Category: War

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President Mrs. Wilson

For the last 14 months of his second term as President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson was virtually incapacitated. His condition was kept secret from the American public and most of the government. His wife, Mrs. Wilson– Edith Bolling Wilson– effectively ruled for him, appointing and dismissing officials and advisors, and shielding him from the scrutiny of members of Congress and even the vice-president.

How does a person know if one is not competent? Woodrow Wilson, apparently, did not know he was incapacitated. Mrs. Wilson did not know that she was not qualified to run the United States of America.

The sky did not fall.

On the other hand…. The New York Times article (sidebar) by Morris makes the argument that history might have been radically altered had Mrs. Wilson properly notified the authorities that her husband was no longer capable of executing the office of President of the United States. Instead, in what is surely one of the most outrageous cases of hubris in history, she decided that she would just do it herself. These men! These cabinet secretaries and advisors and senators and staff… what do they know that I don’t know?

That’s what Morris’ article is about– how do you know what you don’t know? The answer, of course, is that you can’t know what you don’t know. In other words, if you are incompetent, you are not likely to have the faculties of good judgment that would allow you to accurately assess your own performance– by definition.

Think about this the next time you see Timothy Geithner or Lawrence Summers or Bernard Bernanke on TV. Think about this as Senators fall over themselves to eulogize Robert Byrd, Senator for over 50 years, who seems have been much beloved. Who loved him? The citizens of West Virginia who rhapsodize about all the goodies he brought them from the federal government, all the buildings and freeways and public squares now named for him.

Edith Bolling Wilson was careful, in her auto-biography, to insist that Wilson was mentally competent at the time, and that it was Wilson’s own doctor (who was dead when she published), among others, who insisted that humble little Edith Bolling undertake the task of relaying Wilson’s authentic wishes to the world. But Wilson’s doctor and chief steward, in their own accounts, were clear: Wilson had no capacity whatsoever to convey any wishes, authentic or not, to anyone, or to govern; his reason was impaired. Though he later improved somewhat, he was never the same person after the stroke as he was before it. Edith Bolling Wilson, however, issued numerous communiqués from her husband which were invariably written in her own tiny little script. No one else was permitted anywhere near him.

There was no way for any reasonable person to get past Mrs. Wilson to determine if it ever actually was Woodrow who was doing to governing.

It was a critical moment. The international treaty creating the League of Nations was up for ratification in the U.S. Senate. Senate Republicans, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, were against certain provisions of the treaty. But Wilson seemed to take a hard line: no compromise. He’d rather see the bill fail than make a few adjustments, or give the Republican’s a face-saving concession. Wilson– or Mrs. Wilson, concerned that anyone should perceive a vacuum of leadership, brooked no dissent, no argument.

The treaty went down in flames.

Vice-President Thomas Marshall would surely have agreed to some of the amendments proposed by the Republican opposition– as might have a healthy, rational, Wilson– and the treaty would have been ratified, and the might and influence of the United States might have saved the League of Nations from it’s cruel fate of impotence, ineffectiveness, and its ultimate collapse in the face of German aggression and French and British intransigence.

It is possible– perhaps even likely– that no stroke: no Hitler.

This is not the same as saying that Woodrow Wilson was indispensable. The tragedy of Edith Bolling Wilson’s deceit was precisely the result of her delusion that Wilson was indispensable, that no one else should be allowed to lead the country at a critical moment in world history –the same delusion held by Robert Byrd who should have retired years ago.

It should also be said that a responsible Cabinet minister or Secretary of State or General should have insisted that Mrs. Wilson step aside and allow accountable political leaders to determine if the President was capable of carrying out his duties.  If Mrs. Wilson had insisted on blocking access to her husband, they should have followed the law and removed him from office.

But you can see the difficulty.  Do you have the Secret Service arrest Mrs. Wilson?  What if Mr. Wilson was partly coherent?

Tonight, I watched a documentary on the Berlin Wall. There it was again– Eric Honecker, Chairman of the Council of State for East Germany during the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Honecker also did not know what he did not know. As Hungary opened it’s borders and Lech Walesa overturned the Polish government and Gorbachaev transformed Russia with perestroika, Honecker clung to what he knew: the totalitarian communist state.

As tens of thousands of East Germans marched in the streets, he ordered the police to crack down, like the Chinese in Tiananmen Square. His deputy, Egor Krenz, simply refused to transmit the order, and a lower echelon functionary inadvertently– I’m not making this up– announced that the borders were open, immediately. The guards, confused, confronted with streaming crowds of refugees, opened the gates, and the genie was out of the bottle.

