Have things really gotten that bad? → U.S. citizens aren’t rising to the challenge → no functioning opposition party → John Kerry’s candidacy specifically

I haven’t been commenting much here on the upcoming United States presidential election. ’s an exception, and partially, an explanation.

“Kerry has managed to lay out a position so close to Bush’s on Iraq — stay the course, put an international ‘face’ on the occupation, keep the troops in place, and so on — that the two are nearly indistinguishable; and, on the Bush-Sharon position on the Middle East — keep the West Bank settlements, conduct extrajudicial assassinations of enemies, build the wall, and so on — just announced to an astounded world, he has, if anything, gone the president one better.”

This, from Tom Engelhardt, in an introduction to an article from The Nation by Jonathan Schell. Schell’s article tries to explain a Kerry who is backing away from his principled whistleblowing during the U.S. war in Vietnam, is trying to out-hawk Bush about Israel, and who promises to send even more U.S. troops to Iraq — as Kerry complains not that the war in Iraq is wrong and should not have been fought, but only that Dubya isn’t conducting it as well or as wisely as President Kerry would.

Schell’s conclusion: Kerry and the Democratic Party are really an anti-war party but it’s a secret (shhh!). They can’t tell anyone because anti-war candidates can’t win elections, so they have to keep it under cover until they’re in power. Once elected though, watch out! So if you’re against the war — vote for Kerry! He can’t tell you yet, but he’s really on your side.

It’s rare to see this sort of pathetic wishful thinking done explicitly because it sounds so absurd: Don’t look at what Kerry actually says or does, but look instead at what he might do if he really thinks like us and is just saying or doing those things as a ruse! (It makes me wonder if Schell’s article is a “modest proposal” style parody.) But as absurd as this argument is, it underlies the hopes of many people I know who have put on hold their potential opposition to U.S. policy because they think that maybe things will fix themselves after the elections.

Dubya thinks the U.S. should hand over sovereignty to Iraq on , no matter what. Kerry thinks this may be too early and the U.S. should be flexible on the date and wait until greater stability can be assured before returning sovereignty to the Iraqis.

Is this what you’ve been hearing on the news?

Here’s what’s going on: The Bush campaign has built a Bush “brand” that is associated with bold, decisive, confident, unambiguous leadership. It’s working pretty well for them. The Kerry campaign is trying to build a Kerry “brand” of a leader who is incisive, deliberate, cautious, realistic, and practical.

Both teams, I’m guessing, are counting on things continuing to go bad in Iraq. The Bush team hopes that the worse it gets, the more people will want a leader with his brand. The Kerry team hopes that people will get frustrated with the cowboy thing and want somebody with a cooler head in charge.

And so they take their positions on the sovereignty handoff. And so the issue gets framed: “do we hand over sovereignty then or wait for a more auspicious time.” And so the pundits debate.

And so the facts of the matter get lost. Because no “sovereignty” is being relinquished at all. In what will surely be a ceremony full of pomp, well-timed for live coverage in the U.S. news media, one U.S.-selected group of Iraqis will have their positions of quasi-authority dissolved and another set will be brought in. The new set won’t have any more “sovereignty” or democratic legitimacy than the last, but expect the U.S. news media to frame the ceremony the same way the politicians do.

I gave in to temptation and brought up the U.S. presidential election campaign here at The Picket Line. My position, in a nutshell: If you think Kerry’s the answer, you’re asking the wrong question.

A friend emailed me, saying he’d probably be voting for Kerry even though he isn’t too excited about it, and asking who I’d be voting for.

So I tried to give it a little more thought. My working theory is that paying attention to political campaigns helps the pests to thrive and lowers the general quality of discussion and debate as well as having a bad influence on public intelligence and behavior. But I suppose that I have no evidence that occasional indulgence is terribly harmful, so long as I take care not to make a habit of it.

I think I understand people who will be voting for Kerry and I can sympathize with them. Bush is a dangerous lunatic and people will have good reason to sleep better at night with him and his crew out of (as much) power. But I’m hoping to discourage people from thinking of this crisis we’re in as being something that might be over come , or that voting for or working for Kerry is the solution.

Only part of this is because Kerry is campaigning so hawkishly. He’s backing away from his most courageous stands during the Vietnam Era, running to Bush’s right on Israel, promising to send more troops to Iraq, and hoping to strengthen the Patriot Act. So be it. Still, there’s little I can imagine Kerry doing that I can’t imagine Bush doing worse.

