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There are a lot of terrific blogs out there on the world of writing, but The Heart of the Matter isn't one of them. HOTM primarily covers politics and language, particularly language as it influences politics, with the occasional post on some miscellaneous subject that catches my attention.

Politics, it seems to me, gets about the same level of rational, objective analysis as religion, and can be an equally divisive topic (in fact, I believe scientists will soon use functional magnetic resonance imaging technology to discover that politics and religion occupy the same spot in our brains). It's never been easy to discuss politics dispassionately, but in the age of the ascendency of entertainers like Ann Coulter, Michael Moore, and Bill O'Reilly, trying to get to the heart of the matter is more difficult than ever.

This blog aims to be a haven from fulmination, disrespect, polemics, and other attack-style debate. Please, if your aim is to defend your position rather than find the truth, go rent a Michael Moore movie or read a Michael Savage book. They'll provide a laugh and a quick self-righteousness fix and help you avoid the hard work of examining your politics that you'd have to do here.

A word on tone. At the risk of stating the obvious, no one's mind has ever been changed by an insult. Calling your political opponents "mentally ill" or "treasonous" or distorting their statements to fit your diatribe is a great way to sell books, speeches, talk shows, and movies -- that is, to make money, which is the real intent of professional polemicists. But that kind of nonsense never enlightens and it never persuades. Let's not fall victim to it here.
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Barry Eisler

Barry Eisler


Last Updated: 11/19/2009

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Gender: Male
Status: Married
Age: 45
Sign: Capricorn

