"Give Me A Waterboard, Dick Cheney, And One Hour, And I'll Have Him Confess To The Sharon Tate Murders"

Jesse Ventura added this treasure to my trove of revenge fantasies during a Larry King interview, further stoked this week by the entire Cheney family, which collectively told us we should be down on our knees thanking them for keeping us safe from the Bad People.

Other punishment favorites include holding a "Birdshot Party," sending him out as a postal carrier in the slums of Damascus, a regimen of beatings with a baseball bat, and simple execution. Of course these are negative, violent things, and I'm an optimistic and constructive chap. So here's what should really be done:

1) force-feed him a diet of nothing but marijuana brownies, cheeseburgers and milkshakes
2) make him listen to music by black artists, with emphasis on rappers, for 6 months non-stop
3) if he's still alive after 6 months, start an intensive program of feminist consciousness-raising training

In short, he should be sent to a re-education camp which uses advanced psychological therapies designed to literally kill him with kindness. Should he somehow survive it, he'd at least come out a better, perhaps even more bearable person.

I could easily perform this service to the world in a finished basement, pre-equipped for these and similar purposes, and hereby offer my dungeon and time gratis. As for step #3, Lord Wife went to NYU so she can devise the curriculum. Hmm...I think the music would start off with a Martha and the Vandellas video like the one above, a truly frightening version of "Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide."

Obama To Sign Order Shutting Guantanamo, Halting Military Tribunals

Now that title felt good to write! A sanctioned White House leak states:

The Associated Press has learned that President Barack Obama plans to sign an executive order Thursday to close the detention center within a year and halt military trials of terror suspects held there. The executive order was one of three expected imminently on how to interrogate and prosecute al-Qaida, Taliban or other foreign fighters believed to threaten the United States.

A senior Obama aide said the president would sign the order on Thursday, fulfilling his campaign promise to shut down a facility that critics around the world say violates domestic and international detainee rights. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity because the event has not yet been announced.

(Update) Some in the blogsphere are displeased Gitmo didn't get closed right away, but at least the war crimes trials were suspended today. The real problem is figuring out what to do with the inmates, with legal complexities ranging from merely bewildering to impossible. For example, one Canadian is accused of killing a US sergeant with a grenade in Afghanistan 7 years ago. The accused was 15 at the time. Can he really be tried in a US civilian court? As an adult? What justice could a "jury of peers" dispense? Would love to hear any case precedents for that one. Probably best to send him back to Toronto and let them figure it out.

Regardless of guilt, the US would be wise to offer each of the inmates $250,000 or more in exchange for agreement not to sue for damages arising from torture and wrongful imprisonment. Then give them a plane ride home. Many Americans would argue that doing so would let a lot of guilty people go, including Kaleid Sheik Mohammed (who would like nothing better than execution) and five other alleged 9/11 plotters. Too bad, game over.

America lost when it tortured these men, and torture invalidated both their confessions and their guilt. To put that in perspective, most anyone who comes through here, including myself, would confess to being a Sylvania light bulb, 60 watts, after about 20 seconds of waterboarding a.k.a. drowning. I've drowned a.k.a. died, it's not pretty, and these people went through far, far more than that.

For over 7 years, they were in a place scientifically designed to elicit human misery, their keepers inclined to extract revenge. Not surprisingly, the few sane ones left recently tried to starve themselves to death, as a final protest, and feeding tubes denied the privilege. If we let these people go without agreement or closure, guilty or innocent, imagine the flight paths their grievances will take. There are crimes to be punished here, oh yes. And the orders to torture may well prove to be the instruments of it coming to that.

-->What Open Torture Policy Means To Us

Eventually, torturers hear what they want to hear. For its practitioners therein lies great charm, a cleansing, confirmatory, redemptive appeal. Of course admitting that would spoil much of the fun. So instead, torture's proponents would have us believe it's about finding the imminent threat, disarming that nuclear suitcase-bomb set to go off in (insert your city here) in an hour, but it has little to do with that blitheringly false hypothetical, nor with truth. No, not to do with truth at all. It's about two things. First, it's about kidding oneself into thinking it elicits truth. Far more importantly, it's about a sadistic, deep-rooted, simplistic need to express dominance and be loved for it. To inflict one's power, and to hear those supplications and sweet surrendurs, is a delight. Torturers freely admit to that, to what they get out of it. "You see," they will say, "that's all we ever wanted to hear." They share the unwholesome, misguided, self-righteous squalor of the priests sent to drive out the Devils of Loudun.

Writers like Jonathon Schwarz (A Tiny Revolution) and IOZ (Who is IOZ) get exasperated with the naivete and the perma-"shock, shock!" of various liberal writers who decry torture in its current yankee doodle dandy contortions, so they skewer those who collectively maintain, "This isn't the United States I know." Their point is well taken. We've assassinated leaders, overthrown governments, shot into crowds and trodden on people's collective wills so Dole and United Fruit could make a few more pennies on pineapples, reap a few more bushels of bananas. (Hence the term, "Banana Republic.") So why should torture suddenly offend?

