The Heart of the Matter

The Torture Temptation

2009-06-09T15:38:00.000-07:00

What I find most remarkable about America's debate regarding torture -- beyond the fact that such a debate could even be necessary in America -- is the continual recourse of both proponents and opponents to the question of whether torture works. I can't think of any other illegal behavior -- not murder, not rape, not kidnapping, not assault -- that receives this kind of rhetorical makeover. When a murder has been committed, you don't hear people agonizing over whether killing can never, ever be justified. When someone has been raped, people don't ignore the crime in favor of a discussion of whether a rapist's satisfaction could possibly be proven to outweigh a victim's trauma and horror. If a child is kidnapped, the airwaves aren't polluted with discussion of whether kidnapping might actually be an effective way of acquiring ransom money. And so on.

Torture, apparently, is different. Let's talk about why.

Unlike other crimes, torture has a constituency, in the form of the architects who created America's torture regime. These are the people who feed the public discourse with a steady supply of, "Can you really say that torture never, ever works?" And, "What would you do if your child were kidnapped and the kidnapper refused to reveal the child's location?" And, "How can you compare enhanced interrogation techniquing one terrorist to the 3000 people killed on 9/11?" Etc. The architects, and their media allies, know that as long as the talking heads of television and gatherers by office water coolers, literal and electronic, are discussing the morality and practicality of torture, they won't be talking about the illegality of torture.

But this supply-side explanation is only part of what makes torture different. The supply would have nowhere to go in the absence of demand. And the demand is what we most need to guard against. Purveyors of torture excuses will come and go, but our psyches will never change.

I believe some deep place in the human psyche is attracted to torture. A fundamental aspect of human nature is an abhorrence of powerlessness and a concomitant will to power. And what greater confirmation of power, and banishment of powerlessness, is there than utter control over another human being -- body, mind, and soul?

We also abhor helplessness. It's horrifying to consider that over time we will never be able to entirely prevent terrorist attacks. We prefer to believe 9/11 happened because we failed to do something we could have done, that there's some extreme we can still resort to that will make us safe again, that if we do that thing from now on, we can gain greater mastery over the possibilities that frighten us. Because, for the reasons set forth in the paragraph above, torture is already seductive, we seize on it like a talisman custom-made for our fearful psyches.

So it bears reminding that the reason torture is universally illegal in the civilized world is a consensus that torture is not only evil, but also insidious, and that therefore we must guard against the temptation to torture by enacting and enforcing strict laws against it. These laws provide not just a bulwark against a recrudescence of torture, but act also as a signpost, wisely erected by generations before us, warning us to stand fast against the dark sirens of our worst impulses.

Leave aside the irony that it's self-styled "conservatives" who are so eager to ignore the accreted wisdom of generations past. That the consensus against torture is the work of generations -- the product of generations of mistakes and of continual, improbable appeals not just to morality, but to wisdom, too, to the better angels of our nature -- makes the more debilitating the right's progress in once again coloring torture as something respectable, even desirable.

It is nothing of the sort. Torture is an abomination. It is without exception illegal. Those who have authorized it and those who have carried it out have committed crimes. In the face of clear laws and clear evidence of violation of those laws, a rhetorical resort to theory or morality or practicality isn't just an attempt to obscure the commission of crimes. It's also an implicit debasement of the value of the law itself. Most of all, it's a profoundly unconservative attempt to reingest an evil seed civilization has over time and in the face of dark, conflicting impulses, managed largely to expel.

Cross-posted at Humanity Against Crimes. More here:

The Torture Mentality, Part 1

The Torture Mentality, Part 2

The Torture Mentality, Part 3

The Torture Mentality, Part 4

How to Give a Great Talk

2009-06-02T07:25:00.001-07:00

This one's a little off topic, but enough people have asked so that I thought I'd post it here, too. If you want to know how to give a great talk, here are my thoughts following TEDx Tokyo. Enjoy.

Cheers,
Barry

The Torture Mentality, Part 4

2009-05-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

It's impossible to keep up with the ever-creative arguments of torture apologists, but I'm trying. For the moment, let me step back from the cornucopia of metastasizing specific torture apologies and focus for a moment more on the larger picture.

Have you ever wondered how Dick Cheney can be a credible voice on torture? Can you imagine Cheney (or the architect of any program of at best dubious legality) saying, "Well, our intentions were certainly good, but nothing worthwhile came out of it. Definitely was worth a try though." Is there any way on earth Dick Cheney would ever say that? Of course not, and therefore, how can anyone take him seriously as the chief advocate for the illegal program he himself designed? We might equally expect George Bush to say, "Boy, the war in Iraq has really been a completely unnecessary catastrophe. Oops."

When a car salesman working on commission tells us we're going to love driving this car, we know to be skeptical because his opinion is not disinterested. Why does this sort of common sense evaporate when the salesman is a politician, and with far more on the line than the car salesman?

Why is it that the people who argue for torture have no experience with interrogations, while the most experienced are against it? Read this new article from Time magazine. Between them, Matthew Alexander and Ali Soufan have interrogated or supervised the interrogations of hundreds of war on terror prisoners. Both say torture doesn't work and that in fact it has cost thousands of American lives. Why are apologists so quick to dismiss as irrelevant the the experience of men like these in favor of their own evidence-free opinions?

You might have seen recently that rightwing talkshow host Eric "Mancow" Muller volunteered to be waterboarded so he could demonstrate graphically that waterboarding isn't torture. Here's his conclusion, unsurprising to anyone but himself. And bear in mind, this result was achieved in six seconds in the safest, most controlled, most friendly circumstances possible.

So: why not a torture Turing Test? If Liz Cheney can continue to maintain that Waterboarding Isn't Torture even while being waterboarded, she would be infinitely more persuasive. I wonder why Cheney the elder and Cheney the younger, and so many other apologists with so much on the line, refuse to make this extremely persuasive point? After all, they say waterboarding causes no permanent harm. It's just a dunk in the water, a no brainer, no big deal at all. So why not submit to an easy dunk and demonstrate powerfully and persuasively and once and for all for everyone to see that waterboarding isn't torture? Like Mancow did.

Given how strongly motivated some people are to believe in spite of glaring evidence to the contrary that We Do Not Torture, it might not help to repeat this. But still: waterboarding is hardly the only torture technique that was permitted or engaged in under the Bush/Cheney program. The UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment, signed by Ronald Reagan and ratified by the Senate, binds the US not just to not torture, but also not to engage in cruel, inhuman, or other degrading treatment. It specifically prohibits all exceptions.

But you never hear about the law from torture apogists. Instead, they want to make it all about theory: "What would you do if you had to torture someone to save a city? To save a loved one? Can you absolutely say that under all circumstances torture never, ever justified?"

Imagine you're a cop. You come across a dead body with a bullet hole in the forehead, and there's a guy standing over the corpse holding a smoking gun. You want to arrest the guy with the gun, and your partner says, "Hang on a minute there, pard. Can you honestly say that killing is never, ever justified?" This is exactly what torture apologists are doing in the face of actual laws and actual facts demonstrating that those laws were violated.

Really, I get so tired of the ridiculous and irrelevant question, "But wouldn't you torture someone if you thought it could save a loved one?" This is simply an argument for setting policy according to what we would do if we were out of minds with fear, rage, and desperation. How can any rational person believe that policy so devised would be in our interests? What are our rational minds for, if we're so eager to surrender them in advance?

The real question here is: if someone chained your stripped and hooded wife or daughter to the ceiling so she couldn't sleep for a week and the skin on her legs were nearly split with edema, and repeatedly smashed her into the wall, and left her lying in her own urine and excrement, and then waterboarded her again and again and again and again, would you dismiss it all as no worse than a bunch of fraternity pranks, just some "enhanced interrogation procedures?" Or would you recognize it as torture?

It amazes me, the awesome powers we've come to attribute to terrorist losers and misfits. Not only can they dissolve the concrete walls of America's most fortress-like supermax prisons, they're also impervious to the most sophisticated interrogation techniques. You'd think that people who had signed up for a cause as looney as worldwide jihad, who were such true believers that they were willing to blow themselves up along with thousands of innocents in the service of the cause to which someone recruited them, must by definition be reasonably amenable to psychological manipulation. They can be talked into blowing themselves up, but not into giving up information? When did we come to have so little confidence in ourselves that we started to view these cretins as more clever than we are?

I get a lot of mail from people arguing that we should torture terrorists (never terror suspects; after all, if the government says someone is a terrorist, he's a terrorist, because the government has never been wrong about such a thing ever). They're evil, they deserve it, blah blah blah. Even if "they deserved it" could magically render torture legal or otherwise desirable, shouldn't we take a step back and carefully examine our real motivations here? If we really, really want to torture these evildoers because they deserve it, is it possible we'll also want to retroactively invent other, more rational-seeming, respectable reasons to justify the underlying bestial desire? When you really, really want to do something, you start to look for reasons. If you can't find real ones, you might start to invent them. Rational people are aware of this dynamic and take steps to guard against it. Really motivated people don't want to be aware of the dynamic and don't want to guard against it -- they just want to do what they want to do.

It's fascinating to watch the people who argue that torture doesn't matter because people who want to kill us are going to want to kill us anyway. After all, The Terrorists tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, before we started torturing, that kind of thing. And yet these same people also say Obama must never, ever release the new photos of prisoner abuse, lest they inflame anger against us.

Although maybe these photos would cause some inflammation. Some of them are said to depict prisoners being raped.

Okay, here are a few more specific pro-torture arguments. I'm numbering them to make it easier to reference them when I get repetitive pro-torture email.

1. "I'd take your criticism of the US more seriously if you'd also criticize al Qaeda. All we do is rough tactics; they cut people's heads off. Doesn't that bother you?"

This is a really weird argument in so many ways -- call it the Fairness Doctrine for Terrorist Criticism -- but it's out there so let's address it.

First, I wonder, does it only apply to terrorists and torture? Or does the equal time theory apply to other governments and other issues, too? "Before criticizing the US government for its approach to health care, you must provide equal time for criticism of the UK approach."

Look, I'm a US citizen, so naturally I tend to focus on the actions of my government. What my government does affects me, and because we're a democracy, there's at least a theoretical chance my criticism will have some effect. By contrast, somehow I don't think US citizens criticizing al Qaeda behavior is likely to reach the appropriate al Qaeda ombudsman. It might also be that Americans are more critical of their own government than we are of al Qaeda because we hold our government to a slightly higher standard. Are we mistaken in doing so?

Another reason Americans might not spend a lot of time criticizing al Qaeda is because there's no vocal contingent of Americans applauding al Qaeda's barbarism. By contrast, there's a large and vocal segment of the US population applauding torture, and their applause requires a response. So tell you what: when Fox news starts apologizing for and excusing al Qaeda's mass murder, you can count on me to publicly manifest my outrage.

2. "The Democratic party’s civil libertarians seem to believe that several medium-sized US cities would be a reasonable price to pay for insisting on ordinary criminal trials for terrorist suspects." via Clive Crook.

There's so much wrong with this statement it's embarrassing just to read it. An ordinary criminal trial for terrorists will cause the destruction of several medium-sized US cities? What is the connection between one and the other? Which terrorists? Which cities? Seriously, if we try terrorists in civilian courts, we will lose cities?

If Crook rephrases, I'll have another crack. As it is, it's very hard to know what he's talking about.

3. "We're faced with a ruthless foe, so we have to be at least equally ruthless."

I think I saw this one as a deep thought on Talking Points Memo: If torture so great, why have all the countries that used it -- Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union -- been defeated by the US?

And then there was Jesse Ventua on The View: If waterboarding etc isn't torture, why do we not use it more broadly -- on domestic criminal suspects, for example?

4. Here's one you hear a lot. "How can it be torture when we do it to our own people in military training?"

I don't know. How can it be rape when married couples do the same thing all the time at home? How can it be slavery when people do the same thing for wages?

And by the way, it's *not* just what we did to our own people. Dozens of prisoners were tortured to death (that is, murdered). As far as I know, the military doesn't torture soldiers to death as part of their training. Nor, for that matter, does it chain them to the ceiling for a week etc. before waterboarding them 183 times.

5. "You can't call it torture because some people say it's not."

I hereby apologize to anyone I might have misled by referring to the "Holocaust." Or for using without qualification the phrase, "Man walks on the moon." Or for suggesting that "Shakespeare" wrote all those plays and sonnets.

6. Here's a good one from Lindsey Graham: torture has been around for five hundred years because it works.

Hmmm... works at what? For extracting the false confessions torturers want to hear, it's been brilliant, no doubt.

Personally, I think torture has been around for a long time because people like doing it. What's Senator Graham's explanation for, say, oral sex? That's been around for a long time, too.

7. "Bush and Cheney kept the country safe. At least you can say that."

Nope. Not even close. Anyway, even if this outrageous whopper were true, the same is true of Bill Clinton, who kept the country safe from the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Personally, I think my books are what's kept the country safe. I sold the first one in late September, 2001, and have been writing about one a year ever since. Surely this can't be a coincidence.

Kept the country safe? The real bill for what they've done has yet to be presented.

I guarantee I'm going to get comments to this post from apologists who will simply repeat the usual torture hypotheticals while continuing their embarrassing, damning silence on the law and the facts of its violation. If you're one of the people who's going to take that route, could you just acknowledge this paragraph as evidence suggesting you at least glanced at the post before responding to it? Thanks.

How it Looks to the Terrorists

2009-05-26T03:28:00.000-07:00

Transcript of an intercepted conversation between two terrorists in a cave somewhere along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border:

Did you hear Dick Cheney's speech to the American Enterprise Institute last week?

I did. It was funny how Cheney said we think it shows weakness when the Americans argue.

I know. The truth is, I'm a little jealous of the way they get to argue.

I would never say this to my wife, but I think the way they argue is a sign of strength. It takes a lot of confidence to argue like that. I once tried to argue a little with Osama, and he told me if I did it again, he would cut my head off.

I know, I know, Osama doesn't like disagreement. But we have to remember, he's our leader and he knows what's best for us.

That's true. Not everyone has a leader as wise as ours. We're lucky to be able to follow him without question.

What was funny was, who cares about the arguing? And even if we did care, Cheney was arguing, too! It was funny to hear him say, "We must stop doing what I'm doing!"

Yes, that was good. It was like, "We must not be as weak as I'm being!"

In fact, it's the way they're surrendering the freedoms they claim to cherish that's so weak. One big attack and immediately they're torturing, kidnapping, wiretapping without warrants, imprisoning people without charging them... it was so easy! I thought it would be harder, but Osama was right -- America is a paper tiger.

Allahu Akhbar.

I have to admit, I was a little worried when they elected Obama. He seemed to understand that among the country's key strengths were its values.

Empty values, though.

Of course empty values. Equality, freedom, individuality, the rule of law... who wants all that when you can have submission to God, instead?

Allahu akhbar.

But still, a lot of people in the world find those values -- call them the American brand -- attractive. That's what I mean when I say American values were making America strong. Throughout history, the values attracted a lot of people to America's cause. Think of the American brand compared to the communist brand. The Soviet Union never had a chance.

Yes, I suppose that's true.