City: San Francisco
State: Tokyo
Country: JP
Signup Date: 4/26/2006

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Friday, October 23, 2009 
I've been reading The Economist for decades and have always admired the magazine for its coverage, insights, and eclectic politics (who else in the media has called for Bill Clinton's resignation, gay marriage, war in Iraq, and drug decriminalization?). I've respected the magazine's opinions even when I disagreed with its conclusions. But lately, I find myself wondering about its common sense. Two pieces from the October 17 issue, Obama's War and To Surge or Not to Surge, both calling for escalation in Afghanistan, are useful to study not just to expose the flaws in escalation theory specifically, but to illuminate various species of weak critical thinking in general. Let's take the magazine's arguments for escalation one by one. 1. "A less intensive, more surgical 'counter-terrorism,' relying on unmanned air raids and assassination... is more likely to kill civilians and create new enemies than to decapitate and disable al-Qaeda." Certainly killing civilians and creating new enemies would be counterproductive for any policy. It's reasonable, therefore, to ask whether sending tens of thousands of additional foreign troops into the country eight years into the war might have a similar effect, or even a worse one. Yet The Economist doesn't consider the costs of its favored policy. It's as though those costs don't exist. The general flaw here is the assessment of costs only of one course of action, not of its proposed alternative. If your house and belongings were being ruined by a leaky roof and someone told you repairs would cost a thousand dollars, would you reflexively say, "Forget it, too costly?" Or would you also consider the costs of ongoing water damage caused by an unrepaired roof, and measure one against the other? 2. "Anarchy in Afghanistan, or a Taliban restoration, would leave it prey to permanent cross-border instability." The specific problem here is that the argument ignores not just theoretical alternatives, but also actual history. If cross-border stability is a goal, it's important to ask whether there was more of it before or after the current war began. If the answer is "before," we can reasonably infer that the presence of foreign troops in the country is part of the cause of the current instability, and that more troops would make things worse. The more general problem here is unexamined assumptions. Afghanistan has a whole history of instability. Why ignore that history when asserting withdrawal would worsen things? Why leave a critical assumption untested when you have so much data to test it with? Note too the related assumption: stability in Afghanistan is so vital a western interest that no one even has to explain what the interest is. Stability is one of those words that just gets intoned, thought-free, by serious-sounding people who rarely bother to explain why the stability is important enough to warrant a war to maintain it -- and who even more rarely pause to consider how war might foster stability's opposite. 3. "Defeat for the West in Afghanistan would embolden its opponents not just in Pakistan, but all around the world, leaving it open to more attacks." The argument is that we shouldn't do something to embolden our opponents, yes? Then why does The Economist not also discuss the way war -- particularly escalation -- emboldens our opponents? Or can only withdrawal embolden opponents, while escalation can't? Again, it seems the only costs are those associated with the course of action The Economist seeks to dismiss. The magazine's preferred alternative is free of such costs, and apparently of other costs, as well. Wouldn't it be nice if life were really like this? 4. "Withdrawal would amount to a terrible betrayal of the Afghan people, some of whose troubles are the result of Western intervention." I don't know how you measure something like this, especially after the kind of rigged election Karzai just pulled off. Regardless, will this always be true? Afghanistan seems historically a hard place to pacify. How long does The Economist propose staying to avoid betraying the Afghan people? How many lives is it willing to spend for this avoidance? How much money? It doesn't say. Starting to see a pattern here? If a salesman were trying to sell you a car this one-sidedly -- "no costs, unless you don't buy the car!" -- would you get out your checkbook? 5. "The Afghan conflict, it is often said, has been not an eight-year war, but eight one-year wars. NATO comes off worse each time. And so the most important reason for persisting in Afghanistan: the coalition can do much better." If you knew someone who had been married and divorced eight times, would you recommend he give it another go because he can do better? If, as you lay down on the operating table, you learned that your surgeon had killed her previous eight patients, would you take this as a sign your operation will be a success? They say past performance isn't an indication of future results. Maybe not. But the notion that eight years of failure means ipso facto next year will be better is contradicted by history, everyday experience, and common sense. As an argument, it is, simply, delusional. 6. "The coalition’s leaders, at least, seem to have grasped that it must behave not as an occupying army but as a partner, whose aim is to build up the local forces that will ultimately ensure Afghanistan’s security. And soldiers and civilians are beginning to understand that development aid can benefit local people rather than foreign consultants and contractors." If it took eight years for our leaders to figure these things out, is that cause for encouragement? Or despair? If you knew someone who'd been driving for eight years and only just figured out the importance of using the turn signal and rear view mirror and putting on the headlights at night, would you then confidently hand him the keys to your vehicle? Or would you instead sense that someone who learns this slowly will never manage to safely drive a car? 7. "The coalition, however, lacks three essential components of a successful strategy. It needs a credible, legitimate government to work with, the resources to do the job and the belief that America’s president is behind this war." I think Rory Stewart said it best: "This is not a plan: it is a description of what we have not got." 8. "As for resources, it is worth remembering that in 2006, before the American surge, prospects in Iraq looked far bleaker than they do now in Afghanistan." It's odd to tout Iraq as the kind of success we might emulate in Afghanistan. Andrew Bacevich:
Six-plus years after it began, Operation Iraqi Freedom has consumed something like a trillion dollars—with the meter still running—and has taken the lives of more than forty-three hundred American soldiers. Meanwhile, in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities, car bombs continue to detonate at regular intervals, killing and maiming dozens. Anyone inclined to put Iraq in the nation’s rearview mirror is simply deluded. Not long ago General Raymond Odierno, Petraeus’s successor and the fifth U.S. commander in Baghdad, expressed the view that the insurgency in Iraq is likely to drag on for an-other five, ten, or fifteen years. Events may well show that Odierno is an optimist. Given the embarrassing yet indisputable fact that this was an utterly needless war—no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction found, no ties between Saddam Hussein and the jihadists established, no democratic transformation of the Islamic world set in motion, no road to peace in Jerusalem discovered in downtown Baghdad—to describe Iraq as a success, and as a model for application elsewhere, is nothing short of obscene. The great unacknowledged lesson of Iraq is the one that the writer Norman Mailer identified decades ago: “Fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap.” For those who, despite all this, still hanker to have a go at nation building, why start with Afghanistan? Why not first fix, say, Mexico? In terms of its importance to the United States, our southern neighbor—a major supplier of oil and drugs among other commodities deemed vital to the American way of life—outranks Afghanistan by several orders of magnitude.
