Reforms hide private agenda

Today I listened to more Geithner testimony about regulatory reform. I won't get into the specifics of Geithner's proposals at this point. Like Geithner's ill-fated TALF plan, a proposal where private funds would be backed by government resources to buy up toxic debt, the proposed regulatory changes might be jettisoned and save me the work of analyzing the plan in detail and explaining why it won't work. Easier it is to simply wait and hope that Congress will do the right thing, and protect the regulatory environment from private sector--the Fed is a private corporation!--control.

It wasn't an absence of laws and regulatory bodies that contributed to the crisis--although changes in the law had favored greater abuses of credit in private money transactions. Instead an absence of enforcement of existing laws--"on the books"--led to systemic--and still unfolding--damage. De-regulatory steps like eviscerating the SEC enforcement and repealing Glass Steagal weren't the sole source of the crisis, but many hardcore partisans like Larry Kudlow refuse to blame de-regulation.

As I write, criticism of Obama's proposed regulatory reforms expands. To leave the Federal Reserve with new regulatory powers is completely insane in my view. I can't honestly see how Geithner and other financial industry insiders can craft a solution to a problem to which their ineptitude contributed--a fact that I dispensed here six months ago that only now seems to be making its way into the mass media.

The Chairman of the Federal Reserve is a Presidential appointee and serves as his agent. So in this sense Team Obama/Geithner could expect more authority and control over who the Fed chooses to regulate with its new powers. Theoretically this would be a coup for greater Executive branch authority.

I'm pleased to see the mass media openly criticizing the President's plan. At least the media seems to be covering opinions that opposed to any enhancement of Fed power, based on a broader trend which is anti-Wall Street greed. Even Larry Kudlow has turned quite cynical towards authorizing more power to the Fed.

As President Obama has said, transparency is vital to any structural reform of the financial system, so the more analysis of proposed solutions that's disseminated to the public, the better.

Recently Obama did seek to make secret logs of White House visitors (source), in what's becoming a disturbing new trend towards secrecy continued from the Bush years. As is becoming his mark, Obama promises the world and so we don't know if he's just saying he wants transparency when in fact he does the opposite.

Of course it sounds good when the President appears to be on your side, the little guy's...your side. But is he? Or are all the smooth promises just meant to cover up deeper and darker motives, like establishing more power for the Executive branch, or rewarding the financial interests who received so much help from government?

The Federal Reserve has extended a $12 trillion backdoor bailout to financial industry players through Fed programs initiated since last Fall, in what could be a huge ripoff many times larger than TARP. American taxpayers are on the hook for the Fed's debts, as well as the interest on the bonds sold by the Fed.

These bailouts could well be the best example of disaster capitalism, a theory I've explained many times here. The idea is that public services are led to fail, then the solution privatized. Rather than address the underlying causes of the crisis, government outsources functions seen as its traditional responsibility--often by granting huge no-bid contracts to companies with close ties to the overseeing political administration.

Giving the privately-owned Fed more powers amounts to a massive privatization of our financial system, which could lead to profit opportunities in overseeing the sale of more public debt. The interest on the debt ultimately comes from you, the taxpayer, in the form of income tax payments. The more debt that's issued, the more taxes will have to be paid not only eventually to pay it back, but on the interest as well.

Media Agenda

Media criticism is central to this blog as all too often the mass media establishment fails at its purpose to inform. Uninformed, the American people can't possibly know wrong from right. Nor can they be expected to understand any of the details, when the main media choices are Nancy Grace and celebrity gossip. both of which have received a broadening portion of the cable broadcast spectrum.

True, providing real news is more expensive. And yes, news divisions don't turn a profit in the conglomerates into which they've been merged, so naturally they're inclined to soften coverage and weaken investigative journalism, lest it threaten any sponsorship deals. Cross-marketing became the standard bearer--if it could not make money, then at least traditional news could help media divisions sell books or DVDs. In the age of bigger media, content not enhancing the conglomerates' bottom line appeared superfluous.

Perhaps more threatening than dumbing down coverage is the consolidation of media control by corporations under Right-wing leadership.
Oddly, the Right-wing moguls who control the majority of channels posing as news today aren't as concerned with profits as they should be. Perhaps the ultimate goal is to totally destroy whatever credibility the news has, and in so doing complete the self-destructive task of dumbing down America, so the average person knows little more than a serf might in medieval times.

