Constitution exists solely to make it easier for me to lie. Disagree? Let's see if you disagree under torture, muthafucka!
According to the Washington Post, the George W. Bush White House gave the explicit thumbs-up to the secret CIA torture of terrorism suspects:
The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency's use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects -- documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.
The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency's interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing.
The memos were the first -- and, for years, the only -- tangible expressions of the administration's consent for the CIA's use of harsh measures to extract information from captured al-Qaeda leaders, the sources said. As early as the spring of 2002, several White House officials, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney, were given individual briefings by Tenet and his deputies, the officials said. Rice, in a statement to congressional investigators last month, confirmed the briefings and acknowledged that the CIA director had pressed the White House for "policy approval."
Our United States President: Never seen a torture I didn't approve of -- in writing!
Stop the creeping fascism of the GOP! Seriously. Let's stop these cynical, racist, authoritarian, totalitarian motherfuckers before it's too late. Who else is going to stop them? Antonin Scalia?
...And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's take-off. I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.
I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program. And what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute.
We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue...
-- Ronald Reagan, 'The Space Shuttle "Challenger" Tragedy Address', televised on 28 January 1986.
I grew up during the Reagan Administration, followed by four years of George H.W. Bush, passing into my adolescence during the Bill Clinton years. For now, I want to ramble about the twelve years of Reagan/Bush, both the things about those years that I remember from having lived through them and the things I remember about them from having lived subsequent to them. We can talk about the Clinton years at another time (or maybe we just shouldn't talk about them ever!).
I. The world was flat.
It was a time, Dear Reader, of a mass-cultural FLATTENING, during which the consciousness (and conscience) each and every American was slowly but surely DUMBED-DOWN until he became a castaway on his own self-involved, lazy-brained isle of ostensible plenty. The expanding use of plastics in the creation and packaging of cheap consumer junk ushered in a new and more profitable era in planned obsolescence. It was the time during which the Cold War reached the apotheosis of its self-sustaining outlandishness: I'm referring, of course, to the 'Star Wars' missile defense initiative. (Which only ever existed on paper, in tax dollars, and in the meticulously-TelePrompted, content-bereft cadences of Reagan's slow-motion national addresses... Of course, Bush, Cheney, Condi and Co. are clamoring for Star Wars 2.0: 'DA RETURN!!'.)
It was a time of unthinking acquiescence to received wisdom; of consensus formed through every man, woman and child's desire to count himself among the espousers of the consensus-view, of bloated, diet-trend-chasing conventionally and of political and economic group-think. A time that found us aiming our frustrations, criticisms, guilt complexes, and intellectual energies inward; publicly, we adopted the hard-driving but collegial manner of an Atomized Individual Economic Actor after Milton Friedman's own heart. Foot-soldiers in the Reagan Revolution. Power suits. Gay Republicans. The ascendancy of identity politics in academe. Myopia, hypocrisy. Bedazzlement with the shiny gadgetry of Empire. The Magic of Spielberg™, and his big-budget authoritarian morality plays. Disney, and such cinematic achievements as Flight of the Navigator.
II. Politics of Bush/Cheney condones openly the undermining of the moral authority (and coherence) of the USA's democratic project.
But I'll allow that the era of Coke, Diet Coke, Caffeine-free Coke, Caffeine-free Diet Coke, Cherry Coke, New Coke and Coke Classic had something going for it that eight years of George W. Bush lacks. It pertains to W.'s style of governance (if we can call it either style or governance...), or rather, what it lacks. The Reagan years had as one of its pillars a public face that sought to be seen as serving the interests of the rule of law rather than setting the rule of law aside as bothersome or even naive. A set of communications-directives that took pains not simply to lie to the American people, but to tell all of the right lies. That took as agiven the necessity of being seen not only to respect the United States Constitution, but to be seen as actively upholding it.