9. "Mr Obama... might well reflect on a line from a British counter-insurgency specialist, quoted in Lewis Sorley’s book 'A Better War,' which White House staff are said to be busily reading. South Vietnam, he says, could have been saved if America had not cut off military aid to its government. 'Perhaps the major lesson of the Vietnam war,' said Sir Robert Thompson, 'is: do not rely on the United States as an ally.' Perhaps so. Perhaps the point would be more relevant if Sir Thompson and The Economist could point to the country whom South Vietnam could have relied on instead. Otherwise, you could as well argue that Bill is useless to have your back in a fight because he lacks mutant invisibility powers and titanium-coated skin. 10. "Most of all, Mr Obama needs to fight this war with conviction. His wobbles over the last month have done more to comfort his enemies and worry his allies than any recent losses on the ground. Only if he persuades his troops, his countrymen and the Taliban that America is there for the long haul does he have a chance of turning this war around." This sounded familiar to me. So I looked up William Westmoreland on Wikipedia and found this in his 1967 address to a joint session of Congress:
In evaluating the enemy strategy, it is evident to me that he believes our Achilles heel is our resolve ... Your continued strong support is vital to the success of our mission ... Backed at home by resolve, confidence, patience, determination and continued support, we will prevail in Vietnam over the Communist aggressor!
Indeed, the oddest thing about reading The Economist's articles this week was my sense that, had the word Vietnam been substituted for the word Afghanistan, they could have been written anytime during that earlier war (and I'm sure they were). Well, those who don't learn the lessons of history and all that. Measure the costs of all proposed courses of action, not just one. Identify and test your assumptions. Recognize that multiple failures and extraordinarily slow learning are not cause for optimism for success. Don't confuse a description of what you lack with a strategy for achieving it. Spot and learn from historical parallels. Common sense, you would think. But not, apparently, when such common sense is most urgent. P.S. On the subject of weak critical thinking, conservative NYT columnist Ross Douthat claims the secular arguments against gay marriage can be summed up as "institutional support for reproduction." Reproduction needs institutional support? I actually can't think of something that needs less institutional support. Breathing, maybe. And the guy calling for this institutional support for reproduction also calls himself a conservative, presumably in favor of small government and all that? Bonus points, Ross, for irony.
8:51 PM 
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Monday, October 12, 2009 
Hi everyone, forgive my long hiatus. If anyone here is considering moving back from Tokyo, living in a house while it's being renovated, and finishing a manuscript all at the same time, I would advise... don't. But the worst of the storm is past, thank God, and it's good to be back at blogging. Lots to catch up on; here are three recent items that strike me as all being evidence (along with, say, the bizarre and unconstitutional reverence for "our" Commander-in-Chief) of the creeping militarization of American society.
1. On Fox News Sunday, Liz Cheney offered these thoughts on Obama's Nobel:
Well, I think what the committee believes is they'd like to live in a world in which America is not dominant. And I think if you look at the language of the citation, you can see that they talk about, you know, President Obama ruling in a way that makes sense to the majority of the people of the world. You know, Americans don't elect a president to do that. We elect a president to defend our national interests. And so I think that, you know, they may believe that President Obama also doesn't agree with American dominance, and they may have been trying to affirm that belief with the prize. I think, unfortunately, they may be right, and I think it's a concern.
Here are the main premises in the paragraph above: A. America should dominate the world. B. The president "rules" America. C. Americans elect a president exclusively, or at least primarily, to "defend" our national interests. D. The defense of America's national interests should not, and indeed cannot, make sense to the majority of the people of the world. Let's examine the premises Cheney regards as axiomatic. A. Is it necessary, desirable, or even possible for America to dominate the world? What are America's national interests, and is world dominance necessary for their defense? Do all countries require world dominance to defend their national interests, or is America unique in this regard? B. Does the president "rule" America? (Hint: the president's job description is helpfully laid out right in the Constitution. Very handy document·) C. Is it true that Americans exclusively or primarily elect a president to "defend" our national interests? What else do we want a president to do? What does it suggest when someone mentions "defense" as the only, or even the primary, role Americans expect in a president (as opposed to, say, advancing interests, or continuing to form a more perfect union... that kind of thing)? Especially when the same person suggests the president "rules" America? D. Is it true that when the president defends America's national interests, his actions cannot and should not make sense to the majority of the world? Is a decent respect for the opinions of mankind incommensurate with the defense of our national interests, or a part of that defense? 2. Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) supports a repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, which is good. But the senator also says, "It has to be done in the right way, which is to get a buy-in from the (U.S.) military (that) I think is now possible." Huge majorities of Americans, including majorities of Americans with family members in the military, favor a repeal of DADT (it seems the military itself seems about evenly divided). Regardless: what, specifically, would the required military "buy-in" consist of? Was the military's "buy-in" also required when President Truman ordered desegregation? Are there other issues for which the civilian government and civilian population require the military's "buy-in?" Are there other institutions from which the President and Congress require buy-in, or is it just the military? What does Levin's notion suggest about current notions regarding military subordination to civilian leadership? 3. In a September 11 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Fouad Adjami, who writes like Peggy Noonan (this is not a compliment), claimed, "Wars are great clarifiers." Adjami was so certain of the truth of his statement that he didn't even bother to support it, and instead offered it up as an axiom. Is it true wars really are great at clarifying things? Or do they tend instead to enflame and obscure? What does it say about a person's worldview when he believes it virtually goes without saying that wars greatly clarify things? Against the creeping authoritarianism that today thoroughly infests the GOP but that shows increasing virulence outside it, as well, awareness, outspokenness, and familiarity with the Constitution are the best defense. P.S. Glenn Greenwald has a terrific related interview with Jonathan Weiler, co-author of "Authoritarianism & Polarization in American Politics."
9:50 PM 
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Tuesday, July 14, 2009 
MySpace seems to have changed their blog formatting. It's too much of a pain to reformat my entire post, so unless there's some new development, I'm just going to post links here to the latest on Heart of the Matter. Today's post is called Double Standard for a Latina. You can find it on my website here.
8:12 PM 
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Saturday, July 11, 2009 
MySpace seems to have changed their blog formatting. It's too much of a pain to reformat my entire post, so unless there's some new development, I'm just going to post links here to the latest on Heart of the Matter. Today's post is called The Willful Stupidity of Anti-Gay Prejudice. You can find it on my website here.
11:48 PM 
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Tuesday, June 09, 2009 
What I find most remarkable about America's debate regarding torture -- beyond the fact that such a debate could even be necessary in America -- is the continual recourse of both proponents and opponents to the question of whether torture works. I can't think of any other illegal behavior -- not murder, not rape, not kidnapping, not assault -- that receives this kind of rhetorical makeover. When a murder has been committed, you don't hear people agonizing over whether killing can never, ever be justified. When someone has been raped, people don't ignore the crime in favor of a discussion of whether a rapist's satisfaction could possibly be proven to outweigh a victim's trauma and horror. If a child is kidnapped, the airwaves aren't polluted with discussion of whether kidnapping might actually be an effective way of acquiring ransom money. And so on. Torture, apparently, is different. Let's talk about why.

