You Are Dumb - Prisoner Abuse

Your Torture In America Update

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 22:50:00 -0600

Prisoner Abuse, 14 December 2007

In case you're wondering what happened to the Spastic Topic Monkey, it turns out authorities are holding him in a black site prison because he ended up on a no-fly list by mistake. The good news is, he's being treated humanely. The bad news is, it's only because the government hasn't gotten their Fisher Price My Size Waterboarding Kit yet. In honor of his predicament, today is Spastic Tortured Monkey Friday!

It's been a busy couple of weeks in America's new role as Torturer, And Proud Of It. Now, I'm not naive enough to think that Dick Cheney invented American torture. But I do think that they invented torture as defendable, official policy. That this hideous shit has been normalized to the point where people can defend it and not be laughed off the national stage should really be bothering more people than it is.

For example, it should be bothering Nancy Pelosi, Jay Rockefeller, and Jane Harman, who, it turns out, have known we were waterboarding people since 2003. And, depending on reports, they either approved, failed to disapprove, or failed to disapprove besides sending a secret letter to the torture people saying that maybe they shouldn't torture.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and claim that this makes the Democrats as bad as the Bush administration when it comes to flagrant abuse of the Constitution and American ideals and basic human decency. But there's a hell of a gap between "better than Bush" and GOOD ENOUGH. And whatever the reason, their collective inaction then was doubly craven. Because not only was it a failure to stop it THEN, but the revelation of that failure undercuts efforts to stop it NOW. What was that Burke quote? All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing? Well, we don't even have good men, so it's no wonder evil has been such a fucking growth industry this decade.

And speaking of evil, what the fuck must have been on those CIA tapes that getting busted for destroying them was preferable to getting busted for whatever was recorded on them? Of course, in their minds, some underling at the CIA can take the fall for the tape destruction, while the people in charge of the policy that dictated the acts that were ON the tapes skate one more time in what's become the Ice Capades of perfidy.

And there is no greater example of the twisted logic that rules in the psyches of these bastards than Tony Blankley's interview with NPR. Blankley, who is usually paid to say stupid shit by the Washington Times, who approves wholeheartedly of the CIA's illegal destruction of criminal evidence. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"All I could imagine was that video being leaked to Al-Jazeera and from there to YouTube and from there to the minds of hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world... actual waterboarding would instill more passion in the Islamic world than the still pictures of Abu Grahib prison. It would have constituted a catastrophic propaganda defeat for us that would make it yet harder to begin the long process of winning the hearts and minds of currently non-violent Muslims. ... A necessary early step is convincing the Muslim world that we are not their enemy. How could the release of such an inflammatory video help with that vital effort?

That's not an argument for destroying the tapes of us torturing people. It's an argument for NOT FUCKING TORTURING PEOPLE! We're told time and time again by these fucks that our civilization is fighting for its very existence, that winning this war on terror is the most important thing ever. Yet when deciding on a course of action that, if discovered, would cause an epic-level setback in that very fight, they go ahead and do it anyway and just hope that nobody finds out how bad it really was. GENIUSES.

Never mind that it's inhuman, unethical, and proven to be ineffective. Beyond that, even the crazy people seem to realize it's awful strategy. But the tapes got destroyed, so everything's hunky-dory to Blankley! As long as the Muslim world is somehow fooled by this into thinking we're not their enemy. I'm not sure that's something we can count on, since most of the ones we've bombed are pretty sure we're their enemies, and if we haven't bombed them, then odds are they still have working eyes and ears.

Say Everything

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 20:05:16 -0500

Prisoner Abuse, 13 June 2006

Memo to Harry Harris and Colleen Graffy: YOU ARE DUMB.

How dumb are you? You're so dumb that the Bush Administration has to actually pretend to backpedal on what you said so that they don't seem like the complete bastards they are.

Harry Harris, a rear admiral in the United States Navy, and Colleen Graffy, a high-ranking official at State, represent precisely the kind of dehumanizing, us-vs.-them attitude toward the War On Terror that those of us with some small vestige of humanity remaining have been shouting about since "...or you are with the terrorists" left the Chimp-In-Chief's lips.

We've seen it over and over again with the apologists. Abu Ghraib didn't matter because it wasn't that bad and they were the evil terrorists. Haditha - they must have been evil terrorists. Gitmo? All terrorists. Torture? Doesn't matter, they're terrorists.

And you can't possibly care about terrorists, because they behead people! If you take umbrage at human rights abuses, you're coddling beheaders! You care more about the terrorists than you do our troops! Well, fuck you too.

Three Gitmo inmates hung themselves over the weekend. That's always awkward for a jailer - claims of humane treatment and "they've got it better here than they did at home" ring a bit hollow when your guests would rather dangle from bedsheets than spend another day in your hospitality. And whenever the US finds itself up against the human rights wall, ass-covering and victim-blaming are damn near a reflex. Which brings us to Graffy. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"They don't value their own life and they certainly don't value ours, and they use suicide bombings as a tactic to further their jihadi cause. There were means and methods for protestation, and certainly taking their own lives was not necessary, but it certainly did - is good PR move to draw attention."

First of all, if anyone in this day and age really believes the government when they say Gitmo detainees have "means and methods for protestation", or even a REAL word like "protesting", then you haven't been paying attention, and I cannot reach your ears through the mass of colonic tissue in the way.

And second of all, if they're such wily PR jihadis, why did they kill themselves on a Saturday? Everyone knows that's when you put stories out you want buried. Still, as absolutely fucking distasteful as Graffy is, she doesn't hold a candle to Admiral Harris.

"They are smart. They are creative, they are committed. They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.

You can almost see the logic in it. A group of foes so committed they're willing to hang themselves in order to make the US look bad. Of course, they'd have a lot tougher time making the US look bad if they weren't in an extralegal detention center, held for years without hope of a hearing or any kind of oversight, but that's not the big problem. The big problem has a name, and the problem's name is Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi.

Al-Utaybi's crime, the one that got him sent to Guantanamo Bay? Being a member of a banned Saudi militant group. Oh, and one other thing. He was about to be released. He was one of YET ANOTHER group of Gitmo detainees who have been, like hundreds before them, determined to not be a threat to America.

But he didn't know he was getting out. Because our policy is not to TELL them they're getting out until we decide what country to send them to. A process that, for reasons my novice geopolitical mind cannot understand, takes months upon months upon months upon months. And he's one of the three guys that hung himself.

Not some guy who has no regard for life. Not some guy waging asymmetrical warfare by snapping his own fucking neck. A guy who, by our own admission, we were going to release without charges or further punishment. Which is why, as of yesterday, you started seeing the desperate backpedaling.

Like Cully Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense, claiming with a completely straight face that "as Americans we value life even if it is the life of a violent terrorist captured waging war against our country," which is the kind of bullshit statement that really should, in a just world, make the head it came out of spontaneously combust.

Or Tony Snow, saying that Dubya "wants to make sure that this thing is done right from all points of view" - "this thing" being the investigation, and "all points of view", presumably, being the only one Bush is even aware exists.

