Bill Kristol Wants the Medal of Freedom for Torturers and Spies

I hardly know what to say about this commentary from Bill Kristol, in the current issue of the right-wing Weekly Standard. It’s damning on its own without any comment. But then, the premise on which Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and prominent member of the Project for the New American Century, operates here does deserve comment and deconstruction:

“Bush should consider pardoning--and should at least be vociferously praising--everyone who served in good faith in the war on terror, but whose deeds may now be susceptible to demagogic or politically inspired prosecution by some seeking to score political points. The lawyers can work out if such general or specific preemptive pardons are possible; it may be that the best Bush can or should do is to warn publicly against any such harassment or prosecution. But the idea is this: The CIA agents who waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the NSA officials who listened in on phone calls from Pakistan, should not have to worry about legal bills or public defamation. In fact, Bush might want to give some of these public servants the Medal of Freedom at the same time he bestows the honor on Generals Petraeus and Odierno. They deserve it.”

So waterboarding, which is torture, and NSA spying (on all of us) that the White House was caught red-handed doing in express violation of the 1978 FISA law, are not crimes against humanity or felonies deserving not just of impeachment but criminal prosecution at the Hague and in U.S. courts. No, according to one of the more influential voices from the extreme right and from the ranks of those who are making policy in the U.S., these acts are worthy of the Medal of Freedom.

And what is this freedom that these torturers and spies have been defending? The freedom from tyranny – or at least that’s what the American Revolution was supposedly all about – and the freedom from being abducted secretly in the night by agents of the state, the freedom from torture and cruel and unusual punishment, the freedom to challenge your detention in court, the freedom to speak and assemble without being spied upon by your government.

How do the advocates and apologists for tyranny and for war crimes get to be pundits in mainstream media, hob nob with the rich and powerful, solicited for their advice and as censors and gatekeepers for CBS News and so on? They get away with murder, literally, because some people still can’t see that actions taken in the name of protecting American lives at the expense of annihilating non-Americans’ lives (actions that don’t in fact provide greater security but in fact do the very opposite) are the actions and justifications of scoundrels and fascists. The Nazis played this game very effectively until they were finally defeated. Kristol and others of his ilk are our own homegrown Nazis. If you think this language is too strong, think again about what he is saying. Read what he said above again.

If these "leaders" and opinion-makers can justify torture and killing innocents under the rubric of their precious and self-serving "war on terror," then they can justify, and will justify, absolutely anything. Nothing is safe from the "logic" of their "war on terror" and anyone who accepts the fundamental premise of that so-called war is going to find themselves, whether they intended to or not, supporting, doing and saying horrid things.

Obama, it should be noted here, accepts the logic of the "war on terror."

In the preface to my book, Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney, I cited the words of Hermann Goering, Luftwaffe Commander and Nazi Leader:

"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. . . All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."

The Global War on Terror and the constant invocations of 9/11 are, in other words, straight out of the Nazis' playbook.

If Obama does not prosecute those responsible for torture and felonious spying on all of us, beginning with Bush and Cheney and on down, then he is guilty as an accessory to murder and crimes against humanity. This isn’t, as Kristol so deceitfully claims, a matter of partisan politically-inspired vindictiveness. This is the meting out of justice, long overdue, for crimes that all of humanity should be crying out “shame, shame, shame!”

If Obama does not draw a line against this, something that he failed to do as a U.S. Senator when he refused to filibuster the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that legalized torture and stripped habeas corpus rights from anyone declared an “unlawful enemy combatant,” and failed again to do when he not only declined to filibuster, but actually voted FOR, the telecom amnesty bill, then any president from now on forward can do exactly what Bush and Cheney did and more and claim on the basis of precedent, that it is legal and fine because, after all, Bush and Cheney did it and weren’t prosecuted. This is what is at stake. The gravity of the situation we are presently in cannot be overstated.

Mumbai by Glenn Greenwald

Greenwald, as per his usual, has an excellent post today at Salon.com. I encourage you to read it.

Obama's Picks: Know Him by the Company He Keeps

Obama, under fire, rightfully so, for his cabinet and advisor picks, defended his picks on Wednesday on the grounds that the vision for change comes from him and that he needs experienced people to staff his cabinet. The vision for change, he said, “comes from me.”

This is an interesting claim by a man who throughout the campaign stated that this was all about the people and not about himself. It is, however, consistent with the cult of personality that he has cultivated about himself. “I am above and more powerful than the people I am surrounding myself with. I, not they, will call the shots. I, not they, am the decider.”

The flaw in this apologia by Obama is this: a central component of the expression and actions of a leader who represents “change” is precisely his choices for the team that he assembles around himself, as these are the people who will filter, frame and edit the information that they bring to him, and shape the parameters of choices that they offer him. They will advocate what they think he should do and beyond that, of course, take principle responsibility for leading the implementation of "change" in policy.