Unlike other crimes, torture has a constituency, in the form of the architects who created America's torture regime. These are the people who feed the public discourse with a steady supply of, "Can you really say that torture never, ever works?" And, "What would you do if your child were kidnapped and the kidnapper refused to reveal the child's location?" And, "How can you compare enhanced interrogation techniquing one terrorist to the 3000 people killed on 9/11?" Etc. The architects, and their media allies, know that as long as the talking heads of television and gatherers by office water coolers, literal and electronic, are discussing the morality and practicality of torture, they won't be talking about the illegality of torture.

But this supply-side explanation is only part of what makes torture different. The supply would have nowhere to go in the absence of demand. And the demand is what we most need to guard against. Purveyors of torture excuses will come and go, but our psyches will never change. I believe some deep place in the human psyche is attracted to torture.

A fundamental aspect of human nature is an abhorrence of powerlessness and a concomitant will to power. And what greater confirmation of power, and banishment of powerlessness, is there than utter control over another human being -- body, mind, and soul? We also abhor helplessness. It's horrifying to consider that over time we will never be able to entirely prevent terrorist attacks. We prefer to believe 9/11 happened because we failed to do something we could have done, that there's some extreme we can still resort to that will make us safe again, that if we do that thing from now on, we can gain greater mastery over the possibilities that frighten us.

Because, for the reasons set forth in the paragraph above, torture is already seductive, we seize on it like a talisman custom-made for our fearful psyches. So it bears reminding that the reason torture is universally illegal in the civilized world is a consensus that torture is not only evil, but also insidious, and that therefore we must guard against the temptation to torture by enacting and enforcing strict laws against it. These laws provide not just a bulwark against a recrudescence of torture, but act also as a signpost, wisely erected by generations before us, warning us to stand fast against the dark sirens of our worst impulses.

Leave aside the irony that it's self-styled "conservatives" who are so eager to ignore the accreted wisdom of generations past. That the consensus against torture is the work of generations -- the product of generations of mistakes and of continual, improbable appeals not just to morality, but to wisdom, too, to the better angels of our nature -- makes the more debilitating the right's progress in once again coloring torture as something respectable, even desirable.

It is nothing of the sort. Torture is an abomination. It is without exception illegal. Those who have authorized it and those who have carried it out have committed crimes. In the face of clear laws and clear evidence of violation of those laws, a rhetorical resort to theory or morality or practicality isn't just an attempt to obscure the commission of crimes. It's also an implicit debasement of the value of the law itself. Most of all, it's a profoundly unconservative attempt to reingest an evil seed civilization has over time and in the face of dark, conflicting impulses, managed largely to expel.

Cross-posted at Humanity Against Crime.

More here:

10:44 PM 
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Tuesday, June 02, 2009 
This one's a little off topic, but enough people have asked so that I thought I'd post it here, too.  If you want to know how to give a great talk, here are my thoughts following TEDx Tokyo.  Enjoy.

Cheers,
Barry
2:27 PM 
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Friday, May 29, 2009 
It's impossible to keep up with the ever-creative arguments of torture apologists, but I'm trying.  For the moment, let me step back from the cornucopia of metastasizing specific torture apologies and focus for a moment more on the larger picture.

Have you ever wondered how Dick Cheney can be a credible voice on torture?  Can you imagine Cheney (or the architect of any program of at best dubious legality) saying, "Well, our intentions were certainly good, but nothing worthwhile came out of it.  Definitely was worth a try though."  Is there any way on earth Dick Cheney would ever say that?  Of course not, and therefore, how can anyone take him seriously as the chief advocate for the illegal program he himself designed?  We might equally expect George Bush to say, "Boy, the war in Iraq has really been a completely unnecessary catastrophe.  Oops."

When a car salesman working on commission tells us we're going to love driving this car, we know to be skeptical because his opinion is not disinterested.  Why does this sort of common sense evaporate when the salesman is a politician, and with far more on the line than the car salesman?

Why is it that the people who argue for torture have no experience with interrogations, while the most experienced are against it?  Read this new article from Time magazine.  Between them, Matthew Alexander and Ali Soufan have interrogated or supervised the interrogations of hundreds of war on terror prisoners.  Both say torture doesn't work and that in fact it has cost thousands of American lives.  Why are apologists so quick to dismiss as irrelevant the the experience of men like these in favor of their own evidence-free opinions?


You might have seen recently that rightwing talkshow host Eric "Mancow" Muller volunteered to be waterboarded so he could demonstrate graphically that waterboarding isn't torture.  Here's his conclusion, unsurprising to anyone but himself.  And bear in mind, this result was achieved in six seconds in the safest, most controlled, most friendly circumstances possible.


So:  why not a torture Turing Test?  If Liz Cheney can continue to maintain that Waterboarding Isn't Torture even while being waterboarded, she would be infinitely more persuasive.  I wonder why Cheney the elder and Cheney the younger, and so many other apologists with so much on the line, refuse to make this extremely persuasive point?  After all, they say waterboarding causes no permanent harm.  It's just a dunk in the water, a no brainer, no big deal at all.  So why not submit to an easy dunk and demonstrate powerfully and persuasively and once and for all for everyone to see that waterboarding isn't torture?  Like Mancow did.

