Category Archives: History and Politics

Making it Right (and the difficulty of anger)

The world is not right, though it will insist it is, bashing you in the face as many times as necessary to prove it.  History does not proceed by justice, the law does not concern itself with trifles, like the American lynching that was winked at for a century after the Civil War.  You get a flawless receipt from every ATM you will ever visit, along with the exact amount of money you ask for, plus applicable fees, yet the same company that makes the ATMs will insist it’s impossible to guarantee the same accuracy in counting electronic votes in US federal elections.  There are a billion examples, literally, more than that if you go inside families, friendships, workplaces.

In a world as insistently corrupt as our own, how does an individual make it right?   We have the serenity prayer, which at times may guide us to accept the difference between truly maddening things we must fight and things that will only madden us.   I have nothing much to offer here, except to consider for a moment the role anger plays in these proceedings.

A friend’s recent reaction to anger caught my attention.  This cheerful, agreeable woman got angry, years ago, over something she took as a slight.  Her unusual show of temper was mentioned recently (note how slyly the passive voice is used) and she became very apologetic about it, almost worked up that we recalled it.   The words angry and mad are used interchangeably, and both are emotionally fraught words.  A stigma is attached to both, and for understandable reasons.  Angry, mad people often do terrible things.  Seeing people out of control, or feeling out of control ourself, strikes terror.

You read the book Everyone Poops?  A delightful Japanese book pointing out the obvious and showing various creatures pooping.  Here’s an illustrated post about it, keeping it classy, as the author says.  We all poop, very important.   It is clear what must be done regarding poop and we do it as often as necessary.   A very good thing it is, too.   We all get angry, and even funnier, we all have a right to be angry much of the time when we feel it.  It’s what to do with the anger that is the perplexing puzzle.    

It often gets turned inward, which goes badly almost every time.  We blame ourself for something as natural as pooping and wind up using it against ourselves– very bad, as bad as not pooping.  It gets barked at the wrong people, also bad, for at least two reasons.  The source of the anger remains untouched and a person who did not deserve blame got barked at.  Very fucked up.  It’s threatening to express anger to someone who can retaliate, so those who can’t or won’t fight back are often targets instead.  Speak truth to power?  Want to get fucked up, go right ahead.  Unless of course, that truth flatters power; power doesn’t mind that.

My old friend was determined, when he became the father of a brilliant and provocative child, to learn not to react to his child’s provocations with anger.  This sounds easy, but try it for twenty years or so, every waking moment, tired and distracted, in sickness and in health.   His mother had not done well in this department, not well at all.  Not many angry people do well in this department.  My friend did the hard work, I am always proud of the job he did in not repeating what was done to him.

We get mad when somebody hurts us in a strikingly unfair way, or in a way they know will hurt us.  This happens.  What we do after that makes all the difference.  I think of that wonderful line I saw at Buddha Bodai restaurant, under the glass on the table:  remain soft spoken and forgiving, even when reason is on your side.  Wonderful advice.   Hard advice, but consider– if you care about the person who made you angry, what better way is there to respond?  If you have reason to be mad at yourself, what better way to speak than softly and with a tender willingness to forgive?

Game for Suckers

Here is a snapshot of the rules of this game for suckers.  

Put your savings in a bank, the way one was encouraged to do for generations by thrifty adults.  Your savings will nowadays earn less than 1% interest and you will get a 1099 at the end of the year with this interest ‘income’ on it.  This interest gets added to your taxable income and you will pay the same rate on it as you do on the rest of your income.

Keep your money in a diversified portfolio, as people who are more successful, or simply luckier economically, do, let a financial manager take care of the tricky details and earn an average, over time, of 7-10% annually.  Leave the money grow, it will come in handy later on.  The interest on this money will be taxed at a substantially lower rate than the rest of your income, if at all.

Game for suckers?  That’s so harsh.  As my father often reminded me, JFK famously said “life’s unfair.”  Dig it.

 

Heartbreaking

Heartbreaking

 

 

What about this picture is not heartbreaking?   This little girl lived in a remote rural area where, from out of the sky, a Hellfire missile, launched from a circling remote control plane, killed everyone around her.  

The intelligence may or may not have been good that there were bad guys there, but the fragments of the missile found after the attack, falsely claimed by the cynical president of Yemen as launched by his government, were plainly identifiable as American-made.

