Month: March 2013

The Guardian, in a 15-month investigation, has unearthed the fact that Donald Rumsfeld brought veterans from the dirty wars in Latin America, Colonel James Steele and Colonel James H Coffman, to empower sectarian warfare against the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. He set up detention centers for Sunni insurgents that were run by Iraqis but monitored and checked on by two men, one of whom reported to Rumsfeld, the other to Petraeus. So we have the first solid evidence that Petraeus, the golden mediocrity of Washington, was also an abetter of the worst forms of torture imaginable:

“Every single detention centre would have its own interrogation committee,” claimed [Iraqi General Muntadher] al-Samari, who worked with Petraeus’ and Rumsfeld’s designated men on the ground] … “Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators. This committee will use all means of torture to make the detainee confess like using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts.” There is no evidence that Steele or Coffman tortured prisoners themselves, only that they were sometimes present in the detention centres where torture took place, and were involved in the processing of thousands of detainees.

But reporters witnessed horrifying war crimes in US-occupied Iraq, under the authority of those reporting directly to Rumsfeld and Petraeus:

Samari claimed that torture was routine in the commando-controlled detention centres. “I remember a 14-year-old who was tied to one of the library’s columns. And he was tied up, with his legs above his head. Tied up. His whole body was blue because of the impact of the cables with which he had been beaten.”

Gilles Peress, a photographer, came across Steele when he was on assignment for the New York Times, visiting one of the commando centres in the same library, in Samarra. “We were in a room in the library interviewing Steele and I’m looking around I see blood everywhere.”

The reporter Peter Maass was also there, working on the story with Peress. “And while this interview was going on with a Saudi jihadi with Jim Steele also in the room, there were these terrible screams, somebody shouting ‘Allah, Allah, Allah!’. But it wasn’t kind of religious ecstasy or something like that, these were screams of pain and terror.”

How did we find all this out? Bradley Manning’s leaks. Sometimes a whistleblower is not only a traitor. He can also be a patriot, uncovering war crimes. The full documentary can be seen here. A five-minute version is here.

A reader writes:

I’ve enjoyed your series on “Sponsored Content” and the fusion of news and advertising, but you haven’t really touched upon the granddaddy of them all: the fusion of politics and “news”. Here is an example: “NBC Today News: Chelsea Clinton: Hillary is as Vibrant as Ever“. Here we have an NBC News employee writing a “journalism” piece on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  It uses quotes from Chelsea Clinton, who just happens to also be a NBC News Employee.  In addition, the article is written by an NBC News “contributor” – Eun Kyung Kim – who just happens to be the Director of Communications for the National Women’s Business Council, which provides advice and counsel to the President of the United States. In addition, this “contributor” worked as a Senior Advisor on Communications and Policy to the White House in 2011. According to Eun Kyung Kim’s LinkedIn page, she has a “Proven record of originating, developing and implementing strategic communications plans that help raise a brand’s visibility and build relevant audiences.”

This article by an NBC NEWS division is nothing more than a press release, which was practically written by Hillary herself.

Let’s examine some of Eun Kyung Kim’s other pieces of “journalism” for NBC News, shall we? “Hillary Clinton to Write Second Memoir“, “Hillary Clinton Steps Down, but (reluctant) Style Legacy Endures,” “Hillary Clinton: “Maybe I’ll get a Decorating Show”, Chelsea Clinton reveals Politics, Kids are a Possibility“, Michelle Obama: “Bangs are my Midlife Crisis.” This is simply advertising for Powerful Democratic Women.  Pure propaganda.  And written by a current Director of Communications to a Presidential Advisory Counsel under the guise of a journalist. And lastly, this whole ruse is pitched to the low information voter under the morning news provided by the popular Today Show.

Michael Moynihan waves goodbye to the strongman:

His was a poisonous influence on the region, one rah-rahed by radical fools who desired to see a thumb jammed in America’s eye, while not caring a lick for its effect on ordinary Venezuelans. In his terrific new book (fortuitously timed to publish this week) Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, The Guardian’s Rory Carroll summed up the legacy of Chávez’s Venezuela as “a land of power cuts, broken escalators, shortages, queues, insecurity, bureaucracy, unreturned calls, unfilled holes, uncollected garbage.” One could add to that list grinding poverty, massive corruption, censorship, and intimidation.

William J. Dobson doubts Chávez’s brand of politics will survive him:

Chavismo served only to showcase the man who propounded it. A man whose humble origins and charismatic personality helped forge a connection with the country’s poor, a population who had long been excluded from politics. A man whose style, voice, and methods were so unpredictable that it took his opponents more than a decade to even understand whom they were opposing.

Jennifer Cyr isn’t so sure:

The chavistas … could remain a political and social tour de force in the country for some time. After fourteen years in office, Chávez leaves behind an institutional, social, and international legacy that will be difficult to overcome. Perhaps just as important, his memory will surely live on among those Venezuelans who fell under his spell, declaring that they love Hugo Chávez (“yo lo amo”). Whether his closest confidants can continue to fuel that love after his death is an open question. (His refusal to cultivate any sort of progeny to succeed him, as well as potentially conflicting interests within Chavez’s coalition of support, help very little in this endeavor.)

