It was early August in the middle of Cape Cod, on the bay side – Chatham, Wellfleet, south of Truro. We had all met in college in the mid and late sixties, and we were sixties people still, still out to change the world – teachers, writers, academic deans, doctors and others who “help,” and a few of us who had spent decades in the belly of the beast, working in the business world, feeling odd the whole time. We were, way back when, going to change the world. And off we went, into it – but it didn’t change.
So we sat in the shade and talked about how things really might get better, if this, or if that. The current administration would one day be gone. People would come to their senses – compassionate and thoughtful people would be elected to office, the nation’s reputation would be restored, the weak and unlucky would finally get a fair shake – you know the drill. The setting was awesome, but such talk can make your ass twitch. There’s nothing wrong with optimism, of course, but a few of us were wary. The nation isn’t that simple.
What if most people don’t much think about politics? Most people work hard, come home, deal with the family and the home – the kids have soccer games and school and all the rest, and you make your home what you want it to be, and you have your friends and your own passions, old cars or gardening or whatever. You worry about paying the bills and having something left over for the kids, and for when you can quit working. Does the suspension of habeas corpus mean much to you? Hardly – the president saying that the law doesn’t matter and he has the permanent power to name anyone an enemy, detain them indefinitely and torture them into confession anywhere in the world sounds awful, yes, but it sounds remote. Most people assume it must be necessary, or he wouldn’t do such things, and they go about their business. If they voted, they voted for someone else to worry about such things so they wouldn’t have to. Most people live a life that is local and particular.
Someone says gays shouldn’t marry, or have any legal rights, as God said so, and that Darwin ruined everything by trying to explain how we got here through reasoning from evidence, not accepting on faith, and abortion is murder, and so is any form of birth control – so? You shrug. You might feel sorry for a gay friend, but what does it matter to you? You’re driving home from a bad day at work, the wife has the flu, there will be more distressing bills in the mail, and the kid wants some damned video game console you can’t afford, and the neighbors are mad at your dog barking all night – so “national issues” are something you’ll think about later, maybe, but you know you won’t. You’ll need to get some sleep before you have to drive back in the morning and fix what’s messed up at work. That’s the particular – there’s no room for the big, abstract issues. The current administration says we need to wipe out Iran now? They could be right. How are you to know? You have to assume they know what they’re doing – you don’t exactly have the time to look into it.
You explain all this to the crew on Cape Cod – the aging idealists. Do you think voters will reject living in a theocratic police state waging perpetual war? Why would that bother them? Blowhard evangelists with great hair are a bother, but who cares about them? Your own Sundays in church are comforting – dull, but comforting. And civil liberties are an abstraction, something you had to consider in junior high, as there was a test – now no one is listening in on your call to the dentist to change the appointment, and you are hardly likely to be hauled off and disappear for your connections to terrorists, nor is anyone you know. You’re not that scared of the Islamic fundamentalist madmen who want to blow up Cleveland or Chicago or Houston, even if that could happen – it’s just you have quite specific concerns of your own, and those cannot be deferred.
That’s the nature of America, a nation of practical people trying to succeed on many levels, or just stay afloat. Those are the voters. You explain that - the crew on Cape Cod stares at the floor.
So there’s a presidential election coming up, and that could change things, but most of those who will eventually vote will do so a bit haphazardly, if they can even find the time.
Will it be Hillary versus Rudy? At this point that seems likely. And all it will be for most voters is a choice between the witch-lady, the castrator, the shrill but seemingly quite competent woman, and the tough-guy-with-an-attitude but with a shady past and even more shady friends, who wants to slap everyone around, but then who doesn’t feel like that now and then? It won’t get much deeper than that, and many assume Rudy Giuliani would win that match-up.
Why would that be? Jimmy Breslin captured the man in eight words – “A small man in search of a balcony.” Josh Marshall sees what Breslin is saying, that the man is our very own Benito Mussolini –
You’ve got the extreme hostility to civil liberties and the foreign policy adventurism. But I’m not thinking so much of the harder and sinister side of the fascist dictator as his more comic and melodramatic traits. The strutting peacock on the balcony, the histrionic gesture, the rich personal vanity.
The link has a video, an old clip from Italy – that works. But the man said he would make the trains run on time – he spoke to the particular – and that worked for him. It may work for Rudy, who seems to have that populist scorn for all that abstract stuff. For example, he recently confirmed that he thinks waterboarding is not necessarily torture. It just has to be done by the right sort of people –
At the town hall, Rudy was asked about Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey’s hedging on the question of whether waterboarding is torture.