Does it break your heart less to think that this little orphan girl will grow up hating the Americans who sent the drone to kill her loved ones, become a terrorist and deserve whatever fate a future administration may decide for her?

Rationales versus Reasons

Now, admittedly, I am a foolish idealist.  I don’t say this to be cute, only to underscore that living in a world with concrete, monetizable values that override fairness, and what was once quaintly thought of as common decency, it seems foolish to me, over and over, to keep dreaming of a more merciful and equitable society.  It would be different, perhaps, if I had great wealth to hire a talented team to help me market my fond ideals, but that’s a pointless thought.

In the decade before the Civil War, an unprecedented carnage not eclipsed for more than fifty years, when machine guns, aerial assault and poison gas were added to the atrocities of trench warfare, our countrymen were poised to kill each other.   We are again now.    Violence is the default setting in our violent nation and when one people holds another under their dirty boot long enough the only answer becomes murder.  Justifiable homicide, each injured party believes righteously.   

We now have a culture where each side feels, once again, as though it has been held under the other’s dirty boot for long enough.  This feeling is amplified by the mass media, which does whatever it can to get people to tune in.   Billions of dollars hang in the balance and truth, a slippery thing in any case, is reconciled only in the corporate bottom line.

So instead of serious discussions, and an honest search for the real reasons for our problems and possible solutions, we get rationales and overheated partisan rhetoric.  Talented talking head pundits make millions of dollars to pontificate, deliver talking points and push a party line, their demographic choir lustily nodding their agreement, shuddering in disgust, pumping their fists.  My foolish idealism believes, like Anne Frank, before the Nazis killed her, that all people are basically good.  If they had the facts, and a bit of honesty, just a little….

Right, Dave.

I offer just two rationales, instead of reasons, that merely state a good enough excuse to do something truly inexcusable.  In fairness, let me qualify that.   The displacement of millions of people, the violent deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands– not necessarily inexcusable, fair enough.  But to be fair, and in the context of an unprovoked attack on a country ruled by a tyrant and massive destruction in the name of freeing them, it seems a bit hard to excuse.

Rationale for the war in Iraq: 

Why Iraq?  Because we and many others (Democrats too) thought he had WMD’s and because we could use a strong country in the Middle East that was sympathetic to us for their liberation.

This rationale leaves out the oft trumpeted connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, which turned out to be as false as the WMD rationale.   That the CIA and many foreign intelligence sources knew the reports of this connection and the WMDs were false was not seen as an impediment to the invasion of a country that would be sympathetic to us even if we inadvertently destroyed its infrastructure, displaced millions, killed many thousands, subjected it to more than a decade of mayhem, explosions, assassinations and so on, in the name of freedom and democracy… well, such are the costs of war, the price of freedom, one might rationalize.

And I am tortured by torture, as I keep saying.   It makes my skin crawl that so many Americans are so nonchalant about what our government has been doing in our names.  I was proud of John McCain for this speech.  Here is a rationale for torture, you will notice how different it is from a good reason to torture, something that, outside of doing it to inflict maximum pain on someone you hate, I have never heard:

I don’t justify torture…water boarding isn’t torture…it’s used in the training of our troops.  And we only water-boarded three people.  And the times then called for enhanced interrogation methods so that 9/11 could never happen again.

A person saying this, you might think, well, you, Sir, have set up a straw man to try to prove your point.   This is an actual answer to the question “how do you justify Americans torturing people?”.  It seems unfair to suggest that if we grabbed this woman, shoved a bag over her head, rushed her, shackled and diapered, to a dark, coffin-sized cell and locked her in there for a few weeks she would say the same thing at the end of her little adventure.  Even if we did not strip her naked, kept her cell at a comfortable temperature, left her in silence and never put a gag in her mouth, tilted her upside down on a board and poured water into the gag until the doctor monitoring the procedure told us we were about to accidentally kill her.

As for me, I just wish I had something productive to keep me busy enough not to think of these things.   I sometimes envy people I know who are running at high speed all day, far too busy to ponder, more than momentarily, things so sickening, and so futile and depressing to ponder.

Yemeni girl004

photograph from Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars: The World is A Battlefield.

 

Knee Jerk

It was only a matter of time, I suppose, after the recent slaughter of two policemen by a gun wielding maniac who dashed into the subway after the murders and blew himself away, until someone on the political right would place these deaths squarely where they belong: on Hamas, angry Muslim antisemites, race-baiters and the progressives who embrace them.