One of the "great" things about the modern media sphere is that it's so fragmented, every single statement I've quoted above will be of use to the administration. The foaming wingnuts can seize on the Harris and Graffy talking points and call in to Michael Savage's talk show yelling about how those stinking terrorists attacked Guantanamo Bay with all their foreign twitching and dangling. And the moderates can point to the President's promise to make sure this is all fixed and the "culture of life" is respected no matter how many feeding tubes we have to ram down the throats of hunger strikers to do it.

Everybody wins.

Misunderstanding

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 21:23:12 -0600

Prisoner Abuse, 6 December 2005

"Sometimes, these efforts are misunderstood." - Condoleeza Rice

Memo to Condoleeza Rice: OOPS, MY BAD.

It's really kind of embarassing. I let my left-wing moonbat paranoia get the best of me. That's the only possible reason I could have found it suspicious, shady, or even NEFARIOUS that the US would use a secret fleet of charter planes to fly a bunch of secret prisoners to a bunch of secret detention centers in foreign countries.

Turns out it's really just a paperwork thing. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"But there have been many cases where the local government cannot detain or prosecute a suspect, and traditional extradition is not a good option. In those cases, the local government can make the sovereign choice to cooperate in the transfer of a suspect to a third country, which is known as a rendition."

See? It's really ust a technicality. Traditional extradition is, as we all know, a huge hassle. Like that "having to say who the captive is" thing. Pesky. Oh, and the "saying where he comes from" part. Inconvenient. Where they're being brought? Don't get me wrong. They'd LOVE to. But with the CIA's federally mandated two fifteen minute breaks per day, there simply isn't time.

And as for what's done to them once they get there, well, the best way to monitor that is to let an outside contractor like the Red Cross handle it, but with all the fuss these days about outsourcing, it's just not politic to let an international agency do work that the honest, hard-working black ops folks here can just lie about.

Is this the best she can do? "Sure, we fly people to secret prisons in other countries, but the other countries said we could?" That's a grade school excuse. Where's some of that legendary fear-mongering these folks have honed into a fine art form?

"The intelligence so gathered has stopped terrorist attacks and saved innocent lives in Europe as well as in the United States and other countries. We share intelligence that has helped protect European countries from attack, helping save European lives. It is up to those governments and their citizens to decide if they wish to work with us to prevent terrorist attacks against their own country or other countries."

Nice countries you've got over there, Europe. Very historical. Lots of nice buildings. It'd be a shame if something... weren't prevented from happening to them.

Of course, let's remember that the last time anyone crowed about the ten, count 'em, ten terrorist attacks we've thwarted in the past four years, two of 'em were Jose Padilla, who they just drastically reduced the charges on, and Iyman Faris, who thought about blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge, but decided it was too much trouble.

Four more were guys looking at stuff to see if they could be blown up. Not actually trying, just scoping the place. And this is coming from the White House's own "fact" sheet, which contains no specifics. So under the absolute best circumstances, assuming everything they tell us is true, they've actually stopped four terror attacks in four years by abandoning most of the human rights principles we claim to defend. And one of them was bomb attacks against unspecified urban targets in London. I guess they would have gotten it twice if it weren't for testicle electrodes.

But what do I know? I'm probably just misunderstanding things.

You Probably Can Get Fooled Again

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 22:29:23 -0600

Prisoner Abuse, 8 November 2005

First, a note to people who read You Are Dumb via their Livejournal "friends" lists. It may have seemed to you that yesterday's column lacked the kind of vigorous attention to detail You Are Dumb Dot Net is famous for. This is, of course, your fault.

If you choose, freely, to enjoy this site with a technology that falls outside the purview of my retroactive infallibility, then you have to expect, every once in a while, to see things that as far as I'm concerned, never happened. And certainly weren't caused by too many hours of "Guitar Hero".

And speaking of alternate realities, it's about time we took a look back at the Bush Administration's views on torturing alleged terrorists. Now, a year or so ago, a strange schism happened in the fabric of space-time.

In a bubble around the presidential podium, we were being told that the United States does not torture prisoners. Out in the actual world, however, Alberto Gonzalez and the Justice Department were checking, on behalf of the president, if it happened to be OK to torture prisoners.

Many of us noted, at the time, that it was odd to be trying to justify something you were not, and had no intention of, ever doing. We were told, by delusional lying fucks, that it was merely a technicality, a legal analysis done for its own sake. In the end, nothing came of it, and Bush got re-elected.

Yesterday, Dubya once again felt the need to assure the nation, from his podium, "We do not torture."

Out in the actual world, however, Dick Cheney has locked horns with John McCain over a law that would expressly prohibit the US from torturing prisoners. Cheney wants an exemption for the CIA. This is roughly equivalent to passing a law making it illegal to throw footballs, then exempting quarterbacks.

Once again, we note the contradiction. Once again, we are provided with an explanation. This time, it's to preserve the flexibility and number of options the President has at his disposal in the war on terror. We do not torture, we will not torture, but don't outlaw torture, because we might have to torture. And all that other stuff we got caught doing isn't really that tortury.

Which means we can add one more thing to the lexicon of George W. Bush statements that proved to be bullshit, alongside "restoring honor and integrity" and "not just what is legal, but what is right":

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me... can't get fooled again."

Because you know what? We, as a nation, will be all too willing to get fooled again. We'll let them spin it, and a lot of us will decide, even if they are torturing people, it's OK because they'll only do it to dirty brown foreigners who hate our freedoms.

So it's a damn good thing John McCain decided the political wind was blowing in the right direction. The man who hugged President Bush after Abu Ghraib is now vowing to add his anti-torture amendment to every major bill in Congress until it gets signed into law.

Which means that, if he succeeds. the Bush Administration will have to violate the law, cover it up as long as they can, then do everything in their power to minimize it after they get caught. Good thing they don't have any practice at that.

The Keystone Kops of Rhetoric Strike Again

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 13:58:30 -0500

Main Column, 22 June 2005

Memo to Dick Durbin: NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!

Sweet fuck, it's like teaching a trash-talking class to a room full of crack babies who live downstream of the thermometer factory. If Katie Holmes can learn Scientology, you can learn how to talk shit. It's so simple DUBYA has figured it out! What is wrong with you? Let's run through it AGAIN.

STEP ONE: Say shit you can get away with. STEP TWO: Don't back down until you've gotten away with it. STEP THREE: Under no circumstances whatsoever violate Steps One and Two. STEP FOUR: Repeat until you win a fucking election.

Dick Durbin did not violate Step One when he said abuse of prisoners at Gitmo was more like Pol Pot than George Washington. Dick Durbin violated Step One because that's not how he said it. To come to Durbin's defense, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune posted the complete text of his remarks on the editorial page, so that readers could see the comments he was being criticized for in their full context.