“I’m not sure it is, either,” said Rudy. “It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it.”
And as for the media, Rudy said they’ve exaggerated the nature of waterboarding.
“Sometimes they describe it accurately. Sometimes they exaggerate it,” Rudy said. “So I’d have to see what they really are doing, not the way some of these liberal newspapers have exaggerated it.”
Actually, it’s pretty much the same, no matter who does it. Here’s an example –
The first level of torture employed by the Spanish Inquisition was the “water cure.” Water was poured into the accused’s open mouth. The linen cloth was washed into the opening of the throat, preventing the accused from spitting the water back out. The overwhelming sensation of drowning forced the accused to swallow the water. The rules of torture as written by Torquemada, a man whom historians have compared to Hitler, stipulated that no more than eight liters of water could be used in a single session.
See Joe Conason on the issue here –
Echoing Michael Mukasey, his friend and associate who likely will soon be the next attorney general, Republican presidential front-runner Rudolph Giuliani claimed Wednesday that he doesn’t know whether waterboarding is torture. Having become accustomed long ago to making the most absurd declarations without fear of challenge, Giuliani went further than Mukasey’s hesitant demurral.
“I don’t know what is involved in the technique,” Mukasey replied during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, when Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a former prosecutor, asked whether Mukasey thinks waterboarding constitutes torture and is therefore illegal as well as unconstitutional. Perhaps Mukasey (and Giuliani) should be subjected to the technique for strictly educational purposes so that they will become aware that it involves reclining the victim on a bench or table, covering his face with a cloth and then pouring water over his nose and mouth to make him feel as if he is drowning.
Conason duly notes that people who have suffered this kind of treatment - at the hands of Japanese military intelligence officers, for instance - have described it as horrific, and experts have determined that it can result in permanent physical and psychological damage and can even result in death. And as for it depending on how it’s done, and the circumstances and who does it –
Such lazy-minded clichés - “it depends on the circumstances” - are emblematic of the moral relativism that swaggering absolutists like Giuliani claim to despise in liberalism.
Moral relativism is an interesting issue – but liberals do go for the abstract. Giuliani is going for the preoccupied voters who need a quick “sounds okay to me” answer.
Conason duly notes the status of torture under American law and tradition –
As a former federal prosecutor, he should know that the United States has indicted, convicted and punished a substantial number of torturers whose offenses included waterboarding or, as it used to be known, “the water cure.” American prohibitions on the mistreatment of prisoners date back to George Washington, but the earliest prosecution of an American military officer for using that particular technique occurred in 1902, during the U.S. occupation of the Philippines under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.
Following a series of Senate hearings led by Massachusetts Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, the Army tried Maj. Edwin Glenn in a court-martial in the Philippine province of Samar for misconduct and breach of discipline, including “infliction of the water cure” on suspected Filipino insurgents. The Army’s judge advocate general rejected Glenn’s defense of “military necessity,” and he was suspended from his post for a month and fined $50 (not an insignificant sum in 1902). President Roosevelt affirmed the major’s conviction.
More severe punishments were meted out to the Japanese imperial officers who inflicted the water cure on Allied military officers and civilians during World War II in such places as Korea, the Philippines and China. In war crimes trials overseen by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander in the Pacific and a great Republican hero, testimony about water torture led to numerous convictions - and sentences that ranged from years of imprisonment at hard labor to death by hanging. As head of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, MacArthur voted to uphold those convictions and sentences.
Conason suggests reviewing testimony that can be found at Law of War, and their essay on waterboarding and American law. You can find out all about it –
It comes from the trial in Manila of Sgt. Maj. Chinsaku Yuki, a Japanese military intelligence officer. The witness is Ramon Lavarro, a Filipino lawyer suspected by the Japanese of providing assistance to resistance forces. “I was ordered to lay on a bench and Yuki tied my feet, hands and neck to that bench lying with my face upward,” Lavarro testified. “After I was tied to the bench Yuki placed some cloth on my face and then with water from the faucet they poured on me until I became unconscious. He repeated that four or five times.”
It’s not hard to understand, but we are being told now that the Japanese war criminals were wrong, but the CIA is right to use it. Most will shrug.
Andrew Sullivan won’t shrug –
If the Khmer Rouge does it, it’s torture. If the United States does it, it’s not. This man cannot be allowed to be president of the United States. He believes that the United States is above morals and the president of the United States is above the law. He is a tyrant to the depths of his being.
Of course, Sullivan is gay – no doubt someone in the Giuliani camp is reminding everyone of that. Most folks? “Oh, that explains why Sullivan is upset,” even if it doesn’t, at all. Most folks like the short version of everything.
