John Yoo's "Bloodshed of the Two Torture Memos"

Two Decembers ago, former Vice President Dick Cheney said,

"we don't do torture."

And the authors of the two most-famous Bush-era "torture memos"--the ones advocating "enhanced interrogation techniques" including waterboarding and the forced consumption of Brittany Spear's albums--were just cleared of any and all misconduct by an internal Justice Department review. So we must not "do torture."

And yet, on February 14th, Cheney brazenly admitted "I was a big supporter of waterboarding."

So just so we're clear, here...

You're the Office of Legal Council to the President of the United States. The Vice President's office sends word down that we're fightin' a new type of war and all, and maybe that ol', moth-eaten Geneva Convention really don't apply to the people we catch up in this war. Maybe we just need to, oh, I don't know...start letting the CIA kidnap people, throw them in some hole in the ground somewhere...like Morocco...or Cuba...and start torturing them, ya know? The Vice President's representative asks you to whip up a way this might be accomplished. What do you do?

Do you:

(a) Politely thank the Vice President's representative (probably his lawyer, David Attington), show him out the door, immediately grab the phone, call the President, and inform him his Number Two is a raving mad asshole who wants to undermine that greatest of great myths of ours: the rule of law, warping the character of this great nation into a grinning, horrible, schizophrenic parody of itself. Or do you

(b) Inform the Vice President's man that you'll do everything in your power to see that such a policy conforms to the laws of the United States, as proscribed by the Constitution and determined by the courts, or

(c) Inform the Vice President's man you'll be sure to write a memo equally sure to abandon "fundamental practices of principled and balanced legal interpretation,” fail "to cite highly relevant precedent, regulations, and even constitutional provisions," and misuse "sources upon which it does rely," conveniently ignoring everything else in a hard-line, insane drive to vest the Executive Branch of this country with unrivaled power. After all, we're at war. No time to be liberal pantywaist and wring our hands over "the laws". It's time to go all Howard Roark on these Camel Jockey assholes. Tell you what, screw writing up a legal case. You've decided to join up with the U.S. Marines right now, because that'll be the shortest distance between you and you ventilating terrorist scumbags.

Or do you

(d) Call a meeting with other senior lawyers from the Attorney General’s office, the White House counsel’s office, the Departments of State and Defense, and the National Security Council regarding whether the Geneva Convention applied to members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Inform the Vice President's man that, at these meetings, you and your lawyer pals will do everything in your power to draft a memo sure to abandon "fundamental practices of principled and balanced legal interpretation,” fail "to cite highly relevant precedent, regulations, and even constitutional provisions," and misuse "sources upon which it does rely," conveniently ignoring everything in a hard-line, insane drive to vest the Executive Branch of this country with unrivaled power.

(These quotes come from a 2007 critique of John Yoo's torture memo written by Dawn Johnson, currently head of the OLC under Our (new) Glorious Leader, President Obama--so suck on it, Johnny.)

Said memos will be sure to justify the Vice President's stated wishes, producing documents the President, Vice President, SecDef and Attorney General will spend the next eight years (Yoo wrote the torture memos back in 2002) hiding behind. Remember when Bush and Dick used to go on and on, when they were all, like, "Nope, we good. It's all legal. We've got these memos from the OLC, and they say it's fine. Foggedaboutit, not problem. Stop trying to coddle the terrorists and grow your balls back, you liberal pantywaist." Weren't those great times?

And it'll be okay. Really. No one will ever hold you accountable for providing a legal cover to the Bush Administration's obviously-adamant wish to torture people. You can even write a book all about it and no one will even bat and eyelash.

Let's be clear: Dick Cheney's valentine this year? Waterboarding. Fuck Liz and the kids, right? Sick fetishist is all about strapping men down to tables, putting washcloths over their mouths, and dribbling two-gallon milk jugs full of water onto them until their gag reflex makes them puke, or pass out, or both. Former Vice President Dick is a self-described "fan" of this. A "big" one. Sweet bleeding Jesus.

But wait: it gets worse. Lawyers for a Tunisan Gitmo prisoner, Rafiq Alhami, have just filed a lawsuit alleging that CIA kidnapper-spooks were torturing people as far back as December, 2001

In his lawsuit, Alhami stated, as the Associated Press described it, that, from December 2001, he was held in three CIA “dark sites,” where “his presence and his existence were unknown to everyone except his United States detainers,” and where, at various times, he was “stripped naked, threatened with dogs, shackled in painful stress positions for hours, punched, kicked and exposed to extremes of heat and cold.” He also stated that his interrogators “sprayed pepper spray on his hemorroids, causing extreme pain.”

[...]

Moreover, although the OLC memos dealt specifically with a “high-value detainee” program that began with the capture of Abu Zubaydah on March 28, 2002, it’s also clear that the administration began working out how to deal with prisoners outside of existing legal frameworks within days of the 9/11 attacks. Most of this centered, at the time, on expanding the program of “extraordinary rendition” developed by the CIA under Bill Clinton in order to deliver “terror suspects” to third countries, where they could be interrogated by proxy torturers or even “disappeared.”

This in itself was enormously worrying, of course. The Clinton-era program occupied a horribly gray area, in which “terror suspects” — mostly Egyptians — were seized by the CIA and rendered to the custody of the Egyptian government, which was then free to kill them, torture them or imprison them after show trials, but it was at least a carefully controlled program, involving 13 prisoners between 1995 and 2000, according to research undertaken last year by Peter Bergen for Mother Jones, and a detailed paper trail that required the existence of a sentence by a court, even one handed down in absentia by a government with a disturbing human rights record.

After 9/11, however, all these restraints were abandoned. Within 12 days of the attacks on New York and Washington, a Yemeni named Jamal Mar’i, who worked for a Saudi charity in Pakistan, was kidnapped from his house in Karachi and rendered to Jordan, one of several countries with whom the Bush administration had swiftly established arrangements involving “extraordinary rendition” and torture. In the ten months that followed, before the OLC issued its indefensible opinions, at least 25 more prisoners were rendered to torture in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Syria, and we now know, from one of three more OLC memos released two weeks ago — written in May 2005 by Steven G. Bradbury, the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, and revisiting the OLC’s August 2002 torture opinions — that, after the CIA brought torture in-house in August 2002, 94 prisoners in total were held in secret CIA custody.

The fact I can even cut and paste these words without my head exploding, gumming up the keyboard with fragments of skull and brain goo, just goes to show you how far down the moral-evolutionary ladder eight years of Dick Cheney has really pulled us. Congratulations to us as a nation and as a culture: we've re-branded torture and once again made it cool by embracing it in absentia, through our "elected leaders." Great job all around.

Maybe next we can bring poisoning wells with dead bodies back to good. Quick, someone think up a name for that that won't scare people when they hear it on the six o'clock news. Something boring and bland, like the rest of American politics..."enhanced...water treatment techniques"?

Obviously, the correct answer to the above is (d), since torture memo authors John Yoo and Jay Bybee were ruled "not guilty" of professional misconduct. The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility did what the government does best and issued a report about it on Friday. Remember when your kid told you about that flunked Math test on the trip home from Six Flags? Well, the DOJ just pulled one of those one us. With Congress out until Monday (thanks, President's Day) and nobody important watching TV Friday night, they knew they could get away with giving Johnny and Jay a cute little smack on the wrist. Bad, bad boys, you two; letting that mean-old Mr. Cheney talk you into writing things. That gets you in trub-ble!

This sends a clear and concise message to conscientious men and women within the American government, and, indeed, all free governments of the world: suck-up, brown-nose, and bend over backward to please your powerful superiors. Not only will this allow you to twist and mutilate the law, but if your superiors are evil enough, you'll even get to twist some human beings along with it.