With the Internet, the control of information appears elusive. Hard to drop information into the Memory Hole, Orwell's repository for all which the government doesn't wish its citizens to learn. Orwell's fantastically premonitory Memory Hole concept fits perfectly with the suppression of digitally stored information in the present day, beyond 1984 but well into the Age of Computers.

Look no farther than Iran, which has been having a mini-revolution bolstered by constant twitters, cell phone camera postings to youtube, and a broad host of realtime reporting technical innovations. This began actually during the '99 protest against the IMF in Seattle, where police claims no rubber bullets were used were instantly discredited with realtime video of spent rubber bullets on Seattle streets.

In Iran's case, Islamic traditionalists appear to be trying to deny coverage of massive protests as they happen. To drop things in the Memory Hole they can't be occurring realtime, and as widely distributed as they are, contradicting the State's version of reality.

In time we can see how history is reconstructed, judging on how much truth disappears, and how beneficial redefining history is to those in control. Americans do seem particularly vulnerable to forgetting their recent past, with the most recent example being Vietnam (a war whose outcome has been radically revised by those on the Right) where rationale people conclude the US would never again be locked in a land-war in Asia.

Odd how Vietnam-era terms like police action were locked in the past and never reappeared in the corporate media's lexicon. It's as if all the counter-culture associated with resistance to war within the media degenerated into pro-war Right-wing banter. Also interesting is how many radically pro-war voices have elected to forget their strong support for the war. And even more tellingly, the talking heads like Krauthammer who spouted off about the dire threat from Iraq still reign supreme on Fox, America's #1 source of news. Rather than play any clips of how wrong these Right-wingers were, most networks drop those past mistakes into the Memory Hole.

Far worse than these examples of bad press are the dark motives behind dumbing down coverage. In the past years, I've documented plenty of examples of propaganda, related mostly to the war, and what I've labelled propaganda-by-omission.

Who benefits from dumbed down news? Well, the public at large suffers, as what most people see on TV provides perhaps their greatest source of information about issues like the economy and foreign policy. It probably doesn't come as a surprise that economic and foreign policy are the two areas where the US is weakest today.

Of course these pundits were all wrong about the threat Iraq posed, or the unsubstantiated connection between Iraq and al Qaeda (now that the soul source of intelligence for Bush's 'smoking gun' comments was killed in prison.) Yet they're trumped out before our screens day after day as if they know more, and can give us vital insights into policy decisions that shape our world.

So why exactly are these talking heads so valuable to the networks? They seemed to have gotten it badly worn on Iraq, yet continue to appeal the editors and news directors. I've contributed most of the reason for this bias to Zionism, which is believes that Israel should expand geographically into the West Bank using whatever level of military force it wants.

The pundits re-appearances can be traced not to their remarkable powers of observation and analysis, but rather their selective memory. In a word, they cannot nor will they ever criticize Israel or American foreign policy in the Middle East, although David Gergen does come close every now and then.

With Tel Aviv and the Lobby shaping so much of American mass media coverage, and leaving bias wholly against the Arab side, it's no wonder Americans are fearful of Israel's enemies. 9/11 served as the fait accompli for molding public perception--it launched the anti-Arab crusade we see playing out in two wars today. Had the purposes for the Iraq war been analyzed truthfully, Americans may have gotten a far more accurate picture of the risks of intervention.

Missing link provided by torture

With close to 200,000 troops in battle zones, and the threat of an impending terror strike so looming in the fears of so many, perhaps at no time since World War Two has the coverage of international events been so germane to the functioning of everyday life. And supporters of the war on terror would argue what happened in a cave in Afghanistan threatens our safety and security.

In the perception of the mass media, the cause and effect link between 9/11 and al Qaeda is firmly established. If for instance, OBL couldn't be held directly responsible for 9/11, the entire rationale for war in Afghanistan could be undermined. Likewise, if we questioned why the bin Laden's FBI most wanted poster makes no mention of 9/11, or that the Taliban had actually offered him up shortly after 9/11, we might have the preconception that we knew who did it rudely contradicted.

