Psych Out

“Today we are faced with the pre-eminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together in the same world, at peace.”
FDR 1945--his last speech, prepared but never delivered.

"Nowadays particularly, the world hangs on a thin thread....We are the great danger.  The psyche is the great danger.  What if something goes wrong with the psyche?  And so it is demonstrated to us in our days what the power of psyche is, how important it is to know something about it.  But we know nothing about it. Nobody would give credit to the idea that the psychical processes of the ordinary man had any importance whatever."
C. G. Jung
interview in English, 1957

Professional psychology in its current form has taken some withering hits lately.  In July there was the report that revealed (in the words of the Washington Post story) "Leaders of the American Psychological Association secretly collaborated with officials at the Pentagon and CIA to weaken the association’s ethical guidelines and allow psychologists to take part in coercive interrogation programs after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a report released Friday."  

It was asserted years ago, and more recently proven, that several psychologists helped torturers during the Bush administration.   This report showed that such psychologists were highly influential in the organization.  But after this report was issued, the APA did not apologize, but defended what it did. Eventually it cleaned house and passed a binding resolution forbidding its members to do anything outside international law.

In August another study made news when a group of psychologists attempted to replicate 100 previously published psychological studies, and most of the time could not.  Their conclusions couldn't be proved, or they were overstated.

This is a kind of internal failure, within contemporary psychology's own assumptions and rules.  These failures were attributed in various technical ways as well as the inflation of results for gain and fame.  Some of the technicalities, other scientists claim, apply to all kinds of medical and other scientific research, so that most research findings are dubious.

But contemporary psychology's bullshit factor is so high for other reasons, many of which are identified by the eminent psychologist Jerome Kagan in his remarkable and predictably ignored 2012 book, Psychology's Ghosts.  Some of the established and therefore repeated mistakes are the failure to recognize and consider context (class, culture, situation) and the hidden biases that define healthy and unhealthy.

For example, Kagan writes: "Too many papers assume that a result found with forty white undergraduates at a Midwestern university responding to instructions appearing on a computer screen in a small, windowless room would be affirmed if participants were fifty-year-old South Africans administered the same procedure by a neighbor in a larger room in a familiar church in Capetown.”

This is not drollery: American university students of European background were the main subjects for more than 2/3 of the papers published in six leading journals between 2003 and 2007. There are usually a small number of participants, yet universal conclusions are offered.

In my review of this book, I add a corollary factor from my own experience: how the participants are chosen, and what that means.  I offer as an example the famous Yale Miligram experiments that purports to prove that people will obey authority figures to the point of causing painful shocks to others. Accidentally in New Haven at the time, I inquired about participating in what I'm pretty sure was one of those early experiments, but I ultimately refused.  Why I was interested, and why I refused suggests other factors that seem to cast questions on these conclusions, and to my mind invalidate them.

In these ways, psychology seems to invalidate itself as a science.  (Some believe that all of the so-called social sciences are pseudo-sciences.)  Psychology's attempt to measure behavior in order to predict it or modify it (often with drugs) is a failed and pernicious project.  It is based in part on trying to ape the methods of so-called hard sciences, depending on experiments and so-called controlled studies and deductions.  Why this doesn't work for anything as complex as human beings was eloquently explained, off-the-cuff, by the late great Jane Jacobs.  Basically, science can deal with just a few variables, and not with connections.  Science and psychology as they are predominantly practiced, deal with averages and quantities.

What contemporary psychology ignores is the psyche.  That just never comes up.  There's the brain and there's behavior.  The mechanism and the output.  It's either falsely mechanistic or falsely quantitative.

The psychology of Jung has been left behind and forgotten.  But it applies to individuals, not averages or quantities, not mechanisms.  In his own inductive science, through seeing patients and through introspection, Jung created conceptual tools that can help people examine and understand themselves enough to make their own changes in behavior.

Some of these tools I explored in the series on this site called The Climate Inside.  Concepts like the shadow, projection, denial, that individuals can use to examine their own psyches and behavior (with or without professional help), and come to their own conclusions. But today even more than in 1957, "no one gives credit to the idea that the psychical processes of the ordinary man had any importance whatever."

Today's psychology is about treating humans as machines.  Most often as computers, "hard-wired" (often by Evolution) and fixable through tricks or drugs. Machines can only be altered from the outside.  But we are not hard-wired (there are no "wires" for a start), any more than our brains are telephone exchanges, or clocks, or our bodies are dynamos--all dominant metaphors of past ages.

Psyche is another word for soul.  Jung saw it as unfathomable, but we could learn something about it--not just from science but from untold centuries of stories and dreams, including the great cultural dreams called myth.  From the arts and humanities, and from minds that make the arrogant and often naive pronouncements of today's psychologists just so much simplistic nonsense.

There's a reason psychologists were so eager to sell out to government torturers--that's a very big client, and today's psychology is all about clients.  It's so obvious from the level of research that they are all about providing information on behavior and how to manipulate it for advertising, marketing and less subtle forms of persuasion and manipulation.  It's clearly a short walk to the best ways to inflict pain.  Today's psychology has no soul.  

Yet here we are, at a time when it is crucial for us to understand ourselves--without a psychology worthy of the name.

Throne of Cards

As we sampled one of the latest hits in the ongoing so-called Golden Age of Television, I finally realized what these shows have in common: a very old form, born in radio but a staple of television for decades.

The soap opera.

That's basically what Game of Thrones, House of Cards, Mad Men, even Dowton Abbey, and the one we most regrettably watched, The Blacklist, all are: soap operas, with large casts of extreme characters to which seemingly random but extreme things are done in the course of many episodes.  With no reason other than to shock, and create new storylines.

 Mad Men and Dowton Abbey most obviously fall into the category, since their sturm und drang is basically domestic and workplace related, like the daytime soaps.  The others however (and all their close relatives) may be less obvious, because they center on specific worlds, like Washington politics or police, FBI, CIA etc.  And they are incredibly violent.

 They may have elements of thrillers, and resemble latter day Grand Guignol but like soap operas they emphasize sensationalistic grabbers to keep you watching for the next episode, dangling questions and subjecting characters to the most extreme fates, repeatedly. (This sounds like melodrama, but technically melodrama pits good against evil.  These shows don't.  Everybody is more or less evil.)

 Almost by definition, soap operas have no actual center or spine or reason for being, no actual story to tell.  They exist to keep on going, keep people watching and talking, whatever it takes.  Plausibility, let alone integrity, just don't figure in.

The Blacklist stars James Spader, who I've been watching since Sex, Lies and Videotape, and loved in Boston Legal.  But this series is nothing less than a sadomasochistic soap opera, with no discernible purpose other than to light up Twitter with its latest twisted twist.

