Speechless

Greenwald:

On the night of June 10, 2006, three Guantanamo detainees were found dead in their individual cells. Without any autopsy or investigation, U.S. military officials proclaimed "suicide by hanging" as the cause of each death, and immediately sought to exploit the episode as proof of the evil of the detainees. Admiral Harry Harris, the camp's commander, said it showed "they have no regard for life" and that the suicides were "not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare aimed at us here at Guantanamo"; another official anonymously said that the suicides showed the victims were "committed jihadists [who] will do anything they can to advance their cause," while another sneered that "it was a good PR move to draw attention."

The military ordered all press off the island, prevented all lawyers from seeing their clients, prevented any outside investigation, and declared its own investigation, to be publicly released. Two years later, it was indeed released (in heavily redacted form), and failed to satisfactorily answer any of the relevant questions. How did three heavily supervised and separated detainees commit coordinated suicide? Why did none of the guards notice something was happening, and why were none of the guards on duty that night disciplined? Why and how did the detainees stuff rags down their own throats? Why was one of them missing his internal organs at autopsy? (I wish I were making this up.)

Seton Hall University's Law school has released a report [PDF] on the events which is not making my stomach sit any easier about this.

According to the report (and thanks to TalkLeft for highlighting this):

Accepting the military investigation findings as true and complete, in order to commit suicide by hanging, the detainees must have:

* Braided a noose by tearing up their sheets and/or clothing
* Made mannequins of themselves so it would appear to the guards that they were asleep in their cells
* Hung sheets to block the view into the cells, a violation of SOPs
* Tied their feet together
* Tied their hands together
* Shoved rags in their mouths and down their throats
* Hung the noose from the metal mesh of the cell wall and/or ceiling
* Climbed up on to the sink, put the noose around their necks and released their weight, resulting in death by strangulation
* Hung dead for at least two hours completely unnoticed by guards

SOPs [Standard Operating Procedures] required guards to note movement or to see the detainee‘s skin while walking the block. This raises many questions as to how three detainees on the same cell block, on the same side of the block, were able to complete the aforementioned acts without any Alpha guards noticing.

And just so we're clear how truly bizarre this whole situation is, here's Scott Horton interviewing Seton Hall professor Mark Denbeaux, who supervised the report:

Q: One of the prisoners, Yassar Talal Al Zahrani, had been seized as a minor and survived the prison riot that occurred at the Qali Jangi Prison near Mazar-i-Sharif. When his body was turned over for burial, an independent medical examination was arranged which found that the heart, kidneys and throat had all been removed from his corpse. The medical examiner noted that the removal of the throat in particular was highly irregular, and made an independent assessment impossible. Do you have any sense why U.S. military pathologists removed his internal organs and throat? Is this discussed in the report?

A: No.

The most innocent explanation I can come up with that comports with all the facts is that this is Gitmo meets The Lord of the Flies and the Stanford Prison Experiment: no one really cares about the rules. Even in that reading, the NCIS investigation is a cover-up of a gross dereliction of duty for which nobody was disciplined, leading to the deaths of three men. The fact that NCIS did not address these issues is inexplicable and very troubling.

That's the bizarre part, the twisted part. But here comes the shameful, really scary part:

There is one way that a meaningful investigation could be conducted into what happened to these three detainees: a lawsuit filed in federal court by the parents of two of the detainees against various Bush officials for the torture and deaths of their sons -- who had never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any wrongdoing (indeed, one had been cleared for release). By itself, discovery in that lawsuit would shed critical light on what was done to these detainees and what caused their deaths.

The problem, however, is that the Obama DOJ has been using every Bush tactic -- and inventing whole new ones -- to block the lawsuit from proceeding.

[...]

All of this is depressingly consistent with multiple other cases in which the Obama DOJ is attempting aggressively to shield even the most illegal and allegedly discontinued Bush programs from judicial review. Time and again, the most radical Bush claims of executive power, immunity and secrecy (ones Democrats and even Obama frequently condemned) are invoked to insist that federal courts have no right to adjudicate claims that the Government violated the Constitution and the law. As Harper's Scott Horton documented over the weekend, a new filing by the Obama DOJ in defense of John Yoo is "seeking to make absolute the immunity granted Justice Department lawyers who counsel torture, disappearings, and other crimes against humanity."

I don't have anything brilliant to say about this. It's very, very bad, I wish it weren't this way, I consider it a betrayal by Obama of the base, the country, and his own campaign, I really want to know where that poor man's internal organs went, and I would do a lot to live in a world where people were actually prosecuted for this sort of thing.

I'm just going to leave you with this.