Given how strongly motivated some people are to believe in spite of glaring evidence to the contrary that We Do Not Torture, it might not help to repeat this.  But still:  waterboarding is hardly the only torture technique that was permitted or engaged in under the Bush/Cheney program.  The UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment, signed by Ronald Reagan and ratified by the Senate, binds the US not just to not torture, but also not to engage in cruel, inhuman, or other degrading treatment.  It specifically prohibits all exceptions.

But you never hear about the law from torture apogists.  Instead, they want to make it all about theory:  "What would you do if you had to torture someone to save a city?  To save a loved one?  Can you absolutely say that under all circumstances torture never, ever justified?"

Imagine you're a cop.  You come across a dead body with a bullet hole in the forehead, and there's a guy standing over the corpse holding a smoking gun.  You want to arrest the guy with the gun, and your partner says, "Hang on a minute there, pard.  Can you honestly say that killing is never, ever justified?"  This is exactly what torture apologists are doing in the face of actual laws and actual facts demonstrating that those laws were violated.

Really, I get so tired of the ridiculous and irrelevant question, "But wouldn't you torture someone if you thought it could save a loved one?"  This is simply an argument for setting policy according to what we would do if we were out of minds with fear, rage, and desperation.  How can any rational person believe that policy so devised would be in our interests?  What are our rational minds for, if we're so eager to surrender them in advance?

The real question here is:  if someone chained your stripped and hooded wife or daughter to the ceiling so she couldn't sleep for a week and the skin on her legs were nearly split with edema, and repeatedly smashed her into the wall, and left her lying in her own urine and excrement, and then waterboarded her again and again and again and again, would you dismiss it all as no worse than a bunch of fraternity pranks, just some "enhanced interrogation procedures?"  Or would you recognize it as torture?

It amazes me, the awesome powers we've come to attribute to terrorist losers and misfits.  Not only can they dissolve the concrete walls of America's most fortress-like supermax prisons, they're also impervious to the most sophisticated interrogation techniques.  You'd think that people who had signed up for a cause as looney as worldwide jihad, who were such true believers that they were willing to blow themselves up along with thousands of innocents in the service of the cause to which someone recruited them, must by definition be reasonably amenable to psychological manipulation.  They can be talked into blowing themselves up, but not into giving up information?  When did we come to have so little confidence in ourselves that we started to view these cretins as more clever than we are?

I get a lot of mail from people arguing that we should torture terrorists (never terror suspects; after all, if the government says someone is a terrorist, he's a terrorist, because the government has never been wrong about such a thing ever).  They're evil, they deserve it, blah blah blah.  Even if "they deserved it" could magically render torture legal or otherwise desirable, shouldn't we take a step back and carefully examine our real motivations here?  If we really, really want to torture these evildoers because they deserve it, is it possible we'll also want to retroactively invent other, more rational-seeming, respectable reasons to justify the underlying bestial desire?  When you really, really want to do something, you start to look for reasons.  If you can't find real ones, you might start to invent them.  Rational people are aware of this dynamic and take steps to guard against it.  Really motivated people don't want to be aware of the dynamic and don't want to guard against it -- they just want to do what they want to do.

It's fascinating to watch the people who argue that torture doesn't matter because people who want to kill us are going to want to kill us anyway.  After all, The Terrorists tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, before we started torturing, that kind of thing.  And yet these same people also say Obama must never, ever release the new photos of prisoner abuse, lest they inflame anger against us.

Although maybe these photos would cause some inflammation.  Some of them are said to depict prisoners being raped.

Okay, here are a few more specific pro-torture arguments.  I'm numbering them to make it easier to reference them when I get repetitive pro-torture email.

1.  "I'd take your criticism of the US more seriously if you'd also criticize al Qaeda.  All we do is rough tactics; they cut people's heads off.  Doesn't that bother you?"

This is a really weird argument in so many ways -- call it the Fairness Doctrine for Terrorist Criticism -- but it's out there so let's address it.

First, I wonder, does it only apply to terrorists and torture?  Or does the equal time theory apply to other governments and other issues, too?  "Before criticizing the US government for its approach to health care, you must provide equal time for criticism of the UK approach."

Look, I'm a US citizen, so naturally I tend to focus on the actions of my government.  What my government does affects me, and because we're a democracy, there's at least a theoretical chance my criticism will have some effect.  By contrast, somehow I don't think US citizens criticizing al Qaeda behavior is likely to reach the appropriate al Qaeda ombudsman.  It might also be that Americans are more critical of their own government than we are of al Qaeda because we hold our government to a slightly higher standard.  Are we mistaken in doing so?

Another reason Americans might not spend a lot of time criticizing al Qaeda is because there's no vocal contingent of Americans applauding al Qaeda's barbarism.  By contrast, there's a large and vocal segment of the US population applauding torture, and their applause requires a response.  So tell you what:  when Fox news starts apologizing for and excusing al Qaeda's mass murder, you can count on me to publicly manifest my outrage.

2.  "The Democratic party’s civil libertarians seem to believe that several medium-sized US cities would be a reasonable price to pay for insisting on ordinary criminal trials for terrorist suspects." via Clive Crook.