I know this might seem like a minor point -- after all, I'm talking only about rhetoric and propaganda -- but for me it's one of the most distressing things about our current situation. Sure, back in the 80's there was Iran Contra and a billion sketchy/criminal military adventures, but at least the bastards bothered to lie in such a way as to offer most credulous or self-preoccupied people in this country the psychological bulwark of plausible deniability. Joe Briefcase could go on believing sincerely that the values of the United States -- you know, as inscribed in the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights? -- set the parameters of Executive Branch activity in -- at the very least -- its objective, tone and spirit.
That really does make a difference, because at least in those days, the racists and xenophobes from -- I don't mean to generalize, 'cause there are plenty of exceptions to this regional truism -- the South couldn't openly rally around the cause of preserving measures and policies that are essentially fascistic, both in their intent and in their means of execution. For instance, when it is revealed that the has CIA waterboarded a couple of people under the cloak of secrecy, that pisses me off now, and it would surely have pissed me off during the 80's and 90's. The sudden revelation that actual torture is being conducted by the United States would have caused much bigger shock waves among the ocean of citizens of the United States than this exact revelation -- except on a much greater scale -- has caused today. (Or, there'd have been at least a shock wave!)
To be sure, it of course wouldn't have been true that the practice was isolated, and I don't deny for a moment that there are unnerving harms that accrue from the kind of false consciousness that plausible deniability taps into. But, I have to say that by contrast, it is far more disturbing to witness, as we do today, rednecks -- both unreconstructed and in their exurban, Jesus-loving, middle-management-type Joe America incarnation -- rallying around the cause of actually justifying depraved, wicked, and -- I would honestly (and perhaps naively) have assumed throughout my entire life, heretofore -- Un-American practices.
What's shocking to witness is that in the current era of Bush/Cheney, when the veil is lifted from such an onslaught of depravity, cynicism and hypocrisy, the effect is (1) an upsurge in masochistic/patriotic fervor for despotism among lots of (although surely not all) uneducated people, and (2) one of little more than a widespread gross-out and disdain from onlookers who feel totally helpless to change the political and moral tide in the United States. Of course, I identify myself, for better or worse, as one of this second group of onlookers. I was raised, after all, in a nominally middle class (by which I mean upper-middle class) home during the Disneyland 80's. My sense of anguish and doom at the state of things in this country often reaches extremes of hopelessness, nausea and existential confusion.
So I and others who are disgusted by the things that are being revealed about our government, and about the Bush/Cheney Executive Branch in particular, are at this point just trying to cope with all of this evil and madness -- and I'm quite sure that our reaction is shared by the vast majority of people, which is not always the same thing as the vast majority of voters. And anyway, this group is fractured in so many ways, and politicians and advertisers are doing their best to keep our conception of our self-interest fractured (of which, more commentary soon [hint: a significant ray of hope that we can consolidate our power lies in the candidacy of Barack Obama]).
Meanwhile, we watch the first group -- a contingent of uneducated poor people from Alabama or wherever -- whose identification with militarism comes from its lack of access to life options other than either joining the military or working at Quickie-Mart, whose blood lust comes partly from ignorance (which could have been spared them if there were decent schools for them to attend), partly from sexual repression (which is deepened by the stranglehold of extreme, hyperconservative, evangelical quasi-Christianity), and partly from a deep class resentment, the true, economics-based nature of which US culture has taught it not to be able to identify, in favor of cultural resentment, liberation-consumerism, xenophobia and the taking of pride in one's own backwardness.
It's gross...
IV. Let's consolidate our political power to put an end to the USA's dalliances with despotism under Bush & Cheney.
I guess my thought is this: is there a way for people who feel as disgusted as I do to create political solidarity among the widest group of voters that I possibly can? I mean, I know anecdotally that there are plenty of people in the country, both my age, older and younger, who are equally upset about this stuff on an equally visceral, existential level. In other words, all of us who feel this way -- irrespective of what other political views of cultural values we hold in common, irrespective of whether we prefer going to cocktail parties or bible-study meetings -- feel it with passion and don't know exactly how to stop the unchecked, onward march of the immorality and self-destructiveness of the present political course of the United States.