Printing the text of his full comments took FOUR FIFTHS of a full newspaper page. Even with a big-ass picture, if you needed that much time to provide the context and the nuance, you're FUCKED. The ability of the opposing noise machine to twist your words is directly proportional to how many of them you use. It wasn't that long ago that we watched John Frankenkerry become the Election 2004 poster child for this basic concept. It should be at least as fresh in your mind as the last episode of Desperate Housewives. LEARN.

But he still could have gotten away with it. Because what he actually said was defensible. The well-worn tactic of turning his statements into an attack on our fine men and women in uniform is so fucking played out by now even the rubes are considering the possibility that they might roll their eyes at it in the near future. Stick it out! Defend yourself! Yes, it's a dangerous tactic in a party where fratricide is a pleasant way to spend the afternoon. Yes, you're opening yourself to one of your fellow Democrats pussying out and joining the chorus against you to make himself look better. Richard Daley, I'm looking at you. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"I think it's a disgrace to say that any man or woman in the military would act like that." Did I miss something? Did we not, last year, discover that quite a few men and women in the military ARE acting like that? And did we not find this out because they were taking SOUVENIR PHOTOS? For. Fuck's. Sake. Daley. There are hundreds of Republicans who are more than willing to line up to throw bullshit like that out there. And you had to cut in line and get your utterly unhelpful two cents in? Get your ass back to Chicago.

OK. So let's say you tried to tough it out, only to get PANKed in the back from your side of the dodgeball court. And you've decided to apologize, even though all that will gain you is a brief respite from the news cycle. Because no matter how much you apologize or retract, the O'Reilly's and Limbaughs and Hannities and Bow-Tied Motherfuckers of the world will treat the worst possible twisting of your words as if that was what you said. You will forever get the comma phrase ", who once compared American soldiers to Pol Pot," attached to your name. Your apology won't change that, because that's not how the game is played.

But if you're still gonna apologize, please, I beg you, I beg all of you in the Democratic party, EVEN when you apologize, apologize with some balls. Apologize like you know political expediency is dragging the words "I'm Sorry" out of you. Sincerity is not your friend, becasue nobody believes politicians even when they ARE sincere. Do not, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER, make me read another sentence like this one in an Associated Press story.

"His voice quaking and tears welling in his eyes, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate also apologized to any soldiers who felt insulted by his remarks. 'They're the best. I never, ever intended any disrespect for them,' he said." I'll tell you one thing. The Twin Cities metro area should thank its lucky stars that I didn't engage in dubious gamma-ray experiments before I read that sentence, because they'd be faced with one astronomical cleanup bill right about now.

You know why "Don't cry when you apologize" isn't one of the steps listed above? Because it's such a completely ridiculous concept that putting it in there is like printing REMOVE ITEM FROM BOX BEFORE USE on a new television. If you can't figure it out, you don't deserve to be messing with it in the first place. We simply cannot have the Democrats standing up for things one week, then bursting into tears a week later after they get yelled at for it. It's worse than not saying anything at all. It cannot happen. It's self-destructive, insane, and DUMB. But it just happened. We are so never going to win anything again ever.

Urine, Elephants, and Scientology

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 14:16:16 -0500

Main Column, 10 June 2005

It's Friday, and yes, the Topic-Monkey is once again Spastic.

I still have a lot of unanswered questions about Koran abuse at Guantanamo Bay, but the most important one is this. What kind of chickenshit operation are we running down there? The Army says one Koran got wet because guards were having a water balloon fight. And one Koran got peed on because some guard-pee got into an air vent and splashed into a cell.

You know, it's bad enough that we have an extralegal detention center where people whose guilt we're being asked to assume are held without trial for years, tortured, humiliated and abused. But goddammit, do we have to be so fucking redneck about it? Water balloon fights? What the fuck? Can't the army scare up an old Nintendo 64 or something to keep these pinheads occupied? Maybe some Van Damme DVD's? Or maybe they could go the extra mile, use some of their nationally sovereign land, and make themselves a regulation water-balloon fight arena? Come on. We're spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the war on terror, and you're telling me our brave fighting men have to have their water balloon fights in cell block hallways?

And as for the pee... OK. I am not that familiar with military protocol. As a result, I am obviously completely unfamiliar with the mechanism by which urine can accidentally make it into an air vent and, subsequently, a cell. If any of my readers happens to own a copy of Jane's Fighting Urinals and wants to scan the relevant section, I'd be grateful.

Yet another creationist can't stand being excluded from a place where science holds sway. And it's in Oklahoma! Specifically, the Tulsa Zoo, where the world's most appropriately named creationist, Dan Hicks, is trying to get a creationism display. See, the zoo has stuff on evolution, and Hicks thinks he should get equal time.

But the best part of the whole thing is how he comes to the conclusion that it should be OK. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"The Pandora's box is already open. All we're saying is if you're going to open Pandora's box and you're going to allow all these religions in, don't forbid ours."

Which certainly seems reasonable. If the Tulsa Zoo is, as Hicks claims, a rampant pantheistic smorgasboard, keeping out Christians would be mean. And wrong. And also very, very funny.

But the zoo's "allowing" of "all those other religions" consists of the following. One statue of Ganesha, and one globe inscribed "The Earth Is Our Mother". The latter is not specifically Gaian or Wiccan - it's a fricking metaphor on a stray bit of decoration. And the former? Somehow, I can't imagine the Tulsa Zoo is informing people that the elephant god is real, and that zoo visitors should make offerings to Ganesha. Yet somehow, these two items are more than enough justification for the Hicks of the world to demand their superstition be presented as fact, complete with dioramas.

And it even worked. Sorta. There's gonna be a spot for a creation exhibit at the zoo. With the caveat that whose creation myths will be represented will be included at a later date. And they're gonna make Hicks pay for it. And stick it on an empty wall somewhere. I can certanly think of a few choice locations in a zoo for a creationism exhibit.

For the record, I do not give a shit if Tom Cruise is crazy, if Katie Holmes is being sucked into Scientology, or if Mission Impossible 3 ever actually gets made. But I am curious about one little thing. When, exactly, did we decide as a society that celebrities who fuck up can make up for it by engaging in one instance of lame self-parody?

Cruise acts like a nutjob on Oprah, seemingly spontaneously. Couple of weeks later, after some bad press, he goes on Leno and, doing an obvious bit, acts like a nutjob on purpose. And somehow, ergo, he's not a nutjob. I'm sorry, I can't follow that logic. Same thing with Bush. One of his speechwriters slips a joke about how he cannot speak English into a public appearance, and hey, it's OK that he's a boob.

Sure, there are a number of situations where the ability to make fun of yourself in public is a huge help. But after the first couple of dozen times it happened on SNL, it became commodified, an exercise in every PR textbook, followed to the letter by people who don't actually know or believe what they're doing. So it doesn't fuckiing count anymore. Say what you like about Russell Crowe, but at least when he went on Letterman the other day, he wasn't chucking Styrofoam phones at Paul Shaffer.