Bush is a dangerous lunatic, but it’s not like this is a hidden secret that’s being suppressed or censored — it’s right out in the open. The liberal blog world keeps hoping that they’ll finally get The Big Scoop: the evidence on the scandal that proves for once and for all what they already know is going on. The big problem is that a majority of Americans don’t seem to mind the awful truth, or in fact to be willing to entertain its possibility — even if they had the evidence in black-and-white, they’d figure out some way to work around it (like the majority of Americans who continue to believe that the WMD-in-Iraq or Saddam-helping-bomb-the-WTC stories are either true or about as likely as not).

A case in point is the frequent assertion that “we do everything we can to avoid civilian casualties.” It’s a Fact with a capital F. Hawks can assert it confidently as the lead-in to something else, with the same tone they’d use to recite one of the laws of thermodynamics or a cliche about life (“there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” “nothing is certain but death and taxes,” “Rome wasn’t built in a day”). Nobody ever says of this assertion “are we really?” or “how exactly have we changed our policies to enforce this new standard?” or “how do we know how well we’re doing?”

The facts don’t agree well with this Official Motto, but the facts aren’t at issue! “We do everything we can to avoid civilian casualties” sounds like an assertion of fact but it doesn’t seem to ever be interpreted that way — it’s more like a creed or an assertion of pride or something.

I sometimes imagine that when these people are talking about America they’re really referring to a mythical place like Camelot that by definition does what is good and right. If U.S. troops recklessly bombed a civilian area and took out some children, that wasn’t really America but some faulty mortal incarnation of the Platonic ideal of America — of course we regret the loss of life but, let’s be reasonable, we’re America and America does everything possible to avoid civilian casualties, even if actual American troops don’t and actual American policy doesn’t bother to enforce or even monitor this.

Some people agree with what Dubya does (or they like his bad boy pose), some are more skeptical (or think his bad boy pose is too much like the bully who beat ’em up in school), but almost none have the appropriate sense of panic that our government with all of its power and its brutality (both potential and actual, since in Iraq we’re just cracking our knuckles compared to the real beating we could give out if we’re in the mood) is in the hands of a bunch of psychopaths.

The Dubya Squad seem to be particularly nutty in this regard, but Clinton and Gore and Kerry are just quantitatively less severely messed up, not qualitatively different. The problem is that we don’t choose honest and honorable people to run our state (which would be dangerous enough) but instead we choose them through these election spectacles which as far as I can see have evolved to select some of the worst examples of humanity we’ve got. Madness. I’m convinced that if we selected our congress like we select our juries we’d be better off than with the way we do it now.

The fact that people put up with this, and even celebrate it, means that the problem is bigger than who’s in the oval office. I don’t see any sense in wishing for a coup d’êtat by some handful of enlightened people who think like I do (fat chance anyway). My instincts are more democratic than that. I want to see the U.S. government dissolved or fundamentally reformed because we the people demand it — and not so much because of the change in government this would bring about, but because of the change in we the people this would signal.

The only happy ending I can see will be if suddenly, like a crack spreading across the ice, people snap and say to themselves “this is a buch of crap — why are we putting up with this?” No more mufflers in the form of ironic detachment, penetrating media analyses, above-the-fray commentary, or political expediency blinders. No illusions about term limits or campaign finance reform solving anything. Just a big “no more.”

Some people think real revolutionaries should vote for Bush because under the Dubya Squad things are most likely to get so dreadfully awful that folks will revolt. Myself, I’m less prepared to grit my teeth and hope things finally get so intolerable that people snap, and more eager to see people raise their standards so they realize that it’s already intolerable. After all, what are we likely to end up with after a revolution made by people with such low standards?

But this is also a reason why I’m not likely to get enthusiastic about Kerry, since he’s clearly an Anyone-But-Bush, a compromise, allegedly “electable,” a “moderate.” In other words this is more practice in lowering our standards and putting up with things we should practice not putting up with any more.

Anyone remember Abu Ghraib? Seems like only . Did you read about the recently-released Army investigation into the abuses there and elsewhere? No? It’s getting great reviews:

“effectively communicates the strategy of the military brass on the detainee affair, which is to focus blame on a few low-ranking personnel, shield all senior commanders from accountability, and deny or bury any facts that interfere with these aims… implausible and unacceptable.” ―Washington Post

“this 300-page whitewash… found no ‘systemic’ problem… The inspector general’s staff did not dig into the abuse cases, but merely listed them.” ―New York Times

The Democrats sure have been making a lot of noise lately. Maybe they’ll show some remorse for giving Dubya a blank check to invade Iraq, for signing off on the “Patriot Act” with a salute, and for the rest of their cowardly cave-ins by showing some purposeful outrage now. This shall not stand! The United States will not wink at torture or enshrine it as a policy and our Democratic Party will not allow this to happen!

Cue Democrats.