After seeing the pilot and first four episodes and vowing never to see another, I nevertheless read the plot descriptions on Wikipedia of every episode so far (two years worth; it's been renewed for a third season.) It all becomes quite clear. Spader's character murders somebody in just about every episode.  The female lead (an FBI agent; there's also a badass female CIA agent) is tortured, and tortures people, including her husband, though they later get back together. (?--but why bother...)  One of the key characters is diagnosed with a terminal illness, and then he isn't. A new villain is introduced for each story, each more inventively and horrifically evil than the last. No one is who they say they are, everyone betrays everyone, there is no moral center to any of it.

I'm aware that my response may to some degree be related to age as well as taste.  I also resent all the articles offered on the Internet that are headlined "Shows We Love" or "why we like" etc.--assuming a hive mind "we" on almost any subject.  That the kind of action that appears on these shows every week just doesn't happen in the real world (the multiple times that heavily armed men waylay FBI convoys, kill lots of people and make off with somebody in custody--how many times has that happened in America?  How about never? Is never good for you?) --this is part of the postmodern pleasure for some I suppose.  It just pisses me off.

But I do think it is worse than that.  Though it may express a pervasive anxiety in viewers, it also creates that anxiety big time, which bleeds into anxiety about the real world.  Everyone on the street becomes a potential psycho-killer terrorist or sadistic, super-intelligent serial killer.  All done with the purpose of manipulating viewers, which is apparently what passes for innocence in Hollywood.

  Though the intention may be just ordinary cynical manipulation for ratings, the worldview that gets expressed is fascistic.  Various excesses by "law enforcement" on various levels is a staple of every such show, to varying degrees, which makes real world police excesses less of a mystery.

 But shows like The Blacklist (the name itself defiles the name of an historically significant and actually fascistic phenomenon and time in America) promote torture, first by showing it as a regular investigative tool, and by suggesting that it works in extracting good information, which of course is its justification.  That's not debated, it's part of these shows. (That this show is a child of 24 is obvious even if you don't know that the producers' first choice for the lead was Keifer Sutherland.)

This portrait of torture is wrong factually, not to mention morally. How many times did it work in the war on terror?  Check the studies and it's never.  Is never good for you?  It seems the Bush administration really isn't over.  It's alive and well in the Golden Age of Television.

That honorific was previously given to TV's earliest days--the Golden Age was live TV in New York, dramas by real dramatists, comedy by geniuses like Sid Caesar, Ernie Kovacs, Jackie Gleason, Steve Allen.

Though I fondly recall the latter part of that period from my childhood, and know how formative some of the 1950s shows were for me, it's not the period of my viewing I'd call the Golden Age.  That would be the late 80s, early 1990s, with Northern Exposure, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Twin Peaks, Moonlighting, Thirtysomething, even Miami Vice.

While some of the more recent, much praised shows that I nevertheless choose not to watch may be very good in some respects, I also suspect that there is a vicious cycle now involving social media, the media that now reports on social media as a main focus, and the shows themselves.  The ability to instantly text your did you see that? and the amped-up social pressure to watch the shows so you've got something to say on Facebook as well as at work the next day, give these shows maybe more buoyancy than they might otherwise have.  

All that self-involvement may be creating a bubble, that will eventually burst.  As a form, ultraviolent soap operas don't interest me.  They are a huge waste of time and emotion.  And some are worse than that.

The Torture Games

The Senate Intelligence Committee's Report on Torture has been published in paperback, though it is apparently a 549 page executive summary--the documentation running into the many thousands of (heavily censored) pages.  An excellent summary and commentary on the Report--what it does and doesn't say and do--can be found at the New York Review of Books in an interview with Mark Danner, who knows the topic from having covered it for some time.

Even given the tenor of the initial coverage of the report's findings--chiefly that the torture imposed by the CIA was even worse than previously known, and that despite CIA and GOPer claims it resulted in no important information--Danner highlights even more hair-raising contexts.  For instance, that torture was a first resort, done without any real planning or investigation into precedent and results, and that the prime suspect involved gave lots of good information before he was tortured, and none during or after.  Here's Danner:

"What I think is strictly speaking new is, first, how amateurish the torture program was. It was really amateur hour, beginning with the techniques themselves, which were devised and run by a couple of retired Air Force psychologists who were hired by the CIA and put in charge though they had never conducted an interrogation before. They had no expertise in terrorism or counterterrorism, had never interrogated al-Qaeda members or anyone else for that matter. When it came to actually working with detained terrorists and suspected terrorists they were essentially without any relevant experience. Eventually, the CIA paid them more than $80 million.

The second revelation is the degree to which the CIA claimed great results, and did so mendaciously. Sometimes the attacks they said they had prevented were not serious in the first place. Sometimes the information that actually might have led to averting attacks came not from the enhanced interrogation techniques but from other traditional forms of interrogation or other information entirely. But what the report methodically demonstrates is that the claims about having obtained essential, lifesaving intelligence thanks to these techniques that had been repeated for years and years and years are simply not true. And the case is devastating."

It remains a puzzle to me--as it does to Danner--why the Obama administration hasn't pursued prosecutions, or even why the President kept this report at arms length.  The Senate report itself doesn't include recommendations for any actions. Danner suggests it's melancholy evidence of the power of the CIA.

Another fact I didn't know: the Senate committee got the votes to conduct the investigation only when Democrats agreed to limit it to the CIA, and to stay away from the Bush executive department.  Even so, while the FBI comes off pretty well in this report, and the Justice Department not as badly as it might have, the fingerprints of Dick Cheney and G.W. Bush and their minions are all over this.

As Danner says, without prosecutions that involve judicial decisions, all that prevents the US engaging in torture again is President Obama's executive order, which can easily be disregarded by a future presidency.

Meanwhile, it appears that US police have taken more than surplus military weaponry from the so-called war on terror. The depravity unleashed by torture and other abrogation of rights justified by the Bushites has come to the United States, perhaps in racial attitudes, but specifically (according to one report) in the adoption of police state tactics and familiar CIA "black sites" but for American citizens in at least one major U.S. city.

The only positive in this is the fact that the Senate committee did investigate, and that after all the roadblocks thrown in their path by the CIA and allies, it has actually been published.  We'd all like to forget this happened, that our leaders could be this cowardly and depraved, or that people who did it are still politically powerful.  But what we'd better remember is that it could easily happen again.

The Torture Doctors

Apart from the nature and extent of the brutality, I didn't think there was much new to learn from the Senate torture report itself.  But it did expand on a little known aspect of it--the role of "professional" psychologists, and indeed, the organization that purportedly represents professional psychology.

Those are the allegations in this report on Slate.  It begins: Thanks to revelations in the newly released report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, it is now widely known that the CIA’s torture program was created, supervised, and implemented by two licensed clinical psychologists—James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen—who were paid millions of dollars for their efforts. Less widely known is that the Bush administration’s torture operation, at both the CIA and the Pentagon—at “black sites” and at Guantanamo—was devised and supervised largely by clinical psychologists.