The Unknown Unknowns

  • Marshal Petain did not know that he did not know how to fight a war in 1939.
  • He still had all the knowledge he needed, however, to fight another war in 1914.
  • The White Star Line did not imagine that a situation would occur in which the number of life-boats on board the Titanic would matter.
  • Richard Nixon did not know that his actual culpability for the burglary of the Watergate offices of the National Democratic Party Headquarters would not matter, but his discussion of the incident in the Oval Office would eventually lead to his impeachment.
  • Nicholas II did not know even the Russian peasants no longer regarded his position as the result of the direct intervention of God in the affairs of men.

Errol Morris in the New York Times

Eric Honecker

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G20 Opium Wars

The biggest Security Theatre show in the world takes place in Toronto this week. The people who are supposed to represent us, the voters, will do everything they can to keep as much distance as possible between their lavish affair, their snack bars and drinks, their banquets and soirees, and us, the smelly, worried, unprivileged mob.

In fact, they clear the expressways so the cavalcade of bulletproof limos and security mobs can proceed from airport to conference center without having to meet the gaze of frustrated travelers. You wait so Obama can glide. You have to wonder if any of these leaders have the slightest clue anymore of what real life is like for their own citizens.

It’s not surprising that some terrorists out there might think it’s a good target: the display of monumental privilege must surely excite them. The fences and guns and helicopters — it’s all like a wonderful, violent opera.

It also creates a perception among the easily persuaded that these leaders are so important, so indispensable– such marvels of brilliant leadership and vision– that no expense can be spared in keeping them safe. In fact, every one of them is very dispensable— the graveyards are full of them, as De Gaulle observed. The security services don’t mind colluding with the politicians because, if politicians are important, the jackboots protecting them are necessary.

If you think, well, it’s a lot to put up with, but, after all, these meetings are important. No, they aren’t. The idea of public disagreement is so horrifying to the organizers that they have their cronies work out all of the language of all the announcements weeks before hand. If there is real disagreement, the announcements only cover the areas where they agree: we will improve the environment, encourage economic growth, seek justice and purity and the preservation of our bodily fluids. Amen. So, surrounded by security theatre, we have political theatre.

Have you considered… how come they don’t shut down the nation’s capital every time parliament is in session?

History is full of oddities.

In the 19th Century, Britain and other European nations were trying to develop a healthy trade relationship with China. Chinese ceramics, silk, and tea were in huge demand in Europe. Britain sent a delegation to the Qing dynasty to show them some of Europe’s most exciting new technologies to be offered in exchange. The Chinese were not impressed, and demanded silver instead. As supplies of precious metals began to dwindle, the European nations settled on a different product they wished to offer the Chinese. Wait for it: opium. Yes, the British East Indian Company was your local drug pusher.

Those crazy Chinese– they didn’t see the wonderful upside to this innovative trade relationship, and decided to ban opium. This led to the First Opium War, in which the European powers humiliated the Qing dynasty and forced it to sign a humiliating armistice, the Nanking Treaty, granting the European powers the right to brutally exploit Chinese markets and labour. The treaty also ceded Hong Kong to the British, if you’ve ever wondered why the British eventually ceded it back.

I’m always impressed by the righteous outrage expressed by oppressors when their victims summon the courage to fight back. The Boxer Rebellion was portrayed in the West as an attack on missionaries and Christian Chinese. The missionaries themselves only seemed dimly aware of their function as cultural emissaries of British and American imperialism. They didn’t see any problem with associating Christianity with gunboat diplomacy.

Another historical oddity:

In 1945 when Japan surrendered, Chiang’s Chongqing government was ill-equipped and ill-prepared to reassert its authority in formerly Japanese-occupied China, and asked the Japanese to postpone their surrender until Kuomintang (KMT) authority could arrive to take over. [From Wikipedia entry on Chiang Kai-shek]

This is not the only time an ally– a freedom-loving, democratic, liberal, enlightened, western power– actually asked the Japanese– spawn of Satan just moments before– to hold a population down so a new oppressor could take over for the old oppressor without the local people being given a chance to form a representative government.

Well, let’s all not get patriotic here. This is what governments do. They do it with far more sophistication and polish in the west, but they do it nonetheless: pin you down long enough to have your pockets picked clean. You can spot the patriots easily: they have flag pins in their lapels. They get teary-eyed when you play the anthem. They invite the press to view them touring the graveyards for the men they sent to die for your sub-prime mortgage, your derivative, your Enron stock, your gasoline.

