Democracy Still Worth Fighting For

As someone who watched with a sick dread the 2000 election results and the sorry spectacles of the states-rights, anti-litigious Republican party taking a lawsuit from state court to the Supreme Court to stop the Florida recount, I feel a real admiration for – and am definitely shamed by – the protesters after the very likely stolen election in Iran. A sufficient number of protesters in the streets of Tallahassee demanding the full recount take place might not have tipped the balance in 2000 at any point. But I feel bad for not at least trying. And I’ve since tried to make up for it, so there’s that.

But here are people with a legitimate grievance. Their government has defrauded them, stolen power and made up a story about it, and is physically cracking down on anyone who says so. And yet the Iranian citizens, openly flouting all restrictions on freedom of expression, fill the streets to demand justice. They endure horrible beatings and some may be dead – yet the demand for justice, equal representation and the rule of law still impel people forward regardless of the risk.

Or maybe in response to it. It’s often when freedom of expression is threatened by force that freedom of expression shouts the loudest. One of the greatest advances of Humanism – the idea that all humans are inherently equal and start with the same basic rights – is the idea that revolution by persuasion can be at least as effective as revolution by violence. Peaceful revolution is inherently humanist because it seeks change without violating its own principles. It has won revolutions in the Soviet Union and almost all of its client states and former members, India and South Africa – which is an especially clear example because it wasn’t the ANC’s violent tactics but rather the organized peaceful protests that so captured the world’s imagination. Violent acts are easily condemnable and rob any group of its legitimate focus in its grievances. ETA, the Basque resistance group that operates around the French-Spanish coastal border, increasingly loses support for its legitimate claims about guarding the autonomy of one of Europe’s most unique cultures by its acts of violence. When the government oppressing you has the choice of calling you a freedom fighter or a criminal, which do you think it’s going to choose? So why give it the opportunity to justify such a claim?

Humanism – including treating people fairly and all that sissy-ass hippie soft-on-terrorism, soft-on-crime, assuring-people’s-basic-rights stuff that Dick Cheney so insists is making us less safe – happens to be the basis for our Constitution. And although the Constitution as originally written was based on the social contract – that government should serve the governed – it took enough states insisting on a Bill of Rights that carved the government’s limits in stone to get it ratified. All those hippie ideas like search warrants and freedom of the press that led to the abominations of Miranda rights and FOIA began with the impetus of the next tier down from the ruling class protecting its own interests. That they become universal rights is the logical culmination of humanism: the glaring contradictions become increasingly evident in a society that espouses equality but doesn’t practice it or even fully comprehend why it should.

Which is why President Obama’s election is such a triumph for humanism and equal treatment. With his emphasis on ending the extrajudicial treatment of the Guantanamo and black site inmates, on government transparency, opposition to Bush-era secret treaties, civil unions, a better-regulated economy and other issues, his general direction is towards a government for the benefit of the governed and an economy for the benefit of the consumer. That conservatives tend to call this class warfare neglects to mention that the war is being conducted by people who have been robbed of something that was theirs: the faith that a well-regulated economy was not in fact dominated by cheats, number-shufflers and MBAs who favored getting around the law over operating within it.

Additionally the overt clumsiness of the Iranian government’s reaction testifies to its unpreparedness for this vast electoral uprising – not to mention its intellectual laziness and consequent need to be given the heave-ho. The majority of the people have clearly understood that the moral authority that Ayatollah Khomeini carried into the Iranian revolution in 1979 never went so far as to authorize Sharia to be extended as far as it did. Iranian history since then has been a tug-of-war between religious fundamentalist potentates and a populace that still remembers any sliver of liberal freedom it read about or even personally enjoyed.

And now it has come to this: An Iranian populace that would rather shout from the rooftops than quietly admit it has been robbed. The greatness of the liberal humanist idea of government for the governed planted this seed. Last week President Obama reached out to the Muslim nations in a speech from Cairo. He gave Iranian voters a Great Satan with a smile on his face and an extended hand – and removed the saber-rattling, us-or-them exceptionalist adversarialist brinkmanship that has bullied the world into a passive-aggressive resistance.

This removed a major tool of the Ahmadenijad electoral impetus – that the United States was threatening war and needed to be stood up to by a unanimous opposition. Sound familiar? Yeah it’s amazing how much an imminent threat – either real or manufactured – can motivate a populace into thinking out of fear and not reason. Especially if they’re not taught reason in the first place, but let’s not worry about that for now.

President Obama’s speech in Cairo made two innate promises to the Iranian people: that we would engage honestly with the Iranian people and that we would try to advance equality and the rule of law everywhere. Given that, the Obama government should press for complete transparency in Iran’s election process. Iran does not currently allow independent election monitors, which is evident of a systematic mistrust of the electorate. President Obama, as a Constitutional scholar, should know that it’s never in the people’s best interest to blindly trust their government. The people are better off the more the government’s actions are available to public examination.
This has been the main course of the Obama candidacy and the Obama presidency – that America succeeds best when it represents its own values. It should always be reminded of – and never dissuaded from – doing this. As such, we as a nation should demand from Iran the openness and accountability that its civilians are being prevented from demanding of their civil service. We should push for it to acknowledge the legitimate results of the contest even its oppressive election councils approved of. Ayatollah Khatamei should concede that he left the door open to reform and should now admit it needs to take place. And if we’re going to negotiate with a government it might as well be the honestly elected one.

POTUS Is Just Another Four-Letter Word

Just cold chillin' with your homies, a sixpack of Sierra Nevada and the solution to the Palestinian problem sketched out on the back of a napkin? That's the time to choose 1600 -- a complicated and nuanced fragrance by Obama.

You may think that a personal fragrance is the sum total of its creator's experience. You may be right, you may be wrong. All we know is that we have made mistakes. And we've learned from them. And the subtleties of the resultant fragrance are demanding yet fair, complex yet understandable. This isn't an apology -- this is a fragrance that is determined to restart the conversation.

1600.

Another Failed Bismarck with Delusions of Wisdom

Henry Kissinger has, in The Washington Post, a classic case of neoconservative amnesia: he imagines, incomprehensibly, that there is a demand for his advice, while stealthily dropping hints that the Obama administration wants to let North Korea keep its nuclear weapons. Best of all though, Kissinger hews to a few clangy old ideas that happen to be drug out by every neocon as foreign policy panaceas: increase missile defense and fight terror.

One thing’s for certain: Kissinger deserves credit for sticking his horrible wares out there in the free market. Somewhere in Egypt there’s a guy trying to sell sketchy-looking pigs who realizes his might not be the toughest sales job in the world. But to insist, after a thorough repudiation of neoconservative brinksmanship, that “the issue for diplomacy has become whether the goal should be to manage North Korea's nuclear arsenal or to eliminate it” and then make sly innuendos that President Obama will adopt “acquiescence” to North Korea’s nuclear ambitions – when that country tested its first nuclear bomb in 2006 – seems like a huge display of historical revisionism if not simply mad cow disease.