The piece by Steven Reisner goes on to note that the only major professional organization in medicine not to forbid their members to engage in torture is the American Psychological Association.

This has more than symbolic significance.  These professional associations police their membership.  If members are found guilty of ethical violations, they could lose their right to practice. Yet, Reisner writes:

"Recent revelations in James Risen’s new book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, add an additional dimension to this story—it appears that senior staff members of the American Psychological Association, the world’s largest association of psychologists, colluded with national security psychologists from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House to adapt APA ethics policy to suit the needs of the psychologist-interrogators."

I've made the observation before that the psychology seems to be the only science that's actually gone backwards in the past few decades.  I based this on the lack of scientific rigor, and the rise of behavioral psychology which is deterministic and mechanistic on the most basic levels.

Implicit in this is the power to manipulate behavior, something that's largely absent from the psychology of William James or of Carl Jung, which sought to provide tools to individuals to help them guide their own behavior.

Now we see where these trends in psychology lead.  Led by craven opportunists, with apparently little or no self-knowledge.  Unless of course they knew they were evil and just didn't mind.      

Water You Saying

Yeah, I know the torture report is hogging all the headlines.  And that it was issued, with unequivocal statements by Senator Feinstein that there was not a single instance in which these barbaric horrific acts yielded any information, and that everybody is forced to face it now--all righteous things.  But as long ago posts here and previous blogs show, it's not new.  We knew all this, if not in such horrifying detail.  And the GOPer response is also not exactly unpredictable, though Borowitz summarized it well in his satiric column claiming that Cheney called for an international ban on torture reports.

But let's talk about something else.  Like water.  It's coming down, East Coast, West Coast.  Changes in the dispersal of water from the heavens over time is likely to be a major effect of the climate crisis.  Deserts will grow, other places will persistently flood.  Food supplies, power generation, transport, health, let alone the human need for drinking water every day, all are disrupted.   It's happening now.

And here's the thing for our vaunted scientific expertise: nobody knows what water really is.  They fool you with that familiar grade school formula: H20.  Two hydrogen atoms and one atom of oxygen.  Sound simple.

But if it is so simple, and so simply described, why can't they make it in the lab?  They make all other kinds of stuff.  Some labs claim they're making organic life out of inorganic material.  But on the most useful possible bit of manufacturing, they come up empty.  They can't make water.  Except by pissing in the wind.

We don't even know where water came from.  There's new research on that--scientists say that at least half of the water on the Earth is not only older than the planet, it is older than the sun.

If not even the Earth knows how to combine two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms,  where did our water come from?  Some place older than the solar system, it seems.  A prominent theory was that comets delivered it, a very long time ago, from cosmic space.

Now there's data from the Euro Space Agency probe that landed on a comet that the water it harbors isn't the same as the water on Earth. (That's the comet up there, real photo, minus tail.)

 Apparently the comet theory has been controversial for some time.  The best story on the whole topic I read today is this one in the NY Times.  It says this kills the comet theory.  Other stories say it suggests it is wrong, but more evidence is needed.

So the prevailing theory now is that water arrived here via asteroids.  The Times story concludes:

In October, in another Science paper, researchers found that meteorites that originated from the large asteroid Vesta, which is believed to have formed inside of the snow line, also possess Earthlike deuterium levels. These scientists believe that ice-rich asteroids from outside the snow line were pushed inward and were among the pieces that combined to form Vesta and Earth hundreds of millions of years before the late heavy bombardment.  In other words, Earth may have been wet from almost the beginning.

So by this description the Earth was originally a large snowball in space. (Asteroids are getting other kinds of attention, too, including the likelihood that one may come this way.)  But the asteroid belt is between Mars and Jupiter, within the solar system.  So that still doesn't explain where the water came from originally.  Or how it came to be.  Or what it is.

The Change Starts Here

So where's the change? That's the prattle, some sincere no doubt, some the usual self-serving, time-filling contrived drama the media feels it needs. PE Obama is appointing all these folks who've been around for awhile, doing stuff in the area of what they've been appointed to do. Where's the change in that?

Okay, so this is not a problem for most people who like to see clearly qualified people appointed to important jobs. CNN's poll shows 75% of the public approves of PE Obama's cabinet and other appointments. They're so thrilled with the appointment of Hillary that her approval rating is the highest it's been in ten years.

But for those who are worried, there are a lot of signs and signals about the change to come (beginning when they all take office, which is not until late next month.) The change doesn't have to look big right now to eventually be big.

For instance, in her brief remarks at the announcement of her appointment as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton mentioned several important issues and said: “America cannot solve these crises without the world and the world cannot solve them without America."

After eight years of Bushite unilateralism, of the refusal of the U.S. to take part in global negotiations and treaties on such essential issues as the Climate Crisis and nuclear proliferation, Hillary's statement is positively revolutionary.

She went on to spell out a little of what it means: “By electing Obama our next president, the American people have demanded not just a new direction at home, but a new effort to renew America’s standing in the world as a force for positive change.”

That's change we can believe in, change we need...and change we voted for.

While Robert Gates was a Bush appointee at Defense, he's an advocate for closing Guantanamo, and said he will carry out Obama's intention to end the Iraq war and bring the troops home.

Then there's Susan Rice, appointed as the US Ambassador to the UN (which Obama restored to full Cabinet department rank) who is an advocate for strong responses to genocide, particularly now in Darfur. Darfur has a powerful advocate! Change I can believe in, believe me!

Several articles about the entire national security team make the point that it represents a big change from primary reliance on military force and, to put it more bluntly, bullying, to more balance with diplomacy and aid, so-called "soft power." In the best of these I've seen, Marc Ambinder calls it "smart power."

Smart! Pretty big change there!

Eric Holder, appointed Attorney-General, made a point of talking about restoring Constitutional guarantees and traditional American positions (read: no torture.) More change!

Wednesday, Bill Richardson was named Commerce Secretary, and he talked about how "you open markets and minds with partnerships, innovation and hard work." For those who worry he got short-changed, his vision of the job includes international commerce, and he's on board on the overarching issues of addressing the Climate Crisis and creating the Green Deal economy: he mentioned "innovation" and technology several times, as well as clean energy jobs and--here's a word of change: "manufacturing."

You might say that some of this "change" is changing back, and that's true--but it's no less needed, and it's unfortunately no less change. But it's all change for the future. Manufacturing yes, but as Obama makes clear vis a vis the auto industry, manfacturing new kinds of stuff in new ways--the sustainable, clean energy economy of the future. Infrastructure yes, but not just roads and bridges--weatherizing homes, rebuilding the electrical grid, expanding broadband.

Finally, as Obama himself said, the big change is him. He's already showing that he's bringing intelligence to the presidency that's a huge change. So far nothing has knocked him off stride. The terrorist attack in India? Obama has been saying that a key to problems in that whole part of the world is solving the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. And that turns out to be implicated in that attack.