He Almost Bashes Himself

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 14:22:58 -0500

Main Column, 1 June 2005

Memo to President Bush: YOUR TURN AGAIN.

I hate to harp on this Gitmo shit again, really I do. I'm almost as sick of writing about it as you are of reading about it. But they let the chimp out of his cage again, after two days of prepping the audience for his message, and Dubya gave the kind of command performance that usually comes out of a door in the wall on "Laugh In".

And this was, like I said, after the Dick Twins, Myers and Cheney, had carefully paved the road so that George's tricycle wouldn't hit any bumps. You see, the administration had a bit of a political problem. Amnesty International called Gitmo a "gulag". Gulag's a strong word, and we all have pretty fond memories of Amnesty International from the 80's, the last time most people paid attention to the human rights group. Hell, if it weren't for Amnesty International, the administration would have had to make shit up about how nasty Saddam Hussein was.

But now Amnesty was using the "G" word, and unlike the Downing Street Memo, the gulag line was getting some press. So first Myers (Gen. Richard, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), headed to friendly Fox News Sunday, and started throwing out some words - "absolutely irresponsible", with a nice chunk of the everyone-we-captured-is-a-barbaric-terrorist-who-would-behead-us-all-given-the-chance argument thrown in for good measure.

That didn't play great, so out came Dick Cheney, to pretend to be "offended" by the report. Which we covered yesterday. And here's also where we saw the official release of the replacement for "a few bad apples": "In nearly every case, it turns out to come from somebody who had been inside and released to their home country and now are peddling lies about how they were treated." - There's a really important verb here, by the way. See if you can spot it. We'll get to it in a bit. The line is now officially that anybody who says they were abused is lying.

Then Condi Rice, in an interview threw out "I think it's absurd language" in an interview on Sunday. So let's put the pieces together, and see where George went in his news conference today, shall we? ACTUAL CHIMP TIME!

"I'm aware of the Amnesty International report and it's absurd, it's an absurd allegation. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world. When there's accusations made about certain actions by our people, they're fully investigated in a transparent way. It's just an absurd allegation."

There's a fourth "absurd" later on. That's the word they wanted everyone to take away. They started with "irresponsible", but I bet they realized that's what they used on Newsweek all last week, so it was played out. Cheney went with "just don't take them seriously", but that's five words, and thus screws with headlines. But "absurd" is the fucking gold at the end of the thesaurus rainbow. And as for "fully investigated in a transparent way", how, exactly, does that jibe with tribunal transcripts, which the press finally got hold of after several years of FOIA requests, which include the allegations of abuse but no mention of investigation? Is that really "transparent"? Does Bush know what "transparent" means? I'll give you a hint. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

Because Amnesty based its report on released prisoners, they listened to "people who hate America, people that have been trained in some instances to disassemble, that means not tell the truth." Bush got a little extra "ass" in his "dissemble" there... you would think, if there's one subject he'd know the terminology of intimately, it'd be lying. Well, lying or skeebal.

But the thing that really perplexes me about this whole thing (other than, once again, how so many people could vote for a man who, time and time again, shows that he does not actually know what the fuck he is saying) is this. These people making the allegation. These trained disassemblers who hate America. These are the guys we let go. So either we released trained, America-hating disassemblers into the wild, OR, these are the people we picked up for doing nothing, held for two or more years, tortured, said "Sorry", and sent home. And if they didn't hate America before that, I bet they do now.

And just to hammer the point home that our President's brain would make excellent fertilizer, let me pull this bit from later in the news conference. Bush was asked if his particular diplomatic approach had led to North Korea developing nuclear weapons. I know Bush tried his diplomatic approach, and then North Korea had nuclear weapons, so I'd guess the answer is "yes", but here's what Bush said.

"It's either diplomacy or military. And I am for the diplomacy approach. And so for those who say that we ought to be using our military to solve the problem, I would say that while all options are on the table, we've got a ways to go to solve this diplomatically."

I leave it to the longtime astute reader to count the number of things that are deeply and fundamentally wrong with that statement. After the first half-dozen, my medulla oblongata ended up in a steaming puddle on the floor.

If You Fall Back, The Dicks Won't Catch You

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 12:18:57 -0500

Main Column, 31 May 2005

Memo to Government-Trusters: YOU ARE DUMB.

I don't understand people who trust the government. And I don't mean in a Unabomber, woodsy compound, gun-hoarding kind of way. Just the people in it. I like government conceptually. I think government is important, because there's a lot of stuff that needs doing that won't get done if it's left up to the free market. But the people who run it? Come on.

Discarding ideology and party affiliation (I only sorta trusted Paul Wellstone, and only when I didn't think about DOMA too hard), and setting aside for the moment the issues of corruption and self-serving fuckery, the very nature and complexity of government, combined with humanity's innate tendency to cover its own ass, makes for a severe grain of salt shortage.

For example. I don't trust Dick Cheney. Even if he weren't an evil little troll of a man, I wouldn't trust him when he said, of Amnesty International accusing the US of human rights abuses: "Frankly, I was offended by it.". You know why? Because by the time you've been in the system, and played the game long enough to become vice fucking president, I don't care if you're Al Gore, Spiro Agnew, or Elbridge Gerry. It is physically, mentally, and emotionally impossible for you to be offended that easily.

This whole Gitmo/Ghraib/torture/abuse/etcetera bullshit requires people to trust their government to a degree not even remotely borne out by history, frankly. It starts right at the beginning.

Do you trust that all the "enemy combatants" detained by the US government are in fact enemy combatants who'd taken up arms against our country? Did you have that trust before or after they released dozens of them after years in prison because they didn't do anything? You have to trust them, because the system they've set up has virtually nothing in the way of transparency. They will not tell you what they are doing. They will not let you watch. They will not utilize the systems put in place to reassure us, falsely or otherwise, that at least a modicum of justice is present. Do you trust that they're doing this for good and just reasons? Do you trust that they can successfully police themselves?

General Richard Myers, another Dick, defended Gitmo against the Amnesty International meanies thusly: "The ICRC has been at Guantanamo since Day One." This is an excellent defense. The International Committee of the Red Cross monitors prisoner treatment, and isn't affiliated with government. All this defense needs to be absolutely perfect, in fact, is forgetting that we've been caught, and admitted to HIDING DOZENS OF DETAINEES FROM THE RED CROSS. Still trust the government? Hm.

This is the government that felt it had a need to examine the legal definition of "torture" and the extent to which the Geneva Convention actually applied to the people it was grabbing. But it's OK, 'cause they said they'd follow the rules whether they applied or not. Makes you wonder why they cared whether the rules applied if they were going to follow them anyway, unless, of course, you trust the government.

Another bit of odd behavior from people who are trustworthy - using shitty arguments to settle a point on the "sounds good" level rather than the "is actually right" level. Back to Cheney. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME:

For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don't take them seriously. Just in this administration, we've liberated 50 million people from the Taliban in Afghanistan and from Saddam Hussein in Iraq, two terribly repressive regimes that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of their own people." - See, the thing is, Cheney would like you to believe that these two things are somehow mutually exclusive. And it sounds good. But what it boils down to is "We overthrow brutal dictators, therefore we cannot possibly have violated anybody's human rights."