I’m happy to say that I watched none of the convention, and I look forward to to devoting just as little attention to that of the Republicans. But Zeynep Toufe of Under the Same Sun took a gander and failed “to hear the words ‘torture,’ ‘abuse,’ or ‘Abu Ghraib’ mentioned anywhere in the Democratic National Convention.”

Just to make sure it wasn’t just a bad sample, Zeynep searched through the transcripts of the speeches as they were posted to the Democrats’ website. None of the transcripts mentioned those words, including the speeches by:

  • Roberta Achtenberg
  • David Alston
  • Rep. Tammy Baldwin
  • Marcia Bristo
  • President Jimmy Carter
  • President Bill Clinton
  • Senator Hillary Clinton
  • Howard Dean
  • Rep. Rosa DeLauro
  • Rep. John Dingell
  • Shirley Franklin
  • Rep. Richard Gephardt
  • Vice-President Al Gore
  • Teresa Heinz Kerry
  • Barack Obama

She checked the transcripts again the following day, when ’s prime-time speakers were up — including the darling of the left Dennis Kucinich. Still no mention, so Zeynep kept adding to her list:

  • Senator Bob Graham
  • Governor Jennifer Granholm
  • Hon. Cheryl Jacques
  • Rep. Dennis Kucinich
  • Governor Bill Richardson
  • Al Sharpton

Did Kerry say anything about it in his acceptance speech? I’m not even going to look, so if you think I’m being cynical about the Democrats’ great hope, go check it out for yourself and you can triumphantly send me the transcript if my cynicism is unwarranted.

Make note also of the amount of time the Democrats are crowing about how bravely John Kerry fought in the Vietnam War and how little time they’re talking about how bravely John Kerry fought against the Vietnam War. Kerry’s decided to surrender in this battle to keep history from being rewritten by the Rambo Brigade — like he surrendered to Dubya and voted to give him the blank check — like he surrendered to Ashcroft and gave him the “Patriot Act” — and like he’s surrendering now when he could stand up and fight for something worth winning, rather than just a tarnished trophy like the presidency. It seems that his days of bravery are behind him.

“But,” says the donkey on my shoulder, “would you expect Bush to make any brave or good decisions in a second term? At least in Kerry you have someone who can point to an episode or two of genuinely honorable behavior in his life.”

Bush went from drunken ne’er-d’ye-well to much-less-of-a-fuck-up (though on a grander scale). Not anything to expect an award for, but at least a move in the right direction. Kerry on the other hand has effectively disowned his most honorable moment, glamorized the war that he should know as much as anyone was shameful to have fought, and has spent the last several years being a cowardly politician. He may be easily no worse than Bush now, but I don’t like his momentum. I imagine a President Kerry willing to do anything to keep Joe Lieberman or Fox News from questioning his commitment to the stupid hawkish patriotic bullshit he’s “proud” to support.

Just so nobody has any illusions, here’s ’s version of Kerry’s position on the Iraq War:

Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry said on Monday he would have voted for the congressional resolution authorizing force against Iraq even if he had known then no weapons of mass destruction would be found.

Taking up a challenge from President Bush, whom he will face in the election, the Massachusetts senator said: “I’ll answer it directly. Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it is the right authority for a president to have but I would have used that authority effectively.”

And what’s his take on how the war was conducted? He told Stars and Stripes magazine:

Stars and Stripes: The charge is out there, that Republicans are much better suited to handle defense issues. How do you counter that?

Kerry: My record counters that, and my friends counter that. My message to the troops over there? Help is on the way. Help is on the way in every respect. The Guard and the Reserves have been overstretched. [The Bush team] have conducted a back-door draft by the stop-loss provisions and the lengthy deployments. People have been overextended, and stretched too thin.

They went into Iraq in a brilliant military strategy, which we all adopted and supported, but they didn’t have a plan to win the peace. They didn’t bring other [countries] to our side. They didn’t give our troops all the equipment — the body armor and the armored Humvees, and things they need and deserve. And I believe they didn’t go in with enough people to make it secure.

So I think our troops are at a greater risk than they had to be, and I think we have borne greater costs than we needed to. Furthermore, I have a plan for a Military Families Bill of Rights. My Military Family Bill of Rights will provide greater guarantees with respect to education, health care, deployment schedules, and pay.

And I think we can do a better job of helping our troops. I’ll make sure that they have state-of the-art equipment. I will make sure we can actually grow the military. I’m going to create two new active divisions in the Army. I’m going to double the number of special forces troops we have to fight terror.

So, I will do a better job protecting our troops, and a better job of making America safe than George Bush has.

