Deep Blade Journal

Through its torture practices, the George W. Bush Administration in 2004 has redefined America in the eyes of the world

No doubt, 2004 has been a terrible year. How can I even presume to name the worst news event of the year? After all, the Tsunami of the Indian Ocean has devastated an incredible swath of the world.

And what about the US invasion and conquest of Iraq that has evolved into a costly colonial war? America has responded to anti-colonial resistance in Iraq by smashing cites. There is no end in sight. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died as have over 1000 Americans. But to me this is not by itself the worst story of the year. In my mind a story connected to the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan is the top story and the worst story — the development of the United States as a torture state the likes of which the world has never known.

Members of the Associated Press named their top 2004 stories last week (prior to the tsunami). The Abu Ghraib photographs made the list. But here is how they phrase the story: “U.S. military guards at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad forcing naked Iraqi detainees to pose in humiliating positions. Prosecutions ensued….”

Clearly, this represents the cleaning-up-the-bad-apples media posture the Pentagon has used to deflect deeper examination of what is going on here. And use of this posture is bringing the public along the road to dictatorship with hardly a whisper of dissent.

Steps towards dictatorship

The Center for Constitutional Rights describes in a recent release the facilities and practices now employed worldwide on the mere authority of the president alone:

the CIA has been secretly operating a holding and interrogation center within the larger American military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba…the CIA Center at Guantanamo is “related to a network of holding centers operated by the CIA at undisclosed locations around the world”…”The use of secret detentions centers not only violates international and U.S. law”, said CCR deputy legal director, Barbara Olshansky, “it undermines the critical pillars of our Democracy — justice and liberty — and tosses aside the Framers concerns about the dangers of an overreaching executive. How can we hold ourselves up as an example as the world’s preeminent democracy when we are violating the founding principles of our own?”

We must act in 2005 to stop these Bush practices, as the soul and spirit of America will soon become unredeemable.

Washington Post indicts Bush Administration for war crimes

From today’s lead editorial in the Washington Post:

…Since the publication of photographs of abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in the spring the administration’s whitewashers — led by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld — have contended that the crimes were carried out by a few low-ranking reservists, that they were limited to the night shift during a few chaotic months at Abu Ghraib in 2003, that they were unrelated to the interrogation of prisoners and that no torture occurred at the Guantanamo Bay prison where hundreds of terrorism suspects are held. The new documents establish beyond any doubt that every part of this cover story is false…

The Post editorial page has now used its considerable conservative microphone to emphasize what Deep Blade has been saying for months: a dozen or so low-level operatives are not the biggest problem — it is the Pentagon leadership, the White House, and the Republican Congress that are the real Rotten Apples where torture is concerned. US atrocities against prisoners are far more than “isolated aberrations” — indeed torture underpins US policy.

Documents released this week through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that the torturers had “their marching orders from the Sec Def”, according to one of the items released. This memo was discussed by salon.com writer Joe Conason Tuesday on Democracy Now!:

What it says is that the F.B.I. argued strongly against abusive techniques in Guantanamo, and argued with two ranking generals, General Dunlavey and General Geoffrey Miller who figured largely in the Abu Ghraib scandal because he went to Iraq after setting up the system at Guantanamo, and that the response of the military was, of these generals was, you can try your methods, but we have our marching orders from the SecDef, which is what the memo says and the SecDef is military jargon for the Secretary of Defense. In other words, this is an acknowledgement by the F.B.I. in the internal memo that the military was behaving towards these prisoners in a manner that had been ordered by Donald Rumsfeld’s office. That the allegations of abuse and in some cases torture had grown out of an attitude that ordinary conventions and international law did not have to be observed in the treatment of these prisoners.

And “treatment” these prisoners did receive, to wit:

* Mock executions

* Simulated drowning on “waterboards”

* Cuffing and pouring cold water on a subject in an act called the scorpion

* Beatings, chokings, prolonged sleep deprivation and humiliations such as being wrapped in an Israeli flag with loud music blaring

* Dragging feet over barbed wire

* Burning with flammable liquids and cigarettes, including inside the ear

After searching for the slightest bit of administration accountability and failing to find it, the Post to concludes with this lament:

The record of the past few months suggests that the administration will neither hold any senior official accountable nor change the policies that have produced this shameful record…For now the appalling truth is that there has been no remedy for the documented torture and killing of foreign prisoners by this American government.