Christ sake, these two won't even be disbarred. Bybee will go right back to his day job as a federal judge (of all things), while John Yoo gets right back to the business of molding young minds at...Berkeley...of all the goddamnedest places in the Universe. Yoo, at least, has out-and-proud admitted he fixed the law to justify his "client's" (the Administration's) wishes. In the middle of bitching about Obama's decision to close Guantanamo Bay (and, one year out, what the hell's going on with that anyway?) Yoo even let slip the fact "President" Bush himself personally authorized waterboarding "three times in the years after 9/11."

(Sidenote: you know the Spirit of the 60s is well and truly dead when the man who literally wrote the book [and, first, the memo] on American torture programs can remain in his job at UC Berkeley with, apparently, no loss of life, limb, or property. God, the political Left in this country really is a coalition of toothless, bourgeois hypocritical fucks. He's authorized waterboarding for goddsake. C'mon Berkeley radicals: the least you could do is trash the man's office.)

Obviously, at this point, no one in the Obama Administration is the least bit interested in investigating the crimes of their predecessors. Why should they be? President Clinton was equally obliged to let the previous Bush Administration get off scott-free. It's not as if moral, ethical, or even legal concerns are foremost in Our Glorious Leader's mind. You noticed all this "extraordinary rendition" bullshit (when FARC does it it's just called "kidnapping" but I guess American "doesn't do that" either) started under Bill Clinton, didn't you? Good ol' Slick Willy sure stabbed us in the back on that one. The point is, all this is bigger than one evil, little man...or one evil, god-all-mighty-stupid presidential administration.

Let's be clear: U.S. torture policies grow out of fundamental assumptions of U.S. foreign policy. Foremost is the assumption that we, as the U.S., have the power to do whatever we want, whenever we want to do it. And get away with it. Until we get over that little canard, there's not a damn thing voting for your favorite corporate puppet is going to do about all this.

Just FYI.
(Within the Empire is supported in part by a grant from Dick Cheney Foundation: doing what Dick Cheney says, before he shoots us in the face. And by the annual financial support of Dick Cheneys like you. Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney. Go fuck yourself right up the butt.)

"take my pound of flesh and sleep well"

Around nine o'clock this morning, central standard time, a man named Joseph Stack set his house on fire, stole a Piper Cherokee from a nearby Georgetown, Texas airfield, and crashed the plane into an Austin office building, the Echelon I.

Echelon I is home to both the FBI and IRS field offices. Two people are in hospital. One is currently missing. Joe Stack is, rather obviously, dead, and already he's been christened the new Grey Champion of his age. Or the new Osama bin Laden.

Whichever way you lean, copies of Stack's suicide note/exegesis are now available in a variety of places, for the informing of your opinion. Titled "Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let's try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well," it paints the portrait of man driven out of his mind by fifty-four years of good ol' American hypocrisy. Signed, "Joseph Stack 1956-2010. 2/18/10," it shows deliberation, for all its short comings of coherent rhetoric (which its author freely admits). At once autobiographical and firmly political, Stack's note is scathing indictment of American political culture, sure to be swept under the rug at the first convenient opportunity.

In his note, Stack narrates of a life of repeated failure, with IRS bureaucrats, repeatedly cheating him out of his retirement savings. He rails against government bailouts of big business (GM, the airlines, the drug and insurance companies who grow fatter by the day thanks to "the joke we call the American health system") and big business' corruption of government ("there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say"), tacking right off the deep end of America's political spectrum with a new, violent populism, which is really as old as this continent. He justifies his heinous actions (which we at Within the Empire would never in any way condone, defend or advocate) by concluding

"I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along."

In other words, watch out, America. Your citizens are growing desperate, dangerous, and crazy. Not that we've ever been otherwise. But under certain strained circumstances, we have historically been moved to act on our national inclinations.

Personally, I'm putting everything I've got into canned food and shotguns.

Memo from the Climate Scientists: We're All Screwing Ourselves

Via Climate Progress, "a project of the Center For American Progress Action Fund," overseen by Dr. Joseph Romm (author of Hell and High Water) comes a chart n' graph-laden Illustrated Guide to the Latest Climate Science everyone interested in facts should at least glance at sideways before opening their mouths.

The gist? We're screwing ourselves as a nation, as a species, and doing it faster and more thoroughly than even the most pessimistic number crunchers ever though possible. But with all that snow on the ground, don't try to tell anyone about global warming. No. Obviously God Himself has answered those effete, elitist scientists with a triple handful of "treacherous," continent-ravaging storms. That's what we get for letting evil secularists study problems without their partisan blinders firmly stapled into place, and issue uncensored reports.

My dentist paused in the act of torturing my teeth to reveal his own ignorance. "Well," he said, glancing out the window at dead, Midwestern grass, "the climate's changing all the time."

Sure, Doc. But that's not the point. It's changing faster and more radically because of what we do. We, the collective entity known as "the human race" are senselessly murdering our biosphere thanks to a combination of ignorance, willful-stupidity, gross incompetence and greed. Blithely labeling this problem "Global Warming" or (as it was re-christened under Bush) "Global Climate Change," is itself a symptom of our wider, cultural myopia and unwillingness to confront the problems we create for ourselves.

Personally, I told my dentist, I like to cut through all the bullshit and lies and just call the problem what it is: the Apocalypse. Or, at the very least, an Apocalypse. As Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel spent years trying to teach us, there's always another Apocalypse around the corner. Only the concerted efforts of those fighting the "good" fight prevent them from destroying us hundreds of times over.

My problem with Dr. Romm? He (and thus, his organization) have fallen into a trap. By critiquing the Bush-era's Apocalyptic policies, decrying the "politicization" of a global crisis (as if global crisis' occur in the Ideal universe of Plato's Eternal Forms, far removed from politics) he, his organization, and the PAC that funds it, have all fallen into the very trap they hoped to set at Dubya's feet. They have politicized themselves by entering the arena of America politics. And bloodier, more unforgiving stage you will not find this side of Restoration-era England. They have ceded the high ground, because the American System (to use Henry Clay's term) as its currently constituted, requires them to get down in the mud, with paleolithic assholes, like the Republican Governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell. Who, in his White Presidential Power rally response to Our Glorious Leader's State of the Union Address, brazenly declared (in a nod to Dominionist voters across the Old Dominion and throughout the national TV audience):

We are blessed here in America with vast natural resources, and we must use them all.

Because obviously, if we don't, the terrorists will win.

This Apocalypse is not insolvable. The simple fact is, the vicious plutocrats who control the ruling institutions of American (and, to a large extent, global) society do not care. They don't give a high, holy fuck about you, me, the plant, or anything on it unless they can turn a profit by converting whatever-it-is (you, me, our homes, our fellow citizen's lives) into a market derivative. Forget the politicians, as Saint Carlin said,

"Politicians are put there to give you the illusion you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long-since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State Houses, the City Halls, they've got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies so they control all the news and information you hear. They got'cha by the balls. They spent billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well we know what they want: they want more for themselves and less for everybody else...They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking...You know what they want? They want obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it..."

So what are you doing reading this? Time to climb into your S-Fuck-UV, sit in traffic for an hour, making sure to kill your quota of polar bears, show up five minutes late to your designated cube and waste another ten minutes getting a multisyllabic reaming from your asshole boss, who's surely in the same sinking boat as you, as all of us, are. But may all the gods lend you aid in getting him to recognize that fact. After all, "The climate's changing all the time." Nothing wrong here. Go back to sleep.