You almost never find them in uniforms themselves.

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Dien Bien Phu

The Japanese took Viet Nam away from France during World War II. At the end of the war, France– it’s manhood seriously in doubt, I suppose– tried to take it back. To do this– believe it or not– they accepted the assistance of some Japanese forces that had yet to be repatriated. You can’t make this stuff up.

Let’s go back a little further: history is incredibly rich in instructive detail about empires and irony.

The French chose sides in a long-standing civil war in Viet Nam, which had it’s roots in the 1850’s. Eventually, the French and their proxies simply elbowed aside the natives and took over. Why? History books simply tell you that the French “took control” as if there was something logical and reasonable about a European Nation walking into a foreign country on the other side of globe and taking control. It’s ours now. Your wealth will now flow into our pockets. You are now working for us.

With the defeat by Nazi Germany, France lost control of their colonies, to the Japanese. During the Japanese occupation, Ho Chi Minh agitated for a end to any foreign domination, and formed a guerrilla movement. When the Japanese were defeated, Ho proclaimed an independent Viet Nam. That seemed an insanely rational thing to do.

The French, deeply moved by the sad experience of being occupied by an evil foreign power, congratulated them and moved on.

Hoo hah! Did you believe that even for a second? No, France said, not so fast. They offered a puppet state to Ho; he declined.

It was the French and the Americans who defied rationality. The French decided to try to take Viet Nam back, as if they had some sacred title deed to the nation. After the negotiations failed, the French moved their armies in. A little cheesy, you might think. Having been soundly defeated by the Germans and restored to power by the Americans and British, they go marching into Viet Nam all bluster and courage and medals and parades. In fact, General Gracie, the British commander, allowed the Japanese to be re-armed in order to help the French retake Viet Nam from the Viet Minh!

It reminds me of those parties in New York where people you thought were political or literary enemies all gather together and toast themselves.  Kissinger and Truman Capote and Barbara Walters and Jackie Kennedy and Prince Andrew– all together, schmoozing.

Here is the fork of history– how many lives would have been saved if the French had simply admitted that they didn’t belong there in the first place, and if they had simply congratulated Viet Nam on their independence and moved on? Where would we be today? How many French, Americans, and Vietnamese, and Cambodians, and Laotians, would be alive and well and perhaps even prosperous today, if some asshole Frenchmen had not decided that it would do France’s honor some good if it could bully some Asians into submission and take their rubber?

Yes, what they wanted, I believe, was the rubber.

Let’s not be overly simplistic– the communist government in the North were no saints; they destroyed the economy and caused famine into the 1950’s. Russia and China interfered, using them for their own purposes. But the decisive matter is this: Viet Nam resisted both the French and the Americans because they wanted independence, and once the French and then the Americans were gone, they turned on the Chinese and the Russians and did just what they said they would do originally: take control of their own nation. Had the French departed in 1950 as they should have, they would have learned their lessons about management of the economy much sooner. The moderates would also not have been driven from all levels of government the way they were when civil war broke out.

The Americans, we are told in one documentary, confronted Chinese troops in Korea, which led them to believe that communist China must be “contained”. The glib voice doesn’t tell us how the Chinese came to be involved in Korea, of the arrogance of McArthur, and the diplomatic bungling, or the hubris of the allies. (China wanted to stay out, but the Americans blundered into the border areas in order to crush the North Koreans. China warned the U.S. that they had an interest in who occupied the towns near or on their borders– the U.S. ignored the warnings and were completely taken by surprise by the Chinese attack.)

So the French, in order to cut off a possible Viet Minh initiative into Laos, moved about 10,000 troops into a valley in North Western Viet Nam called Dien Bien Phu. Comments on Youtube in response to a documentary on Dien Bien Phu rhapsodize about the honor and courage of those 10,000 French.  These commentators want you, the reader, to be willing to do the same thing, because it’s so honorable and courageous, for your government, if they ask you do.

Are you mad?

What is “courage”, when placed in the service of idiocy and patriotism?  The French built an airstrip and fortifications and promptly found themselves surrounded by 50,000 Viet Minh. Even the possibility of retreat had been excised.

In early stages of the battle, the Viet Minh lost 10,000 casualties to 1,700 French. At that rate, you might think the French might eventually win.

But all the lessons the U.S. later took 13 years to learn were in full expression at Dien Bien Phu already in 1954.