As Harper's Scott Horton documented over the weekend, a new filing by the Obama DOJ in defense of John Yoo is "seeking to make absolute the immunity granted Justice Department lawyers who counsel torture, disappearings, and other crimes against humanity." In other words, as we lecture the world about the need for them to apply the rule of law and hold war criminals accountable, we simultaneously proclaim about ourselves:

We can kidnap your sons from anywhere in the world, far away from any "battlefield," ship them thousands of miles away to an island-prison, abuse and torture them mercilessly, and when we either drive them to suicide or kill them, you have no right to any legal remedy or even any recourse to find out what happened.

As Horton writes, the claim that government officials enjoy a virtually impenetrable shield of immunity even in the commission of war crimes "has emerged as a sort of ignoble mantra for the Justice Department, uniting both the Bush and Obama administrations." Indeed, that is the common strain of virtually every act undertaken by the Obama DOJ with regard to our government's war crimes and other felonies, from torture to renditions to illegal eavesdropping.

Torture.

I've been trying to come up with something intelligent to say about torture for a long time now. There are all kinds of things I could go into--the 1984 angle; the freakishly bureaucratic and clinical language delineating what was and was not allowed, like something straight out of a Foucault lecture; the sheer, tragic stupidity of how this seemed to start, with Zubaydah; the frightening bending of good science on sleep deprivation and learned helplessness; the even MORE tragic idiocy of the apparent massive ignorance of many of the higher-ups involved (not knowing these techniques were used in SERE training? Really?); and on, and on. And on.

But all of those bases are being covered, adequately and intelligently. On some level I'm too tired to do the kind of diligent reading that would allow me to come up with something of my own to say. I'm tired of knowing that this is even a question. I'm tired from living in a country where we all squawk about prosecution and looking forward, backward, and upside down and nothing happens. It's draining to live ina place whose rules are in the process of crumbling. So all I really have to say, when it comes down to it, has been admirably said by Shep Smith of Fox News in the video above.

I suppose were I delivering the same remarks I probably would focus less on "this is America" and more on the fact that torture is not okay anywhere for anyone, but I guess that's why Shep works for Fox News and I am a dirty liberal. Or something.

I will say this: the day the memos came out, although there was plenty in there that I knew already, I felt a little bit orphaned. I think it was seeing all of these acts ordered, described, and justified, on purpose, in advance, in writing that is horrific in its mechanical and professional language and its obdurate refusal to see the forest for the trees. That moved it from "things people I never liked anyway did" to being part of the structure and the body of the U.S. government, which I have had some love for. I think some of that love is gone, because under the government structure for which I felt affection, none of this would have been possible. Something is very, very broken, and I'm afraid I've been given little faith it will be fixed. That's what I see when I look forward, not backward: disintegration and decay.

Still digging through Oral History

This, to me, is the total money quote. My jaw dropped. Emphasis is all mine:

Michael Brown, director of fema [sic], which becomes part of the Department of Homeland Security: Bush’s strength was—he would say to everybody in the room, Tell me what the problem is and I’ll make a decision. The detrimental aspect of that is the president would make a decision and in his mind it was over with. There was no changing course. The blinders are on. You had to work incredibly hard to get back in front of that line of sight to say, We need to take a different tack here.

I’m asked at one point for my input, and I basically say we should not have a Department of Homeland Security, because it’s going to be disruptive to create it in the midst of all of these things going on. [Later,] I remember being in the car alone with Bush, where I’m talking to him about the department and how it’s not working and how we really need to make some changes. And while I thought he may have been listening, I quickly came to the conclusion that he wasn’t, because his answer to it was: Well, we’re bringing in a new leader, a new secretary or deputy secretary, and he’ll be able to fix all these things.

He had made the decision, and we’re going forward. And if things aren’t working, we don’t need to revisit the original decision. We’ll just put somebody else in there.

David Kuo: Every time you had a conversation with him, he would make it clear the subject was important. Bush would say, I care about this. Let’s get this done. But it was like a ship whose wheel is not attached to the rudder.

I'm speechless. I'm absolutely just--I mean--this is the opposite of leadership, all right?

A snippet

From that Vanity Fair Oral History:

Ari Fleischer, Bush’s first White House press secretary: What happened was the president made the point to the staff that, if America ever goes to war, we go to war because it’s the right thing to do regardless of the cost. That is a moral issue, and so we should not be talking to anybody about how much it may or may not cost; the whole issue is, do you or don’t you go? And if you go, you pay whatever the cost is to win. The day the president dismissed Larry and Secretary O’Neill, I remember he said to me that he noticed that morning that everybody in the Situation Room was sitting up a bit straighter.