Joint Chiefs, governors, Republicans-- they're all impressed with what he says, but also with how he listens.

He's already said how important addressing the Climate Crisis will be, that Guantanamo must be closed, the troops brought home from Iraq, etc. He's told the governors that he's going to help the states deal with their crises, with money for infrastructure, but also for the Green Deal. He's indicated that he wants universal health care as part of the economic recovery and rebuilding.

And the American people are behind him. There's another change. He's saying he will do what he always said he would do. Because it's change he believes in.

News Flash--Not A Terrorist

This man was taken off the U.S. terrorist
watch list today. I feel so much safer. Just
winning the Nobel Peace Prize 15 years ago
apparently didn't remove Nelson Mandella
from suspicion. But such bureaucratic contempt
for one of the most admired men on the planet
is hardly the only evidence of this administration's
ineptitude and corruption in its fraudulent war
on terror. There's a new outrage revealed nearly every day.

Like the covert CIA operative in the Middle East who claims that the
Bushites not only ignored his intelligence that
Iraq wasn't working on WMD and Iran had stopped
its nuclear weapons program--his lawyer claims that
"On five occasions he was ordered to either falsify
his reporting on WMD in the Near East,or not to file
his reports at all." This was reported today, as was
the federal court opinion that threw out the government
case against a Guantanamo prisoner as baseless--merely
repeating the same allegation in three documents. The
judge said it reminded him of a Lewis Carroll nonsense
poem. But Wednesday's literary news will also include
The Manchurian Candidate, when the NY Times reports
that torturers at Guantanamo were instructed using a
chart describing Chinese techniques used on Americans
during the Korean War. Said Sen. Carl Levin, “What makes
this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques
to get false confessions.” This is the War on Terror
waged in our name, and permitted by our representatives
of both parties, enabled by how easily Americans were
and perhaps are manipulated by the most simplistic appeals
to fear.

4,000 Killed--and the Euphemisms of American Violence

On Easter Sunday in the U.S., a series of mortar attacks, suicide bombs, roadside bombs and other acts in Iraq meant to kill and maim, reportedly killed at least 50 people, including the 4,000th American soldier to be killed since the invasion of Iraq five years ago.

War cannot be looked in the face for long. That's one reason that we turn our eyes away, and allow or encourage our media to stop reporting the reality of this ongoing war. Why few paid any attention to the Winter Soldiers testimony last week, and some got angry about broadcasting these soldiers telling their stories.

It is also one reason that we lie about war. Unfortunately, the ways our leaders lie about it means that needless wars, criminal wars, can be started and continued. As long as we accept the lies, and let them continue lying.

There are lots of ways to lie, and the least obvious way (the most lying way) is with euphemism. In an essay entitled "Euphemisms and American Violence" in the current New York Review of Books, David Bromwich writes that this term--euphemism--dates back to imperial Rome. He quotes Tacitus accusing certain Romans of deception and self-deception: "they create a desolation and call it peace." Bromwich explains:

The frightening thing about such acts of renaming or euphemism, Tacitus implies, is their power to efface the memory of actual cruelties. Behind the façade of a history falsified by language, the painful particulars of war are lost. Maybe the most disturbing implication of the famous sentence "They create a desolation and call it peace" is that apologists for violence, by means of euphemism, come to believe what they hear themselves say.

Whether our leaders believe it on some level is immaterial. I'm not sure that cruelties matter to them when ideology is served, and massive profits and wealth are the products of war. The point is they use it to makes sure we believe what they say--even when we think we don't.

Bromwich quotes a passage from George Orwell's famous essay, "Politics and the English language," which can't be quoted too much:

" Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them."

Bromwich then comments:

Orwell's insight was that the italicized phrases are colorless by design and not by accident. He saw a deliberate method in the imprecision of texture. The inventors of this idiom meant to suppress one kind of imagination, the kind that yields an image of things actually done or suffered; and they wanted to put in its place an imagination that trusts to the influence of larger powers behind the scenes. Totalitarianism depends on the creation of people who take satisfaction in such trust; and totalitarian minds are in part created (Orwell believed) by the ease and invisibility of euphemism."

And that's it exactly. Words that sound professional--the jargon of the military or "statesmen"--are adopted in the media. They sound precise but they are really fuzzy, and above all bloodless.

Bromwich discusses some of the Bush era's successes: the "global war on terror" which makes no literal sense, names no actual enemy, and excuses absolutely everything. He writes of their success in getting the media to adopt expressions like "contractors" for mercenary soldiers, and "abuses" for torture.

They have been very successful, and not only with the corporate media. Even the progressive blogsites have bought into calling a particular form of torture "waterboarding," as if it were a form of surfing. As Bromwich points out, "Yet 'waterboarding' itself is a euphemism for a torture that the Jap-anese in World War II, the French in Indochina, and the Khmer Rouge, who learned it from the French, knew simply as the drowning torture. Our American explanations have been as misleading as the word. The process is not "simulated drowning" but actual drowning that is interrupted.

There is another form of euphemism routinely used in discussing warfare and torture these days: the application of cliches that merge a certain unearned bravado with the latest fad expressions. Bromwich quotes California Member of Congress Jane Harman stringing two of them together when talking about the legalities of ordering torture: "I'm OK with it not being pretty."

This is corporate-speak, TV-speak, the lazy stringing together of buzzwords and cliches into what passes for sentences and thoughts, especially for those who hear consultants and pundits talk that way constantly, and whose idea of a complete thought is something that can be text messaged while driving.

To make decisions that mean other people are going to torture and be tortured, kill and maim and be killed and mained, by saying "I'm OK with it not being pretty" is a particularly deadly form of arrogance, even if it is steeped in ignorance or self-deception. But when we let our leaders and our media get away with the euphemisms of violence, we become part of that arrogance.

If we penetrate to the truth of it all, we can make decisions based on realities. We can fight for our lives when we must, but not throw away the lives of so many in order to profit the few whose wealth is already obscene.

We have fallen for one lie after another, cushioned by one set of euphemisms after another, until this nation's economy depends on making war, and on fomenting war, so that we can supply the means of making modern war: the means of killing, maiming and destroying on a massive scale.

Last month the Guardian in England reported that the American Secretary of Defense visited New Delhi to promote a $10 billion deal for the U.S. to supply jet fighters to India. With the encouragement of the U.S. (and other arms dealing nations), India has increased its military spending to nearly 19% of its budget, while it spends 1% on public health in a vast country where public health is a severe problem, and 5% on education in a vast country with widespread and severe poverty.

This is the American Way in the world. There are those who defend it according to their views of international situations and human nature. But there are many more who are willfully blind to it, partly because they feel helpless. And part of the reason for that helplessness is there is no way to talk about it, not when we have no clear language in common. When complicated and emotional subjects are further clouded and distorted by the lies enabled by euphemism. Euphemism is the curtain, behind which the imperial wizards pull their levers, and so many lives are distorted and destroyed.