Under Bush, patriotism devolved into simply following orders, obediently, as the wars created by 9/11 were deemed to be different, more vital to the national security interest than past interventions. We, the American people, weren't supposed to question the rationale for war, even if the Downing Street memos indicated that intelligence was being fit to policy--i.e., Iraq was guilty and we could prove it, with or without the evidence.

Now into the next President's terms, we're supposed to "look to the future and not the past," a phrase which could have come from the mouth of Orwell's Great Leader's as Obama's. Coincidentally, we're supposed to forget the torture, all that jive about confessions, even as Uighurs find themselves planted homes in Bermuda or tropical prisons in Palau. I think we're down to 60-70 or so people--all victims of torture--from Guantanamo who will actually face prosecution.

Confessions obtained through torture are notoriously unreliable. Torture victims simply say what their interrogators want to hear. To argue that we need to torture, the so-called 24 excuse simply doesn't hold water (no pun intended.) Now if we knew that the torture victim held some indispensable foreknowledge of an impending terror event, perhaps torturing them would work. But the whole point about any police action--which if the 9/11 investigation were accurately classified, would be a joke--is that the police don't know who's guilty. And if suspects are tortured, they might falsely indict people just to get the torture to stop.

Now as I've documented extensively here, the FBI had to send clean teams to Guantanamo because previous interrogations and the so-called intelligence they provided were procured by torture, making them inadmissible in any Court, despite Bush administration attempts to redefine the prisoners as enemy combatants without rights.

Left over from the Cheney/Obama torture debate is this well-documented post from TVNewsLies. See also Joe Conason's "We Tortured to Justify War" from salon.com.

Torture is the ultimate method for redefining truth--it doesn't matter how guilty the innocent are if they admit their guilt and support the official explanation--and contribute to labeling of appropriate villains. Dated but excellent is George Monbiot's Torture is at the Heart of America's War on Terror.

Along these lines is John Hatch's great article, "Torture and 9/11 in ICH.

Very little of the truths exposed in those articles has made the mass media. If the true extent of the torture were known, and the questionable results, the American people would reevaluate the rationale for the Afghan war--Afghanistan as a haven for terrorists involved in 9/11. If the torture victims were determined not to have done what they'd confessed to, just who did do 9/11 then?

The failure to try anyone for 9/11--surely others were involved other than those who died--leads to the idea that the post-9/11 interventions are unnecessary and may in fact be pursuing the wrong suspects, if indeed finding the right suspects, arresting, and trying them for the 9/11 crime were the intent.

Big money politics

Troubling indeed is the the amount industry spends to lobby in Washington. These numbers have climbed quickly and now reach tens of millions. For firms who may have billions in contracts at stake, or can avoid competitive pressures by channeling regulatory standards in their favor, lobbying makes good sense. The public loses in a zero sum game where the biggest winners pay to play.

Obama's presidential campaign took in $750 million, a record. He was the top recipient of corporate giving from AIG, a company that became dependent on Obama-approved bailouts to rescue itself, or at least prolong its ugly deconstruction.

The financial services industry was Obama's leading source of corporate campaign donations. The process of deduction establishes the premise that a quid pro quo must exist wherein the politician works in the interest of the companies who donate to their campaigns. Otherwise corporation and other lobbyist groups would have little reason to lobby, much less on the scale they do.

The system hasn't changed since Bush's day. Look at Enron, Bush's #1 corporate donor to see just how much Bush would later do to forestall adequate regulatory oversight, enabling Kenneth Lay and other Enron insiders to avoid legal accountability.

Good or bad, we've befallen to this concept of the benevolent dictator, with the Bush ineptitude followed by Obama's tyranny of good intentions and the assertion of the nanny state.

On the systemic level, little differs between successive regimes. Both seek more authority. Big spending, and with it bigger government, continues. Obama doesn't seem able to blame Bush for the big spending, at least until he admits that military spending has gotten out of hand. (Obama did bring up cost savings from leaving Iraq when the how to pay for it question arose recently. As I wrote in "War Spending is the 800 lb. Gorilla," we can't continue to spend as we are without addressing the trillion or so we are spending on wars and "defense.")