In Honor of President's Day

we offer this critique of the Obama Administration by special guest columnist Friedrich Nietzsche:

Hope. Pandora brought the jar with the evils and opened it. It was the gods` gift to man, on the outside a beautiful, enticing gift, called the "lucky jar." Then all the evils, those lively, winged beings, flew out of it. Since that time, they roam around and do harm to men by day and night. One single evil had not yet slipped out of the jar. As Zeus had wished, Pandora slammed the top down and it remained inside. So now man has the lucky jar in his house forever and thinks the world of the treasure. It is at his service; he reaches for it when he fancies it. For he does not know that that jar which Pandora brought was the jar of evils, and he takes the remaining evil for the greatest worldly good--it is hope, for Zeus did not want man to throw his life away, no matter how much the other evils might torment him, but rather to go on letting himself be tormented anew. To that end, he gives man hope. In truth, it is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man`s torment.

--Human, All Too Human (1878) #71
(Photo by Photo by Pete Souza, whitehouse.gov)

The Empire's Collapse Continues Unabated (2009 In Review)

The Supreme Court finally came off the bench today (pun most certainly intended), firing yet another salvo in the all-but-officially-declared Class War the United States' corporate masters have spent decades waging against we mere mortals.

The decades-old system of rules that govern the financing of the nation's political campaigns was partially upended by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling issued just ahead of the pivotal 2010 midterm congressional election season.

Thursday's landmark decision, approved by a 5-4 margin, could unleash a torrent of corporate and union cash into the political realm and transform how campaigns for president and Congress are fought in the coming years.

[...]

The new ruling blurs the lines between corporate and individual contributions in political campaigns. It also strikes down part of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that banned unions and corporations from paying for political ads in the waning days of campaigns.

Even before the court's decision, national political campaigns had been growing increasingly expensive. Watchdog groups worry that by removing limits on expenditures by corporations that are not coordinated with candidates' campaigns, the court will boost the role of special interests in politics.

That last sentence is the kind of “no shit, Sherlock” reporting you can only find on NPR, a paragon of mainstream media tedium. Nevertheless, the implications of this ruling are so blatantly obvious even Nina Totenberg felt compelled to admit, “[The ruling] will undoubtedly help Republican candidates since corporations have generally supported Republican candidates more.”

Occasional liberal hero Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) seems to be the only member of “our” Congress capable of seeing the implications of all this through the fog of lobbyist cash:

"If we do nothing then I think you can kiss your country goodbye," Grayson told Raw Story in an interview just hours after the decision was announced.

"You won't have any more senators from Kansas or Oregon, you'll have senators from Cheekies and Exxon. Maybe we'll have to wear corporate logos like Nascar drivers."

Grayson said the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling -- which removes decades of campaign spending limits on corporations -- "opens the floodgates for the purchases and sale of the law."

Nice words, and Grayson at least has the courage to do what his position allows: In the lead-up to this decision, he introduced five bills with wonderful names like the Business Should Mind its Own Business Act, intended to plug the new holes Justice John Robert's court seems intent on burning into our Constitution. Yet Grayson still appears blind to the essential problem of “our” democratic institutions. Within this little Empire of ours, there is no law that can't be overturned by the influx of cold, hard cash.

Add to this the fact that Our Glorious Leader has renominated Ben Bernanke to his apparently-sacrosanct position as head of the Federal Reserve. The merest hint of a delay in his reconfirmation sent the jackals, vultures and vampires of Wall Street into an uncontrolled, three-day orgy mass nappy-soiling, despite the soothing promises of Senate Banking Committee Chairman, former presidential candidate, and all-around toothless, corporate hack, Chris Dodd.

Add to this the fact that, over a month ago, on December 13, Our Glorious Leader's top financial-industry waterboy and former Laura Ingraham date, Larry Summers, won the unofficial Within the Empire Holy Shit Award when said, live, on CNN, that “everyone agrees that the recession is over,” a comment that certainly holds true for the billionaires he's helped enrich throughout his entire career. The rest of us are faced with one, undeniable message from America's ruling class: “Bend over, shut up, and take your medicine, you fuckin' crybabies. Don't act like you don't like it.”

Meanwhile, the lunatic asylum more commonly known as the U.S. Congress has shelved any further discussion of health care reform until former nude model Scott Brown takes Ted Kennedy's old seat in the Upper House, providing him a greater vantage point from which to join his fellow Republicans in their by-now-year-long campaign to demonize President Obama and piss on the non-billionaire citizens of this country. Their fear-mongering intransigence, along with the opportunism and stupidity of their Democratic “rivals,” has destroyed any chance at meaningful health care reform, ensuring that, whatever legislation eventually appears on the president's desk, it will include a massive give-away to the insurance industry.

From Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) comes conformation of my worst expectations, among them that,

at the highest levels of the Senate and the White House, there's still no plan, and he doubts whether President Obama will insert himself forcefully into the process.

Of course he won't. Our Glorious Leader has two foreign wars to fight, plus the domestic propaganda war against the paleo-conservatism. Hamstrung by his own post-ideology ideology, he seems incapable of realizing the scope of this last war, perhaps the most important one of his first term. With three years to go, the score is a rather obvious 0-1, and no amount of rousing speeches in Ohio or on television are going to change that, Mr. President.

Mr. Obama's appearance coincided with new state figures showing Ohio's jobless rate climbed last month to 10.9%, from 10.6% in November, nearly a full point higher than the national average. National figures released Thursday showed a jump in the number of Americans who applied for jobless benefits, with claims rising 36,000 to 482,000 last week, the third straight week claims increased. Analysts had expected new claims to slip to 440,000.

I offer these comments with no wonkish solutions to the crisis this country faces. Mass firings of those responsible for our current financial crisis would only a trigger another, for which Our Glorious Leader would, in true “liberal” fashion, fall all over himself to take the blame, even without an opposition ready, willing, and clearly able to foist it all upon him. Despite all the myths surrounding President Obama, he is and always has been a conciliator, a self-conscious shill for the status quo. That is the awful truth at the heart of his non-ideological ideology: a truth that, by its ability to please the robber barons that truly own this country, ensured his election in the first place.

How Obama won over the managers and money movers of this country remains the great untold story of the 2009 campaign. The results of this marriage between the centrist politics and the robber barons are visible on any street in the country not named “Wall.”

Outside the corridors of power, the status quo is quickly becoming unmanageable. Now, from the series of tubes comes word that Our Glorious Leader has agreed to cut his party's throat, announcing a freeze in discretionary spending...except for that which is sure to disappear down the military-industrial complex's black money hole across the Potomac River from his house, otherwise known as the Pentagon.

New Review: Star Trek (2009)

Around here, we like to start the New Year off right.

I'd feel remiss here if I didn't add that this was the last film my father and I saw together, on December 28, 2009. He (as a Terminator might say) is the man most directly responsible for my three key obsessions: technology, Star Trek and Monty Python's Flying Circus. Absent these three key ingredients I would literally have no friends...Instead, I have the best group of people a misanthropic writer could ask for. Thank you all for everything in these dark times. We are, all of us, under orders to be happy. So sit back, grab a loved one, and enjoy a movie. Though not necessarily this movie.

And once again, Dad, thank you.

Memo from the Obit Desk

Gary Edward DeMoss passed on to the Gray Havens at 5:15 a.m. on January 6, 2010, one day shy of his sixty-third birthday. He is survived by his big sister, Jenni, big brother Jack, son David and beloved wife, Gene Kay. Per request, he is to be cremated and his ashes scattered where ever the fuck we want. There will be no funeral, but there will be a private party held in his honor as soon as the weather breaks, featuring plenty of margaritas. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be sent to your nearest food bank and/or homeless shelter. Have a few margaritas yourself while your at it, in honor of my father, the hero.

Tariq Ali and Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Afghanistan and Pakistan

Came across a somewhat-dated but nevertheless kickass speech by Tariq Ali today while drinking after class. Since I didn't know either, I quote from Democracy Now, which calls him a "British-Pakistani writer, journalist, and historian, Tariq Ali spoke at Hampshire College on November 17 for the the Twelfth Annual Eqbal Ahmad Lecture. The annual Eqbal Ahmad Lecture honors the teaching, scholarship, and activism of the late Eqbal Ahmad, who was a longtime Hampshire College professor."