In spite of the facts, Kissinger frets. “The negotiating process is on the verge of legitimizing North Korea's nuclear program by enabling Pyongyang to establish a fait accompli while diplomacy runs its stately course,” worries the great statesman. He seems unaware that North Korean nuclearization has been a fait accompli for about three years now. But he has suddenly discovered that the status quo is unsustainable:

Furthermore, some public statements imply the United States will try to deal with specific North Korean threats rather than eliminate the capability to carry them out. They leave open with what determination Washington will pursue the elimination of the existing stockpile of North Korean nuclear weapons and fissionable materials. It is not possible to undertake both courses simultaneously.

So the United States must pursue either an elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons or – um – deal with its various actions after they’ve happened? The neocons have finally discovered the ominous mushroom cloud of their speeches and dreams – in the rogue nation their sabre-rattling has long nurtured.

And how would our master diplomat, advisor to Dubya about Iraq, architect of the lasting peace in Vietnam and offerer of unsolicited advice handle such a threat? With missile defense and – um – a global response to terrorism:

The enhanced role of non-state actors with respect to terrorism would have to be addressed. The concepts of deterrence against state actors are familiar, though not in a world of multiple nuclear powers. They have little or no relevance to non-state actors operating by stealth.

So our reaction to North Korea must somehow involve an emphasis on non-state terrorism? It sounds curiously disconnected from reality that the most isolated regime in the world might somehow develop ties with fanatical Muslims in southwest Asia. But stranger things have happened. In an odd bit of symmetry, eight years ago the previous administration was focused on North Korea and missile defense at the exact same moment that it should have been focused on terrorism.

Maybe Mr. Kissinger is just trying to rectify that past miscalculation. Or maybe he’s continuing Dick Cheney’s legacy of advocating extralegal wars fought in the shadows. Either way, it’s a good reminder when the man most associated with the secret bombing of Cambodia so much as suggests sinister clandestine operations why we are overwhelmingly mistrustful of unchecked government authority. And in that sense it’s fitting, really, that Henry Kissinger will always stand as a powerful argument against his own advice.

Dick Cheney and the Christmas Pony

Dick Cheney made a slight bit of news yesterday, and not by delivering his campfire-horror-story-style defense of his sanguinary, fact-free and failure-ridden approach to national security. No, it’s because he delivered a tepid endorsement of gay marriage while managing to frame it in terms of finding it utterly horrible. Said the master of tact:

“I think that freedom means freedom for everyone,” Cheney replied. “As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay, and it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family.”

It’s sweet that he manages to talk about Mary Cheney’s sexual orientation as though it’s leprosy and has afflicted the whole family with its terrible shadow. The Vice President is nothing if not resilient, though, and has borne up well under the strain. If a man can survive five draft deferments, he can survive the shame and humiliation of his daughter choosing an un-American lifestyle. Fortunately he has another daughter who is active in the fields of opposite marriage and ensuring that her daddy stays out of any war crimes trials.

It might be nice if Cheney’s strengths – his sullen and ruthless infighting, his ability to justify anything as long as it meant personal gain to himself or a loved one, and his tyrannical micromanaging of any task until it’s seen through to completion – would benefit humanity, if only for once. Besides, it would be ickily ironic if most states legalized gay marriage not for the right reason – that everybody deserves the same rights – but for the wrong reason – that children of privilege nagged their daddies until they got what they wanted.

Not that he seems inclined to apply such energy. Cheney shows all the enthusiasm of a hippie whose daughter wants a gun for Christmas – if he plays along for a while, she’ll probably forget the whole thing. So put whatever you want in that letter to Santa, Mary Cheney. Daddy’ll get around to it when the Lord stops afflicting him with your homosexuality.

How To Succeed in Bosnia without Really Lying

My new favorite prognosticator of cooked-up Obama administration controversies, TheFoxNation.com, is now seething over a report that Vice President Biden, in speaking to the parliament of Bosnia-Herzegovina, recalled being fired upon during a 1993 visit to the capital, which was then under siege.

According to a reporter at the speech, Biden "recalled his trip to the country in 1993, and how, flying in at the time, his plane was fired upon, and bombed-out homes with snipers inside could be seen." And the eyes reflexively roll. Ah, Joe -- always out with something ridiculous.

What's funny though is that the statement doesn't sound like one of Joe Biden's typical gaffes. Biden just doesn't deliver the Hillaryesque landing-under-sniper-fire embellishments that start with a basis in reality and add on something unbelievable. No, his semantic seizures usually tend to be dumbass mistakes like telling a guy in a wheelchair to stand up, or reveal his inner unvarnished hick, such as when he said that you can't go into a 7-11 in Delaware without hearing an Indian accent. But making stuff up out of whole cloth? That's not really him.

And in fact the White House prepared statement doesn't mention Biden being shot at. Now maybe he mentioned having his plane shot at in a departure from his prepared statement. Maybe he made a joking reference to Hillary's famous remarks. Maybe the reporter simply misheard him -- or maybe the account is accurate. Since no video is currently available, the Times account can't be verified, nor can Biden's actual speech be viewed or understood in context. But the FoxNation folks haven't let that stop them -- expect this to be a right-wing meme, whether true or not, for a while.

Oh, and there's one more thing. Biden, in a moment of bracing diplomatic bluntness, told Bosnia-Herzegovina's assembled lawmakers that their best bet was to knit themselves into the European community, but that they were still on the wrong path to doing that. This forwardness is the privilege of Biden's being engaged in the region for almost two decades; and his pragmatic advice has the credibility of the diplomacy that culminated in the Dayton accords. But don't expect Republicans to notice that -- they're too busy trying to make tea party hors-d'oeuvres out of the crumbs of a successful foreign policy.

Chatter and Verse: Donald Rumsfeld's Bible-Themed Propaganda as an Art Form. A Bad, Tendentious, Horrible Art Form.

In the latest bit of surprised-but-not-quite-shocked news, photographic evidence has emerged that while he was defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld used to decorate his briefings to President Bush with tasteful warrior photos captioned with Bible verses.

GQ, of all sources, released the information that Secretary Rumsfeld “appreciated” the cover designs. One might assume that Rumsfeld condescendingly figured Dubya would more readily agree to a plan, no matter how harebrained, as long as a Biblical verse was affixed to it. Having to explain why the Iraq situation was getting worse after six years probably went down a lot easier when the president saw a picture of American soldiers kneeling in prayer with an accompanying reassuring verse from Isaiah – these challenges are meant to test us, and let us not lose our resolve, came the message. The subsequent and detailed bad news was probably drowned with syrup, butter and small talk.

And yet the overwhelming reaction on viewing the images is that they’re just craptacular. Let’s be honest – if you’re going to put together a spirited, patriotic, Jesus-referencing, crying-eagle-on-a-rock type of cover, you could do much better than this slop. Henceforth are some suggestions.

Ol’ Ecclesiastes was the liberal elite of his generation – always talking pretty and making the impetuous and belligerent look stupid. He hated America waaaay before it was cool, so he’d be into this. Is there a time for war crimes tribunals?