The point isn't who's in charge; it's more about whether Obama will bring any change to the system or will try to bolster his own authority, a la Bush. Under the new paradigm, what the President decides becomes de facto law. This is ruling by fiat, the right of kings and emperors to dictate what is acceptable and what isn't, no matter how irrational. We saw this behavior in Nero and other insane Roman rulers, who could do as they pleased. The Emperor's will is the law, they might have said then.

I was under the impression that these here United States weren't meant to be governed by fiat. Yes, Obama's decisions are better than Bush's. But that isn't the point. Our country wasn't meant to be run by the President. Nor were we ever to be the world's policeman or the sole judge, jury, and executioner of anyone who opposes our will, or happens to be considered acceptable collateral damage.

There've been many discussions of American empire, with several influential books like Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon, or Chalmers Johnson's well-written Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Empire and more recent The Bases of Empire which details the 800 plus bases the US military has.

Ultimately the effectiveness of foreign policy and military intervention rests in how clearly goals are set. If our goal is to eliminate terrorists, we will be incapable of ending all terror and thus on a permanent and doomed mission. If our foreign policy intends to create client states for our military hardware, and perhaps bust the budget, starving the beast, we've certainly committed the US on that course.

Many conservatives believe that the choice between spending on so-called social programs and our "defense" needs to be forced. While bankrupting government might not seem to successful a philosophy, it would in fact shrink government down to the size of a bathtub and drown it, to borrow Grover Norquist's comment. The third rail of American politics--Social Security and Medicare--might collapse, denying the Democratic party the largest source of political popularity.

Some conservatives might be wishing for a collapse of government finances, but then again that might only bring more taxes. I've always supported lower government spending, and have detailed the problems inherent in trying to stimulate the economy considering the size of our debt. At some point, government spending loses its effectiveness as recipients become less competitive.

The more government props up industries with the most political pull--the auto, financial services--the weaker the private sector gets. While decreasing regulation is good for small business, in the Credit Bubble Burst we see the importance of being cautious in making changes to the legal and regulatory environments.

Americans need to stay cognizant of the relationship between lobbyists seeking to gut the law and change regulations in order to benefit select corporate interests at the expense of the public and market stability. If we're properly informed by our mass media, Americans can make collective determinations about how best to regulate financial entities and spend our public resources.

Odd how Reagan's great de-regulatory experiment might in the end result in bigger government, as the consequences of inadequate regulations like the Credit Bubble Burst of 2008 make their long-term impact on the American economy.

More Links

See this brief post about Torture at Guantanamo and the false confessions it generated.

For dealing with thought crimes like Phil Dick's Minority Report, see this March article about "preventative detention" by Ted Rall.

Another slightly dated but highly worthy piece is this Tomgram: Ira Chernus, GWOT, R.I.P. posting.

Chernus writes:
"Without a 'war' to wage, this administration cannot so easily claim, as its predecessor did, extraordinary powers for the president. It won't be able to use the argument 'we're at war' to justify poking holes in the Constitution, or to get a mindless rubber-stamp for its national security policies from Congress and the public..."
How much of our security needs are actually driven by the political calculations behind managing public perception? How much of the defining of the terrorist threat was designed to seed popular support for the long war, one neither justified nor in our best strategic interest?

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Torture: Illegal and un-American

It's not a big leap from the Executive branch exempting itself from some law to outright lawlessness. If society becomes one in which might makes right, every little too bit wannabe dictator will takes his marching orders from George W. Bush, and do as they please regardless of the laws meant to limit their authority.

The President leads by example. Even if he's not waterboarding people, his role is tantamount to full participation in the "harsh interrogation tactics" if he has endorsed their use, as Bush admitted recently.

Bush's rise to the Presidency really has changed things in our country. During the 2000 campaign, as I was struggling with my business, I hadn't thought the choice of Presidents would really affect me but has it ever. Gas prices spike past $4/gallon, which means prices are and will continue to rise. Our international credibility has tanked, which in my personal experience means overseas friends have given up on coming to visit our country. Another major personal threat is the deterioration of military readiness. We are much more vulnerable to internal tribulations like hurricans, fires, earthquakes, and tornadoes previously left to locally based National Guard manpower and resources, both of which have been shipped overseas.