There’s a great tradition of Democratic presidents who’ve led us in war. From Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, to President Kennedy — Bill Clinton who, managed to do Kosovo without any casualties at all.

So, to summarize: Kerry believes that even though there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq until the U.S. brought their own, the president should still have had a blank-check authorization to invade and occupy at his whim. Furthermore, although the brutal “shock and awe” campaign was “a brilliant military strategy, which we all adopted and supported,” he thinks that the invasion should have been conducted with more countries, more equipment, and more troops. So that he can back up this “more, more, more” talk, he plans on growing the military, in part by creating two new active divisions and doubling the number of special forces troops deployed “to fight terror.”

Oh yeah, and he believes Bill Clinton “managed to do Kosovo” — get this — “without any casualties at all.”

“In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil.” ―Hannah Arendt

Those of you who are choosing Kerry (even enthusiastically supporting him and urging others to do likewise) believe me when I say I understand you and can sympathize with your reasoning. But if Kerry wins will you forget that you chose evil and that evil was victorious? Will you celebrate victory? Will you say “good enough, then”?

I got a lot of feedback about my lesser of two evils post . One reader wrote:

Another reader makes the case for the importance of choosing the lesser evil (edited slightly for clarity):

A presidential election is a mighty fulcrum. In one day of voting, the face of the executive branch of the U.S. government may change, and with it four years of presidential decrees, regulations, appointments, and saber-rattling. The presidential election of looks like it will be a close one, so it’s reasonable to feel that although the lever in a voting booth is a small one, its fulcrum is situated as well as any for a single citizen who wants to make a difference.

A little effort on your part now to encourage people to vote for Kerry — by telling them how important voting is, by playing up Kerry’s comparative positives and staying quiet about what makes him distasteful — could conceivably make a big difference in how this country gets run for .

And even if Kerry isn’t much to get excited about — a lesser of two evils at best — even such a small difference, when seen in a person occupying such a powerful office, can make a big difference indeed. We don’t know for sure what a President Kerry would be like, but even if you ignore his hopeful campaign promises and just rely on the law of averages, he’s unlikely to be any worse than what we’ve got now.

So okay, let’s hope Kerry wins in , and let’s be glad if he does. And now let me try to convince you why you shouldn’t vote for him, support him, or encourage people to vote for him.

What does supporting Kerry’s election campaign mean? It means more than just attempting to dethrone Bush. A pretzel almost did that without any votes at all. Kerry’s campaign is a big package, being sold with a multi-million-dollar budget, and win or lose it is going to define the opposition to Bush and his war and his policies.

Kerry is defining the opposition to Bush in this way: We are passionate about war and the military, and think America’s mission in Vietnam was a heroic one — in fact if you went over to Vietnam and killed people, you’re probably a better person than someone who didn’t. We support the Iraq war, but wish it was turning out better, and think we should have gone in with more troops. We think our military is too small and doesn’t have enough equipment. We don’t want anybody to mistake us for being less hawkish than the Dubya Squad. We didn’t lose much sleep over Abu Ghraib. We think that the Patriot Act and the “burqua resolution”1 gave awful powers to people who used them unwisely, but that doesn’t mean we’re against them.

In fact, Kerry isn’t running against the Dubya Squad so much as he’s campaigning to normalize what they stand for. Worse, he’s being so hawkish that he’s actually causing Dubya to stake out even more belligerent positions for fear of being outflanked! By supporting Kerry, by standing by him, by applauding his talking points, by cursing those who slander him, by vowing to dance on his inauguration day, you’re helping him do this. If Kerry wins, it will mean that something like half of the voters, the ones who don’t think Bush is doing just great I mean, rallied behind this “opposition” message.

And you won’t need to wonder why when you start to hear things like “hardly anybody questions that the American mission in Vietnam was essentially an honorable one” and “everybody agrees that we need a large, global military presence” the same way that this cowardly herd behavior from Democrats led to things like “nobody doubts that Saddam threatens the United States with weapons of mass destruction.”

It’s easy to give yourself over to wishful thinking. A politician’s campaign speeches are as vague as they think they can get away with — promising positive-sounding things in general, and not much in specific. The intent is that the audience will think “maybe he’s talking about me and my hopes.” Some take this to ridiculous extremes and try to believe that Kerry secretly stands for what they stand for, and not for the things Kerry has been voting for, has spoken up for, and has centered his campaign around. Kerry’s the last person a “lesser of two evils” voter has to vote for, so that voter is looking at Kerry like a horny drunk boy looks at the last girl left in the bar — her bad breath and missing teeth are vanishing from attention and thoughts like “I bet she’s got a pretty voice” are starting to pop up.

