Deep Blade Journal

Chomsky: “…a lot of this is called `missile defense,’ but as everyone knows on every side, missile defense is not a defensive system, it’s a first strike weapon.”

It all “would work” if nothing went wrong. Graphic credit: Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space

In a report earlier this week, we learned that yet another test of the politically-deployed Alaskan missile defense system has failed.

The interceptor, located at the Ronald Reagan Test Site at Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean, was supposed to target a mock ballistic missile fired from Kodiak Island, Alaska. The target missile went off as scheduled at 9:22 p.m. Alaska time Sunday, but the interceptor failed to launch.

While missile defense officials “expressed relief that the problem did not appear related to the interceptor,” John Pike, a missile defense critic at globalsecurity.org worried that “You don’t get second chances in nuclear combat.”

Totally absent from most public discourse on missile defense, however, are the negative diplomatic and security implications of the $10 billion/year program. In short, the effect of missile defense is exactly opposite of what this kind of system is purported to be. Because the US has declared to the world that it will not pursue diplomatic reductions and will continue to raise the provocative posture of its own long-range weapons of mass destruction, the mere existence of missile defense further declares a highly aggressive US stance. Instead of protecting anyone from missile attack, such an attack will in the future be all the more likely. States concerned about being in the crosshairs of the US eventually will react aggressively themselves, rapidly increasing tension and the likelihood of war.

Chomsky further explains

There’s a lot of debate and discussion about the so-called missile defense. A lot of criticism on grounds that it hasn’t been tried, and probably won’t work and so on. That may be true or may not be true, but it’s kind of missing the point. The system is far more dangerous if there’s some appearance that it might work, that is going — that’s what’s going to impel potential targets to do exactly what the United States did in the case of a much more primitive and insignificant missile defense system in 1968. Namely, to expand their offensive military capacities to overwhelm it.

Please see also this page for additional references.

To stop the war on Iraq, 11 million in the streets in the manner of February 15, 2003 must be there every day. I want to believe it is possible.

500 march in -20 Celsius temperature, Bangor, Maine, 2/15/2003

Rally in front of the Margaret Chase Smith Federal Building, Bangor, 2/15/2003

Another rally scene

The protests on February 15, 2003 did not fail, on that day. Protests since have failed because they quit too soon. If millions mobilized as a constant presence, the cloak of lies would eventually lift. The truth of the betrayal of our troops, of the Iraqi people, and of every principle America should stand for by George W. Bush and his henchmen would have to emerge. None of us, myself included, have shown enough courage yet to make that happen.

It is sad to say that the world has gotten use to the American war on Iraq. There is no intention for Bush to let go of the country. Lies! They are propaganda experts to and have paid little cost for their crimes. How can we change this?

Failure to achieve absolute majority will dilute Shiite power

American-run TV in Baghdad carries Electoral Commission announcement, note the Dow Jones index display (AFP photo)

Unified Shiite list…48%
Kurdish list…………26%
Allawi’s Iraqi list….14%

I must differ slightly with Juan Cole today. Cole writes that “Allawi’s defeat (he will not be prime minister in the new government) is a huge defeat for the Bush administration, though it will not be reported that way in the corporate media.”

Yes, Allawi is beaten, but it’s not as huge a defeat for Bush, or perhaps even Allawi, as Cole suggests. In fact, Allawi, from the third-place position, will hold significant influence in the formation of a new government because the Shiites are 20% short of the 2/3 coalition that is required. Oh, these Americans are smarter than they look!

But please do read Juan Cole’s analysis, which I think is quite insightful nonetheless. His comments about the sympathies towards Iran of many of the characters who possibly could rule are extremely interesting.

This Bloomberg story lays out perhaps a little more likely scenario, I think:

“The fact that the Shia List didn’t sweep the board means that they’ll have to work with others,” said Rosemary Hollis, head of the Middle Eastern program at Chatham House, a foreign- policy consulting group in London that advises European governments, in a telephone interview.

Iraq’s first free election in more than 50 years may confirm the position of Allawi, a U.S.-backed Shiite who describes himself as secular, as a compromise to unite religious and ethnic groups, according to analysts including Josh Mandel, head of the Middle East unit at London-based Control Risks Group. The assembly will approve a prime minister by early March.