I cast this video into the web because Ali has the wonderful habit of saying things like this:

I'd say the big problem in Pakistan is the grinding poverty; is the lack of education; is the lack of basic health facilities; is the fact that many many villages still do not have electricity. Running water is in short supply. And on top of this you have a corrupt political and military elite—they're equally corrupt—who sit on the country, live in a bubble, send their children to the top schools, send them abroad, and use the English language to maintain their monopoly.

Wonderful.

Why We're Not Leaving Afghanistan

Our Glorious Leader destroyed the last shred of his already-dubious credibility last night, distorting history for his own already-decided purposes and failing utterly to assuage anyone of anything besides our own, most-cynical suspicions. At best, by dragging out his ninety-day “policy review” before more-or-less submitting to that stuck-up little poindexter of a general, Stanley McChrystal, President Obama has supplied his political opponents with distracting, rhetorical ammunition, endangering (perhaps purposefully) his halfhearted attempts to pass health care “reform” and proving, for all and sundry, that no matter how much he might him and haw, in the end Obama will bend to the prevailing winds of Washington.

Just like all the rest of 'em.

How long, oh Lord, how long? Forever, if at all possible. As the president told last night's class of West Point Cadets:

“If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow. So no, I do not make that decision lightly. I make this decision because I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Notice that slick insert at the end. “Afghanistan and Pakistan.” And presumably any other 'stan that might harbor “terrorists” or “Taliban insurgents” or whomever the Bad Guys will be next. If history holds, once the Taliban are “defeated” (presuming they'll ever be), the U.S. will in all likelihood turn on the corrupt, slave-driving warlords who genuinely rule Afghanistan outside of “President” Karzai's Kabul Bubble, our current “allies” in our lop-sided, ghost war against “terrorism.”

It didn't take long for President Obama to lose me. After about two minutes of rhetorically flogging the memory of 9/11 (the defining knee-jerk reaction of every American politician in this blighted age) he reminds the cadets that Congress and NATO give him the cover to continue Bush's First War. “Under the banner of this domestic unity and international legitimacy, and only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden, we sent our troops into Afghanistan.”

Bullshit. If the Bush years have taught us anything, it's that the United States government requires neither domestic unity or international legitimacy. For anything. We do what we want, when we want, at times with all the subtitle tact of the Borg: We say “Comply!” and the nations of the world would do well not to hesitate, not even to ask, “How quickly?”

The fact remains, Afghanistan's Taliban-led government (which was as diverse and factious a group of power-mad assholes as you're like to find) offered to give us bin Laden repeatedly, before and after 9/11, if only we'd offered them some way to save face. The word in Pashtu is aabroh. We know the concept as "an out." Assume you've got a guest in your house. Your guest contracts nineteen guys from the surrounding neighborhood to go over to someone else's neighborhood and fuck some shit up. Representatives from that neighborhood demand you hand your guest over, but how can you do that in public and still save face with the rest of your neighbors?

As Bush's cadre of power-mad assholes rushed through the halls of NATO and the UN, State Department officials and (one can only assume) CIA back-channelers scrambled to arrange some kind of deal with the Taliban, presumably to head off the war. “We were not serious about the whole thing, not only [the Bush] administration but the previous one," Richard Hrair Dekmejian, an expert in Islamic fundamentalism and author at the University of Southern California, told the Washington Post in 2001. “We did not engage these people creatively. There were missed opportunities.”

President Obama conveniently forgot to mention that the sticking point, at the time, seems to have been the State Department's insistence that bin Laden face trail in U.S. courts, a novel idea that went by the wayside pretty damn fast once the bombs began to fall and the CIA Black Sites began to rise up. The seriousness of either side in these negotiations remains an open question, as it probably will far into the future. But there's a wonderful quote in that same WAPO article, straight from the first “war president's” mouth:

“We know he's guilty. Turn him over,” Bush said.

Let's stop right there a moment and invert things. Imagine if some crazed, fundamentalist Christian-American, or some radically Ayn Randian, freemarketeer decided to bomb...oh, I don't know...lets just say the Blue Mosque. Imagine if the Taliban demanded then-Glorious Leader George Bush hand over said “terrorist,” that he might face the “justice” of Afghanistan's Sharia-soaked court system. Now imagine if Mullah Omar (remember him?) went on television and answered our requests that Afghanistan provide evidence linking our hypothetical Randian to his alleged crime by declaring, “We know he's guilty. Turn him over.”

And what, gentle citizen of the Empire, do you think the United States would say to that?

Apparently, sometime in February, 1999

...Taliban security forces took bin Laden from his Kandahar compound and spirited him away to a remote site, according to media reports at the time. They also seized his satellite communications and barred him from contact with the media.

Publicly, the Taliban said they no longer knew where he was. [Former Assistant Secretary of State Karl E. ] Inderfurth now says the United States interpreted such statements “as an effort to evade their responsibility to turn him over.”

Others, however, say the cryptic statements should have been interpreted differently. [Former CIA station chief and footsoldier in the 1980's jihad against the Soviets, Milton] Bearden, for example, believes the Taliban more than once set up bin Laden for capture by the United States and communicated its intent by saying he was lost.

“Every time the Afghans said, 'He's lost again,' they are saying something. They are saying, 'He's no longer under our protection,'” Bearden said. “They thought they were signaling us subtly, and we don't do signals.”

We certainly don't do “subtle”.

The Thirty thousand more troops Our current-Glorious Leader plans to pour down the dank, awful hole that Afghanistan has become (on top of the forty thousand he committed back in March) are not a subtle tool. Neither is General McChrystal's plan to bribe the country's various factions into not shooting each other (as we've done in Iraq). It might work—so long as we continue paying the bribes. But what happens when we stop paying the bribes? Iran, 1979, anyone? In the meantime, this policy will leave us with a cadre of unreliable, insecure, drug-dealing warloards for allies.

And all of the above reminiscences might be immaterial anyway. Former Pakistani Foreign Minister Niaz Naik told the BBC in October, 2001, that “senior American officials” told him “in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October.”

Mr Naik was told that if the military action went ahead it would take place before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.

He said that he was in no doubt that after the World Trade Center bombings this pre-existing US plan had been built upon and would be implemented within two or three weeks.

And he said it was doubtful that Washington would drop its plan even if Bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the Taleban [sic].

We have no real reason to believe Mr. Naik out of hand. After all, he's only accusing the Bush Administration of having a secret plan to start a war everyone now claims was foisted upon us by September Eleventh. Even Our (current) Glorious Leader repeated this last night.

“Now let me be clear:” President Obama said. “None of this will be easy.” Thus, on top of his Nobel Prize, Our Glorious Leader earns 2009's No Shit Awards Grand Prize for Speechifying. “The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan. It will be an enduring test of our free society and our leadership in the world.”

I agree with that last sentence completely. These are dangerous times, and they will expose the true, beating, bleeding heart of this country. There's no need to assume we'll find anything as prosaic as the president describes in there, once we crack the country's ribs. Examining such a rarefied organ will require time we may no longer have. Iran may get the bomb. Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel already have it, and God knows who else is keeping it on the down low. Antarctica is melting, and nobody cares because no one can find out how to make money from the problem. Unemployment hits 10 percent and what new jobs program does our Commander in Chief roll out?

Say, do you like long hours, low pay, and freezing your ass off in the mountains of a country you couldn't even pronounce eight years ago? Discover a strength like no other, and a country so weird Alexander the Great took one look at it and said, “Fuck...”

“After 18 months,” President Obama continued, “our troops will begin to come home.” Ri-ight. “These are the resources that we need to cease the initiative while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan.” Until, that is, our publicly announced troop increase causes the ranks of foreign fighters crawling across the 'stans to swell like a cake-addict's boobs. Iraq, 2004? Anybody? How about Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the Soviets tried sinking a hundred thousand plus soldiers into that deeper well?

