We must not question Dear Leader

I wish I could say I am surprised, but I’m not.

P.J. Crowley is abruptly stepping down as State Department spokesman under pressure from the White House, according to senior officials familiar with the matter, because of controversial comments he made about the Bradley Manning case.

Crowley will step down as early as Sunday afternoon, the officials said, because White House officials are furious about his suggestion that the Obama administration is mistreating Manning, the Army private who is being held in solitary confinement in Quantico, Virginia, under suspicion that he leaked highly classified State Department cables to the website Wikileaks.

[ . . . ]

But Crowley has told friends that he is deeply concerned that mistreatment of Manning could undermine the legitimate prosecution of the young private. Crowley has also made clear he has the Obama administration’s best interests at heart because he thinks any mistreatment of Manning could be damaging around the world to President Obama, who has tried to end the perception that the U.S. tortures prisoners.

[ . . . ]

A little-known factor in Crowley’s comments about Manning was revealed Saturday by April Ryan, a White House correspondent for American Urban Radio who covered Crowley in the Clinton White House.

Ryan wrote on Twitter that Crowley “dislikes treatment of prisoners as his father was a Prisoner of War.”

While it’s true that Crowley’s father was imprisoned during World War II, people close him downplay that as a major factor in his comments about Manning, saying the biggest factor is simply that Crowley believes what he said.

It doesn’t have to be one or the other. It is possible to object for more than one reason.

Well, Hillary?

“This is evil; those who seek to impose this fate on a human being are engaged in evil of an especially monstrous kind.”

Arthur Silber:

Thus, according to this spokesman, Manning is subjected to repeated humiliation and degradation — for his own good. Moreover, the reason for the repeated humiliation and degradation cannot be provided because of the military’s boundless concern for Manning’s “privacy” — that is, the military also refuses to explain the reason for its cruelty for Manning’s own good.

Does the nightmare begin to assume more definite shape before you? If you feel assaulted in the depths of your being by this mere recitation of the facts — and you should — you are experiencing but the faintest shadow of what Manning experiences in captivity. Manning is, I remind you, only the “accused.”

Go. Read.

Yes, Dennis, we DO know

Dennis Blair, Obama’s former DNI chief, on torture:

So I called for the experts to come in, got the reports, and read them, and said you know what is the most effective interrogation technique we have? When it’s done under duress is that — do you actually get true information better than if you don’t use that? And the answer, Charlie, is we don’t know. There has not been systematic science and work on it, and what you have are a bunch of anecdotes. Some people say yes, some people say no. So I think the question is unanswerable, if the techniques that we used back in the wake of 9/11 yielded information that could not have been gotten in another way or not….We don’t. We don’t know right now if putting physical stress on people makes them tell the truth more, better, faster than with not.”

What??? Do you see what he’s done here? There is so much craziness in Blair’s  statement that I scarcely know where to begin.

Justice

At last.

A Sunday Morning Reading: Carl Sagan, Science and Witchcraft

In The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Ballantine Books, 1996), Carl Sagan stressed over and over again the need for science literacy, critical thinking and skepticism. We need not understand the finer points of each scientific discipline, but we need to understand the scientific method and how to apply it in our daily lives, as well as in our national and international policy-making.

Sagan also argued that ignorance of what-came-before can set us up to commit the same errors in the here-and-now. Understanding the past is key to living in the present and planning for the future. To not know our history and our human propensity for unskeptical thinking  is to doom us to continually make the same mistakes, to never move forward, or worse, finish ourselves off as a species.

In Chapter 24, Science and Witchcraft, Sagan revisits the witch hunts of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries that consumed Europe and America.  The parallels in the following passage to today’s political environment are striking: Guantanamo, indefinite detention, military commissions-vs-civilian courts, National Day of Prayer, torture, the run up to the Iraq war, the prosecution of whistle-blowers, even the 2008 Democratic primaries. Sagan appears prescient. He wasn’t. He was just aware of history.

If we do not  know what we’re capable of, we cannot appreciate measures taken to protect us from ourselves. I discussed the European witch mania in the alien abduction context; I hope the reader will forgive me for returning to it in its political context. It is an aperture to human self-knowledge. If we focus on what was considered acceptable evidence and a fair trial by the religious and secular authorities in the fifteenth-to-seventeenth century witch hunts, many of the novel and peculiar features of the eighteenth-century U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights become clear: including trial by jury, prohibitions against self-incrimination and against cruel and unusual punishment, freedom of speech and the press, due process, the balance of powers and the separation of church and state.

