The invisible injuries of war...

Marine vs. Marine in Interstate 64 shooting

Denial not just a river in egypt...

FT.com / Home UK - Powell gives bleak assessment of Iraq security problems: "According to Chas Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and head of the independent Middle East Policy Council, Mr Bush recently asked Mr Powell for his view on the progress of the war. 'We're losing,' Mr Powell was quoted as saying. Mr Freeman said Mr Bush then asked the secretary of state to leave."

The Permanent Propaganda Machine

From WaPo:

President Bush plans to reactivate his reelection campaign's network of donors and activists to build pressure on lawmakers to allow workers to invest part of their Social Security taxes in the stock market, according to Republican strategists.

White House allies are launching a market-research project to figure out how to sell the plan in the most comprehensible and appealing way, and Republican marketing and public-relations gurus are building teams of consultants to promote it, the strategists said.

The campaign will use Bush's campaign-honed techniques of mass repetition, never deviating from the script and using the politics of fear to build support -- contending that a Social Security financial crisis is imminent when even Republican figures show it is decades away.

[...]

With resistance hardening among congressional Republicans, the White House is escalating efforts to get Social Security restructured this year. There will be campaign-style events to win support and precision targeting of districts where lawmakers could face reelection difficulties. As Republicans signaled earlier, they have begun hard-hitting television ads to discredit opponents and prop up the Bush plan.

The same architects of Bush's political victories will be masterminding the new campaign, led by political strategists Karl Rove at the White House and Ken Mehlman at the Republican National Committee.

Bush set the tone for campaign-style lobbying earlier this week with a speech promoting his plan. Yesterday, during an appearance at Catholic University, Vice President Cheney sought to counter opponents' arguments about the risks of the plan, saying that limiting investment options should keep the accounts safe, while harnessing the power of the stock market should provide a far higher rate of return than Social Security reserves now receive.

"Young workers who elect personal accounts can expect to receive a far higher rate of return on their money than the current system could ever afford to pay them," Cheney told an audience of college students and administrators.

This morning, White House budget director Joshua B. Bolten will begin courting business on the issue with a speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And that is all before Bush takes the oath of office for a second term on Thursday and delivers his State of the Union address on Feb. 2.

Mehlman, who was the Bush-Cheney campaign manager and is the RNC's incoming chairman, said the campaign apparatus -- from a national database of 7.5 million e-mail activists, 1.6 million volunteers and hundreds of thousands of neighborhood precinct captains -- will be used to build congressional support for Bush's plans, starting with Social Security.

"There are a lot of tools we used in the '04 campaign, from regional media to research to rapid response to having surrogates on television," he said. "That whole effort will be focused on the legislative agenda."

[...]

In addition to their own efforts, White House and RNC officials are working closely with the same outside groups that helped Bush win reelection in 2004, especially Progress for America, a political organization with close ties to Rove. RNC officials have privately told top congressional aides they will work with Progress for America and others to provide political cover through television ads supporting the Bush position and condemning those who oppose it. To coincide with Bush's new drive, Progress for America is running a television ad on Fox and CNN that compares Bush to Franklin Roosevelt, the father of Social Security.

The group also phoned or e-mailed Republicans, culled from its list of more than 1 million supporters, to enlist their help in selling the Bush plan, either by donating money or talking up the plan to neighbors. Brian McCabe, a spokesman for the group, said it is applying the lessons it learned electing a president to selling a public policy.

One lesson was "realizing the importance of getting information in front of a lot of people," he said. "When it comes to Social Security, for instance, few know even the basic facts."

Once the debate intensifies, Progress for America and other pro-Bush groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers plan to target individual congressional members with the precision of an election campaign.

"We have through CNN and Fox painted with broad brushes," McCabe said. "Over time, we will take our messages inside states and communicate with individual members."

