Waterboarding is Torture… Period

by Malcolm Nance at smallwarsjournal.com

“We live at a time where Americans, completely uninformed by an incurious media and enthralled by vengeance-based fantasy television shows like “24”, are actually cheering and encouraging such torture as justifiable revenge for the September 11 attacks. Having been a rescuer in one of those incidents and personally affected by both attacks, I am bewildered at how casually we have thrown off the mantle of world-leader in justice and honor. Who we have become? Because at this juncture, after Abu Ghraieb and other undignified exposed incidents of murder and torture, we appear to have become no better than our opponents.

With regards to the waterboard, I want to set the record straight so the apologists can finally embrace the fact that they condone and encourage torture.”

“…”

“Once at SERE and tasked to rewrite the Navy SERE program for the first time since the Vietnam War, we incorporated interrogation and torture techniques from the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia into the curriculum. In the process, I studied hundreds of classified written reports, dozens of personal memoirs of American captives from the French-Indian Wars and the American Revolution to the Argentinean ‘Dirty War’ and Bosnia. There were endless hours of videotaped debriefings from World War Two, Korea, Vietnam and Gulf War POWs and interrogators. I devoured the hundreds of pages of debriefs and video reports including those of then Commander John McCain, Colonel Nick Rowe, Lt. Dieter Dengler and Admiral James Stockdale, the former Senior Ranking Officer of the Hanoi Hilton. All of them had been tortured by the Vietnamese, Pathet Lao or Cambodians. The minutiae of North Vietnamese torture techniques was discussed with our staff advisor and former Hanoi Hilton POW Doug Hegdahl as well as discussions with Admiral Stockdale himself. The waterboard was clearly one of the tools dictators and totalitarian regimes preferred.”

A Culture-Setting Intelligentsia

Responsibility and War Guilt – Noam Chomsky interviewed by Gabriel Matthew Schivone @ zmag.org

“Out of this group developed an ideology of technocratic planning. In industry it was called ‘scientific management’. It developed in intellectual life with a concept of what was called a ‘responsible class’ of technocratic, serious intellectuals who could solve the world’s problems rationally, and would have to be protected from the ‘vulgar masses’ who might interfere with them. And it goes right up until the present.

Just how realistic this is, is another question, but for the class of technical intellectuals, it’s a very attractive conception that, ‘We are the rational, intelligent people, and management and decision-making should be in our hands.’

Actually, as I’ve pointed out in some of the things I’ve written, it’s very close to Bolshevism. And, in fact, if you put side-by-side, say, statements by people like Robert McNamara and V.I. Lenin, it’s strikingly similar. In both cases there’s a conception of a vanguard of rational planners who know the direction that society ought to go and can make efficient decisions, and have to be allowed to do so without interference from, what one of them, Walter Lippmann, called the ‘meddlesome and ignorant outsiders’ , namely, the population, who just get in the way.”

No excuse not to try

Bringing Die-hard War Supporters and Feckless War Opponents to Their Knees
by Walter C. Uhler @ OpEdNews

‘To that end, we might follow the suggestion of Harper’s Garret Keizer and begin to prepare for executing a nation-wide strike. Sound impractical? Consider Keizer’s October 2007 Harper’s account of Danes saving Jews during World War II: “In 1943 the Danes managed to save 7,200 of their 7,800 Jewish neighbors from the Gestapo. They had no blogs, no television, no text messaging – and very little time to prepare. They passed their apartment keys to the hunted on the streets. They formed convoys to the coast. An ambulance driver set out with a phone book, stopping at any address with a Jewish-sounding name. No GPS for directions. No excuse not to try.” ‘

What’s our excuse?

A WARNING FROM HISTORY

by John W. Dower @ http://www.bostonreview.net/BR28.1/dower.html

“There is one “lesson” from my own field of Japanese history that I find increasingly difficult to put out of mind these days, and that concerns the road to war that began in the early 1930s for Japan and only ended in 1945. Until recently, historians used to explain this disaster in terms of Japan’s “backwardness” and “semifeudal” nature. The country had all these old warrior traditions. It wasn’t a democracy—and, of course, democracies don’t wage aggressive war. More recent studies, however, cast Japan’s road to war in a different and more terrifying light.