Changes on the national stage do matter locally, I've learned the hard way. The move to disaster capitalism has federalized our emergency response capability. Under the Bush system of crony capitalism, disaster response and recovery have been privatized and de-localized, so we're more vulnerable than ever. The best example during Katrina was FEMA's blocking a Salvation Army relief convoy because it hadn't been authorized by Washington.

As fires rage in California and Florida, earthquakes and floods in the Midwest, drought elsewhere, maybe someone's trying to tell us something. On a higher note, if these weather tragedies are sent to us from God, the US has really been going down the wrong road morally and might actually a warning to repent and change our ways. No one more than George Bush ultimately takes responsibility for putting us on the path we're on, but I just saw a poll on CNBC that said more people blame Congress for higher oil prices than OPEC, Bush, and Big Oil, combined! The fact that Bush represented Big Oil seems lost on a majority of Americans who can't quite connect the hand-holding with King Abdullah with the nearly 10-fold increase in the cost of oil since Bush entered office.

What matters "over there" does make an impact over here. Over time, the fabric of a society can break down if laws are ignored by those in power. If Bush and his annoited lieutenants can break the law and get away with it, our legal system is irrelevant. Our government was meant to be established as a more perfect union. Kings and queens were entitled to no special priviledges under the law, and treated no differently from the average citizen when it came to the law. Nowadays there is a separate and unequal legal system for the rich, and for our President and those who go forth in his name.

Several of our founders spoke about the threat we could create for ourselves from within. Franklin talked about striving for security and losing all, and I believe it was Adams who talked about threats to our liberties posed by a standing army. The Constitution was created in an age when alliances between European nations caused incessant warfare, so entanglements were rightfully shunned. How far have we sunk in that regard, as we engage in multi-decade Status of Forces agreements in the over 100 foreign countries we now base ourselves in.

Essay on Torture:
Terror transgressions

Lurking in the collective consciousness is the scary fact that the US government, its agents, contractors, and proxies all violated both the spirit and letter of the law in treating detainees. The New York Times has an editorial out under the title "What the F.B.I. Agents Saw."

The FBI were canaries in the coalmine for Bush's newly created classification and trials process custom tailored for radical anti-Western Muslims. The NYT editorial says of the FBI who visited Guantanamo that "they also predicted, accurately, that it would be impossible to prosecute abused prisoners."

I posted to commondreams.org under the article, "Report Details Military Tactics FBI Agents Found Abusive" by Marisa Taylor. Here is my post:

The FBI distancing themselves from military procedures is a huge red flag. I'd written in my blog that "clean" FBI teams had had better success than the ones who witnessed or deployed torture using Starbucks and congenial conversation. Recently, during the Guantanamo trials military attorneys voiced concerns that might be disobeying their superior officers in trying to defend their clients from illegally acquired evidence. The judges may or may not choose to disqualify confessions based on torture. Military lawyers representing Gitmo detainees threatened to quit rather than be forced to violate legal procedure. Allowing the tortured confessions to stand as evidence could deny defendants their right to representation and full defense under the law. Strict adherence to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, like the US law which FBI agents operate under regardless of locale, would throw out all the coerced testimony.

The FBI's pull-out showed illegal conduct was commonplace and in violation of US laws and statutes. Just how bad did the torture get? In Abu Ghraib, we saw the horror captured on digital cameras. A journalist imprisoned at Guantanamo, Sami al-Haj drew illustrations showing the horrors he faced. See his story and some of his art article on alternet here. I particulary liked the alien-like appearance of the US military staff performing an autopsy in one of the drawings. For more in this theme, see Fernando Botero's work here and here.

Like the Botero and al-Haj paintings, hunger strikes have plagued Gitmo but gone hidden in the American media. Forced feedings were ordered lest the prisoners starve. Yet these humanitarian grounds for intervention have been carried out in a most inhuman fashion. In Gitmo, prison guards thrust tubes down the nasal passages of detainees as they were strapped down in special feeding chairs. A famous case of IRA detainees starving themselves in the 1970s established a precedent that forced feeding was a violation of prisoner rights, even if it led to their deaths. In essence the forced feedings were simply more torture inflicted against hapless victims.