Via Salon, fabulous doublespeak from Scott McClellan

Press Gaggle with Scott McClellan:

Q There's a report out that Iraq could become an important breeding ground for terrorism. Is the President concerned about that?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think the report talks a lot more -- about a lot more than that. We welcome the report. I think the report confirms that our strategy of staying on the offensive and spreading freedom to win the war on terrorism is the right approach. We are in a struggle of epic proportions and the stakes are high, and the President believes it's important to continue to advance freedom in a dangerous region of the world because it will make the world a more peaceful place, and make America more secure. And so I think that's the -- this report is a speculative report about things that could happen in the world, but we welcome the report and --

Q To what extent is he concerned that Iraq has become, or is becoming a breeding ground for terrorism --

MR. McCLELLAN: I think we talked about this before -- the terrorists recognize how high the stakes are. We're fighting them abroad so that we don't have to fight them here at home. And the way to win the war on terrorism is to stay on the offensive and work with the international community to bring to justice those who seek to do us harm, and to work together to advance freedom, particularly in the broader Middle East region. And that's how we ultimately defeat the ideology of hatred that terrorists espouse.

Q But has the war -- did the war create a vacuum that has made it more conducive for terrorists to use Iraq as a base?

MR. McCLELLAN: The President talked about that during the campaign. I mean, that's just a misunderstanding of the war on terrorism.

Q -- the President to talk about this, as a central front of the war on terrorism, when essentially, what the report is suggesting is that it is a central front created by and essentially helping terrorism.

MR. McCLELLAN: Did the report say that?

Q -- insinuating that it's a place where it's a breeding ground for --

MR. McCLELLAN: I think the report, like I said, confirms that we have the right strategy for winning the war on terrorism, which is to stay on the offensive and go after the terrorists, and to work to spread freedom and hope to regions of the world that have only known tyranny and oppression. And the war on terrorism is won by staying on the offensive and spreading freedom.

We are staying on the offensive to defeat the terrorists, and to suggest otherwise is just a misunderstanding. We are fighting them abroad so that we don't have to fight them at home. The terrorists recognize how high the stakes are. The elections coming up in Iraq are a significant achievement for the Iraqi people, and it's another step forward on the path to democracy in Iraq. And when we achieve peace and democracy in Iraq, it will be a significant blow to the ambitions of the terrorists and their ideology of hatred and oppression that they espouse.

Q Does the President --

MR. McCLELLAN: That's the stakes that are involved. This is a struggle of ideologies. It is an epic struggle, and the stakes are high.

Q Does the President disagree with the report's conclusion that the war and the uncertainty on the ground has created a breeding ground for terrorism?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think we just answered this question. We just went through it, so I would go back to what I just said, and those are, I think, the points to make.

Q I mean, the reason that we keep asking the question again is that it's just confusing to me how you can say it confirms your strategy is the right approach when there is terrorism in Iraq now, a terrorist breeding ground in Iraq now and growing there, and wasn't there before. So how does that confirm your approach?

MR. McCLELLAN: That's assuming that terrorists would just be sitting around doing nothing if we weren't staying on the offensive in the war on terrorism. I mean, by going on the offensive we've been able to liberate two countries, the people of two countries -- in Afghanistan and Iraq. And now we must continue to do everything we can to support efforts to build democratic futures for the people of the region. And that's exactly what we'll continue to do.

But I disagree with the characterization of the report, because I think the report confirms that we have the right strategy to win the war on terrorism, because of what I said a minute ago. So I would disagree with that. And this is -- the report looks at much more than just that. It's a speculative report that looks at a number of areas in the world, and we welcome the report. It's important to look at what the report has to say. And I don't think we've had time to look at the whole report, and I would encourage each of you to look at the whole report, as well, and maybe -- because I think some of the characterization is off the mark.

More protest ideas:

black-thursday.com

Black out your website on Jan 20th

BushBlackOut - 24 Hours Of Silent Protest

Not One Damn Dime!

Not One Damn Dime!

Don't spend money on January 20th.

Michael Isikoff on death squads

MSNBC - ‘The Salvador Option’: "[O]ne Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called 'snatch' operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK."

I'd say it was farce, but torture can never be anything but tragedy...

digby on idiot metrics in the WOT:

Like the mediocre, hack bureaucrats they are, they [Rumsfeld et al] decided that they would guage success or failure --- certainly they would report to the White House success or failure --- based upon the sheer numbers of raids, arrests, interrogations, reports, confessions and breakdowns achieved, regardless of whether any of it resulted in good intel or enhanced security anywhere.