Francisco Toro looks at how Chávez spent Venezuela’s oil wealth:

Where Chávez was able to transcend the Cuban model, it was largely due to the advantages of life at the receiving end of an unprecedented petrodollar flood. By some estimates, Venezuela sold over $1 trillion worth of oil during his tenure, and so his was government by hyperconsumption, not rationing. The petroboom allowed Chávez to substitute the checkbook for the gulag; marginalizing his opponents via popular spending programs rather than rounding them up and throwing them in jail. Rather than declaring all out-war on business, he co-opted them. Rather than abolish civil society, he created a parallel civil society, complete with pro-government unions, universities, radio stations and community councils. Such enhancements were tried before by left-wing populists in Latin America, but always failed because they ran out of money.

The Economist adds:

A majority of Venezuelans may eventually come to see that Mr Chávez squandered an extraordinary opportunity for his country, to use an unprecedented oil boom to equip it with world-class infrastructure and to provide the best education and health services money can buy. But this lesson will come the hard way, and there is no guarantee that it will be learned.

Diego von Vacano argues that Chávez’s form of government wasn’t populist but “democratic Caesarism”:

This term, unlike ‘populism,’ describes a regime that seeks to use constitutional, juridical, and legal procedures to institutionalize reforms aimed at ameliorating the plight of poor and working-class citizens. While populist regimes such as that of Perón and Getúlio Vargas in Brazil relied on demagoguery to stay in power, democratic-Caesarist regimes rely on constitutional and public-law mechanisms to legitimate the authority of a form of republicanism with a strong executive that possesses a martial, anti-imperial component.

Gideon Rachman sees few countries are following Venezuela’s example:

The contrast with former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil is striking. Although Chávez was a military man and Lula was a trade-unionist, both leaders espoused radical, left-wing ideas in their early careers. The difference is that Lula was much more pragmatic in office. This does not mean that he sold out. On the contrary, like Chávez’s Venezuela, Lula’s Brazil placed a heavy emphasis on redistributive policies that favoured the poor. Lula was also happy, on occasion, to play to the gallery with some anti-imperialist rhetoric. But he was also prepared to make his peace with big business and with the United States. Brazil has become a favoured destination for foreign investors.

And Massie insists that Chávez “didn’t matter that much”:

In truth, Chavez was vastly over-estimated by Washington. Listening to bone-headed Republicans you could have been forgiven for supposing this bullshitting caudillo was a Latin American Stalin. Chavez never represented much more than a modest threat to mainstream American interests. It suited both sides to flatter Chavez and over-estimate his influence.

(Photo: A poster of President Hugo Chavez reading ‘There is a great future ahead’ is seen at the consulate of Venezuela of Santa Cruz de Tenerife on March 6, 2013. By Desiree Martin/AFP/Getty Images)

A reader writes:

I’ve enthusiastically followed your conversations about religion with Christopher Hitchens. But this latest part of the conversation provoked me like none of the others.

Nothing Hitchens said bothered me, a practicing, but non-fundamentalist Christian, in the least. His objections seem aimed at a faith that bore no resemblance to mine. Even more, his arguments curiously parallel those of religious fundamentalists. Everything is to be taken literally – even, most weirdly, the parables of Jesus and notoriously difficult passages like the Sermon on the Mount. For instance, Jesus’s saying that we should “take no thought for tomorrow” is rendered by Hitchens as “moral advice” to be treated as a simple command. Treated as such, he calls it “wicked” and “evil” because, understood literally, that means Jesus is telling parents to neglect their children and for individuals and communities to make sure they starve by abandoning the slightest trace of prudence. Reading this teaching of Jesus this way genuinely is not very careful or intelligent. I honestly can’t believe that’s really what Hitchens thought it means, that Jesus was commanding his listeners to harm others, let alone children.

You note at one point that commands like this are “impossible.” I agree. And maybe that’s the point. That Jesus is not so much (to continue with the above example) commanding parents to harm their children, but exposing our hearts – showing us that our attachments, our search for mastery and control, our lust for money, that all these strivings are futile and the enemies of living in a genuinely compassionate and peaceful way. That trying to take the future and impose our will on it leads to destruction, both of ourselves and others. Hitchens treats Jesus like a hucksterish advice columnist for first century Palestine.

Do this, do that, follow these simple directions. My example isn’t fanciful – he reads the Gospels with about as much nuance as I do the morning paper. Instead, why not read the Gospels by treating Jesus, among much else, as a masterful psychologist, a prophet who strips away all the strongholds of our egos, our achievements, our delusional belief in our own self-sufficiency. Isn’t this what Jesus is getting at when he tells us, in Matthew 15, that out of the heart proceeds a whole array of sins and misdeeds. Jesus never settles on the exterior, but is a penetrating analyst of our interior lives – our thoughts, our desires, our “hearts.” This fact alone, that Jesus finds the chief faults of the world come from within each of us, means that by necessity interpreting his words cannot be done in the simplistic, hyper-literal way Hitchens does. We must, like Jesus did with every person he encountered, dig beneath the surface to the inner logic of his commands, move from the letter to the spirit, to what his commands expose about our hearts. We should read Jesus, to deploy an over-used word, “existentially.”

Ultimately, Jesus was not a giver of “moral advice” or the purveyor of a checklist of commands. He was both teaching and enacting a way of being in the world, a way of life, a way radically discontinuous with our natural instincts. At every turn, he took the wisdom of the world, our expectations of what we, left to our own striving and tendencies, should do to solve our problems, and showed their futility. Looking at the world around us, might we not think, if but for a moment, that there was more to this strange, wandering teacher than Hitchens is willing to concede?

(Painting: “Christ Taking Leave of the Apostles” by Duccio, between 1308 and 1311.)