Grave Error

Just when I thought I was getting away from politics, when I thought I had exhausted the topic of torture and Guantanamo, I see the embarrassingly disgusting and partisan reactions to the DOJ Ethics Panel request for preliminary investigations into detainee abuse. Just like with Michael in Godfather III, right when I think I’m out, they pull me back in.

To avoid repeating myself too much, where I have already made my argument, I will only add the following:

• Of course it is obvious why Just-Trust-Me-Dick is against investigations.  All roads lead to Dick. It is almost impossible to argue with a straight face that the legal memos giving cover to the enhanced interrogation program were provided in good faith. In that sense, the Dick Cheney’s should be investigated, not the CIA. But as Kitapsiz has frequently commented, “What difference would it make in any event, he already shot a man in the face while under the influence and escaped the law …” As a result, just like with Abu Ghraib, the small fish pay the price.
• If credible claims of criminal activities exist or, in the alternative, if Dick Cheney is so sure that the CIA did nothing wrong, then why wouldn’t an investigation be a good thing? It would both reinforce the rule of law and set Mr. Cheney free.
• It is ironic that Mr. Cheney and the CIA defenders are calling this investigation partisan. This investigation would not have happened but for Mr. Cheney’s call for the enhanced interrogation program in the first place, a radical change in policy that, as detailed in the IG Report, even the CIA operatives recognized would eventually led them to be investigated. So although Cheney is now crying “foul play”, an eventual investigation was both foreseeable and anticipated. In that sense, the CIA was set up by Cheney. Furthermore, why is Cheney so worried about the CIA’s feelings? Does he think they are little children that need constant coddling?
• Most of Cheney’s fear-mongering about Obama making the U.S. less safe is directed at policy changes that took place during Bush’s second term and that Obama is simply continuing. Remember even Obama the sell-out is against Holder’s independent investigation.
• The Bush Administration did everything in its power to fabricate evidence and conceal information regarding the War in Iraq and has even recently admitted to manipulating terror alerts for political gain. The political and media class have had absolutely no accountability whatsoever for the key roles they’ve played in the massive propaganda campaign that has caused immeasurable death and destruction. The issue of torture only highlights the pathetic state of our establishment media and the farce that is congressional oversight. As Glenn Greenwald has written, Congress and the establishment media have played absolutely no role in demanding transparency here. The only reason any of this information is being disclosed at all is because of lawsuits by human rights groups. This represents a major failure in how our systems of checks and balance and free press are supposed to protect us from government abuse.
• We were led to believe that only the worst of the worst, the most hardened of terrorists were subjected to enhanced interrogation. We now know that to be false. We also know that numerous Guantanamo detainees who were tortured and kept in cages for years were later declared innocent, not by bleeding-heart left-wing socialists but by seasoned military judges.
• The press has largely ignored the fact that some one hundred detainees died under the enhanced conditions and apparently others “just got lost”.
• According to our treaty obligations and therefore as required by law (in conformance with the U.S. Constitution), the U.S. is obliged to investigate credible allegations of torture. Failure to do so may subject U.S. officials to criminal prosecution abroad. Once again, it was Cheney’s program that has set our guys up to become international pariahs.
• Since when was Jack Nicholson’s Cheney-esque “You can’t handle the truth” character from A Few Good Men supposed to be the hero or Daniel Day Lewis’ from In the Name of the Father (tortured until he confessed to a terrorist bombing he didn’t commit) the villain?

Back in 1998 during my last semester in law school, I worked on a project for the Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law where I spent most of my time reading and compiling the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, including all of the gruesome details of torture from the worst years of Cuba, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. For those of you who think that the IG Report is not so damning, it reads like it was right out of a Latin American dictatorship.

It’s interesting that we are supposed to be world leaders, beacons of light, yet the entire Republican Party and many Democrats, with an enabling press, are passionately against transparency and upholding the rule of law. As Juan Cole writes in reference to the CIA operatives who expressed concern about foreign prosecution,

But why weren’t they afraid of prosecution in U.S. courts? When did the U.S. go from having, in the Bill of Rights, among the most advanced human rights laws in the world to being a gulag backwater where it is only a trip to Holland that American torturers fear?

What is happening to us? Suddenly we are afraid of the rule of law. We refuse to innovate or even recognize, as in the case of health care, that other countries have models we can follow. Even in technology and infrastructure, we are falling behind (we are number 28 in the world in Internet connectivity speed). What is left of those infamous American values?

Barack Obama is “extraordinarily relieved” after former president Bill Clinton negotiated the release of two American journalists who had illegally entered North Korea after just five months detention. We are also supposed to express outrage at the Iranian government for detaining three Americans who illegally entered the border into Iran. But while North Korea is a filthy dictatorship and we are an apathetic democracy, it is hard to ignore the fact that we continue to cage people for seven years counting without evidence, trial, and in some cases without violations of American Law. If you want to keep score, it took our government six years to release a foreign journalist illegally detained without trial at Guantanamo.

The extraordinarily relieved Obama Administration would even like the authority to detain anyone it wants indefinitely without any recourse whatsoever. Meanwhile, these journalists must be extraordinarily relieved that they were detained in North Korea and not in Guantanamo or Bagram.

Every time I hear another bewilderingly silly argument against any move towards real health care reform, I think about that huddled, entrenched and entitled health care industry pouring millions of dollars into politicians’ pockets, yearning to maintain their status quo.

For each and every cry of the end of the world that the Armageddonists predict, there is a lobbyist bankrolling a politician (Go Blue Dogs!) to protect their industry’s turf. As a matter of fact, none of their arguments hold any weight whatsoever, most which are actually more damning of private insurance than any possible government mandated coverage. For example, under private care, your insurance company decides, based on costs alone, whether you can see the doctor of your choice and which kind of treatment, if any, you can receive. And your insurance company only makes money when you are denied treatment, not when you are granted it. In other words, their business is to deny you health care. When you go to the doctor, your insurance company loses.

Then there are the blatantly fabricated and misleading tales of the blunders in foreign hospitals. In Canada this or in England that, as if American hospitals were free from error or negligence. There wouldn’t be a medical malpractice industry without malpractice. That’s Free Market 101. Of course, the Republicans blame the free market of trial lawyers and want to regulate the legal practice.

The most absurd argument of all, though, is about how universal health care will somehow turn the United States into a Soviet style communist nation of lazy people milking the system. Wouldn’t that mean that our single payer public education system is also a form of Soviet style communism endangering our land, and that anyone who has ever studied in or sent their children to a public school is just another lazy-ass freeloader? Should we turn the schools over to the health care industry?

As things stand, we look more like one of those heavily indebted third world dictatorships where the majority of government spending is on the military and almost nothing is invested in the basic necessities of the citizens, like schools, health care, roads, or infrastructure. Even our airports, as one airline expert recently told me, are already light years behind their European counterparts. That’s right, we have the most expensive socialized national defense in the history of the world (though after eight years, longer than World War II, we cannot even defeat cave dwellers), we pay for our wars and trillion dollar tax cuts by borrowing the money from communist China. Yet any heath care reform whatsoever that puts us on par with other industrialized nations would place us at risk of socialism.

Of the G8, we are the only one which does not offer universal health care. With every other highly industrialized democracy in the world providing for the health care of their citizens, maybe we do need such a strong military to protects us against these uppity free market socialists.

I don’t know what’s worse anymore: the ludicrous, baseless fear mongering, the American public’s pathological fear of antiquated socialism by its pro-corporate welfare government, or the Obama Administration’s inability to sell what is seen as a basic public service — like access to water, roads, and education — in every other normal, modern democracy in the world.