This was the only metric they could conceive of and in order to get those numbers up they had to detain large numbers of innocent people and torture them for false information to fill the endless reports of success on the ground in Afghanistan, Gitmo and Iraq. They could hoist up a huge pile of paper in a meeting with their president and say, 'look at how much intelligence we're getting. We're really getting somewhere.'

What amazes me is that people still behave as though all the torture that resulted from this focus on the numbers was unanticipated by those at the top. It may well have been, but anyone who has ever read even the tiniest bit of history knows that the arrest and torture and sometimes death of innocents has always been the result of such a numbers game.

Marie Cocco on Democratic Senators' Cowardice re: Gonzales

Democrats' Fury, and Values, Go AWOL:

No senator has come forward to oppose Gonzales. Senate Republicans coalesce around their commander-in-chief. Senate Democrats coalesce around a strategy of convenient fecklessness.

The Democrats are, of course, opposed to torture. They have, they say, 'serious questions' or 'grave concerns' or 'deep reservations' about Gonzales' record on the subject. And they are, most all of them, planning to vote for him anyway.

Just like most of them voted to give the president authority to invade Iraq, even though they had serious questions and grave concerns and deep reservations about that, too. The Iraq war vote, more than anything, is what ignited the Dean insurgency. There was this sense - a correct one - that Democrats in Washington would not stand up to stop George W. Bush even when they sensed the president was driving us over a precipice.

Now these senators are poised to take the following position: They are against torture but they are for the man who set the stage for torture.

[...]

Enabling the Bush administration's habit of escaping accountability for even the grossest failure isn't smart politics. It's cowardice. If Democrats are to compete on the political turf of values, they'd better find some they stand for.

Fucking the future

Arianna Huffington: America's Finite Future?: "It's important to point out, however, that it's not just the White House and the End-Timers. Acting as if we have a finite future has infected our entire culture. Just look at personal savings, which have fallen to next to nothing, with Americans socking away a meager two-tenths of 1 percent of their disposable incomes. Meanwhile, the average U.S. household carries about $14,000 of credit-card debt; one in four consumers spends more than he or she can afford; and, as a result, every 15 seconds, someone somewhere in America is going bankrupt. Which, I guess, in Bush World is how an angel gets his wings. 

All this represents a seismic shift in our cultural outlook. Since our founding, the American ethos has been forward-looking, geared to a bountiful future, with each generation of parents working as hard as they can to ensure a better life for their children. Those days are clearly gone.

And it has put our entire civilization at grave risk – a point echoed with great clarity by Jared Diamond, whose new book, Collapse,' looks at the reasons why so many great civilizations of the past have failed.

Although Diamond offers a range of reasons why these societies collapsed, one message comes through loud and clear: We've got to stop living like there is no tomorrow – or 'f – - the future' will become a self-fulfilling prophecy."

Also, the future's not even a good lay.

Torture memo links; Jay Leno

Conatus: Memo links includes this choice comment from Jay Leno: "According to the New York Times, last year White House lawyers concluded that President Bush could legally order interrogators to torture and even kill people in the interest of national security - so if that’s legal, what the hell are we charging Saddam Hussein with?"

More on torture...

Andrew Sullivan's excellent review of two new books about the torture will appear in the NYT Sunday book review. As is now usual, it is already online. Sully often annoys the hell out of me, but his continued focus on and abhorrence of the torture has been really wonderful. Read the whole review, but some choice quotes below:

And the damage done was intensified by President Bush's refusal to discipline those who helped make this happen. A president who truly recognized the moral and strategic calamity of this failure would have fired everyone responsible. But the vice president's response to criticism of the defense secretary in the wake of Abu Ghraib was to say, ''Get off his back.'' In fact, those with real responsibility for the disaster were rewarded. Rumsfeld was kept on for the second term, while the man who warned against ignoring the Geneva Conventions, Colin Powell, was seemingly nudged out. The man who wrote a legal opinion maximizing the kind of brutal treatment that the United States could legally defend, Jay S. Bybee, was subsequently rewarded with a nomination to a federal Court of Appeals. General Sanchez and Gen. John P. Abizaid remain in their posts. Alberto R. Gonzales, who wrote memos that validated the decision to grant Geneva status to inmates solely at the president's discretion, is now nominated to the highest law enforcement job in the country: attorney general. The man who paved the way for the torture of prisoners is to be entrusted with safeguarding the civil rights of Americans. It is astonishing he has been nominated, and even more astonishing that he will almost certainly be confirmed.