The absence of significant public demand upon the courts and our elected representatives to put an end to this treatment and give those who are criminally culpable the severest punishment is shameful. I feel great revulsion towards this behavior and the failure of our system to do a damn thing about it. We better be careful. These are exactly the sorts of acts President George W. Bush has continually stated were the crimes of Saddam that justified American conquest of Iraq. Is it such a stretch to think new-formed enemies of America could use the same justification for reciprocal attacks?

Family relative in one of the affected units

Photo by Gregory Rec of the Portland Press Herald. The Maine Army National Guard’s 133rd Engineer Battalion is based here. We have a relative by marriage who is with this unit.

Two from Maine died and several were wounded in Tuesday’s bomb attack on the mess tent in Mosul, Iraq. We know that our relative was not killed. But we have no word yet on his condition. This is gut wrenching. We send our prayers to his family, and to all of the families who must suffer through this, especially during the Christmas season.

Reporters Patrick Cockburn and Jeremy Redmond describe the scene in a story posted on Counterpunch:

Soldiers scrambled back into the hall to check for more wounded. The explosion blew out a huge hole in the roof of the tent. Puddles of bright red blood, lunch trays and overturned tables and chairs covered the floor.

Bill Nemitz, columnist for the Portland Press Herald, Portland, Maine writes today about the attack:

With one cruel blow, the insurgents who prowl outside the perimeter of this godforsaken place hijacked a rare chance for true celebration and set it on a collision course with yet another round of tearful eulogies, another set of gut-wrenching final roll calls….

Nemitz closes his column by describing the prayers and sentiments we all now share:

Some [prayers] will be for those who left for midday chow Tuesday with no idea they were sitting down to a full-blown tragedy.

Some will be for peace, now more than ever, in this place where long ago civilization was born.

And some will be that this base, this hell on Earth, will soon loosen its grip on these proud but weary Mainers.

Sunday afternoon, two days before he went to lunch and emerged dazed, disoriented but otherwise uninjured, Chaplain David Sivret welcomed a visitor to his decked-out chapel, poured from his ever-present pot of hot coffee and said the words that will pull the 133rd through this tangle of tinsel and torture.

“It’s time,” Sivret said with a weary smile. “It’s time for all of us to come home.”

I concur completely with the Chaplain’s remarks.

Dictators declare their own law for themselves

Bush gave a pathetic press conference on Monday.

Yesterday, in a news release the ACLU describes to which rotten apple the trail of US torture planning leads:

A document released for the first time today by the American Civil Liberties Union suggests that President Bush issued an Executive Order authorizing the use of inhumane interrogation methods against detainees in Iraq. Also released by the ACLU today are a slew of other records including a December 2003 FBI e-mail that characterizes methods used by the Defense Department as “torture” and a June 2004 “Urgent Report” to the Director of the FBI that raises concerns that abuse of detainees is being covered up.

From his press conference:

PRESIDENT BUSH: I think it’s important to let the world know that we fully understand our obligations in a society that honors rule of law to do that. But I also have an obligation to protect the American people, to make sure we understand the nature of the people that we hold, whether or not there’s possible intelligence we can gather from them that we could then use to protect us. So we’ll continue to work the issue hard.

So, Mr. President, why the coverup? If “inhumane interrogation methods” protect America, why not just say so?

The truth is that the Bush Administration feels that it can make its own law, or be lawless, as it alone chooses. This, to Bush, constitutes “the rule of law”. The president is not accountable, his decisions not “reviewable”. These are characteristics of dictatorship.

And the premise that this torture will “protect the American people” is false. It invites retaliation by new-formed enemies.

Bush established torture regime under theory of absolute power

Boot kicking detainees in distress positions happens under the color of high-level authority.

A report by Michael Isikoff, Daniel Klaidman and Michael Hirsh of Newsweek in the Dec. 27 / Jan. 3 issue underscores the very clear reasons why torture of detainees under US care is not just the work of a few bad-apple, low-level grunts. They write about meetings held in the office of now Attorney-General nominee Alberto Gonzales during July 2002:

And partly out of the discussions in Gonzales’s office came the most notorious legal document to emerge from last spring’s Abu Ghraib interrogation scandal. This was an Aug. 1, 2002, memo — drafted by [Justice Department lawyer John] Yoo, signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and addressed to Gonzales — which provoked outrage among human-rights advocates by narrowly defining torture. The memo concluded, among other things, that only severe pain or permanent damage that was “specifically intended” constituted torture. Mere “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment did not qualify.

So the usual definition of torture was set aside by those at the top, and if a technique was not intended to be torture under these self-defined criteria, it simply no longer would be called such.

