Author: Helena

The way the White House wants us to ‘think’ about things, they want to blame Newsweek for all the anti-US riots that occurred in Muslim countries last week– and you might think they want to blame Newsweek and the rest of the media for having invented the whole set of allegations about US torture of (mainly) Muslims, in the first place.
Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker seems to have gone into hiding. He should have stood his ground! Though the (un-named) military source who had attributed the claim about the Korans-in-toilets to a certain internal report later– under pressure– retracted that and said he wasn’t sure the claim was in that report after all, there are plenty of other reports from other sources of this having occurred in Gitmo.
Like the ones cited in this Human Rights Watch report.
Moreover, so far as I know neither Whitaker nor anyone on his staff ever tortured anybody– and far less did they ever put in place a whole globe-circling system of torture.
The American Civil Liberties Unon and the New York-based group Human Rights First have both done really groundbreaking work on the US torture issue over the past couple of years.
The ACLU has been doggedly filing “Freedom of Information” (FOIA) requests, to try to get various organs of the US government to do their democratic duty and release to US citizens reports that were written using the citizens’ very own tax dollars. So far it has pried 35,000 government documents into the open, some heavily edited, but many extremely damaging to the Bushies and their acolytes.
The ACLU’s latest report on the torture issue is here.
It includes this quote from ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer:

“The government’s own documents describe literally hundreds of instances in which prisoners have been abused by U.S. military and intelligence personnel… In light of what the documents show, it is simply astounding that senior military and civilian officials still have not been held accountable.”

I like Human Rights First’s take on this issue of command responsibility. This is a page they have titled, “One year later [i.e. after the revelations of Abu Ghraib]: Where are they now?”
Learn all about these people:

Don Rumsfeld– still Secdef…
Alberto Gonzales– promoted to Attorney-General with the full “consent” of the U.S. Senate…
Barbara Fast– now in charge of the Army’s main interrorgation training facility …
Ricardo Sanchez– head of the Army’s V Corps in Europe… etc etc.

Seeing all these high-ups shrugging off any taint from the torture and abuse that have been happening– and that, indeed, continue to happen in various parts of the US gulag around the world–is really enough to make you feel sorry for Private Lynndie England and even, just a little bit, for her immediate abuser Charles Graner.
Actually, it’s worse than that the high-ups managed to “shrug off any taint”. It looks from their resumes as if establishing and implementing the torture system was a good, career-building move for just about everyone above the rank of Colonel. (Except Janis Karpinski.)

Jim Hoagland of the WaPo, who was one of the main, most influential, and most insistent voices in the commentatoriat who goaded a (never-reluctant) Bush administration into the truly disastrous war adventure in Iraq, nowadays seems to be having some second thoughts… Or is he?
He has this truly extraordinary piece in today’s WaPo, which shows, well, if not a distinct change of heart on the virtues of the invasion of Iraq, then at least some lofty (and very muddled-looking) self-distancing from it.
Look, I know the move. As an op-ed writer, you have to meet deadlines; and sometimes an issue is so much in the news that you feel you have to write about that issue. But either you can’t figure out exactly what to say; or else, what you want to say runs so much at odds with what you’ve said before that you have to do an awkward-looking bit of segueing to get into it.
That’s definitely how this extraordinary piece reads. It starts thus:

President Bush and Vice President Cheney fight an inexorable tide that pushes their goal of restoring presidential and national power farther away even as they accelerate their efforts to reach it.
They swim against a tide of the global fragmentation of power in all its forms — economic, political and military. More nations today possess the ability to make and sell inexpensive, good-quality shirt buttons than ever before. The same is true for costly but workable nuclear weapons.
Located at the opposite ends of any spectrum of importance, the spread of consumer goods and of history’s deadliest weapons underlines the need to update our notions of power, whether we are ordinary shoppers or strategists working in the White House
Thirty years ago Americans fantasized (in horror or delight) about U.S. troops occupying oil fields in the Middle East to guarantee low-cost energy. Today U.S. troops fight in Iraq — but China and India determine the record levels of world oil prices more than the White House does. The galloping consumption and fierce competition for supplies and future contracts by the two Asian giants make supply and demand dance on a knife’s edge….