But in a democracy, the responsibility is also wider. Did those of us who fought so passionately for a ruthless war against terrorists give an unwitting green light to these abuses? Were we naïve in believing that characterizing complex conflicts from Afghanistan to Iraq as a single simple war against ''evil'' might not filter down and lead to decisions that could dehumanize the enemy and lead to abuse? Did our conviction of our own rightness in this struggle make it hard for us to acknowledge when that good cause had become endangered? I fear the answer to each of these questions is yes.

[..]

I'm not saying that those who unwittingly made this torture possible are as guilty as those who inflicted it. I am saying that when the results are this horrifying, it's worth a thorough reassessment of rhetoric and war methods. Perhaps the saddest evidence of our communal denial in this respect was the election campaign. The fact that American soldiers were guilty of torturing inmates to death barely came up. It went unmentioned in every one of the three presidential debates. John F. Kerry, the ''heroic'' protester of Vietnam, ducked the issue out of what? Fear? Ignorance? Or a belief that the American public ultimately did not care, that the consequences of seeming to criticize the conduct of troops would be more of an electoral liability than holding a president accountable for enabling the torture of innocents? I fear it was the last of these. Worse, I fear he may have been right.

Presented without comment...

by the AP: "Bush administration comments on WMDs (pre and post war).

Iraqi Victim Says U.S. Torture Worse Than Saddam

from Common Dreams, reported originally in Reuters:

A former inmate at Iraq Abu Ghraib prison forced by U.S. guards to masturbate in public and piled onto a pyramid of naked men said Tuesday even Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein did not do such things.

The inmate testified at the court martial of reservist soldier Charles Graner, accused ringleader of guards who engaged in the abuse, which prompted outrage when pictures of the sexual humiliation were published around the world.

"I couldn't believe in the beginning that this could happen, but I wished I could kill myself because no one was there to stop it," Hussein Mutar, who was sent to Abu Ghraib accused of car theft, said in videotaped testimony.

And also: "At the trial military prosecutors have presented evidence not seen before in public from Abu Ghraib, including a video of forced group masturbation and a picture of a woman prisoner ordered to show her breasts."

This is my country, land that I looo-oove! [ insert further patriotic off-key singing ]

Matt Yglesias on why dems should not claim to be open to compromise

TAPPED: "Right now, strictly speaking, the White House doesn't need any Democratic support to pass a bill and doesn't expect to give much up in order to get it. That means there's no basis for a genuine compromise. The only way to get a compromise is to convince the Republicans that a failure to achieve one is going to bring the rest of their agenda crashing down around them. That calls for demonstrating an eagerness not for compromising with the GOP but for using Social Security as a political bludgeon with which to destroy the Republican Party. "

Cornel West on hope v. optimism

AlterNet: Prisoners of Hope:

The country is in deep trouble. We've forgotten that a rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it. This is true at the personal level. But there's also a political version, which has to do with what you see when you get up in the morning and look in the mirror and ask yourself whether you are simply wasting your time on the planet or spending it in an enriching manner. We need a moral prophetic minority of all colors who muster the courage to question the powers that be, the courage to be impatient with evil and patient with people, and the courage to fight for social justice. In many instances we will be stepping out on nothing, hoping to land on something. That's the history of black folks in the past and present, and of those of us who value history and struggle. Our courage rests on a deep democratic vision of a better world that lures us and a blood-drenched hope that sustains us.

This hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism adopts the role of the spectator who surveys the evidence in order to infer that things are going to get better. Yet we know that the evidence does not look good. The dominant tendencies of our day are unregulated global capitalism, racial balkanization, social breakdown, and individual depression. Hope enacts the stance of the participant who actively struggles against the evidence in order to change the deadly tides of wealth inequality, group xenophobia, and personal despair. Only a new wave of vision, courage, and hope can keep us sane – and preserve the decency and dignity requisite to revitalize our organizational energy for the work to be done. To live is to wrestle with despair yet never to allow despair to have the last word.

Biscuit's mom complains about hypocritical Christians

on Democratic Underground today: The Religious Wrong

Yes, Biscuit is very proud of her mommy.

Best..Correction...Ever

From Andrew Sullivan

Correction: The newly minted word "santorum" - meaning "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex" - didn't win the word of the year according to the American Dialect Society; it won the most outrageous word of the year. My apologies.

Department of Software Development, excuses edition

'Minor' Software Glitch Is Cited in Missile Failure (washingtonpost.com): "The test failure last month of the Bush administration's new missile defense system resulted from a 'very minor' computer software glitch that can be easily corrected and will have no effect on the system's ability to defend the United States against attack, the general in charge of the Pentagon program said yesterday."

All software glitches are minor, right up until something explodes.

continued death throes of the mainstream media. CBS edition

Hollow Accountability (washingtonpost.com): "Later, '60 Minutes' killed a report about whether the Bush administration had relied on false documents in making the case that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. A CBS spokesman said it would have been 'inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election' -- a statement just plain stunning in its implications. First of all, it was late September -- a full month before the election -- and, second, isn't affecting elections what can happen when journalists do their jobs? I mean, are we supposed to withhold the truth because, in addition to making you free, it might make you change your vote? This was a dark day for CBS and for all journalism."

Don't be fooled: White House STILL thinks torture is A-OK

The New York Times > Washington > White House Fought New Curbs on Interrogations, Officials Say:

At the urging of the White House, Congressional leaders scrapped a legislative measure last month that would have imposed new restrictions on the use of extreme interrogation measures by American intelligence officers, Congressional officials say.

The defeat of the proposal affects one of the most obscure arenas of the war on terrorism, involving the Central Intelligence Agency's secret detention and interrogation of top terror leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and about three dozen other senior members of Al Qaeda and its offshoots.

The Senate had approved the new restrictions, by a 96-to-2 vote, as part of the intelligence reform legislation. They would have explicitly extended to intelligence officers a prohibition against torture or inhumane treatment, and would have required the C.I.A. as well as the Pentagon to report to Congress about the methods they were using.

But in intense closed-door negotiations, Congressional officials said, four senior members from the House and Senate deleted the restrictions from the final bill after the White House expressed opposition.

Call your senators

to tell them not to confirm Alberto Gonzales as AG

For MA residents:

Kennedy

315 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
202/224-4543

2400 JFK Building
Boston, MA 02203
617/565-3170

Kerry
http://kerry.senate.gov/

Washington D.C.
304 Russell Bldg.
Third Floor
Washington D.C. 20510
(202) 224-2742 – Phone
(202) 224-8525 – Fax
Click here to email Senator Kerry

Boston
One Bowdoin Square
Tenth Floor
Boston, MA 02114
(617) 565-8519 – Phone
(617) 248-3870 – Fax

For those of you not living in the Commonwealth, see http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Democracy at work...

Military to play big role in Inaugural security

Tom Ridge, the homeland security secretary, said Tuesday that even in the absence of any specific security threat to next week's presidential inauguration, civilian and military forces had been ordered to an extraordinarily high state of alert.

"You can well imagine that the security for this occasion will be unprecedented," Mr. Ridge said at a news conference. "Protective measures will be seen. There will be quite a few that are not seen. Our goal is that any attempt on the part of anyone or any group to disrupt the inaugural will be repelled by multiple layers of security."

In his first detailed outline of inauguration security planning, Mr. Ridge said that more than 6,000 civilian and military personnel trained in crisis response, crowd control and dignitary security would be in place, with thousands more available to respond if necessary.

At the heart of the plan are tightly controlled security zones that will restrict pedestrian and vehicle access to the streets around the Capitol, where Mr. Bush will be sworn in, and over the route of the traditional parade along Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.