Furthermore, US Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist may have let a little too much American delight out of the bag:

[Frist] said today the fact that the Shiite coalition won less than 50 percent was “one remarkable piece of information.”

The result “leaves open the possibility that minority coalitions can come together” to form a government, Frist, the leader of the Senate’s Republican majority, said on the Fox News Sunday program.

And then, this same Bloomberg item includes exactly what Naomi Klein suggests in the references from yesterday’s post:

Allawi’s strongest challengers for prime minister are Finance Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi and nuclear physicist Hussain Shahristani, both considered to be moderate members of the Shia List by analysts including Robert Blackwill, a former Iraq strategist in the Bush administration and head of global affairs at Washington-based Barbour Griffith & Rogers, a lobbying firm.

Mahdi Backed

“The interim finance minister is a strong contender for the post of prime minister,” Said of the London School of Economics said in a telephone interview. “He is perceived largely as a moderate secular figure that people could agree on.”
…
The United Iraqi Alliance will put forward four candidates for the job of prime minister, Ali Allawi said: Mahdi, the interim finance minister; Dawa Party leader Ibrahim al-Jaafari; Ahmed Chalabi, once the candidate favored by the U.S.; and Shahristani, the physicist.

Wow! Ahmed Chalabi in the running for prime minister! How’d he get onto the list that achieved the plurality? Did the fact that the lists were pretty much anonymous have anything to do with that? I don’t know.

Anyway, the “Trojan horse” scenario about which Naomi Klein wrote seems to be well underway.

As I cleared the last of a two-day, 60-cm snowfall from the driveway and steps this afternoon, I spent a lot of time thinking about 9-11 and the US response to it.

I came to kind of an obvious conclusion — 9-11 has been used as a wedge to drive millions of frightened Americans into cowardice under an opaque blanket of perceived protective power derived from an advanced technological military.

There is genuine reason to be concerned about the servings some corners of the world may one day kick back towards us. Unfortunately, the blanket makes all those under it blind and in a place where uncontrolled hatreds and desires for vengeance lash out in the dark. But the blind lashing only fans the flames behind the back-kicking.

Too many of our fine, intelligent neighbors in America are gripped with this fear. Our leaders pluck the strings on these scared souls at will. The Pentagon neocons justify a Bushian messianic vision of an aggressively violent and punishing America as a bulwark against monolithic radical Islam, whose cadres reflexively want to kill us because we are free Americans and for no other reason. The 9/11 Commission? Same way of perceiving the “enemy.” DLC/Beinhart Democrats? Same.

American violence, thus licensed, is free to ravage its targets at will without the slightest consideration that our enemies are just as human as we are, and likewise are the innocents that are caught in the same net. No amount of suffering caused because of our own country’s conduct even registers. This is a condition of spiritual death.

Enter this by the amazing blogger, Digby. It’s one of the most gripping things I’ve read in a long time. It captures the waking dream/nightmare state in which I walk at all times now.

I keep thinking I’m going to wake from this awful dream in which law professors (and former deputy attorneys general) of the highest reputation do not make arguments like this (from the important article by Jane Mayer in this week’s New Yorker called “Outsourcing Torture”):

“In a recent phone interview, Yoo was soft-spoken and resolute. `Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system?’”

What would that category of behavior be? Mass Murder? Torture? Genocide? Medical experimentation? Eviscerating babies with a bobby pin? No, those are all covered by criminal statutes and international law. So, it must be something worse than that, musn’t it? It must be worse than Hitler. It must be something so bad that Satan could only conceive of it. We call it “terrorism.”

There is no escape for us long as our county plies its own insanely intense barbarism in the name of fighting barbarism.

In typical Bush style, victory was declared without counting votes

Expertly woven propaganda put Bush over the top in the game of Iraqi illusion. But given the true desires expressed by the brave voters, tough anti-democratic measures will be needed to keep the US in control.

After 14 days and a litany of “problems” and “recounts” following the January 30 voting in Iraq, a news release this afternoon says that results will be announced tomorrow.

Already released are results of voting for local councils. According to a Washington Post story, “Islamic parties will be heavily represented on provincial councils across Iraq.”