There's so much wrong with this statement it's embarrassing just to read it.  An ordinary criminal trial for terrorists will cause the destruction of several medium-sized US cities?  What is the connection between one and the other?  Which terrorists?  Which cities?  Seriously, if we try terrorists in civilian courts, we will lose cities?

If Crook rephrases, I'll have another crack.  As it is, it's very hard to know what he's talking about.

3.  "We're faced with a ruthless foe, so we have to be at least equally ruthless."

I think I saw this one as a deep thought on Talking Points Memo:  If torture so great, why have all the countries that used it -- Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union -- been defeated by the US?

And then there was Jesse Ventua on The View:  If waterboarding etc isn't torture, why do we not use it more broadly -- on domestic criminal suspects, for example?


4.  Here's one you hear a lot.  "How can it be torture when we do it to our own people in military training?"

I don't know.  How can it be rape when married couples do the same thing all the time at home?  How can it be slavery when people do the same thing for wages?

And by the way, it's *not* just what we did to our own people.  Dozens of prisoners were tortured to death (that is, murdered).  As far as I know, the military doesn't torture soldiers to death as part of their training.  Nor, for that matter, does it chain them to the ceiling for a week etc. before waterboarding them 183 times.

5.  "You can't call it torture because some people say it's not."

I hereby apologize to anyone I might have misled by referring to the "Holocaust."  Or for using without qualification the phrase, "Man walks on the moon."  Or for suggesting that "Shakespeare" wrote all those plays and sonnets.

6.  Here's a good one from Lindsey Graham:  torture has been around for five hundred years because it works.

Hmmm... works at what?  For extracting the false confessions torturers want to hear, it's been brilliant, no doubt.

Personally, I think torture has been around for a long time because people like doing it.  What's Senator Graham's explanation for, say, oral sex?  That's been around for a long time, too.

7.  "Bush and Cheney kept the country safe.  At least you can say that."

Nope.  Not even close.  Anyway, even if this outrageous whopper were true, the same is true of Bill Clinton, who kept the country safe from the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Personally, I think my books are what's kept the country safe.  I sold the first one in late September, 2001, and have been writing about one a year ever since.  Surely this can't be a coincidence.

Kept the country safe?  The real bill for what they've done has yet to be presented.

I guarantee I'm going to get comments to this post from apologists who will simply repeat the usual torture hypotheticals while continuing their embarrassing, damning silence on the law and the facts of its violation.  If you're one of the people who's going to take that route, could you just acknowledge this paragraph as evidence suggesting you at least glanced at the post before responding to it?  Thanks.
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Tuesday, May 26, 2009 

Transcript of an intercepted conversation between two terrorists in a cave somewhere along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border:


Did you hear Dick Cheney's speech to the American Enterprise Institute last week?


I did.  It was funny how Cheney said we think it shows weakness when the Americans argue.


I know.  The truth is, I'm a little jealous of the way they get to argue.


I would never say this to my wife, but I think the way they argue is a sign of strength.  It takes a lot of confidence to argue like that.  I once tried to argue a little with Osama, and he told me if I did it again, he would cut my head off.


I know, I know, Osama doesn't like disagreement.  But we have to remember, he's our leader and he knows what's best for us.


That's true.  Not everyone has a leader as wise as ours.  We're lucky to be able to follow him without question.


What was funny was, who cares about the arguing?  And even if we did care, Cheney was arguing, too!  It was funny to hear him say, "We must stop doing what I'm doing!"


Yes, that was good.  It was like, "We must not be as weak as I'm being!"


In fact, it's the way they're surrendering the freedoms they claim to cherish that's so weak.  One big attack and immediately they're torturing, kidnapping, wiretapping without warrants, imprisoning people without charging them... it was so easy!  I thought it would be harder, but Osama was right -- America is a paper tiger.


Allahu Akhbar.


I have to admit, I was a little worried when they elected Obama.  He seemed to understand that among the country's key strengths were its values.


Empty values, though.


Of course empty values.  Equality, freedom, individuality, the rule of law... who wants all that when you can have submission to God, instead?


Allahu akhbar.


But still, a lot of people in the world find those values -- call them the American brand -- attractive.  That's what I mean when I say American values were making America strong.  Throughout history, the values attracted a lot of people to America's cause.  Think of the American brand compared to the communist brand.  The Soviet Union never had a chance.


Yes, I suppose that's true.


And it's a problem for us, too.  Many people are so deluded that they would prefer equality, freedom, individuality, and the rule of law to submission to God.  As though there could be any law but God's law!


Infidels.


Yes.  But now that America is torturing, spying on it citizens without warrants, imprisoning without charge, and all the rest, the people who were attracted to America's values are recoiling.  They are saying, America, the great hypocrite!  And the ease with which the soft Americans have surrendered their "cherished" values shows America's enemies how weak she really is.


Then thanks be to Allah that Obama has reversed all those campaign promises.


Yes.  For a while, we were afraid America was going to restore its brand and attract new followers again.  But Obama is making sure not to do that.  If he has his way, Americans will soon surrender more of their "values," including even this thing called "the right to a trial by jury."


You mean the US government will be able to imprison people without trial?


Yes.


US citizens?


Yes.


Forever?


Yes.