Before the inauguration events, security teams will sweep through hotels and office buildings along the parade route, in some cases barring office workers from sitting near windows overlooking the procession.

[...]

The military will play a more visible role in this inauguration, with 2,500 troops involved in security, said Maj. Gen. Galen B. Jackman, commander of the Joint Task Force-Armed Forces Inaugural Committee, which coordinates military operations for the inauguration.

"We believe we are ready to deter any type of attack," General Jackman said before Mr. Ridge's news conference.

The general wore camouflage gear as he spoke with reporters in front a group of battle-dressed soldiers who carried automatic weapons.

The security plan for the inauguration is based on a system of overlapping zones. Vehicular traffic will be restricted from an outer zone about six blocks from inauguration sites. Pedestrians will be screened at 22 checkpoints set up around an inner zone perimeter about two blocks from event locations. An even more restrictive area in the vicinity of the swearing-in and the parade bleachers will be closed to anyone without a ticket or an invitation.

In a break with past inauguration parades, protest groups are being assigned specific areas for their demonstrations in a way that protest organizers say will enable law enforcement agencies to exert tighter control over them.

Bill Safire thinks our "personal, political, and national character" are "stronger and better than ever"

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Character Is Destiny:

Call me a chauvinist unilateralist, but I believe America's human and economic sacrifices for the advance of freedom abroad show our personal, political and national character to be stronger and better than ever. This moral advance will be more widely appreciated as an Islamic version of democracy takes root. (What's triumphalism without a triumph?)

It is that growing strength of national character - more than our individual genius or political leadership or military power - that ensures the future success of America and brightens the light of liberty's torch.

What universe is he living in?! We're thinking of death squads to supplement our already-impressive assortment of morallly indefensible behavior (extraordinary rendition, detention without trial, torture, etc.) and our national character is "stronger and better than ever"? This is patently fascist speech. I fear for our country...

The Eichmann defense...

Here's another blogger's comment on the involvement of doctors in torture:

The banality of evil indeed. The U.S. medical personnel interviewed by Bloche and Marks compartmentalize and then subordinate their individual conscience, professional ethics, and international laws to dictates of military service, and in their compartmentalization and subordination echoes the final plea of Adolf Eichmann:

I cannot recognize the verdict of guilty. . . . It was my misfortune to become entangled in these atrocities. But these misdeeds did not happen according to my wishes. It was not my wish to slay people. . . . Once again I would stress that I am guilty of having been obedient, having subordinated myself to my official duties and the obligations of war service and my oath of allegiance and my oath of office, and in addition, once the war started, there was also martial law. . . . I did not persecute Jews with avidity and passion. That is what the government did. . . . At that time obedience was demanded, just as in the future it will also be demanded of the subordinate. (emphasis added, "Eichmann's Final Plea")

That future that Eichmann predicted is here now -- or rather it has been with us always, invisible only to those who thought: "It Can't Happen Here."

Why write our doctors about torture?

One of my correspondents asked me what the point was of writing to our doctors about torture. He asked what influence he had over his doctor, and what influence his doctor had over the Bush Administration's policies. He said he thought the most effective action is continued exposure of the torture, and that saying you're against torture is "too easy." All good points. Here is my response:

Of course, the torturers need to be exposed. But where do you think the pressure comes to expose them? What drives individuals who have access to torture memos, to photographs, who have witnessed and participated in torture, to leak those memos, stories, photos to the press? It is their sense that what has happened is wrong, and that THEY CAN AND SHOULD DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. We do not know who we know who might know someone who does have access, who can make a difference. I may not know a doctor who has served in Iraq and has important information that he/she might be convinced to reveal, but my doctor might. Or others of my doctors' patients might. Or his colleagues might.

In a sense, what I'm urging is exactly like the common advice for job-hunters: Put the word out to everyone that you won't stand for this, they shouldn't stand for it, and they expect their friends, family, neighbors, doctors, bankers, and furniture-makers also not to stand for it.