  • technological superiority may not prevail
  • the determination of the enemy should not be underestimated
  • an enemy with a deep and abiding knowledge of the terrain and culture will drive you crazy
  • a war should never be about settling scores or proving your manhood or making points: what, really, was the French interest in Indochina?
  • the full support of the nation is required for a long, drawn-out conflict
  • God knows that you are sacrificing the lives of others. God knows that you asked others to risk what you yourself would never risk for anyone: your life.
  • God knows that you were blinded by self-interest when you assessed the relative risks and benefits of the military actions you commanded.

How many of these lessons apply to Iraq?

They almost certainly apply to Afghanistan which, after 10 years of occupation, shows no sign of pacification.

Above, the monument to Ho Chi Minh.

It’s always been the oil. It’s never been about anything other than the oil. And the fact that naive Americans still fervently believe that it is about anything other than oil tells you a lot about how astoundingly successful the massive public con of “patriotism” has been. My goodness- it’s there, right in your face. It’s not even camouflaged. It’s Dick Cheney in the White House actually admitting that it’s about the oil. And the open question about whether George Bush ever, deep in his heart, did not believe it.

Invariably, the terms offered during negotiations after fighting has broken out and the costs have become clear are worse than those offered initially.

And so it was in Viet Nam: in 1953, the terms offered to the French were far less attractive than those offered at the start of the civil war in 1950. If you were the parents or wife or lover of a young soldier who died in the civil conflict before 1953— would a monument ease your sense of lost?

There is a magnificent monument to Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. Isn’t it beautiful? You should read about Viet Nam in the 1940’s and 50’s and 60’s, and the wars, and the betrayals, and the genocides, and the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia to put a stop the Khmer Rouge, and then the Chinese putting a stop to the Vietnamese… you should look at the monument and contemplate it’s stolid quiet complacency, the almost zen-like beauty of it’s ghostly visage against the horizon, and you will see history. You will see the millions of shattered and destroyed lives, the starvations, the tortures, the explosions and fires, the bombs and bayonets, the rivers of blood– there they all are, asleep, anesthetized, dreaming of the lives they might have lived, were it not for the grand mission of history embalmed in the monument by the name of a general or king or president for life… in this case, a dried up old corpse named Ho Chi Minh.

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The Lofti Raissi Case

The Lofti Raissi Case

It’s been a few years since Lotfi Raissi was finally released but people who actually believe in the competence, wisdom, and good judgment of the authorities in Britain, Canada, and the U.S., should reread this account every day. I mean every day–first thing in the morning, like a prayer: this is your tax dollar at work. You are paying for the keystone cops. But this is not a harmless comedy– these people are doing real damage to all of us.

The important thing about the Lotfi Raissi case is what it reveals about the practices, policies, and — most importantly– competence of American and British police authorities. What it reveals, actually, is that the idiots are in control. What it also reveals is that law enforcement officers have been consistently willing to lie to obtain convictions.

It is the tragedy of our age that the public largely supports violent, inhumane measures against anyone the police think might have ever been thinking of becoming a terrorist. We’re not safer– we’re generating 10 new terrorists for every new outrage. If you were an Algerian, just how would you feel about the treatment of Lotfi Raissi?

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There is a War: Necessary Evils

“Perhaps,” he added, “they should clarify it. We were in the middle of a war, and there was no teaching on that. But the church only gives general moral guidance, and people of good faith have to interpret that guidance.”

Reverend Brian W. Harrison, Catholic Apologist for Torture, NY Times, February 26, 2010.

That’s lie number 1. Reverend Harrison, defending a Catholic defender of water-boarding, rather glibly qualifies his stance: we were in a war. In a war, torture is allowed. In a war, water-boarding is not torture. In a war, human dignity doesn’t count. In a war, all the things we live for, all the things of the greatest spiritual and moral significance, don’t matter.

No, it’s just torture. Torture is torture is torture. Torture is the act of a savage, a barbarian, of a people so utterly bereft of morality and spirituality and ethics, that they should be sponged off the face of the earth. I say “sponged”– not killed or beaten or abused or– heaven forbid– tortured. Sponged– sucked out of government and institutions; squeezed out of positions of authority and influence. Torture is what we, in that remarkable compact called “society” and “culture” and “democracy”, cannot abide, and the right to be treated with dignity at all times– no matter what the suspicion or crime or act– cannot be abridged.