Americans should worry about be the possibility of the torturing police state mentality being turned inward, towards domestic dissidents, then political rivals. First, they came for Jose Padilla, and I did nothing... Then they came for Dr. Sami Al Arian, and I did nothing...

Perhaps the torture is the adrenaline rush peak of a power trip. Our political leadership might get off on doing whatever they want, knowing they can get away with it. Maybe the torture videos circulate the White House like porn in a prison, where they provide late night entertainment. A power trip involves doing things not for any good reason--like gathering intelligence--but rather because they can. Victimization serves the ego of a weak mind, so torture tells us a great deal about those who authorize and do it.

Racism plays a role in allowing unspeakable horrors to befall terrorist suspects, who are under our traditional legal system (vs. the de facto one Bush created), innocent until proven guilty. Arabs are seen as a sub-human, and racism forms the backbone of the attitude of Americans towards the region since 9/11. Bush's comments during the 60th anniversary of Israel's founding--not disseminated in the MSM--basically called for a territorial expansion of Greater Israel, a Zionist program from the start. Of course green-lighting ruthless expansionism doesn't bode well for the Palestinians whose lands will be expropriated. The US traditionally played the role of mediator in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; now it is perceived as part of an anti-Arab axis.

Making enemies

The enemy combatant label was created post-9/11. Fabricated, the new label required a whole new legal system, again one which would not be able to meet the more rigorous qualifications of US domestic courts. However, the Jose Padilla case shows that terror convictions can be successfully made under higher evidentiary standards. Padilla's multi-year un-Constititutional lack of representation and due process should have tainted his trial. After such prolonged isolation however, Padilla appears dysfunctional and incapable of grasping the charges made by the government against him. Little of his abusive treatment at the hands of a naval brig in South Carolina was brought up in his trial. By the time Padilla saw the light of a Federal courtroom in Miami, he'd suffered through years of extreme isolation.

Padilla was likely treated better than those that US has held in secret prisons called "black sites", as well as at the hands of third party nations who received non-US nationals as the by-product of "extraordinary" rendition.

Canadian political refugee Arar was sent back to his native Syria after being detained in New York. Arar has filed civil lawsuits claiming that the US government acted with malicious intent when it rendered him out of the US. Suspecting Arar of terrorist ties, the US simply dropped Arar off to a country they'd known would torture him. This way source of their evidence--likely a suspected terrorist tortured into giving names--could be masked under a national security prextext. The government could likewise avoid having to provide evidence against Arar--which is a red flag saying they simply didn't have enough on him (perhaps because he was--in fact--innocent?) In a similar case, Abu Omar, an Eygptian iman from Milan, Italy was sent back to his native land where he'd been brutally tortured, as stories of abuse written on toilet paper emerged out of his Eygptian jail cell. See the Mother Jones exclusive by Peter Bergen.

The enemy combatant designation deprives detainees of due process in part because the system for detaining and capturing through the process of rendition has little legal precedent on which to rule. Yes, international law could be subverted by classify War on Terror targets as "enemy combatants", freeing Bush and the US national security machine to employ radical techniques. The status of detainees was specifically meant to differ from Prisoners of War, who were given legal rights under treaty law. By changing the names of the terrorist suspects, the Bush administration hoped to reject the legal limitations on their behavior. In going it alone on the enemy combatant designation, the US has abandoned precedent in both international and US military law.

Yet the system for dealing with the detainees after they've been forced to confess is dysfunctional. One big problem with the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is the huge numbers of prisoners that the US must manage.

Our military can't process battlefield detainees, a broad term referring to any persons that the US military and its allies might choose to detain in the battlefield, which through the War on Terror has expanded to encompass just about anywhere. High-value targets are meant to be screened out of the larger group of detainees, and sent up the military chain of custody to Guantanamo, if the military chooses. But what about the Afghan who fired a few potshots then was tortured to confess to being a member of al Qaeda? What if he's simply an innocent who's been brought in order to provide his captors a bounty? If we are to rely on our military alone, we cannot trust whatever evidence our Afghan partners might produce, because it hasn't met our supposedly higher benchmark. And if the US presence is not meant to impose justice, how can we ever get out, yet alone claim victory by creating a functional state through our presence?