As it stands today, there are lots of people who don't know what is going on. They don't even know who Alberto Gonzales is, much less why he's important. They have no idea what Biscuit teams are, or why they should oppose them. They saw Abu Ghraib, they accepted the administration's line that this was an isolated incident, and they'd rather not think about torture anyway. No one they know is expecting them to do anything about it, because hey, what influence do they have on the Bush Administration anyway. If they do think about it, they feel helpless, like there's nothing they can do, so they say "well, I don't have any influence." And they think about something else, because hey, torture is just no fun to think about .

In addition, there are a lot of people out there who would say that torture is wrong, except that in this case those bastards killed innocent Americans, they behead people, they are scum, and we have to get information out of them, and what's happening isn't really torture anyway, and it's not worse than they deserve, and it's guilty people, and so on. These people may not be able to be convinced that torture is wrong in any circumstances, but they can be convinced they are in the minority, if enough of those who think torture is wrong speak up. But if we don't speak up because we assume that everyone else thinks torture is always wrong, then those people won't know they're in the minority.

If we each personally took responsibility for influencing all the people we do have influence over, then the wave of personal responsibility will spread, and very quickly reach the people who have more direct responsibility. As for whether you have any actual influence over your doctor, I don't know. But I suspect the simple shock of receiving a letter from a patient about a non-medical issue will cause your doctor to give the letter a real reading, out of curiosity if nothing else. Having read the letter, your doctor a) knows what is happening if he/she did not before b) knows that one of his/her patients thought this was so outside the pale that he contacted his doctor about it, breaking a very strong taboo against bringing 'politics' into a 'business' or 'patient-doctor' relationship, and turning the traditional patient-doctor authority upside down by asserting a moral authority over your doctor. Both of these circumstances increase the likelihood that your doctor will also act by making it clear to everyone he/she knows that something very wrong is happening. Perhaps not by very much, but by a little bit.

I've just finished reading a book based on extensive post-war interviews with rank-and-file members of the Nazi party, They Thought They Were Free. I wrote a blog entry about what I learned from it, at http://www.kafka.com/politics/2005/01/new-years-resolutions.php I hope you'll read it, I think it's very relevant here. And then I hope you'll say, well, maybe I don't have any influence over my doctor, but maybe I do. If it's so easy (too easy, you say) to say you're against torture, then why not say it?

More stuff you'd rather not think about

AlterNet: A Dispatch From Bizarro World:

'The internal evidence – the awful details of the abuse itself and the clear logical narrative they take on when set against what we know of the interrogation methods of the American military and intelligence agencies – is quite enough to show that what happened at Abu Ghraib, whatever it was, did not depend on the sadistic ingenuity of a few bad apples. This is what we know. The real question, now, as so often, is not that we know but what are we prepared to do,' Danner writes.

Apparently, we are prepared to sit by and watch the confirmation of Bush's attorney general nominee Alberto Gonzales, a key player in the Bush administration's attempt to re-write the Geneva Conventions.

Biscuit Recipes

The LA Times has an op-ed by the guys who wrote the NEJM article on doctors and torture...

Critical to understanding the medical role is the change in interrogation doctrine introduced by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller and his team, first at Guantanamo, then at Abu Ghraib. A classified memo, prepared by Miller in late 2003, made the case for "fusion" of all prison functions to support the "interrogation mission."

Miller argued that "Behavioral psychologists and psychiatrists" were needed to "develop … integrated interrogation strategies and assess … interrogation intelligence production." To this end, he called for creation of "Behavioral Science Consultation Teams," known as "Biscuits," made up of psychologists and psychiatrists.

Desperate for some edge against a worsening insurgency in Iraq in November 2003, U.S. commanders implemented Miller's design at Abu Ghraib. In one example that came to our attention, Maj. Scott Uithol, a psychiatrist, arrived in Iraq expecting to serve with a combat stress-control unit. He was deployed instead to Abu Ghraib's newly formed Biscuit.

Uithol declined to talk to us, but other sources, including Abu Ghraib's chief of military intelligence, Col. Thomas Pappas, shed light on what at least some Biscuit members did. In testimony taken last February for an internal report but made public in October, Pappas described how physicians helped devise and execute interrogation strategies. Military intelligence teams, he said, prepared individualized "interrogation plans" for detainees, including a "sleep plan" and "medical standards." A physician and a psychiatrist monitored what went on.

