Month: December 2009

(To my mind, the most significant meaning of the election of Obama was a return to the constitutional order. Leaving behind a radical and neo-fascist concept of the presidency that assumed wartime powers indefinitely over not just foreign enemies, but over American citizens, and vesting that authority not in an emergency, to be ended, but in a permanent extra-legal executive branch, accountable only to its own theories of executive power, was Cheney's profound attack on the Western way of life.

The Dish has never questioned the legitimate role of the executive in responding to imminent threats without Congressional assent, or even temporary powers in the face of genuine emergencies (and 9/11 was one such event). But the attempt to make such powers permanent, to grant the president an inherent right to seize, detain and torture anyone the executive branch alone deemed an "enemy combatant" was one of the gravest attacks on the American constitution in history. The war crimes perpetrated by these goons, and their criminal lawyers, remain unpunished. Worse, Cheney and his fellow war criminals now posture as if they are the true guardians of US security, despite the fact that they presided over the worst national security failure of any American administration in history, launched two wars they failed to win in eight years, and forever removed the moral high ground that the United States had long maintained with respect to treatment of prisoners in wartime.)

Clive Crook defends himself:

The earlier cases do not prove that waterboarding as practised during the Bush administration was illegal, only that waterboarding carried out in certain ways and under certain circumstances has been successfully prosecuted. The designers of the policy knew the law and manoeuvred–absurdly and offensively, perhaps, but they would not be the first lawyers to stoop to that–to stay within it.

I have to say I find this defense unpersuasive and a little beside the point, to put it mildly. The entire spirit of the UN Convention and the Geneva Conventions is not to see whether governments can find clever, legal loopholes in the ban on torture, abuse, inhuman treatment and outrages on human dignity – but to see that no government ever comes near the kind of prisoner abuse and torture that we have seen throughout history. I cannot begin to believe that those who drafted both conventions believed that waterboarding, for example, was okay if it is done in certain ways and not others. And to even countenance such a sophistry is to have capitulated to the logic that the executive – empowered with massive force and enormous secrecy – should always get the benefit of the doubt when applying the rule of law. 

The lawyers we are talking about, after all, are lawyers for the president, whose oath of office demands that he faithfully execute the laws. These lawyers are not there to help him circumvent or break the law, but to ensure that it's followed. They violated that core responsibility and the sheer shoddiness of their work reveals that they knew it.

The premise of Clive's argument, in other words, is that it's perfectly legitimate for a president to treat the law as something to be defined away rather than followed. And it shows how successful a bully Dick Cheney is. He has managed – even with a very shrewd journalist like Clive – to shift the terms of the debate from why on earth is any of this happening? to how can we let these people off the hook?

There is and was a legal and constitutional way to tackle the terrible crisis Bush faced after 9/11.

If the president believed that following the law at that point would lead to the imminent deaths of thousands of people, then his constitutional responsibility was either to urge the Congress to repeal the Geneva Conventions and UN Convention, or to break the law because this one moment necessitated it  and then present himself for trial. That's the Lincoln model. What Bush did instead was secretly break the law, invoke a constitutional theory that the executive can always break such laws in the furtherance of national security and order his lawyers to provide specious reasons why he had not done so. Then he lied about it repeatedly in public. Then when photographs from Abu Ghraib showed in graphic detail the horrifying reality of much milder techniques than the ones he had explicitly authorized, he blamed low-level soldiers and allowed them to take the fall. Then, over a year after Abu Ghraib and four years after 9/11, he set up an elaborate, ongoing program to torture prisoners, replete with lawyers, doctors, professional torturers, and psychologists. Then, when the International Committee of the Red Cross gave him a report detailing what it described as unequivocal torture, he shelved it, further violating his core responsibility to enforce the law.

This is an ongoing, premeditated conspiracy to systematically break the law and violate treaty obligations.

I guess you could find all sorts of ways to say that this illegal behavior should be ignored because the chief executive has used every sophistry in the book to parse legal statutes against their plain meaning and intent. But why would that be your argument, rather than the simple one that the law be enforced as plainly written, and that a failure to enforce the law when the chief law-breaker is supposed to be the chief law-enforcer is a serious threat to our entire system of government?