Samuel was pretty much the Bismarck of his time – on the cusp of forming a nation. Unfortunately the nation was being built on the remains of the people who lived there before, so Israel’s various neighbors had to go. Since we don’t have that excuse in Iraq, maybe we should invoke a pointless biblical parallel instead and hope for the best.

“Let’s be honest here. I don’t know what Daddy did or why he did it, but I promise I’ll do more of it. Except anything that Reagan wouldn’t have done. And then some. But you’re not gonna believe that shit. Just hold on to your britches.”

Which makes me appreciate all the more what some of the newer briefings might look like:

Pete Hoekstra’s Vapid Attack

Well it’s happening again. The Republicans, beset on many fronts by the successes of the Obama administration and torn from within by arguments over whether their party should try to live in the present or just close the curtains and pretend every day was Januay 19, 1989, have opted to attack when the situation calls for retreat and have thrown a bucket of mud on Nancy Pelosi – specifically, Representative Pete Hoekstra (R – MI) released a document on May 8 that he said proves the speaker of the House is lying about when she knew the administration was practicing torture: “The bottom line is she and her key staff, they all knew about it,” Hoekstra said.

The only problem, however, is that a reasonable person looking at the document sees no terribly compelling proof. The alleged record is an image of a spreadsheet, with names and dates and often just the vaguest summary of what took place at a meeting. The relevant briefing in question is described, in its entirety, as “Briefing on EITs* including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a particular desciption of the EITs that had been employed.” Yet it has no author, no date of publication, no sources, and offers no proof of anything. There are no signatures or initials of attendees and not even a mention of how long the meetings lasted. It looks like the world’s most-hastily-assembled CYA memo.

Even the Director of Central Intelligence, Leon Panetta, refuses to vouch for its authenticity. In a cover letter that was often mentioned in articles but surprisingly hard to track down, Panetta declares that “this information, however, is drawn from the past files of the CIA and represents MFRs** completed at the time and notes that summarized the best recollections of those individuals. In the end, you and the Committee will have to determine whether this information is an accurate reflection of what actually happened.” Basically this is the CIA’s best guess at the past.

And it’s apparently not much of a guess, either. Already Pelosi has cast doubt on the sweeping conclusion that Hoekstra derived from the meeting summary’s single sentence. She has insisted that while torture techniques were discussed, they weren’t mentioned as actually having been used, only approved for use, and that waterboarding wasn’t mentioned at the briefing she attended. In addition, Senators Jay Rockefeller and Bob Graham have both come forward disputing the content of the report with respect to briefings where they are mentioned. Graham says that waterboarding wasn’t mentioned in his briefing, and Rockefeller didn’t attend his briefing at all.

If the accuracy and credibility of this report weren’t questionable enough, there remains the fact that regardless of what was disclosed to Pelosi, there was very little she could do about it – she wasn’t allowed to take notes or consult a lawyer about the briefing. To argue that this redress-bereft acceptance of knowledge represents complicity requires a Madoffian level of intellectual accounting.

The final insult, of course, lies in the fact that Representative Hoekstra implied with his accusation of Pelosi: that to be told a fact, after the fact, implies a shared responsibility that would cause the speaker to back down from pushing any torture investigations. As though her role is so similar to the John Yoos and Jay Bybees and Alberto Gonzaleses of this episode to give her some pause. As though she wouldn’t know the difference between the criminals and the witnesses.

The hearings should be very clarifying, Mr. Hoekstra.

*EIT stands for Enhanced Interrogation Technique – or, as I like to call it, Elsewhere It’s Torture.
**Memorandum for the Record.

Def Takes a Holiday

This evening I had the pleasure of sharing an after-dinner beverage with Wonkette’s two associate editors, Jim Newell and Sara K. Smith. They both blogged that they were trapped in a hellhole in the deep south among the cattails, humans incapable of motion under their own power, and Lincoln among the Cupolas. I thought the scene looked familiar and after a few arrangements we met in front of the Berkley Hotel, where our exhausted heroes were disgorged after a grueling three-hour tour at one of Richmond’s better-known dining establishments. They had arrived discussing Tycho Brahe, and whether the story was true that he had died of a burst bladder. Not an auspicious beginning.

And then they would be off the next morning at a ridiculous hour, as though half a day in Richmond gave any sense of its history. You can walk across Richmond in half a day – to talk abou it could take a year straight without any interruptions, corrections or going back over known territory.

We talked for a while about scandalous stuff. I’m too incapacitated to remember any of the details, but there was lots of it. You would be shocked.

And then suddenly the waiter began muttering “get the fuck out of here” as he walked past us. It seemed like we should go. Outside we chatted with a nice couple from Vladivostok about the standard of living in DC. I slipped into my car wondering if I had made a good impression. If I don’t hear from the CDC tomorrow I’ll call it a yes.

Like a Rock: If You Thought GM's Stock Sucked, Just Look at Their Pension Fund

You might think our recent economic trouble – whether you call it a recession, a depression, or enforced cannibalism – has hit bottom and is about to start turning around. Recently President Obama saw a glimmer of hope in the economy – mortgage refinancing is up, for instance. And even though it’s a small and subjective measurement, things have been looking up. Alas in the economy, as in many hospitals, a patient in critical condition can perk up right before he rolls over and dies.

Unfortunately the bailouts and potential bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler have revealed a long-standing and disturbing truth – their pension funds are short about $49 billion, and our choices, as the responsible corporate socialists that we have become, are both few and painful. We can either spend money bailing out the pension and health plans that the auto companies have underfunded for decades, or we can let retirees work as Wal-Mart greeters and sell their kidneys for spare change.

Reasonable peole might look at the books of major corporations with pension plans and wonder how we arrived at this ugly impasse. After all, the greatest minds of several generations were allegedly focused for decades on making the United States the world’s economic powerhouse, churning out goods faster and cheaper than anywhere else in the world. Turns out that most companies just made big promises and hoped they could keep them years down the road.

When the brilliant people in charge of your corporation’s pension fund didn’t meet their projected growth rate – or, heaven forbid, lost money – they would compensate with what’s popularly known as the gambler’s fallacy. They would put more money on riskier bets in the hopes that they’d strike it big and everything would work out:

On the investment side, pension plans cover over their funding shortfalls first by assuming future returns on equities that, while possible, are not guaranteed. The assumption makes funds look healthier than they are, and drives their investments deeper into the stock market.

Is it comforting to find out that people with years of training and allegedly great financial acuity were acting like drunk vacationing neophytes at a Las Vegas craps table? Then you’ll be thrilled to know that the people who guaranteed that money did the same damn thing.

Maybe the people protesting President Obama’s acquisition of corporate power are rightly afraid that the federal government is a bad manager and not really responsive to the interests of the people. If that’s so, then they’re a few decades late in looking out for the little guy. Right now we’re all the owners of a hundred billion dollars of IOUs for the retirement and health care plans of our friends, families and neighbors. We’re going to have to pony up somehow, and it’s going to be painful and expensive. But at least the worst alternative – which the free marketers keep advocating in spite of the facts – is one we can eliminate quickly. The people who lost all our pension funds in the first place have absolutely no business managing them anymore.