And all the signs for the national vote point toward Shiite domination. But this same Post story contained the following curious statement:

Elections officials cautioned that turnout totals for the national election could differ from the provincial totals. At most polls, voters were given two ballots — one national, one local — and officials said some may have turned in only one.

I don’t know what’s going on. It seems clear from rumor-like reporting over the last few days that early returns show the Shiite list backed by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is in command. Unless “some sort of chicanery” I posted about three weeks ago comes to pass — and that can never be discounted in a Bush election — a government sympathetic to Islamic law is on the Iraqi horizon.

However, the American administration has been insisting that “a theocratic Iraq is unlikely.” Why not? The election results are clearly pointing the other way. How do American officials like Cheney and Rumsfeld know different? If we use terms along the lines Juan Cole did a few days ago, a “theocratic Iraq” means that “shariah or Islamic canon law” will replace civil law, and the clergy will influence the new constitution at its core, but mullahs will not run the day-to-day affairs of the state. Cole concludes by saying

So much for Mr. Cheney’s fantasy of a non-intrusive Grand Ayatollah unconcerned with politics who wants a separation of religion and state. Cheney was only right that Sistani doesn’t want to rule directly. Nothing else he said on the subject is true!

So contrary to my earlier prediction, it sure does look like Allawi is going down. Could the extremely poor showing of Allawi — despite a massive US-backed TV/media campaign — be a cause for the delay of the results, as American operatives scrambled to devise a strategy for retaining essential control from the losing side?

Naomi Klein has some possible answers to this question. She points out today in a deeply insightful Guardian piece that

A decisive majority voted for the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA); the second plank in the UIA platform called for “a timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq”.

There are more single-digit messages embedded in the winning coalition’s platform. Some highlights: “Adopting a social security system under which the state guarantees a job for every fit Iraqi … and offers facilities to citizens to build homes”; the alliance also pledges “to write off Iraq’s debts, cancel reparations and use the oil wealth for economic development projects”. In short, Iraqis voted to repudiate the radical free-market policies imposed by the former chief American envoy Paul Bremer and locked in by a recent agreement with the International Monetary Fund.

But Bush has already made it crystal clear that there will be no early timetable for American withdrawal of its troops or of its plan for economic domination of Iraq. In his February 2 State of the Union message, the president could not have been more clear that he will never accede to the democratic desires the Iraqi voters expressed with their electoral choice. The president said

We will not set an artificial timetable for leaving Iraq, because that would embolden the terrorists and make them believe they can wait us out. We are in Iraq to achieve a result: A country that is democratic, representative of all its people, at peace with its neighbors, and able to defend itself. And when that result is achieved, our men and women serving in Iraq will return home with the honor they have earned.

In other words, America will decide how Iraq will be run and will not leave unless a suitable corps of collaborators can be developed. Knowing something of the history of Iraq suggests that what Bush says here means that the US will never leave the country.

Klein describes Tony Blair’s Bush echo and offers an explanation of how the US will accomplish maintenance of control:

Tony Blair called the elections “magnificent” but dismissed a firm timetable out of hand. The UIA’s pledges to expand the public sector, keep the oil and drop the debt will likely suffer similar fates. At least if Adel Abd al-Mahdi gets his way - he’s Iraq’s finance minister and the man suddenly being touted as the leader of Iraq’s next government.

Al-Mahdi is the Bush administration’s Trojan horse in the UIA. (You didn’t think they were going to put all their money on Allawi, did you?) In October, he told a gathering of the American Enterprise Institute that he planned to “restructure and privatise [Iraq's] state-owned enterprises”, and in December he made another trip to Washington to unveil plans for a new oil law, “very promising to the American investors”. It was al-Mahdi himself who oversaw the signing of a flurry of deals with Shell, BP and ChevronTexaco in the weeks before the elections, and it is he who negotiated the recent austerity deal with the IMF.

On troop withdrawal, al-Mahdi sounds nothing like his party’s platform, and instead appears to be echoing Dick Cheney on Fox News: “When the Americans go will depend on when our own forces are ready and on how the resistance responds after the elections.” But on Sharia law, we are told, he is very close to the clerics.