Cheney smartly limited America's great tyranny-fighting history to the 20th century, but our strong anti-dictator stance (which also assumes we've succesfully kicked the Taliban out of Afghanistan, but anyway.) didn't keep us from violating the rights of thousands of Japanese-Americans in World War II. Now, we all (well, except Michelle Malkin) look back and see that as a bad thing, but at the time, it was OK, because, well, people trusted the government.

It's especially stupid, considering that our whole system was set up by the Founding Fathers, who strike me as a bunch of cynical guys who didn't trust the government. That's why we have the abundance of checks and balances. Oversight. Transparency. The more people you have looking at a situation, the greater the odds one of them might have a fucking shred of principle left. It's not perfect, but anyone actively trying to circumvent that system really shouldn't be trusted, no matter how many times they ask you to.

What We Fought For

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 12:23:38 -0500

Main Column, 30 May 2005

Ah, Memorial Day.

Since nobody's working today, nobody's reading the column. Not that I actively resent the fact that you only swing by to distract yourselves from your day-to-day drudgery - all providers of free Internet content must make themselves quite comfortable with their productivity-ruining nature. But it does mean I can say whatever I want, and as long as there's something else in this space tomorrow, you won't even notice.

But since it's Memorial Day, the day in which we honor the millions who've died for our country - fighting global tyranny, annexing foreign lands, unnecessarily fighting the forces of communism in the jungle, or making sure Dubya got a second term - let's take a moment and see how well we're using the freedom we spent all those lives on.

Judith and Jeff Landreth decided to use their freedom to send a stupid letter to the newspaper. In it, they ask: "Does Newsweek magazine understand the damage it has done to our sons and daughters serving in Afghanistan and Iraq?". Whatever hole they live in must have a very impressive, advanced Knowledge Osmosis Filter on top of it, because they managed to learn that Newsweek had allegedly done something wrong, but failed to grok that Newsweek had its facts right.

They continue. "Does it even give a thought to the harm it has inflicted on our troops and on our country?" I guarantee you they gave more of a thought than Lynndie England did. But that's just me. Oh, and Newsweek had its facts right, in case I hadn't mentioned it. Or in case I had, since it apparently bears repeating. Any other words, oh wise Landreths of Bloomington, home of the Mall of America, Ikea, and thickies with matching initials?

"In our view, Newsweek and other news media outlets lack honesty and integrity in their reporting to the point of treason." - Well, if getting your facts right means being guilty of treason, then at least the Landreths will never find themselves guilty of THAT crime. Just the crime of idiocy.

And speaking of crimes, I can't tell what our fine men and women fought and died for. Did they fight so that moms could hire strippers for their sixteen-year-old sons, or did they fight to bring the mom up on charges as a result? Let's just say they fought so that Tennessee could be Tennessee, and leave it at that. Because really, isn't that bad enough?

On the one hand, how sexually repressed are we again, that we have to charge a mother with "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" when she brings her son a naked dancing lady for his birthday? How, exactly, does that contribute to his delinquency? Nashville police spokesman Ron Aaron explained that since minors aren't allowed in strip clubs, "a person shouldn't be allowed to circumvent that law by hiring a stripper, a lady who took all her clothes off and spent a good amount of time dancing around minors." - It seems to me that by bypassing the strip club, you bypass most of the actual delinquency - the booze, the smoke, and the people you're likely to find in a Nashville titteria.

Oh, and I know he spends most of his time around people who live in Tennessee, but I think even there, they don't need the police to actually define the word "stripper". We'll probably be able to manage on an etymological basis without Ron Aaron's comma clauses, thanks.

Unfortunately, every last shred of sympathy I might have for the mom in question, Anette Pharris, is sucked away by the incredible white-trash quotient of the whole sordid affair. Mom is 34, son is 16. So doing the math, there's a fair amount of family tradition involving naked women and the teen years. Second, just hiring a stripper for a birthday party in the first place, if you'll pardon my East coast liberal elitism for a second, is just fucking tacky. The kid's sixteen. It's not like he needs help masturbating.

But mostly, at the end of the day, it's how she got caught. She took pictures. Of the stripper. At the party. And took them to the drug store to get them developed. And the drug store busybodies turned them in. There are only two kinds of people working in drug store photo labs - the kind who make copies, and the kind who call coppies. And you don't want to bring your titty film to either one. That's why God invented the charge-coupled device, folks. Even in Tennessee, you should be able to get a cheap digital camera for a fraction of the price of a stripper housecall. Or at least I assume. My knowledge of consumer electronics pricing is a lot deeper than the economics of girlflesh - probably because that's what I got for my sixteenth birthday. And nobody got arrested.

Living In The Past

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 14:00:24 -0500

Main Column, 26 May 2005

Memo to The Previously Dumb: YOU'RE STILL DUMB.

Every once in a while, I like to check in with people, institutions, or stories I've covered in recent weeks. As amazing as I am, I can never cover the entire story, but at the same time, usually the revisiting process doesn't fill up the space you all have become accustomed to.

Our friend Jim West is in a bit more trouble again. Apparently, the longtime opponent of gay rights, closeted homosexual, and lover of young boys was so incredibly bad at being closeted that it's a wonder he got away with it for as long as he did.

According to statesenator Pam Roach, back around 1990, when her 18-year-old son was working as a Capitol tour guide, "Go" West came up to her and uttered the following: ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"I want to do to your son what no mother would want to know."

To quote the famous seven foot tall blue sage, that is icky to infinity. Not to mention the fact that if no mother would want to know, why is he TELLING THE BOY'S MOTHER?! I'll say this for Republicans, though. They've got that party loyalty thing down cold. When a creepy middle-aged fellow GOPer tells you he sure would love to fuck your teenage son, and it takes you FIFTEEN YEARS to take your story public, I bet Karl Rove sends you a plaque and an LL Bean gift certificate.

Oh, yeah. Newsweek. Mentioned it yesterday. Yelled at 'em last week. Backed down from a story that said an investigation was due to be released that included allegations that we desecrated Qur'ans in Gitmo, even flushing one in a toilet. Spent a week as the media's Rodney King to the administration's LAPD, then vanished off the radar in favor for the filibuster mess over the weekend. You remember.

So, um, yeah. Turns out that yesterday afternoon, the ACLU released an investigation. By the FBI. And, um, the report included some allegations. A little something about desecration of some holy book or other. Something about a toilet. Something about flushing. Plus the usual stuff about beatings, sexual humiliation, etc. you know. Rush Limbaugh's "hazing".

So the magazine that spent all week humbling itself before the Mighty Bush for being wrong, inciting riots, and putting American lives in danger because of their anonymously-sourced paragraph was, it turns out, entirely correct. Funny how that shit works out, isn't it? You know what else'll be funny? If we all keep a nice close eye on the news coverage of this revelation, and the White House's response to it, as both fill every cynical, jaded, depressing prediction we've all been conditioned to be able to make. Let's all share a hearty chuckle, shall we?