Torture in the Cathedral: How Petty Politics Subverted Our Best National Character

NOTE: This is an analysis of the just-released report of the Senate Armed Services Committee's report on detainee abuse. I have limited my coverage to a section of the Executive Summary, although there's much much more to go through. As limited as it is, the story of how an unprepared bureaucracy was used to justify torture is worth telling. The Committee's report can be found linked in two parts at the bottom of this page. All citations are from part I of that document unless otherwise noted. Any spelling or grammatical errors are likely mine in transcribing it from its original pdf format.

Late in the evening of April 21, 2009, the Senate Armed Services Committee released its report on detainee abuse. This report focused on the chain of events that led from Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of torture (i.e. harsh or otherwise euphemized interrogation tactics) to the spread of such tactics throughout the theaters in the Bush War on Terror, including Abu Ghraib prison.

The report’s executive summary and conclusion sections by themselves are a cold foray into the banality of evil. From its evidence a careful reader can glean traces of the internecine bureaucratic battles between Donald Rumsfeld and his allies and the established forces that – in this case at least – tried to preserve the rule of law against the buildup of an autocratic feifdom. From nearly the beginning of the War on Terror, Secretary Rumsfeld sought for the military unprecedented and clearly illegal leeway to use torture on detainees. The Senate Armed Service’s Committee’s report documents, in rather bland and acronym-heavy language, how the administration carried out this task, propping up a flimsy legal framework when it could and simply ignoring other legal hazards when it had to.

The story begins three months after the September 11, 2001 attacks, with a relatively small arm of the Department of Defense called the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which is charged with “training American personnel to resist techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions.” Its most famous activity is the SERE school, which stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. Soldiers going through SERE school are subjected to the kinds of rough treatment they might expect to endure if they had been captured in 1950s Korea – brutal uses of force intended to break them down and elicit false confessions to be used for propaganda purposes.

For some reason, JPRA was the group that Rumsfeld turned to when the US captured several high-value detainees, among them Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and abu Zubaydah. According to a McClatchy article, the adminstration’s goals were twofold – to find out what other al-Qaida plots were in the pipeline and to uncover the fabled Iraq-al-Qaida connections that could be used to justify the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The continual lack of good information – especially of the latter type – spurred the use of harsher techniques.

A month after Rumsfeld solicited JPRA’s assistance with developing torture techniques, President Bush signed a memorandum stating that the US was not going to abide by the Geneva Conventions in the case of al-Qaida and Taleban operatives (p. xiii). Rumsfeld was set to shove his interrogation tactics through that open door and set up whatever justification was necessary to make it look acceptable.

In the process of appropriating JPRA and the SERE school techniques away from their original mission to one of interrogation, a number of red flags went up throughout the military establishment. First of all (p. xvii) “SERE techniques were ‘developed to better prepare US military personnel to resist interrogations and not as a means of obtaining reliable information.’” Furthermore, the Committee concluded that JPRA had never conducted any investigation into which, if any, techniques garnered reliable information.

Not that that seemed to matter. In the months that followed, JPRA, in conjunction with other elements of the military and the CIA, drafted plans to use SERE school techniques, including waterboarding, on the high-value detainees. Meanwhile, at the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, Jay Bybee was assiduously redefining torture to accommodate whatever new techniques would be tried out on America’s captives (p. xv).

With the groundwork now set for the application of torture, the first place the Defense Department would try them would be at Guantanamo Bay, where a makeshift prison camp for enemy combatants had been set up. On October 11, 2002, Major General Michael Dunlavey, in charge of the Gitmo detainees, formally requested use of the SERE school techniques. His backing legal analysis came from Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, who fully expected a more comprehensive rationale to be executed by a higher authority. General Dunlavey’s request worked its way up to the General Richard Myers, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who solicited opinions from throughout the military (p. xvii).

The reaction was swift and certain: Objections to Lt. Col. Beaver’s analysis, as well as to the techniques themselves, came from the Air Force, the Navy, the Marine Corps, DOD’s Criminal Investigative Task Force and the Chief of the Army’s Internal and Operational Law Division. General Myers’ chief legal counsel, then-Captain (now Rear Admiral) Jane Dalton, initiated a thorough legal review of the proposed procedures in light of the avalanche of troubled responses from the military establishment. According to her testimony, she made DOD Chief Legal Counsel Jim Haynes aware of her actions (p. xviii).

Shortly afterwards, however, General Myers put a stop to Dalton’s review, apparently at Haynes’ request. The Committee’s evidence points to Secretary Rumsfeld growing impatient with the review and pressing for a recommendation before the investigation was stopped. However, only Captain Dalton seems to remember Myers and Haynes calling a halt to her analysis. The general and the lawyer expressed no recollection of the events, although they didn’t object to Dalton’s testimony.

Haynes then issued a one-page memo allowing the SERE school techniques on the Gitmo detainees. When asked by the Senate Committee what his legal basis was for his conclusions, he cited only Lt. Col. Beaver’s legal analysis, which legal authorities throughout the military had called “woefully inadequate” and which she herself had expected would be supplemented by more thorough studies.

Thus did Donald Rumsfeld and the advocates of torture roll over decades of civilized advance in the conduct of war, in the process severely tarnishing America’s image abroad, not to mention turning back the clock on the history of humanistic principles. You might imagine such a momentous decision made only after thorough deliberations by the most erudite minds of the nation in a time of great peril. And while the peril existed, it’s shameful to see that threat held up not as a pretext for fighting a great and principled battle, but as an excuse to trash the values we hold dear.

Determination and fortitude will be necessary to uncover and undo the damage that Rumsfeld and other petty bureaucrats have wrought over the previous eight years. And after that, ideally, prosecutions and convictions will convince anyone longing to follow in their footsteps that this country won’t stand for it.

You Can't Even Torture Some of the People Some of the Time

Hey everybody, there’s good news on the torture front. First of all, we definitely do not torture. This is the official opinion of the Bush administration on August 1, 2002, in a memo released just yesterday by the Obama White House.

The August 2002 memo’s author, Jay Bybee (who is a federal appellate judge now, if that makes you feel any better) was head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel at the time. The OLC originally functioned to advise the president on the legality of proposed actions; however during the Bush years it turned into an apologist and justifier for the most sordid form of American exceptionalism: that because our nation advocated human rights and liberty, anything we did in their name was justified. Essentially, since we’re the world’s supernanny, it’s okay if we beat the children.

Bybee served for two years as the mind behind this ethos of exceptionalism – and while his 2002 memo is not brilliant work (an NYU law and ethics professor called it “abysmal”), it gave the executive branch enough wiggle room to say it was justified in using several dicey techniques against al-Qaida travel agent abu Zubaydah, including sleep deprivation, slamming his head against walls, forcing him to stand for days on end until he risked embolisms and renal failure, and other practices classified as torture under the Geneva Conventions.