Like most people, I was sickened by the news of the killings. Only in the mind of an enraged and suicidal killer could the murders of two policemen in their patrol car innocently eating lunch be justified.   Nobody with any sense of decency could relate to the senseless and brutal act as anything but a senseless and brutal act, an atrocity.  It has been denounced by everyone with a microphone, including the mother of Eric Garner, the man killed after being placed in a police choke hold on Staten Island.  

I will say this for the extreme right, they never lose an opportunity to connect the dots, to exploit every horror to show that progressives are deluded apologists responsible for every terrible thing that befalls us here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.   I had an email forwarded to me just now that sits in my craw like a hairball.  I kick myself for reading it.  It makes the point, in the right’s typically assured way, that liberals, by caving in to their abiding guilt, forced the NYPD to stop surveilling Muslims and thus lost the opportunity to know that this killer had made reference, on Facebook, to Al-Farooq, which is a Brooklyn mosque allegedly well-known to have ties to radical Islam and terrorist plots, where, if he went there, he may well have received instructions to murder those policemen directly from Hamas.

Case closed, as they say.

Why torture tortures me

I should, I know, not be tormented by the arguable torture that has been done in my name.   Who am I to expect to have any say in what’s done in my name, and for my own good, anyway?  I am not on the battle field, after all.  I have not been directly hurt by the fanatics intent on cutting my throat.   Still, something just seems wrong with this picture:

It seems wrong to me, naive though it may sound, to torture a guy until he snaps and then say “see, he was just waiting to snap, faking his moderate stance but look, torture the angry fanatic just a little, not even two years locked up without charges, and the prick will go on the internet and preach jihad for no reason except that he hates our freedom, resents our ability to do whatever we want to Muslim extremists anywhere on the earth.  YOU’RE DEAD, fucker!” 
 
And then, boom, death from the sky, 500 pound Tomahawk missile, poof!  There go your fiery sermons, bitch– go deflower 72 virgins, asshole.   In two weeks we’ll wipe out your DNA in the form of your long-haired American son and the guys he’s having lunch with.   How dare you call us murderous infidels!
 
And I feel a bit insane to be thinking about this at all, but more insane to think about it and not write about it.  In the context of the latest tortured torture semi-revelations it seems timely to note that even just locking someone in a tiny cell without charges or access to anyone in the outside world is torture.  No need for the $81,000,000 in consultant’s fees and all the tortured secret legal opinions– just lock someone in the dark for nine months, that will do it.  Then, when it’s done, and they start to scream, kill ’em for screaming.   It’s perfect, yo, don’t you see?

Unsung American Heroes

There are so many unsung American heroes out there, but let us sing of just two today: James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.  Selflessly these two psychologists, awarded a government grant of $180 million dollars to help the nation in the desperate times after 9/11, charged only $81,000,000. These two men were the brains behind the coercive interrogation program that some, including them, claim kept us safe in the years after the hellacious attacks of September 11, 2001.  

Mitchell and Jessen, given pseudonyms in the Congressional report, reverse engineered the SERE program, a grueling series of tortures used to train our own special forces to resist enemy torture.  Mitchell and Jessen’s work allowed enemy prisoners to be interrogated in ways that would otherwise have been regarded as torture, wink, wink.   Having psychologists and doctors in the room when prisoners are being subjected to things that can cause death makes all the difference between brutality and civilization, some argue.  Mitchell and Jessen’s key roles as designers of “enhanced interrogation” are detailed in the recently completed five year, $40,000,000,  6,700 page, almost 8% public, report on America’s use of torture in the decade after 9/11.

I will let Vanity Fair contributor Katherine Eban take the wheel:

As the report makes clear, some of the worst corrosion occurred in the ranks of America’s psychologists, who, like many medical professionals, are charged with doing no harm. It was two C.I.A. contract psychologists with no experience with real-life interrogations. Instead, as described in the report, they promoted the tactics to the C.I.A., employed them indiscriminately, earned money to do so, and lied about their effectiveness.

I was the first reporter to enumerate the roles of the two key psychologists, James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, as architects of the coercive interrogation tactics, in a 2007 story inVanity Fair. The pair had previously been Air Force trainers in a program called SERE (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape), which subjected military members to mock interrogations—interrogations that ironically had been used by the Communist Chinese against American servicemen during the Korean war in order to produce false confessions.

