What do you mean, tell you what to think? It's been perfectly clear for some time that torture was administration policy.
I think I am going to be sick.
I think I would be happier if I were posting Becks style.
I think I will go work on that.
Katherine ends by thinking about how important it is for her to do these stories. I think that's right. What we're doing is making a record. Our job is to read it and know, and not hide from the people we encounter that we know. It may be depressing but it should be done, and readers have as vital a role to play as writers, in bearing witness.
It's true.
I actually did some background research for HRW for this report. Nothing to do with the soldiers, just digging out corroborating news stories and documents, especially the stuff on the classified task forces. There is a lot, a lot of corroboration. And the soldiers accounts are detailed and credible. And I know and absolutely trust the author.
While I've got everyone good and depressed anyway--this post contains actual original reporting, and I think it's pretty good.
1) I believe it to be true, for two reasons-- it fits the stories I've read in the news, and it *completely* matches the content of the "torture memos." If they weren't meaning to authorize this sort of stuff, those memos make little sense. This is what they were designed to make possible.
2) What I think: It makes me ill. This is being done on our behalf, and I am very, very sad about it. I hope something can be done to stop it soon. Bringing it into open daylight would be a good start.
I'd guess "far more than half true."
Just tonight watched Costa-Gavras Missing with Lemmon & Spacek. Chile in the early 1970s. I guess this current spasm is one of the worst episodes, (Nixon let the Chileans do the torturing, including of Americans, which is much better. Really.) and I applaud Katherine's work. But I have watching this shit for forty years, and I expect it to go on forty years after my death. This is America-in-the-world.
It will only stop...never mind.
What can we think and do about torture? Here's my list:
1. For most of us, as civillians outside the government, there's not much of a chance to directly influence these issues. (Assuming that torture does not become a major campaign issue in any upcoming elections, and does anyone really think it could?). We can however continue to bear witness ourselves, encourage our friends and contacts in the media to do so, and ask difficult questions about it whenever we're talking to someone in power (which, I'm guessing, is somewhat more frequently that the norm for the group of people who read and contribute to blogs like this.)
2. Let's remember too that torture isn't just something that happens on the other side of the world or at Guantanamo. U.S. citizens who are prison inmates are subjected to the same or similar treatment every day. Working for prison reform is something that is much easier for those of us in the U.S. to do and have a reasonable expectation of change occuring.
3. Many of the people who are tortured -- by the U.S., our proxies or by groups not connected with us -- survive, and will need help. Here's a place to start: http://www.cvt.org/main.php
4. Now and in the future, don't let this be swept under the rug. I'm sure we can all imagine what the FOX News and warblogger discourse about this stuff will be like 5 years from now -- more of the same only worse. The political decision to practice torture will be simultaneously elided and recuperated, just like firebombing Dresden, Hiroshima, Operation Rolling Thunder, the Phoenix Program etc. Let's try to keep this fresh in our minds for more than just the usual couple of news cycles.
8: and of course your point 2 illustrates your point 4. We are by now completely comfortable with horrific abuse in domestic prisons, to the point that they made prison rape jokes on fucking Friends; to the point that, when people make jokes about prison rape and one tells them "that's not funny," one feels like a humorless scold.
For now at least we're some of us at least a bit ashamed of the things we're doing in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib & etc. For now at least only Rush Limbaugh and his clones think it's funny. But if it carries on for a few more years and we all get used to it I confidently expect to see amusing Abu Ghraib skits on Scrubs in a few years.
What strikes me as the central claim here is the Power Point presentation -- that the interrogators were told that there were no legal limits on what they could do to prisoners. Once we have the US military making that claim in an official capacity -- that there is a category of prisoner entirely outside the protections of the Geneva Conventions -- then it's both unsurprising that anything at all up to and including beating prisoners to death happens, and it's got nothing to do with bad apples: it's the direct result of interrogators being told that the prisoners were not protected by law.
ask difficult questions about it whenever we're talking to someone in power (which, I'm guessing, is somewhat more frequently that the norm for the group of people who read and contribute to blogs like this.)