The Dreaming Up Daily Image

illustration with my review in
Sunday's SF Chronicle, by Rico
Mendez.

The Shocks That We Are Heir To

I've mentioned The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein's new book before, but now it's out in the U.S. I reviewed it in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle, and this is how I began:

The connections are daring in journalist Naomi Klein's new book, "The Shock Doctrine," but the result is convincing. With a bold and brilliantly conceived thesis, skillfully and cogently threaded through more than 500 pages of trenchant writing, Klein may well have revealed the master narrative of our time. And because the pattern she exposes could govern our future as well, "The Shock Doctrine" could turn out to be among the most important books of the decade.

The rest of the review is here.

There's also a good review in the Guardian.

The Shock Doctrine

The Must-Read Book of the Year

--maybe even the decade. THE SHOCK DOCTRINE : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" by Naomi Klein has just been published in Canada, which means I can finally talk about it. I've been reading the galleys for weeks--which brings up a second ethical problem, because I've just turned in my review to the SF Chronicle, and I shouldn't scoop that. But my review won't be out for a few weeks, and I know I'm going to be blogging from the content of this book well before then.

Though THE SHOCK DOCTRINE will be officially published in the U.S. and Europe later in September, it may be in some bookstores soon. Naomi Klein is traveling and talking about it, starting today. And there's a short film about it, by Klein and "Children of Men" director Alfonso Cuaron, at the Toronto Film Festival this Friday, and she's showing it at some of her appearances.

Before I say a little more about the book, my disclaimers: I have no personal or business relationship with the author (I've never met her) or the publisher. I just think this is a very important book, and one that people should be aware of--and consider getting behind, in case corporte media ignores it (a good bet.)

Some of you (especially in Canada and Europe) probably know Naomi Klein as an activist, journalist and filmmaker, who writes for The Nation and The Guardian, often about globalization issues, and who wrote the book, No Logo as well as a collection of columns, Fences and Windows. Her writing career started in Canada, and here in the U.S. especially, she's not generally well known, and that's one reason I'm blogging on this book right now. Her interview in Publisher's Weekly said she didn't at that point have any firm media bookings in the U.S. I'd like to see that change. She deserves a hearing more than a whole lot of people we hear too much from.

As for the book, it puts together a lot of what you might know and suspect (and a lot most people missed or don't know) into a powerful framework based on a central idea that she believes has governed American foreign policy for decades, but particularly now: THE SHOCK DOCTRINE.

She relates neocon (also known as "neoliberal" outside the U.S.) economic theories of "free market fundamentalism" and the resulting economic "shock therapy" many nations endured, to the actual (and horrific) theories and practice of early actual electroshock therapy, and shows how they relate to torture, and the "shock and awe" bombing of Iraq, and an overall pattern of taking advantage of disaster or creating it, for corporate profit.

She shows for example that Iraq and New Orleans were not the result of incompetence, but examples of disaster capitalism, which requires the destruction and privatization of the public and non-profit sectors, replaced by crony capitalism. She shows that torture is not an accident, but a tool of economic and political shock therapy.

The book's web site has more information, including access to many of her sources. But the book is the thing--it's very well written, and very important. It begins with Milton Friedman and Pinochet in Chile in the 70s, and brings together most of what has happened since (in South America, Russia, Asia,etc.), culminating in Iraq and, in the U.S., the homeland security state and post-Katrina New Orleans.

This book has the potential to be Very Big. The Guardian has named it one of the ten must-reads of the fall. But it could also be overlooked--intentionally, because of its content.

Every book arrives with blurbs, but not necessarily like the ones for this book from Arundhati Roy, John Le Carre, Howard Zinn and Sy Hersh. I join them in urging you to read and support this book. It could be one of those rare books that everyone reads and talks about, and that focuses the debate, and promotes needed change.

Now that I've said all that, I'll feel much more comfortable about blogging on topics within the book, and I hope to do that--several times--soon.

UPDATE: The Shock Doctrine short film is now viewable online. On its first day of publication, the book hit #1 on Amazon Canada.

The Daily Babble

The Outrage Basket

The Injoy basket is empty, but as usual the Outrage basket is overflowing. A few of the items tumbling over the top and onto the floor:

A federal court Tuesday, in perhaps the most legally torturous (in both senses) decision since the Supremes played Bush V. Gore, formally stripped detainees of their rights. So we're going to continue to pretend that "24" is reality, and that due process is some prissy thing we can't afford anymore, torture is necessary, torture works, and it's good for you, too--although there's the inconveniently authentic account in the Washington Post by Eric Fair, about his own experiences doing his country's dirty work, his current nightmares and self-recriminations:

I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency. Instead, I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself. I compromised my values. I will never forgive myself.

But at least he's not an amputee dumped in an abandoned motel across from Walter Reed hospital, although judging the relative pain of traumatic stress for life versus traumatic head injuries for life is as debased as this war has always been. The Iraq war is creating a generation of physically, psychologically and mentally maimed people who will be around long after the last haunted Vietnam vet has faded completely out of existence. And there are people who with a straight and noble face are proposing a new Draft.

But then we're deep into government by hyperbole. Countdown quoted some right wing radio nut job as saying that teachers unions are a worse threat that al Qaeda, and a Repub Florida congressman who is also a party campaign official as saying that he doesn't really care if the lies he spread about Speaker Pelosi were true or not. Unfortunately I don't think he's lying about that.

We've heard about the ideological extremes this administration has gone to, in hiring people for those inconsequential jobs reserved for political favors, like running the Iraq occupation and FEMA. But it wasn't until I ran across a column by Paul Krugman in the New York Times that I realized there was a playbook involved. (I would read everything Krugman writes online except he's part of the "times select" group of columnists, and I can't bring myself to pay for Dowd and Friedman, who are also a mandatory part of the package.) So I saw this in the print edition. Krugman quotes a Heritage Foundation document that instructs the administration to "make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second." Which of course the Bushites took one step further by eliminating the second consideration altogether.

So it shouldn't be surprising that a story in today's New York Times notes that: Scholars say Mr. Bush has been more strategic than most presidents in sprinkling loyalists throughout the administration. Paul C. Light, an expert in public service at New York University, says it has created an “echo chamber” in which the president gets advice he wants to hear.

Krugman's column (from 2/05) also notes that privatization, another ideologically driven obsession of this administration, may have added to the amount of government work hired out to corporations, but not to the competition for contracts. Competitive contracts have nose-dived from nearly 3/4 of the total to less than 1/2. No word on how many of those Halliburton got. And of course, contractors are often getting paid far more than ordinary employees of government would be. Especially if they don't vote Republican.

Day of Shame

It will be hard for future generations to pick a single Day of Shame, on which to mourn this shameful period in American politics and history, to review its hard lessons and to renew their commitment to ensuring that never again will America do these things: brandish cowardice as righteousness, use fear for political gain, make unnecessary war and continue it for bloody year after bloody year, and especially turn the clock back on civilization to conduct, justify and insist on brutality and torture that in the end yields nothing but emnity and shame.