Advocates of torture have long argued that today’s circumstances call for extraordinary measues in dealing with detainees. Today’s religious fanatics apparently put SS troops, kamikaze pilots, Ghurkas and berserkers to shame. The only way to deal with al-Qaida and its associated threats (including innocent cabbies and people whose relatives we killed) is with some sort of muscular pose hastily ripped from a 24 episode’s rough draft. Unfortunately the memo’s prose doesn’t come from the sort of bloody-knuckled streetfighter you would imagine favored torture – rather, it exhibits the logical contortions of an oleaginous schoolboy trying to kiss up to the headmaster while hiding from ideas he does not fully understand. For instance, here is Bybee’s take on pain and suffering:

“Pain and suffering” as used in Section 2340 is best understood as a single concept, not distinct concepts of “pain” as distinguished from “suffering.” See Section 2340 Memorandum at 6n.3. The waterboard, which inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever, does not, in our view inflict “severe pain or suffering.” Even if one were to parse the statute more finely to attempt to treat “suffering” as a distinct concept, the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe suffering. The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering.

All clear now? Bybee shows an immense faith in the idea that future legal scholars will be embroiled in a debate over whether torture had to constitute both pain and suffering or merely one item. While Bybee might be capable of regurgitating dogma about the Transubstantiation if spoon-fed it slowly enough, it is clear that his mind is not capable of arriving at the truth when armed only with facts.

And maybe the Bush administration sought to keep this work of legal ingenuity secret for so long because they knew what an embarrassment it would be if publicized. Either way, the fact that the Obama administration released it with almost no redactions whatsoever shows two things: that the memo held no critical national security secrets, and that the Bush administration’s arguments that revealing such memos would somehow compromise the deterrent effect of torture was an empty one.

Bybee exhibits a corrupt peanut plant inspector’s disregard for oversight when he cites the CIA’s own research into the safety of sleep deprivation: “Your review of the literature uncovered no empirical data on the use of these procedures, with the exception of sleep deprivation for which no long term health consequences resulted.” In fact, the CIA published a manual in 1963 outlining the debilitating effects of such treatment. Accounts by people who suffered sleep deprivation have been around for decades before that. John Schlapobersky was tortured using sleep deprivation in South Africa in the 1960s, and described its effects vividly:

“I was kept without sleep for a week in all. I can remember the details of the experience, although it took place 35 years ago. After two nights without sleep, the hallucinations start, and after three nights, people are having dreams while fairly awake, which is a form of psychosis.

“By the week’s end, people lose their orientation in place and time—the people you’re speaking to become people from your past; a window might become a view of the sea seen in your younger days. To deprive someone of sleep is to tamper with their equilibrium and their sanity.”

Bybee, acting as Dubya’s legal enabler, justified sleep deprivation for up to eleven days – well into the realm of causing deep psychosis. And while later accounts bear out that most of the information extracted from abu Zubaydah was useless, the relentless torture did at least succeed in revealing one deep, dark national security threat – that we, as a people, are almost as barbaric as the ethos we profess to fight. Ideally, bringing these torture memos to light will inspire us not to abandon our defense of our civilization – but to renew it from behind the bastion of our humanist values and not just our basest fears.

Ghost in the Graveyard: Is the War on Terror Really Dead?

Jake Tapper, Teddy Davis and Kirit Radia at ABCNews.com think the War on Terror – the phrase at least – might be over. Or not. While there is no apparent continuation of its use since the previous administration, it doesn’t seem to be officially banned either. The sole shred of evidence of its demise is a context-free memo asking an unnamed recipient not to use it. Tapper and his colleagues have either a mako-like acuity for tiny concentrations of blood in the water or else they’re stumbling around in the dark looking for their car keys.

Although in fairness the term deserves to be cut loose to languish in some historical backwater – for it was a McMansion of a phrase: an ugly brick fortress rising up over a garage and swallowing a moderately-terraced entryway, dotted throughout with a hodgepodge of bay windows, turrets, the occasional exposed rafter, a kitchen bar and butcherblock table opening onto a tiki-themed Florida room. It was a meaningless pastiche designed more to frighten and impress the neighbors than to address any single goal. Most egregiously, cloaking the strategic blunder of invading Iraq, its horrible planning, the White House’s inability to adjust to evolving battlefield conditions and the institutionalization of abhorrent practices were given cover of the entirely rational attack upon the Taleban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan after September 11, 2001.

The War on Terror is not the naming of enemies, like the Franco-Prussian War or the French and Indian War. It does not name a purpose the way The War of Spanish Succession or the War for Independence does – these tell you at least what the war is about. The War on Terror almost reeks of a semantic cover for something much nastier and controversial coming up. Having bought the loyalty of the frightened, The War on Terror told us the government was about to make us watch it beat up a kid and take his candy, otherwise we were out of the club. And we knew as we watched, sick to our stomach, that it was only going to get worse.

As a name, The War on Terror buys into the jingoistic hoopla that comes out of the mouths of fourth-graders building a fort in the backyard. Tapper reminds us of an incident during a Democratic debate in which there was a show of hands asked of candidates who believed there was a Global War on Terror. Was is really only two years ago that legitimate reporters were asking this question? Now it seems that we’re concerned with strategic alignments of tribes in Pakistan’s Baluchistan and how much infrastructure to invest in schools and roads in Afghanistan. The difference? We’re not constricting our thinking in the moral straitjacket of some Tom and Jerry plot, where opponents trade blows with hammer and chainsaw until one is eventually beaten into submission. Free to handle tactical problems as tactical problems, the coalition in Afghanistan can attempt to win the battlefield – which in a guerilla insurgency is always the population – in practical steps rather than bullying our way into the hearts of the Afghan people. The War against The Taliban and al-Qaida is now something to win, rather than amorphous cover for a snakeball of cockeyed global domination projects.

If this is a return to sanity, then, let us make the most of it – you never know how long these things last. Any old alcoholic can wake up shivering on a curb, in his bare feet, covered in his own filth and swear never to end up that way again. It’s the serious ones who find a way to stay on the wagon. We as a nation need to re-establish the checks and balances among the three branches of government. Never again should the executive be allowed to claim sole power and determine that it should oversee itself. This is just as bad an idea in government as it is in the derivatives market.

Finally we should prosecute the people who led us down this road of madness in the first place: those who authorized torture and warrantless wiretapping, who manufactured evidence to lead us to war, who covered their own ineptness with official secrecy, who wilfully flouted the laws of civilized behavior, and who used the Constitution as though it were the Lead Pipe of Freedom, a self-rationalizing cudgel whose bearer could do no wrong. Many of the architects of Bush’s administration admired the Nixon White House’s approach to the world – and if they’re not thoroughly repudiated, they’ll stand as a shining example to the next generation of oversimplifying, paranoid Napoleons waiting to take their turn wrapped in the flag.

When Awful Things Happen to Terrible People

Spring, that heartening season when life returns to the world, brings on a wonderful sense of renewal and restoration of a long-lost balance: migratory birds start arriving home, bugs and flowers peep out of the ground and begin celebrating the warm, moist days – and a Spanish prosecutor contemplates indicting Alberto Gonzales for war crimes.