V. Barack Obama's 8/28/08 speech begins successfully to consolidate support for rebuilding the USA's moral authority.
Well; as it happens, most of the preceding rant was written a few days before this post. But I think that we have a figure around whom we can rally support for rebuilding American moral authority, and saving the idea of democracy so that it can live to see another day. That figure is, of course, Barack Obama. And contrary to the unthinking and flippant commentary of rightwing hired goons like David Brooks (who used the term "underwhelmed" in his characteristically simple-minded reaction on PBS -- screw you, you fake moderate liar; you're nothing but Rush Limbaugh in a three piece suit...), Barack's speech last night was amazing.
What many commentators (Brooks included) seemed to miss was this: the point of having upwards of 80,000 people assembled at the speech was not because of the impact it would have on Obama's rhetoric; it's because of the reaction shots! Anybody who paid any attention could see that witnessing that many people -- a group that was genuinely and unmistabably diverse -- being moved to tears by their shared purpose, values, goals and sense of urgency sends a very powerful set of signals indeed to a very broad cross-section of the United States population.
Remember the run-up to the Iraq War? Remember how it was -- much like today -- a depressing, infuriating time? Everywhere you turned, you found unwelcome reminders that a gang of sleazy assholes -- a.k.a., the Bush Administration -- were running the country, that they quite obviously were eager to invade Iraq, and that they would find a way to do so no matter what? We knew that they were lying to us: that was never in question. What is tantalizing, however, is the prospect that actual concrete evidence and testimony might pop up that would make the nature of these lies comprehensible to our credulous fellow citizens.
Journalist Ron Suskind wouldn't need to try very hard to convince me and most intelligent people I know that the White House -- and Dick Cheney, specifically -- ordered the CIA to forge a document in order to steer popular will in the direction of supporting the invasion of Iraq. Suskind's new book The Way of the World, trotted out a couple of days ago amidst a deftly-coordinated publicity blitz, claims precisely this.
Remember the infamous "top secret memo" -- this stuff is actually quite hilarious -- purportedly containing proof not only that 9/11-pilot, al-Qaeda terrorist Mohammed Atta was "trained by Saddam," but conveniently, in the same memo(!) that Saddam had purchased a uranium shipment from Niger -- or, as George W. Bush put it, in his greatest "I'm too dumb to be a liar!!!" moment -- "from Africa"?
Anyway, that memo was revealed to be a forgery within, like, two days of Bush's retarded speech. But the Administration and its neocon minions had garnered the necessary momentum to invade Iraq.
About this forged memo, Suskind reveals something totally believable to my ears, but also quite astonishing. Here's a reprint of a note he posted on the Web site The Huffington Post:
What just happened? Evidence. A secret that has been judiciously kept for five years just spilled out. All of what follows is new, never reported in any way:
The Iraq Intelligence Chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush -- a man still carrying a $1 million reward for capture, the Jack of Diamonds in Bush's famous deck of wanted men -- has been America's secret source on Iraq. Starting in January of 2003, with Blair and Bush watching, his secret reports began to flow to officials on both sides of the Atlantic, saying that there were no WMD and that Hussein was acting so odd because of fear that the Iranians would find out he was a toothless tiger. The U.S. deep-sixed the intelligence report in February, "resettled" Habbush to a safe house in Jordan during the invasion and then paid him $5 million in what could only be considered hush money.
In the fall of 2003, after the world learned there were no WMD -- as Habbush had foretold -- the White House ordered the CIA to carry out a deception. The mission: create a handwritten letter, dated July, 2001, from Habbush to Saddam saying that Atta trained in Iraq before the attacks and the Saddam was buying yellow cake for Niger with help from a "small team from the al Qaeda organization." *
The mission was carried out, the letter was created, popped up in Baghdad, and roiled the global newcycles in December, 2003 (conning even venerable journalists like Tom Brokaw). The mission is a statutory violation of the charter of the CIA, and amendments added in 1991, prohibiting the CIA from conducting disinformation campaigns on U.S. soil.