Iraq’s elections were delayed time and time again while the occupation and resistance grew ever more deadly. Now it seems that two years of bloodshed, bribery and backroom arm-twisting were leading up to this: a deal in which the ayatollahs get control over the family, Texaco gets the oil, and Washington gets its enduring military bases (call it the “oil-for-women programme”). Everyone wins except the voters, who risked their lives to cast their ballots for very different policies.

There you have it, the real story of the Iraqi election. Even though Allawi is soundly beaten, Bush and his henchmen still win.

But everybody else loses, including the Iraqi people — who look to be occupied indefinitely — and the US troops who must carry out this shameful policy for years to come.

How do we know this?

The Independent Inquiry Committee into the United Nations Oil-for-Food Programme, headed by former Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker, issued an Interim Report on Thursday. It’s contents are quite different than the way it is framed in typical reportage.

This is the second part in my attempt to contextualize the so-called UN Oil-for-Food (OFF) “scandal.” The first part on Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) — who is a tool of radical US statists attempting to destroy the United Nations — was posted in December.

Part I: December 5, 2004: Norm Coleman

Part II: February 6: Oil-for-food — UN “riddled with fraud” ??

Part III: Year zero in Spring 2003: Pentagon/CPA burns Iraq

Part IV: Iraqgate

First let’s get out of the way the pervasive notion that OFF reflects top-to-bottom corruption of the United Nations. The PBS Newshour displayed the typical symptoms of this problem in a segment on the Volcker report broadcast Thursday February 3. Correspondent Spencer Michels framed the report like this:

The investigation, commissioned by the U.N. Security Council and headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, found the program was “tainted” from top to bottom and riddled with fraud.

Later in the interview portion of the segment, a pithy exchange occurred between PBS Newshour correspondent Margaret Warner and Volcker:

MARGARET WARNER: You’ve been at this about ten months. Are you prepared to say now — how big a scandal does this appear to you?

PAUL VOLCKER: Well, let me — I’m glad you raise that question because in the preliminary comments it was suggested that we had somehow discovered fraud and corruption up and down in the U.N. That is definitely not the case. The only thing that we are prepared to opine upon now is what was in this preliminary report that dealt with these contractors, that dealt with Benon Sevan, dealt with the auditing, as you said, dealt with administrative funds that the U.N. was using to finance their own operations, and by and large we found that that was responsibly used. There’s further investigation necessary there, but we haven’t got findings now that justify the statement I heard on this program earlier.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Well, your correction is noted. And thank you, Mr. Volcker, very much. (emphasis added)

Back up a few months to the early break of the OFF “scandal,” a period about one year ago. Please see this item posted in Deep Blade Journal on April 5, 2004 for background.

Here we saw how reactionary tendencies in the mainstream media accepted almost uncritically what is nakedly a right-wing campaign to select facts (some true, some not) and control emphasis, placing the scandal spotlight squarely on Saddam Hussein and his relationship to international figures associated with the UN and US competitors in Iraq.

Let’s start with rightist Wall Street Journal pundit Claudia Rosett. Ms. Rosett engaged in a hyperbolic smear campaign against the UN and wantonly mis-characterized the operation of Oil-for-Food.

Over the course of a series of pieces, she again and again hammered at a “UN is Saddam is evil” nexus. This quote from an April 28, 2004 piece is typical:

Basically, Oil-for-Food was Saddam — just slightly harder to spot, swaddled as he was in that blue U.N. flag.

Rosett’s thing is to present a laundry list of entities who had business in Iraqi oil during the 1996-2003 period and scream about how untoward all of this is. Innuendo and charges of guilt by association flow from Rosett’s pen like an inky stream.

Well, US companies shared a good bit of this business. Yeah, some money flowed back into the regime and was stolen by Saddam. That was Saddam’s nature. But the US had a lot more control of this than Ms. Rosett lets on. Even the likes of Judith Miller at the New York Times, an inciter of war like no other, has been onto the story of the role of US companies in OFF dealings. See two of her stories here and here.

Speaking of Judith Miller, I’ll also mention that there was in the winter of 2004 a guy behind the curtain pulling the levers controlling the flow of the documents. This was none other than Miller’s frequent source, the multi-agent Ahmed Chalabi. In a “weapons of mass destruction”-like manner, Chalabi slipped selected Oil-for-Food documents to the media from a treasure trove he’d been given charge of by the Pentagon. Again, I don’t say he’s making everything up, like was done with WMD. But he sure was allowed to control the spin on this “scandal” in a remarkable way.