If you wanted to fix a police department that had become famous for brutality and corruption, a new police commissioner wouldn’t start by handpicking as his or her leadership team a bunch of corrupt cops known for their brutality. If you’re serious about implementing your vision of change, you don’t, in your first and extremely important act, begin by selecting for your closest advisers and those who will lead these changes a group of people drenched from head to toe in the bankrupt policies of prior administrations.

An upright, uncorruptable police commissioner cannot realistically expect to accomplish his or her rectification campaign by relying upon a bunch of cops who have already demonstrated their penchant for corruption and brutality. You do not bring about change by relying on people who represent and have distinguished themselves as fighters for the old order.

Yet this is exactly what Obama is doing.

He knows very well - after all, he's an extremely smart guy - that his defense of his picks of his people - who emphatically do not represent change - is disingenuous and designed to deceive people.

Know people by the company they keep.

Pure, Unadulterated Balderdash and Poison

Jack Goldsmith (who succeeded John Yoo at the Justice Department, serving in the Office of Legal Counsel from October 2003 to July 2004, and who, to his credit, rescinded the torture memos that Yoo wrote) writes today in the Washington Post, arguing that prosecution of the Bush White House for torture would be a huge mistake:

"The people in government who made mistakes or who acted in ways that seemed reasonable at the time but now seem inappropriate have been held publicly accountable by severe criticism, suffering enormous reputational and, in some instances, financial losses. Little will be achieved by further retribution."

Yes, they merely made "mistakes" or did reasonable things like torturing and indefinitely detaining innocent people by the thousands, murdering many of them and irrevocably traumatizing the rest even though it has been and is against the law to ever under any circumstances torture someone. They have been, my god, severely criticized! Their reputation's been harmed enormously, and some of them have lost some money - oh my Jesus - let my people go!

We certainly shouldn't pursue vindictive prosecutions of people who knowingly lied us into wars that have caused to date the needless and unjust deaths of 1.3 million Iraqis, combat deaths of over 4,000 American soldiers, more than 30,000 suicides by vets, the destruction of a fabled city and the forced extirpation of thousands from their homes in New Orleans, the treasonous outing of a dissident's wife's CIA cover for revenge, the destruction of habeas corpus and that silly little matter of the rule of law! Perish the very thought! We should just shake their hands, tell them how much we admire the difficulties they faced and how marvelously they have handled it all, and give them their pensions and go along our merry way.

That's the ticket!

It's amazing to me what passes muster to be published in a major American newspaper such as the Washington Post, what nonsense comes from the mouths and pens of people who lead this country, and what material the Post and other major publications refuse to publish.

Consider the following unbelievably horrid November 8 article by Michael Kinsley for the Washington Post. Kinsley used to play the "liberal" on CNN"s Crossfire:

Revisiting One Lawrence Summers Controversy

Opponents of Lawrence Summers for a second turn as Treasury secretary have, of course, brought up his 1991 memo as chief economist of the World Bank, in which he wrote that poor countries need more pollution, not less. The memo was obviously meant to stimulate thinking and not to be implemented as policy. But it also was undeniably correct. Summers's main point was that life and health are worth less in poor countries than in rich ones. He measured that worth by the earnings lost when a person is sick or dies prematurely. But another good measure, maybe clearer, would be the amount a society will spend to save a life. Treatments that are routine in the United States, although they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, are simply not available to citizens of poor countries. You get cancer and you die. Of course this shouldn't be true, but it undeniably is true, and rejecting the idea of poor countries earning a little cash by "buying" pollution from rich ones will do nothing to make it less true.

If an industrial plant that causes pollution is going to be built somewhere, it ought to be built where life is worth less. This sounds brutal, but it isn't. Or rather, it is less brutal than reality. Turn it around: If a life is worth less, it is also cheaper to save. For what we spend in the United States to save a single life, you could save dozens or hundreds of lives in poor countries. So if the plant is going to be built somewhere, building it in a poor country will enable more lives to be saved than building it in a rich one.

Summers also pointed out that the harm from pollution tends to be "non-linear," meaning that the harm goes up more than proportionately as pollution increases. A little bit of pollution may be virtually harmless, but double it or quadruple it and you more than double or quadruple the negative effects. If a city in a rich country is very polluted and a city the same size in a poor country is not, you will save lives -- in the rich country this time -- if some of that pollution can be moved from the rich country to the poor one. And the money the rich country pays the poor one can save even more lives in the poor country.

The general point is that clean air and other environmental goods are luxuries. The richer a country is, the more of them it can afford. And if rich countries like the United States had had to meet some of the standards being wished upon poor countries today, we would still be poor ourselves.

Every economic transaction has two sides. When you deny a rich country the opportunity to unload some toxic waste on a poor one, you are also denying that poor country the opportunity to get paid for taking the toxic waste. And by forbidding this deal, you are putting off the day when the poor country will no longer need to make deals like this.

