Another socialist blog

Gerald Ford, the only unelected President of the United States, has died at the age of 93. Many have stepped forward to say a kind word about him, as we should about any man who has died. But Ford was more than a man, he was a historical figure, and kindness toward the dead should never trump an accurate account of history.

The Vietnam War ended on President Ford’s watch, over the objections of Ford, which ought to tarnish his nice-guy reputation just a bit. In 1974 Ford made a speech to Congress trying to persuade them to vote more funding for Vietnam. Congress refused, and some freshmen members of Congress got up and walked out of the speech, to their credit. Today’s Congress could follow that example.

Ford has an entirely undeserved reputation, in the mainstream media at least, as the “healer of the nation” because of the Nixon pardon. The Chicago Tribune’s comments are typical: Stanley I. Kutler claims that “the pardon spared us years of court proceedings, riding a wave of national obsession about Watergate.” Indeed, that’s what Ford said he was doing when he pardoned Nixon for all crimes he committed as President, even though no charges had yet been filed.

The obvious response is, where were the conservatives when the Bill Clinton legal proceedings were going on and on and on, all the way to impeachment? Where was the concern for “national obsession” then? (And since when does “national obsession” give anybody a Get Out of Jail Free card? By that logic, O.J. Simpson should have been pardoned before trial.) Allow me to supply the obvious answer: the interminable Clinton investigations were allowed to proceed because they were politically expedient for Republicans. And the years of court proceedings against Richard Nixon were halted—before charges could even be filed!—because it would have been disastrous for Republicans. Go ahead and call me cynical; I learned how to be a cynic from Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. The message of the pardon is simply that you can get away with anything if you have sufficiently powerful friends. The long history of Presidential criminality since Nixon tells me that the message was heard loud and clear.

Now that even our government admits that Iraq policy has to change, we are hearing lots of statements that we must change the policy, but avoid “defeat.” The President says he listens to all opinions, but he rejects the ones that would “lead to defeat.” The new Secretary of Defense, Roberts M. Gates, warns that “failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility and endanger Americans for decades to come.”

Sounds a lot like the consequences if they succeed. It does no good to talk about whether “America” succeeds in Iraq, or whether “we” succeed in Iraq, only about who succeeds in Iraq. There are the people who wanted the war and started it, and there are the rest of us. We don’t have the same idea of what victory would be.

We’ve known for some time what the White House thinks. George W. Bush and the ruling class he represents are after a renewed American empire, starting with a colony in the Middle East. Bush has publicly admitted what he denied for years, which is that he is after the oil reserves. The more than half a million dead in Iraq were expendable in the cause of U.S. imperialism.

For the rest of us, “success” is stopping a war of aggression before it can do more damage, and bringing the perpetrators to justice. Success is exposing the war profiteers who started two wars for private profit. Success is permanently discrediting imperialism in general and U.S. imperialism in particular, and convincing the rest of the world that the majority of Americans are willing to respect the sovereignty of other countries. David McReynolds notes:

I understand those who feel that it would be irresponsible “to turn and run”. But to think the US can “fix” things now is like thinking a rapist is the ideal person to stay and provide therapy to the victim.

Left Behind: Eternal Forces is something different: a right-wing Christian violent video game. Not something you see every day. Based on a fundamentalist interpretation of Revelation, the game pits players against the Antichrist’s team. You convert the enemy characters to Jesus, or kill them. There’s a good deal of killing.

You can choose to play for the Antichrist’s team, but that team cannot win.

The Antichrist is of course a fictional Secretary General of the U.N. His team includes fictional rock stars and anyone with a Muslim-sounding name. The game’s publishers piously insist they are not fomenting hatred against Muslims, which is about as convincing as George Bush saying his “crusade” isn’t anti-Islam either.

I was not one of those calling for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld didn’t get the war wrong, the entire U.S. government got foreign policy wrong. It’s not that we have a “job” to “get done” in Iraq, a job that Rumsfeld did badly. The entire enterprise was a crime from the beginning, and the entire administration should resign, not just Rumsfeld. Better than half of the Congress should go with them.

But Rumsfeld is out, and now we have Robert M. Gates nominated to succeed him. Lest you think that the Bush administration has learned its lesson, consider these highlights from the Gates bio:

• He has a history of cooking the intelligence: Intelligence cherry-picked for ideological purposes; the claims of a single, unreliable source treated as fact and stovepiped straight up to the White House; a National Intelligence Estimate riddled with dubious claims; efforts made to connect an enemy regime with international terrorism. This will no doubt remind you of 2003 and the run-up to the war against Iraq, but no, these charges come from the 1980s and come from his coworkers at the CIA. Ray McGovern served in the CIA for 27 years and was Gates’s branch chief at the CIA in the early ’70s. He comments that
  

  Bill Casey had this bizarre notion that the Soviets were going to come up through Nicaragua and Mexico into Texas. Reagan even said such things. And Bobby Gates sort of played on that kind of shibboleth. And when Casey mined the harbors, well, Gates wrote a memo that said we ought to bomb them, as well, bomb the tanks. So, you know, whether he believed that or not, this was a deliberate sort of pandering to the known proclivities of Bill Casey and, of course, the President.