Maybe they will choose the day the US invaded Iraq, or the day the first torture photos were revealed. But they might choose today as well, when the President of the United States made his second trip to Capitol Hill to lobby for a law allowing him to define what torture is, and when the US Senate voted to give him that power.

At least at this moment, that's the assumption, because a key vote on an amendment with the best chance of passing, and of denying Bush his power over international law and the US court system, failed in a close vote of the full Senate. Every Democrat but one voted against it, and five Republicans joined them. But it was not enough. And though some Democratic Senators--Kerry, Feingold, Leahy among the leaders--were aggressive and steadfast, in the end not even the Democrats could muster the courage to fillibuster the bill, purportedly for fear of being attacked by Republicans and their massive moneybags for being weak on terrorism.

Update: Senate Dem Leader Harry Reid issued this statement at the end of the Senate's day, stating that many of the worst provisions of the bill were put back into it after a so-called compromise was reached, and his belief that the resulting bill will be eventually found unconstitutional. Of course that will be many torture victims from now.

As Christy Hardy Smith writes at firedoglake, there are multiple reasons for the Bush push, all of them cowardly. Apart from whatever sad security the Bush cowards feel from torturing helpless people, there is the politics of election year--of appearing tough and castigating opponents of international outrages for being weak-willed, as if torturing someone you have imprisoned is brave, instead of as cowardly as it is useless in obtaining reliable information.

But I believe the third reason is really the strongest--Bush needs this law to keep himself and his buddies out of court, out of jail and maybe even out of this same Senate for an impeachment trial.

Smith quotes Jack Cafferty from CNN, and so will I, because this is a succinct summary of this ploy and its effects:


Cafferty: "President Bush is trying to pardon himself. Here’s the deal: Under the War Crimes Act, violations of the Geneva Conventions are felonies, in some cases punishable by death. When the Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Convention applied to al Qaeda and Taliban detainees, President Bush and his boys were suddenly in big trouble. They’ve been working these prisoners over pretty good. In an effort to avoid possible prosecution they’re trying to cram this bill through Congress before the end of the week before Congress adjourns. The reason there’s such a rush to do this? If the Democrats get control of the House in November this kind of legislation probably wouldn’t pass.

You wanna know the real disgrace about what these people are about to do or are in the process of doing? Senator Bill Frist and Congressman Dennis Hastert and their Republican stooges apparently don’t see anything wrong with this. I really do wonder sometimes what we’re becoming in this country. "

There is really nothing more that needs to be said about how future generations will view this day. This is a day of Shame for the country and for everyone in it.

"24" is Torture Porn

Update: A Washington Post editorial has come out strongly against the compromise torture bill that came out of Senate committee, because "In effect, the agreement means that U.S. violations of international human rights law can continue as long as Mr. Bush is president, with Congress's tacit assent. If they do, America's standing in the world will continue to suffer, as will the fight against terrorism." BooTrib is advocating that Dems make an issue of it by opposing and filibustering if necessary.


Here's how the Newsweek story I linked to in my last post on torture begins:

It’s probably not too farfetched to say that what most Americans know about torture comes from watching the TV show “24.” (There is even a Web site called The Jack Bauer Torture Report.) Jack and his comrades and enemies have at various moments on the Fox television program used electrical wires, heart defibrillators, old-fashioned bone breaking and chemical injections to wrest information from their captives. In one episode, Agent Bauer forced a terrorist to watch streaming video—staged—of his child’s execution. The terrorist talked.

The story goes on to say that, first of all, actual torture doesn't much look like what is shown on "24," and that: In recent interviews with NEWSWEEK reporters, U.S. intelligence officers say they have little—if any—evidence that useful intelligence has been obtained using techniques generally understood to be torture.

But a lot of people do believe it works. Partly because Bush and Cheney say so, and if we don't believe them, it's the same as saying that they are morons or liars or both, and war criminals to boot. Not something that anyone wants to believe of their leaders. But I believe it's also partly because of Hollywood and specifically "24."

Entertainment shows stretch reality a lot to be funny--we all understand that-- and also to create drama, but that's done with such apparent realism that we don't always realize it. But why torture? Is it the only way to advance the plot dramatically? These shows present human beings causing prolonged pain in other human beings. And people watch.

Forget for the moment that by portraying a false idea of something that goes on in the real world, "24" and shows like it are lying to people about something important, and the consequence is more suffering and more people endangered, including innocent people.

Forget even that it is often a cheap device, the easy ploy of lazy writers and directors when they want to push buttons of sensation and can't be bothered to do it with honest drama. We've got to grip the audience and we've got a story that's ten minutes short, what do we do? I know: torture somebody.

No, what I want to focus on here is the evident reason we see torture on TV, and that's because it evokes strong sensations--people may not be entirely shocked anymore, they see it so often, but it does push some buttons, and they're all about primal emotions. And in having those buttons pushed, people are entertained. They "like" to watch torture.

My question is: how is this not pornography? I'm not saying ban it, I'm just saying let's name it for what it is, and stop the pretense. Because the pretense is the prime factor in making it believable--I mean, if it's not porn fantasy, then we have to believe this is how it really works.

Real torture is immoral, and I believe that dramatizing torture in the way "24" does is gratitious violence, and I don't watch it. I happen to have met one of the writers who just got an Emmy for that show, and I don't congratulate him. He used to work on the Star Trek series, Enterprise, and during his watch as a producer, there were several instances of gratuitous torture on that show (which had a family audience, insofar as it had an audience). Which I suppose turned out to be his audition for "24."

I think "24" and its depiction of torture and violence does harm for these several reasons, and I have no respect for it. Those who watch it for porn purposes should at least be honest with themselves about it, and deal with it as fantasy. But that's not how it is played--not in a nation that goes berserk over a milisecond glimpse of a bare breast.

Bare breast bad, torture entertainment, does not compute. And then there's the morality of torture itself, defended by self-appointed professional guardians of morality, whose absolutism otherwise extends to defining cells as babies. Here's an example from Molly Ivins:

"I was interested to find that the Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition is so in favor of torture he told McCain that the senator either supports the torture bill or he can forget about the evangelical Christian vote. I’d like to see an evangelical vote on that one. I don’t know how Sheldon defines traditional values, but deliberately inflicting terrible physical pain or stress on someone who is completely helpless strikes me as ... well, torture. And, um, wrong.."

I hope this is just an example of the Rev. Sheldon's arrogance and not the true sentiments of people who call themselves Christians. I could understand some "greater good" argument, if there was any evidence a greater good could be obtained. But to defend the morality of torture on its face, and threatening politicians who want some legal and moral constraints, passeth my understanding.