Saddam's barbaric execution by Sadr's people showed just what happens if we give detainees over to the Shiite government. Corruption and close tribal affiliations mean prisoners released from US custody might simply be set free by the locals or executed, not for doing anything wrong but simply for being from a rival tribe. On a practical level, we can't process these people, because our military probably lacks the sufficient evidence or judicial capacity to try them all.

(Il)legal process

Bush created a military tribunal procedure which is an attempt to break with concept of a traditional military court controlled by the Uniform Code of Military and US laws which forbid "harsh interrogation techniques," a term that refers to torture under long-standing international laws.

The processing system for detainees reflects the hodge-podge of iffy legal arguments made among White House lawyers. Conjecture based on the theory of a Unitary Executive granted through fiat the President extralegal powers based on his job responsibility to protect the American people. Bouncing legal opinions among White House staffers was elevated to the status of scholarly legal opinion and quickly brought into operative norms of conduct. Scrutiny of the proposed legal processes were reserved from broader, judicious review. Looking back on all the violations of law by the Bush administration, we can now see the legal arguments as nothing more than efforts to circumvent the law--in this case removing the well-established codes of conduct for US military personnel.

So weak was the White House argument that it claimed that US laws don't apply to US personnel operating on Cuban soil--the tip of Cuba on which Gitmo is located. Not so, said the FBI, which pulled its people. This approach actually dates pre-9/11, when the Bush administration tried to exempt US soldiers from the International Court of Justice, which could try US soldiers individually. Under Bush, the US has gone to great lengths to protect military personnel from prosecution by foreign courts, so much so that legal invulnerability for our troops is codified in Status of Forces Agreements we sign with nations hosting our bases. Along the same lines, a clause in Iraqi law forbade kept our soldiers and even private contractors from being tried for any crimes they might commit.

In getting US forces exempted from international law, Bush would have been easily sold the popular misperception that the US military would be hamstrung if put under the legal discretion of non-American courts. There is also the possibility that the higher-ups feared being prosecuted for their wrongdoing if lower ranking personnel testified against them in foreign courts. Perhaps the reason top policymakers were so concerned with legal accountability of troops is the understanding they could be liable as their commanders and originators of the orders.

Accountability for the higher-ups in the military chain of command has been sorely lacking. Looking back at Abu Ghraib, we saw Lt. Col. Pappas apparently endorse the harsh interrogation tactics yet face nothing more than a slap on the wrist for his behavior while the "recycled hillbillies" below him in rank were sentenced to prison. Major General Geoffrey Miller brought torture techniques from Gitmo to Iraq in 2004--he's faced no legal consequences for his conduct either.

Violence and outrage rules in a society stripped of its laws like Iraq. The rape of female KBR contractors also shows the legal loopholes that come into play when suing in US federal courts. Without the rigid controls of a functional legal system in place--military or non-military--, justice breaks down. Criminals aren't prosecuted, crimes occur without recourse, the fabric of a society's grounding in the law begins cracking. Rapists and murders go untried, uncaught, and anonymous, which of course just encourages more raping and killing. Knowing they face no prosecution for what they do in Iraq, private contractors do as they please there.

Roots of torture

Politically, Bush need to be claiming success in the War on Terror. The Iraq insurgency had heated up in the spring of 2004, with Fallujah becoming an example of Sunni resistance to the US occupation. With the fall election coming up fast, demonstrating progress in Iraq became vital for political reasons. Someone must have convinced Bush and his people that torture would forestall the insurgency--at least through the election. The spin job concocted around redefining torture as "harsh interrogation techniques" shows how that Bush and his closest legal advisers like Harriet Miers and John Woo were trying to hide the truth, which was that they were breaking international law.

The domestic political audience was the real target of war on terror rhetoric and presumptions--one of which was the TV series 24's use of torture as an anecdotal proof of the need for expediency in dealing with terrorists. The bad guy--alleged terrorist--is tortured in exchange for saving the lives of thousands. A fair trade-off, it would seem, until the legal ramifications of torture are considered.

With 9/11 as the backdrop, American soldiers in the field could have looked at any Afghan or Iraqi as a terrorist. In the field, civilian casualties were identified post-humously as "dead terrorists" so reclassifying live ones who'd dared to resist the occupation as "al-Qaeda" was no big step. In Americans' eyes, they were all guilty of 9/11. This is the VC in the jungle come alive in every Vietnamese face, all over again 40 years later. There, the dead civilians would become part of an ever-growing body count, used as a metric of military progress in that failed war.