Looks like he’s heading for a big critique of the administration’s militaristic power-grabbing?
But he ends up with this extremely clunky (and unoriginal) ending:

What our leaders have to fear is fear itself. Fear will inhibit the vision and judgment needed to adjust and rebalance power on a global and equitable basis.

What the heck that is meant to mean, I have no idea.
I think the WaPo should just retire this tired old guy, pronto. And perhaps along the way some of us can go back over some of Hoagy’s past war-mongering columns and start laying some symbolic coffins of those thousands of Iraqis and Americans who have died because of the war he so successfully mongered right at his front doorstep.
That’s what Abraham Lincoln did to the secessionist General Robert E. Lee whose actions were responsible for scores of thousands of deaths back in the mid-19th centruy…. Nowadays, what used to be Lee’s front meadows– right up to the front door his house– is called Arlington National Cemetery.
So how about it, Jim? Cleveland Park US-Iraqi Cemetery…

In Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Uzbekistan– indeed, just about everywhere they lay its hands– the Bush administration is showing us that it seems to understand only one faulty “logic”: the logic of a dehumanized military.
Have you read the kinds of reporting that the US mainstream media have been providing about Iraq recently? Long gone are all the slick little reports about anything to do with rebuilding civilian livelihoods in the country. Long past (now) is reporting about the “democratic process” in Iraq– most of which has turned into an impotent quagmire. No, now, the reporting– and more importanyly, the focus of the US officials who dominate it– is almost completely about technical military matters.
Like this piece by Brad Graham in today’s WaPo. It’s all about how rapidly the US military can train a replacement Iraqi army.
Yes, I guess an independent Iraq will want to have some kind of a military (though in an ideal “Europeanized” world, maybe not.) But people who want to counter the current insurgencies in Iraq would do far better to focus on providing decent civilian livelihoods for the great mass of Iraqis rather than on honing– in a terribly uncertain political situation– the military skills of as many tens of thousands of them as it can.
Then there’s this about the adminsitration’s policy toward the atrocity-perpetrating government of Uzbekistan (also from the WaPo):

The U.S. government has sometimes spoken to Uzbekistan with more than one voice. Last summer, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell refused to certify that Uzbekistan had improved its human rights record, cutting off $18 million for military training. Weeks later, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Tashkent and criticized that decision as “very shortsighted”; he announced that the United States would be giving $21 million for bioterrorism defense. And the State Department later restored $7 million of the suspended aid, arguing that it was for priorities such as health care and nuclear security.
The result, according to critics, is that Uzbek officials shrug off U.S. complaints about repression. “They don’t take the State Department seriously,” said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. “They think the Pentagon and CIA will protect them. So the Uzbeks are not inclined to listen to American diplomats when they get lectured on democracy.”
The U.S. anti-terrorism program has conducted 41 training exercises for Uzbek soldiers since 1999, most of them since 2001, and also trained 807 civilian police and security officers over that period. “The focus is on engagement, to develop a professional officer corps for the Uzbek military, and improving counterterrorism and border capabilities,” said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter, a Pentagon spokesman.

There is, I guess, a certain mindset that believes that military technology can resolve human problems. In normal countries that mindset may bemore or less limited to people in the professional military hierarchy– though goodness knows, military people are often the ones who understand the real human costs of war better than their civilian counterparts.
But in a “normal” democratic country, the professional military come under the command of the elected political leadership, which places the military dimesnion of things within a broader human context of diplomacy, national interest, etc etc.
What is scary about the Bush administration is how far it has departed from this norm– since the civilian leadership itself, in the form of Rumsfeld and Cheney, has the mindset of a bunch of little boys excitedly playing with war-toys on the kitchen floor.
Except that these aren’t “toys” they’re playing with, and it ain’t the kitchen floor. It’s our whole world– or at least as much of it as they can lay their hands on… And everywhere they go, the direct and indirect fallout from their “games” is that thousands– or scores of thousands– of people die, and millions more have their lives and livlihoods wrecked…