I know it's a trauma for a society to have to go through this. I do not relish it. It's already been very very painful. But a society seriously committed to the rule of law will undergo trauma if it has to, especially if it is the only way to get over this. And this is not our collective responsibility. The trauma is entirely the responsibility of those who broke the law, shocked the conscience and tortured defenseless human beings in the name of the American people. They refuse to show remorse, threaten to use their political party to return the torture regime to power when they can, and have threatened to blame any future terror attacks on the return of the US to the rule of law.

This is why Cheney remains a threat to the constitution and the liberties it guarantees.

And that is why he cannot simply be appeased.

(Photo: Saul Loeb/Getty.)

Another heart-stirring sight from yesterday, just uploaded to the Internets:

And who can blame him? He's right about these loser, partisan Republicans. And all those on the right who are up in arms? This is roughly the state Churchill was in when he won the Second World War. I'm with Matt Welch on this one:

Let's see, what's the other Drudge scandal going on? Ah yes-the president has taken a vacation during vacation season, and even enjoyed a round of golf. These politician-people are, despite whatever evidence to the contrary, just people. Fixating on their minute-to-minute behavior just encourages them.

Juan Cole notices something significant:

Another remarkable dimension of Sunday's events was the sheer number of cities where significant rallies and clashes occurred. Some of those allegedly killed are said to have fallen in Tabriz, a northwestern metropolis near Turkey. Even conservative cities such as Isfahan and Mashhad joined in. Shiraz, Ardabil, the list goes on. The attempt of some analysts to paint the disturbances as a shi-shi North Tehran thing has clearly foundered.

The most ominous sign of all for the regime is the reports of security men refusing orders to fire into the crowd.

 
A reader writes:

You wrote:

Now think of what this foretells: a baseej is cornered, switches sides and is carried aloft in the streets triumphantly.

Unfortunately, that doesn't say much to me.  That says that a man was heavily intimidated, became afraid of what an angry crowd might do to him, and decided to momentarily join them.  This man was part of a group that is murdering people in the streets.  Do you think all it took to convert him was a nice conversation with a crowd?  No way.  If those images do in fact show a defection, they're only to cover his own ass in that moment.

Show me images of groups of Baseej putting down their guns as they approach a crowd.  Show me someone unafraid for their life defecting.  Show me Baseej fighting Baseej.  That will be a defection. This?  This is cowardice.  Maybe I'm wrong (god willing, I am), but that's how it looks to me.

Another writes:

I'm one of the tweeters posting with the IranRiggedElect id. Considering the uniforms featured in your post, the forces are very likely not Basij. Basij usually don't wear professional uniforms like these. Amir Farsahd Ebrahimi, who is a former insider, gives a summary of different uniforms and corresponding forces here (in Farsi). If I'm not mistaken, Iran's official forces are a military, a police and an IRGC which has both a police branch and a military branch.

The basij are an additional unofficial force but the IRGC, faced with a need for manpower in the post-election unrest has repeatedly talked about plans to integrate the basij into the IRGC. In instances we have seen the basij wear vests to indicate their identity but most of the time they wear normal clothes with a religious touch and we call them "plainclothes". One particular day when the basij seemed to have been given vests was June 20, 2009 (see video here).

So my conclusion is that the forces that are seen in the December 27 video wearing anti-riot gear are NOT basij. They are either normal riot police or IRGC riot police. Why is it significant to make such a distinction?

Because the basij is a very ideological, unofficial, mostly voluntary group who may get paid on a case by case basis if necessary. They fight because they believe they are the soldiers of God and they are willing to sacrifice their lives. Whereas anti-riot forces, whether IRGC or not, are paid professionals who get a salary. They are less ideological than the basij. Much less ideological if they are with normal police rather than IRGC. They are the most likely to be looking for excuses not to hit people.

