Month: April 2009

Reading Between The Lines

Drum analyzes Obama's torture answer and wonders if Obama is saying that we got some information from torture:

Obama has obviously seen all the internal reports by now, and he's carefully not saying that waterboarding didn't work. This suggests that it may indeed have produced useful information…fter a bit of throat clearing toward the end of his answer, he says he's seen nothing that "would make me second-guess the decision that I've made" to ban waterboarding.  Which might suggest either that waterboarding produced only moderate amounts of useful information, or that he's convinced we could have gotten the same information with other methods.

I'm pretty sure it's the latter. But what's depressing to me is how these techniques have somehow managed to divide the West on an issue that could easily have been avoided. I have written more these past two years about Abu Zubaydah and Khaled Sheikh Muhammed as victims of torture as opposed to perpetrators of terror. Magnify that across all fronts and you can see what a terrible waste of resources it is in a war in which we need to be constantly on the offensive, on all fronts, including p.r.

One reason for a comprehensive Truth Commission with a remit of a couple of years to pull all this together is that it would allow us to focus again on the core needs of defense, serious intelligence gathering and winning the public relations war against jihadism. Instead we are embroiled in an unavoidable and wrenching debate about the evil of torture; and it is hard not to believe that the CIA is demoralized because of this process. This is no one's fault but Bush's and Cheney's. But it hurts us all nonetheless.

The Case Against Hate Crimes Laws

I almost share the views expressed by this Washington Times editorial. I say almost because for the life of me, I cannot see why you can support hate crime laws for a whole slew of victim-classes, but not for one of the most targeted, gays. The WT seems to think the only rationale is the assertion that anti-gay hate crimes are on the rise. But that has never been the fundamental case. Whether these crimes are rising or falling (and the stats deserve severe skepticism) does not undo the fact that attacks on people perceived to be gay (which includes many straight people) remain a significant chunk of all "hate crimes". The first president Bush started collecting the data. Is sexual orientation a "choice" and therefore unqualified for hate crimes protections?

Nah, but even if it were, hate crime laws already apply to religion which is obviously a choice.

I'm for getting rid of all of these laws, as attacks on freedom of thought. I also think the current proposal is a bit of flim-flam that will likely make no difference in the real world. But the GOP hysteria over this hate crime law, as opposed to all the others, seems obviously a case of prima facie homophobia. That bigotry obscures the serious case to be made that all these laws are unnecessary infringements on freedom of thought and corrosive of equality under the law.

Three Mansions In London

Ben Smith finds a 2005 article on a long-buried alleged torture center in three houses in London in the Second World War. I was unaware of this story and it is indeed disturbing, revealing credible allegations of classic torture techniques used later by Bush and Cheney. I was aware of accusations of mistreatment of prisoners in Europe, detailed here, but the Cobain story on the London Cage cannot be dismissed as the work of people far from supervision (and miscreants in the field found guilty of mistreatment were court-martialed). Equally, however, this needs noting:

It is impossible to discern, from the War Office archives, whether [commander Lieutenant Colonel Alexander] Scotland was regarded by this time as a maverick whose methods were to be quietly overlooked, or whether he was acting with clear, official approval…  It is clear, however, by late 1946 there was "disquiet about his methods" being expressed at the headquarters of the British army of the Rhine.

The man who ran the center was trained in the German army in Namibia, and may have been acting independently. If Churchill or others at the highest levels of command knew about and approved of this torture, then they are complicit and equally guilty of these war crimes. But that is not at all clear from the historical record – and the notion that "Churchill tortured" goes beyond the facts as they appear. It is clear that America's torturing was engineered and premeditated from the first month of the war from the top down – as is now clear from legal memos directed from the White House.

The View From Your Recession

A reader writes:

I am a physician in the Portland area.  We are seeing more and more people unable to pay their bills.  Today I wrote off two patients' cost for a surgery.  Both mom and dad have lost there jobs, their insurance ends this month, and they are losing their house. You can't bleed a turnip. 

Colleagues have been cutting staff.  My office wants a raise but our revenues are way down. We feel keeping wages stable and not cutting hours is generous in this environment.  People can't pay there copays, many are opting out of surgery because of financial uncertainty, and hospital OR cases (the lifeblood of the hospital) are way down.  I have been busy filling out forms to try to get free medicines from the pharmaceutical company for patients who can no longer afford them.   It is getting ugly here.