Month: September 2010

After yet another teen suicide by a gay kid after relentless bullying, ignored by his high school in Indiana, Dan Savage is starting a new project:

I’ve launched a channel on YouTube—www.youtube.com/itgetsbetterproject—to host these videos. My normally camera-shy husband and I already posted one. We both went to Christian schools and we were both bullied—he had it a lot worse than I did—and we are living proof that it gets better. We don’t dwell too much on the past. Instead, we talk mostly about all the meaningful things in our lives now—our families, our friends (gay and straight), the places we’ve gone and things we’ve experienced—that we would’ve missed out on if we’d killed ourselves then.

Another way to help this continuing crisis is to support the Trevor Project, which runs a suicide hotline for gay kids, and has saved many lives.

Jason Mazzone pens a nauseating defense of Reid:

By allowing these amendments did Harry Reid squander the opportunity to repeal DADT?

In a word: no. Even without the last-minute additions, there was a very good chance Senate Republicans would have blocked the spending bill anyway because they have little incentive to allow President Obama to fulfill his pledge to end DADT.

Once Harry Reid recognized the bill probably wasn’t going to advance, it made sense to add on provisions that would appeal to Democratic voters. It made particular sense to add an immigration provision that would appeal to Hispanic voters. With an election a little more than a month away, losing on DADT was an opportunity too good to pass up.

If I lived in Arizona Nevada and had the vote, even though Sharron Angle is beyond nuts, I'd vote for her. Better nuts than this disgusting, cynical, partisan Washington kabuki dance, when people's lives and dignity are at stake.

(Cartoon by Chan Lowe)

Here's the latest ad from a candidate endorsed by Sarah Palin, in which direct conflation of all American Muslims with al Qaeda is simply and unapologetically used as a campaign tool:

Kos defends his thesis (that the American right is comparable to the Taliban) against Serwer’s crticism. This simply sounds paranoid:

There is a massive nationwide shortage of ammunition in the United States, as right-wing fanatics horde ammunition and guns. In fact, the weapons sector may be the healthiest in this current economy. They can’t build bullets fast enough to satiate their desire to arm up. A few of these crazies have actually opened fire (detailed in the book), another flew his plane into an IRS building in a suicide mission. You can argue these are isolated incidents, or you can see them for what they are – worrying signs for an increasingly agitated and militant opposition. When you have Sharron Angle, the GOP nominee for Senate in Nevada, arguing that if the GOP fails to take Congress, they may have to resort to “Second Amendment remedies”, then you have to take this stuff seriously.

I have no doubt that there are very worrying signs of potential violence and unrest on the far right, and agree that the distinction between the far right and the mainstream right is becoming close to indecipherable. But the leap from that to equating them with the Taliban remains absurd and offensive.

Massie ponders Woodward's slant. Serwer thinks that Woodward "gives everyone the Obama they were looking for": 

I'm unsure how this changes the political dynamic on the war, since it mostly confirms what most people skeptical of the war already thought. We're still left with liberals who see the war as no longer worth fighting and a right that, whether it does or not, will sense a political advantage in portraying Obama as too weak to commit to getting the job done. The big difference is that the presidents' critics on both sides will have more ammunition than ever–we'll see whether it matters that the American people are as ambivalent and exasperated about the war as the president himself.

Anyang, Korea, 12 pm

John F Burns pens a wonderful obit today on the remarkable British spy in France, Eileen Nearne, in 1944 who was tortured by the Nazis. Somehow, Bill Keller let the following paragraph slip through the copy-edit cracks:

As she related in postwar debriefings, documented in Britain’s National Archives, the Gestapo tortured her — beating her, stripping her naked, then submerging her repeatedly in a bath of ice-cold water until she began to black out from lack of oxygen.