So, here we go again: the administration is in full attack mode, calling me names, George Tenet is claiming he doesn't remember any such thing -- just like he couldn't remember "slam dunk" -- and reporters are scratching their heads. Everything in my book is on the record, with many sources. And so, we watch and wait....
Hear Suskind explain further on NPR's Fresh Air. When two of Suskind's sources, former CIA director George Tenet, whom we know already to be a blowhard, and CIA official Robert Richer chickened out on their previous testimony, Suskind followed up by sharing some of the transcripts of his interviews, which...ahem...say precisely what Suskind had portrayed them as saying. Suskind's introduction reveals just how weird and suspicious Richer's retraction is:
Rob Richer received a copy of The Way of the World on Monday night, August 4, the day before publication. On Tuesday, he said he had read key portions of the book and was comfortable with what they contained. Later that day, though, he issued the following the statement:
"I never received direction from George Tenet or anyone else in my chain of command to fabricate a document from Habbash as outlined in Mr Suskind's book."
Ron: The intent--the basic raison d'etre of this product is to get, is to create, here's a letter with what's in it. Okay, here's what we want on the letter, we want it to be released as essentially a representation of something Habbush says. That's all it says, that's the one paragraph. And then you pass it to whomever to do it. To get it done.
Rob: It probably passed through five or six people. George probably showed it to me, but then passed it probably to Jim Pavitt, the DDO, who then passed it down to his chief of staff who passed it to me. Cause that's how--you know, so I saw the original. I got a copy of it. But it was, there probably was--
Ron: Right. You saw the original with the White House stationery, but you didn't--down the ranks, then it creates other paper.
Rob: Yeah, no, exactly. But I couldn't tell you--again: I remember it happening, I remember a terrible brief kinda joking dialogue about it, but that was it.
. . .
Ron: Now this is from the Vice President's Office is how you remembered it--not from the president?
Rob: No, no, no. What I remember is George saying, 'we got this from'--basically, from what George said was 'downtown.'
Ron: Which is the White House?
Rob: Yes. But he did not--in my memory--never said president, vice president, or NSC. Okay? But now--he may have hinted--just by the way he said it, it would have--cause almost all that stuff came from one place only: Scooter Libby and the shop around the vice president.
Ron: Yeah, right.
Rob: But he didn't say that specifically. I would naturally--I would probably stand on my, basically, my reputation and say it came from the vice president.
Ron: Right, I'm with you, I'm with you. But there wasn't anything in the writing that you remember saying the vice president.
Rob: Nope.
Ron: It just had the White House stationery.
Rob: Exactly right.
Ron: That's fine, White House stationery's fine. Everything's from there. You know, that's the center point. But not OVP's Office. It's just the White House. It comes from the White House. That's plain and simple.
Rob: And you know, if you've ever seen the vice president's stationery, it's on the White House letterhead. It may have said OVP. I don't remember that, so I don't want to mislead you. . . .
Here's a link to the original piece that broke the news of the existence of the memo, a piece that hangs hysterically and credulously on every fucking word of what was soon thereafter revealed to be a sloppily executed forgery. It's written by neocon hired gun Con Coughlin in UK's The Telegraph. Awfully strange isn't it, as Conason observes, that it should first have fallen into the hands of a neocon like Conason, and so soon after it was "discovered."
I find it howlingly hilarious to imagine people being shocked, positively shocked!!by the revelation that the White House told the CIA to lie to the American people. Anybody who was paying attention knew that the months preceding the invasion of Iraq saw the American moo-cow masses (I include myself in that number, although the nature of such campaigns suggest that they are not aimed to in any way convince me of anything!!) subjected to an unrelenting, blitzkrieg of a disinformation campaign.
I can't say honestly that I wouldn't enjoy seeing that fat, fraudulent lying crook Dick Cheney go down in a great big ball of flames. It's pretty hard not to hate the motherfucker, isn't it?
So: When such a specter is unleashed upon 'civilization', how can it be made obvious to all of our ovine fellow citizens that it is, of course, beyond the pale and self-undermining for our ostensibly free, democratic society to engage in legally-sanctioned torture?
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