• He has a history of lying to Congress about criminal conspiracies in the Executive branch. He told the Iran-Contra independent counsel that he, the deputy director of the CIA, knew nothing at all about Oliver North’s illegal contra resupply operation, the diversion to the contras of profits from covert arms sales to Iran, or the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. These claims of innocence were contradicted by other CIA officials .

George W. Bush couldn’t have nominated a better guy to shred documents for him.

The Bush government is fond of giving lip service to the rule of law. And when they give something lip service, they really give it lip service. These are people who know how to stick to the script. Just today we have comments in support of the rule of law from Bush himself, from Condoleeza Rice, and from State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey, to pick just a few low-hanging examples. There could hardly be a better example of doublespeak. These people who claim to love the rule of law hold it in utter contempt. There are so many examples, but the atrocity of the detainee tribunals in Guantanamo, the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, will be the example of the day.

NPR reports on a study of 393 tribunal transcripts. The study reveals the tribunals to be empty of actual due process.

• In 100% of the cases the detainee was eventually found to be an enemy combatant.
• In 100% of the cases the government presented no witnesses at all.
• In 96% of the cases the government presented no evidence at all, relying instead on secret evidence that detainees were not allowed to see.
• In three cases there was a unanimous finding that the defendant was not an enemy combatant. The Defense Department ordered re-hearings in each case. In two of the three re-hearings the defendant was found to be enemy combatants. In the third, the tribunal again found unanimously that the detainee was not an enemy combatant, so the Defense Department orded a re-re-hearing for that prisoner. At this point the tribunal apparently got the message and found that, by golly, he is an enemy combatant after all.
• Detainees have a nominal right to call witnesses, but the only witnesses actually available to them are their fellow detainees. The U.S. State Department, which is responsible for producing witnesses from other countries on request, have produced none since the tribunals started.

It’s Kafkaesque. The government’s secret evidence is presumed to be reliable. The defendant, who has the burden to prove he is not an enemy combatant, has the right to rebut the government’s evidence. But without being able to see the evidence, he cannot know what there is to rebut, and cannot even get access to witnesses who might be able to take a stab at it. And finally, even if the prisoner is found not to be an enemy combatant, the result of the tribunal is simply vetoed by the Pentagon.

Americans should be deeply ashamed to be associated with this kind of injustice, and doubly ashamed and the hypocrisy of their leaders.

We have been told over and over that the war against Iraq is not about the oil. The U.S. is not looking out for its own selfish interests, they told us, no no, we are altruistically promoting democracy, not to mention defending ourselves. Well. Not everyone was fooled, of course, and many of us knew we’d been lied to from the outset and before. Indeed, U.S. troops were protecting the Iraqi Oil Ministry from looting while all other government buildings were being stripped bare, so I thought it was pretty obvious that the peace movement was right. I never expected Bush to admit it.

I was wrong. Today, Bush argued we must protect Iraqi oil otherwise we run the risk that the new owners of the oil would cut oil production. Phillip Verleger of the Institute for International Economics, hardly a bomb-throwing radical, noted that

Essentially, by making that statement he has stated that his energy policy is totally bankrupt…. The reason they have studiously avoided [any link between oil and the U.S. mission in Iraq] is it provides a huge incentive for taking big steps now to reduce U.S. oil imports. The only way you can do that is through conservation measures .. such as imposing an oil import fee or raising the gasoline tax.

Why such an apparent wild shift in policy? I’m sure it’s not a newfound commitment to honesty. Rather, I imagine the White House calculates that the payoff for fearmongering the day before the election outweighs the cost of being caught in yet another lie later on this week.

A recent study published in The Lancet reports that the actual death toll of the Iraq war is over 655,000, a figure at least eight times higher than previous estimates, and twenty times higher than what the President admits to. The study says that nearly a third of those deaths were caused by coalition troops, more than 13 times the number estimated by Iraq Body Count.

How can we even think about a number like that? What can I compare it to without trivializing it? It’s more people than the entire population of Baltimore. But I don’t know anybody in Baltimore. If Baltimore were wiped off the map I wouldn’t lose any loved ones, so talking about the obliteration of every man, woman and child in Baltimore doesn’t really get me in my gut, and probably doesn’t get you either.

Perhaps this will help. Imagine the worst funeral you ever attended. That one. You weren’t just there out of respect, you were there because you knew and loved the deceased. You dragged yourself around that day like you had an iron ball chained to your leg, and you spent a lot of time wondering how God could let this happen. Now imagine having to relive that funeral every day, for sixteen centuries.

Naturally the perpetrators of this outrage against humanity discount the study without telling us exactly how they suddenly discovered a knack for epidemiology. It will be another contest of science versus ignorance, with the U.S. government firmly against science. Daniel Davies has an analysis of the campaign to discredit the study.