However, they are still very terrified of what would happen to them if they were to be caught on camera "converting" to green with uniform. I have seen the video of that incident and it is by no means showing a conversion. It is showing a desperate riot policeman trying to please the mob in a way that looks good enough for them to let him go free and yet "forced" enough for him to be able to tell his seniors "they forced me". He is aiming for this balance and not really joining the people. He might do that some day when he's not wearing his uniform. But with his uniform it would cost him his life.

Update at the Corner: still no mention of events in Iran, apart from Jonah's pathetic sentence yesterday. Too busy trying to score cheap points off Obama. Ah, conservatism today.

It's a big deal as an Iranian reader explains:

At 3 AM this morning they arrested Dr. Ebrahim Yazdi, he is one of the most seasoned politicians in all of Iran. Foreign Minster to the transitional government of the revolution, he resigned along side the cabinet at the wake of the hostage crisis . He is the leader of one of Iran's oldest political parties, the "freedom movement".

This is a party formed by allies of Dr. Mosadeq in 1953 and Mehdi Bzaragan, the first prime minister of the revolution. Although mainly an older men's club, it had a symbolic relevance and it was less involved with the day to day politics the way reformist parties have been engaged in.

He is 72 and has been struggling with cancer for a few years now. What does this arrest mean? Where are they going with this? Yazdi is perhaps the most known Iranian opposition figure internationally. Many foreign ministers and international dignitaries have good personal relationship with him.

If you're just tuning in and bewildered by the amount of material on the Dish about the latest events in Iran, all we can suggest is that you catch up by going back to the first post on Saturday night, and clicking forward through the cascading, successive events.

One thing a chronological blog can convey is a sense of passing time, of how events can galvanize each other, how small moments of tension can slowly grow into major crises. It was clear to me that something was deeply awry when I saw the video of Khatami's speech being surrounded by brownshirt militia. Go watch that scene: you will feel the chill of terror and tyranny in that room. From then on, moment by moment, the emotional wave moved forward. It cannot be summarized, because it was history.

Start here if you want to capture its flavor – raw, unconfirmed, chaotic but real flavor. Exercize skepticism: sometimes even what you see with your bare eyes is misleading. But it unfolds like a movie. Start here.

For me, the iconic image – of so many – is the one at the top of this post: a baseej switching sides and being carried aloft by the crowd. Proof of this can be found here. And my favorite quote of the day is a simple one, the kind that a New Yorker might make:

"Are you only brave on your motorbike, you piece of shit?!"

There are two critical lines that were crossed yesterday. The first was widespread savagery and violence by the junta on the day of Ashura. This breaks a profound taboo, violates the integrity and core meaning of the religious festival, and places the regime symbolically as the enemy of Shia Islam. This has offended not just the urban elites but the pious poor and rural population. Unrest was all over the country yesterday:

The decision by the authorities to use deadly force on the Ashura holiday infuriated many Iranians, and some said the violence appeared to galvanize more traditional religious people who have not been part of the protests so far. Historically, Iranian rulers have honored Ashura’s prohibition of violence, even during wartime … Protests and clashes also broke out in the cities of Isfahan, Mashhad, Shiraz, Arak, Tabriz, Najafabad, Babol, Ardebil and Orumieh, opposition Web sites said.

The second was the calculated assassination of Ali Mousavi, the rightful president's nephew. This creates a martyr connected to the leader of the Green Movement, and provides a cycle of more mourning and potential for unrest. That may explain the following troubling news:

A relative of Iran's opposition leader says the body of the leader's nephew has been removed from a hospital without the family's permission, a day after he was slain in an anti-government protest. Reza Mousavi said Monday that the body of his brother, Ali Mousavi, was taken from a Tehran hospital, possibly by authorities seeking to deter mourners from organizing more protests around his funeral.

With each violation of basic Muslim norms, the regime is revealing itself as a military junta, using religion purely as a means to retain power. Which is what always happens in theocracy. Total power does not feed faith; it destroys it. And then that corrupted faith wages war on its enemies.

There is more at stake here than simply one country. We are seeing the two great forces of our time – fundamentalism and freedom – fight for humanity's soul.