None of this enters into the calculation of our Empire's ruling class. We've known since October that leaving was “not an option” in Afghanistan. We had that right from the horse's mouth...and Robert Gibbs is no broke-down old mule: he's the Administration's designated show pony. As with health care, the real solution to the “problem” of Afghanistan was removed from consideration before we even began. This allowed President Obama to invite a bunch of people over to the White House and emerge three months later to claim what he considers his great “victory”: a “bipartisan” consensus.

The fact is, such a thing exists. In our president's mind, we can never really leave Afghanistan. As soon as we do, what stops the Russians or the Chinese from rolling right over all those poor little Pishtu tribes people? Genghis Kahn tried that too and it worked out great, let me tell ya. I say God's speed to the Russians and the Chinese if they want to waste blood and treasure in those mountains.

But nobody asked me. My opinion is not considered in the debate.

“I am painfully clear that this is politically unpopular,” Obama told a small group of columnists [including the assume-liberal David Ignatius, from who's column this comes] “Not only is this not popular, but it's least popular in my own party. But that's not how I make decisions.”

So congratulations, Teabaggers, for being right for all the wrong reasons. Our Glorious Leader has just admitted, in public, that we do not live in a democracy. Go forth a shop, plebs. Christmas is here. Rose Bowl's coming up, with the Super Bowl afterward, and really, and who really cares about Afghanistan anyway? As Denis Maloney, one of six pro-war protestors who gathered across the street from the two hundred fifty-strong anti-war candle light vigil, said,

“If you consider the fact that that area of the world produced people who killed 3,000 Americans in America, maybe it's about time we went over there and stomped them out.”

God, I love my country.

The Full Speech:

Science and the Occult: A Weird History: Part I

Over the last four hundred years, science and the occult have enjoyed a strange, complex relationship. Partisans for both sides would have us believe that relationship ended in a bitter, drawn-out divorce, sometime in the nineteenth century. This is an illusion. As is so often the case, the reality is much more complex than that.

To understand why, we must begin at the beginning of modern science, with Issac Newton, despite the fact that this beginning is entirely arbitrary. Human beings have consulted occult forces in the course of their daily lives for the whole of recorded history. Over the millennia, certain thinkers have rebelled against this trend, claiming that human beings were quite capable of understanding the world just by observing it. One such thinker was Newton.

Born the year Galileo died, in 1643, Newton grew up to dream of reuniting religion and what we now call science. He hoped to reconcile the animosity each system of thought had developed for the other over the previous four hundred years. He offered up his “laws” of motion as quantifiable proof, not only of a mechanical, explicable universe, but a universe ruled by an immanent God.

"Gravity explains the motions of the planets," Newton said, "but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done." In writing his Principia, he said, "I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity"

Note the choice of words: this was not the god of some church, be it Catholic, Anglican, or Orthodox. This was not the God of Abraham and Issac and Jacob, but an imminently reasonable God, who created a rational universe out of rational bits and pieces that any rational man can pick up, look at, and understand.

Newton implied that, thanks to our God-given five senses and that all-important, divine gift, reason—separating us from animals—man can know the mind of God. (Women, who obviously lacked reason, would have to wait another few hundred years for that.) The mind of God is, in fact, right there, in that falling apple, and in the undeniable fact that there are rational, mathematical rules governing the way apples fall. All you have to do is invent the mathematics to prove it.

For Newton, the objective of science was not, as Descartes said, to control the world, so much as to describe it. Newton sat in wonder at the ingenuity of a God who could create a being smart enough to sit in wonder of His ingenuity. Writing more on the Bible than what we would call science and what he called “natural philosophy,” Newton studied Scripture for secret codes and hidden messages all his life. This concerned him more than esoteric questions like true the nature of gravity.

It could be, he said, that gravity is an expression of God's eternal love, pervading the universe with the perfect will of the Divine, which obviously seeks itself out. At its core, Newton's physics was an esoteric Christian's retelling of Aristotle's: the apple wants to fall, not because it has an independent nature, but because the independent nature of an imminent God willed it to fall. And fall just so, invariably. Divine intervention was central to Newton's universe.

The image of “God the watchmaker” is not his. It comes from a joke made by one of his detractors, a fellow called Gottfried Leibniz, who, in a letter to a friend, remarked, “God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion."

Leibnitz was a German philosopher and mathematician, one of Newton's contemporaries. We use his integral sign every day, if we use calculus, along with his differential notation. He said he came up with calculus in 1674, and published an example in 1684, beating Newton's Principia to press by three years. There's a little bit of calculus in the Principia, but it's not the point of the book, and Newton didn't publish a notation system until 1696, despite claiming he came up with the idea in 1666. Now we have artifacts to prove that...but for some strange reason they didn't come to light until after Newton's death. The feud between Newton and Leibnitz, carried out almost entirely through a series of letters written by their friends, has become one of the great controversies of early-modern science. Today, that feud's role in how Newtonian science would come to be understood by politicians, scientists, and the general public is barely discussed.

The God of Newton's understanding still cared about the world enough to permeate it with His essential love. Thanks to Leibnitz's joke, all that changed. Newton's disciples looked at Liebnitz's theological diss (a comment on the level with, “Your God is stupid he can't even come up with a self-winding watch.”) and thought, You know...that's a good point.

After all, if God is so obviously powerful and perfect (he created man, and gave us our five senses and our reason) then why couldn't God create a perfect universe—a universe in perpetual motion? A clock that needs no craftsman. We puny humans started making things like that in the 1500s, when Galileo caught sight of a swinging candelabra and got the idea of using weighted pendulums. To the English Enlightenment philosophers, it seemed absurd that God could not have beaten Galileo to that idea by eons.

John Locke's God, the consummate watchmaker, was thereafter re-imagined as the ultimate rational designer. No longer immanent, Locke's God became transcendent, the system He created just so damn perfect He can walk away from it with no problem at all. Almost as if it were an experiment. Or a mathematical formula so brilliant it eventually solves itself. Because for all his religious beliefs, Newton's laws were ultimately mathematical equations. You could plug them in and let them do all the hard work for you.

Maybe not all of it—there was some problem with the orbits of the planets not quite agreeing with Newton's calculations, and all these stupid peasants kept insisting they'd seen rocks fall out of the sky or some such nonsense. But thank God for those irregularities. Without them, what Newton's contemporaries called “natural philosophy” and what we now call “science” would've died in infancy for lack of work. The way it stood after Newton's death, natural philosophers could hold up new breakthroughs in their calculations as further proof that the universe was harmonious, lawful, and (most importantly) self-contained. When you have a rational universe created by a rational god and operating on rational principals, there's no need for divine intervention. No need for a Heaven or Hell either, since both are unobservable. Falling outside the spectrum of our five senses and reason, theological questions thus fell outside the realm of natural philosophy.

Newton's most radical disciples (particularly in France) even began to toy with the idea that nothing existed outside the physical universe at all. There was quite enough stuff inside of it to deal with, thank you. And nothing within the universe could exist save through the agency of Newton's laws. Even if something outside the universe did exist, it would have no effect on the physical world, since there is nothing in the world that operates contrary to Newton's laws.

John Locke applied these ideas to politics. Without an imminent God, the Divine Right of Kings is meaningless. Men are born free, and it's up to each and every man (again, women would have to wait a few hundred years) to form a society, and run it as best they could. More importantly, it's up to each and every man-jack of us to consent to such a society, since rulers derive the only real power they have, not from God, but from the consent of those they rule. The Revolutions—from the Glorious one in 1688 to the Latin American ones of the early 19th century—were, in one sense or another, practical applications of these ideas, each experiencing various degrees of success.