Gonzales has garnered himself a coveted niche in the annals of American jurisprudence – he rose from a hapless Texas yes-man to then-governor George W. Bush to the yes-man for the Bush administration’s initiatives to keep Afghan prisoners out of the reach of any criminal authority in his stint as legal counsel to the president, and from there ascended to Attorney General, inspiring many Americans to do something they never thought possible: miss the wisdom and sober judgment of John Ashcroft.

Currently Spanish judge Baltazar Garzon is considering an indictment against Gonzales and others in the Bush Justice Department for authorizing torture – a term which elicited, in a White House noted for its disdain for such fancy ideas as ethical relativism, an almost reverential degree of nuance, ambiguity and downright confusion. On January 25, 2002, Gonzales issued a memo calling a long-standing treaty against abuse of detainees “obsolete,” while in its defense the Bush administration adamantly declared, “We do not torture.” As though, possibly, the legal opinion that the Geneva Conventions were outmoded was really only a commentary on their oh-so-1950s typeface.

Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, another cautious and deliberate figure when it came to matters of law, issued a memo the very next day that Afghan detainees would receive protection only "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity." While there is no evidence that Rumsfeld also issued thumbscrews and fireplace pokers to relevant combat units, this was probably an oversight on his part, as he was extremely busy underequipping and underplanning the subsequent invasion of Iraq because of the urgent fear that Saddam Hussein might commit more human rights abuses.

Subsequent investigation has shown a direct link between Gonzales’ authorization of policies that go beyond limitations of US law to cases of torture and abuse that riddled the military for years afterwards, from the waterboarding of high-value detainees to the torture of prisoners held without charge at Guantanamo Bay to the beating to death of a cabbie in Bagram in US custody to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

You might think that after creating such a memorable legacy, your average sadist would rest on his laurels (i.e. the skulls of little children) and spend some time congratulating himself on the vast swath of unspeakable horror he’s managed to exsanguinate onto the Constitution. But that would be to misunderestimate Gonzales. It was he, after all, in his previous capacity as legal counsel to then-Governor Bush, who had formulated a memo summarizing the clemency petition of death row inmate Terry Washington – a memo so cursorily penned that it barely mentioned the mitigating factors in Washington’s case – among them that the mentally-retarded 33-year-old had the developmental abilities of a seven-year-old and that he and his siblings had been frequently “beaten with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts.” Bush denied Washington’s petition on May 6, 1997 and he was executed that same day.

If anything could further exacerbate Gonzales’ fetishizing of human suffering and his Rumsfeldian inattention to obvious facts (besides a passion for clown paintings and a large crawl space, that is), it was his ambition to play out his medieval sense of right and wrong on a larger stage – as Attorney General or even as a justice of the Supreme Court. Fortunately Gonzales’ own ineptness, partisanship and downright stupidity kept him from that particular appointment – instead, after a scandal involving the firing of US Attorneys and his subsequent Congressional testimony that displayed equal parts ignorance, corruption and condescension, Gonzales announced his resignation on August 27, 2007, and has since spent his time puzzling over his inability to land a job.

In spite of Gonzales’ horrific performance as Attorney General, equal to the legacies left by previous Republicans such as John Mitchell and Ed Meese, it’s Gonzales’ sycophantically eager authorization of torture and other war crimes that did to American justice what a bus driver with macular degeneration and the DTs might do to a schoolyard full of children and puppies. His conduct has rightfully earned the attention of Judge Garzon – if not, alas, that of serious legal authorities in this country. And while his ambitions to the highest court in the land were thwarted, there is still hope that some sort of international tribunal can find him the lifetime appointment that would cap off his brilliant career.

Cotton Candy for the Republican Soul

Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said, “It is better to be thought of as a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” Now, however, Republicans (i.e. the Party with the Same Name as the Party of Lincoln) have decided that since their credibility is already in a hole, they may as well keep digging in the hopes that they strike oil.

What they’ve emerged with, though not any kind of Texas tea, is certainly a viscous, smelly mess that nobody wants to touch. Behold – The Republican Road to Recovery. The most obvious fact about this document is that, were it ever to be a bill on the House or Senate floor, there would be absolutely no excuse for not reading the entire thing. It’s a massive 19 pages from beginning to end – but you can leave out the front and back pages, which, though some very pretty shades of blue, are devoid of any substance.

Not that you should only read the substantial pages – that would leave you with nothing but a few connected circles you might want to color or doodle in. Essentially the entire plan promises to cut taxes, cut the deficit, create jobs, increase access to health care and limit lawsuits. Sound familiar? It’s as though someone dug around in Ronald Reagan’s old campaign closet, took out all the “evil empire” references and updated the years, and the result was this candied, empty-calorie glop. It’s like Captain Queeg trying to relive his glory days tracking down the quart of strawberries.

Of course there’s nothing preventing the Republicans from coming up with any actual ideas – nevertheless, they insist on sticking to tax cuts (which they call, cleverly, “cutting taxes and creating jobs” because, you know, the two go hand-in-hand) and reducing spending. Granted, no Republican has reduced government spending in decades, but this doesn’t prevent them from advocating it with an endearing tenacity. They are content to stick to a good, morally sound idea despite its untenability – just as the Wright brothers decided to forego learning about aerodynamics but instead kept glueing feathers to their arms and jumping off cliffs until only Orville and Wilbur were left and they had saved up enough insurance money to afford that wind tunnel.

Unfortunately a wave of pity has overtaken me and I can’t help but offer these poor bastards some ideas. Not because I feel any empathy for Republicans – but just in case they manage to purchase another election, they might be armed afterwards with something other than their neolithic talismans and hoary shibboleths to confront the real problems that might be lying in wait tomorrow. What they do with these suggestions is up to them.

Sell Encyclopedias
I was going to start off with actual education, but it’s probably an acquired taste, and it seems a bit much to force the party that believes the current economic downturn is somehow Adam and Eve’s fault to jump in to the fact-based world headfirst. So maybe putting some Republicans next to some actual facts would be a good start. I went this route myself for a little while after college, and while I never made any money at it, I did learn that the poinsettia was named after the first US ambassador to Mexico. Laugh if you want to, but I’ll bet that’s how Einstein got started.

Have a Car Wash
Now who doesn’t love to stop at an intersection and look up from fiddling with the radio to see a bunch of earnest young people waving car wash signs at them? It hearkens back to everything that makes America great – warm summer days on hot asphalt, making almost no money, chasing the girls with the hose until the big redheaded chick locks you in the trunk, and the violation of countless child labor and safety laws. If that doesn’t get this country back on its feet, at least it’ll give the parents an afternoon to get loaded without having the kids around demanding to be fed.