And it's a problem for us, too. Many people are so deluded that they would prefer equality, freedom, individuality, and the rule of law to submission to God. As though there could be any law but God's law!

Infidels.

Yes. But now that America is torturing, spying on it citizens without warrants, imprisoning without charge, and all the rest, the people who were attracted to America's values are recoiling. They are saying, America, the great hypocrite! And the ease with which the soft Americans have surrendered their "cherished" values shows America's enemies how weak she really is.

Then thanks be to Allah that Obama has reversed all those campaign promises.

Yes. For a while, we were afraid America was going to restore its brand and attract new followers again. But Obama is making sure not to do that. If he has his way, Americans will soon surrender more of their "values," including even this thing called "the right to a trial by jury."

You mean the US government will be able to imprison people without trial?

Yes.

US citizens?

Yes.

Forever?

Yes.

Wow. That is a huge victory for us.

Yes. And it came much more easily than we were expecting. Imagine how weak and frightened they must appear to anyone who might once have been attracted to their cause of "freedom!"

Allahu akbar.

I have to say, I don't understand their political system. The Democrats are afraid of the Republicans, and the Republicans are afraid of everything -- except the Democrats.

That is strange.

Yes. But it works for us. You know, when Bush and Cheney left office, Osama was very sad. But all the talk shows and speeches Cheney has been doing since then have given Osama a good idea.

Yes?

I really shouldn't tell you, it's a secret...

I won't say anything.

All right. What Cheney and his allies are doing is trying to convince Americans that if there's another terrorist attack, it happened because Americans didn't give up enough of their values. Because they stopped torturing, for example.

You mean...

That's right. If we can attack them again, there's a better chance than ever, thanks to the work of Cheney, that Americans will quickly surrender even more of their values. That will make them even weaker, and us stronger.

They might torture more?

If we are lucky. Their torture of the brothers is the best recruitment tool we've ever had. It has won us many committed new followers.

They're so easy to manipulate, aren't they? We must take advantage of this opportunity Cheney is giving us.

Exactly. Who would have thought Dick Cheney would go on shaping the battlefield for us, that he would find new ways even after leaving office to encourage us to attack by increasing the benefits of an attack?

Allah works in mysterious ways.

He certainly does.

Our Warden-in-Chief

2009-05-25T06:23:00.000-07:00

Mostly I agree with Glenn Greenwald that only a politician's actions matter, and speculation about his or her motives is pointless. But when a politician reverses himself repeatedly on core campaign promises and rhetoric immediately after taking office, as Obama has done, it's hard not to wonder what's driving him. It's not just that my day job is writing novels, meaning character motivation is a particular obsession of mine. It's also that in understanding what could cause Obama to make such a liar of himself regarding transparency, the rule of law, and civil liberties, we might learn something not just about the man, but about the system in which he operates.

The list of Obama's reversals is long, but in brief: amnesty for telecom companies that violated eavesdropping laws; abuse of the state secrets privilege; not releasing photos of torture at US-run prisons; continuing the Bush administration's plans to establish "military commissions" with lower levels of due process. Most outrageously of all, Obama now proposes that the government should be able to imprison people indefinitely without trial.

Pause for a moment and consider: the US government. In America. Imprisoning Americans. Who might or might not have committed a crime. Forever. Without trial.

Obama wants to call this "preventive detention." Pretty-sounding, isn't it? Detention is such a friendly word. It's what I used to get in high school when I didn't turn in my homework (here's more on the political abuses of "detainee" and "detention"). Rachel Maddow was being far more accurate when she used the language of Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's story, Minority Report: "Pre-Crime."

Now, some people see "Trial by Jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." But what kind of of extreme-left, tree-hugging, blame-America-first, granola-eating, America-hating, socialist, ACLU card-carrying librul retard would believe something like that?

Well, Thomas Jefferson, actually. Obama's a pretty smart guy. But does he know better than Jefferson?

So now we come to why. Why would a guy who campaigned on promises of open government, the rule of law, and the importance of civil liberties and all that, a guy who actually taught Constitutional Law, suddenly position himself to become Warden-in-Chief?

I think it comes down to fear.

Americans have become so fearful of being Attacked by the Terrorists that the fear is increasingly distorting our politics. President Bush claimed his most important responsibility was to keep the American people safe -- despite the lack of any such provision in the Constitution. Dick Cheney distorts his oath of office to invent a responsibility to protect America rather than to defend the Constitution. Obama apes Bush in claiming to wake in the morning and fall asleep at night worrying about how to keep us all safe. Wouldn't it be great if these guys would read their job descriptions, as provided for in the Constitution, and try to govern accordingly?

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So Americans are afraid. The fear is fed by demagogues, mostly on the right, who either share the fear or cynically exploit it. As the fear worsens, the level of safety the populace expects and demands from the government increases to unreasonable levels. But because perfect safety is impossible in life, politicians know that, like other forms of crime, terrorist incidents are inevitable. Faced with the impossible demands of the citizenry, what's a politician to do?

Well, basically you do every batshit crazy, extremist thing you can think of: torture (sold for consumer comfort as "enhanced interrogation techniques"); secret prisons ("detention facilities"); preventive wars ("self-defense against mushroom-cloud smoking guns"); warrantless eavesdropping (the "Protect America Act of 2007"); secret laws ("Our Playbook"); show trials and kangaroo courts ("military commissions"); pre-crime prisons ("preventive detention"). Then, when the inevitable happens, the politician can say to the angry, frightened public, "Look what I did to protect you. No one could possibly have done more."

If Americans have become insane with fear, even otherwise responsible politicians might conceive of their job as just managing the insanity.

And that's my take on Obama. I could be wrong, of course; he could be a power-mad tyrant wannabe who -- muwahuwahuwa -- fooled everyone with all that talk of not sacrificing our values for safety, and certainly the powers he's claiming for himself would support that theory. But my essentially unsupportable sense, for what it's worth, is that he's someone with the education, experience, and temperament to know better, who's doing what he's doing merely to protect his political flanks.

What's the difference between a demogogue and a cynic, then? Or between a cynic and a coward?

In the end, perhaps not much.

But what's an honest politician to do? The people are so fearful, the Dick and Liz Cheney Be Very Afraid Show is playing 24/7, when the next attack happens the right will scream it was Obama's fault, he did this, he could have protected you but he didn't...

Yes, what to do. A difficult question.

Oh, wait a minute. A politician could, you know, lead.

Nah, that's crazy. What was I thinking. You're right, cash in the Constitution to protect yourself politically. What the hell, everyone's doing it, why shouldn't you.

But if Obama did actually want to lead, he could try something like this:

"My fellow Americans, there's no such thing as complete safety in this world. And that's always been okay for Americans. We're risk takers and we love liberty -- a combination perfectly summed up in Patrick Henry's 'Give me liberty or give me death.' There was a man who knew there were things in life more precious than safety.

"Actually, there is such a thing as perfect safety in the world. I've heard they have it in North Korea. Of course, the population there isn't safe from the government, but they are safe from pretty much everything else except malnutrition, and that might not be so bad. At least they're not being attacked by Terrorists.

"But is that what we want for ourselves, to cash in the freedom we cherish to make ourselves as safe as North Korea? Generations of Americans have fought and died to protect the freedoms enshrined in our Constitution. Are we really prepared to barter away the freedom they bequeathed us with their blood?

"No, we won't break faith with those previous generations of brave Americans. We won't allow the government to spy on us without warrants, or to govern under secret laws, or to imprison people without trial, or to torture. And if any of that puts us at some additional risk, that's fine. We're Americans. We embrace risk and we love freedom, and we'll be damned if we'll allow a bunch of medieval cave-dwellers to call our tune."

Obama could actually say all this, you know. But it wouldn't be convincing. After all, it would be awkward for the president to try to inspire us to steadfastness against terrorists while he's simultaneously caving in to fear-mongering from Liz Cheney.

Incoherent Truth Suppression

2009-05-24T20:43:00.000-07:00

As op-eds go, this one in the NYT praising President Obama for reversing himself and deciding to block the publication of additional torture photos is particularly vapid and incoherent.

You have to read the whole thing to appreciate just how nonsensical and self-contradictory it really is, but here's the author's argument, boiled down:

1. The release of the Abu Ghraib photos in 2004 was good because the photos showed the Bush administration was lying when it said it didn't order torture.

2. But the Bush administration was able to wriggle free by portraying the soldiers who took the photos as rogues and prosecuting them.

Therefore:

3. Obama was right not to release additional AG-style photos taken at other prisons because new photos would enflame anti-American feeling while not telling us anything we don't already know.

Huh?

By proving the AG techniques were employed at other US prisons throughout the world, the new photos would tell us *exactly* what we need to know, exactly what the Bush administration managed to obscure by painting the AG guards as a few bad apples: that these techniques didn't spring up at random in isolation, but rather were the result of centralized orders. The author, Philip Gourevitch, himself decries the Bush administration's ability to obscure this central truth of Abu Ghraib -- that what happened there wasn't an aberration -- and yet he salutes Obama for covering up the very evidence that would prove the "bad apples" narrative was a lie.

As for enflaming things, how would the new photos be inflammatory if they don't show anything new? Maybe there would be a little enflaming, but surely not nearly so much enflaming as with the AG photos in 2004? Gourevitch himself argues that the AG photos enflamed in vain. Now we have a chance to finish the job of demonstrating where the AG abuses really came from, at far lower cost of inflammation. But Gourevitch shies from the opportunity.

Gourevitch goes on to argue that:

"Crime-scene photographs, for all their power to reveal, can also serve as a distraction, even a deterrent, from precise understanding of the events they depict. Photographs cannot show us a chain of command, or Washington decision making. Photographs cannot tell stories. They can only provide evidence of stories, and evidence is mute; it demands investigation and interpretation."

If photos are so distracting and deterring, why was it good to release the AG photos? And really, "photographs cannot tell stories?" Is he serious? How does someone come to write something so self-evidently silly?

Regardless, why does Gourevitch set up his argument as though words and images are an either/or proposition, when obviously ideally we would have both? This is all especially confusing because we already do have words, born of "investigation and interpretation," proving that AG was not an aberration. Here, let me quote a few of them, from the bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody:

"The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of “a few bad apples” acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority. This report is a product of the Committee’s inquiry into how those unfortunate results came about."

So we already have the words, and they've accomplished little about fixing appropriate responsibility for torture, as Gourveitch himself laments. It's the photos we need, but Gourevitch claims that (this time, as opposed to last time) the photos would be distracting, deterring, mute, unable to tell a story. Bizarre.

Gourevitch says "Mr. Obama is not suppressing information when he opposes the release of more photographs." It's difficult to imagine that he would say the same thing were Mr. Obama Mr. Bush.

The Torture Mentality, Part 3

2009-05-24T06:01:00.001-07:00

Still trying to keep up with the messages I receive from torture apologists. Recently I received one from a gentleman named James R. Hostert on my Amazon blog. Mr. Hostert's opinions in favor of torture are depressingly common and therefore worth addressing in spite of his equally common refusal or inability to support any of these opinions with facts. In addition to the absence of evidence for any of these pro-torture assertions, note as ever the refusal to address the glaringly obvious point that *torture is illegal.*

Mr. Hostert's points in quotes below; my thoughts interpolated.

"Well, Barry, I don't think we'll ever see eye to eye on this."

James, that's the first accurate thing you've said in this thread.

"I don't understand how you can oppose torture to save lives."

Perhaps you don't understand my point because you're misconstruing it.

First, torture doesn't save lives. Torture costs lives, and indeed has cost thousands of American lives. I'm not asking you to accept my opinion on this point as a substitute for facts (note that your own opinions might be more persuasive to others if you would bolster them with evidence). Matthew Alexander, an Air Force interrogator in Iraq, himself claims that:

"What I saw in Iraq still rattles me -- both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work... I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans."

And Alexander isn't the only one:

"Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists are taught to expect Americans to abuse them. They are recruited based on false propaganda that says the United States is out to destroy Islam. Treating detainees harshly only reinforces that distorted view, increases resistance to cooperation, and creates new enemies. In fact, the April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States" cited "pervasive anti U.S. sentiment among most Muslims" as an underlying factor fueling the spread of the global jihadist movement. Former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in June 2008 that "there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq – as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat – are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.""

And here's a Washington Post article from March this year. Headline: "Detainee's Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots."

Are you starting to understand now? Why don't you do me and anyone else who's reading this a favor: read the articles linked above, and rebut Alexander's, Mora's, and the Washington Post authors' points based on your own experience with torture and interrogation. I'm not asking you to repeat your opinions. I'm asking you for a refutation based on facts (this is Question #1).

While you're at it, please answer this question: is saving lives the only, or even the highest value?" (Question #2) Was Patrick Henry wrong when he said, "Give me liberty or give me death?" (Question #3)

"Obviously, we don't begin by torturing someone."

Not that it matters whether we torture someone in the morning or later in the day, but in fact, like all the other unsupported opinions you've been offering up here, this one is wrong as a matter of fact. Torture was ordered and was used not just during interrogations, but to "soften up" prisoners before interrogations. Such softening up is the whole point of sleep deprivation, stress positions, manacling prisoners to the ceiling for days at a time, etc.

"We attempt to get the required information by other means."

Again, not that it matters, but so what if we also use other means? Are you saying torture is legal as long as we ask nicely first? (Question #4)

"However, I believe that if it comes down to it, torture is a viable tool to get information that can save lives."

Why do you keep repeating what you believe without offering any evidence at all for that belief? Do you expect to persuade people by repeating your opinions and without any evidence to bolster those opinions? (Question #5)

Here's a quote from General David Petraeus from May 2007:

"What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight… is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also all human beings."

Please explain why Petraeus is wrong. (Question #6)

"So, you're telling me that you wouldn't allow a "bad guy" to be tortured to save your wife/child? Really? You'd actually allow them to die. I find THAT depressing."

Not as depressing as I find our failure to teach basic civics in high school, I'm sure.

Anyway, probably in extremis I'd resort to extremes. But James, wouldn't it be more productive -- and polite -- to answer the questions I've already asked you, before repeating ones I've already answered? (Question #7)

I have to say, it is continually fascinating to encounter people who are confident in their opinions despite a complete absence of any supporting evidence and in the presence of so much contradictory evidence. May I ask: since you are formulating and repeating these opinions without any regard at all to facts, what do you think is actually motivating you? (Question #8)

If you want me to respond to you again, please first do me the courtesy of answering each of the questions above. For your convenience, I've numbered them for you -- #1 - #8.

Respectfully,
Barry

The Torture Mentality, Part 2

2009-05-18T05:50:00.000-07:00

Last week, I posted a set of pro-torture talking points sent to me by a persistent torture apologist, along with my responses. The talking points were extensive, by not comprehensive. There are plenty more to enumerate, but today I'd like to talk about the one favorite technique and the most frequent recourse of all torture apologists: the resort to theory over reality. The details of the apologies will vary (it wasn't torture, it saved lives, you would have done it too, it was only in the panicky aftermath of 9/11, it's kept us safe ever since, etc., etc.), but the one point apologists will always return to is The Ticking Bomb Theory of torture.