Supposedly informed intelligentsia should be fully aware that Americans bestialized upwards of 250,000 Filipino natives into the hereafter while suppressing a tribal insurgency circa 1900, that black slaves and citizens were routinely tortured to death for "respect," prison camps in the US Civil War made Dachau look like day camp, and I have yet to see an American Indian in a Thanksgiving Day parade. The torture streak runs as deep with us as with everybody else, if not a recent gouge or two deeper. This country has been international torture's examplar, mentor, and prime exporter of technique and quantity for the last 50 years and more.

Torture spans a cyclically linked continuum. On the one end, it starts with your kid interrupting you, escalates to drivers who don't use turn signals while obstructing traffic to float around potential parking spots like moths blind to light, proceeds past chronic sleep deprivation and barrels on to giving genitalia "a jump" with car batteries, gets down to repeated drowning and resuscitation, and finally devolves to killing off the members of your family in front of your eyes. As of last week, our President now proudly admits that we're torturing, for the benefit of all Americans, in Uncle Sam's name.

"Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people." Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

Shame, and still deeper shame. While the bald, defiant maintenance of its absence comes slinking 'round to the light at last. It makes me realize how keeping up outward appearances has salutary effects, hypocrisy is necessary for the maintenance of mores, and double standards are, well, standard. Denouncing torture while your minions are off enthusiastically performing it at least gives the impression you're against it in principle, so torture is placed in a cultural context of criminality, illegitimacy and risk.

In such contexts, government employees engage in torture at their peril, a fact with which they're fully conversant. The Ocracies in question remember every "rogue agent" story which has occasionally emanated from the White House and Congress. They remember the wrecked reputations, fortunes, and careers. One such story was most famously woven in the wake of Vietnam, wherein we are expected to believe a few Bad Apples departed from official, ethical norms to engage in personal lapses of uncondoned nastiness, lapses which had nothing whatsoever to do with the doctrine known as "Killing Hope." Agents were hung out to dry, wrists were slapped, additional layers of safeguards were set. That's why the agencies were so careful to lay bread-crumbs this time around, to obtain clarification and endorsement: "Is this what you really want us to do? And you're willing to go on the record?" "This is your baby, go get it done," was the executive order.

We're on new ground, a soggy bottom the full implications of which even the leftiest snarkers and most liberal jihad-coddlers alike seem to miss. We finally have an open torture policy, one which our First Zombie announced in public, in front of cameras with words he grunted and hummed deep from in his ruined throat. Although it has and will continue to find its way home, this program of torture emanates from wellsprings of xenophobia, racism, and a yet more base pathology which has no name but may foment in serial killers. The difference from the America of Before is, no one has to be afraid of torturing anymore.

We cannot survive without ordinary truth to nurture our inner selves. Many if not most of us die in our twenties, after a relatively brief period of consciousness emerging from thoughtless childhood cruelty, eventually succumbing to our appetites, collections of multiple vices. It's so hard to keep noticing, to keep observing, to keep caring. But I want to be alive, this boy inside me wants to go on living. And the zombies behind simply shuffled along and repeated what the First Zombie said. They are still heading for their Long War, moaning and jostling each other on the way to mindlessly mortify yet more flesh. Maybe a lot more flesh than they already have. The full implication is that they're going to make us into zombies, too.

Mental Notes, Come The Revolution

1) Scalia is a troll. 2) Another federal court Bush appointee has allowed a money-laundering Swiss bank to shut down the wikileaks.org site.

Scalia ignores the Constitution and stare decisis to impose his support for cruel and unusual punishment:

The National Lawyers Guild calls on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to recuse himself from any case coming before the Supreme Court involving the constitutionality of torture as an interrogation technique. In a BBC interview that aired on Tuesday, Scalia defended the use of torture to extract information from persons in custody by law enforcement officials in some cases.

Although no case involving the use of torture is currently before the Court, recent events suggest that such a case may be forthcoming.

Guild President Marjorie Cohn said: “The Guild is appalled that a sitting Justice of the United States Supreme Court has ventured in a public forum his belief that it is justifiable to attempt to extract information from persons in custody by the use of torture. A justice of the highest court in the land, sworn to uphold the Constitution, whose views so undermine the fundamental right of security of the person guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, is unfit to sit on that Court.”…read on

California District Court Judge Jeffrey White denied, without recourse or notice, a popular whistleblower site on the behalf of a foreign bank. This means war in Web-Land:

In a pretty extraordinary ex-parte move, the Julius Baer Bank and Trust got Dynadot, the U.S. hosting company and domain registrar for Wikileaks, to agree not only to take down the Wikileaks site but also to "lock the wikileaks.org domain name to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar." Judge Jeffrey White in the U.S. District Court for Northern California signed off on the stipulation between the two parties last week without giving Wikileaks a chance to address the issue in court. ...read on

This is pure First Amendment violation, not even involving security. No different from blocking a newspaper or magazine from publishing on its web site.