In his notorious memo, Summers was doing his job and doing it well: thinking outside the box about how to help the poor countries that are supposed to be the World Bank's constituency. Plenty of outside-the-box thinking will be required from our next Treasury secretary too. Summers is famous for this, and for the abrasiveness that goes along with it. But the Obama administration won't have time, and shouldn't have the patience, for the umbrage game that dominated the recent political campaign. There is no point in making Larry Summers promise to behave himself. That just isn't his style, and if President-elect Obama can't face it, he should choose someone less likely to stir up fusses at regular intervals. That would be a pity.

***

Kinsley's outrageous article prompted many disgusted responses from readers. This one's my favorite:

I've decided that the Yucca mountain nuclear waste material should be buried on Mr. Kingsley's property. I come to this conclusion as a result of my proprietary Moral Calculation Process (tm) in which the relative values of various human beings' lives are assigned in proportion to their demonstrated humanity. Mr. Kingsley's humanity quotient being quite low (as demonstrated by this column), he is worth less as a human being than most of the rest of us.

I am SO glad we have come up with these snappy and elegant algorithms for calculating the relative worths of human beings' lives. Thank you, Messers Kingsley and Summers, for filling us in.

Posted by: B2O2 | November 8, 2008 5:04 PM

***

Does it make you wonder about your country when one of the most important and most prestigious publications in the US syndicates the comments of said Michael Kinsley and publishes the ridiculous apologia for torturers and war criminals of Jack Goldsmith? Does it make you want to radically change and overturn this system?

Brennan's Withdrawn His Name!

Good news. Brennan has taken his name out of consideration for a top post in Intelligence such as CIA Director or DNI Head.

From the International Herald Tribune:

John Brennan, President-elect Barack Obama's top adviser on intelligence, has taken his name out of the running for any intelligence position in the new administration.

Brennan wrote in a Nov. 25 letter to Obama that he did not want to be a distraction. His potential appointment has raised a firestorm in liberal blogs who associate him with the Bush administration's interrogation, detention and rendition policies.

"The fact that I was not involved in the decision-making process for any of these controversial policies and actions has been ignored," he wrote, in a letter obtained by The Associated Press. . .

Obama's advisers had grown increasingly concerned in recent days over online blogs that accused Brennan of condoning harsh interrogation tactics on terror suspects, including waterboarding, which critics call torture.

As Glenn Greenwald writes:

Brennan's self-defense here is quite disingenuous. Whether he "was involved in the decision-making process for any of these controversial policies" is not and never was the issue. Rather, as I documented at length when I first wrote about Brennan, he was an ardent supporter of those policies, including "enhanced interrogation techniques" and rendition, both of which he said he was intimately familiar with as a result of his CIA position. As virtually everyone who opposed his nomination made clear -- Andrew Sullivan, Digby, Cenk Uygur, Big Tent Democrat and others -- that is why he was so unacceptable.

from The New York Times' Mark Mazzetti:

"The letter came as a surprise to many intelligence experts and even some lawmakers, and some questioned whether Mr. Brennan had been forced to withdraw his name by senior members of Mr. Obama’s transition team who were concerned about Mr. Brennan’s association with Bush administration policies.

"The opposition to Mr. Brennan had been largely confined to liberal blogs, and there was not an expectation he would face a particularly difficult confirmation process. Still, the episode shows that the C.I.A.’s secret detention program remains a particularly incendiary issue for the Democratic base, making it difficult for Mr. Obama to select someone for a top intelligence post who has played any role in the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda since the Sept. 11 attacks."

[According to Mazzetti then, the ONLY people who have played a role in the CIA's anti-Al Qaeda campaign since 9/11 are those who have advocated rendition. Ergo, if you're AGAINST Al Qaeda you must be FOR rendition. Sure. Of course. So logical.]

* * *

I suspect that this is also why Larry Summers did not end up getting the post that he was widely expected to get as the next Treasury Secretary.

On the Psychologists' Open Letter re: John Brennan

Below I have reposted an open letter asking Obama not to appoint John Brennan as CIA Director. Brennan, along with Jamie Miscik, is heading up Obama's intelligence transition team. The fact that Obama has entrusted the task of assembling Obama's intelligence policies and personnel to these two enablers and defenders of massive deception in the lead up to the Iraq War and of torture and rendition is very disturbing to anyone who has been holding out hopes that Obama will represent a decisive change from the horrid policies of the Bush White House.

Obama has repeatedly stated that he plans to shut Guantanamo down, which is welcome news.

But his team of advisers has also indicated that they may set up a separate category of so-called "National Security Courts" outside of the existing US federal court system. This would be a continuation of the fundamental logic of the Bush Regime's "War on Terror." See Attorney Candace Gorman's comments here and in these interviews posted at Fire John Yoo! See also Linda Rigas' new piece there on Eric Holder and the Bush Regime's torture policies.