Why all this theory? Because the reality is so damning. Apologists hope that if they can get you to focus on a fantasy ("if you had to torture someone to save a city, would you do it?"), you'll overlook that the Bush administration tortured terror suspects not just in the panicky aftermath of 9/11, but for years afterward, and did so in significant part not to defuse ticking bombs, but rather to establish a nonexistent link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

Don't believe the three reports linked above that Bush and Cheney ordered torture not just to save others' lives, but to cover their own political asses? There's more. Yesterday, anonymous "senior intelligence officials" got Walter Pincus of the Washington Post to publish their self-serving claim that although the CIA had indeed questioned Abu Zubaidah and Kalid Sheik Mohammed about an Iraq/AQ connection, such questions were never asked while Zubaidah and KSM were actually being waterboarded. Liz Cheney, currently on tour to defend her father, cited these anonymous claims as proof that the then Vice President didn't use torture to create a nonexistent cause for war.

(BTW, ask yourself this. What is the Washington Post's value-add when it types up anonymous government assertions like these? Why doesn't the CIA just post them on its own website? Answer: if you were to read the same claim on the CIA's website, you'd immediately discount its value because you would recognize it as self-serving. When instead you read the claim as dutifully transmitted by a stenographer with the Washington Post, it seems more substantive because it's being presented, in theory, by the disinterested Fourth Estate. The government uses a complicit mainstream media to sanitize its propaganda much as drug dealers use corrupt banks to launder drug money.)

The CIA waterboarded Zubaydah and KSM 83 times and 183 times each. How likely do you think it is that over the course of 266 waterboarding sessions, the CIA never brought up its questions about an Iraq/al Qaeda connection? Who are you going to believe, anonymous intelligence officials and Liz Cheney, or your own lyin' common sense? And even if you believe the superficially self-serving story of these anonymous intelligence officials, which way does their story cut? Torture is effective at producing false confessions not just because of pain, but because of the *fear* of pain. So someone who's being waterboarded six times a day for a solid month, as KSM was, will spew out anything he can imagine to get the torture to stop not just while he's actually being waterboarded, but also in between sessions, when he's trying to forestall the next trip to the drowning rack.

So don't go for the head fake: what matters here isn't the anonymous officials' claim that Zubaydah and KSM weren't asked about an Iraq/AQ connection while they were actually being waterboarded. What matters is that the anonymous officials have admitted that Zubaydah and KSM were being asked about an Iraq/AQ connection at all. Anything we got from these two is tainted, whether it was produced during torture sessions or in between them.

(And by the way, there's another head fake in there: the implication that if Zubaydah and KSM weren't waterboarded while being asked about Iraq and AQ, they weren't tortured while being asked. Waterboarding is far from the only torture technique permitted in secret Justice Department memos. So the anonymous officials irrelevant claim that Zubaydah and KSM weren't simultaneously waterboarded while being asked about Iraq and AQ doesn't even mean the two weren't tortured in other ways while being asked).

So get ready for the next talking point in the apologists' arsenal: "Okay, sure, they were also asked about Iraq and al Qaeda, but since we were torturing them anyway, why not throw in a few other questions, too?"

Torture. It really does take on a life of its own.

The Torture Mentality

2009-05-12T19:25:00.000-07:00

As I pointed out recently, it's difficult to keep up with the denial, obfuscation, and sheer, tendentious illogic of torture apologists. Even now, despite Bush-era DOJ memos acknowledging that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in a single month, Liz Cheney is still clinging to the Jack Bauer fantasy that KSM had to be tortured (actually, she denies it was torture) because the administration "knew there was a threat of imminent attack." And Dick Cheney claims he had to torture because his oath of office required him "to protect and defend the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic." Actually, Article 2, Section 1 of Constitution requires the following oath: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." See if you can spot the difference to which Dick Cheney is willfully blind.

I was planning on creating a list of the justifications torture apologists trot out most reliably, but as it turns out, I don't have to. Recently I received several messages from a persistent apologist that serve as a nice summary of the sort of bullshit the right and the MSM peddle as a matter of course. Each numbered point below is a verbatim quote from my apologist correspondent; my thoughts interpolated. For a few equally absurd but dangerous arguments my correspondent overlooked, here's Dan Froomkin on the emerging "You can't prosecute politicians because the whole country is guilty" argument.

Now, obviously the gentleman who's advancing these arguments is not going to change his mind. It's fair to ask, therefore, what's the point of responding. The answer, I think, is this. On any given subject, there will be a core group so wedded to a belief that the belief will be impervious to all contrary evidence. But not everyone has his head buried this deeply in the sand, and there will always be some people (many people, I optimistically maintain) who can be persuaded by facts and reason. As I said in the comment section to a previous post on gay equality:

"Persuading any given individual is only part of the purpose of a discussion like this one. In fact, there's a much more important function: by subjecting dogmatic, fearful, irrational opinions to the light of reason, we expose them for what they are. And over time, views that were once respectable become untenable, and then increasingly disreputable, until finally even the few people who still cling to them are too embarrassed to utter them in polite society. This is the very history of the fight against racism, bigotry, and intolerance. We can all feel proud to have contributed to this chapter of that history -- after all, even those of us whose contribution has been unintentional are playing an important part."

And now, the torture apologists' apologies.

1. "We have 'tortured' only a few."

Both the scare quotes and the assertion of "only a few" are demonstrably untrue. Unless, perhaps, you're arguing that nothing we've done except waterboarding is torture, a position that would also be at odds with clear settled law. Moreover, we are bound by law not just to not torture, but also to not inflict cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

In any event, the argument is irrelevant. Try, "we only raped a few. We only murdered a few." If I'm missing something in the relevant law -- a "we only tortured a few" safe harbor exception -- please let me know.

2. "Waterboarding is administered under highly controlled circumstances."

I imagine the Gestapo made the same claim. And waterboarding is certainly not the only, and arguably not the worst of what the Bush administration authorized. And after 183 times in a month, how much does it matter whether it was highly controlled or not?

In any event, irrelevant. If I'm missing something in the relevant law -- a "torture is okay as long as it's done under highly controlled circumstances" safe harbor exception -- please let me know.

3. "And only to those who richly deserve it."

You're basing this on what, exactly? It's belied by the Red Cross and numerous other independent investigations. Also, irrelevant. If I'm missing something in the relevant law -- a "torture is okay as long as it's done to people I retroactively think deserved it" safe harbor exception -- please let me know.

4. "I believe we have obtained some valuable intel from them."

You never include any evidence for your beliefs, so it's hard to give them much credit. Here's some evidence to the contrary. In any event, irrelevant. If I'm missing something in the relevant law -- a "torture is okay as long as it obtains some valuable intel" safe harbor exception -- please let me know.

5. "By the way, the furor over 'torture' is a farce in my opinion. All of a sudden everyone is a Constitutional lawyer because they hated Bush. They won't apply the same scrutiny to Obama I assure you."

Who's they? There' evidence that Pelosi will burn over this, too, and that's fine by me. Likewise if Obama ever authorizes what Bush did. My sense is that people who can't see this as a legal matter -- which it obviously is -- and insist it must be partisan are projecting their own hyper-partisan worldview.

And even though I'm sure some people are motivated by partisanship, so what? If I'm missing something in the relevant law -- a "torture will be excused if some people who seek to prosecute it are motivated by partisanship" safe harbor exception -- please let me know.

6. "The average American would waterboard and then some if it would save someone they love from someone who wants to kill them."

Possibly, and possibly the average American would be glad to eviscerate and crucify someone they believe murdered or raped a loved one. Despite the understandable urge, we don't allow this. Think about why not, and apply the principles you extract to your analogous argument in favor of torture.

In any event, irrelevant. If I'm missing something in the relevant law -- a "torture will be excused if in extremis some people might resort to it" safe harbor exception -- please let me know.

7. "Politicizing criminality could also be called protecting America. One could argue the efficacy of what Bush and Cheney did to protect us but I find it difficult to entertain the notion that the result was not in our best interests."

Let me try to make it a little less difficult for you:

"Torture has undermined the United States' reputation for respecting and following the law and thus has crippled its political influence. By torturing, the United States has wounded itself and helped its enemies in what is in the end an inherently political war—a war, that is, in which the critical target to be conquered is the allegiances and attitudes of young Muslims. And by torturing prisoners, many of whom were implicated in committing great crimes against Americans, the United States has made it impossible to render justice on those criminals, instead sentencing them—and the country itself—to an endless limbo of injustice. That limbo stands as a kind of worldwide advertisement for the costs of the US reversion to torture."

Also:

"Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists are taught to expect Americans to abuse them. They are recruited based on false propaganda that says the United States is out to destroy Islam. Treating detainees harshly only reinforces that distorted view, increases resistance to cooperation, and creates new enemies. In fact, the April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States" cited "pervasive anti U.S. sentiment among most Muslims" as an underlying factor fueling the spread of the global jihadist movement. Former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in June 2008 that "there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq – as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat – are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and
Guantanamo.""

What couldn't be justified, especially retrospectively, as having been done to protect America? In any event, irrelevant. If I'm missing something in the relevant law -- a "torture will be excused some of the people who engaged in it say they did so to protect America" safe harbor exception -- please let me know.

8. "The word "torture" elicits a lot of emotion. I draw a distinction between what we have done and many examples throughout history. We did not line up captives and feed them to dogs or rape them."

Anything short of rape and feeding captives to dogs isn't torture? Wow. Do I even need to repeat my safe harbor question here?

9. "Moral equivalency is the domain of the left. Rape is a crime and I feel safe saying that we would never rape a captive as a means to an end so to compare it to what we have done is hardly relevant."

There's a certain truth to the first statement. Because no matter what our side does, no matter how exactly a match it is to precisely the policy and behavior of sadists and totalitarians throughout history, it's not equivalent because... well, because that was them, and this is us.

Anyway, why shouldn't all the non-existent get-out-of-jail free excuses you're eager to provide torturers generally apply specifically to rapists, as well? We did it to protect America. It resulted in valuable info. We only raped a few. Etc. What's the difference?

10. "We held a man [KSM] who boasted about being the mastermind behind 9/11."

Fascinating use of the word "boast." We waterboarded KSM 183 times in a month. Why do you reflexively believe he was "boasting?" Is it not possible he was spewing out anything he could possibly imagine to get the torture to stop? Where's that flinty conservative skepticism?

11. "We poured water on his face while he was hooked up to a heart monitor. We made records of our actions and applied rules to ensure he was not permanently harmed."

It's fascinating to watch a torture apologist's verbal contortions as he tries to pretty the picture of what Americans have done. And the mention of the heart monitor is nice, too, intended to show how caring we are while we gently pour the water (room temperature water, no doubt, and ph-balanced, too) on the man's face. It couldn't be that the torturer's determination to keep the torture victim alive is about maintaining the victim's life so that he can continue to be tortured?

We applied rules to ensure he was not permanently harmed. Bravo! Then rape really must be okay, too, no? If done carefully, with doctors supervising, under carefully prescribed rules, the victim -- wait, that's the wrong word, after all, these people "richly deserved it," call them subjects, that's nice and dry, or detainees, or why not guests -- the subject will not be permanently harmed by the rape.

Indeed. We raped to protect America. Rape resulted in valuable info. We only raped a few. Doctors supervised the rape. There was no permanent harm to the people we raped. According to your own principles, the government would be derelict if it *failed* to rape.

12. Eventually a plot to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge was was exposed and more. War is not pretty and waterboarding is certainly unkind but I would gladly see that happen before I would see that bridge in the Hudson."

The Brooklyn Bridge is over the East River, and the plot (which in any event seemed more an aspiration than a plot) was uncovered through police work and without torture. This is unfortunate from your standpoint, as it suggests we can prevent terrorism without torturing. You'll have to find another example. Given the utter lack of research you brought to bear on this one, I suspect you'll be able to come up with something easily enough.

13. "War involves shooting other people. Isn't that also a violation of their rights?"

In fact, it's not. See particularly the Hague Conventions. Even if it were, are you saying that because we shoot people on the battlefield, we can do anything we want to them if we first take them prisoner? But you've already acknowledged (incoherently, given your other arguments) that rape is wrong. But isn't it better to rape them than to shoot them, a kind of lesser evil? Especially if we rape them to protect America, under a doctor's supervision, etc.

14. "Let's see how people feel the day after the next attack. I believe the polls will shift rather dramatically."

We could call this the "if some people support it when they're out of their minds with fear and rage, it's not illegal" defense. And to be even barely coherent, this "argument" has to assume that torture makes us safe. Again, all available evidence suggests the contrary. And given the danger of another irrational and dangerous departure from the Constitution, shouldn't we do all we can now to inculcate respect for the rule of law, rather than proactively providing excuses for abandoning it?

There are so many aspects of the apologists' arguments that fascinate me. Most of all is the ongoing refusal to engage on the question of what the law clearly prohibits. Also the utter absence of any facts to support assertions.

If America doesn't stand for the rule of law, what are we? I used to think of myself as a conservative (before the term ceased to mean anything coherent). Part of the reason I identified myself thusly was because I'm a law and order guy and not very sympathetic to attempts to get me to see things from the poor criminal's perspective, how he was temporarily insane when he committed his crimes, or only meant well, or whatever. Well, I still feel that way. It's just that I'm able to apply that world view impartially. Others, it seems, refuse to. For them, America doesn't live under the rule of law. In fact, for them, the law isn't a rule at all; at best it's just an optional, annoying suggestion.

Gay Cooties vs Terrorist Mojo

2009-05-07T18:00:00.000-07:00

Many Americans are willing -- even proud -- to break the law, to abandon our fundamental moral underpinnings, and to engage in practices pioneered by the Spanish Inquisition and refined by Stalin's secret police and the Gestapo, all in the name of keeping the nation Safe From The Terrorists. But we haven't lost all perspective. Some prices just aren't worth paying, not even for Safety. The price, of, say, allowing openly gay linguists fluent in Arabic to serve in the military. Better a city incinerated by a suitcase nuke than that.

I wish I were making this up, but:

"Dan Choi, a West Point graduate and officer in the Army National Guard who is fluent in Arabic and who returned recently from Iraq, received notice today that the military is about to fire him. Why? Because he came out of the closet as a gay man on national television."

Two possible conclusions:

1. Some people hate gays more than they love life itself. More, even, than they value the lives of their own children.

2. Torture isn't really about safety. It's about something else. Because surely if we're willing to torture to be safe, we could manage to rub shoulders with a gay or two, as well?

One thing that's interesting in all this is the supernatural powers rightists ascribe to the things they're afraid of. We can't imprison bearded terrorists in US prisons because they might break out and wreak havoc upon the land! We have to discriminate against gays -- apparently literally at all costs -- because gayness is so potently communicable!

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Gay cooties: even stronger than Terrorist Mojo. On the fear scale that obsesses the right, that's really saying something.

Politicizing Criminality

2009-04-29T23:55:00.000-07:00

Just got back to Tokyo after another week on the road for Fault Line promotion. No time to write while I was traveling, but I did have a chance to read a number of establishment opinion pieces about torture. They were so alike in various respects that they could have have been churned out by the same government press office. The most glaring similarity was an omission of any discussion or even acknowledgment of the role of the law. Reading these opinions and knowing nothing else, you could be forgiven for believing that no law on torture or other cruel, inhumane, or other degrading treatment even exists, let alone that such laws might matter.