Now, I know Tim Pawlenty doesn't read this column. It's statistically improbable and sociologically unlikely. I understand this. And I had fun making a little joke about him starting to use YAD-lite terminology like "profoundly stupid". But now it's just getting creepy.

Last Friday, Pawlenty got on the Legislature's case for not getting anything done. Technically, they did actually get some stuff done, but he didn't like it, because they forgot to cross out the word "taxes" and write the word "fees" above it in crayon. They didn't give Pawlenty what Pawlenty wanted, prompting Pawlenty to ask: "How dumb can they be?"

I knew I should have finished that trademark application last month.

But it doesn't stop there. Apparently Pawlenty wants to jump on the neologistic bandwagon, too. He coined a new term for the amount of work Democrats had done on transportation over the past fifteen years. "SQUATSKI". It's like seeing a baby eagle take its first, shaky steps to the edge of the nest, then, upon coaxing from its mother, leaping into the sky, only to get sucked into the jet engine of a low-flying plane. "Squatski". Jesse could get away with shit like that, because Jesse was a personality. Governor Timmeh, not so much. Pawlenty desperately needs to find a new way of grandstanding that doesn't make him look like your grandfather singing along to "Baby Got Back".

Brooks And Dumb

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 14:01:14 -0500

Main Column, 25 May 2005

Memo to David Brooks: YOU ARE DUMB.

The only thing more annoying than an extremist is an extremist who tries to seem like a moderate. Especially when it's done as a Stupid Pundit Trick, like what David Brooks pulled last Friday in his syndicated newspaper column.

You may remember Friday as the last day anyone gave a shit about the Newsweek thing. It was the last day anyone gave a shit about the Newsweek thing because, well, the powers that be have gotten their full mileage out of bashing the magazine, and can now just store it away as a cheap-shot reference for rallies to get a Stepford laugh out fo the faithful.

But on Friday, we still gave a shit about Newsweek. And David Brooks gave such a shit about Newsweek that he devoted his entire column to pretending he didn't care about Newsweek. Attempting to position himself as a common-folk moderate, Brooks proceeded to detail why both the right and the left were wrong about Newsweek. Which seems reasonable, but the asshole is in the details.

Now, I understand the value of the strawman. I'm not even above using them... on occasion. As shorthand. Sometimes showing the work that gets you from Point A to Point B is long and dull, so you make the jump and hope people follow along. But it needs to be sparing, it needs to be mostly accurate, and most importantly, it shouldn't be completely fucking blatant. If it stands out like a Borg in Amish country, you're doing it wrong. David Brooks was doing it wrong.

He starts off by saying the right was wrong to say Newsweek did what it did because it was "liberal". And he then quotes two right-wing bloggers who specifically say that Newsweek is evil and liberal. And then he turns to the left. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Meanwhile, the left side of the blogosphere has erupted with fury over the possibility that American interrogators might not have flushed a Quran down the toilet. The Nation and leftish Web sites are in a frenzy to prove that the story is probably true even if Newsweek is retracting it. This, too, is unhinged. Would it be illegal for more people on the left to actually be happy that a story slurring Americans may turn out to be unproven? Could there be a few more liberals willing to admit that prisoners routinely lie about their treatment?"

If you look carefully, you can spot the actual point at which the dick merges with the head to form DICKHEAD MEGAZORD. No actual quotes. No actual points addressed. Blatant characterization ("In a frenzy!") creating the left's position out of whole cloth. We liberals desperately want AMERICA to be wrong. We can't be happy that AMERICA hasn't been slurred. Not the interregators that engaged in the abuse. Not the government that paved the way for the abuse. We're mad at America, you see. We're the blame America first crowd, after all. Fuck that noise. I'm part of the "blame the fuckups when they fuck up, regardless of their citizenship" crowd.

And then he twisted the knife, doing exactly what I said a week ago these fuckers would do with the Newsweek story. Use it to generally discredit ALL the stories of abuse, which, in Brooks' world, come from lying prisoners. And in foul, bitter irony, Brooks published his bullshit the same day the news got out that in Afghanistan, our troops pulverized an innocent Afghani cab driver's legs and hung him from the ceiling until he died. Another prisoner had died six days earlier. It's taken two years to even charge anyone in the deaths, and the track record on convictions and punishment in these cases has not been stellar.

But none of this matters to Brooks, who knows the real reason why the Afghan people are angry.

"Newsweek's little item was seized and exploited by America's enemies in a way that was characteristically cynical, delusional and fascistic... they believe everything that could be alleged about America and more. They've spent so many years inhabiting a delusional mental landscape filled with conspiracy theories and paranoia that you could drill deep into their minds without ever touching reality."

According to Brooks, then, the left and the right need to stop bickering about Newsweek, and focus on the enemy that really matters - the crazy brown people who are only enraged because they've been whipped into a psychotic frenzy of hate by their manipulative, lying leaders.

So, you know. If we can get past that color thing, maybe we can find common ground with them after all.

Oh, Something Got Flushed, All Right

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 14:07:14 -0500

Main Column, 16 May 2005

Memo to Newsweek: YOU AREN'T HELPING.

Tell you what. Why not just hand the entire fucking magazine over to the administration, wrapped in a pretty little bow. Did you not learn Thing One from CBS and Memogate? Every fuckup is a weapon in their hands, a weapon that allows them to dismiss the essentially true with the specifically false. Yes, Bush was negligent, borderline AWOL in his National Guard service. Anyone looking at the giant pile of evidence came to that conclusion. But since the audience can't be bothered to look at a pile of evidence, CBS got fed a nice, succinct, one-page bit of easily-digested "proof", got sloppy, ran it, got caught, and as a result, Memogate is used to refute the entire case that Bush was a pampered little puss who got the same treatment as all the other rich white sons of the Vietnam era.

And now, Newsweek. A week ago, Newsweek ran a small story about abuses at Guantanamo Bay. Now, anyone with a pair of working eyeballs* knows that there's a giant pile of filthy, filthy stuff happening under United States supervision. Whether it's Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, or a pot of boiling water in Uzbekistan where we happened to send some prisoners, we are up to our fucking necks in what the more evenminded might call "aggressive interrogation techniques".

And one of the abuses, a real barnburner, in the Newsweek story was that interrogators at Gitmo were setting copies of the Qur'an on toilets, and in one case, flushed a copy down the toilet. As an atheist, the closest thing I have to a "holy book" is a beat-up copy of "Billy and the Boingers", so I can't exactly identify with the emotions involved, but I'm told that to many devout Muslims, this is worse than pointing at their genitals with a shit-eating grin on your face.