Don’t fall into this wishful thinking trap. If you’re going to vote for the lesser of two evils, at least look that lesser evil in the face first. Look at what Kerry has actually done and is actually doing. Case in point: Kerry didn’t just “believe Bush” about these mythical weapons of mass destruction — he was part of the choir singing the WMD chorus. I think you’re fooling yourself if you think that Kerry “opposed Bush going to war.” Hardly. He voted to enable and authorize it, and even now insists that this was the right thing to do. Another thing a vote for Kerry will be is a vote for someone who helped lead the war parade.

His spin, now and then, is that by voting to give Dubya the power to go to war in Iraq, he wasn’t actually voting for war in Iraq but simply to give Dubya a bigger stick to wave when trying to enforce weapons inspections and such. But millions of us knew that the Dubya Squad was hungry for war and we begged Congress not to let them have it. We knew that this resolution was like the Tonkin Gulf resolution — what passes for a declaration of war in today’s Congresses. Kerry’s aw-shucks position reminds me of someone who admits that sure, he gave the loaded pistol to the chimpanzee, but he first admonished the chimp never to touch the trigger.

Now you may say that while all of what I’ve said is true, or true enough anyway, this still doesn’t change the brutal but necessary “lesser of two evils” calculus.

But you have to answer, realistically and not just hopefully, whether the likely reduction in “evil” from a Kerry victory over Bush is worth the cost of further degrading the political opposition and further legitimizing jingoistic bullshit, worth the cost of moving the country, the Democratic party, and the media more in favor of this grotesque dream of ruthless American empire. Remember that it was cynical political calculation of a very similar kind that caused so many journalists and legislators and such to get swept along by the war frenzy in the first place.

We need to start saying “no” and no more of this “well I really’d rather not but just this once more if you promise you’ll be better about it next time” whining. And there’s no reason why we shouldn’t include a big “no” to John Kerry, and a lot of reasons why we should. It might even be helpful.2

Is there a good reason to believe that Kerry couldn’t take sensible, half-way decent, good positions on the war in Iraq or the Abu Ghraib scandal and still win?3 Are we that pessimistic? Is his insistence on decking himself out in a set of New Clothes just as transparent as the Emperor’s really such a great campaign tactic? I mean, hell, even Republican congressmen from Nebraska are coming out against the war these days. Maybe it’s time to start wondering whether Kerry is doing this hawk act not from reluctant political expediency but because he’s deeply mistaken and a Dubya-like jerk.

A losing candidate who ran a campaign dedicated to making the U.S. a better, more honest, more respectable and self-respecting country, and who conducted a campaign that reflected this, would leave us in a better place than a candidate like John Kerry will leave us, even if he defeats the awful Dubya. In fact, such a person wouldn’t even have to be a candidate — such a campaign doesn’t have to wait for election season to come around.

I’m with Thoreau on voting — it’s nothing to get excited about, and nothing to be proud of:

There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free-trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot to-day? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by them. There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man; but it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian of it.

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.

I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought.

The “lesser of two evils” argument says that we’re at a point where we can make two choices, one will add a certain amount of evil to the world, the other will add more. We’ve got to choose one, so choosing the lesser evil is the right thing to do, even though it means choosing evil.

The answer to this argument is that in the real world we have a wide and ever-changing array of choices, each of which may move us and the world in more or less good or evil directions. If Bush or Kerry were our only choices, Kerry would be the lesser evil (by all appearances), and the right choice. In the real world though, we can do better by rejecting them both and choosing something good instead.

Christopher Hitchens seems to have completely lost the plot over Iraq, but I can’t help but check in and see what he has to say from time to time. Today it’s this: “John Kerry actually claims to have shot a fleeing Viet Cong soldier from the riverbank, something that I personally would have kept very quiet about. He used to claim that he was a witness to, and almost a participant in, much worse than that. So what if he has been telling the absolute truth all along? In what sense, in other words, does his participation in a shameful war qualify him to be president of the United States?… ¶ The Democrats have made a rod for their own backs in uncritically applauding their candidate’s ramrod-and-salute posture. They have also implicitly subverted one of the most important principles of the republic, which is civilian control over military decisions. And more than that, they have done something eye-rubbingly unprincipled, doing what Reagan and Kissinger could not do: rehabilitating the notion of the Vietnam horror as ‘a noble cause.’ ”

Someone has decided to call a thumbscrew a thumbscrew:

A British diplomat has accused Britain’s intelligence service of using information obtained by foreign governments through the use of torture, according to a leaked document published today.

Craig Murray, the ambassador to Uzbekistan, said that information extracted from prisoners tortured in the central Asian republic’s jails was being passed on via the American CIA to MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service.