This is the question to always keep at the front of your mind when arguments are being slung around (and it is the general question one should always be thinking of when people talk statistics). How Would One Get This Sample, If The Facts Were Not This Way? There is really only one answer - that the study was fraudulent. It really could not have happened by chance. If a Mori poll puts the Labour party on 40% support, then we know that there is some inaccuracy in the poll, but we also know that there is basically zero chance that the true level of support is 2% or 96%, and for the Lancet survey to have delivered the results it did if the true body count is 60,000 would be about as improbable as this. Anyone who wants to dispute the important conclusion of the study has to be prepared to accuse the authors of fraud, and presumably to accept the legal consequences of doing so.

The Bush administration line on torture is now “We want clarity.” They claim to fear that well-intentioned U.S. interrogators would run afoul of the “nebulous language” in the Geneva Conventions. The President called on Congress to pass a law giving “clear guidelines”.

This debate is occurring because of the Supreme Court’s ruling that said that we must conduct ourselves under the Common Article III of the Geneva Convention. And that Common Article III says that there will be no outrages upon human dignity. It’s very vague. What does that mean, “outrages upon human dignity”? That’s a statement that is wide open to interpretation. And what I’m proposing is that there be clarity in the law so that our professionals will have no doubt that that which they are doing is legal.

Well, if you can’t figure out what an outrage upon human dignity is, perhaps you would recognize one when you saw it? Perhaps you would agree that throwing a prisoner’s Koran in the shit bucket would be an example. Maybe we could all agree that summarily executing bound prisoners would be covered. Maybe, just maybe, decent civilized people could agree that keeping a prisoner suspended by the arms until he died, or suffocating him with a plastic bag, would be an outrage against human dignity. How much debate could there be?

Yeah, right.

The problem is not that they don’t understand the rules. The problem is that everybody in the world understands the rules. The problem is that they want to ignore the rules and torture prisoners, but they know they might go to prison if they do. Their solution is to get rid of the Geneva Conventions by “clarifying” them.

When they’re done, the word “torture” will be like the word “terrorism”—it won’t mean what it did before, rather, it will refer only to what our enemies do, never to what we do. And the word “clarify” will be entirely meaningless.

Having admitted to running secret prisons outside the reach of U.S. law and public scrutiny, the Bush administration has chosen to brazen it out. Yes, as a matter of fact we ARE running secret prisons, and now that it’s politically expedient we’ll brag about it. German Chancellor Angela Merkel made the obvious point in her low-key way:

“The existence of such prisons is incompatible with my idea of the rule of law. Even in the fight against terrorism… the ends do not justify the means.”

Ouch. The U.S. claims at all times to uphold the rule of law, and here’s a foreigner pointing out that we do the opposite. And then she reviews an elementary moral principle for a head of state who claims not only to be a moral leader but claims to be on a mission from God. I guess she’s not his girlfriend any more.

Of course they haven’t bothered to explain why the secret prisons were secret in the first place. They like secrets, and they don’t like explaining. I’ve said it before, official secrets are to protect official liars. If they are keeping their European and Asian prisons secret, it’s because there’s something going on there that they don’t want American voters to know about. Even if I didn’t cynically assume that means the prisoners are tortured we have the accounts of some of the victims of “extraordinary rendition,” such as Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen grabbed in New York:

After three consecutive days of beating and interrogation, he said, “I could not take the pain any more and I falsely confessed of having been to Afghanistan.” After the Canadian government intervened, Syrian authorities released him in October 2003 — more than one year after his ill-fated attempt to change planes in New York City — with an acknowledgment that there was no evidence that he was ever involved in terrorism.

Do you feel safer yet?

September 11th shames me back to work on my blog. I can’t remain silent while the Republicans celebrate September 11th, the best thing that ever happened to them, for the fifth time. At the time of the attacks I was Co-Chair of the Socialist Party USA. My comments at the time, on behalf of the Party, were brief. Let’s see whether they still hold up.

The facts of what happened at the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon are not yet clear. Of course there is continuous media coverage of the disaster, repetition of rumors as fact, and wild speculation as to who might be responsible.

We should spend the coming days mourning the dead. Instead, it’s safe to cynically predict that there will be swift, “decisive” military action by the Bush administration against some perceived enemy, any enemy, without regard for the evidence. As in the aftermath of the TWA Flight 800 disaster, there will be a flurry of “anti-terrorist” legislation that will restrict individual rights and punish foreigners. There will be a sudden bipartisan consensus on huge increases in military spending. None of these thoughtless reactions can work.

National security is not something that can be won by intimidation. Only peace with justice can be a secure peace. We will renew our own efforts to transform the United States into a country that has no enemies—not because our enemies have been vanquished, but because we are capable of getting along with our neighbors.

Well, it didn’t take Nostradamus to predict the war against Afghanistan and the Patriot Act. I’m bitterly satisfied to see the correctness of that “any enemy, without regard for the evidence” idea. I don’t know, maybe stretching that to cover the war in Iraq is overdoing it.

Today we will be treated to uncounted media events designed to make us remember the Republican version of history: that we have done nothing to provoke terrorist attack, that opposition to the war is pro-terrorist, and that our enemy is like Hitler, and that we should somehow feel simultaneously safer, and scared to death. These are the lies that have worked before. On the evidence they will work again in November.