I got an e-mail this morning telling me that Hillary Rodham Clinton would be at a cocktail party at my firm (I'm a summer associate at a major metropolitan law firm) on Wednesday. My first reaction was something like, "this happens?!" Presidential candidates fundraise (e-mail says no contribution expected, but seriously) this retail? My second was to think about what to ask her, which I'm still pondering.
WD: Go, and try to get a sense of her and the situation, and try to tell us who still can't decide what to think of her what your impression was.
Unless you hang out with them all the time, leading pols are almost always incredibly impressive in person. This is what they do, and why they're at the top of their game. So keep your critical faculties in high gear, and ask about something that matters a lot to you, personally.
Then think about it for 24 hours and let us know.
Yes, I never knwo what I'd say. It's not like anything you'd say or ask would actually regiater with them.
I tend to avoid politicians for the reason taht OFE mentioned. They are very impressive in person, so I liek to kee m distance so as to retain some perspective.
Sure, all this torture stuff as official Bush Administration policy looks bad, but at least Bush wouldn't turn tail and run from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ask her about the godawful Specter bill, with a followup of "how are YOU opposing the unlimited interpretation of the President's Article II power?"
16, that's probably right, though I think I would do it as a "criticism sandwich." "So, I was pleased to hear (though it should be de rigeur) that you announced you'd support the winner of the Democratic Conn. primary. By the way, given that it's a complete capitulation to the bizarre Addington-Yoo theory of executive power, how much can you do to stop the Specter bill? Are you doing it? Why not? Also, I hope that if you win the Presidency 1994 doesn't turn out to have scarred you so much that you won't do something serious, and major, about health care. [Mention somewhat tangential, but worth mentioning, connection that I have to HRC in a nice way.]"
Actually, maybe change the order of the pieces of bread.
Washerdreyer, those are all good, but you won't be able to get that much out. Pick one. (Or was 17 just a joke? Cause if I had the time and the undivided attention, I'd say just exactly that?)
No, 17 wasn't a joke. I had said that I've been thinking about what to say for a couple of hours (while doing actual work and commenting), and JM's comment crystalized it. Also, the tangential connection which I'm being mysterious about exists between on the order of 20,000 people and Hillary, and I'd prefer not be less mysterious than that here, even though I'm keeping a "secret" which I repeatedly allude to, and probably say explicitly once or twice, on my own blog. If you're interested e-mail, but it's not very interesting.
My first reaction was something like, "this happens?!" Presidential candidates fundraise (e-mail says no contribution expected, but seriously) this retail?
A big law firm has hundreds of partners, all of whom have the money to be big donors and have large personal networks. It's actually a very efficient, targeted millieu for fundraising.
washerdreyer, I wasn't talking about the fact that HRC is coming to your firm, and I wasn't thinking of your connection to her. What I thought might be a joke was what appeared to be a plan to ask a stream-of-consciousness question. It seemed like a dump of everything you might ever have wanted to say to HRC. I thought that it might be a bit of joking at yourself. "I wouldn't really try to corner her with everything I've ever wanted to say to her (the way that some people do when they meet famouss types), but..." That's why I thought that 17 might be a joke.
Well, I've never done an event like this (also, that's not everything I'd want to ask her, it doesn't even mention the word Iraq). But I don't know what the format is, so what not come up with what I'd ask if I could buttonhole her for five minutes, even if that won't happen. I can ask some subset of it in the actual event.
"So, Senator Clinton, does the carpet match the drapes?"
So, in the last eight days I've developed some new mental illness whereby I can't read dates. So, last Monday I thought that the movie which played at Bryant Park yesterday was playing then, and was annoyed because it was too hot last Monday to see it. Then I thought the Hillary thing was tomorrow and conflicted with another firm thing, when in fact one of them was 8/2 and the Hillary thing is 8/9 which means I won't be able to attend.
Could you have someone in the firm ask my question for me? It's really important I find out before the primary here.