If one could apply Newton's idea to human society, why not go further and apply them to human beings as well? In 1766, a German doctoral candidate at the University of Vienna did just that. He called his dissertation De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum (The influence of the planets on the human body), and in it he figured, since every body in nature submitted itself to Newton's laws, then the human body must do so as well. It must be some sort of machine, influenced by the gravitational forces of the planets. Since any doctoral student at the time knew the human body as a collection of various fluids, and Newton showed how the moon influences the fluids of the earth, maybe the moon, sun, and the other stars influenced the tides of the human body, causing all kinds of apparently a-causal diseases. Diseases that might be treatable if only we knew which planets influenced what tides. A little math, our doctoral candidate suggested, might save a lot of lives, or at least make a lot of deaths less painful. And isn't that what doctors should be doing? “First, do no harm,” after all.

Since this was cutting-edge stuff in mid-eighteenth century Vienna, our candidate got his doctorate and became Franz Anton Mesmer, M.D. Though he never comes out and says it, he may have borrowed his idea from one of Newton's friends, a Doctor Richard Mead, who wrote De Imperio Solis ac Lunae in Corpora humana, & Morbis inde oriundis (On the Influence of the Sun and Moon upon Human Bodies and the Diseases Arising Therefrom) way back in 1704. Closer to Mesmer's own time we find the sensationalist 1748 book L'homme Machine, by the French physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie. L'homme Machine was a reaction to Cartesian mind-body dualism, and La Mettrie the first thinker (that we know of) to explicitly invoke the image of man-as-a-machine, denying the very existence of the soul. He said a rough battle with fever gave him the idea. When he regained consciousness, La Mettrie reckoned that the conscious experience was nothing more than the product of a chemical balance (or imbalance) in his brain. No soul required. It really was as simple as that.

Popular outrage (by which I mean, outrage among the conservative, Catholic upper crust of eighteenth century France) at this materialist philosophy (even Enlightenment figures like Voltaire and Baron D'Holbach covered their mouths with lacy handkerchiefs in shock: “Man-as-machine, indeed! Hurrumph!”) forced La Mettrie to flee the country, because that's just how France worked in those days. He became court reader for King Fredrick the Great of Prussia and (not coincidentally) had his work translated into German for any curious Viennese medical students to pick up and read.

Almost seventy years later, Dr. Mesmer set out to influence his patient's “tides,” to induce “artificial tides” by having patients drink a solution of iron and attaching magnets to their bodies. Patients reported feeling streams of fluid move through them, providing hours of relaxation. Then, one day, Mesmer tried it without the magnets, only passing his hands over a patient. The effects remained constant. Mesmer had a eureka moment and declared that he'd discovered “animal magnetism.”

For three years he tried it out in Vienna. He'd sit across from a patient, their knees touching, gaze deeply into their eyes, and make passes over them with his hands. It was so weird someone had to invent a new verb to describe it. The man “mesmerized” you, and when he did, you experienced peculiar sensations. Or you went into convulsions. Either way, it was fine. Mesmer figured that blockages of the body's tides caused disease. Clearing the blockage with a little animal magnetism, rather than waiting around for the natural motions of the planets to do so, produced a sudden “crisis”. This was a sign of the healing process kicking into action, soon to be followed by a resolution, and the succession of all complaints.

Then, in 1777, Mesmer failed to cure a cute little blind girl—a musician named Maria Theresa von Paradis. Maria just so happened to be the daughter of the Hapsburg Empire's Imperial Secretary of Commerce. Branded a failure by some very powerful people, Mesmer figured it was as good a time as any to move to France.

He set up shop in Paris, practicing on the sly, since neither the Royal Academy of Sciences, nor the Society of Medicine, would answer his letters. Still, by the end of three years he was so popular he started treating people en masse, “magnetizing” whole bathtubs of fully-clothed ladies, who climbed in and allowed Dr. Mesmer to pass his hands over them. Even better: have patients pass their hands over each other, since animal magnetism was an innate property of the human body. The thighs were, apparently, a particularly sensitive area.

Four years of teaching proteges and establishing clinics in France's major cities was more than enough to draw the attention of King Louis XVI, who offered Mesmer a pension for life if only he'd promise to remain in France and allow a royal commission to verify his claims. Mesmer refused, and King Louis finally directed the Royal Academy of Medicine to look into this impudent Austrian, who'd become the talk of all the salons. Nobles and ministers were getting “mesmerized” left and right, and God only knew what they were doing to each other with their animal magnetism. His Most Catholic Majesty wanted to find out.

The Academy appointed a blue ribbon panel to do just that, made up of leading thinkers of the time. These included the newly-arrived American ambassador Benjamin Franklin, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, and Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who's name you should recognize. They ruled Mesmer a fraud, which meant King Louis did as well, forcing Mesmer back to Austria in 1780. Private benefactors raised three hundred and fifty thousand louis to finance Mesmer's return, and return he did, in triumph, the next year. Mesmer remained in Paris until 1784. Having ben banished from Austria, he settled in the German university town now called Konstanz, to die comfortable and famous in 1815. So famous he even turned down an invitation from the King of Prussia to build a school in Berlin. But his ideas lived on.

The King 0f Prussia even sent a doctoral student to learn Mesmer's trade, and Mesmer never seemed to turn down a chance to teach his techniques to others. He encouraged his students to spread the knowledge he'd gained, ensuring European doctors and aristocrats would carry right on mesmerizing patients and volunteers well into the nineteenth century.

Chief among these was Armand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, the Marquis de Puységur. One day, Puységur tried to magnetize a young peasant named Victor Race by stroking Race's head. Race fell asleep and remained insensate when shaken. Puységur commanded him to stand and was surprised as anyone when Race obeyed, still apparently locked in his trance-like state. It seemed Race would obey any command Puységur shouted to him and have no memory of the experience upon waking from his trance. Puységur called this "spasmotic sleep" or "artificial sleepwalking." Today we know it as "hypnotic induction," though it would take twenty years for anyone to invent the term "hypnosis."

In the meantime, John Locke's England prospered. The Anglican God still held high place and philosophers were fine to have Him. After all, He gave us these gifts of reason and our senses, the better to study His revealed Word and the Nature that made it manifest. He also granted England, through His infinite grace, a monarchy and a church leadership all-too happy to use the new science—a science of Newton and Locke and Sir Francis Bacon and James Watt—to their advantage. A science that would go on to transform Britain from an island of rustic seafarers into a worldwide, industrial Empire, the world's first. A science anyone, if they properly trained their five senses and their reason, could participate in, because Newton and Bacon and Locke had specifically designed it that way.

In this spirit of free and open scientific inquiry, middle-class dilettantes began toying around with any thing they could get their hands on. A few, beginning in the 1780s, grabbed on the hot new thing from France called "mesmerism." Sure, the French Royal Academy said Mesmer was fraud, but what did those effete coffee-drinkers know about Science? Hard-headed Englishmen (and -women) were expected to justify their beliefs through experience, and what better kind of a experience than a scientific one? After all, wasn't that what God expected of us, as proper English citizens? Besides, it's not like the Church or the state had any interested in policing scientific inquiry.

In France, on the other hand, thinking too much could catch you quite a bit of flack from both church and state. Ask La Mettrie. Ask Mesmer. In France, these institutions were so powerful, and so intimately aligned, that they had no need to establish and support a new, separate, scientifically-minded class of intellectuals. Sure, you could invite them to the salons, wind them up with a little Spanish wine and let them blather on about education, or social justice, or natural man, or some other damn thing. All in good fun. But if they got too loud, or too embarrassing, with their calls for natural rights, it was better to throw them into prison, or exile, before things became dangerous.