Could the enemy combatant designation have been an effort to produce "actionable" intelligence? The threat to the US couldn't have been framed as more dire than since the Civil War, when Lincoln suspended the Constitution in dealing with domestic insurrections. The end scene in Gangs of New York depicts the harsh clampdown which killed large numbers of New Yorkers. Numerous antiwar writers were imprisoned as well, and denied their right to trial.

Why torture?

The military tribunals system was created out of thin air by the same Bush advisers who created the enemy combatant designation. Trying to avoid international legal accountability originated out of the assumptions that torture 1) was essential to preventing new attacks and 2) would produce accurate results. Torture forces confessions out of guilty and innocent alike, just to stop the pain, so it's inaccurate. Torture is however a good way to find and "detain" a bunch of people regardless of their guilt or innocence, to give the semblance of progress in the nebulous War on Terror.

Just how concerned with accumulating evidence was the Bush administration? After 9/11if evidence were marginal or better, as in Padilla's case for example, convictions could have been had, so why risk it? After all, the military courts which could try terrorists are known to be hard for defendants, so the standards would have been lower than our Courts. Yet we've only seen a handful of post-9/11 convictions; the suspects languish waiting for trial.

Creating a new system to classify and try detainees strongly hints that prosecutors knew that had a sufficient evidence, but not lawfully acquired evidence that could withstand objections by the defense during a trial, whether through military tribunal or other court.

The architects of Bush's detainee classification and tribunals system had to produce convictions, so they created what they thought would be an easier method. They've created a jumble of new terminology and Soviet-style confessions upon which to base the legal side of the prosecution of the War on Terror. Why the need for reclassification and a whole new system of tribunals? Why not just feed their detainees through the standard military justice system?

The Bush people knew that torture worked not from a legal or evidentiary perspective but because it could extract confessions, which provided the currency of the belief that al Qaeda was in fact responsible for 9/11 and that a growing conspiracy persisted. While mostly worthless in a court of law, the results of harsh interrogation reaffirmed the presumption that it was in fact al Qaeda who'd been responsible for 9/11 and that the threat was ongoing. Apprehending terrorists and making them talk became a salve for Americans embittered by 9/11 and thirsty for revenge. In a nexus of politics and terror, they were constantly being told they'd come under attack from al Qaeda.

Our government must have known that their cases were weak long before the manufactured evidence began to come in. They must have known torture would make convictions harder. So why torture, other than to get people to admit being more involved than they actually were? In short, torture created the justification for continuing wars based on a threat from terrorism, by procuring evidence--real or contrived--that an ongoing conspiracy was unfolding, one which rationalized ever more extreme interrogations to prevent a mass casualty event in the US.

Torture committed years ago haunts us now. We have to contend with the thousands of incarcerated Iraqis, Afghans, and others who've been caught up in the terror dragnet. Without a system in place to try, convict, and imprison, or free those detainees, they languish in American-run prisons, denied a right to trial we grant our worst criminals back in the US.

As I said here a while back, the abandonment of Geneva actually causes more problems than it solves. We can still fall back on the rule of international law, but this might decrease the conviction rate, a political liability but a practical necessity if our overseas prisons are to ever shrink and the detainees there processed fairly. Fairness undoubtedly involves the right of habeas corpus--a right to a speedy trial before a judge as well as the right not to be tortured. And back home we need to end this thing one day--with terrorists tried and convicted, doing hard time, or executed.

On a conspiracy level, the inadequacy of Bush's detainee classification and tribunal system may be meant to globalize the prison-industrial complex which has been America's #1 growth industry with more than 2 million imprisoned--more than any other nation. Military functions are being privatized, so we may live to see the day a corporate flag flies over our foreign bases and overseas prisons. Our nation's role in torturing detainees might need to be outsourced in order to save what is left of our global credibility and respect for the rule of law that's been sacrificed in the War on Terror and our ongoing occupations/wars of conquest.

Additional Sources

Good article on torture by Dahr Jamail from March, 2006 here.

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