Mental Health Break

Hyper-spacing spliced together from several different movies: OK TO GO from universe on Vimeo. An attempt at an explanation:

Part of the thing which is so appealing about Hyper Space scenes in films is the idea that something fantastic and unknown lies at the end of them. In fact, here are the primary uses of Warp Speed/ Hyper Space as plot device: A) Tunnel to unknown. B) Escape from danger via total oblivion. Both represent a kind of inversion, or temporary lifting, of the accepted order.

For me, however, there will only be one real hyperspace experience:

Krugman In Wolf’s Clothing

Andrew Sprung notes a prescient column by the FT's Martin Wolf two years ago:

Now think what will happen if, after two or more years of monstrous fiscal deficits, the US is still mired in unemployment and slow growth. People will ask why the country is exporting so much of its demand to sustain jobs abroad. They will want their demand back. The last time this sort of thing happened – in the 1930s – the outcome was a devastating round of beggar-my-neighbour devaluations, plus protectionism. Can we be confident we can avoid such dangers? On the contrary, the danger is extreme.

Once the integration of the world economy starts to reverse and unemployment soars, the demons of our past – above all, nationalism – will return. Achievements of decades may collapse almost overnight.

Right on cue, Krugman unleashes today on China.

How Cheney Made America A Torture Nation

The comparison with Richard Reid is, of course, instructive. The Bush administration treated the shoe-bomber exactly as the Obama administration has treated the pantie-bomber – and convicted him the way no one has yet convicted anyone directly connected to 9/11. But after years of banging the drum for torture as a routine tool for US government, and accountable only to one supreme leader, the right has now shifted the goalposts again. The ticking time bomb is now an ancient criterion. Torture, for Cheney, is about treating every seized terror suspect as an intelligence target, and the entire system he created – of lawless prisons, disappearances, black sites, freezing cells, stress position shackles, upright coffins, neck-braces to slam prisoners repeatedly against plywood walls, waterboards, sensory deprivation techniques, dietary manipulation, forced-feeding, threats against relatives and children – was designed for torture as its end.

Marc Thiessen, one of those most committed to institutionalizing torture as part of the Western tradition, wants to torture the Detroit pantie-bomber:

It likely would not be necessary to use the waterboard to get Abdulmutallab to talk — only 3 terrorists underwent it and only 30 had any enhanced techniques used at all.  But the vast majority of Americans have it right:  You don’t put an enemy combatant who just committed an act of war into the criminal-justice system — and you certainly don’t give him a lawyer and tell him “you have the right to remain silent.”  You make him tell you what he knows so you can prevent new attacks.

There is a lie in this, of course. Far, far more than thirty people were subjected to the torture techniques Cheney borrowed from the Gestapo, the Communist Chinese and the Khmer Rouge. Hundreds were treated this way at Abu Ghraib, Camp Cropper, Camp Nama (under the authority of Stanley McChrystal), Bagram and in many secret sites taken over from the KGB (yes, I'm not making this up!) in Eastern Europe.

But here's the critical line:

You make him tell you what he knows so you can prevent new attacks.

That's the line that defines torture. If you can impose enough mental or physical pain or suffering to make someone tell you something you want to hear you have forced them to say something, true or false, to get the torture to stop. The fact of the matter is: this is illegal under any rational understanding of domestic and international law. In fact, domestic and international law mandates that governments do not even contemplate such measures, especially in extreme circumstances.

So National Review is urging law-breaking at the very highest levels of government. They are urging an extra-legal, extra-constitutional apparatus to seize and torture terror suspects outside of ticking time bomb scenarios as a matter of first resort. And yes, if they are advocating it against the pantie-bomber now, days after his capture, it is a first resort.

This is how far Cheney and the pro-torture camp have moved the debate, and why Obama's calm attempt to overlook it is dangerous in the message it sends. What the Cheneyites themselves once refused to do, with Reid, they are now demanding Obama do to the pantie-bomber.

The few remaining voices on the right with any qualms about routine torture of terror suspects make their case with almost pathetic resignation. Glenn Reynolds seems to believe that openly exposing and opposing torture in a democracy is tantamount to endorsing and promoting it.