Wow.  That is a huge victory for us.


Yes.  And it came much more easily than we were expecting.  Imagine how weak and frightened they must appear to anyone who might once have been attracted to their cause of "freedom!"


Allahu akbar.


I have to say, I don't understand their political system.  The Democrats are afraid of the Republicans, and the Republicans are afraid of everything -- except the Democrats.


That is strange.


Yes.  But it works for us.  You know, when Bush and Cheney left office, Osama was very sad.  But all the talk shows and speeches Cheney has been doing since then have given Osama a good idea.


Yes?


I really shouldn't tell you, it's a secret...


I won't say anything.


All right.  What Cheney and his allies are doing is trying to convince Americans that if there's another terrorist attack, it happened because Americans didn't give up enough of their values.  Because they stopped torturing, for example.


You mean...


That's right.  If we can attack them again, there's a better chance than ever, thanks to the work of Cheney, that Americans will quickly surrender even more of their values.  That will make them even weaker, and us stronger.


They might torture more?


If we are lucky.  Their torture of the brothers is the best recruitment tool we've ever had.  It has won us many committed new followers.


They're so easy to manipulate, aren't they?  We must take advantage of this opportunity Cheney is giving us.


Exactly.  Who would have thought Dick Cheney would go on shaping the battlefield for us, that he would find new ways even after leaving office to encourage us to attack by increasing the benefits of an attack?


Allah works in mysterious ways.


He certainly does.

10:39 AM 
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Monday, May 25, 2009 

Mostly I agree with Glenn Greenwald that only a politician's actions matter, and speculation about his or her motives is pointless.  But when a politician reverses himself repeatedly on core campaign promises and rhetoric immediately after taking office, as Obama has done, it's hard not to wonder what's driving him.  It's not just that my day job is writing novels, meaning character motivation is a particular obsession of mine.  It's also that in understanding what could cause Obama to make such a liar of himself regarding transparency, the rule of law, and civil liberties, we might learn something not just about the man, but about the system in which he operates.


The list of Obama's reversals is long, but in brief:  amnesty for telecom companies that violated eavesdropping laws; abuse of the state secrets privilege; not releasing photos of torture at US-run prisons; continuing the Bush administration's plans to establish "military commissions" with lower levels of due process.  Most outrageously of all, Obama now proposes that the government should be able to imprison people indefinitely without trial.


Pause for a moment and consider:  the US government.  In America.  Imprisoning Americans.  Who might or might not have committed a crime.  Forever.  Without trial.


Obama wants to call this "preventive detention."  Pretty-sounding, isn't it?  Detention is such a friendly word.  It's what I used to get in high school when I didn't turn in my homework (here's more on the political abuses of "detainee" and "detention").  Rachel Maddow was being far more accurate when she used the language of Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's story, Minority Report:  "Pre-Crime."



Now, some people see "Trial by Jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."  But what kind of of extreme-left, tree-hugging, blame-America-first, granola-eating, America-hating, socialist, ACLU card-carrying librul retard would believe something like that?


Well, Thomas Jefferson, actually.  Obama's a pretty smart guy.  But does he know better than Jefferson?


So now we come to why.  Why would a guy who campaigned on promises of open government, the rule of law, and the importance of civil liberties and all that, a guy who actually taught Constitutional Law, suddenly position himself to become Warden-in-Chief?


I think it comes down to fear.


Americans have become so fearful of being Attacked by the Terrorists that the fear is increasingly distorting our politics.  President Bush claimed his most important responsibility was to keep the American people safe -- despite the lack of any such provision in the Constitution.  Dick Cheney distorts his oath of office to invent a responsibility to protect America rather than to defend the Constitution.  Obama apes Bush in claiming to wake in the morning and fall asleep at night worrying about how to keep us all safe.  Wouldn't it be great if these guys would read their job descriptions, as provided for in the Constitution, and try to govern accordingly?


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So Americans are afraid.  The fear is fed by demagogues, mostly on the right, who either share the fear or cynically exploit it.  As the fear worsens, the level of safety the populace expects and demands from the government increases to unreasonable levels.  But because perfect safety is impossible in life, politicians know that, like other forms of crime, terrorist incidents are inevitable.  Faced with the impossible demands of the citizenry, what's a politician to do?


Well, basically you do every batshit crazy, extremist thing you can think of:  torture (sold for consumer comfort as "enhanced interrogation techniques"); secret prisons ("detention facilities"); preventive wars ("self-defense against mushroom-cloud smoking guns"); warrantless eavesdropping (the "Protect America Act of 2007"); secret laws ("Our Playbook"); show trials and kangaroo courts ("military commissions"); pre-crime prisons ("preventive detention").  Then, when the inevitable happens, the politician can say to the angry, frightened public, "Look what I did to protect you.  No one could possibly have done more."


If Americans have become insane with fear, even otherwise responsible politicians might conceive of their job as just managing the insanity.


And that's my take on Obama.  I could be wrong, of course; he could be a power-mad tyrant wannabe who -- muwahuwahuwa -- fooled everyone with all that talk of not sacrificing our values for safety, and certainly the powers he's claiming for himself would support that theory.  But my essentially unsupportable sense, for what it's worth, is that he's someone with the education, experience, and temperament to know better, who's doing what he's doing merely to protect his political flanks.