See also this letter from a reader at Talking Points Memo –
The right has made the war on terror into a moral crusade, yes crusade, on par with abortion. That will be sufficient for most to get behind Rudy.
I spent the weekend with two old college friends who are movement conservatives (Focus on the Family was on the coffee table). They love Rudy. Sure, he is off on abortion, BUT he is right in their minds about the other great defining issue of our time… the global war on terror.
Just as some Catholics (paging E.J. Dionne) argue that liberal social welfare policies are “life” issues, these guys see the war on terror in the same way. Remember, these are people who see in black and white and casting the war on terror as a war against evil provides a religious patina to Rudy’s efforts.
These guys also think that the right will force President Giuliani to pick pro-life judges so the abortion issue is further neutralized.
Running against Hillary would only enable the right to further suppress any questions they had about Rudy.
Rudy is a buffoon who has plenty of warts, but if those factors were a bar to the Oval Office we wouldn’t have had the last eight years now would we?
Josh Marshall says this –
For all his problems of temperament, authoritarianism, ignorance and general ridiculousness, I know most people don’t see him that way. The sheen of 9/11 is real for Rudy. And many otherwise sensible people see him as a generally moderate guy on social policy who couldn’t be as stupid as Bush in managing the country’s foreign policy but would still be ready to kick some ass to keep everyone safe. He’s the only one of their crew who could put even a few reliably Democratic states into play.
Kevin Drum sees it another way –
Actually, I suspect it’s Rudy’s other campaign plank that really explains his popularity. Sure, 9/11 is a big part of his persona, but his crime reduction record in New York City might be an even bigger one. Think about it: in the eye of the public, he’s literally the only presidential candidate who’s actually accomplished anything concrete. He made New York City livable. It doesn’t matter whether this is true; it only matters that this is what people think. And no other candidate has anything close to it. All they can say is that they sponsored a bill or survived Vietnam or ran a company. Big deal. But Rudy, regardless of how he did it, can say that he actually governed a political entity and made it better. Considering the low opinion most people have of politicians, that’s a helluva powerful asset.
By the way, also note how smoothly Rudy turned the waterboarding question into an attack on the liberal media. He really knows how to hit the base’s hot buttons. The guy’s good.
Yep he’s good. It doesn’t matter whether this is true; it only matters that this is what people think. And people have little time for thinking on these matters.
And most voters didn’t read this New York Times article about Rudy Giuliani’s advisors –
Mr. Giuliani’s team includes Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible”; Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps; and Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written in favor of revoking the United States’ ban on assassination.
The campaign says that the foreign policy team, which also includes scholars and experts with different policy approaches, is meant to give Mr. Giuliani a variety of perspectives.
Yeah, right. As Matthew Yglesias adds –
By the end of the piece, I even learn that Giuliani thinks trying to broker a settlement of the Israel-Arab conflict was a “mistake” and even a “debacle” so I guess Rudy is at least consistent in prescribing endless war as a preferred policy for everyone.
Hey, it’s quick, easy, and most people get it. And Mitt Romney is open to this policy – he knew he was being outflanked on the “keep it simple front” and now says he would bomb Iran back to the Stone Age or something. One needs to understand what works – what people will vote for.
Andrew Sullivan, again, gets into what we voted for, twice. We voted for Imaginationland –
I posted an email earlier today trying to understand the extraordinary powers that president Bush has accrued to himself since the 9/11 attacks. No president has ever had so much power over the citizenry of the United States in American history - the permanent power to name anyone an enemy, detain them indefinitely and torture them into confession anywhere in the world. My reader suggested that this extraordinary shift in America’s constitutional balance - the creation of an extra-legal dictatorship within a putatively democratic society - was explicable only if you believe that the very existence of the US is in peril.
That’s the key – make people believe that. President Bush believes that, and Vice President Cheney certainly does, and there was this telling anecdote in a Graham Allison book –
On October 11, 2001 … at the Presidential Daily Intelligence Briefing, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, informed the president that a CIA agent code-named Dragonfire had reported that Al Qaeda terrorists possessed a ten-kiloton nuclear bomb, evidently stolen from the Russian arsenal. According to Dragonfire, this nuclear weapon was now on American soil, in New York City.