(via Crooks & Liars, from Common Dreams, by way of Cat in the Bag)

The Brighter Side Of Waterboarding

The original headline said, "Senate votes to ban waterboarding," but is a Congressional bill ever that simple?

The prohibition was contained in a bill authorizing intelligence activities for the current year, which the Senate approved on a 51-45 vote. It would restrict the CIA to the 19 interrogation techniques outlined in the Army field manual. That manual prohibits waterboarding, a method that makes an interrogation subject feel he is drowning.

So the clause was nestled into a much larger bill. Bush may veto it, given that he has sworn not to constrain intelligence from the full array of techniques. Twenty or so years ago, waterboarding didn't exist (to my knowledge) as a term of art. It was accurately enough called "water torture" since you actually drown or suffocate to death when it's done to you.

Torture has been used by everybody, including the United States, even when it was officially banned. It's not something that needs any encouragement, and people who decide to employ it should at least be desperate enough to put themselves on the wrong side of the law. It'll be really cool for a lot of people when this finally does get banned again, and it'll benefit all of us regular Amis, especially those of us who travel overseas.

Iraq, Then And Now: The Evolution Of A Revolt

Then...T.E. Lawrence writes from the perspective of a successful Iraqi insurgent against the Ottoman Empire:

"It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts, the desert, or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed. It must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form of a disciplined army of occupation too small to fulfil the doctrine of acreage: too few to adjust number to space, in order to dominate the whole area effectively from fortified posts. It must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent. active in a striking force, and 98 per cent. passively sympathetic. The few active rebels must have the qualities of speed and endurance, ubiquity and independence of arteries of supply. They must have the technical equipment to destroy or paralyse the enemy’s organized communications, for irregular war is fairly Willisen’s definition of strategy, “the study of communication” in its extreme degree, of attack where the enemy is not. In fifty words: Granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy), time, and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain."

Now...PFC Damien Corsetti, nicknamed "The King of Torture" and "The Monster" by his compatriots for his enhanced interrogations in Kabul, gave an interview to the Spanish paper El Mundo, describing part of the repertoire:

"They tell them they are going to kill their children, rape their wives. And you see on their faces, in their eyes, the terror that that causes them. Because, of course, we know all about those people. We know the names of their children, where they live, we show them satellite photos of their houses. It is worse than any torture. 98% of the prisoners had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. In Abu-Ghraib and Bagram they were tortured to make them suffer, not to get information out of them."

T.E. Lawrence was tortured and sodomized in Daraa, Syria while in Turkish custody there. His claim has been disputed by people focused on his unknown sexual practices, yet the treatment he reports was commonplace. Lawrence said his captors were so inept and and sadistic they didn't realize his significance, and let him go. He later assaulted the Turkish-held port of Aqaba from the rear, capturing it in 1917, then was instrumental in throwing them out of Damascus in 1918. He was given every medal in the Empire, but refused a knighthood.

The map pictured above is of Lawrence's personal design, submitted by him to the British War Department at the end of World War One. It hangs in the Imperial War Museum in London. It was drawn with the subtle realities of local topography, history, tribes, trade routes, and cultural peculiarities uppermost in mind. Armenians have their own state, for example, and Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria are given to Feisal, Irak to Abdullah, with a second Arab state to Zeid. Things might have worked out differently had the Brits paid any attention to it.

Another Happy (Tasered) Citizen!

A student at the University of Florida asked John Kerry too many questions ("Why did you concede on election day when there was clear evidence of vote suppression? Why are you against impeaching Bush, when he's threatening to attack Iran? Were you and Bush in the Skull and Bones society at the same time?"). Even more importantly, he was a smartass. So it goes without saying that campus police grabbed him, dragged him to the ground, and tasered him.

The video of the incident might be disturbing to some, but really, I'm glad. Hopefully police will keep electrocuting anyone who mildly displeases them, especially young people for sassing off. I hope they taser sour-faced nuns, antagonistic customers in grocery store lines, and I hope they break into the subversive lunch meetings where the Rotary Clubs plot America's demise. We don't need free speech in America. What we need here is more people who are really pissed off, and what better way to accomplish that than with the loss of bladder control that comes with 5 or 10 thousand volts coursing through a human body?

I do think police may have gone a little far when they tasered a 56-year old woman to death in her wheelchair last year. True, she was a a paranoid schizophrenic who had threatened her sister with two kitchen knives and a hammer, but her effectiveness as a murderess was limited by her mobility. It may not have been necessary to taser her 11 times in under two minutes, causing her heart to permanently stop. I mean, you have to draw the line somewhere...right?

Update: I forgot to link to the news item about the mentally ill woman being electrocuted to death in her wheelchair. Her name was Emily Delafield, and it happened in Green Cove Springs, Clay County, Florida.