Historically, the C.I.A. knew the tactics would not be useful. In 1989, the C.I.A. informed Congress that “inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers.” In the desperate months after 9/11, the C.I.A. willfully ignored its own findings.

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As the president recently admitted, to the horror of those who support rough treatment of possibly evil bastards, “we tortured some folks.”  Although unsung American heroes James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, now very wealthy men, might beg to differ with Mr. Obama’s characterization of what was done to those folks.

Bankrupt Democracy

The air is toxic in this sweaty mine shaft where we scratch for the ore democracy used to be made of, my fine feathered friends.  The federal government, once a defender of human rights (as when, a century belatedly, it battled the Klan) and keeper of many valuable public institutions (schools high on that list) and much of the nation’s infrastructure, keeps begging these days to be drowned in a bathtub.  The Free Market, the private sector, is constantly held up (by those with the money to know best) as the best arbiter of what is important and what is worth drowning in a bathtub.  After all, mustn’t we all admit that it’s the extremely wealthy and successful who have the expertise and proven success to tell the rest of us the best thing to do in every sector of  life?

A few days before Christmas, when lines in the post office can be an hour or more long, I got a nice symbol, in my mailbox, of our tax dollars at work.  A large envelope from the post office, with a clear plastic window on one side, showing me the partially mangled envelope I’d sent to my landlord with my rent check for December a week or two earlier.  My landlord’s printed address clearly visible through the window, as is my return address.  The stamp has been cancelled.   The reason my landlord did not cash my rent check this month is that the U.S. Post Office was keeping it, after it was partially ruffled in a government machine, to considerately return to me with this important message on the back:

postal

So, this citizen will spend perhaps $15 on Monday to let Fed Ex do, overnight, the work a 45 cent stamp, and the full faith and credit of our U.S. Postal Service, could not accomplish in two weeks.  And resist the foolish, if understandable, urge to do anything whatsoever to respond to the moronic government robot that signs itself, with sincere regret, after an appropriately Newspeak arbeit macht frei taken directly from the Free Market best practices book,  my postmaster.

 

The Whole Story is often elusive

Getting the whole story about anything requires more work than most hardworking people are willing or able to do at any given time. This struck me again just now reading Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars, a tome from the library I’ve been reading, a few pages at a time, for a couple of months.  

I read today how Anwar al-Awlaki, US citizen of Yemeni descent eventually killed by US government drone for vociferously hating America, was grabbed and detained by the Yemenis and held in solitary for nine months, without charges or sunlight (his small cell was in a dark basement), pen and paper, exercise or visitor, by request of the U.S. government.  Relying on Scahill’s account, and just about every other source I’ve looked at, his eighteen month imprisonment occurred before he was seriously considered a danger to anyone, before he made a single video calling for violent jihad against Dick Cheney.   

It appears that, in the manner that the former Cat Stevens was put on the no-fly list, angering some and delighting others, Awlaki was marked as a cautionary tale.  In Awlaki’s case, as a dangerous radical worthy of lethal retribution, a symbol to be summarily executed without any sort of judicial process, and his sixteen year-old son, too, a couple of weeks later, without any explanation whatsoever for the murder of the American kid who’d gone to look for his father.

The ideologues around Dick Cheney have Awlaki, the go-to moderate cleric after 9/11, a telegenic and reasonable American Muslim, grabbed in Yemen for expressing anger that the US, from all appearances, was waging brutal, endless, worldwide war on Islam.  They stick him in a hole in the ground for nine months, keep him locked up, still without charges, for another nine, and, “whoa! look at that!  This fucking radical cleric hates our freedom!”  Cue the reasonable sounding post-racial front-man and the Predator Drone and Tomahawk missile.  Got one for his American teenage son, too, a few weeks later.  Hey, we droned some folks, ya know, this, uh, happens.