Furthermore, Bush was the direct recipient of ethically-questionable legal gymnastics intended to neutralize US law and the Geneva Conventions:

…memos reviewed by Newsweek and interviews with key principals show that Gonzales’s advice to the president reflected the bold views laid out in the Aug. 1 memo and other documents. Sources close to the Senate Judiciary Committee say a chief focus of the hearings will be Gonzales’s role in the so-called “torture memo,” as well as his legal judgment in urging Bush to sidestep the Geneva Conventions. In a Jan. 25, 2002, memo to Bush, Gonzales said the new war on terror “renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.” Some State Department lawyers charge that Gonzales misrepresented so many legal considerations and facts (including hard conclusions by State’s Southeast Asia bureau about the nature of the Taliban) that one lawyer considers the memo to be “an ethical breach.” In response, a senior White House official says Gonzales’s memo was only a “draft” and just one part of an extensive decision-making process in which all views were aired.

In an accompanying article, Isikoff describes the royal theory of absolute presidential power in matters of torture, and indeed the entire legal backing for invading Iraq that Bush and his shady lawyers declared for themselves:

Just two weeks after the September 11 attacks, a secret memo to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales’ office concluded that President Bush had the power to deploy military force “preemptively” against any terrorist groups or countries that supported them — regardless of whether they had any connection to the attacks on the World Trade Towers or the Pentagon.

The memo, written by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, argues that there are effectively “no limits” on the president’s authority to wage war — a sweeping assertion of executive power that some constitutional scholars say goes considerably beyond any that had previously been articulated by the department….

What is particularly striking is that it goes beyond the joint congressional resolution passed on Sept. 14, 2001, authorizing the president to respond to the terror attacks. Although the White House had initially sought authority for the president to “preempt any future acts of terrorism” without any limitation on those responsible for the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Congress deleted the pre-emption request and narrowed the scope of the president’s authority to attack only those connected with September 11. “The authority granted is focused on those responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11,” Sen. Joe Biden stated on the Senate floor in explaining what Congress intended to authorize.

But Yoo’s memo, written 11 days later, essentially argued that what Congress authorized didn’t matter. “It should be noted here that the Joint Resolution is somewhat narrower than the President’s constitutional authority,” Yoo wrote in the memo, adding that the resolution “does not reach other terrorist individuals, groups or states which cannot be determined to have links to the September 11 attacks.”

“Nonetheless,” he added, “the President’s broad constitutional power to use military force to defend the nation, recognized by the Joint Resolution itself, would allow the President to whatever actions he deems appropriate to pre-empt or respond to terrorist threats from new quarters.” The memo was written at a time when, unknown to the public, officials in the Pentagon — including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz — were privately pushing the president to consider attacking Iraq. Indeed, according to the September 11 commission, a memo apparently written by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith just five days before Yoo’s memo suggested “hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, perhaps deliberately selecting a non-al Qaeda target like Iraq.”

Aggression is the supreme crime under international law. The record under the Bush regime is an open declaration that these precepts no longer apply to the US post-911. If this declaration sticks, the post-WWII international order is dead and a new era of international Aggression is upon us.

For anyone who is interested, I have posted a pdf file containing a letter on Social Security that I have just faxed to my representative and senators in the US Congress. If you have Acrobat Reader installed, you can download the letter here.

I have not forgotten that two weeks ago I promised four entries on the over-hyped “scandal” at the UN and the real corruption behind the destruction of Iraq. I have two more parts largely written and they should be up by Christmas. The last should be up by New Years.

Meanwhile, there have been some interesting developments… The week before last on Monday December 6, Five Republican members of the House of Representatives backed Norm Coleman’s call for UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to resign.

Just as momentum seemed to be building for Annan’s head, the US Ambassador to the UN John Danforth threw cold water on the fire while outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell made his last swing by the UN to check on preparations for the Iraqi election. According to the Chronicle story cited, “Danforth said the White House is not pressing for Annan’s departure now”.

Functioning with UN imprimatur of the barely, if at all tenable occupier-designed election is more important than an immediate sating of Republican dogs looking to snack on Annan. This may be a sick joke, but it seems to be how the Republicans are choosing to run this show. See this post in Empire Notes for more…

Atrios asks, “Why Does the Media Hate Social Security?“

This won’t mean much after President Bush is done with it.

President Bush plans to spend his political capital in order to fulfill a long-time Republican dream of crushing the Social Security program. This sport is as old as Alf Landon’s 1936 attempt to unseat President Roosevelt. Landon’s big-newspaper supporters threw up all sorts of scare tacticts against Social Security in that thankfully losing effort.

