Pruning Shears

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Barack Obama seems to be trying to finesse his way out of doing anything about potential criminality or war crimes during the Bush era, but it just comes across as disingenuous dissembling to me.  A statement like “if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen” make me wonder, what would such a clear instance be to him?  To indulge in a little sarcasm, would Dick Cheney have to fall to his knees on Larry King Live and confess “yes, I did it!” for Obama to feel compelled?  There are sufficiently compelling indications right now to justify an investigation.  Quit trying to punt this down the road.  Either say you’re doing nothing or tell Eric Holder to go where the facts take him.  And trust me on this, if you do the former you’re satisfying the wrong people.

On a more positive note it looks like information is slowly starting to leak out on what has been happening in Guantánamo, though it is hard to think of it as good news when it confirms some of our worst fears about what may be happening there:

“In both cases, for example, [prisoners] were handcuffed to fixed objects above their heads in order to keep them awake,” reads the document. “Additionally, interrogations in both incidents involved the use of physical violence, including kicking, beating, and the use of “compliance blows” which involved striking the [prisoners] legs with the [interrogators] knees. In both cases, blunt force trauma to the legs was implicated in the deaths. In one case, a pulmonary embolism developed as a consequence of the blunt force trauma, and in the other case pre-existing coronary artery disease was complicated by the blunt force trauma.”

Also genital slicing, and other acts of torture that make waterboarding “very far down the list of things they did.”

It isn’t just Guantánamo, either. Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and several locations in Iraq have also been used for large scale civil and human rights abuses.  It is not possible to quarantine disregard for treaty obligations or the law (domestic or international).  Once you start it somewhere it quickly spreads.  And the agents of transmission are at the top.

Please note:  Neither of the preceding items is to be taken as a clear instance of anything.  Thank you.

So Pentagon official Sandra Hodgkinson thinks Guantánamo is being run “fully in accordance with U.S. legal obligations.”  Hardly makes sense to shut it down under those circumstances, yes?  This along with the, um, ambiguous communication policy of the Defense Department policy towards the White House are just the latest indications that the president may not have captured the full attention (or respect) of military leaders.  I wonder if they realize just how destabilizing such an attitude can be if sustained.  Outsized military influence in national politics is more a feature of, say, Pakistan than Canada.  Of course, since it now seems nearly inevitable that sometime in the near future leading lights on the right declare themselves jihadis, perhaps this is by design and not an accident.

A note on our financial troubles.  So now it seems the plan is to give financial institutions lots of money to tide them over until their portfolio of worthless paper recovers some of its value.  Here’s the problem:  That paper is at the moment worth as much as it ever will be.  It will not rally, it will not rebound.  There has been a permanent loss of capital and those who suggest otherwise do so from deep in a well of denial.  This is like telling someone who bought Enron stock at $90 a share in August 2000 to keep hanging on to it after the price collapsed in hopes that it would, say, get back to 50.  (And you technically haven’t lost anything until you sell it!)  The problem with such wishful thinking is that it erects an enormous psychological barrier to moving on.  As long as you keep desperately hoping for some kind of recovery you’ll stay frozen in place.  The first step has to be acknowledging that money ain’t coming back and accepting that painful reality.  Until that happens we will continue to be stuck at a dead end.

UNPACKING JANE:  On page 151 Mayer writes about torture:

It might be banned, but what if the Bush Administration described the psychic stress and physical duress they hoped to exert on captives as something else? Among the euphemisms the President would employ in the years to follow were “enhanced” interrogations, “robust” interrogations, and “special” interrogations.  The redefinition of commonly understood crimes enabled Cheney to describe “waterboarding,” a process of partial drowning and asphyxiation that had been classified as a criminal form of torture in the United States since at least 1901, as “a no-brainer for me,” while at the same time insisting, “We don’t torture.” As William Safire, the conservative language columnist at the New York Times, wrote, “Some locutions begin as bland bureaucratic euphemisms to conceal great crimes.  As their meanings become clear, these collocations gain an aura of horror.  In the past century, the ‘final solution’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ were phrases that sent a chill through our lexicon.  In this young century, the word in the news…is waterboarding.  If the word torture, rooted in the Latin for ‘twist,’ means anything (and it means the deliberate infliction of excruciating physical or mental pain to punish or coerce), then waterboarding is a means of torture.

The Bush Administration’s corruption of language had a curiously corrupting impact on the public debate, as well.  It was all but impossible to have a national conversation about torture if top administration officials denied they were engaged in it.  Without access to the details of the CIA’s secret program, neither Congress nor the public had the means to argue otherwise.  The Bush Administration could have openly asked Congress for greater authority, or engaged the public in a discussion of the morality and efficacy of “enhanced” interrogations, but instead it chose a path of tricky legalisms adopted in classified memos.

Who knows, there might even be some clear instances of wrongdoing in those memos.