The Politics of Torture

Or is it the torture of politics? I've held off commenting on the apparent conflict among Republicans in Congress over several bills that give Bush legal cover to have tortured and to keep on torturing, because I wasn't sure how real it was. Some bloggers and other commentators believe certain GOPer Senators are taking courageous stands in opposition to Bush, others suspect it's all orchestrated politics to provide some Republicans with political cover, or just to keep media attention off the really deadly conflict in Iraq.

Wednesday a House committee voted against it before they voted for it but there's still nothing certain about this except they're going to keep making noise about terrorism and torture and toughness until the election, and nothing is really going to even begin changing until the Democrats control Congress, and we get on their cases big time.

How torture plays politically is a fairly disgusting subject, especially because it should be well outside the political, beyond the pale. First of all, and most absurd of all, the argument over whether the morality of saving innocents by getting information from bad guys versus cruelty to people who may be bad but also may very well be innocent, is all so useless, because torture doesn't work in acquiring useful information, nor even in intimidation, not in the long run. The Canadian citizen captured and tortured by the U.S. who was fully exonerated as completely innocent this week by a Canadian panel, had admitted under torture that he was trained as a terrorist in Afghanistan, despite documented proof that he had never been in Afghanistan.

A federal judge has ordered officials to disclose some information about some Gitmo detainees. The International Red Cross is finally getting to interview some prisoners. Canada is planning an official protest based on this new report. Everyone in the world knows this is wrong and deeply harmful and universally degrading in every conceivable way.

And the practical downside is enormous. It makes a mockery of law. The bar has been lowered so that innocence no longer matters, and even a member of the press can be essentially imprisoned in Iraq for months, and no one knows and no one cares. That we're even talking about this is sickening and more frightening than any terrorist attack.

Apropos of nothing but this mood, this blog has attracted some hatemongering trolls and I've temporarily restricted comments until they lose interest.

UPDATE: A UN report says torture in Iraq is out of control. American occupation has brought with it torture that may exceed Saddam's. This is a completely predictable outcome of US policy and practice under Bush. When a superpower and supposed moral leader unleashes the dogs of torture, everyone feels they have permission to unleash savagery and escalate it without penalty. This is a consequence of immoral leadership. Among other tragic ramifications, we now have no moral standing to condemn the torture of Americans by others. Especially when our government apparently feels free to torture Americans, Canadians, Europeans, anybody.

UPDATE 2: The Bush House and apparently rebellious Republican Senators made a deal on pending legislature involving torture and trials for alleged terrorists, but the substance of the agreement is not clear, and the details of the legislation has apparently not yet been worked out. In other words, mostly P.R, which seemed to be the subtext of Senator Warner's statement that they'll have a deal when he sees Bush's signature on it.

Meanwhile, David Broder, Washington Post columnist and Beltway Elder, is the latest to see this revolt as a declaration of independence on the part of these Republicans, and an indication that a centrist "independent party" is forming. Broder's rhetoric is unusually brutal:

Bush was elected twice, over Democrats Al Gore and John Kerry, whose know-it-all arrogance rankled Midwesterners such as myself. The country thought Bush was a pleasant, down-to-earth guy who would not rock the boat. Instead, swayed by some inner impulse or the influence of Dick Cheney, he has proved to be lawless and reckless. He started a war he cannot finish, drove the government into debt and repeatedly defied the Constitution.

The question of what constitutes "centrism" is a matter for another day, but as a reflection of this year's 'throw the bums out' mood from an unlikely source, this column has some resonance.

As for the supposed central issue--torture, remember?--the transcript is up of Wednesday's Olbermann interview with Jack Rice, former CIA and Minnesota prosecutor. They talk about torture eliciting whatever the torturers want to hear, but go beyond that patent lunacy to the further lunacy--although I suspect it's intentional --of what's been done with some of this so-called information:

OLBERMANN: The name Abu Zubaydah seems relevant here. Zubaydah broke under—I guess the technical term is aggressive interrogation, told the interrogators about plans to booby-trap banks and ATMs, and Homeland Security says, Watch out for banks. Then he said malls, Homeland Security said, Beware of the malls. Then he said apartments, we plan to lease apartments and fill them full of explosives, and Homeland Security said, Be alert in apartment buildings. Then he said the Brooklyn Bridge, and Homeland Security says, Be careful on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The only problem was, he was making all of it up. If we torture supposed terrorists, and they make stuff up, and the government tells people the things that they made up, are we not, in essence, doing the terrorists‘ work for them? Is there not an indirect cause and effect here? Starting point is, you torture suspects into lying, and at the end, you wind up spreading information that scares Americans.

RICE: Absolutely. And the worst part, in the end, is that when there are real threats out there, there‘s something called dread fatigue. We all heard about this. Oh, my gosh, it‘s level yellow. Oh, my gosh, it‘s level orange no. And in the end, the real threats that are out there, we ignore.

Here's how the interview ended:

OLBERMANN: So what works instead of torture, or aggressive interrogation, or whatever they‘re calling it today?

RICE: In many cases, we‘re looking at a lot of things. And we‘ve used these in the States in the past, because it provides reliable information. Sometimes it‘s about personal understanding. Sometimes it‘s allowing people to talk. Sometimes it‘s trying to understand. I would sit in front of somebody and say, I don‘t understand what motivates you. Explain to me so I understand. Teach me. Sometimes it‘s about vanity. You allow them that, if it‘s useful. But what you‘re looking for is truth in the end.

I‘m not a priest. I‘m not trying to be. But what I am trying to do is get something reliable, so our policy makers, so our police, so our military can do the right thing, not the wrong thing.

OLBERMANN: So fact-check me on this, on my simplified version of this whole picture. If it‘s wrong, tell me so. The president wants torture, or a nice euphemism for torture, and all he‘ll get out of it is made-up information, revenge later against American prisoners, perhaps, and destroying any moral high ground we might still have in the world.

RICE: Yes, one other thing besides that. He gets to wrap himself in the flag and say he hates the bad people.

The brutal road to Iraq and Torture

How has America in the early twenty-first century come to the point of justifying the capture, imprisoning and torture of people almost at random, with no regard for rights under the Geneva Conventions and more importantly, for generally accepted minimal rights in the civilized world? How has this prosperous and advanced society turned back the clock on the painful progress towards a more civilized and less dangerous world, for which thousands if not millions have sacrificed their lives?

I believe much of the current attitude can be traced back to the 1980s, when the neocons in the Reagan administration pumped up the rhetoric to absurd heights to justify a proxy war in Central America, while they exploited a highly publicized and inflated rise in urban crime, which led to the reversal of trends in criminal justice. In the 60s and 70s, there was an emphasis on the rights of the accused, to redress the balance of individual rights and society’s interest in preventing crime. Perhaps most importantly as well as symbolically, capital punishment was no longer considered a just sentence or effective deterrent.