A sampling:

David Broder in The Washington Post: "But now Obama is being lobbied by politicians and voters who want something more -- the humiliation and/or punishment of those responsible for the policies of the past." That's one way of looking at it. Another way would be that this is simply about prosecuting criminals. But if you refuse to recognize that the law should even a part of the discussion -- that applicable law even exists -- I can see where you might look at things in the stunted, distorted way Broder does.

Ross Douthat in the New York Times: "We need to hear more: What was done and who approved it, and what intelligence we really gleaned from it. Not so that we can prosecute – unless the Democratic Party has taken leave of its senses – but so that we can learn, and pass judgment, and struggle toward consensus." Yes, if you think people who break the law should be prosecuted and punished, you have taken leave of your senses. You'd have to be crazy to argue something like that.

Tom Friedman in the New York Times: Friedman acknowledges that up to 27 prisoners were tortured to death in US custody (i.e., murdered), but then goes on to argue against any prosecutions because "bringing George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials to trial... would rip our country apart." I'd be more comfortable with this argument if Friedman also favored a constitutional amendment making de jure his de facto grant of immunity to high government officials. Why are establishment pundits always afraid to make explicit arguments for what they're calling for?

Garrison Keillor in Salon: Keillor actually entitles his piece, "Let War Crimes Be Bygones." Substitute "Rape," "Murder," or the other crime of your choice in his chosen title and see how the concept works for you that way.

Lexington in The Economist: "The most important comment on Mr Obama’s approach to counter-terrorism so far came on April 20th, from the CIA agents who cheered him to the rafters." Is cheering at the CIA really the most important comment on Obama and counter-terror? More important, then, say, an analysis of, even a reference to, the law? The spooks must have done a wave or something. Damn lawyers, it's their fault -- obviously they're not cheering sufficiently loudly for the application of the law. Maybe we who believe, as Thomas Paine did, that in America the law is king, should cheer more loudly for the law's application so the law can get favorable mention in Lexington, too.

Jon Meacham in Newsweek: Meacham argues, "And to pursue criminal charges against officials at the highest levels—including the former president and the former vice president—would set a terrible precedent." As opposed to the precedent of de facto immunity from criminal prosecution for our political class? Pretty nice perk Meacham, Friedman et al are suggesting there. I wish novelists could get get out of jail free cards, too, but alas, it seems the hoi polloi are ineligible.

But surely Meacham isn't arguing that politicians are actually above the law? Yes, he is, explicitly, and the only kind thing you can say about it as that at least he's more honest about what he's calling for than Friedman et al: "That is not to say presidents and vice presidents are always above the law; there could be instances in which such a prosecution is appropriate, but based on what we know, this is not such a case." Holy when the president does it, that means its not illegal, Batman! Although again, it would be nice if Meacham could propose some guidelines for which politicians are in fact above the law (is it just the President and VP? What about the Secretary of State and Defense? Treasury? Leaders in Congress? Only federal officials, or state, too? Any lobbyists out there who would be willing to go to bat for novelists? Seriously, we want proactive immunity for lawbreaking, too) and under what circumstances (do sexual peccadilloes count, or is the immunity only for war crimes?). Then we could codify it (maybe as the "Get Out of Jail Free Act") and wouldn't have to rely on pseudo-journalists like Meacham to make up the law as we go along.

Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal: Noonan argues, "A problem with the release of the [torture memos] is that it opens the way—it probably forces the way—to congressional hearings, or a commission, or an independent prosecutor. It is hard at this point to imagine that what will follow will not prove destructive to—old-fashioned phrase coming—the good of the country." Like Friedman, Noonan shies away from saying aloud what she is really arguing: that America is better off when ruled under secret laws, with immunity for government officials who violate the non-secret ones.

Think about that concept for a moment. Secret laws. In America. And we have "journalists" telling us the secret laws are good for the country. War is peace, baby. Dig it.

Even Jon Stewart seems to have momentarily forgotten that there's such a thing as the law, suggesting instead immunity for anyone willing to admit, "My bad." Apply that thinking to criminality generally and see where it takes you.

If you want to stay in denial, avoid clicking on this link (h/t Andrew Sullivan). Especially avoid The UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which President Reagan signed in 1988 and the Senate ratified in 1994, and which Article VI of the Constitution makes the supreme law of the land. Definitely don't read the following excerpts from the UNCAT, which provides that:

Article 1. For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

And:

Article 16. Each State Party shall undertake to prevent in any territory under its jurisdiction other acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture as defined in article I, when such acts are committed by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. In particular, the obligations contained in articles 10, 11, 12 and 13 shall apply with the substitution for references to torture of references to other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

How is it that none of the opinion pieces linked above sees fit even to mention these laws?

For the record: I also failed to include a discussion of applicable law in November 2007, when responding to an interview Vince Flynn did with the Washington Post in which Vince argued for torture. But I've taken the trouble to educate myself in the interim. Vince, you didn't mention it before except by omission, so I'll ask now: do you think the law is irrelevant to a discussion of torture? And what do you make of the news that Kalid Sheik Mohamed was waterboarded not once, but 183 times in a month? Not exactly the "rarest of circumstances," or the "clinical precision" you claimed at the time. And if you have to do it 183 times -- over the course of a month -- can you really claim it's effective, or even appropriate for the Ticking Bomb Scenario? (well, maybe the bomb was ticking really slowly). Especially because all the facts that have come to light since the former administration and its cheerleaders began their "torture works and is necessary" campaign belie both claims.

For a nice summary debunking the myths various establishment figures are still peddling about torture, here's Scott Horton.

Opponents of prosecuting the architects of Amerca's torture regime argue that prosecutions would be about "criminalizing policy differences." No. Failing to prosecute would be to politicize criminality, and proponents of de facto immunity for our political class are doing exactly that.

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By the time we prosecute them, crimes are by definition past. That the crime has already been committed is never an argument for failing to prosecute it ("Your honor, it's true my client raped the victim, but that's part of the past and we need to look forward. This is a time for reflection, not retribution"). But the Bush administration's torture policies are not even part of the past. The fact that President Obama has banned the practices in question implicitly ratifies his or the next president's right to re-invoke them. Only investigation and prosecution can restore the proper place of the law in our country and ensure, insofar as possible, that the law is not treated as a sad joke in the future.

But don't take my word on all this. Take President Bush's:

You'd think Republicans, who purport to be the party of law and order, might be concerned about law-breaking. Well, I thought the GOP was about small government, balanced budgets, and a modest foreign policy, too. To the extent Republicans still bother making such claims, they've become the world's emptiest brand. Republicans have no principles, Democrats have no balls, and our pseudo journalistic class enables the worst and weakest elements of both. Imagine where we'd be without the blogosphere.

Privileging the Posterior

2009-04-01T16:21:00.000-07:00

As Ian Fleming's Auric Goldfinger said, "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action." So when I heard Rush Limbaugh's recent comments about British Prime Minister Gordon Brown getting "anal poisoning" from slobbering over President Obama, I couldn't help wondering whether something was going on.

And indeed, here's Rush again, claiming "we're being told... we have to bend over and grab the ankles" (mind you, Rush would never assume such a position voluntarily).

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And here's Tucker Carlson, opining that Jim Cramer's wife must have been ashamed of "the butt sniffing he gave Jon Stewart."

And Carlson again, asking why Jon Stewart wanted to be John Kerry's "butt boy."

I don't want to make too much of this. Maybe there are examples of prominent left-wingers who share Limbaugh's and Carlson's apparent fixation. But after a while, given the richness of English and the variety of colorful references available to suggest subservience, one does start to feel that happenstance and coincidence might not be sufficient to explain things here.

Regardless, I'm sure that conservatives, who care deeply about maintaining standards of decency on the airwaves, will rise up to protect society by insisting that Limbaugh and Carlson find a way to exclude from public discourse their taste for anal idiom.

Criticize Govt = Hate America?

2009-04-01T05:20:00.000-07:00

Back in Tokyo after three weeks on the road promoting Fault Line, drained as usual after these things but happy. Not much of a break this time, either, with the Japanese version and the Rain Fall movie coming out this month, but these are quality problems and no complaints.

Got a whole lot to write about and not much time, so today, just one thought. I've been surprised by the amount of mail and reviews of Fault Line dismissing the book (and me) as anti-American, far left, etc. I don't want to give away anything essential to the plot here, but I think it's okay to say that in the book the US government is involved in a number of illegal activities, including assassinations. At which point, two questions present themselves.

First, is it not true that the USG is involved in illegal activities, including assassinations?

Second, why would pointing out that the government behaves illegally make one anti-American? At a minimum, such an argument would have to equate the government with America. Is this true? America = the government, no more, no less?

This is a worldview I find difficult to understand. When did the government come not just to represent America, but actually to *be* America, in the minds of people who think criticism of the government and hatred of America are the same thing? Adding to my befuddlement is my sense that the people advancing this line of argument typically call themselves conservative. Among their rank, of course, is Grover Norquist, a fellow who famously declared his desire to shrink the government to a size where he could "drown it in the bathtub." I don't understand -- how could someone hate America so? Where's the outrage?

Tell you what: I love my country, but frequently can't stand the government. Trivial example: one night just last week, heading to a bookstore in Tyson's Corner, VA, from one in Reston, I pulled into the toll booth to the Dulles toll road. There were two booths: one labeled Exact Change, the other, Full Service. Lacking change, I chose the latter. But -- surprise! There was no attendant. I couldn't back up, so I had to drive through, past the camera and the alarm bells. Five minutes later, I repeated the process at the exit ramp. I'm sure I'll be getting a stiff set of tickets in the mail later this month. I'm equally sure the people who designed this system did so with full knowledge of how it would work, just to collect revenue. I think they're all a bunch of government squeegee men. Does criticizing them mean I hate the entire polity, society, and culture of Northern Virginia?

It's easy for me to criticize and sometimes even loathe the government while at the same time loving the country because it's so obvious to me that the two are distinct. For others, apparently... not so much.

Other news: Fault Line is big in the blogosphere! The novel's been covered in The Huffington Post, in Glenn Greenwald's Unclaimed Territory on Salon, in Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, in Scott Horton's No Comment on Harper's, and in Obsidian Wings. It's an honor to be mentioned in these blogs, all of which feature prominently in the novel, all of which I regularly read. Give 'em a try -- they're well worth reading.

Detainees and Prisoners

2009-03-14T12:19:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the Obama administration announced a new policy to govern the holding of terror suspects. Here's what Attorney General Eric Holder announced:

"As we work towards developing a new policy to govern detainees, it is essential that we operate in a manner that strengthens our national security, is consistent with our values, and is governed by law."

Followers of HOTM know I put a lot of stock in words. So two things struck me about Holder's statement.

First, what does it mean to "work towards developing" something? It seems that not only does the Obama administration lack a policy, not only is it not developing a policy, it is merely working toward developing a policy. Is this like being engaged to be engaged? Maybe. Maybe there will eventually be a marriage. But if you really plan to get hitched, why not just get engaged? If you really want a new policy, why not actually develop one? I mean, if a house painter told you he was working towards developing a way to paint your house, how confident would you be that the job would ever get done?

Second, why is the administration (and just about everyone else, including the liberal blogosphere, including even the excellent Scott Horton, who expresses his own doubts here) continuing to call people held at Guantanamo and other prisons "detainees"? For me, "detention" is something that happens to you at a place you first arrived at of your own volition. For example, if I mail a letter at the post office and government agents show up and hold me there for an hour, I think it's fair to say I've been detained. If the same agents hood me, drug me, manacle me, fly me to Guantanamo and hold me there for five years, I think it's fair to say I've been imprisoned.

So why the squeamishness about calling people in the second hypothetical (actually, it's not at all hypothetical) prisoners? Simple: the people in question have received neither a trial nor traditional notions of due process. It would be uncomfortable to acknowledge that America imprisons people without trial or other due process. Suggesting that we're merely detaining them is a way of sanitizing the whole business.

The use of language for political sanitization makes me uncomfortable. It's like calling torture "aggressive interrogation." If we really need to torture prisoners, for example, let's make a case for it. But if proponents instead feel the need to try to sell me on the notion by reassuring me that all that's going on is the "aggressive interrogation of "detainees," I sense these proponents lack the courage of their own supposed convictions. And if they themselves are insufficiently confident in the necessity of imprisoning people without due process to make a clear case for the policy, how can they expect anyone else to be persuaded?

As long as the government calls prisoners detainees, I'll wager any policy changes will be mostly cosmetic.

P.S. For an example of life imitating art -- in this case, the covert operations group at the heart of the plot of Fault Line -- last week Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh reported on an "executive assassination ring" that reported directly to the Vice President. Amazingly close match to the setup in Fault Line.

Fault Line is Here!

2009-03-09T23:09:00.000-07:00

Fault Line, my first standalone thriller, launches today, so I thought it would be appropriate to include some thoughts from a recent interview on the book’s origins and its political milieu. The tour is taking me to Phoenix/Scottsdale, Los Angeles (Pasadena, Thousand Oaks, LA), San Diego, Sacramento, the San Francisco Bay Area (Menlo Park and San Mateo), Houston, Indianapolis (Carmel), Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Washington DC (Bethesda and Baileys Crossroads), and New York City. Details and the full schedule here. Enjoy the book—subject of a nice recent write-up in the Wall Street Journal—and hope to see you on the road!

Ben Treven, one of the three main characters in Fault Line, is also an assassin. Based on your own CIA experience, is there a certain personality type that makes an effective assassin? What draws you to these characters as a writer?

I’d say there are a number of necessary elements: intelligence, adaptability, patience, the ability to role-play, game things out, think like the opposition. But probably the most important element is an ability to dissociate. Snipers will tell you they don’t see a man; they see a target. That there’s no difference between hunting a man and hunting a deer. So you have to be able to separate yourself from what you’re doing, separate the target from his own humanity. Either you have to deny the humanity in the target, or deny it in yourself—anything else produces empathy, and as Dox, the former Marine sniper of the Rain books, points out, “If it inhabits your mind, it’ll inhibit your trigger finger.”

What draws me to these characters? I’m not sure, exactly. I think it’s that, on the one hand, they’re like you and me. They’re not sociopaths; they’re normal. And yet they’re not normal, because they can do—and live with—acts that would crush a normal psyche. I guess I’m drawn to the idea that a person can transcend—commit the ultimate transgression, in fact—without being punished for it. An ability like that would be an almost godlike kind of power, wouldn’t it? Raskolnikov without the guilt. Ahab without the catastrophe.

And yet these men aren’t free of consequences—there is a “cost of it,” as a Vietnam vet friend who’s taught me a lot puts it. That cost, and the way these men shoulder it, is something else that fascinates me.

Like many of the Rain books, Fault Line includes some surprisingly graphic sex. Why do you write so much sex?