It’s too late to undo much of the damage now. When America’s enemies capture a soldier or a scientist or journalist– why not torture? Reverend Brian W. Harrison, defending the American government, has declared that torture is morally acceptable, as long as it is necessary, and by God, when America attacks us, whether we are Muslims or communists or negroes, it is necessary.

Perhaps the most amazing facet of Reverend Brian Harrison’s remarkable hubris is the astonishing arrogance of it: I have the authority to proclaim that God himself approves of one of us violating the most sacred right of another of us, to deprive him of dignity, to extract whatever information he will give, to enact a sadism, an indignity, a violence, a cruelty beyond imagination for most of us.

Ye humble sinners: cower before Brian Harrison and quake with tremulous awed appreciation! Then go forth and torture, because it is something, according to Harrison, that Jesus would do, if necessary, and if Jesus were here today, he would find it necessary.

Reverend Harrison, like most apologists for torture, falls back on the canard that lives can be saved through torture. He proposes that a terrorist exists who knows where a bomb is located and when it will go off and he is caught and interrogated and refuses to hand over the information voluntarily and we will know when he hands over accurate information after we beat or cut or electrocute or nearly drown him. All we have to do is beat, or cut, or electrocute or almost drown him. God will forgive us because we will have saved lives. End of movie.

There is the argument that this actual scenario is extremely unlikely. How often do we find out a bomb has been planted and then catch one of the people who planted it? How likely is that? 

It’s possible. Just not at all very likely, except in the TV program “24”, a homage to the art of torture.

I suppose it’s possible. It’s one of those nice little moral arguments that college students like to play with, just to see how far the logic applies. What if you had to abort the baby to save the life of the mother?

It strikes me that Harrison might not like the argument that without an abortion, a vulnerable young woman might commit suicide, or physically abuse her child. Not really very likely, right? Not a good basis upon which to decide whether or not abortion should be legal. No, it’s not, is it?

Are we in a war, which justifies the use of torture, according to Harrison and many other torture apologists? Only if you define “war” as something that we are perpetually in. And if we are always in a war, than torture is approved– said the Mad Hatter.

We are not in a war. There will always be criminals out there willing to commit criminal acts. That is completely different from an organized, national government committing the resources and manpower at their disposal to an attack on another sovereign state. 9/11 was no different than dozens of other criminal attacks that have occurred over the past 25 years, other than the remarkable profile it gained through sheer spectacle.

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A Saint in Every Dream

And they all pretend they’re orphans and their memory’s like a train
You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away
And the things you can’t remember tell the things you can’t forget
That history puts a saint in every dream
(“Time”, Tom Waits)

A great phrase in a great lyric comes to mind as readily as a lovely image you remember from a distant place of important events in your life. In this case: “history puts a saint in every dream”. I’ve wondered for years what exactly that means.

It’s not the kind of line you sing while hanging upside down, wet, on a trapeze dripping over those awestruck young women who all seemed, in their faces, to be screaming “I want to be her!” It’s something you overhear in a bar, over the smell of urine and stale beer, and the rumble of streetcars or trains, and the dismal cuckold of useless tears.

I think it means that what we don’t remember–that we are not conscious of– constantly intrudes on our interpretation of past events, especially when our memory of those events is suspect.

History is written by the victors, of course, including the emotional victors, and we typically interpret events in light of the prejudices adopted afterwards. Most of us probably remember that the Americans entered the war against Germany to stop them from killing Jews. They did not– they entered because Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and Germany happened to be allied with Japan. Most of us probably remember a kind thing or two about someone who later treated us shabbily.

Only a few years before Pearl Harbor, Great Britain had negotiated a great peace with Hitler and Nazi rallies were held in Madison Square Gardens. A few years later, Stalin became our best friend, our comrade, until he too had to be reanimated. America supported Bin Laden when he took on the Soviets– we know how that ended.

But “history puts a saint in every dream”.

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The Nobel War Prize

There are already lots of prizes for people who believe in war. In the U.S., there is, seemingly, universal acclamation. There and elsewhere there are medals, parades, monuments, and obscene financial considerations. People who are good at killing are more than adequately rewarded. At least until they get sick. That’s when the Republicans suddenly, bizarrely, always seem to want to pull the plug. Check it out: it’s the Democrats who almost always want to take better care of our veterans.

There are not so many awards for people who say “let’s not go out and kill people today. Let’s try to find a way to avoid war, to avoid destruction.” First of all, most Bible-thumpers– oddly– will excoriate you. I missed that part in Sunday School, where Jesus says, “kill your enemies”. Or the part where he says, “people who feel aggrieved by your stupid decisions in the past are your enemies and deserve to be killed.”