As well as denouncing the use of such material as morally and legally wrong, Mr Murray warned that information gathered in this way was unlikely to be reliable, as victims would say whatever they thought their tormentors wanted to hear.

“We are selling our souls for dross,” he wrote in the confidential Foreign Office report seen by the Financial Times.…

Mr Murray caused a stir by speaking out publicly in about “brutality” in Uzbek jails, highlighting the case of two men who were boiled to death.…

“This is morally, legally and practically wrong.”

Intelligence officers had argued that, as they did not know the precise source of the information they received, they could not establish whether the individual involved had been tortured or not, Mr Murray wrote.

“I will not attempt to hide my utter contempt for such casuistry, nor my shame that I work for an organisation where colleagues would resort to it to justify torture,” he said.

Of the hundreds of cases of political and religious prisoners he had looked into in Uzbekistan, very few had not involved the use of torture, he said.…

What a wonderful day it will be when a straight-shooting report like this gets leaked out of the U.S. government. Some days it seems like “such casuistry” is all that’s left over on this side of the pond.

It amazes me how much we’re willing to tolerate and excuse. Should the United States be held to the same standards as other countries? Not if that means we can’t invade anyone we’d like any time we’d like for any reasons we can invent after-the-fact. Can the most powerful military on Earth pummel civilian homes with guided missiles in total disregard for civilian casualties? If that’s what it takes. Is a “zero tolerance” attitude toward torture justified? It’s not even worth discussing.

How is it that in America, after the shame of Abu Ghraib and the many legal memos that set the stage for it, the person challenging the Dungeonmaster-in-Chief doesn’t feel like it’s worthwhile to say “I don’t need a team of lawyers to tell me whether or not torture is wrong — in my administration, America will have a zero tolerance policy toward torture, no ifs, ands or buts”?

Kerry’d say it even if he didn’t mean it, if he thought it was a position he could use to distinguish himself from Bush and that would get him votes. Clearly, his team has determined that as an issue, it’s a loser. To distinguish himself from Bush as the one less likely to countenance torture just isn’t going to help him at the polls. Which tells me that there’s a frighteningly large chunk of the electorate that’s told themselves “so, the United States is having people tortured, eh? I guess I can live with that.”

evening, I sent this email to a list devoted to war tax resistance:

Partners—

It’s sure been hard to drum up much interest for tax resistance over these last several months. Everybody’s been so wound up about the election and how important it is that it’s made everything else seem like a distraction.

Now that’s over, and the people who last week were telling us to please, please, please vote for the fellow who voted for the Patriot Act and the war resolution (and to please save our funny ideas for the annual April 15th war tax resistance fifteen-minutes-of-fame show), are now shuffling around like war refugees themselves, feeling angry and repentant and wondering what to do next.

Meanwhile, the people who covered up Guernica at the U.N. Security Council are planning to paint a new one in Falluja.

We have an opportunity now to reach out and say “you tried voting for the lesser of two evils, and you put your heart into it, but there’s a stronger vote you can cast every day and we can help show you how.”

On , the Republicans extended their control of Congress, Dubya retained his control of the White House, and the majority of voters condoned and even vindicated the belligerence and disregard for life and liberty that has been on display for the last four years. But as awful is that millions of people who should know better woke up on and cast another vote — to continue sending their money to be spent by that terrible bunch.

I feel like we need to challenge these people. I’m in no mood to join another Bay Area protest march with the same old “People! United!” marching under the banner of “Our Opinions Sure Are Right!”

Next time there’s a march, I want to see us marching upstream, with signs saying “And When You’re Serious About It, Get Back To Us!”

Meanwhile, the time to turn up our volume is right now — the gut-felt anguish of these voters hasn’t gone away yet and we’ve got what they’re looking for.

I appended an excerpt from Thoreau’s Resistance to Civil Government that seemed to speak extremely well to today’s election aftermath from a perspective (I’ve taken the liberty of chopping paragraphs more finely than in the original, for ease of on-line reading):

I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.

We are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared; but improvement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or better than the many. It is not so important that many should be good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.

There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret.

At most, they give up only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by them…

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency.

Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.

There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.

I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions?

But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reasons to despair of him.

He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought.

O for a man who is a man, and, and my neighbor says, has a bone is his back which you cannot pass your hand through!

Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in the country? Hardly one.…

It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most enormous, wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.

If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.

See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, “I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico — see if I would go”; and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute.

The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war; is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets at naught; as if the state were penitent to that degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment.…

Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves — the union between themselves and the State — and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury?

