torture – Memphis Flyer

Maybe she should just have them all waterboarded. In Monday’s edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, in an article titled “Feinstein blasts response to oil spill,” the illustrious Senator Dianne Feinstein takes the Coast Guard to task for not responding quickly enough after the Cosco Busan tanker hit the Bay Bridge and spilled a bunch of horrible fuel gunk into the water. She was even going to run and have a meeting with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff about what she cited as a “disturbing lack of readiness for disasters.” Well, senator, you better look in the mirror, because you are part of a disaster that has been happening, is still happening, and likely won’t stop anytime soon — in part thanks to you. If you don’t think it’s a disaster for the United States government to torture other human beings, I wonder just what you think is. Feinstein broke with most Democrats and voted to confirm Michael Mukasey as United States attorney general, even though he wouldn’t come out and say that waterboarding is illegal. By doing so, Feinstein sent her message loud and clear, along with everyone else who voted for Mukasey. He could have said what he knows is true: that waterboarding is illegal. But he whined that he couldn’t comment on that because he hadn’t been “briefed.” What I want to know is, why the hell couldn’t someone have briefed him? Is it that big a deal? Why was everyone clamoring about it being “classified” information that he couldn’t be privy to until he was on the job? Why couldn’t he just talk with someone who had been instructed to carry out this form of torture and ask about it? The boys in Washington have already said that they are doing it and that it has prevented further attacks on Amurkan soil. Of course, they offer no proof of this, and they pretty much do much anything they want and people bow down and thank their God they’re still alive because some cab driver from Baghdad has been locked up in a stress position in Guantanamo for years and therefore couldn’t come destroy their lives. So, the question is not whether the boys have broken the laws of the Geneva Convention, but how Mukasey is going to help them get around getting in trouble for it. Not to mention how he is going to help them keep doing it. And Feinstein seems to think this is okay because it’s better to have Mukasey in there than not have any attorney general at all during this “time of war.” I heartily disagree. I think it would be great not to have an attorney general. Look at the past. Look back, if you can possibly stomach doing so, at John Ashcroft, the singing attorney general. Yep, it was GREAT having him in office — a man who, in a bizarre, mock religious ceremony, anointed himself with Crisco oil when he was sworn in as governor of Missouri. I would love to know where he rubbed it and I know I felt a lot safer with him looking out for me. Better than no attorney general at all? And look back, more recently, at the amazing Alberto Gonzales, who had his nose so far up Bush’s butt he couldn’t even make up a clear story about firing all those attorneys Bush wanted fired. He went to Ashcroft’s bedside while he was seriously ill and tried to get him to sign off on the practice of unrestricted wiretapping of American citizens. So no, I do not think having some weenie as attorney general who won’t say waterboarding is illegal torture is better than having none at all. And what’s worse is Feinstein and her other colleagues who voted likewise bought into George W. Bush’s bullshit about not sending up another candidate if they didn’t confirm Mukasey, leaving us all helpless and trembling in fear that a freaking mall might get blown up. The president and vice president of the United States are criminals and those politicians who are supposed to be representing the people of the United States better get some gonads and do something about it and stop supporting the appointments of their pawns, who’ll just bend over and take it to help them do whatever they want to do. Feinstein — who has much to lose from the Iraq war ending because her husband’s companies have made hundreds of millions of dollars on projects over there — has no right to be outraged with anyone other than herself. Maybe she should spend a little time washing the oil off of her hands.

Some country is about to have a Senate debate on a bill to legalize torture. How weird is that?

I’d like to thank Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham — a former military lawyer — and John Warner of Virginia. I will always think fondly of John Warner for this one reason: Forty years ago, this country was involved in an unprovoked and unnecessary war. It ended so badly the vets finally had to hold their own homecoming parade, years after they came home. The only member of Congress who attended was John Warner.

A debate on torture. I don’t know — what do you think? I guess we have to define it first. The White House has already specified “water boarding” — making the prisoner think he’s drowning for long periods — as a perfectly good interrogation technique. Maybe, but it was also a great favorite of the Gestapo and has been described and condemned in thousands of memoirs and novels in highly unpleasant terms.

I don’t think we can give it a good name again, and I personally kind of don’t like being identified with the Gestapo. (Somewhere inside me, a small voice is shrieking, “Are we insane?”)

The safe position is, “Torture doesn’t work.”

Well, actually, it works to this extent: Anybody can be tortured into telling anything that’s true and anything that’s not true. The more people are tortured, the more they make up to please the torturer. Then the torturer has to figure out when the victim started lying. Since our torturers are, in George Bush’s immortal phrase, “professionals” and this whole legislative fight is over making torture legal so the “professionals” can’t later be charged with breaking the Geneva Conventions, Bush has vowed to end “the program” completely if he doesn’t get what he wants. (The same small voice is shrieking, “Professional torturers trained with my tax money?”)

Bush’s problem is that despite repeated warnings, he went ahead with “the program” without waiting for Congress to provide a fig leaf of legality. Actually, we have been torturing prisoners at Gitmo and, via CIA rendition, in prisons in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan for years.

Since only seven of the several hundred prisoners at Gitmo have ever been charged with anything, we face the unhappy prospect that the rest of them are innocent. And will sue. That’s going to be quite an expensive settlement. The Canadian upon whom we practiced rendition, sending him to Syria for 10 months of torture, will doubtlessly be first on the legal docket. I wonder how high up the chain of command a civil suit can go. Any old war criminals wandering around?

I was interested to find that the Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition is so in favor of torture he told McCain that the senator either supports the torture bill or he can forget about the evangelical Christian vote. I’d like to see an evangelical vote on that one. I don’t know how Sheldon defines traditional values, but deliberately inflicting terrible physical pain or stress on someone who is completely helpless strikes me as … well, torture. And, um, wrong. And I’ve smoked dope! Boy, everything those conservatives tell us about the terrible moral values of us liberals must be true after all.

Now, in addition to the slightly surreal awakening to find we live in a country that’s having a serious debate on a torture bill, can we do anything about it? The answer is: We better. We better do something about it. Now. Right away. What do we do? The answer is: anything. Phone, fax, e-mail, mail, demonstrate. Go stand outside their offices or the nearest federal building in the cold and sing hymns or shout rude slogans, chant or make a speech, or start attacking federal property, like a postal box, so they have to arrest you. Gather peacefully and make a lot of noise. Get publicity.

How will you feel if you didn’t do something and torture becomes the official policy of your country? (“Well, honey, when the United States decided to adopt torture as an official policy, I was dipping the dog for ticks.”)

As Ann Richards used to say, “I don’t want my tombstone to read: ‘She kept a clean house.'”