Hitchens Hits the CIA & Torture on the Head

Chris Hitchens, erstwhile leftist apostate, has been increasingly writing sensible articles as of late, perhaps having milked his "all-pro-war-in-Iraq, all the time" angle or finally seen the insane folly of supporting anyone like GW Bush to do anything consistent with reason or other higher calls not directly beamed into his head by the voice of "God" (who may or may not actually be just a team of mischevious kid geniuses transmitting directly into Bush's head -- "This is Jesus, W... and you've been a very naughty boy."). Though he is now a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institute, that doesn't negate the fact that he says in this article what a lot of commentators have avoided, or at least, synthesizes the elements of the US torture regime that have been left at loose ends by the US media at large and creates a potent indictment of the CIA.

Surely the most flabbergasting single disclosure in the recently released interrogation memos is the revelation that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, captured on March 1, 2003, was put to the water-board 183 times that month, or about six times a day. This can really only mean two things: that the method is very crude and inexact and/or that his interrogators were in a state of panic and under insane pressure to produce results. ...The memorandum rather silkily argues that "before the CIA used enhanced techniques," KSM was resisting "giving any answers to questions about future attacks," but if he was apprehended on March 1, 2003, and then "dunked" 183 times in the next 31 days, it suggests in the dry words of Scott Shane in the New York Times that "interrogators did not try a traditional, rapport-building approach for long."

Here is a seldom-mentioned reason why the CIA might go crazy in this way, to the point where even the FBI and other agencies were cripplingly (for us) reluctant to cooperate with it. On 9/11, according to Bob Woodward, George Tenet audibly hoped that the suicide-murderers of al-Qaida were not connected to the shady-looking pupils at those flight schools in the Midwest. The schools, that is to say, about which only the CIA knew! In other words, and not for the first time, the CIA (which disbelieved the evidence of Saddam's plan to attack Kuwait in 1990 and continually excused him as a "secularist") had left us defenseless and ignorant. Unprofessional and hysterical methods of interrogation, therefore, were unleashed in part to overcompensate for—and to cover up—a general lack of professionalism at every level of the agency from the top down. The case for closing and padlocking Langley and starting all over again with an attempt at a serious national intelligence body becomes more persuasive by the day.

A couple of degrees over on the "intelligence" spectrum, CIA Director Gen. Michael V. Hayden has deplored the release of the memorandums on the grounds that they inform our enemies of how far we are prepared to go. In what conceivable world has the general been living? The techniques of water-boarding were borrowed by us from our previous enemies in Japan and China and Korea and "taught" under the pretext of training people to withstand them...

Potent words, and a potent point: the CIA threw itself (one can barely resist adding the adverb "gleefully") into torture to distract attention from the fact that the failures leading the 9/11 were not due to a lack of authority, aggressiveness, or other "inorganic" barriers, but rather due to questionable competence on the part of the CIA and FBI themselves. What's more, the techniques used were borrowed from countries we ourselves have and had accused of torture for some of the same very practices, and while some in Congress and elsewhere have argued that it can't be torture because we subjected our own troops to it, that doesn't make very much sense assuming THE TRAINING WAS IN HOW TO RESIST TORTURE. That is, you can't claim it's not torture because we did it to ourselves if the reason we did it to ourselves was to expose our soldiers to torture-type techniques such that they could learn to resist it. To think otherwise just makes NO sense.

Anyway, it's work time for bonzo, way past actually, so ttfn...

SCOTUS likely to say, apparently, that a school fucking STRIP SEARCHING a 13 year old girl based on hearsay is A-OK

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH. ps. AHH.

Read this article on Slate by Dahlia Lithwick, in what I can only hope is her most far wrong call of all time. (Well, ok, this is less horrible than, say, Supreme Court (SCOTUS) allowing torture and indefinite detention and the suspension of habeas rights, but it is also less understandable from even a utilitarian perspective.)

Choice excerpts from Dahlia's well-written piece:

When constitutional historians sit down someday to compile the definitive Supreme Court Concordance of Not Getting It, the entry directly next to Lilly Ledbetter ("Court fails utterly to understand realities of gender pay discrimination") will be Savana Redding ("Court compares strip searches of 13-year-old girls to American Pie-style locker-room hijinks"). After today's argument, it's plain the court will overturn a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals opinion finding a school's decision to strip-search a 13-year-old girl unconstitutional. That the school in question was looking for a prescription pill with the mind-altering force of a pair of Advil—and couldn't be bothered to call the child's mother first—hardly matters.
Editorialists and pundits have found much to hate in what happened to Savana Redding... you might see the humiliation in pulling a middle-school honor student with no history of disciplinary problems out of class, based on an uncorroborated tip that she was handing out prescription ibuprofen. You might think it traumatic that she was forced to strip down to her underclothes and pull her bra and underwear out and shake them in front of two female school employees. No drugs were found. [SCOTUS Justices] had access to an amicus brief in this case documenting the fact that student strip searches "can result in serious emotional damage" and that student victims of strip searches "often cannot concentrate in school, and, in many cases, transfer or even drop out." Savana Redding, herself a data point, described the search as "the most humiliating experience" of her life. Then she dropped out of school. And five years later, at age 19, she gets to listen in on oral argument in Porky's 3: The Supreme Court Says "Panties."