I’ll mention just one more agitprop mouthpiece for the rightist consensus against the UN. It is Jonathan Hunt of FOX News. According to a revealing piece at Media Matters, Hunt trafficked in “innuendo” and “vague allegations” in oil-for-food coverage.

The effect has been extraordinary. Everyone in the media now knows what a huge scandal Oil-for-Food was!!

UN 1, Coleman/Rosett/Hunt 0

It seems like most news outlets — as the Newshour did, see above — have used this frame for presenting the Volcker report. But what has Volcker really said? Yes, Benon Sevan seems to be culpable for personal enrichment of himself and friends. Kofi Annan’s son had similar aims. Clearly Saddam had goals of personal enrichment. That’s a familiar disease in America. But what else?

Today, the Observer has an excellent piece by Peter Beaumont, The defiant UN starts fightback: Americans confounded as corruption probes falter.

Despite US mainstream framing, the whole Rosett/Coleman/Hunt narrative is basically a bust. To wit:

Volcker notes, too, a failure of procedures in awarding contracts to manage the scheme - which became so politicised that they were given to suit the agendas of Security Council members, the US, Britain and France included.

Volcker’s report does not reveal any systematic corruption. But what it has shown is the massive scale of Iraq’s smuggling of oil during the sanctions period with the knowledge of members of the Security Council’s permanent five, including the US.

It is a sign of the frustration of the UN’s right-wing critics that their best response to the investigation is to suggest that, as a supporter of the UN’s humanitarian goals through America’s UN Association, Volcker is tarnished. Instead, the ongoing UN investigation - despite five separate congressional probes - seems to have given it a bullish new confidence.

I spent some time with a table issued by Volcker that attempts to compare how the various estimates of the size of the scandal were arrived at. Unsurprisingly, the crazy $21 billion figure used by Coleman is essentially vaporous, based on “anecdotal” recollections extrapolated to every conceivable OFF transaction.

Coleman was ready for this. Back in December, he wrote in his call for Kofi Annan to resign his position as UN Secretary General that, “Mr. Annan has named the esteemed Paul Volcker to investigate Oil-for-Food-related allegations, but the latter’s team is severely hamstrung in its efforts….”

In other words, any null findings must be attributed to unreliable UN self-investigation. And today, unsurprisingly, there is a rash of stories (example) generated from the right suggesting the inadequacy of the Volcker effort.

But even so, I may have been wrong then when I felt that pre-dismissal of the Volcker investigation necessarily reflected that the Bush Administration had taken a decision to remove Annan after the Iraqi parliamentary election of last weekend. Looks like that’s not gonna happen. New US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has gestured in quite the opposite direction. Evidently, the administration still needs Annan and the UN to make its machinations work in post-election Iraq.

The Observer piece concludes,

There is a wider sense in the UN that perhaps the moment of danger from right-wing ideologues in the US who would destroy it has passed. The new US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, has reaffirmed her view of the importance of the organisation. And now, believes Annan, the opportunity is ripe to win back the middle ground of US opinion it feared had turned against it.

The real story of the sanctions period

The bigger real story, of course, is how the 1991 to 2003 sanctions regime with tenacious US insistence punished the Iraqi population. None of the right-wing narratives even mention the 661 committee and how the US used it to maintain rigid control over the whole Iraqi economy. Food and oil were the major commodities, but much else for the health and well-being of the Iraqi population was at stake.

Please peruse the CASI website for voluminous material on the real effect of the Iraq sanctions regime, along with the current humanitarian horrors being wrought on the country. I won’t even attempt to sort out all that here. Suffice it to say, the crimes committed against Iraq by the United States make Coleman et al’s grumpiness about some piddling kickbacks pretty inconsequential.

The best author for concise, extremely well-argued material on Oil-for-Food is Joy Gordon.

This article, The U.N. is Us: Exposing Saddam Hussein’s silent partner, from the December 2004 issue of Harpers draws the right frame around the issue. Gordon writes,

It may turn out that particular individuals in the U.N. did receive payoffs from Iraq in the form of oil vouchers. But fraudulent acts by individuals —in direct violation of their employer’s policies—are not the same thing as institutional failure. The U.N. barred employees from engaging in financial transactions with Iraq. And if Iraq’s government used the Oil for Food Programme to get cash under the table from its business partners, then we should look at who designed the program in the first place.