The Army, who's softpedaled a lot of the abuse allegations, said this was unthinkable, beyond the pale, and would look into it immediately. A horrified people, learning of the news, spilled their anger into the streets. Not here, of course. Here, people barely noticed, becuase nobody gives a shit how we abuse or torture the people around whose necks we've hung "ENEMY" signs. But in Afghanistan, they were mighty pissed. And Newsweek's circulation there is considerably smaller, which gives you a nice benchmark as to how fucking apathetic and lazy we are here.

There wer riots. And deaths. Up to 17 deaths from the riots, in fact. Finally, I thought, our combination of ruthlessness and cultural imperialism had come and bit us on the ass. We'd finally gone far enough that at least SOMEONE in the world noticed and gave a crap, and were making enough noise that at least some of us had to pay attention.

And then Newsweek had to back off its story, and once again, we're fucked. Seems the confidential, reliable source Newsweek relied upon is now backing down from the "they flushed Qur'ans" claim, which means Newsweek is backing down from it's "they flushed Qur'ans" claim, and that means, from now on, every single time someone puts out a story out about Guantanamo abuses, the first fucking thing out of Hannity's mouth, out of Limbaugh's gob, out of Alan Keyes' crazyspout, is gonna be, "Yeah, and they said they were flushing books too, and look what happened with THAT".

It's incredibly, mindbogglingly convenient for them. After nearly four years of the right-wing echo machine's insistence that stories critical of US policy embolden the enemy and endanger our troops, here comes a story critical of US policy that may have caused** rioting, endangers US troops, and kills fifteen Afghan citizens. And mark my words, the caring gap on the right between these seventeen Afghanis and the hundreds of others who've died will make Snake River Canyon look like one square in hopscotch. It's so convenient, in fact, that it stinks of a setup.

And if it IS a setup, then, well, Newsweek doesn't get let off the goddamn hook, because part of the job description is NOT GETTING SET UP. Sources with their own agendas ain't a new phenomenon. It's one of the cardinal booby traps of investigative journalism. So either Newsweek were fools, or were played for fools, and any chance of the tide in this country actually turning against barbarism and torture just took another two steps back. Because Newsweek was dumb. Thanks, guys.

*Some of you are laughing at this, and can fuck right off.

**There's some question about how much of the Afghani anger is actually Newsweek-related, and how much of it is generalized anger at how much things suck, but we all know how it's gonna be presented, don't we?

Defenders Of The Indefensible, Redux

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 13:35:18 -0500

Main Column, 13 January 2005

Memo to Legal Defenders of the Indefensible: YOU ARE BASTARDS.

Time to check in once again with the magical, wonderful world of human rights abuse! I know it's kind of a heavy subject, what with our government repeatedly violating its deepest principles and all. Don't worry. Tomorrow we'll talk more about Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, and it'll be just like the National Enquirer with Tourette's Syndrome. But for now, we have to talk about prisoner abuse.

You see, a couple of high-profile Iraqi abuse trials have come up lately - one finished, one ongoing, and in case you were still wondering if the military court system was going to restore its tarnished image by meting out justice, you can stop worrying.

Meet Sergeant Tracy Perkins. Tracy Perkins gave an order. That order was to push two Iraqi prisoners into a rushing river. One came out. One didn't.

Sgt. Perkins will serve six months in military prison and be demoted one rank for aggravated assault, battery, and obstructing justice. Crimes which carry a potential penalty of dishonorable discharge and 11 and a half years in prison. But Sgt. Perkins will serve six months.

Although Perkins did not admit to giving the order, he did admit to giving an identical order for a different prisoner months before. The defense consisted, apparently, of the following: The LAST time Perkins threw a guy into the river, to teach him a "harsh lesson" about making threatening gestures at soldiers, the guy survived. Also, Perkins is a great guy who's won awards. So he gets six months. Actual quote time.

"Basically the enemy would test your resolve. ... I didn't want them to think we were soft or weak." So he chucked them in a river. Because of the possibility his victim might have survived, even though he hasn't turned up and there's a body in his grave, Perkins was acquitted of manslaughter. So a military jury gave him six months, after hearing statements like this from one of his commanding officers:

"I will always consider him a war hero. ... No one can ever take away his outstanding service over there." - Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman, whose definition of heroism differs from mine in that mine doesn't actually include chucking unarmed prisoners into rushing rivers to teach them a lesson.

We still don't know what's going to happen to Army reservist Charles Graner. You probably don't know Graner by name, but you may recall him standing behind a pyramid of naked Iraqis with a shit-eating grin on his face. When not abusing prisoners, Graner spent his spare time slinging one up Lynndie England, whose name you probably DO know, because she pointed at the prisoners while she smiled and is also a girl. It's nice to know that despite all the bad things to come out of Abu Ghraib, there was still a hint of romance in the air.

Graner's defense is, in part, that he was ordered to do these things by higher-ups, which is very probably true. But it's not much of a defense, so his lawyers have concentrated on minimizing Graner's actions to such an obscene extent that they should be brought up on charges for abusing our sensibilities. Guy Womack, it's your turn on the Actual Quote Time stand:

"Don't cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year? Is that torture?" - Maybe not, but I bet if the cheerleaders were stripped naked and forced to make a pyramid, for the first time, at gunpoint, there'd be some harsh fucking words about it at the next school board meeting. In order to prove his appalling case that the pyramid was a "very creative technique", and that putting prisoners on leashes was OK because "In Texas we'd lasso them and drag them out of there," Womack relied on such expert witnesses as Thomas Archambault.

Archambault, whose last name is French for "to settle a dispute by repeated kicks to the testicles", is a former police officer who now consults professionally. Which carries with it all sorts of fun implications. He defended Graner thusly:

"Based on the stress these soldiers had gone through, a filthy stinking environment and the fact these prisoners killed American soldiers, I think I would have done the same thing. - At which point, in my magic fantasy perfect world, he was placed in handcuffs and taken away for psychiatric evaluation.

But sadly, Archambault's completely insane statement (which was also a lie, as most of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib hadn't done anything wrong, much less murder Americans) didn't sound out of the ordinary. Sounds eerily familiar, actually. Sounds a lot like what was said when the pictures were on our televisions, when Rush and Hannity and O'Reilly and Coulter and the rest were telling us the soldiers were just "blowing off steam", that it was no worse than a fraternity prank, that it was just these seven bad apples in that one place, and that no matter how bad it was, some terrorists were beheading people, so that makes it all O.K.

And we'll find out in a few weeks if the Army thinks that really does make it all O.K. Or, like Tracy Perkins, at least ninety-three percent O.K.

Free Room And Board For Life!

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 13:43:26 -0500

Main Column, 3 January 2005

Memo to the American Public: YOU MAKE IT SO EASY.

For those of you who were wondering how long that spirit of new possibilities, of a change for the better, of basic human hope would last into the new year, the answer is... about 24 hours. That's how long it took for the bastards to drop their latest floater into the news hole.