What does the way forward look like? I’m watching the Kerry voters digest their loss — and what belches their sour stomachs produce! There’s a lot of talk of “values,” such as that from George Lakoff which preceded the campaign, or the more panicky talk since, which seems to boil down to something like this: “The swing voters swung Republican because of something called ‘values’ — is there any way we can fake some of those convincingly ourselves?”

Kerry’s slogan might as well have been “abandon your values and support the Kerry campaign — I did!”

To recap: Kerry voted to authorize the war in Iraq, and used his apologia to broadcast the familiar lies about weapons of mass destruction and the like. He voted shamelessly for the Patriot Act, knowing all the while who was going to be holding the reins of that horse. He spent his campaign bragging about the weapons systems he’d voted to fund, and most grotesquely of all: he bragged about how proudly he’d defended the United States by killing people in Vietnam. He vowed to fight the war in Iraq more tenaciously and viciously, with more troops and (with any luck) more allies.

Now perhaps those repulsive stands did represent his values, but what of the rest of us? Those Democrats who opposed the war were counselled not to vote for their values in the primary but to vote for the “electable” candidate, and that’s what they did. And then after the primaries, there were the daily pleadings to Nader leaners or disgusted non-voters not to waste their votes on their values but to vote for Anybody But Bush instead.

And now the discovery that people who value “values” abandoned Kerry at the polls. Listen to the wailing and gnashing of teeth. They cry: How can opposing gay marriage be considered a value and opposing the ongoing bombardment of Iraq not be? It’s a bit late for that.

In the values war, the Democrats unilaterally disarmed — worse, they turned traitor. Gay marriage? Oh, we hate it too. The war in Iraq? We’re no wimps.

It’s as though they forgot that people who find such positions valuable already had a candidate to vote for and didn’t need a new one.

Those of us who are against the war are doubly-humbled. Not only did we not come close to bringing the country around to our point of view, but we couldn’t even convince the opposition party, which not only might have been able to make hay from a stand against an increasingly unpopular war, but which could have become a useful bullhorn for promoting anti-war views.

Part of our problem is that we too often express our “values” not in our actions but in our petulant demands, petitions, and opinions. The United for Peace & Justice Position on Ending the Occupation of Iraq, for instance, is all about what “The Iraqi people” and “The United States” and “The United Nations” “should” do. None of those bodies of people, alas, give a flying fuck what United for Peace & Justice thinks they should do. Pardon my French.

What distinguishes a value from an opinion is that for something you value you’re going to put your money where your mouth is. An opinion as to which mouth somebody else “should” put their money at is an opinion cheaply had, and worth about that much.

When people who are anti-war move from having opinions that are fit for bumper-stickers to having values that motivate their actions, this in and of itself will be more persuasive than any number of opinions, whether expressed as ad campaigns, petitions, letters-to-the-editor, or protest marches. And beyond persuasiveness, it will be the first step toward change. People will work for what they find valuable; opinions just make for more blogs.

The Red Cross has been visiting Guantánamo Bay to inspect conditions and to minister to certain needs of the prisoners held there. They have bought this rare access with their silence — by policy they do not comment publicly about what they see on the other side of the barbed wire, and in return they are allowed to be the only group independent of the U.S. government that is given any substantial access to the prison and the prisoners.

This puts the Red Cross in a delicate position. The Dubya Squad frequently responds to criticism about conditions at Guantánamo by noting that the Red Cross is allowed to visit — the implication being that the Red Cross would blow the whistle if Gitmo were really a gulag or an Abu Ghraib. The Red Cross, meanwhile, is under this gag order, which prevents it from speaking out even as it is being used as a fig leaf in this way.

In fact, the Red Cross has criticized conditions at Gitmo in the past, but it limits its public criticism to policies that are already public knowledge, like the lack of due process. The Red Cross’s position on what it has observed of the conditions of detention is not for us to know.

, though, some White House memos summarizing the Red Cross’s concerns were leaked, giving us some idea of what the Red Cross is telling the folks in charge:

The International Committee of the Red Cross has charged in confidential reports to the United States government that the American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion “tantamount to torture” on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.…

The report of the June visit said investigators had found a system devised to break the will of the prisoners at Guantánamo, who now number about 550, and make them wholly dependent on their interrogators through “humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions.” Investigators said that the methods used were increasingly “more refined and repressive” than learned about on previous visits.

But I think we can expect the Red Cross reports to continue to get more alarmed and indignant and ignored:

There has to be something in how he won, in how the election was fought, that gave this Administration the distinct impression that it had been handed a “get out of the Geneva Conventions free” card. That’s because the Administration was handed precisely such a gift — by John Kerry.

