Author: Ophelia Benson

G did a comment on ‘The downside of torture’ that needs to be out here in the daylight, so here it is. OB.

What is perhaps most appalling about this is that prosecuting torture has become nothing more than another tawdry political game. Barack Obama is, among other things, not just a Harvard Law graduate but an actual Constitutional scholar. He knows what an appalling clusterfuck the Bush Administration made of the Constitution with its denial of habeas corpus, secret prisons, torture, and all that. He knows what the morally and legally required path must be. But he is rather scrupulously avoiding that path.

Worse, Obama’s administration has in almost all terrorism-related court cases pushed the absurdly counter-Constitutional secrecy policies and claims of authority to defy law at whim of the Bush administration. I am fairly certain that this is not, as some have claimed, out of the desire to preserve those claimed powers for his own use. Rather, I think it is fairly clear that his stated political position of “moving forward” and “not looking back” – i.e. avoiding politically troublesome legal prosecutions of Bush administration criminal acts – absolutely requires that he perpetuate the official legal cover-ups for those activities as long as possible. It is a delaying tactic.

I think Obama has decided that it would be too politically costly to prosecute Bush Administration war crimes at this time. (Sadly, he may be right. Recent polls show that less than half of all Americans support legal investigations of torture and all that, and the ugly reality of such prosecutions would only make them less popular as they proceeded.) But I think Obama also realizes that investigations and prosecutions must happen eventually, both for the good of the nation and for the sake of U.S. standing in the community of nations. So he talks about moving forward and insists that he doesn’t want prosecutions, but he never quite entirely rules out future legal action: Instead, he has officially left that decision it in the hands of his Attorney General (where it belongs, incidentally) – but A.G. Eric Holder will of course not pursue anything until given the go ahead by President Obama.

Meanwhile, the torture memos are released and an al Qaeda operative (Ali al-Marri) is successfully prosecuted in ordinary Federal court without any of the unnecessary and unconstitutional measures introduced by the Bush administration to hold “enemy combatants” indefinitely without trial. (Watch Rachel Maddow’s report on the al-Marri case here. Rachel’s money quote, commenting on the successful prosecution of al-Marri without the Bush system of eternal imprisonment without charges or trial, torture, and so on: “So we end up, at the end of this – after all these years and all of these Constitutional crises one after the other provoked by this system – ending up being able to charge people and bring evidence against them as if we are a normal country under the rule of law.”)

The torture memos and the al-Marri prosecution (along with several other clues) give me the distinct impression that the Obama administration is playing a game of slowly exposing both the brutal reality and the complete ineffectiveness of the Bush administration’s illegal methods, and will keep doing so until the point where the public and the political landscape not only support, but demand investigations and prosecutions.

I don’t know what bothers me more: the manipulative and corrosive character of this political game, or the fact that the American public and U.S. elected officials are so incredibly stupid and venal that such manipulative tactics are probably necessary – and hopefully effective.

Philippe Sands said on ‘Fresh Air’ that Judge Garzon attempted to prosecute a couple of people that the Bush administration had tortured and that the case collapsed because the evidence, being the product of torture, was not admissable in court. Sands said this is one reason Garzon has started a criminal investigation of some of Bush’s team: they (allegedly) not only violated international law, they also made it impossible for other courts to prosecute the objects of the torture.

He also discussed the irony of the fact that Chuckie Taylor was convicted in a US court for crimes he committed in Liberia; that was possible because the crimes he committed were violations of international law. States that have signed such laws have an obligation – not permission, but an obligation – to act on such violations when they have the ability to do so. He also said he was shocked that Jay Bybee still insists that waterboarding was legal; he says Bybee is a federal judge, and US federal courts are highly respected even outside the US, and the honourable thing for Bybee to do would be to admit that in the frantic atmosphere of the time he made a mistake.

In the frantic atmosphere of the time a lot of people neglected to ask necessary questions.

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned. This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved – not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees – investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

And the result is…they screwed up.

The top officials [Tenet] briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

Well that’s a distinguished legacy to be part of.