"Tortured"? Doesn't that break the NYT rule that such techniques are only referred to as "harsh interrogation techniques"? Has the policy changed? Or are we seeing an explicit decision by its editors to use different terms for exactly the same things when used by the US, rather than by the Nazis? You think I'm exaggerating? Here is an eye-witness account of Camp Nama, under the direct command of General Stanley McChrystal, where mere suspects – people not even caught red-handed as Ms Nearne was by the Nazis – were imprisoned and tortured:

[The suspect] was stripped naked, put in the mud and sprayed with the hose, with very cold hoses, in February. At night it was very cold. They sprayed the cold hose and he was completely naked in the mud, you know, and everything. [Then] he was taken out of the mud and put next to an air conditioner. It was extremely cold, freezing, and he was put back in the mud and sprayed. This happened all night. Everybody knew about it. People walked in, the sergeant major and so forth, everybody knew what was going on, and I was just one of them, kind of walking back and forth seeing [that] this is how they do things.

Here is more of an interview with a soldier who was at the Camp, whose chilling motto was "No Blood, No Foul."

Jeff explained that the colonel told them that he "had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there's no way that the Red Cross could get in." Jeff did not question the colonel further on how these assurances were given to those in command in CampNama. He explained that they were told: "they just don't have access, and they won't have access, and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating. Even Army investigators." Jeff said that he did see Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. Joint Special Operations forces in Iraq, visiting the Nama facility on several occasions. "I saw him a couple of times. I know what he looks like."

This all took place in Iraq, which even the Bush administration said was subject to Geneva Rules. (For more details on this, see the NYT story here, where, of course, the t-word is forbidden, and HRW's report here.) But it is also important to note that hypothermia – the Nazi Verschaerfte Vernehmung ("enhanced interrogation") technique of cold baths, dowsing with cold water, use of ice cold hoses, and air-conditioners – was a specifically approved technique by president Bush and vice-president Cheney. At Camp Nama, two prisoners were tortured to death by these methods. In other instances, these deaths by hypothermia torture were covered up:

Among the death certificates issued for prisoners who died while being held for interrogation at Abu Ghraib, one cited by Dr. Steven Miles claimed a 63-year-old prisoner had died of “cardiovascular disease and a buildup of fluid around his heart.” But Miles noted that the certificate failed to mention that the old man had been stripped naked, continually soaked in cold water, and kept outside in 40-degree cold for three days before cardiac arrest.

The use of hypothermia as a torture technique was not restricted to Camp Nama under General McChrystal's direct command, a man who has never taken responsibility for the war crimes under his watch. In Gitmo itself, directly monitored by the White House, al-Qahtani was frozen near to death. Here is what was done to him, under the direct orders of the war criminal George W Bush:

For eleven days, beginning November 23, al-Qahtani was interrogated for twenty hours each day by interrogators working in shifts. He was kept awake with music, yelling, loud white noise or brief opportunities to stand. He then was subjected to eighty hours of nearly continuous interrogation until what was intended to be a 24-hour “recuperation.” This recuperation was entirely occupied by a hospitalization for hypothermia that had resulted from deliberately abusive use of an air conditioner. Army investigators reported that al-Qahtani’s body temperature had been cooled to 95 to 97 degrees Fahrenheit (35 to 36.1 degrees Celsius) and that his heart rate had slowed to thirty-five beats per minute. While hospitalized, his electrolytes were corrected and an ultrasound did not find venous thrombosis as a cause for the swelling of his leg. The prisoner slept through most of the 42-hour hospitalization after which he was hooded, shackled, put on a litter and taken by ambulance to an interrogation room for twelve more days of interrogation, punctuated by a few brief naps.

My italic. As my essay in The Atlantic noted here, an Army interrogator, Tony Lagouranis, described the technique as it evolved in Iraq and Afghanistan:

We used hypothermia a lot. It was very cold up in Mosul at that time, so we—it was also raining a lot—so we would keep the prisoner outside, and they would have a polyester jumpsuit on and they would be wet and cold, and freezing. But we weren’t inducing hypothermia with ice water like the [Navy] SEALs were. But, you know, maybe the SEALs were doing it better than we were, because they were actually even controlling it with the [rectal] thermometer, but we weren’t doing that.

Lagouranis did not witness the Navy SEALs’ technique himself. But the maintenance of cold cells at Gitmo, and elsewhere, shows how high up the authorization went.