I agree with many commenters to the Eschaton post cited above that corporate media owners and other rich folks hate the program because, as one comment writer says, “They don’t need SS and could not care less about it’s fate.”

I’d go farther and say that many rich Republicans view the program with jealousy. It’s money the government reserves for the whole spectrum of little people that they can’t appropriate for themselves or shut off by fiat. They have to pay the payroll tax, but they can’t discipline workers by threatening to cut their Social Security. At least not until now – Bush may have enough political and media juice lined up to force large benefit cuts for future retirees in order to dump a large number of dollars from payroll taxes into the coffers of Wall Street investment casinos.

The media mythology that has become part and parcel of reporting on Social Security (see FAIR’s recent go-round with CBS news for phoniness on the issue) has developed over nearly a decade of hysterical crisis mongering by the libertarian reactionaries at the Cato Institute. Their innocuously named website, http://www.socialsecurity.org/ is the media clearinghouse for framing the terms of the debate. Here is a sample of the Cato hustle:

Social Security is going bankrupt. The federal government’s largest spending program, accounting for nearly 22 percent of all federal spending, faces irresistible demographic and fiscal pressures that threaten the future retirement security of today’s young workers. According to the 2003 report of the Social Security system’s Board of Trustees, in 2018, just 14 years from now, the Social Security system will begin to run a deficit. That is, it will begin to spend more on benefits than it brings in through taxes. Anyone who has ever run a business–or balanced a checkbook–understands that when you are spending more than you bring in, something has to give–you need to start either earning more money or spending less to keep things balanced. For Social Security, that means either higher taxes or lower benefits.

You bet, lower benefits. That stings me hard because the minimal existing benefits are absolutely essential to my own low-dollar retirement plan. Media outlets are likely to swallow and regurgitate this official-sounding crap hook, line and sinker.

Bush last week at the economic dog show (no critical voices present) reiterated the mythology:

One of the things that we heard today from experts is that the Social Security system is safe today, but is in serious danger as we head down the road of the 21st century. And this problem has got to be confronted now. And we heard from people that know what they’re talking about on this stage this morning, saying that it is a far easier problem to manage today than it will be if we continue postponing solutions.

In 1950, there were 16 workers paying for every beneficiary. Today, there are about three, and when the younger workers retire, there will be only two workers per beneficiary. That should be a warning signal for those of us who are charged with having to confront problems and not pass them on to future Congresses or future generations. The system becomes untenable within a relatively quick period of time. The Social Security system is in the black today, but in the long-term, has $10.4 trillion in unfunded liability — that’s trillion with a “T.” That means that a 20-year-old worker today is being promised retirement benefits that are 30 percent higher than the system can pay. By the year 2018, Social Security will pay out more in benefits than the government collects in payroll taxes. And once that line into red has been crossed, the shortfalls will grow larger with each passing year. We have a problem.

First, the whole thing about number of working people per retiree that you hear again and again and again is a huge red herring. The supposedly dramatic downward shift in the ratio over seven decades does not mean anything until you look at the so-called trust fund ratio. Then, the shift is not nearly so dramatic because over the years worker productivity has increased, as has the payroll tax rate. Four decades from now the program will have to seek additional funding sources to replace a slowly declining ratio. And as the SSA trustees admit, there is great uncertainty in these projections. While it’s worth paying attention and making wise fiscal choices that Bush is not now making vis-a-vis the idiotic tax cuts, this is hardly a crisis today.

The Bush “solution” of private accounts for worker-beneficiaries in stock market investments has a dually contractictory premise. First, there is no way that private accounts would solve Social Security’s woes if the economy were bad. But if economic times were good enough to produce historical-average returns for stocks, then there would be no Social Security funding crisis!

Here are some additional references worth reading for facts on the phony crisis…

First, a nice little site with lots of links to reports from the reality-based world: The Bruce Web: Social Security is not Broke

See also The Trillion Dollar Hustle: Hello Wall Street, Goodbye Social Security. By Thomas Frank. From Harpers, June 2002. Excerpt:

You’ve heard this many times before, of course: from the Beardstown Ladies to the Raging Bull website, this was the ideological fantasy of the last decade. This time, though, it is being replayed not to sell us on some mutual fund or hot tech issue but to convince us to bet it all—to liquidate what remains of the welfare state, head down to the great casino, and put our trust in Greenspan. Social Security privatization is to be the trillion-dollar hustle, Wall Street’s final joke on those who just can’t shake the free-market superstition.