[...]

How did military physicians who advised or served with Biscuits justify this role to themselves? Some may have conflated Geneva protections with the ban on torture. So long as interrogation strategies didn't rise to the level of torture, they could see their conduct as lawful. Other physicians feared prosecution for disobeying orders more than they worried about the consequences of following illegal orders.

Some military doctors advanced another rationalization: Whatever their obligations under the international human rights law and the laws of war, medical ethics do not apply when they devote their skills to intelligence-gathering and other war-fighting functions. In such cases, these physicians say, they are combatants, not physicians, because they apply their knowledge to achieve military ends. A medical degree, Tornberg told us, isn't a "sacramental vow." When a doctor participates in interrogation, "he's not functioning as a physician," and the Hippocratic ideal of fidelity to patients is beside the point.

Time to get a new lawyer department

CNN.com - Opening statements start first Abu Ghraib court-martial - Jan 10, 2005: "FORT HOOD, Texas (Reuters) -- A lawyer for Spc. Charles Graner Jr., accused ringleader in the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal, defended piling naked prisoners in pyramids Monday as valid prisoner control and compared it to shows by cheerleaders.

'Don't cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year. Is that torture?' Guy Womack, Graner's attorney, said in opening statements to the 10-member military jury at the reservist's court-martial."

How personal? And could we get some pictures?

From Cursor: Bill Clinton said to be a friend of George W., with the two reportedly having "grown surprisingly warm and personal over the last six months."

News Corp. News

The New York Times > Business > Media & Advertising > Murdoch Will Buy Rest of Fox Shares in $7 Billion Deal

And now we'll never know...

Undiplomatic Immunity - Did Al Gonzales say the president can authorize torture? By Chris Suellentrop: "Finally, Harold Hongju Koh, a Yale professor of international law (and dean of the Yale Law School), solves the riddle—about the 'commander-in-chief override' not the mysterious nanny—by proposing a simple question for Gonzales. He tells the Judiciary Committee, 'A simple question you could have asked today was, 'Is the anti-torture statute constitutional?' If Gonzales answers yes, then he does not believe the president can override the statute. Mystery solved. Only one problem with this professorial inquiry: By the time Koh testified, Gonzales was already gone."

I'm a Kidnapper. Are you?

NYT: German's Claim of Kidnapping Brings Investigation of U.S. Link

The Loss of Possibly Innocent Lives

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | US strikes 'wrong' Iraqi target: "An American air strike in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul has hit the wrong target, the US military has admitted.

The bomb demolished a house in Aaytha, killing 14 people, according to local officials. The US put the toll at five.

The military said it 'deeply regrets the loss of possibly innocent lives', and promised an investigation."

Possibly innocent? They bombed the wrong house, but the people inside were only 'possibly innocent'?

Bellatrys: We are responsible

Citizens of the World: We Are Not Our Government:

—But We Elected Them

This is the critical problem.

Decent Americans don't want to be despised and rejected for the callous and brutal policies of our leaders. We're not like that, we say.

And it's true - so far as it goes.

But we are in a democracy, and we have chosen our rulers these many generations - and by "we" I mean all the lifelong moderate liberals, who have not been up in arms and getting arrested in front of SAC bases all these years, as well as the nice, soccer-mom'n'dad conservatives, all those people who would never have dreamed of civil disobedience because, after all, there was no need, we're a nation of laws, we believe in human rights, we never go to war except in self-defense, we believe in freedom of speech and science and education and the arts, we're the greatest benefactors the human race has ever known.

And people around the world all envy us, because we're the pinnacle, and that's why they want to come here, except for the ones who want to tear us down. Just the sin of envy.

And now, blinking, we find ourselves in 1915 Berlin [US] or Vienna [UK], watching the train-wreck happen as our leaders' many-years-planned expansionist venture collides with their rivals' many-years-planned revolutionary venture, asking how the hell did this happen, coming out of nowhere as it did--?