Some want to claim that equating the torture techniques used by the Bush administration with those used by the Nazis is unforgivable hyperbole. Sadly, it isn't. It's indisputable fact. And one man responsible for it, Stanley McChrystal, was rewarded with promotion and now teaches at Yale. And another man who twisted the law to make it happen, John Yoo, teaches at Berkeley.

The US in 1948 prosecuted German soldiers for using hypothermia techniques, and sentenced its practitioners to death. One wonders: why, if the Geneva Conventions mean anything, is Stanley McChrystal, who bears legal and command authority for everything committed under his command, not in jail? And why are not Bush and Cheney on trial at the Hague? And why does Obama hold the Geneva Conventions in such contempt that he too insists on violating their clear and pressing legal obligation to investigate and prosecute all such war criminals, whoever they are?

He took an oath to enforce the laws of the land. He is violating that oath, thereby subverting both the Constitution and the rule of law.

A new and stunning revelation of where the country now is.

Julian Sanchez fumes over a new report from the Office of the Inspector General:

[A]n FBI supervisor, in an exercise of spectacularly poor judgment, sent a rookie out to monitor an antiwar rally—evading the charge of monitoring Americans based exclusively on the basis of First Amendment protected activity only because of the laughable pretext that said rookie was there to eye the crowd for any international terrorists who might be in attendance. Fine.  But when Congress got wind of this and began to inquire into why this had occurred—and why said rookie had filed a report on “antiwar activity” that focused on whether any persons of apparent “Middle Eastern descent” had been involved—the OIG found that someone at the FBI had utterly fabricated a retroactive justification for the investigation, involving dubious “terror suspects” that nobody had actually believed at the time might be present at this rally.

His bigger complaint:

Someone at the FBI decided that it was a good idea to lie to Congress in order to cover up improper monitoring of an unpopular political group.  In this case, it was pacifists, but who knows who’ll be next. If brazen lies aren’t punished the one case out of a dozen or a hundred that draw the attention of the overseers, why should they ever bother to observe the rules? So watch the Department of Justice.  If someone is fired over this, maybe we still live in a country governed by the rule of law. If not, they’re convinced we’re so dim and besotted by reruns of Friends that they no longer even feel obliged to put up a good show.

The usual Obama Administration tactic in this situation would be to insist that we need to look forward. In other words, it's been quite awhile since federal officials were as subject to the rule of law as the rest of us.

A reader writes:

Unfortunately, it's not true that "Dems had 60 votes for a full year." Because of the Franken/Coleman debacle, they didn't get their 60th seat until July 7, 2009. Scott Brown was seated on February 4, 2010. But Democrats didn't even have those seven months because it took a month to seat Paul Kirk after Edward Kennedy died (August 25 – September 24). So, six months. But Congress wasn't even in session during August and half of November-January. That left about 4.5 months. Should that have been enough time to take care of DADT? Perhaps. But it's just over a third of the time you were granting them.

I repeat: a civil rights proposal with 62 percent Republican support in the country would have been a no-brainer if the president had any guts, the Human Rights Campaign had any competence, and the Democrats had even the slightest integrity. Another writes:

What happened during those 4 months? Democrats got through the Shepard/Byrd Hate Crimes Bill, the first piece of expressly pro-LGBT legislation ever to pass Congress. And even that inoffensive piece of business couldn't pass the Senate as a stand-alone bill; it had to go through as an attachment to a larger, must-pass piece of legislation.

The number of hate crimes prosecutions under the new law, now a year old: zero. I checked with the FBI this week. There are many other "investigations" pending but they understandably cannot give details until the facts are resolved. But I repeat: the Human Rights Campaign's Number One item – the thing they postponed DADT repeal for – has resulted in no actual prosecutions in the year since it was passed.

Meanwhile, gay servicemembers are still being routinely fired by president Obama, and still live under the threat of persecution merely for not lying. And do you not think that a government that itself allows harassment and threats against gay people has no moral standing to prosecute private citizens for doing the same thing? If Obama opposes persecuting gay people for being gay, he should start with himself as commander in chief. He has discriminated against more gay people in the last year than any single private individual or company in the land. There are no excuses. And his cowardice may mean years more persecution for gay servicemembers. If the House goes Republican this fall, as seems very likely, and it it is jammed with Christianists, as seems even likelier, this critical window could be lost for another decade. My reader continues:

The Hate Crimes bill would not have been my first choice of gay legislation to pass while the Dems had a bullet-proof majority in the Senate. Nor would DADT repeal, for that matter. ENDA would have been my pick. But the Hate Crimes bill is clearly what LGBT supporters in Congress thought was the easiest lift.