Finally, lots and lots and lots of documents are linked here: Social Security Website Links from EBRI

Mystery woman used as excuse for Homeland Security nomination withdrawal may not exist.

“The White House has been unwilling to discuss any specifics of the nanny herself…”

It’s easy to see why the White House needed this diversionary excuse, real or not, for Kerick’s departure. Deep questions concerning the former nominee’s personal, professional, and business practices have flooded New York newspapers in the week since the withdrawal.

Two blogs are really keeping track of the juice on Kerick, Talking Points Memo and Steve Gilliard.

Gilliard has many postings including this one that contains a laundry list of his dealings:

Kerick…

*had mystery dealings with companies for contracts which didn’t make sense

*slept with a subordinate, then punished supervisors who admonished her

*had work done by Paulie Walnuts and his crew on an apartment he couldn’t afford

*rented an apartment in the shadows of Ground Zero as a love shack

*borrowed $18k from friends which he never reported

*was wanted for arrest over a condo deal

*associated with people linked to organized crime

*left Iraq after 3 months and failing to train the police

*allegedly threatened a second mistress and stalked her.

…All while running New York’s City jails and police department.

I’d like to expand for a moment on Kerick’s Iraq tenure and this interesting post by Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo. Marshall points out that Kerick was in the thick of the wild early days of the US regime in Iraq then known as the Coalition Provisional Authority. In May 2003, Bush sent him to Baghdad to run the Interior Ministry. Before he left there just three months later, well short of the effort to which he had originally committed, he had he spent 1.2 billion taxpayer dollars to train Iraqi police. Into a country awash in small arms, he imported revolvers and Kalashnikov rifles for the Iraqi police from vendors in Jordan at exorbitant cost to the US taxpayer.

Marshall writes,

It’s been known for a longtime that the Iraqi Interior Ministry under the CPA was rife with corruption. Lots and lots of US tax dollars went missing.

In November 2003, Deep Blade Journal issued its extensive Reference Article on U.S.-Iraq Business Relationships which included the comment, “…there seems to be deep distrust of the financial management of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Numerous articles and reports have appeared in the last few weeks that raise a plethora of serious questions about the conduct of the occupation….”

In one of those articles, Spending On Iraq Sets Off Gold Rush: Lawmakers Fear U.S. Is Losing Control of Funds, Jonathan Weisman and Anitha Reddy of the Washington Post reported on Thursday, October 9, 2003 that

Among the dozens of projects in the proposal is a State Department plan to spend $800 million to build a large training facility for a new Iraqi police force. Management fees alone would run $26 million a month, while 1,500 police trainers would cost $240,000 each per year, or $20,000 each per month. DynCorp of Reston is likely to get the contract.

“All I can say is it’s mind-boggling,” James Lyons, a former military subcontractor in Bosnia, said of the opportunities for private contractors. “People must be drooling.”

Kerick apparently was well suited, for a while anyway, to help initiate the taxpayer sink hole that the colonial project in Iraq represents. A full investigation of Kerick and the disaster he helped spawn clearly is called for.

The black-belt nominee had a “nanny problem”, but that’s not all

Bernard Kerik with Bush Dec. 3 during the Homeland Security nomination announcement

Sure, the obvious irony of having a Secretary of Homeland Security, the highest official in charge of immigration, with a history of immigration law violations is too much even for this venal administration.

But, as the Times reports, the nanny problem only scratches the surface of what is potentially some very rotten pulp:

In just the last three years, Mr. Kerik, 49, made millions of dollars, mainly through his partnership in a security consulting firm headed by Mr. Giuliani and by serving on the board of a stun-gun manufacturer that has been seeking to do business with Homeland Security. Most recently, Mr. Kerik sold $5.8 million of stock in the stun-gun company.

Democracy Now! had a great segment on Kerik last Tuesday, leading with a troubling quote reported by Newsday on October 20, 2003, which had Kerik saying, “Political criticism is our enemy’s best friend”.

Sounds perfect for the Bush approach to “security”.

To top it off, Kerik has a history of misuse of personnel under his authority. In the same interview on Democracy Now!, Ellis Henican of Newsday discusses various incidents, including this striking example:

…the story essentially is that Ms. Regan, who is his [Kerik’s] publisher, lost a cell phone one day at Fox; and the story goes that he sent out some New York Police detectives to go into the homes in the evening of the hair and make-up people at the Fox news channel to investigate the disappearance of that cell phone.

The entire segment is worth a read or listen.

So at 8:30pm on Friday night, the very bottom of the week’s news cycle, the Kerik nomination was withdrawn as quietly as possible.