How much these ideas—the mathematical universe run by the watchmaker God—filtered down through the natural philosophers and the leaders of revolutions to the level of ordinary citizens will never be known. The religious character of the eighteenth century is far more blatant. The old conflicts between reason and faith continued through wars and revolutions that revealed the darker character of the Enlightenment to a very startled world. Like energy and matter, these conflicts are conserved in history, only changing their form as time goes on.

One Frenchman, Denis Diderot, even discarded the idea of a providential God altogether in his 1749 essay Lettre sur les aveugles ("Letter on the Blind"). Published anonymously, it was immediately censored by the authorities, its author arrested and tossed into the dungeon at Vincennes. After three months in prison, Diderot signed an agreement never to publish anything critical of religion ever again. Instead, he spent the next twenty years attempting to collect all human knowledge in his Encyclopedie, causing great controversy - particularly with its evenhanded views on Protestantism, natural rights, and Catholicism. Officially banned by royal decree, it never made its editor rich, or even comfortable. Forced to sell his personal library to pay for his daughter's wedding, Diderot's only real friend in the upper crust seems to have been Catherine the Great, of Russia. When she heard of the reknowned intellectual's fire sale, she bought up the entire library and offered Diderot a yearly salary to keep it safe for her in Paris until such time as she felt the need to read. Diderot used the money to pay for his daughter's dowry.

Thanks to these, and similar life-stories, the French Enlightenment divorced itself from both King and Church. Neither offered it any safe haven, so it threw in (or was dragged in, depending upon whom you ask) with the radicals and revolutionary agitators. England managed to ship most of those over to its colonies—to its eventual chagrin. France implemented exactly the opposite policy, to its eventual downfall. Thus, revolution, and the problem of revolutionaries since time immemorial: now what to do?

If you believe, as John Locke and Voltaire did, that human beings are rational creatures governed by the rational laws of a rational universe—laws that ensure human beings will do everything they can to preserve themselves by maximizing pleasure and avoiding pain—then you erect a rational society without those prideful, backward-looking institutions like the Church or the Monarchy, which only retarded human beings “natural" morality anyway. You reform the calender to do away with all the religious trappings stamped into it. You reform education based on Rousseau's Emile. And you suggest the idea for the guillotine in order to kill all those agents of the old society as humanely as possible. After all, the guillotine was a rational alternative to hanging, or burning, or a man with an ax who's arm often tired after a hard day's work, ensuring he'd need three or four whacks to do a proper job. It also became the symbol of a bloodthirsty, self-destructive regime that eventually transcended everyone's worst expectations and set the pattern for revolutions until well into the twentieth century.

The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars it triggered convinced Europe's conservative elites that the Enlightenment Project (as it was not yet known) was a morally-bankrupt one, just as they'd always said. It led inexorably to worse tyrannies than any monarch ever imagined. With no God to appeal to, the rational State, and the society it created, assumed His place in the minds, hearts, and mouths of the Revolutionary leaders. Leaders who were, as far as those who lived through their reign were concerned, nothing more than a collection of hypocritical power-seekers who appealed to the State the same way clergymen appealed to God. Because if you know the absolute, mechanical Truth of how the universe works, you can justify all sorts of atrocities. Theocratic dictators from Augustus Cesar to Stalin to Hitler knew this in their bones. So does every leader worth his or her salt today. As one of George Orwell's characters said, over a century after the last head rolled through the streets of Paris, “He who controls the past controls the future; he who controls the present controls the past.” For a time, the Enlightenment controlled France's present, and it would go on to gain control over the entire world, long after Napoleon destroyed the institutions it created.

Fort Hood: Mr. Self-Destruct

Remember, remember, the Fifth of November
The Gunpowder Treason and plot
I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

--Popular verse, seventeenth century England.

By now you've all know that poem, and you've all heard of Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who staged his own Gunpowder Treason yesterday at the Ft. Hood, Texas, Soldier Readiness Center, killing thirteen and wounding thirty, including the police office who eventually stopped him, Sgt. Kimberly Munley. All but two of the wounded are out of the hospital, according to USA Today. Major Hasan remains in the coma Sgt. Munley put him, attached to a ventilator at the Brook Medical Army Center in San Antonio, according to the Press Trust of India. (Nothing says the Brits once ruled our country like spelling “center” with that extra “e”).

It's difficult to write about one of these things as the reports come in. Our Glorious Leader has already warned us against jumping to conclusions. Mosques everywhere within the Empire are battening down the hatches, fearing reprisals from “mainstream” (no one dare call them “white”) Americans.

The New York Times reports:

When the shooting began, members of three units of Army reservists in the Combat Stress Control Detachments were inside a medical and services center at Fort Hood signing medical forms and getting last-minute vaccinations before they went overseas.

There is no evidence that Major Hasan singled out his fellow combat stress counselors, but an Army official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation, said Major Hasan had been scheduled to deploy with the three Reserve units.

Hasan, the son of Palestinian immigrants who owned a restaurant in Roanoke, VA, graduated with honors from Virginia Tech in 1995. He joined the service, got his commission, and received his medical degree from Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, in 2003, just in time to serve his residency at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He became a psychological counselor for wounded soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, and stayed on until July of this year, when he transferred to Ft. Hood, the largest military base in the world.

Sometime in August, Hasan legally purchased two FN Herstal Tactical Five-seveN pistols from Guns Galore, a self-evidently-named gunshop in Killeen, Texas, the town Ft. Hood supports. FN Herstal's website describes the Five-seveN (which comes “NATO Recommended”) as “Well balanced, with smooth contours and no protruding parts,” needlessly insisting that it “will instinctively be handled correctly and is extremely easy to use.”

All the classic hallmarks of a public murder rampage are present in the absolute deluge of press accounts (15000 in Google News alone). The initial rumors of four, five, six shooters (no doubt all part of a secret Muslim plot to allow President Obama to take away our guns). The (attempted) suicide by cop. The terse statements of local authority figures. The rush to exploit tragedy by national ones. The fetishistization of the victims. The shocked insistence by co-workers, neighbors, family members and community religious leaders that Hasan was a dedicated professional, a quite man who turned to religion for solace after his parent's deaths in 1998 and 2001, attended Friday prayers in uniform, and toured his apartment building days before his rampage giving away personal belongings.

The standard, disingenuous “Why?” is already under debate on comment boards and talking head shows across the media landscape. As NPR noted in their own, alright-but-not-great report, two narratives are emerging: Maj. Hasan-as-crazed-Muslim-extremist and Maj. Hasan-as-crazed-PTSD-psychologist. Lost in the babel is any stable picture of Maj. Hasan-the-dedicated-professional who was “performing quite well” according to Col. Kimberly Kesling, deputy commander of clinical services at Darnall Army Medical Center, Ft. Hood's hospital. At the bottom of a sudden media dogpile, Col. Kesling is already rushing to distance herself from Hasan. “You would hope you never know someone who would have such a demon.”

S. Ward Casscells, a former Assistant Secretary for Health Affairs, came close to asking an impertinent question of USA Today (they being too chicken to ask it themselves):

“You're entitled to ask, was he moved to Fort Hood because he wasn't doing well at Walter Reed and they thought the fresh start would help?' " he said.

“Talking to people who knew him," Casscells said, "no one thinks that this was (post traumatic stress), and they are skeptical that he was subject to religious harassment.”

“That is not tolerated in the military. The military will look at all this closely and decide if there is any mental or physical illness, whether this is just a lonely guy with a remote personality who got a bad officer evaluation report and lost the confidence of his peers, maybe withdrew into religion as solace. What could we have missed? How could we do better?”

Every one seems to be missing the fact that, less than three years ago, Walter Reed was synonymous with bureaucratic inefficiency, crumbling infrastructure, criminally-neglectful mistreatment of patients, and the complicity of top brass in concealing all of the above. Two and half years can seem like a lifetime in America, but thanks to the internet, yesterday becomes today. Or March 1, 2007, as the case may be. That was the day the Washington Post reported:

A procession of Pentagon and Walter Reed officials expressed surprise last week about the living conditions and bureaucratic nightmares faced by wounded soldiers staying at the D.C. medical facility. But as far back as 2003, the commander of Walter Reed, Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, who is now the Army's top medical officer, was told that soldiers who were wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan were languishing and lost on the grounds, according to interviews.

