Month: May 2009

The reason the Khmer Rouge technique has broken through the cultural noise is that it has a graphic, unusual and specific dimension. People can imagine it. They can go into Cambodia's museum of torture and see the instrument used and approved by president Bush. They can visualize the torturer strapping a human being to a board and making him feel as if he is drowning for the 97th time. They can visualize Cheney watching it; and the CIA destroying the evidence thereafter. But the other torture techniques – which can sound deceptively banal in comparison – are no better and can be worse. To believe that only waterboarding came close to "torture" is to know nothing about the history and practice of torture. Here's how "sleep deprivation" really worked:

A CIA inspector general's report issued in 2004 was more critical of the agency's use of sleep deprivation than it was of any other method besides waterboarding, according to officials familiar with the document, because of how the technique was applied.

The prisoners had their feet shackled to the floor and their hands cuffed close to their chins, according to the Justice Department memos.

Detainees were clad only in diapers and not allowed to feed themselves. A prisoner who started to drift off to sleep would tilt over and be caught by his chains.

The memos said that more than 25 of the CIA's prisoners were subjected to sleep deprivation. At one point, the agency was allowed to keep prisoners awake for as long as 11 days; the limit was later reduced to just over a week.

According to the memos, medical personnel were to make sure prisoners weren't injured. But a 2007 Red Cross report on the CIA program said that detainees' wrists and ankles bore scars from their shackles. When detainees could no longer stand, they could be laid on the prison floor with their limbs "anchored to a far point on the floor in such a manner that the arms cannot be bent or used for balance or comfort," a May 10, 2005, memo said.

Maybe Hannity will take Menachem Begin's word for it that this is indeed torture. He lived through these techniques when Stalin, rather than Bush, implemented them. A prisoner tortured in this way, according to Begin, becomes:

"wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire to sleep, to sleep just a little, not to get up, to lie, to rest, to forget … Anyone who has experienced the desire knows that not even hunger or thirst are comparable it with it."

Or another "no-brainer" for the Bush administration.

Over the weekend the Washington Post called for the release of the OPR report on Yoo, Bybee et al. and the Salt Lake Tribune called for Bybee's bench. Cheney appeared in full panic mode and even seemed ready to drag Bush with him. We also huddled around the idea of Dem accountability on the torture program.

Among the bloggers, McWhorter, Saletan, and Millman tried to navigate the minefield of race and merit. E.D. Kain returned to the bike helmet debate, Car Zimmer looked at brains, Taibbi defended agnosticism, and I examined the evolution of God.

On a lighter note, we came across the world's greatest beer pong players, discovered some amazing David Lynch mashups, and found hundred-year-old writings on the fetishizing of beards. Also, in case you missed it on Friday, we picked a cover for our photo book.

Noah Millman responds to Martin Walker's article on global demographics:

In February, I linked to Tim Flannery's fascinating piece in the New York Review comparing leaf-cutter ants with humans in the era of the Internet. There's a follow-up in the new issue worth airing:

The human species is precisely not a superorganism: its Darwinian success is precisely due to that fact.

We are capable of survival and replication in extremely small single-family units, on the one hand, and enormously large conurbations on the other. This "accordion" capacity allows us to colonize, and recolonize, waste spaces but to endure, as well, the enormous crowding of supercities. Competition, not only between states but between cities, communities, and families, at all levels of social organization, distinguishes us (and other mammals) from the ants, who have laid aside competition at these lower levels in favor of unquestioning collaboration.

The human condition, past and future, can be better understood, biologically, as an exemplar of succession theory, derived from the study of plant community histories.

Flannery responds here.

Gladwell theorizes why Davids beat Goliaths:

Ezra Klein defends Gladwell's piece against the somewhat recurrent charge that he is a brilliant recapper of the bleeding obvious.

Bloggers report.

I reviewed Bob Wright's immensely stimulating book for the Sunday Times today:

From primitive animists to the legends of the first gods, battling like irrational cloud-inhabiting humans over the cosmos, Wright tells the story of how war and trade, technology and human interaction slowly exposed humans to the gods of others. How this awareness led to the Jewish innovation of a hidden and universal God, how the cosmopolitan early Christians, in order to market their doctrines more successfully, universalised and sanitised this Jewish God in turn, and how Islam equally included a civilising universalism despite its doctrinal rigidity and founding violence.

Fundamentalism, in this reading, is a kind of repetitive neurotic interlude in

the evolution of religion towards more benign and global forms.