Anyway, even if I was a real militarist, I would shed a tear or two for the debasing of the Nobel Peace Prize. Whatever verbal pyrotechnics you must perform to prove that Obama’s decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan and rendition and the pictures of prisoner abuse in Iraq that he suppressed– constitute anything even remotely like “the promotion of peace”, they pale beside the plain and simple facts: Obama has embraced the wars and he has bought the Generals’ fervent belief that, given enough time, and resources, and foolish politicians, they might be able to “win” in Afghanistan yet. (Because, after all, we “won” in Iraq didn’t we?). We can “win” the war on terror, much like, after 30 years of the same failed policy, we have “won” the war on drugs.

We live in a world in which politician after politician, after concluding that a particular strategy isn’t working, invariably propose more and bigger of the same. Why? Not because the policies worked– they haven’t– but it isn’t politically viable to try an alternative. What if the Democrats proposed a illegal drug policy that wasn’t based on savage deterrence and ridiculously lengthy periods of incarceration? The shrieking would send Johnny Rotten to the madhouse.

Even if you think he’s right, why give him a “peace” prize for it? Give him a war prize. Give him a monument. Give him a favorable column in The Washington Post because he consulted with general after general after general and they all agreed: war is the solution and he bought it. If a little bit of war fails– try more of it. If that fails: try some more. If that fails: try some more. If that fails: consult with the generals again. Again, they will recommend war.

Could they not have postponed the ceremony at least? Coming as it did the day after Obama committed 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, seems a bit unseemly at best. It was truly embarrassing and sad. His speech to West Point– would Gandhi have done that?

Henry Kissinger’s picture is on the wall of honor at Oslo City Hall. It is almost impossible to imagine, today, what they were thinking when they gave it to him. What did they know? Did they have the slightest clue about what his role actually was in the Viet Nam War, and in the Nixon Administration? Were they nuts?

As a liberal, of course, I like Obama a lot more than Kissinger, but I still don’t think he should have been given the peace prize and I don’t think he should have accepted it. It think it was foolish, premature gesture.

The only good reason for giving it to him was to deliberately piss off curs like Charles Krauthammer and George Will. And the more they fume about it, the more I think, well, maybe he should accept it. They’re just jealous that George Bush Jr. didn’t get a peace prize.

Obama: “And it will require us to think in new ways about the notions of just war and the imperatives of a just peace.”

Yes, that’s what a lot of people thought they were voting for. I still suspect that seven years from now, it might be recorded that armed conflict was avoided somewhere because Obama made some wise decisions… I suspect he is too smart to stumble into something like Iraq. But then, I also thought he was too smart to get bogged down in Afghanistan the way Johnson got bogged down in Viet Nam. But he has and is and in spite of his insistences to the contrary, the resemblance to Viet Nam is uncanny.

Irving Kristol, in today’s Washington Post, quotes Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech and compares it favorably with a speech by Bush. Okay– so does Irving Kristol now support Obama? Will he say, he has made good decisions about war and peace and Afghanistan? Not on your life– so while claiming that Obama is no different from Bush with one breath, he immediately proves that he is by attacking him at every other moment. But then, conservatives, lately, seem to ridicule the very idea that their platform should have any kind of coherence or consistency to it– these are incoherent times for them. Conservative policies created the biggest financial crisis in history and Sarah Palin and her cronies demand more of the same policies. The deregulated markets performed spectacularly badly– let’s have more deregulation. Viet Nam was a failure — let’s try it again in Afghanistan. We know something the Soviets didn’t know when they were there for a heartbreaking seven years. Honest, we do.

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The Naked Assassin: Nidal Malik Hasan

Nidal Malik Hasan killed 14 soldiers the other day, at Fort Hood, Kileen, Texas.

Hasan was an army psychiatrist who was supposed to help frustrated and anxious soldiers deal with their issues before being sent back to war, or civilian life. He was also a devout Muslim. Republicans are sounding the alarm about this– kind of screeching, really, that you can’t trust a Muslim, and that this whole idea of “tolerance” and respect for diversity, should be shelved in a favor of a good, old-fashioned, bitchin’ jihad.

Pat Robertson solemnly intoned that Islam is a religion of death. This, from the guy who supports the death penalty and once advocated assassinating Hugo Chavez.

