Can we all agree that Cheney has zero credibility and that he should not be heard from again unless subpoenaed?
Eric Holder, whether for him happily or unhappily, has got the ball rolling in his appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate torture. I think this move will develop a momentum that will shift us toward the transparency and accountability we were promised during the campaign.
We'll see, but there should be a substantive difference between internal or congressional investigations and a special-prosecutor investigation. Unless the investigator is an ideological hack like Ken Starr, the politics is minimized. Guys like Fitzgerald, and from all reports, Durham, are pros. They do their jobs and let the chips fall where they may. He'll start with those who committed the atrocities, but I think it will be very hard for him not to follow the evidence trail wherever it leads, and that means following it up the chain of command. Peter King and his ilk are, therefore, understandably upset. This is a big blow to their m.o.
Again, the importance of this move, whatever Republicans say to the contrary, is not payback; it's about accountability and not allowing this grotesque policy and the behavior it enabled to set any precedents; it's about making sure that future would-be Yoos, Addingtons, Gonzaleses, and Cheneys will know that they cannot just do what they please because they're special, and that the rule of law applies to important politicians as well as everyone else.
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It's been pointed out that the CIA is not in the business of interrogation, didn't know what it was doing, should never have been allowed to do it, didn't get any valuable information, and in some cases ruined interrogations in progress conducted by people who did know what they were doing. So certainly one question I'd like answered is why the CIA was given this job. What was the thinking behind that? (Maybe there's something already out there about that that I haven't come across.)
As we've learned, the techniques used were from the SERE program soldiers are put through to prepare them for torture designed not to force American soldiers to reveal strategically important information, but to force American soldiers to spout enemy propaganda. It has to be asked whether getting information was ever the real goal of implementing this program. If torture was not used to obtain information, then what was it used for?
I'm not sure, but one thing comes to mind--a need for reverse terror. I think the invasion of Agfhanistan and Iraq was largely about payback, i.e., teaching Arabs a lesson, putting them in their place, and torture is an extension of that purpose. It's wrong to think that the kind of sadistic behavior we've been learning about since Abu Ghraib and through this IG Report is aberrational and that Americans just don't do this kind of thing. We have a long history of it. It struck me how similar many of the techniques described in the IG report are to the kind of torture and terror tactics inflicted on Blacks and Republican whites in the late-reconstruction and post-reconstruction period by southern white supremacists.
The point is that there's a persistent subculture of right-wing primitivism that has endorsed and promoted this kind of thing since forever. And people for whom this primitive mindset is normal often play an important role in American political institutions. It's how they roll. Sane Americans with an ounce of common sense have to recognize this mentality for what it is and do everything they can to minimize its influence.
The mentality of this subculture is a Calibanesque, surd, intractable element that still has a grip on certain precincts of the American soul. The late-19th century and early 20th century white supremacists, for instance, were doctors, lawyers, shopkeepers, and farmers. They were the establishment, not back-alley thugs. They defined what was normal in their world, and that meant that normal, decent people who didn't think things through very deeply came to accept terror and cruelty as normative and justified. This establishment justified such actions as doing whatever it took to preserve its way of life, which in their mind was the best, noblest, most moral civilization the world had ever seen.
It was not for that crowd then, nor is it now for the Limbaugh-Beck right, a big deal to treat other human beings in degrading ways so long as they are perceived as the Other which threatens their "way of life." Since they're living in a bubble, everything happening in the real world threatens to burst it, so they are easy to frighten and for that reason live in a constant state of adrenal agitation. We see what that looks like in the town hall meetings of the last month or in listening to a typical Limbaugh or Beck rant. These people are sincere; they really are terrified, confused, and chemically unbalanced.
When people feel threatened, adrenaline saturates their brains, and it produces a kind of thinking that justifies any atrocity if it's to defend themselves against annihilation, which for them means preserving their way of life. They live in a bubble because they fear the complex, pluralistic world in which people have norms other than theirs. In other words they fear living in the real world. But unlike the Amish or Hasids, who are content to live on their and deal minimally with the world outside them, these right wingers think that the their bubble should envelope the entire society.
To them anything other than their "normal" is normless, nihilistic chaos, so if they cannot shut it out, they must destroy it. They keep saying that they want their America back, and their saying this is hard to understand for Americans who have accepted a pluralistic America as normal. Pluralism is not OK for these frightened people. And then, the most galling thing: these inferior Others stand in moral judgment on them?!--these Others, who are by definition their moral inferiors, dare to condescend or patronize?! These gays and abortionists?! These socialists? These Mexicans?! This cannot stand. We must protect our way of life. Build a wall. Shoot them down.
I think it's very difficult for people who have accepted living in a pluralistic world to understand how enraged people like this become when they see others negatively judging them. They think of themselves as normal, as the ones whose worldview and values should set the norms for the whole culture. And they will defend their Normal, no matter how perverse and violent, because their identity, their sense of self-worth, their sense of honor, derives from their having been shaped by these primitive attitudes.
And the logic of the system demands that they violently defend it. They are shameful cowards if they don't. They really don't think torturing Arabs is wrong. To think torture is wrong is what weak Liberals think. For people in this right-wing mindset, such violence is an act of war, honorably performed, to protect their way of life. My point is that this is not just a fringe way of thinking. It's a necessary consequence of living inside the right-wing bubble. It's not just an opinion I don't happen to agree with. It's a sick mentality that is dangerous to the thriving of the republic. It's the kind of thinking that almost destroyed it in the 1860s. The mentality that seeks to justify white supremacy or torture does not produce ideas about which reasonable people can disagree. It was crazy and ugly then, and it's crazy and ugly now.
So I'm not talking about conservatives here or about differences of opinion between decent reasonable people. Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, et al., are not conservatives. They are men of the extreme right, and their ideas are darkly irrational and toxic. And sane conservatives have to realize that these people, though they might be saying some things they feel some sympathy for, are not people you can support if you truly believe in America.
Obama's election has clearly agitated these people who, because of the fragility of the bubble in which they are living, are already in a high state of adrenal agitation, and I have a growing fear that something ugly is going happen. It would be nice if we could take their hands and gently walk them to a happy place. But they don't want that. There is no short-term fix, and the only longer-term hope lies in that the pressures of the information age will influence their children to move beyond this fear-soaked mentality. Containment is the only short-term strategy to prevent them from doing damage. The arguments that people should be allowed to bring guns to political rallies are ridiculous, even if based on rational arguments. Chesterton somewhere said that the mark of insanity is not illogic, but a kind of obsessive logic that lacks common sense. That and exposure and condemnation of the politicians who share in this primitive mentality or who cynically manipulate those unfortunate people who are in the grip of it.
Whatever the larger problem for which this ugly episode legitimizing official torture is a symptom, this is a pustule that must be lanced and drained. It's understandable that many people, even those who are not directly involved or complicit in the commitment of these crimes, would prefer not to have to deal with it. But better if it never happened to begin with, and more important yet, that it never happen again.