Wikipedia is somewhat conclusory, presenting an apparently convincing case for why this radicalized Muslim got what he deserved, though less than completely informative:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

If you rely on the account on Wikipedia, you will know, based on a 2009 piece in the Santa Fe New Mexican, in turn based on an American government document created after Awlaki’s release from prison that

On August 31, 2006, al-Awlaki was arrested with four others on charges of kidnapping a Shiite teenager for ransom, and participating in an al-Qaeda plot to kidnap a US military attaché.[15][81]He was imprisoned in 2006 and 2007, reportedly under American pressure on the Yemeni authorities.[61] He was interviewed around September 2007 by two FBI agents with regard to the 9/11 attacks and other subjects, and John Negroponte, the US Director of National Intelligence, told Yemeni officials he did not object to al-Awlaki’s detention

You can read the cited May 2010 NY Times article, FN 61, Imam’s Path From Condemning Terror to Preaching Jihad, reporting that not only did America “not object” to Awlaki’s detention, but that he was rendered, imprisoned and kept in prison for many months, even after his “interrogation” by the FBI, under American pressure here.   

That article gives another, more vague, reason for his arrest by Yemeni authorities:  

In mid-2006, after he intervened in a tribal dispute, Mr. Awlaki was imprisoned for 18 months by the Yemeni authorities.

The article also states:

But by the end of 2007, American officials, some of whom were disturbed at the imprisonment without charges of a United States citizen, signaled that they no longer insisted on Mr. Awlaki’s incarceration, and he was released.

Scattered throughout the wiki are quotes from American officials, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and others asserting that prior to his imprisonment in Yemen there was no serious indication that Awlaki had any involvement with violent jihad.  However, as the Santa Fe New Mexican intrepidly reported, and Wikipedia made a matter of instantly accessible public record, he was imprisoned in Yemen for direct involvement in an al-Qeada plot.  

Let’s have a look at another strangely insufficient selection from the wiki on Awlaki (emphasis and annotation mine).

Al-Awlaki was said to have developed an animosity towards the US and became a proponent of Takfiri and Jihadi thinking, while retaining Islamism. While imprisoned in Yemen after 2004 [after being rendered in the dark of night, without charges, to solitary confinement, at the request of the US government–ed.] , al-Awlaki became influenced by the works of Sayyid Qutb, an originator of the contemporary “anti-Western Jihadist movement”.[61] He read 150–200 pages a day of Qutb’s works, and described himself as “so immersed with the author I would feel Sayyid was with me in my cell speaking to me directly”.[61]

Even this small detail of how much of Qutb’s writing he read a day is off in the Wikipedia account, according to the footnoted source Awlaki stated:

“Because of the flowing style of Sayyid I would read between 100 and 150 pages a day,” Mr. Awlaki wrote.

I think of the physician Ayman Al Zawahiri, no doubt a despicable, hate-inspired, mass-murdering psychopath, and wonder about him before his years of torture in Mubarak’s prison in Egypt.  Zawahiri, and his former close associate and fellow al-Qeada boss Osama bin Laden, also big fans of, and greatly inspired by, Sayyid Qutb.  These remaining worst of the worst in Gitmo, the place President Obama closed six years ago?  Well, even the innocent ones can’t be released now, you know, they get kind of unpredictable, these folks who get, you know, tortured and stuff.  And probably all very sympathetic to the detailed arguments Qutb made and published in the decades before he was tortured and executed in 1966 by secular authorities in Egypt for alleged involvement in a plot to assassinate Nasser. 

In the end the U.S. got what it wanted with Awlaki — a high profile, once moderate, articulate, native English speaking Muslim cleric who wound up making videos calling for jihad and giving lone wolf Muslims inspiration for attacking innocent Americans.   I wonder if there could have been any connection between these calls for revenge against America for its persecution of Muslims and his imprisonment without charges in a dark hole in the ground for months on end.  

 I wonder, about this and so much else done in our names, if we will ever know the whole story, except through the lenses of what we are told, and believe to be true.

footnote on “Enhanced Interrogation”

At least some Bush administration officials had opposed the interrogation techniques, including notably Condoleezza Rice’s most senior adviser Philip Zelikow.[55] Upon learning details of the program, Zelikow wrote a memo to Rice contesting the Justice Department’s Torture Memos, believing them wrong both legally and as a matter of policy.[55] Zelikow’s memo warned that the interrogation techniques breached US law, and could lead to prosecutions for war crimes.[26][56]The Bush Administration attempted to collect all of the copies of Zelikow’s memo and destroy them.[55][57][58] Jane Mayer, author of the Dark Side,[59] quotes Zelikow as predicting that “America’s descent into torture will in time be viewed like the Japanese internments”, in that “(f)ear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools.”[60]

 

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