Hasan is a Muslim. He apparently became more and more disturbed about the idea of serving an army that was involved in war against Muslims as it became clear that he himself was going to be deployed to Afghanistan. I suppose he wouldn’t have been bothered if we had been making war on fellow Christians, as in World War I and II, or Buddhists, or Hindus or Communists.

Come to think of it– why was it a problem? In all of the history of the world, has the religion of our enemies ever been a factor in whether or not we were gladly willing to slaughter thousands of them without mercy? My goodness, Mr. Hasan– what’s your problem? Why are you in the military in the first place? If you don’t want to kill people….

The real reason we kill people is, usually, money. Oil. What’s love got to do with it?

Or is it race, after all? If Germany had continued to fight like the Japanese, would we have used the nuclear bomb on Berlin? Do you even wonder for a moment? Never.

When I first heard about the shootings at Fort Hood, I thought, well, there you go: another trained killer does his job. Why are we surprised? Why is anyone surprised when, occasionally, trained killers “go off” without orders, without a plan, without logic, except that blinding, incoherent fury at the world?

But Hasan is a Muslim. He is a devout Muslim. He went to a strip club. That’s right– several times, shortly before the shooting, where he paid girls to give him lap – dances. So how did we know he was a “devout” Muslim? Because he said so? The way we say so, when we proclaim that we are devout Christians, going off to destroy Iraq even though it had nothing to do with 9/11?

There was usually more than one customer at the strip club, and most of them were not “devout” Muslims.

Senator Joe Lieberman insists that he is going to investigate if the army did a lousy job of assessing the risk posed by Dr. Hasan, since he clearly proclaimed his ethical problems with serving in the American army long before he exploded into the news.

Now let me be clear– I don’t think anybody can know for sure, in advance, just who is going to be the next mass killer in America. If the signs were that clear, you would hear about people being detained because some credible experts believed these persons were about to go on a shooting spree. Never happens. Why? Because we can’t know who is about to do it. Well, yes, there is that constitutional issue– but Bush solved that and Obama doesn’t seem poised to change it. Yes, we can arrest and detain and even torture people who have not committed any crimes. Damn right. Bless you, Rudolph Giuliani.

It seems to me that the army was actually quite sensible about dealing with Hasan. I would bet that he wasn’t the only Muslim in the army who expressed strong misgivings about the mission to Afghanistan. I would bet that there was not a single “unmistakable” sign that he was about to do what he did. Unless you count the fact that he bought some guns.

But then again, he was in the army. Then again, he was in America.

It is my understanding that the Obama Administration is continuing George Bush’s policy of “extraordinary rendition”– detaining and hold terror suspects and shipping them to other countries like Egypt or Jordan or Syria to be tortured.

Was there ever a bigger public illusion than the illusion of democracy in the U.S.?

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This is a pretty naked, rather exquisite statement: if I was a Christian, I might want to show mercy. Well, no, as a matter of fact. At least, not if you were an American Christian. Apparently, American Christians are quite free to wish death and imprisonment with cheerful exuberance, on anyone they think “dun it”.

You don’t want to bore people like that with issues like evidence and proof. Good heavens! And they don’t really want to discuss compassion or mercy so much as scream hysterically at you that if we don’t beat the hell out of our enemies, they’ll take away our Hummers. It doesn’t seem to matter much if “them” is Al Qaeda, communists, liberals, drunk drivers, Canadians, or Scots.

Yeah, I’m not interested in sounding reasonable at the moment. I’m just a little nauseated by the orgy of hatred and paranoia that dominates American politics right now. And I’m really sick of seeing this coming from people claiming to be Christians.

There’s that division between Europe and America. Americans– at least, the vast majority of them, seem very, very excited about the idea of inflicting a lot of pain and suffering on Abdel Baset al-Megrahi and they don’t seem to care very much about whether he actually did the crime or not. At least, none of the posters or bloggers that I have found have devoted a single line, let alone a paragraph, to the fairly serious claim that his conviction was a frame-up in the first place. The people who do seem aware of the dubious integrity of the case against him see predisposed to approve of the early release any way.

The crucial witness against Megrahi for the prosecution was Tony Gauci, a Maltese storekeeper, who testified that he had sold Megrahi the clothing later found in the remains of the suitcase bomb.[17] At the trial, Gauci appeared uncertain about the exact date he sold the clothes in question, and was not entirely sure that it was Megrahi to whom they were sold.

You get the feeling the Americans don’t really care about the evidence. You get the feeling they suspect that requiring “proof” would merely be a way of hoodwinking them out of the satisfaction of seeing someone suffer and die in order to vitiate their rage.