Export Something
One of the best ways of making money for your country is making something that other countries need but don’t have. Unfortunately, the only thing Republicans have been good at exporting lately are credit-default swaps, and the bloom seems to be off that rose for now. The only other two exports the party is good at are missionaries and “America – love it or leave it” themed country songs. The first tend to get eaten, and the second, like many fine wines, don’t travel well. It’s too bad there isn’t a country out there that’s in dire need of education and frequent car washes that Republicans have been longing to improve anyway. Oh, wait – problem solved.

When Is a Campaign Contribution Not a Campaign Contribution? When It’s a Bonus.

It’s fun to watch the birth of a meme. I don’t know if it began with this essay by Dan Spencer at examiner.com, but his was one of the earlier ones, at least. Spencer has checked out OpenSecrets.org, a collection of campaign data including breakdowns of the 2008 presidential race, and announced this gleaned fact:

Senator Barack Obama received a $101,332 bonus from American International Group in the form of political contributions according to Opensecrets.org. The two biggest Congressional recipients of bonuses from the A.I.G. are - Senators Chris Dodd and Senator Barack Obama.

He then goes on to call these contributions “bonuses” and wonders if, given Obama’s outrage at bonuses for AIG executives, he’ll be returning his own bonus.

The issue has since ben raised elsewhere, and even ABC News ran a similar story in its Politics section that, in some feint at balance, also mentioned how much Senator John McCain got in AIG contributions before turning back to Obama. Mysteriously, the ABC story didn’t bother to link directly to its sources, or even provide a link to OpenSecrets.org, the Center for Responsive Politics’ site that seems to be the original source of this information.

Which is odd, because it doesn’t take long before this scandalous little fact turns out to be a fairly thin slice of the big picture. And after a little poking around OpenSecrets.org, the thin slice apears to get almost transparent.

First of all, you can only search their database by donor or by donor’s employer. For what little effort I’ve put into it, there doesn’t seem to be a way to differentiate between donations from individuals who happened to be employed by AIG and donations resulting from a corporate effort by AIG or its subsidiaries. To the contrary, OpenSecrets makes clear that is does not have any data that would distinguish one type of giving from the other. In truth, neither Spencer nor anyone who has repeated his story has any way of knowing how much of that $101,322 was from any direct effort by AIG to influence an Obama administration’s treatment of it.

But there are other, more detailed slices of this pie that Spencer doesn’t care to mention. While searching by supporter’s employer doesn’t seem to clearly state whether a set of contributions came from a party representing a specific interest, OpenSecrets has another category that might: Bundlers. They are, apparently, “people with friends in high places who, after bumping against personal contribution limits, turn to those friends, associates, and, well, anyone who's willing to give, and deliver the checks to the candidate in one big "bundle."

So Bundlers might be even more indicative of who was getting contributions from interest groups than Employer turned out to be. Because clearly if I was going to seek out money for my candidate, I’d seek it from people who held views in common with mine. They might be creditors of the same company or on the same board of directors – nevertheless, they would probably have more in common, as a group, than would people with the same employer.

And guess what: when we look at campaign contributions by bundlers, Barack Obama raised $63,200,000 of his $745,000,000 total – or less than ten percent – from bundlers. John McCain, on the other hand, raised $207,200,000 out of a total of $368,000,000, or fifty-six percent, of his campaign contributions from bundlers. When John McCain outraised Barack Obama from special interests by a ratio of six to one, it makes it appear that the $101,332 from AIG employees is a fig leaf hacked out by the Republicans because they simply have nothing else to use to stall President Obama’s legislative agenda.

I’m frankly not surprised that Mr. Spencer’s allegations turn out to be nothing more than a narrow interpretation through a particular statistical prism. Beginning with Joe McCarthy’s lists of known communists in the US government and culminating in their current redefinition of socialism as a tax rate 30 percentage points below the one they just approved, House Republicans have often chosen a strategy of slander over rigorous analysis as a measure of success. This latest episode is just more evidence that they are wise to do so.

Kill the Patient, Reward the Disease

So President Obama, confronted with the actual sordid behavior of those who pretend to live by the free market, is now going to try to reverse the $165 million in bonuses that AIG managed to pay its worst employees as the country was bailing it out to the tune of $170 billion.

The ironies inherent in this whole fiasco are, of course, delicious – or they would be, if the slathering greed of the principles involved hadn’t cost millions of people their mortgages, jobs and life savings. First, every time there’s a booming market we’re subject to endless paeans to the corporate executive, the stock trader and others who allegedly risk losing everything at the hands of the mighty economy so that they might stand a chance of winning the world.

The truth, however, seems to be a little more complicated – the everything they risk isn’t usually theirs, and if and when they do fail, they go running to Uncle Sugar (whether that’s investors, other corporations or – as a last resort – the government) crying about how they got a boo-boo and need a billion dollars or so. Then – humbled by said experience – they pack themselves off to a spa in Arizona and sit by the pool congratulating themselves for a week. Or they keep giving themselves fat bonuses. After all, a derivatives trader can’t be denied the hookers and blow to which he’s become accustomed, can he?

Even more egregious is who’s getting the bonuses:

The bonuses will be paid to executives at A.I.G.’s financial products division, the unit that wrote trillions of dollars’ worth of credit-default swaps that protected investors from defaults on bonds backed in many cases by subprime mortgages.

In other words, they’re going to the same bunch of commission-happy yahoos whose recklessness brought AIG to its knees in the first place. Oh, and they’re retention bonuses – because you don’t want bright minds like these getting snapped up by the competition. Or maybe becoming more willing to talk to the SEC, for that matter.

Unfortunately the Treasury’s hands might be tied on this one – apparently AIG is contractually obligated to make the payouts and they were already agreed to by the previous administration (who shall remain blameless).

Still, is it too much to hope that some lawyer somewhere can come up with a good justification for not giving more money to people who already proved themselves incapable of handling it carefully? Hell, it would be better spent retaining the services of the thousands of mail clerks, secretaries and other drones who make any organization function and who not only suffer low pay and parsimonious benefits, but also have to show deference to the yellow-tied assholes who have been the reason for so many secondhand toys this Christmas. Especially if, as in the case of AIG’s financial products division, they’re probably still strutting about like Napoleon on St. Helena, demanding to be addressed as "your majesty" and complaining about the food.

World's Smallest Whale Shark Caught by World's Largest Dwarf

On the southern tip of Luzon island in the Philippines, an ecotourism trade is steadily growing -- participants swim with whale sharks, who congregate there from December through May.

Recently the WWF documented the inadvertent capture by fishermen of a whale shark, and as the officials raced to investigate and free the animal, they got quite a surprise:

They expected to see a giant animal helplessly stuck, its tall dorsal fin and tail sticking out of the water. But there was nothing there. All they saw was a stick, stuck in sand, with a small rope leading away from it, into the water. Elson walked up to the stick and was amazed to find the smallest whale shark he had ever seen – a mere 15 inches long!

This part of the Philippine archipelago is apparently a hatchery for whale sharks as well as a congregation point -- something that nobody had known for certain until this pup was discovered. Although whale sharks -- or butanding, as they're called in the Philippines -- are the world's largest extant fish, they're not well understood. It's still not known, in fact, whether whale sharks incubate their eggs inside their bodies or are free-floating.