It’s not a linear process — misunderstanding, violence, stupidity, pride and anger will always propel human beings backwards just when they seem on the verge of progress. Greater proximity has often meant greater hatred — as one god has marshalled earthly forces against another. But in the very, very long run, as human beings have realised that religion is nothing if not true and that truth can be grasped or sought in many different ways, doctrines have evolved. Through science and travel, conversation and scholarship, interpretation and mysticism — our faiths have adapted throughout history, like finches on Darwin’s islands.

Wright’s core and vital point is that this is not a descent into total relativism or randomness. It is propelled by reason interacting with revelation, coupled with sporadic outbreaks of religious doubt and sheer curiosity. The Evolution of God is best understood as the evolution of human understanding of truth — even to the edge of our knowledge where mystery and meditation take over.

I've become pretty despondent about the future of religion in these dark days. But Bob's book actually gave me hope that we can avoid both the barrenness of a world without God and the horrible fusion of fundamentalism and weapons of mass destruction.

"In its damning totality, the memorandum is an indictment of Bybee himself, evidence that he is morally, ethically and legally unfit to serve on the federal bench. His continued presence there is an affront to the integrity of the judiciary, to a nation founded on laws and ideals protecting human dignity, and to all Americans who once believed their government would never indulge in the same human rights violations we have long condemned in other countries.

Bybee, a graduate of Brigham Young University and its law school, should show himself capable of better judgment — and of remorse — by resigning his lifetime appointment. If he does not, Congress should begin impeachment proceedings to force him from the bench," – Salt Lake Tribune.

How else to interpret this exchange?

SCHIEFFER: Did President Bush know everything you knew?

CHENEY: I certainly, yes, have every reason to believe he knew — he knew a great deal about the program. He basically authorized it. I mean, this was a presidential-level decision. And the decision went to the president. He signed off on it.

He's not going down alone. Could we ask Bush and Cheney if they watched the actual tapes of torture sessions? And were they in the White House if they did so?

I don’t know how else to interpret his obviously self-destructive grandstanding this weekend. But think of the long view for a moment. Here is a former vice-president, who enjoyed unprecedented power for eight long, long years. No veep ever wielded power like he did in the long history of American government. In the months after 9/11, he swept all Congressional resistance away, exerted total executive power, wielded a military and paramilitary apparatus far mightier than all its rivals combined and mightier than any power in history, tapped any phone he wanted, claimed the right to torture any suspect he wanted (and followed through with thousands, from Bagram to Abu Ghraib) and was able to print and borrow money with impunity to finance all of it without a worry in the world. But even after all that, he cannot tolerate a few months of someone else, duly elected, having a chance to govern the country with a decent interval of grace.

What character does this reveal? The same character that sees torture – torture – as a “no-brainer”. The same man who believes that freezing naked prisoners to hypothermia or strapping them to a board for a 175th near-drowning or stringing them up in stress positions so long the shackles rust up is in line with America’s constitutional history and custom. The same tyrannical temperament that cannot abide another reality existing which isn’t hammered or tortured into the shape he wants and demands.

Worse: he launches verbal assault after assault on the men and women who succeeded him. He accuses them of risking the lives of Americans, of making America less safe, and openly brags that his violation of the Geneva Conventions worked. Not content with writing his memoirs and letting history judge, he flails around like some prize fish, flapping on the deck of the boat, opening and shutting his mouth as his career expires.

And as history slowly accepts that this man disgraced his office more profoundly than any before him, as it sinks in that this man did not merely make mistakes, as all flawed politicians do, but committed war crimes, with pre-meditation and elaborate subterfuge, he slowly realizes what’s happening to him. He can feel it. And so he resists the way he always resists – by lashing out, attacking, smearing, snearing, and grabbing every inch of the limelight he can.

Those of us who want him to face real accountability should, of course, welcome all this. Cheney does not seem to understand that he is incriminating himself further with every interview, every time he adjusts his story, every time he moves from torture as a “no-brainer” to a “last resort”, every time he assaults yet another person who knows too much about him and what he did.

But does Cheney really believe that in a battle for the judgment of the American people, and for history, he will win a brawl with Colin Powell, with a man who is actually on record early on warning of the dire consequences of weakening or abandoning the Geneva Conventions?

Cheney wants a war with him? Now? Judged in the theater of public opinion – outside the Hannity-Limbaugh-Coulter ghetto?

They really do want to commit suicide, don’t they? Well, I’m not in a rush to stop them.

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)