Lt. Gen. Kiley resigned from his position as Army Surgeon General eleven days after that story saw print. The day after, March 2, Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA's 30th) of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent a letter to Major General George Weightman, the man who replaced Kiley as Walter Reed's commander (and was himself temporarily replaced by Kiley after being relieved of command on March 1, 2007). In the letter, Waxman informed Gen. Weightman to prepare himself for questions regarding an internal Army memo that fell into the Committee's hands. Written by Walter Reed Garrison Commander Peter Garibaldi in September, 2006.

The memo (titled: “Challenges Concerning the Base Operations A-76 Study and resulting Reduction in Force (RIF) at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC)”) details the sad story of life inside Walter Reed from its worker's perspective. “It appears that over the past six years,” Waxman wrote,

the Defense Department has been engaged in a systematic effort to replace federal workers at Walter Reed with private companies for a host of functions, including facilities management, patient care, and even guard post duty entrance. This effort occurred under the A-76 process, which is shorthand for OMB Circular A-76.

The A-76 process was an element of Vice President Gore's reinventing government initiative. The idea behind A-76 is to force federal employees to compete with the private sector for the jobs being performed by the federal employees.

Then Florida happened, and Our (former) Glorious Leader, George W. Bush, ramped A-76 up full blast under the newly-rebranded rubric of “competitive sourcing initiatives,” opening up federal jobs of all stripes to private contractors. Like IAP Worldwide Services.

IAP Worldwide Services is a private company owned by Cerberus Capital Management LP, an asset-management firm (a company that owns other companies) chaired by Bush-era Treasury Secretary John Snow. Former Kellogg Brown and Ruth operating officer Al Neffgen holds the chief executive post and ex-KBR VP Dave Swindle (couldn't make that name up if you tried) holds the company president's chair. IAP would go on to achieve infamy in 2005 for it's bungled, over-priced attempts to deliver ice to Hurricane Katrina victims.

But back to Waxman's story:

In September 2004, the Army determined that the in-house federal workforce at Walter Reed could perform support services at Walter Reed at a lower cost than the bid received from IAP Worldwide Services. IAP protested this determination. As a result of the protest, the Army Audit Agency was directed [by whom? Waxman doesn't say - D] to reevaluate the bid from the federal employees. It has been reported that the Army Audit Agency withdrew its certification of the employee bid and unilaterally raised the bid by $7 million, thereby making the employee bid higher than the contractor bid. The Army then reversed its determination and resolved the A-76 process in favor of IAP.

When the employees sought to appeal this ruling, they were not allowed to make their case. Alan King, the Deputy Garrison Commander at Walter Reed, filed a protest of the contract award with GAO, but under the A-76 rules in place at the time, federal employees had no standing to object to A-76 determinations. Consequently, there was no similar cost review of the IAP bid proposal.

By January, 2006, IAP received a five-year, $120 million contract from Walter Reed, with the transition from in-house to out-sourced scheduled to being in January of '07. That year must've seemed a year of absolute hell as skilled government employees, including “skilled maintenance personnel and workers with specific knowledge of Walter Reed's systems and infrastructure,” left Walter Reed in droves, rather than wait for the inevitable round of lay-offs and replacements. By January, 2007, a trickle of twos and threes – an early retirement here, a change in position there – had become a flood, leaving Walter Reed with one-sixth of its original support staff workforce – maybe 60 people, out of an original 300. IAP fired those sixty and replaced them with fifty of their own people on February 3 when it took over management of the facility, but that was a little more than a panacea. Not even too little, too late. These were Dark Times at Walter Reed, when already-stressed infrastructure crumbled under incompetent new management and someone began to shoot his or her mouth off to the Washington Post about the mold on walls, the roaches, and the injured soldiers pulling self-assigned “guard duty” shifts, chasing away the neighborhood drug dealers working nearby street corners.

And is that a brown-skinned, thirty-something Major in a smock we see, making his rounds through all this chaos? Visiting soldiers no longer physically capable of visiting his office (assuming he still has one): men and women with missing arms, legs and faces living in darkness their own filth because the people who fix the lights and change the bedsheets are AWOL this week. Or this month. Imagine you're a young doctor, hot out of med school, interning at a place with a famous name, and all you want is to help soldiers with minds and bodies ground up by the grist mill of war. It'd be like getting up and going to hell every morning. Reports that Hasan received a bad performance review at Walter Reed (if true) should come as no surprise at all. Could you spend years at Walter Reed listening to soldier's stories? Could you then pick up and move to Texas? How is Texas a “fresh” start?

As Mark Ames has already noted (in a much better article than this one) Ft. Hood is no Disneyland.

For one thing, it holds the record for most soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan — 685 so far — and though we don’t know the figures, it’s reasonable to assume that Fort Hood is responsible for a sizable percentage of the tens or hundreds of thousands killed in those countries since America invaded them. Over the same period, 75 soldiers have committed suicide at Fort Hood, ten in 2009 alone — the highest of any base. In just one weekend in 2005, two soldiers who’d returned from Iraq killed themselves in separate incidents. Last year, in something right out of Full Metal Jacket, Specialist Jody Michael Wirawan, 21, of the 1st Cavalry Division, shot and killed his lieutenant, then killed himself when police arrived. And life in Killeen isn’t much nicer: it has one of the nation’s lowest median incomes and highest crime rates. Earlier this year, a 20-year-old Fort Hood soldier was killed by a Killeen cop who claimed he killed the soldier after being dragged underneath his SUV; the dead soldier’s mother filed a lawsuit claiming that the cop was notoriously out-of-control and violent, and that he shot her son while the car was pulled over.

In 1991, George Hennard Jr. killed twenty-three people at a local diner after driving his pickup through the wall, the deadliest rampage in American history...until Seung-Hui Cho shot up Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007.

Our hearts go with the citizens of Killeen and the families of all the victims. We owe it to them to understand why these things happen, in the hope (infinitesimal as it may seem) of preventing them from ever happening again. Understanding will be impossible as long as we engage in the process of separating victim from villain with a hard, fast line, and tossing epithets like "crazy" and "terrorist" around...as if we all agreed on their meaning. There is a deep malaise eating at the heart of our country, our culture and (I would argue) our civilization itself. Maj. Hasan is neither the first nor the most violent mass murderer of our history. Not even in the year-to-date.

On March 10, Michael Kenneth McLendon, a former police officer (who, like Hasan, "didn't last"), killed his mother, set her house on fire, and cut a bloody swath of mayhem across two south Georgia counties, Coffee and Geneva. Mad Mike killing ten people before turning the gun on himself in the parking lot of Reliable Metal Products, a factory where he'd once worked.

March 24: Convicted felon, Lovelle Mixon kills four Oakland police officers: two with an SKS, two with an AK-47.

April 4: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania resident Richard Poplawski used a bullet-proof vest, a .22 rifle, a semiautomatic pistol and...an AK-47...to hold off the Pittsburgh police for four hours, killing three officers.

April 30: Jiverly Antares Wong (or Voong) killed thirteen people at a Binghamton, New York American Civic Association center before turning the gun on himself (beating out Hasan on the sociopathic scoreboard).

June 10: James Wenneker von Brunn walked into the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington and shoot a security guard.

August 4: George Sodini shoot three women at an LA Fitness in Collier Township, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh, before turning the gun on himself.

And, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, so it goes.

New Review: Diary of the Dead (2007)

Over at AYTIWS, we honor The Month of the Living Dead with:



Diary of the Dead (2007)