This makes a lot of sense in what we've seen of Bush's worldview. In some ways it has its merits as an approach--but, to me, it would have to be one approach among several applied to the decision.

In any case, somewhere Larison is sardonically explaining why this is unremarkable as a phenomenon, noteworthy only because it took the usual ideologies of foreign policy a little further.

Essential reading (no, really)

I know I've been linking and doing not much else, but these two pieces are true tours de force. (I've been swamped with work and trying to get back into the rhythm of school after ICCAs, okay, I have obligations and whatnot.)

The first is "An Oral History of the Bush White House" from Vanity Fair. I'm only on page 2 myself, but it's already been amazing hearing people from Richard Clarke to Germany's foreign minister give their uncensored, undiplomatic takes in colloquial language on various moments of the administration. The piece has also illuminated a number of moments or occurrences that I never knew had taken place.

I found the piece through Ta-Nehisi, who gave it a stirring endorsement:

...folks should read the piece just because it really is stunning to see it all laid out before you. Rarely does one see cravenness, arrogance and incompetence married in such expert fashion. I was 25 when Bush came to office, and I never thought it would get this bad. But Purdum and Murphy show how things almost necessarily--from day one--had to go this way.

I read this piece on the plane ride out West, yesterday. I got halfway through and couldn't take it, I had to take a break. Finished it just we were coming over Utah, and I was just stunned. Journalism takes a lot of heat on this blog, perhaps some of it undeserved. So it's only right that I call out something when it's well done. Read this piece. Read it. Read it. Read it.

Second, Radley Balko explains with inimitable and wide-ranging logic why the War on Drugs is both a failure and a costly, harmful, and and misguided effort to begin with in "War on Drugs: The Collateral Damage" over at Culture 11. I particularly found his points about the militarizaton of police to be fascinating, though I suppose that's not surprising given all the studying of political power and state formation/state institutions I do. The piece is a comprehensive indictment of the drug war and its attendant policies and it's very much worth reading for the higher-level perspective that is generally so lacking in discussions of drug policy.

A note on Culture 11--it's a website (webzine?) dealing with culture as well as politics, geared to the American cultural conservative. It's been cited by many conservatives who have been revolted by the contemporary Republican party. I moseyed over there once before and was unimpressed, but this article has caused me to revise my estimation--clearly the piece I read that time was not fully representative of Culture 11's offerings. I'll be interested to see what comes out of the site as part of my continuing effort to understand what the hell this "conservatism" business is actually all about.

Hilzoy takes a truly damning look at GTMO's case files and some other details of a particular detainee's case. It's an honestly incredible combination of evil practices and incompetence.

I think I had a tendency to imagine the torture regime as either coldly, calculatingly, inexorably evil, or deeply misguided but mostly well-intentioned. This was because it's hard for me to understand how anybody would get into government who didn't have either a nefarious plan or a desire, however misdirected, to do good--what's the motivation? The degree to which the Bush administration appears to have been just floundering around in everything it did is truly breathtaking. I can't get my head around what any of these people set out to do when they entered public service, except perhaps for Donald Rumsfeld, who at least articulated a vision of streamlining the Pentagon.

I suppose in Bush's own case some of it had to do with personal failures and some daddy issues, but in order to empathize with that I would have to suspend my respect both for government and for myself. Being who he was, Bush could never have been anything but an embarrassment of a President, and attempting the Presidency was the kind of personal overreach that could only end in tears (cf. Sarah Palin, Rod Blagojevich). Deciding to attempt it demonstrated a profound lack of self-awareness and of self-respect. On top of that, going into government for such selfish reasons (if that is indeed the case--I could be entirely wrong about this whole line of thought) requires such a disregard for the meaning and significance of politics and governance that I am offended at the thought.

Which would be worse--Bush having decided to attempt the Presidency out of a need for affirmation and a disregard/sense of entitlement for the office, or having attempted it in good faith and truly being just that ineffectual and lacking in vision?

Heavens to Murgatroyd, I've found it

..."it" being perhaps the only case in which it is possible and appropriate to describe the Bush administration as "fascist" without sounding like a fourteen-year-old who's trying to come off as knowledgeable and self-righteous when he or she is really just whining. I am not the only person to have thought of this, it turns out--this looks like very interesting reading--but I'm pleased that it occurred to me independently as a result of my fine education in the history of political liberalism.