Apart from the hyperbole at the end, Lithwick's analysis seems pretty solid, and the rest of her article backs up first impressions. I haven't read more on the case myself, so I reserve my own final judgment, but it certainly appears to be another "WTF?" moment, along with such highlights as Lilly Ledbetter, The Torture Years, and the "An American Woman's Uterus is Effectively US Soil" ruling (where most of the men of the court, "respecting the differences between men and women" -- and ignoring the women on the court at the time -- upheld as Constitutional a law making it easier for the child of an American mother and foreign father than an American father and foreign mother to be granted US citizenship, which I have fondly called the "Uterus as a US Embassy Theory of Citizenship").

Fuckety FUCK FUCKING FUCK, court!!!! I, I... all I can do right now is splutter. And get back to work -- got packing for a trip that I've been incredibly procrastinating on to do yet.

Welcome to your aspiring fascist state

I hadn't realized that Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman, Nicole Salazar, and Sharif Abdel Kouddous, along with many other journalists, were arrested at the Republican National Convention, despite being credentialed reporters (reporting a nominally "unlawful assembly" -- aka the RNC protests).

This is similar to what happened four years ago at the conventions, with many being baselessly arrested only to have their arrests overturned, and in some cases paying damages to arrested protesters and journalists for the overzealous and repressive police actions.

This also happened at the Miami anti-WTO protest that took place years ago -- 2002 I think -- that faced a near-media blackout, despite a number of people being beaten and arrested by the police, and a number of protesters outside the meetings, and actually there might still be extant lawsuits from the case, as several protesters were quite severely beaten.

Alas.

In other (old) news: J-Reason #76 Why Proportional Election of Legislators is a Good Idea: Listening to the December 20, 2007 podcast of Democracy Now!, John Conyers argues Ray McGovern on why impeachment is impractical. I agree with Conyers that it is (politically) utterly impractical -- but I also agree with McGovern that the Constitution is declarative in the pertinent section. That is, the Constitution states: "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." That is, it's a command, not a request. It's at least a reasonable common-sense interpretation to say that impeachment is not meant to be done when convenient, but rather that it is a responsibility the same as any other for Congress. This indicates why multiple parties might be better in that the electoral politics changes: one party's loss is not immediately the gain of one other opponent, and thus the coalitions formed between left/center left/moderates/whatever are usually more fluid. That is, while it makes no political sense for the Dems to even whisper impeachment these days, with multiple parties, the risk would be spread and the possibility of a coalition to do it possibly greater (though also, perhaps, more complicated and not in any way a fait accompli).

One might wonder why I still give a shit -- they're almost out of office and it certainly would be bad politics to push for impeachment. But, I feel that leaving those who I think (and many others think) have committed grave crimes in office for expediency's sake is itself a crime against the Constitution, and sets (or rather, continues) a very, very bad precedent for all other presidents.

Basically, it's going to be (for I have no doubt impeachment will not be broached, and, as I said, I sympathize and can agree with this to a large extent) the Constitutional equivalent of screaming "Put it anywhere you want". this past decade will scream to future Americans, especially future presidents, that there are no holds barred in fucking the Constitution, because if you can do what these guys did and get away with it after a senseless show-impeachment like Clinton had (for perjury committed by lying about his sex life in the process of an investigation of something that didn't even turn out to be criminal), there's not much left to do but turn the Constitution into Monica's dress in a direct and literal way.

Big Brother is Watching, Listening, and Reading... for Bootlegged Britney

In a potentially light-weight return to blogging, I would like to call your attention to this Slate article about AT&T's apparent desire to start monitoring all their electronic traffic from their customers for illegal content.

In what may end up being nothing or may end up being, as author Prof. Wu calls it, the beginning of a privately-run police state (though likely without a young Red Forman heading Detroit crime syndicates under the table for OCP). He rightly points out:

No one knows exactly what AT&T is proposing to build. But if the company means what it says, we're looking at the beginnings of a private police state. That may sound like hyperbole, but what else do you call a system designed to monitor millions of people's Internet consumption? That's not just Orwellian; that's Orwell.

This may be nothing, as I think Wu's right that it would be corporate disaster for AT&T: "AT&T's new strategy reverses that position and exposes it to so much potential liability that adopting it would arguably violate AT&T's fiduciary duty to its shareholders." But as the sole poster as of 10 minutes ago points out, AT&T was known as The Death Star among telecom peeps in-the-know in the old days. "Mandycat" goes on to point out: "They persistently and diligently bought up well-run and profitable companies like NCR and proceeded to destroy them. They even took the extra precaution of changing NCR's century-old name to something idiotic like "GIS" just in case there was any residual goodwill left intact. It was like a sickness."

Hmm... a plausible explanation has popped up here, claiming that perhaps this is just a pretext for remaking the internet hierarchically so that they can indeed get around network neutrality and discriminate service quality between high-payers and average joes and joanns (guess who gets higher quality). Seaturnip says: "I don't think AT&T at all wants to analyze HTTP connections for pictures, as you suggest. That would indeed be horrendously inefficient. They are probably mainly interested in stopping bandwidth-guzzling movie piracy via peer-to-peer protocols such as BitTorrent."

What say you, oh people of the internet? Is the idea that AT&T will go through with what it announced last week, that "it is seriously considering plans to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of U.S. intellectual property laws" indeed, as Wu says, "[A] prospect ...too totalitarian for my tastes"? One would think, but of course, I would've said not too long ago that a different prospect would be too totalitarian for most Americans' taste: "AT&T [is] already accused of spying on our telephone calls."

J. Edgar Hoover, eat your heart out.

(ps: what the hell is "eat your heart out" supposed to actually MEAN, anyway?)