Friedrich von Spee (pronounced “Shpay”) was a Jesuit priest who had the misfortune to hear the confessions of those accused of witchcraft in the German City of Würzburg (see Chapter 7). In 1631, he published Cautio Criminalis (Precautions for Prosecutors), which exposed the essence of the Church/State terrorism against the innocent. Before he was punished he died of the plague – as a parish priest serving the afflicted. Here is an except from his whistle-blowing book:

Bragging about torture

Jonathan Turley:

We have now come to this: a Vice President who feels perfectly comfortable in bragging out his support for a torture program. It is a moment that is more of an indictment of Obama than (the unindicted) Cheney. It is fruit that comes from an Administration that chose politics over principle — even at the cost of precedent forged in the Nuremberg trials and the Geneva Conventions. Cheney’s statement should be a moment of unspeakable national shame.

Now that we have Cheney’s confession, can he be turned over to the Hague to be tried for war crimes?

Friday Night News Dump

I’m going to be sick.

While the progs are jumping up and down over Obama’s Q&A, this is what I’m looking at.

Mike Isikoff and Dan Klaidman put up a post about an hour ago letting the first blood for the Obama Administration’s intentional tanking of the OPR (Office of Professional Responsibility) Report. In light of Obama’s focused determination to sweep the acts of the Bush Administration, no matter how malevolent, under the rug and “move forward” the report is not unexpected. However, digesting the first leak in what would appear to be a staged rollout is painful:

…an upcoming Justice Department report from its ethics-watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), clears the Bush administration lawyers who authored the “torture” memos of professional-misconduct allegations.

Why won’t the New York Times name “those?”

In today’s editorial, the NYT editors deservedly call out the Bush administration regarding their illegal actions, but they leave out One Important Player in the lack of torture prosecutions.

There are those who oppose trying to punish Bush-era lawlessness — some who argue that America should not look backward and some who excuse that lawlessness. But the rule of law rests on scrutinizing evidence of past behavior to establish accountability, confer justice and deter bad behavior in the future.

“There are those?”  And who would that be?

The editorial goes on to act as though Obama is acting under duress and blames the lack of prosecutions not on Obama himself, but on his DoJ:

President Obama, much to his credit, has forsworn the use of torture, but politics and policy makers change and democracy cannot rely merely on the good will of one president and his aides. Such good will did not exist in the last administration. And the inhumane and illegal treatment of detainees could make a return in a future administration unless the Supreme Court sends a firm message that ordering torture is a grievous violation of fundamental rights.

Anyone who doubts the degree of executive branch pliability in this realm needs to consider this: The party that urged the Supreme Court not to grant the victims’ appeal because the illegality of torture was not “clearly established” was the Obama Justice Department.

Obushma

George W. Bush could have given this speech. I was agape as I read it and had to stop reading when I came to this paragraph (for fear I would throw up).

Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct. And even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe that the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is a source of our strength. That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed Americas commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard.

We do?

Really?

Tell me all about it. 

I’m all ears.

Yep, we’re the good guys.

No doubt about it!

Heartless

I cannot bear it.  I am truly ashamed to be identifed as an American.

Just think about that.  Torture is one of the most universal taboos in the civilized world.  The treaty championed by Ronald Reagan declares that “no exceptional circumstances” can justify it, and requires that every state criminalize it and prosecute those who authorize or engage in it.  But only 25% of Americans agree with Ronald Reagan and this Western consensus that torture is never justifiable.  Worse, 54% of Americans believe torture is “often” or ”sometimes” justified.  When it comes to torture, the vast bulk of the country is now to the “right” (for lack of a better term) of Ronald Reagan, who at least in words (if not in deeds) insisted upon an absolute prohibition on the practice and mandatory prosecution for those responsible.

With these new numbers, it’s virtually impossible to find a country with as high a percentage of torture supporters as the U.S. has.  In Iran, for instance, only 36% believe that torture can be justified in some cases, while 43% believe all torture must be strictly prohibited.  Similarly, 66% of Palestinians, 54% of Egyptians, and over 80% of Western Europeans believe torture is always wrong.  The U.S. has a far lower percentage than all of those nations of individuals who believe that torture should always be prohibited.  At least on the level of the citizenry (as opposed to government), we’re basically the leading torture advocacy state in the world.

I’d move if I could. I live in a heartless country. We don’t want to take care of our own, we have no sense of “we.” And anything done to the “other” is perfectly fine. We do not want to clothe or shelter our brothers. We do not want to provide healing for our sisters. We can do anything we want because we have the biggest guns.

Shameful.