I’m tempted to paraphrase Blazing Saddles here and just answer, “I like sex.” But let me see if I do better than that…

There are three general ways to get to know someone’s character: time, stress, and sex. In a novel, you don’t have time, meaning you need an accelerant, and that leaves you with sex or stress. Violence is one of the most stressful experiences we humans can face, which is why violence can be such a powerful tool in stories. But sex is also enormously revealing, which is why the biblical euphemism that Abraham “knew” Sarah is so apt. Also, sex can be an incredibly powerful pivot. Sex changes everything. Remember when John Cusack and Ione Skye finally make love in Say Anything? Cusack then tries to pretend that it doesn’t matter that much, and Lili Taylor says to him something like, “Yes it does! It changes everything. Decades could go by without you seeing each other... and then, when you’re in your sixties, you might bump into each other, and you’ll say, ‘Hi, how are you?’ and she’ll say, ‘Fine, how are you?’, but what you’ll really be thinking is, ‘We had sex!’”

Which is why I had so much of a blast with the buildup to what happens in Fault Line and with its culmination. These are characters caught for a variety of reasons between powerfully conflicting feelings of antagonism and attraction. They know they shouldn’t, they even tell themselves they don’t want to… and yet of course they do. What would happen to two people with feelings like that, pressurized by shared danger, enhanced by distrust, catalyzed by violence? Not going to tell you here… you’ll have to read the book to find out.

I’ve heard about how the idea for your first novel came to you as a series of images that led you to ask questions about what you were seeing and why. Did Fault Line have a similar origin, or did you set out to write this novel as a conscious change of pace from your novels featuring the assassin John Rain?

It’s funny, unlike the case with Rain Fall, I can’t identify the actual moment Fault Line came to me. But the story certainly has its origins in an interesting pair of jobs I held: first, a covert position with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations; second, as an attorney with a high-powered Silicon Valley law firm (and as an executive with a high-tech startup thereafter). Somewhere along the line I started thinking about a pair of brothers, radically different in personality, temperament, and worldview. One would be an undercover soldier, the other a hotshot lawyer… yeah, I could draw on my own experiences in those two worlds. It felt right, so I kept thinking about it. They’d have to be alienated from each other for some reason. They’re not even on speaking terms… but then one of them, the lawyer, gets into a kind of trouble his otherwise considerable experience and expertise can’t get him out of. The only guy who could help him would be his brother, but they hate each other… but okay, blood is thicker than water, and the older brother reluctantly agrees to help. And what if there were something cranking up the tension between them, bringing their painful, buried history closer to the surface? Maybe a love triangle? Yeah, with a beautiful Iranian-American lawyer, Sarah Hosseini, who the older brother would instantly distrust even as he was drawn to her…

And on and on like that, questions leading to answers that lead to more questions, and eventually you have a story like Fault Line.

I’m curious about how long the typical assassin—if there even is such a thing—can be effective in the field, either before his or her identity is blown or the psychological effects of the work begin to degrade performance.

This will vary with the individual, but dissociation is hard psychological work, and over time the framework a killer uses to stay functional will start to deteriorate. For more on this fascinating topic, I recommend two books: first, David Grossman’s On Killing: The Psychological Costs of Learning to Kill in War and Society; second, Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character.

How did the covert world of spies and assassins change after 9/11? I recall former Vice President Cheney talking about the need to “work the dark side,” and it does seem that in many cases “the gloves came off,” to use another phrase that frequently crops up in these kinds of discussions.

Ah, the dark side, the same place Darth Vadar went. And what did Yoda tell Luke about that? The dark side of the force is seductive because it promises a shortcut… but in the end, delivers nothing. I guess former Vice President Cheney didn’t see the movie, or if he did, he drew the wrong lesson from it.

Yes, post 9/11, we took the gloves off and went to the dark side or whatever other metaphor we might use to describe the abandonment of intelligent tactics and the embrace of primitive emotion instead. Because what else could “the dark side” be if not a more primitive, id-focused, emotionally-based way of reacting to the world? Diplomacy isn’t the dark side. Dale Carnegie isn’t the dark side. Clausewitz, Machiavelli, and Sun Tsu aren’t the dark side. Rationality, empiricism, logic… these are all concepts we associate with the light. You don’t go to the dark side because it makes sense to go there. You go because going feels good. You go because you don’t know any better.

Torture, kidnapping, warrantless surveillance… it’s well documented that these policies originated in the White House. And now the purveyors of the policies find themselves trapped by a kind of double vision. We have to take the gloves off… but we don’t torture. Telecoms didn’t break the law in turning over confidential customer data to the government… but they need retroactive immunity anyway.

It would be refreshing if dark side proponents would speak a little more clearly. Yes, we torture—forget all that “aggressive questioning” nonsense—and here’s why. Yes, the telecoms broke the law, that’s why we’re trying to get them off the hook. But I guess the nature of the dark side is that spending time there impedes clarity of vision. It certainly impedes clarity of speech.

In your opinion, how have these changes impacted the security of the United States?

They’ve made us less safe. The U.S. brand, often called our “soft power,” has been badly damaged. When foreigners think of America today, do they think of the Statue of Liberty, or of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? Soft power matters because it creates political conditions that foster cooperation. If popular hostility causes a European politician to distance herself from America, that distance trickles down to the levels of intelligence, security, and law enforcement cooperation, all of which are critical in combating international terrorism.

Leave aside questions of morality for the moment, and analyze the issue in cold-blooded cost/benefit terms. Torture isn’t worth it. Sure, it might lead to actual intelligence, but it also leads to false confessions. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff? And torture inhibits the local population from cooperating. People who believe suspects will be tortured are less likely to inform on them. So an authority that becomes known for torture cuts itself off from the source of intelligence it most needs: the local population.

Worst of all, the French experience in Algeria suggests that nothing creates new insurgents faster than torture. Death in open battle is more forgivable than the complete powerlessness, pain, and humiliation of being tortured. People don’t forget it, and the need for revenge after is extreme.

The dark side has also made us lazy. Training interrogators and linguists is expensive and labor intensive. Why bother with all that if you believe you can just do what cavemen did ten thousand years ago? Or perhaps the problem is denial, because what else besides denial could explain how the Defense Department fired some of its few Arabic linguists for being gay? It’s enough to make you wonder what our priorities really are…

So for the sake of some occasional theoretical benefit, we’ve adopted a course highly likely to produce false information, that cuts us off from intelligence produced by local populations, and that is maximally efficient at creating new enemies. I guess Cheney called it the dark side because its more accurate name—the dumb side—would have been a tougher sell.

Ben, the Fault Line assassin, believes, at least initially, that the gloves haven’t come off enough, and the threat to America justifies going beyond the law or even the Constitution. Is this mindset prevalent in the CIA? How does a democracy like America balance its historic respect for individual liberties and its suspicion of government power with its obligation to defend itself and its citizens against those who wish us harm? Don’t we need men and women like Ben—even if we publicly disavow their actions and even their existence?

One of the things I like about Ben is that although his views can be pretty primitive, they’re also refreshingly honest. He doesn’t dress up his behavior in high-minded notions of honor and principle; he thinks America is in a fight, and he knows there’s an advantage to fighting dirty. So hell yeah, he’s going to fight dirty… don’t you want to win?

I don’t know how prevalent this mindset is in the CIA, but it’s clear from the Yoo torture memos, records of meetings among White House and Justice Department officials, and other evidence, that the philosophy was embraced by the Bush White House. I’m concerned it’s now being embraced by Obama, as well.

How do we balance security and civil liberties? I think the Constitution does a pretty good job of it: the government can exercise certain extraordinarily intrusive powers, including not only the power to search and seize but to imprison and even execute citizens, as well, but only with appropriate oversight and only upon a proper showing of evidence. What’s chiefly disturbing about the powers claimed by the Bush administration isn’t that they’re new; it’s that the Bush administration has exercised these powers in secret and in violation of the Fourth Amendment and statutory law. It’s as though the White House has unilaterally determined that oversight is just too burdensome and decided to eschew it. But democracy itself is burdensome—after all, freedom isn’t free.

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Do we need men and women like Ben? Ben certainly thinks so. I’m not so sure. When you look at the history of CIA clandestine activities—regime change in Iran, assassination plots against Castro, skullduggery in Latin America—and of their intelligence calls—the condition of the pre-collapse Soviet Union, Pakistani nuclear efforts, Iraqi WMDs—it’s fair to ask how different things might be if the CIA hadn’t existed to begin with. A public corporation would look at all the money we spend on intelligence and ask what we’re getting for it—and whether we can get the same for less. But because in place of an animating profit motive, the government is propelled instead by bureaucratic self-interest, these cost-benefit questions aren’t seriously asked. Or if they are, the answers are ignored.

Alex Treven, Ben’s younger brother, is in many ways Ben’s opposite. As a high-tech patent lawyer, Alex is wary of the government and respectful of the legal, constitutional framework. Yet when his client is murdered and his possession of the cutting-edge Obsidian encryption program puts him at risk from unknown assailants, Alex turns to Ben despite their longstanding differences—just as the United States, post-9/11, turned to “the dark side.” I almost felt as if Ben and Alex stood for a country dangerously split in two: perhaps the “fault line” of your title.

Yes, Alex does work as a bit of a metaphor there, doesn’t he? He would never think of getting mixed up in Ben’s world—until he really needs to. And even then, he tells himself (to Ben’s disgust) that he doesn’t really want to get involved. He wants the benefits without the costs, which, as Ben puts it, is like trying to pick up a turd from the clean end. It can’t be done.

Sarah Hosseini is a young associate at the law firm where Alex works. Why did you make her Iranian?

I wanted her to be something that would create instant conflict with Ben. Here’s a guy who kills Iranians for a living, so what could be more stressful than suddenly having to work with a woman who looks, sounds like, and comes from a culture Ben thinks of as the enemy? And Sarah, who is both political and idealistic, has her own issues with Ben: she recognizes him as the embodiment of the dark forces she abhors. And yet—of course—there’s an overwhelming physical chemistry between them. Placing characters in conflict like that and seeing what they do is always a blast.

I’ve never worked for the CIA, but I have worked in law firms, and I have to say, you really nail the atmosphere of surface bonhomie masking cut-throat competition. I guess every world has its own assassins.

Yeah, the politics of big firm life can get pretty tough. You’re talking about a collection of people with out-sized analytical skills and ambition, with a lot of money and prestige at stake and a pyramid structure where only a small percentage can hope to make partner. Which is part of the reason I enjoyed making Alex a player in such an environment. True, he’s a civilian, and out of his element in Ben’s world, but on the other hand, he’s survived in the shark tank of big firm life. It was interesting for me (and for Ben) to see the way some of Alex’s skills wound up translating from one arena to another.

I’ve read a lot of thrillers in which the characters are simply mouthpieces for the author, but you step back and allow your characters to possess their own opinions. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help wondering whether you identified more with Ben or Alex… or even Sarah.

Writing political characters can be dangerous because many readers feel so strongly politically that if they disagree with a character’s views, they’ll immediately impute those views to the author, get angry, and get pulled out of the story. But politics and political stories interest me, so I’m willing to take the chance.

As for whom I identify with, the answer is all three. I don’t know how it is for other writers, but when I’m creating a character, I try to identify some element of my own personality or worldview, distill it out, and then culture it in a new person, where it expresses itself differently than it does in myself because it’s growing in a different medium. There are idealistic aspects of my worldview, so I sympathize with Sarah. I have my ruthless, amoral elements, also, so I can understand a guy like Ben. And there are parts of me that don’t want to bother with any of it, that just want to be left alone… so then there’s Alex. But I’m not interested in creating mouthpieces—mouthpiecing is what my blog is for. My characters are people. Their purpose isn’t to express viewpoints or change opinions; it’s to evoke an emotional reaction in readers, to illuminate some aspect of being human, to make my readers care. They’re real to me: sympathetic, complex and three-dimensional. Their opinions are secondary to all that.

What makes Obsidian so dangerous . . . and valuable? Is there real-world technology similar to Obsidian?

I don’t want to give away too much here, so I’ll just say this: the United States is the most networked country in the world. Our computer-intensive economy and society are strengths, but also represent a potential vulnerability for anyone seeking to do America harm. And yes, there are definitely technologies out there like Obsidian. For more, here’s an excellent book: Adam Young and Moti Yung’s Malicious Cryptography: Exposing Cryptovirology.

I couldn’t help noticing that certain peripheral characters in Fault Line bear the names of well-known bloggers. Were you tipping your hat to their work?

You caught me. I’m a huge admirer of various bloggers: Glenn Greenwald, Scott Horton, Hilzoy, Andrew Sullivan, and quite a few others. Even if you don’t agree with them (and I should say I do tend to agree with them), the quality of their argument is peerless.

Remember the end of Three Days of the Condor, when Robert Redford has spilled his story to the New York Times? Or the end of Stephen King’s book Firestarter, when the little girl sneaks past the big newspapers because they’re being watched by government agents and goes to Rolling Stone instead? In Fault Line, the protagonists don’t even pause to consider a newspaper—they recognize that if they go to anyone, it’s going to be a blog. Times have changed.

With your website and blog, The Heart of the Matter, you have a substantial online presence yourself. How has the Internet affected your work as a writer? How do you think it’s changing the nature of the publishing business—and will those changes help aspiring writers?

The most obvious effect of the Internet for a writer like me is in enabling nonstop promotion. It used to be that an author’s promotion efforts were clustered mostly around the launch of a new book, but blogs and social networking sites like FaceBook and MySpace make it possible to reach new readers anywhere, anytime… which in fact typically means everywhere, all the time. I have a background in business and law and enjoy interacting with fans, real and potential, so you might say that the rise of the Internet favors my style of play. But it’s also a challenge, because for me creating a story requires a degree of cushioning from the world that promotion doesn’t permit.

So the big change is of a “because you can, you should” variety: you can promote all the time, so you should. Certainly authors are doing an unprecedented amount of promotion themselves. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Either way, it’s a necessary thing, given various aspects of the state of the publishing world, so I don’t think that much about it, I just do what needs to be done. I think aspiring writers should treat the changes the same way published writers should: with realism. Because once you’re selling your art, you’re in business, and to succeed in business you have to be realistic.

What about the political potential of blogs and the Internet? Can they serve as checks on government power and advocates of policy in the way that the Fourth Estate was meant to do, and sometimes did . . . before succumbing to corporate ownership?

I hope so. The mainstream media has become so lazy and complicit there’s often no difference between the function of television news coverage in America and the role of Pravda in the Soviet Union. Most mainstream journalists depend on politicians for access, and access depends on favorable coverage. This dynamic means our most celebrated “journalists”—the real Washington insiders, the media establishment—function primarily as spokesmen issuing press releases, not as any kind of Fourth Estate “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” So if you get your news primarily from television, for the most part you’re being spoon-fed the official government line.

Can blogs remedy this imbalance? I’m not sure, although I must be optimistic, or I wouldn’t be blogging myself. I will say that I don’t know anyone writing for the mainstream media—and I read widely—who is producing the kind of quality opinion pieces turned out every day by Glenn Greenwald and the other bloggers I mention in Fault Line. So hopefully, over time, more people will stumble across Glenn and the others and realize that today’s preeminent journalism exists primarily in the blogosphere.

The name of your blog is also the title of a novel by Graham Greene. I take it that you’re an admirer of his work. If he were alive today, how do you think he’d respond to the post-9/11 world?

I am indeed an admirer, and although I don’t want to presume to speak for the man, I can’t imagine him being anything other than disgusted about the way Republicans cynically exploited 9/11 and the way Democrats cravenly capitulated to their opponents. But maybe I’m just projecting.