Why “terrifying”? First, much recent scholarship suggests that it was the modern rather than “backward” aspects of Japanese society and culture that enabled a hawkish leadership to mobilize the country for all-out war. Modern mass communications enabled politicians and ideologues to whip up war sentiment and castigate those who criticized the move to war as traitors. Modern concerns about external markets and resources drove Japan into Manchuria, China, and Southeast Asia. Modern weaponry carried its own technological imperatives. Top-level planners advanced up-to-date theories about mobilizing the entire resources of the country (and surrounding areas) for “total war.” Sophisticated phrasemakers pumped out propaganda about defending the homeland and promoting “coexistence and co-prosperity” throughout Asia. Cultures of violence, cultures of militarism, cultures of unquestioning obedience to supreme authority in the face of national crisis—all of this was nurtured by sophisticated organs of propaganda and control. And, in retrospect, none of this seems peculiarly dated or peculiarly “Japanese” today.

The other aspect that is so terrifying to contemplate is that virtually every step of the way, the Japanese leaders who concluded that military solutions had become unavoidable were very smart and very proud of their technical expertise, their special knowledge, their unsentimental “realism” in a threatening world. Many of these planners were, in our own phrase, “the best and the brightest.” We have detailed records of their deliberations and planning papers, and most are couched in highly rational terms. Each new escalation, each new extension of the empire, was deemed essential to the national interest. And even in retrospect, it is difficult to say at what point this so-called realism crossed the border into madness. But it was, in the end, madness. < “

The Empire Never Ended

It’s true.

“The Empire never ended.”

Vices are Not Crimes

“Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property.

Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another.

Vice s are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness.

Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.

In vices, the very essence of crime — that is, the design to injure the person or property of another — is wanting.

It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without a criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practises a vice with any such criminal intent. He practises his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others.

Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property; no such things as the right of one man to the control of his own person and property, and the corresponding and coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property.

For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be falsehood, or falsehood truth.”

Vices are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty by Lysander Spooner

Evading Reality

“In order effectively to distract people from reality, society has to provide them with pseudo-purposes, guaranteed purposeless. (Or, alternatively, with pseudo-frustrations, guaranteed permanent.) There are two main kinds of pseudo-purpose or -frustration; they are known as ‘earning a living’ and ‘bringing up a family’. They both provide a person with a cast-iron alibi for not doing anything he wants with his life. (He does not, of course, want to be free to do what he wants, so this is all right.)

Sane people regard an apparently purposeful activity as disinfected by numbers — i.e. if a sufficiently large number of people is involved, they feel sure that the outcome will be harmless to sanity, no matter how frenzied the labours may seem to be. The most large-scale examples are war and politics.

Into these activities, people allow themselves to enter with almost single-minded devotion.

Both war and politics have played a particularly helpful part in retarding the march of progress. In fact, the history of the human race is only comprehensible as the record of a species trying not to gain control of its environment.”

-Celia Green The Human Evasion, Ch. 4 The Society of the Sane

HA! That’s me

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

The School of Salamanca

Early proponents of popular sovereignty and anti-imperialism in jesuit Spain.

The conquest of America

In this period, in which colonialism began, Spain was the only European nation in which a group of intellectuals questioned the legitimacy of conquest rather than simply trying to justify it by traditional means.

Francisco de Vitoria began his analysis of conquest by rejecting “illegitimate titles”. He was the first to dare to question whether the bulls of Alexander VI known collectively as the Bulls of Donation were a valid title of dominion over the newly discovered territories. In this matter he did not accept the universal primacy of the emperor, the authority of the Pope (because the Pope, according to him, lacked temporal power), nor the claim of voluntary submission or conversion of the Native Americans. One could not consider them sinners or lacking in intelligence: they were free people by nature, with legitimate property rights. When the Spanish arrived in America they brought no legitimate title to occupy those lands and become their master.

Seen @ WikiPedia.

Welcome to Ell’s Island Paradise

Nice to see you.

I decided to keep this blog up for the remainder of the 2008 US Presidential race. Its purpose is to remind me to keep track of the faint spark of dissent that has finally appeared in the early debates, and especially in the recently concluded South Carolina GOP debate. I’m not sure the American people are ready to embrace the truth, and the challenges it poses, at this time – but at least they have had the opportunity to hear it.