What's the difference between a demogogue and a cynic, then?  Or between a cynic and a coward?


In the end, perhaps not much.


But what's an honest politician to do?  The people are so fearful, the Dick and Liz Cheney Be Very Afraid Show is playing 24/7, when the next attack happens the right will scream it was Obama's fault, he did this, he could have protected you but he didn't...


Yes, what to do.  A difficult question.


Oh, wait a minute.  A politician could, you know, lead.


Nah, that's crazy.  What was I thinking.  You're right, cash in the Constitution to protect yourself politically.  What the hell, everyone's doing it, why shouldn't you.


But if Obama did actually want to lead, he could try something like this:


"My fellow Americans, there's no such thing as complete safety in this world.  And that's always been okay for Americans.  We're risk takers and we love liberty -- a combination perfectly summed up in Patrick Henry's 'Give me liberty or give me death.'  There was a man who knew there were things in life more precious than safety.


"Actually, there is such a thing as perfect safety in the world.  I've heard they have it in North Korea.  Of course, the population there isn't safe from the government, but they are safe from pretty much everything else except malnutrition, and that might not be so bad.  At least they're not being attacked by Terrorists.


"But is that what we want for ourselves, to cash in the freedom we cherish to make ourselves as safe as North Korea?  Generations of Americans have fought and died to protect the freedoms enshrined in our Constitution.  Are we really prepared to barter away the freedom they bequeathed us with their blood?


"No, we won't break faith with those previous generations of brave Americans.  We won't allow the government to spy on us without warrants, or to govern under secret laws, or to imprison people without trial, or to torture.  And if any of that puts us at some additional risk, that's fine.  We're Americans.  We embrace risk and we love freedom, and we'll be damned if we'll allow a bunch of medieval cave-dwellers to call our tune."


Obama could actually say all this, you know.  But it wouldn't be convincing.  After all, it would be awkward for the president to try to inspire us to steadfastness against terrorists while he's simultaneously caving in to fear-mongering from Liz Cheney.

1:48 PM 
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Monday, May 25, 2009 

As op-eds go, this one in the NYT praising President Obama for reversing himself and deciding to block the publication of additional torture photos is particularly vapid and incoherent.


You have to read the whole thing to appreciate just how nonsensical and self-contradictory it really is, but here's the author's argument, boiled down:


1.  The release of the Abu Ghraib photos in 2004 was good because the photos showed the Bush administration was lying when it said it didn't order torture.


2.  But the Bush administration was able to wriggle free by portraying the soldiers who took the photos as rogues and prosecuting them.


Therefore:


3.  Obama was right not to release additional AG-style photos taken at other prisons because new photos would enflame anti-American feeling while not telling us anything we don't already know.


Huh?


By proving the AG techniques were employed at other US prisons throughout the world, the new photos would tell us *exactly* what we need to know, exactly what the Bush administration managed to obscure by painting the AG guards as a few bad apples:  that these techniques didn't spring up at random in isolation, but rather were the result of centralized orders.  The author, Philip Gourevitch, himself decries the Bush administration's ability to obscure this central truth of Abu Ghraib -- that what happened there wasn't an aberration -- and yet he salutes Obama for covering up the very evidence that would prove the "bad apples" narrative was a lie.


As for enflaming things, how would the new photos be inflammatory if they don't show anything new?  Maybe there would be a little enflaming, but surely not nearly so much enflaming as with the AG photos in 2004?  Gourevitch himself argues that the AG photos enflamed in vain.  Now we have a chance to finish the job of demonstrating where the AG abuses really came from, at far lower cost of inflammation.  But Gourevitch shies from the opportunity.


Gourevitch goes on to argue that:


"Crime-scene photographs, for all their power to reveal, can also serve as a distraction, even a deterrent, from precise understanding of the events they depict.  Photographs cannot show us a chain of command, or Washington decision making.  Photographs cannot tell stories.  They can only provide evidence of stories, and evidence is mute; it demands investigation and interpretation."


If photos are so distracting and deterring, why was it good to release the AG photos?  And really, "photographs cannot tell stories?"  Is he serious?  How does someone come to write something so self-evidently silly?


Regardless, why does Gourevitch set up his argument as though words and images are an either/or proposition, when obviously ideally we would have both?  This is all especially confusing because we already do have words, born of "investigation and interpretation," proving that AG was not an aberration.  Here, let me quote a few of them, from the bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody:


"The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of “a few bad apples” acting on their own.  The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.  Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.  This report is a product of the Committee’s inquiry into how those unfortunate results came about."


So we already have the words, and they've accomplished little about fixing appropriate responsibility for torture, as Gourveitch himself laments.  It's the photos we need, but Gourevitch claims that (this time, as opposed to last time) the photos would be distracting, deterring, mute, unable to tell a story.  Bizarre.


Gourevitch says "Mr. Obama is not suppressing information when he opposes the release of more photographs."  It's difficult to imagine that he would say the same thing were Mr. Obama Mr. Bush.

3:59 AM 
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