The Open Letter below is a welcome development. I would underscore, however, that a "decisive repudiation" of the torture policies of Bush and Cheney would entail not only ending the practices of "preventive" detention and of "enhanced interrogation techniques," but also the prosecution of the torturers themselves. Without doing that, any future president could do it all and say that "Bush and Cheney did it, why can't I?"

Psychologists to Obama: Don't Name Torture Apologist John Brenner CIA Director

By Stephen Soldz, Psyche, Science, and Society
November 22, 2008

Dear President-Elect Obama,

We are writing to urge you not to select John Brennan as Director of the CIA. We are psychologists and allies who have long opposed the abuses of detainees under the Bush administration. We are just concluding a successful several-year struggle to remove psychologists from their roles in aiding or abetting these abuses. It has been a distressing fact that, while the Bush administration resorted to abuse and torture of those in our custody, often psychologists have been put in positions to use their psychological expertise to guide these unconscionable practices.

We look forward to your administration as an opportunity for genuine change -- in this case for our country to take a new direction in its treatment of prisoners. We applaud your commitment to closing Guantanamo and are encouraged by your clear statement from your “60 Minutes” interview last Sunday, “America doesn’t torture, and I’m gonna make sure that we don’t torture.” This fuels our hope for a decisive repudiation of the “dark side” -- the willingness to use or abet illegal and unethical coercive interrogation tactics that sometimes amount to torture and often constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

We are concerned, however, by reports that you may appoint John Brennan as Director of the CIA. Mr. Brennan served as a high official in George Tenet’s CIA and supported Tenet’s policies, including “enhanced interrogations” as well as “renditions” to torturing countries. According to his own statements, Mr. Brennan was a supporter of the “dark side” policies, wishing only to have some legal justification supplied in order to protect CIA operatives. In describing Director Tenet’s views he stated during a March 8, 2006 Frontline interview:

I think George [Tenet] had two concerns. One is to make sure that there was that legal justification, as well as protection for CIA officers who are going to be engaged in some of these things, so that they would not be then prosecuted or held liable for actions that were being directed by the administration. So we want to make sure the findings and other things were done probably with the appropriate Department of Justice review.

We know, of course, that “the appropriate Department of Justice review” means that torture was authorized and conducted by our government.

The use of these tactics goes against the moral fiber of our country and is never justified. This is true whether these “enhanced interrogation” techniques are used directly by U.S. forces, as in the CIA’s “black sites,” or by other countries acting as our surrogates, as in the “renditions” program where individuals are taken to countries practicing torture, resulting in suffering inflicted by that country’s forces.

We are well aware that these techniques are ineffective as well as immoral. There is extensive evidence that abused detainees are likely to say anything, true or false, to make the pain stop, leading to faulty intelligence. Furthermore, use of torture and other coercive techniques alienates our allies, strengthens the commitment of our enemies, and puts our own captured soldiers at risk.

Earlier this year Mr. Brennan argued in a National Journal interview that a new administration will have great continuity with the Bush-Cheney administration in its intelligence policies:

"Even though people may criticize what has happened during the two Bush administrations, there has been a fair amount of continuity. A new administration, be it Republican or Democrat -- you’re going to have a fairly significant change of people involved at the senior-most levels. And I would argue for continuity in those early stages. You don’t want to whipsaw the [intelligence] community. You don’t want to presume knowledge about how things fit together and why things are being done the way they are being done. And you have to understand the implication, then, of making any major changes or redirecting things. I’m hoping there will be a number of professionals coming in who have an understanding of the evolution of the capabilities in the community over the past six years, because there is a method to how things have changed and adapted."

In order to restore American credibility and the rule of law, our country needs a clear and decisive repudiation of the “dark side” at this crucial turning point in our history. We need officials to clearly and without ambivalence assert the rule of law. Mr. Brennan is not an appropriate choice to lead us in this direction. The country cannot afford to have him as director of our most important intelligence agencies.

As psychologists and other concerned Americans, we ask you to reject Mr. Brennan as Director of the CIA. His appointment would dishearten and alienate those who opposed torture under the Bush administration. We ask you to appoint a Director who will truly represent “the change we need.”

We eagerly await your administration and the new spirit it represents.

Best wishes for a successful administration,

Sincerely,

Stephen Soldz, Ph.D., Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis & Coalition for an Ethical Psychology

(For a full list of signatories go here.)

Stephen Soldz is a psychoanalyst, psychologist, public health researcher, and faculty member at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He maintains the Psychoanalysts for Peace and Justice web page and the Psyche, Science, and Society blog. He is a founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, one of the organizations leading the struggle to change American Psychological Association policy on participation in abusive interrogations.