Apr 17 2009
How about because we’re still waging two wars? It occurs to me that even people utterly repulsed by the torture memos would want to ensure that we didn’t have a sudden brain drain, or sudden disruption in the rank and file of the CIA. The higher ups should be fall guys to protect the overall CIA, because I’m not sure we can actually afford the great disruption inherent in the threat of prosecutions at the lower levels.
QT
Apr 17 2009
The Bigger Picture | By Andrew Sullivan.
I want to take a moment to thank God for the work that Andrew Sullivan has done on this issue. Andrew Sullivan has a relentlessness that, misapplied, is awful to watch (the “Trip is not Sarah Palin’s baby” thing is an example). But as is so often the case, what you dislike about a person is often the thing you most admire. With determination, persistence, and focus – Sullivan stayed on top of this torture issue – and the fruits, such as they are, are now here to see.
I have to admit that I actively avoided the issue for months. Having become a bit of a fan of The Atlantic, I nevertheless frequently skimmed over or altogether skipped reading Sullivan’s torture posts. I have to admit – it is a case of cynicism that caused that. As an African-American, well aware of US history of slavery, brutality, and callous disregard for African-American lives, it wasn’t hard for me to fathom that the United States probably did torture people, and that this was probably nothing new, and really nothing I was going to get worked up about. Yeah, it’s bad.. but so are a lot of things…. I admit to having a hope that with President Obama, a lot of the bad things would get better, maybe not all at once, but still… I admit to being perfectly ok with Obama hiding the ugly stuff under the rug – I assumed it was there, had always been hidden, and saw no reason why the nation’s first black president had to take on the job of putting it out in the public – so long as he got the job done of ending some of the worst of it.
As I said – it’s a cynical viewpoint – one that assumes the worst of the United States, while at the same time, hoping for the best, and believing, despite the cynicism, that better is possible.
Now that the memos have been released, I find that my cynicism, so deeply embedded, nevertheless, at no point accounted for anything so awful. I honestly don’t know what I thought – I’m just taking stock of it all now. I never imagined there could be such a thing as naive cynicism – but I have to admit that my cynicism was naive. I was indifferent to the torture issue because I cynically assumed it was par for the course – I naively never believed it was anything this bad.
I want to echo Andrew’s sentiment:
If you want to know how democracies die, read these memos. Read how gifted professionals in the CIA were able to convince experienced doctors that what they were doing was ethical and legal. Read how American psychologists were able to find justifications for the imposition of psychological torture, and were able to analyze its effects without ever stopping and asking: what on earth are we doing?
Read how no one is even close to debating “ticking time bomb” scenarios as they strap people to boards and drown them until they break. Then read how they adjusted the waterboarding, for fear it was too much, for fear that they were actually in danger of suffocating their captives, and then read how they found self-described loopholes in the law to tell themselves that what the US had once prosecuted as torture could not possibly be torture because we’re doing it, and we’re different from the Viet Cong. We’re doing torture right and for the right reasons and with the right motive. Many of the people who did this are mild, kind, courteous, family men and women, who somehow were able to defend slamming human beings against walls in the daytime while watching the Charlie Rose show over a glass of wine at night. We’ve seen this syndrome before, in other places and at other times. Yes: it can happen here. And imagine how this already functioning torture machine would have operated in the wake of another attack under a president Romney or Giuliani.
That speaks volumes. I guess, cynicism and all, I never believed the US could do anything this bone-chillingly awful. But we have done it, and we have to account for it. I’m deeply grateful that we have begun the process.
QT
Apr 07 2009
Elvis Dingeldein, who I’ve blogged about on one other occasion, is something of a comic genius, and he has posted a fun bit of silliness on Bob Cesca’s site here: http://www.bobcesca.com/blog-archives/2009/04/elvis_dingeldei.html.
Well, my reaction was a little on the serious side, so I decided to post here, rather than spoil the fun:
On this day in history, 4/7/1915, my grandmother, Elizabeth, was born in North Carolina. A great woman who counted Shirley Chisolm and Howard Golden as colleagues, she owned her own property in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn as early as 1974, which frequently provided shelter to her two children, my aunt, and my dad. That the family was unable to keep up her material legacy is one of my most profound sadnesses. That I may yet live up to her legacy of character and dignity is my most fervent hope.
(Sorry – I laughed myself silly reading your “Today in History” stuff… but when I read your ironic tag “For Whitey” I wanted to think of something that was good for brown folk. My grandmother was.)
QT
Apr 04 2009
Europe melts for Michelle – Nia-Malika Henderson and Jonathan Martin – POLITICO.com.