The "news hole" is a wonderful artifact of modern times. It used to be that a politician would get in trouble when something horrible they did, or planned to do, came to light. So they worked hard to keep it from coming to light, usually causing more problems in the process. Our primary referent here is of course Richard Nixon, who got caught and got caught covering up what he first got caught at. We all thought the same thing was gonna happen to Clinton, but a funny thing happened. People stopped giving a fuck.

Thus, the News Hole began to form. The goal now is not to -not get caught-, but rather to get caught when nobody's paying attention. If you manage that, in a couple of days, something else will happen, and nobody will follow up on the shit you got caught doing. The news hole starts on Friday afternoon. People don't watch the news on weekends. So you get it out there late Friday/early Saturday, spin it on the Sunday morning shows, and by Monday, Anna Nicole Smith's life will have taken another astonishing turn and you're off the hook. The only thing better than a weekend is a holiday weekend, and the only thing better than a holiday weekend is a weekend where the people who ARE watching the news are hoping to see more footage of giant tidal waves.

Case in point. On Sunday, the Washington Post revealed that the government is considering hanging on to its terrorism detainees. FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES. Freedom must be on the march, because it's getting harder and harder to find around here. These are people they've already been holding for years. People who, until a couple of court challenges from outside, weren't allowed to see a lawyer. People the government freely admits they couldn't convict in a real court. And now they want to keep them forever officially, instead of just hanging on to them until we forget they exist.

It's not just a bad idea, it's like they took a bunch of bad ideas that have already gone tits-up and rolled them into one. See, first, they'd build a replacement for Guantanamo Bay, a 200-bed prison called "Camp 6", which doesn't sound ominous AT ALL. Thank goodness there's no historical precedent for a culture with numbered POW camps doing things they shouldn't. In addition to Camp 6, they'll also be setting up prisons in foreign countries that the US would administrate.

And as we all know, nobody's better at administering foreign prisons than the United States! Sure, there may be a shortage of black hoods for a while, but you abuse human rights with the military you have, not the military you wish you had. For more on the exciting reasoning behind this brilliant plan, we turn to Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman, who despite his fine choice of first name, is about to become the first ACTUAL QUOTE TIME of 2005!

"Since global war on terror is a long-term effort, it makes sense for us to be looking at solutions for long-term problems. This has been evolutionary, but we are at a point in time where we have to say, 'How do you deal with them in the long term?"

There IS a system to deal with them long term. It's called the courts. Hell, there's even an international one we haven't joined because, well, we pull shit like this on a regular basis these days. Just because the courts won't give you a result you like doesn't mean it doesn't fucking exist.

Luckily, for such an egregious violation of our national "principles", the opposition has prepared a strong response. Why, Dick Luger, a Republican, said it was a "bad idea"! And Democrat Carl Levin drew this line in the sand.

"There must be some modicum, some semblance of due process." That's the fire, the passion, that has been missing fromt he Democratic Party! Finally, a Democrat stands up for what he believes in - a SEMBLANCE OF DUE PROCESS.

But few will see Carl Levin giving lip service to the idea of giving lip service to human rights, thanks to the News Hole. As of this writing, the plan to lock up brown people for life without evidence or trial has been covered approximately one tenth as heavily as the Rams-Jets game. Why, if I weren't filled with the warm glow of New Year's hope, I'd almost suspect my fellow Americans had their priorities completely fucked.

Giving Up: The Ghosts

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 10:49:52 -0500

Main Column, 13 September 2004

Memo to Donald Rumsfeld and the CIA: GOOD THING WE'RE DUMB.

Back in the 80's, in Central America, there was a term. This term described people snatched by the government, taken prisoner, and never seen again. No lawyers, no family, no official acknowledgement from the government that they were in custody. They were "the disappeared". This was the tool of brutal dictators with no regard for human rights.

Today, we have a new word. "ghost detainees". We've discussed this here before. It's when someone is snatched by the government, taken prisoner, never seen again, denied access to lawyers and family, and there's no official acknowledgement that they were ever taken. The difference between "the disappeared" and "ghost detainees" is that the latter is apparently the tool of First World republics, not Third World dictatorships.

Actually, now that I think about it, there's a second difference. When people were "disappeared", it was widely considered a deplorable thing to do, and was roundly denounced by all civilized people. Groups like Amnesty International were listened to by the press and public. Whereas the United States can freely admit to having held up to 100 "ghost detainees" in custody, hiding them from the Red Cross, and the media and public are still fucking around with swift boats and poring over PDF'ed memos with a fine-toothed comb.

The United States has admitted to war crimes and human rights violations numbering in the triple digits, and everyone who should be giving a fuck is farting around trying to determine which models of IBM typewriter could make superscripts. The CIA is mimicking the worst aspects of the fucking KGB! There was a time when this would have been considered, oh, I don't know, IMPORTANT when it was revealed to the public. But not now, apparently.

I mean, I distinctly remember a month or two ago, commenting on how obscene and ridiculous it was when it was ONE ghost detainee, and how I could not believe that people were getting away with it. Little did I know what they were getting away with And continue to get away with. This came out, by the way, as part of the Abu Ghraib investigation. You remember that, right? That thing that was just "a few bad apples" and some "fraternity pranks" according to the right-wing echobox, that in fact was the whole fucking barrel, the guys who loaded the barrel, the quys who built the barrel, the guys who ordered the barrel to be built... and that's just what the military said after investigating ITSELF.

Luckily for us, the Rumsfeld Doctrine is pioneering new ground in moral relativism. According to the Rumsfield Doctrine, as long as something anywhere is even slightly worse, there's no need to get too worked up about a few electrocuted genitals, disappeared brown people, or murders.

"Has it been harmful to our country? Yes. Is it something that has to be corrected? Yes,'' he said. ''Does it rank up there with chopping off someone's head off on television? It doesn't. It doesn't." Rumsfield, explaining his Doctrine to the docile sheep of the United States press corps, who dutifully reported the statements verbatim to a nation full of sessile fucksponges who soaked it up and felt better about themselves because they didn't cut anyone's head off on live television today.

Set aside the polls for a second. Forget Vietnam. Forget lying about Vietnam, even. There are real, actual reasons to hate the fuckers that are running things, and real, actual reasons to at the very least be deeply disappointed in the people running against them who are also saying nothing. We have disappeared 100 people, and not only is there no uproar, no apology, or even more than a half-hearted COVERUP, it's not even a fucking campaign issue.

I swear, I'm starting to think we DESERVE four more years of this. Well, not me. And obviously not most of the readers of this space. But the country in general. Maybe, with another term in office, people can stop following POLITICS long enough to notice what the actual GOVERNMENT is up to. Discard their blind party loyalties and the yammering of right-center versus far-right for long enough to notice what we are becoming. The only thing that keeps me from adopting this worldview wholeheartedly is the sinking suspicion that it would not work, and after four extra years of war crimes and bullshit and a ruling class with complete contempt for 95% of the population they're allegedly accountable to, we'd still be on our asses, the polls would still be 50/50, and three quarters of us would still be sitting November out. Because we're deeply, deeply, DEEPLY fucking dumb.