What seems to be consistently overlooked—not only by right-wing pundits but at congressional hearings and in the New York Times—is a distinction of enormous significance: the U.N. is being attacked for the policies and failures of particular member nations. The Oil for Food Programme was not some concoction of Kofi Annan’s. It was created by a vote of the members of the Security Council. And every aspect of how the program ran—what goods were allowed, the monitoring procedures, the transfer of funds, everything—was explicitly established by the members of the Security Council. Kofi Annan did not have a vote; but the United States and Britain did, and they approved of every resolution and decision that determined how the Oil for Food Programme worked. Whatever critics may say, “the U.N. bureaucracy” did not design a program that handed over cash to Saddam Hussein. The fifteen members of the Security Council—of which the United States was by far the most influential—determined how income from oil proceeds would be handled, and what the funds could be used for. The U.N.’s personnel operating the Oil for Food Programme did not set these policies. They simply executed the program that was designed by the members of the Security Council.

Please see Rodger Payne’s post from November 9, 2004 for additional links to essential Joy Gordon material.

In the next of this series, I’ll take a look at the almost unreported spectacle of the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI, the successor to Oil-for-Food) under the control of the US Proconsul and “riddled” itself with unaccountable transactions. Christian Aid and Iraq Revenue Watch (the latter a Soros organization) reported on potentially massive corruption in the virtual disappearance of billions of dollars over just a few months after May 2003 when the UN Security Council, in its wisdom, gave the US total control of all Iraqi assets and oil. There was supposed to be an international oversight board. But the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and its Pentagon master blocked the board’s formation and functioning at every step.

Two years ago today, Colin Powell punched his ticket to hell at the United Nations Security Council, dragging the rest of our country with him. So far, no one is accountable.

February 5, 2003: “Secretary of State Powell, using a mock-up of anthrax during a Security Council presentation, believes weapons will be found.” (Photo and caption, CBS News)

Deep Blade began in February 2003 because this story of official lies in incitement of war demanded that all of us who could see them for what they were use the biggest, loudest voice that we could muster against it. I will always be troubled by the inadequacy of that response.

From Deep Blade #1 (first posted February 11, 2003):

Administration officials are now well-rehearsed in delivering lines like, “Saddam Hussein is a practiced liar, there is no doubt about it. We should take everything he says very skeptically.”

Apparently, the same holds true for Colin Powell and our own administration. Other countries see this clearly as their citizens line up at 80%+ rates against the war. Notwithstanding posturing of the U.S. administration that failure to vote along lines of U.S. will renders the U.N. “irrelevant,” the U.S. still faces three likely vetoes of a war resolution from China, France, and Russia; teetering of the Blair government in the U.K. as it desperately seeks cover for war; even withdrawal of support for the U.S. position in third-world countries like Pakistan and Cameroon. These are no small measures of how badly Powell’s diplomatic disaster has turned out.

Perhaps even worse was the way the unteneble Iraq weapons story persisted late into 2003. Powell was still trying to save face by writing opeds in October of that year. The especially huge canard (literally a massive psy-ops crime against the people of the entire world) about the mobile bioweapons labs — the perfidy of the promoters of the “Curveball” files, especially Colin Powell — will be a classic study in state propaganda for decades to come.

But the worst thing of all is the current environment of lies. Iraq is a disaster that demonstration elections will not cure.

Though it was doomed, the Democrats for once mounted a dissent

Rhode Island Democrat Jack Reed gave an impressive speech in opposition to the torture theorist Wednesday on the floor of the US Senate.

Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, until recently Chair of the Committee on the Judiciary, provided squirrelly mendacity against the dissenters and in support of Gonzales.

Yet another assertion of Republican impunity has confirmed Alberto Gonzales as America’s highest law enforcer, who took over the US Department of Justice today. Heaven help the sundry persons detained without evidence in the president’s Terror War. Accountability for illegal rendition, torture, humiliation, perpetual confinement without charge or evidence, and other atrocities committed by US military and contract personnel will reach only as far as a few low-ranking soldiers – and then only when there are pictures. No torture policy architect will pay any price. Instead, being the chief legal theorist for torture results in promotion.