Apologies to Nia-Malika Henderson and Jonathan Martin for reporting from the bottom of their article instead of from the top – but for me this part is the heart of the matter:
She gave the same up-from-the-South-Side speech she often gives at home, yet her aides said she recognized what a moment it was in history, for her to be on the world stage as the first African-American first lady.
Her voice broke with emotion, and her aides said that she saw herself in the faces of the students. Afterward, she practically dove into the crowd, kneeling at the edge of the stage to dole out hugs. “People identify with her, even here, she is seen as a woman of the people,” said Crystal Fleming, who is affiliated with the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris. “The French magazine Le Point dubbed her ‘the princess of the people,’ which is pretty impressive when you think about it. She’s an African American woman.”
Fleming said that for non-Americans, Michelle Obama, even more so than her husband, “incarnates how far African-Americans have come, she’s the descendant of slaves, Barack is not, and that is really a source of inspiration that she is in the White House. She is seen as a symbol of progress and source of pride.”
Apr 04 2009
This week, I was confronted with a flyer from the American Family Association, urging the boycott of Pepsico, for becoming a “major backer of homosexual agenda with $1,000,000 in gifts to gay groups”. Well…
I am a Baha’i. I was born Christian. I can definitely sympathize with the religious alarm at the legalization of “gay marriage” as I’ve struggled with this issue myself. That said – do I honestly believe I have a right to tell religions that don’t agree with me that they can’t sanction gay marriage? No. No I do not. Moreover, the flyer was so obviously alarmist and misleading that it offended me. One section says this:
“Pepsi forces all employees to attend sexual orientation and gender identity diversity training where they are taught to accept homosexuality.”
Wow. You know what? That’s just about a corporate requirement – to prevent lawsuits. Are we seriously singling out Pepsi for this? I rejected the flyer on that sentence alone – not to mention my resistance to the term “homosexual agenda.”
I’ve defined my own views on homosexuality and gay marriage here: http://www.windonwater.net/index.php?topic=205.msg913#msg913. But I want to state here for the record – the Iowa Decision felt, to me, like a vindication of my rejection of groups like the American Family Association, and their tactics. A common sense, well reasoned addressing of the issues yielded one of two possible just outcomes. My preference would have been to ban the use of the term marriage by civil institutions altogether, and extend civil unions to all… but the other possible outcome was to define “marriage” in the civil sense as a civil contract, and to extend it to all, as such.
The official summary of the Iowa Decision is at the link above…
QT
Apr 03 2009
Religious intolerance against the Baha’is by Muslims is by no means exclusively an Iranian affair… Here is a Portuguese paper reporting on an attack upon Baha’is in Egypt:
Dozens of villagers attacked Muslim homes in the last week, the elements of the Baha’i community in southern Egypt, after one of its elements have said on television that the village of Sharoyah near Sohagh, was full of religion that followed.
Monday and Tuesday have been burned and damaged four houses Baha’is, told the AFP a source of security services, in groups of human rights were alerted to this problem.
The fire spread to the homes of two Muslim families, which were also damaged, while the three dozen Bahá’ís of that city were threatened with death and accused of being “enemies of God.”
Off to the side, there’s a headline “If Obama was Pope.” Hmmm…
QT
Apr 02 2009
Every answer here was on the mark, and I’m proud of our president. And worried for him. He sounds like he needs sleep:
QT
Apr 02 2009
Well – Michelle Obama’s Royal Opera outfit as a whole is charming The sweater specifically is a disaster. How on earth to rate this? I voted “love it”, because overall, she looks engaging, sweet, and powerful, all at the same time.
QT
More on Michelle Obama Style
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Apr 01 2009
The Tragedy And Betrayal Of Booker T. Washington – Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Ta-Nehisi’s BEST post ever. He may not think so, but this is a very cogent piece of writing. Read it. A quick sample:
In retrospect, this was a grievous error. In point of fact, whites actually did have an existential objection to black people. Their beef wasn’t that illiterates and moral degenerates might get too much power. Quite the opposite. Their beef was that blacks would prove to not be illiterates and moral degenerates, and thus fully able to compete with them. To see this point illustrated, one need only look at the history of race riots in the South. When white mobs set upon black communities they didn’t simply burn down the “morally degenerate” portions–they attacked the South’s burgeoning black middle and working class and its institutions. They went for the churches, the schools and the businesses. It’s one thing to be opposed to black amorality. It’s quite another to be opposed to black progress. The lesson blacks took post-Atlanta Compromise was that whites had used the former to cover for the latter. These days, it’s popular to bemoan the fact that Washington has fallen into disfavor. But it wasn’t blacks who proved the Atlanta Compromise fraudulent–it was the whites of that era.