The movie version of your first novel, Rain Fall, is coming out in 2009. Were you involved in writing the screenplay?

I adapted the book and Sony Pictures bought my screenplay, which was nice, but the director they brought on board, Max Mannix, had his own vision for the movie and decided to write his own. Max’s version is certainly different from mine, but that’s to be expected when two people are repurposing a story for the screen.

Will you be writing more about Sarah Hosseini and the Treven brothers? What about John Rain?

The next book is a sequel centering on Ben. I’m not sure how much Sarah and Alex will be in it, though I find Sarah fascinating and love spend timing her, so I could see her in another book, as well. As for Rain, I see several possibilities there. One is an origin-of-Rain story, because the story of how Rain became who and what he is has so far only been told in fragments. Another is a Dox- or Delilah-centric story, with Rain as a supporting character. I’ll get there… but one book at a time!

Still Winnable, Give or Take Five Years

2009-03-07T20:55:00.000-08:00

Today I read the always-insightful Andrew Bacevich's review of David Kilcullen's "The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One" (h/t Andrew Sullivan). Kilcullen is certainly an expert on the subject and the book sounds well worth reading. But one thing disturbed me. Actually, two.

First, Kilcullen maintains that Afghanistan "remains winnable," and when I read the phrase, I couldn't help but wonder what percentage of conflicts described in their eighth year as still winnable or the like go on to actually be won. I would guess there aren't many such instances, but I'm no expert and I could certainly be wrong. If anyone can offer examples one way or the other, I'd be grateful.

The other verbalism I noticed was Kilcullen's insistence that winning in Afghanistan would require an effort lasting another "five or ten years at least." I found myself thinking about that predicted timeline. Will the effort take at least five years, or will it take at least ten? It can't take both. Why not just say the effort will take at least five years?

I can think of a few possibilities. First, because if the war goes on for much longer than five years, people might in retrospect regard the original estimate as clearly mistaken or even as misleading. But then why not just say the effort will take at least ten years? Because ten years -- especially "at least" ten years -- sounds too long. People might not buy it. But if you say something as vague and logically incoherent as "at least five to ten years," optimistic buyers can focus on the five, and cynical sellers can point to the ten when the five fails to materialize.

Another possibility is that the person making the prediction in fact has no clear idea how long something is going to take and is trying to hide his uncertainty behind a facade of precision. Or it might be that his true timeline is so far out -- say, fifty years or more -- that from the distance of his actual perspective, a difference of five years one way or the other looks inconsequential.

I don't know what accounts for Kilcullen's odd construction. I do know that we're so used to precise-sounding imprecision that often it glides right past us. I remember working at a Silicon Valley startup where executives talked comfortably about product launches in the "Q2 or Q3 timeframe." Q2 and Q3 together already represent six months, but even six months was apparently too narrow for the team to be willing to commit, and they insisted on creating even more wiggle room by reference to that precise-sounding but substantively meaningless word, "timeframe." I suppose the board might have shown its displeasure had management instead said, "We're hoping to get the product out sometime this year, but we're not really sure." On the other hand, the board should have had the sense to know the "timeframe" estimate amounted to the same thing.

Probably not a coincidence that the company in question has long since died.

Of less likely significance, but still odd, is the message from Hawaiian governor Linda Lingle in the program booklet at Left Coast Crime, where I'm spending a few days before the Fault Line launch on Tuesday. Governor Lingle sends her "personal greetings" to the conference goers. But what could this mean? First, Ms. Lingle is identified as the governor, and the seal of the State of Hawaii appears next to her picture, so if anything, this was an official greeting. But even without the official references, how do you personally offer greetings from a pamphlet? Why can't people just send their greetings, unsullied by silly sleight of hand? I wouldn't put Governor Lingle's puffery in quite the same category as something like "sincere condolences," which at least is a logical construction despite its unfortunate implication that condolences unadorned by the adjective might be less than heartfelt. But still.

Obviously, some of the sort of bullshit noted above is innocuous and some of it is dangerous. It's important to distinguish, but I think it's also important to not let it slide. Fixing a problem, even an inconsequential one, without focus and realism takes an awful lot of luck. If we need to be in Afghanistan for half a century, or if experts are so unsure how long we'll need to be there that they offer estimates as incoherent as Kilcullen's, let's get those facts on the table and decide accordingly.

Secrecy and Lies

2009-02-06T20:40:00.000-08:00

Since Wednesday, I've been following the story of how the United States has apparently threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Britain should a British court release details of the torture of British resident Binyam Mohamed by American guards at Guantanamo Bay prison.

I tend to hold a relatively cynical view of human nature (which is why I'm big on the US system of checks and balances -- I don't trust those in power to check themselves). So when I immediately sensed that the USG made its threat not in the interests of national security, but rather to cover up evidence of war crimes, I had to acknowledge that perhaps my take was at least in part the result of my own biases.

And then I read an article by Garry Wills in the February 12 New York Review of Books called "Why the Government Can Legally Lie." You'll need a subscription to read the online version, but in summary, when a B-29 crashed in 1948, the widows of the crash victims sued the Air Force for compensation. The Air Force cited the imperative of national security in refusing to share information about the plane's maintenance and related matters relevant to the causes of the crash. Eventually, the Supreme Court, reversing two lower court opinions, sided with the government, and the crash information stayed secret in accordance with the government's claim that its release would harm national security.

Then, in 1996, the Air Force records were declassified, and the 220-page Air Force report, including fifteen photos of the wreckage, was finally available to the public. As Wills writes, "[Relatives of the crash victims] read the report carefully, looking for details of any secret project the plane was involved in. There were none. Instead, the report told a horror story of incompetence, bungling, and tragic error," which Wills goes on to enumerate in horrifying detail. But the Supreme Court case that found for the Air Force and against the widows, US v. Reynolds, is still valid, and has been used by the government repeatedly to withhold evidence.

Does the government's previous cover-up prove that its national security claims in the current imbroglio with Britain are without merit? No. But certainly the previous case is powerful evidence of a reflex among those in power to confuse their national security prerogatives with the imperatives of their individual reputations, to claim non-existent interests of the nation in pursuit of personal desires.

Moreover, it's hard to imagine what legitimate national security interests could be at stake in the Binyam Mohamed case. The British court seeks to publicize its own summary of Mohamed's treatment while in captivity. So many books and articles have been written on the way the United States captured, held, and treated war on terror prisoners, so many television programs and documentary films have been made, it strains credulity to suggest the British court has some previously uncovered nugget of information the revelation of which might harm US national security. It seems much more likely that the real concern is that the British court's summary was based on documents provided by US officials, and that unlike reports by third parties, those underlying documents might function as confessions in a potential war crimes trial.

We all have our biases. But the ability to ignore the history of the government's abuse of its secrecy power in the Reynolds case, and the willingness to overlook the absence of a compelling rationale for government secrecy claims in the Mohamed case, suggests a mindset possessed of a powerful internal need to believe in authority, a mindset that exists not just independent of, but also in contradiction to, the available facts.

Miscellaneous:

From a Lexus ad on Salon's home page:

"Realistically, what is your ultimate vision for this country as it relates to sustainable mobility? Tell us what you think for a chance at a cash prize."

I think the prize should go to person who responds, "I think you should find a way to ask your question -- whatever it is -- in plain English."

What's with the recorded greetings in drug stores and gas stations? The muzak is bad enough, but now when a motion sensor detects your presence, a television screen starts blaring advertisements (loudly enough to be audible to even the most significantly hearing-impaired, naturally). The Shell screens are the worst: the recorded video actually shouts, "Good to see you today!"

Deep thought: how many millions did Shell fork over to the consulting geniuses who persuaded the company that customers could be won over by a motion-activated video of a guy claiming it's "good to see" people who when he was talking to the camera weren't even there and who he'll never actually meet?

Michael Phelps' bong hits: You might have seen that Michael Phelps, who won eight gold medals in as many swimming events at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, was photographed recently doing bong hits. Phelps apologized, but at least one of his corporate sponsors, Kellogg, dropped him anyway. I feel a little bad for the guy. Not because he got caught using marijuana, not because he's losing millions of dollars of corporate sponsorship as a result, but because it seems his focus on trying to keep the money blinded him to something more important.

Instead of apologizing, Phelps could have said, "Yes, I used marijuana. I like to get high from time to time and obviously my choice of drug hasn't inhibited my discipline or prevented my success. I'm 23, more than old enough to drink, to drive, to kill and die in war. For some reason, the country's establishment has decided to permit alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, and oxytocin, while prohibiting cannabis. Well, I don't share the establishment's hypocrisy. Rather than hypocritically condemning my choice of drug while enjoying their own, the establishment might consider the costs of its smug insistence on continued prohibition: the diversion of precious judicial, security, intelligence, military, and border control assets from the war on terror, and the undermining of democratically-elected governments throughout Latin American and elsewhere. If publicity surrounding my occasional recreational use of this relatively harmless drug does anything to bring America to its senses about drug prohibition, I will be very glad."

Instead, Phelps kow-towed, no doubt hoping to keep his lucrative sponsorships. If others beside Kellogg now desert him, the swimmer will have lost not just his sponsors, but his integrity, as well.

Gaza, the Inauguration, Etc.

2009-01-24T16:28:00.000-08:00

Thanks for all the mail, everyone, and I miss you too. As I mentioned in my first post-election post, I've been trying to blog less so I can focus more on the next novel. The election was hugely distracting and now I'm trying to make up for lost time.

Some of you have written to me to ask why I had nothing to say on Gaza. Part of the answer can be found in this paragraph from a leader in the January 17th Economist:

"Israel’s ruthless offensive has already cost it dear in world opinion. The remorseless demolition of wretched homes and lives by a mighty high-tech war machine cannot but cause grief and outrage in any decent onlooker. Israel asks how else it was supposed to respond to the rocket fire directed for years into its farms and cities, but such questions do absolutely nothing to blunt the emotional impact of this sort of war, whose heart-wrenching images are going to widen an already fearful chasm between the Jewish state and the peoples of the region in which it has yet to win acceptance. For its own sake as well as for the sake of the people of Gaza, it must stop."

That paragraph could have been written (and probably was written) about any Israeli/Arab clash of the last quarter century. I'm sure it'll be written again in the next one. I wrote about some of this in September 2006, and though my view has evolved on a few items I think those earlier posts have held up well. If you're curious, you can read more here, here, and here. Two years from now, I'll probably be linking to them again.

The inauguration: yes, I got up at 1:30 am Tokyo time to watch it. Despite how galactically stage-managed these things are, I found it moving. Former president Bush managed to include a last, characteristic parting shot, saying, "Good speech, Mr. President," following President Obama's speech. I'm sure in Bush's conscious mind, he was being gracious by calling the Obama Mr. President. In fact, he was indulging himself by implying that he was qualified to opine on the merits of the speech he'd just listened to. In Japan, it's considered rudely presumptuous for a student to complement a professor on the quality of a lecture. Instead, one merely says, "Thank you, I learned a lot." "Godspeed, Mr. President" would have been the equivalent for a man given to mangling English as ruthlessly as the former president. Regardless, Bush's last self-indulgence was redeemed by the sight of his helicopter, mercifully extracting him from the capital of the nation he's done so much to damage.

Off politics for a moment: on Friday, I got to see a screening of the Rain Fall movie, out on April 25 in Japan. It was a lot of fun; more thoughts and information here. And if you'd like to say hello in person while I'm on the road promoting Fault Line, out on March 10, here's the tour schedule, which includes Phoenix, Los Angeles (Pasadena, Thousand Oaks, LA), San Diego, Sacramento, San Francisco Bay Area (Menlo Park and San Mateo), Houston, Indianapolis (Carmel), Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Washington DC (Bethesda and Baileys Crossroads), New York City. Hope to see you at one of the events.

Finally, in case you missed it, here's your Jon Stewart fix. Without Fox news, comedy would be much the poorer.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Fox News Fear Imbalance

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Czar Kudzu

2008-12-17T02:29:00.000-08:00

Recently I've noticed a trend where the government, apparently dissatisfied with normal channels, insists on coming up with some special means for accomplishing what the normal channels were always intended to do. I first started ruminating on this when various pundits and politicians began calling for a bailout and restructuring of Detroit's Big Three, a process that sounded to me remarkably like Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. Restructuring and refocusing a company while eliminating unsustainable obligations is the purpose of Chapter 11. So why reinvent the wheel? Why isn't the existing system adequate?

Then I started thinking about the Military Commissions Act, which created special tribunals to try accused terrorists. Did this mean existing courts were no longer adequate to protect society and dispense justice? And if they were adequate, why invent a new system of parallel courts?

(Actually, that last question might be a tad naive).

And we're always appointing someone "special envoy" to the Middle East or somewhere. Why do we need a special envoy? Isn't diplomacy, even (especially?) the most difficult diplomacy, why we have a State Department?

Remember when a year and a half ago, President Bush created a "War Czar?" The guy, Lt. General Douglas Lute, seems to have disappeared, but what was he supposed to do in the first place? If the Defense Department can't manage a war, what exactly is its purpose?

Then I read this excellent article in the Wall Street Journal on all our different "czars." President-Elect Obama is going to have (in addition to the usual Secretary of Energy) an energy czar; in addition to the usual Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, an urban affairs czar; in addition to the Secretary of the Treasury and a Council of Economic Advisers and a National Economic Council, an economy czar. And of course we have a drug czar and a Drug Enforcement Agency, the FBI apparently being inadequate to the task of fighting drug crime.

All the war on drugs duplication and the war's concomitant ongoing success (insert sarcasm emoticon here) makes me wonder: how high is the correlation between the severity of a policy failure and the amount of governmental duplication dedicated to it? Pretty high, I'll bet. Whether the correlation is also causal is debatable, but I have a theory: the more certain a policy is to fail, the more politically imperative it is for politicians to appear to assault the underlying problem with czars and commissions and special overseers. Then, when the inevitable failure occurs, the politician can say, "But look how much I was doing! No one could have done more."

In a sane world, we would simply end drug prohibition the way we sanely ended alcohol prohibition (after insanely criminalizing it). But because that route apparently is politically untenable, politicians have to do something to pretend they're really trying. So they create new positions and new departments. In politics, I suppose, the appearance of trying is almost as good as actual success.

Drug Czars, Special Envoys to the Middle East, War Czars... if duplication is predictive of failure, Obama's emerging org chart is less than comforting.

P.S. Here's some follow-up to my previous post, The True Price of the Dark Side.

First, here's the bipartisan "Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody." Anyone still clinging to the fiction that Abu Ghraib was just a "few bad apples" should read this report, which makes plain that what happened at AG was ordered by the Bush Administration. You'd think a bipartisan Senate report proving the White House guilty of war crimes would be heavily covered in the mainstream media. You'd be wrong.

Second, here's some information on various flaming leftists -- such as 40+ retired Generals and Flag Admirals -- who are opposed to torture.

Third, here's a recent Washington Post op-ed by an Air Force interrogator, whose new book, "How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq," is available at your local bookstore. The article, which condemns torture on moral and practical grounds and is based on searing experience, is well worth reading.