Sullivan hardly needs to say this was untrue. But it was untrue in a special way –
It was untrue on a cataclysmic scale in the way that Abdallah Higazy’s conviction of being an al Qaeda member was untrue on a much smaller scale. The question in my mind is: how did they get that information? They’ll never tell us, of course. We found out that the Higazy conviction was a result of a false confession, after threatening to have his family tortured in Egypt. But the nuclear scare was a huge untruth gained by a CIA agent a month after Bush and Cheney had secretly let loose the dogs of torture. And the one thing we know about torture is that it was never designed in the first place to get at the actual truth of anything; it was designed in the darkest days of human history to produce false confessions in order to annihilate political and religious dissidents. And that is how it always works: it gets confessions regardless of their accuracy.
Of course – and the longer this war goes on and the more we find out, we do need an explanation “for a lot of what our secret, unaccountable, extra-legal war-government has been doing - and the countless mistakes which have been laid bare.” So Sullivan offers a provisional explanation –
On 9/11, Cheney immediately thought of the worst possible scenario: What if this had been done with WMDs? It has haunted him ever since - for good and even noble reasons. This panic led him immediately to think of Saddam. But it also led him to realize that our intelligence was so crappy that we simply didn’t know what might be coming. That’s why the decision to use torture was the first - and most significant - decision this administration made. It is integral to the intelligence behind the war on terror. And Cheney’s bizarre view of executive power made it easy in his mind simply to break the law and withdraw from Geneva because torture, in his mind, was the only weapon we had.
Bush, putty in Cheney’s hands, never wanted torture, but was so cowardly and lazy he never asked the hard questions of what was actually being done. He knows, of course, somewhere in his crippled fundamentalist psyche. But this is a man with clinical - Christianist and dry-drunk - levels of reality-denial, whose interaction with reality can only operate on the crudest levels of Manichean analysis. All he needs to be told is that whatever it is they’re doing, it isn’t torture. He won’t ask any more questions. They’re evil; we’re good; so we can’t torture. Even when they were totally busted at Abu Ghraib, his incuriosity and denial held firm. After all, what if he were to find out something he didn’t want to know? His world might collapse.
But torture gives false information. Everyone admits that. So then you see what happened –
And the worst scenarios that tortured detainees coughed up - many of them completely innocent, remember - may well have come to fuel US national security policy. And of course they also fueled more torture. Because once you hear of the existential plots confessed by one tortured prisoner, you need to torture more prisoners to get at the real truth. We do not know what actual intelligence they were getting, and Cheney has ensured that we will never know. But it is perfectly conceivable that the torture regime - combined with panic and paranoia - created an imaginationland of untruth and half-truth that has guided US policy for this entire war. It may well have led to the president being informed of any number of plots that never existed, and any number of threats that are pure imagination. And once torture has entered the system, you can never find out the real truth. You are lost in a vortex of lies and fears. In this vortex, the actual threats that we face may well be overlooked or ignored, as we chase false leads and pursue non-existent WMDs.
Other than that, torture works just fine.
Sullivan admits to dealing in the abstract, of course –
My original concern with torture was moral and sprang from Abu Ghraib. It never occurred to me that the US would be doing it before. Poring over all the data, it became simply impossible to deny that Abu Ghraib was not an exception to the rule, but a horrible, predictable result of an existing torture policy that spread beyond the limits Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted. My second concern with torture is that much of our actionable intelligence may have come from it. Think of what that means. Much of it may be as valid as that nuclear bomb in New York City or the notion that Abdallah Higazy was a member of al Qaeda.
So we don’t know much of anything now –
We may have entered a world, in other words, where the empirical reality of our national security is less important than the imaginationland that every torture regime will create. We may therefore be sacrificing our liberties for a phantasm created by brutality spawned by terror. We don’t know for sure, of course. But that’s what torture does: it creates a miasma of unknowing, about as dangerous a situation in wartime as one can imagine. This hideous fate was made possible by an inexperienced president with a fundamentalist psyche and a paranoid and power-hungry vice-president who decided to embrace “the dark side” almost as soon as the second tower fell, and who is still trying to avenge Nixon.
In short, we’re screwed –
Until they are both gone from office, we are in grave danger - the kind of danger that only torturers and fantasists and a security strategy based on coerced evidence can conjure up. And since they have utter contempt for the role of the Congress in declaring war, we and the world are helpless to stop them. Every day we get through with them in power, I say a silent prayer of thanks that the worst hasn’t happened. Yet. Because we sure know they’re looking in all the wrong places.
Hey, that’s where Rudy will look. Most voters don’t care. It’s been going on for five years, after all. Somebody should be doing something, this is something, so this will do.
There was a lot of hope on that evening as we all sat and talked and watched Wellfleet Harbor grow dark. It was like the real world wasn’t there. It’s a sixties thing.