It is good that there was principled Democratic dissent, which forced squirrelly Republican mendacity in response. I thank Ted Kennedy, Dick Durbin, Jack Reed, Robert Byrd, and other Senate Democrats for making sure there were 36 dissenting lawmakers, thereby showing that not all of the American people believe Bush’s lies, approve of his torture practices, and think his high officials that are responsible should be given a free pass.

Without these Democrats, the whole record and story would have ended with the outrageous ear candy in service of cover-up that the Republicans dished up. The public record may have ended with fawnings about how Judge Gonzales “grew up in Humble, TX…one of seven siblings living in a two-bedroom house” that was built by his migrant-laborer family, who lacked education beyond elementary school.

“But Judge Gonzales learned through his parents’ example that, with dreams and commitment and hard work, you can be rewarded in this country.”

Yes, and in Bush’s America, you are also rewarded — with the highest office available — for destroying the law of the land.

So it is very good to have the Republican responses to being called on official support for torture — how they ran away from the memos, how they repeatedly were forced to feign abhorrence about bad apples and pictures, how they repeatedly said it was proper to carve out a class of presidentially-declared Terror War suspects who then without evidence could be treated outside the bounds of international law, how good faith ruled the roost, and how dissenters undermine the president and “give comfort” to the enemy — in the permanent record.

But even the slightest perusal of the publicly-available documentation reveals that none of these Republican canards can hold a drop of water. The notion of Republican good faith is put to rest rather thoroughly in a piece by Joshua Dratel posted on Counterpunch a few days ago.

Dratel writes,

The policies that resulted in rampant abuse of detainees first in Afghanistan, then at Guantanamo Bay, and later in Iraq, were product of three pernicious purposes designed to facilitate the unilateral and unfettered detention, interrogation, abuse, judgment, and punishment of prisoners:(1) the desire to place the detainees beyond the reach of any court or law;

(2) the desire to abrogate the Geneva Convention with respect to the treatment of persons seized in the context of armed hostilities; and

(3) the desire to absolve those implementing the policies of any liability for war crimes under US and international law.

Indeed, any claim of good faith–that those who formulated the policies were merely misguided in their pursuit of security in the face of what is certainly a genuine terrorist threat–is belied by the policy makers, more than tacit acknowledgment of their unlawful purpose. Otherwise, why the need to find a location–Guantanamo Bay–purportedly outside the jurisdiction of the US (or any other) courts? Why the need to ensure those participating that they could proceed free of concern that they could face prosecution for war crimes as a result of their adherence to the policy? Rarely, if ever, has such a guilty governmental conscience been so starkly illuminated in advance.

Meanwhile, Senator Reed provided a summary of how the Bush/Gonzales theories of “Commander-in-Chief override” of US and international law were developed in order to provide that absolution for the ensuing crimes.

JACK REED: Despite the Constitution’s clear prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, despite law after law, treaty after treaty prohibiting torture, the President’s chief counsel, Judge Gonzales, requested a series of legal memos regarding the applicability of treaty provisions and permissible interrogation techniques in the war on terrorism.

One of these memos, the August 1, 2002, Bybee Memorandum, was apparently written to explore what coercive tactics U.S. officials could use without being held criminally liable.

This memo created a new and radically narrow definition of torture. It stated that torture would require interrogators to have specific intent to cause physical pain that “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.” Mental torture is defined in the statute but the Justice Department memo states that mental torture must result in “significant psychological harm lasting for months or even years.”

According to Harold Koh, Dean of the Yale Law School, former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, and an international law expert, this memo is “the most clearly erroneous legal opinion” he has ever read. In testimony before the Judiciary Committee he stated:

“In sum, the August 1, 2002 OLC memorandum is a stain upon our law and our national reputation. A legal opinion that is so lacking in historical context, that offers a definition of torture so narrow that it would have exculpated Saddam Hussein, that reads the Commander-in-Chief power so as to remove Congress as a check against torture, that turns Nuremberg on its head, and that gives government officials a license for cruelty can only be described–as my predecessor Eugene Rostow described the Japanese internment cases–as a “disaster.”

One would have expected the Counsel to the President to have immediately repudiated such an opinion. Judge Gonzales did not.