Finally, a common thread I've noticed in many of the pro-torture arguments I've been receiving is a focus on the exception to the exclusion of the rule. I've noticed this tendency before in other contexts and it's always struck me as poor reasoning. A couple examples:

"I'm thinking about taking up judo. But who would win between a judo master and a karate master?"

I don't know that the question is wholly irrelevant to what art you might want to pursue. But are you planning on becoming a master? Do you think you might face unarmed combat against another master? If the answers are no and no, why is this question the foundation of the inquiry?

"I've written a manuscript. Can't I just send it directly to a publisher without an agent representing me?"

I know of at least one such success story (Judith Guest's "Ordinary People"), which proves that the un-agented route is at least possible. But is it *likely* to work? Does it make sense to try to get published in a way that almost never works, while ignoring the route that is proven most likely to work?

Similarly, when it comes to torture, proponents have a tendency to focus on the Ticking Suitcase Nuke in Manhattan scenario, something that so far as I know has never happened and the necessary facts of which are highly unlikely, while simultaneously ignoring the actual, demonstrated costs on torture, including false intel and a propaganda bonanza for our enemies.

In all cases, the thinking at issue strikes me as so tendentious that I suspect something subterranean is motivating it. As Dox might say (for those of you have read "The Last Assassin"): "This isn't really about hunting, is it?"

The True Price of the "Dark Side"

2008-11-29T12:57:00.000-08:00

In the course of researching my next novel, I just binged on three excellent documentaries: "Standard Operating Procedure," which examines the events at Abu Ghraib through photos, video, and interviews with many of the soldiers convicted of torturing prisoners there; Best Documentary Oscar-winning "Taxi to the Dark Side," which examines America's move to what Vice President Cheney called "the dark side" through the imprisonment, torture, and murder at Bagram Airbase of Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver; and "Torturing Democracy," which examines the Bush administration's embrace of "alternative interrogation techniques" and the effect of that embrace on our democracy (available on the TD website either by DVD or as a free download).

Several things came to mind while I watched these documentaries.

First, what will be the continuing impact of these photos and videos--of Arab men being shackled, beaten, set upon by dogs, stripped, forced to masturbate, forced to mime homosexual acts--on jihadist recruitment? I'm not talking only about how many new suicide bombers these photos and videos will create; I'm talking also about the size and depth of the pool of sympathizers without whose support or at least acquiescence the bombers would be unable to function effectively. Whatever good might be accomplished by our overall efforts at counterterror, it's hard to imagine it'll outweigh the effect of what came out of Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and elsewhere.

Second, I was struck by how, in almost every photo and video of abuse, humiliation, and torture, the prisoners were hooded. It's well understood that covering a person's face is a highly effective way of denying his humanity (prisoners ascending the gallows or facing death by firing squad are hooded not as a mercy to the condemned, but as enablement to the executioner). Whatever "softening up" or security benefits the government believes might be accrued through hooding, the costs of the practice, in terms of increasing the likelihood of prisoner abuse, must be far greater.

Third, a thought experiment. If instead of American soldiers and Arab detainees, the photos and videos from Abu Ghraib were of American POWs and, say, Iranian guards, what would be the American reaction? Note the linguistic choices in the previous sentence, which would be automatic: Arabs are denied the dignity of being designated Prisoners of War. They're not even prisoners. They're merely "detainees" (I'm half-surprised we haven't started calling them "guests"). The Americans holding them are "soldiers"; were the shoe on the other foot, the enemy captors would doubtless receive the less exalted term, "guards." Would there be any debate about whether the practices revealed in the photos were "outrages upon human dignity," as prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and US law? Would we describe the practices as "abuse?" Or would they obviously, and rightly, be called "torture?" If Americans were taken against their will and spirited away by Iranian government forces, would we call the practice "rendering," or would we recognize it as "kidnapping?" Would we call the places to which Americans were secreted and where they were held without acknowledgment to their families or even to the Red Cross "detention centers?" Or would we call such a system a gulag?

Fourth, I marveled at the logical fallacy at the heart of our decision to "take the gloves off" and employ practices pioneered by the Spanish Inquisition (where waterboarding was known as the "tortura del agua," and sleep deprivation as the "tormentum insomnia"), and followed by the KGB, Communist Chinese, and North Koreans. All these illustrious forebears of ours employed the practices in question to elicit false *confessions,* yet we decided to employ them to elicit accurate *intelligence.* These are completely different goals, and I'm amazed that advocates of an embrace of such techniques could miss a point so fundamental. Call it your tax dollars at work.

It's common for rightists to justify America's embrace of the "dark side" by claiming that President Bush has kept the country safe. The claim strikes me as remarkably simplistic. If the temporal frame of reference begins on 9/11, and we ignore the unsolved anthrax attacks that came shortly after, and the geographical frame of reference is the territorial United States alone, then one might accurately claim America has been safe *up until now.* Whether the correlation between "the dark side" and our safety up until this point has a causal connection is far more debatable. Regardless, to me, "has kept us safe up until this point" has far too much the ring of Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time." It also makes me think of a parent who seems to be an excellent provider because he's financing all those provisions on a dozen maxed-out credit cards. The temporary comfort he's afforded his family will inevitably be wiped out by the unpayable bill they're all soon to receive. Watching these documentaries, you can't help but feel that bill is out there, and that soon enough, it will be horrifically presented to us. Even if you believe "the dark side" offers benefits, and you're willing to ignore what the dark side has cost us in terms of our own ideals and our image in the world, that bill, when it comes, will represent the dark side's true price.

America's Victory; California's Shame

2008-11-06T06:29:00.000-08:00

I went out last night for a celebration dinner here in Tokyo and it was gratifying to hear so many Japanese at the tables around me talking about Obama (the name is easy to pronounce in Japanese -- there's a Japanese village called Obama in Fukui prefecture, and they were partying hard yesterday).

My greatest pride as an American has to do with our ideals: that we are all created equal, that America is the land of opportunity, that anyone can achieve anything in America if he or she is willing to work hard enough. Obviously the nation has frequently fallen short of that ideal. But yesterday we lived it, and damn, does it feel good.

But my pride in America was leavened by shame for my adopted state, California. There, by a margin of about two percent, citizens voted to amend the state constitution to prohibit gays from marrying. I wrote about this issue a few days ago and don't have much to add here. I'll just say that the discrimination Californians institutionalized today will prove brief -- no more than a single generation, because young people seem not to share their elders' antiquated views on homosexuality -- and that a decade or two from now, we'll look back at what happened in California today the same way we look back at the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor, with the important difference that post-Pearl Harbor hysteria is relatively easy to understand, while the sources of the anti-gay hysteria that in the early 21st century motivated a prosperous and otherwise normal state to send a whole class of its citizens to the back of the bus will forever remain a mystery.

Back to the national election. No one can say for sure what kind of president Obama will be, but his judgment, temperament, and ability to put together a formidable campaign augur well. So does his refusal to deflect nonstop slurs without responding in kind. I hope that in defeat, Republicans will reflect on what cost them this election: a wholesale abandonment of principle, and the uselessness of baseless character attacks in obscuring that abandonment in the minds of a majority of voters. If Republicans can return to the arena once again confident enough of their principles to avoid campaigns based on demagoguery, America will be much the stronger for it, and so will the GOP.

But first the party has to emerge from denial. Here are a few items that might help.

First, as manifestly unqualified as I thought Sarah Palin was for national office, it seems things were even worse than I suspected. Yes, some of the news coming out now is score-settling. But not all of it. A party that tolerates this kind of candidate on its ticket cannot be taken seriously. One way by which we'll know how well Republicans are emerging from denial is whether Sarah Palin can make a serious run at the 2012 nomination.

During the last six weeks of the campaign, I received a fair amount of email from McCain backers who claimed the polls were wrong and McCain would be elected. I hope the people who made these claims will now reflect on the possibility that if they were mistaken about the polls, they might be mistaken on other matters, as well. And for anyone tempted to attribute Obama's landslide win to the ACORN bogeyman, you'd first have to explain how pre-election polls and the actual votes cast could track so closely. Surely ACORN is not quite so all-powerful as to have found a way to match up polling and actual votes.

Listening to President Bush's remarks after the election, I was struck -- not for the first time -- by the president's argument that "the most important responsibility of the US government is protecting the American people... this commitment will remain steadfast under our next commander-in-chief." I hope Bush's retirement will mean the end of this kind of inaccurate, dangerous, and hypocritical rhetoric. Inaccurate, because the Constitution doesn't provide for the importance of Bush's claimed "most important responsibility." In fact, what the Constitution requires the president to swear an oath to protect is the Constitution: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Dangerous, because in implying that the government might have to choose between protecting the people and protecting the Constitution, this kind of rhetoric creates an unnecessary temptation and a a possible excuse. Hypocritical, because the party of rugged individualism and personal responsibility ought not to demean itself by suggesting people are so in need of its protection that the Constitution comes second.

As for the ridiculous, militaristic, and unconstitutional notion of "our commander-in-chief," President Obama would do the country a service by telling America that he is not "our" commander-in-chief. America doesn't need a caudillo, pseudo or real, and the commander-in-chief fetish could very usefully be retired along with our outgoing president.

I'll spend the next four years rooting for the return of a principled Republican party, and, while, wishing our new president very well indeed, doing what I can to help keep him honest. He's demonstrated great promise, and, on FISA, also a willingness to break his promises. He'll need not just our support, but also our honest criticism.

But for the moment... what a day. And what a country.

P.S. With the election done and another novel deadline approaching, I'm going to try hard to get my blogging addiction a little more under control. We'll see if my efforts are successful. If you miss me, stop by my discussion forum and say hello. It's also a good place to find out the latest on Fault Line, including excerpts and contests, and on the Rain Fall movie, premiering in Tokyo on April 27th. Hope to see you there.

No on Prop 8

2008-10-30T20:23:00.000-07:00

If you don't know already, there's a ballot initiative in California, to be voted on this Tuesday, November 4, that would amend the California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry. Here's the text:

ELIMINATES RIGHT OF SAME-SEX COUPLES TO MARRY. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT

Changes California Constitution to eliminate right of same-sex couples to marry. Provides that only a marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

Fiscal Impact: Over the next few years, potential revenue loss, mainly sales taxes, totaling in the several tens of millions of dollars, to state and local governments. In the long run, likely little fiscal impact to state and local governments.

I've written about this issue several times before. For anyone who wants more background, here are a few links: "Cynical or Clinical?," "Those Crazy Conservative Activists Again," "Homosexual Acts are Immoral?," "Activist Courts...?," and "Gay Marriage, Flag Burning, and Congress Again."

What's fascinating about opposition to gay-marriage is how unprincipled it is. I've heard every argument against preventing gays from marrying, and none of them, not even the ones based on the bible, holds up to logical scrutiny. Opposition to gay marriage is based on fear and ignorance, precisely the same kind of fear and ignorance that once led people to oppose interracial marriage -- indeed, the same kind of fear and ignorance that once led people to oppose integration generally.

If you oppose gay marriage, try to imagine that as strongly as you feel, that's just how strongly backers of Jim Crow felt in the 1950's and 1960's. Segregationists, who are now recognized as the racists they were, felt just as strongly about blacks marrying whites as you feel about two men or two women marrying each other. They had their arguments, as you have yours. And yet, looking back, we know they were wrong. When people look back at supporters of Prop 8, they'll recognize that Prop 8 supporters were wrong, too.

Here are some examples of the arguments and tactics put forth by pro-Prop 8 forces:

Eventually, gays will win the right to marry, just as blacks won the right to sit anywhere they wanted on a bus. Marriage equality will be both a consequence and a cause of society's increasing acceptance that homosexuality is exactly as abnormal, evil, destructive, wrong, and immoral as left-handedness. It's just a question of how long it'll take, and how much pain will be suffered in the meantime by gays who want nothing other than to share the basic human right to make a lifelong, legally recognized, publicly sanctioned, monogamous commitment to the person they love.

Here's something else to imagine: how you would feel if society denied you this basic right? Or if society told you you could have a few parts of it, but that you couldn't call it a marriage, because that word is special and reserved for people who are different from you?

A generation from now, your children or grandchildren will ask you how you voted on the current initiative to exclude gays from this fundamental right. You have a chance today to tell them you voted against it -- that you voted against fear and ignorance and discrimination and hate.

A handful of votes is going to make the difference on this one. Be one of those votes. And don't just make the right decision to vote "No" on Prop 8. Call a friend. Talk to a family member. Help them make the right decision, too. And, if you want to feel especially good about being on the right side of history, donate to the No on Prop 8 campaign. You don't need to live in California to donate (the Mormon Church has given about $20 million to pro-Prop 8 forces) and there are no limits on how much you can give. I've donated twice already, and just donated my next Tokyo speaking fee, as well. Why not do the same? You'll be proud you did, and your children and grandchildren will be proud of you, too.

The Myth of Equivalence

2008-10-30T06:31:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of lively conversation about the election on my website discussion board, some of which caused me to write the following post on the reflexive notion of political equivalence.

I have as little patience with people who suggest there's no big difference between the parties as I do with people who see their side as perfect and the other as the personification of evil. These stances seem dramatically different, but I would argue they're equally facile.

Part of what makes politics suck so much is that you have to get over the fact that neither side is doing, nor will ever do, what you think the country really needs (at least that's how it is for me). And then, within that disappointment, you have to decide which one is less worse, hold your nose, and vote.

But there's no logical reason to believe one side can't be *a lot* less worse. For reasons I've gone into at length elsewhere, at this point it's clear to me that the Republican party has been absorbed by people who make the Democrats seem a lot less worse.

Today I watched a video of Joe the Plumber trying to argue why a vote for Obama was the same as a vote for death to Israel. The guy who criticized Obama for tap dancing better than Sammy Davis Jr. was himself tap dancing like a madly inept politician. I couldn't help laughing at his hypocrisy... and then my laughter died away, because I thought, "Why the hell do I have to listen to this third-rate demagogue? Why do I have to engage his millimeter-deep opinions? Here's why: because the Republicans would rather scare people with this kind of crap than have a substantive conversation about which of our adversaries in the world we should talk to, and when, whether and how. The Joe the Plumber approach -- the "Appeasement!" "White flag of surrender!" "Death to Israel!" approach -- precludes that conversation, and we lose a lot because of it. When thoughtlessness drowns out thought, it's bad for America. And if there's one thing Republicans don't want you to do, it's think. That's why they try so hard to make you afraid.

I could go on. Okay, I will: there's no such thing as a completely socialist country, and no such thing as a completely capitalist one. But instead of having a real conversation about best practices -- that is, how much government involvement makes sense, where, why, and how -- the debate is stifled by this juvenile Republican horseshit of suggesting a 35% top marginal bracket is triple-distilled American capitalism and a 38% is the resurrection of Karl Marx. All at the very moment the government is buying up $250 billion worth of banks and getting set to operate them. We need a serious conversation on this and a dozen other subjects, and the reason the conversation can't happen is because Republicans insist on name-calling and fear-mongering instead.

As long as these tactics continue to work for Republicans, they'll keep using them, no matter how much damage they do to America in the process. This is why I think it's so critical that the Republicans be decisively turned out of power on November 4. There's no other way they'll abandon their current tactics, and return to their small government, fiscal responsibility, realistic foreign policy, respect-for-privacy principles. If they return to those principles, and make an honest, non-demagogic case for them, they'll have my vote again. Not before.