I was reading The Economist's thoughts on the exit of President George W. Bush, and was struck by these bits:

Yet Mr Bush’s presidency was also poisoned by his own ambition. Mr Bruni’s “timeless fraternity boy” wanted to be a great president. He not only wanted to win the second term that Bill Clinton had denied to his father—though that mattered to him enormously. He also wanted to usher in a period of prolonged Republican hegemony, much as William McKinley had done for his party in the late 19th century. After the September 11th attacks he not only itched to destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He also wanted to tackle the root causes of terrorism in the Middle East. Mr Bush frequently spoke about how much he hated anything that was “small ball”. His close advisers repeatedly described him as a “transformative president”.

...Other facets of Mr Bush’s personality mixed with his vaulting ambition to undermine his presidency. Mr Bush is what the British call an inverted snob. A scion of one of America’s most powerful families, he is a devotee of sunbelt populism; a product of Yale and Harvard Business School, he is a scourge of eggheads. Mr Bush is a convert to an evangelical Christianity that emphasises emotion--particularly the intensely emotional experience of being born again—over ratiocination. He also styled himself, much like Reagan, as a decider rather than a details man; many people who met him were astonished by what they described as his “lack of inquisitiveness” and his general “passivity”.

...Ron Suskind, a journalist, has argued that Mr Bush created a “faith-based presidency” in which decisions, precisely because they were based on faith, could not be revised subsequently.

I think we can all recognize this characterization. We've seen it before. This in particular--"emphasises emotion...over ratiocination" and the notion of a "faith-based presidency"--combined with the Economist's view of GWB as desperate to prove himself in a big way, put me in mind of some of Carl Schmitt's thoughts from The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. I direct your attention to Chapter 4, "Irrationalist Theories of the Direct Use of Force". (Emphasis added.)

Bakunin gave this struggle...the character of a struggle against intellectualism and against traditional forms of education altogether. ...Even science does not have the right to rule. It is not life, it creates nothing, it constructs and receives, but it understands only the general and the abstract and sacrifices the individual fullness of life on the altar of its abstraction. Art is more important for the life of humankind than science.

and,

The ability to act and the capacity for heroism, all world-historical activities reside, according to Sorel, in the power of myth. ...Only in myth can the criterion be found for deciding whether one nation or a social group has a historical mission and has reached its historical moment. Out of the depths of a genuine life instinct, not out of reason or pragmatism, springs the great enthusiasm, the great moral decision and the great myth. In direct intuition the enthusiastic mass creates a mythical image that pushes its energy forward and gives it...the courage to use force.

[...]

From the perspective of this philosophy, the...ideal of peaceful agreement, an ongoing and prosperous business that has advantages for everyone, becomes the monstrosity of cowardly intellectualism. Discussing, bargaining, parliamentary proceedings, appear a betrayal of myth and the enormous enthusiasm on which everything depends. Against the mercantilist image of balance there appears another vision, the warlike image of a bloody, definitive, destructive, decisive battle.

I could go on--the book is full of things I think are applicable to the Bush Administration. I have several pages that I dogeared because I ran across them in looking for this part and I felt they were relevant in a way I hadn't yet thought of, but I'll spare the length and let it lie.

Anyway, it must be noted that I have excised all the analysis of Marxist thought because while it is important and interesting, I'm interested in Schmitt's conclusions about politics as a whole rather than in particularly how Marxism contributed to those conclusions, since we are not dealing with a Marxist president (although there are some respects in which one could argue that his administration thinks in terms of dialectics and heightening the contradictions).

I do think it's interesting, as in it somewhat upsets the ideal case, how the heroic myth became located in Bush himself and, to an extent, the Iraqi people (in Bush's thinking, that is) rather than in the people Bush ostensibly actually rules. It's as though the American polity were consuming popular will that's been manufactured overseas. Think about all the rhetoric about the "Iraqi people" and their freedom, or the freedom they need to have. The American occupation has been a sort of attempt at educational dictatorship--we will take them by the hand and teach them not only to vote but to vote for people who will do things we like, because then they will have learned to be free; we know better than they what they want and need--in a classical Marxist sense. Ironic, eh?

Schmitt, to be completely clear, was a big fan of dictatorship as a political ideal and is widely considered to have contributed intellectually to Nazism, whether intentionally or not. He is also a big hit among neocons--the very people who brought you George W. Bush and, more recently and more directly, Sarah Palin.

Theory of the unitary executive, anyone?

Awkward

Apparently Condi, Bush and the first Lady have been raking in the swag from foreign leaders. The biggest chunk by far is Condi's $300,000+ worth of jewelry from Arab leaders.

All of which, at least, has to be turned over to the General Services Administration and government archives.

Except now I'm wondering what they've got stashed away in some Cave of Wonders. Possibly the same undisclosed location Dick Cheney hides out in all the time.