Instead, this memo was endorsed by Judge Gonzales as the legal opinion of the Justice Department on the standard for torture.

Into the face of this voluminous evidence of official malfeasance on the part of Gonzales — and the calm and eloquent presentation thereof by the Democrats — the race-baiting ramblings, emphatic gestures, lies, and full-gallop retreat from the content and foreseeable results of the torture memos by Utah Republican Orrin Hatch would have been comical if the issue wasn’t so serious. I’ll reproduce quite a bit of the recorded transcript here. Try not to be entertained.

HATCH: Some Senators on the other side of the aisle are desperately searching, fishing, and hunting to find something, anything, with which to attack Judge Alberto Gonzales. I reviewed some of the issues yesterday, including their attempt to hold Judge Gonzales responsible for a memo that he did not write, prepared by an office he did not run, in a Department in which he did not work, that provided legal advice that President Bush did not follow. That argument is a very thin brew. But some of my friends across the aisle are still throwing political spaghetti at the wall hoping something will stick.

…

What is it about Judge Gonzales that makes some people believe that he is somehow incapable of making the simple distinctions, distinctions made by lawyers every day? Is it prejudice? Is it a belief that a Hispanic American should never be in a position like this—because he will be the first one ever in a position like this? Is it a belief that only liberal Hispanics should be confirmed? Or is it because he has been an effective Counsel to the President of the United States, who many on the other side do not like? Or is it because he is constantly mentioned for the Supreme Court of the United States of America? Or is it that they just don’t like Judge Gonzales? I find that that is not possible because you can’t help but like him. He is a fine, enjoyable, friendly man.

…

It is ridiculous. What is the reason for this opposition? I don’t know what it is. But I have listed a few things it could be…Senator KENNEDY raised all of these torture memoranda as though Judge Gonzales wrote them. He wasn’t in the Justice Department. He wasn’t in the office of legal counsel. He wasn’t the person who wrote them. He didn’t represent the Justice Department. But he did have a relationship to the February 7, 2002, memorandum where the President said that all prisoners, whether or not they were subject to the Geneva Conventions, had been treated “humanely.” People can have different views on the Bybee memoranda, and other memoranda that have been quoted here as though Judge Gonzales had anything to do at all with them, but Judge Gonzales’s opinion, which he gave the President, was that they should be treated humanely. Why do they insist on these points? Why has torture become the big point of debate on the floor of the Senate? There is only one reason: to undermine the President of the United States. Just think about it. Why would we do that publicly as Senators? Why would we do that, especially since we all know that these were rogue elements who have done these awful things? We all condemn them. But why would we do this? Some people think that these statements are so bad, that they give comfort to the enemy. I do not go that far. But why have they used distortions to try to stop Judge Gonzales? Why would they do that? He is a moderate man. He is an accomplished man. He is a decent man. We have had 4 years of experience with him. He has done a great job down there as White House Counsel. He has been up here before every Senator on the Judiciary Committee, eight of whom voted against him, and he accommodated them in every way he possibly could. Sometimes he couldn’t do what they wanted him to do, but the fact is he was always accommodating.

…

Here we have a chance to confirm a man who is a decent man, who is of Hispanic origin, the first Hispanic ever to be nominated to one of the big four Cabinet positions. Why can’t my friends who oppose him recognize that and recognize the historic nature of this nomination, recognize his great ability, recognize his decency, recognize his fairness in working with them, and recognize that this man will make a difference for all Americans, as he has as White House Counsel? Is the hatred for the President so bad they transfer it to somebody as decent as Judge Gonzales after years of complaints about John Ashcroft? He has been a wonderful Attorney General, in my eyes. After years of complaining about him because he is too conservative, all of a sudden you have a moderate Hispanic man who has a distinguished public service record, who has a distinguished career as a lawyer, who came from poverty to the heights of strength and success in this greatest of all nations, and he too gets treated like dirt. And I personally resent it. (emphasis added)

Hatch conveniently forgets the ample evidence that the prisoners have NOT been treated humanely. And what treatment does Gonzales consider “humane”? He would not say in written responses to questions from Democrats on the Judiciary Committee.

I shudder to think of what is going on right now in America’s Terror War dungeons.