Tell me you don't think for a minute that, during that four-month window, in the heat of the fight over healthcare reform, we could have gotten both hate crimes and another piece of LGBT legislation passed? ’Cause that would be crazy talk!

The hate crimes bill should have been the last item on the agenda, not the first. Many gay voters of libertarian and conservative bent actually oppose it. But there is unanimity on the military, ENDA and DOMA. Moreover, its impact has been negligible. It was designed purely to exploit fear of  anti-gay violence to line the coffers of the Human Rights Campaign – while gay couples are split apart, their children have no security, and gay soldiers face constant stress from their own commander-in-chief. Another reader complains:

First, Democrats only had 60 votes for about six months, from early July when Franken was sworn in until early February when Brown was sworn in.

Second, attaching it to the bill increases the odds of passage because some Democrats likely wouldn't be for repealing DADT alone.

Why for Heaven's sake? When vast majorities of the public favor it, when every other major military, including our core allies, have ended this foul discrimination? When HRC has been donating money and so many gay people worked their guts out for this administration in the campaign where this was a clear pledge? But back to my reader:

Finally, Democrats had to wait for this year's defense bill because the military leadership wasn't on board with repeal. And guess what? People like the military more than they like members of Congress. Recall how General Colin Powell ran circles around President Clinton on this issue in 1993. Democrats in red/purple states wouldn't be on board if the military was vocally against repeal. And getting them on board took time. And remember, even Admiral Mullen couched his support for repeal in completing the study!

The military's job is to obey the commander in chief and the Congress. Giving them this kind of leverage over a core civil rights matter, while politically prudent, is constitutionally dangerous. You think Truman would have done such a thing? HRC had two decades to lobby these people. It was a clear Obama campaign commitment. Over 75 percent of the public support it. And the Democrats still do not have the balls to take it on as a stand-alone issue and fight for it and argue for it and stand buy it? What a bunch of spineless, useless creeps. Another:

Once again, you are hyperbolizing and twisting the facts on the Dems. When the Dems had a 60 vote majority, they still would have only had 58 votes. Filibuster still wins.

Now, you can argue that the Arkansas Dems would have vote for cloture under that scenario, but I wouldn't be so sure. The Democrats have never been able to enforce the unity that the Republicans can in their fear-based opposition. Moreover, a year ago, with no expectation that the Democrats would lose their 60-vote supermajority, you would have argued that President Obama was meep-meeping the Republicans as a national consensus built around repealing DADT.

But the national consensus had already been built by the time Obama came to office – though with precious little help from any Democrats.

It sucks, no question. But to blame the "Democrats" as a party, rather than a few cynical cowards who don't represent the broader view of the party, is worse than silly – it's stupid and self-destructive.

Keep up the pressure. It is warranted and necessary. But if you want to guarantee that DADT is never repealed (not to mention DOMA), then go right ahead and bite off your nose to spite your face and lead a gay abandonment of the Democrats.

Another:

Did you see that Kay Hagan, who holds Jesse Helms' old seat, voted to repeal DADT?  Tolerance will break through this hatred eventually.

But not among the Democrats, and not under this president, whose betrayal of and contempt for his gay supporters is now beyond dispute. If I had wanted an administration reeking of fear and cowardice, I would have backed Clinton in the primaries.

(Photo: Antonio Agnone helps to plant hundreds of American flags displayed on the National Mall as part of a campaign by gay rights lobbying groups including the Log Cabin Republicans, Liberty Education Forum, Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, and the Human Rights Campaign November 30, 2007 in Washington, DC. The groups planted the flags on the anniversary of the signing of the 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' law, with one American flag for each soldier discharged from military service due to their sexuality. By Win McNamee/Getty Images.)