In the name of “electability,” the Kerry campaign gave Bush without ever facing serious questions about violations of international law. Fearing he would be seen as soft on terror and disloyal to US troops, Kerry stayed scandalously silent about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. When it became clear that fury would rain down on Falluja as soon as the polls closed, Kerry never spoke out against the plan, or against the illegal bombings of civilian areas that took place throughout the campaign. Even after The Lancet published its landmark study estimating that 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the invasion and occupation, Kerry repeated his outrageous (and frankly racist) claim that Americans “have borne 90 percent of the casualties in Iraq.” His unmistakable message: Iraqi deaths don’t count. By buying the highly questionable logic that Americans are incapable of caring about anyone’s lives but their own, the Kerry campaign and its supporters became complicit in the dehumanization of Iraqis, reinforcing the idea that some lives are insufficiently important to risk losing votes over. And it is this morally bankrupt logic, more than the election of any single candidate, that allows these crimes to continue unchecked.

The real-world result of all the “strategic” thinking is the worst of both worlds: It didn’t get Kerry elected and it sent a clear message to the people who were elected that they will pay no political price for committing war crimes. And this is Kerry’s true gift to Bush: not just the presidency, but impunity.

Yet another way in which I’m hopelessly out-of-touch with contemporary American values, I guess. I still sometimes wake up in the morning thinking I’m in a country where the alarms will go off and the newspapers will switch to their big-font headlines if the Red Cross reports that we’re torturing prisoners by deliberate policy. Nope: ho hum.

I’ve been trying to ignore the political soap opera going on. I don’t much care for it, or American Idol or any of ’em. But this morning my inbox was full of friends gushing about Obama’s performance last night. One asked, “Am I the only big baby who cried through all of Obama’s acceptance speech?” Others assured her she was not. One added: “Does anyone else find Biden completely adorable?”

Makes me feel like I’m hooked up to the Stepford Wives chat room by mistake.

But I remembered that last time this circus was in town I took a little time to see whether the U.S. torture policy was considered remarkable by the participants. It was not. You wouldn’t find the word “torture” by searching John Kerry’s campaign site, and you wouldn’t find any mention of it in the prime-time convention speeches, and Kerry didn’t think to bring up the subject when he had a chance to debate Dubya. This, though the Abu Ghraib photos were still fresh in the news. What I concluded at the time:

How is it that in America, after the shame of Abu Ghraib and the many legal memos that set the stage for it, the person challenging the Dungeonmaster-in-Chief doesn’t feel like it’s worthwhile to say “I don’t need a team of lawyers to tell me whether or not torture is wrong — in my administration, America will have a zero tolerance policy toward torture, no ifs, ands or buts”?

Kerry’d say it even if he didn’t mean it, if he thought it was a position he could use to distinguish himself from Bush and that would get him votes. Clearly, his team has determined that as an issue, it’s a loser. To distinguish himself from Bush as the one less likely to countenance torture just isn’t going to help him at the polls. Which tells me that there’s a frighteningly large chunk of the electorate that’s told themselves “so, the United States is having people tortured, eh? I guess I can live with that.”

I’m happy to report that things are a little different this time around. Yesterday I searched some of the transcripts of the convention speeches to see if anything had changed. Torture now has at least a bit part in the play, though no role in the star’s own performance:

And I’m very proud to say that we reject torture.
Patricia Madrid (co-chair of the platform committee)
Barack Obama knows… that torture is not only morally repugnant, it’s militarily ineffective. It doesn’t work. It puts our troops at risk. It endangers our national security.
Claudia Kennedy (former Army general)
…What about the assault on science and the defense of torture?… My fellow Democrats, America can do better than that. And Barack Obama will do better than that.
Bill Clinton
In less than a decade we have gone from being perceived as the beacon for democracy and justice all over the globe, to a country whose government has little respect for even the most basic tenets of human rights. We know that’s not us. We’re better than that.
Tom Daschle
After they abandoned the principle first laid down by Gen. George Washington, when he prohibited the torture of captives because it would bring, in his words, ‘shame, disgrace and ruin’ to our nation, it’s time for a change.
Al Gore
President Obama and Vice President Biden will shut down Guantánamo, respect the Constitution, and make clear once and for all, the United States of America does not torture, not now, not ever.
even John Kerry

It would be a mistake to look at this campaign rhetoric and to decide that the Democratic Party or these individual politicians in it had a change of heart and decided to oppose torture. This is all just carefully-crafted campaign rhetoric and there’s no reason to expect honest revelations of any sort to come directly out of it. But, going back to my analysis of torture’s complete absence from the last campaign — that it went to show that Democratic strategists didn’t think the voters they were trying to reach gave a good goddamn whether America was torturing people or not — I think this time around the strategists have changed their minds about that, and that’s encouraging.