The subtext of that trend was this: A civilized society does not enact revenge for its own sake, nor does it feed a spiraling culture of revenge. A modern civilized society finds more effective ways to deter crime and deal with criminals, just as many previous societies had done: without capital punishment. Capital punishment brutalized society.

Though this is now accepted in much of the rest of the world, it is likely to be news to anyone who came of age in the US in the 1980s or after. The culture has turned completely around, and justice is equated with vengeance. You need look no further than the ever-popular crime dramas on television. In the 60s, popular series like “The Defenders” and “The Law & Mr. Jones” portrayed defense attorneys as heroes, protecting individuals against abuses by prosecutors and police, against juries being swayed by emotional appeals to exact revenge, and against aspects of the law that treated the “innocent until proven guilty” unjustly.

In today’s crime shows, the heroes are prosecutors and police who use any means necessary to convict suspects. In surfing TV channels the other night, I caught a minute of a willowy blond prosecutor objecting to an accused killer not getting the death penalty because he had a biologically caused mental illness. “We’ve convicted psychotics and schizophrenics before,” she complained. This is typical. You can see the difference even over the life of one series: “Law & Order.”

We all know of the cases of mentally deficient prisoners who were executed. We know of other cases in which prisoners who committed crimes in their youth were executed many years later, when they were demonstrably no longer that person. We also know that the US has the highest proportion of its population in prison than any other “civilized” democracy. We know that there are innocent executed because they could not afford a decent defense, and that African Americans and other minorities are disproportionately jailed because of race as well as economics.

But crime and support for the death penalty were so politically hyped that even though the President has nothing to do with capital punishment, it became the central issue leading to George Bush the First defeating Michael Dukakis in 1988. This despite the fact that the vast majority of voters were untouched by violent crime, except through their television sets. Having hyped the threat, politicians exploited natural fears by promising to get tough, and enacting three strikes laws and bringing back capital punishment. No more attention to the economic crises in the inner cities, or the collapse of manufacturing jobs, or the patterns of racial injustice. Meanwhile, demographers showed that the jump in urban crime was largely predictable by the jump in the proportion of young men, and would abate as the trend reversed. Which is what happened.

By 2004, capital punishment had become such a non-issue that when John Kerry said he was opposed to it, hardly anyone noticed. But the brutalization had done its work.

The demagogic appeals of the 1980s had expanded into a rhetoric of the right wing which is historically startling in its violent oversimplifications, outrageous untruths and brutal assumptions. But there were also countertrends contending for the national soul. It took the match of 9/11 to set this house aflame again.

The Hero of Guantanamo

Heroes don't always get praise and parades. They're often scapegoated, vilified and ignored until they are safely dead. But their sacrifice is worthy of honor. For example, a U.S. Navy lieutenant commander named Charles Swift.

He's a lawyer who was assigned the task of representing a prisoner at Guantanamo. He could have done a perfunctory job, going through the motions to please his military commanders. But he didn't. He took his defendant's claim of injustice through the U.S. court system, right up to the Supreme Court. He defied the polices of the Secretary of Defense and the President. In doing so, he not only damaged his military career, he probably ended it.

But his case decided this week--Hamden v. Rumsfeld--has gone a long way to bringing America back to the rule of law, and back into the international human community.

Charles Swift isn't alone. He said in an interview that he received support from most of his fellow JAG officers. "The one that I remember most, though, is a friend of mine from the Naval Academy. I went back for my 20 year reunion. He’s a marine and he’s an outstanding marine and he’s been in many combat situations, and he took me aside and I thought, this might be the time. And instead, what he said to me was, you know, the rule of law, that’s what I’m out here fighting to preserve. Don’t you dare stop..."

But the Rabid Right is calling him a traitor, and few of those who support decision say anything about Charles Swift. Washington Post defense analyst Bill Arkin calls him "the hero of Guantanamo." His fight for his client is far from over, but his victory so far is a victory for all Americans and for the Republic itself.

Guantanamo Rising

The American facility is back in the news. After recent weeks of increasing charges of cruel and unusual punishment, of the majority of prisoners never charged and many captured in random sweeps:

Today, the AP : The United States must close its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay because it is effectively a torture camp where prisoners have no access to justice, a U.N. report released Thursday concluded.

The 54-page report summarizing an investigation by five U.N. experts accused the United States of practices that "amount to torture" and demanded detainees be allowed a fair trial or freed. The investigators did not visit the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"Those people should be released or brought before an independent court," Manfred Nowak, the U.N. investigator for torture, told The Associated Press. "That should not be done in Guantanamo Bay, but before ordinary U.S. courts, or courts in their countries of origin or perhaps an international tribunal."

The U.N. investigators said photographic evidence — corroborated by testimony of former prisoners — showed detainees shackled, chained and hooded. Prisoners were beaten, stripped and shaved if they resisted, they said.

The White House rejected the recommendation.

The American shame is not only Guantanamo Bay Prison but the fact that Americans have allowed it to continue. Where was the outcry saying precisely what the UN does, but years ago, before all this suffering? Even if Guantanamo were to be closed tomorrow, that Americans permitted it to exist has brought us closer to the possibility of a totalitarian police state for all of us in our near future.

Perspectives

From the "humorous" political blog Achenblog at www.washingtonpost.com:

Last night we made a pilgrimage to a friend's new house in Georgetown, an elegant manse where I immediately regretted not wearing a blazer and perhaps a jaunty cap. We talked about gay cowboys and closeted movie stars and sex-change operations -- traditional Christmas topics, in other words -- and the conversation eventually turned to impeachment. It's true: People actually talk about impeachment, in the wilds of Inner Georgetown, not just in blogworld. I won't go into great detail about what was said, because it was highly speculative, and because I'm worried that my phone, email accounts and blog are tapped. These people don't mess around. They have secret prisons. They are constantly sending memos to one another with titles like, "The Positive Side of Torture."

Today's front-page Post story indicates that the basic strategy for the domestic spying program is to listen to a tremendous amount of conversations on the off chance that something might be suspicious:

"Sources knowledgeable about the program said there is no way to secure a FISA warrant when the goal is to listen in on a vast array of communications in the hopes of finding something that sounds suspicious....One government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the administration complained bitterly that the FISA process demanded too much: to name a target and give a reason to spy on it."

Yeah, that's due process totally out of control.

Former CIA Director Calls Cheney Vice President for Torture

From "'Cheney is vice president for torture'" ITV News

A former CIA director has exclusively told ITV News that torture is condoned and even approved by the Bush government.

The devastating accusations have been made by Admiral Stansfield Turner who labelled Dick Cheney "a vice president for torture".

He said: "We have crossed the line into dangerous territory".

The former spymaster claims President Bush is not telling the truth when he says that torture is not a method used by the US.

Speaking of Bush's claims that the US does not use torture, Admiral Turner, who ran the CIA from 1977 to 1981, said: "I do not believe him".

On Dick Cheney he said "I'm embarrassed the United States has a vice president for torture. He condones torture, what else is he?"