Sorry– does that sound brutal? Yes, doesn’t it? Yes, yes, yes.

Even Obama, sadly, has joined the chorus. Has U.S. politics reached such a low point now that even a fairly honorable guy like Obama feels utterly compelled to name a few witches?

Just imagine Obama saying: “We do need to acknowledge that the evidence against Mr. al-Megrahi is controversial, to say the least, and we must respect the desire of whacky other countries to actually show something they call “compassion” even to people of Arabic ethnicity….”

Something like that. And the Republicans would be foaming at their mouths with apoplectic rage that an American president missed a valuable opportunity to advocate for cruelty and hatred around the world, instead of just in America.

“I’ll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don’t care what the facts are.” Attaboy George! That about sums it up– George Bush Sr. responding to criticism of the U.S. warship Vincennes under Captain William Rogers for shooting down Iranian Air Flight 655 killing over 300 innocent civilians.

Yeah. Do you suppose there are Iranians out there who might be a bit miffed that Captain Rogers– widely regarded by his own military at the time as a “loose cannon” never paid for his sins?

No?  What if they know that he received a medal for it?

I suspect that that is the way America really means it: no matter what the facts are. It’s us vs. them, ours vs. yours, and if we need your oil, we’ll damn well take it, thank you.

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State Secrets

The government’s recent brief cited the leading Supreme Court decision on state secrets, United States v. Reynolds in 1953, but it said nothing about Judge Walker’s reading of it.

“Reynolds itself,” Judge Walker wrote, “leaves little room for defendants’ argument that the state secrets privilege is actually rooted in the Constitution.”

The Reynolds case concerned an Air Force accident report. The government refused to turn it over in an injury lawsuit, saying that disclosure of the report would endanger national security by revealing military secrets.

When the report was finally released in 1996, it contained no secrets, but it did show that the deaths of nine men in the crash a B-29 bomber had been caused by the Air Force’s negligence.

NyTimes, August 2, 2009

As seems inevitable… It is not surprising, of course, that the Bush Administration would have sought to establish Reynolds as a precedent– sparing the government having to defend itself against those annoying lawsuits. A more recent ruling by Judge Walker, against the Bush Administration, asserted that the Reynolds ruling established no such precedent. But once again, we have Obama’s Justice Department supporting Bush policy positions that Obama seemed to criticize on the campaign trail. What gives?

These policies are not abstractions: real individuals have been kidnapped and tortured as a result of Bush policies and their only recourse, the courts, have been denied them by rulings by other courts that are contrary to Walker. The government– the President!– reserves the right to tell the courts when a lawsuit might “endanger” national security, without, of course, ever being accountable for what that danger is. Civil libertarians are rightly aghast.

It is so, so perfect that the major precedent for this kind of judicial ruling is so, so discredited: the U.S. Air Force was trying to cover up it’s own negligence, exactly as the plaintiffs in Reynolds alleged. Does anyone even know or care?

It is nauseating to read conservatives complain bitterly about Obama’s health care plans because they don’t want the government telling them what to do. You idiots! The government is declaring that it has the right to seize and detain and even torture you , and spy on you, and obtain your library records, and tap your phones without any judicial oversight at all– and you are worried that you’re going to forced to have health insurance! You don’t like liberals because they want to infringe on your personal freedoms?! Oh, the rank hypocrisy!

I am waiting for conservatives to enunciate a clear-cut declaration that they no longer accept the idea of “innocent until proven guilty”. Perhaps the movies and television dramas like “24” have finally succeeded where generations of McCarthyites failed.

A director of Homeland Security explained that 60-year-old women in wheelchairs are routinely searched when flying because… “if Al Qaeda knew that we were letting 60-year-old women in wheelchairs through, do you think they would hesitate to plant a bomb on a 60-year-old woman in a wheelchair?”

By golly, he’s right. And if Al Qaeda knew that they couldn’t get bombs onto airplanes, they would start putting them on ships and trains.

Does Al Qaeda know that this dink is in charge of homeland security? Because, if they did, I think they would rest assured that a nation run by idiots cannot long prevail anyway.

The more you are afraid, the more powerful the government and police are. I suggest you laugh at your government at least once a day.

 

More bad news about Obama:  “Unfortunately, the House measure is opposed by the Obama administration, which still seems to operate on the principle that what’s good for Wall Street is good for America.”  Paul Krugman, NY Times.  Link to Story.