And that apparently is because it is more important to be appalled by the alleged "self-righteousness" and "self-glorification" of torture opponents than it is to be shocked at the notion of stripping a defenseless human being, freezing him to near hypothermia, shutting him in a tiny upright coffin, slamming him against walls, near-drowning him hundreds of times, subjecting him to sexual and religious abuse, hanging him from his joints and limbs in such a way as to create unbearable pain, tying him to a post in the freezing cold and repeatedly beating and hosing him with frigid water (as was done under McChrystal's command). Yes, it's a much more moral position to be pissed off by the alleged self-righteousness of Sullivan than to face and tackle and end illegal barbarism perpetrated by the government. This is now the libertarian position as Reynolds understands it. It's a pathetic rationalization of his own capitulation to raw partisanship and unchecked authoritarianism.

Charles Krauthammer, the intellectual architect of the torture regime, and as morally responsible for the torture of others as any in the former administration, argues that by treating the pantie-bomber like the shoe bomber,

we lose all access to any information which would save American lives.

All access to any information? He means that traditional and legal interrogation is useless? That only torture provides information?

Notice again how far down the slippery slope we have gone. Krauthammer's first position was that torture should be restricted solely to ticking time bomb cases in which we knew that a terror suspect could prevent an imminent detonation of a WMD. His position a few years later is that torture should be the first resort for any terror suspect who could tell us anything about future plots. Those of us who warned that torture, once admitted into the mainstream, will metastasize beyond anyone's control now have the example of Charles Krauthammer's arguments to back us up. Stephen Hayes, Cheney's stenographer along with Mike Allen, even argued on Fox News that Cheney's assault on the president as an alien threat to the American people was too soft and wanted to "squeeze" the pantie-bomber for more info. These are neo-fascist sentiments, empowering lawless violence by the government, justified solely by fear of terror incidents. Whatever else junking the entire history of Western jurisprudence and the laws of war is, it is not in any way conservative. It is a radical assault on one of the central pillars of our civilization.

Jonah Goldberg is not quite as perverse:

I'd want to know for sure whether other techniques couldn't get relevant information and I'd want a better sense that this guy knows about an imminent threat.

To which one can only hear Cheney reply: pansy! The principled position on the right with respect to torture is that opposing it is honorable, but of course supporting it is essential. The debate on the right is all but over.

If you believe in torture, support the GOP. That's what conservatism is now all about.

Just Murder Them All, Innocent And Guilty

How does anyone react to this kind of sentiment:

Step (1): Return all Gitmo detainees to Yemen.

Step (2): Use Predator missiles to strike the baggage-claim area 20 minutes after they arrive.

Just an idea.

As Greenwald notes, even the Bush administration conceded that around half of the "worst of the worst" Yemeni prisoners at Gitmo were completely innocent of any charges and imprisoned by mistake. Maybe some have been radicalized by years of Gitmo imprisonment. But the answer to that is not to ensure that this kind of mistake does not happen again but to kill all the victims of that mistake in a missile strike to incinerate them instantly?

This post appeared in National Review. It was written by someone who was once a defender of human rights, the rule of law and spreading the idea of democracy. Now he endorses rounding up even innocent prisoners and murdering them all in one spot as a "bipartisan" proposal for the US.

This is a neo-fascist sentiment. And it is a function of surrendering to barbarism, not fighting it.

Obama vs Oren

The hardine Israeli ambassador, the one who has taken sides in the AIPAC-J-Street dust-up, wants "crippling sanctions" against the Iranian people if Israel is to be restrained from launching a fourth world war. AIPAC has the Congress already primed and ready to go. Oren is adamant that

"there isn't an Israeli view and an American view" on the Iranian question, but rather "one view."

But there are signs of intelligent life in the Obama administration:

The Obama administration is showing signs that its approach to sanctions might not be in line with the "crippling" measures that Israel is expecting. Instead, a more calibrated approach has been emerging in which the US would press for another UN Security Council resolution this month and look at targeted sanctions rather than at disrupting Iran's energy markets and other more broad-based moves.

In addition, the US has repeatedly stressed that the door to diplomatic engagement remains open, notwithstanding Obama's pledge to review the process at the end of the year.