As much as people get aesthetic pleasure and unique experiences out of ecotourism, it's cool to see that its controlled expansion into new areas can also add to our knowledge of biological life. Who knows but that a few years earlier, a specimen like this tiny whale shark pup would have ended up not in the ocean, but in a much less hospitable environment.

Excommunication Breakdown

Too often in America we see faith portrayed as an unmitigated virtue, a means of making us good people even though our understanding of what makes up that goodness only reaches about the third grade level. Christians accept Jesus’ assertion of “love thy god with all thy heart and love thy neighbor as thyself” is the basis for all of the law, although this makes little sense alongside some of the more bizarre proscriptions in Deuteronomy or the salacious rantings of Saul of Tarsus. Ultimately a morality based solely on circular reasoning and argument from authority, as most faith-based moralities are, leads at best to confusion and opportunism. At worst, faith manages to take the misery of the human condition and use it as an excuse to inflict even more pain and suffering.

Such is the case with a nine-year-old girl in Brazil who was repeatedly raped by her stepfather for years. Recently, on a doctor’s visit after complaining of stomach pains, it was discovered that she was four months pregnant. With twins. She was given an abortion because even under Brazil’s restrictive abortion law, which allows the procedure only in cases of rape or danger to the mother, the girl met both conditions.

The laws were applied and the girl was given an abortion while her abusive stepfather – who is also suspected of molesting the victim’s physically-handicapped older sister – was arrested as he was trying to flee town. And then, from the 14th century, the Catholic Church weighed in and excommunicated the girl’s mother and doctors:

Now a Church spokesman says all those involved, including the child's mother and the doctors, are to be excommunicated.
The Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, told Brazil's TV Globo that the law of God was above any human law.
He said the excommunication would not apply to the child because of her age, but would affect all those who ensured the abortion was carried out.

In the ensuing row, Brazil’s President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, also a Catholic, disagreed: “In this case, medicine is more right than the church,” he said. While the qualifying “in this case” seems pretty superfluous – in what instance has faith shown to be better than science at finding anything out? – Lula’s sentiment is reasonable if not painfully obvious. The Vatican, however, has backed up Archbishop Sobrinho. The cardinal in charge of Latin American bishops, Giovanni Battista Re, justified the decision on the grounds that the fetuses were innocent and had a right to live. Even if a nine-year-old girl suffered and died as a consequence. And even if her twins ended up dying as well.

And as a final illustrative outrage comes the complete silence on the church about the responsibility of the girl’s rapist stepfather. While it’s obvious to the archbishop and cardinal – and their brethren with a long institutional history of enabling and covering up pedophilia – that any Catholic performing an abortion deserves excommunication, the pedophile father who put a minor, her mother, and several doctors in this situation seems to have escaped the church’s attention entirely.

It’s certainly true that human laws can be draconian and outrageous. But at least human laws have in them an inherent basis for change. An informed electorate can overturn them; judges can overrule them; even in a dictatorship, another arbitrary leader can come along and negate them. Not so with the Catholic Church and, to extrapolate, all other societies where morality and law are identical and morality is handed down by revelation from an uncontactable being that won’t explain itself.

Think about that the next time some religious fundamentalist argues that the United States is a Christian nation and that the Constitution ought to be brought in line with the Bible. The Enlightenment Humanism on which our Constitution is based is vastly more compassionate, reasonable, and egalitarian than a concept of morals that deems itself “above any human law.”

Update: Archbishop Sobrinho actually did think about the father -- and concluded that his crime was less serious than getting an abortion: "'It is clear that he committed a very serious sin, but worse than this is the abortion,' Sobrinho said." How such barbarians have any claim to morality is one of religion's great mysteries.

President Obama Announces Website For Holdout Opponents

On the same day that President Barack Obama announced a new logo to highlight the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, our most internet-savvy president also announced the launch of a website dedicated to “those who have yet to realize that the tide has changed.” The website, known as IWonBitches.gov, is intended, according to Mr. Obama, “to reach out to those lost souls who are like that last Japanese soldier hiding in the Philippine jungle until the 1970s because he didn’t believe the war was over.”

In a speech today at the US Department of Transportation, Obama implored those opposed to his economic stimulus package, his foreign policy and other aspects of the platform he ran and was elected on to peruse the new website.

“Before you write your congressperson – or if you are a congressperson,” said the president before an enthusiastic crowd, “before you let some AM radio loudmouth whip you into a frenzy about us talking to the Iranians, check out IWonBitches.gov. It has a helpful page called There’s Nothing Stupider than Threatening to Beat Everybody into Submission Unless They Do What You Say. It explains, in terms even Ann Coulter can understand, that if you thought Iraq was easy – well, the rest of the world is a lot bigger, and so we’d better find a less expensive way of getting other countries to cooperate. I’m not sure this has gotten through to some people.

“And,” he continued, “If you’ve been told that my new budget proposal is a conspiracy to expand the size of government, you can go to IWonBitches.gov and click on the page called Private Industry Just Lost Three Million Jobs So Somebody Better Start Hiring People. It’s full of information on how maybe having millions of poor and unemployed people running out of money to pay for food and shelter might not be such a good idea.

“Opposed to gay marriage, or don’t-ask-don’t-tell? Click on IWonBitches.gov. There’s a page you can go to called Maybe That Gay Friend, Relative or Neighbor Won’t Secretly Hate You Anymore If They Have the Same Rights as You Do.

“Worried that some bureaucrat is going to dictate what kind of healthcare options are available to you? On IWonBitches.gov there’s a link to a very useful section entitled Some Bureaucrat Already Decides What Kind of Healthcare Options You Get and If You Don’t Believe That Try Getting an Expensive Disease – But Only If You Already Have Healthcare To Begin With, Because Otherwise You’re Just Going to Die. It describes, point-by-point, the advantages of not letting some people leave their tuberculosis untreated.

“In conclusion,” said the president, “IWonBitches.gov is an essential site for anyone who is still afraid that a government that actually does things that help you is somehow going to destroy America. With sections ranging from If Abstinence Education Really Works Then Why Is My Virgin Daughter Pregnant? to such interesting reading as If Letting the Finance Industry Regulate Itself Was Such a Good Idea Then the Collapse of Every Major Investment Bank in the Country is Obviously a Statistical Fluke, IWonBitches.gov is an invaluable resource for everyone who still doesn’t understand why the direction this country is going now is such a deep departure from eight years of unmitigated calamitous failure.

“And for those of you who feel that, after reading about all the reasons we’re doing things on IWonBitches.gov, you would still rather go back to the way things were, there is final section that you will find particularly appealing. Just click on the link at the main page that takes you to If You Really, Really Must Live in a Country with a Limited Government, Where Nobody Whines about Their Civil Rights, Where You Can Own All the Guns You Want, Drive the Biggest Hummer You Can Find, Start Any Business You Can Dream of and Nobody Taxes Your Hard-Earned Profits, Then Have a Great Time in Somalia.”