I saw a horrible thing on tv last night, in a PBS show about the Kalahari. There are flamingos that nest in in an area of the Kalahari which slowly dries out during the nesting season, with the result that the chicks have to walk a hundred miles through the desert to get to water. They have to walk. A hundred miles. Through a desert. It’s as ridiculous as it sounds. They’re small, they’re feeble, it’s burning hot. It takes weeks.

250,000 leave; some years not one chick makes it.

Good planning! Wouldn’t you think the adults would manage to think ‘gee, maybe we should find a better place to nest’? Or that, failing to think that, they would all quickly die off because they couldn’t keep the numbers up? But apparently that’s not happening. So instead you get this disgusting trek of misery. One revolting detail is that the chicks’ wing tips pick up mud as they trudge along, and the mud hardens and just hangs there, so they’re all staggering along with these heavy blobs dragging them down. It’s a truly sickening sight – one wants to arrest all the parents for abuse.

Another tale for the Devil’s Chaplain.

Oh all right – I quit too soon. It’s too annoying to leave.

[A]ttacking them in broad and often hilarious strokes…allows him to develop an extended interpretive summary of what he describes as mainstream Christian doctrine, a subject about which (as he repeatedly reminds us) the Ditchkins duo, along with the Western intellectual elite in general, knows almost nothing. Eagleton’s terminology is deliberately provocative, and some Christians won’t find his account of their beliefs, colored as it clearly is by the Catholic “liberation theology” of his youth, to be mainstream at all.

Well exactly – a great many Christians won’t find his account of their beliefs to be mainstream at all. So in what sense is he justified in pitching a gigantic name-calling fit at the ‘new’ atheists for knowing nothing of his peculiar idiosyncratic personal version of what Christian belief is? His ‘terminology is deliberately provocative,’ which being interpreted, means he says his version of Christian belief is mainstream when it is no such thing and then screams bloody murder at people who don’t buy his version. ‘Provocative’ is a desperately polite way of describing such a way of proceeding.

I did a post on the same bait-and-switch a couple of years ago, the one in which he said God was no more a person than his left foot was – whatever he said; but I can’t find the post and don’t have time to keep looking. But this is familiar stuff – which doesn’t make it any less irritating.

Horrible man. Revisit this loathsome outburst on the occasion of Salman Rushdie’s K, if you want more evidence of that. He’s an intellectual thug.

Terry Eagleton has at least one fan anyway.

Eagleton…is determined not to commit the same elementary errors he ascribes to such foes as biologist Richard Dawkins and political journalist Christopher Hitchens. (Those two, collectively dubbed “Ditchkins” by Eagleton, are the self-appointed leaders of public atheism and the authors of bestselling books on the subject, Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” and Hitchens’ “God Is Not Great.”)

He gets it right by saying Eagleton ascribes these elementary errors, but then he promptly labels Dawkins and Hitchens ‘foes’ – why are they foes? Because Eagleton doesn’t like what they’ve written. That doesn’t really make them his foes, it just makes them people he is quarreling with. ‘Foes’ is more ascribing. And then, what is that ‘self-appointed leaders of public atheism’ doing there? They’re not self-appointed leaders of anything; they wrote books about something. Eagleton writes books about things; now he is busy ascribing things to ‘foes’; does that make him a self-appointed leader of public anti-Ditchkinsism? Not particularly. We’re all allowed to write books without being labeled self-appointed leaders of something or other. (And this ‘Ditchkins’ thing…that’s just childish.)

[Eagleton] freely admits that what Christian doctrine teaches about the universe and the fate of man may not be true, or even plausible. But as he then puts it, “Critics of the most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook.”

That’s just populist bullying. Why do they? Why can’t critics of any form of popular culture – no matter how enduring, how popular, how ‘authentic,’ how anything you like – just criticize whatever they think is bad about it? In argument it’s better to argue with the strongest case, but in criticism, you can go after the worst stuff, because that’s your point. There’s no ‘moral obligation’ to be deferential to the most enduring form of popular culture in human history; how pompous to say there is.

Still, attacking them in broad and often hilarious strokes – he depicts Dawkins as a tweedy, cloistered Oxford don sneering at the credulous nature of the common people, and Hitchens as a bootlicking neocon propagandist and secular jihadist – lends his book considerable entertainment value.

Hilarious? That’s hilarious? Oookay, if that’s the taste level, I won’t bother reading any more.