P.S. Scott Horton of Harper's is one of the best bloggers, and best thinkers, around. Today he had two particularly excellent pieces on related subjects: "The New McCarthyism," on the continued degeneration of the political right; and "Best of the '08 Campaign V: Northern Exposure," on Sarah Palin's far-out religious beliefs and radical political associations. The links on Palin are particularly damning, particularly in light of her refusal to answer questions at even a single press conference. Anyone interested in facts, transparency, and independent inquiry will enjoy these articles. If you feel you already know Palin despite her newness, her refusal to release her medical records, and her refusal to answer questions at even a single press conference... well, facts, transparency, and independent inquiry probably aren't your bag anyway.

Cheers,
Barry

Rightwing Surrender Monkeys

2008-10-27T22:53:00.000-07:00

God, how much cognitive dissonance can the right bear? Last week, al Qaeda endorsed John McCain, and now... now... the Bush administration is waving a white flag of surrender and appeasing the Taliban! Say it ain't so, George...

Today's Wall Street Journal reports that the Bush administration, with General Petraeus's support, plans to talk to elements of the Taliban, the group, you'll remember, that used to shelter al Qaeda. But I'm confused... isn't talking to your enemies appeasement and waving a white flag of surrender and all that?

Repeat after me:

When terrorists endorse Obama, it means they want Obama to win. When terrorists endorse McCain, it means they want Obama to win.

When Obama proposes incursions into Pakistan in pursuit of al Qaeda, it's naive and dangerous. When the Bush administration actually carries out such a policy, it's sending a tough message.

When Democrats propose talking to our enemies, it's waving a white flag of surrender and appeasement. When Republicans talk to our enemies, it's tactical.

Got that?

When a political movement is at home in the face of such massive hypocrisy, it has lost touch not just touch with its principles, but with reality, as well.

Define irony: the party of small government presides over a half-trillion dollar deficit and a ten trillion dollar national debt. For this state of affairs the party of personal responsibility blames everyone but itself. And the selfsame party's hacks then write books with titles like "Liberalism is a Mental Disease."

If I put these characters in a novel, no one would believe they were real.

Cynical or Clinical?

2008-10-27T02:43:00.000-07:00

Of all the things I learned as a psychology major in college, possibly the most memorable -- and widely applicable -- was a joke. It goes like this:

A woman shows up at a psychiatrist's office. "How can I help you?" the psychiatrist asks.

"I'm dead," the woman tells him.

"Of course you're not dead," the psychiatrist assures her. "You're right here, talking to me."

"No, I'm dead," she insists.

So the psychiatrist ushers her into his office and spends hours trying to convince her that she's not dead. Finally, he gets her to accept that dead people don't bleed. Whereupon, he whips out a pin and stabs her in the back of the hand. The woman grabs her injured hand and watches in amazement as blood wells from the wound.

"Son of a bitch," she says. "Dead people do bleed!"

If this sounds familiar to you, it's because it's a perfect encapsulation of Republican ideology.

Ideology means a way of interpreting the world -- that is, a worldview. The concept is related to, but distinct from, policy. Policies are the means you choose to achieve a desired outcome, and the policies you favor will be driven by your ideology. For example, a CEO whose ideology is that people are best motivated by fear will implement a policy of screaming at his subordinates. A parent whose ideology is that experience is the best teacher will let his child make mistakes. "Money makes the world go round" is an ideology. Ditto, "All you need is love." In politics, "People are driven primarily by a desire for freedom" is an ideology. So is, "People are driven primarily by a desire for security."

Normal people develop their ideologies by interaction with the world. We learn from other people's ideologies (most of all, from our parents'), observe connections, make assumptions about cause and effect, test those assumptions, keep what is useful, reject what is useless. This process is both inevitable and desirable: the world is too big and complex to deal with in the absence of some sort of organizing framework.

But because we invest so much in the development of our ideology, it takes on a value independent of the facts the ideology is supposed to help us interpret. The best way to mitigate this danger is to be aware of it, and to continue to adjust our ideology to new data. People who are unable or unwilling to recognize the danger of an ossified ideology tend to be ineffective, and, in certain positions, dangerous. Facts, after all, are stubborn things. A deeply held belief that you can fly does nothing to suspend the operation of gravity.

I know plenty of people whose ideology differs from my own. Yet I can still engage them, and respect them, because they've arrived at their ideology by applying it to the facts of the real world (it's not a coincidence that the people I'm describing believe in science). Though our ideologies (and the policies that grow out of them) differ in various particulars, they are alike at the foundation: we believe in enlightenment values such as logic, empiricism, and rationality. In other words, our ideology is built on the assumed primacy of reason.

Which is why I feel so alienated from what the Republican party has become. It's not that I disagree with professed Republican policies; in fact, if I were willing to swallow Republican platitudes about small government and the like without first chewing, I might believe the party's ideology was a close enough match for my own. The problem is, the disparity between Republican platitudes and Republican practices has become so stark that the only way to make sense of the schism is to accept that the Republican party has abandoned reason as a fundamental organizing principle.

There's so much evidence of the Republican flight from reason that it's hard to know where to start. But al Qaeda's recent endorsement of John McCain is as good a place as any. I wrote about this development last week, and the angry responses I've been receiving have been in line with Republican talking points. What it comes down to is this: when a terrorist organization (Hamas) endorses Obama, it means the organization favors Obama. When a terrorist organization (al Qaeda) endorses McCain, it means the organization favors Obama.

A person whose worldview is predicated on reason will recognize that such a conclusion is "an argument that proves too much" -- that is, that they have structured their beliefs so as to arrive at the same conclusion whether the data is X or the opposite of X. A reasoning person will understand something is wrong here, and reexamine her premises. But Republicans are unwilling, or unable, to grasp the contradiction inherent in their position. Their worldview demands an outcome: "terrorists favor Obama" -- and they then fit the facts to conform to that worldview, ignoring elementary problems of logic along the way.

The McCain campaign's most recent set of talking points provides another fascinating example. You can argue that Obama is a socialist. But you can't argue that Obama is a socialist but that McCain -- who also just voted for a $700 billion financial sector bailout, including $250 billion to nationalize banks -- is not. Nor can you argue that Obama is a socialist, but that McCain's hero, Teddy Roosevelt, was not.

Although really, could any of the people who are fulminating about Obama being a communist, Marxist, or socialist actually define these terms if pressed? If you're one of the people who's been shouting that "Obama is a socialist," try this test at home: explain to yourself what socialism means. Name three countries that you would define as socialist, and explain how their system of government differs from that of the US in such a way that their system is socialist and ours is not. And if, after performing this test, you realize you don't have a good understanding of the term, ask yourself why you're so comfortable using it to justify your position. By the way, these private tests -- you don't even need to share the results -- are part of what it means to adhere to an enlightenment ideology.

Speaking of the "Socialist!" charge, part of what disturbs me about modern Republicanism is the way its adherents use labels, cliches, and other shorthand as substitutes for thought. Think about the following Republican talking points. Do they foster understanding? Or prevent it?

Terrorist. Communist. Marxist. Socialist. Arab. Muslim. Spreading the wealth around. ACORN. We're all Georgians now. I'll follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell. I'll be Hamas' worst nightmare.

If you haven't had a chance to read Robert Draper's "The Making (and Remaking) of McCain" in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, I highly recommend it. Here's the way a participant described the campaign's efforts to decide how McCain should respond to the news in September of impending financial calamity:

“We presented McCain with three options. Continue offering principles from afar. A middle ground of engaging while still campaigning. Then the third option, of going all in. The consensus was that we could stay out or go in — but that if we’re going in, we should go in all the way. So the thinking was, do you man up and try to affect the outcome, or do you hold it at arm’s length? And no, it was not an easy call.”

The lack of thought behind all those cliches is stunning. No wonder the campaign wound up bungling McCain's response to the crisis -- their verbiage buffered them so effectively from actual thought. If this is the way they engage with reality during the campaign, how might we expect them to govern?

The millimeter-deep labels are also part of what helps Republicans justify their hatred and bigotry. "Liberals hate real Americans that work and achieve and believe in God." (What's a liberal? What kind of hatred? Who are the real Americans? Etc). "Obama and liberals are anti-American." (What's a liberal? What does it mean to be anti-American? How are the two connected?). "Western Pennsylvania is the most patriotic, most God-loving part of America." (What does it mean to be patriotic? How is that quality found more in western Pennsylvania than anywhere else, and where, specifically, is it found less?)

"Who is Barack Obama?" is also a frequent refrain from McCain and Palin themselves and from their supporters. But how can you claim not to know a man who's been on the national stage for two years; who was vetted by both the press and the opposition research arm of the Clinton machine during a long, brutal primary campaign; who has written two books, one a memoir, the other an examination of his political philosophy; and who has given countless interviews, while simultaneously feeling you do know Sarah Palin, who almost no one outside Alaska had heard of until just two months ago, and who since then has refused to do a single press conference? A reasoning person would examine this "I don't know him, but I do know her" contradiction and seek to discover its true cause. A Republican, apparently, would not.

There's more. A reasoning person would recognize the contradiction in attempts to mock Obama for being a celebrity and for the "cult-like atmosphere" that surrounds him, on the one hand, and rightwing gushing over Palin's "starbursts" and "star power" and the like on the other. Ditto for the "Obama is The One" attacks, and the belief expressed by Palin supporters that she has been ordained as the Republican VP candidate by God, in part because God wants Alaska to be a refuge for survivors from the lower 48 during the End Days.

Then of course there's the right's spluttering rage about William Ayers and Jeremiah right. You can't argue that these relationships doom Obama by guilt by association while simultaneously ignoring the Palins' relationship with the Alaskan Independence Party.

Gay rights and marriage equality is another key area that exposes the Republican flight from reason. There isn't a single principled argument that can be leveled against letting gays marry as straights do, and Republican attempts to distinguish between anti-miscegenation laws of the Jim Crow era and anti-gay laws of today are incoherent. Recognizing that logic will not be an ally in their arguments against gay marriage, many rightists fall back on religion. But even here, there is no principled application. Recently on my discussion board, a poster opined that homosexuality was a sin because the bible says so. He was referring to Leviticus 18:22: "Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable."

Citing an episode of The West Wing, someone asked him about Exodus 35:2, which provides, "For six days, work is to be done, but the seventh day shall be your holy day, a Sabbath of rest to the LORD. Whoever does any work on it must be put to death." The poster's response? You have to be a biblical scholar to understand such matters, you can't cite a television show. In other words: facts don't count when they come from other than my preferred sources, and logic is suspended when its application would indicate an uncomfortable result. (I've received similar responses when I post clips from Comedy Central: rightists ignore the facts cited and profess shock that I would cite a comedy show to make a point).

True, I'm no biblical scholar. But I do know that if you articulate the principle that the bible is literally true and infallible, then you must be willing to apply that principle consistently, and forgo the right to cherry-pick the provisions you like and eschew the ones you don't. You don't need to be a scholar to understand this. You only need to adhere to the primacy of reason.

Some of the Republicans who've been responding to my posts have claimed polls showing the race breaking toward Obama are lies or don't matter. This is precisely the mentality I'm talking about. You can argue that the polls are somehow inaccurate, or that because of various fundamentals the polls will ultimately swing the other way. But saying without more that the polls are irrelevant (as, indeed, Palin herself has done) is a perfect example of a belief system so calcified that it's become impervious to facts. (Admittedly, I'm getting less of this now, with Obama's lead expanding, than I was a couple weeks ago. Which is encouraging: it suggests denial isn't necessarily an absolute condition, but rather something that's merely relatively impervious to facts.)

Probably the most telling litmus test of the Republican flight from reason is McCain's selection of Sarah Palin. You can argue that Obama lacks sufficient experience to be president. But you can't also argue that Palin's experience is adequate. I know, I know... all that Wasilla executive experience is what makes the difference. But how can time spent in Wasilla city hall count for something, and time spent in the Illinois senate count for nothing? Both of these things cannot be true, and a reasoning person will reexamine his premises rather than accept a contradiction. Reexamining premises, by the way, means inquiring more deeply into the nature of the jobs in question. Comedy Central did exactly that, and here's what they found:

By experience, by the way, I'm not only referring to Palin's scant time in government (that could arguably be an advantage), but to her lack of curiosity, and even, apparently, thought. Everything Palin knows about Iraq, she's had crammed into her during the last few weeks, and yet she's convinced that Obama's policy is a "white flag of surrender" (another one of the those substitutes for thought again). There's a term for people who adhere so confidently to an ideology in the absence of or in contravention of facts: true believer. I don't see how anyone who believes an ideology should be forged against facts can want another one of those in the White House.

I might feel sorry for Palin, but though her performance has been pitiful, she doesn't deserve pity. By her own admission, she didn't blink when McCain asked her to join the ticket. What level of narcissistic hubris is involved when someone (especially someone this inexperienced) doesn't even blink before accepting a responsibility like the vice presidency? If she were a layman who had without blinking agreed to perform heart surgery, or to repair a nuclear reactor, or to step into an air traffic control booth to direct landing planes, I wouldn't feel sorry for her -- I'd be outraged at the risk she imposed on my country, my family, and me, all in the name of her own blind narcissism.

There are so many more:

Palin accuses the mainstream media of wanting her to "shut up," while refusing to do a single press conference.

The right fulminates about The Angry Left, in the face of innumerable videos like these:

Cindy McCain claims that Obama is running the "dirtiest campaign in history." 'Nuf said.

John McCain claims to be running an honorable campaign even as his robocalls are being done by the same company that did the ones George Bush used in South Carolina in 2000 to make people believe McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock -- a campaign McCain denounced as deeply dishonorable.

McCain claims to be able to reach across the aisle, yet can't even look at Obama during a debate -- in fact, can't even bring himself to say Obama's name.

McCain and the rightwing echo chamber rant about ACORN and registration fraud "destroying the fabric of democracy," while ignoring actual voter suppression.

I'll save what might be the most obvious example of the Republican loss of its faculty to reason for last: the party that currently presides over a half-trillion dollar deficit and a ten-trillion dollar debt continues to claim to be the party of small government. Small government used to be the centerpiece of Republican ideology; today, it's a pathetic mantra, more akin to whistling past the graveyard than any species of coherent principle.

There are many more examples of the Republican flight from reason, and I'd welcome them from readers. Particularly from rightists, whose points, I expect, will unintentionally prove my own.

I disagree with many Democratic policies and with many aspects of Democratic ideology. But these differences are nothing compared to my alienation from a party composed of people who have rejected logic and reason as organizing principles of life. My primary concern in this election is to eject from government politicians who favor faith over facts. Once that goal is accomplished, I'll look forward to doing whatever I can to hold Democrats accountable (as I've already done with Obama and his betrayal of campaign promises on FISA). And I'll continue to encourage principled Republicans to purge the party of enlightenment-rejectionists and to return to the small government, balanced budgets, modest foreign policy, individual freedom ideology that characterized the party before it was hijacked by the current crew of flat-earthers, who have more in common with a religious cult than they do with a modern political party.